It’s ass-cold here in Philly. I just walked the Newf and I nearly came home a popsicle. Time to break out the heavy coat. There has been a lot of hostility around the pond today. I don’t know how much of it was set by my example, but I hope it dies down in my absence. Personally, I’m thankful that it’s Friday and that tomorrow I’ll be settling in in new digs. So, I’m going relax and listen to some jazz with Knox, see what’s going on in the Cafe, and then I’ll see you all Tuesday. Don’t be chivalrous, get frivolous.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Good luck with the move, BooMan!!! It’s cold here in NY too but apparently will get slightly warmer in the coming days. The joy of the northeast. See you Tuesday!
Worked a winter offshore on a fishing boat. Talk about cold. 120 miles off Long Island. The best thing to do was keep working. As if we ever had a choice ;o)
We always kept some brandy on the boat for extra cold nights. Come to think of it, we used it for moderately cold nights…..nights with a slight chill…..balmy summer nights…;oP
Hope all is going well. Personally, I hate moving. Let me re-phrase that: I loathe moving. Thank God I haven’t had to do it since 1988.
Tonight Showtime is having a free weekend; anyone with cable tv gets Showtime for free. So what are they showing? The evening starts with Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” At 10pm, they move on to their new series “Masters of Horror” with a short film by Joe Dante that explores what would happen if dead soldiers could come back and vote for the president of their choice — and then, hopefully, march on the WH and pull the current resident out and eat the flesh from his still living body.
I don’t usually stay up past 10 but I’m really going to try tonight. If I fail, well there’s always tomorrow night when the film shows at 10:30.
Are they aiming to measure the liberal demographic tonight or what?
That Horror thing sounds wild! Slate magazine did a big write-up on it today.
And, Sunday night, they’re launching a new series about a terrorist cell inside the U.S. (Hope it’s good … we’ve gotten hooked on a couple of Showtime’s recent series: Huff and Weeds.)
(Huff is a great comedy / drama starring Blythe Danner and Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt. Azaria is a psychiatrist and Platt is his best friend and an attorney who’s crazy. Weeds is a fabulous serio-comedy about a suburban widow who has to sell pot to maintain her lifestyle.)
Good luck with the move, Boo. I’ll be having a root canal next week and maybe a molar extraction to delete an earlier botched root canal job. It would be a tough choice between that and moving. It’s cold here in Chicago, too — January weather after a wonderfully warm late fall. But it could be worse: take heart from Mark Twain’s remark: The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.
My weekend pleasure will largely revolve around my newly blownup hard drive. Luckily I run Linux, so can do my Net stuff and other activities from a CDrom (as I’m doing as we speak). We’ll see about recovering all my data, tho. This will be a good year to have over and done with.
Try 16 degrees – windchill at 1 and 3 inches of snow on the way overnight.
Of course my wimpy ass has spent a total of probably 15 minutes outside all day today. Mostly running from car to inside and back again.
I’m sure I’ll get a big crowd interested in my plans for the weekend (not), but I’ll be going to my first U of MN women’s basketball game. I’m a season ticketholder and its the one thing that gets me through these long, dark, cold winter days.
God, do I so NOT miss St. Paul (lived in Selby/Dale) for 5 yrs. Chicago is much friendlier, esp in terms of the weather!
I’m feeling pretty proud of our fair city now. We can boast connections to Stark, Kid Oakland, and Scribe. This chip on my shoulder that wants to engage in competition with our “other” Twin City feels like putting out a little blogger challenge. BEAT THAT!! But I’ll just keep it to myself.
That other twin city was just a wannabe Chicago if you ask me. Much, much preferred the east side of the river…the bridge over there near Loring Park. You know the one? With this poem written on the crossbeams
And now I cannot remember
How I would have had it.
It is not a conduit (confluence?)
But a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new,
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all
Where you stand and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up
And places you where you always wanted
To be.
This far.
It is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is.
Steel and air, a mottled presence,
Small panacea and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.–John Ashbery
Btw, tho, NLinSP, unless they’ve since “erased” it, I left a little trace of myself in StPaul. Check out Penumbra Theater’s “Black Nativity”–even if they’ve taken my part out, it’s still worth seeing. If my part’s still in, you’ll know it when you see it.
ARGH! shoulda read “EXCEPT FOR the bridge over there….”
(let me know if they ever move that bridge to SP, maybe I’ll come back. Not. lol).
I always say that in your 20’s and 30’s you prefer Minneapolis, but in your 40’s and 50’s you prefer St. Paul. I’m an old fogey whose too settled in St. Paul now and haven’t spent much time near Loring Park in years. So I don’t know about the bridge. But now I’ll have to make a point to go see it.
You have peaked my curiosity about Black Nativity. I finally saw it for the first time last year. FANTASTIC! But I know its a little different every year. You might just have to tell me what you contributed.
I was the percussionist for the production, 4 yrs running. I created the piece with kids drumming–don’t know whether they’ve kept it.
The drums looked like this.
In fact, that photo, as I recall, is also from the Fitzgerald theater, and those drums are probably the ones we used in the Black Nativity production. But this pic is, as caption says, National Night Out, not Black Nativity. Completely different group of kids, too.
Oh, and here is a pic of the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, here’s another–but reading the poem on the crossbeams as you cross is what makes it special. Check it out. Lemme know what you think.
There I go talking to myself again….you got me to reminiscing about that bridge, check it out, here’s the poet reading the poem…ah the internet.
I love your plans and, if it weren’t so chilly, I’d go with you! We used to have season tickets to the Univ of Wash women’s basketball team. Enjoyed it SO MUCH! Lots and lots of men went because they loved the “pure” basketball.
I read playboy for the articles.
The men I know sincerely felt the women played basketball in its purest Naismith-ian form. They did not watch because it was a sexy experience…. in fact, if anyone did that, it was the lesbians for whom those games were a big meeting place.
I kid. I know what you’re saying. More fundamentals, less Fi Slamma Jamma. It’s why I like Princeton basketball so much.
I have two words to say to you: Pete Carroll.
(Two more: Bill Bradley.)
Ohhh … gotta run … Rita Cosby’s on! ARUBA! She’s covering ARUBA! WOW!
link
It’s odd, I’ve always thought of basketball as by far the least sexy sport. Great entertainment, just not sexy. The story may be apocryphal, but IIRC Mr. Naismith designed the game as a physical endeavor that would be appropriate for the young christian gentleman, i.e. totally unsexy.
Exactly the way Princeton hoops is done.
The one sports I’m I’ve ever truly rooted for: Tigers B-Ball. Point guard pursuing a double major in classics and chemical engineering, and Alonzo Mourning still couldn’t get the ball away from him.
My 9-year-old son is due to Princeton hoops, both in the inception and specific delivery date…March 15th. Long story I’ll tell sometime.
Go Tigers!
Worst non-call ever.
Our own local macho sportswriters crowd two years ago named the U’s star player Lindsey Whalen “MN Athlete of the Year” over Kevin Garnett the year he was named MVP. Thats how serious the women’s game has gotten here. During the NCAA tournament games – the house is packed and rocks like it never has before – even when the men’s team was in-between one of their scandal years.
When we got season tickets, the Univ of Wash made it part of the deal that we had to pay extra to join the Tyee Club…. ugha. But, the cool part of that was when the Sweet 16 was played in Seattle, and Darcy and I were called by the Tyee Club director to be volunteers. We got to do lots of fun stuff like deliver pizzas to the winning and losing lockerrooms. (One was silent except for sobs; the other was raucous.)
Oh my gosh NL, that sounds just like my little corner of SE Idaho. . . .brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr to be sure.
and living safely in the Miami environs where if it gets below 65 degrees F., the heater GOES ON!!
Today: Cloudless, nothin’ but sunshine, upper 70s, low 80s this weekend. Perfecto Wimpiano! (That’s a Harry Potter weather spell for Wimp Wizards that I just made up.)
The office is now empty, soon I too shall depart.
Tonight I’m reflective on all that has happened here today…feeling that the ripples were in fact a rough and particularly nasty Class IV rapid. The water was cold and the waves were deep…waiting to see where the currents flow next.
Peace be with everyone…I’ll see you all later this weekend or Monday.
yes. I’m calm now. I hope Jerome is sleeping.
I’m sorry that you got caught up in it. It is unfortunate. But until you have been publicly defamed its hard to understand how angry it can make you, and how it can lead you to demand people understand what has taken place. Jerome writes an editorial for the Wall Street Journal one week, another week is being called an apologist for white slavery by a former colleague who knows better.
We are not anonymous and we can’t just let shit like that slide. We’ll try to handle it better next time.
Sometimes it seems like I log onto an alternate BT universe. Is this the punishment for not reading all the diaries every day?
Believe me, sometimes it’s good to be out of the loop…
Yes! Let’s all be LOOPY tonight!
Fucking batshit loopy? Where’s notBostonnotJoe anyway?
but Wolverine told me that we sold a bunch of his books. Maybe he is counting his cash? Plotting his cable news appearances? Writing his Pulitzer speech?
Do not get loopy and drive. If it can happen to the women from Lost, it can happen to anyone. Don’t let this happen to you.
Yeah, tell me about it. 🙁
SLRL…I copied your link information…cool site. Too good of a site to go unlinked.
Since HTML can be a real pain for links – I wrote it out for you – kind of.
Copy the line below starting with <a,,, and ending with </a> to your signature settings. Remove the three commas at the beginning and the three commas at the end. It should work fine.
<,,,a href=”http://www.chidjembe.com/performances.html”>Chicago Djembe Project Ensemble</a,,,>
Voila!
More than one way to beat character assassination! Thanks SallyCat.
Sounds like you had a tough day too.
Are you one of the drummers?
One of my weaknesses in life is ethnic drum and guitar groups. We regularly see a Koto drummers group here and an African guitar group in Berkeley. Names slip my mind currently…need more scotch!
I was curious about the link…and have regularly fought with HTML
Have a peaceful night and weekend
If it were just the day, OK. It’s been about a week and a day now.
Yes, I am one of the drummers. The rest of them are my students. At least that’s how they started. Suffice it to say that my “writing career” seems incompatible with my drumming career and the persistent stream of character assassination has led me to increasingly pass the baton to the big 250 lb, 6’4″ black guy you see on the screen.
We have an arrangement: I have no patience for the adults, he has none for the kids. So I teach the kids; he deals with the “adults” .
So, if girls with big boobs work at Hooters, where do the girls with only one leg work?
IHOP.
that’s terrible. 13 year olds always have good bad taste jokes.
A guy walks into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his ass and orders a beer. The bartender looks at him and says, “Do you know you have a steering wheel up your ass?”
The guy answers, “Yeah, and it’s driving me nuts!”
This brunette walks into the doctor’s office and says, “Hey doctor, you’ve got to help me.”
“What seems to be the problem?” he asks.
“Well I hurt everywhere,” she replies.
Incredulous, he asks her to demonstrate. So, she touches her arm with her finger and recoils in pain. She touches her leg, and does likewise. Same goes for when she touches her stomach. The doctor looks at her knowingly…
“You’re not really a brunette, are you”? he asks.
“No, I’m not,” she replies sheepishly.
“You’re a blonde, aren’t you”?
“Yes, but how did you know”?
“Your finger’s broken.”
especially when carrying boxes where you can’t see your feet…
See you soon… 🙂
Just keep the number of a good slip and fall lawyer on your speed dial and you never need to worry again. </snark>
Hollidays+Shoppers=Boxes
Boxes+Icy Patches=Contingency Fees
Contingency Fees=Happy Cicero
Have an Arbitrary and Capricious Holiday Season!
You wanna know my problem? Boogal bought this clear packing tape, and I have four rolls of it where I cannot find the place to lift it. I hold it up to the light, I tilt it, I run my nails over it, and nothing. All I want is to close up these damn boxes and I can’t do it.
it’ll make the layers pull apart.
If you ever do get the roll started, a good thing to remember is to always fold a corner over on the leftover end. (I’ve moved over 50 times so I’m full of moving trivia). Good luck with it all!
Been waiting for a place to put this – since all y’all Northerners have been complaining about snow and sub-freezing weather for a while now.
Last night I came out of work and thought, “Damn, it’s COLD!” Went home and dragged out a firelog and put it in the fireplace. Then thought to check the outdoor temp (I just got one of those nifty indoor outdoor wireless jobbies – way cool).
It was 52°! 🙂
Just now it’s 65° and I’m sitting by my open back door. Eat your hearts out.
And before you call me a weather wimp, you have to do April through October in the 90’s and 100’s. It seems to go on f-o-r-e-v-e-r. That’s what I can’t handle about the Northlands – not how cold it gets but how long it lasts.
Sounds delicious, Janet … be RIGHT over!
Where I grew up, we had some of the worst of both worlds: Freezing winters with lots of snow, and hot, hot summers climbing into the 100s in August.
‘course, we had no humidity in the heat. I never knew about humidity until I visited my aunt and uncle, and got off the plane at Dulles airport .. that humidity hits you like a 2×4! Amazing!
Got some iced tea all ready for you. Do you prefer my patented jasmine/darjeeling blend or the berry-flavored herbal (I alternate, so there’s pitchers of both in the fridge).
I want your PATENTED tea! It sounds lovely and delicious. Thank you!
volunteered to wait tables over at the FBC, I’d probably know how to serve up a nice glass of tea over the internets, but I haven’t and I don’t so you either have to get on the next flight to Austin or visualize . . .
Having grown up in Texas, I can say with authority – that’s how you serve iced tea. A lot of ice with a little tea.
NO sugar. Ick.
Fill the glass as full as possible with ice and then pour COLD tea over it – so it doesn’t all melt before you can drink it.
And I’m a no sugar person too, Susan. No lemon, either. Straight for me.
In Texas, though, there are varying schools of thought on this, including the debate over whether to put the sugar in the hot tea when you first make it or to add it to your (filled with ice) glass later.
It really does taste different if you add the sugar to the hot tea, but since I don’t like sugar in it, I stay out of that debate.
And thanks for the serving help, BooMan.
Well, I’ll be happy to take the sugar that you’re not using. 😉
My internet’s been down most of the day today so I guess I’m fortunate to have missed the “hostility” Booman referred to.
Having had some really big changes in my life recently, my outlook has (I hope) ebvolved considerably. While I still get agitated when inconsiderate drivers do stupid things when I’m driving, and while I still occassionally yellin the direction of the TV if I have the misfortune to see and hear odious shitbirds like Tony Blankley or Ann Coulter mouthing off, I have to say that, as for hostility, I recognize more and more that there’s just no mileage in it.
Sunny California was not very sunny today. Had to chip the ice off my windshield this morning. Using technical terms, it was freezing ass cold today.
about the “hostilities” today? Well, what I think is that Jerome a Paris is fabulous–so knowledgeable and his diaries are so interesting. Booman: the same–plus he has this wonderful blog that I and many others feel at home at. Soj? This person seems to be a divisive figure that may or may not be pulling a scam here and elsewhere. And people, here and at Kos, seems to have backed Jerome and Booman into a corner where they have to defend him/her. Personally I don’t care about Soj; I care about Jerome and Booman. So I hope that this all blows over.
Soj. It isn’t. Nope. Not at all. I am pissed that she was made a tool/pawn in the entire thing. She is an amazing writer and I hate that Welshman used her to gain whatever he thought he might gain. I just finished reading the entire diary. Welshman is a disgrace. I wouldn’t believe a thing he writes.