Amazing.

When the Beloved New York Mets were formed in the lead-up to the 1962 season, they did not look too good. The team was a huge collection of the washed-up and the never-to-be. Guys like journeyman Don Zimmer, who had had a couple of good years in Brooklyn, were pretty bad by the sixties; still, he was lucky to get out of Queens after 14 games. They ran through a vast number of players; they had two different guys named Bob Miller. Catcher Choo-Choo Coleman was remembered (by Ralph Kiner, I believe) as being a terrible interview, a guy who answered every question with "Yeah, bub." Poor Marv Throneberry made a colossal 17 errors at first base, half his career total of 34, and he hadn't even started the season with the Mets. And 1962 put an end to the career of one of the greatest-named ballplayers ever, Vinegar Bend Mizell, a 90-88 career pitcher who crawled through three teams that year to lose his last two with the Mets.

Casey Stengel was the colorful manager, of course, The Old Perfessor who had played on championship New York Giants teams twice and led those guys from the Bronx to seven more as skipper, including five in a row. While he defended his new team and gave them the nickname "the Amazin' Mets," he was frustrated out of his mind with the constant losing.

“I've been in this game a hundred years, but I see
new ways to lose I never knew existed before.”

People think that the Mets that year finished with a record of 40-120, but they are wrong. The actual record was 40-120-1. On September 9, 1962, the Mets played fellow expansion team Colt .45's in Houston to a 7-7 tie with the game stopped by curfew after eight innings. Since the two teams had a combined record of 91-196 at that point in the year, I guess Major League Baseball decided to not worry about resuming the game another time. Technically only the individual records for the game went into the books, not the team records, thus the usual 40-120 stat for the 162-game season. (There was also a rainout that was never made up.) The Mets couldn't even tie properly.

All that said, I assumed the Mets' 120 losses would be like the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the DiMaggio 56-game hitting streak, a monument that would never be equaled. After all, baseball has had many innovations since 1962, such as bonus babies, free agency, more sponsorship, more foreign players, and whatnot that prevented other expansion teams from being so awful. Brand-new teams would always struggle to get their feet, but they would not be forced to pick from the unwanted of the league to assemble a squad. So no one, I was sure, would ever get 120 losses again. 

Detroit came as close as one could fear in 2003, losing 119 games, but just managed to avoid the crown of shame. Surely that was just a fluke; the Tigers bounced back the next year to a more normal 72-90.  

Then along came in 2024 Chicago White Sox. 

They have tied the Mets' 120-loss record. With a handful of games left, they will almost certainly break it. Without having all the "advantages" that the first-season Mets had 62 years ago, how did the Sox do it? 

It depends on whom you ask, but most of the blame seems to go to the owner, who knew the team had to be rebuilt but went about it in a stingy way that was ill-suited to modern baseball, resulting in a 1962-expansion-team-like roster. A Double-A team in big league pants. 

Like most guys who do not labor under the delusion that we could go out there and play pretty well, I harbor the sense that any man who can play ball on a professional level is an exceptional talent compared to the rest of us and could be an asset on a team. Therefore, any group of them assembled with the awareness of baseball tactics and strategy would be able to compete. But that depends on your definition of compete.

Winning only a quarter of your games must be painful, but compared to the 2008 Detroit Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns, who won 0 games, it's pretty good. 

Furthermore, if you really did pull together a roster of American males at random and throw us out there, we'd go 0-162, so there's that to consider. 

Ultimately, though, someone has got to be the worst just because that's how numbers work. Unlike football, you can't win 'em all in baseball, and nor can you lose 'em all. But someone has to lose the most. And for now, that someone will likely be the Chicago White Sox. 

Sorry, guys -- I hope it doesn't take you 62 years to lose that title as it took the Beloved Mets. 

Weekend report.

1) I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to post on Father's Day yesterday, but I hope all you dads had a good one. It was a great opportunity to tell Dad Jokes™ without reprisal. You know who you are. (And who you are is PL Woodstock.) 

My late dad had a great sense of humor in terms of getting and enjoying jokes, but he could not tell a joke for beans. He either started laughing before getting to the punchline, or he forgot part of the setup and had to backtrack, or he felt he had to explain the joke in case you didn't get it (but you did). Well, he was omnicompetent otherwise, so not being Shecky Dad did not rise to the level of a character weakness. I miss him. 

2) Last Wednesday, McDonald's beloved shake-enjoying blob Grimace celebrated his 53rd birthday by throwing out the first pitch at Citi Field. Since then the Beloved Mets have won five games in a row. Fans are calling this the Grimace Era. Plans for a Grimace statue have been discussed. It could stand next to the Seaver statue outside the park.

I'm not saying that there's any connection to the winning streak. After all, the games have been at home against the woeful Mariners and the struggling Padres. But maybe…

None of this would have happened if Grimace had not changed his ways, from the evil four-armed milk shake glutton to Ronald McDonald's two-armed dopey purple pal. Recovery works! 

I would like to see if we could sign Grimace as a bullpen coach. Maybe get some of the others involved. Mayor McCheese could help calm things down in the front office, where they've been getting frantic as the trade deadline gets closer. Hamburglar could work as the base running coach. He's an expert in steals. 

But no Ronald. We’ve had enough clowns.

3) Yesterday I took some Windex to the glass-top table on the porch. Not the first time this spring. I couldn't believe how thick the layer of pollen on it was. It was like pond scum. You would need a paint scraper to write "Wash Me" on it.

If you live in the northeast United States and you think this is a bad allergy season, you are right. But you are not entitled to compensation. 

Just Hoffa top of my head...

Friends of mine, fans of the Jets and the Giants, have been joking (I think) that they want Zombie Jimmy Hoffa to rise from his burial ground under the old Giants Stadium to play QB for their respective teams this year. In fact, they're willing to get into a bidding war over him. They think his almost-fifty-year-old corpse will show more life and resilience than they've seen from the live players.

But some cold-case hobbyists think they have a better fix on the location of Jimmy's remains. The one-time Teamster boss, who disappeared in 1975, is now said to have been planted by his Mafioso pals under third base in the old Milwaukee County Stadium. 

Best seat in the house?

The Giants Stadium myth was the claim of gangster Donald Frankos, who said in 1989 that Hoffa had been buried under Section 107 during construction. The story was so widespread in the 90's in the NY/NJ metro area that one could hear game promotions like: "In 1975, the mob buried Jimmy Hoffa in Giants Stadium. This Sunday, the Giants will bury the Eagles there." A 2004 episode of MythBusters was given over in part to disproving the story, with Jamie and Adam at the stadium, helped by then-Giants head coach Jim Fassel. 

But the new theory makes more sense on one level, or at least more sense than the Giants Stadium story -- Hoffa disappeared in a parking lot in Detroit, which is 225 miles closer to Milwaukee than it is to the Meadowlands. The mob doesn't get away with its hits by playing Weekend at Bernie's with the corpses; they dump them fast. Closer is faster.

But Giants Stadium was under construction when Hoffa vanished, and Milwaukee County Stadium opened in 1953. So why go to all that trouble to plant Hoffa in an extant structure? Plus, Hoffa vanished on July 30, right in the middle of baseball season. I can't think of a worse way to get rid of a body than bury it in a stadium that's always going to have someone on duty at the time. Furthermore, the Brewers were playing a long homestand from July 26 to August 5 that year. "Gee, third base seems a little -- elevated tonight, doesn't it?" is something infielder Jack Heidemann did not say.

To be fair, the cold-case group thinks that Hoffa was not buried there during the 1975 season, but for some reason was moved there in 1995. Which doesn't really make it any less crazy. Why move a body that had been tucked away safely for twenty years? Because the site had become risky? What could be riskier than the middle of a major league ballpark? 

But Richard III was found buried in a parking lot, wasn't he? Is it so crazy?

Yes. It is. For one thing, Richard's plot was not a busy car park in 1485. 

If by chance Hoffa turns out to have been entombed under what is now a parking lot, the Brewers might want to take an option on Zombie Hoffa. Sure, they had a good season, going 92-70 and finishing first in the NL Central, but they got swept by Arizona in the first round of the playoffs. 

If Zombie Hoffa's got a decent changeup, he might put the Brewers over the top. After all, he's kept more people guessing in death than he even did in life.

Lucky strikes.

There's an old saying in sports, especially baseball, that it's better to be lucky than good. That may seem odd, since you can't even play the game unless you develop some consistency with the needed skills. The point, however, is that even the best skills will fail sometimes, but good luck by definition never does. Although unlike skills, good luck will abandon you without warning.

But what is luck, anyway?

In the Silver Age Justice League of America comic, the League was menaced by a scientist named Amos Fortune, who discovered that humans had a "luck gland" -- yeah, I know, I know -- and that manipulating this very rational, very scientific biological feature could give him unbeatable good luck and the League terrible luck. 

Comics have had a number of other characters whose abilities are luck-based, or to make it more sciencey sounding, they had the ability to influence probabilities. Originally Marvel's Scarlet Witch was not a magician, but rather a mutant with the ability to influence probabilities. Domino is another mutant with luck powers, but since she keeps getting killed, I'm not sure how lucky she actually is. 

Definitely the most interesting use of a fictional lucky character I know was Teela Brown, the luckiest known person in the galaxy, brought along on a very dangerous mission to the Ringworld (in Larry Niven's classic science fiction novel) simply because of her massive good fortune. That was it. She had absolutely no other qualification to be on that mission. It's as if they stuck a lottery winner on Apollo 11, just in case. It's impressive to see the way her suspected good fortune plays out (or does it?) in the course of the story. 

In a rational sense, luck is nothing more than numerical chance coming together in a particular time and place. It feels like a blessing, and one that can be influenced by totems or chants, but it's just the way things shake out. Little about probability feels normal. If probability says I'll get heads 50 coin flips out of 100, and I flip 50 heads in a row, there's still just a 50% chance of tails on the next flip. Tails isn't "due." It doesn't work that way, although it feels like it ought to. 

All the same, is that coin normal? I'd check. 

While the Christian is expected to believe in Providence, and that those of a mathematical bent should study probability, he is not supposed to believe in lucky objects or gods of luck. That's paganism, and it's usually invoked in places like the poker table, and it's right out. Sacramentals (crosses, medals, etc.) are intended as a means of keeping us focused on Him from whom all good things come. They are not lucky charms, even if worn with frosted oat cereal. (It should be noted that there are curses and blessings in disguise in this life, and one needs to exercise the virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice to handle the good and bad that come one's way.)

But if there is really such a thing as luck, I think the best kind has to be dumb luck. Dumb luck is so completely out of the blue, so totally unmerited by the recipient, that he can take no pride in receiving it. A man who has been fortunate in business can thump his chest about his smartness and dedication, but a man who finds a Rembrandt in the attic of an abandoned building cannot. He may pat himself on the back for acting promptly to secure his rights to the property, but he certainly can't puff himself up as being a genius for his investment skills. 

Dumb luck is as rare as red diamonds, and should always be appreciated with humility, even if it's just a trick of probability. Now, is that a two-headed penny, or what?

Expansion team.

"At least they made the playoffs," says my friend the optimist.

"After 170+ days in first place, finishing in second is a disaster," I responded. 

You may safely guess if you do not recall that I predicted a September collapse by the Beloved Mets, but it mostly happened in the homestretch of the regular season in October. We snuck in as a wild card, and now we get to play at home, but against the Padres, who beat us four times out of six in the regular season. And of course the Braves, who sucked until they were moved into the NL East (at which time they became division-winning machines) (but not championship-winning machines, heh heh), came out of nowhere to knock the Mets off their perch, sweeping them in the penultimate season series. 

This is all very typical. 

Get your stupid giant head in the stupid game, Mets.

To listen to the Mets' social media people, you'd think creeping into the playoffs like whipped dogs was the best thing that could happen to them. I think most of their longsuffering fans expect to see them swept at home by the Pods, a team with an even more painful but not quite as knife-twistingly awful history. San Diego has only been to two World Series and lost both. But the quality of the Mets' ability to crash and burn is excruciating. The 1986 team should have won three championships in a row, but was damned lucky to win one. Since then they've been to the World Series twice and won one game in each. And that's not taking into account the many late-season disasters, the agonizing seven-game loss to the A's in 1973, the trading of Seaver, and all those other things that have made Mets fans want to change their names and move to Qatar, where no one plays baseball. 

People remember that the franchise began in 1962 as the "loveable losers," but that was no fun for the players, and it was by design. In the pre-free agent era, the new team had to be put together from rejects and over-the-hillers from other teams. If Major League Baseball had set out to create the worst team in history, it could hardly have done a better job.

By the mid-sixties, even diehard Mets fans were sick of losing, and being a national punchline. When Charlie Brown said in disgust that if he ever made it to the big leagues it would be on an expansion team, he was thinking of the Mets. 

The next Mets fan who tells me that I Gotta Believe is going to get slapped. I always remind them that the famous Tug McGraw saying was not about the 1969 Miracle Mets but the 1973 Mets that ran into Mr. October in Oakland. 

I hate to be so pessimistic, but what can I say? I've been trained this way. 

Those who can do, can't teach.

The old George Bernard Shaw line is "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." More cranky Shavian wisdom, dumping his usual load of, uh, Shaw on the heads on lesser humans. 

Nevertheless, the fact that that line survives in common wisdom while many of his other pithy remarks do not shows there's some truth to it. Actors who are rolling in offers to perform don't have time to teach acting classes, but others who struggle do, and need the money. That's just one example, and I hope it isn't actually universally applicable. Do you want a brain surgeon who was educated entirely by people incapable of doing brain surgery? Do we want mathematicians on space programs who have been taught by those who can't calculate? 

Maybe it only applies to the arts. And, I'll say other skilled work, like sports. But there is a flip side, as the title of this blog entry makes clear -- many who can do actually can't teach. 

Aaron Judge may be challenging Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, but the Bambino is still the greatest home run hitter who ever lived; if he played entirely in the live-ball era with today's relatively dinky ballparks he'd have probably hit a thousand dingers. But could he teach someone to hit?

Apparently not, and the baseball people knew it. Ruth had hoped he would be selected as a manager for the Yankees, but he only got to be a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And that didn't go too well, according to the site DodgerBlue:  

Ruth made his coaching debut with a doubleheader but his overall time with the Dodgers was largely unassuming. Anecdotes detail Ruth’s interest in relaying signs as non-existent. He was ejected from an August game due to arguing a call with a first-base umpire.

     Ruth’s arrival did improve attendance but the team’s play largely remained the same. They went 47-49 after he joined the coaching staff and finished 11 games below .500. Brooklyn went 16-13 in July, which was just one of two winning months that season.

What about Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, the last man to hit over .400? He was a proud and clever man, a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. Surely he had some wisdom to impart that would make his team better. 

Nope. Williams's stint as manager of the Senators/Rangers from 1969 to 1972 left him with a record of 273-364, and that was it for his managing career. 

How about the brilliant-hitting Cardinal, Stan the Man Musial? He had some sophisticated advice for the aspiring hitter: "You wait for a strike, then you knock the shit out of it." 

So basically we can see that not everyone is cut out to impart practical knowledge to the next generation. The reason I was thinking about this was that my dad was like that. He could fix anything, but he was incapable of teaching anything. It wasn't his fault. Good teachers really are a gift in any field, and not everyone has the knack. 

I hate the way our nation is expected to slaver over professional educators as a class. Forget it. As we've been discovering, a lot of them suck at teaching (we may have remembered that from our own schooling) and some should not be allowed near children. But if you or your kids had a truly good teacher, be grateful for that. Knowledge alone isn't enough, and theory probably does nothing but get in the way. You have to have the knack. 

Sports heck.

I won't say sports hell, but sports heck will do, I guess. 

An overly optimistic friend of mine has been watching the Beloved Mets coast along in first place all season, expecting a neat slide into the playoffs. An overly pessimistic friend has been expecting another September crash and burn. If you've been reading this blog for a while I'm sure you can guess where I fall. 

You must never underestimate the power of the S.S. Mets to hit an iceberg on a warm September day. Not that everything is over, but the Hated Braves have had an incredible winning streak, and this past week the Mets decided to start losing to poor teams, and we landed in second place over the weekend. The Mets rebounded, and it could be an exciting back-and-forth battle right down to the wire, but I expect the Braves to leap over the Mets and pull away, and the '22 Mets to become the Baxters in another legendary Atlanta season. 

As for football, meh. In years past I would be over the moon by the Giants' gutsy play that won their first game of the season, but I'm still disgusted by the NFL's descent into wokeness. The last places you'd expect to find political correctness were the Marines and the NFL, and they're both becoming riddled with it. I enjoyed the piece by America's Newspaper, the Babylon Bee, on this topic: "NFL Hoping 3rd Year of 'End Racism' Painted in End Zone Will Do the Trick." 

"This is the year that the NFL ends racism, once and for all. Third time's the charm!" said Commissioner Jim Hardleather at a press conference while surrounded by a dozen other old, white members of the NFL executive committee who also showed the courage to not dare recommend removing "End Racism" from the end zones for fear of being canceled.

Yeah, no doubt. 

My overly optimistic friend is a Giants fan, and he thinks the team looks much improved. My overly pessimistic friend is a fan of the Redskins Commanders, so he's already miserable. This is a guy who knows all the words to the original Redskins fight song: 

Hail to the Redskins!

Hail Victory!

Braves on the Warpath!

Fight for old Dixie!

Run or pass and score -- we want a lot more!

Scalp 'em, swamp 'em -- We will take 'em big score

Read 'em, weep 'em, touchdown - we want heap more

Fight on, Fight on -- Till you have won

Sons of Washington. Rah!, Rah!, Rah!

I kind of expect the fans to sing the old words (maybe the revised version that doesn't mention Dixie or use fake Indian talk though) instead of the "Hail to the Commanders" lyrics that have the Official Sanction. 

I don't think this team name controversy means a hill of beans to actual Native Americans compared to more serious issues, but the National Congress of American Indians cares. Mostly, though, it's another scalp -- uh, victory -- for sniffy college types who can't throw a football ten yards, have never been to a reservation, and never done a day of real work. But you know, if it makes the actual tribes happy, that's fine. 

I do wish the Cleveland MLB team had picked a better name than the Guardians. They're in first place now. It would just figure if Cleveland won its first championship since 1948 with that dumb name. 

A test of Mettle.

It's been very pleasant to see the Beloved Mets riding in first place in the National League East. They've mostly had trouble with West Coast NL teams so far, but aside from that have been true powerhouses this season. Of course, taking the two-game set from the Yankees for city bragging rights was most excellent. 

In the midst of this I was reminded of something I had forgotten, if in fact I ever knew it. 

Everybody knows that Mr. Met, abetted by the lovely and talented Mrs. Met, is the mascot of the New York Metropolitans and has been since the team's inaugural year of 1962 -- except for a period in the late seventies when he was put in cold storage. 

It's more proof that everything sucked in the seventies. 

Cast your mind back to 1976. Disco, polyester, The Big Bus, Ford and Carter. The Yankees were heading for the World Series. The Mets had treaded away Tom Seaver, the Franchise, for nothing much, and Tom was leading the Reds to the World Series and a four-game sweep of the Yankees. The previous two years the Yankees had been playing at Shea Stadium, and all Yankees fans could do was whine about how bad Shea was, while the House that Ruth Built was literally falling apart. 

Mets fans forget that '76 was not a terrible year for the Mets, who finished with a winning record but in third place. But for half of 1977, and for the next four seasons as well, Joe Torre was the manager of the Mets, and the Mets lost games by the dozen. None of that Torre brilliance on display twenty years later with the Yankees was seen with the Mets. 

Stepping into this hot, dreary era of stagflation and shame was a mule named Arthur, now rechristened Mettle the Mule, as the new mascot. 

He looks happy.

Mettle's new name came from fan Dolores Mapps, reflecting the name Mets (duh) and the fighting spirit of the ballclub. Little of this spirit was visible, as the team would lose more than 90 games a season. 

Mettle was kept in a pen near the bullpen, and was probably better behaved than the relief pitchers. Loren Mathews, the promotions manager for the team, told the Chicago Tribune in 1992, "Actually, there was serious talk in spring training [in 1979] by the de Roulets [the team owners] to have the relievers come in from the bullpen on the mule. I told them there was no way I could in good conscience tell Bob Apodaca that from now on he’d be coming into a game with the tying runs on base, bottom of the ninth inning, riding in from the outfield on a mule."

This was still the era where relievers were brought out in bullpen carts, some of which were weird, so the idea of a pitcher coming into a game on a mule, or maybe a mule-powered chariot, was not all that way out. Stupid, but not especially so. 

It's no fault of Mettle's that the team was so bad, but after the last-place 1979 season, new ownership came in and Mettle was put out to pasture. No one seems to know what became of him afterward, but we thank him for his service. Anyone can be a supporter of a winning team, but it takes a little badassery (har!) to be there for the team when they suck. 

Bug off.

Man, there are so many bugs out there, I've been getting eaten up like a missionary at a cannibal convention. 

Even more annoying at the moment than the evil mosquitoes are the gnats, who like to fly into my eyes and nose and sometimes ears, making me feel like Father Delaney trying to bless the house in The Amityville Horror. 

At least these aren't biting gnats. They appear to be fungus gnats. And what are fungus gnats? 

Fungus gnats (Orfelia and Bradysia species), also called darkwinged fungus gnats (Sciaridae), are dark, delicate-looking flies similar in appearance to mosquitoes.... They eat organic mulch, leaf mold, grass clippings, compost, root hairs, and fungi.

 

So now I feel extra proud about putting down all that mulch last week.

Gnathole

Truth to tell, the gnats were extra bad this year even before the mulch event, probably because it's been so rainy. We live close to a stormwater pond, which is nice because it is built to prevent flooding, but lousy because it means there's nothing we can do to stop the bugs from multiplyin' like John Travolta's chills. I take care of any standing water around the property, of course, and use other mitigation techniques, but the bugs are too much for me in the end. 

It amazes me how much non-biting bugs can be annoying. To humans, at least. The dogs don't seem to care about the gnats. You see a cow in a field with flies all over the place, all they do is swish the tail once in a while; they don't run away, or get up on their hind legs and MOOOOO with fury. 

I remember being at a relative's cabin in the woods as a boy, and while the adults were having drinks and talking about boring adult things, I went in the yard to practice fungo hitting. It was a cool day, overcast but not rainy. As I was tossing the Wiffle ball and swinging the bat, and missing, the bugs took notice; the more I sweated, the more they closed in. The more frustrated I got and annoyed I got, the more I sweated, and the more covered in bugs. I had to give up. 

To this day, I suck at baseball. Do I blame the bugs? That would be silly. Yes, yes I do.

Go. Team.

Baseball started on Friday night, and my Beloved Mets are 3-0 so far, and I couldn't be less excited. 

Yippee.

Of course, I have my reasons. I don't get enthusiastic without cause, and I don't lose enthusiasm without cause, and I expect you're the same. 

1) The Mets are injury-plagued. I've complained about this many times in the past. Our ace is already hurt in the last year of his contract (which he's indicated will be the last year with the team), and our #2 guy has a dicey hamstring. So the stage is already set for another season in the emergency room.

2) The Mets are jinxed. I swear, since 1986 they've found more and better ways to collapse at just the wrong time than any other team in baseball. The disastrous seasons under Willie Randolph (September 2007 saw two five-game losing streaks that finished them one game out of first place and out of the playoffs) were epic.

3) MLB and the players' union colluded to rob the fans. After a work stoppage -- and let's be clear, these are not starving black-lunged coal miners vs. Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly, but millionaires fighting over an $11 billion pot -- what they agreed to included:

• Significant increases to minimum salaries (need more money from the fans!)
• Significant increases to the payroll thresholds applicable under the Competitive Balance Tax, commonly called a luxury tax (need more money from the fans!)
• Amendments to the MLB draft order designed to deter tanking by teams that won't make playoffs (because the teams have to be forced to care about the fans!)
• Expanded postseason (12 teams) (more meaningless games; season ends at Thanksgiving!)
• Enhanced revenue streams through jersey and helmet sponsorships (need more money from the fans!)
• Improved benefits for former players (need more money from the fans!)

So despite the fact that, as CNN noted, "Owners have said they have been battered by shrinking attendance," the fans are going to have to shell out more, so what now -- $15 hot dogs and $20 beers? Who do they think they are, Disney World? Sorry, not taking out a home equity loan to root root root for the home team.

4) The DH has been forced on the National League. We always knew the "pansy ball" rule would happen to us, and of course it was sneaked in with no fan input. 

5) The hated ghost-runner-on-second for extra innings is hanging around like a boring houseguest. Double-headers will be nine-inning games again, though, but they'll be sure to make most of them day-night double-headers -- two admissions!

6) The convergence of showboating and "moneyball" strategies have led to truly awful baseball games. The showboating is easy to understand -- dummies swinging for the fences all the time makes for tons of strikeouts. Conversely, looking for walks all the time is just as bad. Dull and hard to watch. Changing pitchers constantly leads to burned-out bullpens and bad throwing. It's one thing to protect the starter and another to constantly blow the starter's leads.

7) If the fans haven't gotten annoyed enough yet, Apple and MLB will be putting a bunch of games on Apple's streaming-only Apple TV+, including the Mets' Friday-night win, which will help prevent the aging baseball fan from being able to watch his game on Friday nights. 

8) I don't want to get into it here, but we know the MLB is almost as woketastic as the NFL. I'm sure all us white guys love paying to be told that we're the cause of all the world's problems. Is this one of those privileges I'm supposed to check?

9) I found less annoying things to do with my time during the Chinese Death Virus shutdown than watch my cursed, injured home team stumble through dull, four-hour games on its way to folding like a dollar-store card table.  

If the Mets' luck continues, I might overlook a few of these, even the ones like #1 and #2 that mean disaster is inevitable. But the rest play into the leagues' continual disdain for the goose that lays the golden eggs. Indeed, they seem to think that the best way to get that goose to lay more eggs is to insult it and choke the living tar out of it. 

I may not be an expert in these things, but I think when you're treating the customer like a sucker, you're not supposed to be obvious about it. 

Perils of inflation: entertainment.

We all have heard how bad inflation is, although some people seem to have trouble comprehending the idea. These are people for whom the term "fiat currency" is alien. They still expect to walk up to the treasury building and trade in a dollar note for that amount of gold. They'd better bring a microscope if that's the case.

There are two equations of economics that everyone ought to know, but seem to be mysterious and inscrutable even to those who supposedly do:  

Greater demand or lower supply = higher prices

Too many dollars chasing too few goods = higher prices

The latter is exactly what's happening now, as the government runs off sheets of delicious money that are each worth less than the dollars printed before them. 

But is inflation really bad? Yes, to those who remember stories of little old ladies on Social Security eating cat food to survive before benefits were pegged to you-know-what. My savings cannot possibly keep up with the rate of inflation as it is now.

 

I thought, since people pay more attention to entertainment and celebrity than reality in our culture, it might help to look at inflation in another way, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' helpful Consumer Price Index inflation calculator (costs as of January 2022). Here we go:

The Six Million Dollar Man -- TV show premiered 1973; man now costs $38,958,152.42

The Millionaire -- TV drama where a man gave random people a million bucks premiered 1955; now would now give $10,529,887.64

50 Cent -- Rap star born 1975; now costs $2.59

"Bet-a-Million" Gates -- American gambler earned nickname in 1900; now would be "Bet $33,470,000" Gates*

Marshall Crenshaw's "A Hundred Dollars" -- Song released 1987; now would be $250.80

Two dollars demanded by psychotic paperboy in Better Off Dead -- Film released 1985; now demands $5.28 

Sweepstakes -- Short-lived TV drama ran 1979; million-dollar prize now costs $3,768,739.95

The Million Dollar Duck -- 1971 live-action Disney comedy; duck now costs $7,028,700.00

Two Cents -- expression re: one's opinions originated 1939; now opinions worth 40 cents

A Fistful of Dollars -- 1964 Spaghetti Western; a fistful of singles (approximately 10) now worth $90.40

Million Dollar Baby -- Another Eastwood film, from 2004; baby now worth $1,480,505.53

 

$1.98 Beauty Pageant -- Prize dispensed in 1978 mock-pageant show now worth $8.37

Shoeless Joe Jackson -- Admitted to being paid $5,000 to cheat in the 1919 World Series; now worth $77,665.19 (current Major League Baseball minimum salary is $570,500.00) 

Total 1944 US Government spending --  $91.3 billion; worth $1.462 trillion today, which is a small bit compared to our actual 2021 budget of $6.818 trillion, and we were fighting a World War on two fronts in 1944* -- US population has not quintupled since then

*For these, I had to go to another site as BLS doesn't go past 1913 or over 10 million bucks.

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Everything looks more valuable with inflation, but that only means that the money is less valuable. Does this illustration help? Probably not. Some people can't see the crocodile that's biting them on the butt.

Rain.

This means nothing to anybody, because it's about the Mets, but they've already had seven postponements due to bad weather or Chinese Death Virus this season and we're just over two weeks in. Last night in Denver they were postponed by snow.

Mr. Met doesn’t have a Snow Delay test card.

It doesn't even mean much to me, because I haven't seen a single pitch so far. First, I've been doing a lot of my own work, so I haven't had a chance to watch a bunch of guys who make more money in the time it takes them to adjust their jocks than I do all year. Second, when I was planning to watch a little baseball, the games were delayed and then postponed. And third, Major League Baseball is run by blithering nincompoops who hold their fans in contempt, which makes me very unlikely to want to spend any time with the league. 

The main reason I was thinking about this at all was that I glanced at the National League East standings and was surprised to see that the Mets are in first place. With three painful losses and all those missing games, the Mets have the only winning record in the division at 5-3. (One of the five wins was on a blown call, but when you're the Mets you have to take the breaks when you get them.)

The Mets have played the fewest games in the division at 8; the Nationals have played 10, the Marlins and Phillies 12, and the Braves 14. It's preposterous. 

As you would imagine, the Mets have a lot of doubleheaders coming up now, starting today against the Rockies, if they aren't snowed out again. 

Mets fans are always pleasantly surprised to see the team in first place, because it doesn't happen a whole lot. We savor it while we can. Or at least we do when the commissioner isn't alienating fans with his jackassery. 

For me, I know that this lead won't last, and that it's unlikely I'll watch any baseball this year anyhow. I am too busy scrambling to make a living, unlike the greedy slobs who populate the league. No one needs them, and the league needs to figure that out. We shall see if they get the message. 

Fred's Book Club: At the Plate.

It's Wednesday, friends, and that means another dose of the Humpback Writers, our Hump Day book feature. Get it? Hump Day, Humpback? No? Me neither. 

Anyway, it's also the day before baseball's Opening Day, and with that we have another baseball book, and another brief tale of Fred from when he had a career. Yes, today we have a book from National Geographic and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a children's book that is as American as anything American can be. 

And I couldn't get to Ralph Kiner for an autograph. The local TV crews were all over him. 

America at Bat: Baseball Stuff & Stories came out of a national tour, and the tour came from the love for our nation in the wake of the dastardly attacks of September 11, 2001. The Hall of Fame and its partners decided to put together a tour of sensational baseball memorabilia from the museum, a tour that would launch with an appearance by dozens of Hall of Famers. It began in New York City in March 2002, and traveled as a museum installation for six years, finishing in Boston in September 2008. It was called Baseball As America. 

At the time of the launch I was working for a magazine in midtown, and was one of the only people on staff who was a fan of baseball, or any sport other than backbiting. So when the features editor got an invitation to the launch party at the American Museum of Natural History, she kindly asked if I wanted to go. Did I!

I could not have imagined being in a room with so many baseball superstars at once. Kiner was there, and Hank Aaron, and Warren Spahn, and Bob Feller, and 22 others, and somewhere I had a notebook and press info with everyone's names but that has been lost to time. 

Out of the tour came a commemorative book for adults, but I wasn't given a copy of that. I got the kids' book, written by Paul Rosenthal, with an introduction by Aaron, from which these pages come. It's a great little book, full of amazing baseball pictures, stories, trivia, and photos of objects from the Hall of Fame's museum that were on the tour. Tour items included a replica of Ruth's bat you could pick up, FDR's "green light" letter to Commissioner Landis recommending baseball continue during World War II, and of course ancient equipment, priceless uniforms and cards, and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Tom Seaver. 

I thought then and think now that it was a nice thing for the Hall of Fame to do, and a reminder that sports could really bring people of all backgrounds together. 

Of course, in recent years, sports, like everything else, is being used to tear us apart instead. Which is why I can be sentimental about this sentimental book -- baseball was a light in a dark hour in New York City in the year after 9/11. I wish Major League Baseball and the other pro sports leagues felt that way now. Instead they seem to hate America as much as our foreign enemies do, and then wonder why Americans are tuning out. But I'll probably be watching some games this year, at least until the newly configured Mets fall prey to injuries and stupidity, as usual. 

Fred's Book Club: Prophet Margin.

Welcome back, my friends, to the Hump Day feature that never ends! Yes, it's the Humpback Writers, our feature with the stupid name that runs on Wednesday. We try to get a wide variety of books here in the book club, sometimes seasonal, and this one is pegged to the start of baseball's spring training games on Sunday. 

Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys with a Major League Scout is a book every fan of baseball ought to read, especially one interested in the history of the leagues and how they recruit players. Author Mark Winegardner traveled with Tony Lucadello, an elderly scout for the Cubs and the Phillies, who signed up 49 major leaguers in his career, including Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. Well, he signed hundreds of players, but 49 made it to the Show. This book is the story of Lucadello and Winegardner's scouting trips through the Midwest in 1988.

Lucadello was 75 when they made that trek, and even in 1988 was a dinosaur in the world of baseball. He drove around the country, visiting, revisiting, and re-revisiting prospects from the time they were kids until they were old enough to sign. Initially he could sign up any player he thought had potential. But that changed in 1965.

Tony claimed he'd never said a swear word, but if he ever slipped, he must have used the same inflection as when he says "draft." Before 1965, when major league baseball instituted the draft, if Tony found a player he liked, he could offer him a contract on the spot.... Since 1965, though, the only way Tony can sign a player he likes is by convincing the Phillies to draft that player. 

Tony's method, seen many times in the book, was the cultivation of relationships, expecting that when the time came for the boy to sign, he'd sign with the man who had been so encouraging as he grew up. 

"Tony is different," said [Phillies scouting director Jack] Pastore, who's known the old scout almost twenty-five years. "He's like a gardener; he cultivates his players. He takes an interest in them at a younger age, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. And he keeps in touch, maybe by sending a Christmas card, and he really gets close to the player and the family, probably closer than most scouts today. You know, most scouts would just say, 'Well, the kid's going to get drafted. What's my chance of getting him?' They can find twenty reasons why not to, but Tony takes the one positive reason and he does it the other way. If we draft one of Tony's players, the negotiations are a lot smoother, the probability of signing that player is a lot better, because the families appreciate that personal touch." 

But he didn't just leave young prospects with a handshake; Tony Lucadello also left a plan for the boy and his people to develop his abilities. One method was the wall, his baseball-themed answer to all the basketball hoops in Midwest driveways, which encouraged throwing and fielding skills:

Tony watched Jason throw about fifty balls off the wall. Tony has a scout pose: hands thrust deep into overcoat pockets, hat brim tilting forward, head nodding, face impassive. That blank poker face is a master scout's stock-in-trade, developed over the years to prevent lesser scouts from learning what ball players Tony likes and then going after them. Tony has had so many prospects stolen out from under him that he has not only perfected the poker face but also scouted in secret, concealed in his car or behind telephone poles or on rooftops or even -- at the age of sixty-eight -- from the top of a loblolly pine.

Another method Tony recommended to youngsters involved plastic golf balls, having someone throw them for the prospect to hit. The tiny ball developed the eye; and it could be practiced indoors, as the author discovered, pitching to a prospect at Wright State University. 

Lucadello could be a little underhanded himself, faking tears with onion juice in one well-told incident to use emotion to get a prospect signed. But the fact that other people (including a prospect) that Winegardner spoke to in the book had heard the story from Tony shows that the old scout was willing to tell that one on himself. 

The is a terrific profile of an American original, the kind of hardworking scout one always expects to see on the back roads of the nation but won't find anymore. It's a great book, with wonderful baseball stories and an interesting look at the lives of young baseball dreamers. 

Lucadello did not find a way into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but his personal papers were donated to the hall's library, which shows a modicum of the respect he'd garnered in his long career. 

Miscellaneous.

Yesterday kind of fell apart on me for a variety of reasons, and I had no time to really work on this blog. But rather than disappoint my public (My Public! How they love me!), I am resorting to the old random thoughts column. I always thought those were cheating, but they do enable one to use ideas that don't make a large coherent thought. Coherent thoughts being in short supply everywhere these days.

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Some candy bars just aren't universal as are others. You can find Reese's things everywhere, but Clark bars, Chunkys, 5th Avenues, and others can be hard to find. Including this:

The Whatchamacallit bar was introduced by Hershey's in 1978, but I don't think I ever had one. The Hershey's site says that the name was picked "from a list of nearly 100 possible names brainstormed by Hershey and ad agency staff." It's a fun name, but it says nothing about what's inside. That was probably useful when they changed the formula in 1987 to include caramel. 

I found it delightful. It has an excellent texture for a Hershey's product, light and yet toothsome, and you can't go too far wrong with caramel and chocolate. I wish they made it in Fun Size packages so I could buy a bag to eat on Halloween give out to trick-or-treaters.

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Speaking of Halloween, I mentioned yesterday that we may be trying to rush into the holiday stream to get rid of 2020 fast. Well, the trees here are rushing too, turning color a little early. 

I think it's because we've had dry weather for a couple of weeks. It was a nice change from the long, wet summer, but the trees might all be nekkid by Columbus Day. 

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I may have mentioned that we love our Bosch dishwasher. Having lived our early married life with no dishwasher (husbands not included), we would have liked a clunky old Yugoslavian machine if it got the dishes clean. When we got a house it came with a Kenmore, which was okay, but pretty loud. When it had to be replaced, the Bosch came recommended and has performed admirably.

But I have, of course, one complaint. It's the little flap door you see below, on the machine's detergent compartment.

The little flap door is where you put the rinse aid (i.e., Jet Dry) to help dry the dishes clearly. If it is empty the dishwasher has to run about twenty minutes longer. The flap door is separate from the unit, attached to indents on the bottom with little nubs. Well, one of the nubs broke off somehow. The door stays on, but I think it leaks rinse aid. Of course you can't buy the little flap door on its own; you have to spend $65 for the whole dispensing unit, and if you're Mr. Handythumbs like me, good luck replacing it without breaking something. I just want a new door, which probably costs them pennies to manufacture. Grrrrr.

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A fellow I used to think had some sense posted that "If you aren't a fascist, Antifa isn't your enemy." I guess he hasn't seen all the videos of Antifa burning down local businesses and attacking people they don't know. Antifa is a mob, and mobs don't stop to examine your credentials before they pull you out of a car to beat you, harass you at a restaurant, or set fire to the block where your dry cleaning shop has been running for years. I have had to classify that fellow as an uniformed dodo now.

Anyway, I also saw this online, which seems to have a lot more truth to it.  

Heh.

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I was informed that the Mets have failed to make the playoffs. Good. Less temptation to watch.

Major League Baseball: "We need to start up baseball again this year! The American people need to know we're with them in this time of Wuhan Flu!"


Also Major League Baseball: "We need to make common cause with communists who hate most of the people in America!"

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Should I stop now? I think I should stop now. 

All right.

Fred's Book Club: Southpaw.

Welcome back to our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers, which falls of course on Hump Day. While the writers themselves may actually have no humps, or even backs, they managed to produce something bound as a book, and as you know, we have a very low bar for qualification in this feature. 

Today we have a book that was made into a well-known film. It's from my baseball library, because I love books and I love -- or loved -- watching baseball, as we will note later. It may be the most famous baseball novel written so far.

Mark Harris, who died in 2007, wrote a number of novels in his day, four of them starring pitcher and narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen. Wiggen is a left-handed starter for the New York Mammoths, a successful club modeled on the Giants, called Author by his teammates because he wrote a book. The first three books in the series were written in the fifties -- The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), and A Ticket for Seamstitch (1957). The fourth, It Looked Like For Ever, came much later, in 1979. Bang is the only one I have read.  

The title comes from the famous song "Streets of Laredo": 

Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Sing the Death March as you carry me along
Take me to the valley, there lay the sod o'er me
I'm a young cowboy, I know I've done wrong

So you might imagine it has something to do with mourning. 

The book opens in a dramatic moment of the off-season, when Wiggen gets a collect call long distance from catcher Bruce Pearson.

"You have got to come and see me," he said. "I am in the hospital."
      "With what?" I said.
      "You have got to come and see me," he said.
      "I cannot afford it," I said. "I am up to my ass in tax arrears." This was the statement of a true rat, and you can imagine how it must of sounded to him. But I knew nothing of the circumstances at the time. If he had hung up on me then and there he would of had a right to do so. Yet who could he of called besides me? There was a silence, and I personally cannot stand silence on long distance, especially if I am not sure how deductible it will be, and I said, "Say something! Do not just stand there!"
      "You have got to come and see me," he said.
      "All he says is I have got to go and see him," I said.
      "What did he do?" she said.
      "He is in the hospital," I said.
      "Then you will have to go," she said.
      "I will come," I said.

Pearson is in Rochester, Minnesota, and he has Hodgkin's disease. The prognosis is very bad. Pearson begs Wiggen to keep his illness a secret so he can play in the upcoming season. 

There's a definite Ring Lardner touch to Harris's style with the book as told by Wiggen, which is not too obtrusive. Wiggen's not a learned character, but is no dummy, either, and can be funny. He is also not particularly lovable. He is often abrasive, combative, selfish, petulant, egotistical, and very, very tired of having Pearson under his wing, defending him to players and coaches. 

Pearson continues to catch for the Mammoths, although he is getting sicker. His real disability to me is that he is as dumb as a sack of hammers. He calls Wiggen Arthur instead of Author, and yet has somehow stayed on a good big-league team without ever knowing how to play the opposition.

He begun thinking about baseball a lot, which he never done before, always treating it before like it was football or golf, not a thing to think about but only play. He said to me, "Arthur, if you was on one club and me on another, what kind of a book would you keep on me?"

     "If I was to keep a book on you," said I, "I would say to myself, 'No need to keep a book on Pearson, for Pearson keeps no book on me.' Because if I was to strike you out on fast balls letter high you would not go back to the bench thinking, 'That son of a bitch Wiggen struck me out on fast balls letter high, so I will be on the lookout for the same thing next time.' No, you would go back to the bench thinking, 'I would like a frank,' or 'I see pretty legs in the stands,' and by the next time you face me again you have forgot all about the time before...."

Wiggen can't help but abuse Pearson, but he truly wants to make the dumbbell a better player and keep his secret from the other Mammoth players and management. 

I guess at the time catchers were still thought to be morons -- decades earlier Bill Dickey (or maybe Muddy Ruel) called the catcher's equipment "the tools of ignorance," and Yogi Berra's quotes in the papers (real or not) didn't help -- but catchers have to be the field generals of the game, especially in Berra's day, when managers didn't usually send pitch signals from the dugout. How could Pearson call a game when he has no idea what batters like to hit? 

Regardless, the relationship between the men during the team's pennant chase is what makes the book, and I couldn't help getting involved in it. I give Harris high marks for a sad story well told, and not a trace of maudlin sentiment anywhere.

I lost interest in Harris when I found out that It Looked Like For Ever featured Wiggen attacking a general during Vietnam for coming to a baseball game while boys were dying overseas. I was already sick of politics invading everything and I had no interest in dealing with lefty politics in my baseball. Maybe Harris was sincere about his own pacifism, maybe not, but we know from the amazing change that American leftists underwent from pacifism after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to war hawks after Operation Barbarossa that pacifism was often the sheep's clothing worn by America-hating wolves.

Bang the Drum Slowly was first performed as a TV drama in 1956 starring Paul Newman as Wiggen and Albert Salmi as Pearson. Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro, two once-respected actors, starred in the 1973 film. I've never seen it, but the bits I've seen made the team look a lot more like the Miracle Mets of '69 than the Giants of Thomson, Mays, and Durocher. I've heard it's good. I might watch it if it comes on TCM. Moriarty was fantastic in The Glass Menagerie and through his years on Law & Order. Not sure what happened to that DeNiro guy.

But I'm not watching any actual baseball this year. Why? Leftism has invaded it; Marxism in the sheep's clothing of concern about police violence while their lupine brethren wreck the cities. Leftism ruins everything. Leftism never lets you find a place where politics will leave you alone. Leftism says that if you want peace, if you want a place of comfort, you have to obey. To hell with that. And to hell with professional sports for playing ball with them.

Pitch in the dirt.

My thoughts on Thursday: 

Meh, I dunno. 

I've really missed baseball this year, I confess, although I manage to wrest the remote control away for the length of a whole game very infrequently. Quite often, if I wish to be social, I wind up following it on my laptop while Dr. Pimple Popper or something provides televised entertainment.

Even so, I've missed it, but I've gotten used to its being away. We could have skipped this year, and I'm rather surprised we didn't. 

Sixty games, DH in the National League, no one in the stands, extra innings start with a guy on second? It's so weirdly different from regular years that I wonder that the stats would even count (although they have in strike-shortened seasons, so there's that). (And I'm certain this is the way the National League has finally found to smuggle in the designated hitter against the will of its fans; it'll be there in 2021 too, is my guess.) 

Is a season 102 games short of normal even a season? As my mechanic points out, sixty games in most teams are just finding their feet.

Then again, anything that even nears normalcy at this point has to be welcome. And maybe the ridiculously short season will give teams that barely ever get a shot at the postseason a chance, if they get off to a quick start. Who knows? This could be the year the beloved Mets break the schneid. Hell, it might even see the Padres win the Series!

Then again again, it looks like the anti-Americanism that is poisoning the National Football League is creeping into Major League Baseball as well. While it's unlikely they'll broadcast or perhaps even play the National Anthem in from of empty ballparks, they're going to find ways to stick it in fans' faces all the same. And there's not much of that I can take.

So I guess I'll see how it goes. Three against the Braves, then four against Boston, because the leagues don't really matter anymore anyway, so why not plunge right in. I could be learning the violin or training for a marathon with the time I waste on this stuff, really I could!

(Not really.)

My thoughts on Friday:

Well, they did it. Both the Yankees and Nationals took the knee before the National Anthem last night on the season's first game -- the two teams with the most patriotic names. They wore BLM shirts at batting practice. They don't seem to know or care that BLM is an avowed Marxist organization, or that their actions are a thumb in the eye to the country that made every one of them rich. It's skin-suit time again.

To hell with them. I honestly, truly hope they all go broke.

UPDATE: I was just (6:42 pm) informed that the Mets and Braves all stood respectfully for the National Anthem tonight. So I'm softening my opinion but I'm reserving judgment.

Mascot canceled!

METS HIRE NEW MASCOT

Mr. Met, Disgraced Mascot, Dismissed

FLUSHING, NEW YORK -- Fred Wilpon, majority owner of the New York Mets, announced a new mascot to replace the formerly beloved Mr. Met, who had been the mascot for the team for 58 years.

"Mr. Met's actions were a black, eh, eye to the organization," said Mr. Wilpon, referring to the Twitter war that led to the mascot's dismissal. Yesterday rival mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, had expressed his support for the Green Mascots Matter movement, after which Mr. Met replied online that All Mascots Mattered. A short time later the large, white, male, ballsplaining mascot was dismissed.

"It's time we move forward into the 21st century," said Mr. Wilpon. "We had been thinking about upgrading our image with a new mascot for a while, and then Mr. Met forced our hand. Racist baseballs have no place in this organization."

He then introduced the new mascot, Señor Met, to the press.

"We're very proud to have Señor Met join us," said Mr. Wilpon. "His full name, for the record, is Señor or Señora Juan Roscoe Hernandez Jinping Phyllis Exotic Met."

Señor Met held up a sign in seventeen languages saying how happy he was to join the team, and how much he looked forward to the 2020 campaign, short as it will be.

"These days it is crucial to have a mascot that represents the values of the company," concluded Mr. Wilpon. "If a mascot cannot comport himself with dignity, what's the point?"

Mask on, mask off.

On Saturday I had to pick up a medicine for large economy size dog Tralfaz. The vet's office is closed to hoomans (as the dogs supposedly say) but you can drop off dogs for exams and things. If you're picking up meds or special foods, you can use the courtesy walk-up window. You call to say you're there, give them a credit card number, and they slide the receipt and package to you along the table.

Of course I put the ol' mask on to pick up my package. I don't think it matters much at this point, even in southern New York, but I am willing to do it as a courtesy. Of course, Governor Corleone insists on it. The day before I was on the highway and these signs appeared every fifteen miles or so:

Hey, if I had his face I'd cover it all the time. And look, I could even get official MLB face coverings with the logos of my favorite team! Which is kind of weird, since there's no baseball because of this damn Chinese death virus.

However, Saturday was a lovely day, and when I passed by the park I noticed it was crowded with people walking the trails. And guess what? The majority were not complying with the state edict. Maybe a quarter or an eighth had masks over their noses and mouths. Some had them askew somewhere on their heads, but most wore nothing over their faces. As Instapundit noted, most people started staying home before the government told them to, and now most of them are breaking out before the government tells them to. It's not an angry protest; quarantine fatigue is a real thing. Americans are good and caring people on the whole, but our institutions are throwing away our trust in them at a fast pace these days. With each day the "stay-at-home" orders get harder to obey, financially, psychologically, socially.

It certainly doesn't help me when I see propaganda based on old Soviet artwork, either. Have you encountered this thing? Drippy girl with torch in peasant hat? I have never seen a poster more calculated to elicit the romance of Soviet butchery. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

I want to grab her little torch and stomp it out, rip off her phony wings, Frisbee her peasant hat, and send her home crying with her juice box. Of all the annoying commercials with sad piano music, the messages that people who don't give a damn about me are here for me, the moronic celebrity videos filmed in the part of the house where the help lives (so as to not be too showy) to say we're all in this together, of all these things, none of them makes me want to go running through the streets unmasked, ungloved, coughing and sneezing and spitting everywhere, more than this stupid, creepy poster. Nice job, Ad Council, you pinko wankers.

When, where, and how will this all end I do not know. I'm usually happy to do as requested; I continue to put out my bottles and paper on recycling day even though I am 90% sure it all goes to the landfill. But I'm not doing this shelter-in-place crap into July.