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Muzak, also known as Elevator Music, has always been a great joke. Hearing a Steely Dan tune like “Do It Again” while leafing through a six-month old issue of Field & Stream at the dentist is its own special circle of hell, especially when the mind starts getting infected and singing along silently to the bowdlerized tune (“Back, Jack, Do it Again ….”). And many a great movie has used elevator music to great comic effect. My favorite being Dawn of the Dead (yes, it’s Zombie week at Churbuck.com).

Muzak, at least the true commercial version, is supposed to have a specific effect on the listener. According to the Wikipedia:

“Elevator music is typically set to a very simple melody, so that it can be unobtrusively looped back to the beginning. In a mall or shopping center, elevator music of a specific type has been found to have a psychological effect: slower, more relaxed music tends to make people slow down and browse longer.”

Which brings me to my constant musing about the effect that background music has on certain behaviors. I’ve written in the past* about the way that certain music can improve my ergometer results while other songs effectively kill it. This isn’t your usual athletic lockeroom get-psyched cliche music.  I’m not referring to Eye of the Tiger or House of Pain’s Jump Around. That Rocky soundtrack stuff isn’t what gets my 500 meter splits down an additional two seconds. Indeed, there is some academic research that confirms that some music can improve aerobic results but I’m too lazy at the moment to hunt it down.

When I tended bar it was a given that loud music drove alcohol consumption higher.  At some point in the evening the manager would always step in back, find the big volume control, and crank it when the joint was good and buzzed. Of course the din made it impossible to hear some desperate dipsomaniac shout an order over the heads of her fellow patrons for a pina colada, a peach daiquiri and a sloe gin fizz shortly after midnight on a Saturday night when the only thing that would keep the bar out of the weeds was sloshing wine into glasses and pulling drafts out of the taps. “What?! What?!” we’d shout, handing over a napkin and a pencil with a shrug and the implied suggestion to write it down. Obviously loud music made it difficult to conduct a conversation and all that shouting of “WHAT?” led to a subtle anxiety that could only be slaked by another drink and another drink after that.

Silent restaurants are spooky. I suppose a low volume soundtrack gives one the illusion of being in a sound bubble where one’s conversation can’t be overheard by the next table.

When I was writing unpublished novels and short stories in great earnest during college, I found I could only enter that special creative zone if there was music playing. Loud music. Something about writing to rock and roll got me into a typing groove. I can read fiction with soft music in the background — jazz, etc. — but can’t concentrate on academic level stuff if there are lyrics involved — the word absorption gets mixed up.

My big revelation, and this goes to the post’s headline, is my re-discovery of the Ambient genre and how perfectly it suits a day of concentration. In the mid-70s, when I was a college student, I had two roommates with very eccentric tastes in avant garde music. I’m talking stuff by Morton Subotnick, Sun Ra, Stomu Yamashta and most memorably, Brian Eno, in particular his Ambient 1: Music for Airports. For some reason, ambient is way back on my personal playlist these days.

I think of Eno as the father of ambient music — he’s a genius at elevating background noise from elevators and waiting rooms to high art. Another godfather of ambient has to be Vangelis, particularly his soundtrack for Blade Runner:

So, it’s strange as I age that my taste is music is not the chestnuts from my youth; one more rendition of Freebird or Green Grass and High Tides Forever and I’ll lose it. What’s surprising me is how my tastes have swung to utterly obscure musicians I would never have encountered were it not for the random intelligence behind Last.fm. So, with that said, here’s some names that deserve to be checked out. This is great music to plug into in the background when you’ve got other things to do.

• Aphex Twin

• Eskmo ( a favorite video)

• Lorn

• Boards of Canada (note the YouTube comment, “The Ultimate Homework-Doing Music”)

• Carbon Based Lifeforms

• Loscil

• Stendeck

• Totakeke

• Monolake

• Robot Koch

*: My erg playlist, from 2006 pretty much is holding firm. Suggestions always welcome as “erg playlist” seems to be a top search term driving people to this blog.

1. Scum of the Earth: Rob Zombie
2. Who Was in My Room Last Night: The Butthole Surfers
3. Jesus Built my Hot Rod: Ministry
4. Ain’t my Bitch: Metallica
5. Rusty Cage: Soundgarden
6. Sex Type Thing: Stone Temple Pilots
7. New World Order: Ministry
8. Hey Man, Nice Shot: Filter
9. My Own Summer – Deftones
10. Astro-Creep: White Zombie
11. Them Bones: Alice in Chains
12. Time Bomb: Godsmack
13. Blizzards, Buzzards, Bastards: Scissorfight
14. Du Hast: Rammstein
15. God Save the Queen: Sex Pistols
16. You Think I’m Not Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire, Queens of the New Stone Age
17. Jump Around: House of Pain
18. Liberate: Slipknot
19. She Sells Sanctuary: The Cult
20. California Uber Alles: The Dead Kennedys

When I was in college my girlfriends tended to dress me, and one in particular, decided that my preference for rowing shirts won off the backs of vanquished opponents, Grateful Dead concert t-shirts, and frayed collar button downs carried over from my prep school dress code days needed to be replaced with a new standard “Dave Look” based on white Brooks Brothers button downs and well faded blue Levi’s 505 classic jeans.  Brooks Brothers was different in the 1970s, still the standard bearer of the iconic American Ivy Traditional look, and because of my allegiance to all things Yale, I expanded to include a few button flap pocket J. Press shirts as that shop was the classic Dink Stover haberdasher of New Haven.

After thirty years of Brooks Brothers I finally decided enough was enough. The quality of the oxford cloth was deteriorating, everyone and their brother owned the same shirts, and button downs simply aren’t fashionable enough for someone in the digital creative world. I’ve always been accustomed to life spent in coat and tie thanks to my years in boarding school. Forbes was a good place to indulge in bow-ties and suits. But once I arrived at McKinsey at the nadir of the dot.bomb revolution I realized the older partners were lost trying to repurpose closets full of $8,000 Brioni suits into something resembling business casual. The pit of sartorial despair was Lenovo — the computer industry is the worst dressed collection of pleated Dockers, golf-shirt wearing conformists in the world. As one former colleague despaired, the look was pure Greg Norman.

One headhunter last summer gave me shit for showing up in a bowtie and said I needed to go more digitally hip. For example? I asked. Carry an iPad and dress like Bradley Cooper the guy said. I didn’t know who the hell Bradley Cooper was, but I had visions of being a tan-in-a-can douchebag in distressed fashion skinny jeans with a collarless shirt, hipster fedora, and some wasp waisted velvet blazer with a pink lining.

Feh. No thanks.

A couple years ago I sucked it up and went English, specifically Turnbull and Asser, and haven’t looked back since.  I can’t afford custom shirts — hell, Forbes.com in its annual “Living Extremely Well” index pegs a dozen bespoke T&A shirts at $4,380, a mere $365 a shirt. Me, I am content going off the rack, and being an American preppy at heart, can’t bring myself to go to french cuffs and cufflinks, so my cost per shirt is considerably less. Sure, a custom shirt would be a fantastic luxury, but I’m not living at that end of the sartorial closet where I have the right to insist on hand tailored suits from the likes of Huntsman, Thomas Mahon, or Gieves and Hawkes (someday, but not now).

One thing to be said for the Jermyn Street school of shirtings is the British don’t shy away from plumage and do a wild job with color and patterns. So, goodbye boring blue, white and pink Brooks Brothers, and hello to tattersalls, university stripes, spread collars and those nice little gussets that beef up the tails.  The shirts simply feel better and feeling good is the first step towards looking good. And thank heavens for the current office environment in Manhattan, something about working out of a mid-town townhouse behind the Museum of Modern Art demands a little more fashion effort than a Research Triangle office park.

Ned, our 12-year old Skye Terrier, died today. I had to ease his suffering from liver cancer and I knew it was time when he stopped eating and the shine went out of his eyes. With his passing goes a family fixture that has been a part of our lives since the Christmas of 2000, when my daughter and I flew to Nashville to get him after our previous Skye, Harry, had died in the street under a car the month before.

Ned was named “Stormy” when we met him, named because he was born during a thunderstorm. He was eight months old at the time, a problem puppy who was bullied by his brothers and sisters and picked on by his own mother. Where Harry was a canine genius, one of the most intelligent dogs I’ve ever known, Ned was simple, a bit slow, a shy dog that gradually came out of his shell and thrived on the couch and the yard here in Cotuit that was his domain for his entire life.

He liked sharp cheddar cheese, snapped at dangled pieces of spaghetti and earned the nickname “Pasta Shark.” He slept under the stairs in what we called his Harry Potter bed. He rolled in stinky dead things because he liked the way it made him smell. He hated fireworks and thunder and banged on the bedroom door every night for sanctuary at the foot of my bed.

He hated having his butt inspected for dingle berries and would flip out into circles of animated play-rage, a behavior known as “Kawa-Kawa.” He knew few tricks, liked riding in the car with his head out the window, and was a bit of a lazy slug on beachwalks, once falling so far behind that he returned to the boat where he stood, in the shallows, paws on the gunwale, looking hopefully into the hull for some sign of us. He was a dog of many names, including: Count Dookoo, Gabba, Apartment Bear, Seal Pig, Sewer Pipe, Nedly, and others that I can’t remember now.

Ned was my daughter’s dog from the very beginning. She came to Nashville with me, 13-years old, and helped me squeeze him into a dog carrier bag because the airline wouldn’t let dogs travel in the luggage compartment. We let him out in the terminal and he immediately peed on the rug, ears huge like radar dishes, and went into his first of his crazy kawa-kawa circles.  We let him poke his head out of the bag during the flight and fell in love with him then and there.

Skye Terriers are a rare breed, one of the least registered every year with the AKC and in danger of extinction in Britain. They are the oldest of the terriers — the ur terrier if you will — the basis for most modern terrier breeds. They are big hairy dogs — 30 to 40 pounds — with the legs of a dwarf, giving them the appearance of a large eared grey and black dachshund crossed with a sheep dog. They are stubborn but intensely loyal to one owner. One, Greyfriar’s Bobby, was renowned in 19th century Scotland for guarding his master’s grave for 14 years.

Dogs break our hearts and sometimes give us our first childhood exposure to grief. We’re better for having them in our lives, and I note how my life is punctuated by one dog after another.

No one said it sadder than Pablo Neruda in his poem, A Dog Has Died

With the United States Postal Service on the verge of bankruptcy, and the kind folks at the Cotuit Post Office telling me they need my business to stay open, I write this paean to the mail of snails in the hope that one of the last best things in the world — the handwritten note — survives.

I think Guy Kawasaki once wrote that a handwritten note sent in congratulations, condolence or commiseration is infinitely more heartfelt and well received than a ephemeral email, tweet or blog comment. I was never a big thank you note writer as a kid, but for over a decade I’ve tried to do my epistolary best by keeping at least a half-dozen blank note cards and stamped envelopes in my briefcase or bag. My handwriting sucks (so I print), but it only takes a minute or so to jot down a few words that will be remembered for a far longer time.

In the late 1980s, after writing a cover story for Forbes and winning a couple prizes for it, a friend of my late father wrote me a note that said, in effect, if the old gent were alive today he’d be very proud of you and how you’ve turned out.  I don’t think any praise has meant more to me in my life. Would I have the the compassion to put pen to paper and do the same for some other young person beginning their career and finding their first success? I hope I would.

In the mid-90s Henry Kissinger wrote me a sarcastic letter in the mistaken belief I was the editor in chief of Forbes because the magazine had somehow screwed up the facts concerning him, Richard Nixon, and a bottle of wine consumed in China. I hung onto that one too.

I write on notecards I order from Merrimade, an old WASP institution that used to be based in the Merrimack Valley and was owned by one of my neighbors growing up in Andover, Mass.. They sold the company to Crane years ago, but the quality is the same, and where else can you order note cards with your name on it, or the name of your country estate with a little yacht emblem? (I am stealing the idea of naming my future country estate “Morningwood” from my pal Ham Freeman)

I send them to friends when they get promoted or take a new job, when pets or grandparents join the invisible choir, or just to say thanks for helping me out. Takes but a minute, keeps the postman employed, sticks it to the email demons and can yield tweets like this one. My favorite note of all time, courtesy of Christopher Buckley is this unprintable gem.

With my music in the cloud and freed from the tyrannical clutches of iTunes, I next turned to the question of how to make it truly portable, especially how to get it on the boat. I juiced the memory on my HTC EVO smartphone to 32 gb with a miniSD card and find that I’m running either the Amazon Cloud Player when on the household wifi, downloading stuff locally for playback on the phone when I’m in the middle of Nantucket Sound and too far away from the cell towers, or streaming from Last.fm when I’m too lazy to deal with setlists of my own stuff.

When I was a iPod person I had one of those iPod dock things — an expensive Bose thing that required a wall socket. Battery powered portable speakers are generally terrible, but the New York Times recently reviewed a bunch of wireless Bluetooth speakers and I went with David Pogue’s recommendation for the Soundmatters FoxL unit. It’s not cheap — I paid close to $200 on Amazon — but it uses a rechargeable Li-Ion battery and cranks very loud volumes when needed. Oh, and did I say it’s wireless? This means no proprietary slot connector for the iPod/iPhone, just a discoverable Bluetooth connection that I can hit with my Thinkpad, iPad, the wife and kid’s iPhones or my Android EVO. The range is decent, but anything beyond 15 feet gives it some issues.

My favorite application for the unit is to tether it to my iPad while I’m watching Red Sox games when I’m on the road in NYC. I am tired of having ear buds jammed into my ears for hours and love the freedom to prop the iPad up and just watch it like the tiny television it was meant to be.

Three weeks and I am very happy with this portable sound solution. The unit is solid, small, and very easy to set up and use. The sound is excellent. This toy is definitely moving into the category of favorite things. Now to figure out cloud music in the car and life will be complete.

This has transformed my life and ended the lives of hundred of flies. Talk about better mousetraps.

One of the great voices of American poetry and music has passed. Gil Scot Herron. This song, Winter in America, has stuck in my head since first hearing it in the 1970s.

What better way to celebrate the First of May than a day game at that “lyric little bandbox” of  a ballpark, Fenway Park, aka the Shrine?

Surviving Grady put it best:

“It couldn’t have been scripted any better in Hollywood. The aging veteran pitching well in a spot-start. The aging DH coming up with a big hit. The much-maligned reliever…never mind, Jenks still sucked. And for the finale, the struggling free agent with a walk-off RBI single to win it.”

Taking it all in with my son at my side and fresh scorebook in my lap, to quote the cliche: priceless.

Three driving trips to NYC from Cotuit over the past month has taught me the importance of a decent car iPod dock — mine having failed and degenerating into weird behavior — or a decent set of FM radio presets to keep me from going insane on the long stretches through southeastern Massachusetts, southern Rhode Island and the interminable stretch between New London and New Haven. The trip is exactly 250 miles from the village to mid-town and I can do it in four hours, rush hour traffic and late summer road construction permitting.

Phone calls cut the time the fastest, interesting how interacting directly with someone cuts the sense of time. My second preferred form of aural entertainment is podcasts (remember those?), ranging from college courses downloaded from iTunes (I tend towards history and philosophy), cycling podcasts, and geek casts like the Gillmor Gang (if I can find it as it comes and goes). With the iPod dock in bad shape, I have devolved to the radio, and this past trip resolved to take one of the band of presets and once and for all organize a series of station pre-sets to coincide with the 250 miles haul.

One thing stands clear — I am a left-side of the dial guy. Why the crap stations dominate the 100′s is a mystery, but down in the 80s and 90s live the little college stations and NPR affiliates, places where anarchy and eclecticism rule the airwaves and the advertising is nonexistent.

National Public Radio can be a good thing. And I start the trip at 5 am in the dark listening to the BBC World Update — the Economist of the ether — catching up on the suicide bombings and coups in various banana republics as read by the prickly and sometimes sanctimonious Dan Damon. WGBH — one of the oldest public radio stations in the country, has a monster signal that reaches from Boston to the Cape. The joke locally is GBH either stands for Great Blue Hill (the location of the transmitter in Milton) or God Bless Harvard because the studios are so close to Harvard Stadium in Allston. Locally, the NPR affiliate is WCAI at 90.1. I like CAI (Cape And Islands) because its general manager Jay Allison was such an early force on The W.E.L.L. in the 1980s and their local programming, particularly the local food report, is generally excellent. What I cannot abide is John Hockenberry’s The Takeaway due to their pernicious belief that adding high-tech noises to intros and outros makes the news cool.

GBH and CAI could carry me through Providence Rhode Island and beyond, but once I get to Mattapoisset and Marion I switch over to theUniversity of Massachusetts Dartmouth station, WUMD (89.3) because I love student DJs and some of the very bizarre stuff they play in the early morning hours. UMD isn’t the strongest station in the world, and catering to the local Portugese population one can find a lot of Brazilian pop which — language issues primarily — is unlistenable after a song or two. Some of the more progressive programming is interesting though.

New Bedford at sunrise is a poignant place, recalling one November morning in 1978 when I was hitchhiking from the Cape back to New Haven to make classes after a sad weekend with my father. I stood in the breakdown lane across from the crematorium in the Fairhaven Cemetary, flapping my arms in my thin denim jacket, singing “Black Throated Wind” and swigging from a pint of blackberry brandy to keep my spirits up. Years later,  over coffee at Farley’s on Potrero Hill, I told John Perry Barlow, the writer of that song, about that morning, and how a capella I had managed to make BTW my favorite Grateful Dead song, even if it had first appeared on Bob Weir’s Ace album. He was, I think, flattered.

Then I was picked up by some teenagers in a fast TransAm and had to endure some head banging music which destroyed the mood until they were pulled over for speeding in Stonington.

In Fall River, as the car crests the eternally repainted Braga Bridge, I take advantage of Narragansett Bay and the strong signal beaming up from the south from the University of Rhode Island’s station, WRIU, 90.3, where on Thursday morning the DJ played a solid hour of Les Paul’s work, delving into interesting digressions about how Les Paul did not design the famous Gibson guitar bearing his name, but lent his name to it. That was awesome, listening to Les Paul and Fred Waring, and other stalwarts of popular radio from the late 30s, 40s, and 50s, the signal getting stronger as I plowed through Providence and down the long scrubby stretch of West and East Greenwich, Exeter and South Kingstown, site of the infamous massacre of the Narragansetts in 1675 by the combined forces of the colonia militias in what is known as the Great Swamp Fight.

WRIU can be my favorite station on the entire four hour trip, but it dies in New London where a huge void opens up in the dial space as there seems to be no great station there. I need to tune into WCNI, Connecticut College’s 2000 watt transmitter on the next trip, but haven’t dialed into it as of yet.

Coming out of New London, in the space between the Thames and the Connecticut Rivers — near Lyme, famous for the tick and the disease it carries — I tune to WPKN, 89.5, the University of Bridgeport station, which is one of the oldest and most progressive public radio stations on the coast. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to hear Jim Motavelli, on the air as the DJ. He interviewed me in the late 90s when I was at Forbes.com in a book he wrote about the impact of new media on the traditional press: Bamboozled at the Revolution and described my “droll, preppy demeanor.” PKN was in the middle of its fall fundraiser — usually a sure repellent that has me hitting the buttons for the next non-mendicancy station.

By Stamford, with NYC just a few dozen miles away, I switch to the final station of the trip, Fordham University’s WFUV, which is another NPR affiliate that plays a ton of good music. FUV, which is based in the Bronx and has a strong transmitter, stays with me down the FDR and into whatever mid-town garage is going to take me down for $50 in parking.

I’m sure my next car will have XM radio and stay tuned to the Grateful Dead station most of the time — a predictable shame given the delights of college radio.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.