A Baseball Story

In honor of Opening Day, I'd like to tell a fond baseball story. (Yes, I've read a few books. I saw Miss Pettigrew which was fun and The Bank Job which was also fun, albeit in completely different way but was a great movie. But I digress-on to the story).

The time was the late Seventies and it was a lovely early spring day-Opening Day of the baseball season (we didn't realize this until later) but the weather was so nice-and unusual for Michigan at that time of year, when it's usually cold and snow is not out of the question. We were sophmores in high school and my friend D and I had walked to her house for lunch-her house was only a five minutes walk and we didn't have to pay for lunch in the cafeteria, indeed, we could bypass the caf altogether. This was a good idea, as we had a tendency to start food fights there and blame other people for them. It was fun but way too easy after awhile. So, we walked to her house, bemoaning the fact that after lunch we would have two hours of geometry. Most classes were one hour, but once a week they were two hours and then you didn't have it one day. We liked our teacher and we were doing fairly well in it but two hours of geometry on such a lovely day seemed like a soul-sucking experience.
Until we reached her house and ran into her father, a noted surgeon. It was odd for him to be home at lunch but the reason soon became apparent when he told us he had tickets for all three of us to go to opening day at Tiger Stadium. It was not much of a choice between geometry and Opening Day, even if we were not big baseball fans (that came later for me although I don't D can tell the difference between well, anything in baseball). But what made it even better was the fact that we KNEW our teacher had played semi-pro baseball-he talked about it fairly often in class, to the point that he would sometimes forget to get to the geometry part. If any teacher would forgive our absences for a baseball game, it was him.
So, we went. It was a beautiful day. The Tigers won, we ate peanuts, heckled the opposing team and drove home happy. And when we went to geometry on Wednesday, our teacher asked where we had been on Monday. And we told the truth-we had gone to Opening Day at Tiger Stadium and the Tigers had won! And we had had such a good time! He ate it up. He wanted to know about the game and if we had enjoyed it and what we remembered-luckily we remembered enough to prove that we HAD gone to the game and had not skipped class (we did that our freshman year-we gave it by sophmore year when we realized we would have to go to collge in the not too distant future).
So that's my story-we were lucky enough to have a teacher who loved baseball enough to let it slide and we were even luckier to get those tickets. It was a great day for baseball and for not being in geometry.

Project Runway Finale

I just noticed that I said nothing about it, so here goes. I love Christian and would wear almost anything he put on the runway. I love the drama, the flair, the color (or lack of it). I thought everything he put on there looked like couture. Next for me was Jillian. I liked her drama as well and the clothes were cut very well. I just didn't like Rami. I didn't like his color palette, I didn't like his clothes (aside from the black gown), I didn't like any of it.
So, yay! Go Christian! He may have been cocky and irritating (he was not witty, just saying something in that annoying drawl is not wit) and everything may have been "fierce" but he can run circles around everyone else when it comes to design.

In Pale Battalions...

First of all, I want to say Lost has been terrific so far. For everyone who gave up on it last year (and its season finale last year was one of the best season finales I've ever seen) you should be watching it again-it's great.

What wasn't so great was In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard and I've been trying to put my finger on why I didn't quite like it. It had all the earmarks of a book I would like: a lonely girl with an evil Grandmother and distant Grandfather, a murder and a suicide and a backdrop of WWI. Why didn't I like it?
There were parts I did like-and it starts off with much promise, with a scene of an older woman taking her daughter to a WWI memorial-and showing her that her own father died more than a year before she was born. There seemed to be a cracking good story behind that and in some points there were-the evil Grandmother is very well drawn and is truly evil. However, everyone else is a shadow. From Leonora, who grew up lonely and got sent away to school and was sometimes sad, to her father who hated the war and didn't want to go back, to his friend who tells the tale-none of them seem particularly like real people. I hate to compare authors, but this book would have greatly benefited from the acute observations of both Ruth Rendell and Rennie Airth. What could have been a great story seemed to me to be airless and stale-even with an ending that revealed everything and had (I hate to admit) a nice twist.
And I have a particular nit to pick with this book over something that not only really annoyed but almost lead to me putting it down and not finishing it even though it was close to the end. And it's this-Leonora (the daughter whose Father died a year before she was born) meets up with a young-ish British girl and her American boyfriend sometime in the 60's. She's an artist and so is he and he's from New Jersey. So why oh why does he talk like a hick from the Deep South? A person from Jersey saying "ain't" and "I reckon"? what is that? I'll tell you what it is-it's a British writer who can find no other way to distinguish American speech from British speech except by having this character speak with bad grammar and sound like an uneducated idiot. And if he were a 60's draft dodger, the chances are good that he was a college student-at the least he scraped up enough money to make to the UK and lead a decent life. It was extremely annoying and took me right out of the book and I HATE that.
If you want to read a book set right after WWI and truly captures its horrors (along with a good murder or two) I suggest River of Darkness-not this.

Michael Clayton-Oy...and In Bruges

I remember when I first saw the trailer for Michael Clayton. I thought "George Clooney is playing a lawyer and it looks boring". Then I saw the print ad, and I thought "He's playing a lawyer who has some kind of a problem-drugs or alcohol (gambling, as it turns out), a kid and will be forced to make some kind of a choice where he either sells out or does the right thing". I couldn't quite figure out if he had sold out in the movie or before the events of the movie took place-before, I think because I'm pretty sure I would have noticed because it would have been FAR more interesting than what actually took in this movie. I'd much rather see the movie where George sells out than this, in which he does the right thing.
To me, this whole movie was stolen by Tom Wilkinson, playing the lead lawyer in a huge case who has gone off his bi-polar meds. It certainly was not stolen by Tilda Swinton-I'm even more baffled by her academy award after seeing this movie. Any actress could have done this part and she did not turn it into anything special, unlike Wilkinson, who took a semi-showy part and invested it with heart and intelligence. Aside from him, I thought it fairly boring and somewhat predictable.

That is almost the complete opposite from In Bruges, which is not really predictable and is wholly entertaining. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are hiding out in Bruges, on orders from their boss, Rafe Fines. A hit went wrong, Farrell screwed up and now they're in Bruges. Gleeson loves Bruges, the history, the architecture, the medieval quality of it, while Farrell..well If I grew up on a farm and was retarded, maybe I would be impressed. But I didn't, so I'm not". Usually Colin Farrell annoys me (see Miami Vice or any other movie he's made) but he does a good job playing the irritated-to-be-in Bruges hit-man who is also vaguely suicidal. Brendan Gleeson is always good as is rafe Fines. My only quarrel with this movie is that it's easy to tell that a playwright wrote and directed it. Coincidences happen, things are wound up a little too neatly...it's all a bit like watching a really good play. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just that I think this movie would have benefitted a bit from being not quite so neat. However, I still recommend it to anyone who has a dark sense of humor-that's the sort of person for whom this movie was made.