#24 on a list of 99 reasons why baseball is so much better than football. Actually, #24 reads in its entirety: "Marianne Moore loved Christy Mathewson. No woman of quality has ever preferred football to baseball." Oh, good lord. "Woman of quality." Marianne Moore. Christy Mathewson.
I got to that page via Peter Hoh, who said I should check out #19 on the list. Okay:
Pro football players have breasts. Many NFLers are so freakishly overdeveloped, due to steroids, that they look like circus geeks. Baseball players seem like normal fit folks. Fans should be thankful they don't have to look at NFL teams in bathing suits.
Great. Moobs. Let's take a closer look at those moobs. That list was written back in 1987, and it's my observation that a lot of those football players have very attractively V-shaped bodies. The ones who are tubby are tubby for a reason. What explains the tubbiness of baseball players?
And the fact is we don't have to see either football or baseball players in bathing suits. We see them in their uniforms — their costumes. And the football costumes are glorious and sexy, while the baseball uniforms these days look like children's pajamas.
***
I like to call the uniforms "costumes," because spectator sports are entertainment and because I'm looking for the traces of the feminine within the manly... and because it drives the guys crazy and I'm all about driving the guys crazy.
We're watching the World Series, and I'm wondering if the Bushes are making a profound subliminal impression on American minds, drawing us toward the stability of the past. Bush and baseball — is that a political argument against which the mind cannot defend?
If it seems almost routine to throw a no-hitter now, then consider one that was not.
Forty years ago, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates raised the degree of difficulty to new, well, heights. He threw a no-hitter with Richard M. Nixon calling balls and strikes and Jimi Hendrix, wielding a Fender Stratocaster instead of a Louisville Slugger, digging in at home plate.
Or at least that is what he thought while pitching under the influence of LSD.
Who knows what really happened, but it's Ellis's own voice that's the soundtrack of this animation by James Blagden:
"This woman's a jerk. I hate her," Seinfeld said. "I can't believe they put her in my box that I paid for! You give people the finger and you get upgraded? Is that the world we're living in now?"
"It's pathetic," he added....
"She's a jerk," he continued. "What is she giving the finger [for]? What's the finger anyway? Speaking of interesting and new, how old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?"
This finger incident happened a while back. All he has is "How old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?"? That's pathetic. If she'd just given the finger, I would have thought it was interesting to see how Seinfeld gets started working on one of his little what's the deal with that routines. But he's had time.
And, by the way, I remember the subject — "How old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?" — being discussed at great length back when the movie "Titanic" came out. It was an important moment in character development when Kate Winslet (as "Rose") gave some guy the finger. Was that an anachronism in a movie set in 1912? But I'm not going to do your research for you, Jerry. You're going on the radio. You've had some time to put some jokes together. Do some research!
I don't know if I've ever seen an obituary that presented suicide so directly.
I'd never heard of Callie Angell, but I am intrigued by the idea of devoting one's mind to the study of the films of Andy Warhol and the nature of a mind that ultimately arrives at the decision to commit suicide.
I have read many articles by Roger Angell — the pieces on baseball that appeared in The New Yorker were quite wonderful. I'm sorry for him now.
From the daughter's obituary, I see that Roger Angell's stepfather was E. B. White, and that the dead woman was, in her time, close to White. Perhaps he read "Charlotte's Web" to her. From the obit:
"She untangled this web of films and revealed how they were a vital part in Andy Warhol’s life as an artist..."
This web... Who can untangle the reasons for suicide?
There is nothing in the article about a terrible physical illness. There is no reference to chronic depression. I assume Roger Angell, the brilliant writer, chose to present the news so starkly. But why? Why wouldn't you soften the news of your daughter's death?
Baseball, Warhol, children's books... there are always things to be seen and loved.
An attempt to scare some enthusiasm into Massachusetts voters.
And it's not just the fear of Texan outside agitators, there's a gender war a-comin':
At a Friday rally with former President Bill Clinton and again Saturday, Coakley ... raised the 4-wheel-drive factor, quipping that just because somebody drives a truck doesn’t meant they’re headed in the right direction.
That's a quip because Scott Brown drives a truck.
But Coakley, who despite a modest background carries herself with a patrician bearing...
Does she also bear herself with patrician carriage?
... has compounded the problem voters with a series of gaffes that suggest she’s out of touch, most recently on Friday when she appeared on a Boston talk radio show and seemed not to have heard of former star Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling.
Some Democrats worry that there is something deeper at work.
“I think it’s a man-woman thing,” said Robert Cullinane, a Teamsters local leader in the Boston area.
Teamsters!
Cullinane, speaking following the Clinton rally Friday, said some of his own members know that Brown opposes their agenda but are telling him, “'I’m not voting for that broad.’”
Those louts! Those unnamed louts that Cullinane — does he have patrician bearing? — must stoop to represent. Those brutes say "broad"... at least as paraphrased by the union leader who surely has their interests at heart.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “Here is someone who has voted against them on state issues yet they’re going to vote against ‘that broad.’”
"Here"? Where? Are you pointing at someone? Who is that horrible trucker?! Unbelievable!
Despite its liberal tradition, Massachusetts has never elected a female senator or governor.
OMG! Liberals might be sexists! Sound the liberal alarm! Liberals, prove you are liberal by voting for a woman!
See how that article — by Jonathan Martin in Politico — tried to flip you? First, nonentities were presented as prejudiced against a woman, ready to vote against Coakley because she's a woman, and then, suddenly, liberals are supposed pushed to feel that they ought to vote for her because she's a woman.
Oh, no! It's men in trucks! Plowing in from Texas! Running down all the women! Rape!
The University of Wisconsin Law School professor has written extensively about the long relationship between the Supreme Court and baseball, and he already thinks Sotomayor is "the most important federal judge in the history of baseball besides Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis." Sotomayor's 1995 ruling as a federal district court judge ending the baseball strike...
Judge Landis... was the first federal judge to become known as having "saved baseball," back in 1915. The Federal League had filed an antitrust challenge to Major League baseball, claiming it was a huge illegal trust. Knowing it was a hot potato, Landis sat on the case without acting on it until the Federal League folded. Landis then became baseball commissioner. "Justice Sotomayor is a much better judge than Judge Landis," said Snyder.
I've long been annoyed by the NYT blog called "Bats." I was bitten by a bat once and had to get rabies shots. And I've had other run-ins with the leathery-winged fiends. Actually, I love them when they are outside, eating mosquitoes and so forth. I might like reading a blog about bats. But Bats is not about bats. It's about baseball. (Maybe if I cared about baseball, I'd still hate the blog title "Bats," either because it disrespects pitchers or because I would still think it was about bats.)
Now, today, The Washington Post has a front-page teaser: "Do Juicers Belong in the Hall of Fame?" And I'm thinking, so there's an Appliances Hall of Fame? Where is it? What was the first inductee? Refrigerator! I'll bet it's refrigerator! But I click to the article —which is (obscurely) re-titled "Do Juicers Belong in Canton?" — and see that it's about drug users and the Baseball Football Hall of Fame. Oh, I don't know. But if there's an Appliances Hall of Fame, it's scraping to low too let in the juicers.
We're not even halfway to our goal today, but we needed to stop on an important mission and then again for some coffee and WiFi. In the car, we partook of some of the Sotomayorganza, but that got old after an hour or so. I had my notebook on my lap, and I wrote... I mean authored:
"wrote... authored..."
That was at 9:25 CT, when Sotomayor was in the middle of talking about some Ginsburg opinion. SS had already voiced the word "wrote" and then she changed it to "authored," as if "wrote" was a mistake. I know there are people who think "wrote" and then make a point to say "authored" — and do all sorts of other hoity-toity substitutions — but, jeez, if the simple world has already slipped out, move on. Don't let people hear that you do that.
Not that it's disqualifying or anything. Just something that made me want to write in my notebook, back in Wisconsin a few hours ago. Now, as I said, we are in Indiana.
A cute little girl walks up to our table and stares. I say hi. She thinks a bit, then says, "Y'all got 2 computers?!" I say, yeah. She's all, "How'd you get that?" I say, we just got 'em, as her dad/older brother shoos her along.
Back to my Sotomayor notes.
strategy: boring us to death
+ avoiding creating highlights for the nightly news
no one has ever said "precedent" so many times in a confirmation hearing
And I remember saying something like: "She's talking about precedent so much because it's her way to nullify anything that she ever did as a Court of Appeals judge. She did it because of precedent, so she's not really responsible for anything." But there's room to maneuver within the limitations of precedent, and in the things that she did — while citing precedent — we can perceive her leanings, and we quite properly want to know what her leanings are.
Other techniques she's using: speaking very slowly, laying out the basics of case law, and repeating the most innocuous platitudes about judging.
We switched over to the satellite radio. 60s on 6. "Mrs. Robinson," then The Happenings doing one of those quasi-pedophilia-type songs that no one would do anymore ("Go away little girl..."). Click to 80s on 8. "Rock the Casbah." The 80s sometimes beat the 60s. Not often, but sometimes.
Paul Zrimsek said — paren — "Placeholder for a thousand words of bafflegab involving depth of field and photo-editing software, somehow proving that Obama threw a perfect strike" — close paren. Ha ha. I would front page that.
Later, we get back to the Sotomayorganza, and it's Al Franken at last. He's talking about himself again, saying something that we start parodying: Here I am, Al Franken, a Senator, talking to you, Sonia Sotomayor; we are here, in the Senate, and I am talking and you are talking. Check the transcript and you'll see. He's in this inane "I am a Senator" mode, and he's breaking all records for using the word "I." He bumbles through pointless questions detailing cases and revealing he knows next to nothing about actual Supreme Court cases. He ends his segment by asking Sotomayor: What's the title of the "Perry Mason" episode where Perry Mason lost a case? This gives Sonia a chance to giggle a bit in a human manner — after being ploddingly robotic all day. She doesn't know the title, and it turns out Al doesn't either, which baffles old man Leahy.
Time to close up the MacBooks and hit the road again.
