I think most everyone has seen the cartoon–maybe more apt to call it a meme–wherein the guy in his pajamas pounds at his keyboard while shouting into the next room, “I can’t come to bed honey, I disagree with someone on the Internet!” Well, having no honey, I’m a free man, so:
At this point, “Heights Pride,” whoever that is–I think he’s prudent to hide his identity behind a screen name–stopped replying, which I think means he didn’t really want to “continue this discussion.” I assume it’s a “he” because, generally speaking, the Dunning-Kruger effect is more observable in my gender than in females.
But notice how quickly his sneering, pugnacious attitude evaporates when challenged on the facts. What a chud.
I also had a back-and-forth with the supporters of a congressman who posted, “It’s time to put Fauci in an orange jump suit.” For breaking what law, I asked. The congressman was the execrable Randy Fine; if you want, you can look him up on Facebook and find the post and the comments. It’s sort of fun comparing the pages of the people who “like” my comments with those who put a saddle on their hallucinations and charge. The former are filled with pictures of the account-holder’s gardens, their vacations, their children, their children’s children, their pets, etc., etc. With the latter, excepting the occasional motorcycle, muscle car, or posed picture with a large, antlered, dead animal, it’s all nutbaggery all the time.
It’s perfectly obvious that, in the Minnesota races this election season for governor and US Senate, the Republican party has declined to endorse its only two candidates who have any chance of winning. Since Michele Tafoya and Lisa DeMuth are both women, a natural question concerning the m-word, for misogyny, arises. Do Republicans hate women? What evidence would support an indignant No? I’m trying to remember the last time the Republicans sent forth a woman to vie for either governor or US Senate. Amy Klobuchar has been elected to the Senate four times, and her losing Republican opponents have been named Mark, Kurt, Jim, and Royce. Tina Smith beat Jason. Tim Walz has vanquished Jeff and Scott. You might be tempted to say that Republican men are proven losers.
By the way, speaking of losers: one of Royce’s exes has a restraining order against him, and he has also been dogged by courts attempting to force him to pay delinquent child support. Neither of this year’s Republican-endorsed candidates for the top-of-the-ticket races has ever held any public office, or is even of sufficient public stature to have inspired someone to write them up for Wikipedia. These are the fellas Republicans preferred to Tafoya and DeMuth–who, I admit, are awful, but a couple grams of discriminating intelligence should allow a person, including even a Republican, to detect differences of degree.
For an informative and entertaining tour of this year’s Minnesota races, I cannot recommend highly enough the blog of Naomi Kritzer. She will make you smile and, if you’re not a junky, possibly save you from making a grievous error in a primary, or in one of the lower profile general election contests. I learned from her that, on the subject of gun policy, Tafoya supports red flag laws, so from a Republican perspective maybe the problem with her isn’t that she’s a woman but, rather, that she has a toe nail protruding into the realm of the sane. It’s more than you can say for the boys. Trump has endorsed for governor Pillow Guy, naturally.
Watching in agony and then cathartic relief as the Twins eked out a 12-inning win in Cleveland, while teen-aged pitter-patter drifted in from the next room, brought to mind W.H. Auden:
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . . .
Or while titters about someone's Insta post mix with a dejected sounding Cory Probus as yet again we make the first out of an extra inning without advancing the ghost runner to third.
Just want to point out that the sense of that fourth line is reinforced by the long march of simple words. Really a great poem. The whole thing is here. The painting Auden interprets, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," is above. The line in which a horse scratches its ass on a tree on Good Friday must be one of the high points of the last century's poetry in English; also, entirely consistent with the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who has a painting of what the world will look like to me if the Twins can't win most of their next six games, against the A's and Royals, American League weaklings:
When I was a little kid, my parents gave me for a gift The Story of Baseball, “a Random House book for young people” by a guy named Rosenburg. It looked like the above, which I just found in an ebay ad: apparently, if I still had the book, I might be able to sell it for around fifty bucks. Or maybe not, because the pages of mine were worn and smudged, and anyway I’d want to keep it. I thought of one of the book’s chapters today, on the Daffy Dodgers, a name applied to the Brooklyn team of the late 1920s, when their inept play, in the field and especially running the bases, made them a fixture in the second division of the National League. In one incident described by Rosenburg, a Dodger, batting with a runner on first and less than two outs, drove a ball deep into the outfield and, thinking he for sure had a double, charged around first base and sprinted toward second with his head down. But the base runner, after advancing most of the way to second, saw that the ball might get caught, so he retreated toward first. The two runners crossed each other between first and second bases while headed in opposite directions.
In the Twins game today, something too much like that happened in the ninth inning. With the Twins trailing 6 to 2, our first two batters, Josh Bell and Victor Caratini, reached safely and were occupying first and second bases when the next batter, Brooks Lee, hit a ball into the right center field alley. Of course the camera follows the ball, so you could see the center fielder make a diving effort to catch it, which failed. When the ball was quickly recovered and thrown into the infield, both Caratini and Lee were near second base, and Bell was near third. It seems that Lee, imitating the Daffy Dodger of old, had put his head down and run to second base.. Meanwhile, Caratini, seeing that the outfielder might catch the ball, had stopped near second to see whether he might have to head back to first. Lee ran right up to him. I think that when the ball wasn’t caught, Bell first thought that Caratini would solve the crowding problem near second base by trying to advance to third, so he rounded third and started home. But then he saw Lee head back toward first, so he tried to duck back into third, but was tagged out when the outfielder’s throw was relayed to the third baseman. Then the third baseman threw across the diamond and Lee was tagged out, too. Instead of the bases loaded and no outs, there were two outs, a runner on second, and the same old 6 to 2 score. The next batter struck out to end the game.
As a teenager, I had a summer job coaching tee-ballers, and I distinctly remember one game in which the batter dribbled the ball toward first base. The first baseman charged in, fielded the ball, and was going to tag the batter as he ran past him on the way to first base. But the kid who had hit the dribbler just stopped, and he and the first baseman contemplated each other for a second or two. Then, instead of going back to tag first base for the out, the addled first baseman ran toward the kid who’d hit the ball. The play ended as the runner retreated toward home and the first baseman threw to the catcher, who tagged the boy who’d hit the ball as he slid into home from the first base line. This was around 10 o’clock on a weekday morning in the summer of, I think, 1975, and the moms watching the game loved it. You have to pay good money to see that kind of stuff in the Big Leagues.
Will Rogers famously remarked that he did not belong to an organized political party–he was a Democrat. I thought of that yesterday after Trump endorsed clownish Pillow Guy for governor of Minnesota. The chairman of the state GOP responded by putting out the following statement:
We were surprised by President Trump’s endorsement of Mike Lindell. We strongly support the President and his agenda, but Minnesota Republicans must choose the candidate best positioned to defeat Amy Klobuchar.
When the going got tough under Tim Walz, Mike Lindell left Minnesota for Texas. Now he wants Minnesota Republicans to overlook his serious financial baggage, public records showing tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent property taxes, significant electability concerns, and unanswered questions surrounding his running mate. Minnesota cannot afford to nominate a ticket that gives Democrats an easy target and creates the very real possibility of another DFL trifecta.
Other Republican candidates have spent years strengthening our party, supporting candidates, raising resources, and doing the hard work required to win elections.
Republican delegates considered Mike Lindell at the State Convention, and he finished third. We believe that is where he will finish in the August primary.
These are serious times, and they require serious, disciplined leadership. Minnesota needs a governor who can unite Republicans, earn the support of independent voters, and defeat Amy Klobuchar.
That’s a lot of words from the state party chair without mentioning the name of the party’s endorsed candidate! Embarrassed of Pillow Guy, and less than proud of the guy selected by the delegates. That leaves the candidate Joe Soucheray spoke with recently:
Only outsiders are allowed to say that the emperor is obviously naked. Why is the state chair “surprised” that Trump endorsed clownish Pillow Guy? Clownish Pillow Guy is the biggest Trump sycophant in the group, therefore . . .
The most notable aspect of the chairman’s communication is its barely suppressed undertone of desperation. The desperation arises from the rule against spitting out poison. Pillow Guy has swallowed it and begged for more, thereby earning the president’s endorsement. Soucheray’s guest opts for swishing it around in her mouth for an indeterminate period. I don’t know what to say about the candidate selected by the Republican party’s activists. It might be the only thing I have in common with the party’s state chairman.
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:
Taking 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.
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
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.
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 bed
She’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.
Eric the Blue 