More Weird Coinkidinks

We've been alternating demolition and denouement today, and each brought things back full circle in a way.

By day's end, the bathroom wall you saw yesterday, in the photo taken two days before, had been considerably more denuded of sticky stuff, and mostly by me (and I have the sore left paw to prove it):



Eleanor scraped some of it as well, along with taking off the row of tile closest to the floor and beginning to rip up the floor itself around the area where it's going to have to come up.  There's still pink tile behind the vanity to the right of that picture, and she concluded today that at least the leftmost portion of it will also have to come out in order to get to the tile and flooring behind it.

But what resonated with me today, other than the nail-on-blackboard sound of the razor scraping the glue off, was the sound in my earbuds this afternoon, of a Subway Series game between the Mets and Yankees on enemy ground.  For the last time I did major demolition work in that room was 20 years ago right before that floor went in. We got a price for the new installation back then based on us ripping out the original "Scrabble tile" that had begun falling apart before we bought the house (the previous owners covered it up with a big piece of cheap linoleum). So I was down on that floor, with a hammer and chisel and various other implements of destruction, ripping out those tiny tiles during a Subway Series game, or possibly games, between the Mets and Yankees. I know I’ve seen the receipt for that job around here somewhere, and I’m guessing it was in 2000. Interleague play began in 1997, so it might’ve been one of the two times during the year that the teams met on their home fields. More likely, though, it was the 2000 World Series, the only time they ever faced each other in the post season.  That series became most immortalized for Roger Clemens, oh my goodness gracious, throwing a big piece of a bat at Mike Piazza after he broke it on an incoming pitch and the pitcher grabbed said big piece. Despite  throwing a lethal object at an opposing player not really being within the spirit of the rules, Clemens did not get thrown out of the game, which the Yuckees went on to win, along with the 2000 series.

This afternoon‘s event began the 25th year of regular season play between these two rivals, and other than it producing large crowds and even larger ticket price tags, in the entire quarter century of playing games that count against each other, that broken bat remains one of the two most memorable and stupid moments. This was the other, preserved in both radio and television form from both teams to make Mets fans sick all these years later:
 

Watch on YouTube

But go ahead, Yankee honks. Laugh about something from 2009, the last year you went to the World Series (spoiler alert: we've been there since). And we'll enjoy having beaten you on your own field today with your sterile ballpark being half full of our fans today.

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The other weird coincidence came from what we're watching in between rounds of demolishing the bathroom walls.

We recently finished the second drop of five episodes of Lupin on Netflix. The series has nothing to do with the Harry Potter character or anything werewolfy at all, but is a modern French update of a turn-of-20th-century series of mystery stories which follow a "gentleman burglar" named Arsène Lupin. His serialized exploits rivaled those of Sherlock Holmes across the Channel, and at least one of Lupin's original tales even pit the Great Detective against him.  The Netflix series is updated to present-day, with frequent flashbacks to 1995 with the lead character, Assane Diop as a teenager who is just then learning of Lupin's derring-do. We see that timeline blend with that of the present day, with frequent callbacks both direct and Easter-eggy to the original tales.  It was so compelling, we've gone back and rewatched eight of the ten episodes and will finish the final (for now) two tomorrow.

The deja lu(pin) moment came, though, when I sought out other works featuring the actual Lupin character. Diop is a separate character who merely admires and emulates the earlier fictional one, but there must have been others, oui?  And, indeed, a quick check of the library revealed there's a lengthy and well-received series of anime films which feature Lupin's grandson as the lead character, with stories named directly for those written over a century ago by Maurice Leblanc. Our main branch in town had one of the earliest of these, from 1980, titled Castle of Cagliostro. The title riffs on  Countess of Cagliostro, one of the Leblanc originals, and while I would have wanted to watch it regardless, a look at the DVD brought it back to our other find of the past week. For this anime film was directed by  Hayao Miyazaki, and was his directorial debut even before co-founding Studio Ghibli and creating all the original characters we followed in the documentary about him earlier in the week.

Maybe the Yankees could sign Totoro for the rest of the Subway Series. Then again, they haven't had the best of luck with Japanese ballplayers over the years ;)