Ron's View

I may not be the most spontaneous person, but every once in a while I jump at something. And one of those onces in a while came along two days ago. To set the stage, I need to point out that I am a long-time admirer of the baseball pitcher Randy Johnson. There are a lot of admirers, especially here in Seattle. He is, after all, one of the 10 or 15 greatest pitchers of all time, and he did pitch more years here in Seattle than anywhere else. But I tend to think I have a special bond with him, a deeper appreciation of his greatness. I was there, after all for two of his greatest moments, in the Kingdome at the end of the 1995 season.

Monday, October 2. One-game playoff between the Mariners and Angels to determine the American League West champion. Randy dominates. A complete game, 12 strikeout, 1 walk, 3 hit, 1 run performance, as the Mariners win 9-1. (Box score here.)

The Mariners then played a 5-game series against the Yankees, opening with two games in New York on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 3 and 4. Because Randy had to be used for the playoff game on Monday, he was unavailable, and the Mariners lost both games, 9-6 and (in 15 innings) 7-5.

Coming back to Seattle, the Mariners needed to win 3 straight or be eliminated. Randy pitched the first of the three, Friday October 6, on just three days rest. He pitched 7 innings, gave up 4 hits and 2 runs, and gave the Mariners a 7-2 lead in a game they ultimately won 7-4. (Box score here.) With games 4 and 5 on Saturday and Sunday, that would be it for Randy. In game 4, the Yankees quickly took a 5-0 lead. But the Mariners came back, Edgar Martinez hit a huge grand slam in the 8th, and the Mariners won 11-8. (Box score here.) The moment Edgar hit his grand slam, I announced to Gail and Joel that we were going the next night. Whatever it cost. Whatever we had to do to get tickets. We were going.

Sunday, October 8. And we did. The greatest game in Mariner history. One of the great games of baseball history. The game that saved baseball in Seattle, that led to the Mariners not moving and Safeco Field being built. I could write about it at length. Others have. Some day I will. Let me just focus on Randy though. The Mariners were down 4-2 in the 8th against David Cone when Griffey hit a solo home run. This was followed by single and some walks, with Cone walking in the tying run. We were going into the 9th tied 4-4. Our pitching staff was exhausted. Who could come in? Randy! With just one day of rest, he came in to thunderous cheers. And he pitched 3 extraordinary innings. He opened the 11th with a walk, a bunt, and a single, the only hit against him, but a costly one, as Kelly scored from 2nd. But in the bottom of the 11th, well, you know. Edgar’s double to left. Griffey scoring from 1st behind Cora. Mariners win 6-5. (Box score here.) Randy paid for those heroics. He was injured the next year. He only pitched 14 games, had a 5-0 record.

I’ll skip over our 1997 pilgrimage to Denver to see the Mariners play the Rockies in the first year of inter-league play, and our finding ourselves having lunch at the same restaurant as Randy, just down the street from Coors Field. We didn’t want to bother him, but a waiter took Joel into a private dining room to see him. Let’s jump to this past week.

On Wednesday, Sports Illustrated had the first in a new series of articles jointly written by Joe Posnanski and Bill James, in which they analyzed Randy’s greatness. He began the season with a new team, the San Francisco Giants, and with 295 wins. As of Wednesday, he had 298 wins, tantalizingly close to 300. And then on Friday morning, having not paid much attention to the Mariners’ schedule, I opened up the Seattle Times to discover that the Giants were in town this weekend, in the first games of interleague play for the season. Not only that, Randy was pitching the opening game, that night.

We had to go, right? If not now, when? I told Gail, we got 2 tickets, and we went. But, who to root for? The Mariners? Or Randy, going for 299? I texted Joel. He suggested I root for a close game in which Randy distinguishes himself but leaves before the end with no decision, after which the Mariners come back to win. And that’s pretty much what happened. Aaron Rowand led off the game for the Giants with a home run, but that’s all the Giants could do, as the Mariners’ pitcher Jason Vargas pitched 7 strong innings, giving up only 1 other hit. Randy, in turn, pitched well too, but began to tire, finally giving up a run and coming out in the 6th after 5 shutout innings. The crowd gave him an ovation and, as he left the mound, he took his cap off to salute us. (See above.) We didn’t get to see him win #299, but we saw him pitch well in what will almost certainly be his final game in Seattle. (He turns 46 in September. This may be his last season, but even if it isn’t, the nature of interleague scheduling is such that he isn’t likely to pitch here again in the next couple of years.)

We left after 8. As we drove home, the Mariners loaded the bases with two out in the bottom of the 9th. Ken Griffey came in to pinch hit for Johjima. It’s bad enough that we left for home before the end, but now it was going to end before we even got home. He hit the ball deep. We were now off the freeway and just a half mile from home. The game was about to end with a grand slam. Another historic moment from another old-time Mariner star. But no, caught at the warning track. We were home to watch the rest of the game, which ended in the 12th on a hit off the wall by Jose Lopez with the bases loaded, as the Mariners prevailed 2-1.

Andy Hampsten, Giro d'Italia, 1988

I don’t get it. Why all the coverage of the Giro d’Italia? It’s been ignored for years, but now Juliet Macur has daily coverage in the NYT. Since when is interest in the race sufficiently large?

Perhaps I should explain. There are three great multi-stage bicycle races each year: the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta a Espana. Each lasts three weeks. Each has the cyclists riding all over the country, with mountain stages, flat stages, time trial stages, and so on. The Giro is in May. The Tour in July. The Vuelta in August.

US coverage used to be limited. I have the perhaps false memory that I read little bits about the Tour in the NYT when I was in summer camp in my childhood. And I remember when Eddy Merckx used to be the dominant rider, winning five times between 1969 and 1974. Only Jacques Anquetil had won five times before him. Merckx also won the Giro five times, and the Vuelta once. But I really started paying attention in 1985. It helped that we were in France for part of the Tour, in the early days of our extended honeymoon. On the final day, we were over at my sister’s apartment watching on TV as they came along the Seine into Paris. I realized they were just 200 meters away and here we were watching indoors on TV. That was silly. We could instead cross over the Seine and walk up to the Champs-Elysees to see the finish. Gail (my wife Gail, not my sister Gail) and I headed out and just as we got to the street, sister Gail leaned out the window to shout down to us that our niece Joelle wanted to come too. She would have been 3 months shy of her 3rd birthday at the time. We waited for her to come down, then headed to the Seine,. She wasn’t walking too fast, so I ran ahead while Gail led her on. They eventually caught up and somehow found me amidst the huge crowds leaning against the barriers along the Champs-Elysees. (Many years later I would discover that my friend and colleague-to-be Sandor, then a young student from Hungary, was watching from somewhere nearby, up on a lightpost.)

I got to see the field zip by in the repeated circuits from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe and back that close the race, with Bernard Hinault being cheered as he was about to win his fifth Tour, thanks in part to the help of his teammate and rising star, the American Greg LeMond, who rode beside him safely in the peleton as they awaited the finish. LeMond had finished third the year before, his rookie year, and might well have won it in 1985 had he not been assigned the role of helping Hinault. LeMond settled for second, with the understanding that Hinault would repay the favor the next year by helping him win. Except that a year later it seemed Hinault wanted to win again. There was some friction before LeMond ultimately won. And if LeMond’s brother-in-law didn’t accidentally shoot him the next year, he might well have won five straight, but instead he took two years to recover before winning two more.

I could go on and on about the Tour. By then I was hooked, a committed fan. In the early ’90s, before the world wide web existed but with news services available on the internet, I would sit at my desk in the mornings during the Tour and constantly update my news feed in order to get the latest reports. TV coverage started around then, on ESPN, but in the evenings, hours after the actual daily race. It took years before we had live coverage. What changed everything of course was Lance. Lance Armstrong. With Lance as national hero, we finally got to have live coverage of the Tour every morning.

Which brings us to the answer to my opening rhetorical question. Why the sudden interest in the Giro? Lance of course. I understand, sort of, but it’s still a bit of a mystery to me why someone who retired years ago and is well past his prime should have such a following that we now have detailed coverage. He’s not going to win. He’s 14th at the moment in the general classification, with a week to go. Pretty impressive, I admit, but not a reason for blanket coverage.

An American has won the Giro in the past. Andy Hampsten, in 1988. He is perhaps better known for finishing 4th to LeMond in the first Tour that LeMond won, in 1986. Imagine that. Americans in 1st and 4th in the Tour, at a time when hardly anyone in the US paid attention. And that still didn’t result in greater coverage. It took Lance to change everything.

I should be happy. I just wonder why it took so long, and why it took a national celebrity to bring the press. I wish things were different.

Another hockey post (following my post this morning on Zambonis). There’s an article in tomorrow’s NYT on the meeting of the Chicago Black Hawks and Detroit Red Wings in the conference championship round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Red Wings are currently ahead 2 games to 1 in the series, after losing in overtime last night to the Black Hawks in Chicago.

The article describes the excitement generated in both cities by having two of the Original Six hockey clubs meeting in a late round of the playoffs, something that happens rarely. Indeed, this is only the third such series since 1980. And not just any two Original Six clubs, but Detroit and Chicago, with their rich history against each other: no other pair of teams has played each other as often, 775 games going back to 1926. And starting in 1961, they met in the playoffs five times in six years.

That’s about the time when I first started paying attention to hockey. Not 1961, but somewhere in the midst of those six years. The Original Six were just the Six at that point, since expansion hadn’t occurred yet. And really there were the Four real hockey teams and the two Jokes. I was a fan of one of the jokes, the New York Rangers. They shared cellar status with the Boston Bruins. The top four in the standings each year got to meet in the playoffs, one round to narrow it to two teams and then the round for the Stanley Cup. Not having any sense of hockey history, I just assumed this was the way of the world. The Red Wings and Black Hawks got to mix it up with the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens, and the Rangers and Bruins, after a regular season of embarrassment, got to go home. I didn’t even understand that the Rangers and Bruins had some great players. I just figured we had all the turkeys. But of course, given the existence of only six teams, they were all great players. What I did know was that Stan Mikita was the greatest. He didn’t get the goals. Bobby Hull did. But he made them possible. I didn’t root for the Black Hawks, but I admired them. And just last week, when Joel was home and we were talking about the upcoming Detroit-Chicago series, I thought immediately of Mikita. I then thought that if I ever were to get a hockey jersey to wear (I’m not sure when I would be wearing it — when I teach?), I would get his.

I found myself re-considering this choice this afternoon. Why Mikita? Why not my real hockey hero, the greatest ever? #4. Bobby Orr. So I went online to see what was available. There are autographed ones, suitable for framing. Not what I had in mind. At the Bruins site, one can get authentic jerseys for $299. There’s a customization option, name and number, but restrictions on names of retired players. You can get a current player’s name or just about anything else, as long as it isn’t too long and isn’t too vulgar. Not retired players though, if they retired from the given team. So maybe, since Orr didn’t retire as a Bruin, his name would be allowed. I don’t know. I didn’t pursue it further. At another site I could buy a replica 1972 jersey with his name on it. Maybe that makes more sense. And for less. But they only have smaller sizes. And then I thought, you know, I really want a Johnny Bucyk jersey. The Chief. He may not be Bobby, but he’s the ultimate Bruin, playing with them in all those bad years, wasting his prime, but hanging on into hockey late middle age and hockey old age, still productive and still great.

Then again, what I’ve really wanted all these years is a St. Louis Cardinal baseball jersey. They’re the best jerseys in all of sport, aren’t they? I could get one with Musial on it. Or so I was thinking.

By the way, one of the wonderful aspects of the Black Hawks’ resurgence is the re-appearance of Mikita and Hull at the games. The article explains:

Mikita, Esposito and Hull have been very visible presences at Blackhawks games over the last two seasons after an absence of many years. They were brought back into the fold after the death in 2007 of the Blackhawks’ longtime owner, Bill Wirtz. The last two decades of Wirtz’s tenure were marked by poor performance on the ice, feuding with the club’s former stars and outdated practices like banning telecasts of home games on the belief that it would hurt attendance. In 2006-7, the team sold only 3,500 season tickets.

After Wirtz’s death, Rocky Wirtz, his son, brought in the former Cubs president John McDonough to revive the Blackhawks, and the transformation has been rapid. The Hawks’ second annual fan convention, set for July 17 to 19, is sold out.

“Detroit’s been on top, Chicago’s been down,” Esposito said. “But now they’re coming back, and it’s pretty even hockey. I suspect that the next several years, the rivalry will be unbelievable. Again.”

Who doesn’t love a Zamboni (brand ice-resurfacing machine)? And what better way to start the day can there be than to open the NYT to the photo above and a front page article about Zambonis? The caption for the photo is, “The first test for every new Zamboni is a turn down tkhe tree-lined streets outside the factory in a suburb of Los Angeles.”

Forget the article, at least for a moment. Instead, go straight to the on-line slide show. Among the many delights is a photo of Sonja Henie standing in front of a Zamboni. The accompanying text explains that the “second and third machines built by Zamboni were bought by the Olympic star Sonja Henie for use in her ice shows.”

The article ends with the concern that Zamboni has become the generic name for the ice-resurfacing machines:

Most would-be competitors have come and gone. But one, the Resurfice Corporation, of Elmira, Ontario, said it produces about the same number of machines as Zamboni. The companies are, in effect, the Boeing and Airbus of ice resurfacing.

Resurfice is owned and operated by the Schlupp family, with none of the name recognition of its competitor. Don Schlupp, the company’s sales and marketing director, says he is used to hearing people call its machines Zambonis.

“We refer to it as the Kleenex syndrome,” he said.

All the off-hand familiarity makes Zamboni a bit nervous. It has trademarked its name (and the block shape of its machines) but fears the name becoming a lowercase zamboni, suffering the same fate as Aspirin, Escalator, Zipper and other brand names that lost trademark protections.

The company also asks that Zamboni not be used as a noun (as it has been throughout this article) or a verb. The ice does not get Zambonied, then, and the vehicle is a Zamboni brand ice-resurfacing machine. Good luck with that.

I was sad to learn this afternoon of the death of the historian David Herbert Donald. I saw an obituary at the NYT website. I have read only one of his books, but it’s a masterpiece of biography. Simply titled Lincoln, it is, yes a biography of Abraham Lincoln. The obituary mentions “that the historian Eric Foner, speaking on National Public Radio in February, put [it] at the top of the long list of Lincoln biographies.”

I read it shortly after it came out. What I’ve always remembered is how, as the book went on, the sense that I was reading about a different time disappeared, page by page, until I was immersed in the world of Lincoln. I could hardly bear to read the final few pages. I knew how it would end, but I hoped for the best. And in the last two pages, I felt I was there, beside Lincoln in the Peterson house as he died. Great book. Great story.

We visited Ford’s Theatre and the Peterson house one morning in August 1996, during our brief stay in DC as part of our cross-country train trip. (Seattle to Chicago to DC to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York.) Both are part of the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. It was a pretty full day, and a hot and humid one, during which we also toured the White House, headed up to Baltimore, and watched the Orioles play the Mariners at Camden Yards. The theatre just underwent a major renovation, re-opening on February 12 this year as part of the celebration of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

As for Mr. Donald, the obituary indicates that he was still working at 88, “on a study of John Quincy Adams, beginning with his defeat by Andrew Jackson in the presidential election of 1828.” When I was around 15, I read several of Thomas Wolfe’s novels. I’m thinking I should read Donald’s biography of him. It is described in the obituary as follows:

Mr. Donald won his second Pulitzer, in 1988, for “Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe” (1987). He had been infatuated by the novelist since adolescence, certain, he wrote, “that Thomas Wolfe had told my life story.” Cool reassessment forced him to admit that Wolfe “wrote more bad prose than any other writer I can think of,” but drawing on a mass of letters, diaries and manuscripts, he developed a compelling portrait of Wolfe as an idiosyncratic genius consumed with his self-imposed mission to become “the bard of America,” in Mr. Donald’s phrase.

In January, I wrote a post about Olive Garden. This was inspired by an article by Raymond Sokolov in the WSJ comparing Olive Garden to famed Chicago Italian restaurant Spiaggia. At the end of my post, I listed as a coming attraction my thoughts on another national chain, P. F. Chang’s China Bistro, where we had eaten just two weeks earlier to celebrate Jessica’s birthday. But I have yet to write the promised post.

I was reminded of this today in reading a guest post by Richard Florida at Andrew Sullivan’s blog in which Florida points to an article about Chang’s in Slate. The article , written by Daniel Gross, focuses on P.F. Chang’s’ surprising economic success in the midst of the recession: “Operating margins—the holy grail of any business—at P.F. Chang’s 190 stores rose from 12.8 percent to 14 percent, largely because of ‘incremental operational improvement opportunities.’ The stock has doubled since November.”

Gross’s comments on the food at P.F. Chang’s capture my own thoughts well. Gail and I ate there for the first time a year ago, when we went to Portland for a quick overnight trip on the Friday and Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend. We stopped in the Pearl District on our way out of town to go to Powell’s Books, and it was well past lunchtime as we were leaving, so we decided to eat before getting on I-5. And right by the elevator to the parking garage was a P.F. Chang’s, so we ate there. I had never been too keen to try it, but there was no point searching for something else when it was right there and we were hungry. And to our joint surprise, we really liked it. Last September, we went to the P.F. Chang’s in Bellevue Square, the first one I had ever seen. It was again right by the garage where our car was parked, across the street from the movie theater where we had just seen, um, a movie. (Okay, it was Mamma Mia! Why not?) And again we liked it. The birthday celebration in January was at the P.F. Chang’s in downtown Seattle, part of Westlake Mall. Three visits. Three good meals.

So what’s the deal? It’s not the greatest food. Not the greatest restaurant. But unlike so many neighborhood restaurants, it serves food that is not oily and heavy. Is it authentic? Maybe not, but neither is the greasy food at most non-chain local Chinese restaurants. And the truth is, it’s better than a lot of those places. That’s Gross’s conclusion too: Read more…

Why is the cover-up so often worse than the crime? For instance, let’s look at Maureen Dowd’s now-famous column in yesterday’s NYT. You can no longer find the original version on-line. In it, she wrote:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The only problem is that at his Talking Points Memo blog on Thursday, Josh Marshall had already written:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Okay, so maybe Maureen Dowd actually reads the major political blogs and gets ideas from them. That’s fine. Just give them credit when you quote them. She didn’t. The problem is, here’s her after-the-fact explanation of how it happened that she didn’t, as written to The Nytpicker:

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

The correction is on-line, as you can see if you click on the Dowd link above. But really, this is such an implausible explanation. The pity is, it was as fine a column by Dowd as I read in ages.

Here’s a portion of Mark Liberman’s analysis of the explanation at Language Log: Read more…

George Vaillant

In a post three days ago, I made reference to an article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the new June issue of The Atlantic, but didn’t focus on the content of the article, intending to come back to it in a separate post. Let me do so briefly here. If you haven’t seen the article, you may have read about it in David Brooks’ column earlier in the week in the NYT.

Shenk’s article describes the famous longitudinal study of the lives and health of over 200 men that began when they were students at Harvard in the late 1930s and continues to this day. Officially called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, it was begun by Arlie Bock, a doctor at Harvard’s health services, with funding by W.T. Grant. The study has evolved over the decades, as the article details, and it has been shaped most significantly by George Vaillant, the doctor who ran the study for decades and has written and lectured on it extensively.

Vaillant is still involved in the study as co-director, but it is largely run now by fellow co-director Robert Waldinger, who happens to be a college classmate of mine. I had the good fortune at our 35th reunion last June to hear Bob talk about the study as part of a panel of doctors in the class who are experts on various aspects of aging. (The topic was “How to Age Gracefully to 100.”) As well as having their health monitored regularly, the men respond to questionnaires and have extensive in-person oral interviews every few years. The picture that emerges is rich, complex, and endlessly fascinating, and the Atlantic article, in its short space, gives a good sense of this richness. The men have had all imaginable levels of success and failure in their careers and personal lives. More to the point, they have typically experienced both. How they look back on this as they age is yet another facet of life that the study has begun to illuminate.

The article interweaves a discussion of the study, Vaillant’s thoughts on it, and Vaillant’s own life with glimpses at the lives of some of the study participants, leaving one wanting to know more. Here’s one excerpt, which may be a bit over-stated, but does give a taste of the issues raised by the study.

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way? At times, Vaillant wears his lab coat and lays out his findings matter-of-factly. (“As a means of uncovering truth,” he wrote in Adaptation to Life, “the experimental method is superior to intuition.”) More often, he speaks from a literary and philosophical perspective. (In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs. Later, after taking a stab at answering several Big Questions I had asked him—Do people change? What does the study teach us about the good life?—he said to me, “Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?”

Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. … Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

GQ has a feature article by Robert Draper about Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War that I’m only part way through, but that is worth a look. (I was tipped off to it by several bloggers, including in particular hilzoy here and here.) The most notable item so far is Rumsfeld’s use of cover sheets with Biblical quotes in the daily briefings on the war provided to George Bush. One example is above.

From Draper’s article:
Read more…

The State Department appears to be operating efficiently. Gail’s passport was due to expire this week, mine next month. Our plan was to renew them once Gail returned from Scotland in early April, but weeks later, our expiring passports were still in the house. So a week ago Friday we took the time to get new passport photos, fill out the forms, and mail in our passport applications.

I don’t like being without my passport for long, even if I have no specific travel plans. You never know when you might need it. And in my case, with my sister and her family in France, it’s good to know I can just get on a plane and go there if I need to. We therefore chose the expedited renewal option. The passport renewal is $75. The expediting fee is an additional $60. The guidelines are that normal renewal takes six weeks, where as expedited renewal takes three. It’s also recommended that you do next day mail delivery in sending the application to the address in Philadelphia, along with writing a check for $14.85 to cover next day return delivery. That’s what we did.

It all went out two Fridays ago and arrived in Philadelphia last Monday. The checks were cashed that very day, a good sign. And two days ago, Friday, exactly one week after we sent everything in, our new passports arrived. One week exactly. Pretty impressive.

The new passports look like the one above. The symbol near the bottom of the front cover is the Electronic Passport Logo. We received pamphlets explaining the Electronic Passport Security Features. Each “passport contains a small integrated circuit (or ‘chip’) that conforms to the latest international passport standards. This Electronic passport provides: Automated photo verification; Faster & more accurate immigration inspections; and Greater border Protection and Security.” The passport won’t need to be swiped. Instead, the information “can be read by special chip readers from a close distance.” And best of all, we can “[p]roceed to the special immigration lanes displaying the Electronic Passport Logo to be assured of the fastest and most efficient processing.”

Our first opportunity to use the new passports will be next month, when we head to Vancouver just before Father’s Day. I don’t imagine there are special Electronic Passport Logo lanes on I-5 at the border crossing in Blaine. We won’t get to test that feature for a while.

By the way, it’s a bit disappointing to realize how little I used my last passport. I got it in June 1999, having somehow let the previous one expire two years earlier. Gail, Joel, and I all got new passports then in preparation for our trip to Scotland and France in August. Then in 2004 we went back to Scotland, with a short stop in London on the way back. Other than multiple trips to Canada, that may be about it. The new passport is sure to see a lot more action.