Churbuck.com

Photo by Mark Lee

Here is a way to ruin a perfectly fine July afternoon. Take one iron sled, load it with two 45-lb. plates, grab rope, and drag like a maniac down a shopping mall parking lot, turn at the other end, and then push it back. Follow with 12 kettlebell swings, nine chest-to-bar pullups, rest a minute and do it again four more times. I weighed myself before and after and managed to lose four pounds of sweat (note the drip forming underneath my chin) Emesis nearly followed which would have shaved another couple bulemic pounds off. I recovered with margaritas and mexican food.

Courtesy of my daughter. I cringe.

In the department of poo:

Depressing news out of Little Pond in Falmouth, one of the long salt ponds along the Falmouth shore from the Inner Harbor to Waquoit Bay: over the weekend a bunch of striped bass –some apparently up to 40 inches in length — were found dead on pond’s shores. The culprit? According to the press it’s septic tank pollution from the gazillion houses that surround the pond.

Looking at the density of the houses some lucky developer was able to cram into the area long ago, and add in the fact that each and every one of those houses flushes their toilets into big holes in the sandy ground, who can be surprised that a ton of effluent is leaching into the water? I’m amazed that a significant stack of bass were up inside of such a stagnant pool this time of year (perhaps they followed a school of baitfish in from the clean water of Vineyard Sound) and I can’t understand how anyone, particularly the people who live around there, can sit back and do nothing. The alarm is ringing and it doesn’t smell very nice.

This isn’t Falmouth’s first fishkill. Another one occurred a year ago, nearly to the day, in North Falmouth. Fish kills aren’t rare — so-called “oxygen events” occur regularly in ponds and backwaters with restricted water flow.

The density of development along the south shore of the Cape is astonishing and one has to wonder what the town officials thought they were doing when they zoned postage-stamp lots along the estuaries.  It’s obvious to me that something has to be done to get the shit out of the bays, and the shoreside ghettos of Falmouth seem as good a place to start as anywhere with small, local cluster treatment plants. A big pipe solution is not going to fix these neighborhoods anytime soon, and persuading, even mandating everyone starts pooping into composting toilets is laughable.

I’m starting to warm up to composting toilets (not a great choice of words). Last year Barnstable County had a program offering to install the things on a 20-year, zero interest loan in the homes of people with failed septic systems who were considering a Title 5 septic project. Two friends in Cotuit have installed the technology. One was put in at least a decade ago, the other is going in right now in a new construction project. I was given a tour of the installation and it was pretty amazing — it’s called a Phoenix –but had some limitations in a retro-fit scenario as the composing tanks need to be located generally directly below the toilet itself (which looks like any ordinary toilet). As I have a minimalist Cape Cod cellar (essentially a round, brick lined root cellar sort of thing) I’d have to jack the house up, excavate a new basement, and then, and only then could I consider a composting solution (I could consider a composting outhouse I suppose ….)

People will going to freak out at whatever solution is proposed because it will cost them a lot of money to get there.  When Barnstable hooked the Paine Creek neighborhood in Hyannis up to the municipal waste water treatment center there were pitchforks and torches at the town council meetings.

The estimate for a new Title 5 compliant septic tank is generally $20,000 — and those do nothing to get nitrogen out of the watershed.

The state has an online tool to search for your local beaches and the results of their water tests. Here in Cotuit, water is tested outside of the harbor at Loop and Oregon Beaches. I’ll be working later this week with the Three Bays Preservation organization to initiate private testing at Ropes Beach, where we had a town ordered closing in 2007. Here’s a link to the Barnstable County department of health’s site for beach testing. One beach in Barnstable failed this week – Lovell’s Pond in Cotuit.

Cape Cod Times story

Falmouth Enterprise story

State report on Little Bay nitrogen sources.

This photograph of Michael Caine from 1968 is going to be auctioned by Christie’s this summer as part of its celebration of all things London.

Where the cliche of cool on your run-of-the-mill men’s fashion blog is Steve McQueen in a pair of blue Persols and a Barbour motorcycle jacket, for me it’s this guy, largely on the strength of two movies – Get Carter and The Ipcress File – and because he was the first celebrity I ever came into contact with as a kid. Besides, it doesn’t get much cooler than a pair of shades, a cigarette, and a Martini while wearing a killer suit with cufflinks.

North of Boston, right on the Maine-New Hampshire border, was a small ski area called Big A — or Mount Agementicus in York, Maine. The interesting thing about the mountain was it was upside down — meaning one drove to the top where the lodge was instead of the typical ski area configuration that has the lodge at the base of the hill. It was an easy mountain, perfect for a ten year-old kid with pair of wooden skis and leather boots to practice the snowplow and stem christie. It had a few lifts and one chairlift, which to my mind made it a major ski experience as chairlifts were a lot easier to deal with than T-bars and rope-tows.

I remember it was around 1968, I was somehow skiing by myself, waiting alone in line for the chairlift. Singles always got paired up with other singles. I was paired up with Michael Caine, though I didn’t know who he was at the time.

I sort of figured out he was different. A couple things tipped me off. First, he was English and I hadn’t heard many English accents by that age. Second, people seemed to notice him because he looked … sleek. Adults, mainly ladies, were looking at him, whispering to each other, pointing and otherwise marking him as different from the average guy.

We waited for the chairlift, looking over our shoulders, poles in one hand, and were off and rumbling upwards. Down came the safety gate. He introduced himself, asked me my name, and made very nice small talk all the way up the hill. We talked about skiing, we talked about the Red Sox (who had lost the World Series the summer before and were my pre-Bruins obsession in life),  and we talked about school. He never said he was an actor, just that he had come up alone from Boston that morning to get some runs in but wished he had the time to go farther north into the White Mountains. I had never been to the White Mountains and agreed that would be an excellent adventure.

I nervously disembarked at the top of the hill and made ready to ski back down the intermediate slope that I was fond of cruising down. He told me to go first and I did, bombing down to the bottom of the hill and the tail end of the chairlift. We rode up together a second time. We talked some more. I liked the guy. In all, we skied together for maybe an hour — three or four runs — before my mother waved me into the lodge for a nose wiping and a PBJ.

“Do you know who that man was on the chairlift with you?” she asked.

“Yeah. Michael from Boston,” I said. “He’s really nice.”

Here’s a picture of Big A’s trail map. I miss those old little ski areas that used to pepper the foothills north of Boston in the 60s and 70s. A couple snowless winters killed them off. Big A had killer views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Isle of Shoals off of Rye, New Hampshire. The picture is from the excellent New England Lost Ski Area Project, which has been cataloguing these “ghost” ski areas with loving nostalgia. I was surprised to learn that the year I rode the chairlift with Caine was only the second year that Big A was in operation, so it was pretty much brand new. It closed in the mid-70s. Done in by its proximity to the ocean and the Arab Oil Crisis.

Amazon continues to amaze. I’ve worked with them as both a customer and a business partner in the past and never cease to be amazed at how far ahead of the rest of the world they are when it comes to defining three essential things:

1. Online commerce. They may not have been the first online merchant, but they sure seem like it. Any ecommerce user experience is, by default, stacked up against Amazon’s and compared.
2. Cloud: Amazon Web Services has had more of an effect on startups, SaaS, and the notion of cloud services than any other single provider.
3. Devices: the Kindle was and is brilliant.

What inspires this post was a recent shopping experience I had at my alma mater, Lenovo.com. I was buying a new battery for an old computer (an X61 tablet) and was surprised to see, alongside the familiar PayPal option, a new way of checking out using my Amazon credentials. This is basically the ecommerce analogue to using Facebook or Twitter credentials to log into Foursquare or whatever.

Amazon is rapidly extending its infrastructure from the servers to the warehouses to third party merchants. The old hosted store front, Amazon merchant model that saw brands like ToysRUs abdicate their brand in order to spare themselves the infrastructure investment that a full ecommerce platform demands is slowly giving way to an ala carte menu of ecommerce enablement options such as Lenovo taking advantage of Amazon Payments, and others using Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities to pick-and-pack and ship their goods.

Will Amazon Payments increase conversions for merchants such as Lenovo? Doubtlessly. The days of digging out the wallet and entering CVN numbers are definitely numbered and just as PayPal is turning into a major element of eBay’s recent success, having Amazon enabled in the cart is going to become de rigeur for other merchants.

Note the omission of three key icons in payments: there’s no Visa, Mastercard or American Express option in Lenovo’s list of checkout expediters — just the two that make it the most convenient.

Today’s trip to the gym was brutal — a fast intense workout called “Fight Gone Bad” which was developed for a UFC cage fighter, who, upon completing the routine was asked how it compared to an actual fight: “That was like a fight gone bad” was the reply, and so the name stuck for 18 minutes of fast paced work involving a rowing machine, a 20 lb. medicine ball, a 75 lb. barbell and a 20″ high box.

As the clock counted down from ten seconds to kick off this morning’s FGB I had impending empathy with the masochism of those who do sports that have nothing but suffering to offer. Rowers know that every 2,000 meter race ends with a bad case of oxygen debt so bad you have to fight the body’s autonomic impulse to stop and save itself. A cyclist starts the Tour de France knowing that nothing but three weeks of hell lies ahead. I imagine no one starts the Boston Marathon expecting a good time to follow. A few days ago I watched a Crossfit video that profiled a top competitor; in it he uttered the great line that he guessed his success came from his “embracing the suck.”

Defining the “suck” is a matter of individual taste. For me it involves accepting the fact that the gallon of sweat that is pooling underneath me is fine, natural, and to be expected. Yes I will develop tunnel vision, hear roaring sounds between my ears, get slippery hands and electrolyte-depleted leg cramps for hours afterwards. But, in comparison with anything else life will throw at me today, nothing will come close to sucking as much as a Fight Gone Bad.

Show me the word “analytics” in an ad and I instantly grow cynical for word feels like the refuge of the desperate trying to sell the great white whale of ROI to the tight-fisted.

Dan Lyons calls out a very very interesting technology coming out of the MIT Media Lab for correlating social chatter and user utterances with television programming. This company, Bluefin Labs, strikes a strong chord given my past interest into the role of the “back channel” among fans during televised real-time events: Red Sox games, State of the Union Addresses, the Academy Awards.

This TedTalk from 2011, by Bluefin’s founder Deb Roy, is interesting on several levels. First, it exhibits an amazing demo of data collection and analysis — in this case video footage and audio clips shot throughout his home and then processed to track the progress of his baby learning how to speak the word “water,” mapped against the context of where and when the word was learned (bathroom, near the kitchen sink, etc.). This capture model has amazing implications in terms of building an amazing “life record” and brought to mind the efforts of people like Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project at Microsoft and Stephen Wolfram’s personal analytics analysis of his email history. I freak out when I see an old Super 8 movie of myself waddling around in sagging diaper circa 1959 at Cotuit Rope’s Beach. Imagine being able to see myself take my first steps, say “water”, etc.?

The interesting kicker to Roy’s personal experiment is the commercial application and the ability to map the Twitterverse and Social Graph to mass media events. If I was a media planner or TV stats wonk, I’d be freaking over this stuff from Bluefin.

I spent the day yesterday at Northeastern University attending my son’s freshman orientation. He departs on August 23 for four months at the Dublin Business School, part of Northeastern’s program to spread around its incoming class and give a couple hundred of them an opportunity to start their college careers at affiliate campuses in Costa Rica, Australia, Greece, London or Dublin. This is a good thing I think. He will need to cook for himself, clean his own toilet, and deal with his own budget. I hope he returns with more than just good grades.

We were split up after the welcoming session. He went off with his cohorts to learn about making healthy choices, I went off with the parents  to learn about “letting go.”

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So I have a new phone. The sleek Samsung Galaxy IIIS. It is a nice phone. It runs the latest public version of Google’s Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone is fast, very functional, and a joy to use after my prior junkware laden HTC Evo.

The mobile carrier is Sprint. I like Sprint for the most part. The attraction was their unlimited data plan, but that’s another discussion for another day. I did a jailbreak on the Evo to get rid of Sprint’s asshatted Nascar app and other memory hogging, undeletable pieces of junk inflicted by the marketing morons, and from then on was on my own with Cyanogen. I was happy to see the new Sprint install was basically unjunked and as close to pure ICS as one could get.

Yesterday my Google News page had a link to a story that Sprint was sending out a software update to Galaxy IIIS owners which would disable the “universal search” functionality delivered through the Google search widget on the home screen. This means a search doesn’t hit just the Web, but also looks locally on the phone at contacts, documents, etc. I like this feature very much.  It spare me from going to two functions to perform searches and makes things a lot more convenient.

So why is Sprint disabling the function? Because Apple is suing Samsung and Google for patent infringement, claiming the universal search function on a phone is its idea and its alone. While the parties duke it out in court, Google or Samsung or Sprint — who knows and who cares — decided to remove the function, which means if I accept and install the pending “software update” sitting on my phone, I’ll basically make it less of a phone.

What pisses me off is the complete lack of communication from Sprint, Samsung or Google that they are going to croak a function on my phone. There’s no email. There’s no warning or explanation. Instead I get this bullshit, mislabeled as a “fix” which does nothing to reveal the surprise inside. Indeed, according to a story at the Android Authority, which refers to the disabling code as an “easter egg”, the software update is being sent out to unsuspecting Galaxy owners at Samsung’s request. The “fix” comes with absolutely no description of what it purports to fix.

My feelings about Apple? Jobs did vowed to kill Android so the Samsung lawsuit is a big one. This latest move is what I expect from Apple, along with, high prices, DRM, irrational fans, discrimination against Persians, design porn, multiple failures in the cloud …..

Once again I find myself compelled against reason to score Cotuit Kettleer games with my trusty spiral-bound faux-red leather covered C.S. Peterson’s Scoremaster: Official Baseball and Softball Scorebook.

While I feel self-consciously nerdy and obsessive doing this in public, I find I can’t enjoy a three-hour ball game without making little chicken scratches on a paper grid. Nothing comes from it. No results are tabulated, statistics calculated, or reports issued. The only pleasure comes from knowing the record is accurate, the tallies correct, and every so often I’m able to answer a random question from a fellow fan in the bleachers about how many pitches the pitcher has thrown, or what the batter has done in his previous plate appearances.

Typical Churbuck scorecard from 2010 showing Devin Marrero, the Red Sox’s top draft pick in the 2012 draft hitting a double in the sixth inning vs. Wareham.

I try not to score. I tried to visit Lowell Park without the scorebook and just try to sit and enjoy the game like every other normal person, but something was missing and so I wound up going to the next game with the old hand-softened book in my hand, festooned with the free Red Sox bumperstickers that come inside of the programs they sell at Fenway. I feel a little self-conscious, and end up answering questions like:

Q: “Why?” A: “Force of habit. It helps me concentrate on the game. Actually it’s kind of fun ….” (then I feel pedantic and shut up)

Q: “What do you do with it afterwards?” A: “Nothing. Sometimes I add everything up and see if it agrees with the official scorer’s version, but usually I just stick it in a drawer.”

Q: “Are you a scout?” A: “I wish. Scouts get to sit right behind home plate with their radar guns.”

And yes, when I go to Fenway the scorebook comes with me, and I always dutifully tape the ticket stub to the pages for that game. I see more scorers at Fenway than I do at Kettleer Games.  Arnold Mycock, the general manager emeritus, scores from the stands sometimes, using the free Kettleer scorecards they hand out at the press box. Because of his eminence he is also handed a copy of the lineups before the game, something I wish I could get because getting the lineups down correctly is half the battle.

As I have written here in the past, baseball is a sport uniquely suited to scorekeeping, because the pace and rules as well as the statistical tradition of the game lends itself to being recorded with pencil and paper better than any other sport. One can simply tick off hits, outs, and runs, or one can get very focused and record where hits landed, where pitches were placed, how many pickoff throws the pitcher made, how many fouls were hit …. the output of all this record keeping is the raw data necessary to calculate key statistics such as batting average, runs batted in, earned-run average, and many many others quantitative measures made more popular in this era of Sabermetrics and Moneyball.

It used to be the case that the average fan in the stands would score games. I’ve heard people reminiscence about their spinster aunt sitting in the back yard on a hot summer day listening to Curt Gowdy call a Red Sox game and keeping score while sipping lemonade and swatting mosquitoes. Find an old black and white photos of the crowd at the Polo Field in New York, or Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, all natty in their fedoras, the men wearing ties, the ladies little hats, and there is a blizzard of white score cards.  In the old days, when scoreboards were manually updated and only showed the inning-by-inning box score (runs, hits, errors), a fan relied on their scorecard to tell them how the batter at the plate had fared at his previous two plate appearances, or which fielder booted the ball and earned an error in the fourth inning.

Connie Mack famously used his scorecard to send signals to his fielders. The statue of him in Philadelphia has him waving a bronze one eternally in the air.

Today I only occasionally spot a fellow scorer. My theory is the practice died off with the rise of the Jumbotron and the instant availability of stats and replays and other data on the big outfield monitors.

It’s been said that a good scorecard should be able to be handed to a person with a reasonable knowledge of the game and on its own provide all the information needed for that person to recreate the action in their mind — inning by inning, pitch by pitch — of the entire game. The ultimate test of a good scorer would be his ability to capture the precise conditions there were on the field at the moment that game was suspended so, in the future, the game could resume with every player in their proper spot, standing at the same base they were when the game was suspended, the batter facing the same count of balls and strikes.

My scorecards are nowhere close to passing that test for I am usually in a state of befuddlement by the act of scoring despite having done it now at least 100 times. My motto is: Thank god for pencil and erasers.

The rules of baseball are extraordinarily explicit about the duties of the official scorekeeper and the information that person is expected to record. The tenth, and final section of the official rules are devoted to the Scorekeeper. Twenty pages of the rules are devoted to the scorekeeper. Those rules set down the 50+ pieces of information the scorekeeper must record ranging from the names of the umpires to the duration of the game to the names of the batters who hit home runs when the bases were full (Grand Slams). Some of the rules are quaint, such as specifying that the scorekeeper shall sit in the press box and not on the home nor visitors sides of the stands to insure impartiality but also to provide members of the press with information throughout the course of the game. The rules say the scorekeeper is supposed to remind the umpire when there are only two outs but the players think there are three but the scorekeeper has to keep his mouth shut if a batter bats out of order, because it’s up to the opposing team’s coach or players to detect the infraction and protest. Scorekeepers have 24 hours to change their mind on a play. They can solicit the opinions of others in deciding what to record. But for all the rules governing the art of keeping score, there are no standards for what an official scorecard should look like, nor are there any official shorthand conventions for how to record and track the play-by-play action — hence a scorecard can vary from one scorekeeper to another. Some are personalized with little diagrams, exclamation points to signify extraordinary plays, notes about the wind, the temperature ….

The big challenge for me is paying attention to what is happening on the field while at the same time tending to my scorecard. If I get too engrossed in the card then I am doomed to miss the play and find myself marking the card with a big “?” or asking those sitting around me for a clue as to what I missed.

I’ve learned to focus like the proverbial laser — selfishly blocking out the distracting chatter of my companions — from the moment the pitcher winds up through the crack of the bat, keeping my eyes on everything that happens until the play concludes, thinking to myself:

“Top of the fourth. Two outs. Count is two and three. Runners on first and second. Third base is open. Number nine hits a frozen-rope single to right, finds the hole between first and second and the runner on first base advances to second, the runner in scoring position (RISP if I am keeping track of how batters are hitting in RISP situations) on second base is rounding third to score, the right fielder (number 13 on his uniform, but number 9 in my scorer’s mind) is scooping up the ball and winding up for a long throw to the catcher (number 2) waiting at home plate to catch the runner now rounding third and hauling ass for what looks like an epic collision that has the fans on their feet. Meanwhile the batter has rounded first and is going for second base, the runner originally on first at the start of the play is on third base and being held, The right fielder makes the throw to the catcher but it goes a mile over the catcher’s head and winds up at the base of the backstop at the feet of the pro scouts. The pitcher runs to home while the catcher scrambles like a crab looking for the lost ball. The runner from second scores standing up, the crowd freaks out and screams at the runner on third to take advantage of the missed throw and go for home. He takes off and makes it home for the second run. The batter holds at second. Play is dead.”

While everyone around me high-fives and claps I sit down, click out another millimeter of pencil lead from my automatic pencil, and start scoring.

From that version of events (as witnessed by me like some undependable postmodernist existential narrator in a Kurosawa film or Thornton Wilder novel) I then have a few seconds before the next batter to record the play. I decide the batter standing on second base got there on an error committed by the right fielder because the right fielder’s throw to the catcher was wild and there was no way the catcher could have caught it.  So the box for that batter gets marked with a big “E9″. That means the poor batter gets no credit for the double and no credit for the two runs batted in because he made it to base because of the error. The pitcher doesn’t get an earned run charged to him because of the error. Check. The base runners who scored both get marked with credits for their runs. All of this is being done with symbols and shorthand-like slashes of the pencil. Each batter and base runner has their own tidy box containing a diagram of the diamond. Every defensive player is referred to by a single digit — one through nine, beginning with the pitcher who is “1″ to the catcher who is “2″ on around the infield and into the outfield and ending with the right fielder who is “9″ (never to be confused with their uniform number.

Scorekeepers refer to players by their field number only as in saying “That was a 1-2-3 doubleplay” which translated means the pitcher (1)  was quick and caught the line drive on the bounce, threw it back to the catcher (2) to force out the runner coming home from third, and the catcher tossed it to the first baseman (3) in time to catch the original batter trying to make first base. If you think Laurel and Hardy’s “Who’s On First Routine” is fun, try scoring and getting it through your thick skull that the first baseman is actually a three, not a one, etc.

So back to my fictitious example of paying attention to the many moving parts of a typical exciting baseball play and then trying to write it down. Once I figure out who scored, who was put out, who caught what, threw what, pitched what ….. I write it down before the next batter steps into the box and the mayhem begins all over again. In cases involving errors I seem to constantly be overruled by the official scorer and have to either correct everything to agree with their version or stick to my guns and stay with mine. In my example, the rule governing how to score the play is spelled out in detail by Rule 10.04(a)(2); Runs That Score on Errors.  According to my bible, Andres Wirkmaa’s Baseball Scorekeeping: A Practical Guide to the Rules:

“Rule 10.04(a)(2) instructs the official scorekeeper to credit a run batted in to a batter if he puts the ball into play and the defensive team thereupon makes a play, but commits an fielding error in doing so — and a run scores — if (and only if) there are less than two outs and the play made by the defensive team is one where a runner from third base would ordinarily score.”

Guess what Wirkmaa’s day job is? That’s right: he’s a lawyer. Last week the Cape Cod Times had a story about dog owners pissed off in Brewster because the selectmen banned their pooping pets from the town green. One of the rabble-rousing dog owners fighting the ruling is a New York lawyer named Jordan Sprechman. What caught my attention was the background information that this New York attorney is also an official scorer Major League Baseball. In other words, a Scorekeeping God.

“About twice a week during baseball season, he heads to the press box at Yankee Stadium or Citi Field, where he calls errors and hits. In his small script, using all capital letters, he tabulates the statistics at the end of each game for Major League Baseball.

“He’s used to taking heat.

“I’ve been excoriated all over sports radio,” he said.”

I want to know how one rises to the top of the Scorekeeping Ziggurat. Is there a Society of Baseball Scorers I don’t know about? A test? An apprenticeship?

In a moment of Walter Mitty-esque candor I confessed to my son my secret scorekeeping fantasy. Right before the national anthem is sung at the next Kettleer’s game by Nickie Chevalier or the Singing Barnstable Policeman, a call goes out over the PA: “Is there a scorekeeper in the house to score today’s game?”

And so I slowly rise, brandishing my trusty C.S. Peterson’s Scoremaster: Official Baseball and Softball Scorebook, and finally get a seat in the press box.

This will not happen for the simple reason that I have a long long way to go before I can be trusted to properly record a game. For scorekeeping is not a batter of just counting and writing, it’s about judgment calls, opinions, subjective decisions that will piss people and players off if done poorly. My scorecards are a record of doubt, second guesses and erasures, committed in crazed handwriting that even I can’t decipher. I still don’t know how to credit a winning pitcher or how to give a pitcher a save.  Despite my membership in the Society of American Baseball Research, and my ownership of a Strato-matic set, I do not understand WAR or PECODA.

As my friend and ardent Yankee fan T. Grand once replied on Twitter when I tweeted my ignorance of the infield pop fly rule during a Red Sox game : I would have been shot as a Nazi spy in World War II for my un-American ignorance of the fine points of the rules, for the greatest test of red-blooded Americanism is knowing one’s baseball rules.

Whatever, I can always hope to improve.

Past posts on scoring:

• The Eephus Method
• I Like to Score

Having closed down my presence on Facebook last spring on the occasion of their IPO, I have observed the following phenomena:

1. My presence is not missed, my absence unnoticed.
2. I have not missed any significant milestones or events and don’t feel guilted into sending “happy birthday!” greetings to some faintly remembered account executive at a digital b2b lead gen agency I met at a conference in 2008.
3. I miss being able to lurk on the profiles of local criminals since running the names of local miscreants published in the court reports and police logs was a lot of fun, especially drunk home invaders with four prior DUI’s who list “PARTYING!” as one of their favorite Facebook activities.
4. I use Google+ more
5. I cheated and created a very generic John Smith account so I can do work research for clients when Facebook is concerned.

I still think Facebook is a pig on ice destined for the dustbin where Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe wound up.

A great ball game last night at Cotuit’s Lowell Park, beginning with the dedication of the press building to the original Mister Kettleer: Arnold Mycock.  I don’t know Arnold very well, he’s a quiet man who keeps to himself in the grandstand behind the Kettleer’s dugout, usually with a scorecard and paying keen attention to the action out on the diamond.  Behind the quiet demeanor — what Coach Mike Roberts called the most humble man he had ever met — Arnold Mycock is a legend not only as a founder of the Cape Cod Baseball League –  the preeminent wooden bat summer college league — but also for the four league championships he delivered in his tenure as the general manager of the Cotuit Kettleers, his 63 years of volunteer service to the team and the league, and his quiet devotion to the purest form of baseball that exists (in my opinion).

From cleaning the restrooms to washing the uniforms to mowing the grass twice a week, Arnold did it all.

Arnold’s superlatives are more than impressive. He was the first person inducted into the CCBL hall of fame. More than 40 of his players went onto to the major leagues.  Joe Girardi of the Yankees played for Arnold. Ron Darling of the Mets did. And New Mexico governor Bill Richardson pitched for Cotuit in the 60s. Arnold was a killer scout for the Kettleer’s have won 14 League championships thanks to his off-season trips to the south and west to look for up and coming college talent.

This past winter Arnold was given an meritorious service award by the American Baseball Coaches Association for his contributions to college baseball.

Every time I sit in the bleachers with my pals and marvel at the perfection of free baseball that I can watch in bare feet, with no lights, frolicking mascots, I give thanks to Arnold and the Cotuit Athletic Association for their hard work. It makes my annual donation to the cause and the few bucks I slip into the kettles during the third inning feel very tiny in comparison to his devotion and the ongoing commitment by the entire organization.

Coach Mike Roberts dedicates the Arnold Mycock Press Building to Arnold, who sits second from the right.

The fact that Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard — and not the Hamptons where Robert Benchley’s novel ostensibly took place — has made Cape Cod and the Islands synonymous with gory shark porn in the public imagination. That movie kept me out of the water for the remainder of 1970s, and to this day I prefer to go in the drink only when pushed, capsized or otherwise forced in. Voluntarily electing to submerge myself in the home waters of such critters as the box jelly and the Great White Shark is not something I do lightly.

The past weekend’s awesome photo of a guy looking over his shoulder while paddling a blue plastic kayak a few yards in front of a black dorsal fin has gone viral, and my inbox today is filled with admiring comments from friends who secretly want to see someone get consumed by one of the monsters. So I must muse about sharks. The last person to be killed by a shark in Massachusetts was poor 16-year old Joe Troy, Jr., who bled to death after being dragged underwater by a shark while swimming out to greet a catboat coming into Mattapoissett Harbor on Buzzards Bay

Thanks to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal population on the Cape’s outer beaches and Monomoy Island has exploded, and the sands are littered with big, juicy, swimming fat blobs that just happen to be the favorite snack of Great Whites.  Find a few headless seal corpses on the beach, spot a fin here and there, wait for a striped bass fisherman to report seeing a shark as long as his boat out in the rips and the next thing you know Cape Cod is re-enacting the carnival scenes in Jaws.

Do I care? Not really. The actuaries say my odds of a shark attack are one in 11.5 million — actually more likely than winning the Powerball jackpot which are one in 175 million –though I suspect the shark odds depend on where I live and how often I engage in shark-friendly activities. Like swimming at night or kayaking.

I drove over Matawan Creek in New Jersey last month, on my way to the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and couldn’t help think to that terrible July in 1916 when a shark or sharks killed four people and injured another. Three of the attacks took place in the quiet tidal Matawan Creek, and that fact, more than any other, freaks me out when it comes to swimming in Cotuit Bay.

I once covered a shark attack when I was a stringer for Soundings in San Francisco in the early 80s. A surfer named Lewis Boren vanished around Monterey. His board washed up with a big semi-circular bite taken out of it. And his corpse washed up a little while afterwards. I’ve never been out to the Farallons, but admired Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth, and definitely would not take up any Northern Californian water sports any time soon. Including diving — as one poor abalone diver was decapitated in 2004 while clamming around Mendocino.

If you want to indulge in shark porn and not wait for Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, I recommend:

• In the Slick of the Cricket, Russell Drumm’s lyrical profile of Frank Mundus, the Montauk captain who inspired Quint in Jaws. This guy used to find dead whales floating off of Long Island and stand on them, feeding chunks of fresh cantaloupe to the sharks in between bites of rancid whale blubber.
• The Devil’s Teeth: Susan Casey’s first person account of hanging out with the shark scientists on California’s Farallon Islands. This is the place, along with South Africa Cape of Good Hope, where more Great Whites congregate to eat more seals than anywhere else in the world. It would appear Chatham, Massachusetts is on its way to becoming hotspot #3.
• Close to Shore: Michael Capuzzo’s 2001 history of the 1916 Jersey shore attacks, another inspiration for Jaws.
• In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis: by Doug Stanton. As Quint said in Jaws: “1,100 men went into the water, 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

Google and YouTube can provide you more than enough lurid shark porn. I’m going to buy a lottery ticket.

I came across this the other day and believe it is the best troll ever:

“Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there.”

I’d laugh hysterically save for the time when an earnest colleague sent me some copy to post on a website that contained the word: “wahlah”

I went to him and respectfully asked him what “wahlah” meant as I was unable to find it in the dictionary. He was perturbed that I would ask such a silly thing and explained it was what a magician says when he pulls s rabbit out of the hat. I thought on that for a minute and then it dawned on me that we were talking about “voila.”

I was introduced to this classic cocktail by the late legendary editor of Forbes: Jim Michaels. Named after a WW I artillery piece, it is indeed deadly. I have been guzzling them this past week out of some Subconscious alcoholic homage to the Tour de France. Recipe: Gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, prosecco over ice with a twist. I have a suspicion this could easily become the summer of retro cocktails. Is that wrong?

Two weeks ago the local yacht club invited the harbormaster and fire department to speak to the sailing instructors about how to handle emergencies on the water. The assistant harbormaster — who has personally and justifiably pulled me over and chewed me out in the past for speeding across the harbor while running a race — made a great comment that started me thinking: “You go in, you pay your money, your check clears, and they hand you the keys and that’s it. No license, no training, no nothing … and you’re boating.”

What isn’t funny is the Fourth of July tragedy on Long Island that left three children dead after an overloaded boat (Silverton 34) swamped and sank in 20 feet of water. Obviously that accident has me thinking about a licensing system for boat operators.  I have no knowledge of the person who owned that boat and allowed more than 20 people to crowd onto it, but a system that permits that kind of negligence is one that sets people up to fail in the first place.  There are no regulations governing the passenger capacity of a boat that size, according to the New York Times (there are Coast Guard passenger limits in effect for smaller boats), but there are for commercial vessels such as ferries and launches.

I’m as libertarian as the next person and need another government issued license or registration like I need more taxes and bureaucrats, but the reality is that bad boaters not only put themselves and their passengers at risk, they can also wipe out an innocent swimmer or a rule-abiding mariner in an instant.  The old barriers to boating were considerable. Boats were wooden, expensive, and too heavy to easily trailer in and out of the water.  Today we have “PWCs” — personal watercraft — from jetskis to strange hybrid boats made by skimobile manufacturers. The waters are more crowded, the speeds and blood alcohol contents are both higher ……

If you consider the difficulty a commercial captain faces in getting a Coast Guard license — hours of classroom study, memorization of navigational light patterns, navigation, safety regulations — then why isn’t there anything in place for the average recreational boater?  I can’t go out and buy a Piper Cub and start flying it without a license. I can’t drive a car without one. Why should I be able to fire up a big powerboat, load it up with 30 people,and drive it around in the dark without someone giving me a simple test?

I hate legislators who want to make the wearing of lifejackets mandatory. Every so often some poor kayaker flips and drowns and a local state rep files a bill to make lifejackets a requirement. Yet I wear one because I don’t want to be that guy they find with his zipper down, drowned a mile off the beach because I went over the rail while relieving myself during a moonlight sail.  The majority of boaters abide by the rules, take courses from the Coast Guard auxiliary, and make sure their boats are equipped with the proper lights, flares, PFDs, and other safety equipment. But all it takes is one idiot and headlines are made.

I’ve been on boats that have gone wrong and seen how bad things can get. I laugh at the pictures of the boats stuck on jetties after their clueless owners run into them in the darkness, find YouTube videos of boat ramp bloopers as amusing as the next guy, but a lot of it could be avoided if states would start to extend their boating licensing laws to cover adults. Most have a requirement that underage operators complete a boating safety course and get a safety certificate. But in New York, page 39 of the Safe Boating manual states:

“Adults 18 years of age and older may operate a mechanically
propelled vessel without an approved boating safety certificate.”

I think it’s time to license adult operators as well.