• Cloudy and cold
• Cloudy and humid
• Cloudy and hot
• Foggy, damp and cold
• Fog and drizzle
• Intermittent rain
• Steady rain
• Torrential rain
• Thunder, lightning and hail
• Coastal flooding
• High ozone
• Particulate pollution

So a sunny morning is a treat. Actually, was a treat. A nice morning made me so damn lazy that it took me all day and into the evening to get back to this little rant and finish it.

I was drawn to the book initially by simple curiousity over the fact that the author’s middle and last names are the same. If I ever learned what that was about, however, I have long since forgotten, because everything about the book delighted me.

Abbott writes in the persona of A. Square, a sentient geometrical figure who by accident discovers our three-dimensional world. The story is an astute satire of Abbott’s own Victorian society, by turns funny, poignant, subversive and sly.

Through the years, I have occasionally met someone who has heard of the book. For the most part, however, Flatland sits on my shelf as a sort of private delight. I once tried to get Marge to read it, but it didn’t interest her. I’m not sure she got past the preface. I may have suggested it to Elizabeth when she was a high school student struggling with geometry. In fact, through the years I’ve recommended it to a lot of people, but I’m not sure anyone has ever taken me up on it.

But now, Flatland is available on line. That link at the top of this page will take you to the full text, with Abbott’s original illustrations. So go ahead, click on it. You know you want to…

Now, I know for a fact that there are other places in the country that could really use some of this water, but no. We’re gonna get it all right here on the southwest coast of Maine.

Weather radar tells the story. That bit of nastiness offshore from Portland is probably what I begin to hear booming in the distance as I write this.

The lawn I was proud of back in the spring has been soggy for so long that it is beginning to give itself over to moss and broad-leaf weeds. The backyard we worked so hard to prepare for summer has been just about unusable. No one has been in the pool for close to two weeks.

And to think that not that long ago I was whining because commitments of various kinds were filling up the summer so that the camping trip we talked about back in the spring wouldn’t happen! Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad not to be huddled in a sodden tent. Marge and I did that for a week decades ago. It’s nice to have had the experience because it makes a good story, but once around is a lifetime supply.

As for flash floods, I saw a real one in Oklahoma in about 1976. The house we were renting was built on a slab and had a slider into the back yard. As rain fell at something like 10″ per hour (!) the water built up against the side of the house so that the glass door looked like the side of an aquarium. I spent a busy half hour shoveling water out of the garage. I don’t need to see any of that again either.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

No wonder Bulwer-Lytton has a contest named for him in which entrants compete to see who can write the worst opening sentence of a novel that, God willing, will remain imaginary.

Through the years, the contest has become more and more elaborate, with categories and subcategories and “dishonorable mentions.” I thought I was going to write about the contest, but I find I’ve used up all the time I have reading this year’s winning entries and laughing maniacally.

Spend some time with the winners, and you’ll have favorites of your own. Perhaps it’s only because my nextdoor neighbor has become the proud owner of a genuine hot rod, but tonight my own personal favorite is this:

“Let’s see what this baby can do, Virgil,” said Wyatt, as he floored the Charger, brushing a Dart out of the way, sideswiping an oncoming Lancer, rear-ending a Diplomat, and demolishing a row of Rams before catapulting head-on into the sheriff’s Viper—realizing that we’d indeed missed the turn-off to Abilene and ended up instead, in Dodge City.
–>I want a space here, dammit!<–
Paul Curtis
Randburg, South Africa

Now, what am I supposed to do with the thing? It comes with no instructions whatever. No indication of its size; no information about how it is likely to behave when embedded in a page. Absolutely nothing. Newsweek, you can do better than this!

Although the watch is pretty cool…

We have some old books ourselves, so I’ll make a few scans and send them to Liam. If you’re interested in old books, you might want to do the same.

The POW! site, by the way, contains links to free and cheap stock photos of all kinds. Enjoy.

What got me started on this was a little sidebar in the current issue of Newsweek. The story involves a few drunken Serbs holding forth in a suffocating cafe in New Belgrade. The conversation as recorded is basically in praise of Radovan Karadžić, the Serbian nationalist leader who was arrested last week after 13 years on the run from the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

Remarks around the table consist mostly of that special blend of bullying, bigotry and noxious self-pity that is business as usual for Karadžić supporters. I skimmed over most of it because I’ve heard it all before, but then my eye caught something that I couldn’t ignore.

A drinker known as Misko, speaking nostalgically of Karadžić, says to his American interviewer, “One educated Serb is more precious than a million educated Americans. No offense…”

No offense? NO OFFENSE? Sorry, Misko, you crossed a line there. Actually you crossed a million lines, one for every American you slandered with your self-aggrandizing delusion. Do you expect to get away with it just by asking that we not be offended? Put another way, how much better than you, who neither forgive nor forget anything, do you need to have us be?

In recent years, year-round residents finally wearied of the town’s seamy reputation and have managed to corral the vice industries. Gone from the midway, for example, are the topless joints, the biker bars and the women willing, for a modest consideration, to make a boy into a man.

In the past, the hotels, motels and rental cabins of the town were filled all summer long with visitors from Quebec and New Brunswick, and you still hear a lot of French on the street. We ate beach pizza served to us by a Russian waitress, took a walk on the beach (seven miles of perfect sand!) and strolled through the amusement park.

Against her better judgment, Marge rode with Elizabeth and me on the roller coaster. Marge is a woman who does not enjoy carnival rides. She regretted her decision and began screaming almost from the moment our car began to climb. I used to like carnival rides in small doses and had expected to enjoy the ride a lot more than I did. As a matter of pride, I do want to stress that I didn’t scream or lose my pizza, but I was dizzy by the end of the ride. It just wasn’t much fun, and the damn tickets cost more than $4.00 each! It will probably prove to have been the last carnival ride of my life.

Elizabeth, who has always had the stomach of an astronaut when it comes to such things, was pretty disgusted with both of us. And only partly because she had bought the tickets.

In the past my association with the town was that I worked there as a bank teller during the summer of 1966, between my sophomore and junior years of college. The pace at the bank was frenetic. The days were long and the pay was low, but the job was the first “white collar” experience of my life.

I tried to be serious and professional at all times and had some modest success at it. Inside my conservately tailored suit and carefully knotted tie, however, I was a 20-year-old guy. Thus it was that on the day a young woman in a convertible wearing only the top of a bikini, presented a check at the drive-through window, I smiled (suavely, no doubt) and cashed that check.

When the check was returned to the bank as worthless a few days later, I learned that there were three things about it to which I had been temporarily blinded by the view from the high vantage of the drive-through window:

• The “check” was a photocopy
• The amount was payable in New Zealand dollars
• The words “Not Negotiable” appeared prominently on the front

For the rest of the summer a teller named Linda covered the drive-through, and the office manager made a lame remark about New Zealand every time he saw me.

In retrospect, I’m surprised to have regained my former cavalier attitude toward severe weather events, particularly tornadoes. I’m surprised because I have lived in Oklahoma, in that part of the country that calls itself “Tornado Alley.”

When we moved there I didn’t know what tornado watches and warnings were. I had never seen a tornado and never thought about what being caught in a tornado would be like. We had only been in Tulsa a few months when all that changed. In a nutshell, I learned the following in about half an hour:

Tornadoes are to weather more or less what Machiavellianism is to politics or the fictitious Borg (”Resistance is futile”) to the equally fictitious Federation of Planets. As for Machiavelli, on the subject of permanently defeating recalcitrant rivals he wrote, “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Similarly, if a tornado hits you or even comes close, you will not want to tangle with one again.

Luckily for us, the tornado that taught me all that was airborne, like the one shown in the picture, and so it passed over our house without doing any damage to us. When the funnel first became visible in the sky, our neighbors went out into the street to watch it and, presumably, to plan their strategies. I went out, too, and learned from them that there are basically two choices: you can hide, or you can run. There are rules that apply to each.

In a house built on a concrete slab, like the one we were renting, the place to hide is the bathtub. Barring a direct hit on the tub, you are likely to survive even a tornado’s total demolition of the house. The downside of the idea is that a one-bathroom house provides safe hiding only for one. You choose hiding, by the way, only if the storm is unlikely to hit you, or if you have no time to run. As a first-timer, I briefly considered hunkering down in the tub with a bottle of bourbon, resigned to my fate. By the time I’d formulated this plan, however, the funnel had moved on. Tornadoes are fast.

That’s why if you run (drive, actually) from a tornado the idea is to travel beside the storm, rather than trying to head directly away from it. You just don’t want to race a tornado. The idea is get out of its path because in a normal car on a normal road, you will not be able to outrun the funnel.

Hmmmmm, this turned out a lot longer than I expected. I haven’t thought about these things for years, but now that I’ve been reminded I think I’ll pay more attention to the next tornado watch that comes my way.

We’ve been singing for the Sea Dogs for about 10 years. The best part of it has always been the chance to sing through the ballpark’s astonishing sound system. It’s the only time four guys, at least these particular four guys, can make that much sound. And since it’s the National Anthem, we get, by definition, a standing ovation every time.

Last night, however, was different from all our other experiences with the Sea Dogs. You need to know by way of background that Red Sox superstar David “Big Papi” Ortiz has been out of the game with a wrist injury for several weeks. As part of his rehabilitation plan, and just before returning to the active roster of the Red Sox, he has been appearing with Red Sox affiliates. Last night he suited up in a Sea Dogs uniform as “designated hitter.” According to local news broadcasts after the game, there were people in the stands who had paid as much as $600 apiece for tickets to the sold-out game. They were there to see Big Papi in their hometown.

The enthusiasm, some might say the fanaticism, of Red Sox Nation fans is something that often catches baseball fans from other parts of the country by surprise. And so it was last night.

When we went onto the field to sing, we saw that every seat in the park was filled. The excitement was infectious. When we were done singing, a cheer went up from the crowd such as we had never heard before. I didn’t think too much about it as we left the field, of course, because I knew the cheer was for Big Papi, not for us four old farts in blue blazers.

But then something we had never experienced before began to happen. As we moved toward our seats for the game, people began to smile at us and praise us. More than a few actually reached out and touched our sleeves as we walked past. When the game was over and we were leaving the park, the whole thing started again. Somehow, in that super-charged atmosphere, Big Papi’s celebrity made everyone a star. It was more than a little unsettling, but also a lot of fun.

If it happened all the time, however, it could certainly be hazardous and might do for the soul what a diet of Mountain Dew and Twinkies would do for the body. Big Papi seems to be at ease with celebrity, but there is skill and self-discipline involved that many celebs just can’t muster or maintain. I had a good time last night, but I woke up this morning just a little more sympathetic to those who are destroyed by their own success.