Readers of The New Yorker are familiar with the cartoons of William Steig, back from when their cartoons were wonderful and funny. Steig was born on this date back in 1907 in NYC and died at the age of 95 in Boston. His parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary. His dad was a house painter and his mom a seamstress. It was she who encouraged his art. According to The Writer’s Almanac, Steig said: “If I’d had it my way, I’d have been a professional athlete, a sailor, a beachcomber, or some other form of hobo, a painter, a gardener, a novelist, a banjo-player, a traveler, anything but a rich man.” He was the anti-Tevye.
He is best-known as the creator of Shrek.
Here’s a haiku I wrote yesterday.
Eye exam: Is it
Better this way or this way?
Seems about the same.
I watched the first half of the Jets game last night but didn’t need to see that much to realize how much better the Pats are than us. The Jets started well with an opening TD drive, but the New Englanders moved like a hot knife through butter in response. Their young QB Drake Maye is the real thing. He played college ball at UNC, not a traditional powerhouse, although Lawrence Taylor played there. Next Sunday the Jets face the Ravens in Poe-town, and Owl Chatter will be there. Oy.
Oh, hi Joe! Hey, everybody, it’s Joe Namath with his beautiful daughter Jessica. Looks just like you, Dad! Thanks for dropping by. Grab a Diet Coke and settle in! See the game last night?
Sydney Sweeney has taken her place among the great beauties of her generation. We don’t expect her to pop into the puzzle often: too many letters, but she was the focus of a boring Op-Ed piece by Ross Douthat in The Times today. He’s hoping her stardom can be a counterweight to cookie-cutter AI movies. Blah blah blah. We’re not going to worry about it.
Phil says she’s taking it easy on us in this shot. A full blast could knock you backwards through a window.
Remember that board game LIFE? I remember enjoying it. It first came out in 1860, a creation of the person Milton Bradley, the first ever board game for his company of the same name. It’s the modern version that I recall, and it came out in 1960, when I was ten. It was in the puzzle today at 41A: “Board game that begins with players choosing college versus career.” Here’s Rex on it: “I enjoyed remembering this game. Played it a lot as a child. It didn’t much prepare me for LIFE, though. For instance, I hardly ever drive around in a plastic six-seater convertible.”
How about the spooky 50D? “Horror character known as the Mistress of the Dark.” Remember ELVIRA? She was pretty funny, as I recall. Here she is with her pet tarantula.
Elvira was the creation of actress Cassandra Peterson, a redhead (vu den?)
Per egs: ELVIRA always makes me shake my head in a gesture of awe and disbelief because a man named Dallas Frazier wrote a song which became a big hit for the Oak Ridge Boys and contained, in the chorus, the alleged rhyme, “My hearts on fire, Elvira.” I guess he didn’t think, “Don’t spend your IRA, Elvira” had the requisite zip.
This poem by Natalie Diaz has a helluva name: “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation.” It was today’s poem of the day from Poets.org. I am shallow enough to be impressed that the first letter of each line works down the alphabet.
Angels don’t come to the reservation.
Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—
death. And death
eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel
fly through this valley ever.
Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though—
he came through here one powwow and stayed, typical
Indian. Sure he had wings,
jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. Wherever he stops,
kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies.
Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel.
Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something—
Nazarene church holds one every December,
organized by Pastor John’s wife. It’s no wonder
Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white.
Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?
Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels
up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearing
velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups,
we’re better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and
’xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens.
You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to
Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.
Here’s Natalie. She’s a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet and a prof at ‘Zona State. And get this: She was a point guard on her basketball team at Old Dominion and reached the Final Four of the NCAA tourney as a freshman and the Sweet 16 her other three years. She played pro ball in Europe and Asia.
We rented Eephus from Amazon Prime this week and watched it twice. Bill Lee (yes, that Bill Lee, Red Sox fans) has a small but wonderful role in it. I don’t know how to describe the movie. To say it’s a baseball movie is to be entirely accurate and to completely miss the point at the same time. This is the premise as described in Wikipedia: “In a small Massachusetts town in the 1990s, the Adler’s Paint baseball team faces the Riverdogs in one last game before their ballfield is demolished to make room for a new school.”
It’s the last game. The teams are a combination of middle-aged beer bellies with some college kids sprinkled in. Mostly white, but there is a Black player and when he hits a home run and they welcome him at the plate you can tell his teammates had long ago accepted him without the slightest trace of racism, as if they had no concept of what racism even is or could be.
The whole movie is blue collar baseball banter. One team’s captain is dragged off midgame to attend his niece’s christening and another player says, “That’s why I’m never going to have a niece.” It’s a brilliant line, delivered as a throwaway.
The game is constantly under threat: one team only has eight players and will have to forfeit, but they bat first and prolong their half inning just long enough for their ninth man to arrive. The umps refuse to stay beyond the allotted time, but the teams agree to continue under a modified honor system. The field descends into darkness but they arrange their cars and pickup trucks so the headlights cast just enough light to allow play. You see, the score is tied, and it’s the last game for them, like, forever, and they can’t let it end without a proper resolution.
One of the young players on the Adler Paint team explains how the eephus pitch works. It’s super slow. It just hangs there. You get bored looking at it. You either lose your patience and swing too early, or you finally decide to swing later only to discover it’s gone past you. Bill Lee threw it in his later years in the majors, and he throws it here in his one inning, effectively.
The family of only one player, Bill Belinda, comes to watch. His kids are in the short clip, below. (The daughter asks the quintessential question: “Why do they care so much?”) When his wife tells him it’s late and cold and they have to leave, he gets them to stay for one more at bat of his and he strikes out. He laments to a teammate that it was probably the last time his kids will see him bat and he struck out. The teammate says, “they’re kids, they won’t remember.” He counters: “they’re 10 and 12.” The teammate says, “then they’ll think it’s funny. It won’t matter to them.” And Bill says “It matters to me.”
At another point, one of his teammates says, “Bill, how come you’re the only player whose family comes to the games.” Bill may not have realized it up till then, but it gives him a good feeling. At one point, when the consensus seems to be growing to call it quits, Bill’s daughter, on the field with him for some reason, sings “Take me out to the ballgame,” in her beautiful 12-year-old’s voice. The game continues.
One batter hits a foul popup that the out-of-shape catcher lumbers over and catches. “I should be put down,” he mutters. Tell me about it.
Enough. See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 