Brahmin on the Bagpipes

It's official - The Brahmin will be in the U.K. from May 22 through June 2. With the aid of a handy Britrail Pass (to come in the mail soon), I plan to head north to the land of Robert the Bruce, Sir Walter Scott and a certain lake-dwelling monster apparently J.J. Abrams is too afraid to enliven. Hopefully I'll be able to squirm for a digital camera between now and then so I can get the pics to come on here.

According to Yahoo, romantic prospects for my astrological sign were absolutely dismal on March 1. Let's just say that events in the Brahmin's life that day proved that perhaps online astrologers are a little less accurate than...hmm, I don't know, New Hampshire Primary exit pollers. This is where the Brahmin draws the line at revealing personal details to the cyberuniverse.

William F. Buckley is being lionized, and I certainly don't blame right-wingers for doing so. His patrician verbose eccentricities made for fun watching, but I would choose a number of people on the right as being far more effective advocates for their point of view - William Safire, David Gergen or George Will, for example. I guess what troubles me about his canonization are a number of things: National Review, for instance, has been at one time or another a hotbed of anti-Semitism (holocaust denier Joseph Sobran was an editor there) and apologist - at a minimum - for racism (it opposed lifting the Jim Crow laws in the South and Buckley himself was a supporter of South African apartheid). Utterly ridiculous is the notion that Buckley, for all his wordiness and haughty mannerism, was a gentleman during debate. You Tube is overflowing with examples of his fit with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention ("Listen, you queer, I'll sock you in the goddamned face and you'll stay plastered" - did he learn that in the Yale debate club?).

It's Spring Training. And already the Mets are a MASH unit.

I saw Chekhov's "The Seagull" in the East Village last night. Sort of an odd, distant blocking, but a very good set design and solid deliveries from the cast (though I caught a reference to the word "telephone" during the dialogue - I've got to run that against the original script; considering that Chekhov died in 1904 and the play is set in a rural wooded quarter of Russia).

March has come in like a lion. It always goes out with baseball starting, and me a year older. One out of two ain't bad. In baseball, as a hitter, that makes you...well, no one's ever done anything like that (though if they build more bandboxes like Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, someone might).

The Brahmin