If Only

R's, baseball has a terrible commissioner now, someone trying to ruin the game. It could have had a worse one, and saved the whole world.

'His [former baseball chief Fay Vincent's] reign as commissioner lasted fewer than three seasons before he was undone by a cabal of owners who felt he wasn't pushing management's interests hard enough with the union. As the buildup to the showdown began, several people began expressing an interest in Vincent's job -- including a longtime friend who was president of the Texas Rangers. But Vincent told him the owners had already picked a successor and urged George W. Bush to stick with the family business. ''If it hadn't been for Bud Selig, George W. Bush wouldn't be president of the United States,'' Vincent said.'

High Fashion

Readers, I present my all-time favorite used t-shirts:

5. Hidden Valley Girl Scout Camp. A nice royal blue with a serene cartoon waterfall on it. A little dangerous to wear in mixed company, or humorless company, or law-enforcement company.
4. Good Times Jail and Prison Ministry, Hawaii. White with a prison door silhouette and a cross. Spiritual.
3. Accu-Air Heating and Cooling. Navy blue, understated, shows my sympathy for the working man.
2. MOI. Pronounced moy, not mwah, it's Hawaiian, not French. It's bright green, and ripped, and has a picture of King Kamehameha on it I forget what it means, but I think I'm supposed to be afraid to wear it around Hawaiian separatists.
1. Incredible Stain Remover. Black t-shirt, orange script, a phone number for somewhere in suburban Detroit on the front, and the number 8 on the back. Pretty much the perfect piece of clothing.

NB: Numbers 5, 4, and 2 come to me courtesy of Ms. June Davids, who keeps my collection fresh and stylish and whose trips to the local swap meet allow me to discard, with a sniffle and a tear, the rankest of my old shirts.

Slaughter

Readers, let me tell you about where my parents live. They sold my childhood home in favor of a nice place on a pretty nice sized piece of land in the country. There's a bunch of woods, and, by the house, a small man-made pond. One of my favorite pastimes when I go home is to walk around the pond and giggle as little frogs jump into the water a few feet in front of me -- all the way around. Well, not this year.

judygray1947: Bad thing happened here
Jeff Gray: what?
judygray1947: We accidentally poisoned all the tadpoles in our pond
Jeff Gray: oh
Jeff Gray: fertilizer?
Jeff Gray: mom
judygray1947: Treated pond with copper sulfate
Jeff Gray: too much?
judygray1947: like always
Jeff Gray: you killed them all?
Jeff Gray: will they come back?
judygray1947: Helps keep algae down
judygray1947: Eventually they'll come back
Jeff Gray: they better
judygray1947: Plenty of frogs around elsewhere
Jeff Gray: so there are a lot of dead tadpoles?
judygray1947: Also, I don't think we killed all the adult frogs
Jeff Gray: well not yet
judygray1947: Literally tens or hundreds of thousands
judygray1947: Awful
Jeff Gray: mom
judygray1947: I spent 3 hours yesterday bagging them up
judygray1947: Many more
Jeff Gray: that's horrible
judygray1947: I think we treated the pond earlier than in prior years
judygray1947: This copper sulfate is a standard thing for ponds
judygray1947: Yes horrible
judygray1947: Much guilt

Inanity

Readers, let me tell you, there's a lot of dumb stuff out there on the web. This page now betrays that it knows where the computer you're using is located.

Also inane is this "Reader,..." theme. I thought it was cute (since there are no readers) but I sure am tired of it already. We'll stick with it, until we hear from the masses. But wait. There aren't any...

And to cap off our inane trio for the evening is a reminder that even in England, dubbed "just like the US but more inconvenient" by, well, me, is a reminder that everything here isn't just like like back home. I've lost touch with just how ridiculous the good ole USA can be.

I've gotten no hint of this kind of misguided patriotic nonsense here, and other than the Tim Robbins-Baseball Hall of Fame stupidity and some sporadic Dixie Chicks jokes, hadn't heard much about jingoism at home, either. Wait, I guess I have heard about a fair amount. Americans are frustrating. I hope someone stages a mustard-burning.

55 Most Wanted

Readers, let me tell you, I get twenty-five e-mails per day about the Iraqi Most Wanted Playing Card set. I almost want to buy it.

You Shook Me All Night Long, or At Least for a Couple of Hours

Massive Attack, 18/4/03, Brixton Academy, London

Readers, let me tell you, the dance floor at Brixton slopes down towards the stage. It's great because all the tiny little women in the audience had a much better chance of seeing the stage, and I bet it made the job of cleaning up just that much easier -- throughout the show, sticky, crushed plastic beer cups kept slipping under my feet as gravity pulled them inexorably downwards towards what must have been a sea of sticky crushed plastic beer cups at the foot of the stage -- and I bet the janitorial staff could pretty much ignore the rest of the floor after the show. The ambience at Brixton was further enhanced by two dozen cute girls in lime green vests collecting change for the the Red Cross Disaster Fund. I made the obvious joke, that I was against disaster, and someone had the good grace to chuckle.

We stood on the slanted floor, and the inevitable aisle of open space formed behind me anyway (Readers, I'm six-foot-five). The bass hit hard. The bass player was an enormous black man, remniscent from our vantage of the magic giant well-intentioned felon in The Green Mile. He could have killed us had he played any slap bass or hit a note hard, but he understood the power humming at his fingertips and stuck to gentle picking. The gentle picking still made the whole place shake and forced my heart to beat in time.

They trotted out a whole array of singers. The worst one seemed to be the main one, a little dude in black with hair gelled into a mohawk who moaned into a distortion box. The best was a tall, muscular man with dreads, also all in black, who sang reggae grooves. The sexiest was a blonde woman, and she was sexiest in silhouette. She was swaying to the beat, she had sparkly tassles hanging off the arms of her shirt, and the music was powerful and it was great to watch her move in the white light and the blue light. She wasn't naked, not close, and there was nothing overt, but it was exciting to see her up there with all of this force radiating out from behind her. The music didn't have enough pace, and it lacked the groove of the Beasties and the soar of Radiohead or Moby at his best, before we all heard those songs too many times, but it had enough groove and enough soar to make sure that all that power kept you up and didn't overwhelm you. A few of the baselines sped up and made it impossible not to dance, and they should have explored those more.

The huge screen behind the band made the show. It was a scoreboard, though the pixels were smaller and had more colors than "on" and "off". It showed data -- the date and time, ones and zeroes, letters and numbers, and growing in complexity as the show went on to news tickers, NAV updates, airline schedules, and real-time worldwide statistics on consumption, death, and the movement of the earth. Every piece of data would show up, flesh out, and then get consumed by static. The best was a point in the third song where scrolling streams of ones and zeroes coalesced into a flower blooming, and the ones and zeroes themselves coalesced into larger A's, C's, T's, and G's. The nucleotides made up the shape and outline of the blossom, and pulsed and seethed and scrolled along it even as it wilted into a man running and the bass pounded and the synthesizer synthesized and we danced.

Why not?

Readers, let me tell you. I was in the shower, on Easter, in England. The intermittent, shower-borne desire to write something hit again, even if it neglected to bring with it any ideas. It did say "write what you know." We'll get to that in a minute.

Half of the little holes in the showerhead that spew water are clogged up with gunk, and there doesn't seem to be any way to open them up. I'm fairly certain that wasn't helping anything.

I may be too much of a revisionist writer to publish anything here. I have never been able to write anything without thoroughly altering every single phrase eighteen times. That, and I'm the world's worst typist. I suppose the true test will be if I ever post here again, though I think I might. I can't foresee any reason why anyone except for me would ever want to read any garbage that might get posted here, but it seems like a tremendous format for story fragments, or travelogues, or music reviews, or fantasy baseball strategies or anything else self-indlugent in my head.