A blowout, an injury, a new competition, a theme song, an anniversary, a flamingo, access journalism, birth control, a character evolution and Nighthawks at the Diner
More seriously, Pujols's wife just had surgery to remove a brain tumor. I suspect that being back where he is loved while coping with personal difficulties makes a difference to him and that the team is aware of this. This might be a terrible baseball decision, but maybe it's a great human decision.
Holy s*** she had the surgery YESTERDAY in California. Hopefully the fact that he felt comfortable being 3,000 miles away - and apparently isn't rushing home to be with her - suggests that it's not that serious.
There is a phenomenon called the Baader-Meinhof Effect, which describes that feeling you get when you meet someone and suddenly see them all around town. I'm starting to feel that way about brain tumors.
I am not really sure I care for curatorial activism since to some degree it strikes me not as correcting things but rewriting history. For good or for ill, Hopper is the famous artist, and Hopper is the draw to the museum. Some paintings might be famous enough to deserve to have a wall all to themselves. Yes, show all the artists, but don't pretend that they have the fame of Hopper. At least, though, this recontextualization isn't accompanied by heavy-handed wall texts, and all the paintings are from the same period. MoMA's current approach does both, and I found it offputting the one time I went to see their new permanent collection show before I stopped going to museums, or working at one. (My own experience with curatorial activism has been negative, as I watched well meaning curators desperately trying to tell progressive stories with third rate ham fisted political art while adhering to a museum mission that was far more narrowly focused than they wanted to accept. I can't say I am unhappy not to be there anymore.)
Anyway....glad we got a recap for that game, since I couldn't help but notice that score and wonder. It was worse than I suspected, which is saying something.
Art history is a circle jerk of epic proportions. The ones that had power/money liked what they liked and others created similar art because that was popular at the time.
I took an Art History course at college for one reason. There were a ton of hot artsy girls in the class. The text books were basically coffee table books.
I don't know curatorial activism from janitorial recidivisim. But I do know that a large part of the role of art museums and galleries is to bring attention to the works of non-famous artists. MoMA and Corcoran's display of Bill Traylor's self-taught works opened eyes to an entire classification of art from Clementine Hunter to the Gee's Bend quilters to Lonnie Holley. Traylor, born a slave, had been dead for decades before his work was known to nearly anyone. Limiting central displays at museums to famous artists misses much of the point of the art itself.
Turning a spotlight on artists and works that may not have received their due is not rewriting history - it's expanding our understanding of that history. If a Hopper painting can act as a magnet to get people to experience work by other artists, more power to you. That's what good curators can do.
I was recently at the Art Institute and Nighthawks was already moved when we went there.
Although I hate to break to the curatorial activist that I paid exactly 0% of my time with Nighthawks examining and interrogating Edward Hopper’s privileged, hegemonic white male position vis a vis the two artists to either side. I can’t even describe what the other two even looked like.
So that’s a progressive art display fail.
I did however spend a great deal of time interrogating the atomism and loneliness of large cities and how the two people (man and woman middle) one infers were on some sort of date (perhaps after a show) hardly even looking at each other and how fractured our world was, even in 1942. Please no one tell feminist curator Maura Reilly that I looked at it wrong.
Cavalli wasn't even the only Nats pitcher to give up ten runs in that debacle yesterday. Anibal Sanchez, whom the Nats are desperately trying to make happen after he sat out all of 2021, started and gave up ten himself.
I've long wanted to make the "Guthrie" a thing, the antithesis of the "Maddux", in honor of long-time pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, whose last start in the majors (and only start ever with the Nats) took place in April of 2017 in a game in Philadelphia, where he gave up ten runs and didn't get out of the first. Going solely by runs allowed, both Cavalli and Sanchez achieved a Guthrie yesterday.
Cavalli had to "wear it" because he was scheduled to go four innings yesterday as he builds up for regular season starts. Martinez left him in to get his work in (and maybe to give him a taste of adversity). He'll be fine.
The odder part of the day is that the box score says Annibal Sanchez pitched 4 innings, but he got the first out of the fifth as well. How? Well in the second inning he threw a lot of pitches, so Martinez brought in a reliever to get the last out. Then Sanchez returned for the third inning (apparently this is permitted in spring training). He got the first out in the fifth then walked a guy and Martinez yanked him.
Here are the spring ERAs for the six guys who pitched yesterday: 14.21, 5.40, 12.27, 14.04, 24.00, 6.75. That includes three guys likely to make the team plus the #1 prospect. And Nelson Cruz got a hit on Tuesday to raise his spring average to .091.
Atlanta starter / Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson also pitched, was relieved, then returned to the game. I’m not 100% sure but think this spring training rule is new this season.
Cade Cavalli getting stamped on like a narc at biker rally? [John Oliver voice]Who could have seen that coming? Everyone but Dave Martinez! [/John Oliver voice]
Srsly, this is what I meant yesterday by one-handed typing. Cavalli didn't exactly dominate in his previous outing. Sure, he showed some promising signs, but one look at the pitch chart (see: https://nationalsprospects.com/2022/03/cavalli-hit-hard-in-5-4-nats-loss/) ought to be a clue that he did not.
Yet everyone gushed over that performance because, well, in 2022 the Nats are going blow chunks like the pie-eating contest in "Stand By Me" and the beat writers seem to think it's their job to print the company line.
It's also worth noting that the "bikers" were the Cards' second string, i.e., the very folks Cavalli will face in Rochester. Last September, the AAA batters hung a line of 7.04/4.54/1.86 (ERA/FIP/WHIP for those unfamiliar with the pitchers' triple-slash) in 40.2 IP over 6GS.
P.S. Fun fact: in his 2019 documentary, Lightfoot said the first take he and his band did was the one they used on the LP.
Next thing you are going to tell me that the Pointer Sisters weren't commissioned by Willie Stargell, Chuck Tanner, Dave Parker and - most obviously - Kent Tekulve to create We are Family.
Between the pillbox hats, Candyman and the Cobra, they definitely had cool down pat. Omar the Outmaker wasn't good, but my goodness he was fun. With both Easler and Madlock, they had cornered the market on 'professional hitters.' Scrap Iron and Blyleven gave them an edge on redass per capita. And Pops handing out stars!
Does Ed Ott still have the record for shortest name for a player?
And turning to le NBA, le Sixers theme song is fantastic. Puts a big smile every time it starts playing at le Wells Fargo Center as le final seconds tick down during home victories: https://youtu.be/gEKK3GVd150
I don't even have to listen to know it's better than Kevin Costner's Tampa Bay Rays Wankfest. I had to sit through that one live once. I will never watch Yellowstone for that.
The Cards had their own really awful one in around 1976 or '77. "We Can Do It." (Spoiler alert: No, they couldn't.) The lyrics and tune are forever embedded in my head, unfortunately. I remember one night they were playing it before the game and a couple of Dodgers, including Glenn Burke, were sort of mockingly dancing to it in their dugout. Then they beat our brains out in the game. Good times.
The Red Sox have this, based on a song "Tessie" that the "rooters" sang in 1903. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6EIN3EeE78 OF COURSE it's Dropkick Murphys because that's the Red Sox brand.
Why not? Like walk-up music. It's become huge in the past few decades.
The Jays have this, which reminds me of being a child in the 90s and cartoons trying to sell us on regular exercise. It plays during the 7th inning stretch, which the Jays take literally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qag6w_Tp50A
Very weird. It's not awful, and it would work I think - sort of - as a background for highlights leading into some big game, but it just doesn't seem to have the feel of a theme song for a baseball team.
Also the thing was almost over before I realized they were singing Guardians instead of just miscellaneous whoooaaa-ing but that might be because I'm getting old and life has taken its toll on the upper range of my hearing, alas.
Why? I know I'm alone here but I like both the concept of a power-pop-y song and the actual song.
The retroness is actually a plus for an industry obsessed with the past. And the popularity of closer and walk up music, one of the few baseball innovations people actually like, makes team theme songs inevitable. And I like that the Guardians are trying to create new team iconography now that the tribe is rightly in the dustbin of history.
Guys - I’m starting to worry the 2022 Nats aren’t going to be very good.
PS I went over to my parents’ house last night to help my dad load his Nats tickets (just 5 games) into the Ballpark app on his phone...I guess that’s the thing about family - you love and support them even when you’re worried they are making terrible decisions.
It was quite a show. For some reason, the tickets are under my mom‘s email address even though he loads them on his phone, but neither one of them could remember the password… And when he tried to reset it himself the app was suggesting a “strong“ password with lots of random characters that he was trying to write down and type in again, rather than cut and paste. It didn’t go well.
I ended up at their kitchen table with his phone and her iPad, trying to straighten it all out while the two of them gently bickered about whose fault it was. We finally landed on a new password that was easier to remember… As I said to my dad, if you had millions of dollars in a bank account I can understand a super strong password, but these are ten 2022 Nats e-tickets – you could probably leave them on the ground and no one would steal them.
You’re cracking me and my wife up! I just read the whole thing to her and we’re laughing our asses off because this is *exactly* like her parents, right down to the kitchen table and the bickering.
Type out cusswords but replace e with 3, o with 0, and a with @. Did that for my mom's frequent flyer accounts and she still remembers them even though she hasn't flown anywhere since 2019.
It will not shock you to learn that this isn’t the first time I’ve had to provide this kind of assistance, so I was in and out in about 45 minutes… But it was a looooooooong 45.
I frequently have to be tech support for my parents over FaceTime and my most common request is “Stop showing me your lap and point the camera at the problem”
Well, until you get the message saying that your OS no longer supports the latest update of Chrome, and random things just stop working (until you buy a replacement)
Craig, I was beginning to worry. Yesterday you liked the Nats city view uniform, today you like the home run derby concept. I was holding my breath when I arrived at the topic of theGuardians new song. Faith renewed! Last night I sent the song video to a friend and we concluded that they should just go with Cleveland Rocks and call it a day. Of course, that would involve royalty payments so like anything else involving good ways to invest in the team, that's off the table. Gee Man!
I was listening to HipHop Nation on Sirius yesterday and didn't recognize a song. Looking down, I saw that there was an umlaut in the song title and then realized, "oh shit! it's Craig's boy Yeat!"
It has been too long since I've been to the Art Institute -- back when I was in law school at DePaul, I'd sometimes go there on lunch with the front desk secretary, who was an art student. One time, we ran into my Contracts professor, Professor Leacock. He was very pleased to see us, and with his Barbadian accent, he said, "Mr. Bennett, so lovely to see you here. It is always a good idea to take a break from the law once in a while and take in some culture" (heavy emphasis on last word -- so I can't recall what other paintings have their own display wall. The only one that comes to mind is Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But the Seurat is very large, whereas Hopper's Nighthawks is smaller and having it next to other paintings by other artists with a similar style is a great idea.
The Paris rainy day painting by Gustave Caillabotte also has its own wall, but again it is absolutely enormous. I agree with you, despite the popularity and importance of Nighthawks it seemed weird to have a normally scaled painting floating all alone on a wall. I love the idea of adding context.
The Art Institute has been doing a lot of that lately, and I really like the results. They redid their gallery of African art to give more context as well, listing probable artists on the continent who did pieces if they could instead of just basically "some dude in West Africa somewhere carved this cool thing" and are displaying more textiles and pottery, which show a great deal of artistic sophistication and were extremely important to the culture, but were most often made by women so the men who were collecting tended to dismiss them as crafts and not true art and focus on more manly items like wooden and metal sculptures. It really helps to emphasize the long artistic tradition to see more varied artworks and I really like how it works.
I just don't understand the prevailing wisdom that Republicans will take back the House and perhaps the Senate. The only reason that could happen is because the Democratic party is so inept at elections. There's so much ammunition available to convince normal people that their choices are vote for the Democrat or some third party candidate, or don't vote at all.
The GQP plotting to steal elections while centrist Dems argue about which font they should use on the a sternly, but not too sternly, worded letter asking the GQP'ers if they could find it in their hearts and in the spirit of bi-partisanship, could they consider not stealing the election. All is well in America.
Yes and no. It affects the statehouse, and the House, which means it creates a deeper bench of politicians who are plausible candidates for Senate, while systematically disenfranchising D voters, which affects every election, not just District-based ones.
Why are Democrats so useless? There's no reason they should be.
Or because public officials in some states actively suppress the vote (paring the rolls, closing polling stations in neighborhoods/districts likely to lean Democratic, limiting early voting, etc.).
All of the money the US spent building up countries to hedge against the USSR eroded the massive productivity advantage we had in the postwar era as developing nations became global players and the insurmountable contradictions of the New Deal coalition finally came to a head, while Nixon figured out the formula that is now the GOP’s stock in trade. Now the Dems provide neither the pork barrel patronage that keeps voters and local machines happy, nor the ideological consistency and commitment that keeps the activist base engaged.
The Democratic Party IS inept when it comes to winning elections. I don't know more than one or two people who actually voted FOR Biden, as opposed to voting AGAINST Trump. Nobody with a functioning non-partisan brain could honestly believe that Biden is doing a good job or that he's a good candidate.
I'm someone who would have once proudly referred to himself as a Liberal Democrat but I've grown to regard the Dems as so horribly inept that I have to just hold my nose and vote for them. Just think about how often you see/hear them talking about the need for a strong Republican party. It's a fucking fundraising competition to these people. They don't want to govern, they just want your money and bragging rights whenever they win.
The Democrats are going to get slaughtered in the midterms and we may even have to deal with another Trump presidency in a few years. These people suck.
More seriously, Pujols's wife just had surgery to remove a brain tumor. I suspect that being back where he is loved while coping with personal difficulties makes a difference to him and that the team is aware of this. This might be a terrible baseball decision, but maybe it's a great human decision.
Holy s*** she had the surgery YESTERDAY in California. Hopefully the fact that he felt comfortable being 3,000 miles away - and apparently isn't rushing home to be with her - suggests that it's not that serious.
There is a phenomenon called the Baader-Meinhof Effect, which describes that feeling you get when you meet someone and suddenly see them all around town. I'm starting to feel that way about brain tumors.
"minor surgery" is when it's somebody else.
-- Woody Allen or somebody
I'm seeing the quote attributed to Fred Thompson, senator AND actor.
I am not really sure I care for curatorial activism since to some degree it strikes me not as correcting things but rewriting history. For good or for ill, Hopper is the famous artist, and Hopper is the draw to the museum. Some paintings might be famous enough to deserve to have a wall all to themselves. Yes, show all the artists, but don't pretend that they have the fame of Hopper. At least, though, this recontextualization isn't accompanied by heavy-handed wall texts, and all the paintings are from the same period. MoMA's current approach does both, and I found it offputting the one time I went to see their new permanent collection show before I stopped going to museums, or working at one. (My own experience with curatorial activism has been negative, as I watched well meaning curators desperately trying to tell progressive stories with third rate ham fisted political art while adhering to a museum mission that was far more narrowly focused than they wanted to accept. I can't say I am unhappy not to be there anymore.)
Anyway....glad we got a recap for that game, since I couldn't help but notice that score and wonder. It was worse than I suspected, which is saying something.
Art history is a circle jerk of epic proportions. The ones that had power/money liked what they liked and others created similar art because that was popular at the time.
I took an Art History course at college for one reason. There were a ton of hot artsy girls in the class. The text books were basically coffee table books.
On the matter of what makes a work of art "famous", I can recommend "Famous Works of Art – And How They Got That Way" by John B. Nici
https://pureblather.com/2017/01/09/famous-works-of-art-and-how-they-got-that-way/
I don't know curatorial activism from janitorial recidivisim. But I do know that a large part of the role of art museums and galleries is to bring attention to the works of non-famous artists. MoMA and Corcoran's display of Bill Traylor's self-taught works opened eyes to an entire classification of art from Clementine Hunter to the Gee's Bend quilters to Lonnie Holley. Traylor, born a slave, had been dead for decades before his work was known to nearly anyone. Limiting central displays at museums to famous artists misses much of the point of the art itself.
Hey, CB! Didn't Curatorial Activism and Janitorial Recidivism BOTH open for Industrial Shithouse at Wembley?
Turning a spotlight on artists and works that may not have received their due is not rewriting history - it's expanding our understanding of that history. If a Hopper painting can act as a magnet to get people to experience work by other artists, more power to you. That's what good curators can do.
Would like to see the other two paintings to see if I like them as much as Hoppers.
I don't think that would be any curator's intention; it's just a way of disrupting our accepted view of art history. Same with lots of disciplines.
I was recently at the Art Institute and Nighthawks was already moved when we went there.
Although I hate to break to the curatorial activist that I paid exactly 0% of my time with Nighthawks examining and interrogating Edward Hopper’s privileged, hegemonic white male position vis a vis the two artists to either side. I can’t even describe what the other two even looked like.
So that’s a progressive art display fail.
I did however spend a great deal of time interrogating the atomism and loneliness of large cities and how the two people (man and woman middle) one infers were on some sort of date (perhaps after a show) hardly even looking at each other and how fractured our world was, even in 1942. Please no one tell feminist curator Maura Reilly that I looked at it wrong.
Cavalli wasn't even the only Nats pitcher to give up ten runs in that debacle yesterday. Anibal Sanchez, whom the Nats are desperately trying to make happen after he sat out all of 2021, started and gave up ten himself.
I've long wanted to make the "Guthrie" a thing, the antithesis of the "Maddux", in honor of long-time pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, whose last start in the majors (and only start ever with the Nats) took place in April of 2017 in a game in Philadelphia, where he gave up ten runs and didn't get out of the first. Going solely by runs allowed, both Cavalli and Sanchez achieved a Guthrie yesterday.
Spring training means nothing, until it does.
I am just wondering if there were any Cardinals whose prospects for making the team were improved because they got so many more at bats.
"It looks like the Cardinals have decided to have the worlds shittiest bench and DH options."
I think that's become integral to the Cardinal Way.
Cavalli had to "wear it" because he was scheduled to go four innings yesterday as he builds up for regular season starts. Martinez left him in to get his work in (and maybe to give him a taste of adversity). He'll be fine.
The odder part of the day is that the box score says Annibal Sanchez pitched 4 innings, but he got the first out of the fifth as well. How? Well in the second inning he threw a lot of pitches, so Martinez brought in a reliever to get the last out. Then Sanchez returned for the third inning (apparently this is permitted in spring training). He got the first out in the fifth then walked a guy and Martinez yanked him.
Here are the spring ERAs for the six guys who pitched yesterday: 14.21, 5.40, 12.27, 14.04, 24.00, 6.75. That includes three guys likely to make the team plus the #1 prospect. And Nelson Cruz got a hit on Tuesday to raise his spring average to .091.
Gonna be a long year on South Capitol Street.
Atlanta starter / Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson also pitched, was relieved, then returned to the game. I’m not 100% sure but think this spring training rule is new this season.
I think it started in 2020, but if not then it was 2021.
Do "innings" build up arms, or pitches?
It’s innings, I would think. Cavelli was scheduled for 4 innings and probably 60 pitches. Sanchez was scheduled for 5 innings/80 pitches.
Cade Cavalli getting stamped on like a narc at biker rally? [John Oliver voice]Who could have seen that coming? Everyone but Dave Martinez! [/John Oliver voice]
Srsly, this is what I meant yesterday by one-handed typing. Cavalli didn't exactly dominate in his previous outing. Sure, he showed some promising signs, but one look at the pitch chart (see: https://nationalsprospects.com/2022/03/cavalli-hit-hard-in-5-4-nats-loss/) ought to be a clue that he did not.
Yet everyone gushed over that performance because, well, in 2022 the Nats are going blow chunks like the pie-eating contest in "Stand By Me" and the beat writers seem to think it's their job to print the company line.
It's also worth noting that the "bikers" were the Cards' second string, i.e., the very folks Cavalli will face in Rochester. Last September, the AAA batters hung a line of 7.04/4.54/1.86 (ERA/FIP/WHIP for those unfamiliar with the pitchers' triple-slash) in 40.2 IP over 6GS.
P.S. Fun fact: in his 2019 documentary, Lightfoot said the first take he and his band did was the one they used on the LP.
Cade, it’s too rough to pull ya.
Cade, it’s been good to know ya.
That Cleveland Guardians song is way more Fall Out Boy than it is Imagine Dragons
(But yeah, very weird song for a baseball team…)
Next thing you are going to tell me that the Pointer Sisters weren't commissioned by Willie Stargell, Chuck Tanner, Dave Parker and - most obviously - Kent Tekulve to create We are Family.
Between the pillbox hats, Candyman and the Cobra, they definitely had cool down pat. Omar the Outmaker wasn't good, but my goodness he was fun. With both Easler and Madlock, they had cornered the market on 'professional hitters.' Scrap Iron and Blyleven gave them an edge on redass per capita. And Pops handing out stars!
Does Ed Ott still have the record for shortest name for a player?
They weren't!
'"We Are Family" is a song recorded by American vocal group Sister Sledge...'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Family_(song)
Factual accuracy? Who needs it?!?!
But thanks anyway. ;)
Factual accuracy! Hoaaaaaah! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!
Well, I grew up with "Meet the Mets, Meet the Mets, Come right out and Greet the Mets", so yeah teams commissioning theme songs is definitely a thing.
You sure you got those lyrics correct? I remember everyone always singing “Beat the Mets, Beat the Mets”
Le Marlins have one of le, ahem, "greats": https://youtu.be/9AmzFieO-FE
And turning to le NBA, le Sixers theme song is fantastic. Puts a big smile every time it starts playing at le Wells Fargo Center as le final seconds tick down during home victories: https://youtu.be/gEKK3GVd150
I don't even have to listen to know it's better than Kevin Costner's Tampa Bay Rays Wankfest. I had to sit through that one live once. I will never watch Yellowstone for that.
The Cards had their own really awful one in around 1976 or '77. "We Can Do It." (Spoiler alert: No, they couldn't.) The lyrics and tune are forever embedded in my head, unfortunately. I remember one night they were playing it before the game and a couple of Dodgers, including Glenn Burke, were sort of mockingly dancing to it in their dugout. Then they beat our brains out in the game. Good times.
Looks like it was '78. They killed it off in June, to (almost) everyone's relief.
https://stltoday.newspapers.com/clip/51437960/cardinals-unsuccessful-we-can-do-it/
Ahem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mr7mQuGmp0
O-R-I-O-L-ES!
This sounds astonishingly similar to the theme song for MST3K, which, is of course intentionally corny and terrible.
The Red Sox have this, based on a song "Tessie" that the "rooters" sang in 1903. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6EIN3EeE78 OF COURSE it's Dropkick Murphys because that's the Red Sox brand.
Why not? Like walk-up music. It's become huge in the past few decades.
The Jays have this, which reminds me of being a child in the 90s and cartoons trying to sell us on regular exercise. It plays during the 7th inning stretch, which the Jays take literally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qag6w_Tp50A
Uggh. Then I’m *definitely* not going to listen to it. I wish Fall Out Boy would fall off the planet.
Folie à Deux is a fantastic album
Very weird. It's not awful, and it would work I think - sort of - as a background for highlights leading into some big game, but it just doesn't seem to have the feel of a theme song for a baseball team.
Also the thing was almost over before I realized they were singing Guardians instead of just miscellaneous whoooaaa-ing but that might be because I'm getting old and life has taken its toll on the upper range of my hearing, alas.
It's too long in general, but just like people only know the chorus to "You're the Best Around" or "Living on a Prayer", same with this.
Why? I know I'm alone here but I like both the concept of a power-pop-y song and the actual song.
The retroness is actually a plus for an industry obsessed with the past. And the popularity of closer and walk up music, one of the few baseball innovations people actually like, makes team theme songs inevitable. And I like that the Guardians are trying to create new team iconography now that the tribe is rightly in the dustbin of history.
Came here to suggest this as well. Somewhat relieved I’m not the only one that thought so.
Guys - I’m starting to worry the 2022 Nats aren’t going to be very good.
PS I went over to my parents’ house last night to help my dad load his Nats tickets (just 5 games) into the Ballpark app on his phone...I guess that’s the thing about family - you love and support them even when you’re worried they are making terrible decisions.
Helping your dad load tickets into an app on his phone makes you a warrior, like this guy:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/the-ballad-of-a-wi-fi-hero
It was quite a show. For some reason, the tickets are under my mom‘s email address even though he loads them on his phone, but neither one of them could remember the password… And when he tried to reset it himself the app was suggesting a “strong“ password with lots of random characters that he was trying to write down and type in again, rather than cut and paste. It didn’t go well.
I ended up at their kitchen table with his phone and her iPad, trying to straighten it all out while the two of them gently bickered about whose fault it was. We finally landed on a new password that was easier to remember… As I said to my dad, if you had millions of dollars in a bank account I can understand a super strong password, but these are ten 2022 Nats e-tickets – you could probably leave them on the ground and no one would steal them.
This story is very triggering
You’re cracking me and my wife up! I just read the whole thing to her and we’re laughing our asses off because this is *exactly* like her parents, right down to the kitchen table and the bickering.
Comedy is tragedy plus time. You're welcome.
Type out cusswords but replace e with 3, o with 0, and a with @. Did that for my mom's frequent flyer accounts and she still remembers them even though she hasn't flown anywhere since 2019.
You know how you and I are the same person?
After reading this I am convinced that you and I are the SAME PERSON.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vFGKHzY_38
If that’s the case, then I can’t think of a better person to be cloned from.
They love baseball ❤️
Can we assume that the ticket-loading took at least 90 minutes more than it should have?
It will not shock you to learn that this isn’t the first time I’ve had to provide this kind of assistance, so I was in and out in about 45 minutes… But it was a looooooooong 45.
I frequently have to be tech support for my parents over FaceTime and my most common request is “Stop showing me your lap and point the camera at the problem”
I directed my mom to a Chromebook several years ago. Makes life so much easier as very little goes wrong on a Chromebook.
Well, until you get the message saying that your OS no longer supports the latest update of Chrome, and random things just stop working (until you buy a replacement)
Still much better than something breaking with every Windows update.
Great to read “And That Happened”. was wondering when your Spring Training would start!
Hope all in family are well.
Craig, I was beginning to worry. Yesterday you liked the Nats city view uniform, today you like the home run derby concept. I was holding my breath when I arrived at the topic of theGuardians new song. Faith renewed! Last night I sent the song video to a friend and we concluded that they should just go with Cleveland Rocks and call it a day. Of course, that would involve royalty payments so like anything else involving good ways to invest in the team, that's off the table. Gee Man!
What does a man have to do to attract Taylor Swift? I would never have guessed that. "Yellow and blue for Dustin", indeed.
Just asking hypothetically, I'm not planning anything.
I was listening to HipHop Nation on Sirius yesterday and didn't recognize a song. Looking down, I saw that there was an umlaut in the song title and then realized, "oh shit! it's Craig's boy Yeat!"
It has been too long since I've been to the Art Institute -- back when I was in law school at DePaul, I'd sometimes go there on lunch with the front desk secretary, who was an art student. One time, we ran into my Contracts professor, Professor Leacock. He was very pleased to see us, and with his Barbadian accent, he said, "Mr. Bennett, so lovely to see you here. It is always a good idea to take a break from the law once in a while and take in some culture" (heavy emphasis on last word -- so I can't recall what other paintings have their own display wall. The only one that comes to mind is Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But the Seurat is very large, whereas Hopper's Nighthawks is smaller and having it next to other paintings by other artists with a similar style is a great idea.
The Paris rainy day painting by Gustave Caillabotte also has its own wall, but again it is absolutely enormous. I agree with you, despite the popularity and importance of Nighthawks it seemed weird to have a normally scaled painting floating all alone on a wall. I love the idea of adding context.
The Art Institute has been doing a lot of that lately, and I really like the results. They redid their gallery of African art to give more context as well, listing probable artists on the continent who did pieces if they could instead of just basically "some dude in West Africa somewhere carved this cool thing" and are displaying more textiles and pottery, which show a great deal of artistic sophistication and were extremely important to the culture, but were most often made by women so the men who were collecting tended to dismiss them as crafts and not true art and focus on more manly items like wooden and metal sculptures. It really helps to emphasize the long artistic tradition to see more varied artworks and I really like how it works.
First Lightfoot reference: "Look at him go. This boy can really fly"
Second Lightfoot reference: ""He's gonna slide in head first...here he comes...he' out! No, wait, safe..."
Third Lightfoot reference: "STOP RIGHT THERE!"
I'm not sure my coffee is strong enough to handle Meat Loaf and Gordon Lightfoot before 9 am.
I’m now seeing a business for a finger stick or something (like diabetics use) that would show the amount of male birth control in the blood.
Man, Elizabeth Holmes was just ahead of her time. And a felon, but still ahead of her time.
I just don't understand the prevailing wisdom that Republicans will take back the House and perhaps the Senate. The only reason that could happen is because the Democratic party is so inept at elections. There's so much ammunition available to convince normal people that their choices are vote for the Democrat or some third party candidate, or don't vote at all.
Or it happens because there is a ton of gerrymandering.
Or because the GOP plays to crap like "Critical Race Theory" and it's proven really difficult to make racist voters stop voting racist.
Or because the public believes all the stuff in the media that says Biden is wholly responsible for inflation and Putin.
Which is not to absolve the Democrats. Not at all. I think we ARE bad at elections now. But the environment is incredibly difficult on top of that.
The GQP plotting to steal elections while centrist Dems argue about which font they should use on the a sternly, but not too sternly, worded letter asking the GQP'ers if they could find it in their hearts and in the spirit of bi-partisanship, could they consider not stealing the election. All is well in America.
Yes and no. It affects the statehouse, and the House, which means it creates a deeper bench of politicians who are plausible candidates for Senate, while systematically disenfranchising D voters, which affects every election, not just District-based ones.
Why are Democrats so useless? There's no reason they should be.
There are enough seats in the House that still "swing" that gerrymandering, while a huge reason, should not be determinative.
Or because public officials in some states actively suppress the vote (paring the rolls, closing polling stations in neighborhoods/districts likely to lean Democratic, limiting early voting, etc.).
I am sure they do that here, but all the suppresers are Democrats :(
The question is WHY the GOP can manipulate voters and why Democrats can't. What happened to the party of FDR and Johnson and Tip O'Neill?
All of the money the US spent building up countries to hedge against the USSR eroded the massive productivity advantage we had in the postwar era as developing nations became global players and the insurmountable contradictions of the New Deal coalition finally came to a head, while Nixon figured out the formula that is now the GOP’s stock in trade. Now the Dems provide neither the pork barrel patronage that keeps voters and local machines happy, nor the ideological consistency and commitment that keeps the activist base engaged.
Bigots always vote.
Why? And why don't likely D constituencies like young and minorities?
I vote, but I wouldn’t blame other young people for not doing it when we just had a “blue wave” and all we got to show for it was a Highway Bill.
The Democratic Party IS inept when it comes to winning elections. I don't know more than one or two people who actually voted FOR Biden, as opposed to voting AGAINST Trump. Nobody with a functioning non-partisan brain could honestly believe that Biden is doing a good job or that he's a good candidate.
I'm someone who would have once proudly referred to himself as a Liberal Democrat but I've grown to regard the Dems as so horribly inept that I have to just hold my nose and vote for them. Just think about how often you see/hear them talking about the need for a strong Republican party. It's a fucking fundraising competition to these people. They don't want to govern, they just want your money and bragging rights whenever they win.
The Democrats are going to get slaughtered in the midterms and we may even have to deal with another Trump presidency in a few years. These people suck.
The GOP has a built in advantage in Congress because they own most of the rural states. Plus gerrymandering. Plus gutting the VRA.