So, seriously, what the hell do you people expect?
You expect me, Bloom, to get up here and discuss, seriously discuss sports? Â Do any of you think I’m genuinely capable of doing that? Â Do any of you think I’m at all interested in doing that?
I sit here and I stare at my books. Â And for the first time in a long time, I have more space and more bookshelves than I have books. Â When I went from California to Chicago, I had 15 boxes of books. Â From Chicago back to California, I had upped it to 23. Â When they went from California to Minneapolis, I cut pretty deep and got it down to 12. Â They then got shipped, in the same quantity to Florida, where they shrank to ten. Â I’ve got probably about 11 boxes worth now, maybe 12. Â There’s a mystery box in the trunk of the Bloommobile.
Lately, because of poverty, I’ve been thinking I should sell some of them.  Poverty, plus the sheer absurdity of ownership.  My sponsor had a Buddhist master at one point, before he moved to the city to be a big time nurse.  The Buddhist master lived and worked in Sebastopol.  Phil had been to his house and it was one of the more remarkable things he had seen.  The only things he owned were things he touched and used on a regular basis.  How many things would I have left if I did that? Certainly not many books.
But books. Â Books are different. Â Books make me happy. Â They bring back memories of who and what and where. Â The way I hear other people describe music is how books are to me.
So, what would I get rid of? Â The Bukowski’s probably been with me the longest. Â It’s lived the life with me, through the gutter. Â A few of them are actually stolen library books. Â I think libraries have a difficult time keeping him on the shelves–drunkies tend to not be the most responsible of social groups.
Regardless of how much he enjoys sucking Bill Simmons, um…thumb, I love Chuck Klosterman.  I have everything he’s written, including a copy of Downtown Owl that apparently has gotten up and walked off.  Books are like that: they have a mind of their own.  I can’t tell you how many copies of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I’ve bought. Or Bukowski’s Women.  Or WG Sebald’s The Emigrants.
I can tell you that the Kundera book is probably my favorite book, followed closely by the book that gives me my screen name and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.  But much like anything, it’s so dependent upon my mood, that to construct such a list seems ridiculous. James Agee’s A Death in the Family is poetic and beautiful, as is damn near anything by Zora Neale Hurston.
I suppose I could get rid of all my theory books. Â They’re genuinely generally sought after, and I really have no fursther use for the masturbatory quality of literary theory. Â People who are too smart for their own good, chasing ghosts down unlit halls and artificially inflating the consequences of doing so. It’s not fun for someone who doesn’t enjoy argumentation. Â If we’re building something together, that’s fun, but if you just wish to build a castle and try to turn back the deluge, I’ve got other things to do.
There’s the Faulkner. Â I like him, even though Joel and Ethan Coen have been rude to him, sullying his monkey memory. Â Don DeLillo, who, like Thomas Pynchon, should not be ingested alone. Â Tis my solemn belief that no literature (or any art, for that matter) should be consumed alone. Â While we each are sentient beings and we can digest large chunks of literature, the multi-perspective only serves to further each of our own individual experience. Â John Dewey believed that all learning was social, and my experiences thus far in life seem to support that.
JM Coetzee, who is South Africa’s modern day answer to Hemmingway–writes sentences so taut that they are spring-loaded. Â Samuel Beckett, who can’t go on, but must go on. Marcel Proust, ever brooding on, ever reminiscing, joins Jorge Luis Borges (literature’s answer to AN’s AV). Â Julian Barnes, who writes like he wants to be both Henry James and Lawrence Sterne, which is not an easy marriage, but Barnes pulls it off!
Then there’s Eudora Welty who inherited the title of best short story writer from Flannery O’Connor who inherited it from Chekhov. Â When Eudora left, she quietly slipped the title to Alice Munro. Â I love Fitzgerald and Primo Levi, and Shakespeare and Henry Fielding and Cervantes. Â Ooo, and Dorothy Allison! Â And Zadie Smith and Hollis Gillespie. Â And some of Steinbeck and most of Dostoevsky and Hunter S. and Lester Bangs are fun….and James Baldwin, and David Sedaris! Â Yummy.
And you?
This was all supposed to be a FP article on **, and I just started writing and got way off topic and realized this belongs here, not there. Â Kisses, FK! MB, feel free to change the title to whatever you had in mind, Â I’m sure there was a theme…
So why do you keep all those books imprisoned with you in solitude? Donate ’em to a library. Heck, even selling ’em to Green Apple would put them out to freely roam in the socius.
(Or, I suppose, you could start organizing book orgies.)
In other words, either way, FREE YOUR SAMUEL JOHNSON
I have. Want a pic?
My three fiction writers, alphabetically:
Penelope Fitzgerald
Nabokov
Wodehouse
Alice Munro and Coetzee are up there.
Have you read William T Vollman, Bloom? Seems like it might be your thing, and you’d never run out…
I love the first third of White Noise, particularly Murray.
“How do you know so much?”
“I’m from New York.”
…
“I was covering the Jets, the Mets, and the Nets.”
White Noise is teh awesome. I love the entirety of it. The strange thing about both it and my original exposure to Faulkner: I hated both of them before I discussed it with another person/persons. That’s why I think reading is best when it’s a social activity.
And I’m still open to a FK Book Club.
William T Vollman, huh? I will look him up.
My first priority when deciding whether or not to keep a book is whether or not I’ll ever read it again. If the chances of my reading it again are less than 10%, I take it to my favorite used bookstore and get generous trade credit in return towards the next read.
The second priority is whether or not it fits in with the theme of my library, which admittedly is focused on baseball and poker books. Of course, the theme of your library is “The All Time Greats,” so of course, most everything you have fits in.
I understand the sentiment that the presence of the books can help to remember feelings and place/times. However, test yourself. See if thinking about a particular book brings back the memories just as well as physically seeing/handling the book. You’re pretty smart and sober, and I would think that you’d be able to remember most everything without the particular need of a physical reminder.
One important thing I learned as a crossdresser is not to purge your collection just because you’re in a mood about it for a while, because you’ll miss it and want it back and that would suck.
However, grooming a bookshelf or a closet like a bonsai tree can be profitable and somewhat liberating. It’s the middle path between a valued all-encompassing collection and only owning what you regularly use.
Sage advice. I have several poker books, too. I really love both The Biggest Game in Town and Positively Fifth Street. In fact, it might be time to read them both again…
“Cowboys Full” by MacManus is quite the comprehensive history of poker and its’ reverberations through American politics and culture.
Oh yeah! I did read that, too! And it wandered off….loaned it to my brother, iirc. I still have his Moneyball, though, so…you know.
My copy of Moneyball is full of betting stubs from lost bets on the A’s
well, maybe not full, but a slightly visible bulge
That’s actually kinda cool!
Moving to the US with nothing more than checked-in luggage seriously shrank my library, which would have been more traumatic but for being able to leave most of it to the collective I lived with in London where I still get to revisit it regularly. Merging collections with mrs ptbnl and thinning out the duplicates got us down to about 10 bookcases.
An odd couple that springs to mind right now – George Orwell for capturing something quintessentially English and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for immersing me in its antithesis.
I love Marquez, especially that late life thin book he wrote, about the old man with the prostitute…
Don Marquez?
probably.
88 Lines About 44 Writers?
That would be fun!
I can’t get rid of my books either.
Some favorites are Barth, Bukowski, Calvino. More recently Lethem and Chabon.
Bloom, I assume you’ve read Exley’s A Fan’s Notes?
No, I have not. I should?
And I forgot Calvino. Love him, too…
You read Kundera? Sounds in your wheelhouse.
re: Exley. Yes definitely. A vaguely Bukowski-like fictionalized autobiography, with themes of alcoholism, failure, insanity, and being a sports fan (in his case NY Giants football). Beautifully written, both powerful and funny.
re: Kundera. I know I have “Slowness,” and I think I read it but it obviously didn’t make much of an impression. Perhaps I’ll try the one you suggested.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is…amazing.
Upon reflection, though, it is really not the accomplishment that Ulysses is and calling the two the same thing is a disservice to both, probably.
Boy, now KThugman’s actively testing my hypothesis
Yeah. He’s awesome.
Unlike most of my literate friends, I’ve never a big accumulator of books…read ’em and purge ’em, that’s my motto. If this electronic book thing has legs, though, I could see it becoming something like my music collection, where all it takes is an extra external hard drive to maintain a personal collection of basically unlimited scope. At which point I still won’t have read most of ’em, and I’ll have lost the pretentious benefit of dusty book spines to make me appear much more deep than I actually am.
I read & purge, too… only keep books that I know I’ll read again. Before The Movocalypse, I kept books that I thought I might read again, but I finally had to slice through and say “Nope, I’m not going to read you again, and if I decide that I want to after all, there’s always the library.” So the pile of books that I’d accumulated while in school (and hadn’t yet had time to read) were invited to move into one bookcase at Mom’s house with me, and the ones that I’m pretty sure I’ll read again someday are in only about 4 boxes in storage.
I can’t do e-readers. My love for the things I love is hugely influenced by sensory experiences, and the tactile nature of turning real pages is part of reading. Mr. Poppy downloaded Watership Down on his iPad for some reason, and… it’s just wrong. I’m not sure whether it’s wrong because I hate reading ANY book electronically, or because there’s an almost complete absence of technology in that particular story, so having it on a computer just feels extra weird. (Then again, there’s also an almost complete lack of thumbs in that story, so maybe an e-book with swipe-able “pages” is a more appropriate way to read it…)
I’m with you. I’m old enough that reading it online is not the same as reading a physical copy of the book. I’m not sure why that is, but at least part of it is I like to generally speaking take notes in the book.
I correct typos. It’s genetic… when I borrowed some books from my mom, I noticed she also does it.
When they cleared out her library, after her death, Virginia Woolf had made changes in the printed copy of Mrs. Dalloway. I love that story.
I generally try to read and purge too, and a regular library user, though I still have a crapton of books filling up nooks and crannies all over. FYI, a while ago I sold a bunch of books at Moe’s for credit, and for the one’s they didn’t take they had a donation program for inmates. Thought that was a pretty good idea, don’t know if they still do it.
That’s a good program!
I forgot to mention the 1957 encyclopedia set I had to move into storage to make room for my “haven’t read these yet” books. Actually, they’re “stored” inside the built-in bench under a bay window next to the bookcase. I’m thinking I’ll just leave them there for the house’s next owners to discover…
We pretty much always donate excess to the SF library for book sales. Often books we bought there.
We have a few bookshelves, but my dad is the epic hoarder. He still has, for example, his entire college set of Shakespeare’s works. And all the Mad Magazine books from the seventies.
Friends of the Library is never a bad thing.
I read that as “Friends of Liberty” at first and thought, “Isn’t that confederacy thing?”
Much of the literature in our house is sci-fi/fantasy and children’s books for exactly this reason. Well that and the fact that the Mrs. Aardvark is a children’s librarian and a voracious reader. We have had a number of purges and we are down to 2 floor to ceiling book cases and 2 smaller ones. Many of the rest of our books now reside in the basement.
Leaving out my father and obscure sci-fi/fantasy authors, Alexandre Dumas would probably be my favorite.
You’re father’s a writer? Care to divulge his name?
Jay Feldman. He wrote a number of articles for Sports Illustrated in the 80’s and 90’s, including the first article about the All-American Girls Baseball league in a national publication, and some offbeat stuff like this one about a baseball game in Antarctica and this gem about a dog that loved to watch baseball. I still remember that dog, the most amazing part was that he could clearly tell the difference between the game the the players warming up between innings.
He’s written three books over the last few years, all of them would likely be of interest to this crowd. Here’s the link to the Washington Post review of his latest book.
Very cool.
Interesting profile of Howie Spira, the slimy dude at the center of the story where George Steinbrenner got suspended from baseball from having tried to blackmail Dave Winfield. It’s a lot to wade through, but the guy comes off as quite the pathetic sleazeball. The hook is this loser pipe dream Spira has pursued for decades about the “book-and-movie deal” that’s gonna bail him out of his pathetic life (which he mostly lives in his parents’ Bronx apartment). Ironically, the story might actually make a good book, if written by someone with the proper Nelson Algren or Charles Bukowski sensibilities.
“You bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city!”
I RUN TORONTO! I AM TORONTO! I CAN ORDER CITO GASTON TO COME OVER AND HUMP YOUR WIFE!
Wet or dry?
ladies choice.
He’s quite debonair, you know. I think it’s the mustache.
Moist.
Goddamn fucking Rangers are not only gonna win the Series, they’re gonna make the last game a boring blowout too, aren’t they? What a crappy baseball season.
(I miss it already!)
Hey, maybe not!
I want there to be a game tomorrow night.
Go LaRussaBots!
Heh
I’m excited. I’m going for sushi in 45 minutes, and I know the owner will have the game on, and he’ll probably be drunk enough to pour me a free beer to boot!
Looks like succession in the British monarchy will no longer be based on male primogeniture and a prohibition on marrying Catholics.
Had this been the case on the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 then her eldest daughter Princess Victoria would have succeeded. Since she was already Empress of Germany and Queen of Prussia her death 7 months later would have given us King William V a.k.a. Kaiser Wilhelm, and an entirely different history of the 20th century.
But would we still have the iPhone?
WTF Cardinals?
Was that Bloom on 2nd? I hope his ankle is OK, he was been doing a great job exercising.
Ian, that was a great pitch, please shut up
Holliday looks like he still has another error left in him tonight. Maybe two.
more errors than smiles
That one he helped induce!
getting picked off counts.
Too bad he was safe.
WTF was he doing wandering that far away?
Taking a pretty normal secondary lead, I’d imagine. Why he wasn’t going back soon, who knows.
Didn’t look like it.
The question will soon be answered:can 9 Jack Custs win the world series.
This feels like one of those Royals-Orioles games I occasionally watch on a random Monday night in May.
WHy do you watch little league games during the baseball season?
This is really great baseball to watch. I love seeing a pitcher hit is a big situation
Designated IBBer coming in to start an inning? That’s just crazy, TLR.
OBP may be the most dangerous concept in baseball but right now, I’m guessing TLR is wishing some of his guys could get on base.
His guys are too busy playing the game the right way.
That run shouldn’t count. It came on a walk.
They seem to be doing okay at getting on base at the moment.
Has anyone read The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil? I gave it to a friend as a present a while ago, and he read it and gave it back to me, telling me I should read it so he’d have someone with whom to discuss it.
Now (years later) I’m feeling obligated to read it because I may soon be sharing office space with Singularity University.
Only to a point.
Come on, Molina. You’re the only guy in the game with neck tattoos. Be a badass.
Bases-loaded walk will do.
Wow. Holliday’s a dumbass.
?????
third. he was picked off third
OK, getting picked off third is pretty inexcusable.
Except his hand got in there.
the replay angles weren;t conclusive, but I couldn;t see that. It looked like
he didn;t
I agree with Ed and ptbnl, looked out to me. He was slightly ahead of the throw nearing the bag, so it was the kind of call you expect to see called safe much of the time, but whether by incredible perceptive eyesight or dumb luck, the ump got it right as far as I could see.
From the side perspective it looked like he got the left hand in over the foot before the tag was made.
What a maroon.
1) why did ryan look so pouty, he is no stranger to basesloaded walks.
2) I love adrian Beltre
2) So do I.
Didn’t the Cards have a runner (Suppan?) picked off third in the 04 WS?
yes, let Pedro off the hook, and he cruised to a victory.
Out at home, it looks like, on some bad baserunner.
And a double-play, to boot.
Books! I like you, Bloom.
I need to get out of grad school so I have time to read novels again. … There seems to be something wrong with that, considering I’m studying literature.
I have a difficult time getting rid of books, though I wouldn’t mind parting with all of the theory books I’ve had to buy over the years. This:
is exactly right. Also why I need to get out of grad school.
It’s precisely why I despised grad school, and found a new respect for business majors. They are at least honest about it.
Exactly why I aborted both of my separate stabs at grad school.
What did you go for, mb?
About $4.99/#
Not grass-fed, eh?
Pen-raised, fed with excrement
I didn’t know you were raised in China and/or Colorado
Indiana.
Coalinga.
Damn! You’re rich, bitch!
Ah, nuts
Oh goddamn it.
I don’t get TLR. Now he decides not to make pitching changes?
He’s bringing in Dotel. Methinks we should want to go back to know pitching changes.
In the battle of guys who could have changed the A’s season, Beltre and Berkman have both HRed. Somehow I just realized this.
YEAH BUT KEITH GINTER!!!!
Thanks, and go As.
This is getting sad.
Texas rhymes with vex us. Sort of.
Ah McGuffer … who else could watch Jay hit one to shallow right and announce that the Cardinals haven’t got a ball out of the infield for 18 straight batters.
And then follow Pujols double with an explanation of the no-doubles defense Texas is apparently employing.
And again with Freese… LOL
Ah, but that was a triple ;-)
Does anyone else feel queasy?
I think it’s because this is exactly where the A’s would hit into a double play.
It’s the postseason – the Cards would hit into the DP, the A’s would forget to touch home.
Forgetting to touch home would only be one out, though. There should also be a guy that just stops running the bases.
He’s jumping around first & second thinking the other one scored.
If Craig homers here and Buck says “And we’ll see you tomorrow night!” I’ll barf.
No pr for Berkman?
Nobody left on the bench. Just tuned in for the 9th – what a treat!
Shucks.
I need to change the channel. I don’t think I want to see this.
Okay, I wanted to see that.
Incredible!
Holy crap!
Holy shit!
Cool!
Cruz totally should’ve had that, too.
It would’ve been a great catch, but still, he saw it all the way.
Agreed.
Yeah, he looked like he wasn’t running at full speed and then tried to lunge when he realized he underran it.
Looks like this Game 6 is headed for some Buckneresque moment.
headed for?
Seriously. Awful lot of success via others’ failures going on tonight.
That game came after a rain day off too, IIRC.
Anyone know of a real-time WP tracker – I’m thinking Holliday’s numbers have to look especially ugly with the error & pick-off.
Fangraphs.
Thanks.
The pick-off was worth -15% all on its own. Otherwise the walks and the error were pretty much a wash.
linky
Not sure if they count fielding though
Not officially, but you can still look at the difference between the WP had he not erred and the WP with the error and assign that to Holliday.
FK
blaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrg
Well, that is an unfortunate development.
Jesus Christ, every time the Cards get back even Texas knocks them right back down.
Seriously, and with a proper appreciation of the absurdity of the concept of shut down innings, St. Louis has tied or taken the lead in four innings, and in each successive at-bat Texas has scored.
Well, that didn’t last long.
If I talk about changing the channel in the bottom of the inning, will something wonderful happen again before I get the chance?
{anticipates the 5,000 Josh Hamilton hero-worship articles about to be written}
There’s a 6-year-old in Texas who probably doesn’t think he’s so awesome.
Ouch.
I don’t get it…illegitimate kid?
Son of the guy who fell out of the stands.
That’s Hamilton’s illegitimate kid? What a weird coincidence.
Huh, where’s Neftali Hyun-Kim when we needed him?
You mean Darren Oliver, Master Closer?
Watch TLR overmanage his way out of a rally.
He just wasted a potential bunter.
So… what’s on HBO tonight?
If Ryan was Canadian, I’d make puns on Theriot.
With a name like TheRiot, he oughta be in downtown Oakland, eh?
#Occupied.
I’m holding the remote control now…
I’m amazing.
Please continue to use your powers for good.
Comcastic.
This is fucking insane.
And it continues!
Unbelievable.
Kind of like an all-star game with nobody left available at this point. Think Bud will call the game a tie?
If there’s a game 7, is Carp pitching tomorrow?
Nope – he’s got innings 23 through 28 tonight.
I’m tired of hearing about Napoli’s twisted ankle. Does he also have a Bloody Sock they can show us?
Somehow I am unsurprised that pinch-hitting Esteban German for Feldman failed to add value.
I remember when he was the hot-shot A’s 2B of the future, sometime after the Jose Ortiz era.
Moments before we had to desperation-play some idiot nobody named Mark Ellis.
Who?
{cries}
There, there….[hugs Poppy, glares at Sal]
Probably subtracted value considering Mark Lowe came in and that happened.
Estaban German-Leftfielder
Wait, why is German in RF and Cruz is out?
Got yer baggie, ptbnl?
(don’t know why that’s a reply to FSU)
Holy crap. Freese will never have a better game.
He FKing did it – Joe Buck owes me a new couch.
Listening on the radio – did he really do that? What a way to wreck the moment.
He can’t help it, he’s Joe Buck.
he did, and he kinda stumbled over it
Joe Buck=Asshole
Wow. Just wow.
Man oh man, that was awesome. Except for that fucker Joe Buck barfing his tomorrow night line over the big moment.
Nolan looking very tight-lipped at the moment.
Whammy!
Has Nolan ever taken his pants off at Sea World?
Who hasn’t?
Well, if he hasn’t yet, he will this coming week sometime. Fucking tool. Ha.
Sheeeeze. Crazy, awesome game.
Although I think your BYU football team is hating re: tomorrow night.
Yeah, BYU’s gonna lose that one.
BWAAHAHAHA
Berkman .817 WPA. And Freese outdoes him with .953.
too bad you can’t count dropping a pop up
Winning game 6 is easy. Tell em Wash…
It’s incredibly difficult.
Heh.
If only they could both lose tomorrow …
My sentiments too – and for the second year in a row. Until tonight I have not been enjoying this series at all, but that was a classic.
Speaking of tomorrow, does anyone want to meet up to watch game 7? Plenty of options in north Berkeley for those of us in this area, but I’d be happy to go to an Oakland venue too if that’s preferable to others.
Yeah. Just once I’d like to see a team I don’t loathe make the WS.
2014 Royals-Padres WS
A’s – Padres. Behind 60 HR hitters Carter and Taylor, and .400 / 100 SB man Weeks.
So the last World Series game 7 was an AL West team vs an NL team I didn’t want to win. The AL West team had never won a WS. The NL team had the best hitter in baseball.
Cruz has a strained groin. Might be out tomorrow.
Did that happen before the 9th? If so, maybe that affected his attempt to catch Freese’s ball.
Nah, I think they said it happened right after his last at bat.
Back to WPA …
Matt Holliday is credited with 0.3% for this game, which includes +8.6% for the 2 walks and -14.6% for being picked off 3rd.
It also includes +6.3% for reaching on Young’s error and excludes -7.6% for Nelson Cruz reaching 2nd on his own error – and the WPA would actually be worse than this if assigned to MH because it would be the difference between the actual outcome and what should have been after, not what was before.
How does the lack of smile quotient affect WPA?
There were some pretty funny comments in that old thread.
great thread
great diary, too.
Ah, the days when I had time to post things to blogs…
I’m going to have to reconsider my “No chance in hell” take on the likelihood of Quan being recalled. 20K sigs is still a hard nut to crack without paid petitioners. But dear God. She is bald-faced lying when she says she didn’t make the final decision to roust the encampment. The subsequent police assault, ordered by her newly hand-picked Chief and Administrator, made Oakland a national disgrace. Then she tacks back left, backing the cops off, letting the tents back, announces she’ll address the OccOak General Assembly tonight…and then she leaves because they insist she wait her turn to speak.
Oakland now has a lawn full of tents again, an expanded, radicalized and much more unified group of protestors, and freakin Michael Moore (and can further Jon Stewart jibes be far behind?). The various clampdowns will have accomplished nothing, and the previous problem will be more intractable.
OTOH, maybe the righteous outrage will be so galvanizing that Wednesday’s General Strike will sweep the nation, and the People will overthrow the Corporatocracy before Christmas. In which case Quan will be famous for all time, like Custer and Quisling.
Have you noticed that you can’t say FreeSeatUpgrade without saying Freese?
yes
I have a hard time imagining that Dellums or the Don would have done any better.
You must be kidding. Don would’ve stopped the encampment within the first few days, diffusing the mass before it got too big to jail. Dellums would never have cleared the encampment out at all.
Dellums would have joined them while not actually knowing what he was doing there.
Don would have ordered the cops in earlier and harder. Dellums would have dithered and flipflopped more dramatically than Quan (if he was even in the city at all) via a bevy of competing lieutenants.
Part one, yes, as I said. Part two,
you don’t know what you’re talking aboutplease allow me to offer a different point of view. Indecisiveness and flipflopping were not Dellums problems, nor was internal factionalism. The lack of his presence was real, of course, but there is absolutely no doubt that Dellums (perhaps by phone from a luxury hotel in DC) would have left the encampment to do its thing uninterrupted.Sorry, that was phrased unduly harshly, I’ve edited my choice of words.
No, no problem — no offense taken. You certainly know the players better than I do.
Either A) She knew about and needs to be held accountable for the actions of the OCP. Or B) She’s telling the truth and she needs to be accountable for being completely incompetent and not actually managing the city she’s charged with.
OMG! Quan did just try to wait in line and speak, and got booed so resoundingly that she retreated without saying a word.
Here’s her letter to OccOak.
1 & 2 are fine, 3 would have to distinguish between police and other emergency services, and 4 has no hope right now.
Yeah. 4 is just counterproductive, and makes a “fuck you” more likely than an “ok, we’ll allow EMTs”
She has to say #4 (please don’t camp in the plaza), because she’s getting a lot pressure from the law and order element, which prior to OccOak was arguably the most prominent voice in the City’s body politic, on account of all the murders and the perception of Oakland as too dangerous to do business in.
I thought it was reasonably well phrased, in that points 1-3 say “we need” and point 4 says “we ask.” And the reality, as ptbnl notes, is that everyone including Quan knows they aren’t able to stop the camping now.
I would have not included it in the letter at all. I understand why she did, but it is counterproductive.
I think when your first communication with OccOak post-thuggery includes that as a requirement, and is conveyed via a letter posted on your facebook site, it’s guaranteed to fail.
The CAMPENING!
Reminds me of the “Free Speech Zone” Seattle mayor Paul Schell designated after the forst day of the WTO in 1999.
They were zones where you could and would be arrested for having an anti WTO sign, or a peace lapel pin, or any outward show of “lefty” causes.
Remember when I used that photo once, way back in the olden days?
How quaint.
(love the poster in the back)
Damn, what a game I just slept through!
It was awesome! We went down by 1 when the second half started and then came back and won it 9-6, I scored the final goal to put it away.
Oh wait, you didn’t mean my indoor soccer match?
Thanks, and go As.
Was there any other one?
Heh.
Oakland and Stuttgart, united by more than their love for the A’s alone:
Exactly.
Although it should be noted that everything is bigger and better in the US, beating up the protesters notwithstanding. And that the guys in the bottom were not occupying Wall Street or such, but our city park, protesting the changes in the central train station that bring cutting of the century-old trees with it.
Oakland doesn’t have its own tank-mounted water cannon, though (sighs wistfully).
On the subject of books:
I think the world would be a better place if everyone read:
1. The Jungle
2. Something by Balzac. The grittier the better.
2. Mountain oysters?
Nope, but that reminds me to also ping Catch-22.
1. Mountain oysters?
Oh wait… those are rat heads.
Balzac was a writer. He lived with Allen Funt.
I’m one of those bastards who, when he read The Jungle, was hit in the stomach and not in the heart.
Speaking of purging, we’ve gone through books today and have several bags full to get rid of. Included are 6 baseball-related books I figured I’d offer if anyone wants them:
– Summer of 49
– Summerland by Michael Chabon
– Mind Game
– Fantasyland – good for anyone interested in Fantasy Baseball
– The Mind of Bill James
– Aces by our good friend the Urb
Let me know if you’re interested in any of them.
I’ve never read Aces. Is it any good?
…and the Bill James one sounds interesting.
It’s was a fun read as an A’s fan, from back when they were all good. It would be nostalgic now. The Bill James books is interesting. I can send ’em to you if you want – email me your address.
Done and done! Thanks!
no.
Fantasyland is a fun read even if you’re not interested in fantasy baseball… you just have to know a little about what fantasy baseball is and how superfuckingserious some people are about it. I loved that book.
Seriously. It described me to a tee the first year I ever played fantasy. Since then, I’ve lost almost all interest but the book is still quite good.
Fake Online Baseball > Fantasy Baseball.
Thanks, and go As.
Masturbation > Fake Online Baseball.
that’s just science.
Masturbation > Science
(with all apologies to Shorty)
Ha! You just got Shorty!
It’s close, I’ll grant you.
…and you love science! Think of how the rest of us feel about it.