Veritas et Venustas

It's a sobering thought, that by the time Mozart died, he was 19 years younger than I am today.

I don't know how I missed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday: 27 January 1756. Despite his early death, no one has equaled his music before or since.

(With apologies for the title to the monologues of the great Tom Lehrer)

Life's A Blog — Iraq elections

Click here for links to Iraq blogs (via planetizen).

Hotlanta

I wish I were there now — it was minus 2 in South Bend a couple of nights ago. So here's a webtour of Atlanta (via Atlantalarry). One of photos, below, shows a building characteristic of Southern classicism circa 1910 from Virginia to Georgia. You can almost smell the kudzu.

More photos of Atlanta here.

“Chaos in the City. Architecture, Modernism and Peak Oil Production - Jim Kunstler Interview”

There's an interesting interview with Jim Kunstler at threemonkeysonline. Scroll through most of the first page to get to the start of the interview itself.

Jimbo, New Urbanism & Sex

I have an e-mail from Jim Kunstler that's one of the funniest things I've ever read. He sent it to me after the first meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

The CNU now has 3,500 members, but the first congress had 200 attendees, most of them meeting the others for the first time.

In the e-mail, Jim analyzed who slept with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. What made it so funny was the language -- there must be 50 euphemisms for various forms of sex, all made up by Jim for the e-mail.

I'll leave it in my will for the CNU archives.

(continued)

Several years ago I heard someone on public radio summing up the problems of sprawl and the virtues of urbanism in neat, succinct sound bites that took less than 2 or 3 minutes of airtime, including the interviewer's questions.

"We've been talking to James Howard Kunstler, in Saratoga Springs, New York," the host said.

I called information, got the number for James Howard Kunstler, and called him up.

"Hi, my name's John Massengale, I was just listening to you on the radio . . ."

"Take your amnesia pills, John, you're in the book."

Life's A Blog —A Hockey Story

Several years ago, one of my high school classmates signed up to coach his 8th grade daughter's hockey team. He got a call that two other parents would be his assistant coaches.

When he went to the first practice, he found that one was Denis Potvin. The other was Phil Esposito.

For those who don't know hockey: When he played for the Boston Bruins, Espo was the greatest scorer in the history of the game. He was also the star forward for what was often the best team in the game.

Getting Espo for the assistant coach of a middle-school girl's hockey team is like getting Abraham Lincoln as the teaching assistant for an elementary school civics class.

Then there was Potvin.

(continued)

Espo's teammate Bobby Orr revolutionized the defenseman's game, and was the biggest star on Espo's team - bigger than Espo. The Harvard hockey players I knew referred to him as God.

(Graffiti I saw in a toilet stall at Boston Garden: Jesus Saves! Espo gets the rebound and scores!!)

Potvin came later and didn't revolutionize the game the way Orr did, but he was a more skilled defenseman. His teams won 4 Stanley Cups in a row, and only many injuries and Gretzky and the Oilers in the Stanley Cup finals kept them from winning 5 in a row, which no team has ever done.

He was also one of the meanest guys in a brutal sport. One reason he was so effective was because he always seemed to take great delight in crushing the opposing forwards, no matter what the score. I wonder what he taught the 12 year old girls.

Pitchers & Catchers & the Big Unit Report in 25 Days (and counting...)

0 days 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds !