captainsblog | Just another week at (and out of) the office....

work, cleaning, poetry, death, and another premature end to a hockey season.

Only one court hearing last week, so I took the opportunity to prepare and file a ton of things on a scenic drive up the Niagara River and into Niagara County. At one point, I passed a street which must constitute the spiritual center of the burg, if not its geographic or population one:

Yup, Recovery Road, nestled between a donut shop, a taco joint and a brew pub.

This week promises to be much busier after today: court most of tomorrow morning (afternoon in Rochester blessedly got called off at the almost last minute), then four different hearings there in two different places Thursday morning. At least three of those, and maybe all four, remain totally up in the air: one of the bankruptcy ones got put on and then inexplicably taken off the calendar before a drop-dead deadline next week, while the other one is still on but will probably require at least one more mass mailing to keep it from hitting its own drop-dead deadline at the end of next week. Meanwhile, that whole court just got a lot busier when the local Catholic diocese filed its long-expected Chapter 11 case on the first Friday in Lent. I don't have any clients in it yet, but could do a whole standup routine based on Catholicism bankruptcy jokes:

Wukka wukka! If the Bishop is late for court will the judge rap him on the knuckles with a ruler?

Ayahhhhh! There's a committee of the 20 largest creditors, how about the 20 youngest altar boys?

A Monsignor, a priest and a rabbit walk into a Meeting of Creditors. They try to throw the rabbit out but he says, "I thought this was the 341 Hare-ing!"

Thanks, I'm here all week. Try the veal. Except on Fridays.

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We continued our late winter efforts to make the house, and my offices, less pig-messy than they've been. After spending the preceding weekend throwing out tons of crap and making room for my Mostly Dead office copier at home (still haven't moved it), I devoted much of Monday to a similar purge of crap in my Buffalo office, and then did the same on Friday at the Rochester one. That was my only out-of-town trip of the week; no appearances or even appointments, just filing a couple of things and picking up some documents. One of the filing things was amusing, though; at one of the Rochester downtown court clerks, I saw one of these cans under her computer monitor:

Me: "Why do you have a can of cat food on your desk?”

Her: “It’s not cat food, it’s air freshener.”

Me: “Oh. Looked like cat food to me.”

Adjacent clerk: “You and everyone else.”

First clerk: “If you worked here, you’d bring air freshener, too.”

Me: “If I worked here, I’d bring my cat. She’d meow into the phone, type on the keyboard and hiss at the customers.”

(Unspoken: "And she'd fit right in around here....")

This weekend brought a bit more pitching, but also some fun doggo time; our dog park's been closed for most of the month due to a thaw, but after an alleged blizzard last Thursday that closed down schools and even some court over three whole inches of snow and a little wind, they reopened for a few days this weekend and I got to bring Pepper over before their scheduled March shutdown. Here she is, all pooped out after running round for an hour:

And yes, that is a pretty worn-out comforter on that bed. Or rather, it was. I'd been meaning to replace it for some time when the right sale came along, so after the Parp! trip on Sunday, I made a stop at Kohl's as part of my two hours and six stops of "retail therapy" (torture, in my case). The dog immediately gave it her paws of approval, right around the time the Evil Cat threw out the first drool on top of it:

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Our only night out was the biweekly poetry reading downtown. One of their regulars is coming over tonight to check out Eleanor's yarn stash- maybe take some, maybe learn some about some stitches and such. We may also get to the final Doctor Who of the season before or just after that. The past few nights, we watched Knives Out and the making-of about it that was almost as long as the film itself- both were really well done- and caught up with this season's short series of Endeavour as well as continuing our more-than-trial-now of Picard.

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Nobody died that I knew (that I know of), but I did get news of another Cornell passing from my time there. After sharing the news with my roommates from back then about the Death of a President, Jim shared this word of the demise of one of his most memorable math professors:

Harry Kesten, Ph.D. ’58, the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, whose insights advanced the modern understanding of probability theory and its applications, died March 29 in Ithaca. He was 87.

Kesten’s research into probability and randomness spanned aspects of mathematics and statistical physics guided by real-world applications. His work laid the foundation for describing a diverse range of phenomena in engineering, computer science, ecology, economics and other fields. His doctoral thesis provided a comprehensive system to describe “random walks” – a mathematical term to describe taking random steps on a grid which can be used to model many kinds of processes.

That photo helps explain the specific memories of him that Jim shared:

Harry was, without question, the most adept professor (in my experience) at erasing his notes with his left hand as he wrote new notes on the blackboard with his right. It was both amazing and infuriating. In one of his classes, we started the "Hari Kestens;" members were meant to shave their heads, other than for an isolated singularity.

I have no idea what that last bit means, but it's still funny.

Also passing, in an even more tangential way (heh, math joke, heh), was a baseball player I never saw play but remember all the same: Johnny Antonelli's career preceded my baseball life by a few years, but here are the three things I remember about him:

- He gets a brief mention in Ball Four from Jim Bouton's fandom days growing up in New York: "I remember once at a Giant game in the Polo Grounds I took the top of a Dixie cup and scaled it down onto the field during the game. I couldn't believe how far it went—clear out to the infield. It landed halfway between the mound and home plate. I was scared when I saw it was actually going to drop onto the field and I looked around to see if anybody had noticed me throwing it. Johnny Antonelli, who was pitching for the Giants, walked off the mound, bent down, picked it up and put it in his back pocket. I got a huge kick out of that. Imagine, Johnny Antonelli picking up the cover of my Dixie cup."

- A Met blogger friend included this anecdote in his book about the 1962 Mets : team general manager George Weiss traded for him before their debut season and at the end of his career: "Antonelli chose to retire and go into the tire business, although Milwaukee kept the money." #LOLMets

- Ah, that tire business:

When I moved to Rochester in 1984, the local Firestone chain was still branded with his name. Pack rat that I am, I still have the credit card they issued me, and was still using it well into this century, more than 20 years after the last trace of his name came down (redacted in compliance with FRBP 9037;)

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Finally, you can file under "Mostly Dead" the Sabres' chances for the postseason. They entered this past week with a difficult but surmountable challenge of catching Toronto for the last divisional playoff spot. Then came three road games in five nights, all three of them regulation losses; a new and nasty injury to one of their more promising players; and unfortunate improved play by the Maple Leafs, who just a weekend earlier were losing to a 42 year old Zamboni driver put in as an emergency goalie against them.

Oh well. We can say, as they always said in Brooklyn, Wait Till Next Year- just not for hockey, because their semi-resident team just told the borough

I wonder how much Bloomberg paid for that sign....