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?

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.