Which Baseball Team Are You Allowed To Root For?

A blue collar team with no Hollywood phoney fans...oh, er...

I'm reblogging this from two years ago because after a dreary and depressing off season we're just a few days away from Opening Day.. (And if I can just add that of the four teams I follow across a world of sports (Coventry City FC, Liverpool FC, St Kilda FC, and the New York Yankees I think its not unreasonable to suggest that because of poor long term management thinking the NYY are going to have the worst season of the 4 and their worst season in a long long time)...
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In a pretty silly article in The New York Times Joe Queenan said that the only people who are allowed to be Yankees fans are those who were born or live in the Bronx and Yonkers. Every other New Yorker apparently has to be a Mets fan if they are not to be derided as a phoney. When I emigrated to America I lived in Harlem for 7 years, a district of the city Queenan apparently forgot about; try wearing a Mets hat on 135th Street or in Washington Heights and see how far that gets you mate...But I take Queenan's point. The Yankees have a lot of money and many wanker types like to jump on a winning bandwagon although they know nothing about baseball. So which baseball team are you allowed to support without having to bear the taunts of bandwagonitis? I have devised a formula using Venn diagrams, the differential calculus and advanced mathematics which will reveal the answer...
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First of all let me explain that I'm only talking about Major League Baseball. All minor league teams are equally rootable, but my favourites are the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Albuquerque Isotopes and the excellent Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs.
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Ok onto the majors...The first big cut is any team that has won the World Series in the last 25 years. If you root for any of those teams you are a bandwagon jumping hoor and that is not cool. This eliminates: The Reds, The Twins, Toronto, Atlanta, the NYY, Miami, Arizona, Anaheim, Boston, Chicago WS, the Cardinals, the Phillies, Kansas City, the Mets, the Dodgers, the Giants and the A's. This leaves us with:
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Baltimore, Cleveland, the Cubs, Detroit, the Rockies, Houston, Milwaukee, Seattle, Tampa, the Pirates, the Rangers, the Padres and the Nationals. We can immediately eliminate both Texas teams because they are from Texas. We can kill Cleveland because the film Major League destroyed any chance of them ever being cool again and we can get rid of Seattle, San Diego and the Colorado Rockies because Seattle, SD and Denver are fey, white, and fairly boring places. (This pains me to say it because I've been to about 150 Rockies games and about a dozen Mariners games and they were all fun). I'd also like to get rid of both Florida teams (I've already eliminated Miami) because no one goes to the games or seems that enthusiastic about non spring training baseball and they just don't deserve it. (Miami should be the best supported team in baseball because of the million plus Cubans living there but somehow they just dont go.) What's left then? Baltimore, Washington, The Cubs, The Detroit Tigers, The Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ok I'm going to cut Baltimore because although they've got the whole Wire thing going on and Baltimore apparently can be a hellhole their logo is a cartoon bird and Camden Yards is a very nice place full of yuppies. I'm going to cut Milwaukee because they were a creation of Bud Selig and Milwaukee always makes me think of Joanie and Chachi. That only leaves four teams that it is acceptable to be a fan of:
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The Detroit Tigers, The Cubs, The Nationals and The Pirates. I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut the Tigers. They won the WS relatively recently (just outside my 25 year limit) and although Detroit is clearly fucked, the opening titles of Magnum P.I. kind of ruined the Tigers forever for me. Sorry Detroit - that one I feel bad about. I'll cut the Nationals too because although they've got an exciting young team its Washington DC for Chrissake. Who are we left with? The Cubs and The Pirates. Well you've got to like the Cubs because they havent won the WS since 1908 and they are cursed by the mighty jinx and all, but everybody roots for the Cubs especially toothy little suburban white kids in John Hughes movies, so I'm afraid the Cubs are going too. Which means that:
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The Pittsburgh Pirates are only team in Major League Baseball that you are allowed to root for. The Pirates have everything a baseball team should have: a proud history, an alliterative name, a cool logo, a blue collar city and a disastrous recent record. According to Wikipedia "On September 7, 2009, the Pittsburgh Pirates were defeated by the Chicago Cubs 4-2. The loss was the Pirates' 82nd of the year, and it clinched for them the longest streak of consecutive losing seasons in any North American professional sport." Last season they were riding high but we all knew that heartbreak was just around the corner. The Pirates always get your hopes up and crush them. Always. (Kinda like St Kilda FC here in Australia but thats another story) No, it really doesn't get any better than the Pirates for street cred fandom. See you at PNC Park buccos fans.

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The Songs of Molly Drake

In the 1970's the most important member of the Drake family to me was Gabrielle Drake who was one of the stars of the cult Gerry Anderson TV series UFO. Although they only ever made 26 episodes of UFO it seemed to be on all the time and it became as totemic to me as Star Trek, Dr. Who and the nihilistic Blake's Seven. By the 1980's my UFO phase was over and I was beginning to listen to the albums of Gabrielle Drake's brother, Nick. Everybody knows who Nick Drake is these days but in the 80's, if he was remembered at all, he was recalled as the painfully shy posh English folkie who failed to sell many records in his lifetime and (suffering from rejection and depression) ended up overdosing on amitriptyline (possibly accidentally). In the 1980's Nick Drake was still seen as a failure, not as a misunderstood lyrical and musical prodigy out of step with this time. By the 90's of course everything had changed and helped by a series of TV ads for various products a new generation had discovered Drake's music and especially his album Pink Moon. 
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Nowadays Drake is an established presence in the musical firmament - a proto Jeff Buckley who, like Kurt and Gram and Shannon and Jeff and Marc, left us far too soon: biographies have been written, film projects discussed, his influence name checked from the likes of Regina Spektor to Edward Sharpe, to, er, Taylor Swift. The archives have been trawled for lost songs or lyrics, but unfortunately no lost songs or lyrics have been discovered; however earlier this year, remarkably, an album was released of songs written by his mother Molly Drake in the 1950's. 

You can listen to the album, here. 

The production values aren't so great as the songs were recorded in the Drake living room on a primitive tape recorder as Molly plays a slightly out of tune stand up piano, but Nick Drake's original engineer Joe Boyd should be given credit for saving these songs from oblivion and remastering what was there. Boyd has said this of Molly's music: "She was the missing link in the Nick Drake story – there, in the piano chords, are the roots of Nick's harmonies" Quite, and also perhaps the roots of Nick's melancholy too. Molly's songs are remarkably atemporal in their longings and sadness. There are strange reflections on birds and forests and on the transitory nature of love and life. The songs are fragile and oddly intense but at the same time very English and emotionally a little chilly. Molly's voice is that of a 1950's housewife (and you really can't help but listen to her lyrics through the prism of Betty Friedan) but there is an exotic quality here too. Nick Drake's parents met in Burma where they both worked for the British Imperial administration in the period George Orwell writes about in his excellent novel Burmese Days and the beautiful essay Shooting An Elephant (if you've never read Shooting An Elephant, rectify that immediately!)
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As I say you can listen to the songs of Molly Drake at bandcamp.com, here and if you buy the album the CD comes with an intimate selection of Molly's poetry and reproductions of family photographs. There are 19 songs and fragments of songs and if you're pressed for time allow me to suggest that you try the haunting How The Wild Wind Blows and the very sad Poor Mum.
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If you've never even heard of Nick Drake a good place to start is with my favourite song: One Of These Things First. 
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(And I know this is off topic but since I have your attention I'd like to point you in the direction of Crash - the quirky film JG Ballard and Gabrielle Drake made in 1971 about Ballard's obsession with car crashes.)

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When Will The Oil Run Out?

I haven’t found an adequate answer for this question on the net (just a lot of silliness and/or propaganda) so I’ve had to do the sums myself. Current world consumption is about 26 billion barrels per year. World Oil consumption has been stagnant for the last two years but I think an average growth rate of 1.5% - 2% per year seems reasonable based on the expected continuing industrialisation of China, India and the Third World. That means that world oil consumption will have doubled to about 50 billion barrels per year in around 2045 when oil consumption may level off due to energy conservation measures and plateauing populations and industrialisation. There are - approximately - (no one really knows for sure) 1.3 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves across the world. If we use, say, 1 trillion barrels over the next 34 years that will leave us with only 300 billion barrels when world oil consumption hopefully(!) levels off at 50 billion barrels a year in 2045. That means that post 2045 there will only be a six years supply left. By this metric all the oil in the world will run out in 2051.
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However, there are many unexplored regions of the world and it wouldn’t be outrageous (but it would generous) to suggest that there could be another 1 trillion barrels of oil in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, off Greenland, in Russia and in other inhospitable regions. But one trillion only buys us another twenty years or so at the 50 billion per year consumption rate so the oil runs out in 2071 (and thats assuming a levelling off of oil consumption after 2045). But what about shale oil and the oil sands of Alberta and Venezuela as well as other places around the globe? Well now we’re talking big numbers. At the moment most of those massive deposits are uneconomic but if we’re running out of oil fast then by golly they will quickly become economic. In Canada and Venezuela alone there could be as much as 4 trillion barrels of oil that may be recoverable with advanced technologies. This will get us another 80 years. In the US there could be another 1.5 trillion barrels of shale oil that could be exploitable by frakking.  Let’s throw in the remaining world oil shale and sands reserves and that could possibly buy us another 50 years.

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So when does all the oil run out? Add this all together and I reckon the answer is just before teatime on August 6th 2196. This, I think, is a much later date than most people are expecting, but still what do we do then? Well, if no one’s figured out how to mine the methane on Titan or invented a fusion reactor or cheap solar arrays then we could be back to the glorious days of clipper ships and steam trains, which, personally I would love. Wake up my frozen head and make me happy. 

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The First American Newspaper Review of The Cold Cold Ground

It's been nearly 4 months since The Cold Cold Ground was released in the US and finally the book has gotten its first full length newspaper review. I know they've been cutting down on reviews especially for new crime and mystery fiction so I'm particularly grateful to Robert Anglen of The Arizona Republic for this review. I don't know how Robert has heard about me and my work, it's true that I've done events at the great Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, but as you'll see from the review itself I think it's just the fact Mr Anglen is extremely well read and really knows his Irish crime fiction:

Get Your Irish On With Crime Noir Masterpiece
Robert Anglen, The Arizona Republic March 17 2013

Adrian McKinty opens his new thriller at the onset of the hunger strikes in 1981 Belfast. The rage, dissent and blind self-interest of “the Troubles” are the perfect backdrop for this noir masterpiece. Bobby Sands is dying in Long Kesh. Police and rioters clash nightly in the streets. The economy is collapsing. And sectarian violence looms as the law of the land.

Sean Duffy is a young Catholic detective working for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s nearly all-Protestant police force. He’s educated, has an eclectic love of music and checks underneath his car every morning for mercury-tilt bombs. A witness to the carnage of an IRA bombing, Duffy has turned his back on the cause and is determined to make his stand on the thin blue line. Assigned to the town of Carrickfergus, about 5 miles north of Belfast, Duffy has a caseload of primarily fraud and petty theft when he’s not on riot-suppression duty.

Called out in the middle of the night to investigate a body in an abandoned car, Duffy is thrust into a macabre murder investigation. At first, all signs point to an IRA hit. One of the victims’ hands has been cut off, the mark of a traitor. But the crime scene has other peculiarities and the postmortem suggests much darker motives. A second body confirms that somebody is killing homosexuals, and Duffy finds himself investigating Ireland’s first-ever serial killer. As Duffy says, there’s no need for serial killers in Northern Ireland; sadists and psychopaths have plenty of opportunities to work out their kinks in paramilitary ranks.

At the same time, Duffy becomes preoccupied with the suicide of a young woman whose death seems to epitomize the Irish condition. Against orders, he follows leads into the upper echelons of the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitary organizations. Considered a traitor by the Catholics and an outsider by the Proddies, Duffy finds himself asking questions that neither side wants answered.

This is McKinty’s 12th novel and the best book he has written since his 2004 breakout, “Dead I Well May Be,” the first in a trilogy featuring the reluctant yet highly efficient killer Michael Forsythe. McKinty, who was born in Carrickfergus in the late 1960s, is one of the most underappreciated crime novelists working today. Although he has won several awards for his fiction, he hasn’t achieved the blockbuster status that is his due.

“The Cold Cold Ground” could change all that. It is the first in a trilogy (“The Troubles Trilogy”). The second book, “I Hear the Sirens in the Street,” was published to critical acclaim recently in Great Britain. Unlike the Forsythe books, “The Cold Cold Ground” relies on time and place to provide an unalterable atmosphere of menace and melancholy. Belfast’s blasted streets, the sick ward inside the Maze prison, the polluted shores of the loch and the red-brick row houses of Protestant housing estates are all characters in this finely etched crime saga.

For all of its brutality, the book is subtle and nuanced. McKinty isn’t interested in broad brushstrokes that paint the British as bad guys and the Catholics as freedom fighters. Through Duffy, he observes the bloody hypocrisy of the IRA campaign and the venality of British policies. Much of the book relies on actual events, albeit with historical revision. Real and fictional figures brush up against one another, and McKinty has no issue blurring their lines, including a notorious informer in the ranks of the IRA’s inner council known as Stakeknife. In real life, Stakeknife was linked to dozens of murders with no loyalist ties; many are believed to have been killed in an effort to protect the British mole’s identity.

McKinty revels in the contradictions of war: Sworn enemy factions setting aside differences in order to work out a heroin score; a society that shrugs daily at death but makes homosexuality a crime. McKinty, who has written thrillers set in Colorado (“Hidden River,” 2004) and Cuba (“Fifty Grand,” 2009), is never better than when on his hometown turf. His prose is evocative but does not rely on the heavy stylization of other Irish crime writers such as Ken Bruen. Nor does he cloud his writing with internal brooding; his characters aren’t haunted by doubt and recrimination. This is more Declan Burke than Stuart Neville.

McKinty’s prose is straightforward but not without music. He captures people in the act of doing; drinking in pubs, laughing after sex, examining a crime scene, dying for a cause, killing for pleasure. At the center of this is Duffy; the keen observer, the perfect protagonist. A righteous man who unwillingly takes his pursuit of justice into the realm of moral ambiguity.

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Wow, thank you very much for the review Mr Anglen! Getting a newspaper review is a big step for me in getting the word out; I appreciate that because I am not connected I'll never get reviewed in The New York Times but something like this really helps. And if anyone else reading this wants to drop me a review on amazon, audible, good reads etc. I'd be very grateful. And hey if you have any ideas at all about how to get one's book noticed, well, I'd love to hear 'em. Ciao. 

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