Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Welcome to Catober!

Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.

I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.

At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …

Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.

Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.

Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.

The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.

And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.

I’ll be whelmed.

That’ll be the extent of it.

Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)

We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.

But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”

The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.

Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.

In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.

And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!

adventures / family / history / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Sep 24

Keens

My in-laws had this steakhouse in Manhattan that they went to for years and years. It was quite the classy old New York charm. One of those places that was hard to get into. But the in-laws knew a guy, and so they could walk in like stars. They took me there once or twice, and I was glad for it. But the place closed — landlords, man — and then re-opened in some form elsewhere for a few years, but it wasn’t the same, so my father-in-law found himself a new place.

It was two years ago, as far as I know, that they found a new place to call their steakhouse in the city. I’m not sure how they came upon it, but my lovely bride took her parents in for a show and they went to this place. They raved about it. Insisted I had to come with them into the city to go to this place. Full of history, and also the food.

Keens traces its roots back to the 19th century, when the owner’s first joint, a theater man, turned it into a hot spot for the players who trod the boards, and the people who made the plays happen. Many of the walls in the old rambling building are filled with quirky headshots of actors and actresses, most of them forgotten by all but the true connoisseurs. The real item, though, is this.

(Click to embiggen in a new tab.)

That’s supposedly Abraham Lincoln’s playbill. Ford’s Theatre, 1865, the night he was assassinated. The story goes that someone found it after he was shot and picked it up. It passed through a few hands and when Keens took on what is essentially its current form just after the turn of the century, someone found it on the property.

So the second floor has the Lincoln room, and this wall has been devoted to the theme. Here’s an undated article that most likely over-romanticizes the story.

There are framed photos of Lincoln, an image of John Wilkes Booth, a quality reproduction of Booth’s mother that he kept, an 1862 playbill of a show Booth was headlining in Boston. And then there’s this poster, dated six days after Lincoln’s murder and six days before Boston Corbett killed Booth.

Another feature are these pipes. Keens says they have the largest collection of churchwarden pipes in the world. The story in the menu says they once were ordering 50,000 of them every three years. Apparently there was a sort of coat-check style system, and some people left their pipes there. And here are some of the famous ones.

Ted Turner, Stephen King, John Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Jackie Mason, Joseph Heller, Redd Foxx, Arthur Ashe and more have pipes in that case. That one sits right by the door. This one is by the host stand, it’s obviously from a different era.

Please excuse the glare, but in that case the pipe warden placed the spit covered clay pipes of people like Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Albert Einsten, J.P. Morgan, and many others.

A closer look at Teddy Roosevelt’s pipe. The tradition here started in the early 20th century, so that’s presidential spit on a hard clay pipe that was imported from the Netherlands.

Once upon a time pipe smoking was considered beneficial for dissipating “evil homourse of the brain,” so naturally this was a big thing. The pipes have these thin stems, so they were too fragile to carry, hence the storage and, presumably, the regular big orders the place put in.

I’m guessing MacArthur might have brought and left his own. Looks a bit more ornate, and fits the personality.

Keens’ site says the membership roster of the Pipe Club contained more than 90,000 names. That’s a lot of smoke! And here’s another presidential pipe.

I assume this is the former vice president Adlai Stevenson, not Stevenson II, who was a senator and UN ambassador.

There’s a display case with some signed pipes just thrown in it. No mounts, no labels, just chaotic. This is for a lesser tier of Pipe Club members, I guess. Regular folks pipes?

Just stored on the ceiling. In every possible space.

It’s a steakhouse, but the menu says “legendary mutton.” And when the first woman won the legal right to go into this place in 1905, she sat down and ordered the mutton. She’d been waiting on that. It’s also the first item on the menu. I got that. I was not disappointed.

I was, in fact, too full for the giant desserts, which were giant and delicious.

I’d visit Keens again — that meal was delicious! — but you’re buying.

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
17
Sep 24

Come for the cats, be pleasantly surprised by something else

I have been asked by the house’s executives to get right to the important part of the day’s activity, which is, of course, the most popular feature on the site. So we will go directly to checking in on the kitties.

Phoebe is usually the driver of this, because she knows she is very photogenic. Just sitting on the landing of the stairs, look at those pretty eyes.

She does not want to share the mail, however. Sometimes she gets mail, but she’s convinced all of it is hers. She sits on it.

Oh, sure, she lets us have the bills, but she keeps the bulk mail, magazines and the like. She’s not supposed to be on the counter, but our cats are jailhouse lawyers, and they’ve figured out that if you’re sitting on a bank mailer, you’re not sitting on the countertop.

Poseidon is no better about countertops. And here he is, different day, same counter, sleeping on a box full of produce.

He’s waiting to see what’s inside. He loves trying to chew on some of our veggies. This summer he discovered corn stalks. Corn stalks are bad for cats, so we have to hide them. And we have to hide them when he’s not paying attention, because he remembers they’re in the fridge, or stored away here or there. He remembers long after they’re gone. He’s probably dreaming about corn there.

And when there is no corn, he might switch between pouting about it, and trying to charm you into getting some for him.

But we, of course, tell him no. He’s never one not to try, though. He’s a persistent little so and so.

The cats, you see, are doing well, and they thank you for your interest.

I had a nice cool swim this afternoon. It was a 1,720 yard swim. They’re getting a little faster of late, but there’s only so much improvement of which I am capable of. I know it, because I can still shave chunks of time off in pretty decent increments. Probably it’s the cooler water.

Also, I’m swimming enough to know when my arms will stop protesting and just do the work. And I’m close to knowing lap lengths just by feel.

But to demonstrate my ability: this is the summer where I’ve finally started to swim in a straight line.

More or less.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project. Here, I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, and I’m playing them in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing about them here, because we need the content. These aren’t reviews, because they’d be woefully out of date and I’m no critic. They are, however, sometimes full of memories, and a good excuse to post a few videos. These songs are from 2003, from an album I got in 2006 or so, of the overnight success, Howie Day, who was, in fact, a seven-year overnight success.

“Stop All the World Now” was the second album and, the major label debut, for Day. Critically, it got a lukewarm reception, but it went platinum in 18 or 19 months, and the third single, “Collide,” which you heard on the radio and in TV and movies a lot, was certified gold. And, two-plus decades later, it holds up as a pop-rock record.

And it’s full of hum-along songs, tunes you pick up quickly on the first or second listen and want to come back for a few more times. This is the fifth track on the album, and it fits that bill with an instrumentation that feels simultaneously earthly and ethereal, which seems a feat.

It is also of it’s time. But, there’s a small window on the musical calendar where rock was in an ebb and alt was disappearing and singer-song writers with some indie-pop sensibilities could fill some airspace and some evenings. I don’t really know what that means, except that I do, and it also sounds right.

This was the first single from that record, the first time a broader audience heard him. It was August 2003, and this sounds like that. I don’t remember the first time I heard that song, but I do remember the work I was doing late that summer.

I was doing interviews and producing a documentary on an upcoming tax referendum. (The tax went to a statewide special ballot vote that September, but this is Alabama and so it didn’t just fail, but failed spectacularly. The director of the state Board of Education was in tears on TV that night.) Also, at about that same time I was busy covering Roy Moore being removed from the bench as Alabama’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being Alabama, he got another shot at the bench, largely on the same religious rhetoric that got him kicked off the first time.

Probably I picked up on Howie Day a little bit after that. Sharp-eared listeners might have found him on the “I Am Sam” soundtrack, which we featured here a few weeks ago. He covered “Help!”

Day has had a handful of ugly legal trouble of the domestic and chemical varieties, but he’s still out there doing it. Day is touring on the 20th anniversary of this record right now.

Next time in the Re-Listening project, we’ll have a glance at a post-grunge album at it’s most polished and most posty.

Tomorrow, a meeting, and also a meeting!

music / photo / Re-Listening / Tuesday — Comments Off
10
Sep 24

Day two of a bit of grrr

I am waiting for a phone call. I waited yesterday. I have waited today. Tomorrow, I’m making a lot more phone calls. I am tired of waiting.

While we wait … it has been brought to my attention that I did not run the site’s most popular weekly feature yesterday. Apologies have been rendered and forgiveness offered, contingent upon my remedying the situation. So here we are, checking in on the kitties.

The other day I was removing boxes from upstairs to the recycling staging area — the garage — but Phoebe got there before I could complete the task.

So those boxes stayed just like that for a while. Finally, she moved. Finally, I convinced her there would be other boxes. Also, I reminded her of the other three or four boxes that are always around for her.

At some later point, she curled up next to me for a mid-afternoon nap. I have resolved to not being inside on beautiful days such as that, but there’s no resisting a power move like this. She covered her eyes, and everything.

Poseidon is ready to be plugged in. How else can he know if I am keeping up my end of the cat photo feature bargain? (People tell him, I’m sure.) Fortunately for me, he doesn’t know the difference between a power plug and a network plug.

He’s still not online. Good thing, too. He’s definitely the cat that would land us in the news for buying $4,000 of catnip and self sealing stem bolts.

And much like his sister, if there’s something he can climb into, he’s already been in it twice.

When the groceries come in, he is very helpful. He surprises our storage procedures, chews on plastic, examines the vegetables, raids the pantry, and climbs in the bags. Much of it happening faster than I can type it.

He is a boundless source of amusement.

We return to the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order of their acquisition. It’s an excuse, one I didn’t need, to listen to my old music. And I’m writing about it here to pad the site, maybe share a memory or two, and to include some good music. These aren’t music reviews, because no one needs a decades old review. This is a 2002 CD, one that I picked up used a few years later, in about 2006, just to round out my collection a little bit. And it’s a soundtrack.

“I Am Sam” was a Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle. Diane West was in it too, and so was Dakota Fanning. But most people just remember Penn, and the Beatles covers.

It begins with “Two of Us,” a song my lovely bride and I sometimes sing to one another.

We all come to discover Rufus Wainwright in our own time, and that is right and as it should be, I’m certain of that. And track three was when I discovered Wainwright, and my goodness can he sing.

The whole album is easily findable online, of course. And there’s a some good stuff on there, if you like the Beatles, and aren’t bothered by covers of Beatles classics. I’m hit or miss on some of their catalog, but there’s something for everyone. I like the Wallflowers, Eddie Vedder, and Stereophonics covers.

I just learned that the European version, which I do not have, has a Nick Cave rendition of “Here Comes the Sun.” Nick Cave is brilliant, but I’m afraid it’d make me sad. That’s the song I played when I did the newscast that George Harrison died. It’s been 23 years, this November, and that’s still what comes to mind when that song comes on. But when this soundtrack is in the player, I’m just waiting to hear that Wainwright track.

The movie itself, I remember thinking it was a missed opportunity.

In the next installment of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try an unimpressive bit of little blue-eyed soul.

But tomorrow, we’ll have a bit of history to contemplate. Be sure to come back for that.

cycling / New Jersey / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Sep 24

A part of something on two wheels

Last Thursday night we got a series of frantic text messages from two different friends asking if we were OK. Of course we were OK, we’d just been in the backyard. It was a nice mild evening, and everything was fine. Only everything was not fine. Just two miles away two cyclists were killed.

Word spreads quickly in a small town. A fireman heard a scanner and called the bike shop and the local bike shop started calling and texting people and some of them thought, “Two people,” and thought of us. We spent the night with eyes a little bit wider, and a lot more sad.

On Friday we learned it was two guys who grew up around here were killed on their way home. They were hockey players. Both had skated at Boston College. Both became pros. One was a star in the NHL. The other had returned to their high school to coach the team. It seems the driver was drinking, had been drinking for sometime, and in his own little rush, swerved right through them, killing them just a few miles from where they were headed.

One of the guys has two young children. The other was expecting his first kid later this year. They were to be in their sister’s wedding this weekend. And now, there’s a growing memorial on the side of the road.

I went by there this afternoon to see it. It’s a stirring little thing, a series of small town gestures that barely registers in the terrible anguish that has been visited upon their families and friends.

This weekend, through the Center for Sports Communication & Social Impact we started a survey for cyclists in the area, and we’ve been impressed by the number of responses we’ve received, but not at all surprised by what their telling us. We’re going to going the survey and have several ideas about what we can do with the data we’re collecting.

In the meantime, my lovely bride did two interviews with the local media today. One with ABC 6.

She did another interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which hasn’t been published yet.

They’re asking us, these cyclists who’ve all encountered scary situations, how they can help. The local bike shops want to get involved too.

We went to one of them this afternoon, the ones that were looking for us on Thursday night. They are fed up with losing with losing their friends, worrying about their customers, and making these calls. We listened to them talk about all of it. The stories they can tell. They’re planning a big community meeting, they have the ear of some local lawmakers. Maybe something good will good from this awful mess.

For Johnny and Matty. For our neighbors who ride, from the people we wave at on the road and see on Strava. For all of us.