Blog Archives

Rest in Peace, Robert Chew.

Over at Esquire, check out Tom Junod on the NFL’s theater of pain.

Tina Fey on Twitter:

Smitten Kitchen keeps things bright with this mixed citrus salad.

I’ve shared this before but it’s worth checking out again…

There’ll be a feast if you just come upstairs…

[Photo Via: Lushlight]

[Photograph by Roger M Baker]

Over at Kottke, I saw this story by Laura June on the life and death of the American arcade.

Man, this brings back memories. I was nine-years old in 1980 so I remember all these games–Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaxian, Defender, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong–being a big deal.

Centipede was my favorite.

Check it out.

[Photo Credit: Retronaut]

Picture Via Aberrant Beauty.

On Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o, Patrick Hruby says: Print the Legend.

Spoon Fork Bacon roasts root vegetables.

I’m a Scrooge when it comes to the World Baseball Classic. I don’t want any Yankees to play. Correction: I don’t want any Yankee players to get hurt. I care about how the Yankees play in 2013 not about the WBC.

Will Andy Pettitte pitch for the US team? Klap has the skinny.

[Photo Credit: The Star-Ledger]

Let’s get back to the skit…

Legs.

Over at Grantland’s essential Director’s Cut series, Michael MacCambridge dusts off another gem: John Lardner’s “Down Great Purple Valleys.”

Can’t beat this lede:

Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.

That was in 1910. Up to 1907 the world at large had never heard of Ketchel. In the three years between his first fame and his murder, he made an impression on the public mind such as few men before or after him have made. When he died, he was already a folk hero and a legend. At once, his friends, followers, and biographers began to speak of his squalid end, not as a shooting or a killing, but as an assassination — as though Ketchel were Lincoln. The thought is blasphemous, maybe, but not entirely cockeyed. The crude, brawling, low-living, wild-eyed, sentimental, dissipated, almost illiterate hobo, who broke every Commandment at his disposal, had this in common with a handful of presidents, generals, athletes, and soul-savers, as well as with fabled characters like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed: he was the stuff of myth. He entered mythology at a younger age than most of the others, and he still holds stoutly to his place there.

Over at Roopstigo, here’s Pat Jordan’s latest…on Hialeah:

Once upon a time Hialeah Park was the most beautiful and famous thoroughbred racetrack in the world. People ventured to the sport’s showplace outside of Miami in Hialeah, Florida, not only for the races but also for what they called “The Hialeah experience.” The glamour, the celebrities, the prettiness, the bougainvilleas, the hibiscuses, the royal palms, the pink flamingoes, the food, the champagne, the thoroughbreds and, almost incidentally, the wagering. You went to Hialeah if you were famous, and rich; and if you were not, you went to rub elbows with the famous and the rich under the flamingo pink-and-green canopy that led into the clubhouse.

Then, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Hialeah fell on hard times. It struggled to survive until 2001, when it lost its thoroughbred racing license and faded to black. The track closed, the horses disappeared, and the crowds disbanded into memory like ghosts on the Titanic. The wooden stables rotted then were demolished. The royal palms began to die, their brown fronds littering the grounds. The ubiquitous bursts of pink and green gradually lost their zest. The concrete and coral clubhouse, with its winding stairs that bled the color of rust, decayed. The flock of flamingoes nesting on the infield grass by the small lake grew pale, lean, lethargic. They had no reason to flutter up, as when a trumpeter used to play “The Flight of the Flamingoes,” sending them flapping around the track to herald the most famous race of all, the Flamingo Handicap.

There were tales that Hialeah would be sold, torn down, and replaced by a shopping mall, or townhomes, or a casino. Or maybe not torn down, maybe just turned into a tourist attraction like the Queen Mary, tethered to a dock in Long Beach, California, where it could be gawked at by tourists while it rotted in the sun. But then. miraculously, in 2009–or maybe not so miraculously to some — Hialeah again was granted a horse racing license, but not for thoroughbred racing. Eight years after its demise, Hialeah reopened as a quarter horse racing track. Problem was, no one seemed to notice, at least not the people who counted, those who remembered Hialeah from the past. Quarter horse racing is to thoroughbred racing what drag racing a ’57 Chevy is to racing a Ferrari at Monaco. A low-rent distant cousin of profound embarrassment.

I had last been to Hialeah for the Flamingo Handicap in the early ’90s. So this winter I decided to return to Hialeah, like an archeologist to a Mayan ruin, to excavate, pick through bits and pieces of its bones, to see if I could reconstruct the lost civilization that once flourished there and that was now, like the Old South, gone with the wind.

[Photo Credit: Carleton Wood]

Big Ben…

Found at Kottke…funny.

Rest in Peace: Nagisa Oshima.

“Soluppgang over Staden” by Eugène Jansson.