In Which Monday Morning Links Excite You By The Simple Fact of Their Existence

A God Falls in Love Replete With Links

by Alex Carnevale

A-Rod has found a partner, and a friend, in Miami baseball player Yonder Alonso.

”I’m very private about my workouts, and he’s really the first kid in 10 years that has joined me like this,” said Rodriguez, 32.

The collegiate star put his plan into motion to seek Rodriguez out after seeing him many times on TV. Last winter, he got an up-close look at the slugger by watching him hit at UM, a place where Rodriguez has worked out during the off-season for the past 10 years.

”He might be one of the greatest players of all time,” Alonso said. “I said I need to get a hold of this guy somehow.”

“My Man is a Mean Man” – Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings (mp3)

Trainer Monica Swasey, who works off-season with Rodriguez and knows Alonso, encouraged the young man to introduce himself to his idol.

”When Yonder finally got the nerve to go over there, his grin was from ear-to-ear,” Swasey said. “[Alex] said, ‘Why don’t you come and join me?'”

‘Yonder just froze. He said to Alex, ‘I can’t do it because I have practice.’ Alex said, ‘Let’s start Monday.’ They’ve been hip-to-hip ever since.”

”I want him to use me as a measuring stick,” he said during a break from working out one morning while sitting in the dugout at UM’s Mark Light Field. “I know when I was his age I would be around major-league players, and it did wonders for me.”

These workout photos fill the dark place in my soul, the one that was principally created by Josh Stein’s article about Emily Gould in yesterday’s Page Six magazine.

“Satin Summer Nights” – Paul Simon (mp3)

”How many guys would have the year he had and get back to work and do more than what he did the year before? Yonder keeps up with him pretty well,” Mientkiewicz said. “If Al didn’t like him he wouldn’t be doing it.”

”I was honest, and he saw that,” Alonso said. “I was willing to work and willing to go all-out and not willing to quit. I was a workaholic. I’m like him.”

Diary of Swiss Music Junkie

The K.I.D. thing.

These Rocks Pop with some sick tracks.

Lenny Kravitz album review.

Mew working on a new album.

Are Foals buzzworthy?

A song about unexpected outcomes.

Best Mac tips and tricks.

Alarm is gonna sound! (Nialler9)

In other hot singer-songwriter news, Sandrine’s new album is coming to our shores.

Top ten most annoying video game enemies.

25 photos worth viewing.

House destroyed by derailed coal train.

Sorry, wrong party.

Mark Steyn on Noel Coward’s letters makes me not want to buy the book or for that matter ever go see a Coward play again. A short excerpt from Steyn’s marvelous piece follows:

In the very first of The Letters of Noël Coward, the eponymous epistler writes:

Darling Mother

I hope you are well. Girlie has taught me to row with two oars and I row her along. I had some little boys over yesterday afternoon to tea and I dressed up in a short dress and danced to them and sung to them and we all went round the lake and on it.

XXXXXOOOOOXO

I am writing this in the kitchen with love from Noël Coward.

He was seven and already inventing himself. The letters got longer in the years ahead but the subject matter didn’t change much: tea, dressing up, singing and dancing, though not as many boys as you might think. The snobbery was in place a mere half-decade or so later: Of some blameless lady in Wolverhampton who gave him tea and indeed the tuppenny bus fare to get to her house, the child actor sighs wearily, “I’ve never met anyone so painfully provincial in all my life.” Which seems a mite affected for a lower-middle-class boy from one of the drearier outskirts of London.

In 1954, he wrote to the Lunts:

I have been having a terrible time with After The Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis’s singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile.

So how about that urbane sophistication? Well, I would wager no other epistolary anthology has as diverse a range of intros and outros. To his doting mother: “Ducky old Diddleums. Ever your own, Dinkybobs.” To Broadway leading man Clifton Webb: “Darling Mr. Webb. Love and mad mad kisses, Mr. Coward.” And that’s one of his more sparingly fulsome sign-offs. To Lynn Fontanne: “Darling, darling, darling. Love, love, love, love, love, love, Noëlie.”

coward & connery

[snip]

Coward himself liked to rhyme, of course, and, instead of thank-you letters, which he felt were either contrived or boring, he preferred to dash off a verse or two. After a wartime visit to the Royal Navy’s finest in Malta, he wrote to his host:

Dear Admiral, a Bread and Butter letter
To writer and receiver is a curse
And so this time I feel it would be better
To write to you in lilting, lyric verse.

Very lilting. Rare is the naval base whose filing cabinets can boast a thank-you note like this:

Try to forget my frequent interference
When you saw fit to reprimand your staff,
Rather recall my exquisite appearance
Wearing a spotted Yugo-Slavian scarf.
A little of that goes a long way, as the actress said to the bishop.

[snip]

Still, it’s hard, after 750 pages, not to feel there was something missing in Coward’s personality: He seems genuinely to have had no need whatsoever of intimacy. “Had a long think about what I really want to do,” he once confided to his diary, “a play for Gertie or me or both, short stories, a book or a musical. Wrote three lyric refrains for Josephine, worked at the piano. Suddenly a new and lovely tune appeared. Felt the authentic thrill. All right, the musical it shall be.”

And for much of his life that’s how easy it was.

[end excerpt]