Missed former SF locals / Chris Johanson

Once upon a time, a San Francisco resident strolling around these chilly city streets could brush by Chris Johanson pretty often. Even before I knew who he was, I'd seen him around the Mission a lot; when I finally connected the dots, I realized that he was the guy who had drawn little signs and bits that I'd been loving for years. As I recall, he drew a little guy above the urinal at the Uptown (or somewhere I peed a lot); either way, his simple figures and their cryptically expressed thoughts would be burned into my brain for hours after I saw them. He moved to Portland a while ago, and San Francisco has been a little less visually exciting ever since. For one thing, his beard is an inspiration to any aspiring beardo, and his leadership in this regard will be sorely missed.

More: A cool profile of Chris from Spark, a local PBS art show.

Geniuses / In praise of Bill Walton

Whether he's criticizing a particular player ("Tony Parker just made the worst pass in the history of Western civilization") or the refs ("Why even have a rulebook?"), or extolling the virtues of a benchwarmer who hits a couple of shots in a row ("If Eric Piatkowski continues playing at this level, he's going to replace Jerry West on the NBA logo"), Bill Walton never fails to amuse during an NBA broadcast. His commentary is a masterly blend of satire, deep knowledge of the NBA, and curmudgeonly disdain for playground antics and run-and-gun sloppiness ("Cuttino Mobley has just made the two worst shot attempts in the history of this proud Houston Rockets franchise.") Too bad he's been relegated to the broadcast B-team; I miss his presence during the big games.

If you're looking for Walton quote collections, check out The Great Bill Walton, Gorilla Mask, Complete Sports, and this really bizarre ESPN podcast in which Bill makes repeated references to some Brazilian celebrity's Internet sex video, praises Brendan Haywood ("keep running, it's good for you"), tells a pretty good story about Larry Bird making a series of three-pointers and banking each one in, and discusses his love of, and frustration with, crossword puzzles ("What is a 10-letter word for 'surge'?! I was crushed when I couldn't come up with ... 'escalation.'").

Basketball / Hibachi!

I'm planning to write a manifesto regarding celebrations in professional sports -- Are they ever appropriate? I think so. But when? Where? How should they be regulated? All good questions. As I was looking for evidence of different styles of celebration, I found myself reading a lot about Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas. In the past, he celebrated made baskets by exclaiming, "Hibachi!" In the Wikipedia entry for "hibachi", he is quoted as explaning it thusly, "You know, a hibachi grill gets real hot. That's what my shot's like, so I've been calling it that: Welcome to the hibachi!'"

The NYT noted that he also shouts “Guaranteed, yea-ah!” or “Let’s make it hot-aaah" to punctuate a basket. Add "Quality shots!" to this list, after Kobe claimed that he takes too many bad ones.

All of which prompts me to exclaim: I love this game! Arenas reminds me of weirdo 70's baseball players, like Bill "Spaceman" Lee (claimed his marijuana use made him impervious to bus fumes while jogging to work at Fenway Park) and Mark Fidrych (talked to himself while on the mound). His voluminous Wikipedia page contains dozens of anecdotes, and links to many more. He has also inspired many excellent entries in Washington Post sports columns and blogs, including a classic: "Gilbert Arenas: I'm Not Quirky," which includes this scorcher:

When [Arenas] was in Golden State, he once broke into Chris Mills's house, stole his throwback jersey, then wore it on the team plane to upset him. "That's not weird. That's just funny," Arenas said, laughing to himself.

Hibachi!

Lit / Quang Phúc Ðông & pornolinguistics

As I poked around new-ish social networking sites targeted at wordy people (Library Thing -- connecting through lists of books) and (Wordie -- lists of words), I came across a reference to a satirical paper entitled English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects.¹

The paper's author is listed as Quang Phúc Ðông of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology. As it turns out, the Institute is fictional and the author's name is a nom de plume of a former University of Chicago linguistics professor James D. McCawley. This makes sense because the paper is both rigorously argued and penetratingly absurd (no pun intended; okay, it was). The Wikipedia entry for scatolinguistics (also known as "pornolinguistics") credits him with inventing the field, the "study (including etymology and current usage) of all rude and profane expressions."

In any case, there's lots of stuff worth exploring further:

• Another satirical piece: Days in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists


• A memorial site. McCawley passed away in 1999.


• Speaking of Library Thing, it has an entry for McCawley.

¹ I posted the paper on my site because the current web publication appears to be part of a mid-90's-era email thread, and is therefore rather unformatted. I posted it here to optimize for easier reading on the screen.

Lit / Simpler, more anarchic times

Let's just say that I've crossed paths with the Anarchist Cookbook [Wikipedia] [Amazon] a couple of times in my life. In my youth, making a film canister bomb was a popular diversion, and the cookbook teaches you how to make it with stuff you can buy at a scientific material supply store. The first step is making gunpowder -- a much more straightforward process than you'd think.

Before I moved to Berkeley in 1995, I'd never owned a copy -- I didn't even know that it was sold in bookstores. I figured that you'd have to locate some anarchists and then trade them some vegan stir fry and/or a black hoodie if you wanted a copy. But soon after I moved here, I ran across a really old copy of it (at Shakespeare and Co on Telegraph, for those keeping track), and I figured that it couldn't hurt to have it around. You never know when you're going to need to make mustard gas, right?

I brought it up to the counter, and the clerk -- a grizzled, older Berkeley beardo -- glanced at the cover, then looked gravely at me. He said: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to need to see some ID before I sell you this." Assuming that one needed to be 18 years old to buy it, I started to reach into my pocket. He started laughing, and said something like, "Hey man, I'm just kidding. We still live in a free country, right?" I laughed, and then another clerk added, "Yeah, someday you'll have to register that book with the local police."

It was quiet for a moment, and then we all laughed. Was 1995 really that long ago? It seems like a much simpler time.

Related: the Draino bomb. Beware.

UPDATE: I didn't read the Amazon entry for this book before I wrote this, but I just noticed that it contains a note from the author, William Powell, who requested that the book be taken out of print: "During the years that followed its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to."

Salon chimed in when it learned of Powell's request: "It must be hard to spend your whole life trying to live down an unedited screed that you wrote at the surly age of 19, which just happens to contain some recipes that might accidentally kill, maim or otherwise discombobulate the budding anarchists trying to brew them."

Kansas City / Home for the holidays

I love Flickr, but the good times are killing me. It's got too many amazing high-def and beautifully composed photos. How do they do it? After doing some research, I decided to step up my game and picked up a fancypants camera. Above is one of the first pictures I took with it, a panorama of downtown Kansas City from the Liberty Memorial. The bent horizon is the result of a cheap-o fish-eye attachment that I bought on Amazon. I used the 30D/fish-eye setup throughout the holidays, as you'll see in this set, and while I had fun, I also had the inevitable realization that an equipment upgrade doesn't automatically result in glorious, high-def photos. Back to the drawing board. Or the dark room. Or the Internet forums.

While I was in KC, I sampled some of its finest. I visited some homegrown letterpress printers (Hammerpress), ate some legendary BBQ (Fiorella's Jack Stack in Martin City and Gates on Main), and made a pilgrimage to a basketball temple (Allen Fieldhouse, to witness KU's run-and-gun thumping of Boston College). All in all, a merry and bright time.

Stupid BCS / Viva Boise State!

Question: What do you call it when the richest segment gets to determine all the rules, and they do so in a way that prevents members of the less rich from accessing the advantages available to the rich? A sham? A travesty? Un-American? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the BCS.

After Monday's barn-burning overtime takedown of Oklahoma [watch the legendary fourth-and-18 hook-and-lateral one more time], Boise State provides a slew of new reasons why a more egalitarian post-season schedule makes sense: (1) Obvious Cinderella possibilities. No matter how under-rated they may be at a certain point in time, a team from a "power" conference could never truly be a Cinderella. Who wouldn't want to watch Boise State get a chance to go toe-to-toe with Ohio State? (2) Gun-slinging play-calling. Even if Steve Spurrier would have run the hook-and-lateral on 4th and 18, he would have never called the (modified) Statue of Liberty when going for 2 with the game on the line. Outside of Spurrier's occasional chicanery, you just don't see that kind of stuff, ever, except by inspired teams with nothing to lose; (3) The chance to see a mid-major administer a crushing beatdown to Notre Dame. Enough said.

This much is clear: College football is more like professional boxing than like college basketball. Many competitors, many belts, much confusion as to who is champion. For both, impartial regulation would be better for everyone *except* the people who currently run the sanctioning bodies -- the WBA, the WBC, the IBF, and the BCS.