Now, I really can’t watch any games. There’s no TV in the office, and even if I had a subscription or the like that let me watch them online, I doubt they’d let me get away with it – even if it wasn’t bothering my co-workers or interfering with my work.
Fortunately, there are at least two websites that effectively track games in real time, and display enough action so that it’s kind of like listening to a game on the radio. Sort of. A good enough equivalent, at any rate. Continue reading
The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
Scott Carney and Jason Miklian
HarperCollins
Copyright 2022 by the authors
In November, 1970, a cyclone slammed into East Pakistan. It was the deadliest storm in history, leaving some half a million dead in its wake. Fifteen months later, after a brutal and genocidal war, the nation of Bangladesh was born. As Carney and Miklian show, the events were not unconnected.
Through a mass of documentation and interviews with people who were there, Carney and Miklian have recreated the setting and placed you right in the action.
You probably missed it, but Utah has a new state flag, replacing its old cluttered and frankly ugly one:
Utah’s old flag
Utah: NEW AND IMPROVED!
A good number of other states are considering redesigns as well, and not just to remove traces of the Confederacy or other things of “questionable” merit. It’s that most state flags are crap. Vexillalogists Vexillololiphiles Flag buffs describe most of them as “S.O.B.s”, meaning that they are nothing more than the state seal on a blue field. Which does very little towards making a flag distinctive, which is one of the most important things you want in a flag.
Anyone with a minimal design sense can slap together a decent flag, as long as you follow a few basic rules: Keep it simple, have no words or numbers, make it distinctive, and give it some connection to what it represents.
Since I have at least a minimal design sense, there’s nothing to stop me from having a go at the flags of the two states that I have called home. And as it happens, they’re both SOB’s that cry out for a redesign.
A new baseball season is upon us, and there are a lot of changes in store.
Rather than the basic “if everything goes right for my team, and wrong for everyone else, my team just might make the playoffs” discussion, almost all the talk has been about the many rule changes that MLB has instituted.
The pitch clock and other ones covering the “pace of play” have gotten the most attention, and as we’ve seen in Spring Training, are working out as intended. Teams have adjusted to them, as well as the rules regarding defensive shifts and stolen bases.
But there are a few others that have largely flown under the radar.
Seems that these days, all the fantasy movies and series are based on Tolkien or similar epics, or some YA stories about wizard schools. They can be fine, but they get repetitive after a while.
As it happens, there’s a bunch of fantasy stories that, as far as I know, have never been adapted to a video medium. They deal with the adventures of two, well, “rogues” is what most would call them, but they aren’t anti-heroes or ne’er-do-wells or anything like that. They are just two great friends who travel their world looking for adventure and enough money to buy a round of drinks at the nearest tavern, and perhaps invite one or two of the ladies there up to their room. They are adult men, after all.
I’m referring to Fritz Leiber’s “Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser” stories. Continue reading
For a set of exhibition games, it’s a lot of fun. Teams and players from all over the world showing off their skills, at a time when fans in the US are starved for real games. Thanks to fairly loose rules, MLB players can join the team from a nation where they have some connection. So Lars Nootbaar of the St. Louis Cardinals can suit up for Japan….
Speaking of suiting up, you have to love some of the uniforms. Continue reading
One cannot help but notice that lately, some members of one particular political party are all in conniptions about other people who don’t perfectly fit into the gender stereotypes that they’d prefer. They are even trying to pass laws against anything that they imagine could possibly be considered as promoting or aiding such “deviant” behavior, as if it is somehow an existential threat to the safety of their children.
There’s a LOT to unpack in their delusion; more than I have the time or space or energy for.
But I have tried to get my mind around the whole matter, and I’ve come up with a “working model” that allows me to go about my life unthreatened by other people who, though they may not fit into the usual gender boxes, just want to go about their lives without being threatened, too. Continue reading
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
Edward Slingerland
Little, Brown Spark
Copyright 2021 by the author
We’re so confused when it comes to alcohol. It’s the cause of, and solution to, all of Life’s problems, according to a noted contemporary philosopher. We can’t seem to decide if its good or bad for you. “Red wine has antioxidants, which are good for you!” “Alcohol damages your liver! All of it is bad!” Some alcohol in moderation is fine!” It’s enough to drive one to drink!
You can find someone to support whatever viewpoint you want. But Slingerland steps back from all of that, and asks another, probably more important question:
Why do we like getting drunk in the first place?
Seems that pretty much every time there’s a discussion about the Greatest Baseball Players of All Time, someone mentions that you can’t really judge the players from before the integration of Major League Baseball because they never got to face any of the players in the Negro Leagues.
To me, rather than making a useful observation on racism, the bias in the statistics, or to promote the skills of the Negro League players, it’s used instead to dismiss the talents of the white players.
But just how much of an effect could it have had? How often would Lefty Grove faced Josh Gibson, or Jimmie Foxx have come to bat against “Smokey” Joe Williams? No team or player would be facing the Negro League All-Stars every day, right?
There’s an easy way to test this. Continue reading
General William Sherman had a problem. As the military commander in charge of large areas of the South in the late stages of the Civil War, he had many thousands of Black refugees that he had to provide with food and shelter. A delegation of Black leaders had approached Sherman and offered a solution: give them some land they can settle on and work as their own.
On January 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which designated a large amount of unclaimed and abandoned land in his remit to be divided into lots of roughly forty acres each to be given to the refugees for homesteading (Spare mules that the Army no longer needed were given out later).
There was a bit of a catch in the order, though.
Pure Blather 