Thu 6 Mar 2008

Thursday Thirteen #14: Things I Didn’t Know Until Recently

Posted in Thursday Thirteen at 0:05

For a couple of weeks each year, the National Pastime takes the place of all my other pastimes. If you’ve been around here lately, you probably know that I’ve been focused on the yearly drafts in my 4 sim league baseball teams. I enjoy it a lot, but the focus it takes to properly prepare meant that other off-hours activities had to go on hiatus.

Anyhow, that’s done for another year, and I’m ready to catch up on what I missed and looking forward to doing some visiting and some more regular posting. If you’re in my blogroll, I’m planning to drop by soon and say hello.

The idea for this Thursday Thirteen came from reading Dave Studeman of The Hardball Times. (He in turn gives credit to the BBC Magazine News Monitor.)

1. First, this post is being written in a terrific piece of freeware called Q10. I could write a lot of words about it, but you can read about it at the above link, and anyway, here’s a screen print that shows a lot of what I like:
   

   And besides, it can be set up to sound like a typewriter.

   What do you mean, “What’s a typewriter?”

2. W.C. Heinz always used a typewriter. He died last week at age 93, and I knew he and Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi had written “Run To Daylight”. However, I did not know he had also co-authored the original novel ‘M*A*S*H’.

   Heinz said writing was “like building a stone wall without mortar,” he said. “You place the words one at a time, fit them, take them apart and refit them until they’re balanced and solid.”

   In his column, Gordie Jones of the local Morning Call quoted Jeff MacGregor, who wrote about Heinz for Sports Illustrated, and I could empathize with him when he mentioned ”the panic that creeps over you when you’re sitting in the chair and nothing comes” and the difficulty of ”trying to find some music in the words and about the moment.”

   ”When it’s going well,” MacGregor added, ”you look down at the page and the story comes to you in full, everyone and everything alive in your head and busy on the page, and when you look up again, eight hours are gone and you feel like Lindbergh in Paris.”

3. Also from the newspaper: Shelby Lyman’s chess column recalled a 1963 Bobby Fischer win over Robert Byrne that is still regarded as one of Fischer’s most brilliant games. It should have come as no surprise that it’s possible to go through the game online, move by move.

   In addition, there’s detailed analysis of that game out there on the internets. Maybe someday I won’t be awed by all this freely available information, but it hasn’t happened yet.

4. Another of the freely-available wonders is Joe Posnanski’s blog. His day job is writing about sports for the Kansas City Star*, which he does well enough to have been voted best sports columnist in the United States.** He definitely knows how to find a good story and how to write it, but what I really like about his columns is that I never feel as though he’s just phoning one in or giving a half-effort.

   * It shows you are of a certain age and a certain musical bent if you have an irresistible urge to follow that by singing “That’s what I are.”

   ** Although at the Star’s website, the description actually reads “Named the nation’s best sports columnist in America…” which I guess could either be an accurate, if awkward, description, or else a big-time contender for the Department of Redundancy Department. I just hope it was meant to be funny.

   If the majority of sports writers are coming down on one side of an issue such as the awfulness of Barry Bonds, or the awfulness of Bill Belichick, or the awfulness of Kobe Bryant, Joe might write something on the same side, or he might come down on the other side. But no matter which side, I always get the feeling he’s given the issue a lot of thought, that he wants to be fair to everyone concerned, and whatever he writes in the column is a product of that reflection and fair-mindedness.

   Then last year, if memory serves, a temporary blog he began to promote a book quickly evolved into his present corner of cyberspace, where there are some sports references, but where you have just as much chance of reading a post like this one he wrote after the Super Bowl that shows the man has some major knowledge of and love for pop culture.

5. And one more from pop culture — hey, what can I say, I went to Bowling Green — looking for a way to keep making a living doing what she loves, Jill Sobule has made a new music video with the help of the Wall Street Journal’s offshoot All Things Digital.
6. Pat’s son Jack works with a man named Jim Meyer, who is a talented jazz guitarist. Meyer gave Jack a copy of his album Searching, and after Jack played it for me once, I immediately bought a copy for myself.
7. There are seven new collie puppies at Jack and Jennie’s house. Jennie stayed with the mother throughout, and Jack told me that one was having difficulty breathing right after it was born, but that Jennie knew what to do: “If the puppy appears weak or is not breathing, hold it firmly and swing it up and down between your legs with its head down.”. It sounds extreme, but as Jack said, there’s no use in panicking, because you can’t make the situation any worse.
8. I now know my new go-to place for when I want something good to eat, and quick. A Five Guys Burgers and Fries just opened a few miles down the road. That’ll be one burger with pickles and A-1 sauce, please… and don’t fix it too fast, I’d like to enjoy some of those peanuts while I wait…
9. I knew that my car’s inspection is coming due in March. But look what I just found on my muffler:
   

   That’s a hole big enough to hold a good hunk of my upcoming tax rebate…

10. I hadn’t noticed, but Hydrox cookies aren’t being made anymore. Here’s a history of the chocolate sandwich cookie that predated the Oreo.
11. The other Hydrox link in #10 above references the Gallery of Graphic Design, a site with numerous examples of mid-20th-century magazine advertising. Great, another website I can use as a time sink instead of doing something constructive… weren’t Wikipedia and YouTube enough?
12. I was looking for something else the day I ran across Brand Name Pencils, but it had to wait while I looked over the collection of wood and graphite writing utensils. (That sounds like a couplet Ogden Nash could have written…)
13. Bite-sized pieces of professional information (that just might come in handy someday) are collected in an article entitled Tricks of the Trade.

    Example: If you think someone’s pretending to be unconscious, just pick up their arm, hold it over their face, and let go. (You’d probably want to be awfully sure you’re right before trying it, though…)

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