Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • No kings

    I went to the No Kings Protest in Minneapolis today. Wanted to add my body to the mass of people even more concerned than Susan Collins. I don’t know how big the crowd was. For sure big enough to cause traffic tie-ups in downtown for a few hours. Don’t blame me, I took the bus. As to demographics, the assembled were, if my impressions may be trusted, whiter and more female than the general population, and quite a bit older than I would have predicted. At about 67.2 years, I bet I was less than 10 above the median age. Lots of American flags. On the periphery I found a grassy spot to sit alongside some other oldsters who were similarly unwilling to stand in one place for too long. I could tell there were speakers, but not who they were or exactly what they were saying. I guess they got off some zingers because the crowd at intervals erupted in laughter or applause.

    Even if I’d been able to hear the official speakers, the messaging was of course provided mainly by the signs individual attendees had created and now carried. I could see them without difficulty. Some were quite straightforward–for example:

    FUCK YOU TRUMP

    I committed that one to memory. Many of the others I typed into my phone so as not to forget them. There were several variations on

    NO FAUX-KING WAY

    Some people felt a need to explain their presence:

    SO BAD, EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE HERE

    And:

    I MADE A SIGN OF ALL THE REASONS I’M HERE. COULDN’T LIFT IT.

    One sign had a picture of a full shot glass and off to the side:

    I LIKE MY FREEDOM NEAT. NO I.C.E.

    I think this one had the record for vertical spread:

    SUPER
CALLOUS
FRAGILE
VICIOUS
RACIST
SEXIST 
POTUS

    The absurd underlings were not forgotten:

    YOU COULD GET A BETTER CABINET AT IKEA

    A young woman whose ethnic heritage did not appear to be from the north of Europe had a sign saying,

    IMMIGRANTS BUILT USA, NOW WE HAVE TO REBUILD IT TOO, WTF?

    An elderly white lady held a sign asking:

    HAD ENOUGH OF OLD WHITE MEN YET?

    Ouch. Lots more, but I didn’t spend all my time typing. I’ll close with possibly my favorite:

    ALSO, YOU SUCKED IN HOME ALONE 2

    

    


  • 




    

    Ohtani laps the field
    



    

    

    

    



    

    As a little kid, I was already a baseball fan, but my team was the Twins, and the National League was almost invisible to me. The Twins never played against Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron, or Bob Gibson, or Roberto Clemente, all of whom except Gibson, who was a rising star, were settled into the back halves of their greatest years. Sandy Koufax I unfortunately knew about, on account of his performance in the 1965 World Series against the Twins. That was when I was 7. Willie Mays hit 52 homers that season, a personal best. Hank Aaron hit 32 homers and 40 doubles. Roberto Clemente batted .329, highest in the National League. The season in which I turned 10 was the one in which Gibson pitched 305 innings with a 1.12 ERA. I can’t recall that any of this made much of an impression on me.
    




    Now I feel I’m missing out again with Shohei Ohtani. Why isn’t every baseball fan, which would of course include me, raving about him eight days per week? He has to be the greatest player of all time, and not just by a little. Here’s his line in the box score for his team’s pennant-winning, World Series-qualifying win last night against the Brewers:
    




    At BatsRunsHitsRBIsHRs
    33333
    




    Why just 3 at bats? He walked once.  But wait!  Same player had another line in a different section of the box score:
    




    IPHits RunsEarned RunsWalksStrike Outs
    6200310
    




    I know, it’s just one game, but it was an important one, and perhaps the greatest single game performance in post-season history. (Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in the World Series but how many homers did he hit that day?) And it’s not as if Ohtani’s output last night was any kind of extreme outlier. For the season, he hit 55 homers, drove in 102 runs, and had an OPS of 1.014. He also pitched 47 innings, striking out 62 batters while compiling an ERA of 2.87 and a WHIP of 1.04. By the way, he had 20 stolen bases. It’s kind of like if Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle had been the same person.
    

    


  • 




    

    Edgy young Republicans
    



    

    

    

    



    

    




    Asked today–unless it was yesterday–about the charming chats of the Young Republicans, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that he doesn’t know any of these people, has never even heard of them, but if the details of their jests are true, he condemns them. He said that any picture of him with them was taken at the Inauguration, and he had no idea who they were.
    




    Not sure this is the top-level defense he thinks it is. They were at the Inauguration? Great! To be fair, “I condemn what they said, if they said it” (they in fact said it, all of it) is marginally better than the vice-president’s “Oh those boys and their edgy jokes!” As has been pointed out, the edgy texts of college-aged critics of Israel can get the authors investigated by the FBI and booted from the country. And some of these Young Republicans are well beyond college-aged. Have you seen their pictures? They tend to confirm my theory that men who are repulsive to heterosexual women comprise a key bloc of Republican voters.
    




    It’s not surprising that Johnson doesn’t know these losers. His generalized lack of awareness is an evergreen defense. When asked if he was “comfortable” with large cuts to special education services, he said: “I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know.” Trump said that the Chicago mayor as well as the governor of Illinois should be imprisoned. Asked whether he agrees, Johnson said he “wasn’t following the day-to-day” on that. Cory Mills is a Republican congressman from Florida. His ex-girlfriend just got a restraining order against him after satisfying a judge that the congressman had, among other things, threatened to publish sexually explicit pics he had of her. Asked for comment, Johnson said he had “not heard or looked into the details of that.” When a different reporter noted that this wasn’t the first woman to get a restraining order against Mills, Johnson said: “Let’s talk about things that are really serious.”
    




    Sort of surprising, therefore, that Johnson knows about Bad Bunny and doesn’t think he should be performing at the Super Bowl. 
    




    

    


  • 




    

    Henry Adams’s Jefferson
    



    

    

    

    



    

    




    That’s my current reading project in the picture. Pretty good chance I will at some point abort, as it comes in at just over 1250 pages, and has a companion, History of the US During the Administrations of James Madison, which is also about 1250 pages. Someone trained in actuarial science could likely confirm that, at my current rate of progress, there’s a credible chance I wouldn’t finish the work even if I myself never decided to quit. 
    




    If, though, I had a bad diagnosis, I think I’d put down Henry Adams and take up someone else, maybe Elmore Leonard.  Not that I’m torturing myself. I read in bed, and a lot of it acts as a soporific, but then there is too, for example, the moment when Thomas Jefferson, obviously a major figure in this immense work, first appears on stage:
    




    According to the admitted standards of greatness, Jefferson was a great man. After all the deductions on which his enemies might choose to insist, his character could not be denied elevation, versatility, breadth, insight, and delicacy; but neither as a politician nor as a political philosopher did he seem at ease in the atmosphere which surrounded him. As a leader of democracy he appeared singularly out of place. As reserved as President Washington in the face of popular familiarities, he never showed himself in crowds.  During the last thirty years of his life he was not seen in a Northern city,  even during his Presidency; nor indeed was he seen at all except on horseback, or by his friends and visitors in his own house. With manners apparently popular and informal, he led a life of his own, and  allowed few persons to share it. His tastes were for that day excessively refined. His instincts were those of a liberal European nobleman, like the Duc de Liancourt, and he built for himself at Monticello a chateau above contact with man.  The rawness of political life was an incessant torture to him, and personal attacks made him  keenly unhappy. His true delight was in an intellectual  life of science and art. To read, write, speculate in new lines of thought, to  keep abreast of the intellect of Europe, and to feed upon Homer and Horace, were pleasures more to his mind than any to be found in public assembly. He had some knowledge of mathematics,  and a little acquaintance with classical art; but he fairly revelled in what he believed to be beautiful, and his writings often betrayed subtile feeling for artistic form,–a sure mark of intellectual sensuousness. He shrank from whatever was rough or coarse, and his yearning for sympathy was almost feminine. That such a man should have ventured upon the stormy ocean of politics was surprising,  the more because he was  no orator, and owed nothing to any magnetic influence of voice or person. Never effective in debate, for seventeen years before his Presidency he had not appeared in a legislative body except in the chair of the Senate. He felt a nervous horror for the contentiousness of such assemblies, and even among his own friends he sometimes abandoned for the moment his strongest convictions rather than support them by an effort of authority.
    




    One wonders whether the realism of this portrait of an American saint, which only deepens as the narrative proceeds, owes anything to the bitter election of 1800, in which Jefferson prevailed over the author’s great-grandfather, John Adams. But, no, that seems not to be the case, as evidenced by Adams’s brisk dismissal, a few pages later, of the following contemporary “poetic” lines–
    




    The weary statesman for repose hath fled
    From halls of council to his negro’s shed;
    Where, blest,  he woos some black Aspasia’s grace,
    And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace.
    




    –which he calls the invention of a libeller. Not so fast, Henry!
    

    


  • 




    

    Limited government?
    



    

    

    

    



    

    When did Republicans last plausibly contend that they were the party of “limited government” and “local control”? I think my parents were alive and voting for them. Now, without a peep of protest from any Republican holding federal office, Trump is sending federal troops into cities that loudly insist they don’t want them. How about letting the locals decide what their problems are, and how to solve them? I believe that used to be the Republican way. It’s hard to imagine a more activist federal government than the one headed by Trump. I  suppose it could enact high tariffs, and then give free money to American farmers when their markets disappeared, but that would be too ridiculous  to believe.   
    




    I saw a funny, bitter cartoon that I can’t now find but will try to describe. The only figure in the cartoon is Jesus–the robe, the beard, it’s plainly the prince of peace. But he’s wearing a MAGA hat. He’s also carrying a gun, barrel  pointed upward at the side of his head as he knocks on a door. The caption says, “Better not be any minorities in there!”
    




    I wish the effect was gained by means of hyperbole. You know the internet meme comparing “how it started” to “how it’s going”? Well, it’s a little too long, but how about for “how it started” this, from an opinion of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh green-lighting the Trump administration’s zest for rounding up brown people:
    




     The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully  in the United States, they promptly let the individual go . . . .
    




    And, for the “how it’s going,” the lede to an October 6 article in the Chicago Sun Times:
    




    Pertissue Fisher is still recovering from being detained by federal immigration agents who burst into her South Shore apartment building and pulled her and other residents from their beds early Wednesday  morning. 
    




    An agent put a gun in her face, she said. Another placed her in handcuffs tight enough to leave bruises.
    




    Fisher and other victims of the raid are U.S. citizens, but they were still held for hours.
    




    Our Declaration of Independence has a section enumerating the crimes of George III against the American colonists.  For anyone who thinks “how it started” really ought to reach back a little farther than the daydreams of Brett Kavanaugh, the bill of particulars includes the following three items in succession:
    




    He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
    




    He has  kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
    




    He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
    

    


  • 




    

    In re Eddie Murray
    



    

    

    

    



    

    Found myself wondering idly whether Eddie Murray, Oriole star of the ’70s and ’80s, is in the Hall of Fame. What a stupid question. I know now that he’s one of only seven players in the history of the game with more than 3000 hits and more than 500 home runs, so yeah, he’s in the Hall–inducted on his first eligibility, in 2003. 
    




    In my memory, he was a “solid” player–his nickname was “Steady Eddie”–and maybe that tricked me into thinking he was less than amazing, stupendous, superlative. Turns out that being “very good” for around 20 years in a row adds up to “very good plus, plus.” It’s kind of fun to root around on Murray’s page at Baseball Reference, finding new ways to convey his stature. No one in the game drove in more runs in the decade of the 1980s. Being in the 3000/500 club with the likes of Aaron and Mays (but not, for example, Ruth, Gehrig, Williams, DiMaggio, Musial, Mantle) is pretty good. He won three Gold Gloves as a first baseman. I’m just going to set down his home run totals for his first twenty seasons in the big leagues: 27, 27, 25, 32, 22, 32, 33, 29, 31, 17, 30, 28, 20, 26, 19, 16,  27, 17, 21 and 22. I know you could do this for yourself, but I’ll  call attention to it: in those first 20 seasons–20 seasons!–he hit 33 homers once, 32 twice, 31 once, 30 once, 29 once, 28 once, 27 three times, 26 once, 25 once, and never fewer than 16. (A couple of these seasons were shortened by player strikes.)
    




    Never an eye-popping year, and never a bad one, either. Baseball Reference puts a yearly tally in bold print if it led the league, and Murray’s  page doesn’t have a lot of that. He never won the MVP Award. He was second twice, and finished in the top ten of the balloting eight times. One statistical oddity: he holds the major league record for sacrifice flies in a career (128). 
    




    Another fun tidbit: he was a high-school teammate of Ozzie Smith, the Cardinals great shortstop. This was in Los Angeles, where Murray was born in 1956.  Probably a pretty good high-school team of mainly black kids, assuming they had a pitcher or two who could throw the ball over the plate. Baseball is poorer on account of how African Americans have pretty much stopped playing. I’m one of those who can hardly drive past a ball game in the spring or summer, and I can’t help but notice that the kids playing are almost all white, even though the city is of course racially diverse. The basketball teams aren’t all white! And the quality of the baseball isn’t very high, in my opinion, especially compared to the basketball being played. Pitchers got nothing on the ball, strike everyone out anyway, unless there are four balls before three strikes.  
    

    


  • 




    

    Lolling
    



    

    

    

    



    

    Uff da, sitting at home nursing a bug and scrolling while my friends play golf on a warm fall day.  It seems I “interact” regularly with math-y posts, because my feed has lots of stuff like this
    




    




    which today is an excuse to stay in a chair instead of cleaning the refrigerator, the bathrooms, and doing the copious laundry of my sportzing kids. Some people have it worse than I. The lede to an interesting Slate article on physicist Richard Feynman:
    




    When famed physicist Richard Feynman and his second wife split in 1956, it made for a quirky newspaper item that was syndicated across the country. “Mrs Feynman won a divorce on cruelty grounds after testifying that her husband worked calculus problems all day,” the copy read. He did math “as soon as he arose, while he drove his car,” even “while lying in bed at night.” When he wasn’t doing that, he was playing drums, which “made a terrific noise.” If she tried to talk to him, he said she was interrupting his work. She got alimony; he got the bongos.
    




    Algebra is more my speed. In the above problem, let’s say that the big rectangle is W x L. Then the one with an area of 25 m2 is W x (L-18) and the one with an area of 32 m2 is W x (L-16). You can then expand these expressions to WL – 18W = 25 and WL – 16W = 32 to obtain what math books call a “system of equations.” It’s nice that both have a WL since we can eliminate it by subtracting term-by-term, yielding 2W = 7 and W = 7/2. Now it’s basically just number grinding: 7/2 x (L – 18) = 25 means that L is 176/7 and the area of the big rectangle is thus 7/2 x 176/7 = 88. (Remember that satisfying school sensation when your solution is a “nice” number, not some crazy-ass decimal, which would be a sure sign that you have screwed up?) The problem asks for the area of the shaded region, so subtract the sum of the two given parts (32 + 25 = 57) from 88: 31 m2. (The drawing obviously isn’t to scale.)
    




    Last note on Feynman’s divorce. I suspect the odd details owe something to family law in the days before “no-fault divorce.” If his wife wanted out in 1956, she probably had to prove that there had been either adultery, abandonment, or cruelty on the part of Feynman. Kind of crazy when you think about it: no doubt in lots of cases there had been adultery–but only on the part of the party suing for divorce.  That Don Draper was a whore-dog would not have helped his family court petition.  Anyway, the law required that the last act of cooperation between divorcing couples might be to conspire together to tell tales,  improbable or embellished but not incriminating, to the family court in order to establish “cruelty.”  The odd thing about Feynman’s case, as described in the Slate piece, is that his wife alleged physical abuse–in which case there would have been no need to complain about his drums or his penchant for working calculus problems. But the evidence for Feynman being (as my mom used to say) “a little different” would have been stronger than the evidence for him being a wife-beater.  
    




    




    

    


  • 




    

    Robbed again?
    



    

    

    

    



    

    I’ve been trying to gauge what percentage of my unhappiness with the officiating in the Lynx semifinal series against the Phoenix Mercury can be attributed to a rooting interest. Maybe a hundred. Who knows? The rooter is not in a good place to judge. 
    




    One thing for sure, though, is that the Lynx have some history of getting screwed by the officials in big games. Back in 2016, the championship series against the L.A. Sparks was best-of-five, and the Lynx were leading the decisive fifth game by a point when, with just over a minute left, Los Angeles made a basket after the shot clock had expired.. The play was not reviewed, the basket was allowed, the Lynx lost the game by one point, and next day the WNBA put out a statement acknowledging the error. Thanks!
    




    Last year, the Lynx were in another all-or-nothing Game 5 of the championship series, this time against the New York Liberty. The Lynx led by two points in the closing seconds when a referee, but not slow motion instant replay, detected an act-of-shooting foul that allowed the Liberty to pull even. New York then won the game and the championship in overtime. Lynx star Napheesa Collier took 23 shots in the game, almost all of them from within a few feet of the basket, and was in the estimation of the officials never fouled: she wasn’t awarded a single free throw. For the game, the Lynx team shot 8 free throws, compared to 25 for the Liberty. Made field goals were 26-22 in favor of the Lynx; made free throws were in favor of New York by 21-7.
    




    Possibly the Lynx just foul a lot, and their opponents hardly ever: “style of play,” or something, something, etc. If so, the habit persisted in this year’s semi-final series. In Game 4, free throw attempts were 23 to 9 in favor of Phoenix; the previous game’s disparity had been 22 to 11 in the same direction. Collier again never got to the foul line in the last game she was able to play. The no-call on the play she was injured on appeared to me, if not correct, not outrageous either. Her coach Cheryl Reeve’s explosion was probably the conclusion to a slow burn, and a desire to protect her star, a player who seems to be loved by all in proportion to how well they know her.
    




    I’m referring to a slow burn of years. If you go back and watch Reeve’s press conference after the 2016 championship game, you’ll see that she was making the same points nine years later. The players in this league are really good. The officiating is not. The players deserve better.
    




    




    

    


  • 




    

    Fair-minded
    



    

    

    

    



    

    Of course I’ll wait for all the evidence to accrue, but just going to put it out there that, as of today, I’m leaning toward the conclusion that the President of the United States is not a good man. However, (public service announcement): if you voted for him, and would like something to talk about for the next several years, allow me to suggest a Sunday-afternoon grocery-shopping excursion to the Aldi store at 26th & Lyndale in south Minneapolis. Here is one of my favorite Replacements songs, an ode to several of today’s grocery-getters:
    




    

    

    

    


  • 




    

    Some numbers
    



    

    

    

    



    

    According to its president, there are “fewer than ten” trans students competing in NCAA athletics. This likely explains why your MAGA friends seem to know all their names. The number of NCAA student-athletes is about 510,000, and 9 is to 510,000 as 1 is to about 56,000–which is roughly how many Americans a Harvard study estimates die in a year on account of having no health insurance.  A clue, perhaps, as to why our president is so distressed about pregnant women taking Tylenol.
    




    Whoa, better do something about that! 
    




    I lack scientific credentials, but I suspect the evidence for the perils of Tylenol is on a level with the case Trump makes for America’s babies being subjected to too many vaccines. “It’s too much liquid,” he declared at a White House rollout of the new and scaled back recommendations. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing when you look at it. It’s like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines.”
    




    Penetrating analysis of the kind that lefty bloggers attempt to ridicule by quoting.