The Archives

Tonight when I called Victor he answered the phone with a jaunty little ditty: “Waa-na-na-na.”

And so forth.It’s a favorite little tune of his and Allison’s, and fits my last name quite well. Of course we all remember it from Sesame Street, but then Nick and I got curious about where it actually came from. It turns out it’s from a sauna scene of a 1968 Italian softcore porno filmed in Sweden as a pseudo-documentary. So it was just as absurd as we could have hoped.

For your listening/viewing pleasure, and in honor of Victor’s birthday, here are a number of versions:

• The Muppets version
• The original Sesame Street version
• The hit bossa nova version from 1968 by Giorgio Moroder
• The original film version (it’s as SFW as an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”)
• A better version by Cake

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Just because it keeps coming up, and Victor mentioned he couldn’t remember most of the words that would be good names if they weren’t already words, here’s my complete list. Which is to say it’s the entire list I have written down, not that it’s comprehensive, because there are a lot of good ones we’ve thought of that I forgot to write down:

• Felony (a longtime favorite)
• Pistol
• Nazi
• Machete
• Pirate/Piracy
• Rival
• Malaria
• Burglar
• Larceny
• Soviet
• Parole
• Debris
• Fahrenheit
• Wrestler
• Tyranny
• Concertina
• Havoc (newest addition)
• And the classics: Fiasco, Vendetta, Siren

Some of them I like much better than others, but that’s not the point. Try them out with your last name, come up with a solid middle name (say Jane, Alice, Mary, James, Robert, William) and tell me it wouldn’t be awesome. This is one of those nice, no-pressure daydreams that you can be relatively certain won’t ever happen. It’s a good game for car trips, walks, classes and sermons that drag on a while.

I came into the Evergreen newsroom today to do some of the reporting I still feel a little obligated to do as long as I have newroom keys and a desk with crap on it. Instead I got distracted by library books I still have out about Martha Gellhorn. I think I was mostly into that before I started this blog, so maybe I haven’t written about her yet. She was a war reporter, married to Ernest Hemingway for a while, by most accounts had such a great love and compassion for humanity as a whole that she pretty much ignored her son, and had a tendency to just leave for another war when personal life got difficult or dull. So I see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale.

Anyway, this is from a letter she wrote to Hemingway in December 1943, talking about why she does journalism:

“… if such as me did not write, far worse people would do so. I can only guarantee the truth of what I write, not ever saying that I write the whole truth, because I never know the whole truth and if I did no one would publish it. But I know I am conscientious and serious, and fake nothing, and I think really that I do a sort of negatively useful thing, in employing the space and paper that would otherwise go to someone far worse.”

I quote that part because on bad days that is the reason I keep doing journalism, at least for now. It’s an awful reason, sort of. But she had other good things to say, so I put the whole portion of that letter below.

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From the drive home from Seattle. It was raining.

I’ve been told there are a few special readers of this blog who are far more interested in posts about running shoes than journalism. This goes out to you.

Nick has been needing new running shoes. So after we went running around a little lake in Seattle, we stopped by Super Jock ‘n Jill to get him a new pair. While he was out doing the “just run down the street to see which feels better” part of acquiring new shoes, I chatted with the youngish sales guy helping us. From talking about my still-fairly-clean 858s, it came up what kind of running I’m doing these days.

I told him it’s mostly just casual now, trying to get back in shape, that running 80 to 100 miles a week took a pretty hard toll in a series of injuries once I hit college.

“That’s kind of like my wife,” he said. “She ran at UW for a while, but she used to run 80 or so in high school.”

At this point I had the defensive pride instinct about other girls who ran high mileage in high school. But then he told me her 3,200 PR in high school was 10:11 and my eyebrows went sky-high.

You see, as I explained to Nick when he returned, each year there’s a small set of high school girls in the nation who run the 3,200 in about 10:30. Maybe a dozen or so. That was me at my best. Then there are the girls who we can do nothing but gape at while they run times closer to 10 minutes.

It turns out his wife is Alison Tubbs, a name I definitely remember from my early days caring about such things. She’s two years older than me.

I don’t really miss those days. But after living in Nick’s crew world for most of the weekend, it was like stumbling into an old home.

This is the lesson I learned after getting immersed in Nick’s former rowing life in Seattle this weekend. The two sports are similar in nature and the surrounding culture:

• Both require relatively rare types of water, limiting their scope and popularity.
• Both require expensive, specialized equipment that is damaged fairly easily.
• Both make athletes chronically cold, wet and subsequently tougher. And both develop the friendships that come with group suffering.
• Both require a sense of rhythm and technique that takes a while to learn (you can really tell who’s new), along with high levels of overall fitness.
• Both are dominated by high school kids and old men in spandex.
• Both are miserable sports for parents, requiring long drives to obscure places, generous funding, and standing around all day to watch maybe 200 meters of racing (most of the race is hidden).

The actual story is below.

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Today Nick and I returned from Seattle. It was an all-around good time. We didn’t know for sure we were going until like 24 hours before we left, so the most-uttered phrase of the trip was “I’m glad we decided to do this.”

I’d been to Seattle three other times during my college years, but I’d never really seen the whole city. We had good company, good food and good weather - until today, when it rained while I drank coffee on the way out of town for a stereotypical Seattle farewell. More later, with pictures.

This weekend I am in Seattle with Nick. I couldn’t mention it before we left because he was surprising his mom for Mother’s Day. This picture is from Vantage, a traditional stopping spot by the Columbia River on the route from Pullman. The drive was uneventful, except for running over a tumbleweed and getting caught in a baby dust devil.

We’re heading back to the Eastern part of the state Tuesday, after visiting Nick’s families, friends and old haunts. It feels like vacation to me.

Somewhere an unborn child might be named Vendetta. From my blog stats:

Good sir or (more likely) madam, do not do this! Either the name is way too outrageous with way too may negative connotations, or I want it for myself.

May I tempt you with Siren instead? My friend and I came up with that one in high school, and after lengthy arguments we decided she could claim it. Since then it’s only become more fashionable, with two-syllable names ending in “n” just approaching the cusp of popularity. It’s easy to pronounce and spell, and has a nice base in mythology that sounds kind of intellectual.

Maybe this is a total overreaction, but you can’t ever be too cautious with something as important as names.

On a related note, I came up with one of my favorite recent additions to the Words That Would Be Good Names If They Weren’t Already Words list (or whatever I call it): Havoc. Victor says it sounds unidentifiably foreign, but it’s still nice except for the lack of any decent nicknames.

This multi-part story by a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter facing her 1984 rape has been getting mention on Romenesko, so today I read it. Wow. This is brave journalism, daring and deep social commentary disguised in an equally powerful personal story. Read it, preferably when you have time to sit down 45 minutes or an hour to read the whole thing, but in any case read it.