Brian's [a] Straight Dope

I'll Have the Tantan Udon

Although a couple days have already past as I write this, I still have good memories of a day off Valarie and I spent on Monday. She had the MLK holiday, and I’d worked for about twelve hours straight on a story deadline on Sunday, so I decided not to work very hard on Monday.

We hadn’t been to breakfast for a few weeks, and Valarie had an inspired idea: Café DuBerry. This is a little hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop kind of place on Southeast Macadam that we’d meant to try for several years. Back in the late 1990s, there was a Willamette Week cover story about Brian Grant of the Blazers, and how he was a likable, law-abiding star in the making that fans could rally around. The reporter set one portion of the article in Café DuBerry, citing it as a favorite restaurant of Grant’s.

The place actually calls itself a “country French” restaurant, and the walls are painted yellow inside with a dinner menu that includes French onion soup and some of the other bistro staples. And the breakfast we had was fabulous. My order of eggs benedict, a dish I order frequently at brunch, was probably more flavorful than just about any I’ve had. The ham was particularly salty, and the hollandaise sauce over the poached eggs seemed to have just an extra pinch of lemon juice.

Valarie’s French toast was unlike virtually any either of us have had. More than the standard bread soaked in milk re-fried, its interior texture was so soft that it seemed to have only come from making batter from scratch. It reminded me of my treasured recipe for my Grandpa’s buttermilk pancakes, which is right up there with seared foie gras, chocolate-chip cookies a perfect diner cheeseburger among my all-time culinary favorites.

That evening we made the latest in a succession of trips to Biwa, a relatively new Japanese and Korean-oriented restaurant specializing in grilled meats as well as homemade noodles and broth. It sits on the corner of an old building in Southeast Portland that used to house the Pine Street Theater rock club (also known as La Luna) but now is home to the Simpatica restaurant/catering company and a couple other businesses. The building is essentially on the ground floor but sinks down into the ground about halfway toward being a basement. So it feels cozy with its raw concrete and sleek wood tables but there is still plenty of light peeking through if you come before dark. Biwa always smells incredible because of the grilled meats, and for a starter I returned to an old standby: pork belly, which of course is kind of like bacon only without the built-in smoky flavor. I also got a skewer of grilled garlic cloves. When properly cooked, garlic cloves are so incredibly sweet and soft, almost like candies.

Then for my main course was a noodle dish called “Tantan Udon”, which naturally made me think of The Empire Strikes Back. "This may smell bad, kid, but it'll keep you warm," I told Valarie in my best Han Solo voice. But the Udon didn't smell bad at all. It had stewed curried oxtail over thick homemade udon noodles. Yes, oxtail, a delicacy I've only had once previously at a now-defunct soul food restaurant and laundromat. I dreamt of my tantan udon for hours the rest of that night, and I’ve continued to think of it occasionally since. And my memory goes back to that smoky modern concrete half-basement. Admittedly the Sapporo accompanying dinner was a larger-sized one, so maybe that added a bit to the mellow euphoria of it all. But Biwa routinely sets us off blissfully like this.

And I haven’t even talked about the trip to our favorite local Mexican fast food restaurant, La Sirenita, on the Sunday before our double-whammy restaurant good fortune on MLK day. I feel slightly silly waxing poetic for too long about a shredded beef burrito and a pork taco, but save for the gut-bomb feeling that came afterward, they were nearly as blissful as the eggs benedict, the pork belly, and the Tantan Udon.

In between for much of Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, we watched Australian open matches into the wee hours and ate a succession of snack foods. It wasn’t a three-day weekend for me, but that third day was definitely a holiday.

Spinning on Highway 47

It’s 8:00PM on Christmas night and it feels like midnight. Which is not to say that I had a bad day overall. Quite the contrary, actually. But a few important seconds of it really sucked.

Driving home from my uncle and aunt’s house in the country near Forest Grove, Oregon, about an hour away from Portland my car suddenly slid on a patch of black ice. It had snowed at their house for several hours, but the main roads seemed to be relatively snow and ice-free (although it was accumulating in the shoulder) as I began the drive home. But as I was driving about 45 miles per hour down a straightaway (about five or ten miles under the limit due to the conditions), out of nowhere I came across the icy portion.

First I began sliding one direction, turned the wheel, and began sliding in the other direction. Ultimately I did a 360-degree turn and slid into a ditch. I wasn’t hurt, thankfully, and I was in cell phone range, and was able to call for a tow-truck. My sneakers submerged with icy water as I stepped out of the car, which was slanted with the driver’s side in a ditch. I also have retained this tactile sense in my mind of the feeling of coarse but icy, snow-covered tall grass on my hands, which I at one point was pulling out out by handfuls in hopes of wedging under the left back car wheel, the one stuck in a half foot of ditch water. But icy appendages were clearly the least of it compared to the accident I watched happen a few seconds later as I was on phone for the tow.

What really pains me is that it probably started because someone had slowed down to see if I was alright. I had the hazard lights flashing and was standing next to the car on the side of the road. A second car slowed behind the first car, and then I saw approaching a car that was, despite the snowy conditions, seemingly going at close to full speed. (But then again, so was I.) We often think we see accidents about to happen, or at least I do. There is that surreal moment when you believe you in a millisecond that inevitability of a crash, but there’s no time to do anything to stop it. And thankfully 999 times out of 1,000 they don’t happen. This one happened, in that same mind‘s eye slow motion, at least until you see and hear the crash.

The next thankful thing is that no one seemed to be too seriously injured. According to one of the firemen I talked to on the scene later, one person had chest pains and another had some lower back pain. But having been in a collision fifteen years ago that I walked away from relatively pain free, I know that down the road pain can suddenly arise. In my case, it’s stuck with me for much of those ensuing years in the form of recurrent head and neck pain. Certainly it wasn’t my fault if those people have any kind of mental or physical pain. But it’s still bothersome being even tangentially connected to it.

When the two fire trucks and an ambulance arrived on each side of me as I stood beside my ditched BMW, I was reminded of that familiar, maybe even cliché description of it being like a movie. The lights flashing on either side, the crunched metal, the freezing rain coming down amidst a handful of firemen who looked to be in their twenties. I thought of the slow-motion shot of flashing police-car lights at the end of Taxi Driver when Travis Bickel goes on his shooting spree. And since I’ve been at home, I comforted myself with a glass of wine and a high-volume listening of my favorite album of the moment, “Friend and Foe” by Menomena, which in many of the songs has this baritone saxophone in the background that I totally love, but also hearkens back to Bernard Herman’s heavily brass and horn-infused score for Taxi Driver. Thankfully the accidents tonight weren’t that violent. Worst-case scenario, somebody might eventually need a few chiropractor visits.

Incidentally, the lyrics from one of those Menomena songs seem fitting:

Should my soul should survive this fall,
Then I pray if I pray at all,
That I can catch my breath and,
Come away unscathed,
Away unscathed

To have been in an accident on Christmas night in the snow and ice, and then witness cars crashing into each other as they slowed to survey my scene, and still wind up at home in my sweat pants and slippers, with my beloved fat cat Ruthie now plopped on the top of the easy chair I’m writing this from, not to mention a more or less completely intact car, is in my mind extraordinarily luckily. I even had another uncle and aunt from the Christmas gathering in a car lined up behind the accident scene, ready to give me a lift home had my car not been drivable. Still, when I close my eyes, as I did sprawled out on the sofa just now with the hideous tattered leopard-skin blanket I’ve had since early childhood, I feel dizzy as if I’m still spinning. I still feel the car doing its 360 into the embankment.

But maybe there could be some good to come out of it. As anyone who rides with me knows, I tend to drive way too fast. Although I try hard not to cut off or otherwise annoy other drivers, on any multi-lane freeway or other road where you can go 55-plus, I feel alive weaving in and out of traffic and getting past the car in front of me. Tonight I wasn’t driving like that. I was driving slow and through no fault of my own I hit some ice, did a whirling-dervish routine and slid off the road. But whenever I’ve had a driving trauma like this, however unharmed physically I may have been afterward, it’s always been a bit like reset button that, even if temporarily, shocks me back into more prudence behind the wheel.

Naturally it’s way too early to tell, but I also can’t help but wonder if this could be the marking point I need to sort of turn the page on this period of the past few weeks. As I described in my previous “Steve and Dennis” post, it’s taken a long time to come out of the psychological, emotional mire after first losing a loved one to cancer (the first of my generation from the family), and then having the Ducks football team whose fortunes my emotions (including many non-sports-related ones) are so intricately bound to suffer its most tragic season in 113 years of play...Well, frankly it’s really sucked.

Believe me, I’m not saying this accident was anything pleasant. But such a jar to the system, even one ultimately so benign, is cause to reboot my system of tendencies, assumptions, and ways of seeing my little world. I think of the petty hostility I felt toward a Beaver fan who told my sister she was going to laugh in my dad’s face. Wasn’t that the same thing I’ve been doing to Michigan fans for the past few months when I see them? Who the hell was I to get righteous?

With the reset button deployed, though, I feel shaken up, which overall is not good, of course, but it reminds me not to worry about what Beaver fans or other people think. Things may feel fragile right now, but still something to cherish. In fact, all the more for having been through this wintry spin cycle on Highway 47.

I've already started to feel better, though, here at home again. I was comforted by some of my Christmas gifts, not because they were material objects but in spite of it. Two favorites had personal meaning, too. One gift, from my 90-something grandma whom we visited in Eugene on Sunday, was a 70-year-old certificate commemorating my grandfather's crossing of the Equator for the first time while in the Navy. Apparently it's a rite of passage. It was a kitschy certificate, signed by Neptune and with lots of faux-Ye olde type of writing in calligraphy. But it commemorated a moment that's quietly breathtaking to imagine, of my grandpa on July 14, 1937 at not only the Equator, but also at its precise intersection with the International Date Line at 180 degrees longitude in the Pacific.

And as if all that weren't enough, the whole thing happened while his ship was at sea as part of the search party for Amelia Earhart.

My other gift is slightly self-centered, but authentically meaningful. On Shutterfly.com you can upload your own digital photos and collect them into a bound book. I did so with just over 75 photos from my recent trip to Beijing. Getting me the book stressed out my poor mom because I deliberately chose a blurry photo for the cover (of a Mao Tse Tung portrait in Tiananmen Square), but she thought it was a mistake, and thus spent hours on the phone to Shutterfly in addition to printing out a bunch of 800 numbers I could call to fix it. After the accident tonight, I felt myself flipping through the photo book over and over again, as if to remind myself that if I hadn't been so lucky as I was tonight with my car losing control, at least I'd been able to put a few very memorable pins on the proverbial map.

And tonight's being Christmas is not insignificant. I like to think of the hopefulness that a birth represents. Certainly given how I came through the off road adventure with scacely a scratch, I didn't undergo anything resembling real suffering. I think it was more like our cat Ruthie when she gets startled (which happens about every three or four minutes) and, as Valarie and I call it, fluffy: her hair standing up so she looks inflated, electrocuted or just in from a hurricane. (Actually, she always looks inflated now that I think about it.) I guess I got fluffy tonight, and the fluffiness takes longer to work itself out of my mind than the actual experience was.

Really I just need to be more like my friend Paul, who in high school during snowstorms would happily drive us all over in his beige Volkswagon bus, even deliberately spinning us wildly back and forth diagonally across the road, howling with laughter as the rest of us saw our lives flash before our eyes to the tune of Van Halen songs booming out of Paul's prized Kicker brand speakers.

Oh, and here's one other cool part. It turns out my car had a tool kit for just such a roadside emergency, as if Batman is designing cars out in Bavaria. The tow-truck guy just unscrewed the little toolkit from the inside of the trunk lid, took out a big screw with a circular ring on the end, screwed it into a little port on my car's back bumper that had been hidden by a little plastic flap, and hooked it to his truck. The work-order description on my pink customer-copy receipt says it all: "Winch out of ditch." And there aren't too many ways in which I've been more enthusiastically willing to fork over $73.

This is the part where I think of a clever way to wrap this all up, but I'm afraid I don't feel like it this time. I'm sleepy, but my feet are now dry and there is a Looney Tunes DVD awaiting liberation from its shrink wrap.

Things I've Learned About The Smurfs (or Les Schtroumpfs)

Although it's not a regular part of my freelance writing work, every once in awhile I have reviewed videos in the past for The Oregonian and, before that, Willamette Week. They usually seem to wind up being releases I already had some kind of personal taste for or guilty-pleasure attachment to.

A few years ago, for example, I wrote a loving ode to Top Gun upon a "special edition" DVD release, admitting all the while that it was the most vacant kind of cheesy action movie but one with plenty of enjoyment, depending on one's attitude and, if you're the right age to have watched it as a teen like I was, a good dose of nostalgia. More recently, I reviewed a volume in the ongoing Looney Tunes "Golden Collection" series of DVDs. It was a chance to have a take not only on those cartoons within the disc, but also to wax about the genius of Warner Brothers cartoons made between roughly World War II and Vietnam.

I'm on an email list to receive press releases from a couple different video labels like WB. And today, for some reason, I found myself surprisingly susceptible to news of "The Smurfs: The Complete First Season" being released on DVD.

"The Smurfs" cartoon series was on a lot during my childhood. Yet I never considered myself a fan. It seemed too wimpy for my taste. No explosions! Not even anyone falling off a cliff! But as an unequivocally devoted Child of Television, I watched "The Smurfs" a lot anyway. Because that's what cartoon was on at that time of day. If it was a morning before school, an afternoon afterward, or a Saturday morning between about 7AM and noon, I was dutifully watching TV. And the preference was always for cartoons. Only a couple old live-action sitcoms in rerun syndication like The Brady Bunch or (to a lesser extent) Gilligan's Island could compare.

Staring at this press release about the Smurf DVD today, I'd like to think it was with more of a nostalgia-free lens than usual, because I have never yearned to be watching that cartoon again. I mean, it's actually one of the only children's cartoons from the era of my own childhood that seems weird and almost downright creepy to think about. (Strawberry Shortcake might also fit that definition, come to think of it.) Who are these Smurfs, anyway, with their blue skin and their replacement of every other word with their own name?

For some reason I can't completely put my finger on, there's something so downright surreal about The Smurfs that I find myself drawn to it in a deer-in-the-headlights kind of way. There's something so banal about the show, particularly the cartoon, yet it also had just enough of a fairy-tale theme that it could vaguely tap into our pre-existing notion of that kind of Hansel & Gretel world existing somewhere uncharted out there in the forest. Maybe because of that forest and the mixture of weirdness with banality, The Smurfs almost feel Lynchian.

Which was why, on a whim, I requested a reviewer's copy of the DVD and happened to look up "The Smurfs" on Wikipedia. Surprisingly, the Smurfs actually have much longer of a history than I would have thought. What's next, some kind of ancient Pac-Man game played in the dirt by Druids?

The Smurfs (originally Les Schtroumpfs in French) are a fictional group of small sky blue creatures who live somewhere in the forests of medieval Europe. The Belgian cartoonist Peyo introduced Smurfs to the world in a series of comic strips, making their first appearance in the Belgian comics magazine Le Journal de Spirou on October 23, 1958.

At the time, Peyo created a Franco-Belgian comics series in Le Journal de Spirou titled Johan et Pirlouit (translated to English as Johan and Peewit), set in Europe during the Middle Ages. Johan serves as a brave young page to the king, and Pirlouit (pronounced Peer-Loo-ee) functions as his faithful, if boastful and cheating, midget sidekick.

Johan and Peewit had the mission of recovering a Magic Flute, which required some sorcery by the wizard Homnibus. And in this manner, they met a tiny, blue-skinned humanoid creature in white clothing called a "Schtroumpf", followed by his numerous peers who looked just like him, with an elderly leader who wore red clothing and a beard. The characters proved to be a huge success, and the first independent Smurf stories appeared in Spirou in 1959, together with the first merchandising.

"Schtroumpf" is an invented word. The pronunciation of "Schtroumpf" in French is quite similar to the German word "Strumpf" (English "sock"), but there is no indication that this is more than a coincidence.

According to Peyo, the word came to him as he asked André Franquin for "salt" during lunch and, struggling to find the word that eluded him, finally managed to say "passe-moi le schtroumpf" ("pass me the smurf"). It would later be translated into nearly 30 languages and, in some of those languages, "Schtroumpf" became "Smurf" (see The Smurfs in other languages). The word "Smurf" was first used in Dutch, as the comics were simultaneously published in French (in Spirou magazine) and Dutch (in Robbedoes, the Dutch translation of the magazine).

The storylines tend to be simple tales of bold adventure. The cast has a simple structure as well: almost all the characters look essentially alike — male, very short (just "three apples tall"), with blue skin, white trousers with a hole for their short tails, white hat in the style of a Phrygian cap, and sometimes some additional accessory that identifies their personality. (For instance, Handy Smurf wears overalls instead of the standard trousers, a brimmed hat, and a pencil above his ear). Smurfs can walk and run, but often move by skipping on both feet. They love to eat smilax leaves, whose berries the smurfs naturally call smurfberries (the smurfberries appear only in the cartoon, in the original comics, the Smurfs only eat the leaves from the smilax).

The male Smurfs almost never appear without their hats, which leaves a mystery amongst the fans as to whether they have hair or not.

Of course, here in America we got a much more sanitized, antiseptic version of these characters and stories. But that's somehow part of what intrigues me now. The Smurfs have always had an arresting visual look because of their simplicity and sameness: white legs and hat, blue torso, repeated in every one of them except a select few male Smurfs and of course the lone "Smurfette". Can you imagine, by the way, being the lone woman in a Medieval village, surrounded by males? No wonder NBC sanitized the cartoon.

Somehow it just figures that The Smurfs were created by a French-speaking European. It's something about the look: it's as if knickers or liederhosen are somehow implied. The Smurfs definitely are more plausible as Belgians than as Americans.

But then again, as an American in love with traveling outside the country, maybe that inherent foreignness is what attracts me. Maybe in some crazy way the Smurfs represent the desire to get out of my comfort zone once in awhile and experience people who look different from myself.

Then again, though, to intellectualize too much about these little blue cartoon characters seems like total mother-smurfing bullsmurf.

Steve and Dennis

Three Sunday evenings ago, I had one of the most blissful moments I’d ever experienced.

I’d just returned from Beijing an hour or two earlier and was very relieved to be home amidst familiar faces and surroundings. Valarie made chocolate cupcakes as a welcome-home treat, and Ruthie fell asleep on my lap. I knew I’d have to leave again in less than 36 hours, with a Chicago business trip scheduled for Tuesday. But the fleeting nature my time at home after Beijing made me appreciate it all the more.

Then it got even better. With jet lag keeping me awake and Valarie gone to sleep, I turned on ESPN to catch up with the goings-on in sports. It was just two days after Oregon’s victory over Arizona State, the first time two teams ranked in the top 5 had played at Autzen. With a nationwide viewing audience, the country had got another close look at quarterback Dennis Dixon and the thoroughbred-like Duck offense. After disposing of USC the week before and now the undefeated Sun Devils, the Ducks had risen to the #3 ranking in the country, a feat matched only once before (the 2001 season) in the team’s 113-year history. Although they would have the following week off, Oregon would climb the following week to the #2 ranking. They also received 22 votes for #1, the first ones the Ducks have ever received.

Still, what ESPN college football analyst Kirk Hirbstreet said next practically knocked me out of my chair: “Dennis Dixon is in the driver’s seat for the Heisman Trophy.” I even left Valarie a note on the kitchen table for her to read the next morning, full of exclamation points with the news. Having written the Ducks history that came out this year, Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sideline, I can confidently tell you that no University of Oregon player has ever been considered the front runner for this most prestigious of sporting awards. Not once in 113 seasons.

It wasn’t so much that Dixon’s Heisman candidacy was a bigger achievement from the team being 8-1 at that point, but I’ve always ached for recognition as much as achievement for the Ducks, and to hear Dixon and the team talked about so glowingly by the national media who once ignored them was a lifelong Duck fan’s dream come true. ESPN, Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS - they all covered Dixon and the team with great enthusiasm starting from the Michigan win on September 8, the showdown with Cal on September 29 through the victory over (and apparent dethroning of) USC on October 27, the ASU game that would be Dixon's last to start and finish on November 3rd, and past the bye week to the fateful Arizona game in which Dixon's mildly torn anterior cruciate ligament (hidden from everyone but the coaches and doctors, and called a strain to the outside world) was more thoroughly wrecked, putting him out for the season.

And besides the media attention it brought, the Ducks were walking the talk. As my longtime friend and fellow Duck fan Joel put it, Oregon's offense at full strength--with Dixon, running backs Jonathan Stewart and Jeremiah Johnson, receivers Brian Paysinger and Cameron Colvin, and all the other now injured players--was quite simply "a thing of beauty--unstoppable".

In 1995 I travelled to Pasadena to see Oregon play in the Rose Bowl. The opponent was undefeated and #2-ranked Penn State (also undefeated Nebraska beat them for the top slot by just a few votes) behind quarterback Kerry Collins and running back Ki-Jana Carter, which at the time was called one of the best offenses in the history of college football. For 2003-2005 I watched my sister's school, USC, amass one of the greatest college teams of all time behind Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Lindale White, Lofa Tatupu, and Mike Williams. I have every faith in the world that Oregon's 2007 offense at full strength ranked with those great historic teams.

The next morning following the arrival from Beijing, my first at home in several days, I continued to feel wonderful. And if you ask Valarie, I normally never will admit to feeling even good for fear of jinxing myself. Usually on even the best days all you’ll get from me was that it was okay, or not bad. This morning I felt great.

But then I opened my email. A message from my mom broke the joyful spell: my cousin Steve, who had been battling cancer for a long while, was in his final moments. I thought about driving down to Eugene to see him, but before I could even spend much time reacting, the phone rang. My mom called to say that Steve had passed away.

He’d been battling cancer for awhile now, and the end wasn’t a surprise in that the doctors had declared it a terminal case some months ago. But Steve was only 39, and with his wife Theresa they had three young children. Steve was a police chaplain, and his very religious family, I’m told, clung until the very end to the notion that God was going to heal him. So even when what was in purely medical terms all but inevitable came earlier this month, it still somehow felt like a shock, to them even more than me.

Last Sunday was Steve’s funeral, held at the same church in Springfield where I’d seen him get married about a decade and a half ago. Back then, I remember laughing at how one of the wedding songs, Atlantic Starr's "Always", had been sung to recorded, or ‘canned’, accompaniment. Fifteen years later at Steve's goodbye, though, there was actually a live band. Four teenage boys played guitars softly as mourners entered the sanctuary, and later turned up the volume to lead some Christian songs during the ceremony.

What I liked best about the funeral was how several of Steve’s favorite items had been placed at the front of and upon the stage, from fishing nets and camping gear to cowboy hats (everpresent following his successful battle against cancer as a teen) and even his big black motorcycle in front of the first pews. The ceremony began with a playing of Johnny Cash's "Ghost Riders In The Sky".

As the riders walked on by him
He heard one call his name,
If you want to save your soul from hell
Ridin' on our range,
Then cowboy change your ways today,
Or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the devil's herd
Across these endless skies

Although I appreciate a good Johnny Cash song--tears were mixed with a smile as this one played--Steve and I were very different culturally. He loved to hunt, fish, camp and fire his gun; I would go out of my way to avoid all the above. He was an ordained minister; I more or less never attend church. And of course, we held pretty different political views. But Steve was family, and more than that, it was abundantly obvious what a wonderful guy he was. By leaps and bounds his kids are the most naturally best behaved, and yet I’ve never even heard either him or Theresa raise their voices to them. It's naturally cliche after losing a loved one to say he or she was always smiling, but Steve seemed to be fearlessly positive right until the end. When I asked him at our grandpa's funeral earlier this year, in June, Steve (who presided over the graveside ceremony) described his illness as "quite a ride." That was the closest you could get to hearing him complain. He spoke with an endearingly forced but what was to me a still very genuine smile.

And you should have seen how many people stood up at his funeral to talk about him. Even just Steve’s former subordinates from Skateworld--the Eugene skating rink he managed for some 20 years on the side, moonlighting along with his chaplain duties--took up several minutes singing his praises. I didn’t think there were that many avid roller-rink skaters left in the world, let alone Skateworld employees.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, Steve was the oldest kid in the greater Libby family (including my dad’s two siblings, their families, and our grandparents) and I was third in line, with Steve’s sister Susie between us and their brother John a year behind me. (Various younger siblings came several years later.) Early on as a kid, I remember hearing how smart Steve was, and how his parents wondered if he might one day become a doctor. It’s actually only for the first time does it occur to me as I write this that, in a sad ironic twist, he could have used that expertise. But back in childhood, I both admired and wanted to beat Steve. He was very tough not to like, effortlessly charming but with a favoring for bad puns and cheesy ghost stories that made his very sharp intelligence--the kind that made him tough for even the adults in the family to beat at chess-- from ever being oft putting.

Since I was an only child in those days, many of our family camping trips included him, as we backpacked into places like the Strawberry Mountains in remote eastern Oregon. I recall Steve and I trying to find gold by panning the river by our campsite, as our great grandfather had done in the Black Hills of Dakota three quarters of a century earlier. We even made a divining rod out of a tree branch, and wound up finding a few inches underground an old animal bone. Somewhere in one of my mom’s photo albums there is a snapshot I always remember, of Steve in a golden velour shirt and a fishing net on his head.

When I was about eleven years old, Steve came up to McMinnville and stayed with us for a week. I’d been developing a crush on one of the girls across the street, who was a year older than me. Naturally, it was never acted upon. Steve, on the other hand, actually became her boyfriend during the brief time before his dad picked him up on his motorcycle.

But Steve is only half the reason I’ve been down. The other reason is not even remotely comparable to the tragedy of losing our 39-year-old cousin, husband, father, friend, grandson, son, brother, and all else that Steve was. It was just one meaningless football game. But no matter how ridiculous it may sound, it is the Oregon Ducks’ loss to Arizona a week ago this evening--and the related season-ending injury to their quarterback, Dennis Dixon--that pushed me over the edge into full-blown grief.

When something truly tragic or fearsome happens in real life, it’s a natural tendency, I think, to steel yourself. In Steve’s case, I thought not about my own sadness, but instead focused mainly on the young family he was leaving behind, or his parents losing their first-born. After that, losing Steve causes me less to feel outright morose than to sort of stare off into space and wonder how this alters the way I view the world. But after Oregon came crashing down to earth last week, when they’d over the course of the season risen to arguably the highest level of both on-field prowess and national media notoriety in the team’s entire 113-year history, I’ve spent the last seven days going through all the different stages of grief, from disbelief and anger to bargaining and sadness.

Each morning I stand in the shower shocked anew that it’s actually really happened. I just can’t get used to the fact that the glorious ride the Ducks were on to the national championship game and a Heisman trophy could turn out so suddenly just like I’d seen in nightmares crouched in the corner of my mind: in injury and loss. Lost games, lost awards, and the lost opportunity of a lifetime.

When Oregon defeated 5-time defending conference champion USC a few weeks ago, I remember Oregonian columnist John Canzano writing that Dennis Dixon's habit of pointing with two fingers to the sky after each touchdown was a message to his mother, who passed away when Dixon was young. Naturally her passing is a far greater tragedy than her son's injury, but pointing to the sky naturally felt as good to Dennis as it did to us.

But the days thankfully continue to roll on. And something my former colleague Zach Dundas said in a Willamette Week cover story on Oregon’s tragic demise (“A Ducking Shame”), though, has stuck with me. I actually figured prominently in the story, particularly in the second half when he talks about the loss. I talked about how even though you try not to get your hopes up in a situation like this, with the national championship and a Heisman unquestionably within reach, it happens anyway. And as I also said in the article, there’s no getting around the fact that this was shaping up to be Oregon’s greatest season since the team began in 1894. And now it’ll amount little more than a toilet bowl and an eternally lingering sense of what might have been. Yet one very simple phrase that Zach used to talk about sport and fandom, “continuing narrative”, represents my first glimmer of hope.

It’s helpful to remind myself that whether it’s Steve or Dennis, the chapter I and they just went through is over. But the narrative continues. Steve can’t come back, nor can the Humpty-Dumpty season Dennis and the Ducks experienced ever be put back together again. But the key to sports fandom in particular, which is also instructive for the rest of life, is to always look ahead to the next season. A season to continually celebrate Steve, to embrace his family all the more. And a chance to keep hope alive that someday the Ducks can fulfill this season of incredible promise.

Even now, I see how ridiculous it can look to put Steve’s tragedy beside a sports loss. Maybe what Zach wrote is true: "He is now subject to a level of neurosis that can only come through near-DNA-level identification with a team." But I’ve been reminded through this experience, and how Steve and Dennis Dixon have been paired in my thoughts and grief, how much sports exist for me and so many others as permission to hope and dream. No Heisman Trophy will bring back a loved one, but hoping for it--and the prospect perhaps someday seeing it come true--are an integral part of my DNA. Sports, and particularly the Ducks, are something to which so much of my emotions have, for better or worse, been grafted. Steve’s surviving family needn’t care what a college football team does on Saturdays; they’ve got enough to concern themselves with. But if I’m to carry on, whether in the name of Steve, his family or anyone else, I need to be able to envision that what Dennis Dixon and the Ducks lost can be someday won back again.

Tom & Jerry at the Air China Lounge

It is still nearly two hours until my flight, but I feel as though my spirits have been lifted.

I'm writing this from the VIP lounge for Air China at Capitol Airport in Beijing. I've been here since either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on whether you mark from the day I left Portland or the day I arrived here. I entered the lounge profoundly exhausted. It's been a good trip, and I'm thankful for this incredible opportunity to see China for the first time. I am here on a press junket for the opening of the Ullens Center, a new contemporary art museum here in a renovated circa-1930s former munitions factory building. I've been to the Forbidden City, Tianmen Square, and even the Great Wall. I've been treated to countless dinners and exhibitions, whisked throughout the city as a VIP, put up in a 4-star hotel, and had the opportunity to take some five hundred pictures.

But trips like this can also be quite a long slog, even in the best of circumstances. Jet lag kept me from getting restful sleep until last night. The people running the junket have had us on the go from about 8AM to midnight most days. I'm also really fed up fending off people trying to sell me stuff. China may be a so-called 'Communist' country, but these seem to be the most naturally and most aggressively entrepreneurial people I've ever met. I even was accosted by people trying to sell me trinkets, t-shirts and copies of Mao's Little Red Book on the wall itself. And I miss my cat and girlfriend!

I'd never been in an airport VIP lounge before. And when I first entered this one, it did not impress. All the furniture seems left over from the 1970s, and the VIP meal consists of hot noodles in a paper cup. But then I sat down and was surprised to find something else on the television here than the usual ubiquitous airport CNN. On the plasma-screen TV a few feet away as I write this, Air China has a continuous loop of Tom & Jerry cartoons. And as it happens, this is precisely the tonic I needed.

As a child, I watched hours of cartoons each day. I'd begin with the local favorite Ramblin' Rod in the morning with his procession of Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes favorites (punctuated by smile contests and birthday songs), graduate to Star Blazers before scurrying off to school, and return in the afternoon for episodes of The Flintstones and Superfriends. In those days, I was never a huge Tom & Jerry fan. They always seemed like second-rate Looney Tunes, and for some reason I always rooted for Tom to catch Jerry even though I wasn't suppposed to. They even spelled their medium incorrectly: a cartune?

But as I sank into the worn, brown-orange seat of the lounge, clutching a Pepsi Light can with an old pull-tab I hadn't seen since the Carter administration, I found myself enraptured by Tom and Jerry's pursuits. I've heard various parents complain over the years that such cartoons as these are improperly violent and aggressive, but the absurd physicality of their exploits made me chuckle. In one, Jerry helped a seal that had escaped from the circus. Another pitted a black alley cat against Tom for the rights to a ham in the fridge. During a romp through a haunted house, Tom had nine numbered ghosts nearly sucked from his body as he clung frightfully to a stairway banister. Just now I turned from the computer to glance at the screen, and Jerry was dressed in a film noir trenchcoat and fedora while Tom negotiated barbed wire and mines in the living room (I have no idea what this means).  I can't tell you exactly what was so brilliant about any specific moments, except that they all involve a series of sight gags that are as universal as McDonald's or converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Most importantly, they made me smile on the eve of some 18 grueling hours of transit. Even now, hearing Chinese spoken all around me, with its odd musicality of odd consonants and inflection, I feel at home thanks to Hanna and Barbera's half-century-old cat and mouse. For that, they can call it a cartoon, a cartune, or a kartoone. And I will embark on my marathon of boardings, security checks, turbulence, baggage claim and a new round of jet lag as a decidedly happier customer.

Cheating on the Pepsi Challenge

The other day I was talking with somebody about brand identity, the way in which we form loyalties to company brands. 'Brand' is a term that gets thrown around a lot in business and marketing circles, of course, and it's long been a fascinating concept for me. That's probably because, particularly as a child but to a lesser extent even today, I've always been one to patronize certain products and companies over and over again. Sometimes there are good reasons. Sometimes there aren't - like when I pathetically resorted to duplicity simply to prove to the world that I preferred Coke to Pepsi. Which, as it happens, wasn't even true.

Many of us remember the successful marketing campaign Pepsi waged in the early 1980s. Challenging viewers to take a blind taste-test against Coke went at their more popular rival soft drink in the best way possible: by attacking the mystique itself. A recent study named Coca-Cola as the most popular worldwide brand, and I think it was probably true back then as well. A lot of people probably have been loyal to Coke over the years versus Pepsi for reasons other than the taste of the cola itself. Coke has always seemed like the more original and therefore authentic soft drink. Its very name is used as a verb denoting not just the brand, but the thing itself. A 'coke' means a cola just as to 'xerox' means to make copies or a 'kleenex' can mean any tissue.

As a kid, I picked up on and responded strongly to that undercurrent long before I knew anything about marketing. I was fiercely loyal to Coca-Cola versus Pepsi. I also felt the same about McDonald's versus Burger King, Ford versus Chevrolet, and a host of other corporate brand showdowns. I was an advertiser's dream, buying into certain brands unequivocally and committed myself to them like a teenager in 1941 eager to volunteer for the draft. And while today I'm of course a little less naive as an adult to the insipidity of the corporate machine and the sometimes not so inspiring realities behind  brand making, I still am a sucker for certain companies' work, deserving or not, be it BMW or Sony or Apple.

But back to the Pepsi Challenge. Not only was this campaign waged on TV, where people were of course shown to choose Pepsi over Coke in mass movement taking place across America, but the company actually embraced a grassroots approach in which Pepsi Challenge booths were held at a host of festivals and fairs around the country. Each year in July my small hometown, McMinnville, held its annual "Turkey Rama", a three-day fair with main street closed to traffic and lined with stands from various local businesses, pronto pup (a.k.a. "corn dog") stands operated by local Elks, Lions and Kiwanis club members, and the usual assortment of Captain Funtastic carnival rides like The Scrambler (my personal favorite), The Sky Diver (a ferris wheel with spinning carriages), and The Spider (which I nearly barfed on during my one and only childhood ride).

I was very excited to see there was a Pepsi Challenge booth. This was the chance to show the Coca-Cola Company and its current spokesman, Mean Joe Greene of my beloved Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers (I carried his autograph around in a padlocked briefcase, but still managed to lose it), that I was a fellow guzzler of Coke. If I dared to willingly drink Pepsi, I reasoned, it would inevitably be a slippery slope until I committed that even greater horror of horrors: becoming a Dallas Cowboys fan. I had to show what side I was on.

But this was of course a blind taste test. After standing in line for several minutes, my heart beating out of my chest with nervousness before this moment of truth at Turkey Rama, I sat down at the little yellow booth with two unmarked Dixie cups of cola. ('Dixie cup' being another brand that's crossed over from proper noun into a catch-all regular synonym for any tiny paper cup.) I swirled the bubbly fluid of each sample in my mouth like a vintner sizing up his new batch of Merlot. I wasn't thinking about which I liked better, but which was more likely to be Coke. I remember the panic setting in as I realized I couldn't tell any difference. I'd have to just guess.

"You chose...Pepsi Cola!" I still remember the way the woman from the Pepsi Challenge booth jumped up an octave when she named her employer's brand as my selection. Her happiness at another conquest claimed for Pepsi burned into my young psyche like carbonated soda will corrode a penny.

But I hadn't worshiped the swirling red-and-white logo only to go down without a rematch. Heading to the back of the Pepsi Challenge line, pronto pup lunches and sneaker sales at Clubhouse Athletics be damned. This time I was determined to choose Coke.

And that's when you could say I either (a) caught a break, or (b) became even more desperate and diabolical. While standing in line, I noticed that the woman conducting the Pepsi Challenge was simply switching the Coke and Pepsi samples back and forth without any variation. As I neared the testing seat, I carefully monitored the rhythm of sample-switching with laser-like focus. I still was worried as I swirled the samples again, thinking I could be the case where she finally abandoned her simplistic switching pattern. But then I heard her voice say with a dourness that was music to my ears, "You chose...oh, Coca-Cola."

And with that, I had safely proved my mettle to my Coca-Cola overlords. But I'd done so with a George Costanza-like ruthlessness and amorality. Or maybe I should say George Bush-like. After all, what I did to Pepsi in about 1982, he did to the country in 2000, and possibly 2004. As it happens, I'm now drinking what seems like several gallons of caffeine free Diet Pepsi per week -- or whichever brand happens to be on sale. I'm not exempt from brand worship, though. As I write this post from an antique PC with the speed of a tortoise, I dream not of how the Apple I plan to buy will work more efficiently for me, but how cool it'll look on my desk, and how I'll be aligned with a perceived cooler, hipper, more loyal customer base than the likes of HP and Compaq and Microsoft. Or then again, maybe it all comes back to the fact that my first computer was an Apple II Plus on which I played many a game of Frogger.

Travel's Push-Pull Effect (Part Two)

Reading a week later what I wrote in flight from Dulles to Portland, I cringe a little inside.

To read about my trip, or at least the attitude I had coming home, you’d think I had a terrible time. But the trip was for the most part a total success. I had a wonderful time going to my friend Mike’s wedding near Charlottesville, Virginia, which I neglected to even mention the first time around, even though it was the whole reason I went on the trip. 

After checking into a Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on an unseasonably hot sunny Sunday afternoon, I headed west on Interstate 64 for the evening wedding in my Saturn Ion rental car. The sudden beauty of the territory unfolding was a surprise. I’d driven for two hours the day before from Dulles airport near Washington down to Charlottesville. For the most part, it was not a great view, with the usual peppering of strip malls and gas stations. Even when I’d see a farm it never felt like I was truly away from the city. But heading west on the way from Charlottesville to the winery where Mike’s wedding was being held, it seemed in the golden late-afternoon light as if the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley were suddenly  bursting onto a stage.

The wedding itself was a delight, too. It was very informal, with a cocktail hour before the ceremony on the deck of the winery, overlooking the vineyards and the mountains at sunset (groom mingled, bride stayed in hiding). There was so much good feeling at the wedding that it was hard to muster an iota of cynicism, which is a nice antidote to how I feel most of the time. It more than worth the discomfort of my tight-fitting suit trousers.

Before the ceremony I chatted with two old friends, Rich and John, with whom Mike (the groom) and I lived in Jersey City after college in about 1996. Along with a group of several others, we occupied two adjoining apartments that were part of a decaying three-story brownstone off Grove Street, about two PATH train stops from the World Trade Center in Manhattan.  There was also a seemingly dopey guy who never remembered to flush and still (at 23) called his father “Daddy“ but seemed to be doing well in the advertising industry. I also remember a Jersey-girl (whose accent I ceaselessly immitated behind her back) working in the fashion industry whom Mike briefly dated, and an aspiring chef named Kate who ended up marrying a landscaper in Nantucket after a sojourn in dot-com-era San Francisco at a now defunct tech industry magazine. Kate also made some very yummy Sunday night dinners; one of which I remember contributing a risotto to after having just worked for a few months at Nick's Italian Cafe in McMinnville following graduation.

A couple years before Jersey City, Mike was a Godsend of a roommate after having a hellacious time the year before. Returning to NYU in January 1994 after a year and a half off from college, I'd been randomly paired with this absolute asshole from Tokyo who'd come into our room in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep, turn on all the lights, and begin snapping and folding his laundry, with the TV on in the other room loud enough that he could here it a few feet from my bedside. Then he'd call home to Japan and shout into Japanese. So finding Mike for my senior-year roommate at the Third Avenue North dorm at NYU - a guy for the most part likely to be OK with lights off and silence in the middle of the night, was great. I also gained a friend and even a fellow Oregon Ducks supporter. When Oregon made it to the Rose Bowl that year, their first since 1957, he got almost as excited as I did. I remember going out for a celebratory dinner at BBQ on 2nd Avenue.

Rich and John, who I talked with at the wedding, were both recent Syracuse grads and aspiring illustrators back when we lived together in Jersey City. I remember when Rich had his first career coup getting to illustrate the cover of the Fairfield County Weekly in Connecticut. This being the election year of ‘96, the illustration depicted Bob Dole giving a number-one sign with his finger, but with Jack Kemp holding up his arm. He soon went to work at a big NYC ad agency and, 11 years later, is married with a kid on the way. Jon freelanced his first drawings for the Wall Street Journal when we lived together, and now is on staff there. Rich and Jon also were the first people I ever met who designed web pages.

The reason I’d originally planned to stay until Tuesday after a Sunday-night wedding was to explore the area around Charlottesville, particularly the Thomas Jefferson-designed architectural landmarks at the University of Virginia and Monticello. But with the heat in the 90s and high humidity, and my having not even a hat or sunscreen to protect my Nordic, extremely heat-sensitive skin, I knew any visits I made would have to be brief.

The casualty of leaving a day early was that I had to pass up Monticello. But I did have time to see the university. At 10:00 in the morning, it was already so hot that sweat was pouring down my face like Robert Hays in Airplane! as he takes the jet’s controls. Luckily the quad I’d come to see had some built-in shading. The school’s library, with its massive circular rotunda and Roman columns, sits like the head of the household at a rectangular dinner table. All around the perimeter, clad in contrasting red brick with more white columns, are student residences complete with traditional old rocking chairs. When I wasn’t mopping my brow, it looked spectacular.

After that, though, I pretty much got in the car and drove to Dulles.

It’s when I got home from that aforementioned trip, though, that my thoughts of it began to change. It’s a pattern I see so often in myself and virtually anyone else that travels. At the beginning and end of it, you’ve got to get there. And particularly if it involves flying, you’re in for an enormous hassle, even if everything technically goes according to plan. Somewhere in the middle, you have the experience itself. But going into and coming out of the trip, one’s perspective is inevitably skewed by the combination of stress and boredom accompanying long trips.

Make no mistake: I feel profoundly fortunate and enriched by the chance to have gone to many different places over the last handful of years. Just don’t ask me about it while I’m enmeshed in it at 38,000 feet, in between places to sleep.

Travel's Push-Pull Effect (Part One)

Before long, we will make our descent down from the plane’s cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Four and a half hours have gone by in this 5.5-hour flight, and it’s gone by more quickly than most. Besides, the Romanian husband and wife next to me have been traveling for 24 hours straight. They’re loving the inflatable neck pillows right now as they snooze away. I just want the turbulence to stop. Every bump sends my mind a so-far mercifully incorrect message: we’re going down.

The flight I’m on wasn’t the one I originally booked. I was supposed to return from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I’d gone for my college roommate Mike’s wedding, on a flight tomorrow. But yesterday afternoon, huddled in my room at the Holiday Inn from the unseasonably 90-degree October heat gripping the East Coast, I decided parting with a C-note was worth it for the chance to be in my own bed a night sooner. But it wasn’t just the heat.

Travel is a constant push-pull effect in my life. When at home, I constantly look at my thousands of travel photos and spend hours in the basement editing video shot on various trips. For Valarie and me, imagining and planning our next destination is a constant topic. In the last three or four years, mostly with her but sometimes without, I’ve been to a host of countries, some of them multiple times: England, France, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, The Bahamas, Scotland, Sweden. (I suppose England and Scotland probably only count as one, Great Britain, but I still think of them as seperate. They do, after all, have separate soccer teams.)

But there are also times like last year, in the first stages of my Japan trip. We’d completed about two-thirds of the 11-hour flight from Portland to Tokyo, but a passenger’s medical emergency (which turned out to be nothing) meant that we had to turn around the plane and fly to Anchorage, Alaska for the night. In the couple hours it took us to return eastward, I actually got it in my mind that I wanted to catch a plane in Anchorage back to Portland. I’d been so depressed about leaving home that I was ready to turn down what to many (including myself) would be a dazzling journey. Japan is quite possibly even my favorite country in the world to visit. But the gloom that overcame me in the days leading up to the trip, and as we flew out of PDX, was incredibly difficult to overcome. Thankfully there was the surreal pleasure of watching a plane load of largely Asians taking photos in the empty Anchorage airport in front of a gigantic taxidermied polar bear.

On one hand, I’ve since an early age had a romantic sense of wanderlust. I’ve always had the mindset of a collector, and I think of the places I visit as my ultimate collection. Notice how eager I was to rattle off the list of countries I’d been to a couple paragraphs ago? I even add up the number of countries my parents, friends and Valarie have been to, as if it’s some kind of competition.

But I’m also an unequivocal creature of habit. I find solace in having a sense of how the day will unfold. I’m not fond of surprises. I can see in my mind most days a succession of espressos, walks in the neighborhood, cooking dinner, watching a little soccer on TV, and perhaps best of all, regular visits from our cat to a spot on my chest as I lay on the sofa. When I’m removed from my little lair on Mulberry Street, I often start getting depressed a few days before it’s time to leave.

Of course some of this has to do with the exhausting marathon of travel. When I was a kid, my dad would regularly leave his day job at the restaurant for Air Force reserve trips. (Talk about a schizophrenic existence: making turkey sandwiches and taking out the garbage to analyzing satellite and spy-plane reconnaissance photos.) I remember telling him as a kid how envious I was about getting on an airplane a few times a year, and clearly in some way that rubbed off on me a lot. At one point I remember him saying, “Once you fly a few times, it becomes just like a bus ride.” I strongly doubted I’d ever become that cynical. But air travel does really, really suck sometimes. The waiting is endless, the environments saccharine and confining. Even on a great international trip, at the beginning and end of it you always wonder a bit if it was worth it.

If there’s a silver lining here, perhaps it’s that I need both the push and pull of travel. There’s a born hermit in me, I think, looking to spend my days in the basement editing video with my parents’ old stereo playing the classical station. But what am I editing down there? Travel footage. And after every trip, I neglect several days of work to edit my still-camera pictures. You could say I’m obsessed with documenting these excursions. And if I stop traveling, I’ll run out of material.

Once on vacation I said half-jokingly to Valarie, “I can’t wait until this trip is over so I can remember it fondly.” Like, the trip to Charlottesville I cut short this weekend? I can’t wait to upload my photos of the Thomas Jefferson-designed University of Virginia rotunda. When I took the pictures, it was so hot even at 10AM that the sweat coming down my forehead and scalp began seeping into my eyes and making it difficult to see. But in the picture, I’ll only see the architecture, and the blue sky made even bluer by my camera’s polarizing filter.

In perhaps even better news, though, the captain has turned on the fasten seat-belt sign, and we’ve begun our descent. They hope we’ve had a pleasant journey. As always, I haven’t and I have.

Albums and Songs

A few days ago The Oregonian ran a story about what songs different noteworthy Portlanders listened to on their i-Pods. Two of them were friends, John Jay of Wieden + Kennedy and developer Randy Rapaport. And a third, writer Diana Abbu-Jabber, is a longtime colleague who I remember chatting with at many a movie screening when we were reviewing, her for The Oregonian and me for Willamette Week.

There was also a list from governor Ted Kulongoski, who favors Rolling Stones songs, and new Blazer Channing Frye, whose choices included Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me". (Hopefully his jump shot is a lot better than that song.)

I knew my friend Randy would choose at least one Flaming Lips song - the man is devoted to that band like jihadists are to the Koran. He actually went with two, "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton" and "Chewin' the Apple of Yer Eye" - the only person besides the governor to pick two songs by one artist.

It was also especially a treat reading about one of John's Choices, "The Breaks" by Kurtis Blow:

"I am just starting my career in fashion marketing at Bloomingdale's. New York is completely alive from the party music of hip-hop in the Bronx to the emerging art scene and new wave music. I am sitting in the studio of Antonio Lopez, the greatest fashion illustrator of our time, while 'The Breaks' fills the studio. Antonio introduces me to break dancers he has discovered and sent to Paris to perform."

The i-Pod is as relevant in my life as it seems to be in so many other people's. I'm listening to it as I write this (Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom is playing currently), and the ear buds are in for much of my day while I work, when I go for a walk, and when I drive.

There are of course lots of individual songs that I love, by artists ranging from Chuck Berry to Wham! to Sonny Rollins to Bananarama. But if you look at my top 25 list on i-Tunes, most all of them come from those albums that I listen to more or less start to finish.

Yesterday, imagining a kind of alternative list to those in the Oregonian feature, I sat down with my laptop in front of my CD collection, which numbers about 500. There are also Valarie's discs I pick and choose from, which are about the same in number. Out of those 1000 or so CDs, I made a list of the albums that I either listen to regularly and/or am reasonably likely to want to listen to in their entirety at some point in the not to distant future. Although any time I look at the list I wind up removing a record or two and/or adding some as well, my current list consists of 85 albums.

The first noticeable thing about the list is that there are more than twice as many Beatles albums as those by anyone else. I chose seven: Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, the 'White Album', Abbey Road, and Let It Be. I really should have also added Help! and A Hard Day's Night, both of which I've listened to in their entirety scores of times. The #1 song on my i-Tunes list, "It's All Too Much", is from Yellow Submarine, which I don't really ever listen to all the way because there's a lot of scoring from the movie in the second half.

The next closest multi-album artist, of which there are three, has three albums: The Clash (Combat Rock, London Calling, Sandinista!), Elvis Costello & The Attractions (Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!), and jazz virtuoso Roland Kirk (The Inflated Tear, Volunteered Slavery, Domino). I could easily have added at least one to the Costello list (This Year's Model) if not three or four more. Same goes for Roland Kirk (Rip, Rig & Panic).

There are 15 artists with two albums on my list, and once again, many could have had more. For XTC, the English new wave band I fell in love with in college, I chose two seminal early albums, Black Sea and English Settlement. But I also often listen to Drums and Wires and several others.

The Police were also tough. I added Synchronicity and Outlandos D'Amour as start-to-finish listens, but on another day I might add Regatta de Blanc instead. With Nirvana I chose Nevermind and Unplugged In New York, only reluctantly leaving In Utero off the list. Fugazi also placed two, the later-career Red Medicine and In On the Kill Taker. All their albums are excellent, though. I could say the same about Thelonious Monk, whose albums Straight, No Chaser and Brilliant Corners I still listen to frequently.

Other artists seemed to more clearly have enough with two: A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory is a bona fide masterpiece, and Beats, Rhymes & Life is superb. But I'd argue their other records don't hit that same mark. I also liked American Music Club best after they moved into a richer, more complex sound with Mercury and San Francisco (made with the terrific producers Mitchell Froom and Joe Chicarelli) from the sort of industrial folk they'd been doing earlier - although there are some gems in that period, too, like California and Everclear.

There's probably no album I've listened to more in the last few months than The Shins' Wincing The Night Away, and their previous effort, Chutes Too Narrow, is great too. I imagine someday I'll get more into their first record, but it's not a start-to-finish, regular-rotation album for me right now.

But there are also plenty of cases where I chose one album by an artist, but I love that album a lot. Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus absolutely blows me away every time I hear it. If I had to pick the single greatest jazz record I've ever heard, this might be it. Yet Mingus tends to re-record many versions of the same songs, though, so I never feel quite as compelled to listen to, say, Blues and Roots or the excellent Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus all the way through.

Although I have absolutely zero-point-zero-zero (0.00) interest in Elton John's contemporary work, or even stuff he made in the last twenty-five or thirty years, when I was growing up my mom often played his first volume of greatest hits. Part of me wants to call it a guilty pleasure, but I never tire of songs like "Bennie and the Jets" and "Daniel". I also confess to loving Sir Elton's personal style in those days, before he was a fat old guy belting out songs for Disney soundtracks.

As I've been writing this post, after the Costello album somehow I started playing the Top 25 playlist upon looking for the spelling of one of the songs. In a couple of cases, the songs have stopped me from what I'm writing to either bob my head or just space out. Just a few seconds ago "Last Living Souls" from Gorillaz' Demon Days did that.

Years ago I remember watching a documentary on Damon Albarn. He was recording a string section and kept getting frustrated and surly with the classical players, because he was having a hard time getting to play in a different way, with more bounce like dance music called for and less of the strict sharpness that classical playing requires. In the show, Albarn looked like a pompous jerk in his Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and holier than thou rock star attitude. But I must admit: the strings on "Last Living Souls" have an exquisite circular sense of the looping beat that I've never heard from classical musicians before.

As much as I like lists and stats like the ones i-Tunes provides, or that I make myself with the laptop in front of my increasingly dusty CD shelves, I know they're never completely accurate. For example, there are only two classical albums on my start-to-finish list, a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and one of Shostakovitch's Piano Quartet & Trio by The Borodin Trio. But I know I listen to a lot more classical than I used to. I guess it's still hard to make it through entire albums, though. And classical is much better to me live. On CD I feel like I'm always turning the volume up and down - it never sounds quite right.

The beauty of these stats, though, is that they're always fluid and subject only to my own whims and tastes.

A Win For The Ages,Punctuated By A Primal Scream

This past Saturday, less than 48 hours ago as I write this, my beloved Oregon Ducks earned what is easily one of the greatest victories in their 113-year history. Playing on the road against Michigan, college football's all-time winningest program, the Ducks absolutely torched the Wolverines: 39-7. They did it before the largest gathering of people in America that day: more than 109,000 at legendary Michigan Stadium, the "Big House". And the game was actually even more lopsided than the score indicates. Oregon could easily have scored 60.

As most sports fans know, Michigan was having a tough time this year even before the Ducks came calling. A week before the Wolverines, then #5 in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll, had become the first ranked team to lose to a lower-division squad in falling 32-31 to two-time Division 1AA national champion Appalachian State. So it's not as if the Ducks were facing one of the best teams in the history of the "Maize and Blue". But Michigan's offense is laden with seniors, and are still probable to rebound. This is largely the same Wolverine squad that was ranked #2 last year going into their season-ending battle with #1 Ohio State. 

Besides, I'm not letting even a sub-par Michigan squad detract from how astonishing this win was. Year after year, Michigan's recruiting classes are ranked in the top five. They're the gold standard of college football, with 11 national championships and a legacy second only to Notre Dame (and perhaps USC). Nearly every game is on national television, and their every move gets more media attention than if Oregon were to play naked. (Wait, don't give Nike any ideas - I can already envision see burly nude offensive lineman with a swoosh tattoo.) Beating Michigan on their home turf, no matter what the circumstances, is incredible. And Oregon didn't just win. This game wasn't even close. It was over before halftime. I wouldn't have thought to even wish for an outcome like that.

Yesterday I happened to run across our next door neighbor outside, and she said, "I heard you screaming yesterday. Was that the Oregon game." Yes it was, I told her. Yes it was.

I waited to really yell until the game was over. I'd kept it internal up until then, so much so that I had to keep turning the TV on and off as the nervousness became unbearable. You'd think having a huge lead would make it easier, but that just sets one up for worrying about some colossal comeback by the other team. After all, in 1993 Oregon was victim to the biggest comeback in college football history, losing 42-41 to Cal after enjoying a 41-0 halftime lead.

When the clock finally hit zero, I screamed a long loud version of "Yeah!" that reminded me of that old Tears For Fears Song: "Shout. Shout. Let it all out!" It was really a primal scream, and it felt great.

It's really ironic for me to talk about yelling in a positive way, because I'm the most noise-sensitive person I know. I'm always crabby at the neighbors for the endless stream of noise coming from their assorted lawn equipment, home improvement tools and young children. But with my scream we're only talking about four seconds. I'm sure they were OK with it.

Besides, it's so rare in life that one feels such a moment of pure joy. I know, of course, that a football game is totally meaningless compared to real-life issues. But when you've supported a team your whole life, and now even written a book about them, and you experience a win of this magnitude that happens maybe a handful of times in a generation, then it's really something to savor.

For all I know, Oregon's season could be all down from here. That was certainly the case last year when another historic Ducks win, this time over Oklahoma in dramatic comeback fashion, was followed by a second-half collapse that saw them finish 7-5 and suffer a miserable Las Vegas Bowl loss. Controversy also tainted the thrill of beating the Sooners, because most people around the nation incorrectly believe Oregon benefited from a wrong onsides kick ruling.

There was no questioning who was the best team on the field at Michigan Stadium on Saturday. Dennis Dixon looked like a second coming of Vince Young or Michael Vick (the football player, not the dog killer), practically toying with the Wolverines as he ran in an out of defenders on some plays and completed perfect long bombs to Oregon's speedy receivers on others. Then there was Jonathan Stewart pounding the ball up the middle, and Jeremiah Johnson going around them. Johnson also made perhaps the best stiff-arm move I've ever seen, pushing a would-be Michigan tackler to the ground with one swipe.

That stiff-arm of Johnson's made the "Top Plays" countdown on ESPN's SportsCenter at #9. But even better was the #1 highlight on that same telecast: a pair of "Statue of Liberty" plays, one a fake and one the real thing, but both for touchdowns. Boise State made the old schoolyard play famous again in last year's Fiesta Bowl by beating Oklahoma in overtime with it. We doubled the pleasure on what is arguably college football's most hallowed ground.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch my video tape of the game some more. Hell, even Oregon's usually terrible uniforms looked great on this amazing day.