All's well with the world -- somewhere.
Somewhere flags are flying, and somewhere children smile; life's worth living somewhere, and somewhere toil's worthwhile.
For a few brief shining moments Sunday, somewhere was London and what was well was tennis.
On the banks of the Thames, in a big muffin of a building punctured with toothpicks to see if it was done, they staged a world championship of significant sorts, a round-robin shoot-out among the ten best players on the planet to see who'd be the last man standing at the end of the year.
Appropriately, the No. 1 ranked player in the world stood on one side of the court. His name is Rafael Nadal and at 24, he's as boyish and naively charming as he was when, at 19 and wearing knickers, he first burst on the scene beating men many years his senior and supposedly many points his better.
Even more appropriately, the man on the other side of the court was named Roger Federer, and this was the real Roger Federer, the man whose grace and gifts had transformed tennis from sport to art form. This was not the shabby impostor who had sunk to No. 3 in the world during a dismal 2010. Some angel, it turned out, had rolled back the stone sealing his crypt and from it had emerged, after the U.S. Open, the man who floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee and did things on the tennis court that no man had done before him. These things included winning more Grand Slam championships than anyone and doing so while pulling off on the fly shots so improbable that neither names for nor descriptions of them existed.
In a tense, important Grand Slam match against a Top Five opponent, he ran back for a lob so deep that not even the world's fastest human, Usain Bolt, would have tried to run it down. Federer not only got there, but hit a shot back between his legs. A shot that not only cleared the net, but did so with enough pace, spin and accuracy to score a clean winner. He did this in a tense, important Grand Slam match not once, but twice -- in successive years.
Once I watched him practicing on a side court at Indian Wells, CA. He was playing points against a favorite practice partner, Gustavo Kuerten, himself once one of the top three players in the game. Kuerten, still no slouch, ran down a penetrating Federer approach shot to the backhand corner and launched a good defensive lob. At what seemed like the last second, Federer decided to try something I had never seen before, and have not seen since, which I can only describe as an overhead drop shot. Rather than kicking into the stratosphere, as most good overheads do, this one struck the court and died a quiet but brilliant death. Neither Kuerten, nor Maria Sharapova, who was waiting to take the court next, nor any member of her entourage, nor any of Federer's, nor any of the tennis aficianados watching, nor I, had ever seen anything like it. Shouts of amazement ensued, catcalls at the audacity of this unheard-of trick, challenges that not even Federer could repeat such a phenomenon. Roger called upon Kuerten to serve him another lob, whereupon Federer hit exactly the same shot with exactly the same result.
Early on in London, though he never lost a set, one could not be certain if one were watching an impostor -- albeit a very, very good impersonator -- or the real Roger. In one match he was winning points launched by 88 mph first serves, causing his opponent to break several racquets in frustration, but suggesting either an impersonator or a refabricated Federer who used wile and spin rather than matchless skill.
Turns out it was the real Roger, but one with wile and spin and tricks the younger Super Roger may or may not have had, but never needed. Like the drop overhead.
The real Roger won the championship match, 6-3, 3-6, 6-1, granting the world's best player a glimmer of hope in the second set, then slamming the door with forehand winners, backhand winners, Edburgian volleys and Samprasian serves -- the kind of performance that only the maestro of the most complete game in tennis history could have mustered. Once, after breaking to win the second set, Nadal would have attacked Federer's backhand with massive topspin forehand drives until Roger's weaker stroke broke down. Nadal chose exactly that strategy again Sunday. Federer met the nuclear energy of Nadal's attack with topspin backhands even stronger than the missiles Nadal launched against him.
"This," the rueful and ever classy Nadal said afterward, "was Federer at his best on his favorite surface. Not much you can do against that, no?"
No. The ruling young monarch of tennis was only second best this day. The once and possibly future king has made it a rivalry again.
We need them both. Each is magnificent in his own way. Nadal's youth and raw power. Federer's grace and mastery of every nuance. Both of them gracious and charming in victory or defeat.
And oh, such tennis. Such wonderful, wonderful tennis.
Welcome back, Roger.
"I cannot have spoiled Rafa's vacation today, " Federer said when accepting his trophy. "He has had a year most players only dream about."
One more very important tournament fast approaches: the first Grand Slam of 2011, the Australian Open.
Bring it on.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Monday, November 29, 2010
Can We talk Turkey About Big Oil and Our Military?
A most pleasant holiday in the company of the journalist who covers Oil, Big and Small, for a major news organization set me to musing.
Is there such a thing as Small Oil?
Having proved his mettle as the journalist covering the industry that extracts methane gas from coal beds, our Thanksgiving guest had been recently immersed in learning how his new field works.
Fortunately, he didn't talk much shop over the turkey and stuffing. If he had, it would have been like having Stephen Hawking across the table talking quantum physics. A bit over my head.
I know, for example, that a barrel of crude today costs $82.34 US, down 21 cents from the day before. But that's about it until the stuff, having been refined into fuel for my old pick-up truck, reaches the local gas pump, where it costs $2.61 per US gallon. These things I understand even if they do involve numbers. Everything else is a mystery and involves other, bigger numbers; enormous numbers; staggering numbers. I do not handle big numbers well, which is one reason why I have never invited Stephen Hawking to dine with me on Thanksgiving Day.
My clumsy musings after our guest's occasional remarks about the Awl Bidness raised a plethora of questions.
The United States military is by far the world's largest consumer of petroleum. The largest by so far that if you stood on the flight deck of the USS George Washington in the Yalu Sea and looked toward the second biggest user, you'd need the Hubble telescope to see it as a speck in a nebula dwarfed by a black hole. U.S. military consumption of oil is a very big number indeed.
Now, if you consider that each barrel consumed by the U.S. military costs $82.34, and do the multiplication, the result is a number so large that. . . . oh, my, that what? I suppose if you transmogrified the dollars into inches and imagined a coil of rope that long, you could dangle it from the tops of all the peaks in the Himalayas and still have enough rope left over to dangle from the highest building in Texas, which happens to be where our journalist friend works.
What kind of contracts do they have for all that military oil? They must have contracts. The captain of the George Washington doesn't just park next to a pump off the coast of South Korea and fill 'er up. Somebody, probably in the Pentagon, has worked up a contract with somebody, probably in Texas, to determine how much of our tax money will be involved in filling up the aircraft carrier, and all the other things the military uses that run on gas, not to mention the oil to lubricate them and generate the energy that lights the Pentagon, and all sorts of other stuff.
What are all those contracts worth? Who, if anyone, oversees the guy who negotiates them? What relationship do they have, say, with the kind of money that Texicans like Tom DeLay launder? Does Texas have a secret laundering process that cleanses money without leaving it all soggy and yukky? Or is this all funny money, like derivatives and toxic assets and Monopoly? Sometimes in places where lots and lots of money is involved, some people are tempted to do things that are, well, you might say, a wee bit shady. Might that happen every now and then with military oil contracts? Just asking. Then there's the entire matter of our foreign policy and whether there's a sort of Tinker to Evers to Chance connection between, oh, pick one . . . launching wars in the Middle East and the quantity of oil our military uses. Just meandering, not even asking. Back to smaller matters and numbers I can deal with.
I have concluded that there is such a thing as Small Oil, but it's relative. Small Oil is the gas that I pump into my pick-up. I used to pump it from a place on Highway 28 near the Interstate. It was the highest-priced gas in town but it was convenient. Then a discount outfit moved in down the block and began selling gas 20 cents a gallon cheaper than my station. Now my station has the cheapest gas in town, always beating the price of the discount guy down the street by a penny.
The company that makes the gas for my station had profits -- profits, mind you, not sales -- of 600 million dollars last year, which is Small Oil. Big Oil doesn't even begin counting profits until they reach a billion or so. Yet my station didn't even flinch when it cranked down its prices to match the discount competitor's. What's 20 or 30 lousy pennies per gallon among friends?
If Small Oil has that much pricing leeway, and still makes a tidy profit (the CEO got a huge bonus last month), how much pricing leeway does Big Oil have? Exxon Mobil is, after all, the most profitable corporation in the history of profit. As certified patriots with Support Our Troops stickers on all their tanker trucks, does Big Oil knock 20 or 30 cents a gallon off the going price for their military customers? Probably not.
Oil contracts must be different from other military contracts. Buying three or four hundred Stealth airplanes that will be obsolete in 10 or 12 years is one thing. You can always recycle the scrap metal, or whatever they're made of. Sure, you get the occasional $1,000 hammer or $10,000 toilet seat but who, other than Russ Feingold, ever blinked an eye? Small spuds, bud.
But when you talk about the biggest consumer of petroleum products on the whole bloody planet, and you're talking about $82.34 per barrel at the wellhead, you are talking serious money.
How serious? Maybe our journalist friend will explain it next Thanksgiving. Or the one after.
Is there such a thing as Small Oil?
Having proved his mettle as the journalist covering the industry that extracts methane gas from coal beds, our Thanksgiving guest had been recently immersed in learning how his new field works.
Fortunately, he didn't talk much shop over the turkey and stuffing. If he had, it would have been like having Stephen Hawking across the table talking quantum physics. A bit over my head.
I know, for example, that a barrel of crude today costs $82.34 US, down 21 cents from the day before. But that's about it until the stuff, having been refined into fuel for my old pick-up truck, reaches the local gas pump, where it costs $2.61 per US gallon. These things I understand even if they do involve numbers. Everything else is a mystery and involves other, bigger numbers; enormous numbers; staggering numbers. I do not handle big numbers well, which is one reason why I have never invited Stephen Hawking to dine with me on Thanksgiving Day.
My clumsy musings after our guest's occasional remarks about the Awl Bidness raised a plethora of questions.
The United States military is by far the world's largest consumer of petroleum. The largest by so far that if you stood on the flight deck of the USS George Washington in the Yalu Sea and looked toward the second biggest user, you'd need the Hubble telescope to see it as a speck in a nebula dwarfed by a black hole. U.S. military consumption of oil is a very big number indeed.
Now, if you consider that each barrel consumed by the U.S. military costs $82.34, and do the multiplication, the result is a number so large that. . . . oh, my, that what? I suppose if you transmogrified the dollars into inches and imagined a coil of rope that long, you could dangle it from the tops of all the peaks in the Himalayas and still have enough rope left over to dangle from the highest building in Texas, which happens to be where our journalist friend works.
What kind of contracts do they have for all that military oil? They must have contracts. The captain of the George Washington doesn't just park next to a pump off the coast of South Korea and fill 'er up. Somebody, probably in the Pentagon, has worked up a contract with somebody, probably in Texas, to determine how much of our tax money will be involved in filling up the aircraft carrier, and all the other things the military uses that run on gas, not to mention the oil to lubricate them and generate the energy that lights the Pentagon, and all sorts of other stuff.
What are all those contracts worth? Who, if anyone, oversees the guy who negotiates them? What relationship do they have, say, with the kind of money that Texicans like Tom DeLay launder? Does Texas have a secret laundering process that cleanses money without leaving it all soggy and yukky? Or is this all funny money, like derivatives and toxic assets and Monopoly? Sometimes in places where lots and lots of money is involved, some people are tempted to do things that are, well, you might say, a wee bit shady. Might that happen every now and then with military oil contracts? Just asking. Then there's the entire matter of our foreign policy and whether there's a sort of Tinker to Evers to Chance connection between, oh, pick one . . . launching wars in the Middle East and the quantity of oil our military uses. Just meandering, not even asking. Back to smaller matters and numbers I can deal with.
I have concluded that there is such a thing as Small Oil, but it's relative. Small Oil is the gas that I pump into my pick-up. I used to pump it from a place on Highway 28 near the Interstate. It was the highest-priced gas in town but it was convenient. Then a discount outfit moved in down the block and began selling gas 20 cents a gallon cheaper than my station. Now my station has the cheapest gas in town, always beating the price of the discount guy down the street by a penny.
The company that makes the gas for my station had profits -- profits, mind you, not sales -- of 600 million dollars last year, which is Small Oil. Big Oil doesn't even begin counting profits until they reach a billion or so. Yet my station didn't even flinch when it cranked down its prices to match the discount competitor's. What's 20 or 30 lousy pennies per gallon among friends?
If Small Oil has that much pricing leeway, and still makes a tidy profit (the CEO got a huge bonus last month), how much pricing leeway does Big Oil have? Exxon Mobil is, after all, the most profitable corporation in the history of profit. As certified patriots with Support Our Troops stickers on all their tanker trucks, does Big Oil knock 20 or 30 cents a gallon off the going price for their military customers? Probably not.
Oil contracts must be different from other military contracts. Buying three or four hundred Stealth airplanes that will be obsolete in 10 or 12 years is one thing. You can always recycle the scrap metal, or whatever they're made of. Sure, you get the occasional $1,000 hammer or $10,000 toilet seat but who, other than Russ Feingold, ever blinked an eye? Small spuds, bud.
But when you talk about the biggest consumer of petroleum products on the whole bloody planet, and you're talking about $82.34 per barrel at the wellhead, you are talking serious money.
How serious? Maybe our journalist friend will explain it next Thanksgiving. Or the one after.
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