The magnificent career of Rafael Nadal

Early on, Rafael Nadal made this Roger Federer fan suffer by beating him at the French Open four years running (2005 in the semifinal; 2006 to 2008 in the final). But I learned to appreciate Nadal's compelling style, especially on the clay courts at Roland Garros, with his fourteen titles, 112 wins, and only four losses. Even though his clay-court style had been around for seventeen years by the time he last won it in 2022, only three players ever figured how to beat him there: Robin Söderling (2009), Novak Djokovic (2015 and 2021), and Alexander Zverev (2023, when Nadal was suffering from the injuries that have now ended his career). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 October 2024)

Finding Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association” on a library shelf at Stanford in the 1980s

Regarding Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), I remember now that I did not read it in school when I played tabletop baseball games, but in college a few years later. I worked at Stanford's Meyer Library shelving books, and when I shelved one by Coover, I recognized him as the author of a novel about such games, so I checked it out and read it. By then, I had already begun reading literary criticism, so I dug up an article about the novel. To my amusement, the scholar did not know those games actually exist, but thought that Coover had completely made them up. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 October 2024)

SwissPass, the Swiss Federal Railways, and the “enshittification” of customer service on the internet

The internet's "enshittification" (Cory Doctorow) includes how companies make it hard to contact them. I received a suspicious-looking email from SwissPass, a service of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Although it wasn't phishing, I replied to mention that it looked like it was. It was a no-reply account. The SwissPass website has no email address or contact form. I found an SBB Customer Service email address. An auto-reply said it's no longer used. That reply mentioned a "help and contact" page – which has no email address or contact form. Both sites offer phone numbers to call – but not toll-free. I finally wrote them using a form for complaining about train personnel. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 October 2024)

“The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), by Robert Coover (1932-2024)

When I recently had the idea of writing about mechanical pencils, I put it on my list of possible topics for daily prose. But only yesterday did I not come up with an issue to write about (films and politics having grabbed my attention for most of the past week). While I was writing about my life with mechanical pencils, which began with tabletop baseball games in the 1970s, I thought of a novel I read back then about a man playing such games: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968). So it was uncanny to learn this morning that Coover died on Saturday at 92. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 October 2024)

Mechanical pencils

In the mid-1970s, I began playing tabletop baseball games like Strat-O-Matic, though my favorite was eventually one called Extra Innings. I stopped playing them around 1980 or so, but one thing remains from my years playing such games: mechanical pencils. Back then, when I needed a new pencil or new lead, I would walk the mile or so from our house in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, to the University of Toledo bookstore, which had a great collection of Pentel pencils. I still prefer their P205 pencils with 0.5 mm lead. Back then, such pencils were only available in black, but these days I have several of them in a range of colors. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 October 2024)

Anti-smoking rhetoric in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017) and Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

About eight minutes into "Get Out" (Jordan Peele, 2017), Rose (Allison Williams), a young white woman, takes a cigarette from her boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black man, and throws it out the window of the car she is driving. Her opposition to his smoking, which her parents turn out to share, runs through the film. This time around, it reminded me of the guardians at the boarding school in "Never Let Me Go" (Mark Romanek, 2010, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel), who insist that their "students" should never smoke. In both cases, the anti-smoking people want to keep the bodies they want to exploit as healthy as possible. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 October 2024)

A petition against Basel’s staging of the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2025

Today in my mailbox was a petition from the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland to start a referendum against the staging of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel next May: "35 Million [Swiss Francs] in tax money for a propaganda show?" Given what I know about this small, "national-conservative" Swiss political party, which is against homosexuals, trans people, and abortion, I assumed they were against the "propaganda" of a "gender ideology" they would claim was bering spread by Nemo, the non-binary winner of the 2024 ESC. But to my surprise, they dislike the ESC for the "occultism and Satanism" that they claim some of the contest's performers have been spreading. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 October 2024)