Venus, Jon Stewart and Red Light Districts

CBS Sunday Morning did a piece on Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval a few days ago. If a product carrying the coveted seal does not perform as promised, the magazine—not the manufacturer or the retailer—will refund the purchase price or replace the product. Which brings me to today’s mail and a copy of a magazine-sized glossy catalog of women’s apparel from Venus of Jacksonville, Fla. It’s 96 pages of soft porn images of fetching young maidens in bikinis and otherwise come-hither fashions. The back cover headline is “Sexy Sunrises are on your horizon.”

By the way, this hot catalog was not sent to Gilda. It was sent to me! I’m flattered Venus considers me, or Gilda, sexy. But I can’t help but thinking Venus and others of its ilk should adopt a Good Housekeeping-like creed—if their products don’t turn you into the personification of sexiness (at least to your partner’s satisfaction) in say, 60 days, you should get your money back. Or at the very least, they should remove you from their mailing list.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is no Sandy Koufax. You’ll remember the southpaw ace of the Los Angeles Dodgers forsook pitching the opening game of the 1965 World Series against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Judaism’s holiest day. (For the record, Koufax pitched and won two other games in leading the Dodgers to the baseball title.) Stewart chooses to ignore, and even mock, Jewish holidays, working on Yom Kippur and other holidays including this week’s Passover celebration. Most Jews I know have a liberal sense of humor about our religion, so we laugh along with Stewart’s comedic send-ups. 

Monday night, however, one of The Daily Show’s best puns went unappreciated by what must have been an audience with few if any Jews, given that it was the night of the first seder of Passover. There wasn’t even a hint of laughter when Stewart’s reporting on the president’s trip to Israel was accompanied by the caption, “Barack Atah Adonai.” For the non-believers out there, and anyone else Hebraically challenged, Barack Atah Adonai is a play on “Baruch Atah Adonai” which begins every blessing and means “blessed are you, Lord our God.” In Stewart’s version, the Hebrew translates to “Barack (Obama), you are God.”  

Uh-oh: Retirement may cost me about 50 bucks. Since I don’t travel out of LaGuardia Airport too often these days I was unaware traffic lights were installed on an overhang above the departure ramp of the main terminal. As I drove Ellie and Donny to the United Airlines door, I was softly questioned by my son-in-law about gliding through a red light. 

I stopped at the next one and noticed a camera stationed to the right of the red sphere. Dread descended. No doubt my picture was taken at the prior light. No doubt I’ll get a notice in the mail in a few weeks demanding payment for going through a red light. No doubt my defense that no lights previously impeded my progress down the ramp will not absolve me from having to pay for the infraction. Ah well, it’s a small price to pay for an otherwise enjoyable retirement.

Economic Lessons From An Early Age

Choo Choo Coleman is back in town.

I wasn’t a NY Mets fan growing up, nor at present, but I saw Choo Choo play for the Mets in the old Polo Grounds, the team’s first home before Shea Stadium and now Citi Field rose in Flushing Meadows. It was at the Polo Grounds I witnessed first-hand the mastery of Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the Polo Grounds, pitchers would warm up before the game near their respective dugouts. As Koufax warmed up, my brother and I made our way to the front row. I still can visualize the 12-to-6 curveballs Koufax spun during his warm-ups, hear the thumps of his fastballs as they hit the catcher’s mitt.

Choo Choo (nobody called him Coleman) came back to New York for the first time since 1966 to be a featured guest at baseball memorabilia shows and a baseball writers’ dinner (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/sports/baseball/mets-choo-choo-coleman-50-years-later.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=sports).

One of the foundations of any sports show is the showcasing and trading of baseball cards. Like most youngsters I had a massive baseball card collection, cleaned out one day by my mother. I didn’t have a hard to secure Rogers Hornsby card, but I had my fair share of Mickey Mantles, Yogi Berras, Roberte Clementes and Stan Musials.

Baseball cards were not just for collecting. They were also for playing with, often in ways that were sort of like gambling. Just like pitching pennies, where the winner is the one who flicked a penny closest to the wall, kids would cast cards toward a wall. A variation on this game was tossing a card towards a wall already targeted by your opponent; if your card landed on top of your opponent’s, you claimed his card. If it didn’t, he took yours.

Another game entailed holding a card to a wall and letting it tumble down. Your opponent won your card if his fell on top of yours. He lost his if it didn’t.

A fourth game was dropping cards from your hand to match the front or back of your opponent’s cards. One trick we used—if you wanted the card to land on its picture side, you’d hold the card with the back facing out. Fifth game variation: dropping cards from a wall, your opponent trying to match the fronts and backs.

Baseball cards were not just gambling devices. Using clothes pins, kids affixed cards to bicycle wheel spokes to make clicking noises while speeding through neighborhoods. Of course, I didn't do this because I never learned to ride a two-wheeler as a child.

Cards were also used to set up a defensive field in a game of marble baseball. If a batted marble rolled to a pre-determined spot on the field without first touching a card, you reached base safely. But if a marble skimmed over a card, you were out.

Perhaps the greatest contribution baseball cards made to the youth of America was their part in our education into the ways of capitalism.

Baseball cards were our currency of exchange We learned about supply and demand. We learned not all cards had equal value. We learned how to trade for the cards we wanted. We learned how to be good losers. We learned how to size up the competition, how to stay away from sharpies, how to exploit suckers. We learned fortunes could be won or lost in an hour. We learned sometimes it's the smart thing to walk away during a hot streak, that success can be fleeting if based on the flip of a card.

We learned, ultimately, that not everyone shared our values, that what we thought was gold our mothers thought was trash.

We learned to forgive, at least on the outside, but never to forget the simple joys of baseball cards.

And lest anyone think I'd forgotten, mom also threw out my comic book collection.