Tomorrow is the day–Tuesday gives the Opener for our boys. And today, well, there’s two more Elite 8 games. No, we ain’t dead, we’s just getting’ started.

Picture by Bags.

Yeah.

[Photo by Constantin Joffe via hollyhocksandtulips]

Head on over to The Smithsonian’s website and dig this coolness. 

Photograph by Chuck Stewart.

Miggy gets paid…again. 

Bananas. 

[Photo Credit: Jim McIsaac/Newsday]

Welcome back for another turn through the aisle to Where & When. The posts have been less frequent, but not because I don’t care. So here we are again, trying to puzzle out another intriguing picture of New York in its architectural glory days (if not a glorious period in it’s history). Let your eyes wash over this delight:

Brilliant, eh? I won’t say too much, because it pretty much speaks for itself, but to be fair I will give you a clue on the date: ten years after this photo was taken, Hopalong Cassidy became the first Western series to premiere on television.  Some four hundred years earlier, King Henry VIII divorced his fourth wife, Anne of Cleaves.  Not to mention, on the same day this picture was taken, Pan Am began flights between the US and England.  There, I think that’s very fair.

You know the rules; if you don’t, take a peek at some earlier games and come back.  A root beer of your choice if you tell us what is depicted here and when it was taken, a scoop of ice cream if you can tell us anything else interesting about the event it depicts, and cream sodas for the rest who follow. I’ll try to get back to you on this in the afternoon; try to savor this one, okay? Have fun, and no peeking at the photo credit >;)

[Photo Credit: Shorpy’s]

Pat Jordan’s latest for Sports on Earth is a profile of Rays’ pitcher, Chris Archer:

I met Chris Archer for dinner at the Outback Steakhouse on my first night in North Carolina. He showed up with a handsome black man in his 40s, whom he introduced as “Ron Walker, my mentor.” The hostess led us to a booth in the far corner of the room. As we sat down, Archer said, “Wow! This is the same table where I met my father last February.” He meant his biological father, Magnum. Walker had helped facilitate that first-ever meeting between father and son. It did not go well. Archer peppered his father with questions. Why had he never tried to contact his son? That sort of thing. Archer did not like the answers.

By the time his father had left, Archer said, he had already decided, “I had no intention of ever seeing him again. The type of person he was. He had three children with three different women. Zero of which he is in their lives. He couldn’t tell what school his kids went to. I had no intention of trying to change a grown man who didn’t want to be in my life.”

I told Archer that I hadn’t planned to ask him about his biological parents until tomorrow, after we’d gotten to know each other a bit. He smiled and said, “Yeah, I came out throwin’ heat right off the bat.”

When the waiter came to take our order, Archer discussed with Walker what he should eat. Walker suggested fish and steamed broccoli, nothing fried or with butter. One night, before Archer was to pitch a minor league game, he had called Walker and told him he was eating a pizza. Walker said, “You’re eating what? Don’t put that in your body. Spend $30 on something healthy.”

Now, at Outback, Archer said, “He didn’t want me to put regular gas in my high-performance engine. We talk all the time.”

“We always dialogue back and forth,” said Walker. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

“He’s like my brother,” said Archer.

Walker looked at him sternly and said, “Uncle.”

[Photo credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports]

SI‘s baseball preview issue is out and features contributions by Cliff Corcoran, Jay Jaffe and a feature by Eric Nusbaum. Oh, yeah, and four different covers (including Yadier Molina and some kid named Trout).

Over at Deadspin, Barry Petchesky breaks down the 2014 payrolls and salaries for every team in baseball. 

[Photo Via: Daily Dot.com]

Via Baseball Researcher and Richard Sandomir of the New York Times: Ruth hits.

[Photo Credit: Baseball Fever]

Biblioklept is just a great site. Bookmark it.

Today gives Flannery O’Connor’s great story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

[Picture by Heinz Straeter via Lushlight]

Darryl Pickney reviews a terrific book of photography for the New York Review of Books:

Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.

Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.

Drug money circulated fiercely. People could get shot in the middle of the afternoon and if you chanced to be on the street where it happened, you knew that you had seen nothing, heard nothing, and would say nothing. Many gave up because the streets and the schools were so bad, especially middle-class blacks who could at last go elsewhere. But jobs were plentiful in the city. If you didn’t like your boss, an old head told me, you could quit and have a new job by the end of the day. Some people had jobs as well as welfare. Blacks felt that they ran the place. You could pass out on a traffic island in Harlem and no one would bother you all day long. The only people around in those days were black, old heads say. If whites found themselves in Harlem, then they had to run. But you can meet whites who have spent their lives in Harlem, in their family homes, tolerated because they’d always been there, hadn’t run.

Buy Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto here.

The new documentary on Stones Throw Records. 

[Photo Via: Smart Shanghai]

Michael Pineda’s looked good this spring. 

Final cuts coming soon.

[Picture by Bags]

 Sunday groove. 

[Photograph by Sophie Harris Taylor via like a field mouse]

[Photo Via: Ned Hepburn]

NCAA Hoops tonight and all weekend.

Have at it.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

Dig this cool post from Messy Nessy Chic on the last Japanese mermaids (and heads up, there’s some nudity involved):

For nearly two thousand years, Japanese women living in coastal fishing villages made a remarkable livelihood hunting the ocean for oysters and abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls. They are known as Ama, and if you’ve dipped into Messy Nessy’s archives, you will have already met the few ladies still left in Japan that still make their living (well into their 90s) by filling their lungs with air and diving for long periods of time deep into the Pacific ocean, with nothing more than a mask and flippers.

In the mid 20th century, Iwase Yoshiyuki returned to the fishing village where he grew up and photographed these women when the unusual profession was still very much alive. After graduating from law school, Yoshiyuki had been given an early Kodak camera and found himself drawn to the ancient tradition of the ama divers in his hometown. His photographs are thought to be the only comprehensive documentation of the near-extinct tradition in existence.

Okay, I’m reloaded. 

Some wild games in the NCAA tournament last night. And of course, the Yanks played too.

Mostly, they are concerned about the health of their new center fielder.

[Picture by Dave Bullock via West Coast Avengers]

We’re doing some technical stuff behind the scenes today so blogging will be light. Be back shortly with more Internet Fun.

Just as a quick follow-up on Grover Lewis. Check out this memoir piece he wrote in 2005.

In 1943 my parents—Grover Lewis and Opal Bailey Lewis—shot each other to death with a pawnshop pistol. Big Grover had stalked us for a year, fighting divorce tooth and nail, and when he finally cornered Opal alone and pulled the trigger, she seized the gun and killed him too. They’d started out as Depression kids who had eloped from the Trinity Heights area of Oak Cliff, where they’d both been friends with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Like Clyde, my father was an unschooled country jake who fell—or jumped—into low ways in the big city. Opal, like Bonnie, was a bright student who left school early to help support her family—a moral girl with high ideals. Like Bonnie’s, Opal’s main crime seems to have been picking the wrong guy. In the end, she managed to save my father from everybody but himself.

The fatal events took place in my hometown of San Antonio when I was eight, and I became the ward of a brutish Fort Worth in-law who amused himself by trying to break my body and spirit. By today’s standards, he would have been deemed abusive enough to serve jail time. After five years, when I realized that my options were either suicide or homicide, I ran away and refused to return if I died in the process. Many of my mother’s kin considered me unsalvageable because I was a “pure Lewis.” They’s give me that look: “Just like his daddy.…”

Spook—my great uncle, C.E.Bailey—saved my life. When he took me in, I was badly damaged—withdrawn, lacking confidence, blind as a bat, smart as fire, dumb as hell. Still, with a friendly home base only a block’s walk from my high school classes and the local library also close at hand, I began to mend. My case was extreme but hardly singular in a workingman’s district where a lot of families got blown to smithereens.

A sagging condo pile with a “No Drugs” sign out front occupied the lot where our old family boarding house had steed. Spook and I had lived upstairs in a bare room with a bare bulb above the iron bedstead. When I started working after school, I bought us reading lamps, feeling grown-up about pitching in.

Spook’s insight—his special grace—was to treat me as a younger brother instead of a ward. In is fifties by then, a union machinist and a lifelong bachelor, he kept his mind sharp by studying the Bible and parsing out “the lies in the papers.” Half a Wobbly in his secret heard, he taught me a multitude of useful things, one of the germinal ideas being that decency and common sense were most likely to be found in common people. He offered general advice, specific if asked, and never raised his voice or hand to me. In the long haul, I think I was less trouble to him than his batty sisters, both of whom constantly schemed to lure him into their religious cults.

If Spook was our family Samaritan, Matthew Bailey—my mother’s father—was our scourge. A Snopesy little jackleg-of-all-trades—he had been Bonnie and Clyde’s favorite bootlegger—he worked for thirty-odd years as a maintenance engineer at the Wholesale Merchants Building in downtown Dallas, where he routinely slept with maids as a condition of their employment. With a flame of rage perpetually flickering in his head, he once put a black man off a city bus at knife point for sitting in front of him. I loved the old devil regardless and helped him out sometimes on weekend plumbing jobs, mostly just handing him his bottle. Matthew approached everything with a maximum violence required for the job, he never swatted me around, because as a rule, he only beat on the people who lived under his own roof.

And then dig this nice oral history on Grover by Texas Monthly:

Peter Bogdanovich (director of The Last Picture Show): I don’t remember how Grover got on the set, obviously through Larry [McMurtry]. He introduced him. And at some point we decided he’d be good to play Sonny’s father. I had written something, and we told Grover what the lines were, and he did it. I don’t remember that I was told that he was going to write a piece about the film until it was a fait accompli. Because I never saw him take notes. No tape recorder. No interview. I was surprised when I saw the piece. At the time, I remember being very unhappy with it and thinking that it was ungenerous, unkind, and inaccurate, if well written. And I remember being rather angry about it at the time. I don’t believe I ever saw Grover again.

Rae Lewis: The thing about Grover—I saw this time and time again—was he had a reporter’s instinct for relaxing his subjects. By the time he’d interview them, he had researched them. When he talked to Robert Mitchum [for Rolling Stone ], he knew about Mitchum’s short stories. He would start talking and point out that he was taping the conversation. He wanted them to understand that they would be quoted. But he just had a way of talking so they’d relax, and next thing you knew they were going to town.

Robert Draper (correspondent at GQ; former writer at Texas Monthly; met Lewis while researching Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History): Around the time I interviewed him for the book, he hadn’t really done any work at all for two or three years. His confidence was shot. Maybe, to put a finer point on it, his ability to reconcile his standards with the realities of the publishing business had gone the way of the buffalo. Not to give myself too much credit, but in his eyes my book had restored his rightful place in magazine journalism, and it was only after that that he started to churn out magazine stories again. Although by churn out I mean three stories a year rather than one a year.

Kenneth Turan (film critic for the Los Angeles Times; worked with Lewis at New West): Posterity is so quirky. Grover was as good as anyone who wrote nonfiction journalism in his era. You can hold his stuff up against anybody’s. Who knows why some people get to be better known than others? But in terms of quality, Grover took second place to no one.