Where’s the Seesaw?

I was flipping through TV channels, looking for something I didn’t want to watch. See, I was going to read the Sunday paper, and needed the background noise to drown out the sounds of traffic on Broadway, right outside my window. I found a documentary on Jackie Robinson, on SNY. Perfect. I know his story, and have seen many documentaries on him already. So I put down the remote and picked up the paper.

I’m glad I left it on that channel. The very next show that came on was something called Playing for Peanuts. It was the first of 10 episodes; a documentary about the now-defunct independent baseball South Coast League, focused mostly on the also-now-defunct South Georgia Peanuts, who were coached by Wally Backman, former second baseman for my beloved New York Mets.

Baseball in general piques my interest; add to that anything connected to the Mets and you’ve got me. And it didn’t hurt that Playing for Peanuts was actually pretty darned good. So good that I immediately set up a season pass on my DVR.

It was made by an independent documentary filmmaker named John Fitzgerald, who also made The Emerald Diamond, about the Irish National baseball team. I found the site for the show as well as a blog.

“The plan was to start filming with a small amount of cash until the show got picked up by a major TV producer,” explains Fitzgerald. “Unfortunately, that never happened and I was left with a choice - give up on the project or continue to film by using my credit cards. I chose the credit cards.” He claims, “This is the best baseball show you’ll see all year. It has two drug suspensions, one managerial firing, twenty-two bats thrown onto the field, three in-game blackouts, a bench-clearing brawl and lots of hot foots.”

I can vouch for the fact that this show makes for great TV. Still, the fact that it’s on any network anywhere is a combination of miracle and outrage. The major networks passed. Mild outrage, sure, but we all know how network programmers keep putting tons of crap on the air even after they’ve seen something that would be great for them. Yes, ESPN, I’m looking at you. The real outrage, however, is that the show is only being carried by Comcast Sportsnet. Why is that an outrage? you might ask. After all, it is on TV. Yes, but only as a time-barter deal. What’s that? John gave the show to them for free, and they’re doing him the courtesy of showing it. No money traded hands. So John is still in debt (He’s selling DVDs on his Web site; $9.99 right now, but going up to $19.99 soon. Go to his site to see when it’s airing, catch an episode and — if you like it — help the guy out and buy a copy. I’m going to.)  I guess the miracle part would be John breaking even, or turning a profit.

I must say, I really enjoyed seeing Wally Backman again. I often wondered what happened to him after he got screwed over by the Arizona Diamondbacks. (They hired him, then fired him four days later. Turned out he has a DUI conviction; a fight in his home with his wife’s friend which, by state law, was listed as a domestic dispute making many think he’d been beating his wife; and he’d filed for bankruptcy. Thanks for ruining his career, New York Times.) He did get a taste of baseball again, after two years’ unemployment. He even — SPOILER ALERT — led the Peanuts to the championship. Backman is managing the Joliet Jackhammers in the Northern League, another independent league, this season.

Anyways, I urge any baseball fans out there to give this show a look. It’s fun!

There was a sweet little piece in The New York Times about an MTA ad in the subway remarkable for its impeccably correct use of the semicolon:

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

The piece also includes the tragic-but-true sentence “Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.”

Alas, the poor semicolon. Seems like serial killers are among the few who use it properly. What? That’s right; the Times also lets us know that “David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver.”

At least the next time I am assaulted in the subway by the random capitalization in Dr. Z’s ads (”Now YOU can have beautiful clear Skin!”), I can take small comfort in knowing that Neil Neches is hard at work at the MTA, keeping their ad copy in line.

What I loved most about this story is the correction that ran after the article first appeared:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

I’ve been going a little crazy with the baking this season. First I made a batch of Martha Stewart’s cashew-caramel cookies. She nicely drizzled the caramel over the top; I just painted the whole thing with gooey goodness. Yum!

Then I made some Swedish ginger cookies. The secret ingredient? Bacon fat! Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. These were great.

After that it was a batch of Earl Grey cookies (Martha again), then some taralles, an old Italian specialty.

One thing was missing: Swedish coffee bread. It’s a sweet bread, often made this time of the year. My mom made the best, and I followed her recipe a few times, though not with the same success. It was a chore, I’ll tell you. Putting the cardamom pods inside a towel and pounding them with a hammer. Knuckle-busting kneading. The endless wait while it rose.

Sadly, I lost her recipe. So I dug around on that Interwebnet thingy and found another. This one, however, is a lot simpler. (I made a few minor changes to the original.)

¾ cup milk
¼ cup butter
1 egg
1/3 cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
3 cups flour
1 packet active yeast
1 T. cardamom

1. Heat milk and butter in microwave till butter melts and milk is warm.
2. Meanwhile, fill a mixing bowl with the other ingredients.
3. Add warm milk and melted butter; mix until you have a sort of stiff dough.
4. Divide dough into 3 sections. Roll into equal strips, about 1 foot long. Cover with a clean cloth and let rest for 10-15 minutes
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the dough strips on the sheet and braid. Mix 1 egg with 1 T. water. Brush the top of the loaf with this egg wash, then sprinkle generously with granulated sugar. Cover with plastic and let rest in a warm area for 40 minutes to 1 hour.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes, until the bottom is brown, the top is golden, and it sound hollowish when thumped with a finger.
8. Remove from oven and let cool on rack. Who am I kidding? Rip a hunk off and eat it while it’s still hot. Try to contain yourself and not wolf down the whole loaf so there’s some left when your S.O. gets home from work.

The result (minus the end hunk I wolfed down):

How many commercials have you seen that use home movies — whether authentic or faked — and classic old music to elicit some kind of emotion from you, in hopes that you’ll buy a product? Lots. In fact, you probably couldn’t even begin to count them.

So let me point you in the direction of some authentic home movies with a cool old song that some guy put up on YouTube. It just might make you feel something real. Go here and watch. Then dig out that old footage your relatives shot.

[via Metafilter]

This video of a baby in a car seat driving through a tunnel is incredibly creepy.

[via a garden of varied delights]

Perhaps this is what Charlie Brown would put up each year if he’d become an English major in college.

[via swissmiss]

Ever wonder what those old buildings on your money look like in real life? Well, here’s the bills and the buildings at the same time:

The photographer who took these writes:

I check in, freshen up, and figure I’ll walk to downtown to get a feel for the city - DC is one of those mythic places - a bit like Vegas, actually - where the thing it’s most famous for is not really representative of the city itself or where ‘real’ people live. So I stroll down Connecticut Ave to Dupont, seeing some of ‘neighborhood’ DC, and eventually make it to the White House.

As I pass one of the buildings on the way, can’t remember which one, I remember something that I read in the “Irreverent Guide To Washington DC” about the Treasury building being the one on the $10 note… I suddenly realize that the building that I’m actually looking at, the White House, is also on a US note… Huh, what’s on the others? I fumble in my pockets and find a $1 - boring - then a $5 and $10 and $20 - gosh, the’re all… here!

Go to his Flickr site to read the rest, and see some other nice photos.

Without a doubt the best Guinness ad you’ll ever see (if not one of the best ads you’ll ever see) can be found here.

The ad basically turned the remote mountain village in Argentina where it was shot into a giant, rattle-trap Rube Goldberg device. It starts with falling dominoes, progresses to knocked-over pieces of furniture, really gets rolling with burning haystacks, and concludes with an ingenious final shot we won’t spoil for you.

Don’t miss it! [via Very Short List]

The other day I ate a sandwich while sitting next to the Irish Hunger Memorial.

Here is the cover to XTC’s second album, titled XTC’s Go 2:

Don’t know if the album is any good, but the cover is great. It was designed by Hipgnosis, a British firm that designed some of the most famous album covers ever. Such as:

and:

and:

Guess they’d had enough of making great images, and decided that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, then they’d come up with a cover worth 450,000 pictures. Oh, the irony.

[via Sleevage, a nice little site that looks at not just classic record covers, but contemporary ones also. What, you don’t download the album cover too when you’re stealing your music? Your iPod is sad.]