Crazed Teacups

Quote of the Day

This is from a lovely post on the Powell's blog by Tod Davies:

We went to our dog agility class today, which, for the uninitiated, is a hilarious kind of mini-Grand National training for dogs... hoops, tunnels, jumps, climb-its... the dogs love it and we, surprising ourselves, do too.  It's a great pleasure to take the long drive across the valley floor between the mountains, past the ranches and small-town houses, out to where Diane has all the brightly colored obstacles set out on her fresh mown grass.

Diane, who teaches the class, is one of those very American women you never hear about.  A good neighbor, a quiet citizen, a person who thoroughly enjoys her life, and has created that life to give her a decent, unextravagant living by doing the things she loves best. She's one of those people (thank God for them) who volunteers actively at the local animal shelters, and really makes a difference with her volunteering.  She's the one who started a free obedience class with each adoption; she goes out every week and teaches new pet owners how to get the best out of their pets. Doing that, she single handedly cut the return rate on dogs to the shelter by a half.  That's where we met her, when we adopted one of ours.

Quote of the Day

From Nancy Franklin's review of Jay Leno's new show in The New Yorker:

Speaking of ebony and ivory, though, when it comes to diversity Leno has the biggest tent of all the nighttime talk shows. Three of the regulars on the new show are black—D. L. Hughley, Dwayne Perkins, and a young comedian named Marina Franklin. (Larry Wilmore, a comedy writer and producer who talks about racial issues on Jon Stewart’s show, is referred to as the show’s “senior black correspondent”—the joke, and it’s a good one, being the implication that there is, or ever would be, more than one. Well, there are now, on Leno’s show.) Hughley went to Washington, D.C., to see if he could raise money for California—the sixty-eight dollars and change he made from a bake sale will be given to Governor Schwarzenegger the next time he’s on the show. Franklin, who is not as polished as Hughley, did a remote in Harlem that was unexpected, and unexpectedly funny—it touched on gentrification and, fascinatingly, the great divide between black hair and what white people know about black hair. It took place partly inside a black-owned salon, and it was a glimpse into a world that most of Leno’s audience isn’t familiar with. Even more pointedly, there’s a sardonic recurring bit in which Perkins singles out “Great White Moments in Black History,” such as the precise time that black people stopped saying, “You go, girl!”—it was after Ricki Lake started using it on her talk show. In other diversity news, Leno’s and the rest of the nighttime comedy shows are bizarrely lacking in women writers. Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing? The other night on the Emmy Awards broadcast, the names of the nominees for best writing on a comedy or variety series were read, and, out of eighty-one people, only seven were women. Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O’Brien. Come on.

Quote of the Day

From Sports Illustrated's Jon Wertheim's current column:

Many sports media members are still discussing Michael Jordan's vindictive speech at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Am I off to say Jordan's rancor is akin to that of Jimmy Connors? Connors did not attend the opening of Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997. He initially balked at being inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1998, contending that he had never retired. What do you suppose makes Jimbo and Air Jordan tick? Is it a personality type that does not age well?
-- Dan Martin, Dayton, Ohio

• You know the first person I thought of when I heard about Jordan's monologue? Roger Federer. In a million years, could you ever imagine such a tone-deaf, ungracious, self-absorbed speech at his Hall of Fame induction? Could you even begin to conceive of his calling out former junior rivals, recalling decades-old feuds, trashing Rafael Nadal, making only awkward passing reference to his own kids and threatening a comeback at 50? The Jordan apologists have cited this as an example of his "pride," a vivid illustration of his "fierce competitiveness," his "killer instinct." Whatever.

Episodes such as this ought to heighten our respect and admiration for Federer, who's managed to achieve all he's achieved without such an aggressive streak, without the me-against-the-world self-delusion. The knock on Federer is that he's not a killer, that doesn't have that "assassin mentality." To me, it's just made his accomplishments all the more impressive. He became tennis' analogue to Jordan based on his physical ability, superior fitness and accomplishments on the big stage, but without that "killer instinct" and the attendant nastiness.

Quote of the Day

Below are some excerpts from The Nation's review (via the Powell's blog) of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, who was a Brazilian writer who died in 1977.  They make her work sound difficult, but after reading some of this, I'm eager to try her.

Lispector was fascinated by the possibility of extinguishing self-consciousness; she idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate their experiences into words.

Lispector is most "mystical" when she describes her longing for silence and her belief that she could never express in words what she called her "truest life." She was obsessed by the inaccuracy and dullness of language: it dooms us to become common, to repeat what others have already said.

She said the word "literature" made her "bristle like a cat," and she wasn't concerned about whether she was following or abandoning a literary tradition. Still, she shared with contemporaries like Woolf a suspicion of language, a sense of deep alienation and a fear of madness that led to heightened self-consciousness.

Quote of the Day

From an ESPN article on Federer's 22-semifinal streak:

Ivan Lendl, navigating the Merritt Parkway through the leafy Connecticut countryside at breakneck speed, laughed loudly into the phone Wednesday morning.

He was once the shining standard of consistent excellence in tennis; from the 1985 U.S. Open to the 1988 Australian Open, Lendl reached 10 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals.

With a victory over Robin Soderling on Wednesday night, Roger Federer ran his total of consecutive semifinal berths in majors to a staggering 22. Lendl's total remains the second best of all time.

"If you called me eight years ago and said 'There will be a guy who comes along, and he'll be in 21 straight Grand Slam semifinals,'" Lendl said. "Well, I would be looking for a polite way to end the conversation as quickly as possible because I'd be talking to somebody out of their mind."

Then he laughed again.

"It's just ridiculous," Lendl added. "There is no other way to say it. You can't explain it to people, it's just absurd.

"When you slow down and really think about it, it's almost obscene."

Quote of the Day

Back home in the states, as my Yankee cousins made clear by their astonishment at our conspicuous lack of them, they had ice machines, air conditioning, stereo sets and colour televisions. Damn it, in Britain even our TV was grey. In my eyes my American cousins were little short of gods: their basketball sneakers shamed my plimsolls, their t-shirts laughed at my short-sleeved air-tex and their Levi jeans made a blushing disgrace of my bagged corduroys. The details of suburban American living I think excited me more than the mythology of the West or of Chicago’s South Side or of the surfers of Santa Monica. I liked trying to understand what bake-offs, yard sales, drive-in movies and spelling bees were, what sophomores and semesters might be and what homecoming queens and commencement and proms and Spring Break and Elks and Shriners and pledge rings and trick or treat could possibly portend.

- Stephen Fry in just one of many excellent passages in his excellent essay, America's Place in the World

Quote of the Day

...There's something unsettling about the last days of the 153, the 41-Tacoma, the 74-Lloyd District/Southeast and the 86-Alderwood.

Those lines will be eliminated and 49 others will experience service cuts the very same day that TriMet launches regular service of the MAX Green Line with banners and a sparkling new transit mall.

I'm not opposed to TriMet's light-rail manifest destiny. But after listening to Davis and other passengers riding bus routes targeted for cuts, I can't help feeling TriMet is about to lose a bit of its soul.

- Commuting columnist Joseph Rose is dead-on in this morning's Oregonian

Rick Reilly on the Williams Sisters

From the opening of Rick Reilly's new column, "In Awe of the Williams Sisters":

What if I told you about two white brothers from a trailer park on the tattooed side of the tracks? Their father decides -- against all logic -- to teach them a rich man's sport, golf, even though he's a complete chop himself. They become great on the weedy public courses, turn pro and dominate the sport. Just wipe the Tour up. Golf harrumphs in disbelief.

Then the two brothers grow disinterested with golf and get into motorcycle building. They nearly stop playing altogether.Then they grow disinterested with being disinterested and decide, What the hell, let's go thump again. So they crush all new saps, until it's obvious nearly every major is going to be won by one or the other.

Preposterous?

Well, change their color to black, their sex to female and their sport to tennis, and you have the Williams sisters, who now have 18 majors between them -- 11 for Serena and seven for Venus. Eighteen! If this were golf, Serena would be tied with Walter Hagen for third, and Venus would be tied with Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead and others for seventh. From one family, one coach, one house in Compton. It's the single most underplayed story in American sports in the past 25 years. Where's their postage stamp?

Quote of the Day

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

- The suicide note of actor George Sanders, famous for his portrayal of Addison De Witt in All About Eve.  According to his wikipedia entry, when he was just 31 years old, Sanders told David Niven that he would kill himself when he was 65. Sanders killed himself in 1972... when he was 65 years old.

Quote of the Day

We used to get a visit every year from the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile, which was an enormous vehicle shaped like a hot dog. The driver was a Dwarf, and the wiener mobile would broadcast music while he sang the song "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener." He drew quite a crowd. Pretty exciting for a shopping center.

- Tom Waits in an interview with Beck, who has started a new interview series "without promotional pretext or editorial direction" (thank you, Beck!) called Irrelevant Topics.  (Thanks to NME for the link.)