11 Friday Jan 2013
Posted in Family and Friends
The other day I was asked to ‘help out’ with Abby for an hour and a half while her parents Annie and Danny kept an appointment.
“Sure,” I said.
“After all, how bad could an hour and a half with a two-year old be,” I foolishly thought to myself.
10 Thursday Jan 2013
Posted in Go Sox
Now that Opening Day is in the current year, more and more of my thoughts are turning to one of my serious but not life threatening obsessions.
Apparently others can say the same, as I’ve received from MillersTime readers the following two links to baseball articles, both of which I gladly pass on to others who may be equally obsessed and looking for something to read other than warmed over Hot Stove material.
09 Wednesday Jan 2013
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures, Family and Friends
Tags
"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", Extroverts, Introverts, Susan Cain
A couple of weeks ago I noticed something that seemed strange at the time, but now I think I’m beginning to understand it.
As one of my on going interests is reading, I am a sucker for the end of the year lists of favorite books. One list that I saw was quite surprising. Goodreads, the online site that focuses on what its reading members list and like, had as its top nonfiction book of the year a title that did not appear on any of the usual lists of the year’s best books that I had seen.
08 Tuesday Jan 2013
The signs are all around us.
The football season is, finally, coming to an end.
There will be an announcement tomorrow about the new inductees to Cooperstown.
References are appearing to the number of days until ‘Truck Day,’ ‘Pitchers and Catchers,’ Spring Training, etc.
Two of my three Nats’ ticket partnerships have had their drawings for 2013 tickets.
Life is beginning to stir again.
Which brings me to thoughts of the annual MillersTime Baseball Contests.
As most of you know, I offer six contests each year based upon contestants predictions for the coming baseball season. The prizes are good ones – seats at future baseball games, often playoff ones. Even if not everyone claims his/her prizes! (To see the questions and results of last year’s contest, use this link.)
And it’s an equal gender contest as about half of the winners are consistently of the female persuasion (three of six in 2012).
So as I fashion this years contests, I’m calling for ideas on what would make for good questions. In the past, I’ve asked about your best single prediction for the coming season, who would be in and win the World Series, how well would the Nats do, what would happen with the Red Sox and Yankees’ seasons, etc.?
But I am open to some new questions, some new contest ideas.
Hopefully, some of you will send ideas for questions for the 2013 MillersTime Baseball Contests.
You can do so by emailing me (Samesty84@gmail.com) or putting your question(s) in the Comment section of this post.
Thanx in advance.
Go Sox.
04 Friday Jan 2013
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change", Al Gore, Susan Cain
I have a ticket for someone who wants to join me (free) at either of the two speaking appearances described below at Sixth & I St. in DC. Let me know by email or in the Comments section.
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
(Updated 2/27/13 to include films that I didn’t get to see until 2013, but ones that came out in 2012.)
Between our Sunday morning Cinema Club, Ellen’s love for movies, and my freedom to go to a film any day, any time, I saw a lot this year.
Below is a list of the just the ones I gave four, four and a half, and five stars. For many of these I wrote brief, mini-reviews and have linked to those reviews. I’m not sure I can define my distinctions between the three categories any more than to say all three are films I enjoyed. The five stars and the four and a half ones I recommend without reservations.
In retrospect, I might adjust my ratings up or down on a few just a bit, but I decided to leave the ratings I gave the films shortly after I saw them.
There are a few more still on my ‘to see’ list (Zero Dark Thirty, The Waiting Room, Flight, Amour), and all of which I suspect would get one of the three top ratings.
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
I came across a brochure for this Washington Jewish Film Festival which starts Jan. 3. It’s spread over eleven days and includes 55 films from 15 countries and takes place in 14 venues around DC.
Paris Manhatten is the opening night film and Hava Nagilia closes the festival.
To get the details of the films, the venues, etc., use this link.
29 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
Favorite Books, Favorite Books Read This Year, Millerstime, MillersTime Readers's Favorite Books
Ursula Klawitter / Corbis
First, much thanks to all who sent in your favorite reads, those who have done so in the past — and continued to do so — and the dozen or so new contributors too.
Please forgive my endless reminders, tho the results, I believe, may have been worth the nagging. (Late additions will be posted as they arrive, without any snarky comments from the editor.)
I often heard three comments from readers:
Nevertheless, seventy of you contributed this year, listing 250 different books, split virtually evenly between fiction and nonfiction. The female-male division was 54%-46% (F/M), about what it has been in the past. About 20% of you were in what I would loosely call the ‘younger’ category, under approximately 39 years of age (my definition of ‘younger’ continues to expand).
I’ve made several adjustments in my posting of the results of what you’ve sent:
For a quick overview, titles that appeared five or more times were:
But as is often said, “the devil is in the details.” I suspect one of the strengths of this (and previous) year’s list has more to do with what contributors said about why they enjoyed certain books rather than the number of times a book was listed.
When I printed out the lengthy list you are about to see, I found 20 different titles I immediately marked for my ‘to read’ list for the coming year and another 29 that also interested me. Many of these were only mentioned once or twice.
Just a reminder that this list is not meant to be the best books published in 2012, but rather what the title of this posting states – ‘The Books Most Enjoyed by MillersTime Readers in 2012.’
And, of course, I take responsibility for any inaccuracies or mistakes in the posting of the titles, authors, comments, etc. as MillersTime readers rarely make grammatical or other mistakes in their submissions. Please feel free to let me know about any of my errors as I can correct them quickly and easily.
20 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
" "Detropia", "A Late Quartet", "A Royal Affair", "Burn", "Central Park Five", "Chasing Ice", "Quartet", "Sky Fall", "The Fitzgerald Family Christmas", "The Life of Pi", "West of Memphis, Documentaries, Films, Movies, Searching for Sugarman
Mini-reviews here of seven films I’ve seen over the last month or so (it’s great to be retired and also to belong to the DC Sunday morning Cinema Club).
And these don’t include Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, Jack Reacher, Les Miserables, and The Waiting Room (any other suggestions?), all of which I plan to see in the next ten days. Nor do they include recently reviewed movies on MillersTime: West of Memphis, Silver Linings Playsbook, A Late Quartet, Lincoln, and Argo.
Once I see the five listed above, I’ll have a post listing the movies this year that I’ve give ratings of four, four and a half, and five stars.
15 Saturday Dec 2012
Tags
" "Seeing God in the Third Millenium, "Hallucinations, "Proof of Heaven, "The Science of Heaven, David P. Stang, Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Oliver Sacks, Near Death Experiences
VS
Family and friends can take you to some really strange ‘places.’ After joining my wife on a trip to Peru and into the Amazon recently, I went to Columbus, OH for six days for the Obama campaign because a friend urged me to do so. And now another friend wants to take a small group of us on horseback through the battlefield at Gettysburg. And then there’s this posting.
14 Friday Dec 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
" "Lincoln, " Lincoln Group of D.C., "Team of Rivals, "The Fiery Trial, Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearn Goodwin, Eric Foner, Richard Margolies, Stephen Spielberg
(Having seen the Lincoln film, and mini-reviewed it on MillersTime, I got to wondering what folks who ‘know Lincoln’ and spend lots of time getting to know him even better would say about the film. I asked Richard Margolies, an active member of the DC Lincoln Group and one of those folks who spends a good deal of time increasing his knowledge of Lincoln, about the validity of Spielberg’s film and whether the Lincoln presented is one we can believe in. Here’s his response, with a few edits)
Abraham and Mary Todd In Context
by Richard Margolies
Spielberg’s Lincoln is masterful. It shows our greatest leader during a few weeks in January, 1865 working to gain the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. It focuses on his relationships, as portrayed by Doris Kearn Goodwin’s fine study, Team of Rivals.
Yet, like the story of blind people touching parts of an elephant, it is difficult to understand the whole person from a touch. A few examples.
10 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Go Sox
Tags
Agents, Coaches, Fans, Players, Sports Enthusiasts, Sports Fans
I’m ‘working with’ an eighth grader at a local school who for a major two year project he will complete this year is trying to determine “Why People Like Sports.” (Not so different, I guess, from a question a friend asked asked me as we were leaving a Nats’ game earlier this year: why are these games so important to us?)
Anyway, my young friend is looking for “sports’ enthusiasts – players, coaches, agents, fans – who are willing to be interviewed for this project.
The end result will be “a radio documentary/podcast about the root of why people like sports.” I participated in a 20 minute interview last month and mentioned that I’d be willing to help find others who might also be willing to be interviewed.
These interviews can be conducted “by phone, email or whatever is most convenient,” including in-person interviews if you are in the DC area.
If you are willing to help out, my young friend has a list of questions he is ready to ask you. Just let me know (Samesty84@gmail.com) if you are willing to participate and what is the best way for him to be in touch with you. I’ll pass on your contact info to him. Also, if you know anyone who works/plays in sports for a living, he would very much like to interview some of those folks also.
Maybe we will learn why so many of us are obsessed by which ever sport has taken on a life of its own in our own lives.
10 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Brasilia and Oscar Niemeyer
by Ellen Miller
One of the 20th century’s most influential architects — Oscar Niemeyer – died last week at the age of 104.
I felt lucky that just about 3 weeks prior I got a first hand introduction to his work when I was in Brasilia, a city for which he designed nearly every major building. As one architect said on his passing, “Brasilia is not simply designed, it is choreographed.”
That’s a perfect summary of my experience — not only did the buildings and the plazas hang together, but they were nearly picture perfect. (Though I found it hard to do justice to them.)
I was in Brasilia – my first trip there, but second to Brazil within six months – to speak at Transparency International’s conference – a gathering of nearly 2,000 from nearly every country in the world. Whenever possible on these speaking trips I try to sneak away for an afternoon when I am not needed, and hire a guide to learn something I couldn’t pick up from a guidebook.
06 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
""The Tummy Triology", "About Alice", "Deciding the Next Decider", "Dogfight", "Family Man", "Messages from My Father", "Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin", "Remembering Denny", Calvin Trillin, Politics & Prose Bookstore
Having the good fortune to live in the same city where the independent bookstore Politics & Prose is located, I stopped in last night to see and hear one of my favorite authors, humorist Calvin Trillin.
NYTimes photo
Trillin was in town to promote his latest book, Dogfight, a slim volume of his ‘deadline’ poetry (doggeralls, so to speak) about the 2012 Presidential campaign. This book is a sequel to his 2008 Deciding the Next Decider.
Lamenting that only one party had a primary fight and that he had already used up his Obama rhymes in 2008, he told the assembled (and aging) audience that he liked ‘iambic candidates,’ such as Ross Perot, John McCain, Chris Dodd, and Bob Dole. He read from his new book, mostly poking fun at Mitt Romney and the string of Republican candidates who ‘challenged’ him. He also admitted he once told Hilliary Clinton she had a bad name and was “insufficiently iambic.” He claimed Hilliary took that as a great complement.
Mixed in with his ‘poetry’ in Dogfight are perhaps a half dozen “Pauses for Prose,” most of which I think are probably better than his poems. In fact, generally I think his prose is much better than his verse.
But Trillin has long been a hero of mine, especially since he campaigned for making spaghetti carbonara our national dish and also admitted he didn’t like turkey and always “goes for Chinese” on Thanksgiving.
Trillin was born (1935) and grew up in Kansas City and has written for most of his life for The Nation and The New Yorker magazines. He has somehow maintained, retained, Midwestern cultural and regional values despite his living in Greenwich Village for more than 40 years. The title of this post, “You Might as Well Be a Mensch,” is his often quoted line of the advice his Kansas City father gave him.
If you don’t know Calvin Trillin and if you enjoy a dry sense of humor, mixed with self-deprecation and writings about family (specifically his two daughters, Sarah and Abigail and his wife Alice), food, and travel, you have some fun ahead.
You could start with any of these:
*About Alice
*Messages from My Father
*Family Man
*Remembering Denny
*The Tummy Trilogy (“American Fried,” “Alice, Let’s Eat,” and “Third Helpings”)
*Travels with Alice
*Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (40 Years of Funny Stuff)
27 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
I had not previously read, listened to, nor followed Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose articles appeared frequently in Vanity Fair, Slate, and the Atlantic and whose books included writings on Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and included God Is Not Great, The Portable Atheist, and Hitch-22, among others.
But when I read about his last book Mortality, I was intrigued.
This very short book (104 pages) is a compilation of the seven award-winning articles he wrote for Vanity Fair as he struggled with esophageal cancer for the last 18 months of his life (and includes a “Forward” by Graydon Carter and an informative “Afterward” by his wife Carol Blue).
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral; photograph by Mark Mahaney for The New York Times
Hitchens is neither the first nor the last to write personally about the end of life. But he has to be one of the best, at least one of the best I’ve read.
In a book that can be read in an afternoon, Hitchens uses his considerable writing talent and his honesty to give his readers not only an account of his illness and impending death but also his insights to his end of life. Specifically, he writes of the gradual loss of his two biggest assets, his voice and his pen.
Without self-pity, he also writes about his regret, his sorrow, and his anguish at having to “leave the party” before he is ready. He died in Dec. 2011 at the age of 62.
