Churbuck.com

Okay, so the Fourth of July water fight was getting a little out of hand but the baseball team started it, or actually the EPAC Grotto’s peeing clam float started it, but that’s my theory. The local landscape company towed a trailer the size of a tennis court behind a big dump truck and loaded it with the best college baseball teams in the country. Young men at the peak of their capabilities, armed with SuperSoakers the size of Iwo Jima flamethrowers and an endless supply of softball-sized water balloons, wreaking havoc down Main Street from the Kettle-Ho to the elementary school.

Someone was sure to get hurt. Some toddler diving for a piece of penny candy was going to get crushed beneath the trailer wheels like a fanatic hurling himself under the wheels of the legendary Juggernaut. Old ladies in lawn chairs were being rudely entered into a bad wet t-shirt contest that no one wanted to judge. We had to defend ourselves, and over the years the sidewalks were lined with garden hoses, pressure washers, water cannons and the war was on, escalating to the point that finally reason had to step in and say enough.

The Cotuit Kettleers sat out the 2010 Cotuit Fourth of July parade and the village was upset.

Would we take out our aggressions on the Mason’s Mariner Lodge, and do away with a dozen old men wearing white shirts and natty little aprons? Would the librarians get it next? What could be done? The omission of the boys of summer was the talk of the counter at the post office. We were mad. A ritual had been taken away from us.

The season had already opened in early June, when snowflakes still could be imagined in the rickety wooden bleachers in the shade along the third base line at Elizabeth Lowell Memorial Park, the gem of all the Cape Cod Baseball League’s ballparks, an oasis carved out of the pines and oaks a few hundred yards away from Cotuit Bay. Was this our year? Had coach Mike Roberts (UNC Chapel Hill’s coach from 1976 to 1998 and father of Oriole second baseman Brian Roberts) recruited a dugout full of superstars? It was impossible to tell. June was a difficult month, of rosters churned by the College World Series, the Super Regionals, Team USA try outs, and even the Major League scouts knew not to come with their radar guns as the college freshmen and sophomores made the wrenching transition from metal to wooden bats. The scouts would come, trying to answer the question we all asked:

Who would be the next major league superstars? They were out there, on the dusty basepaths and achingly green outfield. We knew they were out there, every summer revealed them to us. Chase Utley. Ron Darling. Mo Vaughn. Jason Varitek. Kevin Youkilis. Nomar Garciaparra. All had once stepped up to the plate, dove for liners, fumbled and stumbled for our ticket-free enjoyment on the hallowed grounds of Lowell Park. But who were they? We wouldn’t know for a few years, not realizing that the tanned pitcher who sold us our 50-50 raffle tickets in the stands would soon be standing on the mound at Wrigley or Petco or Fenway heaving heat on national television. What was clear was how blessed we were to be living in the town with the team that had won the most championships in the country’s most prestigious amateur baseball league, the league where the best of the best came to learn how to swing wood and get noticed by the scouts.

As the season progressed one learned to pick one’s place in the bleachers very carefully, to arrive precisely 45 minutes early while the basepaths were being hosed down and the coaches spraypainted new baselines. The musical cliches of the game blared through the PA – a weird playlist of country music, jump-around fist-pumping hip hop, and hair band anthems that we wished would just stop — and we all snickered at the interns behind the microphone who mispronounced “Cotuit” and referred to Cape Cod as “The” Cape Cod. Top row, back corner, brown paper sack of popcorn from the Kettleer’s Kitchen and a bottle of Poland Springs. Layout the scorecard, fill in the teams, the date, the names of the umps, the start time, and wait for the announcer to list the lineups. A few rows down, the founder of the dynasty, Arnold Mycock, for whom the Cape Cod Baseball League championship trophy is named, dean of the scorers, always presented early with the coaches’ lineups by an intern sent from the press box. Avoid sitting near the bozos — cell phone man who loudly calls his friends and always repeats the same silly cliches “…it’s the best wooden bat league in the country …,” anyone with kids under the age of ten, the Fountain of Misinformation who plaintively repeats over and over the obvious plea to the pitcher to “Throw Strikes.”

Rise for the National Anthem, cap over heart, as Nicky Chevalier takes the microphone out to home plate and we all look out to centerfield, the maroon (or is it Cranberry) uniformed Kettleers standing in a long line in front of their dugout, everyone’s eyes on the flag waving flaccid in the summer southwesterly breeze.

Play ball.

The pitcher superstitiously skips over the third baseline on his way to the mound. The umps and coaches swap line ups at home plate. The announcer reads the same script he’ll read at every game. The first pitch it thrown out by some account manager from Wells Fargo Private Wealth Advisors LLC. Their picture is taken with the catcher, they are handed the ball as a souvenir, the only one that will be given out as balls are too precious to give away blithely like they are in the majors. Shag a foul ball and return it to the red tent for a coupon to the Kettleer’s Kitchen.

And so it goes for 22 home games. The same routine, the same script, the same vista, the same rules, the same nine innings. But the players are all new. Few ever return for a second season. Yet instantly they become Our Team, their names gradually memorized through rote and repetition until they are as familiar as nephews at a family reunion.

Would this be the year? Cotuit hadn’t won the champs since 1999 and Coach Roberts didn’t have a title on his mantle yet. Bandy legged from years of hitting of swinging a fungo bat during batting practice, he gamely rises from the dugout and takes his place before us in the third base coach’s box, semaphoring hand signals and truly coaching his new charges in the art of Roberts Small Ball, a game of bunts and steals, and devious tricks like the mythical Hidden Ball Trick. His temper is wonderful to behold, a mixture of ferocious indignation and bewilderment over the genetic stupidity of umpires and the appalling rudeness of the visiting team’s fans, all philistines who should know when to sit down and shut up in the presence of his righteousness.

My scorebook gradually fills with the record of games won and lost. Exclamation points cryptically marking moments of greatness, moments uncaptured on film, lost in a park with no replay, no statisticians, no grotesque mascot dressed like a kettle. Sweat stains mark the heat waves. Mustard the hot dogs. Every page has a dogeared greasiness from the popcorn butter.

The girls in their summer clothes parade back and forth behind the dugout trying to catch a ballplayer’s eye. Vacationing bozos in Yankee caps self-consciously preen. Every foul ball into the parking lot where only a fool would park is greeted with a warning of “Heads Up!” and cheers as yet another windshield gets smashed with a spidery thunk and the line at the snack bar cowers and holds their hands over their heads.

The sailors from the yacht club arrive in the fourth inning, salt stained, barefoot and sunburned. “What’d I miss?” they ask. And I dutifully read back the highlights from the scorecard. “Bushyhead lined to third into a double play. Coach intimidated the visiting Meat into a balk. Yaz hit a dinger to center. And there’s a yellow jacket nest behind the the bathrooms that just attacked a herd of anklebiters and made them cry.”

The lack of a parade concerned us. Would it cast a dark cloud of bad luck on the home team?  Cotuit baseball fans fight all change. “The day they install lights is the day I stop coming.” But no parade? It was wrong. Something would happen and it wouldn’t be good.

It did happen. And it was good. Yesterday the Kettleers won the championship in a beautiful post-season run that saw them sweep their way into the finals against the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. I missed it, obligated to attend a meeting, but the game played on my phone, a little window of video that suddenly saw a flood of cranberry colored uniforms rush the mound, silent with the audio muted, a clutch of bouncing hopping happy young men surrounding a weathered coach with tears in his eyes.

There won’t be any parade this year. In the 70s, when the Kettleers won a consecutive string of championships, the fans would drive up and down Main Street for an hour blaring their car horns. But last night the village was quiet, chilled with a harbinger of the fall to come, silent except for the emerging crickets.

There won’t be any parade this year. The players have scattered back home or back to college. Soon the Volvos and Range Rovers will file out of town, pink children’s bikes on their racks, back to what seems to be an earlier and earlier start of school every year. The skiffs will be hauled. The yacht club dock dismantled and stacked in the bushes. And the town will go quiet for nine months, waiting for them to return.

I’ve quoted it before, but I must quote it again, Bartlett Giamatti, late President of Yale, former commissioner of baseball, quoted in this summer’s baseball sermon by my friend (who also has sadly moved away) the Reverend Jeremy Nickel, quite possibly the saddest obituary of summer and baseball that I know:

“ [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

The Tour de France kicked off yesterday — I watched the Rotterdam prologue off the Tivo last night — and caught Lance’s solo ride through the streets with mixed emotion, caught up the explicit allegations of doping leveled against him by his disgraced former lieutenant, Floyd Landis.  I have been a cycling romantic since the 1970s, when the movie Breaking Away inspired me to take my grandmother’s college graduation present and convert it into a classic Raleigh 12-speed racing bike that I rode all around New Haven and Cape Cod in a pair of sneakers and gym shorts. It was the European mystique of the sport, the wonder of what I think is arguably man’s most noble form of transportation, the sensation of flying down the rolling hills of the mid-Cape that addicted me to cycling forever.

In 2004, when Lance won the Tour, I was inspired to get back into cycling with a vengeance, pouring thousands of dollars into the helmets, shoes, gruppos I was ignorant of in the 1980s. Soon I was putting in hundreds of miles per week, hauling myself around the back roads of Cape Cod with my friends.

That all ended over Memorial Day weekend in 2006 when I was hit head on by a car and absolutely destroyed myself in a disastrous crash. So ended my cycling, forbidden by a wife unable to think about me out there in harm’s way, a would-be organ donor at the mercy of every teenage drive texting away behind the wheel.

Yet still every July I tune into the dulcet tones of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin calling the most extraordinary athletic contest in the world, one so brutal that yes, indeed, to survive the riders turn to testosterone patches, EPO, and blood transfusions.

And yes, I remain in awe of Lance, his comeback, his survival, his fighter’s spirit. It’s just very sad to see him in this, his last Tour, saying his farewell to a sport he transformed under the damning cloud of Landis’ specific and detailed allegations.

I don’t know if I will watch again after this.

In the 1970s I remember seeing ads on Manhattan buses for Cynar, the Artichoke Apertif. Big garish Mussolini typography with an alien looking artichoke on the label. “Who in their right mind would drink artichoke liquor?”

A couple years ago, while dining with master ThinkPad designer Richard Sapper, he mentioned his preference for a taste of Cynar. I asked the waiter who was totally confused and eventually went to the bar and asked the bartender if he had any.

“Arti-what?” he asked.

It's good for you

As an ex-bartender in the alcoholically sophisticated bar-city of San Francisco, I was exposed at an early age to some weird stuff like Fernet Branca (easily one of the more strange digestifs) and 150 proof Chartreuse. But never had I tasted Cynar until last month in Italy while on Dave’s Excellent Adventure. I’m a total addict now, and even persuaded a highly skeptical companion that it was indeed, when served with soda and a slice of orange, one of the lbetter things in a glass after a long day of marching through Tuscan hilltowns or thwarting the amorous advances of psycho street mimes.

It’s made by Campari, who makes all sorts of Italian goodness, but I haven’t seen a bottle on a liquor store shelf… ever. I guess I could special order it, but for now I have a bottle I brought back with me.

Here’s some good recipes over at Chowhound that utilize Cynar.

“To conclude my weekend of day trips, I saved the best for last- Cinque Terre. Possibly the prettiest place I have ever seen. I woke up at 6:30, got onto the train at 7:20, and arrived at the Italian Riviera at around 10:00. I had no plans and no expectations, I heard about a 5 hour walk that went through all five towns, and I was sold.”

My daughter is finishing up a term in Florence. Her blog has been a surprise to me. So, excuse the proud father thing. I’m headed over there the last two weeks of May to let her show me around.

via Cinque Terre « B in Italy.

I settled in for the 14 hour haul with some massive reading and viewing. I never sleep on long hauls — small naps and moments of narcolepsy aside — and so I need tons of mental stimulation.  It all begins with packing:

Hardcopy: this is paper-based reading for those non-electronic device moments the airlines are so fond of dogmatically imposing. Why a Kindle can’t be used during taxiing is beyond me. But I am not going to argue with the Man.

• Sunday New York Times. $6 at the Hudson News in Terminal C. I repeat: SIX DOLLARS.
• Ten back issues of a newsletter from a Club that shall not be named that I am a guest of this summer for a few days
• Saints and Strangers: Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families, with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Limbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock, by George Williston, the best account of the Pilgrims I have read yet beyond Bradford, Mourt’s Relation and Nathaniel Philbrick.

Digital: Kindle primarily – working through William Vollman’s excellent World War II novel, Europa; the New Yorker, and a ton of other texts. I downloaded War & Peace for a re-read. Lots of Kindle usage going on in United business class from Chi-to-PEK. Saw one poor soul start off the trip with a new Apple iPad in his hands. He made sure everyone knew he had one. By Siberia the guy had a massive case of arm fatigue and was trying to prop the sucker up against something. I pitied the fool. Spied another iPad in a guy’s dutyfree bag going through immigration at PEK.

Video: loaded up the ThinkPad with some in-flight viewing. The video screens on the plane are super small, but I suffered through a historical costume drama, The Young Victoria then abandoned the in-flight options and went to my own library. Big surprise was The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s winner of the Palm D’Or at Cannes in 2009. Amazing, amazing movie set in pre WW-I northern Germany.

After that I started a Kurosawa flick about a bureaucrat with stomach cancer …. but that got old and I dove into the Willison’s excellent history of the Pilgrims, which had my attention all the way into Beijing.

All in all, I love flying only because I can get a ton of reading and viewing in. Sure, out of guilt I do a little work, but for the most part it’s just a lot of reading and watching, about the only such non-interrupted stint I get these days.

My father accidentally introduced me to Barry Hannah in the mid-70s when he bought Hannah’s first novel, the Faulkner award winning Geronimo Rex. For some random reason I read it — we never discussed the book, my father never recommended it or even mentioned it, it just appeared on a shelf in the bookcase and I read it.

It is one of a few books which makes me laugh out loud, a book I push on people to read over and over as one of the most wickedly funny examples of Southern American writing ever penned.  A tale of coming of age in 1960s Mississippi, it actually more like Animal House on paper — a very sophomoric story of three misfits rooming together off campus at Ole Miss.

In 1977 I was accepted into a writing class taught by Gordon Lish, fiction editor at Knopf and short story editor at Esquire. He championed the new wave of post-modern writers like Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Hannah. In one of the first classes he handed out copies of Hannah’s amazing short story anthology, Airships and read out loud the extremely short story, “Coming Close to Donna.” I was captivated.

Barry Hannah never broke out as a best selling author, nor did he go on to achieve great things like others of his generation. But he did write beautifully, crafting his sentences with the precision of a Haiku. He was earthy, his humor was located south of his belt, but he was entertaining as could be. I loved his writing.

I walked most of the eastern shoreline of Cotuit yesterday, breaking the hike into three sections. One at 7 am. One at lunch, and the last in the late afternoon around sunset. All told I covered six and half miles of mostly sand, with some Main Street pavement mixed in. The dogs accompanied me for half of the distance, their favorite thing in the world is a beach walk. Indeed, all I have to say to them is “Do you want to …..?” and they start bouncing off the furniture and assault each other in anticipation.

The new camera is a nice thing to bring along, especially its high definition video capabilities. I find myself very fond these days of Flickr’s video hosting for two reasons: the Flickr uploader application bundles the videos on the camera up with the still pictures so I don’t need to upload stills to one place and videos to YouTube; and second, Flickr is not normally blocked in China or Turkey — two places where YouTube is dead.

First, a video of some Canada Geese exploding off of the marsh when I surprised them at Handy’s Point. Good thing Captain Sullenberger was not on the ascent in the neighborhood.

I started at the town dock right at sunset — which at the start of this week at this latitude is 5:15 pm. By Sunday it will be 5:31 — so we’re gaining two minutes of daylight every day now. There’s still ice in the harbor — it comes and goes depending on the wind and temperature. This sheet stuck against the town dock makes an interesting ringing sound as the waves wrinkle underneath it.

Then along the beach to Lowell’s Point. Above is the abandoned home of the former president of Harvard, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, also known as the arbitrator in the Sacco-Vanzetti case early in the last century.  The cement sea wall and old wooden groins are disintegrating.

Then along the shore to the boat ramp at the foot of Old Shore Road, where this old sign warns people not to anchor on the submarine cable that runs across the bottom of the bay to Grand Island.

My father always advised setting the mooring of the family boats to the south of the cable, in the belief that in a blow they would drag through the black mud and fetch up and hook onto the cable. So much for warning signs. I think the old man was right though. Stay to the south of the cable.

Then around the fresh water springs at Hooper’s Landing where Conrad Geyser proves the best use for an O’Day Daysailor is to be reborn as a clamming catamaran named the Thermoplayae.

The rest of the walk is smooth sailing down the broad sands of the yacht club beach to Handy’s Point. Ducks cruise along, the winter sticks on the moorings look like crosses in a military cemetery, and critters rustle in the underbrush under the bluff. The dogs get freaked out by something at the same place along the beach. I think a coyote must have killed something there  because they sniff at the spot and then cling to me like something bad is going to happen.

Handy’s Point is where my great-great-grandmother used to live, before she sold the place to be closer to the village in the winter. Can’t blame her, husband at sea, infants, big drafty house on the beach. Her descendants may wish for the view, but the salty old timers wanted nothing to do with the beach. That’s where bad things happened during storms and where the lower class clammers and watermen made their livings.

I find myself needing beach time more this time of year than the middle of summer. It’s just me and the dogs and no pissed off waterfront property owners, few ticks, and a vacant harbor to gaze out on.

This one from my daughter who is spending her Junior-year spring term in Florence.  I have to say a WordPress.com blog, a Flickr account, a digital camera, and a Lenovo S10 netbook are a great way to keep the grandparents and friends informed.

http://bchurbuck.wordpress.com

I marked the end of 2009 by retiring my blue backpack that has accompanied me through the last decade beginning with its first trip to London to McKinsey’s offices in January 2001 to its final brokendown trip to San Francisco two weeks ago.

It was a fine pack, one I purchased at the Hyannis Eastern Mountain Sports store along with a padded laptop sleeve. From McKinsey to 21i.net and my Zurich days, to my ghostwriting days at Gartner through my eight months at IDG, and finally — for the past four years at Lenovo, that blue bag has carried the following cargo (give or take a few exceptions).

• ThinkPad (usually an ultraportable like an X60 or an X200, but lately a big T500)
• The aforementioned padded laptop sleeve with four mesh compartments (which is obsessively managed to provide me with the perfect “in-my-seat” experience from ChapStick to iPod and white cable, Shure headphones to mini-usb cables, wireless mouse, and 4gb “Clouds of Promise” commemorative 2008 Summer Olympics memory key from Lenovo Chairman Yangqing Yang.
• Lenovo power adapter in zip up mesh bag with power tips, airplane plug, and 12v car charger adapter
• A clear plastic folio for holding receipts and travel documents
• Moleskine notebook
• Pack of 3″x5″ index cards
• Business cards
• Laser pointer and LED flashlight from Qualcomm
• Passport
• Stamps
• Four personal notecards and envelopes for real thank you’s, congratulations and condolences
• Restoril (temazepam) for sleeping on jet lag intensive trips
• Immodium and Pepto-Bismal tablets for dysentery
• Advil gel-caps
• Claritin
• Blackberry and charger
• FlipCam
• Mifi wireless hotspot and charger
• refills for my Lamy Swift
• A mechanical pencil
• A spare ballpoint
• A few packages of spare contact lenses
• Gum
• Wad of foreign currencies held together with a paper clip
• Handful of spare change tossed in willy-nilly whenever I approach the TSA metal detectors
• Soylent Green protein bars
• Wad of frequent flier cards held together with a paper clip
• Checkbook
• Office keys
• Lenovo ID badge on a zing-it
• Leather “pocket briefcase” with index cards,  business cards, and taxi receipts
• spare American Airlines red checked baggage tags
• Kindle

The faithful EMS bag has been heading downhill for a few years, beginning with an ill-conceived bottle of SuperGlue packed to Phoenix Arizona in 2001 for a McKinsey partner’s meeting at the Biltmore. I had the idiotic idea that I would tie saltwater flies while traveling by packing my Renzetti Traveler vise, and the feathers and others materials to make a series of Bob Popovics Shady Lady Squid patterns (one of the most deadly early season striper patterns on the South Cape). Somehow the Superglue  discharged prematurely inside of the pack’s front compartment and permanently welded shut half of the zipper and created an amazing frozen sculpture of junk inside. I did tie a dozen of the pattern and caught a gorgeous 36″ bass in the rip at Succonnesset Shoals with one in the spring of 2001.

The right shoulder strap adjustment buckle was caught between the tailgate of my car and shattered, necessitating a permanent figure-eight knot in the end of the strap. The very front key compartment simply lost its zipper and has been gaping open for the last year. The blue fabric is still fine, but a bit grimy, and I admit I feel like a bit of an overgrown schlub carrying around a big knapsack like a 12 year old boarding the school bus. I looked at various briefcases — from Coach to Glaser — but none had the infinite capacity of the EMS, and none could be fully shouldered and humped in times of forced marches through the endless concourses of the world’s airports (I refuse to use wheeled luggage or take moving sidewalks as part of a silent protest against the Wall-E vision of fatsos being carried to-and-fro in electric wheelbarrows).

My son and I started poking around San Francisco for a replacement during the interregnum between Xmas and New Year’s, starting at the REI south of Market Street. I told him as we entered that I would not purchase anything less than a perfect replacement for the dying EMS; that I couldn’t accept any compromise because  it had to last another decade, and that I would be very picky. The problem with pack shopping is that it can’t happen online. Sorry, but there is no way to fully experience the heft of the zippers, the utility of the compartments, and the possibility of fitting under an airplane seat unless one pulls it apart and ignores the salesman”s pitch.

REI had an impressive assortment of bags ranging from little day packs to hardcore backpacks with metal frames and enough capacity to handle a tent, sleeping bags, stoves, fuel, water bottles, and clothing to complete a passage of the Appalachian Trail. There was a couple contenders, but no winners, and for an hour I fretted and unzipped one bag after another. I came close to committing to an Eagle Creek pack, but came to my senses and walked away. Then we hit a Sports Basement in the Mission and there was even less of a choice. The old blue bag would have to do, and no, EMS doesn’t make it anymore, offering a great selection, but none so great as that original winner.

Yesterday, New Year’s Eve, found me on the road along the coastline to Santa Cruz and eventually Monterey. I stopped at the Patagonia outlet in Santa Cruz and found nothing in the way of a back pack. But I did find perfection and it’s name is MLC (Maximum Legal Carry-on)

This sucker is a briefcase/suitcase with a shoulder sling strap and two stowable shoulder straps — permitting me to convert it from a bag with a handle to a bag with straps. I might be able to do away with my duffel bag and fit my clothing into this bag for the usual two-night stand to Raleigh or New York City. Even without clothing it easily ate the list above and then some. The zippers aren’t as burly as the EMS, but I can feel myself falling in love already. Of such simple things is contentment built.

Woke up at 4 am in California to take East Coast calls. Stumbling around pre-coffee in the dark in my mother-in-law’s Potrero Hill kitchen I grabbed a baguette and smeared some Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk cheese on it.

I needed a gas mask. This stuff is seriously toxic (but good). Reminds me of a French Epoisse,  the cheese that is reputedly banned from French public transportation. I am totally ruined for public consumption. Mere breath mints will not erase this issue. Now to figure out how to smuggle a few of these things back to Boston on Sunday without a) ruining my suitcase and its contents and b) setting off the nerve gas detectors at the security checkpoints.

A band I have been keeping my eyes on for a few weeks — Them Crooked Vultures — is a week away from releasing their debut album. It’s one of those celebrity rocker projects — John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Dave Grohl from Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss. In keeping with the trend set by Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and others, the band has done an interesting job in building demand for the music through a web site, email newsletter, and the release of a sample song …. through YouTube.

This morning the band notified me via email that the entire album was on YouTube. The website is a great example of leveraging social sharing tools to spread the word — a real time Twitter feed — Facebook integration. So very smart interactive marketing happening behind the scenes.

So I went to YouTube — which is not surprising given that I heard the experts at YouTube/Google once confirm that the most viewed type of content on the service is …. music — and indeed, there were all 13 tracks from the furthcoming release.

Now it gets interesting. I’ve been playing with DoubleTwist all summer — a content “synchronizer/player” developed by DVD Jon. This is a very very very intriguing piece of software that has freed me from the locked tyranny of iTunes so I can manage my digital assets across multiple devices — in other words, I can put iTunes music on my BlackBerry Bold thanks to DoubleTwist. The program has a cool function that also allows one to paste in the url of a YouTube video and import into a local playlist.  Five minutes and I had the entire Them Crooked Vultures album on my iPod a week early (I will buy it, the quality of the MP3s is obviously low and sub-par).

So what? Well, the so-what is that the artists are sharing stuff for free on free platforms and I can collect and manage that free stuff using free tools. If I were a credit-card challenged 25-year old who was compelled to build a music library I think I would need look no further than YouTube and DoubleTwist. I look forward to the insights of noted Music Economist Uncle Fester on this “freemium” tactic.

Next Sunday through Thursday — Oct. 25-29 Lenovo Headquarters in North Carolina

Following week – Nov 1-5 will be in Beijing

So why the silence? Six weeks have transpired  since the vitrectomy to reattach my left retina and I have been a little depressed and too challenged vision-wise to do much writing.  No gory details — but here’s the state of affairs today:

1. I have double vision. There is a second version of everything pointing down and to the right of the real thing.

2. I have some problems reading as the day goes by and my eye gets tired

3. Due to scar tissue my affected eye has a “pinch” effect where everything is pulled together in the middle of my field of vision. This causes words on a page or screen to compress together into a solid “slug”

How do I cope?

1. Big fonts. I’ve cranked up my screen fonts.

2. Kindle — the font sizer on the Kindle is a great thing for bad eyesight

3. New glasses. I am being fitted with my first spectacles in six years with a prismatic correction to solve the double-vision

4. Eye patch to cut down the confusion.

Prognosis: very good. I have vision where I had none before and I could be looking at a six month wait before things really settle down.

If I mention I am from Cape Cod sooner or later someone asks if I know the Kennedy’s. Not really, I say. My family was a bunch of crabby Cape Cod Protestant Lincoln Republicans who viewed anyone with a summer house as an intruder. Anti-Kennedy sentiment fell on tender toddler ears. But interestingly enough, over time the orbits crossed and for me they crossed because of a simple wooden sailboat called a Wianno Senior. So yes, I met Ted Kennedy, a couple times in fact. I thought he was a good guy. With the flag in the Cotuit park at half-mast, here at random is where Ted and I collided over time:

1969, Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta: I am eleven years old and sent over to Martha’s Vineyard with the yachtsman Marvin Green, a childhood friend of my father’s, to keep his son Sandy Terry company. Terry and I bring bicycles over on the Green’s yawl and ride around Edgartown and Chappaquiddick in the midst of the regatta chaos. Then there is the morning of July 18^th and we see lots of police and ambulances crossing the channel on the On Time, the Chappaquiddick ferry. We ride our bikes out to the eastern side of the island in time to see a car pulled out of the water by a tow truck. We aren’t told who the car belongs to, but we are told that a woman is dead. I am frightened by this and steal a long splinter of wood from the Dyke Bridge as a souvenir. I lost the splinter before returning home two days later.

Mid-1970s, Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta: A leeward start on a very windy day. I am sailing our Wianno Senior, the yellow Snafu III, and manage a good start with a smart spinnaker set right at the gun. It’s a very crowded starting line, with a fleet of forty sloops careening just feet apart from each other as they race towards a mark downwind to the north. To leeward of us, being incredibly aggressive and announcing his intention to exercise his right of way, is Teddy Kennedy, Jr. in the Kennedy’s boat the Victura. Maintaining control is nearly impossible as the boats start to death roll in the building swells. As I get ready to douse our spinnaker and avoid the crazed Kennedy boat their spinnaker explodes with a satisfying pop!, and for one magical second the tatters fly forward like a hundred pennants, held out in perfect outline by the tapes along the parachute sail’s leeches and foot. We sail on as they fall behind.

Early 1980s, Andover, Massachusetts: as the resident geek in the newsroom of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune I am told to cover the opening of a new high tech company called Symbolics (makers of a LISP processing workstation). I get to the scene and see in the lobby the office developer, Wianno Senior sailor and Ted Kennedy friend Jack Fallon (also developer of the Prudential Center) and Senator Ted Kennedy. Both make remarks, and afterwards, not sure of what in the world to ask them directly, I start talking Wianno Seniors with them (Wianno Seniors are the totems of the Cape Cod sailing class. JFK’s boat sits, in silent homage, outside of the Kennedy Library in Dorchester and can be seen from the air as one lands to the north at Logan) and the discussion gets very animated, to the exclusion of the other reporters and Symbolics staff, none of whom have the faintest idea of what we are talking about when we get into a discussion about that year’s new jib from the Hood sail loft.

The front porch, Cotuit, Massachusetts: the old Cotuit Inn, now demolished and turned into a plastic hive of condominiums, had a wonderful little bar run by Hack Daniels. It was a nice quiet place to have a drink or two, and usually closed when Hack ran out of ice. One night some associates left the bar and saw on the porch of the inn a small igloo cooler with the words “Rose Kennedy Cottage” written on the lid. Inside were the makings for additional cocktails. The cooler was pilfered and brought to the Churbuck porch where the party continued. An hour later the senior senator stood on the steps demanding his cooler be returned for his boat ride back to Hyannisport. He chided us not by name but by our boat’s sail number, “140.”

He was meekly obliged and Hack banned us from the bar for a while.

1984, Lawrence EagleTribune: The democratic primary was in full force in New Hampshire and Ted Kennedy dropped by the newsroom. As political editor (at the sage age of 26) I am called in to record the Senator’s remarks. Massachusetts politics are chaotic. The junior senator, Paul Tsongas is retiring due to cancer (opening the seat to John F. Kerry). Walter Mondale and Gary Hart are battling it out in the Granite State. The Carter legacy has opened the door for the Reagan Revolution. And the Grand Lion of the Democratic Party is in the conference room holding forth. I can’t stop staring at his face. Ted looks terribly tired. Painfully so. It was, in retrospect, a low point for him. Little did I know.

And that’s it. Booze and boats. I’ll miss the guy. Now for my prediction. Remember Opening Day at Fenway? Ted was there to throw the first pitch with his niece, Caroline. The same Caroline once thought to be a contender to assume Hillary Clinton’s senate seat in New York. My theory? Caroline gets Ted’s seat – this state can’t exist without a Kennedy in office and I imagine Caroline can claim residence in Chilmark. Update: I blew that prediction. Say hello to Scott Brown.

watch?v=pr2X5zEazKk&feature=related

Feedburner displays my feed subscribers in the left column. I keep an eye on as a casual reference to growth in readership and declare little victories everytime the odometer clocks another 100 readers.

Typically it hovers around 600 subscribers but in the last few days it has spiked to 900 plus. Why? No clue. The number fluctuates up and down, but a 30% spike means either Feedburner has burped or … (update, Nathan Gilliatt said FriendFeed subs are added)

Some undetected thing spiked inbound traffic.

Look at the green bar just go nuts in the last week.

I’m not a collector of stat counts — I have to worry about followers and ranks too much in the real world of Lenovo — but it is an ego-stroke to know someone reads this stuff.

Then again some don’t ….. Stefan Constantinescu, a great commentor on all things related to ThinkPads, had to unsub when he realized that my professional title doesn’t mean this blog follows in my career’s footsteps. (No hard feelings Stefan, just citing your decision as example of blog identity crisis).

1. Churbuck: David Churbuck works for Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY), a company that makes a line of laptops known as the ThinkPad. Why do I know this? I’m a huge ThinkPad nerd. Practically every laptop I’ve ever owned has been a ThinkPad. I love the design, the dependability, the battery life, but do I love David? This is his personal blog more or less. He constantly writes about getting back into shape and fishing. I’m sorry, but I just don’t care. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Public Affairs Section Stockholm – Press Release.

Fingers crossed for my Cotuit friend and fellow Cotuit Skiff sailor, Matthew Barzun:

“On June 19, President Barack Obama announced his intent to submit to the U.S. Senate for approval the nomination of Mr. Matthew Barzun to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Sweden.In reference to the nomination of Mr. Barzun and several others for ambassadorial posts President Obama said, “I am grateful that these fine individuals will serve in my administration and I am confident that they will well represent our nation abroad and help strengthen our relationships within the international community. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.””
The Senate will do well by confirming Matteo.

… I slept an hour later than usual, woke to grey skies, ate bacon and eggs instead of beneficial oatmeal, did rapid-fire errands, stopped by the herring run just as the day turned awesome (I saw a big school of herring waiting in the top pool), installed a new mower blade and mowed the lawn, bought a six-pack of Offshore Ale, strung up my rod with a new lure, and hit the prettiest beach on Cape Cod for two hours of casting practice (no fish yet) in the setting sun before rushing home and catching the last five innings of a four-hour classic of a baseball game against Yankees (who also lost a nailbiter to the Sox the night before), cooking the entire time (rillettes, duck leg confit, vegetable stock, hummous) screaming at the TV in the kitchen, and scaring the dogs.

I congratulated my esteemed neighbor for doing the right thing, and she told me about an profile of your humble narrator in the Barnstable Enterprise.  I couldn’t find a copy, but someone dropped it by the house while I was running errands. I feel conspiciously auspicious. I’d point to it, but it’s not online and I am not in the mood for personal promotion.

A good friend dropped by and we got on the topic of seagull attacks and the time I watched a seagull poop into someone’s agape mouth aboard the Hyline ferry M/V Point Gammon when I worked on there as a deckhand in college.

Tomorrow I paint the bottom of the yacht and continue my gardening. My spring peas have sprouted and my arugula is showing itself.  The tulips have opened and the alcove reeks of hyacinths.

On a day like today it does not suck to be me.

One day after having my right nostril roto-rooted so I can breathe like a stallion. It looks worse than it is.

My first pate de campagne is in the oven, cooking slowly in a bain marie, assembled per the recipe in my new favorite cookbook, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This is basically a French meatloaf, but a really, really, really good meatloaf. Pate has the reputation of being cruel liverwurst because of the iconic cliche of pate de fois gras, but the campagne version is the country version of essentially a big pork sausage without the casing, sliced, and served cold.

I’ve been itching to make one since an unforgotten meal some ten years ago in Paris, with my wife’s godfather, at a little hole in the wall in a neighborhood somewhere on the southwestern side of the city. We sat down and the waiter brought over a terrine — a rectangular earthenware container — with a baguette and knife.  I dug in and have been on a crusade to find that experience ever since.

I had to buy a meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, and I just nuked the kitchen putting the recipe together, but little does my poor wife know what lies in store for I also purchased the sausage stuffing attachment so I can get real serious and start pumping out some andouille and other smoked tubes of goodness. I won’t be doing the salami, dry-cured stuff. Flirting with botulism is not my idea of culinary fun. Now I have to hit up my nephew for use of his mega-smoker that he got for Christmas a few years ago. This book has it all — how to use every part of the pig except for the veritable squeal.

For baseball fans it is hot stove season, the interregnum between the World Series and the call up of pitchers and catchers to spring training. I’ve got my wood stove roaring and my bookshelf groaning with winter reading. Here’s a quick list of what’s in the backpack, on the nightstand, and on the Kindle these days; and then what I’m watching on the DVD player.

What We Had:  A brief memoir by James Chace of life growing up in the southeastern Massachusetts city of Fall River — once the largest cotton spinning city in the world — now a sad hulk and husk of its former self. This is where Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her father forty whacks, but Chace writes an amazingly poignant story of the decline of a Yankee family from privilege to irrelevance. From his grandfather, the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate to his brother, a crazed World War II war hero, Chace tells a elegant story of a family, a city, and a society in decline.

Not on the par of “Goodbye to All That” — but nevertheless a good book about the slide of a Yankee family and one man’s determination to make sense of it.

Going to See the Elephant: Rodes Fishburne’s first novel. He worked at Forbes ASAP when I was at Forbes.com but I didn’t know him. He edited the annual “Big Issue” — a compendium of essays by big thinkers and celebs — and that most shows in his brilliant portrayal of the mad scientist/big thinker that seems like an amalgamation of Dean Kamen, Nathan Myhrvold, Esther and Freeman Dyson, and every other digital visionary to draw breath and haunt a podium the last twenty years. This is a good San Francisco novel — worthy of the canon that includes McTeague and rolls through the ages — but being a comical effort, it may irritate on occasion as it reaches for laughs that are not always (but occasionally) there.

Movies

I decided to dig through my son’s amazing 50 DVD collection — Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, and have been toting around some discs as I travel. This past week I viewed:

Brief Encounter: 1945 David Lean directed this Noel Coward weepie starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Listed among the best efforts of all time in British cinema. Amazingly effective, melodrama aside, in terms of Lean camera work and impeccable editing, but mostly in the pre-WWII depiction of adultry and morals in suburban England. I wasn’t boo-hooing in my hankie, but it’s interesting to see how to do a weepie right.

Ballad of a Soldier: directed by Grigory Chukhraj. 19-year old Russian soldier in World War II destroys two tanks, is hailed a hero, asks for a leave to go home to fix his mother’s leaking roof. Makes his way through peril and travail, falling in love along the way with the awesome Zhanna Prokhorenko (with whom I have a crush now). Interesting flick released in 1959 during the post-Stalin thaw, so not a lot of propaganda weirdness. Apparently a major sentimental favorite in Russia to this day.

Richard III: Laurence Olivier as the deformed evil tyrant and usurper Richard in Shakespeare’s masterpiece of treachery and lust for power. All I can say, is whoa, I mean I know Olivier had the reputation, but for some reason I had never full appreciated why (and it isn’t for his role as the Nazi dentist Dr. Zell in Marathon Man). This confirms why. The dude can act. Directed by him, this is considered his cinematic Shakespearean masterpiece. Technicolor makes the sets and costumes bizarrely gorgeous.

I wish I could memorize his “Now is the winter of our discontent …” soliloqy for my next staff meeting. Watch this piece of acting:

M. Hulot’s Holiday: Faithful French readers will doubtlessly say, “Duh, where have you been?” — but this is the funniest movie I have seen in a very long, long time. Jacque Tati, director and star, has to be one of the greatest physical comedians ever — up there with Chaplin and Keaton. The tennis scene made me pee my pants.  See this.

The nice thing about Facebook has been the coalescing of random Churbucks around the FB group. “All Things Churbuckian” organized by Paula Churbuck. One of the Churbucks to come out of the woodwork was Frederick Churbuck, a young man from Colorado who pinged me in an email with a question about how were we related.

I have no idea — but shared my theory that some semi-literate ancestor in Southeastern Massachusetts (The Churbuck name seems to be concentrated in Middleboro, Wareham and the Upper Cape) messed up the first “B” in “Chubbuck”, didn’t close the bottom loop and left it open as an “R”. Hence Churbuck is a typo from Chubbuck, of which there is also a sizable population in the same aforementioned towns.

Frederick asked if I knew of the place where he spent his summers, a grand mansion on the seaside of Buzzard’s Bay with the name of “Windsway.”

I had not, but on Thanksgiving my daughter and I set out for Old Silver Beach in West Falmouth, and under dramatic lowering skies, saw off to the northwest a pretty impressive house on a peninsula. Just as Frederick described it.

Was it “Windsway?”

Here’s the picture I took.

Windsway?

Frederick says it is at the end of Wild Harbor Road, and indeed, this is the last stop on Wild Harbor Road.

Amazing. And no, I didn’t come from that branch of Churbuck. Apparently the best known of the Falmouth Churbucks is the painter Leander. Of the rest of that branch, I know very little. I wish I were retired and could indulge my geneological urges. Alas. I cannot.

Update: George Taylor sent in the following picture of Windsway in its heyday. I like it better this way, the way it was.