Slava

Some things ultimately can't be explained.

I seldom listen to music at my desk. I have an old set of headphones our office administrator gave me a few years ago, and once in a while I listen to a CD or something online, like if the cube farm is noisy and I'm having trouble concentrating. Last week I was listening to Bach's cello suites on a 1995 CD by Mstislav Rostropovich. It's by turns soothing, rousing, sensuous, turbulent, and calming. Something about the cello has a kind of visceral effect that's almost painfully beautiful, like I'm hearing it through the third chakra as well as my ears.

So last week my Wednesday night men's group tackled the topic "What is beauty?" and the six old coots generated some interesting responses. Among other things - sunsets, women, forests, the usual suspects - the Bach cello suites were mentioned in passing. Friday I was listening again while correlating a textbook, and I got so worked up I had to ask my nearest co-worker if she likes that kind of thing, and would she like to borrow the CD some time? She said her significant other might, because he enjoys "otherworldly" music, and we went back to what we were doing.

That evening on the way to Cleveland, I heard on NPR that Rostropovich had died earlier in the day in Moscow. They played short selections of his work on the radio and interviewed Yo Yo Ma, who couldn't say enough about Slava's (his friends called him 'Slava') boundless energy, love of music, critical ear for nuances in a performance, eagerness to share with younger players, and ability to keep learning new pieces well into old age.

To paraphrase the old saying, I don't know anything about music but I know what moves me. JB suggested the possibility that a last burst of Rostropovich's life-force reached central Swingstate all the way from Russia (via the CD drive on a Dell desktop PC). Works for me.

not a story

It has a beginning and a middle but no end, so how could it be a story? No plot, just character(s) and setting. Signs and symbols are everywhere. Language is so secondary, it almost gets in the way. And there's the rub. I'm not sure declarative sentences are possible without distortion. Where does subject end and predicate begin? Did subject X do that to object Y, or did things mutually and simultaneously shape themselves and each other?

Can you dig?

After my meeting Saturday morning, I had a second breakfast and went directly to the compost pile. Something told me it was time for the ritual dismantling of compost from the past year, marrying its remains with the vegetable beds, and thus preparing the garden for this year's planting, amen.

The wooden structure surrounding the compost had been in place for about a year, so it was time to liberate the alchemical stuff to begin its next incarnation as soil. I raked the lower two-thirds out into the bed and spread it evenly over the ground. Now it will settle and mingle, get rained on, blend in, and spread all that organic goodness.

The sun was out in all its glory, so I took my shirt off and got a mild burn, but it was worth it. Like Steve Zink, a friend of a friend at Purdue back in the day, who admitted that listening to Hendrix at full volume on headphones probably caused some permanent hearing loss, but he insists he got the better end of the deal.

It was just a great day to be outside, what can I say, not much. I didn't do much except pull a few weeds, transplant a few perennials from full spots to empty spots, empty the week's kitchen compost scraps into the now nearly empty enclosure, and cover it with a wheelbarrow full of weeds, and call it a day.

Somewhere in there, Gven Golly came outside and we talked about a pergola. Meals were eaten, coffee, water, and beer consumed. Rumor has it more (weeds, compost, soil, vegetables, raking, digging, food, drink) will follow in the future.

Vonnegut

I was lucky to be born in the right time and place to stumble across the novels and stories of Kurt Vonnegut when I hit my stride as a reader and he hit his stride as a writer. There are some things you can't plan and that schools, curricula, and academic advisors can't require. Being set on fire by an incendiary work of art just kind of happens, if you're lucky.

Slaughterhouse Five had that effect on me at a very impressionable time, turning me on to antiwar literature, The New Journalism so-called, and the blurring of genre distinctions between sci-fi, pop, and literary fiction. As a budding would-be journalist myself at the time, this was hot stuff indeed. Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and Joseph Heller were part of a vanguard of writers my friends and I idolized.

I remember one article in particular, I think it was Vonnegut's review in Harpers of Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, so it must have been the politically nightmarish year of 1972. The review began with a statement something like "Some days I have Hunter Thompson's disease..." the symptoms of which include a mixture of hopelessness, rage, contempt, and disbelief. Another statement in the same review that hit me in the face was Vonnegut's assessment of Thompson's thesis that there had been a sea-change in the two-party system: "It's no longer the Democrats vs. the Republicans, it's the winners vs. the losers, and the fix is on." Subtext: If this is news to you, then guess which side you're on.

I don't mean to romanticize the writer or the historical situation, because it wasn't the first or last time those things could be said about American society. The last two presidential elections prove it. And there were more sophisticated commentators than Vonnegut among the literati. But I can't think of any during my lifetime who put as much heart into their work while seeing through the lies, deceptions, and rationalizations of power, and yet maintained a sense of humor on the whole macabre spectacle of war and money and the vanity of domination.

He was just a guy from Indianapolis, albeit with the advantages of family wealth and privilege that happen to fall to some people and not others. To his credit, Vonnegut didn't take those happy accidents - or any sense of entitlement - seriously. Good buy, Billy Pilgrim.

On being a walking boomer stereotype

"How should I know, why should I care?"

I've heard that song, which I really like by the way, so much lately, covered by someone, performed in concert on PBS for a nostalgic audience by the old but identical-sounding Zombies, or on TV in a car/drug/phone commercial, that I'm almost sick of it.

"But she's not there!"

More evidence. I own a copy of George Harrison's solo triple album "All Things Must Pass" - not the vinyl but the CD set issued thirty years later with altered cover art, new liner notes, and additional tracks added by the older Harrison who was not long for this world. Not only do I own it but I listen to it and respond to it's over-produced wall of sound, against all reason, like getting the willies from hearing a Puccini aria and not understanding a word of Italian, but still.

Certain tracks, the predictable ones, still speak to me in the same ways they always did, both viscerally and spiritual, if that's possible, and no one can tell me it's not. The first few songs on Disc 2 - Beware of Darkness, Apple Scruffs, Let It Roll, and the knockout punch, Awaiting on You All. I'm a product of my time, and I guess cultural forces (whatever that means) have a real and lasting effect on individuals, try as they might to get outside them.

Don't the songs take themselves a little too seriously?

It can hit you, it can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for

Yet others hold up pretty well...

Let it roll across the floor
Through the hall and out the door
To the fountain of perpetual mirth
Let it roll for all it's worth
Let it roll

I confess, in this confessional space, that songs from 1970 still ring true; that the extreme reverb in recordings by the villainous Phil Spector still shake me up somatically; that I still respect the quiet Beatle; and against all reason still buy into his transcendent vibe.

Dodged a bullet

Or some other fast-moving projectile. Actually it was a large limb from a hundred-year-old Norway maple demonstrating once again that Galileo and Newton were onto something. I really did want it to come down, I just hadn't resolved to take the chainsaw up as far as the extension ladder would go and decisively cut it. Now I don't have to.

We'd had a violent storm two nights earlier with hail and heavy winds that brought down some big branches. One of the branches nicked a gutter but missed the roof, saving us the water damage and expense of fixing a leaky roof. So I had some big limbs to clean up.

While I was at it, there was another limb, lower on the trunk, that I was able to reach with the ladder, and the saw cut through it easily. But it got hung up on the low-hanging curve of the higher limb, and instead of dropping neatly to the ground as I'd hoped, it just hung there suspended.

I still wasn't ready to reposition the ladder, climb it to the top, and cut the upper limb. Is this what they call a gut-check? So be it. So I trimmed the branches I could reach off the cut-off limb, buying time while cleaning up some of the mess I'd gotten myself into. This is why some people hire professionals to do their tree work.

It's just hanging there, right? Maybe if I pull on one end of the cut-off limb, it will tilt itself off the fulcrum of the hang-up and let gravity do its work. Fat chance but worth a try, and as I pulled with all my weight, I felt something begin to give, then a big old CRACK, and sure enough something is coming down. Before I could duck and cover my head or spin away in a ward-off move, I fell forward and felt the other branch hit my calves, just a glancing blow to the gastrocnemius, dontchaknow, and just like that everybody is on the ground where they belong. Me, the hung-up limb I'd cut, and the other limb I hadn't cut.

Not exactly the way I'd planned it, but I'll take it. Which I did, piece by piece, after trimming off the branches, back to the woodpile for next winter, luckily with life and limb still intact.

Jim Hightower tells us explicitly what we already vaguely knew

Just in case there's any doubt, let's find out why we're in Iraq.

The future is in eggs

A play by Eugene Ionesco, if long-term memory serves me. The so-called Theater of the Absurd, it must have been freshman year, and it was a whole new world of literature that rang true in my adolescent mind. I think it was the sequel to "Jack, or the submission," in which Jack takes his place onstage alongside a girl (Jill?) as their families press in from both sides, and others (stagehands?) gradually fill the stage with eggs. Those ideas occasionally resurface, reminding me of the value of a hodge-podge liberal arts education.

The scene at the rec center Thursday night, which sparked the title which led to the blog that lived in the house that Jack built, was a trip and a half. It was my first time at the rec center's home away from home for a year or two while the building on High Street - the real rec center next to the library - undergoes renovation. It will be a wonderful space when it's finished, and for now all the programs will take place in an older building , a former elementary and middle school in the middle of an aging neighborhood between Clintonville and Worthington, built in 1945.

An architectural walk down memory lane, the brick and block structure sits on one end of a small park lined with mature spruce and maple trees. Woodwork is dark, polished, beautiful. Floors are tile inlaid with letters of the alphabet and animal figures. Lots of glass bricks everywhere letting in light. It's definitely old school and a source of nostalgia, even for the neighborhood people who went to St. Michael's up the street. Rumor has it that it's destined for the wrecking ball, since population is shifting and schools are closing, and the city wants the space for parkland.

My classes ran their course in an unheated upper room, succeeding in what the first class of the quarter wants to achieve. To wit: get to know the new students enough to gauge the vocabulary that will register with them, find a pace that will be challenging but not intimidating, find out where they're coming from and what they're looking for. And if the stars align, get a workout, get a clue, learn something new.

I guess the stars aligned, because it was a highly satisfactory two and a half hours in the city that knows how to keep a secret. As the advanced students were winding down from a long, slow short-form, teenagers with flashlights were scurrying around the yard outside our windows searching for eggs among the trees and flowers, making noise and having fun under the watchful eyes of rec center staff and parents huddled in doorways and hallways, waiting patiently for closing time.

Good Friday came and went. I proofed pages and found correlations. Instead of going to a movie, I ended up staying late to respond to an e-mail by making a motel reservation for a small-town homecoming, family reunion, and memorial service beginning midsummer night in LaCrosse. Saturday I cleaned, baked bread, made soup.

Easter Sunday arrives, bittersweet. The bags under my eyes lift a little after I've had coffee and moved around. It's still cold outside, so the trees and flowers that started to open up last weekend are in a state of suspended animation, tulips drooping over looking at their shoes. I forget to bring a cut flower and trust that there will be extras.

The packed sanctuary is a mixed bag of rambunctious kids, parents who don't set boundaries, other kids afraid to look sideways, and parents with nothing but boundaries. I recoil just a bit from the cute story about bunnies seeking bunnies, and the country-rock arrangement of "Amazing Grace" isn't working for me, so I begin to feel like the perpetual first-time visitor judging everything about the service and deciding whether to ever come back to the Church of Existential Doubt.

Then I notice two young families two pews in front of me, parents whom I kind of know, and their beautiful kids whose hair and eyes and stature and manner echo or embody their parents' past, present, and future, like time-traveling while sitting still. Rev. Susan notes in passing that this is the 150th Easter Sunday service in this building. Her reading (Mark 16) tells a familiar story, but what I hear this time is the question, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

I start to plan a quick getaway, but the kids save the day by passing out flowers to each person in the congregation; a young lady in jeans, whose dad I know from committee meetings, hands me a long-stemmed carnation. Instead of bolting, I make my way to the hubbub of the back room for coffee and run into a friend from a drum circle. She wants to talk about a relationship she's dealing with after the fact, and I appreciate her willingness to connect on any level - musical, intellectual, platonic. She goes back for more coffee, and I stop at the social justice table to buy two bars of Fair-Trade Very Dark Chocolate, which will be, like the coffee and the carnation, kind of a sacrament tonight after quiche and sourdough and Chardonney.

Chuck

My uncle Chuck Anderson passed away a few days ago after a gradual decline during the last year or so. He was 89. I remember him as an easy-going guy with a great big laugh who loved music.

My Mom's only brother, his real name was Albert Benjamin (A.B.) Anderson, but everybody called him Chuck. The story goes that his Dad, my grandpa Al Anderson, used to exclaim "Shuck, by golly" to anything mildly surprising. They say it might rain. "Shuck, by golly." The store is out of sweet corn. "Shuck, by golly." Coolidge won the election. "Shuck, by golly." So his firstborn, rather than being 'Al Junior', became 'Chuck'.

Grandpa Albert ran a restaurant, Al's Lunch, in Spring Grove, Minnesota, and set up his brother Freddie in the grocery store down the street. After the war, when Chuck and Helen were both married and starting families, Al decided to retire. Chuck and my Dad, whom everyone called Dunc, took over the restaurant and renamed it the C&D. We used to go back to the C&D as kids, sit at the counter, and spin around on the stools.

Two of my three older sisters, like me, were born in Spring Grove. Shortly after I arrived, we moved out of the big brick duplex we shared with Chuck, Marion, and their two kids and moved to Rochester, where my Dad started out in the insurance business. When I was three, we moved across the river to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and a few years later, Chuck and his family, now with three kids, moved to LaCrosse. He tuned pianos and Marion taught business courses at the high school. They lived on Coulee Drive, out by the bluffs, and we lived on Market Street, closer to downtown.

It's a little odd reconstructing such a long, textured narrative in just a few fragments of the story. What am I leaving out? Just about everything. How accurate are the pieces I remember? I don't know for sure. How badly does this crude account misrepresent a person's life? If you read this, please correct the mistakes or fill in the blanks.

Kris, Lee, and Russ were the cousins I knew the best growing up, and we were like stairsteps. Anna Banana was the firstborn of the tribe; Kris is the same age as Jeanie Beanie; Lee is a year younger than Jo Jo; Russ is three years younger than me; Rock was the trailer, coming along after we had moved away from our extended family roots and transplanted ourselves in Michigan.

Helen's family and Chuck's family belonged to different churches and different politics - we were Methodist, they were Lutheran, we were Nixon Republicans and they were Humphrey Democrats - but were ideologically more similar than not. Chuck sang in the church choir, and so did Helen. Chuck was affiliated with the big music store downtown, and Helen gave piano lessons. All the kids except me inherited some of that musical talent. Lee and Russ played in bands, and my sisters sang in choirs.

Music was important to Chuck. During the War he played in an Army band in Europe; picture Glenn Miller in uniform onstage in France or Italy - that kind of band. Every summer for as long as I can remember, Chuck and his bandmates would get together. He played string bass in a jazz group in LaCrosse, too, mostly guys his age playing clubs and festivals up and down the Mississippi Valley. Since kids weren't allowed to go to those places, I only remember seeing them once as a young adult. They were really good, very professional, pretty hot - in a Pete Fountain/Al Hirt kind of way - and as a rock and roller nonmusician, I was impressed. This was the real deal.

I'm looking forward to the memorial service in LaCrosse, touching base with my cousins and honoring my uncle. I know it will be painful, especially for my Mom, and I hope there is music involved.

This just in: Earth is hollow

Maybe I'm the last last one to know. This has probably been common knowledge among the cognosenti for ages, and I'm just now getting the word. Oh well. All this time I've been accepting the old myth of tectonic plates, Earth's crust resting on a mantle, a layer of molten rock, and within that a core. You've seen the cross-sectional diagram, which someday will go the way of Ptolemy's dome of the heavens arrayed neatly around terra firma, all nice and geocentric.

I don't know where Max Fyfield gets his information, but I like the depiction of the planet. It resembles an early developmental stage of a multicellular organism, beginning to develop an endoplasm, mesoplasm, and ectoplasm with the appropriate orifices connecting its inside with its outside. I also appreciate the disclaimer: "Inner Earth to be re-drawn by someone who has been there! Thank you..."

Why weren't we told these facts in geography class! What are "they" trying to hide from us? Which episode of The Twilight Zone did I miss? If anyone has answers to these or the many other questions raised by The Hollow Earth, please disclose them now, before the next saucer to Venus leaves Agharta, land of advanced races.

spring, sprang, sprung

It's somatic.

Sure, the weather change is huge, and this week we seem to have turned a corner in the conditions outside. No need to wear a jacket when walking the dog, turn down the thermostat, no need for extra covers in bed. I could hear water percolating into the ground in the back yard last night. It felt like the right time to ride the bike to work this morning. No problem, until I got to the mile-long hill on County Line Road going west against the wind, for which my heart and lungs were not prepared.

I made it, of course, by crawling up the hill in low gear, not to push the envelope too much, and now I'm lamenting my aerobic condition. It's lamentable. Solid Stan reassures me that I'll be fine after a couple more bike rides, easy for him to say. And he's right, of course. I'll make an effort to ride more regularly to get the systems - cardiovascular, neuromuscular, psychoskeletal - in better working order.

I also found it hard to get down to work right away. Like the archaic definition of exercise, riding stirred up something that doesn't want to examine spreadsheets, check items in lists, cut and paste bookmaps. Something that would rather listen to rock and roll, look at trees, take a walk on the wild side. Then, geek that I am, I had to look at Merriam-Webster's word of the day and find the quote from Henry IV:

"...your health; the which, if you give o'er to stormy passion, must perforce decay."

They say it's going to rain later today, another reason not to ride a bike to work on impulse.

It did rain, two or three times in fact, waves of a storm system sweeping across central Swingstate to soak the ground and swell the streams and send flood warnings to several counties. Then it stopped and I rode the bike home just before dark, no problem, mostly downhill and not directly against the wind. Denouement, anticlimax.

Then the weekend, and the genie is definitely out of the bottle. There are tree branches to trim and the first generation of weeds to pull, general clean-up chores in the yard. Since nothing is ever simple, the former involved taking down an electrical wire strung from the house to the garage, giving rise to ideas (uh-oh!) to reconfigure the wiring around a pergola on the patio. Are we getting grandiose yet?

Watch basketball, be disappointed in Kansas and North Carolina but reassured that the Buckeyes are for real. Watch "Spiderman 2" and hatch a plan to string ropes across treetops, hang a swing from a stout limb, use gravity and tenacity to simulate flight. Okay, I guess we're getting grandiose now. But a swing would be nice.

And a new rear wheel for the bike wouldn't hurt either. The old one hasn't been truly round for aeons, and I think it would make a difference. One or two bike rides later, and Stan was right, I can already feel the difference in my legs and back muscles, a little more taut, like a spring.

with a little help from my friends

If I don't write this, that song will never stop running through my mind. The Joe Cocker version, a slow-wringing torch-song with three backup singers, not the bouncy little ditty by the mop-tops. The good news is that I got through an entire Tuesday this week without a flat tire. [Chorus: Week's not over.] The bad news is that I'm reduced to that kind of good news. But the point is the manner in which the preceding Tuesday left me relatively unscathed, though chastened by the consequences of my own inaction. I'm lucky enough to brush misfortune, escape disaster, and carry on. I'm superstitious enough to take it all as symbolic of some larger truth.

I exit the building after a productive day mapping books and proofing pages and make it to my six o'clock class at the rec center. It's the last scheduled class of winter quarter. The one dedicated student who shows up is highly attentive and clearly getting the hang of Basic Movement until 6:45, when he develops a sore hip that forces him to stop and call it a day. Misfortune turns to advantage, as this frees the editor/teacher to depart the rec center in time to get up Old State Road to the old meeting house in Lewis Center for a seven o'clock committee meeting.

The committee meets the third Tuesday of every month, except when snowstorms cause a cancellation, and all four of us are fully present. We do our usual check-in ritual, and on this occasion it seems especially useful for all of us to say a few words about what else, besides committee business, is happening in life as we know it. We have an agenda, we moved through it without forcing the issue, digress when necessary to illustrate a point, and accomplish quite a bit in an hour and a half. I like these people, who are rather unlike me in many ways, and we seem to play well together.

As I'm driving out of the gravel parking lot, something is pulling-dragging-thumping, and on the pavement of Franklin Street I can tell I have a flat tire. This time it's the left-front. Last Tuesday it was the right-front, but that one was before the rec center class, so my luck is improving; this time I made it to both meetings before the breakdown of long-neglected tires. I'll just have to call the tow-truck and do that whole thing again.

But no, John stops to see what's the matter. Not just to ask but to offer the use of a can of Fix-a-Flat he has stashed in his trunk. He methodically walks me through the directions printed on the aerosol can and hooks it up to the tire, which quickly inflates enough to get me moving down route 23 toward Discount Tire on route 750. There's a glitch in the switch for the warning flasher, but I move it up and down a couple of time, and due to another miracle it starts working.

Discount Tire is closed, and the Tuffy Muffler shop next door, with a few tires displayed on a rack, is about to close. The proprietor doesn't have my size in stock, and he says I can get a better deal from the guys next door, whom he trusts. I take his card with their number and appreciate the help but choose to continue on down to A&A Tires on route 3, where they fixed me up last week.

It's interesting what you see going 25 on Polaris Blvd. at night that you don't see going 50. I decide to turn down lesser-traveled Old State, then Lazelle, then Sancus, then Park, Cleveland, Schrock, Cooper, and finally route 3, making a strangely slow zig-zagging mythic night journey on my hobbled steed. I park it in front of A&A Tires and make a couple calls.

My voice-mail messages to Gven and Zelda go unheard for the time being, so I take up Burb on his week-old offer to be the go-to guy in case of tire trouble. It's ten o'clock on a weeknight, for goodness sakes, he has a family to take care of, and I'm standing in a parking lot asking for a ride home. If you know Burb, you know he said, "No problem," put on jeans over his jammies, and came to the rescue. In a few minutes, he was there in his little red car, and I was quickly transported to my own warm house.

The next morning, it was a simple matter for Zelda to drop me off at A&A Tires on her way to work at the bookstore. It was snowing, adding a touch of drama to the logistics of everyone - Zelda, me, the tire guy, his helper - getting from point A to point B. Let's just say I had ample time checking out the titles in the all-night video store next door while waiting for the tire guy to arrive and throw a new P225/70R14 on the left-front rim, and while you're at it let's do the left-rear too.

Now, with the passage of time, it all blurs together. The first flat coincided with my eye exam the following day; the second flat and support-group rescue coincided with the new lenses being fitted to the old frames. What's that scene from Gatsby featuring a sign for an optometrist? The third week, anticipating a harsh third strike, I went back and replaced the fourth tire. Same surly tire guy, different helper at A&A, still a good deal for the money.

stream of consciousness/arrested development

A thought-provoking tour of the sunday dispatch reveals, once again, that the most valuable information in the newspaper can be found in the comics. "Tina's Groove" explains through sophisticated neuromuscular analysis how high heels lower a woman's IQ. "Doonesbury" traces the relative life trajectories of a female undergraduate named Cricket (law school, marriage, birth of a child) and a male undergraduate named Zipper (thinking of majoring in physics but still undeclared). "Dilbert" outlines the organizational imperatives of goal-setting, goal-writing, goal-reporting, and goal-ignoring. "Hi and Lois" reveal the key to making difficult decisions through monitoring somatic response, i.e., ask out the girl who makes you blush the most. And what am I doing even reading "Hi and Lois"?

Yet another charlatan is getting a lifetime's worth of free advertising for their self-fulfilling, self-promoting book of prophecy, ostentaciously titled The Secret. Apparently the big secret is getting whatever you wish for by convincing yourself that you can and should get whatever you wish for. Hey, it worked for one "network-marketing professional" in Zanesville, why shouldn't it work for everyone? It's working for the author, isn't it?

Fortunately, the somewhat more grounded Joe Blundo's column is right nextdoor, and Joe says the best investment strategy this week is to ignore the stock market and watch basketball. I'm with Joe. In other breaking news, real estate prices are higher per square foot in popular neighborhoods!

In the always deeply probing 'Insight' section, there is more edifying discourse on the proper role and function of the stack of newsprint used to wrap fish and line the compost bucket. A number of readers are demanding that the editor return or destroy the public school directories - which parents chose to be listed in - that the newspaper uses to check facts. In the 'Letters' column, one reader objects to the inclusion of a photo of "ultimate fighting" competitors, and another objects to the negative language used to describe the sport of "ultimate fighting." Both want editors to publish exactly what they want to see, nothing more and nothing less, shielding their delicate sensibilities from anything offending or disagreeable. The concept of 'turn the page', like the parallel concept of 'change the damn channel' has yet to occur to these conscientious citizens who are vigilant in protecting you and me from harmful information, much like the protectors of school children who seek to ban information on certain (you know what kind) subjects. The assumption being that 'good' journalism, like 'good' education, is that which reveals less and conceals more.

After going off on the Sunday paper, I decided to do something constructive, started a batch of sourdough bread, and watched some basketball on TV. After careful analysis based on a lifetime of close observation and about 40 years of serious study, I concluded that the Buckeyes beat the Badgers because they have better athletes. Wisconsin relies on three or four guys to carry them, while Ohio State can run six or seven in and out without losing a step, although it's the big guy, who blocks shots, and the little guy, who passes the ball, who make them go.

While it was still light outside, I grabbed a hacksaw and tore through a leftover piece of sheetmetal roofing, cutting large sections down to the size of the remaining uncovered part of my patchwork shed. Because I don't have the proper tools and I'm too stingy to go out a buy the proper tools, I used a combination of elbow grease and pure improvisation. After scrounging up just enough roofing nails (salvaged), I nailed down most of the remaining pieces over most of the remaining plywood, hitting only one finger with the hammer and ripping only one piece of skin in the process.