As Far As You Know

It's championship weekend for several winter sports here in the New England prep schools. I made my way up to Brookline, Massachusetts to see Choate's girls' hockey team lose a semifinal playoff game and then booked over to Deerfield just in time to catch our female swimmers and divers win the New England title!

The New York Times columnist Frank Rich has never been better than in his recent columns, wherein he manages to eloquently capture the dynamics of this presidential election season. Here is his penultimate paragraph from today's piece:

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

Brilliant.

I am SO looking forward to the fourth--and final--season of Battlestar Galactica when it kicks off in April. People who haven't watched this because they think it's cheesy science fiction are missing one of the best-written shows on television.

I caught the last showing of Vantage Point tonight at the Wallingford multiplex. It takes a Rashomon-like approach to a terrorist attack at a presidential summit in Salamanca, Spain, replaying a common chain of events from the points of view of multiple characters. It's fun to watch, even if aspects of the plot are wildly improbable.

I just got my copy of Microsoft Office: Mac 2008 and am installing it now. It cost me a total of $25! I'll let you know how I like it soon.

Having just finished writing the last reports on my advisees, I am officially done with my winter term duties. I'll be mostly around school this week to whittle away at some long-term projects before I head to Bermuda on Sunday, but vacation has arrived!

The Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon has a witty and inightful piece in the this week's issue of The New Yorker about super-hero costumes that is worth a read.

I caught a matinee of The Seafarer on Broadway this afternoon. I was in the second row of the orchestra section--within spitting distance of the stage. Conor McPherson's play is wonderfully written--in turns funny, poignant, suspenseful, and poetic--and it features an absolutely spectacular cast. The action takes place entirely in a run-down house in a town north of Dublin and there's not a boring moment in the piece.

For the second portion of my New York theater double header, I saw the Disney-produced musical Mary Poppins tonight. The show was reasonably entertaining--and certainly a terrific visual spectacle--while being pretty lightweight. Certainly the most memorable elements were the songs I knew well from watching the Julie Andrews film as a kid.

Not sure which piece of news was the bigger surprise: that Andy Roddick knocked off #2 Rafa Nadal in straight sets in the Dubai quarterfinals today or when, after the upset, Roddick announced that his working relationship with coach Jimmy Connors had ended a week ago.

The on-court result has to be seen as good news for the American. He had beaten the Spaniard in the 2004 U.S. Open and then lost their only other two meetings: in a memorable Davis Cup final later that year and then in the Indian Wells semis last spring. Next up for Roddick: the hottest player on tour, Novak Djokovic.

I wrote several weeks back how I was re-ripping my CD collection to encode my iTunes music at 192 kbps--still far more compression than even the compact disc format, but at least with 50% more information than the default 128 kbps iTunes standard. Well, I've gotten somewhat manic about plowing through my collection. I own far too many CDs--hundreds and hundreds really--and so I've spent way too much time hauling stacks of jewel cases up to my study to feed them into my newest iMac, which is where I sync my iPods. But I have yet to bring any discs back down to the living room shelves, so my primary work space in my study looks more like a used record shop at this moment! Time to tidy up, I guess.

I pay for digital cable and get about 5 HBO channels. While I am a regular viewer of HBO original series--The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, The Sopranos--I find I almost never watch movies. Today, though, I got wrapped up in Notes On A Scandal, which I missed when it came out a year or two ago. I will watch Cate Blanchett in just about anything, and Judi Dench is one of my favorites as well. This was an entertaining flick.

Andy Roddick completed his week in excellent form, following his win over Nadal with a victory over Aussie Open champ Djokovic and then a three-set decision over Feliciano Lopez in today's final. Perhaps 2008 will shape up as a better season for Roddick? The Indian Wells and Key Biscayne Masters events are within the next month, so it will be fascinating to see if Federer and Nadal can restore their dominance of the top-tier events, if Djokovic can continue to play spoiler, and if Roddick or any others can break through.

It's just after 4 in the morning and I'm up and about to head off to Boston to catch a flight to Bermuda for the Choate Tennis spring break training trip. Got just about an hour's sleep, so no doubt I'll catch some shut-eye on the plane. But oddly enough getting up this morning was not a problem.

I've arrived in Bermuda, as has the entire team, and the weather is fine, the waters are alluring, and the Coral Beach and Tennis Club is comfortable and welcoming. We are on Atlantic time here, which means we all had to set our clocks yet another hour ahead for the second time in twelve hours!

We are lucky to be staying at the Coral Beach & Tennis Club, set right on Elbow Beach in Paget Parish in Bermuda. The club has eight Har-Tru tennis courts (as well as two squash courts, a fitness center, and quick access to the beach). Our accommodations are on the grounds as well and breakfasts and dinners are included in our arrangements. The dining room is fancy--blazers are required in the evening--but not so stuffy to make it uncomfortable. These are clearly nicer digs than we are used to having on our training trips.

I am using down time here in Bermuda to get caught up on reading and some DVDs that have been accumulating. Amazing Journey is a documentary history of The Who, with lots of footage of the band from the 1960s to the present. It's worth a viewing.

Chuck Klosterman's latest compilation of essays, mostly short articles written for Esquire and Spin, is a very entertaining collection.

I watched the direct-to-video release The New Frontier last night and early this morning. This animated feature, set in the 1950s and featuring DC heroes, greatly exceeded my expectations.

Won't be long now until Indy is back in action.

We've had our first batch of rough weather in our time in Bermuda, with heavy winds and rain this morning. But the clay courts are drying out now and we expect to be back in action before lunchtime later this morning.

I am packed up and ready to head to the airport. It's a bit sad to have to leave Bermuda after a week of spectacular weather (especially for March), good tennis, and a terrific location.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all my Irish brethren and sistren out there. As my dad was fond of saying: there are two types of people in the world--the Irish and those who want to be Irish.

I am in a maddening pattern of my iTunes freezing up. When I use Force Quit to escape, the application never fully shuts down, which means I have to reboot to get back into iTunes again (which, of course, I need to sync my iPhone). I re-installed iTunes but this didn't seem to fix the problem. I'll have to keep working on it, as this is very annoying.

My 2008 shipment from HEAD has arrived and I've got three new racquets to play with. I am shifting to the MicroGel Prestige Pro frame. I'll have the new sticks strung today and I look forward to hitting the courts with them later this week.

Required viewing:

Today is the first day of spring!

I've returned home from the Metropolitan Opera House. It took me a full hour to get my car out of the garage, mainly because a production of South Pacific let out at the same time right next door. I was at Lincoln Center to see Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's study of the outsider living in a seaside town on the English coast. It's a powerful piece, with music evoking the power of the sea as a leading "character" in this opera.

If one had predicted this morning that #3 Djokovic would knock off #2 Nadal, 6-3, 6-2, in the Indian Wells semis, I wouldn't have put up much of an argument. If that result still can be considered an upset, it's a mild one at best. But for #98 Mardy Fish to school Roger Federer by the same score in the second semifinal today, well that's a surprise of a different order of magnitude. Assuming the mononucleosis that plagued the Swiss star is now behind him, he will need to find another gear soon if he wants to keep his perch atop the men's game.

And so nearly three months into 2008, neither of the world's top two players has yet to bag a title. Interesting season thus far . . .

I've been under the weather since I finished my classes at about 1 p.m. on Friday. After a feeble attempt at lunch, I came home and napped for about two hours, went to tennis practice (where I felt like a zombie), and then crashed at 6 p.m. for 14 straight hours. That seemed to knock out most of the nasty bug I've been fighting, though there were some lingering effects yesterday. This morning I feel worlds better--not yet 100%, but certainly getting back on track.