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I’m Number 1!

My morning routine when I get to work is always the same: Check email, check bank account balance, check web site statistics. All three are generally stable and ho-hum. Even my web site statistics have remained same-old-same-old for a long time, with no spikes caused by a virulent trend of search engine traffic.

Until today. This morning there was a huge uptick in traffic from Yahoo. In fact, at 8am, there were 1000s of hits since midnight last night. Huh. That’s weird. What happened last night? Did my ode to beet greens strike a chord among night-owl health fanatics? Have my reviews of perfume samples finally won me fame in China? Did one of my cute kitty photos make Reddit?

Nope, turns out my newfound popularity was coming from… the Red Sox’s World Series victory. Kind of funny, since the only reason I’m celebrating the Red Sox today is because they put a swift end to the foot-dragging baseball season in a city far, far away. Go Sox! Go away!

A page of my pictures from the 2004 World Series Rolling Rally (here) is the top-ranked page in Yahoo for search queries of “red sox parade” in lower-case letters. It’s beating out freaking boston.com in the results ranking (see screenshot below).

As of 4pm Monday, the 2004 Rolling Rally page on my web site received over 4300 hits, because not only is it Yahoo’s number one choice for “red sox parade,” but it’s also pretty high ranked for “red sox peraide,” “red soz parade,” “red sox prade,” and “blow up doll.”

redsoxparadeyahoo

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By Meredith – October 27, 2007

Can’t Beat Beet Greens

What can be better than beet greens? Of course, it can only be free beet greens!

Yesterday, a kindly vendor at the Boston Public Market handed me a bag full of beet greens after I inquired about the per-pound price of what I thought was swiss chard. “Beet greens? Is it like swiss chard?” I asked. “Yeah, but I think swiss chard is more tender,” he answered. Swiss chard is more tender? Beet greens must be, like, the Mike Tyson of leafy greens.

I tried to pay the vendor, but he waved away my money and told me (with a wink) to come back next week and tell him how I liked them. Wait, are you trying to win my affections by plying me with free beet greens? Do I look that healthy to you?

I know a secret: Any leafy green can be transformed into delicious by being sauteed in olive oil, garlic, onions, cider vinegar and a splash of maple syrup. An accompanying glass of wine is, of course, mandatory.

Mr. Pinault was simply thrilled by the appearance of “tougher than chard” beet greens on the dinner table, although he was suspicious about what I said or did to get them gratis. “Come on, I’d never flirt for beet greens. Tomatoes, berries, and maybe a melon, but not beet greens.”

beetgreens

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By Meredith – October 26, 2007

Aye, Matey, ‘ere’s me tenure?

On Boston.com’s Health section, a picture showed an elderly man with an eye patch, and the teaser said Paul Sally is the 74-year-old “Professor Pirate.” Woah. That’s prime Human Interest content, and I’m human, so of course I clicked on the link to read the article.

The article is a bizarre but moving portrait that mashes the professional accomplishments of a University of Chicago math professor with his tragic physical deformities resulting from diabetes complications, including the loss of his left eye 25 years ago. One day he’s ignoring doctors advice to lower the height of his two prosthetic legs from the unwieldy stature of 6 foot 3 inches…the next day he’s lecturing at MIT about supercuspidal representations of p-adic groups.

Disappointingly, past the teaser, nowhere is the moniker “Professor Pirate” used, although the line “a laugh large enough to make his eye patch dance” more than made up for this omission.

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By Meredith – October 25, 2007

The American Idea

This month, The Atlantic Monthly celebrates a century and a half of noble existence with their 150th anniversary issue. 150 years! Yes, this is a magazine so old that, in its infancy, it published an article called “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” Ha ha ha. It’s hard to be outraged by such quaint grammar.

The issue features dozens of essays from celebrity contributors about “The Future of the American Idea”. The essays range from John Updike’s foreboding literary parallelism (“The American idea, promulgated in a land of plenty, must prepare to sustain itself in a world of scarcity”) to Nancy Pelosi’s political ass-honking (“Young people are engaged in their own dialogue – talking about their hopes for a brighter future and for peace and prosperity”) to Eric Schlosser’s cynical liberalism (“The America I love bears little relation to the freak show now peddled by Hollywood and the cable-news networks”) to Frank Gehry’s cry for attention (“I wonder why great architecture isn’t considered an important shaper of the American Idea.”)

But I agree with regular Atlantic correspondent PJ O’Rourke, who, in the midst of a four-paged crazed riff on a 5,289-paged book of historical US statistics utters a simple truth: “America has a lot of things.” Yes! Yes! The future of the American Idea, like the past of the American Idea, and the present for that matter… involves a lot of things. One Idea, but billions upon billions of things.

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By Meredith – October 24, 2007

Chuckles over Knuckles

I discovered that saying the word “knuckleball” (as in, “The Red Sox knuckleball pitcher isn’t playing in the World Series”) has an interesting effect on Mr. P, who gives a delighted chuckle not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy when he receives a poke in the stomach.

That’s how we discovered that Mr. P didn’t know what “knuckles” are. It’s an increasingly rare event that he’ll come across an English word that he does not understand, so when it happens, I must exploit:

“Want a knuckle sandwich?” I asked, to which he gamely agreed. Pow. “Wanna play Bloody Knuckles?” I asked, to which he demurred.

It turns out that there is no commonly-used French equivalent of the word knuckle. Like, they’ll say craquer mes doigts (cracking my fingers) or craquer mes jointures (cracking my joints), but don’t use a specific term for the joints of the fingers.

Knuckle is a German-origin word that can also be used as a verb to mean applying oneself industriously to a task. Interestingly, this is another concept for which the French lack a word.

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By Meredith – October 23, 2007

“Put on your red socks, darling, and let’s go dancing!”

It was a helluva Monday morning. The weather forecast said 80 degrees, so I threw on my summertime office attire: a pair of cropped cotton gray pants, a slinky light-weight flowered blouse, and my German-engineered sandals. At 7:30am, I walk to the train station in the brisk morning chill, shivering like a wet mule under the weight of my laptop, my French books, my lunch, and all of the personal accoutrements that I will need until I return home at 8:30pm.

On the train, I stand by the doors with my bags ratcheted between my legs, struggling to physically handle the New York Times while intellectually overcoming the distraction of the Spanish-speaking woman talking on her cell phone in a barrage of rapid-fire retorts. The train is running at reduced-speed through maintenance zones, and we arrive at South Station 50 minutes later.

I walk to my office, a billion ‘to do’ bullet points unorderly floating in my brain. Phone calls to make. Emails to write. Decisions. Decisions. Must buy stamps. Must buy new train pass. Must send birthday card. What’s for dinner tonight? What did I need to buy at CVS? Jesus Christ, did I do my French homework? And oh yeah… my job. Tee-hee.

I rush through a crosswalk just as the Don’t Walk sign stops its warning flashes, and come face-to-face with an elderly street person who is shaking a small Dunkin Donuts cup to rattle the coins within. He looks at me and grins. He doesn’t have any teeth. “Put on your red socks, darling, and let’s go dancing!” he booms, bobbing slightly in place.

I continue to walk. I make it about a block before I turn around, battling the stream of oncoming commuters that I am now walking against. I approach the panhandler from behind and drop a dollar in his cup. I sneak away. He is homeless, toothless, and carrying a cup of coins. He is the happiest-looking person I’ve seen all morning.

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By Meredith – October 22, 2007

Sun, Sand, Surf, and Foliage

When the fall foliage is peaking, the automatic urge is to head to the forests, probably because, well, there’s a lot of trees in the forest. Look at that explosion of red! That outburst of orange! That flare of yellow! And how they all blend together to form a patchwork of color!

But with the temperature hovering near 80, we headed to Crane’s Beach in Ipswitch for some frolicking in the sand dunes and picnicking aside Ipswitch Bay. The colorful foliage amid the white dunes was quite striking. Mr. Pinault photographed some dramatic contrasts…



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By Meredith – October 21, 2007

The Political Leanings of Drunks

I had an hour to kill in Boston’s Back Bay/Fenway neighborhood, so I headed to the original Bukowski’s Tavern, the only nearby bar where aging hipster bartenders sling beers brewed by Trappist monks to people who weren’t in the area shopping at Copley Place or Newbury Street.

I sat at the bar and ordered some kind of Weizen. I pulled out an Atlantic Monthly magazine. I hated to be that person sitting in Bukowski’s and reading at the bar, so I tried to look nonchalant and unabsorbed. Occasionally, I would look up and smile at nothing, or stare meaningful at my beer.

Before I left, I went to the restroom. Someone had meticulously penned on the wall in black marker “i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife” and attributed it to Bukowski. It made me giggle.

Today I sought the source of the Bukowski restroom quote, imagining it to come from a story but it’s actually the title of poem. The poem touches on politics (“We plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty”), but overall it’s a fine example of Bukowski’s iconic uninhibited maleness (“[I was] always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually / a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor.”)

The part of the poem that I get stuck on, though, is this: “I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government / but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as / their ideas / and that ideas were governments turned into men.” Hmm. Okay, I think he’s saying that governments are good ideas that are poorly executed by men. I must have read it about fifty times and I still can’t fully wrap my brain around it.

But, why the heck am I trying to decipher Bukowski’s freaking political philosophy? If the title of the poem didn’t clue me in, certainly the last line should: “I would have to get / very drunk again.”

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By Meredith – October 20, 2007

The Red Sux

I have not been a devoted baseball fan since the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies, who improbably battled all the way to the World Series (and lost to Toronto). This mulleted and paunchy bunch won my heart with the sheer unlikeliness of their superior athleticism, epitomized by first baseman John Kruk, who was once parodied dead-on by Chris Farley and is now a ESPN “analyst” who says insane things like “I’d rather have my leg cut off than hit against a knuckleballer”.

In fact, living in Red Sox Nation for the past 12 years, I’ve grown quite anti-baseball. I’ve never witnessed any phenomenon like the Red Sox, which induces grown adults to block out everything in order to focus on a boring, drawn-out, repetitive sport, and stake all their happiness and self-worth on the outcome.

After last night’s Red Sox loss to Cleveland, which puts Boston in a 3-1 series deficit, the mood is perceptibly grave… it’s life or death. “They’ve been in tough spots before,” one man pontificates in the sandwich line at Viga. His voice raises, and people rip their hungry eyes from the foccaccia-stuffed comestibles to stare. “They can come from behind and win a playoff series. They did it to the Yankees. They can do it to Cleveland. This is a team that’s all about comebacks. This is a team you never stop believing in!”

Many people applaud this crazy man. I’m sure the fact that he looks like a CEO and he’s with a woman who looks like a young Candice Bergen helps his cause. But for me, it just pours a bit more salt on the plot of soil called “baseball” that lays fallow in my brain.

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By Meredith – October 17, 2007

Tales from the Rails

I pause ever-so-briefly while climbing the steps to board this morning’s Boston-bound express train. From within the double-decker car, a distinct buzz emanates: Scores of unrestrained vocal cords, vibrating disharmoniously in affected, outraged nonchalance. Dear lord. Teenagers.

Upon stepping into the car, I am welcomed by a cluster of shiny-haired, jean-clad high school girls (sophomores, I’d bet), one of whom looks directly at me while half-screaming “Doesn’t anyone get off this train?”

I push my way through the crowd of 12 or so girls, who buzz about how their male counterparts have migrated to other cars in order to find seats, and how they want seats, and how they don’t want to stand for the 35 minute ride into Boston. Welcome to the real world, ladies, where none of those dozing old fat dorks in suits are even considering chivalrously ceding their comfort for yours.

They do not think to sit on the stairs that they’re flanking, so I sit on a newspaper on the top stair. I can block them out of my vision with a New York Times, but I am two feet away from the epicenter of the conversation, which borders on mind-numbing tedium until it turns to the Natick Collection and Chanel purses.

“Nobody at Framingham High has a Chanel purse,” one girl is saying. “I mean, that’s, like, what? A couple thousand dollars? I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

The girls fall silent until someone says “Well, maybe people have Chanel purses, but they’re not taking them to school.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” the first girl says. “I mean, I would never bring my Chanel purse to Framingham High. It would be gone in two minutes.”

Everyone rushes to agree that they would never bring their Chanel purses to school.

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By Meredith – October 16, 2007