that "flagpole sitta" video made me incredibly happy, just when i thought there was NOTHING that could make me listen to that song again. a thousand thank yous. and make sure the girl in the front row at the end know that i spotted the billy joel storm front concert t-shirt and that she is cold busted.

much love to all,
sean

I hope you're pretty, then, because it doesn't look like they employ uggoes. Nice happy vid for a Monday morning, though. They all look like they're having so much fun that you can forgive the youthful smugness.

Even the people in the comments section look like they're in an American sitcom.

I was slogging it out in a fucking factory at their age, not prancing about in a fancy New York Office looking all relaxed and upwardly-mobile. So no, can't forgive the smugness; round 'em up and kill 'em.

After finally leaving this morning at about 10am, I headed west toward the mountains of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the weather started turning nasty, i.e. 40's and very windy. I knew I would have to come back to NYC next week anyway to pick up one last part for my panniers, so, after consulting the weather channel, I decided to haul on back before it started snowing. I will be leaving in about one week when the weather looks to be in the 50's. If only UPS and the weather would cooperate...

Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

"My God," she said, "are you a Hoosier?"

I admitted I was.

"I'm a Hoosier, too," she crowed. "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier."

"I'm not," I said. "I never knew anybody who was."

"Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I've been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.

"That's reassuring."

"You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?"

"No."

"He's a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo . . ."

"Attaché," said her husband.

"He's a Hoosier," said Hazel. "And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia . . . "

"A Hoosier?" I asked.

"Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too, And that man in Chile . . ."

"A Hoosier, too?"

"You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn't made his mark," she said.

"The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier."

"And James Whitcomb Riley."

"Are you from Indiana, too?" I asked her husband.

"Nope. I'm a Prairie Stater. 'Land of Lincoln,' as they say."

"As far as that goes," said Hazel triumphantly, "Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County."

"Sure," I said."

"I don't know what it is about Hoosiers," said Hazel, "but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed."

"That's true," I said.

She grasped me firmly by the arm. "We Hoosiers got to stick together."

"Right"

"You call me 'Mom."'

"What?"

"Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom."'

"Uh huh."

"Let me hear you say it," she urged.

"Mom?"

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel "Mom" had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Yesterday, the NBA announced that they are awarding Fort Wayne with a Development League (aka D-League) expansion team, bringing pro-basketball back to town. I say back because what's virtually unknown outside of Fort Wayne is that more than 50 years ago, in fact 1941, the Fort Wayne Pistons were founded by Fred Zollner, an area industrialist who built pistons for Ford and GM. Jim Hareas writes:

The Zollner Pistons competed in the National Basketball League (NBL), which began as the Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935 and changed its name in 1937 with hopes of attracting a larger fan base. It was a league that was ahead of its time when it came to the marriage of professional sports and corporate commercialization, boasting such team names as the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets.

...

In those days, you would drive into town and look for the biggest building,” recalled Jeannette, like McDermott, a Basketball Hall of Famer. “We drove up to this bar and I got out of the car and ran inside and I said to the bartender, ‘Hey, we are supposed to play a basketball game in this town today, can you tell me where it is?’ He said, ‘This is the place.’ I looked around and there were tables all over the place. After we got dressed they had shoved all the tables back and put a basket on one wall, and on the other side they had a basket drawn up into the ceiling. The referee drew a big circle on the middle of the floor, and a net dropped down around the floor. And the damnedest fight you ever saw started. That was a real education.”

In 1948, the Pistons, along with three other teams from the NBL, joined the Basketball Association of America. It was a merger in which Zollner played a pivotal role in overseeing. The BAA then adopted a new name prior to the 1949-50 season, the National Basketball Association.

The revenue streams weren’t exactly flowing, considering that the Pistons played the majority of their games at Fort Wayne’s North High School. It wasn’t until Zollner convinced the city to build an all-purpose arena so they would finally have a big-league home. The Pistons surged to the NBA Finals versus the Syracuse Nationals in 1955 and because no one in this northern Indiana city had expected them to reach the championship series, the arena was already booked, having previously scheduled a bowling tournament, forcing the Pistons to play Games 3, 4 and 5 in Indianapolis.

“He was really disappointed,” said Danny Biasone, the owner of the Nationals and inventor of the 24-second shot clock, said of Zollner. “He said, ‘I’m moving the team to Detroit.’ And that's what he eventually did."

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

On the grounds of a private psychiatric facility, two family members find themselves brought face to face with each other's involvement in their traumatic past. In court-ordered rehab, Drew calls on his brother, Terry, to corroborate his story of abuse. Drew's request releases barely-hidden animosities between the two; is he using these repressed memories to save himself while smearing the name of his brother's friend and mentor? In Neil LaBute's powerful new play, these siblings must struggle to come to grips with their troubled legacy, both inside and outside their dark family home.

Labels: Girl Talk