A Very Few Words on This Sporting Life

Vanity Fair

We played golf like Tiger Woods and Brian Williams the other day.  That’s right, the glutes failed to activate and an RPG disabled our cart, baby!  We still managed to finish our usual 20 over par despite buttery buttocks and the Navy SEAL team training in the water hazard on 18.

You gotta shake your head at those SEAL guys.  What cards!  They tried to bring down our approach shot with .45s and ended up clipping the wings of a bald eagle, which we rushed to the vet after finishing the round with our own eagle. Oh, the humanity! The doc saved him, though, and to this day we keep the crippled big bird in a cage on our desk as a reminder of our service to the sporting life of America.

Which reminds us of a nugget from Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope (full disclosure: we are an unabashed devotee and have 34 of his books on our Nook).

More weak and foolish . . . he had been, but not to my knowledge more wicked.  But it is to the vain and foolish that the punishments fall -- and to them they fall so thickly and constantly that the thinker is driven to think that vanity and folly are of all sins those which may be the least forgiven. 

– The Small House at Allington

  

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Lesley Gore: An Appreciation

In 1963, just before the Beatles conquered America, a 16-year-old New Jersey girl in a honey-blonde bouffant told us all to go to hell; her Johnny was gone and we could play her records and keep dancing all night without her.  It was her party, and ours was beginning about the same time. As we said, it was the early’60s and it was going to be a lot of fun.

There was a throaty tartness in Lesley Gore’s voice, and the songs she sang, even the nominally happy ones, seemed laced with the make-believe love of the lonely, as in:

Rain goes, disappears, dear

And I feel so fine

Just to know that you are mine

 

My life is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows

That’s how this refrain goes

So come on, join in, Everybody!

 

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, everything

That’s wonderful is sure to come your way

When you’re in love to stay.

Sure you are, Leslie. 

She sang that tune sashaying down the aisle of a bus in Ski Party, a favorite of ours featuring our favorite teen cutie Deborah Walley.

We saw the late Miss Gore in a free concert sometime in the ‘80s, somewhere in lower Manhattan.  Our dusty memory of those early New York days tells us it was the South Street Seaport, but it could have been elsewhere on the southern edge of that isle of dreams.  All that is gone now, but once in a while it comes to mind like a rainbow.  The rain goes, disappears, dear, and I feel so fine.
 

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The closing of the American mind

This just in.  Parents, kids and teachers are revolting against the Common Core because -- gasp! -- it’s too hard.  You know, we think they may be right.  We feel awful when we don’t understand something.  And we’d rather not know we don’t get it than feel stupid.