The Pride Is Back

21
Years since the Boston Celtics last played in the NBA Finals, prior to tonight's 89-81 Game 6 win at Detroit. With the seasons the Patriots and Red Sox have had, Boston fans don't deserve anybody's sympathy, but it is sweet to see the Celtics return to championship form. The cold day in Hell has arrived -- tonight the Red Sox were playing a 13-inning marathon at Baltimore, and I had no idea it was happening, because I was so absorbed in a Celtics game. It was not always this way. In the mid-80s, when I was a regular in the Fenway bleachers, fans' attention would be split between the baseball game in front of us, and the Jumbotron (it was a black-and-white version, and I think it was actually called a SpectraVision) behind us, where they'd give occasional updates on Celtics playoff scores.

I never much cared for "Yankees suck!" chants, but here's one that I've missed saying in the past two decades:

BEAT L.A!!!!! BEAT L.A!!!!! BEAT L.A. !!!!! BEAT L.A!!!!! BEAT L.A!!!!! BEAT L.A. !!!!!

Toxic Triumphs

5
Great Aerosmith Albums
In light of the recent news about Steven Tyler, 60, it's time to pay tribute to Aerosmith's moments of greatness. A notable exclusion is "Toys in the Attic" (1975). This one has what are arguably Aersomith's two best songs, "Sweet Emotion" and "Walk This Way." But classic rock stations have wrung all the life out of these two songs -- at least for me. What's left are some good "deep-cut" tunes. "Uncle Salty," "Toys in the Attic" and "No More No More" are both rocking and beautiful.
So anyhow, here are 5 great non-"Toys in the Attic" Aerosmith albums:

• Rocks (1976) -- This is their best-arranged '70s album. "Back in the Saddle" and "Last Child" are the hits; "Rats in the Cellar" is the underappreciated deep cut. "Home Tonight" is one of the better metal-band power-ballads, coming from a time before the power-ballad became such a cynical, perfunctory requisite on every metal-band's album.
• Pump (1989) -- Album-wise, "Pump" is probably Aerosmith's signature work. The songs flow, especially with the micro-songs and sound collages that segue many of the tracks. It kicks less arse than the band's best '70s albums -- the price paid for high production and keyboards, which almost always blunt metal.
• Get Your Wings (1974) -- I dug this one out of my CD graveyard a half-year ago; I'd forgotten what a strong overall album it is. The sound is crude (in a different way from how the lyrics are crude), but it still works nicely in sequence as a whole album. There are no throwaway tracks -- I actually think the lone hit, "Same Old Song and Dance," may be the weakest song on the album. "Seasons of Wither," a transcendently sad and beautiful ballad, has gotten some love as the years have gone on; so has "Train Kept A-Rollin'" (though it's neither sad nor beautiful).
  
• Aerosmith (1973) -- Their very underrated debut album. "Dream On" is on this album, so is "Mama Kin." All eight tracks are good, though -- they're raw, and on everything besides "Dream On" they just sound like a great, blues-tilted bar band. "Movin' Out" may be the most underrated song in Aerosmith's quarter-century of existence.
  
• Permanent Vacation (1987) -- This album sounds like a triumph. Like "Pump," it's blunted by heavy production. There's nothing metal about "Dude Looks Like a Lady" or "Angel." But "Rag Doll" is a great pop tune, and the album is bookended by great tracks -- "Heart's Done Time" leads off, and the instrumental "The Movie" brings it to a heavy, ominous conclusion.
  

Memorial Day

1918
Year Cpl. Delmar Warner was killed in "The Great War." His is a grave my wife and I saw at a cemetery in Lynnfield, Mass. this morning. My gratitude and thanks to him and to the many others who paid the ultimate price in fighting for our country, from the Revolution through Iraq.

"Every great cause ..."

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
-- Pat Buchanan (paraphrasing Eric Hoffer)

From The Fall of Conservatism in the New Yorker, 5/26/08.

5 Reasons, Four Ponds

5
Reasons why Four Ponds Conservation Area is one of my favorite places in Bourne.

• Biking - Recently I resumed biking after a hiatus of nearly two years. (My Silver Spring, Md. neighborhood was not very bike-friendly, to put it mildly.) At Four Ponds, there are four trails; biking is permitted on the two longest ones. They're absolutely awesome. There's enough topography to make it a challenge.
  
• Hiking - Two hiker-only trails wind around The Basin and Freeman Pond. This is the most scenic hiking in the conservation area.
  
• History - The Pocasset Iron Foundry was once located here. No buildings still stand, but each of the Four Ponds are man-made. At the lower end of each pond are the remnants of dams that are nearly two centuries old.
  
• Wildlife - I see a pair of mute swans almost every time I go by Upper Pond. With pond, forest and bog terrain, there are about 40 types of birds that nest in the area.
  
• Solitude - About every third time I go to Four Ponds, I run into somebody else. They're often walking a dog, and they're almost always in the relatively small stretch of trails around the ponds. Elsewhere, I never see anybody. For the vast majority of the bike-permitted trails, I'm the only one out there. I know I'm no Alexander Supertramp -- you can hear Route 28 traffic in the distance here sometimes -- but in some of these back areas, I've gotten lost several times in the last two weeks. It's actually a pretty cool feeling, but only because I found my way back before sunset.
  

There Won't Be Romance

5
Reasons not watch "There Will Be Blood" on a date

SPOILER ALERT: Reading the following may spoil it for those who haven't seen There Will Be Blood, but I'm operating under the assumption that I'm pretty much the last person to see this movie, at least among those who have any intention of doing so.

• The early scenes inside the prospective oil wells. I have a new addition to my Jobs I Never Want to Have list, especially if the job calls for time travel back to 1898. Wow. These scenes invoke all five senses -- you can smell and taste the fumes the workers gulp in, and feel it when they get blasted in the face with bubblin' crude. Add in the lack of any dialogue early on, and this is sort of a director's unspoken statement of confidence in the movie: it's good, and Paul Thomas Anderson knows it.
  
• "You're an orphan from a basket in the middle of the desert. And I took you for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to buy land. Did you get that? Now you know." Whether this statement is literally true or not, I don't know. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. But through most of the movie, even those Daniel Plainview is loathsome to the core, you're still often pulling for him, because so many other people around him are every bit as bad, or worse. When Plainview says the above, though, it's officially impossible to pull for him any more.
  
• "There are times when I look at people and see nothing worth liking." -- A far cry from, say, "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen."
  
• Music Association -- Your next Brahms violin concerto won't seem very romantic if it reminds you of Plainview's bowling lanes.
  
• Be a frontrunner instead. If an utterly dark movie is your idea of a good date, go see the one that won the Oscar -- "No Country for Old Men." I've seen both, and at the moment I don't know which I like more. I need a few more days to digest TWBB.
  

Where??? And When????

7
Bands -- ABC, Rick Astley, Bananarma, Curiosity Killed the Cat, The Cutting Crew, Johnny Hates Jazz, and Paul Young -- co-headlining the Here and Now Tour 2008 when it stopped at Wembley Arena last night.

90,000
Capacity of Wembley Stadium. For one terrifying moment, after hearing about the Here and Now Tour lineup from my friend Adam, I confused Wembley Arena with Wembley Stadium.

12,500
Capacity of Wembley Arena. I feel a little bit better now -- just a little bit.

Where the 80s Live Forever

80s
Because I'm in the '80s zone now ...

24
Years between the release of Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance" (1982), and the release of their "Live Hats" DVD (2006). If you feel like you missed out on the chance to experience the exuberance, the raw power, and the punctuality of a live Men Without Hats show, well, the time has come to bury those regrets. Here's Safety Dance live. This video is perfectly safe for work, but make sure no small children are in the room -- they might be terrified to see Ivan interpreting his own "Everybody look at your hands" lyrics to mean "Everybody smack yourself in the face."

20
Years between A Flock of Seagulls' I Ran (So Far Away) (1982) and the release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, with commercials featuring "I Ran." Another wussy 80s song? Nawwwww.

7-0, 275
Height (in feet) and weight (in pounds) of former NBA player Bryant "Big Country" Reeves.

19
Years between the release of Big Country's In A Big Country (1983) and the retirement of Bryant "Big Country" Reeves, then on the Memphis Grizzlies, in 2002.

Wuss You or Wouldn't You?

5
Wussy 80s songs that I like despite their wussiness -- I listen to XM's 80s station fairly often, even though it was overall a wretched decade for mainstream pop music.
Here are 5 80s songs that are synth-drenched and wussy, yet I like them just the same. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list -- there's at least a few other wussy 80s songs I like. Nor does it include such borderline candidates as Devo's Whip It or Gary Numan's Cars. These two songs are synth-based and arguably wussy. Still, I consider them quality tunes; not just for 80s nostalgia kitsch reasons. They were self-consciously mechanized-sounding, progenitors of techno, industrial, trance, and any number of club genres that I'm clueless about.
But hey, enougha my yakkin'. Guitarists, bassists and drummers of the world, you are all expendable for the moment. Fire up the synth, and let's boogie:

• Safety Dance, Men Without Hats - This one falls just on the wrong side of the borderline. You can definitely groove to this song, but have you ever heard "Pop Goes the World" ? That wussified every other song Men Without Hats ever performed. (Did they perform anything else?) I think of this video every time I frolic about a Maypole at a renaissance festival, which, now that I think about it, I've never done.
  
• Dance Hall Days, Wang Chung - Dig the "Wizard of Oz" effect in this video; B&W streetscape, vibrant colors as the dancers get their groove on. And if you really want to Wang Chung tonight, check out this 21st-century-sounding (ok, 90s-sounding) Dance Hall Days remix.
  
• Things Can Only Get Better, Howard Jones - HoJo was almost my first rock concert. He was coming to the Worcester (appropriately, pronounced "WUSS-tah") Centrum circa 1986, and one of my friends asked if I'd go. Our parents discussed it, reached a tentative approval. Somehow negotiations fell through, and it was not until late 1987 that I debuted on the rock-concert scene when I saw The Cars (not wussy, dammit!) at the Old Boston Garden.
  
• Love Plus One, Haircut 100 - The most embarrassing inclusion on this list. What can I say? I'm in touch with my inner wuss.
  
• Blue Monday, New Order - Upon re-listen, this song's coolness conquers its ample wussiness (some Depeche Mode songs are in the same ballpark). I ain't really ashamed of this one. And the video is mind-blowing. "How does it feel? Tell me, how does it feel?"
  

Postage Pattern

42
Price (in U.S. cents) of a first-class postage stamp, effective today.

$.41
Price of a "Forever Stamp" up through this past week. Forever Stamps will always be accepted for first-class letters, no matter how high stamps may go in the future. They're a good short-term investment, but given that the price of a stamp has remained pretty steady in inflation-adjusted terms for the last 30 years, I have no plans to buy a lifetime supply.

368
Days that the price of a first-class stamp held at 41 cents -- they went from $.39 to $.41 on May 14, 2007.

$.20
Price of a stamp in the early '80s, when I first started writing letters. So the price has more than doubled in my lifetime -- file it under Things That Make You Feel Old.

Road Forever Crawlin'

66-16
Boston Celtics' regular-season record this year, the best in the NBA.

31-10
Boston Celtics' regular-season road record this year.

0-4
Boston Celtics' postseason road record so far this year.

6-0
Boston Celtics' postseason home record so far this year.

32-13
Cleveland's lead over the Celtics at the end of the first quarter in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals last night. The Cavs went on to win it 108-84. It was the first game in Cleveland after Boston swept the first two at home. It is not an encouraging sign that the Celts have been unable to win an away game since the playoffs started, and it goes without saying that they're lucky to have home-court advantage.

Stasi Stats

100,000
Collaborators were part of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police force, in 1984, according to the introduction to The Lives of Others. The movie won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

200,000
East Germans were informants for the Stasi by 1984, when "The Lives of Others" takes place.

2
Gold medals won by East German figure skater Katarina Witt, the first in Sarajevo in 1984, the second in Calgary in 1988.

41
Years East Germany (GDR) existed, from 1949 to 1990.

3
Years after the Stasi was dissolved in 1989, the newly declassified Stasi files were published. After German reunification in "The Lives of Others," playwright Georg Dreyman goes to view the files that were kept on him nearly a decade earlier. He is stunned when a woman presents him with a giant cartload of files, and says, "I ordered them chronologically. Old ones at the top."

10
My 10-scale rating for "The Lives of Others." This is an incredible movie. Knowing that the Berlin Wall will come down 5 years later makes it all the more amazing to see how the Stasi haunts the characters -- both the artists they're spying on, as well as the Stasi's own agents. Another great line: After Stasi agents conduct a furniture-slashing raid of Georg Dreyman's house looking for subversive writing, an agent tells Dreyman, “In the unlikely event that damage has occurred, you may claim compensation.”
The final line of the movie is incredible, but there's no need for a spoiler here. See this movie.

Flood of Fiddlers

65
There are at least 65 different species of fiddler crabs; several sources say there are more than 100.

12-18
Average lifespan of a fiddler crab in months.

On the outer shore of Falmouth Harbor, I saw hundreds of fiddler crabs near the high-tide mark. I'm guessing these were Atlantic Marsh Fiddler Crabs, but please don't quote me on that. The sand was dotted with burrows, and as I walked along, stampedes of crabs scurried to the safety of their burrows. A friend describes it as looking and sounding like a parting of the tides -- it sounds like a rush of water.

When Is a Comedy a Terror?

2.75
Good romantic comedies the Farrelly brothers directed/produced. "Dumb and Dumber" was solid, and "There's Something About Mary" was in the pantheon of '90s comedies. "Outside Providence" was decent, but the romantic plot arrived late in the movie, so they get half a good movie for that. "Me, Myself and Irene" is worth a quarter of a good movie. By "Shallow Hal," the Farrelly brothers had officially lost their fastball. And we're not even going to talk about "Fever Pitch."

4
Good romantic comedies produced by Judd Apatow -- he's done "40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Superbad" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." (Yes, I know it's a massive stretch to call "Superbad" a romantic comedy.) I recoil in terror whenever I'm informed that a movie I'm about to watch is a romantic comedy -- add the adjective "lighthearted" in there and I'm going to run screaming out the door. But Apatow brings some genuine laughs and really good side-characters to a genre that's been offensively bad and cliche-ridden through the 21st century.

7
My 10-scale rating for "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." I'd read some lukewarm reviews, and it was better than I expected. Pros: It's funny all the way through; no real lulls in the laughs. The "Freaks and Geeks" strain of humor stays alive in "Sarah Marshall," as it does for most of Apatow's recent movies. Cons: The ending is pretty predictable, but at least I cared how it ended.

'What is Missing in Society is What was Missing in Me'

40
Lee Atwater's age when he died from a brain tumor in 1991. Atwater, a Republican political consultant, was the mastermind behind George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign ads -- or more properly, the Willie Horton and Tank ads attacking Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.

2.25
Years after the 1988 campaign ended, Atwater apologized in a "Life" magazine article for what he had done to Dukakis and other Democratic "enemies." Much of Atwater's article is quoted by Dorothy Wickenden in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town this week.

"Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. ... It was a sense among the people of the country -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- that something was missing from their lives, something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn't exactly sure what 'it' was. My illness helped me to see what is missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of grandiosity. ... I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul."