Road Trip Report Part 1

It’s been almost a month, so I guess it’s time to write something about Baseball Tour 2009. Pictures are available here.

I flew out to Chicago the crack of dawn in Saturday, July 18th. I met my brother at O’Hare Airport and we picked up our rental car, a 2010 Kia Forte with all of 240 miles on it. We didn’t have any games scheduled for the day, so we did the tourist thing in the museum district of Chicago. After a quick drive-by of Soldier Field, our first stop was the Shedd Aquarium where we had lunch, followed by the Adler Planetarium (just short of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing). Lou Malnati’s on South State Street was our dinner.

Game one was the following day, featuring the Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles. Our hotel was right on the subway line, so we just went two stops south to New Comis…. I mean U.S. Cellular Field. Sox pitcher Jose Contreras didn’t have anything on the day, throwing 99 pitches and giving up 4 walks in only 4.1 innings pitched. The O’s won 10-2. Notable parts of the afternoon included our quest to get inside the ballpark even though our tickets were missing, and the singing beer vendor (“Buy some, buy some, buy some beer from mee…” based on an opera standard). The evening involved a stop at the Weber Grill in downtown Chicago and a walk through Navy Pier.

Monday July 20 wrapped up the museum district. Since we had a night game, we visited the Field Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago (home of Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Wood’s “American Gothic“), the “Sears” Tower (name changed to “Willis Tower” on July 16th, but everything still said Sears), and ate at Jimmy Johns subs. Game two was the White Sox versus the defending AL champion Tampa Bay Rays. The Sox won this one 4-3. Sox closer Bobby Jenks loaded the bases in the 9th (a sign of things to come), but struck out Jason Bartlett to win it. Despite the 4-3 final score, this was a good offensive battle. Rays CFer Carl Crawford hit an inside-the-park HR in the 4th, and the game had 4 HRs total. The hero of the game however was Sox CFer Scott Podsednik, who went 3-3 with a walk and 2 runs scored.

The following day we took advantage of having a car to explore lands further out from our hotel. We drove to the Museum of Science and Industry south of the city. There was some cool stuff there, such as a captured WWII U-Boat, a massive model train display, Lego skyscrapers, classic cars, model boats, and the Wright Brothers Flyer. We managed to avoid the Harry Potter stuff though. That was extra money (which reminds me, if you ever go to Chicago and plan on hitting up more than one of the museums, get the Chicago City Pass. It’s totally worth it). We lunched on ice cream 1910 style at the museum.

The afternoon involved a road trip to the western suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. Reading one of those tourist guides from the hotel, I discovered that the Ernest Hemingway museum and his birthplace were right out there in Oak Park. We fought traffic and made it out to the museum with less than an hour before closing time. The walking tours to his birthplace were done for the day, but it was only two blocks, so we hoofed it ourselves. The Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio were nearby as well, but we were too late to make the tour.

The evening’s game was game 2 of the Sox-Rays series. Remember what I said about Bobby Jenks? The Rays took this one 3-2 as the Sox closer gave up 2 in the 9th.

Wednesday we bode goodbye to Chicago for a bit and drove to Detroit. The trip took much longer than expected, as it rained most of the time and along the way we made a brief stop to see the University of Notre Dame. Not wanting to risk our lives, we spent the night outside of Detroit in Allen Park, MI, but we did tour the city briefly and stop at Cheli’s Chili Bar for dinner with a friend from New Jersey.

To be continued…

The Pryce of Freedom

I went to see G.I. Joe on Saturday. It’s about what you’d expect from a movie based on action figures. Attractive people blowing lots of stuff up. Great special effects, but not much in the way of plot or memorable lines (except of course for “knowing is half the battle” ). The only real surprise in the film is the actor behind the Doctor/Cobra Commander mask. He is fantastic and unrecognizable in character. Anyway, I went in with low expectations and had a good time. If you liked Transformers, you’d probably enjoy it.

At one point I got an unexpected chuckle though: in a cameo role Jonathan Pryce plays the president of the United States. Welch-born Jonathan Pryce from Ronin, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Pirates of the Caribbean. You couldn’t get a more obviously Euro president unless you voted for President Connery.

I wonder if the wingnuts will ask for his birth certificate.

Goodbye Holiday Road

We lost writer, director, and producer John Hughes to a heart attack yesterday. He was 59. Before disappearing from the public eye in the mid-1990s, he was responsible for some of the most appreciated comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, including National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck, and the first two Home Alone movies.

Here you can read his “Vacation ‘58″, the short story that launched his career and served as the basis for the first Vacation movie.

Aged Malaise

July 15th marked the 30th anniversary of President Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, also known as the “Malaise Speech” (complete text and video here courtesy of the University of Virginia). Here’s the first five minutes:

After a ten-day retreat at Camp David, where he met with various political, religious, and academic leaders to hear their criticisms of him, President Carter delivered this speech, thinking he had a grasp on the nation’s psyche. The speech was well received at first (immediate polls shot up 11 percent), but Carter followed it up by asking for resignations from his entire cabinet, perhaps suggesting that Carter’s crisis of confidence was in his own administration. Needless to say, the buoyant optimism of Ronald Reagan in 1980 provided a stark contrast.

Yet liberals, and not a few conservatives (like Rod Dreher), have tried to resuscitate the image of the Crisis of Confidence speech. They say it was a sober assessment of where America was in the 1970s, but the nation was unprepared to receive it or Carter was a bad messenger. The recent book What the Heck are You Up to, Mr. President? called it a speech that should have changed the country. Fans call it sober, realistic, and adult; the kind of message a president should be giving. Not a few of them say President Obama should use the same kind of straight talk, because he could pull it off far more effectively.

There is some appeal, I admit, in portions of the Crisis of Confidence speech. Passages like this–”In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”–are appealing. But when I watch that video, I see a chastened, almost hurt, man. Like he took the Camp David meetings a little too much to heart.

Frequently our politicians try to fill us with false hopes based on cliche and catchphrase. Campaign 2008 was enough evidence of that. Jimmy Carter tried to diagnose a problem, but without providing much motivational inspiration (“This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.”), so he got burned by Reagan’s “we can do it” optimism. Americans are ok with self criticism and reflection, provided leaders also show the way to something better, smiling as they go.

Last Lecture

When I was home for Easter, I paged through some of my mom’s old copies of Pittsburgh Magazine. Their person of the year was Randy Pausch, former Carnegie Mellon professor who died in July 2008. His final lecture about achieving childhood dreams has been a YouTube phenomenon and popular book. Here’s the lecture in its entirety, over one hour in length.

Dear PG County: You Don’t Shoot Puppies

Last summer I read about a disturbing story from Berwyn Heights, Maryland, where the mayor’s dogs were murdered in a SWAT raid gone bad. Some criminal on the west coast mailed a large package of marijuana to a random address–which turned out to be the mayor’s house–and when the mayor’s mother-in-law received the package, SWAT (without notifying local law enforcement) busted in guns blazing. The mayor’s two black labs were killed, and the mayor and his mother-in-law were held handcuffed for hours until the whole mess was sorted out. It was a major black eye for the Prince George’s County police.

Radley Balko, who was indispensable when the story first broke, has provided an update. The county sheriff’s department cleared its officers of any wrongdoing. Balko writes, “Police and county officials…stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing, such as not doing the least bit of investigation before sending the SWAT team to take down Calvo’s door, not knocking and announcing before entering, or slaughtering Calvo’s two Labrador retrievers. In fact, Prince George’s County officials have been stunningly callous about it all, at various points praising the officers for their ‘restraint,’ and commenting that everyone involved in the investigation and raid ‘deserves a pat on the back.’” An internal investigation reportedly found that deputies had acted in a “professional and acceptable manner” by shooting the labs because they had posed a threat (from what, licking?).

It’s not surprising county police would close ranks to protect their own. Correspondingly, I read in The Examiner that Mayor Calvo is suing PG County for damages and to ask the courts to rewrite law enforcement policy, because of the county police’s apparent inability to reign themselves in. The police department reported that SWAT teams were used in 400 incidents in 2008, and Calvo’s suit alleges that “the county police and sheriff’s office frequently break the law by having SWAT teams enter innocent people’s houses without a proper warrant and ‘randomly and routinely’ kill family pets.”

It Doesn’t Pay to be a Celebrity

Now Air McNair is dead? Of homicide? Good grief.

The Books of 2009: First Half

I’m posting my “books read” list every six months these days.

Blackston, Ray. Last Mango in Texas. A harmless beach read. Blackston’s trademark florid style is less pronounced here, which is a big improvement. He does have a gift for dialogue and goofy humor. But all his characters are so danged earnest and his villains are caricatures (this time a radical environmentalist) it’s hard to take them seriously.

Driscoll, Mark. Confessions of a Reformission Rev. You can skip this one if you’re not planting a church of your own for some reason. With the title I was expecting something like St. Augustine’s Confessions, but this book was very little of the sort.

Frum, David. Comeback. If you’re a Republican, this book is decent, but not great. I like how he gets (like Douthat and Salam in Grand New Party) that the growing wealth divide in this country is a real issue, and not just “class warfare.” As if we needed a recession to tell us, middle class life is increasingly unstable, with high levels of consumer debt and growing health care expenses taking a bite out of people’s pocketbooks. Frum recognizes that some government action in health care is needed, as well as in education and the environment. The environmental chapter in particular is a worthwhile alternative to the subsidy-love that Washington typically displays. On the other hand, the chapter on supporting marriage and big families was just odd. It was funny reading about a “conservative” manipulating family life like that. Comeback tries to be a Republican new deal aimed at winning back suburbanites and the upper middle class. But Frum’s proposals are less radical than GNP’s working class agenda–and therefore less compelling. I still wonder why no Republicans even consider re-thinking the “war on terror” concept, Iraq, and the expansion of executive power that follows. That seems to be the only place where Republicans are afraid to challenge orthodoxy, yet probably where they need it most (see the Niebuhr book below). Even longer review here.

Hybels, Bill. Too Busy Not to Pray. Fairly simple book (with short chapters) on why prayer habits are important in one’s life.

Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. Kunstler is a prophet about Peak Oil, Peak Water, and many other kinds of environmental issues facing us in the 21st century. He blames most of our troubles on the development of suburbia and its concomitant “Happy Motoring” lifestyle, calling it “the greatest misallocation of resources” the world has ever seen. His solutions call for localism and scaling-down human activities—small towns, local farms, local businesses, communities traversable by foot and/or mass transit—and have a certain nostalgic appeal. This pugnacious book was a fun read.

Livingston, Gordon. Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now. Thirty nuggets of wisdom accompanied by short essays. A quick, inspirational read.

Livingston, Gordon. And Never Stop Dancing. Ditto.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. Thoughtful book on the need for humility in foreign relations and the ironies of the exercise of power. Convincing and Christian takedown of American exceptionalism and the problems it can raise. Niebuhr teaches that we are all historical actors as well as acted upon by history. We do not know as much as we think we do and hubris is our greatest foe. Though written during the Cold War, Niebuhr’s words were prophetic of the past 8 years, as historian Andrew J. Bacevich points out in the introduction. If Niebuhr really is Barack Obama’s favorite philosopher, we’re in good hands.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Favorite book of the first half of 2009. Review here.

Turtledove, Harry. How Few Remain. Alternate history novel about how the U.S. would have been different if the South won the Civil War. Part of a series.

NoVA Represent

Remember that SNL “Lazy Sunday” rap that went around a couple years ago? This guy Remy has now made one for my ‘hood, the northern Virginia DC suburbs. My friends have been passing it around Facebook for the past couple days and I thought I’d share. It’s quite funny and true. NoVA really is as sorry as he makes it appear.

Bobo 4 life, yo!

End of An Era

My grandmother’s church, where my parents were married, is closing its doors this weekend after 146 years. I think the church’s records found their way to the University of Pittsburgh. Perhaps an institutional history article is in order.