Man Martin's Blog, page 191

Putt-Putt and Cottage Cheese

We played putt-putt last night, I woke up this morning all primed to blog about that.  I was going to say the game descended from the ancient Egyptian sport of Phutentut, which accounts for the African theme of the traditional putt-putt course.  I was going to say that originally the Pharaohs used bamboo shafts and heron eggs.  It was going to be hilarious, trust me.
But then as I sat down to write, I decided to blog about cottage cheese.  I'm eating a bowl even as I write this.  Nancy doesn't like cottage cheese but she bought it because she knows I do.  Think how remarkable that is.  I don't want to overstate it, it's no big deal buying cottage cheese, but its very insignificance and ordinariness is what makes it so remarkable, that the universe is equipped with another person who spends a certain amount of her week specifically thinking what I would like.  Again, I don't want to make a bigger deal of this than it deserves -  Nancy doesn't work herself into a lather fretting about my personal contentment; nevertheless, there's a small loving gravitational pull in the cosmos that sometimes buys me cottage cheese.
And don't feel too bad about missing the putt-putt blog.  I used all my best gags in the opening paragraph.

The Fab Five

Gabby Douglas defying gravityYesterday, in case you've been hiding under a rock, the USA Women's Gymnastics team won Gold.  Calling the team "women" is problematic because they range in age from 15 to 17.  Who knows how many hours they've given up in training, what opportunities for socializing and ordinary girl goof-around play they sacrificed for this honor  Watching women's gymnastics jades you after awhile; we see these young ladies do a summer-salt, leap into the air, do two and and half barrel rolls upside down, and then we say, "Rats!" if landing on the mat, the competitor takes an extra step.  We measure them against impossible yardsticks of perfection, and what's more - they measure themselves that way.  Their lives are made up of ninety-nine percent disappointment punctuated by one-percent moments of fleeting satisfaction.
The American girls wept after they won.  The Russian team wept, too.  Whose heart wouldn't break seeing sweet Anastasia Grishina, tears rolling down her face after a momentous stumble during her routine?  Poor child.  She hadn't measured up to the yardstick of perfection.
So what happens to the girls from here  They might get another shot at Olympic Gold in four years, but it's a long shot.  The shelf-life of women gymnast is shorter than premium yogurt.  What happens to them?  Is it because as they get older, their bones get heavier, their breasts develop, they get taller, they get injuries and muscle tears?  Whatever the case, a world-champion twenty-four year-old gymnast is a rarity.  Five of them all at the same time would be inconceivable.
The Greek poet Pindar, who wrote lyric poems in praise of athletes in the original Olympics, once said with uncharacteristic understatement for a Greek: "The present will not endure long."  Thus it will be for the Fab Five - all the disappointments, set-backs, and self-sacrifice they have suffered for this moment of glory, but it is a moment.  The present will not endure long.  You might think the tragedy that fills this world is a drawback or a necessary price for the yardstick of perfection.  It's not.  It's the essence.

Sea Critters

Yesterday Spencer and I wen swimming in the Gulf. I'm hoping to do a triathalon sprint with her next summer.  I'm pretty sure we swam at least a quarter mile, in addition to which is the incalculable aerobic benefit of swimming in choppy surf, plus screaming.  Most of the screaming was accomplished on this journey by Spencer.  When she screamed, she screamed like Curly on the Three Stooges: a high pitched "Woop-oop-oop-oop," as she flailed her arms.  If you think it's easy swimming in rolling waves, flailing your arms, and shouting "woop-oop-oop-oop," like Curly on the Three Stooges all at the same time is easy, you try it some time.  The reason for the Curly style screaming was a certain number of sea critters down there were getting up close and personal with us.  It's strange that this would provoke a scream.  They were very small, we could tell, and they never bit us, just sort of nosed us.  They were smaller than the smallest kitten, and if a kitten had done exactly that, we'd have thought it was adorable.  I think part of it is, that you can't see what's down there.  You don't know if it's got flippers, fins, or tentacles.  You don't know how big it is.  It feels like the nose of a relatively small fish, but the nose tip of a twenty foot shark and a two-inch minnow would be approximately the same size, so who can say?  Also, you know whatever's down there it's not like you - you might be in there training for a triathalon sprint, but that little critter bumping against your nether regions is in there pursuing its livelihood, and its livelihood is mating with other critters of the same species and finding stuff to eat: given that you know you're not a potential mate, you have to wonder if you might be a potential meal.  When we reached our destination Spencer was somewhat unnerved and evinced no further desire to swim in the Gulf, so this morning I swam alone.  One fish was particularly intrigued by my nipples which much have appeared to it underwater like two pink bull's eyes.  It didn't bite me, just nosed me.
I squealed like Curly.

Family Photos

Every time our families get together, my sister-in-law Donna makes us all pose for group shots: year after year, usually in front of a Christmas tree or Easter Baskets.   Birthdays, Fathers Days, Mothers Days.  Everybody grumbles about it comically, but we cooperate with it and smile and try not to blink.  In an age of digital photography, there aren't fat photo albums anymore with pages that stick together slightly with yellowing photos.  These will end up on Facebook pages, fancy photo-books printed at CVS, and emails.  And this time, a blog.Why do we need to take these pictures? If anyone cared to thumb through them, they'd seem the same set of people with occasional subtractions and additions, gradually growing older in front of an unchanging scene of Christmas trees and Easter Baskets and beaches.  We imagine we will look back on these years hence and sigh at happy memories, but I'm not sure that ever really happens.  We do look over the pictures at our next get-together; this is usually a prelude to taking a family photo. I think contrary to all logic, the reason we take pictures is not for some future memory but for the present.  Standing on the balcony of our condo, smiling and good-naturedly chaffing Donna, "Let's get this over with," we're compelled to freeze in for a minute or two and contemplate the fact that this moment when we are together is a moment worth documenting.  We put our arms around each other and smile.  We stand close enough our hips are touching.  Nancy's hair sometimes gets in my nose.  We don't talk; we stop and think.  No, we don't even think.  We just smile with our arms around each other.  

Packing for Panama

The RAV4 T-One Hour ( Nearly packed.)  Notice
bag strapped to roof.Nancy and I are spending the week at the Redneck Riviera, ie Panama City Beach, with the extended family - Nancy's brother and sister, brother and sister-in-law, parents, our daughter Spencer, and her boyfriend Glenn.  Nancy's sister went down the day before to help her mother pack.  "You should have seen," Donna wrote in an email, "she had enough laid out for a month."
"Scoff, scoff," Nancy and I scoffed.  "How foolish.  Imagine thinking you needed that much for a simple trip t to the beach.  Senior citizens are so comical."
Seen en route in Quiznos parking lot.
We aren't the worst.


We didn't have time to write a witty rejoinder to Donna's email because we were still in the process of packing our own stuff.  Luckily, Spencer had already driven down with Glenn and taken the bicycles, or I don't think we'd have had room for it all.  As it was, we had to put the overflow in a bag on top.  The thing is, everything we brought was absolutely essential.  "Should we bring the onions?"  "Yeah, go ahead."  "There's not room in the cooler."  "Well, get the other cooler.  That way we'll have room for the mozzarella, too."  (This is, by the way, a verbatim exchange.)  In the bag on top we have the beach chairs, un-inflated floats, and beach toys such as paddles for a kind of beach paddle-ball, etc.  The beach toys are in absolutely pristine shape in spite of being at least a decade old.  Not because we've taken such good care of them, but because to my knowledge, they've never once been played with.  They've gone to the beach every year for a decade, but gotten no closer to the water than the big bag on top of our vehicle.  In many ways packing is actually the highlight of the trip, (Look at all the fun we're prepared to have) followed closely by unpacking, repacking, and un-repacking.  Our efforts at packing took approximately three days.  A day for all the materials to begin staging themselves in the bedroom and living room, another day to get themselves into more or less prepacked bundles, and a final day to get into the back of and on top of the car, along with last minute detritus such as cellphones, ipods, computers, cameras, ipad, gin, vermouth, olives, cocktail shaker.  One last check to make sure there absolutely anything else we might want.  By this time we did not have enough in the trunk to last a month.  We had enough to equip Caesar's army for the invasion of Gaul, assuming Caesar had any use for chaise lounges and beach balls.  We planned to leave at 5:00 AM sharp on Saturday morning.  We left at 6:30.  Not bad.
We were ten miles down the interstate before we realized we'd forgotten something.

Olympics for the 21st Century

Marathon Texting Multi-Task I-285 Texting and Driving Bi-athalon

800-Yard Carry-All-Your-Beach-Gear -Back-to-the-Car-Across-Scalding-Sand-Dunes Dash

More Sightings

After the miraculous sighting of the Virgin Mary in a tree trunk (Compare the two pictures above.  Hard to tell apart, aren't they?) throngs of the faithful have swarmed to West New York, New Jersey.  (The Virgin was first noticed when the tree said to a passerby, "I'm the Virgin.")  Since then, other miraculous sightings have occurred, specifically in my own garden.  A sign the end times are at hand?

This one's kinda tricky, because the picture's sort of blurry, and
the she's with a watermelon rind instead of a saucer of eyeballs.
(These saints, yeesh!)  But my chicken is a dead ringer for Saint Lucy!
Still don't believe it?  Well, she told me so herself!  "I'm Saint Lucy,"
she said, "Cluck, cluck.  I'm Saint Lucy.  Now go get me some more
damn watermelon!"
This tomato is clearly St Thomas Aquinas (pictured right)  Just imagine
the tomato is holding a model of a cathedral and a big book.  Or
picture Aquinas with a sunburn.  By the way, the tomato told
me, "I'm St Thomas Aquinas."  Clear as day.










Take a careful look at the cucumber on the left and you'll clearly see
it's St Luke (Pictured above)  Whoa!  Wait a minute!  They're
so much alike, I got them mixed up myself!

Another Reason I Never Made It as a Cartoonist

Noah Annotated, From Genesis 6-0

God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.  They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.  [9] Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah.For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 

Joe Paterno and Doublethink

Lenin addressing crowd at Red Square.  In the top
photo Trotsky has been masterfully edited out. (This
was before PhotoShop.)  You can see him in the bottom photo
standing on right side of podium.Be it said, I have no knowledge or interest in sports whatsoever.  Before the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke, I couldn't have told you who Joe Paterno was anymore than I could tell you who won the last Superbowl.  Nevertheless, it was with anger I heard that the NCAA stripped Paterno of his 111 victories, so that he is no longer the winningest coach in Division I Football.  Penn State also removed his statue; with this I have no quarrel, a sad but appropriate and necessary measure regarding a man who has shamed his university.  But the victories.
The bottom line is, Paterno won those, and it doesn't matter what the NCAA has to say about it.  Trying to undo history is the very nature of Doublethink, defined by George Orwell in 1984 as telling "deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality."  Rewriting history is precisely what we want to do when we are morally offended - and we should be morally offended, to any extent Paterno covered up and abetted Sandusky in his abuse, we should all be offended, but the fact remains: those 111 victories are Paterno's, and however unpleasant it is to recognize that, the fact remains what the fact remains.
Not that this will stop NCAA from rewriting history, or sports historians from reiterating what NCAA passes on.  History isn't fact, but just one version of what we believe the facts to be.  We have the ability, when moral outrage or any other catalyst makes us want to badly enough, to make history veer as far from the facts as our fearful hearts desire.
That's scary.