Author: DOuG pRATt

Take us out to the ballgame

Eric and I are doing something we haven’t done in a long time. We’re going to Fenway Park to watch a Red Sox game. I think the last time we went the seats were about $75, but now they’re $125. We’ll be back there on August 5 with Carol to see Paul McCartney. Those seats are $100, but fees bring the total up to about $115. The field seats for the show — which don’t exist for a baseball game, of course — are $200.

Well, the Sox lost to the Orioles, 6-2, but mercifully it was a short game, especially because we got sunburned. I’d like to point out two photos that I took. First, in the background of this one is the Prudential Building, commonly called “The Pru,” making it a must for Prue Bury if she ever visits Boston…

The Pru

… and the big Budweiser sign makes me want to point out that the King of Beers now belongs to a company in tiny Belgium. The present King of Belgians is Albert II.

Budweiser sign at Fenway Park

The Gates of Harvard Yard

I would suppose that the first thought for some Americans when hearing “Gates” and “Harvard” in the same breath would be to think, “Didn’t Bill Gates drop out of Harvard?” But the talk of the town today is the imbroglio surrounding the arrest last week of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The disorderly conduct charge was quickly dropped. The arrest report is available at The Smoking Gun.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html

This story is such a big deal here in greater Boston that I’ll weigh in with a few points.

  • I don’t think it’s the job of police to know who every “somebody” is in their town. In fact, it’s better that they don’t know.
  • President Obama, after saying “”Skip” Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all the facts,” should not have said “that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly.”
  • I think Gates should have stopped making reckless accusations of racism against Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, and when he didn’t I think Crowley should have let it drop.
  • If Gates pursues a lawsuit against Crowley, I wouldn’t be surprised if Crowley sues Gates for slander.
  • I would like to see Gates and Crowley appear together, shake hands, and say the whole thing ends then and there. Neither has to apologize personally, other than to say they’re sorry it happened, and leave it at that.

A world without Gordon

Peter & Gordon

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that passing of Peter Asher’s musical partner Gordon Waller. They had a solid string of hits in the 60’s. I’ve grabbed two of their tunes from 1967 off of an old piece of groovy vinyl I own, both composed by Mike Leander and Charlie Mills. I’m fairly sure Peter produced these singles.

First the slighty risqué “Lady Godiva”…

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/LadyGodiva.mp3]

… and “Knight In Rusty Armour”

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/KnightInRustyArmour.mp3]

Goldman Sucks & Co.

The talk show “On Point” on Boston’s NPR station WBUR has a must-hear hour on Goldman Sachs & Co.. The springboard is investigative reporter Matt Taibbi’s exposé, “The Great American Bubble Machine.”

[audio:http://www.bu.edu/wbur/storage/2009/07/onpoint_0721_1.mp3]
(Note: I’m hot-linking this audio from ‘BUR, and it isn’t on my server, so it may disappear.)

Taibbi rips apart the understandably defensive, but ludicrous, arguments put forth by Goldman Sachs consultant Charles Ellis, who claims to be outraged by the excesses of the market — yet he insists the blame lies with government regulators and complicit consumers, but not the banks. I feel that Ellis and his ilk deserve to be treated with ridicule, condescension and derision.

Taibbi also tears into President Obama, for paying lip-service to an end of lobbyist influence and bonus-driven business as usual on Wall Street. I’m becoming increasingly disappointed with Obama for what he isn’t doing, in contrast to Bush, who I hated for what he was doing.

The tyranny of technology

Doing my part to help move the economy along, and move myself along, I bought a Garmin 305 GPS for running. J&R had it for a fantastic price on one of their typically tempting close-out deals.

Garmin 305

The damn thing works! Too well. It revealed that my 8-mile running route is actually 7.63 miles, and my 6-mile run is in fact a mere 5.5 miles. Therefore, my pace is slower than I previously believed.

You know what that means. I need to do more running and less blogging!

From Moon to Mars?

On NPR this morning I heard author Daniel Wilson suggest that by now, 40 years after landing on the Moon, we could have made it to Mars. But I’m sure he knows as well as anybody that the reason America went Lunar roving was not for its own sake, but to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. With that goal accomplished, the pressure was off.

My opinion is that a journey to Mars is still too ambitious and costly an undertaking. The scenario postulated in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is what I favor — a Moon base with a way station. The future was indeed set in 1969, but it was the Arpanet going online, and not Apollo 11, that changed everything.

Which reminds me. Way back in my first month of turning my old web site into this web log, and I wasn’t yet embedding audio, I said that Buddy Holly recorded only three songs in stereo. That is incorrect. There is a fourth recording, called “Moondreams”, although this particular dub doesn’t bring out the full stereo effect.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/Moondreams.mp3]

And back on the subject of Mars, my son Eric has of late taken an interest in the early works of David Bowie, who has a song on “Hunky Dory” called “Life On Mars?”.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JUL/LifeOnMars.flv 400 300]

Whoever posted “Life On Mars?” on YouTube disabled embedding, so I had to work around that. I got the poster picture of Bowie looking like Keith Richard playing the Cavern Club from a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.