Backpacks and Breaking News

It's been a good week for getting steamed up about little things, like those ghastly,  generic "free" commuter newspapers I mentioned the other day. (Come on New Yorkers, The Post, a classic big city tab, is a friggin' quarter - that's in a world of $6 cups of coffee!).

Today, my rant is backpacks. Ray, Sanja, Tim, Ptenisnet, Tanya, etc. please tell me you're not part of the faux sporty geek brigade wandering around the city under backpacks, at least not with both arms in the straps (slung over one shoulder a backpack is acceptable, provided it isn't the size of a keg of Heineken).

The thing about the full-on backpack is that it's a burden for everyone but the person wearing it. Every time some dork in a loaded backpack tries to turn on a bus, some little old lady's life is endangered. Oh! Sorry! Didn't mean to knock you over with my pack - hips can be replaced quite easily these days! On the subway, a door-loiterer (already a bottom-feeding species - standard subway etiquette calls for passengers to move into the cars, right Sanja?) not only blocks the portal, her stupid backpack also keeps polite alighters from moving into the car.

So there she stands, Ms. Backpack, obliviously reading Life of Pi (is there a worse book in the English language?), while everyone has to navigate around the rock of Sisyphus strapped to her back.

Need to work your way through a crowd? It's no longer enough to shimmy and twist, uttering "excuse me"s and "sorry"s as you go - these days, you have to part a veritable sea of backpacks. Sometimes this means grabbing the backpack, owner attached, and steering him out of your way while his head does a 180 on his neck and he regards you with startled eyes. I've literally lifted people off the ground by the backpack just to get them out of my way.

And you know the most annoying thing?  Even more than the cuckolded husband, the sporty backpacker is always the last to know. He has no idea that he's a royal, space-hogging, people-bumping, out-to-lunch, Pi-reading, retro-sneaker-wearing, Tarantino-and-Starbucks-loving pain in the arse.

So get with the program! Dump the backpack and use a good, old-fashioned messenger bag or similar shoulder bag. Make life easier for your fellow Gothamites, as well as visitors to our fair city (okay, tourists are part of the problem, not part of the solution. At least they have an excuse.)

The other day I was at a dinner with my friend Wayne Nordberg and his daughter, Anna, a talented journalist. She works for the modern parenting magazineCookie - Conde Nast's first foray into the field. Anna was not very sympathetic to my beef,observing, "Parents have so much going on that if it makes it a little easier for them to stuff things in a backpack then, okay. . . I won’t judge. Obviously Wall Street isn’t the place for them but in, say, our industry, who cares?"

Anna, I care!

Anyway, Anna contributes to a Cookie weblog that may be interesting to all you parents of kids 10-and-under, but she tells me the real action is over at their sex column (sounds a little better than comparison shopping for sippy cups, eh, Ray?).  Of course, you can always skip the sex column and go for a serious read on how parents ought to divide labor. As if. . .

But I have breaking news, folks. My old pal Ubaldo Scanagatta, one of the three titans of Italian tennis journalism (the other two, as Miguel noted yesterday, are Gianni Clerici and Rino Tomassi) has his own blog. Dang, I wish I could read Italian! Pass it on to all your friends in the old country, though.

Ubaldo is a very clever, wise, and well-informed pundit. In fact, I emailed Ubaldo in Shanghai to congratulate him on the blog and to inquire about the identity of that handsome guy standing with that tennis player, Roger something-or-other, in the picture in one of Ubaldo's first blog entries. This was his response:

Mikey Seabra is going to be giving us more background and analysis on this subject, in a post I may get up sometime this evening.

So it looks like we're in for some kind of shake-up in the Masters regimen, and the name I hear bandied about a lot as a driving force behind it all is Ion Tiriac.

I agree with Ubaldo about the glory of those two five-setters in Rome. My own feeling is that the ATP really is moving in a bizarre direction: The organization appears to be boosting doubles and emasculating singles.

I hope Mikey can shed some light on this increasingly messy-looking state of affairs.

P.S. - New ESPN post by yours truly should be up by tomorrow. . .

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