Had the kids in stitches at the supper table tonight. Would likely be pleased with myself if I’d been trying to be funny.
Eric the Blue
Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews
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Nerdy Minnesotan
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Got a little misty-eyed watching Dick Bremer get a little misty-eyed while being inducted into the Twins’ Hall of Fame this afternoon. They’re playing now, and the telecast just cut to Bert Blyleven, his ceremonial duties discharged, enjoying the game with a Coors Lite cracked open in front of him: everything’s coming back into focus. My free-associating mind settles on the one-sided game from years ago when Dick and Bert began assembling, on-air, an all body parts team. They had Bill Hand, Rollie Fingers, maybe a couple others and then, after several seconds of dead air, Bert said, “Not sure this is a good idea, Richard.”
Seeing all those old-time Twins made me curious about some statistical tidbit from the past and, in the course of looking it up, I was impressed at how Killebrew dominates all-time team statistical leaders in batting categories. He’s at the top of the list for
- homers
- RBIs
- runs
- total bases
- extra base hits
- slugging percentage
- OPS
You could say that it all flows from the homers–he hit 559, almost twice as many as Kent Hrbek, who’s in second place with 296. An extra 260-some homers gives Harmon a big head start in all those other categories.
Well sure, that’s fair: homers win games. I should say that, with respect to winning and newfangled statistical calculations, Killebrew is second in WAR (“wins above replacement”), just behind Rod Carew and just ahead of Joe Mauer and Kirby Puckett. No real surprises at the top of that list. I think I’ve mentioned before that I anyway am surprised by Byron Buxton’s place among all-time slugging percentage leaders:
Killebrew .514
Buxton .495
Morneau .485
Sano .482
Hrbek .481Taking account of his fielding and base running, Buck would be in the mix for greatest Twin ever if it weren’t for the injuries that have kept him off the field.
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I edited a joke and texted it to my sister, a retired chemistry professor. Slow day, needed a brightener, and figured she’d deliver.
Yes, it developed that the dots, blinking in real time, were an alert: rant gestating. But you can get enough of those from her brother.
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Since writing this, I by chance saw the above episode of Firing Line, in which the legal scholar Melissa Murray, though without mentioning what Tennessee’s state legislature did to the people of Memphis, says pretty much what I said about the Supreme Court’s decision in the case called Callais. There’s at least two of us!
I thought the last part of the interview, concerning the difficulty of amending the Constitution, was even more interesting. Twenty-seven amendments might sound like a goodly number, but, as Murray points out, ten of them (the Bill of Rights) were adopted in 1791, leaving just 17 more to be enacted over the last 235 years. She might have added that one of those 17 was Prohibition, which was subsequently rescinded by another amendment, with the result that, discounting contretemps over whether an American can have a drink, there have been 15 amendments in 235 years, including just one in the last 55.
For those of worshipful inclinations, that’s just fine: you don’t edit the Ten Commandments or the U.S. Constitution, as the former came from God and the latter from guys whose portraits are on our money. Yet the Constitution allows for itself to be amended, has been amended, and, when you consider the contents of some of those amendments–I mentioned Prohibition (and its repeal)–you feel as if possibly even weightier matters have been overlooked. It comes up in the interview that Murray participated in an exercise whereby scholars from different segments of the ideological spectrum convened to try to come up with some needed amendments. I take it that there was at least majority support for
- amending the Constitution to make it easier to amend the Constitution
- making it harder for the House to adopt articles of impeachment but
- in the event said articles get adopted, lowering the bar for conviction in the Senate
- resurrecting the legislative veto
- scrapping the requirement that the president be a natural born citizen
- instituting term limits (18 years) for Supreme Court justices
- abolishing the electoral college and providing for direct popular election of the president
I’d be happy with all those. The most obvious missing item, in my view, is reform of the Senate. That every state gets two senators has resulted in grotesque imbalances in representation that the founders could not have foreseen and would not have condoned. The combined populations of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska come to about 7.5 million people. The population of Los Angeles County, in California, is about 9.7 million. So 7.5 million people are represented by 12 senators, while 9.7 million of their fellow citizens share two senators with 30 million other Californians. I said the founders could not have foreseen such an arrangement and wouldn’t have approved, which I think is true–mainly because some of them, preeminently Alexander Hamilton, did not approve of the much milder imbalances that obtained in the founding era. See, for example, Federalist No. 22, where Hamilton wrote:
Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail . . . .
The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best way of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays, continual negotiation and intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public good.
A dozen more such passages, on a handful of other topics, from a few additional representatives of the founding generation, and I’d consider withdrawing my skepticism of their supposed omniscience.
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I understand Taylor and Travis are hitched. I have an online subscription to the NYT and can tell you: that organ of journalism is on the case. I’m the better for it, as I now know that Cornelia Street is in Greenwich Village, not London, as for some reason I had supposed. Maybe it’s because on the Lover album “Cornelia Street” is separated from “London Boy” only by “Death from a Thousand Cuts,” so I’ve heard those songs together on the same short car trips when traveling with my roommates. Through osmosis, I know a fair amount about TS, and, like a lot of people less than half my age, feel a connection with her. In my case, it’s largely on account of the lyrical opening to one of her . . . I think the kids say “bangers”?
The moon is high
Like your friends were on the night that we first met
Went home and tried to stalk you on the internet
Now I've read all the books beside your bedShe’s way too rich and famous to qualify as a dweeb, but a worldview that includes the notion that reading the books that a love interest likes is a good way to get to know them? Whoa! She was meant for me, not a football player. Will sign the prenup.
Here’s the music video of said banger, “Paper Rings”:
According to the refrain, she likes shiny things, but would marry him with paper rings–another case of life not imitating art, assuming the Times’s coverage to be moderately accurate.
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According to this New York Times article, an American family of four–dad, mom, two kids under age 8–cannot keep above water with a household income of $130,000. In 2024 they had a small cushion that has now trickled away. I was a little skeptical–for example, I don’t doubt that the claim would hold in Manhattan, but how about in Manhattan, Kansas? It also seems like the lack of line-item expenses in the article is a weakness, but of course one can try and do that on one’s own, and now that I’ve done it my skepticism is leaking. In what follows, I’m tweaking my own numbers to make them perhaps more “normie,” and in cases where I have no idea what’s normal (which is most of them), I’ve accepted the calculations of AI for questions typed into Google, such as “Average grocery bill for family of four.” Here we go:
Housing (mortgage, homeowner’s insurance, and property taxes): $26,000
Childcare for the kids, one of whom is assumed to be in elementary school, the other a full-timer at the day care: $25,000
Health insurance: $23,000 (source for this estimate is KFF’s Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator)
Groceries: $17,000
Own and operate two cars: $22,000
Federal income tax: $7500
Okay, so now they have less than $10,000 left, and no one has been to the dentist or gotten a new pair of shoes (or clothes of any kind). Nothing for a plumber, either. Nothing for state taxes. Save for college or retirement? LOL!
It’s no wonder that opinion surveys detect a sour mood in the land. I suspect $130,000 was chosen because it’s the nearest figure divisible by 10,000 that’s above the median household income for a family of four, which means more than half the families earn less than that.* I recently stumbled upon an essay in which a conservative intellectual was wringing his hands over the high percentage of young Americans who express a favorable view of socialism. I’m not sure what the definition of “socialism” is–almost certainly includes any effort by the government to help people to afford health insurance and day care. If he thinks they shouldn’t have to pay $7500 more in taxes than Elon Musk, that’s something we could agree about. Meanwhile, the president won’t stop blathering about the golden ballroom he’s building on the White House grounds.
*At the school where I work there’s a teacher who I’d be elated to learn was going to have my kid in her class next year–she’s really, really good at her vital job. Since I’ve always worked in the public sector, I know you can find online the salary of any public employee in Minnesota, so I looked her up: $46,000. She’s young, and if she stays at it, gets her master’s degree, marries a colleague, and has two kids, the above financial scenario would likely be a pretty close fit.
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Sometimes, when Trump shits the bed, it’s kinda fun to switch over to Fox News to see who’s pinch-hitting for the befouled king, maybe a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college “near San Francisco” with unusual views about . . . something. Today, the leader of the free world went on an unhinged social media rant about a golf course he wants to build in D.C., with a detour into the plague of algae at the mall’s reflecting pool, which he’s still blaming on Far Left Vandals armed with mysterious powers that include, it seems, expertise in biological engineering –the algae, he now says, is “criminally made.” I’m sure the people put off by the attention he’s devoting to algae mitigation and the construction of his golden ballroom will be happy to hear a golf course is in the works, too.
The Twins and their shaky bullpen were nursing a 1-run lead in the late innings, so I did not switch over to Fox. I did bring up on my phone the URL of the Power Line blog, to see what’s newsworthy in the world according to the authors of that unintentionally amusing site. Not, predictably, their president’s heated preoccupation with ephemera, but, somewhat to my surprise, since it raises the issue of climate change, the heat wave in Europe. The author, John Hinderaker, quotes approvingly a fellow winger who says temperatures of 36 degrees Celsius in the UK mean it’s time to drill for more oil in the North Sea, before proceeding:
I wondered: how hot is 36 degrees C? I was surprised to see that it is only 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hot, to be sure. But where I live, in the northern US, not the southern, that is a pretty common temperature in the summer. In fact, the forecast for Monday where I live in Minnesota is a high of 98 degrees. When I was a kid growing up in South Dakota, summer temperatures in the 90s were common, and occasionally the thermometer soared over 100 . . . .
Not sure what point he’s trying to make, but I also live in the northern US–which, as Hinderaker helpfully points out, is not the southern US–and, since his description of the local weather seemed to me a little off, I can now report that, going back to 1891, there have been more than 60 years in which the single hottest day in Minneapolis had a high temperature of 96 degrees F or less. So I don’t think it’s accurate, strictly speaking, to say that 96.8 degrees “is a pretty common temperature in the summer” where Hinderaker lives, in a suburb of the Twin Cities: in almost half the years, there’s not a single day it’s been that hot. According to the Internet, Hinderaker was born in 1950 and grew up in Watertown, SD, so I’ve checked out the hottest day of the year in Watertown, 1956 to 1968, which I’m guessing coincide with the years he attended school there. In 9 of those 13 years, the hottest day was less than 100 degrees F. Maybe he should have said that “very occasionally the temperature soared over 100, [and those handful of days made a strong impression on me.]”
I guess his point is that it’s always been hot in the summer and therefore it’s no surprise, and certainly not evidence of climate change, if it’s hot in Europe late in June. But in that case what to make of the half-cocked geography lesson with which his column begins:
Sometimes it gets hot. Even in Northern Europe, currently in the midst of a heat wave. Many people don’t realize that London is farther north than anywhere in the contiguous U.S. It is at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada. Paris is at the same latitude as North Dakota and Montreal. So Northern Europe has not generally been home to high temperatures.
If Northern Europe has not generally been home to high temperatures, and now it is, maybe that’s a sign that human activity is causing the climate to change? The paragraph is odd in other ways. It’s true that Calgary and London are at the same latitude, but it’s weird to say that a city (Paris) is at the same latitude as a state (North Dakota) that’s more than 200 miles in its north-south dimension, corresponding to more than 3 degrees of latitude. Since Paris is at 48.86 degrees north latitude, and the 49th parallel is the border between North Dakota and Canada, virtually all of North Dakota is south of Paris. Paris is also considerably farther north than Montreal, which is at 45.5 degrees north latitude. It’s almost as if Hinderaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
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In his poem “The Great Society”–title refers to President Johnson’s domestic program–the American (rural Minnesota, born and bred) poet Robert Bly begins with dentists who “continue to water their lawns even in the rain” before proceeding to hands that, having been “developed with terrible labor by apes,” now “hang from the sleeves of evangelists.” Later, we are told that “[t]he president dreams of invading Cuba.”
I’ve been thinking that, were the poem to be updated for MAGA times, the Secretary of War would be blowing up little fishing boats in the Caribbean while the president pores over blueprints for his ballroom. The updated poem would have to be longer than a sonnet if we wanted to allude also to the MMA fights on the White House lawn, the algae in the reflecting pool over which Lincoln gazes sternly, and the brilliant planning for the Iran war from which it appears we will be extricated by folding like a poor man holding a pair of nines.
You know, without evidence, that the corpses in those fishing boats were “narco-terrorists” because the guys who can’t get the algae out, or lay a plan for what to do if Iran closes the Strait, could not possibly be confused about three things. I’m leaving out all the dead elementary school children. Details!
The bit about the president dreaming of invading Cuba could stand.
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I’ve been with my daughters in Oregon, where their high school ultimate frisbee team was in a national tournament. And they won it! They get annoyed when relatives think they must be playing frisbee golf or something, so if you want to see what “ultimate” looks like, here’s one of their games from Friday’s pool play. The championship game is on YouTube, too–here–but it was played in the early evening and players’ long shadows are kind of distracting. (Plus, my older daughter is interviewed on-air after the pool game.) There’s a recap of the championship game here.
At the high school level, the sport has been dominated by teams from the Pacific Northwest. Last year, five of the eight teams that made it to the quarterfinals were from the Seattle metro, and for the last three years in a row the championship game has been between the same two schools–one from Seattle and the other from Eugene, Oregon. This year my daughters’ team, Washburn High in Minneapolis, defeated that Seattle school, the defending champion, in the quarters–after trailing by two points late in the second half, they scored the game’s last four points to win 10-8. In the semis, they built a big lead (7-1) early and then held on for a 14-11 win. The championship game was against the team from Eugene, the tournament’s #1 seed. Washburn won easily, 14-6. Our team has a big roster, lots of solid players, and I think maybe Eugene relied more on a small corps of stars who were spent by the time we played them. It was 90 degrees in Salem, the host town about an hour south of Portland, and both teams were playing their third game of the day, sixth of the weekend.
Next day we had time to kill, so drove back to the Portland airport by way of Pacific City on the Oregon coast. Here’s my happy national champions with the ocean in the background.
One of the other dads sent me this picture of the three captains with their gold medals after the championship game:
Number 27, Charlotte, is one of Lydia’s best friends. Number 9, Samantha, is one of these all-everythings–gifted athlete, valedictorian, merit scholar, “one of Augustine’s fit and fair” as a critic once said of John Updike. By chance, I sat next to Samantha on the flight home. I’m on the aisle, her dad by the window, she’s between us, my daughters in the row in front of us. Soon as we were up in the air Samantha pulled out a door stop of a book and began reading. Figures! Her dad did the same. It’s genetic! My girls, phones out, buds in, were probably planning their Insta posts. Everyone kept at their diverse activities, which in my case meant trying to make those dribs of coffee they pour you last till South Dakota. Had flashbacks to interminable work meetings made bearable only by the contents of a travel mug. Fun weekend though.
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Not until now have I felt the need to post one of those envy-inducing social media pics exhibiting my advanced culinary skills and elevated lifestyle. Yes, that is today’s lunch up there. Fyi, I enjoyed it with a Gatorade Red. If anyone is interested, DM me for the recipe. I don’t recommend it, but if you think you can pull it off on your own, here’s a pro tip: the ratios are not as important as the bread. Indeed, the most common way to fail is to use something other than the cheapest, pastiest white bread for sale. Oles, I don’t mean the cheapest at Whole Foods, or even at your second favorite grocery store, whatever that might be, probably Kowalski’s. No, get the bread where you get your gas. You’ll thank me later.
Hylanders, just follow your instincts.
According to the AI Assistant who comes with this blogging platform, I need a “clearer introduction.” Apparently readers who don’t know me or anything about my “culinary journey” will be more “engaged” if provided some “context.” With that in mind, I should say that I just got back from a trip and discovered that I was out of Miller Lites: thus, the Gatorade Red. The AI Assistant really used every word in quotes, including the phrase “culinary journey.” Perhaps I should not scoff as beginning a sentence with “indeed” might have been my subliminal attempt at imitating a real food writer.
Eric the Blue 