September 2009 Archives

All week, the Dodgers have slogging through a dull late-year road trip to Washington and Pittsburgh, the two worst teams in baseball, barely playing up to the level of their competition, or, for that matter, of their broadcasters. When the Dodgers head east of Colorado, the quality of their game-calling goes from "best in history" to "sonorous at best, borderline retarded at worst." On the radio, Charley Steiner and Rick Monday are all cliché and pomposity, describing plays inaccurately and five seconds too late, talking about guys who "play the game the right way", and complaining about jet lag, though Steiner does do an exciting home-run call. The TV is much worse, with Vin Scully, the greatest broadcaster of all time, replaced by Eric Collins, a guy who, when we go up 8-2 on the Nationals, says things like, "Looks like the Dodgers are threatening to break this thing wide open."

Such disparities aren't lost on my son. As I drove him home from school the other day, with the late-afternoon game on the radio, he said,

"These guys aren't as good as Vin Scully."

"That's for sure," I said.

"They talk too much," he said.

"Vin Scully talks a lot, too."

"Not as much as these guys. Vin Scully lets you actually watch the game and he only talks when he has to."

I grew up listening to Vin Scully, spending half my boyhood Sundays on a raft in a pool, letting him narrate huge chunks of my childhood. It's such a treat, and a privilege, that my son has the same narrator, at least for a couple more years. We just need to mute the TV during those East Coast road trips. No one, especially not a six-year-old, wants to know what Eric Collins had for dinner in Pittsburgh.

Originally published in The Faster Times.

When we were talking about what the hell a yoga column would contain, my editor proposed that we feature photos of me, demonstrating the yoga pose of the week. I said that would be a great idea, if he wanted to immediately lose 95 percent of his hard-gained page views. While I practice some poses more skillfully than others, my yoga asana technique can, in general, best be described as “mad cattle stampede through the sagebrush.” People go online for any number of reasons, but no one, no matter how mentally ill or fetishistic, is ever looking for photos of an early-middle-aged, slightly overweight, hairline-drastically-receding, back-furred Jew doing half-assed yoga poses. Of this, I can be fairly certain.

Nevertheless, I think I can explain some things about yoga, in the most basic sort of way. So: If you’re practicing asana (Sanskrit for poses), you want to be as focused and diligent as possible, for many reasons. Proper alignment means your skeleton and muscles and joints and digestive system will be healthy. Frequent (but not too-frequent) practice means you won’t hurt yourself as easily. As for what that proper alignment might entail, I suggest you turn elsewhere for adjustments. BKS Iyengar’s Light On Yoga is probably the best contemporary source for showing good asana form. You’ll get excellent alignment instruction if you attend an Iyengar class, though the odds are also high that you’ll end up getting bent over the back of a folding chair by a stern schoolmarm wearing a red velour sweat suit. That happened to me recently in a studio at the back of a West L.A. strip mall, and it wasn’t real sexy.

Elijah and I were having our daily wrestle. He whipped a pillowcase off a pillow, stood up, tied it around his waist, and began to dance like a foolish chicken.

"Look, daddy!" he exclaimed. "I'm a hipster!"

Oh, no, I thought. I wanted a cool kid. Not a fucking hipster.

"What did you just say you were?" I asked.

"A hipster!" he said.

"Do you even know what a hipster is?" I said, adding, in my mind, please say no, please say no, please say no.

"It's someone who ties things around his hips!" said Elijah. "I have a pillowcase around my hips. So I'm a hipster!"

What a relief. He wasn't a hipster, at least not yet, just a big goofball.

"I know some hipsters," I said. "And you're no hipster."

"But I am Genghis Khan," he said. "Was he a hipster?"

"No," I said. "He was a badass."

"Why did he have a bad ass?"

"Forget I said that."

"I'm a hipster!" Elijah said.

I've started a yoga column/blog over at The Faster Times. It's sure to eclipse Perez Hilton and/or Deepak Chopra any day now. Here's the first installment. It's already changed the world in ways that I can't even imagine.

I also continue to offer parenting advice as "Alternadad" over at the recently-relaunched, and totally cool, Offsprung.com. Here's a taste of that brilliance. The family-friendly fun never stops in Pollack-town.