Jenny Miller | Heck's Kitchen Pantry, 2005

From the old memento box: HK VIP Ranger Ted and his mom, Elsa Payne, 1957 Water Carnival Queen, Riverton, WY. "I'm Mr. T's mom. The photo, which he discovered in an old box of mementos, I think, is from the town where I grew up, where prior to 1957, the only queens in the county were rodeo queens. It was fun, and we got to water ski around Boysen Lake all weekend. Sadly, the drought in the west has nearly dried up the lake, along with many more, including Lake Mead."

JM: Hi Ms. Neilsen. That's an awesome queen photo. Mind if I post it on my site?

Ms. Neilson: Hi Jenny, and no, I wouldn't mind at all. I'd be honored. I like your blog and would feel as if I'm part of what's happening in the 21st century.


Ranger Ted, June 1992, Laramie, WY	Elsa Payne, 1957 Water Carnival Queen, Riverton, WY

08.24.05
AMERICA'S GAME: Did you know that 56 percent of NFL players are obese? Or that 20 years ago there were five 300-pounders in the NFL, and now there are 350? And that 49ers o-lineman that died the other day was 100 POUNDS overweight? But normal for a lineman? I love football as much as the next redblooded American lesbian, but our fat and violent game is going to claim more and more mountain-sized men, because they're sure not getting any smaller. Living Large, Dying Young, Mike Wise, wapost.

POSSIBLY A METEOR: The Best of Pat Robertson, IMBD, from Caryn. " [about Gay Day at Disney World] I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs, it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor."

FUNNY KP: EWW! HERE'S WHAT LADIES THINK IS GROSSER THAN GROSS, the black table. Darci Ratliff: "Do you know what's disgusting? Public toilets. I used to pride myself on not being one of those prissy girls who had to hover over a seat in a bar bathroom stall. But then I started frequenting more disgusting bars and the hover-pee technique became a means of survival. I mean, I'm adventurous, but there are times when you take chances and then there are times when you stare syphilis in the face and say, 'No, thanks.'" See also, Jokes I made up today, kittenpants.

Martin Boozehound says, "Stage photo from the Judas Priest concert at Jones Beach in June. You can kinda see Chaz and me in the background Would you even imagine I'd be in the 8th row? Because I wouldn't have."

08.23.05
This space turned 3-years-old on Sunday, and I threw a giant party for it, with playpens full of bunnies and mountains of cocaine. But no one showed up. So I snorted all the bunnies and fondled all the drugs by myself. Heck's Kitchen says THANKS A LOT, FRIENDS, FOR SHOWING UP MOST DAYS, ANYWAY.

Masts this week are brought to you by Mr. Cowal, and Baltimore's Dime Museum. I'm backed up on the news, but here's something much-sent that should annoy you. The Glass Closet: Latasha Byears' off-the-bench 'dirty work' helped the Los Angeles Sparks win two WNBA championships. Then a sexual assault allegation ended her career. latimes, from mw and SSB.

I spent the weekend at grandma's, shopping for davenports, slacks, and eating at that dago place. At The Gap, a very nice salesclerk admonished me for looking for men's jeans, noting that I am "very feminine" and that I "really should show off that ass." Thanks Hanover, PA!

08.19.05
Today I drove to work in the rain with my top down (yeah yeah, I mean, the titties is out). As long as you're in motion, you stay dry. The trick is to run every light. The pic above is me and Brian crossing into post-apocalyptic New York. I'm saying, "So then I sez, I sez, 'Bitch, chill, I don't know your life.'" No, really I'm saying, Brian, how is it that you always have gorgeous girlfriends? Is it because you're freakishly tall?

Suzy Questionmark, Ace Reporter: So, what are you, exactly?
TheHottBoxx: I'm a brand new queer dance night!

SQ: So what kind of music do you offer?
THB: Punk, hip hop, pop, riot grrrl, 80s, 90s. And Judas Priest, of course.

SQ: Who is playing this great music?
THB: junebullet and this really cool new dj named dj c.rush. They're my favorite djs ever, natch. But we'll have guest djs also, and I'm sure I'll really like them too!

SQ: Anything else besides music at this fab event?
THB: Totally! We're taking over the big screen at the club and showing videos all night long!

SQ: This party sounds super fun. I totally have to go! When is it?
THB: The third Sunday of every month. The first one is Sunday August 21. That's this Sunday!

SQ: Phase 1? Isn't that, like, far away?
THB: Get over it already! This party happens once a month! You can't get your ass out of NW once a month?!

SQ: Anything else I should know?
THB: Yeah, it's from 9pm-2am. $3 and 21+. Phase 1 is at 525 8th St SE in Capitol Hill. The first night is this Sunday, August 21! With junebullet and dj c.rush. Be there.

08.17.05 - premembering autumn edition
Jesus H. Christ, who died and made you boss? This week on Work I'm playing the roles of Jenny (Codebot) and Ted (Manager of Codebots). I'm learning a lot about myself. Like, I hate working for me, and I hate managing me. What a little bitch I am.

NY TO DC: I took the bus (The Jew Bus) to New York for the weekend. While dining at Grimaldi's with Chris, Laura, Edward, and Brian, I remarked that never in my public transit history had a hot lesbian sat next to me, not on train, bus, nor plane. The remark was intended to impress upon my audience the obstacles I face when trying to locate potential mates on public transit, but Brian said, "Me neither! I don't know what I would do! Probably give her your number," which was kind, anyway. So, an hour later I boarded my bus, and lo and behold, a very cute girl appears, beaming, inquiring as to whether I minded if she occupied the seat beside me. I said something like, Huh? Oh, sure! And then didn't speak another word to her for the next four hours, EVEN AS we watched XXX: State of the Union together, she looking over at me at all the "funny" parts in a sharing kind of way, and EVEN AS she curled her bare feet under my thigh, which seriously, you might not even do to a close friend, right? Alas, I have no game, and when the bus pulled up to McPherson Square I fled.

XXX: State of the Union stars Ice Cube (née O'Shea Jackson) in the place of Vin Diesel. It's a ridiculous movie, and it's allegedly set in DC. The following are geographical references used in XXX: State of the Union that have no meaning whatever to DC residents:

There was one moment when Ice almost uttered a legit historic DC line, but instead said, "She set me up, the bitch." How could they fuck that up? THE BITCH SET ME UP!!

CREEPY BUILDINGS: Ok, here's a New York story. Edward, Brian, Chris, Laura and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. On the Manhattan side there's an enormous, ugly building, which looks more enormous because there's nothing else tall around it. As Ed and I walked along, gaping like the tourists we are, it struck us how fucking creepy this building is. It appeared to have no windows. Brian told us it might be a Verizon switching station, in which case it would be a 500-some foot skyscraper full of server farms, almost empty of people. He was correct. Yikes. Check this stuff out.

A SONG: Artists > Mendoza Line, The > Whatever Happened To You?
Submitted by papercup on July 6, 2002

you are like a child with your folded-arm denials and a convalescent look and your pleaded hands out front you are like a con locked away for doing no wrong oh the system is your foe but your alibi's see-through you are like the moon in the fading afternoon like a distant memory you don't mean a thing to me whatever happened to you baby you once were the light that helped to show me when i was right and when i was wrong and now all you are is a line in a song to me you are like the wind howling through deserted glens your power is intense but your audience has left you are like the stars so near and yet so far like an ancient mystery you're unsolvable to me whatever happened to you baby you once were the guide that helped to save me from when i was right and when i was wrong and now all you are is a line in a song to me you are like a dream reoccurring to me when i wake i can't recall what you were saying at all.

08.15.05
SSB writes, "My friend Jacqueline Dupree, the intranet editor at the Post, had an online chat at 11 this morning about a story on Near Southeast redvelopment, down by the proposed new Nats stadium. The Post real estate writer wrote most of the story, but it is based on Jacqueline's blog on the subject, which she's been chronicling for several years now. Check it out:

In other famous friends news, I just learned Cheryl sings on this Mates of State tune: Along for the Ride.

"Silverman caused a brief controversy after using the racist slur 'chink' in a comedy routine on the July 11, 2001 episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Even though Silverman was obviously making fun of the racist thought process, NBC issued an apology.

The offending joke was about Silverman's reluctance to serve jury duty: "My friend said, 'Why don't you write something inappropriate on the form, like 'I hate chinks'? But I don't want people to think I was racist. So I just filled out the form and I wrote 'I love chinks.' And who doesn't?"

I love love love Mirah, and her sexy songs. And sad songs, and fun songs. *sigh* This pic I lifted from lovelyalice. It's Mirah and her girlfriend Emily in Italy.

08.11.05
Last night we moved Bob and Bob's things about four blocks in a southeasterly direction. (Bob's things: media, skeletons and zombie stuff). It was the easiest move ever. Afterwards we relaxed on his new back deck, beneath the world's largest weed. Rebenga has magnanimously allowed this weed to thrive, and has been rewarded with the sort of plentiful shade only a twenty-foot weed can provide. One with leaves the size of placemats. As a tree, it would be formidable. As a weed, it is a grotesquely oversized natural exhibit, like the moon, were it to suddenly fall into an orbit 10 feet above the earth, or like The World's Largest Spider, or like John Holmes.

After the pizza the beer and the weed, I drove home, but instead of going into my house I went into the neighbor's house, which was ok, because I'm sitting their kitten. Their perfect, perfect kitten Nokomis, a noble name for the daughter of the Emerson Street tomcat, Bad Peanut Butter, and Calico #1.

08.10.05 - everyone's talking about underwear edition
After a long day in front of the computer at work, I like to spend a long evening in front of the computer at home.
My Evening in Surfing: mightygirl > dooce > dollarshort

1.) DISCRETION, from mightygirl.net. Excerpt: "When Heather comes to visit, I suggest that we stop by Good Vibrations, a local highbrow sex shop, for a quintessential San Francisco experience...Heather draws immediate attention. She's approximately 6'4"; in heels, and is wearing a skirt that clearly shows her legs stretching up to her armpits. Also, her mouth is so agape that her jaw is getting rug burn. Every few feet she gives a Southern-drawl stage whisper, "What is this?" and then withdraws in horror when I explain." Via an email from Deb Duncan: "The 'Heather' she refers to is dooce.com Heather.)"

2.) The B. stands for BACKFIRE, dooce.com. Excerpt: "Our dog has officially entered puberty. He acts like he's just discovered Bauhaus and we, the parents, are too plebeian to appreciate its finer textures. Just now we walked down into the basement and he was lying on the futon, pouting because globalization and cultural imperialism are killing the rain forests, and when he saw us coming he was like, just because you can walk upright does not give you the right to act so smug."

After a few good hours with the internet, I put on some shoes, jogged around the block, then collapsed onto the couch to watch the Nationals. The Nats just started a two-week road trip, opening in Houston, against our competition for the NL wild card spot. It's us or the Astros in the playoffs. Who cares about the fucking Astros? Their honky crowd makes DC's look downright rowdy. Highlight #1: With two outs and two on in the top of the eighth, Edward called for unflappable 22-year closer, Chad "The Chief" Cordero. And just then Frank called him in from the bullpen. Attention Ed's dad: your boy not only knows who our closer is, but knew when to hook the middle reliever. I hope you're proud, and please give a little credit to JM for this transformation. Highlight #2: "Brandon Watson homers and doubles in his major league debut and the Nationals start a pivotal road trip with a 6-5 win over the Astros on Tuesday." The Nats had 4 homers. Four! "It's a veritable offensive explosion," chuckled our hometown game announcers, and it was true.

Book: I just finished a good book. The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Here's an interview. She's in the money, too, cuz it's being made into a movie. Recommended by resident librarian/cat lady SLyon.

Orgasms: This is pretty amazing, from Dave, on the Female O Beat - Marylin Monroe's Therapy Transcripts. "We went to Joan's bedroom ... Crawford had a gigantic orgasm and shrieked like a maniac. Credit Natasha. She could teach more than acting. Next time I saw Crawford she wanted another round. I told her straight out I didn't much enjoy doing it with a woman. After I turned her down, she became spiteful. An English poet best describes it: hath no rage like love to hatred turned; and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – most people wrongly credit that to Shakespeare. William Congreve is the author. That's me, Marilyn Monroe, the classical scholar.""

Sports: Gary Smith has a very recognizable style - cheese on more cheese, but he always writes about stuff I like. Like....Jamila Wideman, Mia Hamm, and other hot women of the sporting world. A couple weeks ago he wrote about the Veecks for SI - specifically Mike Veeck, the brain behind the infamous Disco Demolition Night, and his daughter Rebecca. Lifted in its entirety for you from SI Exclusive........(click the big title to expand the story)

The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Mike Veeck, the wizard of the minor leagues, has passed on his love of baseball and penchant for comic spectacle to his teenage daughter, Rebecca. She has taught him a few things too - by Gary Smith

Rebecca, a fixture at home games in Charleston, takes a ride on her favorite
RiverDog -- her dad.
Lynn Johnson/SI

A man with a salt-and-pepper goatee walks alone through an airport. Pick an airport. Any airport. He has walked alone through them all. He's thinking about his five minor league baseball teams. He's thinking about putting on the world's largest pillow fight on the field after a Hudson Valley Renegades game; hatching a reality show to find the next Natural of either sex for the St. Paul Saints; spraying green paint over the bald spots on the Charleston RiverDogs' field; holding BALCO Night at a Sioux Falls Canaries game and handing a small plastic cup of Mello Yello to every fan at the gate; and, yes, sad to say, staging a Tommy James and the Shondells concert at a Fort Myers Miracle game ... when suddenly his eyes close. To see what it feels like to be his daughter. Again.

They close partway -- no, that's cheating -- then tighter until it's all gone: the harried commuters and zigzagging children and jostling luggage. He sends his left foot, slowly, into the blackness ... then ... his right foot. There it goes, the bottom dropping out of the pit of his gut. Now the left foot again ... three steps ... four ... five....

His eyelids open. He chickens out. Darkness 1, Veecks 0.

But plenty of games remain on the schedule, so call now for group packages and bobblehead giveaway dates.

This is a 100-year story, covering four generations of one baseball family, but don't panic. There are only four characters to follow, and they're all named Veeck, and only two of them, the two still breathing, truly concern us. We'll even provide a genealogy, the way Russian novelists do --

William Veeck -> Bill Veeck -> Mike Veeck -> Rebecca Veeck

-- and deliver you midgets and Martians and mimes being pelted with hot dogs, which Tolstoy never did. William's passion for the game lived on in Bill, then Mike (in
1981) and Rebecca.

Mike's in a taxi. Pick a taxi. Any taxi. He's ridden in them all. He's thinking about the five minor league teams he consults and writes ads for, besides the five he partly owns. A nice little wad fattens his pocket. It's a Vegas taxi. He never used to give the slots the time of day, but that was before he discovered their secret: They make everything go away. They make you forget.

The first half of his life was hand-to-hand combat with his father's shadow. Booze, drugs, jail, divorce, a heart attack -- he tried all the classic routes to escape or annihilate it ... and himself. But that was nothing compared with the second half: mortal combat with his daughter's shadow, the literal one descending over her eyes. Everything's a weapon now. Every trick, hustle, gag and audacity -- the entire Veeck kit and caboodle -- he's pulling out of the attic, hoisting out of the gene pool, taking to the plate. He's 54 and swinging from his heels at something he can't even see.

He calls the RiverDogs' office from the cab.

"Charleston RiverDogs, Rebecca speaking, how may I help you?"

It's her. He braces. He never knows what's coming. The effects of the disease may have worsened. Or some jerk at school may have soaked the bathroom floor again and given her a shove, and then Mike will beat himself to a pulp for being 2,000 miles away. He wings it, alters his voice, hopes for the best.

"Yes, ma'am, this is Elvis Presley. I'm out here in Vegas with your father."

"Daddy! Heyyyy, Groove Thing! You're my pop! You're in -- da da da da de daaah -- Las Vegas! How are ya, Elvis?... Laaaahs Vegas! Did you win?... Thirty-six hundred! Viva my money!... O.K., love you dearly, but I must get back to work because the phone is ringing, and please tell Elvis I said hi. Bye-bye!"

That's Rebecca. She's working the phones. She's got retinitis pigmentosa. She's 13. She's blind.

Oh, yes, she's a ham ... with honey mustard glaze and melted cheese. She wants to be a singer and drummer in a rock-and-roll band, a Broadway actress, a dancer, a pianist, a writer, an equestrienne -- "Hey, wanna see a blind kid ride a horse? I love an audience!" -- and then, when she's gotten all those out of the way, she wants to be, just like her great-grandfather, grandfather and father, "a baseball guy."

Mike pockets his cellphone. His eyes cloud with tears. He hates being away from her 15 days out of the month, keeping all these crazy crap games afloat. He loathes the road. He needs the road. Was born for the road. He feels guilty when he's not out there making money and flogging the cause -- raising funds and awareness of Rebecca's disease everywhere he travels. Guilty when he's not back home by her side. What's a man, the father of a jewel like her, supposed to do?

His own father is a one-legged legend, a Hall of Famer, the damnedest owner sports ever saw: Bill Veeck. The one responsible for ivy on the outfield walls at Wrigley Field, for the Chicago White Sox' last American League crown, for the Cleveland Indians' last world championship, for record attendance figures, exploding scoreboards, postgame fireworks, names on the backs of jerseys, a midget pinch hitter named Eddie Gaedel, a 43-year-old rookie named Satchel Paige, belly dancers at home plate, circus acts at second base and an outfielder named Minnie Minoso dressed as a matador as he waved a cape at a fake bull on Mexico Fiesta Night -- all while Bill's polishing off five books a week, three packs of cigarettes and a case of beer a day, fathering nine children and hosing down the infield before ball games in his swimming trunks on a wooden right leg.

Mike spends his toddler years living in an apartment inside a baseball stadium, Sportsman's Park in St. Louis; the bullpen's his first sandbox. He moves 11 times in his first 11 years, the new kid always trying to fit in, and then moves once more at age 16: out of his own home in Easton, Md., into the family's studio apartment a couple of hundred yards away, just to get away from his old man, the one whom everyone -- rich men, poor men, sportswriters, thieves -- except Mike and a dozen buttoned-down major league owners find the most engaging man on earth.

Mike starts hitchhiking in high school. The only hitchhiker in Easton who doesn't care which way the driver's going, because going is all that matters. Who doesn't care if there isn't even a driver, or whether that's not hitchhiking, son, that's larceny. It costs him only a few nights in jail.

Then one day in 1975, three years after Mike graduates from Loyola College in Baltimore, his old man calls out of the blue, invites him to a 12-hour liquid lunch at a saloon, and at the end of it says, "McGill" -- Bill calls him that out of affection for Cornelius McGillicuddy, the ancient owner-manager of the Philadelphia A's better known as Connie Mack -- "McGill, I'm going to buy the White Sox again. You might want to come check it out. It's going to be interesting." And Mike, an English major/philosophy minor/rock band drummer and guitarist adrift, realizes he's being offered a job in the Show, a shot at the bigs, a place at the legend's elbow.

Hot damn. Double dip: He finds Dad. He finds himself. Some of Dad's best promotional ideas are actually Mike's ideas, because the kid's got a couple of quarts of zany in the blood too. Then, in his second year on the job as promotions director, Mike uncorks a whiz-banger. He's sitting in a Chicago saloon one summer night at 3 a.m., relishing the 20-stage disco-dancing contest that just juiced the gate at a White Sox game, when he remembers two things: his abhorrence of disco and his old man's marketing mantra -- think opposites. So he blurts, "What about an anti-disco night?" Before he knows it, it's July 12, 1979, and he's got 60,000 fans inside 52,000-capacity Comiskey Park, another 15,000 pounding on the ticket booths and 15,000 more gridlocked on the Dan Ryan Expressway, all for Disco Demolition Night. He's got vinyl Bee Gees 45s whizzing through the air, a dumpster behind second base crammed with the crowd's old disco albums, explosives about to blow them to kingdom come ... and a mushroom cloud of marijuana smoke wafting overhead with the second game of a twi-night doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers yet to be played.

Down goes the detonator, up goes Abba and -- ohhh my Waterloo! Finally facing my Waterloo! -- there goes Mike's career. Onward they surge, Pillage People and Travolta Revoltas, climbing over the dugouts and fences, shimmying down the foul poles, storming the field, torching the field, cartwheeling the batting cage across it. When the Night Fever subsides, six people are injured and 39 arrested, and the 14th forfeited game in modern major league history has been declared. A travesty, howl the media and Sox season-ticket holders. When the following season ends, Dad sells the team -- forced out of the game by runaway costs as the free-agent era explodes -- and Mike is so radioactive that not a single baseball mogul will touch him.

For a half-dozen years he bangs around in Florida, sending unanswered application letters to the bigs, hanging drywall and promoting a jai alai fronton, pretending not to miss baseball, not to wonder if he was just his father's creation, not to notice the disappointment of all the strangers when they find out that he's Mike Veeck, not Bill. It all crests in the mid-'80s. He's drinking a bottle of whiskey a day, inhaling recreational drugs and watching his marriage unravel. His heart starts skipping beats. He starts blacking out. He goes to the hospital to take a Lamaze class to help his soon-to-be-ex-wife give birth and has a heart attack there instead. The doctor gives him two years to live unless he changes. His first child, Night Train, is born. His father dies. He cries so hard that his glasses fly off his face. His father's shadow doesn't die. Mike gets divorced. He goes into debt. He loses the battle for joint custody of his son.

Then comes Veeck Demolition Night, when a cop in Fort Lauderdale pulls him over and pours him into a cab instead of a jail cell. The bleary glimpse he catches of himself, on his hands and knees clawing under sofa cushions and through underwear drawers for nickels and dimes as the cabbie waits in Mike's town house, is so degrading that the next day he weaves on his bike to the local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, then stands outside paralyzed for hours until an old woman named Mary comes out and reels him in.

One hundred fifty AA meetings in the next 90 days, 100 hours of bike-riding a week -- they help, but it's really baseball that makes the shadow go away. Baseball, ringing him up out of the clear blue in 1989 after a New York lawyer named Marvin Goldklang buys a wreck of a minor league franchise named the Miami Miracle and bumps into Baltimore Orioles general manager Roland Hemond, who tells him, "If you're crazy enough to buy the Miami Miracle, you're crazy enough to hire Mike Veeck." So Goldklang does. Mike unleashes a decade of pent-up promotion, the franchise moves to Fort Myers and it becomes, financially, its nickname: a Miracle.

No. It's really Libby Matthews, a plucky pharmacist's assistant who shows up in his life the same year that baseball does, who makes the shadow go away.

No. It's really the firecracker they produce together, blue-eyed Bec.

No. The shadow doesn't go away. It just gets swallowed by a deeper, darker one.

Her first baseball job, before turning two, is team greeter. Rebecca squeaks the same salute, 16 or 17 per customer, to everyone entering the St. Paul Saints' front office:

Hi!
Hi!
Hi!

She collapses from hospitality prostration in Libby's arms in the seventh inning each night in the stands behind third base. By age four she's a ballpark rat, darting from bleachers to concession stands to broadcasting booth to gift shop to jump castle to groundskeeper's tractor to her pal in the stands behind home plate, Saints fan Peter Boehm, who reads books to her between innings. She and the team's mascot, a pig, deliver baseballs to the home plate umpire wearing matching tutus, clown suits or rabbit ears. "Oh, it's embarrassing," she'll concede, "but it's baseball. So it's O.K." She and the pig take between-innings spins across the field on a remote-controlled motorcycle. She's slapped with a three-game suspension by her father for excessive waving to the crowd. She dresses up in a miniature San Diego Chicken costume when the real Chicken shows up, follows him across the field, and right on cue, lifts her leg and pretends to pee on the ump, bringing down the house.

By age six she's answering the front-office phone. "St. Paul Saints, Rebecca speaking, how may I help you?"

"How old are you, Miss?" a caller grouses. "Aren't there laws against child labor?"

"Oh, well," she replies, "I'm doing what I love!"

She fits right into the menagerie that Mike assembles on the Saints, the second minor league team that the Goldklang Group -- Marvin, Van Schley, actor Bill Murray and singer Jimmy Buffett -- asks him to run. There's Darryl Strawberry, recovering from drug addiction; J.D. Drew, baseball's No. 2 draft pick, recovering from a ruptured negotiation with the Philadelphia Phillies; Ila Borders, the first female pitcher in pro baseball history; Dave Stevens, the second baseman in training camp with no legs; Don Wardlow, the radio color man with no eyes; Sister Roz, the nun who gives fans massages on the dugout roof; Rebecca, the radiant urchin ... and Mike himself, walking to centerfield when the ballpark's empty, asking his dad for advice.

St. Paul eats it up. Joint's packed every game, 2,000 on the season-ticket waiting list. HBO and 60 Minutes bring their cameras to gawk. Mike turns his father's philosophy into a way of life: Fun Is Good. He empties another cup of coffee, leans back in his chair. The eyebrows start hopping, feet jiggling, fingers wriggling as if something's coursing through him that he can't contain. Here it comes: another shenanigan. Give away a funeral to a lucky customer. Give away a vasectomy on Father's Day. Give away minibats and invite Tonya Harding. Give away seat cushions with Don Fehr's and Bud Selig's faces on opposite sides so fans can sit on the one they blame. Wrap fans in rubber fat suits and have them sumo wrestle between innings. Hire improv actors as ushers, post signs prohibiting neckties and the Wave, offer free admission to pregnant women on Labor Day, hold Lawyer Appreciation Night and charge attorneys double, have a blue Spanish cockatiel trained to croak Ball! and Strike! and What are ya, nuts? over the P.A. system.

Betty Crocker's lab kitchen gone berserk, he calls it. Childish? What's better than being a child, asks the man who on one of his weekly outings with Night Train pours a jar of maraschino cherries down his pants in a grocery store to make his son giggle, who rides bikes with the boy through a car wash to make him guffaw. Ain't no stopping him in St. Paul; he's on a roll. He stations mimes on the Saints' dugout roof to provide instant replays, a stunt so heinous that the crowd smashes concessions sales records in its frenzy to turn hot dogs into missiles: Even Bad Is Good. The Saints win three Northern League championships between 1993 and '97. During one of the title celebrations Mike races onto the field and scoops up Rebecca to save her from being trampled by the players.

The lights never go out in Veeckville. He works all day and all night, just as his father did, keeps his staffers up till 4 a.m. strumming his guitar, regaling them with the story about the time Dad dressed his midget ex-pinch-hitter, Gaedel, and three dwarves in Martian costumes and lowered them from a helicopter onto the field at Comiskey to deputize the White Sox' diminutive double-play combo, Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, as honorary Martians in their battle against the giant Earthlings. The next day, when Mike's dazed employees sag at work, he lights an M-80 firecracker and rolls it down the office corridor, his laughter as loud as the ka-boom! Funny, though, that laugh of his, that wheezing, honking eruption. It always ends so abruptly. As if someone yanked a plug.

He still hasn't made it. It's still not the bigs. The Goldklangers buy the Sioux Falls, Charleston and Hudson Valley teams, making Mike part-owner and president of all three as well as the Saints and the Miracle. Impossible. Nobody could have that much energy. Nobody except a man trying to carry his father's torch and escape his father's shadow ... at the same time.

Twenty-five million bucks. That's the net worth of the business Mike and his Mischiefmakers are building, enough doubloons to glitter in the eyes of the major league stuffed shirts who've snubbed him for two decades. And so at last, in 1998, it happens: The Tampa Bay Devil Rays ask Mike to be their senior vice president in charge of marketing and sales. He pops the champagne and dances Libby around the living room. At 48 he's back in the Show. Without Daddy. On his own.

A month passes, just enough time for Mike to start finding his way around paradise. He zips up to St. Paul to emcee a charity event on the day that Libby takes seven-year-old Rebecca to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta to find out why she couldn't read the top line on an eye chart. His cellphone rings. It's Libby. Something's wrong with Rebecca's eyes, something unpronounceable and unthinkable. There's no cure. No way to stop it from killing the photoreceptor cells in her retinas. The lights are going out.

What scares her most is awakening in the pitch black, alone, and not knowing if the pitch black means it's happened -- she's gone blind. So the little girl with retinitis pigmentosa, her central vision already vanishing, keeps taking her pillow and blanket to the hallway outside her parents' bedroom to sleep on the floor beneath the painting of Grandpa Bill. Her guardian angel, she tells people. He'll look out for her.

Mike looks down at his sleeping daughter. Then up at the painting of his smiling father. Dad knew. He was born into a house of shadows, to a mother still wrecked by the death of her seven-year-old son, Maurice, by a bullet accidentally fired by his best friend five years before Bill was born. Bill's father, William Sr., buried himself in his work as a sportswriter for the Chicago American so effectively that Cubs owner William Wrigley, upon reading William Sr.'s series of articles about what was wrong with the team, said to him, "All right, if you're so smart, why don't you come and do it?" and named him Cubs vice president in 1918 and president one year later, launching the Veeck family on its blazing trail across baseball's sky.

Somehow, Bill ran faster and harder than his father, even on an ankle smashed to bits by the recoil of a 50-mm antiaircraft gun during a Marine training exercise in the South Pacific during World War II. The ankle became infected and, doctors kept telling him, required amputation. Instead Bill kept pouring cologne down a hole in his cast to kill the stench and kept running, parlaying a stake in a minor league team, the old Milwaukee Brewers, into the purchase of the first of his three major league teams, the Indians. Relenting at last to the knife and inviting a thousand people to a coming-out party for his new wooden leg, dancing every dance until the pressure split open his stump and he had to crawl back to his apartment, trailing blood, on his hands and knees. Oh, well. "Suffering is overrated," he declared. "The only thing we have to fear is fire and termites!" Running his whole life, on three hours' sleep a night, through a failed first marriage, 36 operations on his right leg, emphysema, and lung cancer, running with a children's rhyme -- he confessed in his memoirs, near the end -- forever echoing in his head: Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man.

So what does Mike do as the world goes dark on his daughter? Buries himself in his new Off the Wall advertising campaign to pump everyone up about the Devil Rays, in his 16 hours a day of work and his dozen speeches a week -- his overnight bag always packed and ready in his car so he can bolt justlikethat. He's lying in bed one Friday night, recuperating from himself, when Bec runs in wearing new battery-powered glasses that whir and telescope, like a zoom lens, to magnify objects. "Sharp!" he enthuses. "Space-age!" Then he pulls the sheet over his head against the wave of despair and remains in that bed, with his work notepad and phone, the whole weekend.

One evening a half year after the diagnosis, Mike comes home from work and tells Libby how frustrating his day has been, how all the petty politics and stuffed shirts are gumming up his Betty Crockery. Libby explodes. His day? What about her day, running from doctors to vision technologists to Braille tutors to teachers' conferences? What about the two crowns she's fractured, grinding them in her sleep from the tension of going to war alone? "Our lives are going to change!" she cries. "If you want to continue to be a man driven by your career, you can. But you're going to miss something. You can lose your second child the way you lost your first. There's this whole other world out there, and you're missing it."

Him ... blind? He cringes, staggers around for another week, delivers another Fun Is Good speech to another roomful of enthused local citizens and is trudging back to work afterward when a thought hisses in his head: You're a liar. This isn't fun. He quits the next day. Walks away after seven months from the thing he craved for 20 years. Now what?

He wants to change. He wants to turn and face this new shadow ... but how? He keeps finding himself in front of that painting of his father, above his sleeping girl. It's all there inside that man, the malady and the antidote, coiled one around the other, nearly impossible to disentangle. It's all still there, deep in Mike's memory....

The swimming pool. He must have seen that amputated stump before, he must have, but the first time it dawned on him, his first consciousness of it, was at a pool as his father stripped to his trunks. Mike's eyes filled -- not quite with tears, his mother, Mary Frances, would recall, but with a luminousness -- and in that same instant Bill grasped what was occurring and began to hop on his good leg, flapping the stump in a crazy dance and singing, "Daddy's little leg ... Daddy's little leg...." And what was rising up the little boy's throat came out as laughter instead of a sob, and ... that was it. From that day on Mike was proud to be the one to whom his father handed the wooden leg at the ocean's edge so the boy could run it back to their towels before they dived into the waves. Tickled when his dad gathered the gawking children around him, hammered a nail into the wooden leg and snorted, "Now go home and see if your fathers can do that!" Delighted when his dad carved out a hollow in the wooden leg and used it as his ashtray.

Yes, it occurs to Mike. That's it. The way to confront the thing he's been fleeing, Bec's loss, his loss. Dad's way. Hammer it with humor. He starts to sway and sing, to the tune of the 1962 hit Johnny Angel, "Ret-in-i-tis...." Rebecca takes the cue and sings, "pig-men-to-sa...." Back and forth they go until it's their song. He bangs his head into the front door, pretending he didn't see it; she mimics him and they collapse in a heap, laughing. "What's the matter with you, kid?" he yelps. "You blind?"

"Yeah," she croaks. "What do ya expect out of a blind kid?"

"Oh, I see.... So you're still blind."

They both play hooky: she from school, he from work. The Veecks hit the road for most of '99. "I want you to see all the things that are wonderful," Mike tells her, swallowing those three extra words: while you can. They go to Yosemite and the Badlands, to Bermuda and Ireland and Guadalajara and New England and New York City. They see snow in the Grand Canyon, ride horseback in Death Valley. They jump fences to bury their noses in rose fields, to pick cotton and almonds and pecans and pistachios, to harvest life and save scraps of it in her wooden memory box. He lowers the roof of their rented convertible, pulls Rebecca into his lap so she can grip the steering wheel and know what it feels like to drive the Pacific Coast Highway, big breakers crashing the cliffs on her left, sea breeze whipping through her hair and the oldies station cranked. "Car dance!" he bellows, jiggling the wheel left and right as she whoops.

He spoon-feeds her Grandpa's spirit, every story he can remember, as they roam. Did you know, Rebecca, that once when your grandfather owned the minor league Brewers, back in the '40s, they played at a ballpark in Columbus, Ohio, that was so dark they could barely see? And instead of getting mad he turned it into fun by having his players wear miner's lamps and his first- and third-base coaches hold up lanterns and his second baseman take light-meter readings? Not that Grandpa was averse to darkness, because another time, when his Brewers were losing a critical game, he had his electrician short out the stadium lights -- zap! -- sorry, game's canceled, a shame it'll have to be replayed.

Mike and Rebecca pull into Cooperstown to see Bill's plaque in the Hall of Fame. Mike lifts his daughter to see a picture of his dad beside Larry Doby, the African-American ballplayer whom Bill chose to break the American League's color barrier with the Indians in 1947. The little girl presses her face to the photo of the middle-aged white man and the young black outfielder, runs her fingers over it, turns her head to the side to see if her peripheral vision can do any better. Then she asks the most bittersweet question that Mike ever heard: "Which one is Grandpa?"

Mike can sense it beginning to happen, the slow melting of ego. A glimpse of the world through the eyes of someone who can barely see. Rebecca looks up at the blue sky one day, holding his hand, and says, "It's O.K., Daddy, if I go blind, because I'll always have you and Mom to tell me what you see."

If you've ever stood inside a chalked box with a 1-2 count against a fastball pitcher in a big league ballpark in the late afternoon, then you know. A man, after considerable anxiety, can adjust to a shadow, but almost as soon as he does, the shadow moves. So he can never relax.

Mike returns to his minor league empire. Rebecca goes back to school. The sun moves across their blue sky. The shadow shifts.

The black holes in the center of Rebecca's vision grow larger and begin to devour the periphery as well. The closed-circuit TV monitor that magnifies her school texts to 10 times their size is no longer enough. The schoolwork grows more complicated. Each test she must study for, each homework assignment, takes twice as long for her as for her classmates. All those straight-A report cards and honor-roll ribbons disappear from the Veecks' refrigerator door. She hits puberty. It's a different condition, blindness at 13, from blindness at eight. A whole new kind of darkness for her and her dad to navigate.

Now she yearns, more than anything in the world, just to be like the other kids at her middle school just outside of Charleston. Yearns to smash the Braille typewriter that clacks out the difference between her and them. Yearns to ditch the full-time adult aide who accompanies her to every class to help her take notes. Yearns to read one of the notes that kids pass in class, just once, so she can know what they're giggling about. Yearns to walk the hallways without worrying if a book bag's waiting on the floor to send her sprawling. Dammit, she won't use that white cane that her orientation-and-mobility tutor keeps urging on her. Won't take people's arms unless she has no choice. Won't admit she missed that plot turn on the movie screen. And don't you dare mention a school for the blind. She's mainstreaming, no matter how big and crowded and confusing high school will be next year. "I like big!" she gushes. "I love crowds!"

She says, "I'll be fine. I'm a Veeck." That means no retreat. That means you scoff at your handicap, like Grandpa, never give in. Damn, it's confusing for a kid. A couple of times a month she'll say something that makes her dad look at her in awe and say, "You're him." Grandpa. Reincarnated. Both blue-eyed, blond-haired lefties overloaded with sauce and smarts and spunk. It floods her with joy when he says that. She'll Google Grandpa and hear the robot voice on her Jaws software read the text about Bill's legendary tenacity. She'll go out in the yard, lift her right leg and hop on the left one for 10 steps and tumble, just to know what it felt like to be him. And now her teachers and Braille tutors and parents are telling her that damn the torpedoes won't work, that she's got to accept her blindness, use the cane, use the Braille, stop the bluffing, let people know that she can't see and needs a hand before she finds herself in deep trouble.

She concedes, finally. Once. The Veecks are changing planes in Atlanta last summer with Mike on crutches, his femur fractured in three places from his attempt to ride his bike, catch a basketball thrown behind him and shoot at the same time -- why not? The foot traffic is pitiless, bumping the blind girl and her hobbling father. Rebecca finally halts, thrusts out her jaw, jerks off her backpack, yanks out the telescoped white cane and takes the lead, tapping and shouting as she goes, "Coming through! Cripple coming through!" Meaning her father, of course.

"I accept that I'm blind," she says, "but I never totally accept it. You can't. You don't. Because pride will be lost if you totally accept it. Accepting it means I'm O.K. with it -- and I'm not. You give in if you accept it totally. One percent of me -- no, one and a half percent of me -- doesn't accept it. I keep that one and a half percent for me. I want my sight back. I'm only 13, but I'm sick of waiting. I just want my vision back. I'm at the age where I'm realizing I'm not going to be able to drive or maybe even see my own kids when I have them. I think God did this for a reason. I just don't know what it is yet."

Some days it all piles up on her: the cruelty of classmates who yank chairs out from under her, the certainty that she's the only 13-year-old girl on earth who hasn't been asked out by a boy, the geography test for which she has to identify all 50 states, their capitals and all the squiggly rivers and mountain ranges in between from studying a map that she alone has never seen. She storms upstairs. Slams the door. "Why did you do this to me?" she screams at the ceiling. No! That can't be her. She's a Veeck. She collapses onto her bed, picturing all the kids who have it worse than she does, picturing the ones in Iraq with their limbs blown off, scalding out her self-pity and anger. Then she gets up and cranks up the music, dances and sings and weeps.

Days like that, the darkness sifts down and settles over Mike. He's not sure anymore when to crack a joke or sing a song about her blindness, when to bump into the front door or run into a tree and titter on one of their two-hour tandem bike rides. She might laugh. She might explode. She's the Dalai Lama one minute. The next she's the kid who insists there's a Santa Claus and a Tooth Fairy and a cure for retinitis pigmentosa right around the corner. She's a teenager.

It kills him to hear her upstairs sobbing. Kills him that it was his recessive gene that coupled with Libby's and wrought this. Kills him to have to tell her she can't try out for the basketball team or the cheerleading squad or ride her bike anymore. Kills him to kill off the child in her, the believer, even though he knows, for her good, he has to. Kills him because his whole life's about making and marketing magic, awakening the child asleep in us all. Kills him that he has to get up at six the next morning, board another plane and leave her for five days to fight her fight without him.

"It's the life we choose," he tells her as he lifts his suitcase.

"It's the life we choose," she echoes. "I know you're good and you've got to go show your tricks to the world."

"I'm strong like bull," he says.

"I'm strong like baby bull," she says.

Then her fingers search the air, trying to find his cheek, and she kisses him, and he turns for the door. Because worse than leaving is the helplessness he feels if he stays. He can do nothing here to save her, but if he climbs on that plane, if he launches another madcap marketing campaign, if he gives another speech that makes another 50 men laugh and cry and feel what it feels like to watch the lights go out, if he signs and sells another hundred copies of his new book, Fun Is Good, if he goes on three hours' sleep until he grows so surly that he has to crawl into the tub and take another three-hour bath, then maybe he can salt away enough money to make sure his daughter never knows a day of need, and maybe, just maybe, he can hand the Foundation Fighting Blindness or Charleston's Storm Eye Institute another fat check that'll help make a miracle appear beneath a microscope. It's the only shot he's got at relighting Rebecca's world: his father's torch.

And so he goes, harder than ever, but for a higher purpose -- for her -- cutting corners on each road trip to get back earlier, buying a stake in a private plane so he can fly home at any hour to catch her piano and dance recitals, so he can sit in the audience holding it all in, the pride and the panic, when she pirouettes across the stage: Does she know she's one step away from the edge? God, does she know?

And keeps telling himself that no matter how hard this is, no one could be better equipped for it. Because they've got Libby, the warrior. Because they've got Don Wardlow, the blind man Mike hired long before his daughter's diagnosis, who showed Rebecca during his six years as color man in the Saints' and the RiverDogs' radio booths that nothing's impossible. They've got laughter, they've got music -- the piano and drums and guitars at home that Mike and Rebecca love to play -- and there they go again, crooning that Temptations verse they love to croon: I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.

But facts are facts. The days, in all likelihood, will only grow cloudier, and Santa Claus won't walk through her bedroom door and pull up the blinds. So she pops another one of the Great Classics -- she's already got more than 100 recorded books under her belt -- into her player and listens away the rest of the day, knowing that her mind is her treasure and that blind men like Ray Charles, the one she loves most, have seen something beyond and dragged the whole world there with them. Reminding herself of the dream she had years ago, before the eclipse even began, in which a little girl, one who looked like her but wasn't quite her, came up to her, touched her eyes and said, "I'm sorry ... but you have a path to take."

There's one place where she can see. One place where Rebecca knows every stairway and doorway so well, it's as if she weren't blind. Where she has freedom to wander, and family at every turn: Dad in the seats beyond third base kibitzing with fans, Mom in the office lending a hand, half brother Night Train on the ball field supervising between-innings mayhem, and dozens of employees doubling as her uncles and aunts.

When school's out and the RiverDogs are at home, she works a few games each week and then just roams the park during a few more. She mans the guest-services booth near the entrance. She sells programs. She keeps the little kids smiling while they wait in line for the jump castle. She escorts Charlie the RiverDog, who can barely see through his costume's headpiece -- the blind leading the blind. She dresses up as characters on Geek Night and '80s Night. She does radio ads for the team and occasional player introductions on the P.A. mike. She plays Twister with eight-year-old fans but gives them fair warning: "I'm gonna beat your booty!" She's all empathy and charisma while handling callers on the office phone, until one fan too many on a rainy night demands to know when the downpour will stop and the ball game begin. "What am I?" she blurts. "A psychic or somethin'?"

She loves the smells. She loves being the last human being who still yells, "Charge!" when she hears the tape-recorded bugle. She loves the aura around the game she can barely see. "My real job," she confides, "is to keep everyone at the ballpark happy. To keep everyone alive. Especially when my dad's not here. He tells me I'm his secret eyes when he's gone. I let him know when something's not right."

Sometimes she sits alone in the stands when the ballpark's empty, tilts her head so the edges of her retinas, where not all the photoreceptor cells are dead, take in that beautiful sweep of fuzzy green. "I can feel it when I stare at a baseball field," she says. "I've got stuff to do, something big to help people, something that has to do with a baseball field. The world is stupid, so stupid -- it fights and kills over land. I look at a baseball field, and I see this piece of land that's everybody's land. And every field I see has a piece of my family in it. I know this sounds corny, but I see my grandfather out there walking on the grass on his peg leg. I see this place where you can run and be a child somewhere besides your own home. And who made this place that way? My dad! I love him for that.

"I like to think about what I'll do if I run a team some day. I want to come up with crazy ideas, because ideas are great. If you can make 'em, wonderful. If you can't, I'm sorry for you. People are too serious. People need to loosen up. Like I've got this one idea where you put Slip 'n' Slides all along the sidelines of the field, and you soap 'em up and let kids slide and sit in the sun while the ball game's going on right beside them, and I know you'd probably have to put a net up to protect them, and I know the idea needs a little work, but...."

The closest she's come to that, her hands-down favorite ballpark moment each season, is Big Splash Day, when she puts on her bathing suit and climbs onto a platform over a water tank, baiting bystanders to ante up a buck to hurl three balls at the bull's-eye and dunk her.

Mike watches her from a distance. He's sure it could be like this at big league ballparks, no matter what the stuffed shirts say. No matter that he's taken two more cracks at it, with the Florida Marlins and the Detroit Tigers, neither job lasting long because divine lunacy can't last in a bureaucracy, because of the usual turf battles, and because he insisted on commuting from Charleston to be here for moments like this.

"Ahhh, you throw like a girl!" she taunts a fan. Mike grins. Swear to God, he's never seen her so alive.

"What's the mattah wit' ya!" she bellows. "Ya must be blind!"

Bang! She kerplunks into the water, spluttering and laughing herself silly.

Issue date: August 1, 2005

Cats: also from the excellent Ms. SLyon: "holy crap, i forgot to email you the funniest thing from this weekend. my dad "borrowed" an issue of Cat Fancy magazine from the vet's office cause there's an article he thought i should read ("Trim Down Your Fat Cat"....yeah yeah, whatever). but the best part of Cat Fancy is the section called, "Flights of Fancy", where readers write in about their pets. it's actually very sweet, but my initial reaction was, well. Ahem." (*Author's name withheld)

08.08.05
Peter Jennings is dead from lung cancer. Quit smoking. Whosover lacks the appropriate respect for the secret Canadian should take a look at his obit for reminders like, "He was sent to the Middle East in 1969 to establish the first American television news bureau in the Arab world, and there he found his niche. For seven years, based in Beirut, he traveled to virtually every Arab country and built up a store of knowledge he would draw upon for years."

Aside from huffing and puffing around the neighborhood on my new/old bike, I only left my house once this weekend for Breakfast with Bob. What does one do over an entire weekend spent at home? Watch the Nationals lose, twice. Watch The X Games. Tennis. NASCAR. The Godfather on Spike TV. Try to work on the motorcycle, but give up. Weed the front yard, then the backyard, at dusk, and be feasted upon by a eleventy hundred mosquitos. Clean the basement. Stumble upon BWA's collection of The Tick comics, D&D notes, and a whole bunch of cassettes, which I've adopted for my car. I'm excited. There are a lot of mixtapes in there, both from and to him. There's a mix of The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. A man who's distilled the 12 very saddest love songs from 69 of the very saddest love songs is my kind of man.

But I wasn't completely bereft of human company this weekend, thanks to the Cowals, who arrived Saturday evening with a big sack of crabs.

For the uninitiated, watching native Marylanders go to work on a pile of crabs is at times disgusting, at other times horrifying.

The Cowals set up at the table on the front porch, with knives, newspapers, brown bags, and a mallet. They piled the big, shelled sea bugs upon the table. They casually dismembered them, sometimes sucking flesh from the severed joints, all the while chatting and smoking cigarettes and drinking from cans of Busch beer (in attractive 50th anniversary cans). Shauna remarked that she doesn't enjoy tearing the balls out. Guts and lungs, though, no problem. I learned that if you flip a crab over, its underside will look either like the Washington monument (boy crab), or the Capitol Building (girl crab). Shauna recalled her grandmother telling the kids that they'd die if they ate the lungs. Matt remarked that crabs are never happy. I replied that ghost crabs seem to be having a good time.

Matt cleaned a couple crabs for me and I went to work, trying to separate flesh (delicious) from shell and mustard and god knows what else, while clouds of flies flew in from surrounding states to crawl over our crab pile, mate, lay eggs and die. By the way my midwestern friends, don't be fooled - the "mustard" isn't mustard, it is poo. "Some people love it," Matt said, while attempting to claim that partially digested food and poo are somehow different.

If you are lucky enough to have the opportunity, I heartily recommend crab feasting with Maryland people.

The photo at right is of Jacob, a young man I met at the wedding, in front of Julie Comnick's new painting at the Comnick-Jones house. If you happen to want to check out 300 snapshots from the Comnick-Jones Wedding Weekend, here you go.

A US Customs Primary Inspector at a border crossing asked the driver of this Suburban for vehicle registration. Suddenly, a hand came out of the glove compartment, producting the requested document which the driver showed to the Inspector.

Since the driver did not appear to be a member of The Adams Family, the Inspector became suspicious, thus leading to a full search. Just think, if alien smugglers can put a 135-lb body behind the dashboard, imagine what they could do with dope." - Tuesday, July 31, 2001. Imagine! Alien Smugglers with Dope! Snopes says...True.

Let's ignore the news, about our soldiers stuffing prisoners into sleeping bags and beating them to death. Let's not discuss Bolton, or the Sudan, or Iran or Intelligent Design, or your Washington Nationals. And we won't even think about the case of an illegal immigrant who raped and murdered a teenager, but who can't be tried because he's deaf and mute and illiterate. All right! Moving on!

You've got to hand it to Mr. Minter. When he pledged to reach across the aisle after November Spawned a Monster, he wasn't lying. Since then he's been engaging the enemy on Ann Coulter's message boards. The guy's no pussy, unless there's a scary bug in the room. Writes he,

All the lazy dykes
cross-armed at the Palms
their legs astride their bikes
indigo burns on their arms

One sweet day - an emotional whirl
you will be good to yourself
and you'll come and join the girls

All the lazy dykes
they pity how you live
'just somebody's wife'
you give, and you give and you give
and you give…

One sweet day - an emotional whirl
you will be good to yourself
and you'll come and join the girls

Touch me, squeeze me
hold me too tightly
and when you look at me
you actually see me
and I've never felt so alive
in the whole of my life
in the whole of my life

Free yourself
be yourself
come to the Palms
and see yourself
and at last your life begins
at last your life begins
at last your life begins
at last your life begins

From Astrofiammante, resident Briton: How are squirrels trained to act? "Forty squirrels were trained to crack nuts in the new film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How?" Air guitar strikes academic chord. "Amanda Griffiths will attempt to explain in 60,000 words why the attractions of air guitar are overlooked by women." Atkins: The Crash Diet. "Dr Robert Atkins' diet revolution swept the world. Then he died of heart failure and now his empire - run by his wife - has filed for bankruptcy." Reprieve for 'Woolf's' lighthouse. With Smiths-y caption: "There is a light that should not go out, protesters said."

08.01.05 - cute edition
I was going to post this disturbing photo, and I was going to rant about this disturbing story: Off-duty officials take photos of gay Latino club. "An attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice and her husband, a prominent bio-ethicist with the National Institutes of Health, startled customers and employees of D.C.'s gay Latino dance party Fuego last month when they began videotaping and photographing customers entering and leaving the event." That's Cada Vez on U Street. How conspicuous are two middle-aged white asshats with videocameras hanging outside Cada Vez? The fact that they weren't beaten to death should be enough evidence that our people are too kind.

BUT I was foiled in my commitment to disgust and misanthropy by a torrent of cute baby animal picures. HK IS your clearinghouse for cute baby animal pictures.

SLyon reviews March of the Penguins. A Story of Love (and Arctic Breezes): "i saw march of the penguins last night with my mom, it was amazing, but cold. in the theater and on the screen. kind of an unpleasant sensory experience. (morgan freeman! please stop describing how it is 58 degrees below zero. i am only wearing a t-shirt for chrissakes.) also, check out my new top five. extra points awarded if any of the below are fluffy:

1) ducklings
2) kittens (Jill and Lauren's Julius. Now with a wristband.)
3) puppies
4) bunnies (ack! tco! from Zulkey)
5) baby emperor penguins >>

To close the cute edition, how damn cute is Lauren? Super. Thanks to Jill for sending me the wrong picture.

For some, the urge to light out for the territory is hard to shake. It's one thing when you're young, and don't own much, to pull a Huck Finn and push off on a small raft with everything you need right next to you.

Your raft could be a live-in van or a one-way airplane ticket. . . . I used to love living like that. The self-absorption was total. By choice I was one of those half-educated entitleds who pitched up in beautiful places and thought the world owed them "clean air and money," as Thomas McGuane so memorably wrote. What did it matter if you washed dishes at night for a living? You had all your days to fool around on a ski slope or river or stream. . . .

In time it became clear that I wasn't floating but was, in fact, sinking. Work at a desk eventually fixed that, I think. As the years stacked up the Peter Panisms were shoved to the weekends. Time once spent skiing and paddling turned into wanderings along Route 1 in search of bathtub hair strainers and toilet plungers, or moping in my apartment.

Of course it didn't have to be this way. I'd left the mountains rudderless and in an overcorrection tended to disqualify the natural gifts surrounding us right here. Just go look at stunning Great Falls or, an hour or so up the road at the edge of West Virginia, go to the Shenandoah River, down which, with the two people closest to me, I floated in an inflatable raft for the first time last week.

"Sylvia Sexton" visits the therapist.....

"here's a short transcript of the most
retarded talk ever with my shitty therapist, who
thought that her grevious and frankly offensive
ignorance was funny."

lady: tell me something. (out of nowhere, btw) i've
noticed that gay men keep themselves in shape. why is
that?

me: uh, lots of different men are gay. or bi. some are
fat and lazy, you know. some are, like, ranchers.
there's these people called bears? oh, lord.

lady: and some lesbians i've treated talk about their
sex lives plateauing after a while in an LTR. why do
you think that is? is it biology? (horrified gasp from
me)

me: oh, that "lesbian bed death" thing. well, that
happens in any relationship. you try being in any
nontraditional realitionship for 4 or so years and see
how horny you feel. any relationship!! rr. and it's
not like you can just be a dude and shove it in and
fuck poorly and not care about actually connecting
with the person or making them satisfied. there's more
at stake satisfaction wise when one of you can't roll
over and snore happily after 3 seconds...

lady: so what about butch women? are they dressed like
that to keep men away?

me: uh, some butch women are straight. some date men
and women, some date other butches. some are just
wearing jeans! and sometimes two women in skirts have
sex! you never know what someone's like by the
freaking clothes they wear! oh, god, c'mon! i'll get
you a copy of metro weekly if you need it this bad.

lady: are you a butch or a femme?

me: it's not 1975.

lady: ha ha ha! you should come to this group therapy
session! you'd have so much to contribute.

me: uh, no.

JM: please, please allow me to post that tomorrow.
SS: sure thing! i wish it were not ALL TRUE!

07.28.05

Oh joy, it's one of those days when This Space fills itself. The HK rule (just adopted) is that when I am sent the same link by more than one correspondent, it shall automatically be deemed postworthy. Unless I just really don't like it. As was the case earlier this week with an article about underarm odor. That goes on the short list of Things That Gross Me Out, where we also find flatulence (it pains me to type "fart"), drool, and detailed accounts of rimjobs (Bob).

This is funny, from Dave.
"I've been using the personalized Google homepage for a week or two now, and a few days ago I added a box for eHow.com How To's, and at the top of today's list is How to Know Someone Likes You Romantically, which is particularly funny because they totally over-intellectualize it and make it seem like it's some complex foreign language. But it makes for a better read than "Is the person still talking to you?"

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07.27.05 - heatstroke edition
Headlines: On the hottest day of the year, a rocketship was launched into Outer Space. In DC, hundred year-old grannies sat in dark apartments, sipping instant coffee, quietly wilting and waiting for the power to return. Four scoutmasters were electrocuted to death in a freak jamboree accident. The Nationals walked in the winning run in the tenth, handing first place to the dirty Braves with their stupid tomahawk chop. And the Post reports that during the Reagan era Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts "presented a defense of bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme jess snappin

Court of jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases; he argued for a narrow interpretationof Title IX...and even counseled his boss on how to tell the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow that the administration was cutting off federal funding for the Atlanta center that bears his name." Cool dude, right?

But what you won't read in the papers is that on the hottest day of the year, I played tennis. I had just settled in to the air-conditioned living room to watch the Nationals play (to watch the Nationals lose) when my housemate Anisha popped in and guilted me into joining her and Ed for some tennis on the hottest day of the year. Since I recently bought a racket (at WalMart, no less) for this very occasion, I could hardly say no, even though I was on duty to check out a friend's date (Q: is he/she cute/crazy? A: Yes/Yes). Here's how the tennis went: it seems that tennis balls and rackets have become very, very bouncy in lo these many years since I last played. Anisha remarked that it was as if we were playing with Superballs. My own game was quite terrible. I was glad to find that I could move around pretty well, get in position and all that, but my actual shots suck, and my eye-hand coordination has deteriorated to a great extent. After tennis on the hottest day of the year, we headed over to the new Giant, which was exactly like walking into a huge refrigerator.

I have Comnick Jones Wedding pictures galore, but I'm waiting on more guests to post before linking to the album. Right now my group of friends is grossly overrepresented, and a disproportionate number of pictures capture myself, Tessie and Bova clinging drunkenly to the top of the rental Ford Explorer as we drove the eight-mile dirt road back to the ranch. Meantime, here's my sister being the wedding photog. Is she cute or what?

In keeping with the HK grand vision - kittens, ladies - here is Mrs. Cowal in New York City last weekend. She and Señor Ding Dong went to see some rock shows. She would like for me to note that she's "drunk as hell and covered in beer and other people's japanese sweat."

Occasionally, athletes are honest. Carolina Panther Kris Jenkins on Warren Sapp: "I hate him. Everybody says I'm supposed to be polite when I talk to you all, but I hate him. He talks too much, he doesn't make sense, he's fat, he's sloppy, he acts like he's the best thing since sliced bread. He's ugly, he stinks, his mouth stinks, his breath stinks, and basically his soul stinks, too. Not too many people have personalities like that and survive in life. I don't know how he does it."

Stuff going on this week: TONIGHT! Nothing. TOMORROW: "dear friends, this wednesday, if you're not previously engaged, please come out to the galaxy hut. i will be the guest "DJ" and i will play your favorite music, i promise. love, ed." THURSDAY: Tacos. FRIDAY: Girl Friday.

Friend of Jackbot and Danar: My Robot Friend. He's awesome, and he's got some mp3s - go to Music > Hot Action.

I have a cold, ear infections in every ear, and I took the redeye from Phoenix and straight to work. I hope to recover and deliver an illustrated wedding report very soon.

07.20.05
Last night the better part (numerically) of my house discovered an unusually large mushroom in the yard. Dave suggested we make a spore map. Ed wondered if we would eat it. Maegan didn't care. In the end we ate it, and then were transported, by Volvo wagon, to a hot place where exotic dogs and lesbians ran wild, and where the reggae would not stop, no matter how we wished it to. But I'm coming down with something, and so spent a good portion of the evening sneezing. Once I start sneezing, I can't stop, and had to keep excusing myself to have sneezing attacks in private. Sneeze sneeze sneeze....twenty times or more. Sneeze is one of those words that really starts to look funny after a while.

Anyway, I'm getting sick. We didn't really eat the mushroom. Yet. But I did get some puzzling hate mail from some dumb fuck yesterday.

Hmm....unoriginal? Derivative? Sick? Ok. But have I ever said George Strait sucks? I wondered. So I searched the site and found this entry from May 1, 2003.

There's a lesson here somewhere, about reading carefully, or sending stupid emails, or about George Strait fans.

Here's a little something from SLyon, who had a personal interest in the Hummer case.

I'd say I've been burning the candle at both ends, but the candle I'm imagining has at least four or five ends, and the flames have jumped to the pile of bills and magazines and comics and newspapers on the floor and now we have stacks of ephemera afire, and next thing you know the whole house is burning down. I am really tired.

But how will you know what's going on in the world if you don't read it here? In News, the President drank wine with Manmohan Singh. In Sports, the home team is losing. Losing ugly. I took in the game last night from some very sweet, $40 (free) seats, behind the backstop. The humidity was amazing. The game was terrible. I couldn't believe how bad the Rockies were, and yet they won. Hey coach, are the Nats starting to crumble under the pressure?

"Ask them. Has the lead got their butts tight? I can't answer that. I can answer almost anything else. But I can't answer that." Then he muttered something like, "They don't want to hear what I'd say." Thanks Frank!

I'll bet Brian has something to say. I'll bet it has something to do with records or Ninjas, or both.

07.15.05
Last night I saw a Fleetwood Mac cover band called Mac Attack. They wore costumes and played all the hits and I could hardly have been happier. Stevie gave a nice intro to Silver Springs. Opening for them was Athens, an REM band. They were good, too. But they didn't play Nightswimming.

Since I can never really extract myself from the '80s, especially now that my iPod's gone and I'm back to my old tapes, I decided to look up Ofra Haza yesterday. I found she'd died. From her obit: "Ofra Haza, who melded ancient Yemenite Jewish devotional poetry with 1980s techno music to become Israel's first international pop music success, died Wednesday. She was 41." That was in 2000, and she died from AIDS, and there was a lot of suspicion surrounding the circumstances. The leading consipracy theory: THE MURDER OF OFRA HAZA. There's tons of Ofra stuff all over the internet, remembrances, like, hey! one from the Washington City Paper: a salute to Ofra Haza. And this one, from the Jewish Journal, and this one, Jerusalem Post, and pretty extensive fan sites, etc. etc.

Anyway, after she was sampled on Pump on the Volume, she got pretty big. This was her #1 hit: Im Nin Alu. My favorite is My Aching Heart (Lyrics). Because I'm a cheeseball.

The wide world of area sports:so long Kwame. And, our own UMD bball coach, Mr. Gary Williams, right in his element. Nice chickens.

07.13.05
Democrats Suffer Demoralizing Loss
Mainstream Types Hand Asses to Dykes, Sensitive Guys
Sweeping Generalizations, Beer Drinking, Follow

GONZAGA HIGH SCHOOL, WASHINGTON D.C. -- Tuesday night Senator Byrd's Capitol Hillbillies were pounded by Senator Frist's team, Dr. Field Good, by the unseemly score of 20-1. The Hillbillies fielded staff ace Caryn, good-looking lesbians at first, second, and short, an intern who had never, ever played before, a fellow with a single working hand, two guys who were merely bad, and one who was actually good. The Republican nine walked straight out of central casting and in a numbing display of power, appeared to demonstrate why Democrats frequently lose, and why Republicans frequently are not my kind of people. Except for that one dude in the yellow shirt; he was cool. And a couple of the others. But one of their guys yelled at his girlfriend to get her head in the game. And the pitcher got bitchy when we didn't swing at alleged strikes, and they were just very, very serious, and had brought a case of sporting equipment, while we brought a case of beer. It was hard not to read too much into everything.

It was fun, though painfully embarrassing at times, and very humid, and we got winded running to first base, because we are old people.

After the Fristers left we stuck around to drink beer and take BP. We played with some local kids who dropped by, too. The lesbians gave them pointers and pitched, and the three guys who could play shagged. Some time after that I broke my only car key off in my trunk, and several hours after that, while playing impaired-catch-in-the-dark-street, I put my bag down on the sidewalk, where it was quickly disap

This Space for Rent Archive XVIII: Summer, 2005.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice Mike Veeck, the wizard of the minor leagues, has passed on his love of baseball and penchant for comic spectacle to his teenage daughter, Rebecca. She has taught him a few things too - by Gary Smith

The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Mike Veeck, the wizard of the minor leagues, has passed on his love of baseball and penchant for comic spectacle to his teenage daughter, Rebecca. She has taught him a few things too - by Gary Smith