Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Baseball adopts instant replay; Piniella ready to throw down

I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about baseball finally following the lead of other major U.S. sports and adopting the instant replay. But quote of the day on this or any other subject clearly goes to notoriously explosive base-tossing manager Lou Piniella. "What's the format? I'd love to be able to throw a red hankie or a green hankie," Piniella said, referring to the NFL system in which a coach throws out a red flag to challenge a call. "Imagine being able to throw something on the field and not be ejected."

Monday, August 25, 2008

Things To Do In Denver When You're A Democrat

Pardon the lame movie-title pun, but after a couple of weeks of summer doldrums (read: watching the Olympics instead of blogging), there is suddenly so much raw material to commentate upon that my head is spinning and I hardly know where to begin. Fine, let's go with the Democratic National Convention for $1000, Alex.

In no particular order:

Is it possible not to be moved by the very sight of NBC's new "youth correspondent" at the convention -- Tim Russert's son Luke? I think not.

Newsweek columnist Ellis Cose raises the deeper issue that's been lurking behind the conspiracy-theory-wingnut disinformation campaign that has attempted to paint lifelong Christian Barack Obama as some sort of closet Muslim. The real issue being, so what if he was? There is no religion test for the Oval Office. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and, yes, Muslims are all welcome to apply. Right?

As for the convention itself, all I can really say there is thank God for The Daily Show...

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...