I was a lifeguard at the modern iteration of Action Park (now called Mountain Creek) for a summer job in about 2007. Best gig I ever had and the Action Park stories are the stuff of legend. There's a great mini doc about it on YouTube too.

Posted by bronxcheer on 8/11/2020 5:00:00 AM (view original):

bronxcheer, we are glad you are back and well. Plus this looks like a very interesting read.

I'm reading a decent collection of writing by Charles Portis (the "True Grit" novelist) and came across this bit of reportage. Portis is in Wales, summer of '64, working on a travel piece for The Herald Tribune. He writes that he's in a pub in a small town, struggling to get anyone to talk to him because the Welsh won't be drawn into familiar conversations with strangers. Aside from the village bore, that is, a Cliff Clavin-type who corners the writer and starts babbling about Barry Goldwater (Republican nominee for that year's presidential election):

He wants to talk about Goldwater because he thinks you want to talk about Goldwater. It's a hard topic to choke off.

Well, I don't think he'll be elected anyway, he is told.

"Aye, that's what they said about Hitler."

Goldwater's not that bad. He's not Hitler.

"I'm thinking they said the same about Hitler."

They didn't say he wasn't Hitler, did they?

Dumb, but made me laugh.

Re-reading:




So overlooked and underrated!

"Here comes the pissball, ********-----get ready!"

heh ceez said to me something like "here comes the saltball, pus-head"

harper lee "go set a watchman"

went from good to bad in no time

posthumous i am absolutely sure because she knew it sucked and didn't want to finish it

said some fun things early but the whole second half needed a rewrite

at the end its like twelve angry men or east of eden or some pontificating trash like that

a tired '50s morality play



her heirs said lets cash in is my take

and a couple years before black lives matter!

she has got to be rolling over in her grave

501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die (2013) by Ron Kaplan.

First, the bad. Lots of typos and botched quotes (the author has Yogi Berra saying, “It gets dark early out there”—oof, he stepped all over that classic). And since the 501 entries are by necessity brief, it’s annoying that he wastes precious space telling the reader how many weeks a book spent on the NYT bestseller list or which awards it won (and he does this a lot). A few of the must-read books he seems to not like much, but couches the criticism in “some people think” timidity (except for a Larry King baseball book, not an official entry just one that he mentions in passing, that he outright calls saccharine trash, ha ha). Finally, for some unexplained reason, a bunch of the most famous baseball books ever (Glory of Their Times, Boys of Summer, Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, etc.) don't have their own entries, even though they're referenced admiringly in discussions on other books. Maybe the author thinks they're so well known they need no promotion, but he doesn't say that.

The good? I was introduced to a ton of baseball books I’ve never heard of, that sound really terrific, and that I’ll be tracking down and reading. Even with the negatives, this is a book worth owning if you're a fan at all of baseball writing.

re-reading

i was over at my kid's house yestiddy and guess what he had on his bookshelf

Bill James Abstract right next to Cooperstown Casebook

i knew i liked that kid for a reason

Sad stories about Harper Lee's book and this baseball books we must read book.

Better news about bagchucker's son.

I just finished




A bit repetitive in places but I learned a ton. The descriptions of the travel overland across the continent are really mind blowing. I've been to Astoria and can really understand the misery that those first arrivals dealt with.

I've just started




I'm about 10% of the way into it and am captivated by the background on all of the outside people who would come to play such outsize roles in history.

The Blush and Other Stories (1958) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), both by Elizabeth Taylor, both excellent (the second one's a novel). Very English, understated, comic, bittersweet.

Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca" (1993) by Aljean Harmetz. Too long and a little too much focus on the bit players, but enjoyable if you're a fan of the movie.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020) by Mary Trump. Surprisingly insightful and humorous, with about as much focus on the author’s dead father (Fred Trump Jr.) as on her more famous uncle.

Apropos of Nothing (2020) by Woody Allen. Uneven but interesting. Description of his rise to fame was good, anecdotes about his movies amusing, but the Mia Farrow/molestation accusation stuff was tedious (and I believe he’s innocent). Then Woody limped to the finish line with some banal “this actor was great, that actress was a beauty” tripe.

The Lying Life of Adults (2019, translated 2020) by Elena Ferrante. Well-written, but full of ridiculous characters. Judy Blume turned into an Italian opera. Pretty sure this anonymous writer is in fact a man, a lot of focus on genitals.