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Grillmaster
Although I love to cook, all of the grills I have owned have been undersized, hibachi-like affairs, and I don’t grill out that often.
Our local AM radio station, WLIJ-AM, has had a trivia contest over the past several weeks. Our pagination techs, Mary and Carol, always have WLIJ on their radio, and sometimes I’ll turn it on the radio on my desk as well. The contest involved trivia questions read by Keith Cook between 2:30 and 3:30 each day. Each question answered correctly, up to a maximum of three, earned you an entry in the drawing.
We would often collaborate in the newsroom; one person would shout out the answer and two or three would begin dialing. You know that I have a massive collection of useless information, and it became a joke that when anyone from the newspaper got through, they’d tell Keith, “John Carney gave me the answer.”
Well, on Tuesday they drew five grand prize winners, and darned if I wasn’t one of them. I won a grill, a bag of charcoal and a cooler — but I won’t get the prizes until tomorrow, during a live remote WLIJ is doing from our flagship city park. I will be at the park taking photos of their first-ever disk golf tournament. (I wish I could enter the tournament, but I have to work later.) As soon as I get my prize, I’ll have to rush back to the newspaper, where production of the Sunday paper will already have started.
I don’t know exactly what kind of grill this is, but I assume it’s larger than any of the dinky little grills I’ve owned in the past. It may be the round, shallow, cover-less three-legged type of grill, but that would still be wonderful.
I wish I had it today; I have chicken thighs marinating in the fridge right now and bet they’d taste fantastic grilled.
I should get through at the paper by 3 or 4 tomorrow afternoon.
Tomorrow night, I’ll watch the fireworks from the home of my vacationing parents, which is a stone’s throw from the park and has a great view, without the crowds or parking problems. My brother and sister-in-law and the kids are going to a cookout at some friends of theirs, but they may stop by for the fireworks. I’m not sure when.
I may wait for Sunday to break in the new grill.
Frazzled
On Monday, without warning, I was handed some extra interim responsibilities at the newspaper. I don’t know how long it will take to resolve the situation, but in the meantime I’m trying to do my normal job, plus the extra responsibilities, plus get ready for the mission trip to Africa which I will be co-leading in, oh, about three weeks.
Last night, I drove to Cowan to meet Gail Drake and Jennifer Janeway for dinner, so that Gail and I could go over a few things and Gail (who’s snowed under in her own day job) could hand off some paperwork which I had offered to take last week.
I have the day off work tomorrow, although I will have to work some on the Fourth (and every Saturday, except during the trip, until the current situation is resolved and we can set up the normal on-and-off rotation). I’ll spend part of the day putting together a notebook with vital information about the team members, a task I started tonight.
Please keep both me and Gail, not to mention our teammates, in prayer over the next few weeks.
Overkill
Here, we see two Kodak printer ink cartridges — one black and white, the other color — ordered at the same time, as part of the same order, from the same vendor (Kmart — I was trying to rack up some partner miles from American Airlines to keep my banked miles from expiring).
Each small cartridge arrived in its own much-too-large box, surrounded by packing material (foam peanuts for one, inflated plastic sausages for the other). Both boxes have the same return address, both were delivered at the same time.
What gives? One of these boxes would have been overkill if you’d shipped both cartridges in it. To ship each of the two cartridges separately is just absurdly wasteful.
Field trip
In the nearly 20 years that I’ve been involved with the Nashville Symphony’s community concert in Shelbyville, I can’t recall that we’ve ever taken a field trip to any of the symphony’s other concerts. That oversight will be corrected tonight, as Dawn Holley and I check out the concert at Cumberland University in Lebanon.
Of course, most of the things we need to exchange information about aren’t related to the actual night of the concert — they’re things like promotion or publicity ideas. But it will still be fun to see how another community handles its concert.
It’s been a long day at work, and this will be a nice diversion.
Aptly named
In 1952, a 4-year-old boy named Steven thought he was going to the circus. I’m not certain from the stories I’ve heard whether he misunderstood or whether he was playfully misled. He was disappointed — at first — when he was taken to a big building with seats facing a flat white screen, where he watched moving pictures of the circus instead of the real thing. Eventually, though, he realized that the pictures held their own magic.
Turner Classic Movies has been saluting directors during the month of June, and tonight the object of their affection is one Cecil B. DeMille. I have watched a little bit of “The Greatest Show on Earth” tonight, but mostly I’m taping it to enjoy later.
The movie was preceded by a documentary about DeMille during which Steven — who went on to direct his own movies, such as “Jaws,” “E.T.”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Schindler’s List” — told the story of being taken to see the movie by his father. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was Spielberg’s first movie. It’s a great example of how movies can transport you to another place and time, in this case the vanishing days of the big-top tent circuses.
As always, DeMille has both glamour and spectacle. You have Chuck Heston, with all of the machismo but before some of the pomposity, as the road manager for the show; Jimmy Stewart, lovable as always, in constant clown makeup for reasons I won’t spoil here; Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour and a cast of thousands, including real circus performers of the era.
A real treat, for all ages.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you
I was looking for something else and discovered that Comedy Central has begun re-running back to back episodes of the wonderful and underrated “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist” at 7 a.m. (8 Eastern).
This gem of a show from the mid-1990s is crudely animated (using a computer-based technique called “SquiggleVision” which some found annoying) but somehow wins you over. Standup comic Jonathan Katz stars in the title role, and his “patients” are other standup comics or comic actors, who play themselves and basically do their normal routines while lying on Katz’s couch. “Dr. Katz” was the first place I ever saw Ray Romano, before “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Breaking up the “sessions” are Katz’s humorous interactions with his sullen receptionist and his slacker son.
My DVR is happily recording these episodes while they’re available.
Meanwhile, my Carolina brother has informed me about another of my favorite comedy series being released on DVD: “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.” While I’m also a fan of “The Larry Sanders Show,” Shandling’s acclaimed HBO series, but “IGSS” is a different animal — a wacky, fourth-wall-shattering sendup of sitcom conventions and Shandling’s own prissy-boy image.
I’d love to be able to get this some time. (My brother plans to rent the individual disks from Netflix.)
Direct flight
The last-minute decision by TSA not to allow the start of direct air service between Nairobi and Atlanta this month caused me some hand-wringing over travel plans, but in the end it was only a minor inconvenience.
For the people of Kenya, however, the situation is more serious.
The country is already seeing a decline in revenue from tourism — this just isn’t the year for many Americans to take that once-in-a-lifetime safari vacation to Masai Mara. The country has cut its visa fee in half, from $50 to $25, but that’s mostly a symbolic gesture. (The cut came after I had already paid the original full price for my visa.)
No doubt, Kenyan officials hoped the new direct route would help encourage tourism. What’s more, they have publicly voiced concerns that the TSA’s decision would be interpreted by potential tourists as a general travel warning, even though that’s not exactly how it should be taken. The decision was apparently a response to a specific terrorist threat.
This article discusses the benefit the direct route would have had for Kenya exports, such as the floral industry.
Hopefully, the situation can be resolved at some point, and the direct route started.
A matter of timing
I didn’t get ESPN Classic when the brilliant series “Cheap Seats” was in production, but I get it now, and I have my DVR set to pick up the occasional rerun which ESPN Classic airs in the middle of the night.
In case you don’t know, “Cheap Seats” is like “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ for sports — hosts Randy and Jason Sklar show cheesy sporting events from ESPN’s library, and make wisecracks and pop culture references about them.
Anyway, an episode aired overnight and was waiting for me this morning.
At one point, Randy and Jason said that poker player Phil Hellmuth “is to poker sense what Farrah Fawcett is to common sense.” (This was probably when Farrah’s dippy appearance on the Letterman show was still fresh in memory.)
A few minutes later, they said that a player “was sweating more than Michael Jackson in a Discovery Zone ball pit.”
I just thought it odd that an episode with both those references would air this weekend, of all times.
Right length, wrong time
By the way, our layover in Amsterdam’s Schiphol (pronounced sort of like SKIP-pole) Airport is almost five hours — which would normally allow us to take the bus tour of the city which leaves for the airport. You get to see the downtown area, a windmill, a shop that produces wooden shoes and so on. You pass by the Anne Frank house, although obviously there’s not time to stop or take the tour.
Unfortunately, we arrive at 5:30 a.m., and I don’t think the bus tours start until 9. And, if security at the airport is still the same, you need to be at the gate a full hour before departure time, because there is a security checkpoint at the departure gate.
Actually, both of the last times we flew through Schiphol there was some security crisis right around the time of the trip, and so security was especially tight on our return trip to the U.S. — with gate attendants questioning us about where we’d been, with whom we were traveling and so on.
I won’t necessarily miss the bus tour myself, since I’ve taken it twice. And there’s fun stuff to do at the airport, including an exhibit hall run by Amsterdam’s famed Rijksmuseum. (There’s also a casino, although that might send the wrong message to my mission trip teammates.) But I’m sorry that Kim and Jennifer, who have the same itinerary as me, won’t get to take the tour. I’m not sure about my other teammates; some of them may have later departure times and get the chance to take the bus tour.
You’re stuck with me
Happily (depending, I suppose, on your point of view) it now looks like I will get to return to the U.S. following the Kenya trip. Our terrific travel agent notified me earlier this afternoon that we now have a replacement itinerary for the canceled direct Nairobi-to-Atlanta flight. We will be changing planes in Amsterdam on the way back, just as we had already been booked through Amsterdam on the way out.
I knew this would get worked out somehow, but it’s still a relief to actually have the details
Doldrums
When we were all in the car headed to Nashville Friday night for our symphony concert wrapup meeting, Dawn Holley asked me how the novel was going.
It isn’t, actually. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve sold a copy in person, and longer than that since I’ve sold one online.
My North Carolina brother wants me to try to market it to a traditional publisher, but I just haven’t had time to fool with that — or to do anything more aggressive about marketing the self-published version.
I do get occasional nice comments from people who bought the thing early on and didn’t read it until later. Of course, you never know how seriously to take nice comments.
What about the Dufresnes?
I’m watching an episode of “Top Chef Masters” in which one of the competitors is Wylie Dufresne.
For some people, the name “Dufresne” immediately kicks up “The Shawshank Redemption,” but for me, it makes me think of the late, great comic Mitch Hedberg. Hedberg had a very funny routine, delivered in his unique, hippy-dippy cadence, about restaurant waiting lists. The servers will sometimes call out a name (”Dufresne … party of four … Dufresne …”) and then, getting no response, just move on to the next name (”Bush … party of three ….”)
Hedberg then responds in horror, expressing his concern for the missing Dufresnes.
“How can you eat … at a time like this?” he asked. “It should be ‘Bush … search party of three. You can eat after you find the Dufresnes.’”
Like any Hedberg routine, it loses something in transcription. You really had to hear him do the routine in his own voice.
The professionals
LEAMIS has always booked the travel for my previous foreign trips, and even on this trip — with me as co-leader — it was Gail Drake who originally dealt with the travel agent. But since our uncertainty over the return flight from Nairobi, I’ve been included in the loop of messages from our travel agent, Heather at MTS Travel, and I have to say that so far, I’m thoroughly impressed by her attitude and her customer service. MTS Travel specializes is mission trip and relief work travel — according to its web site, it originally grew out of a Mennonite church agency. It now works with a broad spectrum of groups and denominations and has access to special fares intended for mission or relief work.
Heather is trying to sort through the sometimes-conflicting information she’s getting from Delta. She has customers in Nairobi right now and says the airline people at Jomo Kenyatta Airport seem to be on top of the situation (more so, in fact, than the reservations people here stateside); the folks at the airport are making alternate travel arrangements for anyone who happens to arrive in Nairobi without knowing about the problems with the Nairobi-to-Atlanta route. But, obviously, it would be preferable to get a new itinerary worked out before we leave, and Heather is on the case.
Naturally, what we want to happen here is for the airline to make the changes, since the it’s their responsibility, so that we can avoid any fees. Yes, we can always get a refund and book alternate passage ourselves, but that would be more costly and would be only an emergency last resort.
In memory of Ed
My all-time favorite segment on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” was the occasional appearance of that mystic, sage, soothsayer and Montgomery Ward replacement mannequin, Carnac the Magnificent. It’s a great demonstration of the Carson/McMahon dynamic:
Flight update
Well, our travel agent is waiting to hear from Delta about replacing our return trip from Nairobi to Atlanta. It’s possible we won’t hear until closer to the trip, since Delta may still hold out hope of a resolution which would allow them to launch the direct flights.
And, to my North Carolina sister-in-law, I’m not setting the schedule and wouldn’t be able to engineer a getaway for myself into the City of Lights, even if we do end up changing planes in Paris. But thanks for putting that idea into my head. Now, however we end up getting back to the States, I’ll feel cheated. 
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