a partial list of pet peeves

. ... when bartenders or waiters leave a little bit of the paper wrapping on a straw. i hate straws to begin with, and i really can't stand the effortful carving of the perfect deliverabl straw sheath. just don't fucking touch the end, or don't give me a straw at all.

... when the street-crossing signs in movies set in historical new york don't match with the era. donnie brasco was a great movie, and i particularly liked the vintage cars that were in every street scene. but if you're going to do all that, would it kill you to change the walk/don't walk signs as well? i'm no fan of the hand + the albino AOL guy... i mean hell, it took me about 12 years to get used to the grid overlay (like this:
but donnie brasco was set in a time when the signs had their own shelves, and there was no grid in front of them. why take your viewers out of the scene like that?

interpreting the lid on my coffee cup

most mornings, i get coffee (and occassionally a bagel) from reuben, who mans a cart on the southeast corner of broome + broadway. reuben and i have a lot in common: we both like to shout "next", we both love efficiency in food service, we're both often misunderstood by regulatory agencies (he's had trouble renewing his vendor's license), and we both spend a good portion of our days in a small space, surrounded by bacon. lately, i've been limiting myself to one bagel per week (thanks to moses for leading us out of egypt, and incidentally helping me in this restriction), but i still enjoy a medium coffee on most days.

maybe reuben got new lids lately, or maybe i never looked. but when i went to take a sip the other day, i noticed that there was a lot of information on my coffee lid. i mean, a LOT.

here's a description (picture to follow): with the drink area at 6:00, the crest that stretches from 9:00 to 3:00 reads "place drink area opposite cup seam." dead center, it reads "caution hot", with "dopaco®" in a logo just above. underneath these two phrases, and just above the drink area, the cup reads "lock here." to the left of that, "dtbl", "10S", and "12-20", each on its own line. to the right of the drink area, there is a "6" in the center of a recycling triangle icon, with "ps" faintly below it. below that, and slightly to the right, is "68."

if in fireworks lie secret codes, on coffee cups rest cryptic characters. the "caution hot" i understand, missing colon notwithstanding. the "place drink area opposite cup seam" reuben does not; on this day and the next, my "drink area" was right over the seam. the recycling icon makes sense, but "6"? that must mean to hell with it, dump this in a landfill. the "lock here" is for people who take their "drink area[s]" a bit too seriously for my tastes, and "dopaco" represents the cryptographers who put this all together. that leaves the numbers and letters surrounding the drink area. "dtbl" is a mystery to me, but i assume that "10S" and "12-20" refer to ounces. perhaps "68" is the individual number on my cup (i'll check tomorrow!).

as for the "ps", well, i'll write about that later, as is fitting for a ps.

anyway, that is all. you may go.

john flaherty will save our broadcasts.

we all know that i love the yankees, but can't stand michael kay. i tuned in to the twins-yanks broadcast last night fully expecting the usual bromidic nonsense from kay and whoever was paired with him-- singleton, who's not awful, or perhaps kaat, whom i like somewhat. i heard a voice that sounded like al leiter's, but that was a bit more subdued.

turns out it was former yankee backup catcher john flaherty. he didn't say much, and when he did it was at the prompting of a specific question from kay, at least at first. he was calm, and his statements were imperfect: he trailed off mid-sentence a few times, and he tripped over a word on occassion.

but he sounded great. he let kay call the game, and didn't bite when kay tried to sucker him into a heated debate. he added some interesting comments on the weight of the catcher's mask (he had a herniated disc, so his trainer in tampa switched him to a hockey mask), and about pitch sequencing (when a-rod struck out). he talked about fundamentals, but one by one, and without using the cliche of "fundamentals." in other words, he was talking about baseball, with no bluster or false excitement, just with an appreciation for what was going on, and with a responsibility to help the average baseball fan understand everything, in all of its nuance.

but the best part was the silence. he didn't talk when he didn't have to, and the faint sounds of the game itself shone through. that hasn't happened in a yankee broadcast for as long as i can remember. the times when he trailed off were because the action was resuming, and he realized that the pitch was more important than his thought. kay, and john sterling, and other announcers try to impose; they foist their catchphrases and vapid pseudo-analyses on the public, superimposing themselves over the game. the beauty of an announcer like vin scully, for example, is that he understands that the game is beautiful, not the instant interpretation of the game. flaherty didn't impose himself: he complemented the action like another camera angle or a well-placed area light. maybe he was too timid, but his calm demeanor couched his silence in terms of an overarching perspective, not in terms of hesitancy.

i believe that he will get even better. he's only one season removed from being on the field, and his inexperience in the booth was clear. he used the phrase "nice job" at least 6 times, for everything from a cuddyer single to get the run in, to a mientkiewicz stop on a sharp grounder, to an abreu snare on a liner to right. while i believe that the genuineness of his statements insure that they are not themselves bromidic, i wouldn't mind if he came up with different ways of complimenting players, or even if he didn't do it so often on relatively routine plays.

kay was his usual self. "the yankees are writing a GLOVE story," he declared after the mientkiewicz play, and he also said that the last time the giants and yankees played each other in san francisco during the regular season was... in the 1962 world series. kay and flaherty disagreed on mauer's sac bunt that moved the tying run into scoring position, and kay kept hounding flaherty, either trying to get him to cave in or trying to lure him into a superfluous conflict. flaherty didn't bite, and seemed to take a small degree of satisfaction in what happened next: "the sac bunt worked," he said, when the next batter, cuddyer, singled home the tying run.

so long live john flaherty. i fear that he won't be popular, with his steady tone and his penchant for quiet, so please feel free to contact the yes network to offer your support (info at yesnetwork.com). and listen this friday, when he + ken singleton will broadcast the game without interference from kay! not bad for our wonderful backup catcher, who started his career behind rich gedman and ended it, 849 hits later, with a .252 career average and 80 home runs, behind jorge posada.

i am very grateful...

... that neil young follows natalia zukerman in my iTunes.

movie review: babel

i saw the movie babel yesterday, or rather i DEMANDED it from movies on DEMAND. the cable box provided the film immediately; i see why you have to speak to them firmly, though, and be insistent.

babel was very confusing. the best i can figure, it was about how brad pitt and kate winslett went around to a lot of poor areas and adopted as many kids as they could carry. first, they went to arabia and adopted these two little goat herders, and then they went to mexico and took two tow-headed children from a chicken farm. then somehow they also adopted the leader of a band of deaf japanese sporting types, although she wound up being an adopted kid more in the "soon-yi previn" sense than in the "oliver twist" sense.

meanwhile, there were a lot of villians who were trying to disrupt this happy family. the japanese secret police kept hounding the birth father of the deaf girl, possibly because he kept trying to reclaim her as his own. then, the border patrol chased two of the children through the desert and made their caregiver, esmerelda, dance a forbidden dance in her red dress. things got even worse when one of the adopted kids shot his new mom, probably because it was a custom in his home country. this made brad pitt VERY upset, so he punched a tourist and then, in the film's only real action sequence, jumped on a helicopter and flew it into a military base. that was cool.

overall, i'd say the point of the movie is that you should adopt as many kids as possible, and learn to speak a lot of languages. but you have to watch the kids you adopt, because sometimes they get naked and sometimes they shoot you. i wasn't counting when i watched (DEMANDED!) it, so i'll give it an 8 out of 10, where 1 is really crappy and 10 is the best movie ever.

i'm only gonna say this one time...

... alanis morissette's cover of my humps may be most important cultural critique of our generation.