reyonthehill

- My 6am flight out of Oakland ended up being a disaster. I thought it would have been a light passenger load, but nope, nearly full. I didn't check my bag this time -- a new experiment -- and I found it not to be worth the effort. Baggage claim from here on. The rental car site is a twenty-minute shuttle ride from the airport, and you arrive at a farm of rental car lots. The total time from touchdown to sitting in a car was roughly one hour. The total time from wake-up in California to working in the Denver office was six hours. I thought Denver was closer.

- My favorite warning sign (read: yellow) on the road has to be "CORRECTIONAL FACILITY: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS." I wonder how many drivers miss that sign. And the sign shouldn't be yellow, but brown/informational, like at state parks.

- I like this slogan out here: "Landscapes do not waste water, people do." That was on the back of a van. I'm assuming -- safely, presumably -- that the van is owned by a landscaping company.

- The main terminal of the Denver Airport -- with its fabric structure -- must have been designed by Birdair, whom I worked for during the summer following my freshman year at Syracuse. (Yep, I'm right.)

- And the view of the snow-capped Rockies from this conference room is pretty cool. Pretty golden, I should say. Coors, anyone?

A thought that came to me while watching Syracuse blow an eleven-point lead with minutes remaining at the Carrier Dome (think cool, cool air) in Syracuse, New York (that's right, Onondaga County; let me hear it, "O-N-O-N fuckin' daga")...

Shouldn't ING Direct -- with it's line of savings (Orange Savings), checking (Electric Orange) and mortgage (Orange Mortgage) products -- be a natural sponsor for the collegiate athletics teams of the Syracuse Orange? Has this at least been mentioned in the board meetings?

- Yes, John, go ahead.
- Sir, the marketing team has been doing a lot of work on this, we've been up late at night -- and not just watching cartoons, if you know what I mean -- and we are recommending to the board of directors that the ING Orange product line focus its efforts on tying into the campus of Cornell, home of the Big Red. Our research shows that this will really cement our brand with our core demographic.
- Let's do it, but you are fired, because we have one too many marketers anyway.
- It's been a pleasure, sir. And this will give me some spare time for my model airplanes.

I've finished The Fourth Bear, a truly interesting book. My wife picked it up and read a couple pages while waiting for me, and she continues to give me strange looks as a result. It is purely fantastical, which was welcome during this heated election season, but it was more of a children's book than not. Or I think it was. It was difficult to judge.

Moving on, I've decided to tackle the classic, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans...

Image: Amazon.com

Note: This is not the exact cover I have, which I could not find; damn the Google.

Interesting point about Mr. Cooper, which I learned while reading the introduction, an introduction that proceeded to give away the entire plot so I had to stop reading it (Why do introductions do that? Not everyone has read the story.), was that his father settled Cooperstown, New York, home of the baseball hall of fame.

When I started the reading project, it was my goal to read all of the books I have in my house, although I have bought a few more along the way. Over the years, my wife and I had accumulated a bunch, but I had never actually read them, and now I'm trying to make use of them. They've mostly served as decoration.

I'm not sure if the Mohicans will survive, however (pun intended), since I have already found myself bored by the end of the first page, although it is difficult to switch gears and start a new book. I'm certainly going to give it a chance, and maybe it will last longer than John Fowles' trash.

This book was an assignment for a college course I had, and needless to say, I never read the book. Let me back up for a moment.

In college, I had a relatively strict curriculum at Syracuse, mostly engineering prerequisites the first two years, core engineering courses the third year, and elective engineering courses the fourth year. On top of that we needed six courses within the school of Arts & Sciences, what we called "throwaway classes." I was able to turn two of the six courses into one of my two minors, but the other four were random, and there was nothing I could do to make use of them. One of those was "English Textual Studies: U.S. Literary History through 1860," a course they currently do not offer. The course covered early American writers, including Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Apess, etc., and one of the books we read was -- you guessed it -- The Last of the Mohicans.

Considering that this course was one of my throwaway classes, I jogged through it, and ended up getting a 'B' or something. Life goes on. But now I am going to try and read the novel, although I admit early American writers using the British writing-style of the time does not excite me.

I'll see how I'm feeling after a chapter or two, and as always, I'll report back.

Dan Meth (talented Syracuse alumnus) sent me along his latest cartoon, a roast of the internet celebrities (all of them)...

"Real internet people use Tumblr."

In May 2002, I graduated from Syracuse University. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the commencement speaker. (We got screwed. Not only did the class of 2003 enjoy a basketball national championship, but also Bill Clinton as it's commencement speaker.)

All Giuliani did was talk about nine-eleven. It was horrible. Here we were, the young class of 2002, about to embark on a journey into the real world, and all the guy had to talk about was his actions on that day. And how the world was now a much different and more dangerous place. (It was depressing.)

Before September 11 we were living like there was a cloud, a veil in front of our eyes. We didn't see what was going on in the world clearly or precisely enough. We didn't understand that there was the kind of hatred for what we are and who we are that could inspire a monstrous attack like that. Maybe we partially understood it, maybe we understood it somewhat, but we didn't understand it with the full drama with which we should have understood it.

What is clear, however, is that Giuliani was running for president. Not in 2004, but he had already determined his signature point for the 2008 campaign: "Remember me, the guy from nine-eleven."

A film friend of mine from college -- we were on the same freshman dorm floor at Syracuse -- has released a series of hip-hop related films featured on AOL, the first of which is titled, "A Retirement Party for Lloyd Banks."

reyonthehill: I'm sad to say I have no idea who Lloyd Banks is.

Eric Rosenthal: Actually, your not knowing kinda works; that's why we picked him. He's a rapper in 50 Cent's crew who sold a ton of records his first time out, then bombed with his sophomore effort.

Fresh off the disaster that was the Fowles experiment, I've picked The World According to Garp by John Irving off of my dust-gathering bookshelf...

Image: Amazon.com

I first became interested in John Irving with A Prayer for Owen Meany in high school. I must have purchased Garp somewhere along the way since then, most likely at Syracuse. Irving's liberal use of semicolons led to one of my first major transformations as a writer. (Read: I started to use a lot of semicolons, which has since subsided.)

In the Owen Meany English class in school, I post-scripted a letter to the author (for a class assignment) with, "You use a lot of semi-colons." When Irving responded a couple months later, he didn't comment on my statement, but I am sure he nodded in agreement, and then tucked my letter beneath his pillow, where it remains to this day.

This is a classic, and twenty-or-so pages in, I am already hooked.

Last week I finished the Jack Kerouac book, and now I'm heading into untraveled territory. John Fowles' Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings is surely a book I picked up while at Syracuse based solely on the cover (which I tend to do). I've never heard of this Fowles guy (is that bad?), but if you are good enough to have your "occasional writings" published, goddamn, all the power to you. Look at this cover...

Image: Amazon.com

I have to admit, it intrigued me. So, five or six years later, let's see what this Fowles guy is all about.

Being all but displaced from my hometown, Buffalo (well, actually, a suburb northeast of Buffalo), my second home has become Philadelphia. I had spent time there courting my future wife after college before moving to California. My wife's family is nearby, just over the border in New Jersey, and her sister lives in Center City Philadelphia. My brother lives in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia. My sisters are not too far away (the Bronx and Connecticut). So when I go "home," I usually mean Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, I'm able to hang out with my brother, possibly see my sisters, and a couple of Christmases ago, all of us, parents included, hunkered down sitcom-style in my brother's townhouse for the weekend. My wife and I are also able to spend time with her entire family while in Philadelphia. We got married in Philadelphia. In fact, I haven't been to Buffalo in quite some time, although a trip there seems to be looming in the future; to Syracuse, as well.

My new hometown is somewhat ambiguous. We own our home in Hercules (or, we are paying the bank to sleep there), but we initially moved to Berkeley, and that is where I work. We have both worked in Oakland, and that is the closest major city. We have spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and we love Marin. In reality, the entire bay area is our "hometown."

That being said, I root for the Oakland teams around here. I follow the Oakland Athletics, and to a lesser extent, the Golden State Warriors (who I'd prefer to call the "Oakland City Warriors" if I owned the team, but I don't). Buffalo has football and hockey, and I still root for the Bills and I follow the Sabres religiously, but Buffalo doesn't have professional baseball or basketball, so it has been easy to relocate my hometown feelings for the A's and Warriors. And wouldn't you know it, the Oakland Athletics were originally the Philadelphia Athletics. And the Golden State Warriors were originally the Philadelphia Warriors. The two teams I follow in Oakland both originated in Philadelphia. Talk about your hometown cross-breeding.

I had finished On the Road just in time for my trip to Philadelphia. Let me just say that it was an interesting read. Kerouac certainly developed a new style of writing -- spontaneous prose -- which I was not accustomed to. But the novel is most engrossing, and I definitely suggest reading if you haven't already. I feel different about my life where I am, where I have been, and where I am going, as a result of reading the book. I talk different, think different. I shower less.

I started reading an anthology of Kerouac's selected letters for the trip east. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1957-1969 is the second volume of a large trove of letters that Jack wrote (and received) from the time of publishing On the Road, which made him famous, and his untimely death.

Image: Kinokuniya BookWeb

I came into possession of this book while at Syracuse, during one of my many bookstore jaunts, and I thought the cover was cool, recognized the author, postulated that someday I'd get around to finally reading On the Road (and guess what, I did), so I figured this book was worth purchasing. And there couldn't be a better way to follow On the Road than reading his personal letters discussing its publishing. So far, it has been fascinating.

Also, for a month or two in 1957, Kerouac made 1943 Berkeley Way here in Berkeley, California, his home, and I plan on checking that out during lunch sometime this week. (I wonder if the current residents know that.)