Letter to the NHL
Cancel the season, yes, but give us a single-elimination tournament, you toothless geeks. Add one independent team to your fractured 31 for a smooth 32 field. (32 teams? 32 teeth?) If you're feeling game, make the final a 7-game series; but, really, I like the drama of all 32 teams having a game-by-game, do-or-die crawl for the cup. No laser highlight needed on the televised puck.
-cK (nee PucK)
Bookworms
The OCLC has released its list of the top 1000 volumes held by its member libraries. (The caveat is on "purchase votes" or something like that. Perhaps that disqualifies acquisitions such as new potboilers, which a library might not keep on the shelf beyond the book's limited public life.) The list of intellectual works is culturally intriguing. Following the initial run of the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Mother Goose, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and other heavyweights, number 18 registers like a wet fart: Garfield. Following America's favorite lasagna-eating cat, we promptly revert to more Shakespeare, Jonathon Swift, Chaucer, etc.
http://www.oclc.org/research/top1000/complete.htm
Allan Bloom--who produced an excellent translation of Plato's Republic--eked out number 1000 with his critical look at American universities and students: The Closing of the American Mind.
I don't find Garfield's presence among literary luminaries to be troubling; just funny. Much funnier, in fact, than Garfield, which I think I realized wasn't funny around the age of 11. With hormones goes humor. Read as you will.
-cK
Note to Peter King, sportswriter
Dear Pete,
Enough with your hysterics on the Terrell Owens / Nicolette Sheridan towel-drop incident. Does it escape you that you work for SI? Which markets its swimsuit issue to kids? I had my first SI subscription at age 11. The swimsuit issue was a big part of that, pal. And you know that.
Today, in fact, there are two banner ads supporting your column, fucker: they feature SI model Melissa Keller. SI--or is it Ms. Keller?--ask, "Don't you miss summer?" I'm sure she's referring to baseball.
Dude: Shelve your Nipplegate rage. You've been shitting your pants about this for two weeks. Jesus. The towel drop promo was in bad taste--the same bad taste that Pete Coors markets at all hours on the tube--but worth two weeks of loin-fearing invective? Stick with your sports writing, but avoid the half-baked social commentary...esp. when (a) your name is PETER KING (Hello! Vivid Video?), and (b) your work is propped up by the aforementioned banner ads. (Don't you have ad reps to sell that space?) You might also stop picking games. Am I remembering correctly? Did you pick Chicago over Indy? Are you addicted to pain killers?
-cK
Compulsory Service: Orff
Whether this is at all responsible for my life as a nerd, I’m not sure, but “now, more than ever” I think it played a role:
For a month or two in fifth grade, students were compelled to serve in a musical regiment known as Orff. The name was not an acronym; rather, it was a nod to the composer Karl Orff. Those with a far better classical composition background can tell you about Orff. I know he composed Carmina Burana, the “Fortuna” portions of which are often used in film trailers to splice together dramatic, zooming images of actors in awe, demon heads emerging from the darkness, white gowns in wind and exhausted heads lolling to muscular shoulders. That’s pretty much where my knowledge of his work ends. Now, about my own private Orff and the echoes thereafter:
We were let out of class about ten minutes early to attend Orff practice, two or three times a week. The session held us five minutes into the lunch hour.
Orff practice involved each student—roughly 20 of us—learning scores on glockenspiel. I don’t believe Karl Orff geeked out on the glockenspiel, but we had something like 30 of them and one triangle in the music room. I don’t think we even played any Orff. I recall “Rock Candy Mountain” as one of the pieces. (I also recall the instructor, Barbara Wardwell, asking if we understood the meaning of the song. Crickets. A dog barks in the distance. Horrified that no one, NO ONE – You rejects! – seemed to get it, I raised my hand. I said, barely able to contain my incredulity with the ignorance of my friends, “It’s about CANDY.” We then were held to a lecture about something called The Great Depression.) By the end of one’s Orff tour, even a prideful, hasty-lipped idiot would have learned a few parts to a longer piece than we were normally taught in music classes, and perhaps even a full individual piece that the Orffers then played in a maniacal round.
The upside of Orff was getting out of class early and the idle, unmonitored walk to the music room. (Simple pleasures.) The downside was arriving at lunch five minutes late.
The lunchroom was located just below the music room. A long straight stairway emptied out on the far side of the cafeteria, and as we descended those stairs, our voices and footfalls echoed on the painted concrete blocks. The orange-framed doors (with chicken-wire-patterned safety glass) at the bottom were open, and we could hear the din of our 400 peers at their tables. And they could hear us.
Maybe it was pizza day, maybe it was the coveted hot ham and cheese day. Or maybe it was just the need to catch up with the rest of the school, to get our lunches and wolf them down—very much like boot camp—so we could get outside with everyone on time. Regardless, we were in a rush. The sound of the Orff students thundering down the stairwell swelled in the lunchroom with the chaotic clip of a gym of dribbled basketballs. The din of the lunchroom picked up, as we all anticipated the inevitable.
As the first student crested into view, our fate was sealed. We had to take the long walk to the lunch line, while around us 400 students paused with fork and knife, or drinkbox and a sandwich with a thumb-squish. They chanted “Orff! Orff! Orff! Orff!” until the last of us had made it across the room.
-cK
