Mark Your Calendars:

Banned Book Week

The other day when I was buying books for my family and myself, I got into a discussion about books from my childhood that I've subsequently read aloud to my children. This led to a discussion of banned books beginning with A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L'Engle which falls in at number 22 on the top 100 challenged books from 1990 to 2000. Conservatives were threatened by the witchery and pagan discussion in the book, but interestingly, I find the whole series to be deeply Christian, which allowed the Jewish Rabbit family the opportunity to have theological discussions on the use of religious metaphor.

Looking at the list, I am pleased to see how many of them we've read separately or together, including To Kill A Mockingbird, which we are currently reading. It is fascinating that a whole culture of people is willing to censor some really great works of literature (though they can have Ulysses as far as I'm concerned) but have no qualms about putting up a website like this one where someone is actually advocating lynching. Ironic, eh?

So go out there and read Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, Captain Underpants, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Slaughterhouse Five and celebrate intellectual freedom.

Things That Make You Go “Yuck”

I was riding the train into New York yesterday, and at one Connecticut station, I saw a billboard for New York Sports Clubs. It had a guy standing on an outdoor basketball court blocking two other guys who were obviously going to get into a pushing match at the very least. The caption read, “What do you want to do?” and then “play”. It was a good ad, and I thought, gee, I’d join a club like that.

On the way back to New Haven, I saw another of the billboards in NYSC’s ad campaign. This one showed the side of a house with a bedroom window. Inside was a woman in a bra and panties, and further in the room was a man in a tie, the implication being either husband or father. Dangling out of the window was a half-clad well-muscled boy who was, according to the picture, barely escaping detection. “What do you want to do?” read the caption, and then “scram”. It was a bad ad. It was tasteless and disturbing and ugly. It was the sort of ad where the male executives clap each other on the back and say, “Good one” and the conservative right says, “See, NO family values, let’s legislate censorship.’’ Too bad you can’t legislate taste.

It’s All About the Beer

I wasn’t allowed to bring my purse into Gillette Stadium for Patriots' opening day. I was told that it was because of new NFL rules, as if somehow my tiny backpack might have held an explosive device that would have leveled the stadium and Ozzy Osbourne, rather than my wallet, cell phone, bandages, and some tampons.

Instead, the Patriots’ owners encourage other forms of mass destruction by inviting game attendees to drink as much as possible and then get in their cars and drive down I-495. It isn’t okay to have a bottle of ibuprophen, but it is okay to drink 12 margaritas during the course of a 3 hour game, or the equivalent in beer, Mike’s Lemonade, or various Seagram’s Coolers. In fact, it is more than okay. It is actually the main activity of the game. The people attending this game are more than likely the same ones who will pay $9 to see a movie (without beer) and will stay in their seats for the two hours, perhaps getting up once to void. Once at a football game, however, the event that is going on in front of them is completely superfluous. Even though they may have paid as much as $75 for nosebleed altitude seats, they won’t watch the game, oh no. They will walk, then stumble up and down the stairs at least a half dozen times to pay $7 for a beer, nay, $14 for two beers, which is all that they are allowed to purchase at one time. Incidentally, the walking up and down completely obscures the view for the eleven people who actually went to the stadium to watch the Patriots play football.

I’d like to go see another game, because watching this is really just as entertaining as the game, which I can’t see anyway, because there’s some drunk guy in front of me waving and cheering and pointing to his hat which tells us that the Patriots won the superbowl last year, like we might not know that. I’m sure he’ll be at the next game too, because all of the seats belong to season’s ticket holders. However, I can drink really good beer in my house for about $1.20 a bottle. I can watch the Patriots play on the TV in my den and be able to see a lot more of the game. Think of all the money I’ll save. Maybe I’ll ask my son to stand in front of the television while I’m trying to watch and do a Neanderthal impression. I’ll feel like I’m really there.

Where Have All the People Gone (Long Time After)?

Gentrification. I love it. Tacky neighborhoods being overhauled. Fear no more as you walk through the Boston’s South End, or even sections of Jamaica Plain. Turn-of-the-century brownstones and Victorians given new life by those with taste and money. It’s a pleasure to walk around without the affront of having to stare at drunks in doorways, menacing youth following you down the street. But where are they? Their absence is so striking that you realize that to call their existence an affront to the sensibilities of upper middle class citizens is a horror. I looked down alleyways, in gardens. No one. Gone are the corner liquor stores which catered to the clientele that upwardly mobile Bostonians would refrain from giving their spare change to those that “will only spend it on booze, so why should we give them our hard earned cash”. Replaced by Tapas restaurants and galleries. Even the police station in the South End has been relocated to a more distant address while the D-4 station on Berkley Street is turned into pricey condos.

This seems to me to be in keeping with the rest of the current administration’s thinking: if we keep telling people how good things are, we can brainwash them into thinking it’s true. AND, if things LOOK good, why, they must BE good. Funnily enough, if you check the government income statistics (even before Hurricane Katrina), median household income has gone down over the last year. So it makes me wonder two things: Who is buying these properties; and Where did everyone else go?

Processed Lunch Meat

I’ve been having an internal debate about whether spammers are Democrats or Republicans. They COULD be Democrats, because we have that “let’s let everyone play no matter how inappropriate they are” attitude. Or they COULD be Republicans because they have that tremendous sense of entitlement, that they’re allowed to muddy my e-mail, and now interfere with my blog. The end result is the same, so now I am doing what everyone else is forced to do and adding word recognition until the spammers get past that too. They’re so clever really, don’t you think they could be putting all of that creativity to good use, say, saving New Orleans?

Bush Pitches a Nine Hitter?

During the World Series last year, I gained enormous respect for Curt Schilling of the Red Sox. After years of watching Pedro whine every time he turned the wrong way or bruised his pinky closing a door, it was incredibly refreshing to watch a talented player continue to pitch well in the face of an injury that might impact the rest of his career. No matter that he was making more money in one outing than I’ll make in 10 years; he was tough, he pitched well. My cynical mother told me that he was doing it for the bonus he would receive on top of his regular salary, but a bit more money on top of a ton of money isn’t that noticeable. When you’re making that much money a year, what’s another few hundred thousand dollars. I thought he was doing it because he loved baseball, because he wanted to be part of an historic team.

Then, on November 1, shortly after the Red Sox won the series, Schilling went on stage with George Bush in Wilmington, Ohio and gave him a ringing political endorsement. Obviously, if Tim Wakefield had showed up at a John Kerry rally and encouraged the public to get out and vote for Kerry, I wouldn’t have had the same seething antipathy that I’ve had towards Schilling ever since that appearance. Or would I? We’ve become accustomed to seeing Hollywood’s finest at political rallies for years, and that’s become sort of humdrum. But the Red Sox players had taken on super hero qualities over the course of the playoffs and the World Series, so Schilling’s move was tantamount to Batman coming out publicly in favour of Commissioner Gordon, waving from election posters, arm in arm. It felt wrong. It would have felt wrong even if he had done it for Kerry instead. Baseball and politics should be as separate as church and state. Oops.

On Monday, Schilling pitched predictably poorly against the league-leading Chicago White Sox. The crowd cheered him with his oddly dyed hair as he walked out to the pitchers' mound, and they gave him a standing ovation when he was taken out in the 7th inning. All around me I heard fans who had gone to the bathroom or to get another beer return to their seats saying, “Why is he still in the ballgame?” And then there they were cheering wildly for him as he left the mound. Were they all Republicans? Did they forget that for the last 2 1/3 innings he couldn’t get the ball over the plate? After the (deserved) reputation Boston fans have for being incredibly harsh towards players, I was shocked at their idolatry. Schilling doesn’t have it any more, and politically, he is naïve, so he brings little to the plate, if you will. Maybe we can sign Batman for the starting rotation.