Month: May 2005

  • A Vulture With A Wicked Curveball

    Tonight Jesse Crain picked up his fourth win of the season out of the bullpen, and it looks like he’s on his way to eventually supplanting Juan Rincon as the main set-up man for Joe Nathan. He’s also looking like pretty good insurance for Nathan in the event that disaster strikes. I love Crain enough…

  • The Opposite of Right is Not Always Left

    It took us three days to get through Michael Sokolove’s provocative piece in the New York Times magazine about Sen. Rick Santorum—partly because we couldn’t stop talking about it before reading to the end. (A long, loud discussion over beers at Pizza Luce on Sunday night was especially energetic.) Of course, we can’t plan these…

  • Everyone's A Meta-Critic

    On Friday, Timothy Noah published the results of his online survey which asked the question, “If you had to pay to read each New York Times columnist, how much would you pay?” Apropos of the Times announcing that they were going to place their columnists in a premium subscription-only area of the Times website, Noah…

  • Poetry and war

    A friend of mine told me over the weekend that she missed my poetry posts. (If you are nostalgic, you can go back to any posts from April for the pedantry.) But that comment, and today’s news from Iraq made me think of one of my favorites: Horace’s Ode 3.2–the famous “Dulce et decorum est…

  • A Long Time Ago, Somewhere Else In The World

    After a time the beggars just sort of receded and became a peripheral blur in my daily routine, the traffic I had to navigate each day on my way to work. There were almost no cars in my part of town. A number of people had beat-up motor scooters or bicycles, but the narrow maze…

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    –Illustration by James Dankert Fridays aren’t gonna work for me. I’m not a writer, dammit. I can’t be expected to drag my ass home from the day job (and I do mean drag my ass; some days it feels like I’m hauling a Volkswagon Beetle behind me), watch a baseball game, and then sit down…