Watching the memorable match between the United States and Algeria in the World Cup this past Wednesday (which was, sadly, followed by an American loss to Ghana on Saturday) has put me in a sports frame of mind.  Movies about sports (either fictional or based on real events) are plentiful, but truly good ones are tough to find.  Here are 5 that make the cut:

1. Hoosiers (1986)

The greatest feel-good sports movie of all time (I much prefer it to Rudy, probably because I can’t stand Notre Dame), Hoosiers is about a small-town Indiana high school that perseveres to become state basketball champs.  Whoever the guy is that plays Jimmy Chitwood must be a terrible actor because they only let him speak about fifty words, but he sure does have a pretty jump shot.  This is the only basketball movie worth the time, the rest being either mediocre (He Got Game, White Men Can’t Jump) or downright awful (The Air Up There, Blue Chips, Dr. J’s tragic The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh).

2. Bull Durham (1988)

Kevin Costner is no stranger to baseball movies, having also played the lead in For the Love of the Game and Field of Dreams (also a wonderful movie, but when it comes to tug-at-the-heartstrings baseball fare, I’ll take Robert Redford in The Natural), but his comedic turn as aging minor-league catcher Crash Davis is his best effort.  I’ve never understood why Costner is so maligned.  Sure, he’s had some duds, but any actor with Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, The Untouchables, No Way Out, A Perfect World, and Dance With Wolves on his résumé is worthy of respect.    

3. Victory (1981)

The World Cup got the ball rolling (pun intended) on this post, so it’s only fitting that a soccer movie make the list.  Expertly acted by Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and Max von Sydow, Victory tells the story of a group of Allied POWs who join together to play a match against the German national team during World War II.  This scene alone is worth the price of admission: After an Allied team member (played by international soccer star Pelé) scores on a bicycle kick, the German officer who organized the match—a soccer aficionado, he hoped to use honest sportsmanship to counterbalance the horrors of war—erupts in spontaneous applause.  His superiors, who’ve attempted to rig the match to ensure a Nazi victory, can only frown as their efforts are upended by the unpredictability of sport.    

4. Rocky (1976)

As a sport, boxing has all but disappeared from our national consciousness over the past couple of decades.  As entertainment, though, it’s the sport with the highest ratio of quality films.  Aside from Rocky and Rocky II (and Rocky III—yeah, I said it) there’s also Raging Bull, The Great White Hope, and the more recent outings Million Dollar Baby and Cinderella Man.  I’m not going to tell you what Rocky is about because if you don’t already know, you have only yourself to blame.  It’s without question one of the best films ever made, sports-related or otherwise.

5. Vision Quest (1985)

Probably my favorite ’80s movie, and by that I don’t mean a movie made in the ’80s—as most of those mentioned on this list were—but a movie about coming of age during the ’80s.  Actually, come to think of it, I like Sixteen Candles better.  And Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  And Some Kind of Wonderful.  And Lucas (which has its own sports-related subplot).  Okay, Vision Quest is my favorite ’80s movie about high school wrestling, that much I can say with certainty.  Matthew Modine plays Louden Swain, a newcomer to the sport and a bit of an outcast who drops weight classes to compete against Brian Shute, the most feared wrestler in the state.      

**Bonus!  5 more not mentioned above that could very easily be on the list: The Sandlot, Slap Shot, Kingpin, Caddyshack, and The Longest Yard (the original, of course).

Living in South and Central Florida, the most exciting birds I ever saw outside of a zoo were Cardinals and the stubborn Red-bellied Woodpecker with high hopes (as Sinatra would sing) that insisted on trying to drill his hole through the metal downspout on the side of our house.  North Georgia is a far different story—all you have to do is hang a feeder outside, and dozens of species in various sizes and colors will drop by over the course of the year.  These are 5 of my favorites:

1. Red-headed Woodpecker

Of Woody Woodpecker fame, this bird is common in more rural areas where invasive European Starlings haven’t established themselves.  They usually depart for the winter, so the first Red-head of spring is always a welcome sight.

2. Indigo Bunting

The best way for me to describe the male of this species is that they’re so blue, they look fake—it’s an electric, cotton-candy shade of blue.  They’re supposed to be fairly common, but I rarely see them, usually only for a week or two before they move on.

3. Cedar Waxwing

A flock of these used to fly through at my old house on their way south every winter, but I haven’t seen any since we relocated to another part of the Atlanta area.  A brown bird with a black mask and wingtips that look as though they were dipped in red wax (hence the name).  

4. Northern Flicker

A woodpecker by design, this bird is often seen feeding on the ground instead of the sides of trees.  Adorned with clearly defined markings on their head, breast, and body, they always remind me of a horse decked out in Native American war paint.

5. Brown-headed Nuthatch

Not as visually striking at the others on the list, this little bird has personality in spades.  They have a chittering vocabulary and a hummingbird’s tendency to buzz by your head on their way to the feeder. 

**Bonus!  5 Books About Birds I Like: The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson, The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher, Bird Songs by Les Beletsky, The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, and if you’re looking for a good pocket reference, Stan Tekiela’s guide for your region is excellent for quick, easy identifications.

The Fall television season is in full swing, which is a welcome respite from reruns.  I don’t watch a ton of TV outside of sports, but there are a handful of shows that I follow regularly.  Thanks to HBO and TiVo, the quality of network programming seems to have been changed permanently and for the better, and I have no doubt that without them, more than a few of these shows would probably not exist:

1. Friday Night Lights, NBC

I shied away from Friday Night Lights at first, worried that it was going to be like The O.C., but with football and a Texas twang.  It’s so much more, a solid drama about family, relationships, and playing sports in front of one of the toughest crowds in America.  Coach and Mrs. Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton) are the most convincing married couple on TV.  If you happen to be a Direct TV subscriber, you have the added bonus of watching the new season in full on Channel 101 before it airs on network NBC.   

2. Castle, ABC

Nathan Fillion is good in everything I’ve seen him in, and this show about a mystery writer who consults with police detectives on their investigations is no exception.  Castle brings back that old Moonlighting vibe, though Fillion fills the roles of both David Addison (hip, wisecracking sleuth) and Maddie Hayes (pampered outsider slumming in the world of real-life crime).

3. Southland, formerly on NBC

I first heard about Southland when talking with Michael Cudlitz during one of my Surrogates set visits—he told me he’d just come from shooting some of the episodes, and he was excited about the show’s impending debut.  Michael seemed like a nice guy, so I gave the show a shot.  And I’m glad I did.  It’s a bit like NYPD Blue, but with a larger cast comprised of both detectives and uniformed cops.  Despite it being critically acclaimed, word recently came down that NBC has canceled Southland, so it’s looking for a new home.  Will you be its friend? 

4. Top Chef, Bravo

For the most part, I find the attraction of “reality TV” to be utterly baffling, if for no other reason than the fact that being followed around by a camera crew every waking minute is not at all like reality.  I do enjoy Top Chef, though, probably because I worked in restaurants when I was a kid, and I’ve always found them to be fascinating places.  It also portrays the competing chefs as genuinely respectful of—if not always liking—each other, so you don’t get too much of the infighting that often comes with other shows of the genre.  Plus, I like to eat.   

5. Hung, HBO

I’ve been an HBO loyalist since watching The Sopranos, which I got onboard with in the second season.  You can never go wrong with their dramas, but somehow their comedies always leave me cold.  Until Hung.  This story of a history teacher (Thomas Jane) who turns to a life of prostitution in order to *ahem* make ends meet is both funny and *ahem* touching.  I feel things are getting a little too suggestive, so I’ll just add that Hung is on hiatus now, but HBO is good about re-airing entire seasons of their shows.

At one of our old houses, we lived next door to a retired Scottish couple.  The man of the house was Bert (“Bert” is the Scottish shortening of “Robert,” so we shared a name), and he was the coolest guy you’d ever want to talk over the fence with.  We both enjoyed pop standards, so I’d bring him Michael Bublé sampler CDs from Borders, and he’d burn me Rat Pack CDs in exchange, complete with track listings written in his calligraphic style. 

Bert also shared his stories with me, maybe because everyone in his family had heard them all before.  He told me that at one point he worked at a factory in England, where many of the employees were cockney, a term that refers to individuals born within hearing distance of a particular set of London church bells (the name of which escapes me).  Cockneys have a rather unique and amusing style of slang that replaces common words with rhyming equivalents, much of which Bert picked up during his years working alongside them.  He kept a running list of cockney vocabulary for me, which he’d update whenever he recalled another phrase.  I still have the list, and looking through it I selected 5 that I find the most enjoyable (cockney appears in italics):

1. wife: trouble and strife

2. a piddle (a pee): Jimmy Riddle

3. a lie: pork pie

4. believe: Adam and Eve (“I don’t Adam and Eve it!”)

5. hands: happy lands

While most slang truncates words and phrases into shorter bursts, as you can see, cockney slang does the opposite.  The difference becomes glaring when putting sentences together: “I’m going up the apples and pears to put my loaf of bread on the weeping willow.”  The English translation of this is, “I’m going upstairs to put my head on the pillow,” or in even more concise terms, “I’m going to bed.”  17 words become 4.

Perhaps recognizing the wordiness of the jargon, cockneys do in fact truncate, but in doing so they often jettison the rhyme that established the slang term in the first place.  For example, while butcher’s hook is cockney for look, it’s often truncated during usage, so the speaker might simply say, “Have a butcher’s.”  Taking an example from the list above, the cockney plural of lie is not pies but porkies, maybe because pies is part of the rhyme for eyes (mince pies).  Confusing enough for you?  Did I mention there are also in some cases multiple rhymes for the same word?  A chancer (otherwise known as a liar) can be expressed as either a highland dancer or a Bengal lancer.

Maddening to be sure, but also a great lot of fun.  I always laughed when Bert rattled off his phrases.  Not his trouble and strife, though.  It drove her nuts.

Years ago I read a book about WWII Japanese code breakers who were befuddled by the code of their Navajo adversaries in the U.S. Marines, when pretty much all the Navajos did was communicate with each other in their native tongue.  Were there no cockneys whom Churchill could deploy against the Germans to the same effect?

I didn’t grow up reading comics.  I remember my older brother reading Spider-man and The Incredible Hulk, but other than a few scattered issues of Marvel’s Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle and a handful of assorted titles at the barbershop, I was never all that interested in them.  My comics-reading experience began in 2000, which sets me more in the era of the graphic novel than the single issue.  Of the many graphic novels I’ve read over the past nine years, here are 5 (by no means the only 5) that I like enough to recommend:

1. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95 by Joe Sacco

I read primarily nonfiction books, and I’ve always thought that there aren’t enough of them in comics (not counting autobio, of which there is plenty).  Joe Sacco does his best to fill the void, and any one of his books of journalism is worth your time.

2. Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Josh Cotter

I like my stories to be straightforward, so I’ve never been a fan of abstract writing—I find that often the abstract storyteller puts form over function, showing off in a way that one of my creative writing professors once described as the “look, Ma, no hands!” approach.  Skyscrapers is abstract, weaving reality and illusion into a single garment . . . but it works perfectly.

3. Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon

Reading this allegory about a pride of lions that escaped from their zoo after the bombing of Baghdad, Iraq reminded me of Watership Down, the first grown-up novel I ever read.  Henrichon’s art is wonderful, and of all of Vaughan’s works I’ve read, I like this one the best.

4. Where Hats Go by Kurt Wolfgang

Sometimes the mark of a good book is that it demands multiple readings, but other times it’s that the book can only be read once because there’s so much emotional weight.  The latter is the case for me with Where Hats Go, the silent tale of the legacy left to a boy by his grandfather.  I was very close with my maternal grandfather (I never knew my paternal grandfather, as he passed away when my father was still a child), so this one resonated with me in a way that makes it difficult to revisit.

5. The Playwright by Daren White and Eddie Campbell

You most likely haven’t heard of The Playwright because it won’t be released by Top Shelf until 2010.  I had the pleasure of reading a galley of it, though, and it’s quite possibly the most literary graphic novel I’ve ever read.