Memo to the New York Yankees: What Have You Done LATELY?

Before anyone reads this posting, let it be known that I just hung a photograph on my bedroom wall of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig sitting on the dugout bench together in 1938. "The Iron Man and the rookie."

This photograph was the only piece of baseball memorabilia that survived a horrific kitchen fire in a house my wife Valerie and I owned in Spokane Washington, on January 8, 2007. Everything else I had hung on the walls of that kitchen, including my mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan, taken on the night in 1989 when he threw his 5,000th strikeout, was destroyed. But while picking through the soaked, charred wreckage of the completely-gutted kitchen, I found this photo of DiMaggio and Gehrig, which I had given my late father as a Father's Day gift some years earlier, lying on the floor in a corner. It was badly covered with soot, but salvageable. I cleaned it up, framed it and hung it over my dresser.

Why would I, as dedicated a Yankee-hater as ever stepped into a ballpark, want a photograph of Gehrig and DiMaggio facing my bed? Not hard, as Robert Graves once said. It's right and morally proper to hate and despise evil empires. And as evil empires go, the Yankees rank right up there with the USSR, which squandered 55 percent of its GNP on military hardware. The GNP of the USSR was probably about the same size as the Yankees' payroll.

But hating evil, as personified by people like Stalin and George Steinbrenner, is one thing. Respecting great players is something entirely else. And Gehrig and DiMaggio were great players. DiMaggio, in fact, might qualify as the third greatest player of all time, behind Ruth and Cobb, or Cobb and Ruth, depending on which side of that argument you're on.

'Nuff said. On to the fun.

I've been driving around reading about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for days, owing to the fact that I've been keeping Mike Vaccaro's marvelous book Emperors and Idiots, a history of that rivalry, in my car to give me something to do while waiting out Washington, D.C.'s innumerable (and endless) red lights.

While enduring page after page, chapter after chapter of Yankee strut and swagger and Red Sox agony, I started thinking about the unfortunate, and not terribly accurate overall impression this creates for the average reader who doesn't know much about baseball but who, bombarded with Yankee propaganda from predominantly New York-based news media, is bound to get the impression of the Yankees as a team of unbeatable champions who never lose.

Well, the humiliation that the Red Sox visited upon the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series aside, (and it was truly, madly, deeply a humiliation; not just a defeat, but a crushing of Goliath's testicles by an insolently merry and disrespectful David) and by the way, the bluster of simian Yankee fans who never shut up about the Pinstripes' 26 World Series titles also aside, one intractable fact remains, and I'll go to the mat for it.

The Yankees have spent most of my life in a slump.

I was born in October, 1955. The very year, in fact the very month, that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally managed to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series after all those years of failure. The 1950s were the Yankees' decade, no question about it. Fortunately, not having been born until '55, I pretty much missed out on their glory days.

But, despite the much-vaunted 1956 Yankee "revenge" victory over the Dodgers in the following year, (in which Don Larsen pitched the perfect game which would be the last perfect game pitched by a Yankee until Larsen's fellow alumnus of San Diego's Point Loma High School, David Wells, did it in 1998) The End for the Yankee Dynasty was already in sight.

A premonitory flicker of The End occurred in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the World Series away from the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski's famous bottom-of-the-ninth home run in Game 7. It amazes me when I hear people like Billy Crystal, in Ken Burns' famous documentary film Baseball, talk about Mazeroski's home run as if it were somehow unjust, a case of lese-majeste against their eternally-entitled heroes. Au contraire. That was justice, Billy, not its opposite. That was those oh-so-reliable mills of the gods, grinding deliciously away at New York's trademark arrogance.

The Yankees did come back to win the World Series in 1962, against the Giants. That was the October I turned seven.

I took no notice of it. I was only seven, had just attained the biblical Age of Reason. I was even years away from even becoming a Yankee hater.

But that truly was The End, for a long time.

The Yankees would not win another World Series until 1977, the October I turned 22. 15 years. Not exactly a dynasty. In fact in 1966, the year I played shortstop for the South Bay Little League Shamrocks, the Yankees finished dead-last in the American League. Boston ended the season in next-to-last place, one game ahead of them.

The World Series of 1963 and '64, the first two October classics I was old enough to notice, framed the highly-just end of a Yankee dynasty that had begun in 1949, the year New York took the pennant away from Boston in a cliffhanger of a late season (see David Halberstam's Summer of '49, a truly great baseball book.) But by 1963 it was over. First the '63 Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deadly right-left pitching rotation of Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, throttled the Yankees in four games, and then the '64 Cardinals, fueled by the vicious right-hander Bob Gibson, vanquished them again. And then they were gone, the Yankees. Not to be seen again for a long time.

The Yankees would not even appear in another Series for 13 years.

They won the World Series in 1977, the year I turned 22. They won it again the following year when I turned 23.

They would not win the World Series again until the October I turned 41, 1996. In fact, the last Series in which they even appeared during that 18-year period was 1981, which they lost to the Dodgers.

From '81 to '96 they weren't even there. New York baseball in the 1980s and early '90s, as my book Three Flies Up points out, was all about the Mets. The Yankees were in the wilderness.

Under Joe Torre they had a flurry of successes in the final four years of the 20th century, winning four Series championships between 1996 and 2000. But do the math. I'm 53 now, and since I was seven, the Yankees have won the World Series eight times. Eight victories in 46 years. That's not a dynasty. That's not winning all the time. It isn't even winning most of the time. Yankee fans who gloat about 26 championships are mostly remembering the period from 1920 to 1962.

1962 was 47 years ago. John F. Kennedy was president in 1962. People were dancing the Twist in 1962. Women wore beehive hairdos in 1962.

1962 was a long time ago.

Now, let's move on and take a look at the 21st century, the only one that matters because it's the one we're living in now. The 20th century is history. Gone. Done. Ovah, as big-mouth, hot-air spewing New Yorkers say.

How many World Series titles have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

"What about 2000!!??" I hear Yankee fans screeching.

Sorry, no. Zero is not a positive integer. The new count begins with "1." The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st.

Now that we've settled that, ahem. I ask, how many World Series championships have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

How many World Series championships have the Boston Red Sox won in the 21st century?

Two.

That's Red Sox two, Yankees nothing. And that's not the score from a Thursday night pitcher's duel, that's the score over eight years of the new century. The new century that wipes the slate clean. They say that after the last pitch of the World Series is thrown, everyone is in last place again until next spring.

Ditto when a century turns. When a century turns, the team that blustered and boasted its way through the previous century, buying pennants because it had more money than some countries, is rated exactly the same as all the other teams. On January 1, 2001, everybody in baseball was in last place. No 21st century World Series rings had been handed out yet.

Since then, Red Sox players have earned two. Yankee players, none.

2004 was the annus mirabilis of the 21st century. It will be hard to improve on from the standpoint of good historical precedents. Because it was the year New York's mouth was slammed shut.

And until the Yankees win a championship in this century, it had better stay shut.

Wagner in Steeltown, USA? Ausgeschlossen.

Today, for only the second time in my career as a concertgoer and opera fan, I walked out of an opera before it was over.

In fact I walked out before it was half over.

In fact I walked out at the end of Act I.

The opera was Wagner's Siegfried, the production that of Washington (D.C.) National Opera.

The last time I walked out of an opera was in March, 1986, when my pal Charlie Berigan and I took to our heels following the second act of Handel's Samson at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The staging was just so downright silly that we decided we'd had enough.

But that time we walked out of purely aesthetic considerations. This time was different. This time I was both disgusted and offended.

I bought my ticket for this matinee performance last September. I waited eight months to see it. Then, on the very morning of the day I was to go to the opera, someone from the Wagner Society of Washington circulated the New York Times' review, written by Anthony Thommasini. It begins like this:

"WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.

The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.

Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class conflict between the haves and the have-nots."

Now, if I had seen this review in time, I would have put my ticket for this production up for sale on eBay. I go to the opera to hear music and experience drama, not to be preached at about politics. Especially not Marxist politics. Are these people kidding? There is nothing fresh, innovative or cutting-edge about loading up a Ring of the Nibelungs production with nonsense about "class struggle." It's been done before. Lots of times.

Maybe director Francesca Zambello didn't get the memo, but this is the ninth year of the 21st century, not the 68th year of the 20th.

Evidently New York Times reviewer Thommasini didn't get the memo either, although it shouldn't surprise me that the relentlessly left-wing New York Times would respond to "Marxist" Wagner, even 50 years after "Marxist" Wagner was anything new, the way the New York Times responds to anything "Marxist:" by jumping up and down squealing and hyperventilating like an excited pom-pom girl at a Pop Warner football game.

I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts not knowing quite what to expect. But I had a ticket in my pocket for which I'd paid $102 last year, and I wasn't about to just waste it.

But when the curtain went up on Act I, my worst fears were realized.

God, I wish somebody, somehow would do something about snotty, self-important theatrical directors who feel compelled to take classic works of art and stage productions of them aimed at communicating some political or moral message that originated in the mind of the director, not the author. Some message the director wants the audience to get. Directors should tell people where to stand and whether or not to cry when they deliver their lines. They should not take the work in question and use it as a soapbox for their own political beliefs.

Hence, the set of Act I of Siegfried, a tale set in mythic times among dark forests, with Nordic heroes, gods and giants wielding magic swords and whatnot, resembled the set of the old NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Mime, the dwarf who dreams of stealing the mythic ring and the hoard of gold that goes with it for himself, is depicted as living in some sort of east Los Angeles junkyard, littered with gas cans, lawn chairs, piles of scrap metal and the bombed-out trailer that he apparently sleeps in. There's an old gas stove in front of the trailer that he cooks on, a la life in a 1930s hobo jungle. (Steinbeck!) As if all of that detail didn't make the "message" heavy-handed enough, looming in the background were gigantic images of an electric power corridor. (Industry!)

How absurd to have Wagner's characters singing about forging swords and slaying dragons on a set that would more appropriately have accomodated rival street gangs going at each other with guns and knives.

As greasy hero Siegfried, and then the god Wotan disguised just as greasily as "The Wanderer," enter and exit during Act I, they repeatedly go to Mime's bombed-out trailer to get bottles of something, presumably good, proletarian beer, out of the refrigerator, from which they swig while they deliver their lines. All this scene needed was Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in his "wife-beater" shirt, yelling "Stella!"

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? As I watched this idiocy unfold, I kept thinking of the first night I attended the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. During the Soviet period of Russia's history, the stage of the Bolshoi Theater was crested, proudly and in full view for all to see, with a gigantic profile of Lenin and a just-as-gigantic red Soviet hammer-and-sickle. Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle have long since been removed from the Bolshoi, as they are no longer anything of what modern Russia is all about.

In terms of sheer subtlety, that picture of Lenin and that hammer-and-sickle were all this production lacked. Perhaps Ms. Zambello contacted the Bolshoi to see if she could borrow Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle, and, given how cutting edge her vision is, she was no doubt shocked and dismayed to find that they had been long since discarded. Too bad for her.

It is almost beyond belief how anyone in the 21st century could take seriously a "Marxist" spin on Wagner, or anything else for that matter that wasn't intended as "Marxist" to begin with. Pretty hard to keep a Bertolt Brecht play non-Marxist, which is probably why you don't see or hear too much of Brecht anymore, but Wagner? Sure, he was one of the 1848 revolutionaries, but that didn't make him a Marxist, and certainly not a Leninist. And it's no excuse at all for muddle-headed aging romantics (I call them "the bald-headed ponytail crowd") who just can't let go of their tie-dyed Che Guevara T-shirts, carte blanche to go on for decade after decade using the Ring to flog a horse that, whether they like it or not, is dead.

for Mr. Thommasini and Ms. Zambello and all of the others who didn't get the memo, the USSR rolled over and died nearly 20 years ago. Even the supposedly "communist" Chinese have embraced their own somewhat bizarre relationship with free-market capitalism. The whole notion of class struggle, of "haves" and "have nots" locked into a quantifiable and scientifically-scannable preordained fight-to-the-death is as hopelessly 19th century an idea as perpetual motion or phrenology. I repeat: are these people kidding? Does anyone, in the year 2009, seriously believe in Marxism anymore, an idea which is no longer even "last century," but now, "the-century-before?"

I'm all for updating Wagner. But while we're trying to be up-to-date, let's keep in mind that some things that seemed "up-to-date" when the Beatles were still making records are anything but up-to-date now. "Marxist" Wagner? This can only be about my fellow baby-boomers' nostalgia for the Woodstock era.

Oops, I've said it. Next we'll see a production of Der Rosenkavalier set at a 1960s hippie rock festival.

Hopefully I'll see the reviews before I waste my money on a seat.

People change

My choice of images with which to begin this blog posting was the basest kind of self-indulgence, rooted in the deepest nostalgia.

And I freely confess that nostalgia is a vice of mine, no less than alcohol, food and gambling are to some other people.

The image of Rod McKuen that appears above (and I realize that most of you don't remember Rod McKuen, which is the reason I'm writing this) is the cover of an album he made for Warner Brothers Records in 1969, Rod McKuen at Carnegie Hall. Billed as his "birthday concert," it was a live album of his songs and readings. Four sides, what was called a "double album" in those days.

For my 16th birthday on Oct. 12, 1971, I asked for, and received, this album. I still have it somewhere.

For that same birthday I was taken to a Rod McKuen concert at the San Diego Civic Theater. After the concert was over, I hung around among the Q&A crowd. Asked a question. He wasn't giving autographs, but I waited around the theater exit after that, and when he came out, I went up to him and shook his hand. I was newly-minted 16. "Mr. McKuen, I just want to thank you, because it was you who got me started writing poetry two years ago," I said to him.

"That's good, don't let anybody stop you," he replied.

He was a star. His fame was superlative. If you had given almost any American a word-association test in 1971 and said, "poet," the response would have been "Rod McKuen."

Women carried his books around in their purses. He was commissioned by popular magazines to write cycles of poems. People like Frank Sinatra recorded his songs.

And now almost nobody remembers who he is. He's in his late seventies now. He wears a beard, and looks a bit like George Carlin did just before he died. I hope that doesn't mean we're about to lose McKuen, even if the world forgot about him years ago, and I myself, by the time I was 17, no longer thought as much of his poetry as I did a year earlier. (By then I was hooked on Dylan Thomas.)

McKuen wrote many songs that were quite famous in their day, including Seasons In The Sun and Jean from the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Smith won an Oscar for her performance in that film. McKuen was nominated for an Oscar for the song, but lost out to Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song Burt Bacharach had written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the same year.

One of McKuen's many songs was entitled People Change.

And here, in which you will re-read much of what I just wrote, is a preview of my own novel-in-progress. What follows is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between the protagonist of my new novel and his recently-ex girlfriend:


“People change,” Olga remarked.

McCarver laughed. “You know what you just said? You couldn’t possibly know. But you just gave me the title of a song by Rod McKuen, and it couldn’t have popped out of your mouth at a more appropriate time. McKuen wrote a song called People Change.”

“Who was he?”

“Yeah, almost nobody remembers him anymore. Hard to believe, but in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, his name was practically a household word. He was a singer—with a terrible voice, though, very gravelly—and a songwriter who also wrote this treacly free-verse poetry that was very easy to read because it didn’t try very hard to be poetry. It was just thoughts, meandering thoughts, usually about failed love affairs. Women were suckers for this stuff; they love ‘sensitive’ men. Housewives carried his books around in their purses. If you asked any American in the early seventies to name a poet, ‘Rod McKuen’ would probably be the name you’d hear. He was perfect for that blow-dried era. I used to have some of his books. Lonesome Cities. Fields of Wonder. Some of the books were actually based on his record albums. Lonesome Cities was also an LP record, released in 1968 I think. Magazines like Women’s Day commissioned McKuen to write poems for them. He wrote a song, Jean, which was featured in the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Jean was nominated for the Oscar in 1970 for Best Song, but was beaten out by Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the score that Burt Bacharach wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. All of this is apropos of nothing of course, except when Wayne Breedlove and I were teenagers, Rod McKuen was our idol. I used to check the Lonesome Cities LP out of the public library and listen to it by the hour when I was, oh, 15. Believe it or not, my big birthday present for my 16th birthday was being taken to a Rod McKuen concert here in Baltimore. Wayne’s and my early poems sounded just like McKuen’s, as did those of every wannabe poet in the United States in those days. Now he’s almost completely forgotten. But he was plenty big in his time. I was with Wayne when I heard my first Rod McKuen album, The Single Man. Queasiest bunch of self-pity-fueled hogwash you ever heard. We loved it. We wanted to be just like him.”

We did, too.

Now, with that by way of introduction, I get down to my real subject, which is how people really do change.

What follows is a list of things about me that have changed during my life. I used to be this, used to be that, used to like this, used to eat that...don't anymore.

I'll bet you're the same way. Because people change.

Make your own list. Share with me. As the Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." I had an argument along these lines just the other day, with a friend who refused to see the usefulness of examining the past. Only the present matters, she insisted.

Which is the same as saying that a room at night looks better with the lights off. Sure it looks better with the lights off; You're not looking at anything. I won't quote that wheezy saw of George Santayana's about how those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, but I think there is more to be learned from the past than just remembering where you got the cuts and bruises. Wordsworth said the child is father to the man; what better way to know the man, or woman, than to remember the child?

What better way to know thyself than to reflect on how different your today self is from the self you used to know? (Or, as another of McKuen's songs had it, The World I Used To Know?)

Here are some ways in which I have changed over the years. Make your own list and share.

1. When I was 25 I was a big fan of Bruce Springsteen's. I can't stand him anymore. I think if I saw him coming down the street now, I'd go the other way.

2. When I was eight, I loved ketchup on scrambled eggs. Not now.

3. I was a bed-wetter as a child. God, I hope that doesn't come back in old age. It did to my father.

4. Like all baby boomers, I grew up watching television. Thousands of hours of it. You couldn't pay me to watch TV now.

5. When I was in college, I thought Japanese women were the most beautiful women in the world. I haven't necessarily abandoned them, but they've been supplanted by Russian women. (That could be because I've never lived in Japan, but I have lived in Russia.)

6. When I was 12 years old I dreamed of being an astronomer. By the time I was 15 I had realized that someone who can just barely manage long division is not going to be an astronomer. That ambition deflated quickly.

7. At ten I bridled at being told to go to bed. Now I don't have to be told.

8. Like most novice drinkers, when I was 19 I thought rum-and-coke was a great drink. Kids like alcohol, but they like it sweet. The thought of drinking rum-and-coke now is almost enough to make me heave.

9. In high school I thought that T.S. Eliot was a great poet, and that W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats were jokes. After one semester of college I had reversed that judgement 180 degrees.

10. At 20 I had a thick, full head of hair. At 53 I look like Arnold Schoenberg.

11. When I was a child, any and all talk of lawns, gardens and that sort of junk on the part of adults would make my eyes glaze over. Now I'm thinking about when I should plant my tomatoes. (Hint: next week.)

12. At 15 I used to sit up at night worrying about death. Now I just take another drink and go to sleep. As the guy said in the movie Manhattan, "I'm alive, I'm alive. When I'm dead, I'm dead."

13. As a youngster I was bored silly by jazz. I love it now.

14. I used to be afraid of girls. Now I'm afraid of women. (Probably more than I am of death, come to think of it.) Now, don't start screeching "misogynist," all you "feminists" out there. We all fear what we don't understand, and I gave up on understanding women years ago.

15. The exception that proves the rule: at 10 I used to get in trouble for reading library books when I was supposed to be doing my arithmetic. Stuff like that still happens -- I will still shirk what I'm supposed to be doing in favor of what I like to be doing.

16. When I was a teenager I loved the short days of fall and hated the spring. Now I love the spring and, although I still rather like the short days of fall, now they make me think of mortality more than what they used to make me think of, e.g. the holidays.

17. I used to love to go to the movies. When I was a kid, 50 cents got you a feature film on a big screen, and a cartoon. Now $11 gets you a feature film on a screen the size of someone's garage door, preceded by 15 minutes of commercials. Pass.

18. When I was young a snootful of alcohol would prompt me to call someone on the phone and bend their ear. Now, with each successive drink I take, the telephone becomes a repellent, not an attraction.

19. I used to love the play Inherit The Wind, in fact I did a cutting from its courtroom scene for speech tournaments when I was on the speech squad in high school. Now I regard it as simplistic, two-dimensional, manipulative and generally second-rate.

20. I was raised, like a lot of Americans are, sort of nominally Protestant. My parents' attitude was, any church more-or-less is okay as long as it isn't Catholic. In fact my parents (neither of whom went further than high school) encouraged me to despise and look down my nose at Catholics. When I was 19 I became Catholic. I haven't been anywhere near a church in years now, Protestant or Catholic, but I don't look down my nose at anyone (except New York Yankee fans.)

And now.......before I sign off, let me leave you with this thought, something to ponder the next time your local surplus store is having a special on gas masks:

A few years ago one of my doctors told me (and I don't know where he heard it) that when you sit down on the toilet to have a bowel movement, most of what you pass is not, in fact, food waste.

Most of it is stuff you have inhaled.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Aujourd'hui le déluge

Pictured at right is one of Washington, D.C.'s tourist attractions, the D.C. Duck. Half-bus and half-boat, You can ride around town on it, and then right across the tidal basin.

If things don't ease up here soon, however, the D.C. Duck might become a mode of commuter transport.

In fact, if things don't ease up here soon, we may all develop webbed feet. WE'LL be the D.C. Ducks.

If you were to visit the nation's capital now, I swear you'd think you were in Seattle. You know, good old rainy Seattle, where they see the sun so seldom that Bill Cosby once commented that when the sun does come out, people look at each other guiltily and ask, "What did we DO?"

Today is Thursday, and I don't think we've seen the sun since last Friday. In the meantime it's been either pissing down or pouring rain down rain steadily. Rain to annoy you a bit, like that persistent dribble that forces you to set your windshield wipers on "every-ten-seconds," and then all of a sudden whoosh--it's coming down like the proverbial cow pissing on a rock.

Last night my wife Valerie was busy in the garage, sorting out things for a neighborhood yard sale this weekend. She wanted me to get my three bicycles out of the way. I put them in the backyard for temporary storage, but was afraid they'd get rained on, so I rummaged in the basement until I came up with the only thing I could find to cover them with -- the drop cloth I use when I paint. Not the best thing, because it's only canvas, with no plastic on either side. But better than nothing. I threw it over the bikes where they leaned up against the back fence.

A few minutes later Valerie came up to me with an old used shower curtain she had found. "Here, this is plastic, it'll cover those bikes better than that canvas drop cloth," she said.

I went out and threw the shower curtain over the bikes. And not a moment too soon, either, because less than five minutes later here it came again, another downpour like something out of the ninth chapter of Genesis.

What is going on here? If this had happened in January and all of this precipitation we've been getting this week had been snow instead of rain, the government would have shut down completely. I'm not kidding. I have lived here in D.C. off and on for years. At the first sign of a winter snowflake, government offices empty out. It looks like the crowd fleeing Godzilla in a Japanese monster movie.

Come to think of it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, would it? D.C.'s horrific commuter traffic would get to take a holiday, as would the rampant waste of your tax money on things like invisible sneakers and studies of why fish don't watch television.

I'll tell you one thing, though. All joking about the government aside, this relentless storm system is playing hell with us suburban crabgrass farmers. We have a particularly aggressive species of bluegrass that grows around here. When this stuff takes a nap in the winter, it's just harboring its energies for spring. The grass in my backyard grows so fast that the place looks like the Guatemelan jungle if I fail to mow at least once a week. Now, add all of this rain to that and you have a situation where the grass is growing so fast it looks like it's threatening to overthrow the city.

Remember that Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon about the Pottsylvania Creeper, Bullwinkle's prize-winning flower that grew to monstrous size in minutes...and then started eating people? I think I have something like that on my hands.

So does my next-door neighbor Ted, who came over here last night just as he was preparing to launch a lawnmower assault on his own lawn one more time. He had a great idea.

"I'm gonna buy some goats," he said. "How many goats do you want?"

"I'll take three," I told him. Do I have to provide them with rain slickers?

Ha-ha, of course not.

But I might have to call the D.C. Duck to come rescue them -- and me -- from off the roof if this doesn't end soon.

Sales Resistance 1A

Okay, everybody. Here's yet another chance for all of you to benefit hugely from old K.D.'s extensive experience in the wonderful world of getting ripped off.

When dealing with anyone trying to sell you anything, I offer the following stars to steer by. I guarantee that they will bring you safely into port, and you, the fool, will not be parted from your money:


1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

2. Internet web sites that promise you riches and then ask for a credit card number are always scams.

3. The following Q&A may be a cliché, but you’ll never go wrong keeping it in mind: “When is a salesman lying? When his mouth is moving.”

4. And by the way, things really do break the day after the warranties expire. That’s not your imagination.

5. Never make eye contact with anyone carrying a stack of anything.

6. Ditto anyone carrying a stack of anything who is obviously trying to make eye contact with you.

7. If you see a sign on something that says it’s for sale “as-is,” don’t buy it unless you’re sure you know how to fix it.

8. If you answer the phone and there’s a long silence at the other end, hang up. It’s a telemarketer or a bill collector—the long silence means that the computer which automatically dialed your number is disengaging and they’re getting ready to the put the telemarketer or bill collector through to you. Hang up!

9. Related to #8, caller ID is an essential in the modern world. If you don’t have it, get it.

10. Nobody legitimate sells anything door-to-door anymore. If someone rings your doorbell and tries to sell you something, assume he or she is a crook. Or it might just be the Jehovah’s Witnesses—they still go door to door. But they're usually nice people and at least they’re not going to ask you for a credit card number. Your call.

11. If you put your resume on Craigslist in search of employment, be advised that scammers are actively farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses. If you get an e-mail that purports to be from a recruiter looking to match you up with a job, be very wary. Legitimate recruiters will almost always contact you by phone. E-mail usually means it’s someone trying to recruit sales people or sell you an iPhone.

12. Citigroup is especially aggressive this way, and they will contact you by phone. If you get a call from Citigroup offering you employment in some "management" position,, most likely the job will involve commission sales. Take the call at your own risk.

13. If you’re thinking about buying a new car but haven’t made up your mind yet, don’t just wander up on to a car dealer’s lot. Their salespeople will be on you like ugly on an ape, and your only defense will be flight. Have an escape route planned before you leave the safety of the sidewalk. I find the binoculars-from-across-the-street approach both helpful and safe.

14. If a “career counselor” hands you a service agreement to read and then leaves the room, assume that on the reverse side of it you will find his very hefty fee, not mentioned until that moment.

15. This one is strictly for my former colleagues in the U.S. State Department: never so much as give the so-called Bureau of Diplomatic Security the time of day unless there’s a lawyer present. Those people are looking for promotions, and they’re looking for promotions at your expense. Don’t trust them, ever.

16. If someone is talking to you and he uses your first name three times in one sentence, run for your life. He wants to sell you something.

17. Also, it’s a good idea to keep track of how often that same guy blinks. If he goes for a full minute without blinking, he’s either a crook or a nut. Thus trapped, my m.o. is to say, “Look! a naked lady!” Then when he turns to look, I run.

18. Ask to see the goods, up-front. Take nobody’s word for anything.

19. If you are in fact looking to buy a car, never buy one from a private individual. Always go to a dealer. Even if that Nissan you found on Craigslist looks wonderful, it might have been sitting at the curb or in the guy’s driveway for six months and all of its gizmos and gasmos have deteriorated to the point where it’s just waiting to die.

20. There is no such thing as a legitimate "fat-off" pill. Any product in a bottle that promises to melt fat off you is fake. Some products might indeed suppress your appetite and help you that way, but anything called "Super Fat Magnet" or something of that nature is fake, fake, fake. There is no easy substitute for jogging and meal-replacement shakes.

21. Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.” Well, he had it close. My advice is “Don’t trust to begin with, then you won't have to bother verifying.”

22. If you get an e-mail purporting to offer you a job, and they have the word "Employment" spelled wrong, e.g. "Employement," I'd say that's a safe bet for deletion.