Text © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Nin

Roberto Baggio

Thanks to Pro Paul for the pic.

With the severe lack of perspective, characteristic of the footiemad species, I have been living half of my life assuming that everyone knows Roberto Baggio and all people knows why they know him. But this unhealthy outlook is of course wrong. So here's the basics.

Roberto Baggio was born in Caldogno, Italy, on February 18, 1967. He's 174 cm, and was 73 kg when this season in the Lega Calcio opened. He's been playing for Vicenza (1981-85), Fiorentina (1985-90), Juventus (1990-95), AC Milan (1995-97), Bologna (1997-98), Inter Milan (1998-99), Brescia (2000). He's got the Serie A Cup twice, a UEFA Cup, a Copa Italia, and on the national team for the whole century (or so it seemed).

I've been watching him on the field since I was 12 years old.

I've seen him winning, defeated, hailed, devastated, being a starter, being a bench-sitter, prioritized, dumped.

The 1994 World Cup in the God-chosen, one and only, soccer country USA, stays in my mind forever as he missed in the penalty shoot-out when the whole world of his was counting on that one goal.

I don't go for strikers. My favorite players are almost always goalkeepers -- second in line are midfielders. But Baggio is an everlasting exception. He, amigo, is a legend for the whole Planet Football -- discount that if you will, he'd still be an Italian calcio god. Now he only plays for an unlucky little club on promotion in the Serie A, Brescia, which has been so far consistent with losing almost every match, but, hey, at least he didn't go to the New York Metro Stars, did he! It doesn't really matter where he ends his career -- every great footballer, after the golden days, always went to endure the same fate -- but you know big players shone still. Even if he's only 1.74.

I've been his fan for the last e-i-g-h-t-e-e-n years, man.

So I know what I'm talking about.

Get one of his matches and see how a master works on the green carpet. With players like Baggio, it doesn't even matter whether he scores or not. It's the play itself that counts.

With such people like Lev Yashin (1963 Dynamo Moscow), Denis Law (1964 Manchester United), Eusebio (1965 Benfica), Bobby Charlton (1966 Man.Utd.), George Best (1968 Man.Utd), Gianni Rivera (1969 AC Milan), Gerd Muller (1970 Bayern München), Johan Cruyff (1971 Ajax), Franz Beckenbauer (1972 Bayern München), Michel Platini (1983 Juventus), Marco Van Basten (1988 AC Milan), Lothar Matthäus (1990 Bayern München), Jean-Pierre Papin (1991 Marseille), and so on -- no matter how regrettably so, some of these guys' being there at all, including the '90's Brasilian Ronaldo, Baggio is going to stay a historical something as long as there is football.

Lighthouses

North Carolina lighthouses pic:
thanks to Mary Debenham.

I can't satisfy those who asked why I love lighthouses. I'm not so verbose in this department.

It's just this: No connection to phallic symbols, as invariably guessed. No nautical stuff, as automatically thought. No megalomania, as sometimes dawned.

Lighthouses are, to me, just useful romantic ideas. It doesn't really have anything to do with lighthouses themselves - not, that is, the tall, gangling structures of bricks and stones, put in lonely high places along the shores.

Romantic, because they stand alone. Useful, because they aren't monuments. They give light. They show the way. Or at least let you know they are there in the dark of nights.

I think what I have in mind is John the Baptist.

My waterlily pond (above)
& my water hyacinth pond (below)

I love this little spot at my backyard -- where waterlilies and water hyacinths grow. I can't really explain why. Only water, only lilies and hyacinths -- nothing so spiffy, heavy or mesmerizing -- but I see peace breathed there inside the pond.

A little bit of nature always got me this way. Like when I was in college, I used to do morning run. It always got me to this point: a wholehearted stoppage at the campus' "woods" cut by the wide asphalt road.

A busy, stupid road during the day like every other; but there among the tall old trees I saw a couple of squirrels one of my dawns, and I always halted my Sunday morning there since -- though never again I saw those furry little guys.

The Blair Witch Project was enough to make the whole planet sick of woods, but still to me forests and jungles are sanctuaries -- if not for the green wackos then for the ones who really need it. Even if this tiny piece of tree-populated land is in the middle of a heavily jammed traffic, it is a glade -- like the grass blades on a crevice on the concrete sidewalk in the concrete jungle of any big city in the world, it defines an independent universe, it breathes.

Image of the sea

Adriatic sea pic: thanks to Ralf Gad

"It all came down to the sea," said a friend from Surabaya, East Java, a major port. "Yeah? What?" I asked. "Your romantic English poems," she replied.

Romantic, huh. Such a flush she is. Even I wouldn't call them that; in my mind those verses are always stupid, period, and this is a very useful, encompassing adjective, you can spare nothing and nobody.

"I never knew you are so nautical," she added.

Of course she never knew that I am nautical. Because I am not.

I don't even know since when oceans and seas and every other waterway started to slip themselves into my mind. All that I can remember about the sea is its incompatibility with everything that I have been -- a family outing that started and ended in my getting seasick, in fact so sick I didn't get up at all for a week, feeling that I had taken the sea home; a day at a lake when everybody climbed onto a boat and I onto the car to smoke; an afternoon at a river as my boyfriend prepared to go rafting with his buddies and I got ready for staying put waiting for them to come back; even numerous swimming-pool-related occasions that were always a disaster considering that I only went because it was one of the schools' subject-matter. I always got somewhere between "D" and "F" for this kind of mandatory stuff.

"Nautical" is as close to the core of my being as it is to a cat.

But in daydreams and such, namely my occupation, yes, the sea is everpresent.

I'm afraid I have been unconsciously misleading all these years, in this, online. Many of my online buddies have never met me in person, so they have no idea how close I live to the sea and how far I am from it at the same time. I have tried to say this once, via a short sketch written with several other people who are -- all, each and every one of them -- some real sea-something. Looks like this piece has misled them even farther.

But, once again, I always have the sea in my mind -- because it is, to me, representing a connection. It got its strongest sense when applied to the intercontinental relationships I have been having -- pen-pals are near because the sea they see is the sea I (am supposed to) see too, no matter how different the face might be. Knowing that even the small river I pass reaches the Indian Ocean and then it meets the Pacific and Atlantic makes me feel good. Like I said once, these waterways sew the five continents together.

I guess this has been responsible for my (as someone calls it) fuzzy worldview -- I really am unable to separate an event in Jakarta from one that happens in Liverpool and both from a happening in Miami -- my mind doesn't work that way. I only differentiate (so it means I only care about) individuals.

All of these shows in whatever I write. But just in case you haven't noticed, I confess so.

So all thoughts come down to the sea.

Jerome Klapka Jerome

Jerome's stories

I'm a lucky poor person, because I happen to like old books and mostly can't love the contemporary ones. Because of this inborn quirk (it never changed since the first time I knew that newspapers could be read), my heart never got broken by the catastrophic monetary facts.

Among the old tomes I love are Jerome Klapka Jerome's books, like Three Men in a Boat (1888, disastrous sailing along the Thames) and Three Men on the Bummel (1900, calamitous biking tour through the German Black Forest).

Jerome (1859-1927) might be a Nobody for the uninitiated; at least no one I've known so far -- in long years stretching from the day I found him in High School until this year 2001 -- ever heard of him. The same fate is shared by my other favorite Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). Both are not employed to bore schoolkids to neurosis, that's one of the reasons. So while everyone of course ever heard the words 'Charles' and 'Dickens', a distant recollection of the faraway school years we hate, we can't find Jerome there because he never was. Second reason might be this: Jerome is, just like 99% of humorists, considered non-literary to some degree. I mean, you automatically (you were schooled to do so) see a tall, big, sturdy structure -- like, the Titanic minus its drawbacks -- everytime someone mentions Shakespeare. Compare now with what you see if I say 'Dave Barry' [Miami Herald humor columnist, and my favorite writer] -- rollerblades?

But Jerome is in my mind whenever I find something new that makes laughing a smart thing to do. Though he, as is every humor-weaver on earth, not for everyone.

Here's a cut from Three Men In A Boat:

The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether. I never can understand it. The barometer is useless; it is as misleading as the newspaper forecast. There was one hanging up in a hotel at Oxford at which I was staying last spring, and, when I got there, it was pointing to 'set fair'. It was simply pouring with rain outside, and had been all day; and I couldn't quite make matters out. I tapped the barometer, and it jumped and pointed to 'very dry'. The Boots stopped as he was passing and said he expected it meant tomorrow. I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not. I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the rain came down faster than ever. On Wednesday I went and hit it again, and the pointer went round towards 'set fair', 'very dry', and 'much heat', until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further. It tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself. It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace 'very dry'.

Vash The Stampede

Trigun manga © 1998
Yasuhiro Nightow
Anime: produced by Mad House
Script by Kuroda Yosuke, designer Yoshimatsu Takahiro, animator Ohashi Yoshimitsu, music by Imahori Tsuneo, director: Satoshi Nishimura.
© 1998 Yasuhiro Nightow, Shonen Gaho-Sha, Tokuma Shoten, JVC

Leading character:
Vash The Stampede, male, an outlaw.
(Sort of a) Sidekick:
Meryl Stryfe, short-tempered slow-thinking female, insurance company exec.

The Video CD's that I got from Thailand had been there on the shelves for an absurd length of time before I got a bored little guest who nagged me to let him watch some violence when his mom turned her back from the screen.

This Trigun series (don't say a word about anime titles -- most of them are ridiculous), so I thought, must be violent. The badly printed covers of the original discs gave nothing away but that hint. And I was certain that the silly background of the tale -- obvious cowboy towns -- would appeal to the guest and get me repulsed. Alright, I said to the restless, probably obsessive-compulsive, 9 year-old boy, I'd give you violence.

About 3 hours and 6 VCD's later, I still watched the anime while my guest had been falling asleep.

Trigun isn't violent the way I thought it would have been. Sure, the main character, a super-blond red-coated extra-slim fugitive Vash 'The Stampede' carries a big gun everywhere he goes, including the bathroom, and there's always a flock of bounty hunters at his heels creating rampage, but Vash's nomadic life is more about having fun than anything else. So he let my little guest down because he doesn't even look like an outlaw and he surely never acts like one.Not enough blood there within the 3 hours to satisfy the expectant audience.

Humor is almost invariably a significant portion of manga and anime, just like in Hong Kong movies no matter how serious and/or violent the storyline could be. Trigun isn't unique in this department. Yet, the portion is healthy, and the un-heroic Vash who cries galons if touched (for instance, if offered some huge free meal), is always ready to marry any available female to get rid of loneliness, and so easily deceived by pretensions of innocence, is good to have in your living room.

He never missed anyway whenever he got to use the gun. That's still heroic enough. Yasuhiro Nightow had told him when and where to be really cool, too. That's human enough.