With April over, we are well into the baseball season. Things should start settling out now, as “small sample sizes” are a thing of the past. Trevor Story has got to cool off, the Phillies can’t really be as good as they’ve been, and the Astros can’t be as bad.
But it’s not just April that’s a special part of the baseball season. Every month all the way through to October has its own characteristic, its own “feel”.
The Book of the Dead
Jared Shurin, editor
Jurassic London, 2013
Vampires and werewolves have never really left our collective social and cultural consciousness. Neither has Frankenstein’s Monster, once it was created. Of the classic “Universal monsters”, the Mummy has been the one left by the wayside. Partly because it’s so culturally specific; and partly because (perhaps) it’s pretty lame when you come to think of it. They have no special powers, and a well-thrown torch will have them go up in flames. They are just dessicated corpses, whose spirit for some reason has yet to complete the passage to the afterlife.
Does that mean there are no stories left to tell? Is the idea of a mummy as a monster one that has run out of scares? This collection of original stories says emphatically NO.
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Nostalgia is a tricky thing. When reminiscing about the past, we automatically filter out all the crap and spend time thinking only about the good things. When we recall the first decade or so of television, we think of it as a “golden age” as we recall shows like “The Honeymooners” and “Dragnet”. We conveniently forget all the mid-level stuff like “Drama at Eight” or “Richard Diamond, Private Detective”. But the really good stuff, just as in any art form, lasts and lasts because each era can find something new or something relevant to its own time.
Back in the late 1840s, a growing nativist movement coalesced into a political faction. Calling themselves the “Native American” Party, they were vehemently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic – which were at the time pretty much the same thing, given that the largest influx of immigrants were Catholics from Ireland. The party almost always met in secret, and when asked about their activities usually responded with “I know nothing.”
Naturally, they became known as the Know-Nothing Party.
This can be applied to Trump and his followers, in more ways than one. Not only are they staunchly nativist and anti-immigrant, but Trump himself seems unashamed of his ignorance.
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Senator Sanders seems like a decent enough guy. His long Senate career, while not really distinguished, is still honorable and trouble-free. There’s very little that you can say about him that’s to his discredit. This makes him different from the other major candidates. He describes himself as a “Democratic Socialist”, which sounds like a European political party. No one can really explain what that means. So if we’re going to criticize him, we’ll have to focus on his proposals.
His main platform, as I’ve seen in his recent TV spots, is to punish the Big Banks, increase taxes on the major corporations, and use the additional revenue gained thereby to provide universal health care and free college tuition to everyone. That’s a decidedly European socialist economic plan.
Would it work here?
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Backpfeifengesicht.
It’s a German word that roughly translates as “a face in need of a fist”, or “a face that needs to be punched”. It’s come up quite often in discussing Ted Cruz, to the point where a neurologist has discussed Cruz in an article on how people react to facial expressions.
Unusual facial expressions put us off. Cruz’ odd face only partly explains why no one likes him. From his college roommate to his Senate colleagues, people hate him with a passion.
And that’s even before considering his politics.
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Now that we’re in the heart of primary season, and everyone is gathering in my home state for primaries next week, it’s a good time to take a bit of a closer look at the four main candidates.
I’ll do them in alphabetical order, just because I want to.
I was thinking about being fair and even-handed here, but then I realized that this is my personal, private space, and I don’t need to. So let me come right out and state that I consider myself a pragmatic left-of-center Democrat, so I favor Clinton, with Sanders as a close second.
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It’s probably expected that anyone writing for a mostly American audience explain what the world’s largest song competition is about when discussing Eurovision.
So….
Think of “March Madness”, the national college basketball championship tournament. Picture the fan following, the media coverage, the statistical analyses, and even the betting. Now imagine that instead of basketball, it’s all about a “Battle of the Bands”.
That’s what Eurovision is like in Europe.
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In just a few days, the 2016 baseball season will begin. So all the sports magazines and websites will soon be publishing their predictions (if they haven’t already) on what the final standings will look like. I cannot add anything to what they’re saying (most of what I could say will just be a rehash anyway), but I can still muse on what we might see in the upcoming months.
Can the Royals and Mets repeat?
So there’s been a lot of talk during Spring Training this year about “showing respect for the game” – whatever that means. Usually, it’s the Old School Traditionalists decrying the number of bat flips and fist pumps, insisting that showing a little emotion during a game is an offense to the other team, the fans, and everyone who ever had anything whatsoever to do with professional baseball. Naturally, a lot of younger players disagree, saying that they should be allowed to have fun on the job. Baseball is too stuffy and old-fashioned to attract many new fans….
Now I don’t like the showboating that’s far too common in football and basketball, but there’s no reason that baseball players have to be soulless robots.
Just keep in mind a few rules when celebrating….
Pure Blather 