Author: Ray Cornwall

Harry Kalas

Harry Kalas died today. He was in the booth prepping for today’s game at Washington when he collapsed. He was 73.

He was legend.

If you ask any real Phillies fan what baseball means to them, it’s Kalas and Ashburn on the radio on a hot summer night. Maybe there’s a couple of beers involved, or a cheesesteak, or a soft pretzel and some mustard. The Phils are probably losing; you don’t get to be the first team to lose ten thousand games easily. It’s humid. The radio is clear from the 50,000 watt tower of WCAU-AM 1210.

And Richie Ashburn, quietly chewing on his pipe, maybe throwing in a “Hard to believe, Harry”.

But maybe it’s a good night, and Schmidt hits one out, and those pipes of Harry’s bellow out, “Swing AND A LONG DRIVE OUTTA HERE HOME RUN MICHAEL JACK SCHMIDT!”

But that’s rare.  Most of the time, it’s bad baseball. But you sit there with your dad, and you listen quietly. Maybe during the commercial you ask a question. Maybe your dad talks about playing semipro ball, like mine did. But maybe not. Maybe your dad doesn’t talk much. He just works quietly in the garage.

And you learn the manly art of saying as much as possible in as few words as possible from Ashburn. And you learn when to celebrate the good times from Kalas.

—

I want to say something profound about Harry’s death; something about how we’re all lucky to have had him for so long (he’s been calling games for the Phils since the early 70s). Or that it’s great that he called the last out last year (I heard it in the car). Or how he died doing what he loved. And maybe someone else will write that.

Right now, it hurts. For me, Kalas was as much a part of my childhood as Fantastic Four comics and Atari. We’ll never hear those dulcet tones, aged with tobacco and midwestern horse sense, over WCAU again. As I type this, the Phils are up in the game that Kalas died before.  I’m in central Jersey, so I can’t pick up the game, but I’m not sure I’d want to.

Goodbye, Harry. Thanks for everything.

UPDATE: Thanks to We Should Be GM’s for this:

Sunday at Five Guys

Five Guys logo
Five Guys logo

So CL (my wife) and I decided that we had to have a good burger on Sunday. Per the recommendation of noted French fry enthusiast Glenn Walker, we went to Five Guys. A new location had opened up near the Target in Ocean, NJ.

If you haven’t been to a Five Guys (they just opened their 400th location, according to the web site), you should if you’re a carnivore. All they do is burgers and fries, but they do them right. The burgers are fresh and made on the spot, with tons of toppings available. And the fries- wow. Hand-cut, fried perfectly, not overly salted.

The interior aesthetic is definitely low-rent; they are huge bags of potatoes and peanuts around, and you’re encouraged to help yourself to th peanuts while you’re waiting for your order. Our order took about ten minutes, not bad for a busy Sunday. We’ll definitely go back.

We’re also going to try Bobby’s Burger Palace, a burger joint run by famous chef Bobby Flay, very soon. We actually didn’t realize that this place, with a really weird exterior, was one of Bobby’s places until a neighbor told us. There’s an interesting article here.

Hey, Glenn, you’ll have to come over and review it! Maybe we can do a podcast from there!

Let’s go have an adventure…

If you want it

You can have it

But you’ve gotta learn

To reach out there and grab it

–Weezer, “Photograph”, Weezer (The Green Album)

Today begins the first day of my new adventures. I’ve been having adventures all my life- I just wrapped up an adventure that took me into midtown Manhattan every day, next door to Bernie Madoff’s old place of “business”. I did that for eight months, spending five hours a day on a train. And now that adventure’s done, and it’s time for a new one.

Sure, I was really going to work. And now I’ve changed jobs. Some might not think of that as an adventure. But then, it’s just going to work every day, day after day, and who wants to think of their life as a monotonous chore to be carried out without passion, without daring, without fun? Not me, that’s for sure.

My new adventure is a lot less strenuous. I won’t be spending five hours a day on the train. So that gives me time to finally write, and thus here I am. I used to write more for my old site, whyilovecomics.com. But I found that limiting myself to only writing about comics led to an enormous case of writer’s block, and I stopped writing about anything. Well, no more of that. I’ll still write about comics (and I’ll crosspost those posts over to WILC, I promise), but I want to write about anything I can think of, so that’s what I’m going to do.

There are two strict no-nos I won’t be writing about. I won’t be writing about my jobs, and I won’t be writing about my wife. I have to sign so many contracts for my jobs that writing about my work would probably lead to trouble, and who wants to read about database development, anyway? As for my wife, she’s pretty awesome, but she likes her privacy. Since I happen to love being married to her, I’ll respect that.

I’m going to do my best to write every day, and not just post links and videos (though I’ll do that too). I can’t promise that, but I’ll try my hardest. I urge you to add this site to your feed reader, and post your thoughts in the comments. I promise to try to make this as much of a dialogue as possible.

So let’s go have an adventure together!

Excuse our mess

A few links aren’t working after the latest upgrade. I’m upgrading the blog to a new version of WordPress, and will soon be migrating over to a new domain. Details forthcoming.

Iron Man- MOST awesome superhero movie or…

…most AWESOME superhero movie ever?

Spoiler-free thoughts:

1. Goddamn, that was good.

2. GodDAMN, that was good. A really fun movie, with a ton of cool stuff to make up for whatever slow points existed. My buddy Glenn will probably find something to pick on, because he’s a better movie critic than I’ll ever be, so go look to him for that sort of thing. But I was damn happy for my $10.

3. Seriously, when did movies in Central Jersey go to $10?

4. So that’s where Stephen Platt got to! (He’s a storyboard artist for the movie.) I remember those few weeks when Platt was the next superhot comics artist back in the mid-90s when all it took to get that designation was the backing of Wizard and the ability to spill ink on the page. Good times.

5. There was an “Adam Austin” listed in the credits. At one point in the sixties, legendary comics artist Gene Colan worked for Marvel under that name. And what did he draw?

Well yeah, Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula. But also, Iron Man! Neat.

6. Nice to see the Jack Kirby credit at the end. Wonder if that makes up for the fact that Marvel doesn’t pay the Kirby estate any royalties on the reprints of the comics that led up to all of that stuff, including the new $100 Iron Man Omnibus? (Yeah, I didn’t think so either.)

7. Stay past the credits. TRUST ME.

8. Wonder how much it bothered Joe Quesada, Marvel Editor-In-Chief, to see a primary villain in the movie smoking a cigarette in a prominent scene? Quesada has banned depictions of all Marvel characters smoking cigars or cigarettes in the comics because of the death of his dad and grandfather, among others, from smoking-related illnesses. I’m sure we’ll hear from him on that at some point.