Superstition

I’m finally back on the roads after a commercial break sponsored by my left achilles. Very slow, very short, and begun with a careful warm-up walk of a quarter-mile or so, but back. And with my return to shuffling, I return also the the area of my life most affected by juju.

I’m a mostly rational person, but I operate as a runner within a cloud of dogmatic unreason. It’s never okay, for example, to cut a corner (speaking literally here) in a training run. Always square it off or run the longer way around rather than the shorter. On the other hand, it’s absolutely prohibited to do that little jog-in-place dance at corners waiting for traffic to pass or lights to change. Just stand there. Never use the stopwatch function of your wristwatch to time your aerobic runs. If you really have to know your splits and total, use the regular watch function and do the math in your head. Regardless of speed or oxygen requirements, sync inhaling with your left-foot strikes, never your right.

Along these lines, five miles is a meaningless distance. In my cosmology, four miles is the shortest distance that really counts. Six miles is the minimum distance that actually does you any good (this is personal voodoo, remember, not science). If I’ve been running a regular four mile loop, and want to increase the distance now and then, five miles would be the natural next step. But it’s existentially nonexistent. So I go to six.

This all may sound silly, but it’s nothing compared to my baseball fetishes. No, no, no! Don’t cross those bats!!

Stevie has his own take on this:

When you believe in things
That you don't understand,
Then you suffer.
Superstition ain't the way.
No, no, no

Clearly, this won’t be my last dinged tendon.

Hello, Central. Get me Google.

I signed up for Google Voice a month or so ago, but hadn’t used it until the other day. I gave out the number to someone I knew I was going to to be setting up schedules with, and I thought the value would be that her calls would ring through to my mobile and both my home/office phones, and we wouldn’t miss connections and have to be going back and forth.

It’s actually much better than that.

We did miss connections, because she called me twice today when I was away from home but couldn’t reach my mobile. And when I got home there were two emails in my box with quite accurate transcriptions of her voice messages (although the family name came out as “Hall Verizon”). There’s also an option to play the message itself. Superb. If you’re a texter (I’m not), it leaves messages there, too. And you have a Voice homepage where all messages appear (with aural option appended). You can instantly see who called, you can immediately see which messages are worth spending time on, and you can check them in any order. Wonderful.

Really

This guy is really good.

This is really good on race in America.

And this is really good on journalism of a certain kind.

And this is about beer. (Well, it’s just a link. But it’s still about beer, so it’s really good.)

All in one day! Blogchamp. Really.

December 7

I haven’t exactly covered the waterfront, but the only notice of Pearl Harbor I’ve seen today is on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which is running Frank Capra’s seven sequential “Why We Fight” films, made in 1942-45. Frank propaganda in the best possible cause. To modern viewers they look yawningly like hundreds of war documentaries that followed, but they were in fact the first that used what became the now-familiar standard elements: actual footage, good editing, sharp cuts, dramatic voice-over, and music to shape emotion. They knocked people out when they arrived in wartime theaters.

A good morning

H called fairly early because sweet B was pointing at the laptop and saying, “M.” And she seemed quite happy when her M actually appeared on the other side of the iChat. Fortunately, I’m made of stern stuff and she cannot turn my head with calls for my presence, beautiful smiles, cheerful play, and general sweetness.


She went on to display newly-acquired language skills (among other things, she can make monkey noises, a key to popularity in this family). We won’t be seeing B, A, and H in person until next weekend, but this morning’s touch was a joy.

Afterwards, I geared up and headed out to test the strained left achilles with something beyond the standard morning stroll. A little walk to warm up, a gentle and gingerly eight-tenths of a mile, and things were feeling okay, which was not the case last week. It wasn’t the jungle sound of a cheerful small primate, but it was pretty good.

Recycling

This is me with H, a long, long time ago, herringboning her back up a little hill we’d just skimmed down together. You can’t see it in this resolution, but she’s got her little tongue out, tasting snowflakes.

My father just found those very skis, in all their 70 cm. glory, tucked away in his garage, cleaned them up, and brought them down. This winter may be a bit early, but surely next year a somewhat less svelte me will be wandering around in the snow with sweet B on her new-old skis.

(I bought that supercool hat in Jackson Hole in the early ’80s. Still got it. Still wear it. Still, obviously, supercool.)

Tommy Henrich, RIP

Tommy Henrich (he told me he actually preferred to be called Tom) was the hard-hitting right fielder of the New York Yankees from the late 1930s through 1950 (with time out for Coast Guard service during the war). A pro’s pro, the left-handed Henrich was an excellent fielder with a terrific arm and great baseball sense. He was known as “Old Reliable” for the steadiness and coolness under pressure that made him a feared clutch hitter. Oddly, he’s most famous for striking out against the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Hugh Casey in the the fourth game of the 1941 World Series. With Brooklyn leading 4-3 with two outs in the ninth, Casey broke off a sharp curve that Henrich swung at and missed for strike three. But catcher Mickey Owen couldn’t handle the pitch either, and it rolled to the fence as Henrich ran to first, leading to a Yankee rally and victory.

Tom Henrich was also a fine, fine man. Here’s the final paragraph of the New York Times obit:

Henrich’s dedication on the field was matched by a reputation for strength of character. As [Yankees manager Casey] Stengel put it in a 1949 profile of Henrich in The New Yorker: “He’s a fine judge of a fly ball. He fields grounders like an infielder. He never makes a wrong throw, and if he comes back to the hotel at 3 in the morning when we’re on the road and says he’s been sitting up with a sick friend, he’s been sitting up with a sick friend.”