Gold in 2016!

Over the years our kids, like many I'm sure, have on occasion been called, Little Devils. Well, now they have graduated to a new level of deviltry. They have both joined the Sea Devils swim team.Sea Devils is a swim club that trains and coaches kids to race. At registration, each child received an in-pool evaluation to place them in proper levels. Then Mom and Dad got soaked with all of the swimming equipment needed. I thought all you needed was trunks and water to swim. Apparently, you need a mesh bag, goggles, swim cap, nose plugs, snorkel, fins and Aquaman action figure. And water logging swim trunks have been replaced by sleek spandex jammers. Before leaving for Number One Son's first practice, we asked if he was ready to go. He answered, "Yup, I've got my jammies on." N1S got a chuckle out of himself with that one. I'm glad he said that at home and not in front of his swimming group. Sweet Pea has all of the same equipment except she needs to wear socks with her fins. Her feet are just a little too dainty to keep the fins on. But when you swim like a fish it's a miracle she doesn't swim right out of her suit. She is one level lower than her big brother, but it won't be long before she is moving up.They each practice two evenings per week and, of course, on opposite days. N1S is on Tuesday/Wednesday and SP swims Thursday/Friday. Add that to Girl Scouts, dance and piano and that make a busy week. So, unfortunately, one activity had to be axed. SP reluctantly chose to take a break from dance.So now all we have to do is book our daily 5am pool time for training for the summer Olympics in four to eight years.

The Birds and the Bees and Girl Scouts

Recently, Lady Di and Sweet Pea had an interesting conversation on their way to their girl scout meeting.From the back seat, SP asked, "Mom, did it hurt you when I was born?"Not wanting to scare SP, Lady Di replied, "Not too much.""Did it hurt when you had N1S?", she pressed.Since N1S came cesarian, LD said no.Then came, "How did N1S come out?".LD was honest with SP and said the doctor had to cut an opening in her and let him out that way because he was so small and early. Starting to sweat, LD hoped that would be the end of the questioning. But SP had one more question to go."Where did I come out?", she innocently queried.As LD was formulating what to say in her head, they arrived at the girl scout meeting. "We're here!", LD exclaimed, hoping her excited tone would make SP forget her question.SP wouldn't be sidetracked, though. With all the confidence in the world, she stated, "That's OK Mom, I know where I came out. I came out of your B-U-T.", she spelled.Lady Di hastily said, "OK, time for girl scouts.", and left it at that.I'm sure glad LD didn't say, "We'll ask Dad when we get home."

One Trip Pass at Billy Reid

When Jay Carroll from Rogues Gallery had a bad combination of winter/recession blues a few months back, he and Ned Martel, late of Men's Vogue, headed out west for some sunshine and some blacktop therapy. "We started wondering what the West might have been like in the summer of 1976, with all the patriotism around the bicentennial, and then we set out on the road to find out," Carroll says. "We hit Twentynine Palms [and the Wonder Valley Thrift Shop, pictured], Joshua Tree, Tucson, Las Cruces, Marfa, Austin, and a lot more. The thrifting's great out there, and we were buying up stuff anyway, so we thought we might as well do a pop-up shop to try to get people excited about America and about summer." Starting Thursday, the two take over the parlor room at Billy Reid, where they're about to hole up to install a mise-en-sc

Roger Cohen Rebuts

You may recall my several posts on Roger Cohen, his views on Iran, and its disposition towards its Jews, the Jewish people, and Israel. Here for background are also Cohen's Times website columns on these matters.Then there is my catty suggestion that Cohen and his column had been demoted by the Times to its website. He wrote me to say that this was not the case. And rather than paraphrase him, I decided: Why not let him speak for himself?
New York, May 2, 2009
Dear Marty,
I have fond memories of contributing to The New Republic, particularly in Bosnia days, when Leon Wieseltier coaxed me into a couple of pieces that benefited from his fine hand. I also recall the feeler you put out to me in Paris about the editorship; I was honored by that. I still think of your publication as one with high standards and fine journalism. So I'm doubly perplexed by your "The New York Times Downgrades Roger Cohen."
It's false and tendentious, as Andy Rosenthal and David Shipley, copied here, will attest, and would have if you'd bothered to contact them. I've never had a permanent place on the NYT Op-Ed page. I'm an NYT columnist with a twice-weekly column in the International Herald Tribune newspaper (our global edition), and on the NYT website (not the "on-line blogs" as you write.) I pinch-hit in the NYT paper when there's an opening, as there was while Kristof was on book leave 18 months ago, and when Kristol left earlier this year. Nothing has changed in that arrangement. I will continue to write for the IHT paper, the Times web site, and the Times itself when openings occur.
My first inclination was to ignore what you wrote. But we live in a viral age, and I keep getting inquiries (and some insults, of course) about my "downgrade." Standards matter less in the age of the Web, when anyone can post anything they like and nobody really gives a damn. But I imagine that you still have standards that matter to you, as they do to The New Republic. I would therefore request that you correct or retract what you wrote, since it's baseless. As I said, if you wish to confirm my unchanged status, you may do so with my editors.
Yours,
Roger CohenI don't need to check with either Andy Rosenthal (whose father Abe, a great managing editor and columnist at the Times, I knew well) or David Shipley (whose work at the Times seems to me to be so lapidarian, certainly in comparison to his labors at TNR). I believe Roger.In a subsequent letter from Cohen he lets out his weltschmerz about how his views on Iran, Israel, and the Jews have been received. He seems agonized by the pain he has caused, and elevated by the support he has received. So let me show you his second letter from yesterday:
Dear Marty,
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Believe me, I reflect without much interruption on Iran and Israel, as anyone subjected to the vilification I've faced would. I gave a talk last week to several hundred people in the Iranian Studies Department at Stanford. There are few such departments left in the country, yet another sign of the lamentable effects of three decades of non-communication. Dr. Abbas Milani, who invited me, began by telling a story of how his sister was brought to tears by several of my columns. I've heard of many such reactions from Iranian exiles, even some Jewish Iranian exiles, who dislike or detest the regime but loathe even more the hateful, one-dimensional caricature of their country that amounts to the sum total of received wisdom on Iran in many circles. Iran, as I've written several times, is an unfree, repressive society; it is not a totalitarian reincarnation of the Nazi regime. We don't know -- they don't know -- who's going to win the election in June. Case closed.
I was in Iran in the immediate aftermath of the Gaza mini-war. Synagogues were being desecrated from the Paris suburbs to Caracas. The Iranian regime was whipping up whatever hysteria it could -- not much -- with posters showing slaughtered Palestinian children. Everyone knows where the Jewish quarters are in Tehran and Esfahan. Everyone knows where the synagogues are, and there are a couple of dozen of them. Was there a stone thrown? Graffiti? A single insult? Violence of any kind? Not that I heard, and I asked and looked. I will continue to reflect on the nature of Iranian society and the current state of Israel, but I would ask you to consider whether you are comfortable that you know enough of Iran to pass unequivocal judgment, and whether you might not be distracted by one or two men's intermittent use of vile, hateful language from the more nuanced realities of a deep civilization.
Best,
Roger
As it happens, I went to a concert in New York on Sunday and met a young woman who had just returned with her mother from a visit to Tehran. They are Jewish, and had "escaped" (the young lady's word) 19 years ago. Her grandmother had remained, much as nearly 300,000 Jews had remained in Nazi Germany even by 1939. Her own evocations of what Iran is like are desolating.I won't rehash what I've written about Cohen's writings. But there is a long clause in his letter to me above that indicates how disastrously wrong he is about Iran, and how positively reckless he is about the future of Israel and the remnant of the Jewish people that survives in this world. He writes:...you might be distracted by one or two men's intermittent use of vile hateful language..."Distracted" indeed. "One or two men's..."; "intermittent use..."; Israel may not be precious for Roger Cohen. The Jewish people, of which he is a high priest and of which I am only an ordinary Israelite, may not be precious to him either. So let me say: No, I am not distracted. I am obsessed. And wish others had been obsessed 75 years ago.

Introduction

All right! I should update this more often. And in honour of that, here's a several-years-belated introduction.I'm 28. I have a PhD in Victorian literature, earned through blood, sweat, toil, tears, and a conveyor belt of first-year essays to mark. There's a conversation happening across a few academic blogs at the moment regarding the number of people who get the PhD in a fairly pleasant environment with nothing to concentrate on but their own research and the occasional class to teach, and that wasn't my experience, by a long way. There was one year I had four jobs plus the PhD, and I earned £10500 and gave the university £3000 of it for tuition... we're not going to dwell on that, but it's fair to say those weren't the absolute best days of my life in many ways, although they were great in others.At the moment, I'm a postdoc in a field which both is and isn't within shouting distance of my own. I love my job, my new department, the fact that for the first time in five years I can get all the sleep I need (which turns out to be about six hours when I'm not working the job-juggling schedule from the jaws of hell), and to a growing extent, the city I've moved to, which is huge and confusing and seems to be lacking in hills and woods and wildlife but has some things going for it all the same. And I am determined to learn to love this place.I live in a little flat with a spiral staircase in an old Victorian school; my bedroom was once the headmaster's office. My much-loved tropical fish live with me, and I am not at all joking when I say that the best way I've ever found to motivate myself to get research done in the past is by thinking of the big reef aquarium I'm going to get when I can afford it. My boyfriend is a scientist, although disappointingly this seems to be all done on computers these days with nary a lab-coat nor a test tube to be seen.For the first time in four years, I'm not teaching. I can't decide whether I miss it or not.In non-academic parts of my life, which I am hoping will get a bit more headspace now, I like cameras and horses and sci-fi and far-away places and the idea that the thylacine isn't extinct after all. (I do not like long walks on the beach, because it is hot and there is sand.) And music, and fossils, and Macs. My work schedule for the past few years killed off all my hobbies; I'm hoping to fix that in the future.Also, my blood group is O+. I find this rather disappointing.

What if I had won the mouthpiece contest in 4th grade?

In 1973, at the beginning of the year, my fourth grade elementary school teacher announced that any children wishing to join the band and take music lessons could meet in the gym. I didn't have an instrument, but the school had one loaner trumpet. The other kid in my class who was interested in playing trumpet and I both competed for the loaner instrument by blowing through a mouthpiece and making it hum like a kazoo. Unfortunately for me, (Doctor William) Neal Woolworth was the better kazoo player, and he earned the loaner horn. Before school started for the 6th grade, my parents bought me a Conn Director for $100 at a yard sale (serious money in those days for us), and I began taking lessons in 1976. By that time, Neal Woolworth was already a trumpet wizard, and was playing a beautiful gold Bach Mercedes II and playing solos like "My Regards" by Llewellyn. That horn was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen at that point, until we went to junior high school, and Neal got his first silver Stradivarius. In those days, a Strad at Schmidt's Music Store in Sioux City, Iowa was about $900 retail, which seemed an absolute fortune to a kid like me. The only horn playing I did after high school consisted of playing bugle at over 200 military funerals, mostly retirees, as a volunteer member of various honor guards with the United States Air Force during my 22 years of service as a Hebrew Linguist. One of my other passions as a kid was coin collecting, which I took up with gusto when I lived in the UK back in 1993. I started selling rare coins, and eventually Beanie Babies. One fine day, my friend SSgt Rich Harrington came to me with a problem. He didn't have an anniversary gift for his wife for the following day. He asked me if I had any Britannia Beanie Bears, and I did (I was buying them for 10 pounds sterling each to all of the Hallmark Store owners in the UK I was bribing with cartons of cigarettes and bottles of gin from the BX). He said "You remember that I still have my old Bach Stradivarius?" "Yep" I replied. "Would you trade me a Britannia Bear and $100 for my Strad?" I gasped and said "Are you SURE you want to do that?" Affirmative -- "Sold!" I yelped. Up until a few months ago, I was employed by the world's largest Rare Coin company here in Dallas, until over 150 of us were laid off. Now, I'm dealing coins over the internet, and have a lot of spare time on my hands in between eBay auctions. I pulled out that Strad the other day and polished it like new. I'm currently in the process of getting my lip back, practicing a couple of hours a day. Baby steps.
Very respectfully,
David M Lewis

Goethe-Institut: Helmut Käutner Film Screenings

From the Goethe-Institut, Glasgow. Helmut Käutner (1908-1980) was one of the most successful German film directors of his time. He produced numerous film classics that are nowadays Evergreens within the German film history and received several awards for his films.
We will show 6 of the most popular in April and May here at the Goethe-Institut.
In German with English subtitles. Free admission.
Further information from http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/gla/ver/en4298719v.htm
Great Freedom No. 7 (Große Freiheit Nr. 7)
Tuesday, 21 April, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany 1944, 112 mins. German with English subtitles. With Hans Albers, Ilse Werner, Hans Söhnker.
The Devils General (Des Teufels General)
Tuesday, 28 April, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany 1955, 120 mins., With Curd Jürgens, Victor de Kowa, Karl John.
Sky without Stars (Himmel ohne Sterne)
Tuesday, 05 May, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany 1955, 108 mins. With Eva Kotthaus, Erik Schumann, Georg Thomalla.
The Captain from Köpenick (Der Hauptmann von Köpenick)
Tuesday, 12 May, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany 1956, 93 mins. With Heinz Rühmann, Martin Held, Hannelore Schroth.
The Affairs of Julie (Die Züricher Verlobung)
Tuesday, 19 May, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany 1956/57, 106 mins. With Liselotte Pulver, Paul Hubschmid, Bernhard Wicki.
The Redhead (Die Rote)
Tuesday, 26 May, 6.30 pm, Goethe-Institut
Germany/Italy 1962, 94 mins. With Ruth Leuwerick, Rossano Brazzi, Giorgio Albertaz

Grading the Red Wings - part 2

Yesterday I took a look at the forwards. Today Ill grade the defensemen and netminders. Defensemen Nicklas Lidstrom: A- The captain isnt the point producer that Brian Rafalski has become in Detroit, but hes still very good at keeping the puck out of his net. While Lidstrom is still an excellent defenseman while facing the toughest competition, the team has made an effort to reduce his ice time night in and night out. But that reduction in ice time hasnt come at the expense of his time on the specialty teams. Lidstrom leads all d-men in points per 60 mins with the man advantage. And the top PK pairing of Lidstrom and Andreas Lilja have allowed the lowest goals against per 60 mins amongst Detroits d-men while typically facing the toughest competition. Car: BMW 7 series. BMW has coined their cars as being the ultimate driving machine. Norris is the ultimate d-man. Brian Rafalski: C Rafalski has been a brilliant offensive defenseman in Detroit. He currently leads all defensemen in goals, assists and points. However hes been on the ice at even strength for the highest number of goals against and is the one d-man playing big minutes who allows over 3 goals per 60 mins at even-strength. So theres definitely room to improve while playing in his own end. Rafalski is not a significant contributor on the PK but is a mainstay on the top power play unit alongside Nick Lidstrom. Hes more likely to score the goal while on the power play while Lidstrom generates a higher number of helpers. Car: VW Touareg. They are small but quick SUVs, just like Rafalski is a small but productive d-man. But SUVs have trouble with tipping and Rafi has struggled playing sound defensive hockey in his own end. Niklas Kronwall: B- Kronner is starting to pick up some of the slack that resulted from Lidstrom playing fewer minutes at even strength. As a result he logs the most minutes per night at even strength. There are some good signs - Kronner trails only Rafalski in points generated per 60 minutes - and bad signs - Kronwall only allows fewer goals per 60 mins amongst Detroits top 4 d-men than Rafalski. Kronwall is obviously a mainstay on both of Detroits specialty teams units. Hes third in ice time amongst blueliners on the power play and ranks 2nd in points generated per 60 mins. The second PK unit of Kronwall and Stuart has struggled, allowing the most goals against per 60 minutes - and by a large margin. Thats one area where Kronwall will need to continue to improve. Car: Audi A5. While the Audi is a nameplate that tends to fly under the radar the A5 has started to make a name for itself, much like Kronwall did during last years playoffs. Brad Stuart: C+ Stuart signed with the Wings following a short stay last season that resulted in the franchises 11th championship. Stuart played alongside Niklas Kronwall and the two formed a sandpaper second defensive pairing. While Kronwall is more likely to announce his presence with an open-ice hit, Stuarts work is done mostly along the boards, in scrums, and in front of the net. He leads the team in hits by a large margin. Coming into the league as an offfensive-defenseman, Stuart has found his niche as more of a defensive defenseman while in Detroit. Hes been on the ice for the fewest goals against at even strength amongst the top 4 defensemen. Stuart doesnt contribute much on the power play but is a fixture on the PK. This is the one area where both Stuart and his defensive partner Niklas Kronwall can show the most improvement. They have allowed the highest goals against total per 60 mins while playing short-handed. Car: Dodge Ram pickup truck. Theres nothing flashy about Stuart and his physical play perfectly compliments a big pickup truck like the Ram. Andreas Lilja: B Lilja is the player most likely to join Mikael Samuelsson in the doghouse when it comes to Red Wings fans. Lilja proved his worth when Chris Chelios was lost once again to injuy. Cheli has served as Nick Lidstroms defensive partner while short-handed but with him out of he lineup Lilja has capably filled in and done a solid job on the PK. He leads the team in blocked shots. Most of those occur while on the PK. Lilja has also displayed an offensive flair when he tallied two assists in a win against Calgary. Car: Dodge Sprinter van. Its big, its ugly, but its also good at what its designed to do. Brett Lebda: C- Lebda is up there with Kirk Maltby as one of the guys I routinely criticize. Its not like I have anything against the guy; its just that both guys have very limited, specific roles and if they struggle they get killed when it comes to grading them. Lebda was removed from the lineup when he had a team-worst plus-minus rating. He was generating no offense which is understandable when you play on the third pairing - but you have to keep the puck out of your own net. Lebda doesnt play much on the specialty teams, so if he struggles at even strength he gets a bad grade. The good news is hes looked better since he rejoined the lineup and is starting to chip in some offense. Car: Mazda 3. Small, nimble and quick, but not very powerful. Goaltenders Chris Osgood: D Ozzie has benefited from having one of the leagues most potent offenses playing in front of him. His goals against average and save percentage are absolutely pedestrian. Hes only had three games thus far where hes allowed less than 3 goals. A team typically needs to average 3 goals per game to win a playoff series. Right now theres no reason to believe Osgood could hold an opponent beneath that threshold. If were lucky and the playoffs follow the regular season and turn into an orgy of goal-scoring then the Wings are as much of a threat as anyone to win the Cup this year. That never happens though. The three goal average almost always ends up being the difference between the team that wins the series and the team that loses the series. Theres still plenty of time for Osgood to round into shape but its clear hes nowhere near where he needs to be right now. Car: VW Beetle. The Beetle was a big hit with chicks like Bill Gates back when it was re-introduced in 1998. Ozzie has always been incredibly popular with the puck bunnies. Ty Conklin: B+ Conklin was the top backup netminder available via free agency and hes lived up to that billing in Detroit. He has a respectable goal against average [2.41] and save percentage [.918]. Only three of his starts resulted in him allowing 3 or more goals. Right now Conklin is starting a third of the games for Detroit which is a good rotation. That should help to keep Osgood sharp without overworking him. Hes done a fine job given his role and his lone loss came in a game against the San Jose Sharks. Car: Honda Accord. The Accord always wins reliability awards and to date Conklin has been safe as houses [not the best analogy given the housing market I guess] for the Red Wings as their backup netminder. Happy Thanksgiving and Lets go Red Wings. Red WingsRed Wings