My dad's photos Saturday bring consideration of the greatest D.C. snows of my life. Below, welcome to the fam's front and back yards.
February 1983. I obviously recall nothing, but photo albums show brother Rob, three months old, and I propped up in the alley behind our apartment building. If I am remembering the albums correctly.
January 1987. We get back-to-back snowstorms totaling more 21". My dad moves my Playskool playhouse to the front yard, and the family turns it into a snow fort. The pictures in the albums show more, but all I remember is how the snow had awesomely consumed my world. This aftermath the single greatest snow-affected moment of my youth.
January 1996. The single worst snow-affected moment of youth. Amid the blizzard, Gonzaga is one of the few high schools not to cancel the school week outright. The week happens to be finals week. So, every day of the week, the fourth biggest snowstorm in city history, exams threaten to come the next day. Fourth biggest storm, greatest killjoy.
Though Shepard lacked East Coast sophistication—he was poorly read in those days—he brought news of what he called “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America”: its blue highways, its wilderness, its wasteland, its animal kingdom, its haunted lost souls, its violence. “People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth,” a prescient character in one of Shepard’s early one-acts said. Shepard, it turned out, was the answer to those prayers. He got a job busing tables at the Village Gate, and began to write in earnest. “I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said. “There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”
Outside magazine pages, friend Greg surfaced two striking quotes in his status messages last week. From Joseph Campbell, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." From F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
In that vein… maybe in that vein, for me at least… friend Casey posted four mash-ups for his readers' Super Bowl parties. The standout for me was Mighty Mike's Use the Same Old Song, where the Four Tops meet the Kings of Leon. I honestly haven't been able to stop listening to it.
A passage from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul leaps to mind. Marsh writes how The Same Old Song was "the immediate follow-up to the Four Tops' first big hit, I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and the second song sounded the same as the first. Against its critics, he defends The Same Old Song as being what's known and so much more.
… The Same Old Song is a better record. If it's the same sax solo, it's bigger and brighter here; if the melody hardly varies, the bass line is bolder, the drums kick just a hair harder, and there's nothing quite as thrilling on I Can't Help Myself as The Same Old Song's vibes part. It's a probably a toss-up between the two lead vocals…. The lyrics are a big improvement over the cloying "Sugar pie honey bunch / You know that I love you" (even if they do begin "You're sweet as a honey bee."
Or maybe it's just like the song says: "I keep hearing the part that used to touch our heart."
You hear the old song, and the moon and stars end up in the pool every night. But there's a third song, a next night and new voices.
The running family gag from childhood, based on when I ran round the corner at the bottom of hill after church and passed the cutest girls in school piling into an '80s station wagon: Patrick says, "Hey, girls!" and promptly wipes out in the most ridiculous fashion possible. Feet go out from under, topsy turvy, Patrick tumbles across the Murphys' lawn. Did this happen in real life? No, but it was the dream, and it never got less funny. I supposedly got more coordinated after this. Apparently false.
Apparently, my apparent lack of coordination has been lying in wait for years, waiting to team up with left-handedness and my troubles with numbers. So, if you're a cute girl, I'm going to walk fine through the ice and snow, so I can continue to knock glasses through the air, all over you, run into half my exes at once and be the worst cards player ever.
Really? Really? I can't even estimate the odds! And yet, there we are.
Jonathan's reportedly now back in the States for a bit*, but we did get more of his first-person before he left the island. Above, via Vivi, Katz shows the wrecked AP house. Elsewhere, he talked to On the Media.
Related, Katz's dad spoke to DailyFinance, and fellow Daily alum Sam Eifling, who visited Katz last year, wrote about the Haiti reporting in the CJR: "For once, it seems that journalists are bristling on behalf of Haiti, a place usually painted by wariness and fear and resigned pity. Haitians themselves may be getting something like good press, no small development for the most maligned people in the hemisphere."
*If you're not aware of the way things work or you're inclined to hate news media, no, the AP hasn't stopped on Haiti. It's standard to rotate reporters through super-intense, 24/7 news situations, as you would teams of rescue workers, for their care and ability to go long-term.
Update: Was about to publish when I learned friend Sameer had been in Haiti after the quake. Here are two good photos copied from Fb, and the Muslim Media Network has a post about his team's work there.
The Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) said today that it has helped convert the “Bojeux Parc” amusement park in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to a health care facility. The facility is being operated through a partnership between IMANA, Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS) and AIMER Haiti volunteers.
…
“On day one, an air hockey table doubled as a procedure table. Now, with our partners, we are providing services from pediatricians, obstetricians, emergency doctors, and surgeons to at least 100 patients a day. We are hoping to arrange equipment that would allow our surgeons to go from performing simple procedures to running a full mobile operating room,” said Dr. Sameer Gafoor, a volunteer physician in Port-au-Prince. Gafoor is a cardiologist at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blizzard…
Rocket Love, from Stevie Wonder's 1980 Hotter than July album. Sweat! "You took me riding in your rocket, gave me a star, but at a half a mile from heaven, you dropped me back down to this cold, cold world…"
The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff, for warmth and justice. "So as sure as the sun will shine, I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine…"
Lovers in the Cold, Springsteen Born to Run outtake. "Tonight we're lovers on that road, oh-oh-oh, running past the graveyards in the snow, oh-oh-oh, walking in the street with nowhere to go, oh-oh-oh…"
It's been a wild month for the G-spot. Or haven't you been keeping up with your science news? I know what you're saying, "Isn't every month wild for the G-spot?" But this month was different — and scientific. The British disproved the spot. Then the French proved it again. Traditional media had the duty to cover the news. Now, your top three coverages:
3. From the Guardian (the story was big for the British, under the hed, "French hit back after British attack on G-spot touches nerve"):
There are a handful of subjects — among them cricket, the weather and the art of downing pints through a funnel — on which the French deign to allow the English a degree of authority. Sex, however, is not one of them.
Some British women find it dispiriting to be told about the non-existence of the G-spot; but still more are disappointed to hear all these French women bragging about having them while we, instead, have fluoridisation and proper tea. "Weeth zees long 'olidays we 'ave plenty of time for ze looking," they seem to be saying. "We 'ave it, ze G-spot. It ees 'ere!" Yet others are murmuring that it seems a peculiar preoccupation of (mostly male) research scientists to want to find something that many rational people are certain isn't there. South Americans have El Dorado. The French have their G-spot. We have the Loch Ness monster. Each to his (or her) own.
1. From The Washington Post (thank you, Style section, under the hed, "New research snub of G spot leaves many hot and bothered"):
Thirty years and about 200 Amazon.com how-to guides later, the G spot remains an elusive Snuffleupagus of sex studies: utterly real to some women, a baffling, shame-inducing fantasy to others. Every few years, another study comes out saying that it's been found or it hasn't, and either way some portion of the female population is left feeling, somehow, wrong. (Question: Why is every news article about these studies accompanied by a photo of Meg Ryan's fauxgasm scene in "When Harry Met Sally"? Centuries from now, archaeologists will infer that we copulated only fully clothed in delis.)
Speaking of which, this is the year we move the bed. I'm tired of the bed facing east and want to swing it around facing north — toward Anchorage, the city of my destiny. I'm pretty sure I devoured too much Jack London as a kid, and the little guy is now following in my eye steps, falling asleep on my shoulder as I read him "White Fang" each night.
Anchorage is in our future, I just have a feeling. I think we'd like it up there. Posh would go bananas, but that seems inevitable in a life with me. To soften the transition, I'd buy her a snazzy snowmobile and a gold-mining pan. I'd name a typeface after her: Posh Courier Condensed. I'd write her dirty limericks that don't quite rhyme. I'd run her for governor.
