Eric the Blue

It occurred to me yesterday, while watching the NCAA women’s tournament game between the Gophers and UCLA, that in basketball it’s helpful to be tall.

Don’t look now but, for the first time since before last year’s all-star game, the Twins do not have a losing record. I saw that if you want to bet on the over-under for Twins wins this season, the number is 70.5. Seems about right since, if my life depended upon placing a winning bet, I’m not sure what I’d do. Seventy wins mean 92 losses, a bad season, so I’m not expecting much. Whatever, it’s still baseball.

I went to the rally/protest at the Capitol today. Took the below picture of almost the first person I saw upon disembarking from the train at the Capitol station. It seems there is a perception among the MAGA populace that we’re all a bunch of commies, but, honestly, I’ve rarely seen a larger collection of normies. Two out of three males without a sign featuring one of the most well known Anglo-Saxon expressions look like retired Lutheran pastors. They’re out-numbered, however, by women who could be their wives. Perhaps actuarial science accounts for this. Just judging by crowd demographics, however, you’d say that older white ladies are at least as pissed as Bruce Springsteen.

I’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet in order to talk about it with my 9th-grader, who, to her dismay, has to read it for school English class. My take is that everyone in the play except Juliet is ridiculous, and maybe she is too, considering that she falls for Romeo. “You woo by the book,” she tells him in, I believe, a forgotten line from the play’s most famous scene. This is after he says all the cliched things that lovers need to say, in rhyming iambic pentameter, which makes it even worse than in real life. Why doesn’t she tell him to shove off? It might be because Shakespeare, as usual, had a source, and, for purposes of plot development, she didn’t tell him to shove off in the source. The older generation–what a shit-show. Old man Capulet really likes to plan a party. The clergy: self-important bumblers. Who else? The nurse is a fool. So is Juliet’s mother, who resists only briefly her husband’s mindless, reflexive cruelty before adopting it herself. The best that can be said for Paris is what Juliet’s parents say in recommending him to their daughter, and that’s not much: nice looking, conventional young man. In other words, an incipient stuffed shirt. He is saved by the general slaughter from taking his place among the next generation’s mediocrities.

The best scene in the play is the one in which Romeo buys poison from the keeper of the seedy apothecary shop, and he (Romeo) here has to step out of character in order to win my sympathy. At the end of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, you feel bad about everyone being dead.