Month: April 2006

  • How'd Ya Like Them Apples?

    This piece of information doesn’t exactly qualify as comfort, but on a rainy Saturday in late April it will perhaps serve as a grim and modestly entertaining diversion: For two days, late in the first month of the 2006 season, the Minnesota Twins were the worst baseball team on the planet. And maybe this will…

  • Let's Have A Party: A Kilo Is A Thousand Grams –It's Easy To Remember

    Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering. –Denise Levertov, from “Every Day” Bring me all your dreams, You dreamer, Bring me all your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world. —Langston Hughes, “The Dream Keeper”

  • Real World Situation

    United 93 and Akeelah and the Bee “United 93”, 2006. Written and Directed by Paul Greengrass. With a cast of unfamous actors and actresses and many of the grounds crew, air traffic control, and, perhaps the star, Ben Sliney. Now showing at theaters throughout town. Around the turn of the last century, the Coney Island…

  • Look out weekend here I come

    Ah, the weekend lineup. They just about write themselves. I’ve been looking forward to it all week… There’s yet ANOTHER Minnesota Book Awards reading tonight, and this will be the last since the official awards are being handed out tomorrow. Guess who’s “moderating” tonight’s reading? Tha’s right. Me. (Sorry Tex!) But with a lineup that…

  • Hacking, Ineffectually

    Here’s the frustrating and telling thing about last night’s half-assed performance in Kansas City: Sure, the Twins scored just one run off Runelvys Hernandez, but it’s what they did –or didn’t do– when they weren’t scoring that one run that was so pathetic. Hernandez was making his first 2006 start, this after going 8-14 with…

  • Oh, My Stars

    I know these things about my barber: He refers to his wife as “the battle-ax.” Or, alternately, as “the fucking battle-ax.” Though uncommonly foul-mouthed, even by my debased standards, his favored exclamation remains the sturdy and old-fashioned, “Oh, my stars!” The project of his old age is reading all thirteen volumes of the Lewis and…