The best? I don’t know. But my favorite Vietnamese place in the city is Thai Son. Went with a friend last Friday night; hadn’t been there in years and was grateful to be there again.
Slammin.’ Take the trip to Chinatown, wait in line, it’s so worth it.
[Photo Credit: Yelp]
Cool, ‘Cause I Don’t Get Upset
I Kick a Hole in the Speaker, Pull the Plug, Then I Jet
Inception is the “It” movie of the summer but I don’t have much interest in seeing it. Which isn’t to say I won’t, but it’s not the kind of movie that gets me excited–complicated science fiction mystery, dreams within dreams…M’eh. Just makes me shrug my shoulders.
Hey, when is Leo DiCaprio ever going to make a comedy?
Still, I’ve heard some wonderful things about Inception–that it contains some stunning material. I’ve also heard that it isn’t all that after all. Which pretty much sums up the critical reaction. Strong in both directions.
Here’s a piece in the Times that covers the range of opinions…and dig Roger Ebert’s take as well.
Over at SI.com, Joe Sheehan thinks the Angels did a great job getting Dan Haren:
Striking out of the blue, Angels GM Tony Reagins completed a trade that not only makes his team better over the next 10 weeks, but better over the next three seasons. By acquiring Dan Haren from the Diamondbacks without giving up any top prospects, Reagins set a high bar for his fellow GMs in the runup to the trade deadline, buying low on one of the game’s top starting pitchers.
…Based on their underlying skills, Haren should allow about 20-23 fewer runs down the stretch than Saunders would have, while also taking a handful of innings away from the bullpen. At the standard estimate of 10 runs gained or saved equalling one win, he makes the Angels two wins better. Essentially, this trade matches what the Rangers did in adding Cliff Lee; and in a race that could well be decided on the season’s final weekend, adding two to three wins is a huge improvement.
The Yanks are still in the market for bullpen help as well as a hitter to come off the bench.
Phil Hughes gave up three runs on a couple of homers through five innings today but had a lead when the skies opened-up thanks in part to two dingers off the bat of Curtis Granderson. It started pouring by me in the north west corner of the Bronx before it hit the Stadium. The tops of the trees whipped around in a frenzy and I had half a mind to go outside and run around just cause. You know, little kid stuff. Then the old man in me sighed, thought better of it, and sat my ass right back down.
Pretty soon the tarp came on the field at the Stadium and it wasn’t until two hours later that play resumed. The Yanks rolled from there. The only blip came when Joba Chamberlain walked the lead off runner in the eighth and then gave up a two-run homer. But the Yanks piled it on late and ran away with it. One scary moment in the eighth when Alex Rodriguez got plunked on the forearm and had to leave the game.
Fortunately, he was okay, didn’t need to go for x-rays and is expected to play tomorrow. The bum didn’t hit a homer. Stuck on 599. Only got two hits and three RBI. Loser. Jeter had three hits, Teixeira had two, and so did Robinson Cano, who got the 1,000th base hit of his career.
Final Score: Yanks 12, Royals 6.
The Rays won but the Sox lost. Yanks stay three ahead of Tampa and are now eight ahead of Boston. And we prepare for the week ahead and go to sleep the heppiest of kets.
[Photo Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images]
Earlier in the week, Sean O’Sullivan handed the Yankees’ their ass while pitching for the Angels. Since, O’Sullivan has been traded to the Royals, and he’s on the hill again today. No offense to Mr. O’Sullivan, but I sure would expect the Bombers to come out a-sluggin’ this afternoon. Phil Hughes is on the hill for the Yanks, and it would be nice to see him have a good, strong, outing, now wouldn’t it?
Stay cool, cheer hard, eat well, and Let’s Go Yan-Kees!
[Picture by Bags]
The Good Reverend…
Before the Grits…
It started ugly for Serge Mitre today, deep counts, base hits, boiling-hot afternoon, and by the time he left the game, seven runs were on the board for the Royals, which proved to be enough to hold-off the Yanks, 7-4. Jose Guillen crushed a home run into the second deck in left field. Can’t recall seeing one hit up there in the new park yet, man, it was a shot.
Mark Teixeira continued his hot hitting–even the balls he hits foul are ripped these days–with two dingers but made the final out of the game. It was a tough play, two men on base, Teixeira the tying run, Alex Rodriguez, sitting on career homer #599 on deck. Replays showed that Teixeira just beat out an infield hit, but it was a close play and he was called out. Tough way to end the game, but Teixeira didn’t argue.
The Yanks can still win the series tomorrow.
Hose off, people. Grab something cool, get a nice beverage, and we’ll see youse in the morning.
[Photo By Nick Laham/Getty Images]
Africa hot. Dog Day Afternoon hot. Hotter n July hot.
Don’t forget to drink plenty of fluids and let’s go Yan-Kees!
Here’s Vic Ziegel, from the introduction to his collection Sunday Punch: Raspberries, Strawberries, Steinbrenner & Tysons–a Famed Sports Columnist Takes His Best Shot at Sports’ Big Shots:
Many of the pieces contained here were written in the press boxes, very close to deadline, with the stranger next to me typing a lot quicker. When sportswriters describe other sportswriters, good is high praise, quick is the ultimate. (The two words, quikc and good, make the work sound almost lewd. Me? I never got it for free and I never will.) The deadline is the problem, the enemy. It is there, at the same time, every night. You stand still and it comes closer. You can’t fake it out because it doesn’t move. It grows shorter and towers over you. It doesn’t understand that you want a better word than fast to describe a baserunner. Very fast is very bad. Fleet is out. Swift, nimble, speedy. No, no, no. Fast is starting to look better. There’s coffee spilled on my notes, you know in your heart that the press lounge has run out of beer, and now the stranger is on the telephone telling someone named Sweetie that he’s on the way.
On those days I write in the Daily News‘ sports department, and the ax of a deadline isn’t about to drop immediately, when you might think I have words enough and time, it suddenly becomes important to play chicken with the blade. So I shmooze with the guys in the office, go downstairs for another cup of cardboard coffee, call home, anybody’s home, until I have finally arrived at the moment I dread: the sports editor standing over me and saying, “Where is it?” (This is what you answer, kids. You say five minutes. And not to worry. If you miss once, nothing happens. If you miss too many times, they make you sports editor.)
And here’s John Schulian remembering his friend.
It was Vic Ziegel who once began a story with these immortal words: “The game is never over until the last man is out, the New York Post learned late last night.” If I had a nickel for every baseball writer who has paraphrased or just plain stolen that sentence, I might be able to afford a box seat at a Yankee game.
But those 19 words, no matter how often they appeared in one form or another under someone else’s byline, would always belong to Vic. He took a cliché and, with one deft addition, told his readers that he had written about a game, not the end of the world. Better still, he was setting the stage for a story filled with fun and whimsy. It would also be wise and free of self-importance, because those were trademarks of Vic’s work, too. Most of all, though, his story was going to make people laugh.
Making people laugh was what Vic did best until he died the other day, at 72, and turned my smile, and the smiles of everybody else that knew him, upside down. At the old Dorothy Schiff Post, he tickled funny bones by writing a sports advice column he called “Dear Flabby.” When Red Smith invited him to go to the horse races in some exotic, Ali-inspired locale -– oh, did Vic love the horses -– the next thing he knew, Red had written a column featuring a character named “Bet a Million” Ziegel.
And then there was a story that never made print, the one Vic told on himself about his turn as a hockey writer. The old one had left the Post, and when the new one couldn’t start for a couple of weeks, Vic volunteered the fill in even though hockey left him cold. Somehow he survived. He was such a team guy, in fact, that he even escorted the new man to the first game he covered. Soon after the puck was dropped, the new man began waxing rhapsodic about the action in the crease.
“The crease?” Vic Ziegel, hockey expert, said. “What’s the crease?”
As the story comes back to me, I can hear him laughing. Not loudly -– there was nothing loud about him -– but with the joy he got from telling a funny story well. And if he was the punch line, so what? We’re all punch lines at one point or another in our lives.
He and I might have qualified in that regard when we wrote for P.M. papers–Vic the Post, me the Chicago Daily News–and still struggled to make our deadlines. It was funny for everybody except us and the desk men who were waiting to slap headlines on our copy as dawn came creeping. For all I know, that was how our friendship was born: We were the last two guys in the pressroom. The only thing I can tell you for sure, though, is that we met at the Muhammad Ali-Alfredo Evangelista fight outside Washington, D.C., in 1977, and we became friends, just like that.
It was one more stunning development in the year and a half or so that saw me go from cityside reporter in Baltimore to sportswriter at the Washington Post to columnist in Chicago. Here was Vic, whose work in the New York Post had been making me laugh since the first time I picked up the paper, in 1968, and he was giving me his phone number and calling me “pal” and treating me as if I belonged in the kind of company he kept in Manhattan. He had worked with Leonard Shecter, Larry Merchant, Pete Hamill, and Murray Kempton, and I’d read in the Village Voice that he hung out at the ultimate writers’ bar, the Lion’s Head. Now he was my friend — how cool was that?
There was a grace and good-heartedness about Vic that never wavered throughout the 33 years I knew him. He took me to the Lion’s Head for my first visit, and made a point of introducing me to Hamill and Joel Oppenheimer and Joe Flaherty, towering figures in the pecking order in my head.
When I was married and my wife and I visited New York, Vic and his wife, the pluperfect Roberta, hosted a brunch in our honor at their apartment, and who should show up but Wilfred Sheed, another writing hero. Vic knew the Italian restaurants I should eat at, and the movies I should see (especially if they were film noir), and the old jazz I should be aware of, by Bix Beiderbecke and Jellyroll Morton. I’m partial to country music myself, but one rainy night Vic picked me up to go to dinner and then abruptly pulled his car to a stop on a side street so I could listen to what he thought was the perfect blending of our sensibilities: Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, backed by Louis Armstrong. If a goy from Salt Lake City may say such a thing, he was the ultimate mensch.
There are people who knew Vic longer than I did, and there are people who knew him better, but I consider myself lucky to have spent the time I did reading him and hanging out with him. The last time was after last year’s Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita. He stayed for a couple of days in the room where I keep my crime novels and a jukebox that I’m ashamed to say has only one jazz CD on it, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.” He had aged and he seemed less sure of himself physically, but if he had been diagnosed with the cancer that ultimately killed him, he never breathed a word of it. He wanted to talk, to laugh, to eat, and when I suggested that we watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle, he was up for that, too. He took the sofa, I took the easy chair, and we were both sound asleep before we got 20 minutes into the movie. It’s what old guys do. Then they say goodbye and hope they’ll see each other again.
When Vic was back in New York, he told me about the health problems that had begun to dog him, though still with no mention of cancer. But I’m not sure I ever told him about the anthology of boxing writing that George Kimball, another old friend, and I are putting together. I should have, because he’s in the book with a blissfully funny story he wrote for Inside Sports 30 years ago about the devoutly unfunny Roberto Duran. The story opens with Vic’s description of two chinchillas, Ralph and Steve, who live in a window cage in New York’s fur district. Now nobody will ever open another boxing story with chinchillas named Ralph and Steve, damn it.
[Photo Credit: NY Daily News, Corbis]
It’s hot and damp in New York. AJ Burnett goes for the Yanks tonight and all eyes are on the $82 million knucklehead. With Serge Mitre throwing tomorrow afternoon, it behooves Mr. Burnett to not only pitch well, but deep into the game. Otherwise, he g’wan here it but good, Bronx Cheer Style.
Man-up, tough guy, and let’s go Yan-kees!
(p.s. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here when I tell you that I think Alex Rodriguez will hit career dinger 600 and more this weekend.)
[Picture by Bags]
Neptune and Triton, By Gianlorenzo Bernini (1620)
First:
Flipped:
I just happened to be downtown last night, looking for a quick bite, when I realized I was near the Milk Bar. So I stopped in–it was crowded–and ordered the pork buns. A $9 treat. I stood there and savored every bite, knowing I shouldn’t eat too fast, knowing they’d be gone all too soon. But I couldn’t help myself.
And it was worth it.
[Photo Credit: Momfuku for 2]
Two years ago, I had dinner with Vic Ziegel at Liebmann’s Deli in the Bronx. We’d been introduced through some mutual friends and I wanted to chat with him about his career and the history of sports writing. He was funny in that skeptical, weathered manner you’d expect from a career newspaperman. I asked him who he thought were the best sports writers and he told me that on any given night any number of guys were the best. “We all had nights when we were the greatest.”
When I asked him who were the most literary sports writers he looked at me like I had six heads. “There is no such thing as a literary sports writer. Not when you are working on deadline, even if I spent most of my time working for an afternoon paper.” Vic wasn’t a journalist. He was a newspaperman. No pretensions.
I just got word that Vic has passed away. Man, this is tough news for the New York sports writing community. His sense of humor and sharp eye for detail will be missed.
In the meantime, read this wonderful piece by Vic about the joys of being a sportswriter:
When I covered baseball for the New York Post, the real New York Post, it was especially important that I finish in good time. Before the bars closed. The Lion’s Head was my bar of choice. If I got there at a decent hour, there was a great chance that Len Shecter, my friend, my idol, would be at the corner of the bar. He was the champ, tough, outrageous, funny, shrewd, fearless, acerbic, but don’t get me started. I wanted to write like Lenny – as they say in TV, the same but different – and on my best nights I came close.
He covered the Yankees when they won the pennant twice a year. When their clubhouse was colder than Greenland. Mickey Mantle was probably the main perp. It was no easy thing to be tough, outrageous, shrewd, etc. Lenny always got there. A few minutes after he left the baseball beat, Mantle told him, for his ears only, “I always thought you had a lot of guts.”
Lenny did a lousy thing to those nights at the Lion’s Head. He died. To this day, when I write a line I like, I tell my friend, “I did good, Lenny.”
My condolences go out to Vic’s family.
In case you don’t already know, a site called MLB Trade Rumors is the spot to go if you are interested in the latest tweets, posts and pieces from around baseball. These guys do a tremendous job of assembling information, they are top-notch. Course the Yanks are in on everyone, or maybe no one at all.
He wouldn’t come cheap, but Dan Haren, anyone?
David (Detail), By Gianlorenzo Bernini (1623-24)
Cause I just never get tired of this movie…
