A Life Well Lived

Dominic Imprescia was not my first thoroughbred trainer. That distinction would go to Bob Dubois, who I selected after much letter-writing, phone-calling and statistics-searching. Bob lasted a little over a year, during which I won my first race at Arlington Park in Illinois with my first foal, Star Spectre. A powerful, distance-preferring son of Star Envoy nominated to the Florida Derby, Star Spectre returned to Florida and promptly bowed a tendon in his first race back at Calder. It was nobody’s fault, but my then-wife, Harolyn, preferred that we move on and I didn’t argue. She was riding mornings at Another Episode Farm in Ocala and the owner, Tony Everard, sent a ton of horses to Dominic so we went down to Calder to meet him. In addition to being a pretty good horseman, Dominic was quite the charmer and we decided to send our future runners to him.

The first two we sent were Nightqueen and Deadly Nightshade. Dominic called as soon as they arrived and we discussed what they had been doing in Ocala and what we expected of them. Dominic laid out the training plan for the next month and closed with his signature line:

“Don’t worry about nuthin’.”

I would get that reassurance many times in future years as we raced horses from Calder to Suffolk Downs in Boston and Rockingham in Salem, N.H. We had big successes with Thundering Heart, Mito’s Touch and Black Limousine and big disappointments with plenty of others, but we always had fun. Unlike many trainers who would prefer their owners be seen and not heard, Dominic tolerated input and participation. “I’ll tell you what you should do,” he always said, “but you pay the bills so you decide.” What Dominic thought we should do was usually right so we deferred to him more often than not. When we overrode his inclinations and were exposed in defeat, he just smiled.

“Don’t worry about nuthin,” he would say.

Training hours at Dominic’s barn on Saturdays were a hoot. Saturday is the day most of the owners show up to check in on their horses and watch them work. So there was Dominic, who started out as a used-car dealer in Fitchburg, Mass. before taking over the training of his own—and eventually other people’s—horses, parading down the shedrow like a mother duck with a following of wealthy baby ducks in tow.

Working horses, Dominic had the best watch of anyone I ever saw. If a horse worked in 36 and 2, Dominic didn’t call it 36 flat. In those days, the Daily Racing Form had clockers at most race tracks in the morning to record the work times for their readers. At Calder, there was a guy named Thunder (I assume he got the name from bellowing the work times down from above to inquiring trainers), who was unerringly accurate. Dominic would call up to Thunder to get the time and Thunder would report back, upon which Dominic would extend his arm for all to examine the watch. They were always in agreement. It was like a magic act.


Timely Writer

Dominic ran a horse in the Kentucky Derby once. His name was Dr. Renzi (after his owner) and he finished seventh, I believe. He got another chance with Timely Writer, a powerful colt owned by the Martin brothers of New England, sent down to him by Tony Everard. Timely Writer won the Flamingo at Hialeah and the Florida Derby at Gulfstream (Dominic purchased a salmon-colored suit for the former and a somewhat purplish number for the latter. I know you don’t think it’s possible, but they both looked pretty good). He basked in the glow of national television after the two races and looked forward to the big race with a horse likely to be morning-line favorite.

I asked him where he was staying in Louisville.

“Louisville?” he exclaimed, eyebrows arching. “Last time I was in the Derby, I hadda stay in Indiana!”

“Don’t worry about nuthin’,” I told him. I got hold of Churchill Downs publicity and an incredible liaison girl named Claudia Starr. Churchill had rooms blocked off for Derby principals in the prestigious Galt House and we booked Dominic and his wife, Ethel, there. He couldn’t believe it. “How’d you do that?” he asked, in wonder. “Telephone, Dom. You’re a big deal now. They take good care of you when you have a horse in the Derby.”

Alas, however, ‘twas not to be. Timely Writer coliced while at Churchill a week before the race and required surgery in Lexington. It was a great disappointment and a greater one ensued. Following a break to recover from the surgery, Timely Writer returned successfully to the races and entered the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park as the favorite. To the horror of everyone watching, he broke his left front cannon bone in the race, triggering a three-horse pile-up, and was euthanized on the track with his head in the hands and lap of Dominic, Jr., his groom. An experience to test the toughest of men. It took quite a while for Dominic to come back from this one, but Time eventually assuaged the wounds and his good spirits found their inevitable way back.


Bill’s Salad Days. Not.

Dominic was not a sophisticated money man, but he had plenty of friends who were. He parlayed some good stock market tips into an impressive portfolio. He bought South Florida condos when they were a good investment. He sold horses for tidy profits and won a bunch of money on the track. Nobody ever thought of him as a rich guy, but he was wealthier than most. I got in a jam one day during my Dark Ages and put a horse in an OBS two-year-old sale in Ocala. When she didn’t bring a decent price, I bid her in even though I didn’t have the 30-day credit requirement with OBS to do this. Naturally, the sales company threw a fit. I called Dominic and laid out the problem.

“Don’t worry about nuthin’,” he said. “Tell them to put it on my account. They can call me.” I didn’t own the horse anymore, but at least she was going to Dominic, who would race her in Florida and give me, as breeder, the opportunity to reap some breeder awards if she won. Which she did, of course, Dominic’s luck being what it was—in cases other than that of Timely Writer.

On another occasion, I had built up a large training bill to Dominic and probably would have been fired by most other trainers. He never said anything about it. One day, two of my horses, Mito’s Touch and Black Limousine, won on the same card at Calder, wiping out the entire bill.

“I thought I might never see that money,” Dominic said.

“Don’t worry about nuthin’,” I told him.


Sainthood Not Bestowed

I don’t mean to give the impression here that Dominic was a saint. Nobody would accuse him of that. He was suspended a couple of times, once for having a needle in his shedrow in New Jersey. He was out a year. He combated this by hiring a trainer named Aurelio (Joe) Perez to handle his horses, while he sat up in the restaurant in the Holiday Inn overlooking the track. At the end of the mornings’ training sessions, Joe would troop over to the Holiday Inn and they would discuss the day’s events. In the afternoon, Dominic would return for the races. This was all perfectly fine with the restaurant as Dominic was a prodigious tipper whom everybody was always glad to see coming.

One morning at Calder, Dominic asked me when I was checking out of my room. I told him it would be around eleven, I had some things to do before the races. He told me not to check out, just leave the room open and he would check out for me later. Dominic never let advancing age get in the way of a good tryst, but I felt a little uncomfortable with this, having also spent time at his home with his wife of many decades, Ethel, an absolute rock of support for Dominic. When I foolishly wondered why all this was necessary, Dominic provided me with one of the classic married-man lines of all time:

“Ah,” he said, “I don’t want to bother Ethel.”


The Latter Days

Dominic always talked about “collecting Social Security,” by which he meant retiring, though most of us doubted it would ever happen. Nonetheless, one day he decided it was time and he turned the horses over to his long-time assistant, Oliver (Buddy) Edwards, a bright, articulate New Englander, but a horse-trainer in spite of the fact. Dominic couldn’t stay home, though, and Buddy would roll his eyes whenever Dom would show up and saunter down the shedrow making “suggestions.” Things eventually came to a boil when Dominic and a couple of partners acquired a horse named Jackie Wackie, who turned out to be a multiple stakes-winner, and Dominic, in practice if not in program, pretty much began training him. This eventually led to a separation between the two and no lack of bad feelings, which took years to cure. They were on better terms several years ago when Buddy unexpectedly passed away at an all-too-young age. “I’ll really miss that kid,” Dom told me. With Dominic, anybody was a kid if he was under eighty.

Dominic drove his car up to his 92nd year, even if it was just to the betting parlor half-a-mile down the road. He always had the biggest Cadillac he could find, and gave up driving grudgingly. He continued coming to the track when he had a horse in or when friends from out of town showed up for the day. The last time I saw him, he was shaky, advancing to his seat with the help of his daughter and Dom, Jr., but he was still his usual charismatic, glass-half-full self, drawing in many well-wishers and admirers who saw him rarely anymore.

Dominic Imprescia, 93, made it to Kentucky Derby day, 2011, went to bed that night and passed away quietly in his sleep. For the last couple of years, Dom, Jr., long perceived as a ne’er-do-well unworthy of the throne, has lived with him and taken care of his needs, however intimate, dispelling any need for nursing homes or outside help. Dominic’s long list of friends are grateful to Junior and maybe a little proud of him. And so was Dominic. Junior told me on the phone the other day that Dom had said to him, “I knew I hadja for some reason.”

Some day soon, Dom’s ashes will be spread at the Calder finish line, near the Winner’s Circle. And whoever is in charge of assigning rank and residence to those no longer living, will unroll the scroll, peer down the record of a life and smile.

“Don’t worry about nuthin’,” he will say.


Training Report

Elf went 24.3, out in 39 flat in her first real work. She gets her final pre-Calder work Saturday and we’re looking for her to knock a second off both times. Juno covered her first two-minute lick in 28 flat. Wilson, in a short break from eating carrots, gets his first 2ML Saturday.


Million Dollar Yard Sale

Siobhan’s really making progress with her EPM drugs. She’s produced a treatment drug which will be on the market not long after you read this. And she just about has a vaccine ready. She told me the other day that all the accoutrements of vaccine production—patent attorneys, field studies, etc.—cost money, so we would have to dredge some up. “How much?” I asked her. “A LOT!” she said. “We might need venture capitalists.”

I always thought venture capitalists were those guys who gave you a big bag of money and took half your company. Siobhan says that’s right. I suggested alternate fund-raising:

“Lemonade stand?”

“Not enough traffic on our street.”

“Yard Sale?”

“See answer number one.”

“How about a car wash? Bake sale? Cookies!”

“Cookies might be good.”

Okay, then. We need all of our friends to commit to buying six thousand boxes of cookies each as soon as possible. This is when you find out who your friends really are.


A Little Learning Can Be Dangerous

Larry, our Fedex man, comes here so often with blood samples for Siobhan he’s like a member of the family. He and Siobhan even share gardening tips and Larry religiously reads his blog every Thursday. He told me the other day that he had learned so much about horses over the last few months that he finds himself getting quietly critical of his many horse-farm customers’ habits.

“Every time a see a long line of buckets on a fence, I want to knock on the door and say, ‘Do you realize you’re inviting serious consequences with these slipshod horse-management practices,’’ he says. But, liking his job, he wisely remains silent. You know, Larry, there’s always the Anonymous Note.


Return Of The Conspiracy Loons

Well, they no longer had Osama bin Laden knocked off, wrapped in gauze and dumped in the ocean when the conspiracy theorists were screaming for photographic proof positive.

“Well, my Uncle Eddie runs a General Tso’s Chicken franchise in Abbottabad and HE didn’t see any Navy Seal raid,” one of them says. “Couldn’t they at least have sawed off a finger?”

“It’s just like the Moon Landing,” squeals another. “Didn’t really happen.”

“Yeah, and what about the mysterious guy on the grassy knoll?”

Of course, much of this doubt could have been alleviated if the governments of old hadn’t lied to us about the whole flying saucer fiasco. Chickens coming home to roost and all.


Out With The Old, In With The Old

Having lost one 93-year-old friend, we felt it imperative to find another. Luckily, 93-year-old Norm from the gym invited us to his dinner party this Sunday afternoon. Siobhan was concerned about what she should wear.

“I don’t want to be all dressed up if everybody else is wearing bathing suits!” she complained.

I reminded her that Norm is 93. And many of his friends are likely to be, well, old. And maybe not wearing bathing suits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And if they are, well, maybe it will be a short visit, anyway.


That’s all, folks…..

My Old Kentucky Home (You want to follow along, don’t you?)

The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
Tis summer, the darkies are gay
The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in bloom
While the birds make music all the day
The young folks roll on the little cabin floor
All merry, all happy and bright
By ‘n’ by hard times come a-knocking at the door
Then my old Kentucky home good night.

Weep no more, my lady
Oh, weep no more, today
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home
For the old Kentucky home far away.



When the horses parade onto the Churchill Downs track to the strains of My Old Kentucky Home for the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby this Saturday, nobody will have a clue as to what is about to happen. Never in memory has there been a Derby so wide open, so devoid of a convincing favorite or even a couple of favorites. Of the twenty horses in the race, it’s probably fair to say that only a half-dozen or so can’t win—after that, it’s anybody’s ballgame. Unlike most years, several of the horses in this year’s race are Florida-breds and a large number of entries were broken and received their early training and/or raced here. Horses coming off the winter meet at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale have performed well in the Derby the last few years so we’ll see if the trend continues. We don’t have a dog in this hunt so, as usual, we’ll root for some little guy to poke his head into the picture and win his 15 hours of fame. And hold our breaths that everybody comes back in one piece.


Down On The Farm

Elf had her first real work the other day, going 24.3 for the quarter, out in 39 flat. She comes back for a final work a week from Saturday and then it’s off to Miami. Juno has her first two-minute-lick this Saturday morning. Wilson has asked when it’s his turn and we told him it won’t be long. We forgot to bring his carrots the other day and he was very offended. “I just can’t understand the incompetence,” he told the other horses. We were very embarrassed.

Wanda coliced last night, an event that never ceases to generate a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach. Every horse owner has lost one or more to colic over the years and has endured long and arduous battles, occasionally degenerating into abdominal surgeries which often end badly. Most of the time, a simple banamine shot from the owner or his vet dissipates the colic spasms and everything turns out fine, but when that first shot doesn’t work or produces results for only a short time, you know you’re in for a grim few hours….or worse.

Colic has many causes. Horses can get sand colic from ingesting too much dirt, which is one reason not to feed them from buckets hanging along a fenceline. They spill grain onto the ground, then eat it—along with the surrounding sand. Most of the time, this causes no problems but occasionally, particularly on farms with little grass which do not feed much hay, the result will be sand colic. The latter can be determined by examining the feces of the horse in question, especially by inserting it into a long plastic glove, adding water and holding the glove up with fingers down. The sand will sink into the fingers, often filling them up and extending above the finger level, an obvious illustration that the horse is full of sand. Most horses with reasonable degrees of sand colic can be treated and, if managed better in the future, returned to health.

Other colics derive from feeding issues or lack of a good deworming program. Horses are creatures of habit. It doesn’t make any difference what times you decide to feed them but when you have chosen a schedule it should be adhered to religiously. Also, changes in types of feed and amounts increased or subtracted should be adjusted gradually. Again, most of the time, horses will adjust to bad feeding practices with no bad result…but these practices invite colic.

You have probably driven by pastures with those round bales of hay left out for horses so eat, free-choice. By allowing horses to eat all the hay they want, you are inviting impaction, during which a horse’s intestinal tract becomes blocked and cannot pass manure. These situations produce some of the longest, most drawn-out sieges of colic, as horses suffer through days of oiling, excessive walking, drugs and general misery until they either achieve relief or death. Horse farmers like to buy these round bales because they are less expensive and we use them, too. But we do not make our hay available free-choice—we keep it in an enclosure and peel off a specific amount for each feeding. The absolute worst use of round bales involves leaving them in the pasture until they are used up and then waiting a few days to replace them, inviting the horses to gorge on the new bale after having no hay for an extended period of time. This is just asking for trouble.

Wanda’s problem may have originated from ingesting straw which was used as bedding in her stall after she foaled and was brought up at night. Most mares will not eat straw, but Wanda, if she is hungry (which is always), will eat rocks. She is out at night now and there is no more straw, so hopefully the problem will not recur. She seems okay this morning and grouchy as usual. Hannah says hi.


And Now, Let’s Have a Long Round Of Applause For….

MARTY JOURARD!

Long embarrassed by his prodigious girth, Marty recently embarked upon a severe regimen of modest exercise (reading) and discomforting bulimic restriction (eschewing, at least, the equally dangerous gastric bypass), dropping a phenomenal amount of weight in what seems like no time. As a reward for this impressive success, he would now like to be called “Marty The Thin.” It’s the least we can do.


Motoring In Florida—The Northern Provinces

I escaped my annual visit to Jacksonville this year when I missed my first Florida-Georgia football game in 20 years, but The Fates were not going to let me get away that easily. Stuart Bentler, previously trapped in the Coney Island Memorial Hospital in Broward County, was finally diagnosed—for the second time—with amyloidosis and shipped to the Mayo Clinic just outside Jacksonville. Unlike the South Florida hospital, the Mayo Clinic insists their personnel attend Doctor School someplace other than Ulan Bator and be able to write with an implement superior to crayon.

Siobhan and I made the trip in a bulky 2 ½ hours, taking the scenic route through the dubious municipalities of Citra, Hawthorne, Waldo, Starke, Middleburg and Orange Park. From a mileage standpoint, this was the shortest route. From a waiting-at-stoplights standpoint, not so much.

Waldo, north of Gainesville, has long had a reputation as a speed trap. The American Automobile Association felt so strongly about Waldo—and another town just down the road named Lawtey—that they bought billboard space just outside these little hamlets advising drivers what they were getting into, the only two places in America to earn this distinction. There used to be a third little town in north Florida which was equally nefarious, but one fine day a carload of state legislators, travelling from the Jacksonville airport toward Tallahassee, was detained and ticketed by some Gooberville Police Force. Whereupon, immediately after arriving in Tallahassee, they marched into the State Capitol and revoked the offending town’s charter, causing it to cease to exist. That sure was a good joke on them.

Anyway, I never had any unpleasant experiences in Waldo. Maybe that was just because the Police Chief, A.W. Smith, was a pretty good friend of mine, but I like to think it was because I’m a law-abiding citizen. Waldo doesn’t really pull any of those clever speed-trap tricks like reducing the speed limit from 50 to 25 in the space of one block, it just seems to be the kind of town people like to speed through. And the fact they have five hundred cops sitting there over a one-mile area waiting for this to happen pretty much insures they’re going to pluck off an offender every now and then. It doesn’t mean they’re bad guys.

I’m not sticking up for Lawtey, though. When you look up “speed trap” in the phone book, there’s a picture of Lawtey. What? Oh. Well, there would be a picture of Lawtey if they put pictures in the phone book. We’re just trying to use a little poetic license here.

Anyway, getting back to Jacksonville (if we must), one day the guys who run the place decided they wanted to be the biggest city in the country—in land area, at least—so they annexed the rest of Duval County and made it all a part of Jacksonville. A sneaky maneuver, I’d say, and of no discernible lasting import. Jacksonville is now merely The Biggest Redneck City In The World instead of the second or third biggest. Jacksonville, and thereby all of Duval County, prides itself (themselves?) on not having one single Democrat voter in the entire city/county limits. I’m not making this up. But even if that were not the case, Jacksonville would rank right up there in the Top Ten of Cities You Do Not Want To Live In. We’re not sure why this is. I mean, the St. John’s River, very pretty, runs right through the place. And the outer extremities of the town to the east are right on the Atlantic, always a good choice when considering oceans. There’s an easy-to-get-to airport, good roads and plenty of barbeque, all important considerations. So what’s the problem?

There just seems to be a general tackiness to Jacksonville not found in nearby jewels like Amelia Island, just across the water, or Ponte Vedra, a ritzy enclave just south on the coast, or St. Augustine, a mere half-hour away. If you travel south of St. Augustine, however, there it is again! Daytona Beach, a tacky boardwalk town full of carnies spray-painting T-shirts and bikers bonking one another with bowling pins in strip joints. And, just to prove I’m fair, Daytona has long been considered a Democratic town. Both of these cities do share one commonality—police forces that will slap you upside the head and clap you in jail for an offense so meager as jaywalking. But if you had to deal with 50,000 drunken, hedonistic college kids on Spring Break, jumping off motel balconies, snorting coke in Appleby’s and pissing all over themselves in your nice police cars, you’d probably get a little cranky, too.


The Bentler Report

We know you think we’re being unnecessarily mean to the Broward General Hospital so we’re not going to say any more hateful stuff about them. After we tell you that the other day when the staff at Stuart’s new digs, the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, was trying to get the records for Stuart’s kidney biopsy stain from Broward they learned that the South Florida hospital had LOST it. WHAT? This is a HOSPITAL, right? It’s not like a kid losing her mittens. Stuart’s daughter, Katherine, has nightmares of the Broward doctors playing Can You Top This? at one of the neighborhood watering-holes:

“You think that X-Ray is something? Look at this goddam kidney biopsy stain I got from this guy yesterday. Is he a goner or what?”

The Mayo Clinic, by the way, is a very impressive place, as you might expect. A lot of marble, spacious, uncrowded areas, parking lots a two-minute walk from the main building. Stuart’s room is double the size of a room in a normal hospital and you could play basketball in his bathroom if you were the kind of person who did that sort of thing.

We do have one complaint, though. This place is out in the middle of nowhere, a few miles from the beach near Ponte Vedra, right off a good highway, but completely unmarked and unadvertised until you get a half-mile away. Would it kill somebody to put a couple of signs up so people like us don’t get off the highway one exit early and go rambling around the subdivisions? I mean, it’s the MAYO CLINIC, f’gawdsakes, give us a clue.

Stuart, by the way, is sort of on hold while the new guys try to assess the problem. They’re not taking anything the Broward doctors told them for granted, which strikes us as a wise M. O. Stuart says he is miserable, but he did ask about the Gators—probably just to be polite—and said he is looking forward to the first big road race ever in Austin in November. Austin? “They’re building a track,” said Stuart.

Well, we haven’t seen Pat Brown for awhile. Or Marilyn. Or any one of the old crowd who might remain extant in the Capitol of the Lone Star State. So, Stuart, if you’re going out there in November, so are we. We’ll meet you at Scholz Garten. It’s still there, isn’t it, Pat?


That’s all, folks….

Prologue

It’s warming up around here, 78 this morning at feeding time. The foals, Puck and Hannah, greet us at the gate each morning now, expecting their morning scratching. Hannah, the Calamity Jane of the duo, after gashing her leg the day she was born, somehow managed to bung up her right eye a few days later. In between these events, she got kicked by her mother, Wanda, who makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Theresa. Hannah is none the worse for wear.

Elf went evenly in her last two-minute-lick, getting the three-eighths in 42.2 and galloping out in 58. She’ll have her first real work next Tuesday. Juno, over her abscess woes, will two-minute-lick the following Saturday. Wilson is galloping well. Cosmic Song goes tomorrow in the 9th at Calder, a non-winners-of-a-race-other-than at six furlongs.

We bred Zip to Wanda yesterday. Considering the polar opposite dispositions of the two, if we get a baby we might have to name it Jekyll & Hyde. Dot has been bred to a stud named J Be K, who started off his stallion career in Kentucky for a $10,000 fee, got an unsatisfactory number of mares in foal, and now stands here for $3000 (or $2000 if you’re Siobhan, the Mexican bargainer).


Here Come De Jurist

Siobhan got called in for jury duty the other day. That’s what she gets for bragging about never being called. I, on the other hand, get called all the time. They always bounced me in Gainesville, certain that I’d be sympathetic to the defense since I often was the defense, but they did take me in Ocala. I was on the jury of a wife-beater. The jury foreman was Big Ron of Big Ron’s Yoga Academy, so you know this was a hell of a jury. Anyway, I was the only juror who thought the wife-beater was guilty (take that, you Gainesville States Attorneys). The wife wouldn’t testify, probably because she was terrified, but her little sister came to court and bravely told her tale. The rest of the jurors were put off by the wife’s disinclination to appear and voted the scumbag innocent. Hey, I’m used to being in an 11-1 minority. Siobhan’s trial involved the burglary of three women by a man with a knife. Sounds like you’d want to get all the females you could off that jury. Anyway, Siobhan made several new friends in her jury pool, none of whom we’ll be having over for dinner.


Happy Birthday To You

A shout out to our neighbor, Allen Morgan, who was 86 Tuesday. Allen still drives and goes to the UF softball games, where he complains about the umpires and also our right-fielder, a prodigious power hitter.

“She never gets a hit when I’m here,” he griped the other day, shortly before the girl blasted one over the trees past the outfield fence, astonishing even Allen.

“Never mind,” he squeaked, in his best Rosanne Rosannadanna voice.

We like to talk about Allen because he’s one of the few people extant who is older than Bill. He calls me a kid. You can’t find guys like that every day.


Bill’s Rant Of The Week—Trump And The Birthers

H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and that was never more true than today. Only 38% of Americans feel comfortable that Barack Obama was born in this country and Republicans, by a margin of 43% to 38%, think he was not, despite reams of newspaper columns and hours of TV newscasts proving otherwise. Think about that. Is there any hope for an electorate which can’t even decipher the simplest of questions? Maybe we should move to France with Gilbert Shelton, although that would mean we’d have to put up with Frenchmen. Anyway, now comes Donald Trump, gutterball extraordinaire, to add fuel to the fire. Realizing that the only way he can jump to the top of a sorry heap of Republican candidates, Trump has played the birther card. Yesterday, Obama provided the birth certificate evidence Trump was looking for and, instead of hightailing it back to the swamp of misinformation and prevarication he arose from, Trump announced he was “proud” he had been able to bring this issue to a close, “Nobody else has been able to do it,” he exclaimed.

Despite the sudden whirlwind of publicity, Trump has an unshakeable problem: nobody, as in nobody, really likes him. If he has any political future at all, it’s as Governor of Florida. We’ll take anybody here.


Dead Man Walking. Still.

Maybe it was the chanting. Or the demonic rites performed by our readers. Maybe, it was a simple lack of self-confidence on his part. But for some reason, the Grim Reaper has so far failed to gather in our old pal, Stuart Bentler, apparently ripe for the picking. We’re thinking of taking credit for this. Earlier, we instructed everybody out there to gather up their implements of resistance to delay the respective demises of Pat Brown and Marilyn Todd, our Texas girls afflicted with mortal wounds. Today, if not bouncing around on shiny trampolines, they are leading happy unimpaired lives. And when Stuart’s daughter, Katherine, went to visit him the other morning at the One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Memorial Hospital in Broward County, he was sitting up! And hungry, even. Stuart’s doctors, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, have finally affirmed that he does, indeed, have amyloidosis, but that’s just this week’s diagnosis. They’re quite the kidders, so next week he could have leprosy. Anyway, turns out the Mayo Clinic, a for-real hospital, has a particular affinity for amyloidosis cases so Stuart will be travelling to the clinic in Jacksonville if he can ever get a bed. So, whatever you’re doing out there, keep it up. We accept all credit cards, including witchery and satanic shenanigans. This is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Bentler.


Urban Mythology

If you were to meet my sister, Kathy Scanlan, you would think she was the nicest person in the world. Friendly, hospitable, loyal to a fault, intelligent about most things, despite being a devoted Red Sox fan. But last week she sent me a letter warning that hotel room keys contain credit card information that can be harvested by miscreants if those cards are not erased or destroyed. And I was willing to believe it, having been the victim of ID theft shortly after a visit to a questionable Miami hotel (and I am still sure my credit card info was misused there even if it was not taken from my room card).

Shortly after the column was printed, however, two of our readers/detectives, first Kathleen Knight in Gainesville and, soon after, Mary Kline in Pennsylvania, advised me that this information was inaccurate, another in a long line of Urban Myths foisted on a public in love with conspiracy theories. Since I have earlier admonished Marty Jourard to take responsibility for his lack of gustatory self-discipline, I find it necessary to do the same in this case, so I will be standing in a corner for ten minutes a day for the next week. I would like to mention that my more enlightened Sister, Alice, was wise to this tomfoolery—maybe because it apparently originated in California, where she lives—which proves that there is at least one person in the family who’s on the ball.

Anyway, according to Snopes.com, which makes a business of ferreting out this kind of information:

The notion that hotel key cards are routinely encoded with all sorts of personal information began in 2003 when an overzealous detective with the Pasadena, California Police Department sent around a warning e-mail based on a misunderstanding of something she’d heard:
“One of our investigators was at a meeting with other fraud detectives,” says Ronnie Nanning of the Pasadena police. “Someone there happened to say that they heard that it was possible to put this information on this key card.”

The detective notified other detectives as a “heads-up” to the possibility. That information was shared with others in the police department, who then passed it on before the risk could be evaluated, she says. It took on a life of its own.

Nanning says her department contacted major hotel chains at that time and “were told time and again that this was not the policy.”

In a nutshell, during a presentation about current fraud techniques, a hotel keycard that had been wiped clean then reused by identity thieves to store a target’s banking and other personal information was shown to those present. The detective in question took that to mean that all hotel keycards were routinely encoded thus by the hotels that had issued them, rather than what was really being said, which was that any sort of magnetic swipeable card could be used as a blank on which identity thieves could store such information. Said presentation could just as easily be used as a grocery store loyalty card, a casino’s slot card or any generic keycard used to enter an office building or access an elevator. The nature of the card, itself, didn’t matter, nor did the information it had previously contained when it had been issued for its intended purpose—what mattered was that it was reused as a blank onto which information stolen from other sources was placed.

The misinformation wave created by the detective’s erroneous e-mail was so large the Pasadena police eventually issued a retraction explaining that the information it contained was based on a single incident from several years earlier and that they had no evidence the warning reflected a current or ongoing issue.

In January of 2006, Computerworld investigated the key card rumors by collecting and examining over 100 hotel cards and found no personally identifiable information on any of them.

We also purchased our own MagTek card scanner and have scanned several dozen magnetic room keys we acquired during our various hotel stays over the last few years and likewise found not a single key with any personal information stored on it.

Okay, then. I guess we can all be happy about our little room keys. But call it paranoia, I’m still not sure I’m giving mine back. At least we know that in the future when we have these scary warnings we can check in with our crack detective firm of Knight & Kline and get to the bottom of things.


More Urban Myths

Everybody is aware, of course, of the alligators in the Manhattan sewer system. This story dates back to the 1930s, when sensationalist newspapers started reporting endless incidents of alligators, allegedly brought north from Florida as tiny pets by tourists, being found in and around New York City. Nearly all of these stories are false and the few that are true almost certainly concern animals which escaped from local zoos.

Then there’s the one about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, hoping for a later return to life when future technology made it possible. If that were true, Walt probably would have advised his heirs not to cremate him when he died in 1966.

One of the oldest and most often repeated urban legends is of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. The most popular version involves a man who picks up a young hitchhiker (usually a girl) on a deserted country road. He drives her back to her house, but when he turns to say goodbye he finds that she has inexplicably disappeared from the back seat of the car. Confused, the man rings the doorbell of the house and learns that the girl has been dead for years, killed on the very spot where he picked her up that night. Yet another reason to refrain from picking up hitchhikers.

The Good Samaritan legend has also been around for years. It has been associated to a number of rich people, from Bill Gates to Nat King Cole. As the story goes, a motorist stops to help a man change a flat tire. The man thanks the benefactor and asks for his address. A few weeks later, the motorist receives a thank-you note and a check for $10,000 signed by whatever famous celebrity. One popular version claims that Donald Trump paid off a helpful stranger’s mortgage and Trump, himself, has lent credence to this. This one is an obvious phony, however, as that weasel Trump isn’t giving $10,000 to anybody.

Since the 1970s, an urban myth has been making its way across college campuses. It avers that any college student whose roommate commits suicide will automatically receive a 4.0 grade point average for the semester as part of the college’s bereavement policy. We know that this can’t be true, however, since there has not been a rash of murders by roommates disguised as suicides to get that grade point average up.

Although it’s more folklore than urban legend, The Bloody Mary story is so old and well-known it could be a peripheral qualifier. A common game at children’s slumber parties, the story states that the ghost of Mary Worth (not the newspaper cartoon lady), a woman supposedly executed for being a witch, will manifest when summoned. This usually involves going into a darkened room and shouting her name three times, at which point her face will appear in a mirror. There are a number of variations on the story, with some claiming that the face of Satan appears. By far the scariest possibility, however, is that you go into a darkened room, intone three times, look into the mirror and suddenly see the face of Donald Trump.


That’s all, folks….

Prologue

The days are warming up in Florida as we gallop inexorably toward Summer. On the morning of Sunday, the 17th, at 4 in the morning, the Horse Gods presented us with Hannah, a chestnut filly by Juggernaut out of Fortyninejules, whom we call Wanda. We’re in a 4 a.m. rut this year. The first morning out in a tiny paddock, Hannah somehow managed to cut herself inside her left front leg, thus the bandage you see in her pictures. Next day, her always-grouchy mother kicked back at some unknown irritant and blasted poor Hannah in the hindquarters. We can hardly wait to see what happens next. Nonetheless, the Fates seem to have some secret device which protects innocent young foals from true disaster and little Hannah is out there running around and raising hell as if nothing untoward ever happened. Her future buddy, Puck, is peering curiously at this new phenomenon (But Ma—she wasn’t even there yesterday!) but is keeping his distance for the time being. So far, so good.

Elf had her second two-minute lick Tuesday, tearing off from the first pole to the second in 12 seconds before leveling out to finish in 27. She goes three-eighths next week and then works a quarter a week later. Juno’s abscess has finally cleared up and she’s jogging on the grass track. Wilson is eating carrots.


A Letter From Marty Jourard

Dear Bill:

The post on me is very funny. However….I’ve never been chubby, that would be my younger brother, Leonard.

You know, Marty, it’s fat kids like you who give morbid obesity a bad name. It’s one thing to deny your faults but a much more reprehensible act to throw your kid brother under the bus. In the future, we hope you’ll begin to take more responsibility for your actions.


Kentucky Derby Report

Well, it’s become obvious over the last few weeks that nobody is going to win the Kentucky Derby. All the favorites have been beaten and there isn’t a standout in the bunch. If you’re betting, seriously consider taking the field.


Bill’s Rant Of The Week—McDonald’s Vanilla Hoarders

For healthy people, Siobhan and I go to McDonald’s a lot. Siobhan’s favorite meal is large fries and a caramel frappe. I mostly go for the Vanilla Iced Coffee. I’ve got to tell you, though, that the little elves who work in McDonald’s are very inconsistent in their preparation of Bill’s iced coffee. Like, sometimes they put in very, very, very small amounts of vanilla. The McDonald's in Williston, the closest one to us, often puts in no vanilla at all! C’mon McDonald’s—how much can a little vanilla cost? Once I complained to the Williston store and they went back and put another squirt of vanilla in and charged me for it, an outrage of the first stripe. Do I have to bring my own bottle of vanilla with me and embarrass you people in front of your valuable customers? I’ve been known to do worse. Mess with vanilla iced coffee drinkers at your own peril, McDonald’s. This is your last warning.


A Public Service Notice From Kathleen Scanlan

She writes:

Ever wonder what is on your hotel’s magnetic room key card?

Answer:

a. Customer’s name

b. Customer’s partial home address

c. Hotel room number

d. Check-in date and out date

e. Customer’s credit card number and expiration date.

WHAT? How come nobody ever told us that? This means that when you turn your room cards in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a handful of cards home and, using a scanning device, access all the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense.

Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically overwritten onto the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process. But, until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR information on it.

The bottom line is: keep the cards, take them home and/or destroy them. NEVER leave them behind in the room, even in the wastebasket, and NEVER turn them in to the front desk when you check out of a room. Despite what the hotel tells you, they will not charge you for the card because it is illegal to do so.

A tip: if, for some reason, you want to return the key, pass a small magnet over the strip several times. Then, try it in the door. If it doesn’t work, everything on the card has been erased.


Return Of The Grim Reaper

When I was five years old, the visiting nurses came by my house every day to remove the gauze bandage from my grandfather’s neck, clean the gaping hole created by his lung cancer and replace the bandages. The smell unleashed when the bandages were removed was like nothing else, memorable to this day. So, when my grandfather said, “Billy, I got this from cancer—don’t ever smoke!” you can bet your ass I listened. My grandpa was eventually taken to Mass. General Hospital, where he passed away. I remember my grandmother coming down the stairs and meeting my mother with a hug in the stairwell. “Bill’s gone,” she said, crying. That might be the only time I saw my grandmother cry. And so my acquaintance with the Grim Reaper began. We waked my grandfather at home and they kept us kids away from the casket for awhile. Eventually, my grandmother walked me up to the edge and I looked down on my grandfather, who appeared much the same as he did in life. She told me his soul was gone, stolen by the Grim Reaper. Gee.

My Uncle Arthur, my grandmother’s brother, might’ve been my best friend when I was a little kid. He’d take me to Canobie Lake Amusement Park in nearby Salem, N.H., and let me play with the toys (he was a sign painter) in his apartment. He even painted “Billy” in yellow on the back of my red Radio Flyer wagon. I think my Uncle Arthur was married to a big Italian woman named Rose, but it’s possible she was just his girlfriend. Everybody loved Rose, but one day Uncle Arthur split up with her, took up with a woman named Hazel, and before anybody knew what was happening, got married. We all went to the wedding even though nobody liked Hazel (whose name my grandmother delighted in modifying with “witch”.) Not long after, Uncle Arthur was dead. My grandmother said Hazel poisoned him as she had a previous husband but nobody had proof. The Grim Reaper had struck again—and this time he might have had help.

In an earlier column, I wrote of my father’s death from congestive heart failure when I was a junior in high school. While we were not as close as many fathers and sons, I nonetheless resented the Reaper’s intrusion. And, years later, when he stole my beloved grandmother two days before I was to visit, I was livid with the bastard. My mother’s passing at age 83 was a little easier to endure, she having been beset by senile dementia for several years, so I’m not going to hold that one against him.

The deaths of young friends are always difficult to bear, but I’ve got to admit Janis Joplin was a reckless, if spectacular, young girl and Lieuen Adkins and Win Pratt invited the Reaper into their homes. Dick North took a big risk with a hair-trigger pistol and nobody can know whether he or the Reaper pulled that trigger.

When I was lying on a hospital table momentarily pondering my chances of meeting him, I thought—for a few seconds—“oh, what the hell’s the difference?”—before thinking of Siobhan and all the unknown answers to questions I still had. I abruptly righted myself, determined not to give the Reaper that slight opening he might quickly take advantage of.

So I know this guy and know him well and now he is back haunting the world of Stuart Bentler, who has been languishing in a hospital in Fort Lauderdale with an undiagnosed life-threatening illness. Stuart’s daughter, Katherine Chamberlain, is with him for the duration, come good or come bad, dutifully performing the daily assignments required of a loving daughter. Yesterday, she took Stuart, too weak for a wheelchair, home on a gurney while the tortuous diagnoses continued. Despite off and on vomiting, Stuart told Katherine he was “happy as a pig” to be home, parked on his couch and watching his treasured Formula 1 Racing DVDs.

Years ago in Austin, a friend of mine named Joe E. Brown, in a fit of youthful exuberance (and probable drunkenness) took to the roof of the tallest building in Austin with a can of yellow spray paint in hand. Once on the roof, he sprayed the sentence, “F*ck you, Sky King!” on the rooftop so Sky King, no hero of Joe’s, would see it when he flew over. A perfectly rational approach if ever there was one.

So now Katherine Chamberlain, paint can in hand, ignoring the handwriting on the wall, climbs the ladder to her father’s rooftop in Fort Lauderdale. She pauses for a moment. The sky is clear and the stars are bright. She can see forever. Now she raises her weapon, and spraying words not only appropriate for her father but also for brave resisters like Pat Brown and Marilyn Todd and thousands of Others Unknown who must marshal their forces daily to defend their own personal Thermopylaes, she strikes the red button on top of her paint can and lets her defiant message hiss out.

“F*ck you, Grim Reaper!” she scribbles on the roof.

And, circling above, her adversary measures the ferocity of her resistance….and, hopefully, shrinks away into the distance to find a more accommodating soul.

Prologue

This might be the best time of year in Florida. We wake up with temperatures in the fifties, gradually escalating into the eighties as the hours pass into afternoon. The skies are not cloudy all day, for the most part. We get a smidgen of rain here and there prior to the very dry month of May and the much wetter months of Summer. The hurricane season cranks up in August and keeps everyone looking over their shoulders until October.

The two-year-old thoroughbred sales are going on now and racing at Gulfstream is winding down as Calder gears up for another eight month season. Elf had her first two-minute-lick Tuesday morning, negotiating the quarter-mile in 29.1, just about ideal. Juno came up with an abscess, putting her a couple weeks behind and pretty much insuring that Elf will be the first to ship south.

The Kentucky Derby looms ever closer and all the early favorites keep losing. Racing fans across the country look now to The Factor, a very fast sprinter who has yet to go further than a mile-and-a-sixteenth, to see if he has the stamina to get the Derby distance of a mile-and-a-quarter on the first Saturday in May.

The baseball season has started and the World-Series-favorite Red Sox are off to a bounding 2-9 start. Our favorite piñata, Dice-K Matsuzaka lasted two innings in his most recent start. What ever happened to hara-kiri? Most of you, of course, are more interested in our running medical soap opera, so why wait any longer:


As The World Turns—The Ongoing Saga Of Stuart Bentler

When we last left Stuart, he was on the verge of being diagnosed with amyloidosis, put on a course of treatment and returned to the world of the living. But things are never so easy as this in Bentlerland. After an earlier diagnosis of hyperparathyroidism (inaccurate) and a current suspicion of amyloidosis (inaccurate) which never reached the diagnosis stage, Stuart’s doctors are still floundering around trying to get to the root of the problem. And, after all, they’ve only had eleven friggen months, be patient. It’s like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men all over again. That’s what happens when your doctors are named Larry, Moe and Curly.

What if Stuart’s doctors were airline pilots?

“Gee, Captain Larry, this instrument panel is lighting up like the White House Christmas Tree. We’re landing in Canarsie pretty soon—what should we do next?”

“Well, Co-captain Moe, this is certainly a stumper for me. Let me ponder on it for about eleven months while you alert the passengers.”

Or, what if Stuart’s doctors were Cowboy Heros in the Old West?

“Golly, Rex—the villains done tied Miss Pauline to the railroad track and the 3:10 is due in five minutes! Not only that, but they’ve gone and burned down the town, stolen all the horses and, well, you know what they always do to the wimmen….”

“Don’t worry, Fester! They’ll pay for their nefarious deeds! We’ll cut ‘em off at the pass and put an end to this tomfoolery! But first—I’d like to sing you folks a little song….”

Oh, well. At least we’re learning about more exotic diseases every week. We could end up a walking medical encyclopedia if Stuart lasts that long.


Rant Of The Week—Bogus Hurricane Prognosticators

Every year about this time, the newspapers are full of aggravating stories about the number of hurricanes which are going to barge onto the southern coastline, destroying property and killing millions. Every year they tell us the number of hurricanes will increase, the number of serious hurricanes will double and the number of hurricanes which will smash down your very house will appear in record numbers. And every year they are wrong. This seems to make no difference, however, to the newspaper and television people who go back to them year after year for their exalted forecasts. And the main guy they go back to is in goddam Colorado—what’s up with that?

Once, good old Jean Dixon came up with a correct prophecy and she was forever besieged about her predictions henceforth. She was wrong about 95% of the time, but they never forgot about the one time she was right. The hurricane prognosticators don’t even have that going for them—they’ve never been right. Where else can you get a job where you’re wrong all the time and people keep asking for your opinion? Oh, that’s right—you can be one of Stuart Bentler’s doctors.


Rant, Part II—Hurricane Weathermen

And, while we’re at it, what about those hurricane weather guys who try to con you into thinking “hurricane season” extends from the First of June to the end of November? Nobody ever had a hurricane on the First of June or the last of November. Not even close. Hurricanes come in August and September, period. Oh, alright, you might get a teeny, tiny hurricane late in July that will foam up in the eastern Gulf and peter out or dump a few showers on Big Pine Key or something, but no big deal. Don’t tell that to the weathermen, however, who pretend to be just as worried as you about hurricanes but secretly jump up and down in delight when one approaches because it makes them relevant.

“Now folks, there’s no real reason to worry because Hurricane Murgatroyd is still six quintillion miles off the coast of Florida, BUT if a certain impossible combination of events should occur in the next seven hundred hours we could be looking down the barrel of Disaster!”

Stuff like that. And then they’ll tell you to buy some kind of wonky “weather radio” to follow the storm when the power goes out. Last year the power went out around here during a lesser storm and it took out the weather alerting station which fuels the weather radio. They, unlike us, didn’t have a backup generator so they were off line until the all-clear. Now what do you do?

Not all weathermen are nitwits, of course. One time Siobhan called our local weatherman in the middle of a hurricane around midnight and he calmly told her what to expect over the next few hours. He even told her to call him back if she had further worries. And all the stuff he said would happen did. We need more guys like him in the doctor profession.


Questions From The Peanut Gallery

As any of you who have written with questions know, I always answer you within 12 hours, usually much faster, especially within the first two days of publication of a new column. Some questions are funny. Some just seek further information about a subject that is of particular interest to them. Other questions, however, are of broader interest and are thus presented as follows:

Is Stuart Bentler a real person?

We’ve been going back and forth on this one for some time now and, after considerable hemming and hawing, we’re coming down firmly on the side of “yes.” Stuart first entered our consciousness when he appeared one day at the Subterranean Circus, eyed the constant variety of 40 brands of cigarette rolling papers, marched up to the counter and announced, “I’ll take one of each.”

As time passed, we grew to appreciate Stuart’s happy demeanor, quirky sense of humor and wife, Leslie, whom he certainly didn’t deserve. Stuart was on the verge of graduating from the College of Architecture at UF (which he eventually did) but he was a firm believer in the “All work and no play makes Stuart a dull boy” philosophy and he certainly did not want to succumb to that horrid fate so, for a while, Stuart’s apartment in back of the Gainesville Krispy Kreme became Party Central. One of my girlfriends, Patty Wheeler, was particularly enamored of Stuart’s wizardry with the electric yoyo (it even lit up in the dark) and it is probably to the regret of all of us that I did not swap her for Leslie.

Eventually, Stuart graduated, got married and opened his own architecture firm in his native Tampa. Occasionally, his Gainesville pals would pay him a visit but it’s tough to carry on these long distance relationships so we saw him less and less. To his credit, Stuart always kept in touch over the years and brought his children Katherine and Stuart Jr., up to visit the horses and see what kind of people their father associated with when he was young and foolish. Sadly, Stuart Jr. passed at an early age and Leslie eventually migrated out West, leaving Stuart on his own, a dangerous happenstance. He made the best of it, finding another 10-year partner and moving to Phoenix for a short time before finally coming to his senses and returning to Fort Lauderdale where he remains, barely, to this day. Katherine, internationally renowned for her delicate beauty and sketchy choices of men, visits often and stays on top of the medical situation, if anyone can be truly said to stay on top of that mare’s nest of folly and confusion. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. Hopefully, the doctors—even these doctors will, by the process of elimination if no other, figure out what the hell is wrong with Stuart and bring this mess to a happy conclusion. The alternative is unacceptable.


Do Mares Always Foal At Night?

Well, all the ones we know do, but perhaps we’re hanging around in the wrong circles. This probably goes back to antiquity, when horses had predators. The only defense the horse has is flight. If a foaling mare can secret her baby for a few hours, the foal will be able to rise and follow her out of danger. We tried to explain to our mares that we don’t have any predators out our way and it would be very considerate of them to foal between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. but they looked at us as if they thought we were pulling a fast one.


What Is The Nature Of Siobhan’s Business?

Oh boy, that’s going to take a little while to explain. Siobhan is the universe’s leading expert on Sarcocystis neurona, the main cause of an unhappy disease called equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM). Horses which contract EPM become bobble heads. They wobble, become lame, and are unusable due to microscopic protozoa that invade the central nervous system. Sometimes they die. They get this infection by inadvertently eating opossum feces in their pastures. Texas must be the opossum feces capital of the world because we get more samples and questions from Texas than anywhere else.

Siobhan receives blood samples daily from around the country (and Canada) which she tests to determine the presence and degree of seriousness of EPM. She works with companies large and small to develop assays to detect disease and test possible treatments. Recently, she was able to move her test to Brazil, another opossum hotbed. Hopefully, a vaccine to curb the demon will be developed soon. Things are progressing favorably.

If you want to keep track of all this, her web address is: www.pathogenes.com.

Siobhan has decided that no level of success on the Sarcocystis neurona front is going to win her the Nobel Prize, however, so in her spare time she is working on a cure for malaria. Ambitious as that may seem, I wouldn’t bet against her.


That’s all, folks....

A Blast From The Past

Last week, we got a G-mail from Marty Jourard in Kendrick, Washington, whom we haven’t seen in forty years. He somehow tracked us down to get an interview for his upcoming book on Gainesville Rock History. When we first met Marty, he was kind of a chubby wise-ass kid who, for some reason, liked to hang out at the Subterranean Circus and glean knowledge from his elders. We tried to shoo him off, but he kept coming back. Sometimes, he brought doughnuts. You know how we feel about doughnuts.

“He’s a little jerk, sometimes,” said Dick North, “but he’s pretty smart for a little kid.” So Marty got to hang around. Later, he and his brother, Jeff, joined a band called The Motels and lived the dream for awhile. We lost track of Marty after that and haven’t heard from him since. His book project is ambitious and will require a lot of time and legwork, but if there’s one thing we know about Marty it’s that he’s persistent. We’ll keep you posted on the book.


The Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu

When we last left our old friend, Stuart Bentler, he had (finally) been diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism and sent on the road to recovery. Not so fast, my friend. After a few days of feeling better, Stuart reverted to misery. He was weak. He couldn’t keep food down. He had violent diarrhea. His chewin’ gum lost its flavor on the bedpost overnight. It got so bad, he called us up and asked if it was okay to have his ashes spread in Siobhan’s garden. Gee. Maybe you should at least try the Mayo Clinic first, Stuart. We’ve got enough dying friends already.

Couple days later, Stuart called back. They weren’t sure, but they thought he had Amyloidosis. We knew this must be bad because we have heard Dr. House talk about it on his television show and he never talks about anything but rare and exotic diseases which could kill you. We found out that amyloidosis is a disease that occurs when substances called amyloid proteins build up in your organs. Amyloid is an abnormal protein usually produced by cells in your bone marrow that can be deposited in any tissue or organ. Amyloidosis can affect different organs in different people, and there are many types of amyloid. Amyloidosis frequently affects the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen and gastrointestinal tract (that’s about everything, right?). Amyloidosis is rare and the exact cause is often unknown. Symptoms include swelling of the ankles or legs, general weakness, significant weight loss, shortness of breath, numbness or tingling in your hands or feet, diarrhea or constipation, feeling full quickly, severe fatigue, irregular heartbeat, difficulty swallowing, protein in the urine and a partridge in a prune tree.

We don’t have a definite prognosis yet and we’re not sure how Stuart’s doctors will manage the disease if and when their suspicions are confirmed. Apparently, there is no real cure. In the meantime, if you happen to notice some old geezer stumbling past your house, breathing hard in soiled pants, do not be so hasty to go out and poke him with a stick. It could be our friend Stuart.


Don’t Blame Us, We Voted For The Other Guys

From a column by Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald:

I once referred to a past Florida Legislature as a festival of whores, which, in retrospect, was a vile insult to the world’s oldest profession.

Today’s lackluster assemblage in Tallahassee is possibly the worst in modern times, and cannot be fairly compared to anything except a rodeo of phonies and pimps. It’s impossible to remember a governor and lawmakers who were more virulently anti-consumer, and more slavishly submissive to big business.

The list of who’s getting screwed in the state budget battle is long and sadly familiar: the schools, college students, foster children, the poor, the elderly, the sick and the jobless. The happiest faces, of course, belong to lobbyists for corporations, insurance companies and utilities, who are getting almost everything they want.

It’s astounding that so many voters were suckered into thinking that this new generation of Republicans was going to fight for the common man instead of the fat cats and their special interests.

Hey, Carl—next time tell us how you really feel.

And from a column by Howard Troxler in the St. Petersburg Times:

In 1995, the operator of a Pasco County dance studio was sentenced to prison after scamming more than $1 million from lonely, confused elderly customers. When he got out….he simply went to a new dance studio. This led to an investigation by the St. Petersburg Times in 2002. Some of the cases:

In 18 days’ time, a 74-year-old widow was talked into writing checks totaling $247,295 for dance lessons, competitions and trips.

A 67-year-old Clearwater woman spent $88,000 over eight months for lesson packages, trips and competitions.

An 85-year-old widow signed up for $29,000 worth of lessons.

An 81-year-old spent $271,000 over a few months.

Investigators found 30 customers who had been talked into signing 328 separate, deliberately confusing contracts worth $3.5 million.

A studio operator defended all this by saying customers had voluntarily made an “adult decision.”

As for any complaints, he said: “Maybe some of the students went on these trips and didn’t get laid.”

He got 30 years in prison.

Why am I dredging up this ancient history? Because dance studios are one of the 20 professions about to be deregulated entirely by the Florida Legislature.

Thanks for the warning, Carl. We’re actually quite happy that many of the imbeciles who elected this crew of misfits will suffer the punishment. Unfortunately, the rest of us will, too.


The Tea Party Eats Possum Guts

Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column, tells us: “This pulls the mask back a little bit on the Tea Party movement,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. “Adding riders against Planned Parenthood and gutting the environmental laws indicate that the Tea Party is focused on imposing a right-wing agenda on the country and using the budget as a vehicle.”

Thanks, Maureen. Did any sane person ever believe this collection of selfish loons would restrict their demands to financial overhaul? Just another Trojan Horse. And that brings us to this:


Long Live The King!

It’s obvious that Democracy is no longer a viable alternative in this country. The voters are too stupid to consistently elect leaders who can accomplish the great projects necessary to save the planet, restore social justice and move us successfully into the new century. Meanwhile, China—a true dictatorship, not a real Communist country—is moving ahead with great energy on several fronts, determined to leave us in their rear-view mirror. If the guys running the show in China want to do something, they just do it—while all our plans get mired in the legislative morass of Washington, where it’s every lobby for itself.

Many people are ready to throw up their hands in despair, but not me. There is an obvious solution to this vexing problem and I’ll tell you what it is. We need a king. And not like the kind of kings they have in Denmark or England or Northumberland, either. We need a king with power. A king who can say to the know-nothings in Kansas—Hey, Dipwads! Evolution is a goddam FACT! Get with the program or it’s the dungeon for you! Or maybe, Sarah—if I hear one more hateful morsel out of your Alaskan-redneck mouth, I’m putting you on a Bridge to Nowhere!

A king like that. If nobody else wants the job, I volunteer. You know where to reach me.


Foaling Season

It’s that time of year again—foaling season, as can be attested to by anybody driving around Ocala and noticing all the thoroughbred babies gamboling in the fields. This goes on through May, with a slight trickle continuing into June. All over the county (and all over Kentucky to an even greater degree), farm help is up nights watching bad television and prowling the foaling barns, waiting for signs of imminent birth. The old timers cut down on their nightwatching by waiting for the mare’s milk to whiten or wax to form on the teats, an indication that a birth is less than 48 hours away. But mares, especially some mares, are notorious for foaling unexpectedly, so you can’t take much for granted, especially when the gestation period approaches 325 days and the mares’ bags begin to fill.

In an earlier column, I mentioned a mare optimistically named Stakes Producer, who didn’t want anyone around while she foaled. She tricked me two years in a row, indicating nothing was amiss and lulling me into a false sense of security. As soon as I went off to get something else done—even if her window of opportunity was limited to 15 minutes—she’d sneak the foal in. The third year, I was not to be so easily duped. One night, Stakes Producer looked close to foaling and I suspected she was just waiting for an opportunity, so I loaded the back of my tractor with buckets of grain at the usual feeding time and drove off the down the road to the pastures. Then, I parked, left the engine on (as I usually did) and furtively made my way back to the barn, where—voila!—Stakes Producer had started to foal. When she saw me, she was extremely pissed, but had reached the point of no return. Stakes Producer—2; Bill—1.


Problems

The reason we stay up with the mares is to help if there is a problem or to make it easier on the mare by getting the foal out more expeditiously. The great majority of the time, foaling will proceed without incident, whether any humans are there or not. Many farm people believe in leaving them alone unless there is a crisis, but we’d just as soon help a little with the birth to spare the mare the extra effort. Problems arise mostly when the foal is premature, weak, too large, or improperly positioned. In the latter case, the best alternative is to try to keep the foal inside the mare until it self-adjusts or can be rotated to the correct position.

Maiden mares (having their first foal) often present problems. They are more likely than the average mare to present a premature foal or to have difficulty ejecting the baby. Of all foaling problems, getting a large baby out of the mare is probably the most common. The usual procedure is to get as much lubrication as possible around the baby and alternate manpower pulling on the front legs. Many people, even experienced hands, want to pull straight back but I realized after a few foalings that you also have to pull down a little. Time is of the essence. You like to get the baby out within 20 minutes of the mare’s water breaking, but this is sometimes not possible and it is important not to panic. Occasionally, the mare will be thrashing dangerously and unrelentingly and may have to be medically tranquilized to allow the farm hands an opportunity to assist in the birth without having their heads, or other useful parts, taken off.

One mare tranquilizing incident stands out. It occurred at the tiny farm of an older lady named Ruth Reid, one of Siobhan’s more interesting clients from years past. Ruth had run away from an unhappy family life to join the circus at an early age. She thought just anybody could run away and join the circus. “Well, what can you actually do?” asked the man in charge of circus employment. I mean there’s not many grade-school runaways who can swing from a trapeze, walk a high wire or tame a lion. “Can you ride a horse?” he asked, hopefully. “Sure,” said Ruth, lying, a falsehood she paid for time and again while she was bounced from pillar to post as she learned to ride a horse. Nonetheless, once this was accomplished, Ruth earned a gypsy life with the circus and established a lifetime bond with the horse.

Eventually, she moved to Anthony, which, if you didn’t know it, is a little town just north of Ocala on the east side of Rte. 441. There, she set up shop with her little horse operation and earned a reputation as a sort of Ma Barker, as all of her sons wound up in prison at one time or another. One of them, Robbie, made the colossal blunder of robbing his own neighborhood bank in which he and Ruth had accounts.

“I’ll take all your cash!” demanded the bankrobber.

“Why, Robbie Reid,” scolded the teller, “whatever are you doing?”

Another one bites the dust.

Anyway, after a very hard day, Siobhan was summoned by Ruth Reed at 3 a.m. one morning. Her best mare was having difficulty foaling. I went along for the ride. And to help pull. When we got there, Ruth was in hysterics. They couldn’t get the foal out, and neither could we, at first. Siobhan decided to tranquilize the mare to give us a better opportunity, and, eventually, it worked, the foal was born. But it was an extremely weak foal and Ruth was weeping and moaning in the background as we hovered around ascertaining the probabilities. Everybody was weary and exhausted, including Siobhan, but after a couple of minutes she turned to me with a wry smile.

“Do you know what’s wrong?” she asked. “If I did, I’d fix it,” I told her.

With that, she went over to the mare and clamped the line which was delivering the tranquilizer to the mare and, eventually, the baby, keeping him in his puny state. Shortly thereafter, rid of his onerous encumbrance, the baby jumped up to the acclaim of all, especially Ruth, who told Siobhan she was the greatest veterinarian known to man.
“Right,” said Siobhan, amused by her foible. “I’m sure we can get that baby to agree with you.”


Puck Arrives

All the past experiences, happy and morbid, better prepare you for the duties at hand. And so, on April 1st at 4 a.m. Siobhan was ready to assist Dot with any difficulties occurring during the upcoming delivery of her foal by Hear No Evil. Happily, no problems presented and a bright, strong chestnut colt with a large swath of white on his face showed up in the early hours of a warm morning. We named him Puck, it being April Fools Day and all. Puck never missed a beat, rising to nurse quickly, abstaining from the usual enema, following his mother like a good foal should. Puck has no idea what awaits him. His only job now is to run giant circles around his mom or speed lickety-split across the field and suddenly stop, wondering where she went. A year from now, he’ll be on his own, he and his as-yet-unborn pal out of Wanda, due around April 15. Around the end of next year, it will be time to go into training, the better to be ready to race in June of his 2-year-old season. So, have fun while you can, Puck. Run as far as you want as fast as you can, for, even now, adolescence is not that far away.


That’s all, folks….

Prologue

Gee. It’s comin’ the tornada, as my old Oklahoma podner, Jim Lavendusky, would say. Rain all night. Fierce thunderstorms. Tornado warnings. All this on the first day of Major League Baseball Season, no less. In the Northeast, they’re expecting a foot of snow. Maybe they should return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the season started on April 14th. We’re waiting for Dot to foal. She’s due April 1, but you know how they are. They’ll foal when they get around to it. We’ll keep you posted. Cosmic Song is finally running—sixth race at Gulfstream, tomorrow. We’re hoping for no April Foolishness. The race is shorter than we’d like, 5 furlongs on the grass, but the other races didn’t go. This is a $35,000 claimer, so there’s a chance she’ll be taken. There’s also a good chance she’ll win. The weather could be an issue—rain in Miami might move the race to the dirt, letting in a nice also-eligible horse who’s entered for main track only, but probably knocking out a couple of others and reducing the size of the field. You give a little, you get a little. Results to follow.


Bill’s Rant Of The Week—Underwear-Hating Tebow Bashers

Ex-Gator Quarterback Tim Tebow signed a contract the other day with Jockey to model their products on TV ads, etc. The Christian Right, of course, fell into paroxysms of depression.

“We thought he was one of us,” they moaned.

Waitaminnit. Does this mean the Christian Right people don’t wear underwear? I thought it was just the opposite. I thought they wore big poofy underwear that covered every inch of their bodies and then put external clothing on top of it. Maybe the Jockey underwear is too small. Or maybe the Jockey underwear is okay if nobody can actually see it. Or maybe the Jockey underwear is okay if people can see it, but not on Tim Tebow. Whew—it’s difficult to figure all this out. But I’ll bet one thing. I’ll bet if you went up to any of these religious idiots and offered them what Tebow is getting paid, they’d be out there in their mini-thongs dancing to the music.


The Banzai Pipeline

It being the beginning of baseball season and all, I think I’m entitled to a second rant. We in the good old U. S. of A. are getting ripped off by Japanese pitchers sent over here by the Evil Emperor to pay us back for dropping the Big One on him. Or, more precisely, the Big Two. Now, I wouldn’t care about this so much if they all didn’t seem to gravitate to my very own Red Sox, but there seems to be some kind of a Japanese pitcher magnet hanging over Fenway Park. Now they’ve got four of them. And they’re bums. The most expensive bum is Dice-K Matsuzaka, who they signed for a piffling FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS after gaining negotiating rights from his Japanese team for FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS! When you’ve got that much invested, you can’t just admit you made (tee hee) a tiny error and get rid of him when he can’t cut the sushi. And he’s unwatchable. Every batter that comes to the plate eventually gets a 3-2 count. Several walk. Dice-K would rather chew ground glass than actually let anybody hit the ball. Nobody ever told him there were eight other guys out there to help him out. So the beat goes on. And now they’ve got three more Japanese pitchers to add to the fun. Oops, wait a minute. I just found out they sent Hideki Okajima, a left-handed relief pitcher, down to Triple-A. They kept him around for years because he was left-handed even though he never got one single person out. Well, if he did I never saw it. And don’t think we’re racists around here, either. Siobhan’s sister-in-law, Mary, is half Japanese and we really like her. As long as she stays away from the Red Sox.


Take Me Out To The Ball Game

My father, Thomas Joseph Killeen was a pretty ornery guy. He was born in Presque Isle, Maine, his Irish family eventually gravitating to Somerville, Mass., just outside Boston. Somerville was a tough town, full of Irishmen and Italians. I remember going to a high school basketball tournament game in the old Boston Garden once and when the Somerville team came onto the court their fans dumped so much confetti (shredded newspapers) into the air you couldn’t see from one side of the Garden to the other. Turns out, the Somerville fans stole newspapers all along the way to Boston to provide themselves with ammunition. On the court, if you were somehow talented or lucky enough to beat Somerville, you came out of the adventure one bruised fellow.

My mother was in her early twenties when she married my father, who was 25 years older. He had a good job with the telephone company. He belonged to the union, the Communication Workers of America, I think. My father was a no bullshit guy. He went to Catholic church every Sunday but didn’t like it when the sainted old Monsignor Daly would litter his sermons with requests for more money. Or even when the Pope would give everybody a “special dispensation” from the Church rule against eating meat on some particular Friday.

“Who does he think he is?” my father wanted to know of Jesus Christ’s direct representative (through St. Peter) on Earth. “If you can’t eat meat on Friday, you can’t eat meat on Friday. It’s either one way or the other.”

My father walked a mile-and-a-half to work almost every day and he usually walked back. Dinner was, without fail, at five o’clock, when he would arrive home. Except on Friday, it was meat and potatoes and something else. Irishmen like their meat and, especially, their potatoes. Occasionally, he would drive to work or back home with his best friend, Jim Carney. When there was a crisis at the telephone company—usually involving bad weather—Jim would come by, pick up my father and they would be gone until the problem was resolved, often through the night. Once in a while, we would bring him dinner while he solved these great mysteries and my sister, Alice, and I would prowl down the unending corridors of wires and cables and wonder how anybody could ever figure it all out.

You did not want to get on the bad side of Tom Killeen. He had a quick temper and he also had a belt that he would strap you with if the offense was deemed bad enough. My mother stood by as Counsel for the Defense but her objections were often overruled. It took a lot for Alice to get the strap, but not so much me. (And I am not forever scarred by this; my mother was neutral and my grandmother favored me.) My father never touched my mother, but his fist did put a big dent in the pantry wall one day. My mother’s most effective weapon was tears. He didn’t know what to do about that.


The Good Old Days

Most of the time, my dad was even-tempered and we did a lot of things with him. Often, with my mother and Alice in tow, we would troop down to South Union Street to shop. There were no Wal-Marts then, not even any large grocery stores, so we would visit the fish store, the bakery, etc. The First National Store was a small grocery that was always a staple of the trip. If you lived any distance away, you could get there on the Belt Line bus. The only Jewish guy in town (no dummy, he) owned Sullivan’s Furniture Store and was the owner of the only snow globe I had ever seen. I was fascinated with this little miracle and he didn’t seem to mind. Almost at one end of the South Lawrence section of Union St. was the O’Connell Playstead, which we called “the common,” and virtually across from it a bar called Jenny’s. The bar was a family-oriented place with an awesome—in the true sense of the word—and colorful Wurlitzer Jukebox. You could play 6 records for a quarter and we did. On Sundays, at five o’clock, Super Circus came on the bar’s large television and everybody stopped what they were doing to watch Mary Hartline and her friends cavort under the big top. Almost nobody but businesses actually had television. My mother and father nursed their beers and ate sandwiches. Alice and I had potato chips and “tonic,” the New England word for soda. Bars like Jenny’s were common and each of the many nationalities in town seemed to have its own “social club.” Even my grandfather, Bill, owned a bar. Also on South Union street and in no danger of being thought a family place, it was called The Whippet Club. Some nights my grandmother and a male friend or two had to drive down to The Whippet Club to pick up my grandfather, who might have had too good a time that day. My job was to sit in the back seat and hold his hat on my lap. My grandfather was most proud of my ability, even at four years of age, to recite the entire American League Standings, not to mention most of the Red Sox’ current batting averages.

The Little League started in Lawrence when I was eight, so I had to try out. My father said all the doctors’ kids would get in since they were supporting it financially and there were only four teams, but I didn’t believe stuff like that happened. I was more optimistic when I didn’t miss a ball hit to me during my tryout, but my father, who took me, told me not to get my hopes up. He was right, of course. I ended up in some minor league version of the Little League, playing for the Braves at “the common.” On one of the few days my father went to a game, I had a rare opportunity to do something that would make him proud. The score was tied in the bottom of the sixth, the final Little League inning. There were two outs and a man on third. The batter hit a screamer to left field, just foul. It was a long distance from where I was playing in the outfield but I ran over, dived and saw it bounce off the middle finger of my glove. The kid hit the next pitch through the right side of the infield and we lost the game.

“Nobody could have caught that ball,” my father said, supportively.

“Dom Dimaggio would have had it,” I told him, referring to the Red Sox center fielder.

“Well, maybe Dom Dimaggio….” he agreed, grudgingly.


Fenway Park

When I was five, my father told me he was taking me to my first baseball game. We used to listen to all the Red Sox games on the radio and I could see what the park and the players looked like in the pictures in the Boston newspapers, but this was moving to another dimension.

On game day, we walked down Winthrop Avenue to the B&M railroad station. This was exciting enough, I had never been on a train, although I got a great view of them with a railroad yard just over our back fence on Garfield Street. Boston was only 26 miles away, so the trip was brief but no less wonderful. We detrained at the North Station, also the location of the Boston Garden, home of the Celtics and Bruins, and jumped on the subway, elevated at that point. The mostly underground train screeched, rocked and rolled its way beneath Boston’s streets, stopping at iconic stations like Haymarket (farmers’ market), Scollay Square (strip joints), Park Street (the state capitol and Boston Common) and on to Kenmore Square, closest stop to Fenway.

If you’re not a big sports fan, it’s hard to describe the scene. A little less than 35,000 people converging on a modest-sized ballpark, all totally devoted to the Red Sox, all nonetheless critical of some aspect of the team (the manager, the relief pitchers, etc.). They exulted over every win and anguished at each loss. In the northern half of New England, you could go anywhere and there would be a radio with the Red Sox game on. I’ve been around and there’s no place like it. And we’re talking every day for 162 games, not a 12-game football season. And the fans never leave, whatever the score. Oh, a few tourists may drift off, but the bulk of the Boston fandom is sitting through nine. Hell, it’s so hard to get in nobody wants to leave early.

I was a little disappointed when we reached the park. I could see the big light towers, so I knew it was the right place, but it didn’t seem possible this modest red-brick building could contain the spectacular Fenway Park I had heard so much about. Gee, I was only five years old.

When we finally went through the gate and up to the aisleway, I stopped dead in my tracks. The inside of the park was perfect, better even than The Beach. The field was impossibly green. The left-field wall (which nobody called “The Green Monster” and which didn’t have those silly seats that sit atop it now) looked exactly like it was supposed to. The chalk lines were very white and very straight, unlike our shabby crooked and lumpy imitations at the B&M field in South Lawrence. The Red Sox home uniforms were blindingly white (they still are). They looked like they had been laundered in Heaven and carried down by Angels. The hotdogs tasted better than any hotdogs in the world (where did they get that mustard, anyway?). It was like being transported to some unanticipated eden, overwhelming all your five-year-old senses.

Nonetheless, the Red Sox fell behind the Cleveland Indians 12-1 by the fifth inning. “It looks like we picked the wrong day to come to your first game,” my father said, ruefully.

“But Dad,” countered Bill, even then ever the optimist, “it’s only the fifth inning….we can catch up.” Tom Killeen managed a sad smile at his son’s foolish naiveté. But the Red Sox, laden with hitters like Dom Dimaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and the redoubtable Ted Williams, did catch up and won the game 15-14. Cleveland brought in practically every pitcher they had, including Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Gene Bearden (no “specialists” in that era), all to no avail. Leaving the ballpark, I was about the only one who wasn’t stunned. It all seemed perfectly logical to me.

I didn’t get my Red Sox pennant, though. On the way in, I saw a beautiful white pennant with red letters, unlike any I had seen before. I asked my dad if we could get it. He said we’d get one after the game so we wouldn’t have to carry it around. But after the game, there were none. Oh, there were pennants of every description, but no beautiful white ones with red letters. My father felt bad about my disappointment. When we got back to Lawrence, he walked us over the bridge to downtown Lawrence and over to Louis Pearl’s novelty store on Broadway in a vain search for the lost pennant. The following year’s trip to the game, we bought the first white pennant we saw and nobody minded a bit carrying it around all damn day.


End Of An Era

My father died at 63 of congestive heart failure, which none of us kids even knew he had. It happened in the middle of the night. Being a hardass, but a considerate hardass, nonetheless, he wouldn’t let my mother bother his doctor. By the time somebody finally rounded up an ambulance, it was too late. They closed the doors around his bedroom and kept the kids out so we wouldn’t freak out, I guess. It was shocking to think something like this could kill Tom Killeen. I thought they would need to hit him with a bus.

His wake was at our house. Most wakes were in homes, then. I did a good job of not crying until the funeral at St. Patrick’s. There, leaving the church, I encountered my entire high school home room class and teacher from Central Catholic and I was overwhelmed by the gesture. As I sat in the funeral car on the way to the cemetery, I thought again about that first Red Sox game. I thought about dropping that ball in the one game my father came to see. But mostly I remembered being in Church, where our grade-school graduation was held. Before they handed out the diplomas, they would announce who had won the academic scholarship to Central Catholic. I figured I was about the third smartest kid in the class, so it never occurred to me that I would have a chance. But the two smartest, John Barry and David Kiernan, had received scholarships to neighboring Phillips Academy, known to the rest of the world as Andover, the finest prep school in the country.

Monsignor Daly, the besainted old relic, looked up from the altar, from which he presided.

“And the Central Catholic scholarship,” he intoned in his own inimitable fashion, “goes to William Thomas Killeen!”

Oh, shit! Now I have to walk all the way down there and get it, I thought. All by myself.

“Congratulations, William,” smiled the monsignor.

“Thank you, Monsignor,” I said, by now almost giddy with my unexpected accomplishment. And I turned and walked back up the middle aisle of St. Patrick’s church, self-confidently, all by myself. By the time I reached the pew I was to turn in, I could see my family a few rows behind. My father was on the aisle, and, if I didn’t know better, it almost looked like he was smiling. I didn’t worry about dropping that ball any more.


That’s all, folks….

The Object Of My Affection (1934)

The object of my affection

Can change my complexion

From white to rosy red

Any time she holds my hand

And tells me that she’s mine.



25th Anniversary Edition

In addition to being Spring Garden Festival day at Kanapaha Botanical Gardens in Gainesville and thus Siobhan’s favorite day of the year, Saturday is also the 25th anniversary of Bill and Siobhan’s first date. Everybody gets a little agitated now and then, but there have been no big blowups, temporary splits, jealous rages or boxing matches.

Once, when I was married to Harolyn, I was teaching Danny some boxing moves in the front hall and Harolyn, mad about some unknown past outrage, took the gloves from Danny and began slugging away. She was no flyweight walkover, either. One night, after a shoplifting incident at the Subterranean Circus, she beat up a couple of black girls simultaneously and threw them out the door. I know I was impressed.

Anyway, I tried to avoid returning fire as long as I could, just warding off her punches. When somebody isn’t afraid of her opponent fighting back, however, she can cream the poor sucker. So, after a bit too much of this foolishness, I popped her a small news bulletin in the stomach. She was horrified.

“You HIT me!” she wailed, throwing the gloves off her hands and retreating upstairs in fury and confusion. Another day in the life of an unwieldy marriage.

We don’t have any of that stuff in BillandSiobhanland. On a mean day, we might criticize one another’s driving. I will tell her she always finds the slowest way of getting somewhere and invariably chooses the most unlikely lanes. She will tell me I’m going too fast and not paying enough attention to the horrendous threats offered by every single other car on the highway. If you’re going to, as Tom Robbins says, “make love stay” over the years, it’s a good idea to avoid the big calamitous battles that knock the innards out of a relationship. It also takes time and lessons learned, as discussed below. But first, a word from our sponsor.


Republicans Eat Possum Guts

A Tea Party numbskull wrote a letter to the Gainesville Sun the other day bemoaning the fact that Barack Obama had taken the time to fill out a bracket for the NCAA Basketball Tournament, which takes, oh, ten minutes.

“He should be working on the problems of this country!” said the fruitcake.

Well let me ask you, Mr. Dipwad, is it okay if the President occasionally—in emergency situations, mind you—steals the time to take a piss? Is that okay with you? Besides, you should be grateful for the administrative downtime since whatever else he does will be horribly wrong, wrong, WRONG! Hey, see that stump-grinder over there? Why don’t you just….


Go Gators!

Tonight, the University of Florida’s basketball team plays Brigham Young in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, trying to reach another Final Four. This weekend, the Gator baseball team, ranked first in the country plays defending national champion South Carolina while the second ranked softball team plays #4 Georgia. Men’s track has already won indoor and outdoor national championships, gymnastics vacillates between first and second, women’s tennis is #1 and the women’s lacrosse team, formed only last year, is ranked ninth in the country. So we’re having a lot of fun around here now.


Bill’s Rant Of The Week—Movie Texters

We go to the movies almost every weekend. Oh, occasionally the choices are mind-numbingly awful and we’re forced to stay home, but generally we’re there in our little back row seats enjoying the action.

In the past few years, however an unwelcome intruder has crept into our consciousness—the horriferous teen-aged movie texter. These kids are unbelievable, checking and rechecking their little cells, awaiting messages of grave import from similar dull-witted associates. And these cell phones are BRIGHT, mind you. It’s impossible to ignore them. The whole mess makes me feel old and crotchety.

Last week, a particularly long-limbed and hyper kid sat a couple of seats down from me with his cell phone glued to his hand. He constantly shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, which never happened. He turned his phone on and off every five minutes, doubtless expecting an incredibly important message from the president or, at least, his girlfriend. He looked like a praying mantis with a lantern. Finally, I just stared at him, didn’t say anything, just stared. He got uncomfortable and went and sat on the other side of his three friends. Every so often he would look over to see if I was still watching and I was. He probably had nightmares about the weird old guy in the movies with, no doubt, the Uzi under his shirt. Good. As my grandmother used to say, let that be a lesson to him. And speaking of lessons….


Lessons Learned

My two sisters, God bless them, have each been married only once. Alice (age 68) has been married almost fifty years and Kathy (age 60) is getting close to forty. Their marriages have not been perfect, but they stuck it out, which goes to show that miscreant behavior does not run in my family. It just runs in me. I like to think I’m just more adventuresome than most.

Still, when a relationship breaks up there’s always a little sadness. And when a marriage disintegrates, there’s an inevitable feeling of failure, a long consideration of what could have been done to better the chances for a different outcome. As the years pass, you learn from your mistakes and put the education to use in the next relationship. If you live long enough, you finally get things figured out and come up with someone who will put up with you. Or not. Anyway, here are a few lessons I’ve learned in my long apprenticeship. I hope they save you some time.

1. Pocahontas

My first real girlfriend was Rita Payton at Oklahoma State. I met her in the OSU student union while trolling for women with a friend. Rita was great, smart and very funny. She was also part American Indian. She even grew up on a reservation. We stayed together, though living apart, until I left college. I snuck her into my rented apartment (carefully patrolled by a vigilant granny-lady who, fortunately, went to bed at ten o’clock) the last night I was there. We stayed up all night discussing Great Ideas, etc. When I left for the last time, we knew we would not see each other again. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Just get on the bus and don’t look back.” Gee. It was just like the movies or somethin’. I even got a lump in my throat.

Lesson Learned: You’re liable to find somebody great almost anywhere, even Oklahoma. Stay alert. And always wear nice underwear. No holes.

Would You Date Another Indian Girl? Absolutely. They own all the big casinos now. And, as the Lone Ranger will promptly tell you, they are great to send into town for supplies.

2. The Jewish Princess

I met Karen Meckler when I was about twenty. I was at the University of Illinois, hired by publisher Bruce Johnson to edit his magazine Chaff and Karen came by to join the staff. (On a side note, Roger Ebert also came by with a science fiction story. It wasn’t the type of thing we usually published, but knowing he would be very famous in the future, we published it anyway.)

Karen and I had a lot of fun, but her mother kept sending her newspaper clippings from Dear Abby about “reckless relationships” and encouraging her to find a nice Jewish boy. Eventually, I left Chaff in a disagreement over editorial autonomy and got an apartment in a building owned by Indians (from India Indians), which reeked of incense and Indian food, a dubious mix. With tons of time to spare, I saw Karen a lot—so much, in fact, that her parents got worried.

One night while I was sleeping in my odiferous little room, the Champaign-Urbana police busted in. The first thing I heard was the doorlock crashing into my mirror, then they took me off to jail. If you ever get the notion you have certain inalienable rights, remember this: you have no rights if you have no power. The cops don’t have to give you any phone calls if nobody is going to come looking for you anyway. My first day in jail, I was introduced to a little fat guy who liked to play preacher during the day. He trooped around reading the Bible to anyone who would listen, and you didn’t have much choice. The individual cell doors remained open all the time, making access free around the cellblock.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he told me after I was assigned the bed above his. “Those men over there come into the cell every night and try to kill me.” (He pointed out a couple of mean-looking and very large individuals who were in for attempted murder, waiting shipment to a state prison.) “Now you can help me when they come.” Yeah, I thought, I’m sure I’ll be doing that. Sure enough, that night—and every night—they came in around ten o’clock and started strangling the little bastard. I looked over the edge of the bed and surveyed the ugly scene. Eventually, after everyone had enough fun, the jail guards came in and pulled the guys off. Ashen, the victim looked up at me with an accusatory stare.

“Hey,” I told him. “If I were you, I’d lay off that business with the Bible.”

After a week, Bruce Johnson started looking for me and tracked me down at the jail. The cops were worried about Bruce’s magazine so they let me out pretty quick. He asked him what the charges were and they told them “Threatening to do damage to private property.” I had earlier written to Karen, jestingly threatening to burn a cross on her bigot parents’ lawn in University Heights, Ohio. Some people just can’t take a joke.

Lesson Learned: They say opposites attract and that can be true. But you might be better off, generally, finding someone with whom you have a lot in common.

Would You Date A Jewish Girl Again? Why, of course. But only if there were no Beijing Buddhists, Somalian Shiites, Liverpool Protestants, Bangalore Sikhs or atheists from the Kamchatka Peninsula available. Everybody has his preferences.

3. Texas Girls

Texas girls are my favorites. Where else are you going to find a parlay like Marilyn Todd, Pat Brown, Janis Joplin and Karen K. Kirkland? Nowhere, that’s where. Alright, I will admit there was Louise. But even Louise was beautiful, after all. I went out with Louise in Austin one night to dinner and a movie. I couldn’t understand why she was available—and none of my supposed friends told me, either. From the time I picked her up until the time I saw her home—minus time for good behavior in the movie—Louise never stopped talking. It was like being confined to a place the size of a confessional with a buzzsaw. It wears you out. You start planning little retributions for your pals. It’s all that keeps you going.

Lesson Learned: Don’t judge a book by its cover. My mother told me that. We’d all be better off if we’d paid more attention to our mothers.

Would You Date A Texas Girl Again? Without hesitation. Hey, four out of five ain’t bad. Ten minutes from the time Siobhan throws me out, I’ll be at the airport.

4. Not Our Types.

I guess I have an inclination towards tall girls with long hair. Any hair color is alright, any complexion. But I don’t do this on purpose, I just seem to fall into it. And there have been some great against-type girlfriends, like Dani Hughes and Claudine and Betsy Harper. Betsy was way against type—about five-three with curly hair. She was always upbeat, though, ready to travel, fit as a fiddle from her fitness instructor job.

We had known each other for years but always had our own relationships, mostly travelled with different crowds. One day, we showed up at the same wedding. Everybody always looks great at weddings, right? Betsy, wearing a long antique ivory dress, looked better than the bride. Shortly thereafter, I mailed her a couple of plane tickets to Miami where I had a horse racing. Mailing is good, it gives a girl the time and space to think about it a little before she decides whether to accept or reject. Betsy accepted. When I went to pick her up, she asked me if we’d both be staying in the same room.

“That would be my preference,” I told her.

“Mine, too,” she said with a smile.

Lesson Learned: It’s one thing to have a “type.” It’s a little silly to be rigid.

Would You Date An Against-Type Girl Again? In an Alabama minute.


The Object Of My Affection (Current Day)

Okay, we’ve been having a little fun, but seriously folks….

The hard-won lessons of a lifetime are there for us to draw upon if we have the sense to recognize them. Unfortunately, many don’t. People keep making the same mistakes, year after year, relationship after relationship, and expecting things to work out. What was that old definition of insanity—something about continuing to do the same things time after time and expecting a different result?

As you move along in life, you run across more couples who have made it work. Some of them have just decided to endure, but many of them are very happy. The happiest couples have a lot of things in common. First and foremost, they have made good choices in their mates—in addition to being husbands and wives, they are great friends. They appreciate the fact that their partners need their own time and space and friends and they are not resentful of any of it. They have merged finances, but they also have their own money and do not have to ask for it from their partners. Each partner participates in decision-making and each has veto power over decisions. Each has areas of expertise in which they take the lead and the other willingly follows. Each partner has an iron commitment to the relationship and there are no little threatening games played—nobody is leaving. Each has individual goals that the other gladly helps them attain. Great effort is put forth to avoid hurting the other person’s feelings. Anger and disagreements are dealt with in short order and quickly forgotten. Love conquers all.

As for me, after years of mucking about and ungallant behavior towards good women who deserved better, I have mended my ways in order to preserve the treasure I have unearthed in Siobhan. Not to mention, she would kill me in some very diabolical way if I didn’t.


That’s all, folks….