Well, at least this is kind of neat.

It's Palindrome Day on Twitter.

01-02-2010 backwards is, 01-20-2010.

Does that mean I now have to everything I did today backwards? I hope not. It was painful enough forwards.

***

If some Sherlock Holmes nut tells you that they didn't mention Holmes' cocaine use in the movie, they did-they just came at it obliquely. At one point, Watson says to Holmes, who has just consumed something from a vial, "You know that's intended for eye surgery!" Cocaine hydrochloride used to be used as an anesthetic for eye surgery.

***

My son's theory is that the aliens are coming to kill us all in 2012. My response was, "Well, I guess I won't be worrying about how to pay for your college, then."

2009 Can Suck It

Or, as the immortal Bono once put it, "Nothing changes...on New Year's Day..."

So, we can take 2009 and relegate it to the back of the shelf. It's over. "Put it on the board, yes", as Ken Harrelson says. I posted 5 fewer blog entries in 2009 than in 2008. If this trend continues, I will be posting 1 item per year by 2135 or so. So you have that to look forward to.

It's a semi-quasi fraud of a holiday. People don't go to work because, well, you have to throw out your old calendars, right? That must be the reason. My son actually stayed up to witness the new year for the first time, and now he realizes it is as much of a fraud as flossing your teeth.

Resolutions? Never make promises I can't keep.

Thirty years ago, I can't remember anything significant. Rumor has it it was 1980.

Twenty years ago, I was in college, and very deeply in love.

Ten years ago, I was married with a toddler.

So it goes.

Here's hoping that the nice, round, symmetricalness of the even number, 2010, is better than 2009.

"Things are Sh&^ty..but I'm pretty sure they can't get worse."

-Rent

It Ain't Us, Bay

Jason Bay, formerly known as Everyone's Favorite Canadian, has flown the proverbial coop, leaving good sense and Boston behind to become a New York Metropolitan. With the Mike Lowell trade having vanished into the ether, this leaves Boston oversupplied with aging semi-respectable batters with health issues (Lowell, Ortiz, Drew) and undersupplied with legitimate major league batters (Our Man Youk, and Our Man DP, and...uh....did I mention Youk?)

So hopefully, a deal of some sort is in the offing, or you can expect to read sentences like "Sox lose 3-2" on here quite a bit in the months to come.

I Win! I Win!

What do I win, you may ask?

Well, nothing at all, but I did, in fact, win my Fantasy Football League this year. Thanks, in part, to Philadelphia's own Donovan McNabb, the Arizona Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald, the Packers' Ryan Grant, and the Colts' Dallas Clark, along with my shrewd picking-a-pretend-football-team skills and the fantasy advice of the Talented Mr. Roto, @matthewberryTMR on Twitter, I have managed to triumph over my brother and 10 other worthies.

What do I win, you may ask, again?

Nothing. Not a goshdarn thing.

But it's all mine.

The War On Christmas

Well, we lost, because it came anyway.

Anyway, someone sent a bulk email at work wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, then bragging parenthetically that they were "not politically correct".

I forget where I heard it, but I heard a comic say once that complaining about being politically correct is basically saying, "I want to be rude, and I don't want to be called on it."

The recipients of that email don't all celebrate Christmas. That's just a fact. Saying "Merry Christmas" necessarily excludes people who don't celebrate that particular holiday. It's inappropriate. It's rude. If you want to show off your freedom of speech, start a blog.

(It shouldn't be sent on a work email system anyway, but that's an issue for management to ignore, not for me.)

(Also, that being said, in the United States in 2009, if you're honestly offended by the use of the phrase "Merry Christmas", you really have to learn to pick your battles.)

Sometimes, you're looking for nothing in particular, and you find gold.

Oh, and this?

Oh, and this?

I thought we were fighting them over there so we wouldn't have to fight them over here. I thought war and killing was supposed to make us safer. I thought we were going through all this to make our world a better place. That was what all this was about, right? We're going to make the world safe for democracy, isn't that it?

War never makes anything better.

Only The Lonely

TTBOOK had another great program this week, this time about loneliness. You can take the UCLA Loneliness scale test here, if you want. I scored a 29.

I've never really had friends as an adult. I know a fair amount of people, but in terms of people I would ask to pick me up at the airport? Other than my wife? None. Not a sausage. This bothers me sometimes. It seems deeply abnormal, but I don't know how to change it. I don't know how to be someone's friend. I don't remember what it feels like.

Ten Songs About Loneliness

1. Roy Orbison, "Only The Lonely"
2. Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"
3. Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"
4. Paul McCartney, "Lonely Road"
5. Eric Clapton, "Lonely Stranger"
6. The Beatles, "Lonesome Tears In My Eyes"
7. Live, "I, Alone"
8. The Eagles, "The Sad Cafe"
9. Billy Joel, "The Stranger"
10. Pearl Jam, "Alone"

Jesus Loves Health Reform

Matthew 25: 35-46


[35] For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

[36] Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

[37] Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

[38] When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

[39] Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

[40] And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

[41] Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

[42] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

[43] I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

[44] Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

[45] Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

Two Great Books

I finished Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs", and it was gobsmackingly good. She is breathtaking. I read "Birds of America" back when everyone else read it, but I haven't, for no particular reason, read anything else of hers.

I just started Steven L. Carter's 2nd most recent book, "Palace Council". Years ago, I read his first two-"New England White" and "The Emperor of Ocean Park", and he is really a terrific author. He writes thrillers, but very intellectual ones.

I hope everybody (by which I mean, all 12 of you) had a lovely holiday.

Merry Christmas

A Charlie Pierce story, ten years old but no less relevant, about how the drive to cut down on government waste can hurt real people.

God Bless Us, Everyone.

Spectacle

I saw a wonderful television program-Spectacle, with Elvis Costello hosting a group of musicians. They play their own songs, and Elvis' songs, and just generally talk about music and songwriting. The one I caught was with Sheryl Crow and 3 other people I should probably have heard of, and I really enjoyed it. I know Sheryl Crow is kind of, I don't know, commercial and hackneyed-but I like her, and I really enjoyed watching her reinterpret her work with Costello playing with her.

Tangled Up In Blue

I first heard this song driving home from a girl's house, at an absurdly early hour. It was someone I had talked myself into being with, mostly because I didn't want to be alone. I think I knew this, all the way through the relationship, and I never said anything. After we broke up, I remember slamming the door on my car so hard I shattered the window. Did you know you could do that? I didn't until that day.

I treated her poorly, and I have always regretted it. She deserved better.

For some reason, this song always reminds me of her, even though we never heard it together.

Brittany Murphy

Actress Brittany Murphy has died. Twitter pretty much exploded with the news, while I, only having access to Twitter at the time, was forced to ask myself, "Who is Brittany Murphy?" I'm terrible at recognizing actresses and actors. Whenever my wife and I watch a movie with a number of characters in it, I separate the actors into two groups: the ones I know, and the others. For example, Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibilty" stars Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, and a bunch of people who are not Grant, Thompson, or Rickman.

So I had to come home and look up Ms. Murphy, and it turns out the only projects of hers I have seen are Fox' "King of the Hill" and the film "Clueless". I saw Clueless, but this is the only part of Clueless I can remember:





Which I love for the line, "Girlie, I'm the Messiah of the DMV." And she's not in that scene. Ms. Murphy was 32, and there is tons of speculation that her death involved drugs or anorexia, which is sensible at least as far as it is rare for 32 year old people to suddenly suffer cardiac arrest. It doesn't, in the end, matter what killed her because she's gone. Dying young, though, she may get a Heath Ledger/Marilyn Monroe sort of halo effect, making the work she did better than it was because she'll never get the chance to turn 46 and play the mom on a sitcom about two wacky teenage twins.It's a shame that she's gone, though, because people will miss her. Eventually, she will be only the sum of her work, the series of characters she played and the impression she made on audiences. Which is too bad, but it sure beats not being remembered at all.

Leaving

This is an Outside magazine profile of Laura and Guy Waterman. I heard about their story on the incomparably wondrous "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" (ttbook.org). They are a couple who were avid outdoorspeople and were living and working deep in the New England woods, writing and working on wilderness conservation. The reason why they are featured in the profile and on the show is that Guy Waterman, in early 2000, made it clear he was going to commit suicide, walked up into the mountains, and froze to death. I'm currently reading her book "Losing The Garden", about her marriage.

The stunning and somewhat noteworthy part is that Mrs. Waterman knew what he was planning to do and didn't try to stop him. Comedian Doug Stanhope tells a joke in his act about suicide being like leaving a movie halfway through-if the first half of the movie has been horrible, you really don't have any reason to believe the second half is going to be any better. Laura Waterman seems to have a similar attitude-she let her husband go because she loved him-he made sure she was taken care of, but he had grown tired and miserable at the prospect of more life, and didn't want anything else to do with it, so he left it.


This is a stunning way of thinking. It's realistic, and I can't deny the logic of it. It goes against our typical way of reasoning-in the West, we seem unable to admit that life has an end the same way it had a beginning. It's an involving story, if not a particularly cheerful one. Worth your time.

I'm not prepared to judge her, or him-that's not my job, and I can't even understand my own marriage, never mind someone else's. It's a compelling, if sad, testimony.