Breaking the Record

Ichiro is three away from breaking George Sisler's 1927 record of 257 base hits in a single MLB season.  Around here, there's much talk about whether Ichiro should break the record at an away game or wait until he gets home to Safeco Field.

GET REAL!

Ichiro should not concentrate on breaking a record.  He should only do what he does well, hit the ball and let the chips fall where they may.

If he breaks Sisler's record at an away game, then he can jolly well set a NEW record at a home game.  That's the way I see it.  Stupid Mariners fans.

Federal Inmate Martha Stewart

It was reported today that Martha Stewart may be going to the federal women's correctional facility at Alderson, West Virginia (my sister's home state).  The minimum security prison has been nicknamed "camp cupcake" due to its laxity and lenience.  Inmates typically perform light duty yard work, or sometimes knit items for charity.  One can only imagine how much a hand-knit sweater by Martha Stewart would fetch in an auction on e-Bay, especially one knitted while in the pokey.

Isn't it all just too ridiculous?

In English Common Law, there were two categories of crime: felonies and misdemeanors.  Felonies always carried the ultimate penalty--execution.  Misdemeanors were lesser crimes that usually carried a prison sentence.  Most of the felonies we now know as felonies, once were punished by death.  Nowadays, people are sent to Camp Cupcake.  Is it a better world for that?  Probably.  I recently read a figure that there are over 4,000 federal crimes that could earn you prison time.  It's getting harder and harder to avoid committing one or more of them, especially when you don't know what most of them really are.

Magma

Boiling gaseous energy, swarms of small earthquakes, hot molten rock rising slowly through an intractable crust:  Mount St. Helens?  No, the Kerry campaign.

The comeback kid can't campaign for JFK due to his recent heart bypass surgery, so he sent the next best thing--his best and brightest, to help bring about a sea-change in this election.  And you can tell--the pit bulls of the GOP have unleashed their reductive, minimalizing attacks on the senator, calling him all kinds of names and attacking his character, which the GOP loves to do.  (By the way, why do we always pronounce it "jee oh pee", huh?  Why not call it for what it is: the stuff you dig out of a septic tank: "gop" something that rhymes with "cop" and "slop").  They're attacking.  They're on the defensive.  Meanwhile, Kerry keeps his course straight ahead, sure of his ability to save America from this gang of thieves in the White House and their incompetent masthead.

The tide is turning; you can feel it, just like the mini temblors deep inside Mt. St. Helens indicate.  I feel it in the soles of my feet, in my ankles, my knees.  A positive thrumming.  The electorate is waking up. 

The Return of the King on DVD

Peter Jackson's Return of the King, which won Best Picture at the 2003 Academy Awards, will be extended by 30% in its upcoming DVD release (December 14).  Hopefully, one scene will feature Gandalf preventing Witch King from entering Minas Tirith, which was one of my favorite moments in the book.  As Gandalf the White, he is able to do what he could not do as Gandalf the Grey at the Bridge of Khazad Dum.  That has nice symmetry, and it was missed in the film.

Cintra Wilson

Last night went to Cintra Wilson's reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore.  She was superb, actually having memorized her reading as a monologue, and performing it.  Her biting, satirical invective was as delightful as her comestible figure.  Beauty, brains and 'tude.  What more can one desire from an evening?

Censorship in Hollywood

Last week I watched The Birth of a Nation for the first time.  In the special features, the narrator quoted from a Supreme Court case that held First Amendment rights did not apply to motion pictures.  Fascinated, I did some research and found the quote.  The case was Mutual v. Ohio.  The money quote:

"It cannot be put out of view that the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion. They are mere representations of events, of ideas and sentiments published and known; vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but, as we have said, capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition. It was this capability and power, and it may be in experience of them, that induced the state of Ohio, in addition to prescribing penalties for immoral exhibitions, as it does in its Criminal [236 U.S. 230, 245] Code, to require censorship before exhibition, as it does by the act under review. We cannot regard this as beyond the power of government."

Friend Due In

Today my friend Steve is coming to visit from Minnesota.  I'm really excited.  I love showing off my city and region and he's never been here before.  I just hope that the weather cooperates at least somewhat.  The old saw about Seattle is if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.  And generally that's true.  In Alaska they may have fifty different words that mean snow.  In Seattle, it seems it would be handy to have at least fifty different words to mean rain.  The hard, cold rain, the hard warm rain, the drizzle, the mist.  The mist is my favorite, the consistency of the spray they use in Las Vegas to keep people from dying of heat stroke as they trudge from casino to casino in high summer.  Seattle's weather encourages poetry and other literary aspirations.  Although not all are gothic like mine, the gloom, the chill and the sudden expansion of the landscape on sunny days reinforces my emotional ambivalence. 

It's true, I need miracle ear.  Was talking to my coworker Joyce yesterday and almost thought I was being harrassed.  I heard a sigh, and what I thought were the words, "On me!"  When what she actually said, when I asked for clarification was, "ennui!"  Mama mia.