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Nov 12 2010
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Sometimes you win, sometimes you cruise

I had my first cruise experience when I was 19 years old.

There’s something about a cruise vacation. It’s different than your typical tropical vacation to Cancun or Tahiti or Cabo.

I guess the general point — the specific mission of each trip — is pretty similar.

It’s about getting away and soaking in sunshine and sipping fruity drinks by some body of water. Paradise, right?

But if you’ve been on a cruise, you probably know that cruises are different.

You’re on a ship with the same 1000 people or whatever — and something happens during those six or seven or eight days you spend on the water.

The cruise ship becomes a sort of small town on the sea. You interact with the same people. There’s only a few places to eat. And if you go on a really long cruise, like eight or nine or 10 (!) days, other vacationers — other cruisers — start to develop reputations. You learn about the family from Michigan with three daughters. Or the creepy-nice family from Texas, with the mullet-rocking dad who always extends his fingers like guns when he sees you and says HEY!!! I KNOW YOU!

These are people you feel like you’ve known all your life. And yet, they still don’t seem real. Nothing seems real. You go eat ridiculously large meals and you go to the “Cruise club” at night — a place called the “Viking Lounge” with a disco ball in the center, a place you would never go in real life, but this is a cruise and faux-reality rules the day.

By the end of the trip, you have memories that blend together. You remember certain things, like the free soft-serve ice cream machine on the pool deck, but you’re not sure if what you just experienced really was paradise — or just some strange construction of it, designed by some marketing executive at Royal Caribbean who works in some office somewhere far, far away from the sea.

I thought about all of this yesterday when I stumbled upon a story on CNN.com about a stranded cruise ship with 3,300 passengers on board.

On the surface, the story seems mildly absurd. Apparently, the ship lost power on Monday after a small fire began in the ship’s engine room. That, of course, wasn’t the ludicrous part. The ludicrous part is this: Sure, we feel for the cruisers, who had their vacations ruined and suffered a few mild inconveniences. But the story on Wednesday made the whole ordeal sound like a national catastrophe, like a real-life version of that terrible movie “Poseidon,” with people rationing food, and guests running around the ship all frazzled, with their shirts untucked and fresh sets of stubble covering their faces.

According to the story, the USS Ronald Reagan was called in and guests were forced to eat — wait for it, wait for it, — pop tarts and cold cuts…

Oh the horror.

From CNN.com:

“Passengers said they were not told there was a fire. Guest Marquis Horace said the cruise line told passengers there was “a flameless fire. … Everybody just laughed.” And passenger Ken King said guests were told there was “a lot of smoke.”

“It was absolutely deplorable,” Horace said. At one point, the ship ran out of food, he said, and “they started making mayo sandwiches.”

“I expected a really nice time and it was like Gilligan’s Island or something,” he said.

He said he ate a lot of bananas and dry cereal, but at one point didn’t want to eat anymore because the smell of overflowing toilets, spoiled food and rotten milk was overwhelming.

Once the USS Ronald Reagan showed up to assist, passengers felt safer, he said. And the Navy provided good food — Horace said he particularly enjoyed the bean burritos.”

You serious, Clark?

Oh, we certainly have sympathy for the maligned cruisers — especially the elderly woman who rode a motor scooter and had to be carried up and down the stairs because the elevators didn’t work.

That sucks for her. And we feel. We really do.

But let’s not pretend this is some sort of tragedy.

A bunch of rich people paid thousands of dollars to go on a vacation and eat gluttonous amounts of food — and then they had to settle for cereal and bananas and mediocre deli meat* when a major snafu occurred.

*Oh, yea… thank god for those bean burritos.

Still, we’re still wondering what the heck happened to all the food that was on the ship in the first place. I know that a lot of food will go bad really quickly. But in a matter of hours?

By Tuesday, the USS Ronald Reagan had resupplied the ship. According to CNN.com, “Sailors stood on the deck in 50-yard lines, handing off boxes of water, frozen bread, sandwich meats, granola bars, paper plates and more…

“Reagan received 60,000 pounds of food, bottled water and supplies by airlift for the cruise ship, said Cmdr. Greg Hicks, spokesman of the U.S. Third Fleet.”

60,000 pounds? By my rudimentary calculations — that’s about 18 pounds of food and water for each passenger. That doesn’t include all the staff, but these people weren’t exactly starving*.

*I have a friend who watched his first episode of “Man vs. Food” a few months ago, and when I asked him what he thought, he paused for a moment and uttered the following words:

“I’m pretty sure that’s why the world hates us.”

Well, file the Carnival cruise catastrophe under the same category.

Again, I hope nothing like this ever happens to you or yours.

But if it does, and you happen to be stuck in a semi-inconvenient situation, here’s one idea:

Take a moment to think about the millions around the world who will spend the next night without power, wondering when the next meal will come. Consider yourself lucky that you’re wealthy enough to be trapped on a cruise ship. And then unwrap your pop-tart, take a bite and savor the moment.

It just might end up being the most enjoyable thing you do all week.

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Nov 09 2010
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Rapping in the late 90s

The journey down Memory Lane (Sittin’ In Da Park) began with Nas and his Illmatic album. I had just moved a CD wallet containing some of my oldest CD’s from my room to my car and felt like listening to rap music. Illmatic begat DJ Clue’s Backstage Mixtape begat Ruff Ryders Ryde or Die Volume II begat Silkk the Shocker’s Charge It To Da Game, which got me thinking back to a time passed.

In 1997 to at least 2000, many commercial hip-hop/rap artists weren’t defined by the lyrics he spit or even the thumping beats in the background. A rapper was defined by one’s crew. One’s label. One’s association with someone better and more well-known than him or her.

It went like this. A talented artist, a Nas or a Jay-Z, released a couple of successful albums. He made enough money to buy the island of Cyprus. He released a clothing line. Then he decided to share the wealth amongst his friends, giving them a platform to rap while dreaming the friends could attain similar accolades but actually and smartly knowing they sucked but it didn’t matter because people would pay $14 for an album by a nobody and think it was decent because they were affiliated with said famous, successful rapper.

I was anointed into this rap community with Puff Daddy splashing the holy Cristal on my forehead. It was the same way every white millennial from suburbia experienced the dive into rap. His album No Way Out dropped in 1997, when I was in fifth grade. Puff Daddy, who actually went by Sean “Puffy” Combs for about seventeen minutes that year, had groundbreaking hits then, notably “Mo Money, Mo Problems” (actually on B.I.G.’s album) and “I’ll Be Missing You.” “Mo Money, Mo Problems” rocked and still does, but he was parroting off the fame of his late friend the Notorious B.I.G.

Biggie was the center of Bad Boy, the originator. He had the talent. He made the money. He lent cache to anyone with a microphone who drew near. Because of him, Bad Boy exploded. Artists like Lil’ Cease and Puff Daddy, as a rapper, became household names to hip-hop heads because they hung around with and recorded with Biggie.

And there was nothing terribly wrong with the Bad Boy clique, as far as music goes*. The Lox was a talented group, Mase a talented rapper pre his born-again Christian phase and Lil’ Kim was at least tolerable as a featured artist. The problem came because others across the country replicated the formula.

*The opinion that opposing rap alliances Bad Boy (east coast) and Deathrow (west coast) contributed to the deaths of Biggie and 2Pac is valid, if not irrefutable, but not the point of this blog post. I am simply here to discuss how much rap music sucked because of these amalgamations of non-talented musicians who just had good connections.

As Bad Boy reached its apex and then plummeted, other groups around the country took off. There were the Ruff Ryders. DMX, maybe the first rapper to be charged with both sodomy and animal cruelty, was the originator, his song “Ruff Ryders Anthem” announcing their arrival.

Besides DMX, there was Eve, a good musician and then people with names like Drag-On, Young Wun and Jin. Drag-On is such a terrible, forgettable rapper that you can’t even find his second-most famous song, “Groundhog Day,” on YouTube.

Other East Coast groups included the Flipmode Squad, headed by Busta Rhymes, Roc-A-Fella with Jay-Z and a short-lived effort by Nas’ Ill Will Records. Those mistakes brought us artists like Spliff Star and the Bravehearts and gut-wrenching songs like “Oochie Wallie.” But the worst offenders came from the South. The worst offenders included No Limit Records.

Other crews had a talented musician at the center; No Limit had Master P. He became famous because he uttered “ugh” every four seconds in his songs. He made two movies, “I Got The Hook Up” and “Foolish,” that no one, to this day, has ever seen. He played an exhibition basketball game for the Charlotte Hornets. He was not talented.

No Limit Records never aspired for artistic greatness, nor did it pretend to. The word business is commonly thrown out to describe the rap game, and no crew approached music as a business more than No Limit. Master P wanted the rappers from his legion, as he termed them soldiers, to release 20-song albums at a near-weekly basis. Wikipedia tells me that in 1998, 23 No Limit albums came out, a number that included a CD titled My Balls and My Word by a rapper named Young Bleed.

There was no thought put into any of it. Each album was the same. They contained forgettable odes about drug dealing and ghetto stereotypes and the requisite “fallen homies” and “crew shout-out” songs that featured seven artists. Nepotism got you signed. Master P’s brothers, Silkk and C-Murder, were on the label. The majority of the artists, like Mr. Serv-On, hailed from P’s hometown of New Orleans. None of them were good. None of them. Yet Fiend’s album reached No. 8 in the entire country, and rappers like Serv-On and Big Ed and the Gambino Family had albums in the top 20. Silkk the Shocker had an album go No. 1.

The commercial success led to No Limit’s greatest sin, spawning the Southside’s other mistake, Cash Money Records. Like No Limit, it differed from some of the other rap crews. It had talent at the center, in Juvenile and a young Lil’ Wayne, but usually crews were started by rich, established stars. No one had any money for Cash Money records. As you could imagine, this became a problem, considering the sole gimmick of Cash Money was to describe how much money they had even though they didn’t have any.

Every single song was about Bentleys and Rolexes. A song like “Rich N*****” would have a verse that would then turn into the chorus for the song “Loud Pipes.” It was cut and paste, and borrow the sweet cars and platinum chains that were in the music videos. Thankfully a few years ago, Cash Money handed everything over to Lil’ Wayne so the label actually survives today and resembles little of the genre-ruining entity it was years ago.

Back then, rap had changed. The music at its origins was largely about MC battles. One person rapped to the same beat as another, and a crowd decided who was better. Individual talent won out. If someone grew up on the same street as DMX, it didn’t matter. You were exposed if you didn’t have the necessary skill. But in the late 90s that was no longer the case.

The rap industry resembled the real world in that who you knew mattered as much as what you could do. The talented didn’t necessarily catch the breaks. Sure, some did, but far too many got in through connections. Memphis Bleek was from Marcy, so Jay-Z gave him a spot on Roc-A-Fella and the opportunity to release two terrible albums, maybe more.

That was the late 90s and the early aughts for hip-hop. Excess and undeserved opportunity. Fortunately the Internet came along and gutted the music industry. Commercially successful rappers don’t make near as much as they used to, and the cliques full of wannabes dissolved years ago because stars can’t afford to offer alms to their friends. All that’s left are the Drag-On and Silkk the Shocker albums tucked into a CD wallet in the front seat of my car, albums I still listen to and still question why.

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Nov 07 2010
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Life and the future — and Marty McFly

The phone conversation was wrapping up, and for just a moment, I had one of those uneasy feelings, like a head rush that hits you a foot lower, in the chest, and then filters out through your extremities.

I was talking to an old baseball player named Buddy Biancalana. This was a work assignment, something on the 25th anniversary of the Royals’ 1985 World Series title.

Biancalana was a shortstop on that team, and he had become somewhat of an overnight folk hero in the mid-80s. He was a journeyman with a goofy name, a heartthrob to a small generation of teenage girls, a baseball player who would break into the main stream for a few weeks, even appearing on David Letterman’s old NBC show.

So I wanted to ask Biancalana how often people bring up ’85. How many times do people recognize him — or recognize his name — and ask about those three weeks in the October of 1985.

Can fame, even fame as fleeting as one memorable performance in a World Series 25 years ago, survive?

“You know,” he said, “there’s a lot of people around now that weren’t even born yet in 1985.”

“Yea,” I said, laughing quietly into the phone. “I guess that’s right.”

And then I paused for just a second. And I had that strange feeling.

You know, I wonder if this guy realizes that the reporter he’s talking to is one of those people?

A week later, I would be sitting in a frigid press box at a high school football game in Kansas City.

I was bundled up, hunkered over my laptop computer, and a little upset about the dozens of thick cords from the local television station that had to be connected to some outlet outside the press box.

These cords were keeping the door open, and it was freezing, and so maybe I looked pretty young all balled up in a black coat that would never be used in the Rockies.

Still, I wasn’t quite expecting a parent to approach and ask if I was a student at the school where the game was being played.

“Umm. No. I work for the newspaper,” I said.

This happens every once and a while — a few weeks ago I had a stadium custodian say, “You don’t look old enough to be a reporter.”

“Well, I look pretty young,” I said. “But I’m not as young as I look.”

The man nodded and walked off.

And in my head, I replayed what I had just said.

Wait, was that Zen?

So I guess this is sort of a rambling post about adulthood and age and all that.

But not quite.

It’s also a post about paths and choices and moments that point us in a certain direction.

A few weeks ago, as I was working on that story about Buddy Biancalana and the 1985 Royals, I came across the fact that “Back to the Future” had premiered during the 1985 World Series.

Maybe it was the history geek in me — or maybe I just enjoy small little connections like that — but I found this fact beyond enthralling.

So, of course, for the next 10 to 15 minutes I binged on “Back to the Future” Google queries.

I read old reviews, and found articles on the 25th anniversary, and then I stumbled upon a clip of a cast reunion from the Today show.

They were seated together, answering the usual questions you hear in these types of interviews.

“So,” the host said, “Why do you think this movie resonated with so many people?”

The camera focused in on Lea Thompson, who of course played Lorraine Baines McFly (and would later star in a forgettable ’90s NBC sitcom, “Caroline in the City,” which of course proves I watched too much television as a kid).

“I think,” Thompson said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “There can be that one important moment in your life that can change everything.”

At the time, I didn’t think much about that. Pretty soon, my caffeine rush subsided and I went back to researching the 1985 Royals.

But a few nights ago, I had another one of those uneasy moments.

I was doing some late-night reading on the laptop, searching for something — anything — that would be worth sacrificing sleep. And after a few seconds of clicking, I found a random blog post about the 10th anniversary of ESPN.com’s “Page 2.”

I don’t think about “Page 2” much these days. I do check out ESPN.com on a daily basis. And I know “Page 2” is there, just a link away. And I know there’s still content on there, a daily dose of opinion-pieces and sports and pop culture and other stuff.

But by now, it more or less fades into all the other noise on an extremely crowded and chaotic sports website.

But for minute, I remembered being 14 years old and using my parent’s old dial-up internet — I believe Netscape was our browser of choice — and stumbling upon the writers on “Page 2”.

Jason Whitlock was a contributor then, and, of course, I knew about him. So was Hunter S. Thompson, and as a 14-year-old who spent most of his free time lobbing shots at the basketball goal in my driveway and ordering JBC’s at Wendy’s with friends, I’ll admit I had hardly heard of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Of course, Bill Simmons was writing back then. Just some young guy from Boston who wrote a lot about the Red Sox and a lot about “The Karate Kid”.

It was so different* than any sports writing I had ever read.

*At that point, my sole sources of sports coverage consisted of The Kansas City Star and Sports Illustrated — and even then, I mostly just read Joe Posnanski and Rick Reilly.

And I don’t remember the day or the week or month, but I remember sitting down one night, reading Page 2, and saying, I think I want to do this.

I didn’t know much about journalism schools or newspapers or the relentless onslaught of the Internet and its future effect on the publishing industry, but I knew I wanted to do that. I wanted to do what I saw on Page 2.

Ten years later, I sat up in bed and retraced the past 10 years. So much had happened. My journalism tastes have evolved. My goals have shifted,too. And it’s hard to return to that instance and remember what it felt like to be 14.

I like to think that I still feel 14. And, according to that dad at the high school football game, I must still look 14. And on most days, it doesn’t feel like Page 2 debuted 10 years ago.

My story on Biancalana and the Royals would be published in The Star on the same morning I would read that random late-night blog post.

And it was a strange feeling. Because there are moments I still feel like a teenager, and adulthood still feels like some faraway place — a space and time still firmly waiting for us in the future.

But then, I’ll open up the mailbox, and I’ll see my name on an envelope. And I pull out my checkbook and pay the electric bill. And then I’ll see my name in the morning paper, and I’m reminded that life is moving, always moving, and the future is here — and there’s no going back.

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Oct 31 2010
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State of the ‘Brew’nion

To the regular readers: Many apologies for lackadaisical posting here. I’m working on a writing project outside of work that is killing my time and I know Rustin is always busy working what amounts to two jobs at the Star. That said, let’s take this as a step toward much more regular posts.

I sounded like Christine O’Donnell, and those preceding words are the hardest I’ve typed in a long time, maybe ever. But it’s true. Click here and look back at the introductory blog for the Brew House, written almost a year ago today.

Or just read. This was my attempt to define a blog, a meaning I considered philosophical back then and can now regard only as stupidity or perhaps something that ranks higher on the not-so-smart list, like ignorance.

“Some were people’s opinions about politics or sports. Some were just pictures. Some were random thoughts. Some seemed to be nothing more than a person’s daily schedule.

“Then it became clear. There really is no definition for a blog. Blogs are anything. Blogs are you.”*

A year later, I only want to say that whatever blogs are, they aren’t Christine O’Donnell. And I want to ramble on about the last year of my life, the first year of the Brew House, in this first State of the ‘Brew’nion. In much the same way my thoughts about the definition of blogs have changed, so has much else in my life. Of course, unlike my opinion of the meaning of a blog, this change was more natural, more a gradual step of a never-ending evolution, something Christine O’Donnell would claim doesn’t exist.

*If you don’t get the O’Donnell reference. Watch this commercial and then you will.

I’m sure all of us feel like this. It would be strange for us not to evolve. Years blend and blur into the next, the only concrete difference being the four digits we type next to the day and month at the top of Word documents, but then you realize the smaller changes that take place each day when you slow down and look in the past, past what’s in front of you. I think these changes particularly relate to people my age.

Last fall was the first time since I was six years old that I didn’t begin a new school year in late August. College had ended. I had stopped living with two of my best friends at 12th and Louisiana, just five minutes from the Union and five more past Fraser toward the heart of campus. I would no longer drink at Dollar Night on Wednesdays or write my Morning Brew for the Kansan on Sundays. I wouldn’t study. I wouldn’t sit in lectures. I wouldn’t purposely stomp really loud on our hardwood floors at the apartment just to be freaking hilarious and annoy the people who lived below us.

I would put on a polo and slacks – thank God not a tie – and go to work. I would be thrust into a city I hadn’t seen or visited since third grade, a city where I knew only one person and he would be moving to Korea in two months. I wouldn’t be around young people all the time. That was the biggest thing. Life wouldn’t continually intersect with the lives of others that are the same age, and I think all of us probably took that comfort for granted. People with similar goals, opinions and lifestyles surrounded us from grade school through college. We could always talk with someone and likely find common ground.

And now I would have to work with adults, spend a significant chunk of my day with them. Not one person under the age of 35 was employed at my office when I took my job. They would be people who are married. People who have kids. I wouldn’t even have a dog. Or a cat. What had life become? What would it become?

A year has passed. I’m still living in Dallas – and enjoying every day. The two strangers I rented an apartment with off Craigslist weren’t serial rapists, per the usual Craigslist zeitgeist, and have become two of my good friends. Younger people have been hired at work, and the adults aren’t so bad either. Uptown bars aren’t a whole lot different than those on Mass. Street. I bought a new car, performed standup comedy twice, saw some sick bands at Austin City Limits, played ball at the Rucker, choked in several matches of a tennis league, ran a half-marathon. I’m comfortable, probably every bit as comfortable as college. Life has become life.

And nothing feels different from a year ago, although plenty is. Every day or perhaps every week marked a small yet significant alteration in life’s delicate fabric, and every day probably will bring the same from here on forward. Sometimes this evolution might not be easy. Sometimes the nicks and cuts might linger. But it always feels right to take time and look back on all those changes and realize that they make you better.

That’s the point of this State of the ‘Brew’nion, to take inventory of an always-evolving life. Who knows where I’ll be or what I’ll be next year? Who knows what it will be like for any of us?

I only know one thing won’t change. I can say with certainty that I’ll never be a witch.

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Sep 09 2010
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Living for Labor Day

The movie lineup always seemed to be the same. The couch was always my homebase — a comfortable headquarters in which to waste the day. And the tennis was always the sideshow, a constant soundtrack of grunts and popping racquets.

This was how you spent Labor Day. This was how I spent Labor Day. It could have been 1995 or 1996 or 1997. The year was inconsequential to the real story: a young kid having a day off school to relax and think about the upcoming events of the fall. High school football. Tailgates. Book reports. And so on.

I thought about Labor Day on Monday — what it used to mean, what it means today, how the old routine, movies on basic cable channels, tennis on a blurry 24-inch standard definition television, doesn’t exist today … and, well, couldn’t exist today.

On Monday, I watched 20-year-old Caroline Wozniacki outhustle Maria Sharapova to a straight-sets victory on the blue courts at Flushing Meadows.

It didn’t really feel like Labor Day. I still had to work. The memories of school are fading further and further into the past. And I rarely watch basic cable.

*Who needs movies on basic cable when you have Netflix?

But for a moment — with Wozniacki winning, and with the afternoon off, and with some average comedy on some average cable channel — I was transported back to 1996.

I remember one Labor Day in particular. And I can’t remember if it was TNT or TBS or USA — but I know the movie marathon was promoted as the Labor Day Leisure Day Special. And I remember, as a 10- or 11-year-old kid, there was nothing better.

It was wall-to-wall movies — most with Steve Martin or Chevy Chase. And there were commercials for television shows I never watched — like “Highlander” and “Silk Stalkings” — and there was Pete Sampras exchanging groundstrokes with some old nemesis … Petr Korda? Goran Ivanisevic? Patrick Rafter?

And maybe the movies are only memorable only to me.

But there was Steve Martin and Rick Moranis saving a Little League field in “My Blue Heaven.” And there was “Problem Child 2” … and the subsequent question of our time: why was this movie ever made?

There was “Fletch” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” — and if we were lucky, “Three Amigos.”

And there was nothing better. This was a time when it was still considered socially acceptable to record television movies on VHS Tapes. This was a time when, if you weren’t one of the lucky ones with HBO, and my family surely wasn’t, you still had to go to the video store to find movies without commercials.

And so, as I watched Wozniacki, a 20-year-old former prodigy, a player a full four years younger than me, I wondered where all the time had.

And then… another Labor Day was left in the distance.

Aug 24 2010
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Traffic Jamming

There are times when the words won’t come out, when the fingers punching the keyboard can’t produce what the mind desires.

There are times when excessive commitments from work or social life take away any opportunity to write.

And then there are times when you hear about a nine-day traffic jam in China and the thrill of absurdity and inexplicability knocks down any considerable blogging obstacle.

So, did you hear about the traffic jam?

The one that’s lasted for, oh, about nine days. NINE FREAKING DAYS. People have been caught in traffic. Not moving. In their cars. FOR NINE DAYS.

That’s six days longer than the Isner, Mahut zombie match, longer than “Ben-Hur” and only a day shorter than the average checkout line at Wal-Mart.

And it’s actually still happening, all of it on a road connecting Beijing to inner Mongolia. The armada of cramped, immovable cars stretches for more than 60 miles.

I’ve never been to China, but I’ve read about the driving and the roads and the congestion from the author Peter Hessler. It’s grating. The best way to describe its insanity and mind-warping annoyance is this: Picture the worst traffic you’ve experienced and multiply it by 735, add thicker-than-L.A. smog, an alarming number of Volkswagens, bad tires, and a lack of passion for the well-being of an automobile, and then pretend that in addition to those variables you also have Dane Cook sitting next to you in the passenger seat.

Yeah, it’s that bad. This time it became worse because in addition to the usual problems, there was also construction. Yes, construction. A few oranges cones and cranes have led to a nine-day and counting headache.

Reports say people are playing cards to pass the time and sleeping in their cars. Food comes from vendors who are gouging the unfortunate drivers. But these stories aren’t nearly enough in-depth. This is the biggest event in weird news history. There should be on-the-clock CNN reporting*. So many questions are unanswered.

*Perhaps if there were a balloon boy hovering above, CNN would increase its coverage.

What have people been listening to on the radio?

What if someone left behind his or her cell phone at home that day?

What if you were driving back from a first date?

What do you tell your boss?*

Sorry Bob, not going to be able to make it in today, tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, next Monday, next Tuesday, next Wednesday or next Thursday.

What if you had to go to the bathroom?

What if your air conditioner was broken?

At what point did drivers decide to put the car in park and rest their legs. Or is there still a driver out there with his car on, keeping his foot on the brake pedal and thinking that at any second the flow of traffic could resume?

Even without stories, we know this would be an absolute nightmare. Besides Dane Cook, there are few nuisances in our society worse than traffic. A famous scene in “Office Space” displays our cultural opinion.

Either the bald guy or Michael Bolton is on his way to work. I think it’s the bald guy. Anyways, his lane stops moving so he switches into another that is moving. That lane stops. His former lane starts moving. He switches back. That one stops. He screams, he pounds his steering wheel and that, my friends, is traffic.

But this, this Chinese ordeal, isn’t traffic. It’s beyond that. It really isn’t even a nightmare. Nightmares contain bits of reality. This can’t be real. Our imaginations can’t wander far enough to create such implausible, lasting chaos.

I remember getting stuck in traffic for two and a half hours last fall. There was no construction and no accident. It was just plain ol’ Texas confusion! And it sucked. My IPod shuffle saved the last piece of my sanity.

I can also think of the worst traffic I’ve seen. It was in Cairo. A main avenue was fraught with honking cars and a whole lot of random vehicles, like horse-drawn carriages and makeshift buses where people sat on top of the roof and hung out doors and stopped wherever the quote-un-quote bus driver felt like stopping. There was even a guy in a sweatsuit running in the middle of the road. I’d never seen anything like it.

And this is 735 times worse. Drivers in China are living something beyond the throes of nightmare, and the strangest part is they hardly seem to care.

I looked over and over for quotes about this event, about this insanity, and I kept coming across only one.

It comes from a guy with the last name Wang.* Wang is a trucker. He told a reporter that from CBC News that he had been stuck in the jam for the past three days and two nights.

*Really? In a story about Asians, the lone guy quoted has to have the last name Wang.

He told the reporter that drivers had been advised to take detours, to get the hell out of the mind-bending traffic snarl. But he was going to stand his ground. He wanted to stay as long as he could.

“I would rather stay here,” he said to CBC, “since I will travel more distance and increase my costs.”

And unfortunately there are no words to justify that man’s decision.

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Aug 02 2010
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Nostalgia and Target

Not so long ago, about seven years now, I donned the red shirt and khakis and clipped a sweet walkie-talkie and an inventory scanner gun on one of my belt loops five days a week. Yes, I worked at Super Target.

My position was titled Electronics/Sales Floor. This meant I would make up facts about digital cameras to sound like an expert and stroll around the aisles pretending I was busy for a period of six to eight hours, not listening to what any co-workers said on the aforementioned walkie-talkie. When a guest (not a customer, we called them guests) asked me a question, likely about the location of a specific item, three different outcomes could arise.

One: I would tell them I had no idea where it was and point them in the direction of someone else.

Two: I would hide behind the large tires in the auto section.

Three: I would tell them I didn’t work there, insisting that I was actually wearing a blue shirt and thus they must be color blind for thinking it was red and accosting me.

Somehow I lasted at Super Target for nearly six months. Then again, my shtick probably worked out better than the other employees, considering one of them my age was fired and indicted for stealing thousands of dollars worth of electronics.

All of this comes to mind because I went to Super Target on Sunday in Dallas, looking to buy a new swimsuit,* and the old feelings returned. They always do. Memories of that summer and fall resurface every time.

*And yes, Super Target is considered classy for me. I mean, I could have bought a swimsuit at Wal-Mart.

When I go, I think about my bosses. One of them was named J.R. His breath reeked of a smell that I’d never whiffed before and haven’t since. I suspect it may have been raw fish heads.

Whenever a new person was hired, the first conversation they had with me always followed this dynamic.

New employee: Who the hell is that guy with the toxic breath standing 70 feet away from me?

Me: Oh, that’s J.R. Wait until he finishes eating his “seafood” lunch.

The breath was a great bonding tool, not that we needed any extra bonding. Target made sure of that.

After all, us workers weren’t a group of individuals (there’s no I in Target). We weren’t even an ensemble or a troupe. We were a team, damn it. And teams don’t just go to work and avoid helping guests. They must plan.

So every afternoon or morning we assembled in the warehouse. A boss discussed sales figures and strategy as if we were planning a two-pronged flank attack in the Caucasus region rather than assisting suburban housewives looking to buy the Mercy Me CD, a frozen pizza and a metallic picture frame all in the same place.

The focal point of this strategy often included “bulls eyes.” Bulls eyes were lingo for credit cards. Employees were supposed to ask guests if they wanted to buy a Target credit card EVERY SINGLE TIME they bought something. If I accidentally listened to the walkie-talkie sometimes I would hear about how one of my co-workers (teammates) sold up to three in a day.

In my entire six months, I asked ONE guest about the credit card, begging him to say no, which he did.

So yes, there are some great memories from that summer. And on Sunday, one swirled back that I hadn’t thought of in a long time.

It surfaced in the checkout lane. The cashier charged me $14.99 for the swimsuit, when I had found it on the sales rack that said all swimsuits cost $10.98. I told her this, and right away she entered $10.98 as the price. She didn’t check. She didn’t use her walkie-talkie. She just took my word.

I might have thought this crazy, but then again, maybe she was just like me.

Every once in a while, the Target managers would wrest me from my hiding spot on the sales floor and ask me to help as a cashier. I always ran into difficulties when this happened because I was actually forced to perform a tangible duty. I’d routinely call a manager for help, and one time, he showed me a cool trick.

A guest had argued that a price was incorrect. The manager quickly did some research and found this was indeed the case. Then he entered a code onto the computer that allowed you to override the designated price and enter a new one.

I’m not sure if it was the same day or many days later, but I was back at the cash registers again, forced to actually work. A lady came through with a curious object. I believe it was some kind of decoration for a garden or some sort of interior sculpture for a house. Whatever it was, it looked as high-end as anything could look at Target. It looked expensive, like $100 or up expensive.

“Sir,” she said, “I couldn’t find the price tag for this.”

I looked. There was no tag to scan that would indicate its cost. She said there was no label on the shelf where she found it.

I looked at the line behind her. A throng awaited. I thought back to my manager’s cool trick. And I spit out a number like $40, asking the lady if she would pay that much.

She was shocked. Her face portrayed a mixture of giddiness and mystery. She wasn’t sure if this was legal but she was sure this would get her a great deal, and she quickly agreed.

But my haggling wasn’t finished. I looked at the sculpture or whatever the hell it was and decided to take another $10 off the price.

Bulls eye!

My duties at the cash register ended a few minutes later, and I went back to the sales floor more inspired than ever to pretend I knew information about megapixels and hide behind tires.

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Jul 27 2010
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The end of the shore

1,500 bins of protein
20 new tanning beds
12,000 washes and dries at the local laundromat
6,000 bottles of LA Looks hair gel from Amazon.com

***

You may have heard the news by now and understand the meaning of the numbers at the top of the page.

The cast of the Jersey Shore recently re-upped for a third season and didn’t sign until MTV assured them what could be years of financial security for most normal people. But for the Guidos it makes more sense to describe it as I did above. With the money they make from each episode, they’ll be able to buy either 1,500 bins of protein, 20 new tanning beds, 12,000 rounds of laundry or, yes, 6,000 bottles of hair gel.

For the less-frivolously-inclined, that comes out to $30,000 an episode or about $300,000 for the entire season. That comes out to ways of excess and waste we can’t even comprehend but will likely see on a weekly basis as we watch the Guidos. And it comes out to end of this show’s popularity and charm*.

*I just became the first person to use the word charm to describe the Jersey Shore?

This is the third time I’ve written about the Jersey Shore, and I don’t know why. But I do know why I watch it.

Maybe for some people that question is not so easy to answer. In fact, the New York Times recently featured a story about Snooki in which it stated that most avid viewers of the show can’t even say why. But I believe there is an obvious reason why we tuned into the first season. It was real.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, the Jersey Shore was “a medium for them to express their true desires and feelings, for them to demonstrate and educate to those of us who didn’t believe this type of behavior was possible, for them to attempt to reach hair-gelled, tanning-oil-soaked nirvana.”

We saw their behavior and thought that was really them. Their unquenchable desire to listen and dance to house music, their belief nutrients blended into shake-form made the best meals, and their distaste for any clothing item that didn’t contain rhinestones may have been pathetic (actually, it certainly was), but it was them. They were genuine reality TV personalities.

Now they’re just reality TV stars. And there’s nothing worse than being a reality TV star. Reality TV stars are Flava Flav. They are Kim Kardashian and Sharon Osborne and Paris Hilton. They aren’t real celebrities, but they aren’t real people either. They inhabit a netherworld between fame and normalcy that we don’t envy and can’t relate to.

Shows, starting with season two that begins this week, won’t be so much about discarding grenades and Snooki searching for love.

Because of the money, the Guidos have reached that exalted state of nirvana. Protein is plentiful. Tanning will mean walking downstairs to the basement and a personal booth. Girls will seek the Situation. A really drunk, disturbed, crazy juice-head might actually go after Snooki.

MTV, in the end, is really to blame. The network could have found more Guidos (I’m sure plenty would have loved to audition) and started each season again from with fresh, new headcases.

Instead we’ll get excess and inflated egos and fakeness, the marks of all other reality TV shows, and we’ll quickly discover that, even though a Guido would never admit it, 6,000 bottles of hair gel is too much.

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Jul 19 2010
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Speaking about the Rucker

THE night before our pilgrimage to Rucker Park, we lounged on a Lower East Side rooftop, drinking and talking and people-watching. I was in New York on vacation, time spent with my friend Pat, cousin John and aunt Kathy.

John and his friends wanted to go to the bars and stay out late. Pat and I wanted to join, but partying didn’t reside at the top of our itinerary. We longed for the next morning’s promise of basketball.

To build a trip to the greatest city in the world around a visit to a patch of manicured asphalt anchored on both ends by 10-foot tall hoops would, of course, be foolish. And really, it didn’t seem like we built our trip around playground basketball. But when Pat and I finalized our plans for New York, he mentioned basketball. He had been playing the game often in his new hometown of Washington, D.C. for the last few months and wanted to try it out in the City. I thought of the Rucker immediately.

We had no other concrete plans for the weekend visit. We thought we wanted to bike all over the five boroughs, and my aunt lives close to the Met, and Ray’s Pizza is supposed to be delicious, and, well, we wanted play basketball. So maybe we did build the trip around a game. Maybe we were/are idiots. Either way, playing at the Rucker was a must. The must.

We kept mentioning this on the rooftop as night teetered closer toward early morning. Crowds of young people below passed a decaying church on the way to bars and apartments, and the glowing Chrysler Building touched the sky in the distance. After a couple of beers, another friend of John’s arrived to join the group. He wore high-tops and gym shorts. He had played basketball earlier in the night. He was tall and lanky, and his legs looked like they held the secret of an explosive first step.

I asked him if he had played at the Rucker. He hadn’t and offered an ominous reason.

“You actually have to be good to play there.”

*****

DESPITE the fact that I’m more suburban than Iron Kids bread, I knew about the Rucker because my granny wanted me to read something, anything, on a boring, late-summer day in the tiny burg of McPherson, Kan. We went to a book store on the town’s main strip, and a lightning yellow cover with Shaq, Kobe and the bolded letters of S-L-A-M peeked at me from a shelf of magazines. I loved basketball. All Kansans do. We watch the Jayhawks play in an old barn on the campus where the doctor who invented basketball coached and then go home and rehearse jump shots for hours on hoops hanging above driveways.

Granny bought the magazine for me. I remember reading about the Lakers’ 2000 championship, Duke’s Jason Williams, a high school diary from Eddy Curry and then getting hooked enough to subscribe. Yes, I subscribed to SLAM – kind of wish I still did. And if you’re a suburbanite who even knows what SLAM is then you’re probably already either laughing or blushing in embarrassment because you read a few copies back in the day as well. SLAM was and still is a basketball magazine, only it was more than that. SLAM was the self-proclaimed “in-your-face basketball magazine.”

The writers from SLAM drenched their stories in hip-hop. And SLAM, before And-1 Mixtapes and Hot Sauce, before Skip to My Lou made the NBA, pried me away from plush, private school gymnasiums and into the foreign world of street basketball. Into the Rucker.

The Rucker, I read, was the capital of basketball’s Holy Land. It was Madison Square Garden, only everyone could play there. If, as Rick Telander wrote, heaven is a playground, then the Rucker is the first court you see when you enter the pearly gates.

The Rucker acted as a refuge for Harlem youths and a springboard for superstars. Stephon Marbury, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kenny Anderson and Wilt Chamberlain played there, and they aren’t even the legends. The Rucker’s greatest fame isn’t granted to those who move on to a better basketball life; it’s reserved for the ones who don’t leave, men like Earl Manigault, the Goat. Manigault supposedly had a 52-inch vertical leap. He did the Double Dunk, an impossible move where he dunked, caught the ball as it went through the net while in mid-air and then dunked again. Kareem called him New York’s greatest of all time. His pro career was limited to a failed ABA preseason, and before he died his arms were punctured with holes in the places he injected heroin. But he dominated at the Rucker and that meant something.

After all, the Rucker means something to all New York players. I spoke with former Kansas basketball player Russell Robinson for a story two years ago about his upbringing in the Bronx and Harlem. He loved talking about the days where he’d buy a couple of Arizona Iced Teas for energy and head to playgrounds in the Bronx or to the Rucker for an afternoon of basketball.

So yes, I knew about the Rucker. Knew about the legends. Knew about the history. Knew that Arizona Iced Tea, at least according to Russell, was the street baller’s drink of choice. I knew you had to be good to play there.

And I knew about us. Knew that we were from Overland Park, Kan. Knew that we honed our game firing jump shots on driveways. Knew that we couldn’t jump 52 inches. Knew that our most genuine Harlem experience came when we listened to Mase’s first rap album.

But at least we enjoyed drinking Arizona Iced Tea.

*****

THE M2 bus trekked through Manhattan, past the Park and past 110th into Harlem, and let us off next to the Harlem River. The new Yankee Stadium beckoned from across the water, baseball’s Mecca situated so close to basketball’s.

We stared for a moment and then walked toward 155th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, to the Rucker. It was still early, and it was a Sunday, so men and women scurried around in suits and sun dresses, the wardrobe of the hardcore churchgoer. Even if we weren’t white and from Kansas, the gym shorts and t-shirts would’ve separated us from the people ambling on the sidewalks.

Before we turned the corner to the Rucker, I didn’t know what would happen. Part of me expected near-vacancy. It was early in the morning, and the sun already sizzled streets and skin. In fact, we decided to come at a relatively early time thinking we’d have a better opportunity to stick around in a game for this very reason.

The other part of me thought the opposite. This was the Rucker. I imagined lithe, young bodies dribbling, passing and dunking. I imagined the next Earl Manigault crouching on the sidelines, cradling a ball in his hands while waiting for some real competition and then posterizing the pretenders. Neither time of day nor stickiness of humidity would stop ballers at the Rucker; nor would it allow for two average-at-best outsiders to step on the court and involve themselves in its transcendent game.

Finally at 155th, we could see the Rucker. Lush trees guarded the court and a row of dilapidated project buildings towered across the street. Yellow bleachers, their hue as sharp as the SLAM cover from years ago, commanded attention on one side of the court. Plain metal ones stood on the other. Dark green tinted the playing surface, relenting for maroon lanes, and a fresh mural painted in the middle of the masterpiece depicted LeBron wearing a blue Knicks uniform next to a caption that read “Harlem Loves You LeBron.”

A man loitered on the metal bleachers, solitarily tinkering with a cell phone. He didn’t have a basketball. A father helped his son practice layups on one side of the court. The other side was empty. Our side. I made my first shot, and the swish of the ball in the net sounded like nothing I’d heard from other basketball goals before. The net was nylon, but it sounded like it was chain-link. It was perfect.

We shot for a while, enjoying our time but craving a game, a true Rucker experience. The man from the bleachers walked toward us and held out his hand for the ball. He wore a white t-shirt that sagged over his stocky body. When he made shots, he motioned at me like he didn’t think I knew to give him his change. I began chatting with him, asking about how often he plays and if he thought more people would come for a game. After telling me he thought not many people would show up today, he pointed at LeBron’s gigantic face, saying how badly he wanted him to come to New York. I said it was a good thing that the Knicks had at least signed Amare Stoudemire.

Soon, another man arrived. Pat asked them if they wanted to play two-on-two. Game on.

I am 5-foot-9, perhaps 5-foot-10, with spindly arms and an accurate jump shot. Pat is an inch taller, slightly more built and wins games because he cares more than anyone else. Our opponents were older and bigger. They weren’t muscular but they were thick. The man in the white shirt liked to shoot, and the other one liked to dribble through his legs and attempt crossovers. Neither was particularly fast. Neither appeared to have a 52-inch vertical. This was a good thing.

I did what I do best: made a few dribble moves, floated in the air long enough for my opponent to falter and then delicately released the ball, relying on my touch to save me from what should be a terrible time to shoot. Pat stayed in the post, his moves more polished than his defender’s, and scored often. We took an early lead.

About five to 10 other men filtered onto the metal bleachers, loudly recanting their Saturday nights as our game went on. They arrived one-by-one or in pairs. It seemed a spontaneous gathering. If you wanted to hang out, you walked to the oasis across from the projects, you watched basketball, you swapped stories and you jumped in when the game beckoned.

One time when my man drained a three-pointer, someone hollered from the bleachers in support. Fortunately, that didn’t happen often. The game went to 16, by ones and twos, and we won easily. Our opponents slapped our hands, and the guy guarding me said I played like Steve Nash, exasperation in his voice. It was a flattering, if egregiously untrue, compliment, but I didn’t care much anyways. As we rested on the bleachers and drank now-warm water from plastic bottles, I thought about the impossibility of the circumstance: We, two Kansas boys south of six-feet, had control of the court. We had control of the freaking Rucker.

A few minutes passed. The men who arrived during our game now wanted to play. One of them joined our side, and we would play a game of three-on-three. No one asked where we were from or why we came. We checked the ball and played.

Our teammate was ripped like a linebacker and wore a sleeveless shirt. He invited contact but didn’t embrace it. He grunted, “Get off me, nigga,” playfully but never actually called fouls. We were hopeless. Pat bended over breathlessly after baskets, and a hip injury from a few years ago stabbed my side every time I tried to shuffle my feet or make a first step. We trailed by plenty when my man dribbled to his left. He flashed by for a layup, a wave of long legs and dreadlocks.

“Is the game over?” Pat asked.

They laughed. No, it was just 15-8. One point away from elimination, one point away from a .500 record at the Rucker, an accomplishment we would have happily accepted.

Then something crazy happened. Anger shifted into success for the Harlem guy on our team. Pat’s low post moves started complimenting him perfectly. I said to hell with my hip and started driving again.

I wish I remembered the exact baskets, but I don’t. I remember the sweat, the panging heat, the voice in my head switching its tone from leisure to rage and an abstract flurry of beautiful basketball produced by a Harlem native and us not because the artists painted with deft strokes but because the perfect canvas willed us to try.

16-15.

We won. We were still undefeated at the Rucker. We had controlled the court, again, but the two games were enough. The sun blazed and my hip ached. We shook hands with our opponents, waved so long to the players in the bleachers and walked toward a bodega on the corner of 155th for Arizona Iced Teas.

Right before that, before the Harlem men began the next game and before we retreated to reality I had to make my last shot. For years I have practiced the superstition, believing it is bad luck to leave any court having missed my final attempt.

I planted my legs on holy ground for the final time and aimed toward the hoop where the gods double dunk. I was Russell Robinson, I was Kareem, I was the Goat, I was the kid fascinated by the stories of the same game practiced in a different world.

The ball rippled through the net, sounding just right, the way I imagine it does for everyone.

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Jun 24 2010
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Breaking point

Damn the summer sporting scene. Daytime events just don’t fit into schedules of the working individual.

I, a sportswriter nonetheless, spent the morning at Starbucks sipping on a frappucino (Java Chip) while writing a story for a special high school sports summer section (concussions).*

*The job sure beats digging ditches, eh?

This, of course, meant no World Cup. This was the second time in a row I would miss the U.S. team’s match. I had already missed the coach’s son’s kick and the infamous referee from Mali. What more could I miss? It couldn’t get any worse than that, right?

At around 11 a.m., I received a text from fellow BrewHouse writer Rustin Dodd, bearing this message: Do you believe in miracles? YES!.

My response was acute: Damn it I missed the goal. I really need to start slacking more at work and watch more sports.

Quickly, I received a phone call and scheduled an interview for another story I was working on. Minutes later, Rustin called. He asked me if I had been watching Wimbledon, if I had been paying attention lately to the John Isner match.

The answer was a mild yes. As much as it pained me to miss Team USA play its last two matches, no sporting hurt caused by a work schedule stings as much as the type doled out during the summer Grand Slam schedule. The French Open and Wimbledon are nearly impossible to watch live. Nearly impossible.

Going into today, I knew about the Taylor Dent-Novak Djokovic match, Federer’s match against the qualifier and about Isner and Nicolas Mahut. I planned to check the scores on the Internet as I worked. That’s really all I could do in order to stay productive.

And then Rustin called. I told him I had checked the Isner score about an hour ago and saw that it was 11-10 in the fifth. I had already thought this score was both surprising and outstanding.

And then Rustin served up the ace. He said it was 27-27 in the fifth set.

I had two choices: stay at the coffee shop and refresh the scoring page every minute or go home and put work on the back burner for a little while.

I chose to speed home. And I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

At first, the Isner-Mahut match played out like a moment of triumphant history happening live on TV. I made a sandwich and watched. Surely it would end soon but hopefully not too soon. I did want to watch some of it.

After a few minutes, it was 30-30. Then 33-33. And I began noticing something.

Isner really didn’t appear to be moving around the court well when he wasn’t serving. It wasn’t that he was dogging it, no, not at all. He’s 6-foot-9, and he was exhausted.

As for Mahut, he appeared to be in ridiculous shape, at a nearly perfect fitness level for a tennis player. He wasn’t going to tucker out, yet he couldn’t return Isner’s bullet serves.

This was an obvious conundrum. Neither player was going to get a break and thus the match would last forever.
I mentioned this to my roommate, Joe, who was at home eating lunch. Hearing this, he decided that we should change the channel and play FIFA. I agreed, but was then interrupted by a phone call from a source.

For 45 minutes, I discussed with him his time in the military, typing out the words furiously. They passed through my mind, and I comprehended them, but it sounded like Isner and Mahut were the ones talking. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

But it had been 45 minutes. The match had already lasted longer than any in history by a hell of a lot. I know I made that comment about this match having the potential to literally last forever, but it was half in jest.

The score was 48-48 when I returned to the living room. I sat.

And sat.

And sat.

Sitting on the couch, I began to feel like my life was intertwined with this match and that everyone else who watched felt the same way. We had given up part of our day, given up productivity, given up time, and we had to see that our sacrifice would pay off in the form of seeing the end of a historical sporting event.

But it never ended.

It was pleasure, yet torture at the same time. It felt like we were all out there on Court 18, rewarded with the joy of tennis but punished with having to experience tennis and nothing else for eternity.

Normalcy, i.e. our job, our day, our families etc., couldn’t resume until this match ended, until one of the sweating men hit match point and that Rolex game clock on the side of the court stopped.

Around 3:45 p.m., this nearly happened. Isner had two break points and quite a few other opportunities on Mahut’s serve. There were only four break points in the entire fifth set, and here were two of them. This was it. This was perfect, right at dusk. Life could resume with still an hour left in the traditional working day.

But, as a Guardian blogger, Xan Brooks, put it, (and you must check out his hilarious live blog): “A tweet, a tweet from Mr. Andy Murray. “This,” he says, “is why tennis is one of the toughest sports in the world.” Thanks for that Andy: wise words indeed. Actually we were hoping you were tweeting to say when the angel was coming to rescue us all. Instead we get that. You sit comfortably, and eat your nice dinner, and spare us the tweets. Unless they’re about the angel, that is. We still have hopes for the angel. And ooh look, it’s 57-games all.”

Murray hadn’t invested himself in this match. He could eat his “comfortable dinner.” I had invested. The Guardian blogger had. Anyone who gave up their time to watch tennis had.

And while we watched, at least on TV, we didn’t quite notice that the dusk was turning into straight darkness. The game was tied at 59 when the two players approached the umpire.

Mahut wanted to postpone the match. Isner didn’t. The umpire seemed to want to play another two games (like that would help).

Mahut won. AND WE ALL LOST.

So now here I am, almost 11 at night. I wanted room for summer sports in my daily life but not like this. I can’t sleep. I can only think of awe and disgust but mainly awe about tennis.

And it will only increase. Closure hasn’t come yet and might not for a while. Isner and Mahut resume their marathon on Thursday, meaning daily life shifts back to Court 18 for a little while longer.

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