We’ll go see this movie soon, I’m sure. I’m going prepared. You should too:
Anyway. Spent the afternoon on campus, doing a little work and meeting with the boss. He’s given me a few projects to do over the next few days. One of them, pulling together the exit assessment scores of recent graduates, seems never-ending. But I’m happy to do it. I have the time. It is useful. It makes me remember things about Microsoft Excel that I’d previously deemed it acceptable to forget.
Did a little bicycle test driving today. Rode about three miles on hills and parking lots, trying out different bike styles and geometries — a fancy way to discuss how the bike is shaped. It is true what they say, I learned. You never forget how to ride a bike. Riding is easy. Getting on the thing can sometimes be a challenge for those of us not blessed with fair amounts of grace.
I liked both bikes. They are both out of my price range. I will now shop online, looking for some used geometry. I might one day find one the right size and the right price range. I hope I’ll still remember how to mount the thing by then.
After that I went to the gym. Ran 1.5 miles by foot, pedaled 8 miles. Now I’d like to get back to my sprint speeds.
Shouldn’t be too long, now. I finally figured out my iTunes problem. I had to get help from a kid on campus, but at least I can put songs on my iPod. Turns out I was having a synch issue. No one said that 30 years ago.
So I have a bunch of songs on the iPod. I’ll keep adding a few a day. I have that cool looking arm band thing that really gets in the way as much of a convenience as it is intended to provide. And now I just have to get back into proper form.
In the World Cup, defending champion Italy is out. They look dreadful yet again. Paraguay and New Zealand battle to an unsatisfying draw. Denmark got mauled by Japan. The former will go home, the latter advances from group play. The Netherlands looked solid as they defeated a struggling Cameroon. All of the groups have rounded into form. The tournament started slowly, but things are certainly picking up now.
Tomorrow we’ll watch the last matches of group play. I’ll hit the gym, peck on a few keys on the laptop and call it a week. Not a bad week, at all.
What a day. The US win and two other important, meaningful World Cup games and history on the grass at Wimbledon. This was a great day to be a sports fan. First, read this.
Soccer defies that. It is opera on a field. Not the Italian variety where a series of humorous misunderstandings yield mildly sexy results, but German opera—Klingon opera. Plenty of tridents. Sheets of rain. Thunderbolts cascading from the sky. In the background armies march through the mud, toward each other. Patterns converge in a rumble, pressure building until it’s unbearable and someone falls over, a spear jutting out from his breastplate.
[…]
The USA’s narrative has been bootstraps. College kids rescuing the program, batty goalies with an American flag fetish, Paul Caliguri, and so on. Tom Friend just published a lengthy story on USA 1990 third-string goalie David Vanole that’s veritably dripping with half-truths dedicated to shaping that narrative. The USMNT is the 1980 hockey team spread over twenty years, because that’s the way we want it.
We don’t roll around on the ground. If we fall over, we probably just fell over. We run and and run and run, and late, when everything is stacked against us in a game where it’s just so hard to finish the job, we do it Puritan style: ugly effort. A minute into stoppage time, the ball’s just lying there and it’s all about who will get there first.
The defensive shakeup for the Americans didn’t hurt, though it came to resemble an open scramble, as much of a track meet as you ever wish to see on the pitch. The Algerians are just begging to give this game away, but the referee has, again, interjected.
There are too many dives, too many questionable calls. This game is a microcosm of the entire tournament. Though a purely representative challenge at midfield would be both symbolic and useful in a game that is starting to grind. Ian Darke asks about our nerves; he’s really telling us that his are shredded.
Clint Dempsey is bloodied. The man is bleeding, marching down the field. Ultimately he is fed a ball in the box and he and the goalkeeper maul one another. Dempsey goes into the net, Landon Donovan takes the rebound and … well, the announcer for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation calls it best:
Soccer is a communal game. If you’re watching at home you aren’t really seeing everything. Check out a big game in a crowd. Like Spencer Hall, who live-blogged the game. With others you can know the frustration, the elation, the relief and joy. In the 90th minute, plus three, the United States went from going home early (a big disappointment) to winning the group (something they haven’t done since 1930’s inaugural World Cup).
And then there was Wimbledon. I’m not a big tennis fan, but watching a piece of history is something I’ll tune in for. The John Isner and Nicholas Mahut match became easily the longest tennis match ever. In fact, today this set alone became the longest match ever. So I have a new proposal: When the tiebreaking game reaches 25-25 we start pulling strings out of the rackets.
Serves dominate. Both players are exhausted. Volleys are rare. Oddly, neither tennis player have fallen, grabbed their ankle and rolled around in anguish while covering their smiling face.
Someone is updating Isner and Mahut’s Wikipedia pages as their death march continued past the nine hour mark. Nine hours! The grass on the Mahut-Isner court has been worn down. And is now growing back. There’s no real at-this-rate of progression in this match any longer. It is stasis and progress rolled into a singularity. Is the hadron collider on?
We’re beyond the point where one of these guys is secretly admitting to himself — and the Smurfs sitting on the net because they must both be delusional — that they hate tennis. I compiled a list of things I’ve done for long stretches of time than this tennis match: slept, studied, breathed. That may be about it.
I’m secretly cheering for Isner, who just looks out on his feet, to pull out the American Gladiators tennis cannon. And then, finally, Mahut surrenders to the darkness. The crowd is chanting for more, but they will have to wait until tomorrow, day three of this epic contest. Records have been crystallized, frozen and shattered in the wake of this pull of equal forces. Neither of them know it yet, but these two young men will be forever attached to one another. I hope they get along.
Meanwhile, as Wimbledon stops for the night, there are two excellent finishes simultaneously in the World Cup between Ghana/Germany and Australia/Serbia. The U.S. will face the Ghanaians for the second consecutive World Cup. And if the ride is finished here this team will have done a lot for the game at home. But you have this feeling that they might be able to ride their spirit just a little farther, yet.
I have friends who, as children, lived in the same town, grew up and got married. They knew each other in school, they’re from a small enough town that it isn’t hard to find yourself in someone’s orbit pretty regularly from an early age. As they were dating, they realized through the course of many conversations that they’d attended a lot of the same events — circuses, plays and so on — not together, but at the same time. It is a cute story, but a little less impressive than this:
Thirty years ago, when they lived in separate countries long before they met and married, a family shot of little Donna at Walt Disney World captured Alex in a stroller in the background.
[…]
That fateful realization came just one week before their wedding eight years ago. Alex and Donna had been going through old family snapshots. There, in the blurry background of a picture of 5-year-old Donna was 3-year-old Alex being pushed down Main Street at the same moment in 1980 by his father. The senior Voutsinas’s distinctive jet-black hair with its white tuft caught his eye.
If you read the comments you’ll find a handful of similar type stories. Some of them from people who grew up near each other, like my friends above, and others from different continents. It isn’t fate or destiny, but a curious quirk. Given how many millions of people are in relationships it would be more improbable to not hear stories like this.
Want mine? The Yankee and I actually worked at Clear Channel at the same time. Clear Channel is a big, big company, but we were actually in the same market at the same time, working for the same stations, but in different buildings. We just didn’t know each other. We met after we’d both moved on to different jobs, me to al.com and her to television.
Some such instances are obvious, others can be easily explained away, but sometimes the connections defy easy description. For an interesting academic discussion on the matter I point you to Jon Kleinberg. There was an informal Email experiment of Stanley Milgram’s small world theory a few years back.
I have about 230 friends on Facebook. I rarely visit the site, but I feel confident that everyone I know in real life on that site is my friend there. I do enjoy seeing how my friends know each other. Some of them make no geographical sense whatsoever, to the point I’ve had to write strangers and ask “How do you know these two separate, distant people?” The answers usually make a great deal of sense when you hear them. Usually.
They are neat stories, part of many families’ lore. It only helps that the Small World theme song is now stuck in all of our heads.
I recorded this one last December.
Pretty neat, right?
Nothing else to report. I’ve been editing photographs again this evening, having now published 298 from the honeymoon. That gets us through Ephesus, which was amazing. There are more here. Still a few more stops to edit, too!
We visited the Villa Borghese Museum today. Originally a suburban party villa, the collection that now resides there was started by by Cardinal Scipion Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V. From those 17th Century beginnings, coming to Napoleon’s brother-in-law and finally transforming into a public museum in the 1700s.
The museum boasts the world’s greatest Caravaggio collection and one of the best Bernini collections you can find. There is no photography in the 20-room museum, but here are our favorite sculptures for the day, first a Bernini, his famous Apollo and Daphne. It must be seen in the round, and up close. Then, even someone with little understanding of sculpture, like me, is awed. Another incredible piece is Antonio Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte, which was quite scandalous. She’s reclining on a mattress, which looks for all the world like a different stone, or perhaps like an actual mattress.
The detail in both are incredible.
All of the Caravaggios are in one room. Bernini, meanwhile, absolutely steals the show. He always does. His talent was so great that he could convert even the unartistic viewers. The man had a gift. And makes you redefine your concept of having a gift.
There is a park on the property. We rented a two-person, pedal yourself rickshaw and drove it around, enjoying the beautiful afternoon weather. I took a lot of pictures.
We had a War Eagle moment at the museum, Ren’s first international one. We were waiting to go inside — you visit by appointment — and a lady walked by and noticed my shirt. Guess I’ll have to make a WEM section for the site after all.
We went across the Tiber River into Trastevere, which has gone from medieval village, to working class neighborhood to Left Bank to high priced neighborhood to rustic and touristy. The graffiti is plentiful, though. To get there we caught a bus, which took us to a tram. We missed our stop on the tram, so we got off about six stops later to catch a tram headed the original direction. We took the correct stop (which was the intial stop for the first tram, incidentall) and wandered deep into the neighborhood.
The sky was growing dark and we are stumbling through alleys. Occassionally we wander across a little piazza that Americans have overtaken. Mostly we feel like we are in alleys. A policeman finally helps us find our way to Trattoria da Lucia. Rick Steves says “lets you enjoy simple, traditional food at a good price in a great scene. It’s the quintessential rustic, 100 percent Roman Trastevere dining experience, and has been family-run since World War II. You’ll meet four generations of the family, including Giuliano and Renato, their uncle Ennio and Ennio’s mom — pictured on the menu in the 1950s. The family specialty is spaghetti alla Gricia with pancetta bacon.”
We sit in the alley under the stars, in Italy. We are serenaded by an old man on an accordion who says “U.S.A.!” and then launches into a passionate “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” It was perfect.
Steves has given us three great restaurants in a row, so I say pick up his books before your next European visit. I had the spaghetti alla Gricia, which was profoundly delicious. We’re ripping off that dish. And we also found the most simple, delicious summer dessert. When we get settled at home after the trip you’ll have to stop by and have some.
A table of four American ladies, a mother and her three adult daughters, were seated next to us. We exchanged names and hometowns and notes and tips on traveling in Rome. Turns out they are from not far from where my family lives. Turns out one of the ladies’ daughters is going to a basketball camp at Auburn. She gives us her card. She is a financial adviser.
We need one of those.
We got turned around in the alleys of Trastevere trying to leave, somehow emerging blocks away from where we needed to be. At first it was The Yankee’s fault (and she’s usually great at this) and then I took over, pointing us in at least the right direction. Time was of the essence. Meals aren’t to be rushed through here. Late starts and two hour dinners are the norm, and the waiters aren’t necessarily in a hurry to produce the check.
Our hotel is on the exact opposite side of Rome from Trattoria da Lucia and the buses stop running at midnight. We finally make it back to the tram stop, catching what might have been the last ride of the night back across the Tiber. We caught the absolute last bus, waiting out what seems to be the driver’s mandatory break at St. Peter’s, still miles from our place.
Finally we made it back to our neighborhood. But we missed the stop. We needed the fourth stop. The Yankee (who really is good at this sort of thing, normally) insisted we’d just made the third stop. Turns out the fifth stop is at the bus station, so we walked back from there. I’ll give her grief over that for days.
In addition to the slideshow above, there is a brief photo gallery on the day.
