Strange day
Among other things, April 18th marks the date of:
The Great San Francisco Earthquake in 1906
And in 1881 Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico. (the jail is now a tchotchke shop in Mesilla Plaza.)
Month: April 2010
Saturday is rantacular!
An open letter to the Bay Area’s NBC-11 (KNTV) television station
Dear programming directors at my local television station, NBC-11:
I’d like to begin our conversation by thanking you for televising Friday night’s San Francisco Giants baseball game on your regular ol’ not-cable television station.
For people like me who have gone back to days of yore by using rabbit ears to tune in my television, it’s fun to actually get a chance to watch my home team instead of only being able to listen on the radio.
The Good Man and I celebrated by eating bratwurst for dinner to get in the mood.
Very cool.
That said…
I’d like to kindly remind you that your whole reason for being in Los Angeles Friday night was to video and broadcast the game on behalf of your home viewers.
You know, the residents of the Bay Area? The SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area?
See, here’s the funny thing, by and large, on Friday, your viewers in the San Francisco Bay Area were all actively watching your fine station in order to see the Giants play baseball.
You know, the SAN FRANCISCO Giants?
So when you spend large portions of the game focused solely on Matt Kemp, giddy about Matt Kemp, how wonderful is Matt Kemp, showing us Matt Kemp in the dugout, Matt Kemp in the on deck circle, Matt Kemp picking his nose, you might fail to understand why I might be rather upset?
Why would I be this upset? Because %$!&ing Matt Kemp is a sonova$%#@ing player for the Dodgers!
How do I know this? Well, you see, I was able to take a gander at the front of his jersey. You might try this trick. Focus your freaking camera on him in every idle second, and you might get a close up look at the letters on his chest. Can you see it? Can you see it says D…O…D…G….
….ARE YOU EVEN PAYING ATTENTION!?!?!?!?!?
You are broadcasting a Giants game to Giants fans! Screw the Dodgers fans in the Bay Area! Who cares about them? They are not your core demographic!
I do not want to see Manny Ramirez unless he’s batting. I do not want to see Casey Blake unless he’s fielding a ball. I do not give one miniscule rat’s ASS about Matt Kemp unless he is batting or actively making a play.
And I give even less than a miniscule rat’s ass about all of the repeated views of Matt’s Kemp’s adorable little girlfriend Rhianna sitting in the stands.
Yes, we’re all very excited that Matt Kemp is dating Rhianna. Yes, she’s very cute. Yes, I know all you big sport broadcasting boys are squeeing with glee about the chance to film Rhianna sitting there with a hoodie over her head looking all cool. I know she’s like, oh my god, whoa, isn’t that the coolest thing ever, double squee!
But for f*ck’s sakes! Let’s just let the LA station broadcast the gratuitous lingering camera shots of their own players and their own players girlfriends.
Hey, here’s a cost saving idea! Why don’t *you* just use LA’s KCAL television feed for the next Giants-Dodgers game? That way I can, at the very least, listen to the dulcet tones of Vin Scully call the game.
At least that would be something interesting!
Now.
That said.
Saturday’s game is nationally televised on Fox. You know that that means? That means Joe Buck.
I guran-frapping-tee you that your crappy Friday night television coverage will hold up well by comparison to Joe freakin’ Buck’s uninspired and wooden-like call. I plan on feeling nauseated. Buck’s voice usually inspires that in me..
Because, NBC-11, you suck, but Joe Buck sucks worse.
And that’s something to build on.
Baseballically yours,
Karen
P.S. These are my pants. They are cranky. That is all.
Image found here.
Keeping it in the family
Last night, The Good Man took me to see a play called “Perla” staged by Teatro Vision at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose.
The play was written by Leonard Madrid, a native New Mexican, and is set on the front porch of a home in Portales, NM. (funny, there in the theater, they didn’t capture that certain “wind off the feed lot” that I always associate with Portales.)
The story surrounds a pair of sisters who were raised by their very protective aunt after their father, a noted Norteño singer, ran off, and their mother died (both of sorrow and of cancer). The younger sister, Perla, goes on a quest in dreams and reality to find her lost father. However, finding him proves to be less fulfilling than she’d hoped.
Supporting a New Mexican playwright was my first objective. As an added bonus, I was pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the Mexican Heritage Plaza, and the efforts the cast went to in order to capture their characters.
One of the main cast members is married to a man from New Mexico, so she used her mom-in-law for guidance.
They also had a New Mexico woman as dramaturge. Yeah, ok, I had to look up that word. It’s the person who helps set the time and place for the cast so they can build their characters. So the New Mexican dramaturge had the job to help the cast and crew understand New Mexico.
Mostly, they did a pretty good job. There were a couple anachronisms, but in general, they caught the flavor and culture of my home state.
I *might* be a bit protective about my home…you know, just a little. So of course I had an eagle eye out on everything.
As we went on a preview night, the cast hadn’t fully relaxed into their lines, but it was a wonderful story and well told by the actors. It felt like the director may have over edited the script a bit, as there were leaps in time that didn’t flow smoothly, but mostly, it was a sad tale that ends with redemption.
My favorite part was a young girl who led Perla around in dreamscape, much like the Coyote Angel from The Milagro Beanfield War.
As there is the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Conference happening this week in San Jose, there were a lot of people from all over visiting San Jose who also came to see the show. It was fun to hear the New Mexico people in the audience finding each other.
“I’m from Taos, and my friend is from Silver City,” I heard a few rows back. And I smiled. My people.
The only sad part of the night for me was when one of the employees of the theater told me that on opening night this weekend, they are making sopapillas.
I gasped when he said that! I am going to miss the sopapillas?!?!
Then he replied, “yeah, that seems to be the reaction of all the people from New Mexico. I had no idea that sopapillas were such a big deal.”
Oh silly non-New Mexican yet very kind man…sopapillas are like a religion, second only to the cult of green chile!
The poor, downtrodden, much ignored lunchmeat
Liverwurst.
Poor lonely liverwurst sitting there in the corner of the deli case, wishing for somebody to love it with a slice of swiss and generous helping of mustard on a nice marble rye.
I think it’s that word “liver” in the name that puts people off, despite there being only being maybe 10%-20% of actual liver in the product.
I suppose if McDonalds served a McLiver and fries, it might be hip and people would eat it without thinking.
But sadly, no.
Liverwurst and its lonely brother braunschweiger get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
I, myself, am a HUGE fan of braunschweiger (owing to the partial German heritage of both my parents), but when I eat it, my loving, studiously liver-avoiding husband refuses to give me a smooch for quite some time after consumption.
This is obviously a big point of consideration.
So if it comes down to smooches or sandwiches, I’ll take the smooches and leave the braunschweiger to the “only very rarely” category.
However…that being said, we have a well understood agreement that whenever we manage to find ourselves in a real deli (like Molinari or Carnegie) I will order a chicken liver salad, no questions asked.
These sorts of negotiations keep our marriage humming along, I think.
Anyhow…..
By the by, in case you are wondering why I am opining about liverwurst? It’s because it was the word of the day on my WordBook Dictionary iPhone app.
I had open that app today so I could look up a ten cent college-level word that my friend NewMexiKen threw out there on Twitter. It was a doozy!
And then I got lost in thoughts of lunch.
To you, that may look like a brown lump, but to me, that’s a lump of tasty goodness!!
