Letters From The Front
When we last left my sisters, Alice and Kathy, they were headed for Belize and their first exciting Zip-line experience. Since we believe in continuity around here and since we didn’t want to leave you hanging, as it were, in the balance, here is a dispatch from Alice.
Kathy and I went on the Zip-line. Kathy was not thrilled about this but she did it. She said never again. I liked it, but, unfortunately, we both had a hard time stopping and managed to crash into a few Belizean guys who were the catchers for people like us who couldn’t stop. We zipped 5 lines and then went cave tubing. Kathy liked the cave tubing much better.
Hey Alice—don’t we think about the stopping part when we sign up for the trip?
The Zip-lines do have brakes, but you have to place your hand on the line and if you have it on there too heavy it just about rips your arm off. If you brake too soon, you have to pull yourself in, hand over hand. It was easier to crash. They told us not to worry—if we had a problem stopping they would catch us. And they did. You have to pick your feet up or you will hurt yourself, but they make sure to yell at you to pick your feet up. It was fun.
Well, fun for you, Alice, but what about the poor “catchers.” Not to be critical—and giving full credit to Alice for significant weight loss over the past few years—but the sisters are not exactly…um, ballerinas. It’s not like catching a small loaf of bread that someone has tossed up to your balcony. We were wondering about the possibility of serious injuries in the world of Zip-line catchers. Are Belizean men very large, like, say, Samoans? Do they undergo a rigorous course of being slammed into by giant practice people? Do they have to alternate turns with their co-workers where very large Zip-liners are concerned?
“I took that last buffalo, Antoine, it’s your turn this time.”
“Oh please, Zealand—you are so much bigger than me and this one is a real hippopotamus!”
“Alright, alright—but when this is over, I’m expecting a free meal of split peas and pigtail.”
“No problem, mon….”
Since Alice seemed to be having so much fun, we meandered on over to the Ocala Zip-line operation the other day to check it out. As soon as I got out of the car, a large young man covered with what looked like mountain-climbing gear approached me.
“Are we zipping today,” he asked.
“We’re zipping into the office to get some information,” I told him. The office people told me they take people out every half-hour and to book early for weekends. I had no idea this stuff was so popular. But what’s going to happen to the poor Zip-line man when everybody in Marion County who is interested has concluded his Zip-line experience? How many repeaters will there be for $89? It isn’t like we have a constant tourist influx around here like they do in Belize. I don’t know about you but I’m thinking of investing elsewhere.
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
Well, our readership in the United Kingdom dropped from 42 to 4 this week, but some of the slack was taken up by a new group of 17 Russians, giving us back-to-back weeks of record numbers. By now, we know better than to hope that any of these people will ever contact us, but maybe someday we’ll get a Moscow surprise. Oh, and not to brag, but we somehow drew in our first true believer from the United Arab Emirates. Haven’t heard from anybody in Somalia yet but they’re all so busy with the street fighting, you know. In the U.S, readership is spread around pretty evenly except for Florida, where we rock. We’re a little disappointed to report, however, that we have never received a single hit from either North or South Dakota. We’re attributing it to a glut of Republicans.
King Of The Road
As everybody is certain to remember, Cosmic Crown ran at Gulfstream last Friday. Our feedperson was busy—she had a horse in at Tampa—so Siobhan stayed home to manage the farm and I drove to Miami myself. And then I drove back by myself, a nice round-trip of about 10 hours, broken up by 3 hours of race track. My friends react like such a trip is an impossible nightmare but it is not exactly like Hercules taking on the Erymanthean Boar. On the way down, you have the race to look forward to. The morning is sunny and warm. And you know that soon you’ll be stopping at one of the wonderful Florida Turnpike islands to visit your friendly Dunkin’ Donuts store. Uh oh.
It’s February, right? Kids still go to school in February, don’t they? Well then, how can there be five hundred thousand of them in the Dunkin’ Donuts store? Oh, I forgot—everybody is home-schooled these days. That’s why all the modern-day children are so smart.
“Okay, Freddie—what’s the capitol of Vermont?”
“I know! It’s Helena!”
“No, that would be Montpelier. How about South Dakota?”
“It’s Helena this time for sure!”
“No, Freddie, it’s Pierre. One more try—what’s the capitol of Montana?”
“Oh, I know that one, guaranteed. It’s Toad Suck Ferry, right?”
No place is so crammed with true Americana as these food and gas islands, where legions of rat-faced little brats are dragged around by one arm like damaged teddy bears by obese parents decked out in sophisticated t-shirts (‘I swam the Bay of Fundy’….’Visit beautiful Newark’….’My other wife is a supermodel’). And don’t get me started on the bathrooms in these places, which despite the best efforts of a put-upon crew of moppers and flushers, would make the Augean Stables look like a Swiss spa.
Getting back to Dunkin’ Donuts for a minute, is it just me or have these places suddenly quintupled? One minute there are a couple of them in Boston, next minute they’re taking over the world. And the amazing thing about Dunkin's is they don’t even need their own buildings, you can fit one in anywhere. Got a couple of feet in the back of your 7-11? Plenty of room for a Dunkin’ Donuts. Extra bay available in that old gas station? We’ve got a new tenant for you. Pretty soon, you’ll get out there to your garage and find a Dunkin’s snuggled into the back seat of your SUV.
After this day-brightening experience, it’s back on the road to Gulfstream Park in Hallandale. The entire state of Florida is bathed in sunshine this day, except, of course, for Hallandale, where it’s chilly and pouring. The first two races went off without a hitch but, after that, monsoons. The Gulfstream people sealed the track to keep the water out as best they could but this is not exactly the type of surface you want for your filly who has not run since December 23rd. Nonetheless, Cosmic Crown took the lead, opened up a couple of lengths and held on until the eighth pole, where she was joined by the favorite. They duked it out down the stretch, the favorite opening up almost a length, Cosmic Crown coming within a half-neck just before the wire, eventually losing by a half-length, though finishing second in a game performance. She now has one win and three seconds in five starts for $28,000. I think we’ll keep her.
Irana, of course, showed up for the race, as she usually does and we appreciate her participation. We must say, however, that we are getting a little suspicious of Irana’s fantastic Frank Merriwell finishes in her Scrabble games with Siobhan. Irana loudly denies accusations of skullduggery but we don’t know anybody else who keeps getting 43 points on the last move.
The Dark And Lonely Road
If you’re ever planning on leaving Miami on a Friday afternoon, you’d damnsure better get out of there early. The roads clog up like a donut eater’s arteries well before five and it takes hours to get anywhere. Even leaving Gulfstream before four, Hallandale Beach Boulevard, the main east-to-west artery in the area, was impossible. I took side streets as far as I could before getting back on it to pick up I-95. Irana called. “You’d better just stay at the racetrack, traffic is horrible.”
“NOW you tell me.” I told her to take the back streets but she was already further along than me.
“And I’m not cheating at Scrabble,” she hollered. Methinks she doth protest too much.
I originally intended to stop a couple hours north of Miami, unable to stay overnight because of an early Florida-Vanderbilt basketball game, but the adrenaline rush from the race propelled me all the way back. A few years ago, Siobhan programmed about 1000 songs into my I-Pod so that makes a nice companion for the trip. I have almost NO music on there that was created after 1980 and I’m perfectly happy about it, too. Oh, I tried to be a contemporary guy. I actually went out and bought an album by Beck when I read it was the best one of several years ago. It was impossible to get more than halfway through. It’s a little bothersome to think we’re turning into our parents when it comes to musical prejudice but I guess that’s the way it goes. I’ll still bet anything OUR stuff outlives the current stuff. Hell, some of it is already 50 years old and still being played. I don’t hear anybody playing The Funky Cold Medina and that was one of their good ones.
The Scrabble Wars
Siobhan, who doesn’t get out much, has taken to playing long-distance Scrabble against a shady cast of characters. You remember Scrabble. The whole family would gather around the living-room table and choose their seven inverted Scrabble tiles and plop them up on their personal shelves and the game was on. There was always a reasonable agreed-upon time limit on moves. If a dubious word was contested and found wanting, the submitter of such word forfeited a turn and the infidel word was disqualified. Noah Webster had the last word. Nobody was allowed to look up a word in advance. The person with the best vocabulary, given any kind of luck at all in awarding of letters, had the best chance to win. Well, hold on, Lucy—it ain’t your grandma’s Scrabble any more.
NOW, a Scrabble game can take days. It’s as bad as chess, for crying out loud. Do you remember when Paladin would leave town in quest of another bounty, stopping at the old sodbuster’s shack and making a move on the everpresent chessboard? Then, days later, on returning home he would stop in again for another move? Well, that’s modern-day Scrabble. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the patience. Oh, every so often, Siobhan will come up to me and say, “I need a word,” and I will offer something like “exurb,” which her brother, Stuart, will incorrectly insist was derived by criminal means. But, for the most part, it’s WAY too drawn out for me. I am not surprised, however, at Stuart’s paranoia, because the current Scrabble game provides incredible opportunities for underhanded tactics.
First, the electronic board, itself, features a dictionary which allows words like “qi” and “ne” and other phony-baloney likenesses, which no self-respecting lover of the English language would consider an actual word. Then, of course, it being the era where anything is available via the computer, there are sites like “Scrabble Cheat.” which provide the player with every possible combination of letters that can be used in a given situation. There is even a website that will accept a photo of the board and your available letters and tell you what to do. If one person uses these maneuvers and the other doesn’t, the former will almost assuredly win. If BOTH use them, well, it’s really the machine playing the machine, isn’t it? It’s a little depressing. Who says newer is better?
That’s all, folks….
