Limping

I stepped on a fancy Hot Wheels ambulance. It had sharp tail fins. It made a dime-sized crater in the arch of my foot.

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A few recent club transfers involving Ecuadorians:

• Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton to Milan (permanent transfer)
• Piero Hincapié from Leverkusen to Arsenal (loan with purchase option)
• Kendry Páez from Chelsea to Strasbourg (temporary loan)
• Jeremy Sarmiento, Brighton’s last remaining Ecuadorian, to Cremonese (another loan)

It was expected that Joel Ordóñez and Kevin Rodríguez would be swooped up from Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise, respectively; but they weren’t. So, they’ll have to spend another season lighting up the Belgian league.

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Ecuador’ll play in Paraguay tomorrow night. We’ve qualified for the World Cup. Paraguay is on the World Cup’s doorstep.

So, our motivation is low, Paraguay’s is high, and Paraguay is playing better than usual (if nowhere near as well as from 1996 to 2011).

And we’ve only ever lost in Asunción.

Still, I’d wager, we’ll earn our first point there. Our defense just doesn’t let in goals.

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Current mini-book: Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1956), the inspiration for the novels of Sjöwall & Wahlöö. Inspired by the show Dragnet, which every other cop procedural is indebted to, e.g. the one that goes:

In the criminal justice system

Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous

In New York City

The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies

Are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit

These are their stories

(Dun, dun)

Cop Hater is set in New York, but the place names have been changed.

Wikipedia says the first edition has 166 pp. and the revised edition has 236. I must be reading the text of the first edition. In my omnibus, the novel’s page count is 116.

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Current late-night viewing: Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), starring Canadians who haven’t crossed over to Hollywood. That, in itself, is refreshing. I’m also enjoying the lingo. Royal Canadian Mounted Police = RCMP = The Horsemen. I keep expecting a guy on horseback to show up and harangue the cops at the precinct in Downtown Vancouver, but no, it’s always a twerp in a suit.

Lots of autopsies are performed. The nude bits are blurred out (unlike on Britain’s Silent Witness, which uses famous guest actors to play the corpses).

Da Vinci streams, free, via various apps.

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I think the weather has started cooling for good this summer. We’re getting a nice rain tonight. The back lawn is about nine inches tall. I would’ve mowed on Saturday, but my foot had a painful gash in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 77: The daytrippers

You’ll enjoy this movie only if you can stomach its matriarch, Rita (Anne Meara).

“She’s an insufferable scold,” complains Roger Ebert,

and since she’s onscreen or nearby for almost the entire film, her presence becomes unbearable. It has been said that you should never marry anyone you are not prepared to take a three-day bus trip with. I wouldn’t even get into a cab with Rita. … I do not mean to criticize Meara herself. She is, almost by definition, superb at her assignment here, which is to create an insufferable mother. The film’s problem is that she does it so well.

Four people spend the day with Rita: her husband (Pat McNamara); their daughters, Eliza (Hope Davis) and Jo (Parker Posey); and Jo’s boyfriend (Liev Schreiber). They drive from Long Island into the City to track down Eliza’s office-worker husband, Louis (Stanley Tucci), who might be cheating on her. Eliza has found what appears to be a love note among Louis’s possessions. Her family members don’t take this red flag very seriously. Their trip to the City is basically a joyride. Well, who hasn’t devised some spurious errand in order to get out of the house on the day after Thanksgiving?

What ensues – a surreal excursion through darkest Manhattan – isn’t so different from Scorsese’s After Hours; only, it happens in daytime, with a station-wagonful of family members gnawing on one another. Still, I must disagree with Ebert. These people actually behave pretty civilly toward each other, all things considered. Rita is a bit monstrous, yes, but I’ve met worse. It takes a lot of aggravation before the seams in this family tear; and when they do, it’s not all Rita’s fault. Rita herself is pretty hilarious, compulsively overstepping social boundaries: usurping strangers’ hospitality, getting personal details wrong (she tells a young woman who insists on being called Cassandra, “I bet a lot of people call you Sandy”; no, they don’t, but try getting that into Rita’s brain). In a grim comedy like this one, these little outrages are the point. But you have to be in the mood.

Rita isn’t even the most insufferable character. That prize is shared by Jo’s pretentious boyfriend (an aspiring novelist) and various yuppies (career literati). Here the movie twists the knife. You’d expect hamfisted suburbanite Rita to bulldoze these people, but no, she’s in their thrall and blind to the plight of her unfortunately-paired daughters, who see the world with clearer eyes.

But maybe you don’t want to endure this Rita character for more than a few minutes. Then I recommend you see Meara in this episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Talk of a lousy mother!

It amuses me to recall that Ben Stiller is Meara’s child.

Bad hats

I bought more Madeline for Samuel – all of the stories by Ludwig Bemelmans, conveniently gathered in the omnibus Mad about Madeline, which is introduced by Anna Quindlen. (LB’s grandson also has written sequels; they are not in the omnibus.)

I believe that Samuel would prefer to just listen to the first Madeline again and again, but he did endure all of Madeline and the Bad Hat. That book is about Pepito – the Spanish Ambassador’s little son – the girls’ next-door neighbor. Pepito is a sociopath. The first Madeline is pretty tame next to Madeline and the Bad Hat.

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I am struggling to find enough time to read The Sleep of Reason, C.P. Snow’s rather long, penultimate Strangers and Brothers novel. It, too, is concerned with a couple of very Bad Hats. They commit a horrific crime.

As a courtroom procedural, the novel is not at all bad (though the crime isn’t “center-stage” until the halfway point). It even includes a stimulating Law and Order-style discussion of free will.

As soap opera, the novel is so-so. Most of the series’s recurring characters are trotted out. Two of them are especially compelling. The first is the narrator’s father, who is struggling to accept his obsolescence. The second is the narrator’s friend, George Passant: an irreverent, seedy, aging libertine who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Socrates – and who is not inaccurately thought of as a corruptor of the youth. George looms large in three earlier novels (one is even named for him). It’s in this novel, though, that he commands my fascination. Is he partly to blame for how the Bad Hats have turned out? I am disturbed by his inability to confront this question.

(Honorable mentions go to Olive Calvert and Jack Cotery, who make interesting cameos.)

Learn ’em up good

At last the dreary fall weather has arrived, which has put me into a very good mood. Also, my Spanish students – both groups, the Beginners and the Intermediates – have figured out that to get decent grades, they must memorize when to use the different verb tenses. And so their quiz scores are becoming more respectable.

For that matter, my command of Spanish grammar is becoming more respectable. I can now tell you what the pluscuamperfecto is. Before, I couldn’t have done so, though I would’ve had no trouble using that tense.

Having run out of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to watch (I’ve now seen most of them two or three times), I’ve been casting my net wider. Karin & I tried out and rejected CSI Miami. It was rather soulless. Last night, on YouTube, I watched an episode of the long-running German/Austrian/Swiss police-procedural show, Tatort. It was very good: it had some vacant buildings in it, and a lot of rain, and the detectives themselves were adequately weathered. But I realized that scenery and weather weren’t enough for me. I also needed to understand the dialogue. This particular episode had English subtitles, but I would need to learn German to view all of the 900+ episodes.

India

I had to buy a certain cheap-looking DVD for the high school Social Studies Dept. The back cover says:

Discover the enchanting and vibrant land of India and its people. INDIA – ONE COUNTRY, A MILLION WORLDS lets you explore ancient civilizations, phenomenal architecture and brings you up-close to India’s dynamic and diverse culture. Learn of India’s past and present, including Mahatma Ghandi’s struggle for India’s freedom and present day city life including customs and religious ceremonies. Everything from India’s geography and climate to present political formation is all here in INDIA – ONE COUNTRY, A MILLION WORLDS.
Running Time: 24 Minutes.

My Juan Bosch paper, which was due last Sunday, is nearly, but not completely, written. (I have excuses, but surely no one wants to hear them.) The teacher is breathing down my neck just a little. My loved ones are breathing down it quite a lot more. I want to curl up in a dark, small room so that I can watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in peace.

I do allow myself to check the soccer scores. Leicester City have won the English Premier League title, shocking the world. Atlético de Madrid have eliminated Bayern Munich from the Champions League. Independiente del Valle have eliminated River Plate from the Copa Libertadores.

Rumor has it, David has arrived from Houston, two weeks before the wedding.

The salt mines, pt. 841

Back at the high school: making copies, moving heavy textbooks. For this I receive, daily, a heap of praise. At home, I dredge the Internet for PDFs of other people’s dissertations. I read their acknowledgements, abstracts, and introductions; and if I decide, “I’m doing better than this poor sap,” I write for a couple of hours. Then I watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (Karin is present for some of this). Then I go to bed. This is the routine I foresee for the next nine months – along with tutoring, which I’m on holiday from, one more week.

I go to the school at six-something each morning, with Martin. Mary has retired from teaching. She got a job at a nice little public library. Next week she will go back to college to become a nurse.

“An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the Pacific Northwest. The question is when.”

July fragments

Martin & Mary were in Ecuador for three weeks. I took care of Bianca. She ate one of the houseplants.

On Friday, M&M came back. They brought a hammock (too small) and a new, woven tablecloth. Bianca likes the tablecloth very much.

Mary has been watching some new DVDs, e.g., Harry Potter and the Bucket of Bla. Martin has been growing his hair out.

During the three weeks M&M were gone, I followed a kind of caveman diet, eating mostly sweet potatoes. (I don’t know how many lbs. I’ve lost. I’m not supposed to weigh myself yet.) Every day, I would eat sweet potatoes and watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and then I’d read and write a lot about political philosophy. And I’d watch the Copa América, which you already knew.

This last Sunday, I played soccer and gave seven assists. I scored one goal, but it was invalidated. I also wrecked one of my ankles, and so now, when I walk down the stairs, I have to lean against the wall.