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Her name is actually “Blanca,” with an “L.”

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Throughout the pandemic my stance towards other people's actions has been largely non-judgmental since we've been let down by our institutions so thoroughly and left to fend for ourselves at every level. But then the callousness in that Texas wedding article is something that directly challenges that ethos. I feel like the only way to synthesize these two thoughts is to think about why weddings and other stuff like that are literally worth dying for to some people. Upon some reflection it's definitely ignorance to some degree (which relates to the institutional failure from before), but I also think our culture of alienation makes it so that events like that are the only thing worth living for for some people. So yeah in that mindset why wouldn't you risk death? Don't know how to easily solve that!

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As the saying goes, everything's bigger in Texas. Even -- especially? -- assholes.

Looks like Paul Alexander jumped up a few spots on the list of people who should never again be gainfully employed in the public sphere.

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