A Book for Dan

Hey Dan, remember this guy?

I know I posted on my other site about dinosaurs a while back and watching shows on dinosaurs on Netflix. On the first show that we saw (that wasn't a BBC production) I saw this old guy. The beard, the dusty looking cowboy hat, the faint New England accent, I totally recognized him. I sat up and told Corrie that both you, Dan, and I used to watch dinosaur shows as kids, and this guy was one of our favorites. Well, one of my favorites anyway, I couldn't really speak for you...

But then I started to look up information on the guy. Named Dr. Robert T. Bakker, he was born in Massachusetts, went to Yale and then Harvard, was a hippie radical, and had some outsane ideas about dinosaur orthodoxy. He even wrote one of the most important books during the revolution in thought process about dinosaurs, The Dinosaur Heresies:

I looked all this information up on my phone during the episode (modern technology, baby!), and, being fueled by some fine gin and tonic, I found the book for sale on eBay for a very modest price, and ordered it.

Bakker was one of both Michael Crighton's and later Steven Spielberg's sources during their respective Jurassic Park projects.

I've almost finished the book, and it's pretty excellent. Check out the cool drawings that Bakker himself does:

The sketches are on nearly half the pages, and they're all very cool. This one in particular shows the differences in the caloric intake needs for active, warm-blooded dinosaurs and the far more ancient, cold-blooded fin-back lizards that were the protomammals.

One thing is odd when reading this book, though. The current view of dinosaurs--their habits, their habitats, their food sources and activity levels--are all a result of this book, or at least reflect the point of view of this book. The heresy of the title was the fact that the book battled an incorrect orthodoxy that had dinosaurs as cold-blooded, lethargic, swamp living dumbasses. Now the view has dinosaurs as active hunters and actively defensive prey, running around the Mesozoic landscape with abandon.

This book makes the case emphatically, so much so that it's hard to fathom a time when the evidence Bakker presents was as ignored as it had been leading up to this revolution of sorts. The book's still easy to get and worth some time.

A Book for Dad

That last post about candy was mostly a silly joke. But this is different.

I know, dad, we trade book suggestions on occasion, and I know I try to diligently look up information on the suggestions you make, and then act on them as I see fit. Gould's Book of Fish? Yeah, that was the best book I read in all of 2012.

But here I have a suggestion I wouldn't have found on my own. Uncle Dan got the following book for me for my just-occurred birthday:

As They See 'Em by Bruce Webber is a briskly paced book with article-like prose about Webber's own trip to attend baseball umpire school; interviewing umpires; and even umpiring some games. You get an extraordinarily close look at the game, at the intricacies of the art of umping, and at one of the last professions--or activities even--where regularly dealing with hate-speech is just part of the daily routine.

I gained a profound new insight into the game and how difficult the art or science of being a major league ump is, not to mention how horrible the life in the minors turns out to be.

Also in my book collection is another book by this same Bruce Webber:

Webber is a sports writer for the New York Times, which explains the journalistic prose of the book. If you'd like to read an intricate look at baseball from a different angle that reads like a Times article, definitely check it out.

The Answer!

I finally discovered a very important thing about myself.

With Reese's Pieces and Sour Patch Kids coming in a very close tie for second place, my very favorite cinema house candy:

I know this is nearly heretical for our family. Food? At the movies?

Dickensian Names and Athletes

Dad, you mentioned in your last post Peter Dinklage, and how cool and "Dickensian" his name was, and it reminded me about an idea I had that I posted about a while ago, likely when I was laid up on the couch with the busted leg.

There were some athletes from different sports that had what I felt were "classic" names, but Dickensian is a better term for these players. I'll list them here, again, so maybe we can add to the list as we go forward with our lives.

I was reminded that I wanted to do this just a second ago upon hearing that the 49ers just traded for Colt McCoy.

Colt McCoy was the QB of the UT Longhorns before being drafted by the Browns, not playing like a pro-bowler, then getting rocked, and now being slated to compete for a backup job behind Kaepernick. But, "Colt McCoy" is about as quintessential a Texan QB name anyone could fabricate, let alone believe was real.

Usain Bolt. If you wanted to make up a name for the fastest man on Earth, who is also Jamaican, could you come up with something better than freaking Usain Bolt?

Hope Solo. How about a foxy goalie, all alone, trying to stop the attacking enemy?

I also kinda like Mark Trumbo, as a thumping old-school baseball player. Maybe?

Outside of sports, besides Dinklage, maybe Wolf Blitzer?