Bird Watching

I seem to remember that you, dad, have as a hobby bird-watching. I've always thought that that was pretty cool, mostly because it's a demonstration of an overall understanding of many of the variables in the animal kingdom happening around you at that given point in time.

Where we live now is maybe devoid of the major exotic species of birds, but in our local immediacy we do have gulls and pigeons and crows and sparrows and, my favorite to watch, brown pelicans.

I've written a few times before about the Modern Dinosaurs of Long Beach, about watching their interactions and hierarchy (crows vs gulls; sparrows vs pigeons; the huge pelicans ruling the sky and roost), and I may have spoken about the sublime pleasure of watching the pelicans dive-bombing the sea for fish.

Diving pelicans is as cool to see as it is as regular to witness. On any given day, there will either be no pelicans at all, or there will be pelicans diving. If there's none, that just means you missed feeding time, or are too early for it. If the pelicans are something you want to see and record with a camera, it'll only take a few trips to get images you'll like.

I was over at the sand the other day, and I had my camera, but I didn't go to snap shots of the pelicans. It just kinda worked out that way.

I saw one diving, and raced to take a picture. After scanning the image in that brief moment where it shows on my Canon's screen, it looked like all I got was a picture of beach. But, upon closer inspection, visible left of center at the top is the splash of the bird:

Next picture I'm putting here was a Rossian happy-accident, as my finger slipped as a pelican was turning in mid-air. If you can close up on the guy or gal you'll be able to see some cool details:

Here's a diving specimen. Notice the ships in the distance beyond the breaker heading to one of the two adjacent ports:

The brown pelican, while the largest of our local aviary critters, is actually the smallest specie of pelican. The Dalmatian pelican, if I remember correctly, is usually considered, along with the trumpeter swan, one of the two largest flying animals alive today, as the record goes back and forth as to average weight (not wingspan, which is the albatross).

I put this post up because I've been busy and haven't been posting anything anywhere, really, and thought that afternoon getaway stroll yielded some cool pictures.

Maybe Take a Look at This, Too...

I found a movie on streaming Netflix that featured David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga, Ty Burrell, Keri Russell, that douchy brother-in-law from "Weeds", Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the star is a young man named Graham Phillips.

The name of the film is Goats, and when I saw the poster on Netflix, I had a feeling I knew a little something about it, but I'll get to that later.

The movie is about Ellis (Phillips), a 15 year old kid living with his mom (Farmiga) on a big spread in Tuscon in the Sonoran Desert, and his being shipped out to a private boarding school in Pennsylvania. His father (Burrell), went to the same school, and at many turns Ellis is reminded how much he looks like his father, and since he's so big for his age, will he be joining the track team just like his dad? We don't meet Burrell's character until somewhere in act 2, when Ellis visits for Thanksgiving and meets his new pregnant step-mom (Russell).

Ellis' mom still refers to his dad as "Fucker Frank", and Ellis was raised to resent him. Ellis refers to his mom as "Wendy", and although his dad had been out of the picture, we see from the very opening of the movie that the Tuscon property's caretaker, a botanist known as Goatman (Duchovny), has been the boy's only father figure for the formative years after Frank left.

While keeping track of the property, Goatman grows copious amounts of pot (he and Ellis have been getting stoned for years by the time Ellis heads off to prep school), and he is an experienced goat trekker. The dynamic of Ellis off at school, Goatman trying to deal with Wendy's mooching asshole of a new boyfriend (the guy from "Weeds"), Ellis feeling abandoned and having to deal with issues probably beyond his ability all give the movie a precarious authenticity. It's also authentic, I feel, in the cavalier attitude to drinking and drugs that rich-kids exhibit.

The movie is written is by Mark Poirier, who also authored the novel that serves as the basis of the film, and I know the author must have knowledge of Jim Corbett. Jim Corbett was a writer, philosopher, naturalist, and was a co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement. During the American funded civil wars in El Slavador and Guatemala the US wasn't granting refugee status to people fleeing the fighting, and Corbett smuggled refugees across the desert from Mexico into Arizona using goat trekking as the method.

Jim Corbett---Wyoming ranch kid, Harvard philosophy master, Quaker convert---describes how to survive in the Sonoran Desert with nothing but goats, and that's the framework for his highly original, highly cerebral, spiritual, political and philosophical book Goatwalking:

This is an important book, and sometimes is hard to get a hold of (took me a while on Amazon, it seems to go through cycles of availability).

The movie Goats, and the book before it, takes part of the Jim Corbett character and makes him a pot growing, struggling father figure, and in the case of the movie, gives the material to David Duchovny, who's underused (but I don't watch "Californication", so what do I know about it...).

The last scene of the movie felt right, felt like it fit with the film's ethos properly, and showed that Goatman was the one person there for Ellis the most often.

Overall it was pretty good and worth the viewing. Also, check out Goatwalking if you're into that kind of thing. (Chris Farley, I'm thinking of you...)

Ol' Pops Says, Check it out.

If you gentlemen have been catching HBO's Game of Thrones, you've been treated to the very cool and memorable work of Peter Dinklage. He plays one of the princes of one of the royal families, but they don't like to acknowledge him. His father is ashamed of him because of his achondroplasia - he suffers from dwarfism. He's amazingly good, though; his acting on the premium series earned him every inch of his Best Supporting Emmy.

Anyway, The Station Agent (2003) came on Starz the other morning, and Cin tuned it in because she saw Dinklage in it. (Your Uncle Tom and I discussed him is passing last June. He very wittily observed that he has a Dickensian name, where the person's name indicates or suggests a feature of his character: Mr. Skimpole of Bleak House, Ebenezer Scrooge, etc.) This is a story about this guy, played by Dinklage, who inherits an abandoned train station in rural New Jersey when his only friend dies.

He wants nothing more than to lead his solitary life, but cannot escape entanglement from pushy neighbors, particularly a young and garrulous snack truck operator played by Bobby Cannavale. They meet a woman trying to sort out her life in the wake of personal strife (Patricia Clarkson). No special effects, unless you count Dinklage's awesomeness - what an expressive face! He's just superb. The script and direction, both by Thomas McCarthy, are just what the doctor ordered. It's just an exceptional, quiet picture, with no cloying tie-up at the end, no smarmy moments. The scenes shot outside had to have been done on location, and they are so beautiful, especially at the lakeside home of the Patricia Clarkson character.

 This movie opened to raves, and won potfuls of awards when it premiered at film festivals all over the place. Check it out and see some really, really excellent acting, and a script to savor.

Ugh...How Bad Will 2013 be for the Yanks?

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Watching that Bernie homer from '96 got me waxing nostalgic for the opening of a dynastic stretch for our team, dad. It came to an end, in one regard, in the first week of November in the aftermath of 9/11, in 2001, when Mo turned out to be (almost) human, and blew game 7's save opportunity. Soriano was homegrown, but whiffing badly, and the team felt different, but that was Paul O'Neil's last run, and Brosius, and Tino...

Perennially in the playoffs (except for 2008), making it back to the top of the heap in 2009 with a fresh crop of big budget free-agents, the Yankees just seemed to be getting older and producing less talent from the inside. Granted, to trade for the big-game players they were forced to plunder their farm system, but that system did produce Robinson Cano, one of the Yankees two current actual superstars (the other is CC Sabathia). Also, though, catcher Jesus Montero (now with Seattle, traded for pitcher Michael Pineda, who should be good if he's recovered from the injury that kept him out of the entire season last year); pitcher Tyler Clippard (closer for the Nationals...eh, he was given up on by the Yanks a few years back); and outfield sensation A-Jax, Austin Jackson (the jewel that Detroit got in the Curtis Granderson trade, a trade that also netted Arizona former Yankee phenom pitcher Ian Kennedy, a guy who couldn't get it done in the Bronx but came in second to Clayton Kershaw in the Cy Young voting in 2011).

(Sigh) I haven't even got to what I wanted to write about. This off-season has been an odd one for me, one where I've sat here and watched the AL East go from the two North-Atlantic teams and their foil in St. Petersburg to one in which everyone but the Yankees improved.

The Red Sox got out from under the Beckett/Gonzales/Crawford mess last season (thanks Dodgers!), still have to rely on John Lackey (that had the stink of a bad Yankees deal on it from the get-go), but did upgrade to Mike Napoli at catcher. If they get back to what they do well, or at least what they did well when Theo was running the show, they'll compete.

There's bound to be some regression with the historic winning percentage in one-run victories for the Orioles, but Manny Machado is maybe 20, and he's a star, and they've got some young arms that can take them places. Maybe the playoffs again, maybe not, but the point is this is an exciting time for Baltimore.

The Rays keep losing star players to free agency, and keep coming back with stars from their farm system. I like to think of them as the Twins of Florida, or, maybe more accurately, the "New Twins", seeing as how they're run on a shoestring and have a knack for drafting and developing players well. Their ten best starting pitchers could start on any team in the majors, and three or four could start this year in the minors.

The Blue Jays! They finally made some shrewd moves and decided to take advantage of a possible BoSox/Yankee transition period and went all-in. How exciting for the cleanest city in North America. In any other division in baseball, the past few Jays teams could have maybe been playoff teams, but with the Yanks/Sox/Rays hogging everything, and the Orioles last year snaking a playoff spot, there have been few happy times in Toronto's baseball world.

And then there're our boys. The spendthrift Bombers of the Bronx? Money conscious? Now I know that the drunken-sailor style of spending is mostly unsuccessful, if you gauge success by World Series victories (welcome to an ugly truth Angels and Dodgers), but when it does work out (ahem, '09 Yankees), it's due mostly to pitching. But this past off-season we had Jeter getting his 38 year old ankle rebuilt and A-RoidRod going under the knife and out until maybe July, maybe August. His hulking body is slowly breaking down, like Canseco and Sosa before him.

No longer in pinstripes this season: Andruw Jones, maybe old and fat but not a bad OF platoon and good for maybe 10-15 homers in 200 PA, which is decent power; Russel Martin, starting catcher; Raul Ibanez, aging outfielder and DH who showed late-career power (hmm?); Nick Swisher, charismatic RF who added a goofy element to their '09 run to the Ring; Eric Chavez, former A's 3B and last year's backup who got plenty of playing time and who still has some ball left in his tank...

Those aren't five players who were lucky to be getting coffee in the show, they played significant time with the Yankees last year. Swish and Russel were starters, as was Chavez for most of the year, and Ibanez got plenty of starts at DH.

Well, they're gone. A-Rod's out until either late July or early August (maybe earlier is his "conditioning" allows it, right?). Curtis Granderson, the slugging starting CF, was hit in the forearm during his first at-bat in Spirng Training and broke something, and he's out until May. Mark Teixeria typically sucks until the end of May or early June, when he finally finds his stroke, but he just came up lame, and will be out until May just like Grandy.

Derek Jeter's back; Big Mo's back; even Brett Gardner is back. Ichiro's still here. And Cano remains an MVP caliber player.

One issue with a team filled with superstars (and their contracts) is that depth is sacrificed--the backups tend to be of less value than great backups because there's too much invested in the star starter playing.

Of course, like always it's about pitching, and CC is still good, and Hiroki isn't washed up yet, and Phil Hughes is serviceable, and Pineda may be healthy yet. Pettitte's not too old, right? These guys may hold the fort until everyone gets well enough to carry the team.

This may well prove to be my most pessimistic off-season. It just seems like it could be a collapse year. Jeter's old and returning from a broken ankle (like ma); A-Rod's body's breaking down, maybe for good, and he's out until after the All-Star break; Grandy's arm is broken; Teixeria's out lame; Swish and Chavez and Ibanez and Martin and Jones are all gone; and I'm supposed to be excited that Brett Gardner's back?

I like Gardner, sure, but while we lived in NY the battle for him was always, "Sure, his speed is great, but can he hit enough to lead off?" So far he's killing the ball this spring, which is great. Maybe I am excited, but he's a .270 hitter with great speed...and Grandy's a .250 hitter who pops 40+ homers...

(Sigh)(#2)

Excuse me for my rambling misgivings on this upcoming baseball season.

One more thing: I'm a fan of the WBC, the World Baseball Classic, but there are two things I would change. The first is the name. The NAME! Holy cow, what a stupid name. At least call it the Baseball World Cup, or something, jeeze. The second is the timing. If they want it to become a thing players want desperately to participate in, if they want it to organically become a quadrennial showcase event, they have to put it in the middle of the playing season, in the middle of the summer. During BWC seasons players would get maybe two weeks off during the All-Star break, except players who participate. Something like that, anyway...