Ummagumma

My 1998 paperback featuring an ominous photo of the World Trade Center on the cover. These towers would fall three years later. “ It is all falling indelibly into the past.” That line appears early in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and serves as a wonderful encapsulation of the entire novel. Everything in the book is falling into the past. The Cold War. The Polo Grounds. Bobby Thomson’s home run. J. Edgar Hoover. Lenny Bruce. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon. The Zapruder film. The Bronx. The great postwar promise of American life. The garbage that promise produced. It is all falling, but it is not disappearing. That is the key. It falls indelibly. It leaves marks. I first read Underworld not long after it appeared. My copy is the 1998 Scribner first paperback edition, the one with the epic, ominous photograph of the World Trade Center on the cover. All page references here are to that edition. I doubt DeLillo chose the cover. That was almost certainly a publisher’s decision. September ...

I’d rather be lucky than good. That old saying applies in many places in my life, but never more so than on the occasion of my first concert in high school. I was 17. I didn’t know anything about life yet though I had strong opinions. My first concert happened to be Fleetwood Mac with the Eagles at Atlanta’s Omni 50 years ago tonight. I went with eight or so of my high school friends, including my future first love. We were just flirting and having group fun then. On a grander scale, it was Bicentennial weekend. Being a lifelong history buff, I knew its significance and probably more about its history than anyone I went to that concert with. But still, I was just a kid, and it really wasn’t that big for me. But the Omni electrified me that night. Just entering the space, we were kids and got there early, and seeing a vast indoor arena for the first time in my life was somewhat awe-inspiring. It was a cool building, constructed so it would rust through time. It has been bulldozed since....

I had my first tomato sandwich of the year for dinner the other night. Jennifer had bought them at the local farmer's market. She picked out three large nice ones.  It is early for tomatoes. The best ones are yet to come. Same with cantaloupe. I love a lush, juicy cantaloupe. But the first really excellent tomato is a signpost of the season every year. I put three slices between two pieces of wheat bread and a generous helping of avocado mayonnaise. You can slather it on there and tell yourself you are doing something healthy. I have no idea whether this is true. I did not stop long enough to investigate. The sandwich was good enough that I had another one the next night. A tomato sandwich is one of those things that does not need much improvement. In fact, you can probably make it worse by getting too clever. Get so far from the tomato that it becomes background and that is not the point of this at all.  Jennifer likes her tomatoes salty.  Texture is at least h...

I have tinkered with my " Most Likely " chart from May.  It became the "Win Zone" Chart, showing the clear discrepancy of scoring 4+ runs per game versus 3 or less in Major League Baseball.  This is the chart going into tonight's play. The Braves have been #1 on this chart all season until yesterday or maybe the day before. They are currently #3 which would ordinarily be considered great, something to get fired up about. But their dominance has become an epic choke over the last 12 games going only 3 - 9.  I especially like the + for win and - for a loss formatting.  You can view the entire league at a glance and see that the Dodgers, Brewers, Astros, Marlins and Phillies are all hot right now. Atlanta is playing as well as the lowly Mets right now. Oh god. This earns them three minuses on my chart, worst possible trend. *'s are rising trends.  Rk Team W-L 4+% 4+Rec 4+W% 4+WS ≤3Rec ≤3W% ≤3WS TotWS Last12 L12 Trend -- ---------...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Israel won its war early. The decapitation strike was entirely theirs. It worked. Spectacular. Iran's leadership was devastated. Its military was badly damaged. Its nuclear infrastructure was hit very hard. Netanyahu had spent decades trying to bring about some version of this moment, and Trump gave him the American participation he needed. The opening campaign was spectacularly successful by the standards of war. Then the war kept going. Iran did not win the military contest. It did not come close. It lost too much leadership, too much infrastructure, too much military capacity for that conclusion to make sense. Netanyahu and Trump kicked ass . Nevertheless, Iran found two things it could still use after the initial devastation: the Strait of Hormuz and Lebanon. The official purpose of this whole thing was Iran's nuclear program. That was the strategic reason for the strike. Iran was too close to nuclear latency. Its program was too dangerous. ...

In my books , I highlight research that indicates play is good for neuroplasticity. Your brain changes through use. Play is one of the more enjoyable ways to keep that change alive. No grim self-improvement face required. Play is strange because it looks like nothing serious is happening. Kids run around making up rules no adult can understand. Someone tells a joke. A family enjoys group games after dinner. People sit around a table playing cards, laughing, arguing over the rules, and pretending the stakes matter more than they do. Alex Hutchinson, writing in Big Think , discusses recent work in a piece called " Why Play Brings Us Pleasure ." The basic idea is simple enough and yet surprisingly deep. In the article's own phrasing, play lets us "create the uncertainty that we can then resolve." We invent a game, accept its restrictions, enter its little world of rules, and suddenly the outcome is unknown. That uncertainty is the point. Play is chosen uncertai...