Journal of a Sabbatical

October 19, 1999

new used car

ALCS Game 3 starting pitchers: Pedro Martinez vs. Roger Clemens

ALCS Game 4 starting pitchers: Bret Saberhagen vs. Andy Pettite

ALCS Game 5 starting pitchers: Kent Mercker vs. El Duque

Today's Reading: none

Yesterday's Reading: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, Pieces of White Shell by Terry Tempest Williams

Day before Yesterday's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Day before the day before yesterday's reading: Danube by Claudio Magris, New England Hurricane by Federal Writers Project

OK, in the past 4 days I have watched three baseball games excruciatingly attentively, put out the October issue of the MRFRS volunteer newsletter, attended one Purrfect Companions meeting, finished reading Danube, and bought a car. But I still haven't mowed the lawn (although I did finally buy the replacement cord for the weedwhacker).

So, on the baseball games:

Pedro Martinez did a great job on Saturday, and Clemens didn't. It might have been more satisfying to watch if it had been the pitching duel of the century, but it was still fun.

The umpiring was not good. That is an understatement. Can't they get the best umpires to do the post season games? But the umpires didn't cost the Red Sox the series. They just didn't play as well as the Yankees. They made way too many errors and left way too many runners on the bases. See totals:

Game 3:

                                        R  H  E  LOB
      New York Yankees   000 000 010--  1  3  3    6
      Boston Red Sox     222 021 40x-- 13 21  1   10

Game 4:

                                	   R H  E  LOB
      Yankees            010 200 006--  9 11  0    8
      Red Sox            011 000 000--  2 10  4    5

Game 5:

                                        R  H  E  LOB
      Yankees            200 000 202--  6 11  1   11
      Red Sox            000 000 010--  1  5  2   11

On the newsletter: Unless readers are really interested in how gross-looking the herbal remedies for ringworm make the cats' drinking water I'll just skip over the content and say that sticking to my deadline no matter how much people plead to get one more thing in, really makes a big difference. I was able to spend exactly the amount of time I'd allocated to it yesterday - the day I'd scheduled to work on it.

On Danube: A better knowledge of Mitteleuropean culture would have made Danube a little more accessible, but I loved it anyway. Magris journeys from the source of the Danube River, a tap somewhere in Germany, to the delta where it empties into the Black Sea in Rumania, but he doesn't write about traveling. Every city and town he visits has some historical or literary significance or some bizarre quirk of its inhabitants or its geography. Even without having read any of the authors he writes about (except Sartre and Marcus Aurelius), I get a kick out of his descriptions of the books, poems, cathedrals, bridges, and people in this crash course in Mitteleuropean culture. Some of the eccentrics he writes about are so weird I thought he might have made them up, but truth is stranger than fiction. My favorite is the "archivist of affronts", who kept a detailed ledger of every insult he ever suffered. My friend QI has a copy of Danube in Italian in his book collection but he hasn't read it. When I asked him why he said he thought it would be too solemn. It's not. It is very funny - and I don't even get all the jokes. Basically, even though this book is way over my head I had a lot of fun with it.

On the car: It's not exactly a new car, and it's not actually in my possession yet. I put a deposit on a used 1997 Honda Accord - a former lease car with only 16,000 miles on it. The main reason I picked it over a brand new 1999 or 2000 Accord is that it feels like my old one. It's the same body style and the interior is laid out the same. The last year Honda made that particular body style was 1997. After that the Accord got bigger. This one drives and steers just like my old one. When I reach for the cup holder it's where I expect it to be. It doesn't have a moon roof or ABS brakes, but my ABS brakes never worked on the old one anyway. The kids will miss the moon roof, but them's the breaks.

Random afterthoughts:

Check out New England Hurricane from the library the next time you anticipate being housebound by an Atlantic hurricane (assuming you have power or a really good book light to read it with). The WPA must have had legions of photographers out during and immediately after the Hurricane of '38. It's an amazing piece of work.

QI called me with a question about the meaning of the term "horcynos orca". Since that sounds sort of like "Orcinus orca", the common name for the killer whale, he thought it might be another species of killer whale. When I called him back tonight after looking in all my reference books, the Internet, and my favorite chapter of Moby Dick, I could confidently tell him that "Orcinus orca" is the only species of killer whale and I have no idea why Linnaeus named it that except that the common name orca goes back well before Linnaeus and "orcynus" is the general word for big tuna-like fish. So I had to ask: "Why do you want to know this? Does Saint Augustine get swallowed by a tuna or something?" Turns out this has nothing to do with his Saint Augustine project. It's the title of an Italian novel he's reading. So he's reading some Italian novel with an indecipherable multilingual title and he doesn't have time to read Danube? Horcynos Orca indeed. And I can't get this image of Saint Augustine being swallowed by a tuna out of my head.