Expensive Santa Cruz Mountains search finds stoned teen

(04-30) 05:28 PDT Santa Cruz, CA (AP) --

A mother's frantic 911 plea for help finding her injured teen son lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains led to an expensive search that ended with rescuers locating the youth stoned on drugs.

Eighteen-year-old Matthew Rosenberg had used his cellular telephone Monday night to call his mom and tell her he tripped, broke his leg and was lost.

But Cal Fire Capt. Bill Finch says the Los Gatos High School senior didn't break his leg, adding the teen had apparently swallowed hallucinogenic mushrooms, possibly dropped some acid and just "thought" his leg was broken.

Finch says the teen "was really gorked" when rescuers found him standing at the bottom of a ravine. The cost of the search was estimated at up to $10,000.

The teen's father Mark Rosenberg says the boy will be punished, adding "he probably won't get to use the car for a while."

Roth recall: Mickey Sabbath visits the treatment center

Mickey Sabbath visits the treatment center to see to his wife Roseanna two weeks after he had her committed. Roseanna is an alcoholic of some long standing, but what pushed her latest, most strident episode of the suicidal variety, was the tape recording of 64 year old Mickey phone fucking a 20 year old college student of his, Kathy. The tape wound up in the dean’s office, and then found its way to a local phone bank where anyone calling could listen to the half hour aural grindfest.

Our hero, Mickey Sabbath, finds a radiant Roseanna, healthy and bright two weeks clean. She shows him around the hospital and grounds, has lunch with him in the cafeteria, and then he waits in Roseanna’s room while she gives her first “I’m an alcoholic” speech. In her room he finds her journal, where she has been recording memories of her drunken father. She writes vague notes and then more descriptive notes, and then finally a letter to the long dead (by suicide) father. Sabbath, in his own hand, in the same notebook, composes a note from Roseanna’s father to her, complaining of her truculence and distance, and signs off as “Your father in Hell, Dad.”

Out and about he stumbles across nurses taking nightly blood pressure of the interned, and with an outbound patient he starts to bet on the spread of the results. At one point a 29 year old fox, Madeline, a patient, engages him in a discussion on the merits of the hospital, life, and mental health. Sabbath is asked to leave, and he waits for Madeline. He asks for her help in finding his wife, flirts with her, hits on her, asks her to his car, and she assents provided he secures a quart of vodka.

Vidia Among the Knuckleheads

Naipaul’s Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) takes our narrator to 4 non-Arab Muslim countries (Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia) where the constant idiocy of the citizens and those that govern said citizens leaves him speechless. Here Naipaul begins to let the people he meets do the talking and narration, and it’s a great technique. Naipaul asks few leading questions, and his jabs at the nonsense in between the discourse are few but razor sharp; you can, at points in the book, hear the sound of Naipaul banging his head against his desk.

In Indonesia he meets students and masters of a peasantren, a schooling system where the agriculture-bound poor attend to learn poor agricultural skills. They sit with their Korans and pretend to read. Naipaul wants to punch people, but refrains – his lets the narratives tell of their homegrown stupidity. He finds no one to agree with him that this is all nonsense.

In Iran, post the Khomeini revolution, he watches the first stages of Tehran’s decay. Building cranes sit idle, hotels staff to the hilt to greet the few people passing through. He meets one Imam who has been studying the Koran all his life (30 years) and claims to know half of it. 30 years! One book, and only half comprehension! Naipaul is aghast at the moron before him.

Pakistan is failing to distinguish itself, and the Chinese in Malaysia while small in number have the prime seats in the financial theater. The disaffected are clamoring for change, and yet they adhere to one book they believe can remedy any wrong. Too bad the Koran doesn’t contain any sleight-of-hand tricks. At least Vidia could have been entertained.

FUCK YOU- BEST BAY AREA SPORTING MOMENT SINCE THE MAVERICKS FELL

Vidia Among the Savages

I’ve read two of Naipaul’s India narratives, the first and the last. Separated by 25 years, they both merit criticism and analysis. The first book, An Area of Darkness (1964) showcases the incompetent, shit-strewn India in which, 15 years after independence, the sub-continent wallowed. Naipaul is shocked by the filth, by the men who walk the streets only to curb themselves with a quick raise of the robe and squat. He comes across a handful of women taking a piss; they giggle at him, for in India, the shame is displaced onto the voyeur, not the actors.

Naipaul cannot fathom the chaos. He has read none of this insipid behavior in Indian novels, histories, or modern travel accounts. Indians pretend no one is shitting on the streets; they are deluded about this and much else. Naipaul visits his ancestral homeland and it holds nothing for him. He sees nothing of intelligence or striving in the masses. He retreats to Kashmir to find some comfort in the derelict Liward Inn, where he rents out rooms from the proprietor, Mr Butt, and his second, Aziz. Naipaul has affection for these two, and tells of their stories and interactions; still he can’t help but to want to strangle the boatmen who take him around the Indus. Aziz takes Naipaul on the pilgrimage to Amarnath, where again he encounters amazing incompetence, and a dumb foxy blond American girl.

The girl winds up at the hotel with Naipaul and takes up with a sitar player, a Muslim. They fight and get married. In the end she leaves the hotel to find an Ashram. She looks to Naipaul as another westerner in search enlightenment; he tells her off and she considers him beyond reach. The wretchedness is entertaining; Naipaul becoming Kipling.

25 years later Naipaul returns, this time a well established writer with a better sense of the travel narrative, which he mastered in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). The better of the two books, both from an empathetic and narrative standpoint, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), showcases a country exploiting the best of its talent pool while still minding the manners of the mongrel enlightenment element. Naipaul argues, through his habit of reaching out to Indians within the economic system of the country and letting them narrate, the benefits of post-colonial India; they have law rather than a maharaja dispensing fake rule. They have knowledge seekers in sciences and art rather than mysticism. He finds time to slightly praise the latest form of the Indian cause, the Shiv Sena, a nationalist group that while dim witted in its mission at least strives for a better, noble India.

Naipaul returns to the Liward in this book, and is warmly welcomed once again by Mr Butt and Aziz, who is now a father. They talk of the months Vidia spent with them and the work and lives all have done and led since. The Liward has blossomed into a true hotel; Aziz wants for his son a better life than he has led. Naipaul in the foothills of the Himalayas can finally relax.

Come Sail Away

Looking for a Ship is John McPhee’s account of a voyage aboard the Stella, a cargo ship, as she makes for South America from Charleston, SC. The subject matter isn’t the ship or the cargo (though they have nice cameos) but rather the crew, an American crew of US Merchant Marines, AB’s (able bodied seamen), a dying but supremely talented brotherhood of men.

The engineers below deck push and pull the ship by voice commands, twisting knobs and throwing levers in 150 degree heat. Topside, a crusty Captain watches over the enterprise; he gets lost driving in his FL neighborhood, but under sail he can tell by the ship’s pull when a storm is coming. The first mate on the radar is a descendent of Nathaniel Bowditch, who wrote the book carried on every ship in North America. The rest of the crew contains its share of bums and swells, for every hound bound for duty-free gash at ports in Guayaquil or Valparaiso, there’s a cat like Duke who loaded up a ship full of European Jews post WWII and tried to sneak them past the British blockade into Palestine.

The stories of deaths, wrecks, and havoc are harrowing. The book is full of useful maxims (“you never drift out of trouble; you only drift into trouble”), and describes a condom giveaway program that would make a modern undergraduate blush. There are less than 500 American ships left on the waters. In 1950, US carriers represented 43 percent of the world’s shipping trade. By 1995, the American market share was 4 percent. Ah, progress.

American Pastoral

Rereading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is like revisiting a part of the past that I’ve got no reason to adopt as mine, yet will probably never shake. I didn't like this book after read one, but now it's on the top shelf. The Swede is the Swede in all his glory, right up to old age and hanging out at a ballgame with his son, when he encounters Zuckerman who will, ten years on, lay out the Swede’s downfall, a harrowing account of sadness, missed opportunities, and stone failures brushed over with thick applications of bullshit, politics, money, and vanity.

Let’s start by compiling the wrong Swede does; joins the Marines, gets engaged in the South, eventually marries Miss New Jersey (a Catholic!), moves to the country, lets his wife baptize Meredith (their daughter). These would be what Lou Levov, Swede’s old man, would categorize as his son's faults. Sure, Lou was there to bring him to a local college so that he could learn the glove business, sure it was Lou who broke up the engagement when Swede was at Parris Island, it was Lou who interrogated Dawn, the shiksa beauty queen, and it was Lou who thought to mention to Swede, when he was successfully in charge of the family business and moving to the country, that the country was for Klansmen and a nice place for pogroms. Fathers; it’s telling that Lou gets stabbed with a fork by a drunk WASP at the book’s close.

So we have a familiar Roth theme here, the father-son. We also have the brother-brother Roth, the husband-wife Roth, the Jew-goy Roth, and the married couples-cunt married couples Roth. The new Roth here is the father-daughter Roth. Young Merry Levov blows up a post office and kills a doctor in the idyllic NJ town; it’s 1968, she’s 16, and she can’t win.

Roth devastates with descriptions of Merry’s stutter, her shyness, and her relations with mother, grandparents, and Swede himself. Swede’s fall is incredible, and he’s never able to do more than witness. He’s berated by his outcast brother regarding Merry, and the guilt laid down by his wife and parents is subtle, but not enough to ebb accumulation.

There's a new record store in town, 1234 Go Records, located on 40th St. between Broadway and Telegraph. It's smaller than my wife's shoe closet but what a gem- a punk rock shop run by a nice dude with very low prices. Really- decent prices. Get down there and support the man. Here's yesterday's take-

Pierced Arrows- Straight to the Heart- first two listens and this screams WINNA- like Andrew never got booted

ACDC- Flick of the Switch- never heard this before but it sounded incredible last night on a Newcastle belly dump

Dead Moon- Nervous Sooner Changes- it's Dead Moon, for fuck's sake- great on arrival

ACDC- Let There Be Rock- I was taken back to the Port Lite when I stuck this on after beer 3 yesterday evening, and that's never a good memory. The music sounds outstanding, though...

ACDC- If You Want Blood- two dollars of live power-even Nicole did an aural doubletake and nodded assent

Dead Moon- Dead Ahead- see above, then go buy the whole fucking catalogue

Sonic Chicken 4-s/t- I had this downloaded, but for seven bucks brand spanking new when ITR is selling it for 13, I dropped dime in support of local record union 101. Why the fuck not?

"The Rolling Stones"- Jamming with Edward- 3/5 Stones with Ry Cooder, I thought I might have stumbled upon a gem as this was released in '72 when the lads could do no wrong. Yea, and I thought the Sharks were going to end the series tonight. Sounds like some jackass left the tape running while the boys were frying and decided to boogie down.

Dead Moon- Crack in the System- kicks off with "Poor Born" and then "Cast Will Change," one of the great one-two punches in rock. Only complaint is that it's been licensed by some German fuck and the vinyl quality is bad even by Dead Moon standards. Surface noise cannot, however, ruin one of the best lines penned: "I'm pissed off, pissed off, pissed off, it's just the way I am."

I knew Lucas’s initiation had begun when we hit the sidewalk in front of the Tank, and swiveling towards us were two junk-trunkers swinging it proudly, Jersey flip-do’s flipping and doing, sporting too tight jeans shooting matching love dollops up their hips and sporting matching boob tight t-shirts reading, “We Want a Ride on the Cheechoo Train.”

Welcome to the NHL playoffs, son.

We got there early because I wanted to soak up the atmosphere, to be amongst my people and to allow my eldest to better appreciate the right kind of cathedral. Polish sausages and popcorn and plastic Bud bottles in hand, we followed the streams of teal jerseys and whooped when they whooped, booed a Flame jersey when they booed it, and made our way through the doors to behold .

The Zambonis looked like moving altarboys, and the ice was the belly of Christ. For only the second time in my life I felt the presence of God (the first was alone atop a jetty in Newport, frying on acid and wondering if a midnight swim in the Pacific would defile the sperm of the Lord), and for maybe the fifth time in my adult life I cried (the birth of three children, Game 6 in 2002, Anaheim Stadium) salty tears during the pre-game pump-up, as a giant Shark head was lowered slowly from the rafters and 17,000 fat middle-aged honkies in registered jerseys heiled white pompoms and chanted, “Nabby! Nabby! Nabby!” I had shivers on my goosebumps, as I finally embraced my inner joiner and submitted to the higher force that is collective tealdom. When you enter the Tank, you leave individual identity behind. We are as one engaged in a communal orgy of sharklove, secure in our united power. When the scoreboard flashed several players saying it takes 16 games to win a title (16 games- 16 games) and the sound system exploded with David Lee’s pig squeal on “Unchained,” I had won the battle with myself and come to love Doug Wilson.

Yes, there was a game, and yes there was a victory. The Sharks now lead 3-2 in the best-of-seven series and look to douse the Flames Sunday night in Calgary. More importantly, the boy found his godhead. I can be certain now that his wedding colors will be teal and white, and the bride will be in a lettered too-tight t. I’ll sleep well from here on.

Now you see him...

Christopher Priest’s The Prestige is an epistolary novel concerning two rival magicians who enjoy nothing more than sabotaging the others performance while in full swing. The bulk of the book concerns the diaries of Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, the rivals. Borden is poor born, and uses his cabinet maker skills and strength developed in the lumber yard to make a hard scrabble life on the stem. Angier is born to a peerage and has a trust-fund chip on his shoulder, but his amusement with conjuring leads to dedication and ultimately mastery.

Flanking the journals are two modern set pieces with Borden and Angier descendants. It is fair here to point out that the film version of The Prestige took many liberties with the novel. The addition of the modern doesn’t make much sense or add anything in the first part of the book, but the coda’s payoff is surprising, frightening, and odd.

Having read much of the history of magic and magicians over the past few months, Priest’s take on the late 19^th century circuit is spot on. There’s a sense of depravity he brings through in the journals, as these grown men make a living at deceit. Comparing the book and the film is moot, as they are completely different. Both are great entertainments.

WASP v. Negro

John McPhee’s Levels of the Game is a prose account of the 1968 US Open men’s semifinal tennis match. The opponents are Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe. The match play-by-play is interrupted by a running commentary on the players thoughts on the points, the thoughts of a few key spectators (wives, fathers, coaches) and the history of the 2 men and how they happened to arrive at Forest Hills on this particular day.

Ashe’s story is obviously the more interesting of the two. His father and his coach were damn resolved, yet the game he develops is his own creation. Graebner is a power player with limited flexibility, which Ashe exploits. He of course wins the match, then goes on to win the Open. Then he and Graebner and the rest of the best US amateurs smack the reigning Australians to reclaim the Davis Cup.

The best parts of the book are when Graebner and Ashe break down the other’s game while it is underway. They are both in their mid twenties and have known one another and played against the other for over a decade. They have opposite approaches, habits, and nerves, and as it is 1968, cool wins out.

Sleight Return

Dai Vernon didn’t invent sleight of hand, but for a century he was the best card handler in the world. He knew almost everything about card handling, and he learned from a bible of card hustling, The Expert at the Card Table. The Expert at the Card Table was a grifter’s guide. Vernon mastered the tricks to use as sleight, not to win money. He had it down and became the card guru of the US. Then he heard a rumor of a man in the Midwest who could deal a card from the center of the deck. Dealing the second card was a common grift, as was bottom dealing. Dealing from the center was a new paradigm; it meant that a dealer could give any card to any player he designated at any time.

Karl Johnson’s The Magician and the Cardsharp tells of Vernon’s quest to find the gambler who invented the move. He finds a derelict Mexican in a prison who tells him of a man in Wichita who can do the move. Vernon moves about Kansas City’s underworld trying to locate the sharp, but no luck. He grinds a living cutting silhouettes in departments stores and fairgrounds, making weekend trips along the Mississippi to find the man.

Pleasant Hill, MO was a grifter’s paradise in the depression. A train depot, it served bums and swells in a town that looks like a set from “Miller’s Crossing.” Midnight Underwood was the boss with a predilection for black chicks (hence Midnight), and no one in Jim Crow central raised a peep about his habits; the town was too much fun.

Midnight’s ace was Allen Kennedy, who ran a poker game behind a dentist’s office on First Street. Kennedy invented the center shuffle, and used it and other techniques to ensure a steady profit for himself and Midnight. When Vernon finally locates Kennedy he sits him down and shows him the center move, and it’s beautiful, especially when you don’t even know it is coming.

The Magician and the Cardsharp was a magazine piece, and the addition of more info on MO and KS and the era are nice touches to Vernon’s quest.

Are you watching closely?

What’s a white man to do in turn o’ the 20th century America, when the magician and vaudeville circuits are brimmed up with talent? Change his name, snip on a ponytail, and become Chinese. It’s happening all over again right now in SF’s Richmond District, or so I’m told.

As one learns in Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception, William Robinson was a well known designer of magical apparati. He was a first rate engineer. He was tuned in with Hermann and Kellar and their top flight troupes, designing props and working as an assistant for both. A bit shy and less than eager to pick up the bit, he was no showman. Happening upon a Chinaman’s silent show, Robinson witnessed the magic of one Ching Ling Foo. Foo tore up America with top tricks, and critics and public raved. Robinson’s bright idea took him to England, where he became Chung Ling Soo, garbed up, and had his pint sized wife do the same.

Robinson/Soo was a secret to all but magicians in the know, and he made a killing. He hired on real Chinese to act out other parts of the stage show, and to “translate” for him when nosy white reporters came calling for interviews. Robinson/Soo responded in his best fake coolie, and the ruse held up until the fateful night Robinson/Soo tried the old bullet catch bit, and some punter mixed up the sleight, and poor Robinson/Soo was dead before they got him to a hospital.

Steinmeyer does a yeoman’s job here, but the book is a bit thick and ponderous, and it feels at times like an ironed magazine piece. That magicians kept journals and correspondence is wonderful, but Robinson/Soo, for all his creativity and philandering, while interesting, doesn’t seem to hold the imagination like a Hermann, or like the Great Lafayette, who Steinmeyer unwittingly describes as the world’s first homosexual entertainer (Lafayette’s ashes are interned alongside his taxidermied dog). Hiding the Elephant is the better Steinmeyer, but he’s got a new one out on Charles Fort that should be good, given what I know of that cad.

The Drift...and How to Get it

John McPhee is a talent. He’s been with the New Yorker for 400 years, and has published, at last count, 300 books. He goes in for odd subjects, but attaches himself to an expert idea or person in each field he investigates. I read everything he writes for the NYer (which includes the best thing they’ve published in the past 10 years), and yet I’ve only read 3 complete books. One, on oranges (entitled Oranges) is about said oranges. Another, The Founding Fish, is a narrative of the shad, a tough as nails fish that runs through the Delaware River back east and the Russian River out here. Shad birds are unique and resolute; they make their own darts (lures, flies, to the rest of us) and know that once on, they will fight like hell to land. McPhee is shad brained.

I read Assembling California over the weekend, and it’s frighteningly good. The premise, now gospel but shaky, is that your fair state of CA is comprised of once proud islands that have rammed together to over millions of years to make this weird land. Our state’s costal ranges, Great Central Valley, and Sierras, are the result. Evidence is everywhere. The north edge of the Napa Valley is oceanic; the Oakland hills are one of the most inland points of coastal range, thus perhaps the meeting point of a long ago island. The faults that shake the crap out of here are the still moving parts of the state – San Diego is pushing towards Sacramento. In eight hundred million years, Japan will be affixed to Alaska.

McPhee’s guide is Eldridge Moores of UCD, the drift pioneer. He takes McPhee from the top of the Sierra’s down I-80 and lays out the history of the world in our own back yard. In Davis he can pinpoint areas in the flat tundra where new mountains are birthing. McPhee states at one point the summary of the books is this; the rock at the apex of Mt. Everest is oceanic.

The geology-speak is interrupted by two great narratives; once concerns the gold rush and the other the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. He also lays out the worst spots to be during the upcoming Hayward Fault big one. Barclays, alas, looks safe.

The sun also sets

There is a considerable lack of blackface novels. That I have just read my first does not make me think the canon is long or foreboding. Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves is one of the early full Jeeves and Wooster novels, and it's a riot. The plot element involving the blackface is as absurd of the rest of Wodehouse's robust plot turns (a group of Negro minstrels boards a boat to play some music for a party; Bertie escapes his involuntary capture by, at Jeeves' suggestion, applying boot polish to his face.) Needless to say hijinks and frivolities abound, all to put Bertie in harm's way. Al Jolson would be proud.

Another full length, Jeeves in the Morning, brings the hapless Boko Fittleworth and the dim D'Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright to the fro, and again, more nonsense. Nothing to complicated but enough laughs and some outstanding anti-American jabs go a long way.

Aside from The Code of the Woosters, I'm not entirely sold on Wodehouse in full novel. His short stories, particularly in the the collections The Inimitable Jeeves, Carry on, Jeeves, and Very Good, Jeeves, seem brighter and more digestible. I've just referred to Wodehouse's output as a foodstuff, but not without reason. It's nice to read these in the midst of other serious work.

What the novels do explore is, as Jeeves himself would say, the psychology of these individuals, especially Bertie. He's an amazing, aloof literary character. He doesn't remind me of anyone I've ever known or will know, but he has much to say of the course of man, even saddled with his limited intelligence and a kind heart. A reader can't elevate Wodehouse to genius status, but for pure entertainment there is nothing like him.

Everything he hated was here

Philip Roth’s latest novels, Everyman and Exit Ghost, can be read in two sittings. Only Everyman is worth the time.

Everyman tells the story of a nameless protagonist, thrice a father and thrice divorced, who loses a fight against cancer. He is the younger brother to successful Howie, and was the loving son of two Elizabeth, NJ denizens. The novel is furious in its pace – it starts with the dead protagonists funeral, and then works back over childhood horrors and triumphs, and routes our Everyman through his work life and his relationships. Roth slams home the pain of disease and the love of lust as a break out of the mundane. When our hero, then 50 years old, nails his foxy face down, ass high 19 year old secretary on in his office, we cheer for the man. But when he marries one of the tarts he can’t keep from balling, we see that he’s undone by something not missing from the latter stages of middle age, but from longer term issues. There are passages where Everyman unloads on the sons who do not forgive him for abandoning their mother, and where he rages against his beloved older brother for having the nerve to exist disease free. Roth calls this outstanding read one of his “Other novels” (ie, not related to Roth, Zuckerman, or Kepesh) and this is the first of said distinction since Sabbath’s Theater, his best book.

Exit Ghost starts off promising then dissolves into a few lazy characteristics that marred The Plot Against America. Nathan Zuckerman is ensconced in Western MA, going about his seclusion with the addition of diapers. He’s been incontinent for 10 years as the book opens, and he seeks out surgery/treatment back in NYC, where he hasn’t been for years. He stumbles across an ad in the NYROB and finds a young couple with an apartment for swap. Billy and Jamie are looking to get away to the country for a year, and Zuckerman is looking to ball the daylights out of Jamie, a raven haired honey 40 years his junior. The book is fun and modern, and the counter story, that of Zuck running into Amy Bellette, who he first met years ago at EI Lonoff’s house and thought to re-imagine as Anne Frank still alive. Roth breaks the story with imagined, flirtatious dialogue between himself and Jamie, and it is fun for a bit, but turns to a dramatic drag. I think he meant this as something akin to the best footnote ever written, that transcript in Sabbath’s Theater, but also as a device for redemption, something the soiled man of 71 can’t achieve anymore. The best parts of the book are when Roth gets into the suicide of a friendly neighbor, and the reminiscing of Amy’s horror in flight from the Nazis. The coda has some fine moments too but feels disjointed from the rest of the book.

Requiem for Client 9

I finished Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game for perhaps the fifth time. When I chucked the 1.5 thousand books to the SF library 5 years ago, it was the only William Kennedy book I kept, and I maintain it’s his best.

BPGG is the true first of the Albany Cycle, which introduces the Daugherty and Phelan clans, the most hilarious and saddest of families in modern literature. Martin Daugherty is a local celeb columnist for the Hearst paper, and he’s a gadfly about nighttown Albany, both at once secure with his position and living in the shadow of his famous father, playwright Edward, who is in an old folks home as this book kicks off. He’s also guilty of carrying a torch and later balling his father’s former mistress Melissa, worries of his son gone to the seminary, and he’s always a few beers into the day regardless of mood. He chronicles the plot line of the kidnapping of Charlie Boy McCall, heir to the McCall dynasty, and he’s using his premonition to, among other things, bet the ponies.

His parlay is laid down with Billy Phelan, who can’t cover the bet (Martin’s horses came in) so Billy heads out on the town to hustle pool, cards, and booze to cover the loss. It’s a great dual storyline which finds Billy and Martin converging and departing throughout the 2+ days of the book, and while Martin has his own hangups, Billy is saddled with the reunion with his bum father Francis, who has been on the lam for decades, now returned. He also finds time to ball a Cuban Irish fox, and knows more about the kidnapping of Charlie Boy than he lets on the to McCall clan. The McCall machine aces Billy out of the town’s action for a bit, but he is reclaimed.

Endless booze, action and gabbing make BPGG a top book, and none of the thick sadness of Kennedy’s follow-up, Ironweed. God save Eliot Spitzer and all the dregs of Albany.

This really happend. Go Giants.

One event captured the essence of the Giants' first week. It did not happen on the field, but in the clubhouse. Reliever Keiichi Yabu was doing an arm exercise, pulling a long rubber tube attached to a hook inside his locker, when the tube came loose, snapped back to his face and hit both of his eyes.

It happened Saturday, and Yabu's vision remained blurry with corneal abrasions Sunday. The proof came when Yabu was asked if his vision was better and he told a reporter, "Yes, you look good."

Yabu was not available for Sunday's game, which the Giants lost 7-0. Randy Winn could not start because of his own freak accident Saturday. He bruised his right ankle with his bat on a backswing. Aaron Rowand remained on the pine with sore ribs. X-rays taken Sunday were inconclusive, and he might have to take another set this morning.

Just bought a bunch of Jhumpa. Don't let me down!

Can we try beers this Friday afternoon once again?