By 'we' do you mean white people? Because there are plenty of groups that seem to do it better than us and have for thousands of years. Not sure I want them to die for our sins.
Have you considered that there is some selection bias in this, that such events are what you notice because they are shocking, and that historically many cultures went hundreds of years without the kind of conflict or behavior you decry but of course that didn't make the history books? I didn't claim only white people are shitty, however right now the vast majority of the bad going on in the world is largely due to the leavings of white colonialism, including the genocides in question.
And of course, it's not just the people on people suckage. There's what I think of as a softball question covering some of the end-the-semester ecology stuff on one of my bio finals - "Outline two of the reasons for the current high rates of biodiversity loss on Earth". I've had to add: Do not just write "People suck" - because that particular answer/non-answer was showing up w increasing frequency...
If you truly cared about the environment, you wouldn’t still be a Cardinals fan. When Chris Archer owned the Cardinals in his Pirates debut, his fastballs had such velocity that they were smokin’. The wind vortices created by the Cardinals’ repeated whiffing at those smokin’ heaters funneled the smoke up into the ozone layer at a much higher rate than normal, thereby speeding up the global warming process with such velocity that it was smokin’, thereby speeding up the global warming process even faster.
Liked for the imaginative aspect but a little unsure about how you're envisioning the mechanistic flow chart here. Smoke -> gets to ozone layer and reduces ozone? -> increased warming? I could go with [increased wind&smoke] -> [plants close stomata to slow water loss that results from increased wind speed] -> [less CO2 uptake] -> [more heat trapping]. This also tells us that baseball of the 'three true outcomes' style (w all those strikeouts) exacerbates climate change... and small ball is our only hope.
Thank you for pointing that out - I forgot to add that the smoke from The Wizard of Pitching's heaters that day was still so hot when it reached the ozone layer that it actually burned a hole in the layer. This allowed more ultraviolet rays to penetrate Earth, undoubtedly causing more people to get sunburn. Naturally, that would lead to a spike in sunscreen purchases. A significant portion of sunscreen is packaged in plastic bottles, which contain oil. That means oil companies drilled for even more oil to make all that extra plastic, which increased pollution and global warming along with it.
And, in the meantime since Archer's Pirates debut, the hole in the ozone layer started to patch up and trap the remaining cooled smoke (remember there was a lot of it, Archer absolutely owned the Cardinals that day, and they whiffed untold amounts of it up into the ozone with their swings and misses) in the atmosphere, increasing global warming even further.
This proves that the Cardinals support pollution and are the Koch Bros of baseball. Yet Paper Lions is still a fan of them, and is able to sleep at night?
I read bill bryson 30 years ago. One of his books about the planet made the point, the planet will be fine. it will survive any (at the time) ozone disaster. Humans and lots of other flora and fauna will not survive, but the planet itself, that will survive.
I am not sure Night Court would feel the same now. A comedy about our broken court system? Hard to find the humor there unless you really, really handle it right. And I can't see an OTA network doing that.
If MLB viewed the Negro Leagues as competitors at the time, unlike how the NPL is viewed now, should they have compensated the Negro Leagues for hiring their talent any more than a modern corporation compensates another for headhunting their talent today? I realize it's cold to say that, but...
I don't think MLB viewed the Negro Leagues as competitors, but instead as a vassal that they could drain talent from if it made them money, but not too much because their white patrons did not want their product to be too Black. MLB could have absorbed at least 2-3 times the number of players on merit had they been fully committed to integration. The Negro Leagues would have still folded because baseball cannot IMO support a second independent major league (see the history of the Pacific Coast League), but it would have been fair to the players who deserved to be in MLB.
Except that’s not how MLB did things back then with other independent minor league teams. Players who were good were usually “sold” from independent baseball teams to the teams in the majors.
I guess there’s some weird irony that it was okay for the white players to be bought & sold, but not the black players...
I read that Texas wedding story yesterday and had to go for a walk to collect myself. I’m a hard-core “faith in humanity” kind of guy and in that moment even I would have signed that “nuke from orbit” petition. Brutal.
People seemed to be confused. They believe the maskless person is the only one taking the risk. I don't know how that can be remedied. It's not just trump supporters that don't get virus theory.
Night Court was far & away my favorite sitcom from the 80s, and the one good thing about this reboot is maybe some network or streaming platform will finally start showing the old reruns again. It’s mind-boggling that it’s not on Nick at Nite or Antenna or Peacock or whatever other channels us olds watch.
In very related news, there was a Twitter thing going around last week about random (not “classic”) lines from tv/movies that somehow got stuck in your head and are impossible to remove. Mine? When the fisherman who rescued Dan Fielding after his plane crash said “SEATTLE”. (Sorry for not issuing a spoiler alert there.)
And I know there’s a lot of Barney Miller stans out there, but Night Court had the best theme song ever.
Night Court and Barney Miller theme songs are great, but Sanford and Son was the best ever in my opinion.
Regarding Barney Miller though, I once read a fan theory that it was in the same TV universe as Night Court. The theme songs being bass-heavy was a piece of evidence to support the general idea that the arrestees from Barney Miller went before Judge Stone in their next step through the justice system.
And Craig, you weren't the only one with strong feelings for Markie Post...
I do a verbal rendition of the Sanford and Son theme fairly often, and haven't watched the show in a long time. That's one that sticks in the head. There are other great theme songs, but the ones with words are generally easier to remember than instrumentals.
There is a kind of melancholy that I always felt, even as a child, when listening to this theme song for Taxi. I mean that as a compliment. A lot of those shows featured spot-on depictions of working class people, which is something that you just don't see anymore.
The first several seasons of Roseanne belong in that discussion; everything about it rang true to my experiences as a kid growing up in similar economic circumstances.
I'm with you to a certain extent. Roseanne was one of the last of those shows that was trying to depict a working class family with worries about bills and potential job losses. It was a helluva lot better than the sitcoms that followed, where there almost seemed to be a directive from the executives that they don't depict "working class" as anything other than a mostly good time. Once you get to the nineties, it's almost all white people living in nice apartments in NYC and never struggling with anything other than relationships.
I recall reading an article - I think it was in TV Guide - where a former cop, in commenting on the police shows on TV, noted that every class of recruits at the NYPD academy was told almost immediately to forget everything they learned about policing from TV - except for Barney Miller..... Being a cop in a small precinct was mostly doing paperwork, and talking people out of pressing charges over stupid things so you didn't have to do paperwork.....
I dont know if it still is because I am too lazy to try and position my antenna juuust right anymore, but Night Court was on LAFF for a period of time if you have that in your area.
MLB & the Negro Leagues: Howard Bryant was interviewed on PBS News Hour last night and expressed much the same commentary. His main objection was that the statistics of the players subsumed into MLB records are incomplete & unreliable because of the second-class record keeping, in a sport that holds numbers as “sacred”. It makes sense that players knew not even their own batting averages because it was unclear if many games were league games or barnstorming “exhibitions”. He also said that MLB “destroyed” those players & coaches. I was unable to grasp that concept, as a few of those players became MLB stars, and others were legendary in their own communities.
Craig offers an explanation that helps me understand Bryant’s point; particularly the almost immediate disbanding of the leagues, and with them, the end of careers in baseball.
I’m going to invest in Bryant’s latest book, “Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field”.
Along these lines, I understand it better by thinking of the NFL’s “Rooney Rule”, now adopted in many organizations, including businesses. The Ambassador wisely influenced his fellow owners, and the Steelers have benefited from the Rule directly in the person of Mike Tomlin, in his 13th year of excellent football as Head Coach here in Pittsburgh. The very least MLB could do would be to adopt the Rooney Rule.
Striking that in the Night Court intro (the music for which was indeed good) two of the characters they introduced were smoking. Seems unimaginable now. I lived through that era, but I would have thought showing smoking on TV would have been out by then. I guess not.
The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”
In a nutshell, why I fucking hate living in Texas. You're my rotator cuff, went to physical therapy. A medical practice. No masks. No requirement for masks. Two months later still in pain. Why? I walked out. Now too frightened to go to any provider. Should can't get worse. I'll wait for pandemic to subside. I hate people.
I too lived in Texas for 10 years long ago -- well, Austin, but it's surrounded by Texas -- and can confirm most of this. I had a roommate there -- smart, educated, I'd even say a cultured guy -- who'd never been out of the state until I invited him on a road trip up to St. Louis, where I'd moved from. Granted he was only about 25, but still.
Though... even Austin is in Texas :(. My daughter lives in Austin, we're in the SF Bay Area, and she just visited for a few days. (Before y'all freak out - she was in the Moderna trial, has a lovely antibody count, and her dad up in the Sacramento area has been having some health issues she came to help him out with.). She was marveling at the way people here are wearing masks, social distancing etc. - she says that this is not happening in Austin. Bars are packed, people are not wearing masks, not maintaining distance, acting like nothing is any different. Tho' the music scene is split. She's got a small gypsy jazz group, and for the most part the places they play are not trying to book anyone. But her bass player also plays with some country groups, and she says those groups are playing (small) live shows all the time.
I think to a large extent people take their cue on how to act and react on how the people around them are acting. In Texas, people don't wear masks, which leads to more people not wearing masks. In other states the opposite is true.
I guess in his defense it IS kind of hard to get out of Texas, it's so damn big. As the drivers' lament goes, "The sun has ris', the sun has set, and I ain't out of Texas yet." It's as far from Brownsville to Amarillo as from Dallas to Chicago.
That's funny. I tell people all the time that this is like living in a foreign country.
When they ask where I went to school, they mean high school to see if I went to a high school football power. When I answer that I went to the University Of Southern California I get peppered with questions about liberal bias in education and told college doesn't prepare you for the real world. The ignorance is astounding.
My favorite Night Court memory. The gang was talking about exercising and Selma Diamond said that she had recently gotten an exercise bike. It had a speedometer, odometer, heart rate tracker, timer, etc. She said "But I finally gave it away"
Only after going to SI did I focus on that the uniform Mr. Allen is wearing is the White Sox and not the Phillies. I don’t think I knew they wore red. Looks all wrong.
Great commentary on MLB and its impact on those who played and worked in the Negro Leagues. The point about how so many people were impacted when MLB just skimmed the top players away and still shut everyone else out is not just a baseball thing -- I think so many (white) people don't really understand how racist policies of the past still impact lives today (not to mention the racist policies of today).
A few years ago, I read a debut novel from Yaa Gyasi. It's called Homegoing and it tells the story of two half-sisters in Africa, one who marries a British military officer and one who is kidnaped and sold into slavery. Every subsequent chapter deals with one of their descendants, all the way up to present day. In addition to being a stunningly talented writer in terms of language and character development, Gyasi really brings home how slavery still impacts people today. The book got some buzz, and I'm reading her second novel right now, and she's still a great writer. However, it came out the same year as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which took a much different tack, and won the Pulitzer, even though it, in my opinion, isn't nearly as good as Gyasi's novel. Anyway, the decisions institutions and governments made many, many years ago still have concrete repercussions today.
Night Court's theme song left an indelible mark on my youth, because when I heard that closing theme I knew that it was time for 7-8-9-year-old me to go to bed.
Same with the opening of Northern Exposure. I remember begging to stay up just long enough to see the moose.
We all need to get the shots, whatever the order. Yours is not to wonder why yours is to do and get the shot.
Why are we saying "got vaccinated" when it is a series of 2? Wouldn't "vaccinated" be after shot 2?
I don't need to outrun the zombies, just out run those around me. I am 3,000 miles away, in SF, I suspect I'll have others to dodge before you
My commitment to mincemeat has its limits.
Of course, you could just do what everyone else does, and order it from amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Borden-None-Such-Mincemeat-Original/dp/B0005XMSSO/
"arrives December 28-Jan 5"
Conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (Christmas: Jan. 7) would solve that problem.
By 'we' do you mean white people? Because there are plenty of groups that seem to do it better than us and have for thousands of years. Not sure I want them to die for our sins.
Have you considered that there is some selection bias in this, that such events are what you notice because they are shocking, and that historically many cultures went hundreds of years without the kind of conflict or behavior you decry but of course that didn't make the history books? I didn't claim only white people are shitty, however right now the vast majority of the bad going on in the world is largely due to the leavings of white colonialism, including the genocides in question.
And of course, it's not just the people on people suckage. There's what I think of as a softball question covering some of the end-the-semester ecology stuff on one of my bio finals - "Outline two of the reasons for the current high rates of biodiversity loss on Earth". I've had to add: Do not just write "People suck" - because that particular answer/non-answer was showing up w increasing frequency...
If you truly cared about the environment, you wouldn’t still be a Cardinals fan. When Chris Archer owned the Cardinals in his Pirates debut, his fastballs had such velocity that they were smokin’. The wind vortices created by the Cardinals’ repeated whiffing at those smokin’ heaters funneled the smoke up into the ozone layer at a much higher rate than normal, thereby speeding up the global warming process with such velocity that it was smokin’, thereby speeding up the global warming process even faster.
Liked for the imaginative aspect but a little unsure about how you're envisioning the mechanistic flow chart here. Smoke -> gets to ozone layer and reduces ozone? -> increased warming? I could go with [increased wind&smoke] -> [plants close stomata to slow water loss that results from increased wind speed] -> [less CO2 uptake] -> [more heat trapping]. This also tells us that baseball of the 'three true outcomes' style (w all those strikeouts) exacerbates climate change... and small ball is our only hope.
Thank you for pointing that out - I forgot to add that the smoke from The Wizard of Pitching's heaters that day was still so hot when it reached the ozone layer that it actually burned a hole in the layer. This allowed more ultraviolet rays to penetrate Earth, undoubtedly causing more people to get sunburn. Naturally, that would lead to a spike in sunscreen purchases. A significant portion of sunscreen is packaged in plastic bottles, which contain oil. That means oil companies drilled for even more oil to make all that extra plastic, which increased pollution and global warming along with it.
And, in the meantime since Archer's Pirates debut, the hole in the ozone layer started to patch up and trap the remaining cooled smoke (remember there was a lot of it, Archer absolutely owned the Cardinals that day, and they whiffed untold amounts of it up into the ozone with their swings and misses) in the atmosphere, increasing global warming even further.
This proves that the Cardinals support pollution and are the Koch Bros of baseball. Yet Paper Lions is still a fan of them, and is able to sleep at night?
I read bill bryson 30 years ago. One of his books about the planet made the point, the planet will be fine. it will survive any (at the time) ozone disaster. Humans and lots of other flora and fauna will not survive, but the planet itself, that will survive.
Her name is actually “Blanca,” with an “L.”
Boy, we are both up early, aren't we?
I am not sure Night Court would feel the same now. A comedy about our broken court system? Hard to find the humor there unless you really, really handle it right. And I can't see an OTA network doing that.
If MLB viewed the Negro Leagues as competitors at the time, unlike how the NPL is viewed now, should they have compensated the Negro Leagues for hiring their talent any more than a modern corporation compensates another for headhunting their talent today? I realize it's cold to say that, but...
I don't think MLB viewed the Negro Leagues as competitors, but instead as a vassal that they could drain talent from if it made them money, but not too much because their white patrons did not want their product to be too Black. MLB could have absorbed at least 2-3 times the number of players on merit had they been fully committed to integration. The Negro Leagues would have still folded because baseball cannot IMO support a second independent major league (see the history of the Pacific Coast League), but it would have been fair to the players who deserved to be in MLB.
Except that’s not how MLB did things back then with other independent minor league teams. Players who were good were usually “sold” from independent baseball teams to the teams in the majors.
I guess there’s some weird irony that it was okay for the white players to be bought & sold, but not the black players...
OK, fair enough.
Excellent point about the purchasing of players from independent leagues.
I read that Texas wedding story yesterday and had to go for a walk to collect myself. I’m a hard-core “faith in humanity” kind of guy and in that moment even I would have signed that “nuke from orbit” petition. Brutal.
People seemed to be confused. They believe the maskless person is the only one taking the risk. I don't know how that can be remedied. It's not just trump supporters that don't get virus theory.
Night Court was far & away my favorite sitcom from the 80s, and the one good thing about this reboot is maybe some network or streaming platform will finally start showing the old reruns again. It’s mind-boggling that it’s not on Nick at Nite or Antenna or Peacock or whatever other channels us olds watch.
In very related news, there was a Twitter thing going around last week about random (not “classic”) lines from tv/movies that somehow got stuck in your head and are impossible to remove. Mine? When the fisherman who rescued Dan Fielding after his plane crash said “SEATTLE”. (Sorry for not issuing a spoiler alert there.)
And I know there’s a lot of Barney Miller stans out there, but Night Court had the best theme song ever.
The Rockford Files had another good theme song.
Night Court and Barney Miller theme songs are great, but Sanford and Son was the best ever in my opinion.
Regarding Barney Miller though, I once read a fan theory that it was in the same TV universe as Night Court. The theme songs being bass-heavy was a piece of evidence to support the general idea that the arrestees from Barney Miller went before Judge Stone in their next step through the justice system.
And Craig, you weren't the only one with strong feelings for Markie Post...
I do a verbal rendition of the Sanford and Son theme fairly often, and haven't watched the show in a long time. That's one that sticks in the head. There are other great theme songs, but the ones with words are generally easier to remember than instrumentals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WqazleR3FE
There is a kind of melancholy that I always felt, even as a child, when listening to this theme song for Taxi. I mean that as a compliment. A lot of those shows featured spot-on depictions of working class people, which is something that you just don't see anymore.
The first several seasons of Roseanne belong in that discussion; everything about it rang true to my experiences as a kid growing up in similar economic circumstances.
I'm with you to a certain extent. Roseanne was one of the last of those shows that was trying to depict a working class family with worries about bills and potential job losses. It was a helluva lot better than the sitcoms that followed, where there almost seemed to be a directive from the executives that they don't depict "working class" as anything other than a mostly good time. Once you get to the nineties, it's almost all white people living in nice apartments in NYC and never struggling with anything other than relationships.
It's a shame Roseanne Barr went batshit.
I cannot imagine a show about funny cops has aged well. But Barney Miller was really good back then.
Brooklyn 99 pulls it off pretty well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdYzMhV0OVk
I recall reading an article - I think it was in TV Guide - where a former cop, in commenting on the police shows on TV, noted that every class of recruits at the NYPD academy was told almost immediately to forget everything they learned about policing from TV - except for Barney Miller..... Being a cop in a small precinct was mostly doing paperwork, and talking people out of pressing charges over stupid things so you didn't have to do paperwork.....
I dont know if it still is because I am too lazy to try and position my antenna juuust right anymore, but Night Court was on LAFF for a period of time if you have that in your area.
Never heard of LAFF before (since it lives within the obscure non-HD channels on Fios), but it turns out Night Court is on every day from 8-10 AM.
Thanks for the hot tip!
MLB & the Negro Leagues: Howard Bryant was interviewed on PBS News Hour last night and expressed much the same commentary. His main objection was that the statistics of the players subsumed into MLB records are incomplete & unreliable because of the second-class record keeping, in a sport that holds numbers as “sacred”. It makes sense that players knew not even their own batting averages because it was unclear if many games were league games or barnstorming “exhibitions”. He also said that MLB “destroyed” those players & coaches. I was unable to grasp that concept, as a few of those players became MLB stars, and others were legendary in their own communities.
Craig offers an explanation that helps me understand Bryant’s point; particularly the almost immediate disbanding of the leagues, and with them, the end of careers in baseball.
I’m going to invest in Bryant’s latest book, “Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field”.
Along these lines, I understand it better by thinking of the NFL’s “Rooney Rule”, now adopted in many organizations, including businesses. The Ambassador wisely influenced his fellow owners, and the Steelers have benefited from the Rule directly in the person of Mike Tomlin, in his 13th year of excellent football as Head Coach here in Pittsburgh. The very least MLB could do would be to adopt the Rooney Rule.
Also, if you are a baseball fan and find yourself in Kansas City, do not miss a trip to the Negro Baseball Hall of Fame. I was amazed, and shamed.
Striking that in the Night Court intro (the music for which was indeed good) two of the characters they introduced were smoking. Seems unimaginable now. I lived through that era, but I would have thought showing smoking on TV would have been out by then. I guess not.
The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”
In a nutshell, why I fucking hate living in Texas. You're my rotator cuff, went to physical therapy. A medical practice. No masks. No requirement for masks. Two months later still in pain. Why? I walked out. Now too frightened to go to any provider. Should can't get worse. I'll wait for pandemic to subside. I hate people.
I too lived in Texas for 10 years long ago -- well, Austin, but it's surrounded by Texas -- and can confirm most of this. I had a roommate there -- smart, educated, I'd even say a cultured guy -- who'd never been out of the state until I invited him on a road trip up to St. Louis, where I'd moved from. Granted he was only about 25, but still.
The music alone makes it worth the three hour drive from Houston.
but breakfast tacos are everywhere
Though... even Austin is in Texas :(. My daughter lives in Austin, we're in the SF Bay Area, and she just visited for a few days. (Before y'all freak out - she was in the Moderna trial, has a lovely antibody count, and her dad up in the Sacramento area has been having some health issues she came to help him out with.). She was marveling at the way people here are wearing masks, social distancing etc. - she says that this is not happening in Austin. Bars are packed, people are not wearing masks, not maintaining distance, acting like nothing is any different. Tho' the music scene is split. She's got a small gypsy jazz group, and for the most part the places they play are not trying to book anyone. But her bass player also plays with some country groups, and she says those groups are playing (small) live shows all the time.
I think to a large extent people take their cue on how to act and react on how the people around them are acting. In Texas, people don't wear masks, which leads to more people not wearing masks. In other states the opposite is true.
I guess in his defense it IS kind of hard to get out of Texas, it's so damn big. As the drivers' lament goes, "The sun has ris', the sun has set, and I ain't out of Texas yet." It's as far from Brownsville to Amarillo as from Dallas to Chicago.
That's funny. I tell people all the time that this is like living in a foreign country.
When they ask where I went to school, they mean high school to see if I went to a high school football power. When I answer that I went to the University Of Southern California I get peppered with questions about liberal bias in education and told college doesn't prepare you for the real world. The ignorance is astounding.
USC? Liberal bias? Compared to what?
Baylor, TCU....
Tore my rotator cuff...
Texas really makes it difficult to to have a good opinion of.
My favorite Night Court memory. The gang was talking about exercising and Selma Diamond said that she had recently gotten an exercise bike. It had a speedometer, odometer, heart rate tracker, timer, etc. She said "But I finally gave it away"
Gang "Why?"
Selma "No room for the ashtray"
Who wore the lip heater better? Selma Diamond or Dick Allen.
Only after going to SI did I focus on that the uniform Mr. Allen is wearing is the White Sox and not the Phillies. I don’t think I knew they wore red. Looks all wrong.
Great commentary on MLB and its impact on those who played and worked in the Negro Leagues. The point about how so many people were impacted when MLB just skimmed the top players away and still shut everyone else out is not just a baseball thing -- I think so many (white) people don't really understand how racist policies of the past still impact lives today (not to mention the racist policies of today).
A few years ago, I read a debut novel from Yaa Gyasi. It's called Homegoing and it tells the story of two half-sisters in Africa, one who marries a British military officer and one who is kidnaped and sold into slavery. Every subsequent chapter deals with one of their descendants, all the way up to present day. In addition to being a stunningly talented writer in terms of language and character development, Gyasi really brings home how slavery still impacts people today. The book got some buzz, and I'm reading her second novel right now, and she's still a great writer. However, it came out the same year as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which took a much different tack, and won the Pulitzer, even though it, in my opinion, isn't nearly as good as Gyasi's novel. Anyway, the decisions institutions and governments made many, many years ago still have concrete repercussions today.
Night Court's theme song left an indelible mark on my youth, because when I heard that closing theme I knew that it was time for 7-8-9-year-old me to go to bed.
Same with the opening of Northern Exposure. I remember begging to stay up just long enough to see the moose.