In Which The Sap Begins To Rise. Almost.

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Last evening (this morning, really), ol’ Robbo had a dream in which he was peeling a cantaloup on the back porch of Port Swiller Manor.  (I don’t know why.  It had skin like layers of an onion, with all kinds of elaborate patterns.)  At some point, I accidentally dropped the peeler over the rail, so I scurried down the stairs to fetch it.

At the bottom of the stairs, I suddenly found myself in the midst of a garden.  It was green and lush and all the plants were loaded down heavily with flower buds.  “Wow,” I thought, “Spring came and I didn’t even notice it!”

And then, as they say, I woke up.

Sigh.  More snow and freezing rain this morning.

The good news is that we actually are entering that transitional period in which the weather in these parts turns psychotic.  (March doesn’t come in like a lion, it comes in like Norman Bates.)  The high’s supposed to hit 60 mid week before dropping back down into the mid 30’s by next weekend.

It’s been such a cold winter ’round here that I am growing increasingly dubious about whether a lot of perennials I put in last spring made it through.  I’ll be especially crabby if my so-called cold-tolerant jasmine perished.

Gratuitous Spring Training Observations

Those friends of the decanter who are of the better sort are well aware that Spring Training is well underway and that it’s just about a month now until Opening Day.  Ol’ Robbo. Can’t. Wait.

I won’t go into a detailed analysis of my beloved Nationals in this post, except to say that I believe we are fielding a very, very strong team this year and have our best shot yet of making it deep into the post-season, perhaps even going All The Way.  (N.B. to the baseball gods – I said “perhaps”!)  As far as solid predictions go, I will state that I believe we will take 95+ games and win the Division pretty handily, especially as the Braves and the Phils are both in flame-out mode this season, while the Mets and the Fish are still building.

No, the thing I wanted to highlight here was the appearance of Danny Espinosa when he arrived in camp.  Danny is, and always has been, an excellent fielding second baseman but a mediocre (at best) switch-hitting batter.  This year, fighting for a bench position, he has finally agreed to stop trying to hit lefty, and to concentrate on his right-handed swing.  He also pledged to devote a great deal of training time to his swing mechanics.  To mark his resolve, he showed up looking like this:

All I can say in response is to paraphrase Wash:  “Man walks down the street in that ‘stash, people know he’s not afraid of anything.”

Anyhoo, in all seriousness, I wish Danny the best of luck.  For all the heartburn he’s caused me at the plate, I still like him a lot.

And with that, what else is there to say except

GO, NATS!!!

Robbo Is Listening To

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Regular friends of the decanter will recall that I posted earlier this week about going up to Harrisburg, PA to check out a used Honda CR-V with an eye to giving teh Eldest Gel her first set of wheels?   Well since then things have proceeded with rayther alarming speed, the upshot being that said car was delivered to the Port Swiller Manor driveway this morning.

I’ve never bought a car this way before – first online, then via email and phone, and a signing at our kitchen table that took maybe twenty minutes, tops.  Never set foot on the lot.  Never met the sales rep in person.   Very strange but pleasant experience because I’ve always loathed the old method of car-buying.

I mentioned this to the gel and her only response was, “Welcome to the 21st Century….Daaad!!”

Whipper-snapper.

Anyhoo, you can imagine how excited she is.  You can also imagine how much leverage ol’ Robbo is going to get out of this.  “Want those keys to stay in your hands?  Then don’t cross me.”  Indeed, she’s even readily agreed to get a job in order to pay for gas and to chip in on the insurance.

In Which Robbo Smells A Rat

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

As is her habit from time to time, teh Eldest Gel approached me this evening with a piece of trivia she had picked up somewhere, namely, that there’s  a new theory floating about that Asian gerbils were responsible for the bubonic plague that ravaged Medieval Europe, not rats.

This was intriguing enough to ol’ Robbo’s scattershot brain that I had to look it up.  Turns out she’s right:

“What we are suggesting is that it was gerbils in Central Asia and the bacterium in gerbils that eventually came to Europe,” Stenseth says. The scientists used climate records to check their theory, and they found a tentative link. When the climate in Asia was good, gerbils are thought to have thrived; but when it went bad, the population crashed. And about 15 years after each boom and bust, a plague outbreak erupted in Europe. The theory is that fleas carrying plague jumped from dead gerbils to pack animals and human traders, who then brought it to European cities. The research team’s results appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of course, rats are still disgusting creatures.  (The jury is still out on Siberian hamsters.)

This reminds me of something:  The Left attaches all sorts of moral opprobrium to the introduction of small-pox and other diseases by Europeans to the Americas, where said diseases devastated indigenous populations who had no immunity to them.  The tone, if not the explicit argument, is that the Europeans did it on purpose as part of their eeeeevil genocidal strategy.  Have you ever, ever, heard a single similar argument made with respect to the introduction of the plague to European populations from the East and the Middle East?

No, neither have I.

But then again, consistency is hardz.

Just Because

Greetings, my fellow port swillers and happy Wednesday!

Just a little something for the Middle Gel.  It’s become something of a (bad) joke between us:

Gratuitous Home Again, Home Again Random

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!  As noted below, ol’ Robbo is back from his latest travels.  A few random thoughts, firstly travel-related:

♦   Going through airport security, I was submitted both times to the full TSA Grope Special.  In each instance, they claimed that they needed to check out something on the front of my pants picked up by the body scan.   Hey, Einsteins!  It’s called a “fly” and it’s made of metal!  (Either that or the rosary I always carry in my pocket is radioactive and left some kind of signature after I pulled it out.)  Baysterds didn’t even give me flowers or buy me breakfast afterwards.

♦   Perhaps in my bemusement over getting an unexpected hand in my crotch, or perhaps because I hadn’t yet had any coffee, on my way out Wednesday morning I managed to lose my driver’s license going through security at Reagan National.  Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this loss until I got to the car rental counter at my final destination.   Not being able to get a car proved to be a nuisance, but at least one that I was able to work round via taxis and bumming rides from people.

♦   The good news is that the airport folks not only found my license, they also called about it and then mailed it to me with a very polite cover letter.  I got it back this evening.

♦  By the bye, Ol’ Robbo has resolved that he is never again going to fly on Ash Wednesday with the expectation that he will get to Mass at the other end.  Even when I plan it all out in advance, I’m so frazzled by the time I arrive that I just can’t make myself do it, especially, as noted above, when I don’t have wheels of my own.

♦  Oddly enough, in all my years this was the first time I’ve ever flown Southwest.  I must say that their open-seat boarding policy confused me mightily at first.  On further consideration, it still doesn’t make that much sense to me:  All the early boarders naturally are going to take up the aisle and window seats.  When the tail of the line (the despised “Group C”) comes on board, there’s still going to be a lot of confusion and aisle-crowding as they seek to insert themselves into the middle seats.  I don’t see how this is superior to assigned seating with more controlled boarding groups.   (Oh, and I put Southwest’s policy of offering to put you among the “Group A” borders for an extra fee at the same contemptible level as Disney’s policy of letting you pay more to jump to the head of the ride line.)

♦  Oh, and this trip was to Texas, where regular friends of the decanter know ol’ Robbo spent the bulk of his misspent yoot.  It’s remarkable how much at ease you can put a Texan of a certain age you’re interviewing by saying, “Oh, sure I remember Cody Carlson from high school!  He was just a year ahead of me!”

And a few non-travel thoughts:

♦  Remember when we were all told that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” and that we should “Question Authority”?  Me, too.  Good times, good times.  I certainly prefer it to “Shut your whore mouthes, you rubes!”

♦  Per my previous dose of random below,  teh youngest gel got her braces slapped on today.  I have to admit that I can barely suppress my amusement at the way all her “s’s” have transmogrified into “th’s”.   And the Middle Gel, who got hers off last fall, evidently couldn’t suppress her urge to taunt her younger sister over what’s in store for her the next two years.

♦   Meanwhile, it looks as if Mrs. R and I are headed up to Harrisburg, PA this weekend to check out a used Honda CR-V for the Eldest.  It’s two years old, single owner, 30K miles, clean bill of health, moderate whistles and bells, balance of extended warranty and a pretty reasonable price.

♦  Braces and another car, all in the same week.  Siiiigh.  I suppose I could set up as a cocaine wholesaler.  Or perhaps run guns.

♦  Of course, we’re now in Lent.  I plan to do a considerable amount of new reading, and have already started in on a series of sermons by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, recently recommended to me by a member of a Catholic FB group where I like to hang out.   However, while I am delving into the serious stuff, I am also permitting myself to take breaks with lighter reading fare, so long as it has some Christian-based theme or sensibility.  As a practical matter, this means the fiction of Chesterton and C.S. Lewis.  At the moment, I am running through the former’s Father Brown mysteries.

I have the ability sometimes when reading to hear in my mind specific voices for specific characters.  In the case of Father Brown, I derive infinite satisfaction from imagining his voice (and his appearance and movements) to be that of Sir Alec Guinness.  I’ve never actually seen his portrayal of the padre, but it is evident, almost obvious to me that he was absolutely perfect for the part.  (Without looking it up, I recall reading somewhere that his work on this project was one of the key factors behind Guinness’s swim across the Tiber.)

♦  Finally, my latest Star Trek: TOS comment (which may be the last until after Easter):  The Corbomite Maneuver.   A classic.  First totally space-based episode.  First battle of wits between ship’s commanders.  First gratuitous shirtless Jim Kirk shot.  And to this day my brother and I refer to adult beverages as “tranya”.

On Practice, Practice, Practice

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Ol’ Robbo is back from his most recent travels safe and sound and has some choice vignettes about them to relay to you friends of the decanter in the near future.  First, however, I must do a bit of gratuitous Proud Papa-ing.*

As regular friends of the decanter know, teh Middle Gel is a chorister at the Washington National Cathedral, now in the middle of her third year and her first as a senior chorister.

Last night saw the debut of the Cathedral Choir at Carnegie Hall in New York.  Today’s NYTimes gives this review.   First, the players:

For these works, Mr. [Julian] Wachner, who is also a composer, assembled some 300 performers: the excellent Choir of Trinity Wall Street; the Trinity Youth Chorus; the Washington Chorus, an award-winning ensemble that Mr. Wachner also directs; the Boy and Girl Choristers of Washington National Cathedral Choir; and Novus NY, the Trinity Wall Street’s contemporary music orchestra, its ranks fortified for this demanding concert with extra players.

 The pertinent meat re the choral work goes thusly:

For sheer terror in music, however, not much matches the most intense moments of [Alberto] Ginastera’s passion, which put all the evening’s performers onstage. Like the Bach passions, this one has a solo Evangelist who tells the story, not in recitative, as Bach does, but in Gregorian chant. (Thomas McCargar sang the Evangelist here, along with Geoffrey Silver as Pilate and Judas, and Scott Allen Jarrett as Jesus.)

Those who know Ginastera, who died in 1983 at 67, only from his earlier South American nationalist style work may be stunned to hear this passion, essentially a 12-tone score of gnashing dissonance and multilayered complexity. Yet much of the harmonic language sounds lushly chromatic, in an Expressionist vein. The piece’s most audacious element is its shrieking cinematic realism. Sometimes the choirs speak and sputter the lines; sometimes the music breaks into free-for-all bouts of hysteria.

Mr. Wachner led a viscerally dramatic performance. With this concert he signaled that next year, the centennial of Ginastera, Trinity Wall Street will present an extensive survey of the composer’s works. Adventure and ambition go hand in hand at Trinity Wall Street.

For what it’s worth, teh Middle Gel, who is, after all, ol’ Robbo’s child, despised the piece, which they also performed last week at a gala at the OAS for the strategic benefit of exposure to Big Shots at the Kennedy Center and the Washington Performing Arts Society.  Although I would much rayther see her take the Emma Kirkby route, and have long thought that she was born to sing Susanna, all I could do was to remind her that Show-Biz often demands the performing of personally distasteful works and to point out that there are very, very few 15 year olds (or anyone else for that matter) who can boast that they’ve played Carnegie Hall.

Anyhoo, as noted, ol’ Robbo is one seriously proud papa.

 

* I hope that regular friends of the decanter will know by now that ol’ Robbo does not stick on side and that his enthusiasms for the successes of his progeny are genuinely heart-felt.

UPDATE:  Teh Gel, who reads this blog even before the pixels dry, came in just now to correct me on one point:  Teh Choristers did not perform this Carnegie Hall piece at the OAS last week, but instead served up some Mendelssohn there.   Sounds to me like the OAS johnnies caught themselves a break!

On Fat Tuesday

Greetings, my fellow port swillers and happy Mardi Gras!  (I hope you all behave yourselves.)

Ol’ Robbo will be flying out on biznay tomorrow.  This will be the second time I’ve done so on Ash Wednesday.  The first time was back in 2006, the spring after Hurricane Katrina had flattened Noo Orleans, and my destination was Mobile, Alabama.

I was unaware of it until I visited Mobile the first time, but the city maintains the claim that it was the first to organize a Mardi Gras celebration and that Noo Orleans was a mere usurper of the tradition.  (Rayther like the ongoing squabble over who held the first Thanksgiving.  The local lawyer with whom I was working was quite sniffy about it.)  And since Noo Orleans was still a mess that year, many people who would have gone there went to Mobile, instead.  

By the time I got there on the Wednesday, downtown was an absolute cesspool, covered in trash and smelling to high heaven of beer, vomit and pee despite a very strong and blustery wind. 

I don’t think there’s any danger of the same sort of thing happening this time, as I am headed to a completely different kind of place. 

Storm of the Century of the Week Watch – Gratuitous Pre-Tempest Random Edition – Now With Post-Tempest Update

Well, it looks as if Ma Nature finally is going to send some of that sweet, sweet white stuff to Port Swiller Manor.  Current prediction is for 5 to 9 inches overnight.   (UPDATE:  As I look out the window, I see the flakes are starting to come down already.)   Look, if it’s going to be this damned cold anyway, we might as well get something to show for it.

♦   Ol’ Robbo is off on his biznay travels on Wednesday, so in anticipation of things being shut down tomorrow, he tooled into the office (otherwise closed for the hol) mid-day today in order to retrieve some things he’ll need.  We hates driving downtown during the middle of the day.  Most of the people on the road then are a completely different kettle of fish from your morning/evening commuter types, generally of a much poorer quality.  Indeed, as I left the Port Swiller neighborhood and started in, I got caught behind an old duffer in a late-model Caddy doing about 15 mph.  As I returned, damme if I didn’t get stuck behind the same guy coming back the other way.

♦   Speaking of driving, teh Eldest currently is out doing her mandatory road work in anticipation of getting her license next month.  When she learned that she would be in a car with an instructor and two other students, she became extremely trepidatious, worrying that one of what she delicately described as “those idiots” would wind up wrapping her around a tree on the Beltway.  We assured her that the course would start out on the quieter back streets and that the instructor would be unlikely to let anybody do anything they weren’t capable of handling.  (UPDATE:  She just got home, alive and in one piece and very pleased with herself.)

♦  And yes, it looks like Ol’ Robbo soon will be digging into his jeans and ponying up for a set of wheels for the gel.  Anybody have any suggestions?  I’m thinking smaller SUV.

♦    Not related to anything but as I type, one of teh kittehs is slowly tormenting a stink bug to death behind my chair.  Pew.

♦   Oh, and speaking of Robbo digging into his jeans, the orthodontist said this morning that it’s time to get those braces on teh Youngest’s teeth.  Sigh.  On the way home, she started squabbling with the Middle Gel (who got hers off last fall) about what color rubber bands she ought to get.  Double sigh.

Well, I better go deal with that stink bug.  I’ve flicked it on the head several times, but the thing still seems to be alive.

UPDATE:  Four or five inches of very dry, powdery stuff.  A bummer for those hoping to build snowmen but a real boon for the poor shlub who had to get up at dawn this morning and shovel it off the driveway.  [Raises hand, waives.]  Plus, the power didn’t go out.

On Ol’ George

Greetings, my fellow port swillers and happy Washington’s Birthday!

I take the opportunity to repost what has long been my very favorite portrait of ol’ George, painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1772 and showing Washington in uniform as Colonel of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War.

Ol’ George wasn’t a brilliant man, either on the battlefield or off it, but he had two outstanding qualities:  He never gave up* and he was absolutely incorruptible.

*Yes, yes.  Fort Necessity and all that.  But you know what I mean.

UPDATE: Diane’s comment reminds me that I meant to point out that calling today “Presidents’ Day” is not acceptable usage according to the Port Swiller stylebook because I don’t see why any of the others, especially the more miserable ones, ought to be allowed to ride ol’ George’s coattails.  (I leave it up to you friends of the decanter to decide for yourselves who should be considered the more miserable ones.)