On Chris Henry

courtesy of http://www.allproblogger.com

I’m not sure what to say that hasn’t already been said about Chris Henry’s death. I don’t have any contact with the Bengals organization, have access to the locker room, or any real insight about the facts of the matter. Really, I’m armed only with my opinions and the nearly gargantuan amount of available material telling the depressing, sad story from just about every angle that’s possible right now. I’m also working from the assumption that you’ve read all the same shit that I have, and that you’re more or less just as bummed as everyone else about the matter.

The consensus, of course, is that the whole thing is tragic. I defy you to find someone heartless enough to disagree; anytime a 26-year-old guy shuffles off this mortal coil, no matter the circumstances, you’re looking at some unfortunate business. That, as a fact, boils over when that 26-year-old is a well-known person, especially when there’s a good or interesting story attached to it–and Henry’s story is all of the above.

Problem is, that’s just about all that Chris Henry is to me: a story. This is something I should probably feel a little guilt over, but not necessarily because he’s recently dead, I don’t suppose. I guess one of the lessons I’ll take from this ordeal is that while fandom creates, to a certain degree, a measure of knowledge about a person and his or her body of work, they’re never really much more than an object of your (or my, more accurately) affection, for lack of a better term. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Even though well-known people such as Chris aren’t much more than objects or role models or admirees (yeah, I know that’s not a word) of the general public, that doesn’t mean they’re not real people. This is an easy thing to intellectually grasp, I feel, but the reality of Henry as an actual person above and beyond his football career could not possibly have been better elucidated by none other than his Bengal teammates–real people who probably are more aware of this dynamic than I might possibly ever know.

So, when you’re reading all the stories that come out about the events of Chris Henry’s death, or watching the news reports about it or sitting silent during those few seconds before kickoff in San Diego this Sunday, think about the words of the people who knew him best above all else. They’re the people who know Chris as a man and not just a “troubled football player.”

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Roundtable: What’s the Manliest Way to Break Up With Your Lady?

I haven’t had to break up with my lady, because I like boys (for the record, I’m a chick).  Forinspiration, I look to 2 places- Casablanca and Dave Barry.

Ed Schindler

The manliest way to break up with your lady friend?  Be honest.  It takes a man to look into a woman’s eyes and lay out your many differences.  It takes a man to explain why you truly feel like you’re just not good for one another.  It takes a man to tell her everything that’s wrong with her, including how much hotter you find her sister.

It also takes a man to stand firm by your principles.  No, you cannot “be friends.”  No, you cannot help her move to her new apartment.  No, you cannot go shopping with her and stand outside of the dressing room holding her purse like some kind of asshat.

With these tenets in mind, here is a step-by-step break up MANual:  1.)  Surround yourself with chrome, motor oils of varying weights and viscosity, and dirty magazines  2.)  Don something camouflage or with wolves and a full moon on it, or better yet, wolves wearing camouflage howling at a full moon  3.) Be brutally honest with no regard for her feelings 4.)  When she starts to cry, fart loudly  (careful not to try too hard on this step; sharting will undo all of your hard earned manliness)  5.) Congratulations, you’ve just executed the manliest breakup since Henry VIII.  Fuckin’ A!

Mike Hickerson

I’m not the best person to respond to this, because a) I have never broken up in a manly way with anyone, and b) I’m married and don’t plan on breaking up at any point in the near or distant future.  When I was dating, my expertise was breaking up in a variety of cowardly or pathetic ways.  Surprisingly, there’s actually a manly way to do this: leave for an unquestionably manly adventure, and let her figure it out on her own, a la Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” (here covered by Nanci Griffith). You’re still a coward, but the adventure side of things evens it out. As a bonus, you might die before you get back and have to face her wrath.

Jason McGlone

The only thing that comes to mind for me here is to literally walk away.  Let me set the scene: take your lady out to dinner, and when you’re done, just walk faster than her, without looking over your shoulder, until she isn’t around anymore.

Breakup complete.

Manly?  Probably not so much as, you know, being truthful and all that, but that doesn’t un-awesome what I like to call “The Brooklyn Walkoff.”

I’ll Post Some Commentary Tomorrow, But For Now…

Courtesy of www.allproblogger.com

That is all.

The 5 Manliest 20th Century American Poets

“Poetry” and “manly” don’t often go together in contemporary imagination, but maybe that’s about to change, since manly men Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman have just teamed up to make a movie named after a poem.

Here are the rules:

1. American poets only. Otherwise, Homer (the real Homer) would win every time. OK, maybe David. But definitely one of them.
2. Twentieth century poets only. Sorry – Walt Whitman‘s cool, but I’m tired of him coasting on his beard.
3. Twentieth century only poets. If you’re still alive and writing poetry, sorry, you’re not eligible. Wendell, Robert, Billy – get back to us in 90 years.
4. I don’t mean to be chauvinistic or anything, but, if you ever moved to England and affected a British accent, or moved to Italy and started writing pro-Fascist propaganda, you’re not eligible. Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you and you.

With no further ado, the manliest 20_th century American poets. These choices are mine and mine alone. If you disagree, leave a comment. It will be fun to get into an argument about poetry.

5. Wallace Stevens – If there were a Mad Men about poets, Stevens would be the star. Part-time poet, full-time insurance executive, Stevens turned against his family to marry his true love and once got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway. In his poetry, he wrestled with dense, philosophical ideas using ground-breaking imagery and rhythm. Some well-known poems: Sunday Morning, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,

4. William Carlos Williams – Another moonlighting poet, WCW lived a double-life as a New Jersey pediatrician-slash-literary giant. Can you imagine being a kid whose family doctor was a father-figure to Allen Ginsberg? Plus, he shares initials with a defunct wrestling circuit. WCW’s style focused on the concrete and local details from his native Paterson. He famously wrote “no ideas but in things.” Some well-known poems: The Red Wheelbarrow, Queen-Anne’s Lace, The crowd at the ball game.

3. Carl Sandburg – What’s the manliest city in the US? Quite possibly Chicago. And who wrote more good poetry about Chicago than anyone else? Sandburg. Not only that, but Sandburg also wrote the definite biography of Abraham Lincoln and won three — count ‘em! Three! — Pulitzer Prizes. How many Pulitzers have you won? The clincher, however, is that Sandburg’s best-known poem, “Chicago,” begins with the words “Hog Butcher.” If you can start a poem with the word “Hog Butcher” and still have it included in every middle-school textbook in America, that’s pretty manly. Some well-known poems: Chicago, Fog, Prayers of Steel.

2. Langston Hughes – When confronted with racism and injustice, what should you do? If your answer is “write a poem,” that’s usually not very manly, unless you’re writing poems like Langston Hughes wrote poems. A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes expressed pride in being black and intense anger at America’s racist attitudes. He took the “manly poetry” of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, and transformed it for the black experience. Some well-known poems: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, I, Too, Sing America, Theme for English B.

1. Robert Frost – Frost might be America’s most misunderstood poet. Because of sentimental high school English classes, we have this image of Frost as the “Norman Rockwell of literature,” a poet who wrote about small town America, old-fashioned values, and family farms. In reality, Frost’s favorite subjects were despair, death, and the lonely isolation of the individual. It’s sort of like finding out your kindly old grandpa, who always gives you hard candy at Christmas, spent three years in prison for killing a man in a bar fight. Some well-known poems: Mending Wall, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Home Burial, The Death of the Hired Man.

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Day Care + Melatonin = Stupid Stuff, Possible Misnomers, and Angry People

This story is worth following, especially if you’ve got kids small enough to be in day care.  Admittedly, that’s primarily what drew me in in the first place.  If you didn’t want to click, here’s the quick run-down:

• Day care facility has kids that apparently have trouble sleeping (which is to say, “regular kids”).
• Crafty day care worker(s) decide it’s a good idea to give kids melatonin to make them go to sleep more easily.
• People find out and tell the police.
• Investigation ensues.

Try to put this baby to sleep. I dare you.

That’s pretty much where we are now.  Understandably, lots of parents are alarmed, scared, and outraged over the whole thing.  If you don’t have a kid, then you probably aren’t aware that for some kids, it’s fucking insanely difficult to get them to go to sleep reliably.  My daughter is teething currently, and to say it’s a struggle to get her to go down for the night would be something of an understatement.  A more accurate representation would be to say that you’re trying to soothe to sleep an ogre who’s been set on fire and is screaming like you just tried to shove a Buick up its ass.

Try to hum “Brahms Lullaby” to those dulcet tones, and get back to me.

To say that I can sort of identify with the sick a-hole who was giving the kids melatonin would be almost fair.  But that doesn’t make it the right thing to do–the person(s) should definitely be fired (and they were), and maybe spend some time in jail.  Of course, I don’t know any of the legality in relation to this stuff, so maybe nothing at all will happen.

Moving right along, with respect to the melatonin itself–we don’t know that the kids were actually getting melatonin.  It’s a little more complicated than that, probably.  “Melatonin” can come in a variety of forms.  The story says that they’re a “supplement,” but I’m not sure that’s the correct terminology.  Specifically, if you’re talking about proper melatonin, that’s a hormone, probably extracted from some gland somewhere.  There are lots of synthetic melatonins out there, as well.  But to call it a “dietary supplement” or a “drug” doesn’t really tell you all that much about it–just that it’s a sleep aid.

The FDA doesn’t evaluate melatonin hormones or supplements for safety/efficacy/etc.  So nobody’s entirely certain that the kids got a safe dosage, whether the supplements were tainted (heavy metal toxicity and other taintedness is an outside possibility here), or whatever.  Plus, you’re talking about kids being given things that the parents weren’t aware of.

Not fucking cool.

What do you want to bet that we see some kind of questioning of the day care industry in general about this practice?  It wouldn’t be the worst idea, I guess, but I’d also be willing to bet that that’ll be taken to its logical conclusion–which will only make it stupid and end up serving no purpose.

Dubious sleep aid dispensing aside, the lesson to be learned from all of this–if you’re a parent, anyhow–is that you should take your kid to a place that you’re comfortable with.  Talking to people is really important, and if you’re not getting the kind of information you need, either from the folks working at the day care facility or their managers, finding a new day care isn’t the worst idea in the world.

If anyone knows of anyplace that “rates” or “grades” daycare centers, drop it in the comments.

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Hooray to Citigroup and Wells Fargo!

Not pretending to fully (or even half) understand the ins and outs of the bank bailout, I was pleased to see this AP report that the last  two remaining banks toiling under the TARP bailouts, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, just got out with repayments to the US Government.  With all the questions and available information explaining the bank bailout, the reasons for it, and all the mitigating factors that converged to make the whole thing happen in the first place, I still don’t completely understand the finer points of it.

Not that I really want to.

The last two major banks getting out of the program under their own power, though, tells me a little bit and raises one major question.  Here goes.

First, the repayments tell me that maybe this bailout thing wasn’t such a bad idea.  Well, it was a bad idea, but it maybe worked a little better than anyone expected it to.  We didn’t have to completely nationalize our banking system, and hopefully the banking system isn’t too much worse for the wear.  In the end, like pretty much everyone else, I’m hoping that these bank pricks have managed to learn something about how to run a bank safely and profitably.  Keep your fingers crossed.

As for the question: the thing that got our banking system into this situation in the first place was super-risky investments that nobody really expected to come to any kind of profitable fruition.  They needed a government bailout to fix the problem.  Another, perhaps more significant, result was that people trust banks a lot less than they have since maybe the fucking dust bowl period.  So, after all this, what is the level of risk that the major banks are taking now?  Have they gotten all this bad debt off their books?  All of it?

Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?