This is going to be about sports. I’ll understand if you’d rather look at stick figures.
Last Friday, a friend of mine asked me to explain how scorekeeping works in baseball. It was one in the morning, and there were four of us left of the twenty or so who had taken over the top floor of the bar earlier that evening. The last few innings of a ballgame were playing out on TV, a Yankees loss at the hands of their inexplicable nemeses, the thrice-renamed California Angels.* He wanted to know how to decipher the letter/number diagrams that are shown when a batter comes to the plate. So I walked him through how the positions are numbered, and how the letters correspond with each type of out. Even after half a dozen beers, I could rattle them off no problem — and even after something like seventeen martinis, he picked it up right away. It’s baseball. The numbers just work.
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In honor of Independence Day, we present an all-American edition of “Own Words.”
“It is wholly fitting that we should celebrate July 4th, 1776. It is the day when the rest of the world’s nations dropped their playthings and said, ‘Uh-oh, Dad’s home.’”
-George S. Patton, 1943
“America is a train. A train that steams mightily along its tracks, picking up passengers from all the cities and towns on its route. There’s room for everyone, and the destination is a better tomorrow. But what is the biggest threat to a train? Indians. I think you can see where I’m going with this.”
-Andrew Jackson, 1835
“The Ancient Greeks invented democracy, but it was the Americans who figured out how to fill it with melted cheese.”
-Julia Child, 1972
“America. America, America. Strange that they named it after Amerigo Vespucci’s first name. A little informal, don’t you find? I should think they would have called it Vespuca. How about that, hm? The United States of Vespuca?”
-Winston Churchill, age 82, on the phone with John F. Kennedy, October 1962
“Yeah, that’s uh … gosh, we’re kind of busy here Winston, can I call you back?”
-John F. Kennedy, October 1962, who was dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis at the time
“People talk about this country as if it’s carved in stone. It’s not, man. It changes. It’s like a beautiful butterfly that transforms into a swan and flies away into the sky! And then the sky transforms into a thousand rainbows, whose colors sound like different notes on a xylophone. Then the rainbows shift, and become every person in this room, only our hands are rakes, and each time we touch someone we can see their bones. I think I need to lie down.”
-Timothy Leary, 1966
“A great day.”
-Abraham Lincoln, July 4, 1863 (entire text of speech, and the only thing he said all week)
“Always Vigilant, From Sea To Shining [REDACTED]”
-Department of Homeland Security, official seal
“Serving in the United States Army has been the greatest honor of my life, and I hope that the nation will continue to stand strong in the face of hey quick can you help me untie this?”
-Colonel Thaddeus McKitrick, 1829, during his retirement ceremony (he had somehow gotten his foot tangled in his horse’s bridle, and the horse had begun to walk away)
“Freedom is free, though they really screw you on the shipping & handling.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt, 1954
For the last two years, I’ve been using a cell phone that I hand-picked from the multitudes strictly for its comic tinyness. Nearly everyone who’s gotten a look at it has remarked on its size, up to and including the girl who sold me its replacement. People ask how I manage to talk with it held up to my ear, or type on the itty-bitty keys. I can fit the entire thing in my mouth.
The aforementioned replacement arrived last Saturday. Without getting into too much detail, I will say that it is a phone that is full of fance and also indexes high on the schmance scale. It is an integrated device, the pinnacle of modern convergence. The instant I got home, the phone demanded I make it pancakes. It also shoots lasers — ptew ptew!
Anyway, the jump from Phone of Tinyness to Phone of Fance & Schmance meant that I couldn’t just port over my SIM card. (In case you’ve never dealt with one, the SIM card is the half-inch piece of plastic under your cell phone’s battery that contains your phone number and broadcasts your thoughts to the NSA.) I had to browse through the old phone and type all of my contact numbers into the new one. While doing so, I noticed three things.
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