This week is Groundhog Day, an annual celebration of German heritage and the folklore that was brought over from the old country and adapted to life in America. The origins of this day can be found in the German holiday of Candlemas, where part of the proceedings was a weather forecasting badger. Once my ancestors arrived in America (my father was the interesting combination of Native American and Pennsylvania German), they switched the forecasting varmint to a groundhog. The tradition continues to this day, and it’s a fun time in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania as thousands gather for what is basically a … Continue reading Of Groundhogs, Joe Rogan, And Germ Theory Deniers
Tommy T. is feeling poorly, and I’m filling in for him. Let’s all send him our best wishes for healing. I mentioned back in the fall that I had finished planning our first vacation in 9 years, and we actually took it earlier this month. Wow. We planned the trip back in September when there was no Omicron outbreak, and we ended up canceling our trip to see my family for Christmas because of Omicron, so we had to do some serious thinking about what we were going to do. The day before we were set to leave my parents … Continue reading Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude
This week another upbeat and downright perky song as an antidote to a cold and gloomy month. I’m still irked,
Pennies From Heaven was written in 1936 by Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke. It was the perfect song for the Great Depression when pennies were hard to come by.
The song was introduced to the world by Bing Crosby, so that’s where we begin.
My favorite version of Pennies From Heaven was recorded in 1956 by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle.
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, NY
.A warning before we start. This is going to be a sports essay. If you are not into sports, hang on till the end, I promise I’ll bring this around to current affairs.
You may have heard the gnashing of teeth and grinding of axes over the non-induction of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to the baseball Hall of Fame. This was their tenth year of eligibility and I don’t have the time or desire to explain the ins and outs of HOF voting but suffice it to say the two most dominant players of their era were told by the voters “so sad, too bad, you juice you lose”.
The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) are the folks who vote for or against induction into the Hall. Enough of them have taken the stand that anyone who used performance enhancing drugs is a cheater and should thus be banned from induction. So far major names from the steroid era, Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, A-Rod, et al have failed to win election and either have or will soon fall from the ballot without induction.
Except for the guys they really liked and who, in the voters minds, might have used PEDs, might not, we’re not sure so we’re gonna just take a pass and pass them into the Hall or in other words, give them a hall pass. Like the one player who did get elected this year, David Ortiz. He was only tangentially mentioned in the Mitchell Report, MLB’s investigation into PED use that was released in 2007.
There are two things I think that are important to remember about the Steroid Era ™. The first is that it indeed was an era. It lasted from the late 1980’s or thereabouts until 2003 or thereabouts. In 1991 Major League Baseball banned the use of any PEDs, but they had no testing for it until 2003. Think about that for a moment. For twelve years players could use PEDs pretty much without fear of retribution because without testing there was no way to prove players were using. It was during that period that the record for most home runs in a season was broken twice and the Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa “Long Gone Summer” took place.
While I think it’s absurd to think every major leaguer was using, I don’t think it’s absurd to think most major leaguers were using. In fact I think there were so many who were using that the level playing field moralists are always arguing steroids upended was actually level. If enough players were using then they were all back on even ground. Should they have been using? It’s easy now to say they shouldn’t have, but back in an age when there was no mechanism to see who was and who wasn’t, the pressure to use must have been acute. I’m not talking about pressure from teammates alone. I think the pressure to use came in subtle forms from managers, coaches, and even owners.
“Gee, we’re really looking for a shortstop who can give us 25-30 dingers a year and you’re only popping 10-15. What do you think you can do to get those numbers up? If you can’t, we’re gonna have to look elsewhere and we don’t want to do that since we’re gonna offer you a new multi-year, multi-million dollar contract”.
Money talks, the “pure” ballplayer walks on four pitches to first, down the foul line, and out the bullpen gate.
Bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, click below for more
The word “tell” can be used as a noun. It has origins in poker, where a “tell” is an expression or action that gives away what the player is really thinking. It’s the opposite of “poker face,” the blank, neutral expression of a seasoned player. Republicans have more or less abandoned the code words and sleight-of-hand of the past, where “welfare queen” was a derogatory term for a low-income Black or Hispanic woman. That way, they could express outrage that you would dare accuse them of racism but now, they are less interested in hiding that. They feel comfortable just … Continue reading These Are All Tells, Conservatives
I’ve had a bad case of insomnia the past two nights so I’m not sure if I can be as coherent as usual. I can, however, still complain about irksome things. I’m as irked as Dirk Bogarde in the featured … Continue reading Irksome Things
What was wrong with The Dark Ages? Limited government, low taxes, religion played a big role in daily life… Also, average life spans were 40-50 years, depending… That said, I doubt Moloch, um, I mean Murdoch, and his Employee-of-the-Month-for-Many-Consecutive-Months Tucker want to revert to the simple life for themselves or their dining, working, and/or travelling companions. But they sure don’t mind pushing a pray-the-Covid-away-or-at-least-make-the-libs-cry-for-fun-and-profit…and if people die, or public health services are overwhelmed, I doubt either loses sleep. It’s been a while, but I’ll repeat something I’ve mentioned off and on from my little soapbox here: The issue is as … Continue reading Shorter Fox Noise
I usually use vintage paperback covers for this feature. The ones for In Cold Blood were dull so I went for more recent editions except for the vintage Life Magazine cover,’ There have been two movies made about Capote and … Continue reading Pulp Fiction Thursday: In Cold Blood
Unlike Encanto’s Bruno, he doesn’t make accurate prophesies that cause people to fear him, but you still may be familiar with the work of Peter Doocy, the spring-loaded punching bag FOX reporter for Jen Psaki’s press conferences. Every day he … Continue reading We Don’t Talk About Doocy
Strictly speaking, I’ll Cry Tomorrow is an EP, not a LP. But I wanted to follow up on Monday’s Susan Hayward influenced post. In I’ll Cry Tomorrow Hayward played hard drinking Lillian Roth a singer-actress with a mother of a … Continue reading Album Cover Art Wednesday: I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Photo by Krysten Sinema, United States Senator, via Instagram
Yesterday El Grande Hefe de First Draft wrote about the early political obituaries for Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema. Today I come here, in the words of Shakespeare, not to praise her but to bury her.
In an American Oak wine barrel filled with Sonoma Chardonnay.
Sinema of course has gained fame and notoriety for basically telling all the folks who helped her get elected, both the political classes of the Democratic Party and the good citizens of Arizona who voted for her, that her idea of being a maverick is to do everything she can to prevent the implementation of laws designed to give people the certainty that elections will be held in fair and honorable means. She wants to muck up every chance her party has to turn the hatred of Trump into a solid watershed moment to beat down incipient fascism and create an America where all truly are created equal. She wants to in effect take a parliamentary procedure not mentioned in the Constitution, something not even codified till near 50 years after the Constitution was written, and make it a permanent fixture of congressional debate going forward.
In other words she just loves her some filibuster.
You shouldn’t be surprised. If you have followed her career in politics at all she is the winner of the “Most Likely To Say One Thing But Do Another” award. I mean this is the woman who ran as a moderate Democrat wanting to help the poor of her state then showed up on the floor of the Senate dressed like a teenager heading out to the mall to squash the $15 per hour minimum wage. Not that I have any statistics to back it up but I have a feeling many of the people who voted for her could have really used an upgrade in their minimum wages to help with things like, oh I don’t know, food, shelter, clothing. Especially in the middle of a global pandemic. But hey, she made all Gen Xers yearn for the good old days of Debbie Gibson.
Now I know it’s hard to believe, but we here in Sonoma have a tie to the peripatetic Ms. Sinema. One that is, to say the least, a bit strange. You see, back in the summer of 2020, the Senator from Arizona spent two weeks here in Sonoma as a paid intern at the Three Sticks Winery just a few blocks from my house. How I never ran into her I don’t know. It’s a small town and word of strangers with big names gets around quick.
Let that sink in for a moment. A United States Senator, making a salary of $170K a year, decided to take two weeks off and go learn how to scrub out wine barrels. Not only that, but she got paid $1117.40 per week for the privilege. A quick bit of math shows that means she was paid $28 per hour, nearly twice the minimum wage she voted against. She did it in the middle of a pandemic, five months before the rollout of the initial COVID vaccine, and in the middle of a presidential and congressional election that just might have been the most consequential in the history of the country. I’m sure some of her constituents would have liked her to have been working on programs to save their jobs or even their lives. I’m sure the Democratic Party would have liked her to have gone out stumping for congressional candidates to shore up their House majority or to swing into some swing states to help Joe Biden.
Instead with all that going on she decided to take a couple of weeks off to leave the humidity of Washington and the “but it’s a dry heat” of Arizona to come up to the warm during the day, cold at night temps of Sonoma to learn the ins and outs of winemaking. It shouldn’t be surprising though. Sinema had been called out before the pandemic for missing critical senate votes so she could compete in Ironman Triathlons in such nearby locales as New Zealand. At least the winery was in the US.
But she wore her Ironman garb even better than Tony Stark and that’s all that really matters in the end.
More on this rather strange story by clicking the link
The Trumper safaris are going to keep being published in the Paper of Record, apparently. The Old Grey Lady, as the New York Times is sometimes referred to, is in love and has been in love since 2016. By this I refer to the steady stream of empathetic pieces about the American far right. The latest love letter to their sweetest came in the form of a fairly glowing profile of the January 6 insurrectionists published on the front page of yesterday’s Sunday edition. Basically, the gist of the story is how inspiring January 6 was to the far right … Continue reading The New York Times’ Obsession With Normalizing The Far Right Continues
OK – I’m sure that by now you’ve head about Joey B. Shark’s immaculate takedown of Loosey Doocy at the press conference last week, so let’s take a look at how Doody’s dismemberment played out in Freeperville, in real time!
President Biden Holds a Press Conference (Live thread) youtube ^ | Jan 19, 2022 | Various
Anywhoo, the Freeperati spend the first half-hour or so doing the usual “Biden’s senile” bullshit (which is pretty funny coming from idiots who think this is intelligent speechifying ) :
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They spend the remainder of the time bitching about how Cock-a-Doocy-Doo is being excluded :
To: dead
We’ll see if this is a full out dog and pony show by whether or not Fox’s Peter Doucy(sic) gets to ask a question.
334 posted on 1/19/2022, 3:32:55 PM by rickomatic ( )
To: 1Old Pro
Not calling on Peter Doosey(sic)!
Biden: I’m a success and my report card looks good!
425 posted on 1/19/2022, 3:48:52 PM by CWW (Pray for God’s Protection!)
Jesus – they don’t even know how his name’s spelled.
To: 1Old Pro
He hasn’t pulled out his note card about how many US Covid deaths as of today.
Right-wingers have a standard reply to news of anyone dying from COVID-19 : “What were his comorbidities?” As if any other medical issue he or she had means that their COVID-19 infection didn’t kill them. Look, right-wing jerkoffs – if I have stage 3 cancer and my house catches fire, cancer didn’t kill me, and it has fuck-all to do with my death. I burned to death. If I have Type 1 diabetes and a plane crashes into my house, I didn’t die from diabetes, I died from a plane crashing into my house. These denialists will go to any … Continue reading Today on Tommy T’s Obsession with Random Ruminations – comorbidities edition
The featured image is from the late Peter Bogdanovich’s wonderful 1973 movie, Paper Moon. Tatum and Ryan O’Neal aren’t having cocktails, but it might have been Friday. You never can tell.
It’s Only A Paper Moon was composed in 1932 by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Billy Rose and Yip Harburg. The song’s original title was If You Believed In Me.
We begin with one of the earliest paper moony radio hits by the King Cole Trio. It’s a Natty version.
Has a Velvet Fog ever obscured a Paper Moon? Beats the hell outta me. Here’s Mel:
In two weeks the Winter Olympic Games ™ will begin in China.
I won’t be watching.
I will be boycotting these games. My physical attendance was never going to happen, so my boycott will be of the television kind. And I strongly urge you to join with me on this boycott journey.
First of all let’s face it, nobody really cares about winter sports unless they or a family member are playing them. Strapping boards on your feet and sliding down a mountain trying to be one tenth of a second faster than the other guy is not compelling sports viewing. Really, it is like auto racing, we’re just waiting for the crash. Don’t get me started on ice skating, a “sport” tailored to be a cesspool of corruption. Ice hockey? I have the NHL for that, if I really need it. Luge, bobsled, cross country skiing? Fine things to do, but a bore to watch. Now curling, that’s something I could get into, but until they let the curlers (don’t call them athletes) play it in their natural habitats, ie, with a beer can in their hands, I’ll pass.
But all that’s just my distaste for winter sports. That’s not the real reason I’ll be boycotting.
Did I mention these games are taking place in China? You remember China. The land that censorship loves so much it bought a timeshare there. The land of suppression and repression. Where surveilling leads to jailing. Where human rights are thrown into the back seat of a police car never to be heard from again. Yeah, that China.
China, or to be more correct the city of Beijing, was selected to host these Olympics through some pretty dubious means. Back in 2014 when the selection election was held, Oslo Norway was the leading candidate. That made perfect sense since, well, Oslo is well known for it’s winters, i.e., they have plenty of naturally occurring snow and ice. But at the last minute the International Olympic Committee (IOC) threw in demands such as:
“Diva-like demands for luxury treatment” for the IOC members themselves, such as special lanes on all roads only to be used by IOC members and cocktail reception at the Royal Palace with drinks paid for by the royal family. IOC also “demanded control over all advertising space throughout Oslo” to be used exclusively by IOC’s sponsors, something that is not possible in Norway because Norway is a liberal democracy where the government doesn’t own or control “all advertising space throughout Oslo” much of which is privately owned and has no authority to give a foreign private organization exclusive use of an entire city and private property within it.
Now the IOC is pretty well known for being a little footloose and fancy free when it comes to demanding things from potential host cities, but that was ridiculous. It actually sounds to me like the IOC made these requirements with the idea of gaming the election so that ONLY Beijing would be able to win. As it stands the only competitor for these games after Oslo pulled out was Almaty Kazakhstan, another Asian country with dubious credentials when it comes to human rights (but notably better than the Chinese).
So Beijing becomes the first city to ever host both a summer and a winter Olympics and they will have done both in the span of 14 years, far quicker than any other two time host city ever has. Then again, while once upon a time cities fought tooth and nail to get an Olympics now they mostly have an ambivalence about them, especially the winter games. Let’s face it, as a ski destination you only have a few months to make money and if those months have to be given over to preparing for and then hosting an event you don’t make money on, well thanks but no thanks.
But having the IOC game the system for them is the least of my problems with China hosting these games. Let’s talk about what they are requiring of those attending the games, both participants and partisans.
This is sort of a minor trope in the movies and TV, where a character realizes that someone they trusted/loved/partnered with is actually a villain, and the shocked character gasps out “what ARE you?” as they back away in horror. I’m sort of wondering that myself about our country. I do know the past two years have been a little unnerving. We learned that a disturbing number of Americans are perfectly cool with you dying if you are elderly or have an underlying condition. I just want to be able get a beer in a bar and it’s been MONTHS, … Continue reading What Exactly Is America?
