Rino is still god -- and launch the Shawn-O-Meter

The power of television to make the world smaller cannot be understated. For one thing, it can make a girl from Warrenton, Ga., who not only had never been to Chicago but didn't know anyone from Chicago and didn't know anyone who had ever been to Chicago, into a Chicago Cubs fan.

Yes, my Braves have always had my greatest loyalty. I was taught to pull for them by my grandfather, who despite his sheet-metal-plant worker's paycheck and his dislike of expense on himself, was one of the first people I knew in Warrenton to subscribe to cable television -- all so he could watch the Braves games without bad weather disrupting the signal from what used to be Channel 17 out of Atlanta.

But the coax cable that carried the Braves games to Warrenton also carried the Cubs games on WGN, and especially in those pre-lights days at Wrigley Field, the two teams' games rarely overlapped. In summertime, I could watch the Cubs on WGN in the afternoon and then watch the Braves that evening.

It's the mid-1980s from which my Cubs memories are strongest. While I got my Braves loyalty from my grandfather, but when I think of the Cubs, I remember watching with my dad. He was police chief then and, about four days a week, he reported for his shift very, very early in the morning and got off at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. "Ryno is God" was one regular Bleacher Bum sign we loved to chuckle at -- of course, that's in reference to Ryne Sandberg, the second baseman who was the Cubs' major star of that era; he's now in Cooperstown (.289 career batting average, 282 HRs). And there was another, the "Shawon-O-Meter," a frequently appearing sign that sought to keep track of the offensive exploits of a younger player, shortstop Shawon Dunston (.269 career batting average, 150 HRs).

The Cubs' manager of that time was Don Zimmer, who would later be one of Joe Torre's helper-coaches in the Yankee dugout, maybe most famous for his awkward attempt at fistcuffs with Pedro Martinez, which got him impersonated on the next broadcast of Saturday Night Live. (By Horatio Sanz, as I recall.)  I tend to think that's more public exposure than any bench coach had ever gotten in the history of all baseball.

I remember Mark Grace was the first baseman. And one of our favorite players was the catcher, Joe Girardi, who has since replaced Torre as skipper of the Yankees.

My memory may be fuzzy on this, but I remember watching Girardi perform a tremendous feat one day, one that -- sadly -- I never did see written about by the baseball press when Girardi was hired in New York.

Girardi started the game at his normal position, catcher. As the game progressed, some other Cubs players had to be stricken from the game, and Girardi was called on to fill in elsewhere on the field -- I want to say he subbed for one of the infielders, but he might have been in the outfield. Then, as innings passed, the Cubs confronted another staffing dilemma, and Girardi was dispatched to the mound to pitch. I remember Harry Caray saying Girardi had broken a major league record for most positions played in a single game.  I think he may actually have gotten a batter out as pitcher, but I'm not certain of that. (Any baseball savants out there remember this? Am I mis-remembering?)

Needless to say, Harry Caray was as much a part of watching a Cubs game as the players on the field. (An interesting, and sometimes funny, thing to do: When the Braves played the Cubs, sometimes my dad and  I would turn on two TVs, one tuned to the Cubs' broadcast on WGN, and the other tuned to the Braves' broadcast on TBS, where the play-by-play announcer was Harry's son, Skip Caray.) I also remember that the WGN broadcast team seemed as intent on finding attractive young women in the stands displaying their cleavage as they were interested in the progress of the game.

I bring all this up because I finally got to see the Cubs play, live and in person, last night -- in Houston, against the hapless Astros. Rino is a minor league manager now, and Minute Maid Park doesn't quite exude the vibe that I imagine comes fromf the bleachers at Wrigley Field, but it was good to finally see them play. They won, 7-1, on a night when the Astros, not the Cubs, looked like the doormat of the National League.

Wouldn't Steve Goodman be proud?

Some thoughts on the Indy 500

To me, summer officially begins when I hear Jim Nabors singing "Back Home Again in Indiana" at the start of the Indianapolis 500.

Now that the race is ending, some thoughts:

The Indy 500 just does not have the iconic place in American culture that it did when I was a kid. Open-wheel racing folks have allowed themselves to be plowed over by NASCAR in the national popularity contest. How many people other than me were actually watching this broadcast?

When I was a kid, we always turned on the Indy 500 at my house -- though I remember it more often on my grandparents' TV in Emanuel County. Watching the race was a ritual. This was the late '70s and early '80s -- I remember names like Rick Mears and Al Unser Sr. and A.J. Foyt in his orange car. How many average people today could name one person, just one person, who raced in the Indy 500 today? OK, maybe some can name Danica Patrick, because she's on commercials everywhere. How many others could they name?

I went to an IRL race once, a few years ago, in Nashville. It was pretty cool -- Tony Kanaan won and did a burnout right in front of the grandstands where I was sitting before being presented with a customized Gibson guitar as a trophy (hey, I'd much rather have that than get a grandfather clock from winning at Martinsville). I tried to follow the IRL a bit more closely after that, but it just could not keep my interest the way NASCAR could.

Some thoughts on why IndyCar is not as popular as NASCAR: Not as many races. It's harder for me to tell the cars apart during the broadcast -- I don't know if that's the fault of the IRL or of ABC's broadcasting; part of it may be the racing teams' tendency to assign identical color schemes to all their cars, such as the orange-and-white scheme on the Penske team's cars. Many of the drivers are from other countries -- which I think is cool, but I have a feeling that it could bother some American fans. I mean, we live in a country where NBC felt it necessary to remake The Office with an all-American cast and setting. If we have to have The Office remade in our image, we ain't gonna cotton to pulling for a sport where the Brits and the Brazilians outnumber us.

Some thoughts on Danica. I like Danica, and I want her to win -- her 3rd place finish just now is the highest ever for a woman at Indy, and I was pulling for her. But she's in danger of being deemed overrated. She won a race last year, the first ever by a woman in IndyCar, but it's just one race. The amount of media attention she gets is a little bit more than I think her record deserves. She's got to get up there and win another one, or, within a year or two, I predict the media is going to start saying she's seriously overrated.

Again, I want her to win, and I like her -- she's sharp, she's focused, and when you see her on the track or in interviews, she carries herself with seriousness. I like that about her. But I have my criticisms of her. I don't like the swimsuit pictures. I don't like the wink-wink, nudge-nudge GoDaddy.com commercials. I know she has said in past interviews that if her sex appeal helps her career, she's willing to use it. I really disagree with that approach, and I don't think it's positive for women in general. The message being sent is, "I'm a woman and I can get ahead if I'm hot-looking and I act in a sexually suggestive fashion." Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I want a woman driver to be respected because she's a good driver, not because she's a hot babe.

Thing about it is, I think Danica is good enough to be respected for being a good driver alone. I wish she would let the other stuff go.

Helio: I can't help but like Helio. He's really the Roberto Begnini of motorsports -- and not just in his victory exuberances (substituting fence-climbing for seat-jumping). I often don't have sympathy for rich people accused of income tax evasion, but when Helio and his sister-business manager said they really didn't know what they were getting into, I found them actually pretty darn believable. I get the feeling he's a nice guy, and sometimes an inadvertently funny guy, and he can sure drive a race car, but he probably can't balance a checkbook.

Other thoughts: Good Lord, didn't Vitor Meara have an awful race -- first he gets set on fire, then he's in a hellacious wreck.

Some great albums

Some favorite all-time albums of mine -- because I need to test the "bullets" function on my blog for something we're doing at work. (Criteria: No greatest-hits compilations allowed.) And keep in mind, this is not a complete list.

• Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen
• Otis Redding Live in Europe, Otis Redding
• Dancing in the Parlor, Stephen Wade
• Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette
• Traveling Without Moving, Jamiroquai
• The Band, The Band (the "brown" album)
• Area Code 615, Area Code 615
• Licensed to Ill, Beastie Boys
• Solo Banjo Works, Tony Trischka and Bela Fleck
• New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass, Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman

Transparency Camp '09 is awesome

I'm in Washington, D.C, for Transparency Camp, an "uncamp" being led by the Sunlight Foundation at the Center for Politics, Democracy and the Internet on the campus of George Washington University. (And the subject is government transparency -- no, friends on Facebook, I am not learning how to make myself invisible. But thanks for the laugh.)

This is my first uncamp, and it's really awesome. I've met a lot of really cool people doing really cool things -- and it reminds me how behind the times I am! Read more by searching Twitter for hashtag #tcamp09. I'm tweeting as Texas Watchdog.

I' just checking e-mail right now during the lunch break. More updates to come when I can.

ALSO: It's supposed to snow like crazy here starting ... Now.

ManyEyes and MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech

I've been messing around a little bit over the past few weeks with the Web site ManyEyes, a project of IBM. It's intended to let people visualize data, and one of the things it lets you do is upload a piece of text (like a speech) and map it out.

I went over there, and someone had already uploaded the text of the "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963, which CNN just replayed a little while ago. Below is an interactive of how Many Eyes charts it out, using "dream" as the keyword.

ManyEyes is free to use. Go over there and have some fun.

From the road

From Arkansas.

Smallest fish in Harpeth River caught by world's worst angler

Had a good time fishing with Miss Anne and Warren and their friend Tony at Newsom's Mill in Bellevue yesterday.

I (heart) Skip

He spoke with a voice that reached across the miles and enlightened countless thousands.

He educated and inspired untold scores of followers.

His passing is a great loss.

Solzhenitsyn? Heavens, no. I'm talking about Skip Caray.

I cannot believe I will never turn on another TV or radio and hear him call another Braves game.

His voice is an integral part in one of my most cherished childhood memories, watching the Braves on TV with my grandfather on hot-humid summer nights, him in the easy chair and me laying on the carpeted floor, with the windows up on the screen doors to my grandparents' house and the ceiling fan going, but never fast enough to actually cool the room off.

I remember when the Braves would play the Cubs and you could flip the TV back and forth and hear both Skip and his father call the same game.

I remember all those games, year after year after year, when the Braves were so bad that if the opposing team failed to show up at the ballpark, they'd still manage to find a way to lose.

I remember him yelling "Braves win! Braves win!" when we finally won the World Series.

I was an unabashed fan. I will miss Skip Caray. My prayers are with his family.

My city was gone

I can’t remember when Blundale, Ga., ever was much of a town. It was before I was even born. Heck, it was really before my dad was even born. Even when he and his parents moved there in the 1950s, Blundale was well in decline.

But it was still sad to drive through the old town over the July Fourth holiday and see how time has continued to wear it down.

Blundale, Ga., is no more.

This little teeny-tiny itty-bitty town was on the far northern edge of Emanuel County. In its time, it had a little downtown, with a sort-of main street and a store and railroad depot for the Wadley Southern Railroad. The railroad stopped running in the ‘50s, leaving only a raised berm that had been the railroad bed; I remember my father walking me over there as a small child and showing me where the tracks had been and telling me how the train had come through every afternoon.

Now, even the berm is gone. The ongoing widening of the highway folks there just call “Number 1” has wiped out what remained of it.

 

I drove between the orange barrels and turned off into Blundale’s little downtown. You couldn’t miss Miss Pumpkin’s house – an old Victorian with a huge wrap-around porch – now covered in vines and surrounded by 10-foot tall brush and weeds. Miss Pumpkin’s real name was Lumpkin, Delmar Lumpkin, and she was living in that house when my grandparents moved to Blundale from Swainsboro in the mid-‘50s. Her husband had been a supervisor for the workers on a huge nearby farm, my grandmother recalled. When I was little and she would visit with my grandparents, I called her Miss Pumpkin, and Miss Pumpkin she remained to us for the rest of her life.

Next to Miss Pumpkin’s house was the old Blundale store. It had been abandoned well before Miss Pumpkin had passed on. It, too, was grown up, weedy and forlorn.

 

There were a few houses about 100 yards down the way, and some people were outside cutting the grass. I would have stopped to talk but I had a long drive back to Warrenton, and a cloud was on the horizon, and I opted not to bother them on July 4^th.

But saddest to me was my grandparents’ house.

The grass was all grown up. What little I could see of the backyard looked to have weeds and grass practically as high as my head. Someone had plopped a chain link fence back there, but to hold in what, I’m not sure, ‘cause there was nothing to hold in back there but weeds and what looked like a child's inflatable swimming pool. The tin roof was peeling back over part of the old garage, which will cause it to rot from the rain inside. I couldn’t see the old smokehouse or the old store building in the back, much less my granddad’s garden behind it -- it was too grown up.

At least the row of crepe myrtles are still there, in full pink bloom in the summer sun.

I wonder if my granddad’s gourds are still hanging from the wire across the backyard. I wonder if those spiky plants my grandmother brought from Florida are still back there. And the place where my father buried his two dogs behind the old store, and chiseled their headstones for them by hand out of rocks he found.

Two songs are in my head as I write this. The first is My City Was Gone by The Pretenders:

I went back to Ohio

And my city was gone

There was no train station

There was no downtown …

I went back to Ohio

But my family was gone

I stood on the back porch

There was nobody home

I was stunned and amazed

My childhood memories

Slowly swirled past

Like the wind through the trees.

The second, I’ll close with. It’s I’m On My Way Back to the Old Home by Bill Monroe:

I’m on my way back to the old home

The road winds on up the hill

But there’s no light at the window

That shined long ago where I lived.

View Larger Map 

(I’ll try to blog again some more later on about my trip to Emanuel County for the Fourth.)

Hot chicken

You gotta eat good on vacation, even when it's just a stay-cation. So I headed on down to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack today at about 1:30 -- trying to get on the tail end of the lunch rush. Had about a 20-minute wait (I was No. 36; the first number called after I arrived was 17).

 

I got mine as a take-out order and took it home to eat it. Was it good? Of course. 

 

Missing in action

Does anyone know what has become of the Emanuel County (Ga.) GenWeb page? It's disappeared. The links refer to you to a nonexistent page on Ancestry.com .... ???

Some more random thoughts and unsolicited endorsements

While I wait for my Palm Pilot to soft-reset so I can try to reinstall my screwed-up password-storing software:

• Spray-on suntan lotion may be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Especially for a person like me who burns easily.
  
• Firefox might be even better than sliced bread. Can't wait for Version 3 to come out. The many add-ons for Firefox are awesome, and I can even install them on my work computer without having administrator privileges on my machine. I'm running the Del.icio.us add-on, 1-click Weather, Abduction, Copy Link Text, FireShot, GMail Space, Scrapbook, ScribeFire, and as of today, TwitterFox. Why did I wait so long to switch from Internet Explorer?
  
• Google Reader is up there with Firefox. Almost as good as Google Reader is Google Notebook. I am just now starting to make use of Google Documents and Google Sites.
• Apple needs to stop trying to sneak its Safari browser onto my PC when I update my iPod software. No fair. I thought better of you, Apple.
• I would be willing to make more use of iGoogle if it loaded faster. What gives?

Some random thoughts for no reason

+ FedEx is doing away with the Kinko's brand name. I'm not happy about that. Kinko's is an American icon. You tell someone, "I have to go to Kinko's today," and they know you're going there to make copies or get something printed. You say, "I'm going to FedEx" -- what, to pick up a package?
+ Why did Bath and Body Works recently stop selling the Cotton Blossom line? Now they sell Sea Island Cotton. It's good, and it's almost as nice, but it's not Cotton Blossom, which was my favorite. I know they have to change out their inventory every now and then to keep things fresh, but I hate it when things I like go away. Maybe it will come back.
+ I'm really enjoying Firefox lately. I've become a committed Firefox user.

Trying again with the palm tree video

It's good to be home

The Miami airport is a zoo. The seat-belt fabric barriers must go on for miles and miles and miles.