How Was "Overbearing Parent" Depicted in Cuneiform?

The Times had a front-page story Saturday that is always good for a guffaw: impossibly controlling parents who want to know everything about what their kids are doing -- and give them pointers on how best to do it! -- even when they're X hundred miles away at summer camp. And now they're aided by 21st-century communication tools! The Globe had the same one a few weeks ago; same placement on A1, in fact.

Now, these stories are fairly entertaining; always good for eye-rolls and astonished laughs; a nice glimpse into the good-intentioned but wayward parenting skills of the wealthy("Why choose which cell phone to take to camp? Take both! Who cares if they're prohibited?"); and help define class lines and resentment. And, yes, it's now a lot easier for these parents to exasperatingly intervene, thanks to e-mail, etc.

But these two factors do not make a trend. Reporters, too often when writing a trend story (and I've been culpable of this before) have an inkling of something happening, find a few examples and quickly have 25 inches of copy. Or, as in the case of these stories, they fail to realize the concept of overbearing parents is nothing new, cell phones or none.

Fussy, high-maintenance parents will be fussy and high-maintenance no matter the technology at their fingertips. While I'm sure I was oblivious to it during my five years at sleepaway camp, there is no doubt it happened at a nearly equal level as today. (Who knew how much my parents were the source? They certainly have it in them, and my overly long, detailed letters probably didn't help [while everyone else wrote three sentences just to be admitted to dinner, I'd write three pages], but in retrospect, they might not have been as domineering as I used to think they are. Whatever, let's stop the pscyhoanalysis.)

I'm sure when Socrates and his kids hopped off the boat in Crete in July to start camp and he started using his patented method on the counselors to see how they'd get his kids to shower at least every third day, the counselors would be none too excited. OK, bad example; Socrates didn't have kids, and who knows how often people showered in Ancient Greece. How about Ramses! I doubt any counselor wanted to see his kids mosey into their bunk. First unhappy tablet home and the counselors' limbs would be torn apart!

Update: Writing about this made me incredibly nostalgic for my sleepaway camp.

Of Course Manny Is Being Manny -- That's Who He Is

With the MLB All-Star Game followed by a six-game West Coast road trip for the Sawx, meaning no one stayed up to watch the games and only the Globe's last edition went to print early enough to have game stories, what else was the Boston sports world supposed to do this week but endlessly agonize about left fielder Manny Ramirez?

Manny (who actually refers to him colloquially as "Ramirez"?) is probably the greatest conundrum in current professional sports. He's a PG-13 version of Dennis Rodman, the former NBA star famous for his rebounding and infamous for his multicolored hair, tattoos, cross-dressing and sex life. Manny doesn't do any of these risque things; he's just impossibly perplexing, or, as Ben McGrath wrote in the New Yorker last year, in one of the most entertaining pieces ever, "attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark." (Seriously, reading that story is one of the best things you'll ever do.)

How can someone excel so breathlessly at one skill (and hitting a baseball is quite, quite hard) and be so aloof about everything else? How can one care so much about one thing (Manny's reported devotion to the batting cage and the craft of hitting is almost matchless) and be so irresponsible about the rest? How can one be so kind to teammates and indifferent to everyone else in his profession? How can someone be paid $20 million per year and be so uninterested in being the adult that such wealth is supposed to require? How can one shrug off the rest of the world?

Yes, Manny's had a deplorable summer: intermittent slumps at the plate, the indefensible pushing (assault?) of the team's 64-year-old traveling secretary, and now, a knee injury. And he doesn't deserve $20 million next year, considering he's on the downside of his career -- the controversy that sparked a week's worth of inane pontificating. But the barbs thrown his way on WEEI have been absurd, heading too far toward dismissing his career. "Dennis & Callahan," always the nadir of sports journalism, even went after him for his dreads, which don't appear to have been trimmed (controlled? washed?) in at least three years. Who cares about his hair? As an interesting side note, ESPN's tease for Sunday's game against the Yankees, featured a picture of Manny circa 2004, when he had a tightly wound 'fro. Can America not except someone with darker skin and long, knotty, ugly hair? (Though, to be fair, "Dennis & Callahan" also went after Sawx pitcher Clay Buchholz, who's white, for wearing too many necklaces? Huh? Homophobia?)

Really, Manny is the second-best hitter of my generation. Look at the numbers from 1995-2006 -- just awesome. The OPS is more than .900 each year! (I'll give A-Rod the gold medal, based on what his careers stats will be when he retires, but, boy, are Rodriguez's accomplishments deathly boring. If Manny weren't guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame, he would receive an honorary induction for, earlier this year, continuing to run to the fence after making a catch, leaping, high-fiving a fan in the front row [!] and then doubling the runner off first base. [!!] That will never be repeated.) I even think he's a decent left fielder in Fenway, where he knows how to play the wall -- and one hopes he would after eight years there -- and has a routinely accurate throw for something that looks more like a whimsical fling. And faced with the proposal of taking someone with his extraordinary hitting skills, or at least hitting skills circa 2005, or sub-ordinary fielding ones, I'd take the hitting ones any day.

Why do we nag our sports celebrities so, most especially here in Boston? What do we want from them? They play a game! When you have one extremely superb talent, shouldn't that be enough? Or is it exactly because of that that we want more?

Update: Manny went 3-for-5, with 2 RBI and 2 runs scored, last night, just a few hours after telling the press Sawx ownership is welcome to trade him if they think the team is better without him, and that he's tired of them and they're tired of him. And one of his two outs was a mammoth 419-foot fly ball to center! He's the most irresponsible professional -- needlessly and distractingly ragging management -- and also the most consummate one -- not letting any of the surrounding hubbub distracting him from doing a great job. Unsurprisingly, CHB was not amused and issued his second-straight column (umpteenth this summer?) urging the Sawx to dump Manny. They can trade him if they like, but there's no way the Sawx make the World Series, maybe even the playoffs, even they do. Manny just went indie.

Dude, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" is Legitimately Scary

So two weekends ago I was watching "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" with my girlfriend, who's made too many appearances on this blog recently, because she hasn't yet seen any of the trilogy (now quadrilogy?) and, after weeks waiting for one to be available at my library, this was the first.

The opening scene in the Shanghai nightclub is great fun, but after that, the movie is terrifying. Seriously. Enslaved child labor, exorcisms, famine -- even the scene of the feast, where Kate Capshaw and "Short Round" are served snakes, monkey brain soup, etc, which is meant to be played for laughs, is gross. (Trait I share with Indiana Jones: Snakes make me weak in the knees, not in a good way.) How did this movie ever receive a PG-13 rating?

We shut it off midway through because it was too scary. In fact, we were searching for a mildly upbeat scene, even a neutral one on which to end, and after 20 minutes of waiting, it hadn't arrived. Now, I've never been courageous or stiff-willed, but, wow, that movie gives me the creeps, which is a shame because the other two are such good fun, with a wonderfully stylized approach to adventure. The absence of digital trickery makes them refreshing to watch. Here's a really scary part from "Temple of Doom" just to wreck your day:



Listening to Migala's "Arde" as the rain falls outside is much more soothing.

An Ode to Garlic Scapes

The best part about the summer is the fresh produce. I take such pleasure from going to a new farmstand and buying some vegetables there, or washing a bunch of blueberries, putting them in a bowl and eating a big handful. It's so refreshing. (OK, OK, here is where you mock me for living the "Stuff White People Like" stereotype -- locavore, organically grown, etc -- but this actually comes from my dad, who took me to farmstands starting in elementary school; he still does. I have shopping-for-produce cred!)

Anyway, my favorite discovery this summer is the garlic scape, which one stand at the farmers' market near my job convinced me to try. Technically, it's the green shoot removed from the top of garlic bulbs, and tastes like a scallion-garlic hybrid, with a slight reminder of string bean. There's a crunch and then a strong zing of flavor (and then, my girlfriend would say, my breath becomes stinky; I continue to eat them). I put them in salads and also eat them plain (though generally advise against the latter unless you have audacious taste buds), and actually enjoyed eating a scape and then eating a strawberry -- they both made my tongue tingle. (My girlfriend, [making her second appearance in one post!] said the combination sounds like something Richard Blais from Top Chef's Season 4 would try, so, Richard, if you're reading, I grant you permission to see how it works. Just get back to me.) A woman in line at the farmstand Friday suggested putting a few into mashed potatoes, which I'm going to try this week. The excitement that is my life!

And on "Stuff White People Like," this post sent me there for the first time in a few months. Its entries are still very funny -- Girls With Bangs," "Statistics" and "Menus with No Decimal Places" all cracked me up -- but, as further proof of the downside of the Internet's light-speed hype cycles, do you hear anything about it anymore, six months after it was a huge phenomenon? When its author signed a book deal, it sparked lots of coverage, but apparently the book was already released? Talk about going in with a bang and leaving with a whimper.

Grey Lady, Grey Hair: Two Things I Learned From the Times This Week

1. Maybe the Sunday Business section should go to print a little later than Thursday: In an otherwise comprehensive, informative and excellent article on how gas prices reached the price where they are today, Nelson D. Schwartz had a very embarrassing sentence. When chronicling several senators' opposition in the early '90s to increasing fuel-efficiency standards, Schwartz writes one of the main opponents, Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, did not return calls seeking comment. Um, Helms died Friday. Now, obviously, Schwartz wrote this at least several days before Helms' death, but you would think in the calls he was placing, he would find one of Helms' aides (I imagine former senators still have personal/professional assistants on hand), who would've warned him Helms was about to die. Even with the correction in that day's paper, Oof.

2. Rush Limbaugh is deaf: Huh? It's true, mentioned in an entertaining profile of the radio talk show host in the Times magazine. He uses cochlear implants to hear, but, nonetheless, very surprising, considering the number-one requirement to being a talk show host is loving the sound of your voice. (Note to self: Look up "cochlear" in case it shows up on the GRE.) This story, by Zev Chafets, was very interesting because it sought to legitimize him as a learned, shrewd and influential kingpin of an otherwise hyperbolic and crude profession -- all in the face of what I'm sure was a skeptical readership. Among the many, many categories of stories there's the "More to X than you think is going on," and Chafets' piece is a premier example of it. I wonder if Limbaugh liked the story. I would hope he did because it's congratulatory and nuanced, i.e. "Even the Times, that liberal rag, recognizes my genius," but probably to keep up appearances, he tore it to shreds.

I Know Where the Summer Goes

There's something beautiful about how Wimbledon's grass goes from a well-manicured green to patchy, rough brown over the tournament's fortnight. That, with the fading sunlight of the early-evening matches, say "shimmering summer" like perhaps nothing else.

The U.S. Open, the hometown tournament, where genteel tennis gets dragged through the New York muck, will always be my favorite, but Wimbledon has a wonderful, precious aesthetic with its Victorian air, required all-white uniforms, and formal "Ms." and "Mr." before each player's name on the scoreboard. And then there was yesterday's men's final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

I don't think I've ever seen two people so committed to what they were doing, so unwilling to lose, so strong to will themselves to keep playing, to keep competing, to keep overcoming. It takes a personality, motivation and mindset that few in the world have. It's what makes them the best two men's tennis players in the world. The shot-making, which continued through the fifth set at such an unparalleled level, was breathtaking. Here's the final point and celebration. I wish I could post the whole match, all four hours, 45 minutes of it:



Even beyond the romantic, titanic nature of it, the match had a lot working for it yesterday: The rain delays were perfectly placed so I was able to read a few sections of the Times yesterday morning, catch the first set, head over to my aunt's for brunch for a couple hours and only miss parts of the second and third sets, and then go grocery shopping during the last rain delay in the fifth, before watching the end and head straight for a 5 p.m. appointment. It was great.

Then there's Nadal and Federer, both of whom are so likable that the victory felt enjoyable no matter who got it (though I was pulling for Federer for historic reasons). And Nadal has his hillarious shants, which seem to give him the world's highest-ever rate of wedgies. And Federer has his unnecessary white cardigans and blazers -- he's trying way too hard for a "Great Gatsby" look, but he's so earnest it kind of works -- and gets huge props for dating the same woman for at least the past eight years, who, while attractive, is not like an incredibly beautiful model, who I'm sure throw themselves at Federer at every opportunity. I mean, if Pete Sampras, my favorite tennis player ever, married "Veronica Vaughn," then you know Federer could probably date anyone he wanted.

Update: Thanks for the post's title to Belle and Sebastian, a band as delicate and British as Wimbledon.