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Mike Flanagan and Earl Weaver in the glory days.

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It's amazing how disorienting it is.
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Mike Flanagan, before his suicide, was apparently depressed because of the vicious criticism of his management of the Orioles (he had become part of the front office team). He felt responsible for not turning around the team but also felt savaged on the chat boards by the people of Baltimore who had once loved him.

A good reminder that bullying isn't limited to teenagers. Being mean and nasty online shouldn't be a leisure-time activity. And nothing exempts a person from the protection of moral treatment: not wealth, fame, job, being a smarty-pants, being stupid, politics, religion, lack of religion. 
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I don't know the whole story, of course, but I have to take the occasion of Mike Flanagan's suicide to put in a good word for antidepressants. Too many people suffer needlessly because of a still potent stigma about 'popping pills to solve your problems.' Eff that. Pop those pills. To insist on handling it alone is not heroic, not strong, just a crying shame.


For those who don't know, Mike Flanagan was a Cy Young pitcher for the Orioles in the late 1970s and 1980s---a fan favorite and all-around great guy. It just breaks my heart that he was in such despair.

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It's kind of creepy out there. Clouds at tree height, a weird tint to the sky.
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It turns out that we East Coasters live in the middle of the North American tectonic plate, which extends basically from California (although in the north it extends as far as Siberia) in the west to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the east. The San Andreas fault represents the western edge of the plate, and the eastern edge is marked by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is a deep gash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

In the north, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge extends to Iceland, so you can actually see it:

Because our earthquakes are within-plate earthquakes, they're little. Places where two plates meet (like California) get the biggies.

Note: I started my editing career on the Journal of the Seismological Society of America, where you are NOT allowed to use the word "quakes." To this day, I cannot do it.
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(Thanks, Deb. And whoever created this.)
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Earthquake damage:

Poor Rocky was home alone!

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It's every afternoon, with the darkening clouds, sky-cracking thunder, sturm-und-drang weather.
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Thank you, chica, for introducing me to the awesome Flaming Lips.

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I've read a decent amount of romance fiction over the last few years, after being inspired by a Washington Post list of best love stories a few years ago. Most are dreck, but here are a few winners. They have good stories, witty dialogue, non-puke-inducing heroes and heroines, and---an absolute must---good sex scenes.

By Jo Goodman:

If His Kiss Is Wicked
One Forbidden Evening
The Price of Desire
A Season to Be Sinful

By Lisa Kleypas:

The Devil in Winter
Secrets of a Summer Night

By Laura Kinsale:

Flowers from the Storm

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Perhaps the rarest specimen in cinema is a thing called wholesome entertainment. It's a movie that is essentially made for adults but can be enjoyed by all (as opposed to The Incredibles or Finding Nemo, which are movies made for children that can be enjoyed by all).

Wholesome entertainment used to be all around: The Sound of Music, The Great Race, even something like Doctor Zhivago. But the 1970s brought gritty realism to film, the 1980s brought cussing to genre films, and the 1990s brought the raunch comedy, all of which are great in their own right. The sad thing wasn't that these films existed, but that wholesome entertainment virtually ceased to exist.

That's why it was such a treat to see Captain America this weekend. The story of a scrawny kid with heart, it harkened back to the 1940s in style and attitude. There's not a single curse word. Not a single flash of nudity or moment of raunch. The sets are subtly stylized to give a light feel of fantasy. The dialogue is beautifully simple. Remember John McClane  and all his snappy comebacks? When the villain in Captain America says to our young hero, "You don't give up, do you?" you know how he responds? With the brilliant rejoinder: "Nope!"  The filmmakers even resurrect the old WWI trope of a gang made up off one American, one Brit, one Frenchman, etc. And when the gang needs to get into the villain's super-secure, mile-deep-in-the-Alps fortress headquarters, do they spend hours poring over blueprints and planning an elaborate entrance? No---there's no hanging from the ceiling, Mission-Impossible-style. No turning off the power grid and slipping through the metal doors using a quantum magnet. Captain America shoots his way in, and then his friends ride a zipline down to a big window. Which isn't even made of a tempered glass, because they go right through it.


There was humor, sentiment, and action. And, rarest of all, the movie had an identity, a sense of itself and the kind of story it was telling. It wasn't generic and still managed to be fun and even artistic.Go ahead---watch it with your 8-year-old. You'll like it too.
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Crazy, Stupid Love got some really rave reviews, so I had high hopes when we saw it Friday night. And to be clear, the parts of the movie featuring the actor the interwebs call "your boyfriend Ryan Gosling" are fabulous. He and Emma Stone have mad chemistry. And as the "player" in this rom-kinda-com, his character could have been crass and stereotyped; but the writing and his own awesome self make him original and just great to watch.

The Steve Carell-Julianne Moore portion of the movie, not so much. There are lots of stupid stock scenes that are as tired as they are implausible. Carell and Moore are great actors, and the movie can be funny as hell and sometimes sweet. But they are mostly walking through a series of romantic-comedy checkboxes.

Worse than the cliches, though, is the sexual politics of the movie. Julianne Moore's character has had an affair at the beginning of the movie, and she never stops being punished for it. Steve Carell's character, Cal, follows with a long string of one-night-stands which he gets a little comeuppance for but which is mainly played for laughs and a kind of satisfying revenge.

Worst of all, though, is the icky subplot of Cal's 11-year-old son who has a crush on his 15-year-old babysitter, who in turn has a crush on Cal. First of all, NO. And second of all, as in so many movies, the boy's desire ennobles him while the girl's desire demeans her. She tells the boy several times, Stop; this has got to stop. But he is encouraged to "go for his dreams" and "never stop trying." She, on the other hand, is made to take naked pictures of herself to send to Cal, which are discovered by her parents before she has a chance to send them. We are treated to a scene in which her mother submits the photos to her father, who stares at them at length. Both parents bypass the girl entirely, and the father runs off to beat up Cal. Which in itself is a pretty funny scene, but it would have to be a hundred times funnier to make the preceding one palatable.

But the whole thing does what it's supposed to do, which is to teach each kid a lesson. The boy learns that following the strength of his conviction is an important passage to manhood. The girl learns that her desires are unhealthy and mistaken. His desires lead to a payoff. Her desires lead to public humiliation.  For the whole second half of the movie, I was waiting for the inevitable denouement of this little morality play, the one where she finally caves in to the rightness of his campaign and rewards him with his first kiss. At the middle-school graduation scene at the end of the movie, you see it coming. There in the crowd he spots her, standing alone and luminous in her billowy romantic dress. He walks over to her to make peace, say he understands that she just wants to be friends. Does she say, Good, I'm glad you finally got that? Does she bend down and tenderly kiss his cheek?

God help us, she hands him one of the naked pictures of herself. To help "get [him] through high school."

Well, all has turned out as it should. She's learned that what is seemly in a girl is to be the object of desire, to be a source of sexual inspiration for boys, and  to accept that role graciously. But NOT to have desires herself, which will only embarrass her. And so it is throughout our culture. Buying a copy of Maxim with Olivia Wilde on the cover? Rock on. Buying a magazine with Rob Pattinson on the cover? La-ame.

So, all in all, disappointing. There is good stuff in this movie, though, and it makes me wonder what the original script looked like. Maybe the grosser and more contrived aspects are the result of studio meddling.
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Sally, Hoxie, and Lauren just got back from it, and here is one of Lauren's many stunning photos.

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Think Like Solomon

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Here's what it comes down to: The Republicans were willing to let the country default, and the Democrats weren't.
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