Futile Horn

10.08.2003 - 2:40 am (who let the jocks speak)

I’ve been meaning to update this for days, really I have. Not out of some kind of mystic moral obligation (it’s relatively difficult to get me to feel obliged) but there had actually been things I had wanted to write down. However now I’m having trouble remembering what they were, or at least why they were important. The only sound solution I can think of is just to write for a bit and hope to stumble upon what might have been important.

This Sunday is approaching with a sense of impeding doom, as that’s the day my favorite coffee shop closes. Everyone needs a place, and right now it feels like the safe spot in the city I’ve been looking for. I think I spotted another place that might be an acceptable temporary substitute down near the nexus of the universe (as a technical term), but I’d have to sit in the big glass window, which is nothing I really want.

The other day I ran into someone I don’t know from college who I recall seeing playing half the titular role in an all female production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. We didn’t talk at all, but she did pose for a picture for me. If everything happens for a reason, that was probably a bit of glitch in the system.

I’ve been watching baseball. I’ve no desire to follow the sport during the season, but I love the playoffs. I am from the Bronx, but I think I am mostly rooting for the Cubs and against the Red Sox.

There is one announcer who has no idea what the word “equalizer” means. You’d think it would be hard to get wrong, because it actually does mean “that which makes equal”. But maybe he has heard death called an equalizer too often and now thinks it means “destroyer” or at the very least “trump”. For example, he said something like Manager X picked Pitcher A instead of Pitcher B to start game 4 because experience was the equalizer. I chalked it up as a slip of the tongue, but he went on to use the word two more times in stupefying unfamiliarity with the concept of equality.

Why is it that no one in sports seems to know what the word “execute” means? Execute is what is called a transitive verb, which means by the very meaning of the word there must be some recipient of the action. Just like you can’t accuse without having someone to accuse, you can’t execute without something to execute. “They’re not executing,” doesn’t mean anything. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt and pretend there is some implied object to that statement (and often there is absolutely no telling what it might be). “Execute” means carrying out some series of predetermined actions or instructions. So while you may be able to execute a dance move, and if I am a charitable mood you might be able to execute a three point shot (“Step 3: Don’t miss”), you absolutely cannot execute a getting a batter to swing at a bad pitch.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other night. We discussed a bit of classics shop for a while (the fool actually answered the phone “Dic mihi”), and then seemingly out of nowhere he asked, “Aren’t you lonely?” Huh. Now I am, you ass. Zero to malcontent in 6.583 seconds.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn

'Twas in another lifetime || Some day I'll make it mine