Tell 'em Wash, Harper at the cold corner, some GMs got the scoots, Boras' B.S., more on autonomous vehicles, the delusional J.D. Vance, Great Moments in I.P. Exploitation, and waitin' for your man
I never stopped watching cartoons, nor have most of my friends. There aren't many I like now, but my allegiance to things like Batman and Gargoyles was brought about when I was in my 20s.
Though my actually watching cartoons on Saturday mornings ended with becoming more of a sabbath observer.
The Spielberg affiliated shows were never about selling toys, they were about indulging Spielberg's love for the old cartoons and trying to replicate them. (Even now, when there is a market for adults buying toys based on cartoons they loved 30 years ago, there's not much merch.)
Batman has been all about the toys since the beginning, but if anyone put pressure on the creative team to make a "toyetic' character or episode, no one was paying attention.
I think my holy trinity of cartoons growing up were Batman: The Animated Series, TMNT, and The Real Ghostbusters. Those were certainly the 3 that I had the most toys from, but I think The Real Ghostbusters was probably the overall winner. All my Ghostbusters toys were based off that cartoon, including Slimer and the 3-foot tall firehouse. And I had the life-sized plastic proton back with the long yellow foam noodle that stuck out of the front as the "beam", man that thing was awesome. My white whale was the official trap though, I never got that, but my dad did make a cool homemade one as part of my Egon Halloween costume one year.
Also does anyone remember that cartoon where, I think maybe it was Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and maybe Bo Jackson? would fight monsters and stuff using their hockey sticks, bats, balls, etc.? I remember watching that one but can't really remember much else about it.
I was working Sat mornings at MickyDs by then, so could have never watched it but our VCR was just sitting there doing nothing. It's tragic that I am only just now learning about this show.
Probably Earthworm Jim, which was a cartoon for kids that had the Litany of Fear from Dune as a running gag. Shame that the creator later revealed himself as an obnoxious transphobic jackass.
"Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future" A kind of version of "Battlestar Galactica" (humans vs evil robots) that was specifically - and explicitly - intended to sell toys, but managed to have some surprisingly adult themes in it. One scene I remember had the team decorating a cheap little fake Christmas tree, while lamenting that their mission kept them from being with their families and friends over the holidays....
There are so many for me. The Flintstones, Jetsons, Bugs Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, the Roadrunner, Speedy Gonzalez, Yosemite Sam, basically all of the old school Warner Brothers cartoons.
Mine was the rather atrocious *Dungeons & Dragons* cartoon when I was in junior high and a D&D player. I'd do my Saturday morning paper route, then watch that as well as *Inside the NFL* on Showtime with Len Dawson and Nick Buoniconti
I’m not defending Nightingale, who seems firmly planted in the would rather be first than correct camp, but this time of year there’s not much to write about and editors still need columns. So we get lots of stupid columns predicting free agent destinations and contracts, which is folly unless it’s Kershaw, and often wild speculation. And anything that feels like news gets amplified 10x. You can’t really write that the Cubs are interested in Ohtani but so are 14 other teams.
In that vein The Athletic has a story today “Ten big-name MLB players who could be traded this offseason”. Have not looked but once you get past Soto, I expect it’s a lot of guys with a 10% chance of being traded rather than the usual 1%.
Up early here ... the gales of November came early to northern Minnesota and WOW is it windy.
How hard could it be to manage the Angels?
PS The number of Republicans trying to argue that they (not the voters) are the only ones in step is simultaneously maddening and hilarious.
PPS I like to think of myself as relatively accepting of new technology, but it will be a long time, if ever, before I get into a driverless car. I freely admit that it is an irrational position, but it is deep-seated.
Peterson being out for the Mets adds to the shopping list, but it doesn't really change the level of urgency. He doesn't shake anyone covering the Mets as likely to be the sort of starter you wanted to see regularly, and I haven't seen talk of him going to the pen. I hope he heals well and can return and find his place in the game, but this isn't that big a deal, except insofar as it seems like half the team entered the off season badly dinged up.
If we had been given three or four more Ghostbusters films that would have done interesting things with the original cast, I would have been okay with that. The Ghostbusters cartoon of the 80s did that and did it pretty well despite having awful animation. And I know people who really liked the distaff reboot and wanted more of that. But I agree that no one anywhere asked for more of whatever it is we have now. (The two franchises I would rather have, all that said, are Master and Commander and Easy Rawlins. One film for either is not enough.)
Did the GOP jump the shark by giving it's zealots what they wanted regarding abortion?
I thought the idea was to keep *promising* to outlaw abortion, but never actually doing it. Once done, having fucked around, they got to find out that it wasn't as popular as they thought and holding it out as a carrot was far more effective than finding out that it was something only their zealots wanted but that most of America did not.
They seem absolutely determined to force their version of religion on everyone whether they like it or not and simultaneously insist that in spite of all the advantages they have they are an unfairly persecuted minority under seige by secular armies.
It's so infuriating. Their religion's 2 major holidays, Christmas and Easter, are widely celebrated even by secular people (heck, Good Friday is an official holiday at my workplace, which is weird but I don't mind a 3-day weekend and it's a long haul between MLK Day and Memorial Day) and yet they batch and moan that not everyone believes the same thing they do.
The phrase I've heard is that Republicans are like the dog who was chasing a car and suddenly caught it. What do they do now? There's not a plan for that. Also, going forward on issues where people more or less agree on what they want but disagree on the method to get there, voters are more likely to say, "Well, I couldn't trust you with reproductive rights so why should I trust you with _____?"
Unfortunately their plan is now to add more voter restrictions. Because they know they tend to lose when turnout is high. Coincidence that a majority Black district in Mississippi ran out of ballots TWICE on Tuesday? Unlikely.
I have often said that the Republicans on abortion are like the dog who caught the car. There are, no doubt, many people who are focused solely on the issue for religious reasons, but it strikes me that there are far more Republicans who were happy to ride that passion to serve the interests of capital. Smarter people than me can disagree, but that feels to me like one reason why we have seen this growing anti-trans/book banning sentiment – they need a new stalking horse.
I realized more than a decade ago that the gops have no interest in winning free and fair elections, so if I've known it for that long, it must have been true for way longer than that. But that's the reason they often do things that would be baffling if they were done by a political party that had any interest in winning free and fair elections, like continuing to back wildly unpopular policies. They "caught the car," but much like the proverbial dog, they not only can't drive it, they have no interest in driving it.
I always sensed that growing up in a conservative family in a conservative part of town -- that it was just about being "right" and the "right" things needed to be enshrined in law, regardless of who/how many agreed with them or how it was achieved. If it was through a legitimate election, hey, the majority agrees with them, but I always got that underlying sense that if conservative-minded people didn't get their way they would just rearrange things so that they did. It's a huge part of why I am not conservative.
Yeah, and that's basically an authoritarian mindset, which has always been present in conservatism, but hasn't always been the dominant way of thinking, at least in this country. Chris in Illinois in this thread mentioned Reagan, who I think was part of a transitionary period launched by Goldwater's nomination. That was a move away from what I think we mostly now call Eisenhower Republicans — the kind of Republican administration that might, and did, send in National Guard troops to enforce desegregation orders and spoke out against the military industrial complex, a phrase Ike coined — toward today's gops, who are straight-up authoritarians.
I think the rise of that wing can be traced to the success of Newt Gingrich. It's been a steady march toward extremism since the Contract on America period. And that's a march away from small-d democracy.
Before Newt came along, and even for a decade or so after, it would have been a stop-in-your-tracks scandal if two prominent Republicans spoke explicitly about small-d democracy as a bad thing in the space of a few days. That's just happened — Mike Johnson and Rick Santorum — and it barely caused a ripple. I realize Johnson said the thing about the two wolves and a lamb in the past but nobody heard it till the other day.
The rise of Goldwater conservatism happened at the same time as the civil rights gains were being made and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. The GOP adopted the Southern Strategy and that's when it stopped being the party of Eisenhower.
Yes, except nothing turns on a dime. It took a while for the old-school Republicans to filter out. Nixon straddled the eras. He won the presidency on the Southern strategy, but also: It's literally impossible to imagine a Republican administration since the 90s presiding over something like the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.
One of the priorities of the Republican party in the Goldwater-Reagan era, predating Gingrich, was "this is what's best for the United States as a country." It wasn't necessarily always, or maybe even ever, the top priority, and certainly I personally disagree with not only most of their ideas about what was good for the country but their ideas about who qualified as Americans, or "real" Americans. But "good for the country" was part of the calculus.
The Republicans are the party of grievances, not a party of solutions. Since the Southern Strategy kicked into gear, the party has been a small number of people at the top who primarily don't want to pay taxes, or see the government spend unnecessary money, and those people are willing to listen to anyone. Want to whine about racial politics, or the LGBTQ+ community, or immigration, or that this country sent itself to Hell when they stopped forcing kids to pray in public schools? They will be happy to listen, and tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to get your vote. That's why when conservatives are in power, even when they run on an issue like killing the ACA, they never get anything done--except occasionally lowering taxes on the party leaders.
The key to their success, though, was keeping a tight leash on their base while also keeping the carrots juuust out of reach. They knew giving them everything they wanted would be a disaster for their ability to remain in power, due to the unpopularity of the specific aspects of those desires. What Trump did was weaponize the same forces in essentially the exact same way, only he actually started to give the base what they wanted. He threw the courts to the evangelicals, he threw the FBI to the conspiracy theorists, etc. So now the party is all but in a civil war between leaders whose power is evaporating and a base who don't like the idea of going back to not getting what they want. Meanwhile, the majority of the country is horrified and milling around in between enthusiasm to vote those fools out and despair that those people have power in the first place.
we all have seen precise and insightful remarks regarding our sad state of affairs (re)ignited by tRump. I love the Kasporov quote on propaganda, and one of my go-to remarks, is this, from Frank Wilhoit: "Conservatism consists of one proposition, to wit, there are in groups whom the law protects but does not bind and out groups that the law binds but does not protect." That leads us right to the end of rule of law and authoritarianism but if you look at our country it's where we've been for a long time.
First congratulations to Ohio on the election business, since I was at an all-day seminar and also making long commutes successfully avoiding deer in the dark yesterday.
And I'm so glad the "it's not an abortion ban if you call it a limitation or consensus" messaging failed in Virginia. You can make a poop sandwich on artisan sourdough instead of store-brand white bread, and it will look superficially prettier, but it still smells like poop and won't fool anyone paying attention.
Yeah, my supervisor has hit 2 deer in the last four months and the beginning and end of my drives were in the dark on mostly 2 lane roads through woods and farm fields, so I was definitely on high alert.
Before the clouds moved it I saw a very pretty pink sunrise behind the wind turbines so that was cool. And the "wintry mix" precipitation didn't show up which was even better.
Indiana had eliminated the deer scourge by the end of the 19th century, but the bastards at the DNR went out and bought some deer from other states in the 1930s/40s and imported them to Indiana.
Deer disappearing is a horrible situation. I haven't read the article but I'm guessing the reason they were wiped out was there was little to zero regulation back then. DNR absolutely did the correct thing. It's finding a place in the middle. The current population has far surpassed the steady mark. It's to the point in which this season the boy (daughter's boyfriend) has already harvested two bucks in deer reduction hunts on separate properties. Firearm season doesn't start until (11/18). For the uninitiated...deer reduction permits are given to landowners who have overpopulated deer damaging their crops (apple orchards, farm ground and the like). Look at how early the reduction season starts.
I admit I am being an irrational jerk here, but I hate deer with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns. I want them all gone. (Plus, as you mentioned, they're harming farmers' crops, so I'm not being 100% selfish.)
Mainly standing in the middle of the road and not moving - that's my only real complaint.
I keep reading "benefits of deer" articles and it seems the first thing mentioned is "an important food source for wolves, bear, and coyotes". It sounds like most of those articles were written either by deer or by wolves. :-)
200 people dead a year!
About 1.5 million deer-car accidents happen every year.
More than $1 billion in annual insured losses are due to damages caused by deer-car accidents.
Deer-car accidents cause about 175 to 200 fatalities and 10,000 injuries annually.
Ron Washington was absolutely beloved by the ATL beat writers. And as best we can tell from the outside, by the players too. His relationship with Ozzie Albies seems particularly warm.
I guess it is because I remember his playing days while the manager’s career fizzled out in the low minors but he seems like a much older person than Brian Snitker. But the two are pretty much the same age.
ATL’s coaches tend towards the old side. Walt Weiss and Kevin Seitzer, both of whom were playing when I was in college, are the youngsters.
...
Speaking of young, I went to Posnanski’s book signing last night. It was great. Tomorrow is my 56th birthday. I was below the median age for the audience. My 23 year old daughter was with me. She also enjoyed the show. And scanning the crowd of a few hundred at the Marcus JCC, she was probably third or fourth youngest.
Seitzer was a high school star just up the road a few miles, he’s a few years older than me, but I saw him play. Just drafted him in my continuing DMB league that we started up beginning with 1984…
…the Braves sure like their central illinois coaches/manager.
Had the same experience with the demographics at his San Francisco event, though I’m a few years younger than you, which surprised me because I expected an event publicized via newsletters would draw a younger crowd.
When my dad was still working, it was pretty clear that if he and 2 other chemists disappeared in a plane crash an entire part of the company would collapse. While if all the executives died in a crash, they'd replace them with another group of white men in navy blue suits and no one would have any idea anything had happened.
Middle managers might be the most replaceable (judging by how they weren't needed when people started working from home more) but top executives are right behind them in being able to be replaced by algorithms with no drop off in performance.
Wow, Moneyball, Citizen Kane, and Velvet Underground refs all in one place; we certainly live at the intersection of art, culture, and the rich man's playthings of professional sports.
As someone who lived in both Tokyo and Singapore for extended periods--driverless cars already exist (or at least one driver for a multitude of cars)--it's called a train, and when properly designed it gets you to/from work or school more quickly than any car could, and at a fraction of the monetary and environmental price. Yes, yes in the land of "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death" we want equal access to all points in the 'developer'-designed sprawl of our exurbs--but I refuse to believe that eighty years of car-based planning can't be changed, or at least adapted to, modern times and needs.
Not alone, I suppose, but I suspect a bunch of flat land would work pretty well with regional light rail and decent bike infrastructure, and shifting more shopping trips to delivery. You can't eliminate cars entirely, but even in more spread-out areas, trains and buses can work better than wrapping a person in a ton of metal.
The land isn’t the issue—-there are railroad tracks everywhere—-it’s not dense enough to be practicable. I live 7 miles from work, at worst it takes me 15 minutes (if I get caught at a railroad crossing), usually it’s ten. Any rail option would be at best 45 minutes, more likely an hour for me to get to work.
Public transportation would require a complete revamping of how the county is laid out and where people work/live. This would cost billions and billions in my county of 200,000 people.
I can’t think of a single day where I left the house where having a rail option would in any way be preferable.
Dallas brags about it's transit system having the most miles of light rail out of any in the country. It's only good if you are going to a place it travels. Trying to make a train system work in a car-centric city is tough. Especially if you're putting in the train after the city is built up. For example, the train doesn't actually stop at Love Field. You have to get off at the Love Field stop and then take a shuttle bus. At least you can finally take the train directly to DFW. But as somebody who flies out of Love, it's just easier to take a car. Either uber or drive/park myself. Don't get me wrong, I wish I could use DART more, but between it not going where I want to and 9 months out of the year it sucks being outside, I just take my car.
I don't claim to be a train expert, but outside of NYC, DC, Boston, and Chicago, are any of the city rail systems really useful?
Passenger trains in rural areas just aren't practical. I'm in central Indiana. The landscape is essentially identical to that of Chris in central Illinois. It takes me 20 minutes to get to work (traveling country roads). I too can't think of a day where I feel a rail option would be more convenient. Traveling to large cities from a rural setting? I'm with you. But I'd still have to see the financial impacts.
Also perpetuating car culture? The move toward EVs! There's way too little talk about reducing reliance on cars. E-commerce has been the sole real force toward reducing total miles driven over the past few decades, and that's a bug rather than a feature.
The self driving car evangelists can call me when their product can handle unmarked country roads in pitch dark or double parked cars in the rain on Flatbush Ave forcing a driver to weave in and out of the preferred line over a freshly repaved road with no markings.
Both of which are scenarios I drive through regularly.
Those scenarios would just require the car to have controls for the human driver to take over when it becomes confused. Though the autonomous taxis don't have drivers. And if autonomous vehicles become the norm, will the average person even have a driver's license?
When the entire trip to my destination is what I described, that's not really self driving then is it?
I am describing situations I encounter on a daily/weekly basis where the entire drive between my origin and my destination would not be accomplished by a self driving car, or would be switching monitors often enough to be functionally useless.
Put differently the ideal use case only works if every car is self driving and follows the rules. Its an admirable goal but not something I expect will happen in my lifetime.
True, they won't be fully autonomous cars anytime in the foreseeable future. More conventional cars with an autonomous option that one can turn on. And if the conditions you regularly drive in aren't conducive to the autonomous driving mode, then it wouldn't make sense for you to buy a car with that feature.
I was going to say it would make driving much less frustrating in heavy traffic, but I guess just the much simpler adaptive cruise control common in modern cars already does that by avoiding the need to constantly go back and forth between the gas and the brake in that situation.
I see some usefulness on freeways, where people who don't know where the cruise control is slow all lanes down when a hill appears. If freeway traffic movement was controlled, we'd benefit out here (the NW). But i just keep waiting for the light rail to come a bit closer to home. That ride rocks.
I posted a shorter version of this on Bluesky a few weeks ago -- people are going to HATE driving with any significant number of autonomous vehicles sharing the road just based on how cautious driverless cars will operate. I love the adaptive cruise control feature in my car, but other drivers get frustrated that I'm NOT tailgating others, that the feature follows the car ahead at a respectable distance that isn't practical in any sort of heavy traffic
You were not "recklessly flip" and your friend is wrong. A private study funded by a driverless car company is as valid as a 1970s second hand smoke study by Big Tobacco.
And your instinct on robot attack drones is correct, the only lives it will save is our military personnel, while making our populace more accepting of mass homicide. There's no such thing as "precision" bombs, that's propaganda to get us on board with slaughtering innocent civilians.
Oh and I'd bet a lot of money that private companies that give not one single shit about public safety will never develop safe, fully autonomous cars; civilization will collapse first.
Bryce Harper showed off the skill set to be a pretty darned good fielder at first base. The one area he needs to work on is realizing what balls that come toward the hole are the ones he should take. During the post-season, there were a number of occasions where he dove for a ball that clearly was something for the second baseman to field, which either led to him awkwardly sprinting back to the bag, or having the pitcher cover, which didn't always work, because the pitcher didn't expect the first basemen to roam so far from the bag on a ball to the second baseman. That being said, this could prolong his career and more Bryce is a good thing.
Harper was a catcher growing up, so I'm not at all surprised that he's handled first base pretty well to date. The ball in hole instinct will sharpen over time with experience.
The GM meeting ailment is almost certainly norovirus. Everyone only associates that with cruise ships, but it's common everywhere. When you hear "stomach bug" that isn't food related, think norovirus.
Friends of mine just got back from visiting relatives in British Columbia. The relatives hadn't told them that several of them were quite sick, lest they cancel the trip, and not get to celebrate Mom's 90th birthday. Mom ended up hospitalized with pneumonia. P got quite sick (still is, if last night's zoom was any indication, but at least he can talk now), and V was fine. She was the only one of the lot who'd gotten an RSV shot. And yes, everyone tested negative for Covid.
New Ultraman movie or we riot.
(If our knees don’t hurt, that is.)
I will be right with you hiring contractors to flip over cars.
Shuwatch!
:crosses arms, shoots energy beam:
I never stopped watching cartoons, nor have most of my friends. There aren't many I like now, but my allegiance to things like Batman and Gargoyles was brought about when I was in my 20s.
Though my actually watching cartoons on Saturday mornings ended with becoming more of a sabbath observer.
The Spielberg affiliated shows were never about selling toys, they were about indulging Spielberg's love for the old cartoons and trying to replicate them. (Even now, when there is a market for adults buying toys based on cartoons they loved 30 years ago, there's not much merch.)
Batman has been all about the toys since the beginning, but if anyone put pressure on the creative team to make a "toyetic' character or episode, no one was paying attention.
I think my holy trinity of cartoons growing up were Batman: The Animated Series, TMNT, and The Real Ghostbusters. Those were certainly the 3 that I had the most toys from, but I think The Real Ghostbusters was probably the overall winner. All my Ghostbusters toys were based off that cartoon, including Slimer and the 3-foot tall firehouse. And I had the life-sized plastic proton back with the long yellow foam noodle that stuck out of the front as the "beam", man that thing was awesome. My white whale was the official trap though, I never got that, but my dad did make a cool homemade one as part of my Egon Halloween costume one year.
Also does anyone remember that cartoon where, I think maybe it was Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and maybe Bo Jackson? would fight monsters and stuff using their hockey sticks, bats, balls, etc.? I remember watching that one but can't really remember much else about it.
That would be ProStars, my good man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProStars
I was working Sat mornings at MickyDs by then, so could have never watched it but our VCR was just sitting there doing nothing. It's tragic that I am only just now learning about this show.
Only 13 episodes, so you didn't miss a lot.
I guess the brightest stars really DO burn out the fastest.
Wait, are you me? *Spiderman pointing.gif*
Hong Kong Phooey.
https://youtu.be/6dum1WJXJMA?si=I1_DICJXj7tSay25
Though I admit I did like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles my son watched constantly in the 90s.
Probably Earthworm Jim, which was a cartoon for kids that had the Litany of Fear from Dune as a running gag. Shame that the creator later revealed himself as an obnoxious transphobic jackass.
Kim Possible. But that was with my kids. I'd feel rather creepy watching a cartoon teenaged cheerleader slash secret spy without them.
On my own? Underdog and Rocky & Bullwinkle. But speaking of creepy, I had a thing for Sweet Polly Purebread.
"Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future" A kind of version of "Battlestar Galactica" (humans vs evil robots) that was specifically - and explicitly - intended to sell toys, but managed to have some surprisingly adult themes in it. One scene I remember had the team decorating a cheap little fake Christmas tree, while lamenting that their mission kept them from being with their families and friends over the holidays....
There are so many for me. The Flintstones, Jetsons, Bugs Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, the Roadrunner, Speedy Gonzalez, Yosemite Sam, basically all of the old school Warner Brothers cartoons.
Mine was the rather atrocious *Dungeons & Dragons* cartoon when I was in junior high and a D&D player. I'd do my Saturday morning paper route, then watch that as well as *Inside the NFL* on Showtime with Len Dawson and Nick Buoniconti
Kids today: "stems and seeds???"
Pop goes the seed-els!
Bob Nightengale has made a career of stating the obvious and making some bonkers predictions. It’s both disheartening and amazing.
Not to mention some hilarious and idiotic typos and predictions. There's an entire Twitter account specifically following his screw-ups.
I used to think any bad prediction or rumor should cost sportswriters a week ban from Twitter 😂
Haha. There wouldn't be anyone left to tweet any news or game updates.
I’m not defending Nightingale, who seems firmly planted in the would rather be first than correct camp, but this time of year there’s not much to write about and editors still need columns. So we get lots of stupid columns predicting free agent destinations and contracts, which is folly unless it’s Kershaw, and often wild speculation. And anything that feels like news gets amplified 10x. You can’t really write that the Cubs are interested in Ohtani but so are 14 other teams.
In that vein The Athletic has a story today “Ten big-name MLB players who could be traded this offseason”. Have not looked but once you get past Soto, I expect it’s a lot of guys with a 10% chance of being traded rather than the usual 1%.
Up early here ... the gales of November came early to northern Minnesota and WOW is it windy.
How hard could it be to manage the Angels?
PS The number of Republicans trying to argue that they (not the voters) are the only ones in step is simultaneously maddening and hilarious.
PPS I like to think of myself as relatively accepting of new technology, but it will be a long time, if ever, before I get into a driverless car. I freely admit that it is an irrational position, but it is deep-seated.
I am flying to Detroit today, and I'm not NOT interested in visiting the church tomorrow. It feels like it's too perfect not to, timing wise.
The GOP on abortion is giving off big Principal Skinner vibes. "Are we so out of touch? No. It's the voters who are wrong."
Peterson being out for the Mets adds to the shopping list, but it doesn't really change the level of urgency. He doesn't shake anyone covering the Mets as likely to be the sort of starter you wanted to see regularly, and I haven't seen talk of him going to the pen. I hope he heals well and can return and find his place in the game, but this isn't that big a deal, except insofar as it seems like half the team entered the off season badly dinged up.
If we had been given three or four more Ghostbusters films that would have done interesting things with the original cast, I would have been okay with that. The Ghostbusters cartoon of the 80s did that and did it pretty well despite having awful animation. And I know people who really liked the distaff reboot and wanted more of that. But I agree that no one anywhere asked for more of whatever it is we have now. (The two franchises I would rather have, all that said, are Master and Commander and Easy Rawlins. One film for either is not enough.)
Oddly, that is what "Tylor Megill" means in Elvish.
There is sequel material in comics and novel form, but it just doesn't grab me.
As long as they keep walking in a circle...
I know. It said the adventure "begins"
Something I learned five minutes ago, 12 years after everyone else:
Chris Pratt played Scott Hatteberg in Moneyball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyvu1nWjOlI
One of my favorite lines in moneyball
Rivaled only by “50 feet of crap“ ;)
I picture Mike Rizzo delivering the 50 feet of crap line this winter
To an empty room because they fired everyone. #sob
Great scene. I also liked when Beane told David Justice something like, “The Yankees are paying you seven million dollars to play against them.”
Did the GOP jump the shark by giving it's zealots what they wanted regarding abortion?
I thought the idea was to keep *promising* to outlaw abortion, but never actually doing it. Once done, having fucked around, they got to find out that it wasn't as popular as they thought and holding it out as a carrot was far more effective than finding out that it was something only their zealots wanted but that most of America did not.
So, would that have started with Reagan or Nixon?
They seem absolutely determined to force their version of religion on everyone whether they like it or not and simultaneously insist that in spite of all the advantages they have they are an unfairly persecuted minority under seige by secular armies.
yes! the victim thing is just *chef's kiss* adorbs and particularly revolting.
It's so infuriating. Their religion's 2 major holidays, Christmas and Easter, are widely celebrated even by secular people (heck, Good Friday is an official holiday at my workplace, which is weird but I don't mind a 3-day weekend and it's a long haul between MLK Day and Memorial Day) and yet they batch and moan that not everyone believes the same thing they do.
War on Christmas not a thing to you, eh?
The phrase I've heard is that Republicans are like the dog who was chasing a car and suddenly caught it. What do they do now? There's not a plan for that. Also, going forward on issues where people more or less agree on what they want but disagree on the method to get there, voters are more likely to say, "Well, I couldn't trust you with reproductive rights so why should I trust you with _____?"
Jinx. You owe me a Coke.
Unfortunately their plan is now to add more voter restrictions. Because they know they tend to lose when turnout is high. Coincidence that a majority Black district in Mississippi ran out of ballots TWICE on Tuesday? Unlikely.
I have often said that the Republicans on abortion are like the dog who caught the car. There are, no doubt, many people who are focused solely on the issue for religious reasons, but it strikes me that there are far more Republicans who were happy to ride that passion to serve the interests of capital. Smarter people than me can disagree, but that feels to me like one reason why we have seen this growing anti-trans/book banning sentiment – they need a new stalking horse.
I realized more than a decade ago that the gops have no interest in winning free and fair elections, so if I've known it for that long, it must have been true for way longer than that. But that's the reason they often do things that would be baffling if they were done by a political party that had any interest in winning free and fair elections, like continuing to back wildly unpopular policies. They "caught the car," but much like the proverbial dog, they not only can't drive it, they have no interest in driving it.
This goes back to 1980 at least for some of that party as they embraced Reagan’s magical realism.
I always sensed that growing up in a conservative family in a conservative part of town -- that it was just about being "right" and the "right" things needed to be enshrined in law, regardless of who/how many agreed with them or how it was achieved. If it was through a legitimate election, hey, the majority agrees with them, but I always got that underlying sense that if conservative-minded people didn't get their way they would just rearrange things so that they did. It's a huge part of why I am not conservative.
Yeah, and that's basically an authoritarian mindset, which has always been present in conservatism, but hasn't always been the dominant way of thinking, at least in this country. Chris in Illinois in this thread mentioned Reagan, who I think was part of a transitionary period launched by Goldwater's nomination. That was a move away from what I think we mostly now call Eisenhower Republicans — the kind of Republican administration that might, and did, send in National Guard troops to enforce desegregation orders and spoke out against the military industrial complex, a phrase Ike coined — toward today's gops, who are straight-up authoritarians.
I think the rise of that wing can be traced to the success of Newt Gingrich. It's been a steady march toward extremism since the Contract on America period. And that's a march away from small-d democracy.
Before Newt came along, and even for a decade or so after, it would have been a stop-in-your-tracks scandal if two prominent Republicans spoke explicitly about small-d democracy as a bad thing in the space of a few days. That's just happened — Mike Johnson and Rick Santorum — and it barely caused a ripple. I realize Johnson said the thing about the two wolves and a lamb in the past but nobody heard it till the other day.
The rise of Goldwater conservatism happened at the same time as the civil rights gains were being made and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. The GOP adopted the Southern Strategy and that's when it stopped being the party of Eisenhower.
Yes, except nothing turns on a dime. It took a while for the old-school Republicans to filter out. Nixon straddled the eras. He won the presidency on the Southern strategy, but also: It's literally impossible to imagine a Republican administration since the 90s presiding over something like the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.
One of the priorities of the Republican party in the Goldwater-Reagan era, predating Gingrich, was "this is what's best for the United States as a country." It wasn't necessarily always, or maybe even ever, the top priority, and certainly I personally disagree with not only most of their ideas about what was good for the country but their ideas about who qualified as Americans, or "real" Americans. But "good for the country" was part of the calculus.
It's not part of the calculus now.
This was always my thought too.
The Republicans are the party of grievances, not a party of solutions. Since the Southern Strategy kicked into gear, the party has been a small number of people at the top who primarily don't want to pay taxes, or see the government spend unnecessary money, and those people are willing to listen to anyone. Want to whine about racial politics, or the LGBTQ+ community, or immigration, or that this country sent itself to Hell when they stopped forcing kids to pray in public schools? They will be happy to listen, and tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to get your vote. That's why when conservatives are in power, even when they run on an issue like killing the ACA, they never get anything done--except occasionally lowering taxes on the party leaders.
The key to their success, though, was keeping a tight leash on their base while also keeping the carrots juuust out of reach. They knew giving them everything they wanted would be a disaster for their ability to remain in power, due to the unpopularity of the specific aspects of those desires. What Trump did was weaponize the same forces in essentially the exact same way, only he actually started to give the base what they wanted. He threw the courts to the evangelicals, he threw the FBI to the conspiracy theorists, etc. So now the party is all but in a civil war between leaders whose power is evaporating and a base who don't like the idea of going back to not getting what they want. Meanwhile, the majority of the country is horrified and milling around in between enthusiasm to vote those fools out and despair that those people have power in the first place.
we all have seen precise and insightful remarks regarding our sad state of affairs (re)ignited by tRump. I love the Kasporov quote on propaganda, and one of my go-to remarks, is this, from Frank Wilhoit: "Conservatism consists of one proposition, to wit, there are in groups whom the law protects but does not bind and out groups that the law binds but does not protect." That leads us right to the end of rule of law and authoritarianism but if you look at our country it's where we've been for a long time.
they don't care about what "most of America" wants, they are fundamentally anti-democracy
First congratulations to Ohio on the election business, since I was at an all-day seminar and also making long commutes successfully avoiding deer in the dark yesterday.
And I'm so glad the "it's not an abortion ban if you call it a limitation or consensus" messaging failed in Virginia. You can make a poop sandwich on artisan sourdough instead of store-brand white bread, and it will look superficially prettier, but it still smells like poop and won't fool anyone paying attention.
We have a lot of suicidal deer here. One viciously totaled my car some years ago. So I applaud your success at avoiding the tall cute rats.
Yeah, my supervisor has hit 2 deer in the last four months and the beginning and end of my drives were in the dark on mostly 2 lane roads through woods and farm fields, so I was definitely on high alert.
Before the clouds moved it I saw a very pretty pink sunrise behind the wind turbines so that was cool. And the "wintry mix" precipitation didn't show up which was even better.
Lay on that horn Catherine.
Indiana had eliminated the deer scourge by the end of the 19th century, but the bastards at the DNR went out and bought some deer from other states in the 1930s/40s and imported them to Indiana.
https://www.wane.com/news/indiana/130-years-after-deer-virtually-disappeared-from-indiana-current-population-remains-steady/
Deer disappearing is a horrible situation. I haven't read the article but I'm guessing the reason they were wiped out was there was little to zero regulation back then. DNR absolutely did the correct thing. It's finding a place in the middle. The current population has far surpassed the steady mark. It's to the point in which this season the boy (daughter's boyfriend) has already harvested two bucks in deer reduction hunts on separate properties. Firearm season doesn't start until (11/18). For the uninitiated...deer reduction permits are given to landowners who have overpopulated deer damaging their crops (apple orchards, farm ground and the like). Look at how early the reduction season starts.
Reduction Zone: Sept. 15, 2023 - Jan. 31, 2024 (where open)
Youth Season: Sept. 23-24, 2023.
Archery: Oct. 1, 2023 - Jan. 7, 2024.
Firearm: Nov. 18 - Dec. 3, 2023
I admit I am being an irrational jerk here, but I hate deer with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns. I want them all gone. (Plus, as you mentioned, they're harming farmers' crops, so I'm not being 100% selfish.)
WHY WON'T THEY GET OUT OF THE ROAD?
What specifically have deer done to you for you to have that kind of hatred?
https://precisionoutdoors.org/the-many-benefits-of-deer/
Mainly standing in the middle of the road and not moving - that's my only real complaint.
I keep reading "benefits of deer" articles and it seems the first thing mentioned is "an important food source for wolves, bear, and coyotes". It sounds like most of those articles were written either by deer or by wolves. :-)
200 people dead a year!
About 1.5 million deer-car accidents happen every year.
More than $1 billion in annual insured losses are due to damages caused by deer-car accidents.
Deer-car accidents cause about 175 to 200 fatalities and 10,000 injuries annually.
(https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/deer-car-accidents/ - granted, this is an insurance-focused site so I'm sure they're anti-deer like I am)
Ron Washington was absolutely beloved by the ATL beat writers. And as best we can tell from the outside, by the players too. His relationship with Ozzie Albies seems particularly warm.
I guess it is because I remember his playing days while the manager’s career fizzled out in the low minors but he seems like a much older person than Brian Snitker. But the two are pretty much the same age.
ATL’s coaches tend towards the old side. Walt Weiss and Kevin Seitzer, both of whom were playing when I was in college, are the youngsters.
...
Speaking of young, I went to Posnanski’s book signing last night. It was great. Tomorrow is my 56th birthday. I was below the median age for the audience. My 23 year old daughter was with me. She also enjoyed the show. And scanning the crowd of a few hundred at the Marcus JCC, she was probably third or fourth youngest.
Seitzer was a high school star just up the road a few miles, he’s a few years older than me, but I saw him play. Just drafted him in my continuing DMB league that we started up beginning with 1984…
…the Braves sure like their central illinois coaches/manager.
Happy birthday dlf! Have a second cocktail if you'd like.
What I need is a bike and brew!
They're still open - my wife bought a (pricey) e-bike there last weekend.
Had the same experience with the demographics at his San Francisco event, though I’m a few years younger than you, which surprised me because I expected an event publicized via newsletters would draw a younger crowd.
Happy birthday. Enjoy the book.
Happy early birthday DLF! Glad you enjoyed you and your daughter enjoyed yourselves.
Otherwise, I'm a little saddened (but certainly not surprised) that the crowd skewed to the older crowd.
Driverless corporations, that's the ticket!
Probably more CEOs could be replaced seamlessly by AI than a lot of the employees, actually.
When my dad was still working, it was pretty clear that if he and 2 other chemists disappeared in a plane crash an entire part of the company would collapse. While if all the executives died in a crash, they'd replace them with another group of white men in navy blue suits and no one would have any idea anything had happened.
Middle managers might be the most replaceable (judging by how they weren't needed when people started working from home more) but top executives are right behind them in being able to be replaced by algorithms with no drop off in performance.
This is my theory for why Elon hates AI so much. It could do his job much easier than that of the workers he wants to replace.
His job is writing the world's dumbest Tweets, no!?!?
Wow, Moneyball, Citizen Kane, and Velvet Underground refs all in one place; we certainly live at the intersection of art, culture, and the rich man's playthings of professional sports.
As someone who lived in both Tokyo and Singapore for extended periods--driverless cars already exist (or at least one driver for a multitude of cars)--it's called a train, and when properly designed it gets you to/from work or school more quickly than any car could, and at a fraction of the monetary and environmental price. Yes, yes in the land of "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death" we want equal access to all points in the 'developer'-designed sprawl of our exurbs--but I refuse to believe that eighty years of car-based planning can't be changed, or at least adapted to, modern times and needs.
Trains are great in urban areas, not so much in the prairie where I live.
Yeah I live in rural Montana now so I feel you while remaining an admitted hypocrite.
Not alone, I suppose, but I suspect a bunch of flat land would work pretty well with regional light rail and decent bike infrastructure, and shifting more shopping trips to delivery. You can't eliminate cars entirely, but even in more spread-out areas, trains and buses can work better than wrapping a person in a ton of metal.
The land isn’t the issue—-there are railroad tracks everywhere—-it’s not dense enough to be practicable. I live 7 miles from work, at worst it takes me 15 minutes (if I get caught at a railroad crossing), usually it’s ten. Any rail option would be at best 45 minutes, more likely an hour for me to get to work.
Public transportation would require a complete revamping of how the county is laid out and where people work/live. This would cost billions and billions in my county of 200,000 people.
I can’t think of a single day where I left the house where having a rail option would in any way be preferable.
Dallas brags about it's transit system having the most miles of light rail out of any in the country. It's only good if you are going to a place it travels. Trying to make a train system work in a car-centric city is tough. Especially if you're putting in the train after the city is built up. For example, the train doesn't actually stop at Love Field. You have to get off at the Love Field stop and then take a shuttle bus. At least you can finally take the train directly to DFW. But as somebody who flies out of Love, it's just easier to take a car. Either uber or drive/park myself. Don't get me wrong, I wish I could use DART more, but between it not going where I want to and 9 months out of the year it sucks being outside, I just take my car.
I don't claim to be a train expert, but outside of NYC, DC, Boston, and Chicago, are any of the city rail systems really useful?
Passenger trains in rural areas just aren't practical. I'm in central Indiana. The landscape is essentially identical to that of Chris in central Illinois. It takes me 20 minutes to get to work (traveling country roads). I too can't think of a day where I feel a rail option would be more convenient. Traveling to large cities from a rural setting? I'm with you. But I'd still have to see the financial impacts.
Same Chris.
Came to the comments to note that companies spending billions on driverless cars kind of sucks on its own because it perpetuates car culture.
Relatedly, was just reading about a housing development in Arizona(?!?!?!) that was built to discourage individual car ownership. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/oct/11/culdesac-car-free-neighborhood-tempe-arizona
Not sure if it's the photographer's intent but that looks like living within a de Chirico painting.
Also perpetuating car culture? The move toward EVs! There's way too little talk about reducing reliance on cars. E-commerce has been the sole real force toward reducing total miles driven over the past few decades, and that's a bug rather than a feature.
The self driving car evangelists can call me when their product can handle unmarked country roads in pitch dark or double parked cars in the rain on Flatbush Ave forcing a driver to weave in and out of the preferred line over a freshly repaved road with no markings.
Both of which are scenarios I drive through regularly.
Those scenarios would just require the car to have controls for the human driver to take over when it becomes confused. Though the autonomous taxis don't have drivers. And if autonomous vehicles become the norm, will the average person even have a driver's license?
When the entire trip to my destination is what I described, that's not really self driving then is it?
I am describing situations I encounter on a daily/weekly basis where the entire drive between my origin and my destination would not be accomplished by a self driving car, or would be switching monitors often enough to be functionally useless.
Put differently the ideal use case only works if every car is self driving and follows the rules. Its an admirable goal but not something I expect will happen in my lifetime.
True, they won't be fully autonomous cars anytime in the foreseeable future. More conventional cars with an autonomous option that one can turn on. And if the conditions you regularly drive in aren't conducive to the autonomous driving mode, then it wouldn't make sense for you to buy a car with that feature.
I was going to say it would make driving much less frustrating in heavy traffic, but I guess just the much simpler adaptive cruise control common in modern cars already does that by avoiding the need to constantly go back and forth between the gas and the brake in that situation.
I see some usefulness on freeways, where people who don't know where the cruise control is slow all lanes down when a hill appears. If freeway traffic movement was controlled, we'd benefit out here (the NW). But i just keep waiting for the light rail to come a bit closer to home. That ride rocks.
I posted a shorter version of this on Bluesky a few weeks ago -- people are going to HATE driving with any significant number of autonomous vehicles sharing the road just based on how cautious driverless cars will operate. I love the adaptive cruise control feature in my car, but other drivers get frustrated that I'm NOT tailgating others, that the feature follows the car ahead at a respectable distance that isn't practical in any sort of heavy traffic
You were not "recklessly flip" and your friend is wrong. A private study funded by a driverless car company is as valid as a 1970s second hand smoke study by Big Tobacco.
And your instinct on robot attack drones is correct, the only lives it will save is our military personnel, while making our populace more accepting of mass homicide. There's no such thing as "precision" bombs, that's propaganda to get us on board with slaughtering innocent civilians.
Oh and I'd bet a lot of money that private companies that give not one single shit about public safety will never develop safe, fully autonomous cars; civilization will collapse first.
Glad I'm not the only one wondering if Craig's friend is Nick Naylor.
Bryce Harper showed off the skill set to be a pretty darned good fielder at first base. The one area he needs to work on is realizing what balls that come toward the hole are the ones he should take. During the post-season, there were a number of occasions where he dove for a ball that clearly was something for the second baseman to field, which either led to him awkwardly sprinting back to the bag, or having the pitcher cover, which didn't always work, because the pitcher didn't expect the first basemen to roam so far from the bag on a ball to the second baseman. That being said, this could prolong his career and more Bryce is a good thing.
Harper was a catcher growing up, so I'm not at all surprised that he's handled first base pretty well to date. The ball in hole instinct will sharpen over time with experience.
Tell that to Pete Alonso. He's still going for balls in the hole he should let the 2B get.
I like to think of an alternative reality where Harper challenged Piazza for best hitting catcher of all time.
You can bet your ass he would actually be a catcher as well. As opposed to you know, being a DH that happens to play catcher?
“Bryce Harper showed off the skill set to be a pretty darned good fielder at first base. “
Meaning being a poor outfielder. Kidding, we’ll maybe.
Especially for infielders, I think learning to move AWAY from the ball when you play 1B is the hardest skill to master.
The GM meeting ailment is almost certainly norovirus. Everyone only associates that with cruise ships, but it's common everywhere. When you hear "stomach bug" that isn't food related, think norovirus.
The world runs on norovirus.
(I’ll show myself out, thanks.)
Friends of mine just got back from visiting relatives in British Columbia. The relatives hadn't told them that several of them were quite sick, lest they cancel the trip, and not get to celebrate Mom's 90th birthday. Mom ended up hospitalized with pneumonia. P got quite sick (still is, if last night's zoom was any indication, but at least he can talk now), and V was fine. She was the only one of the lot who'd gotten an RSV shot. And yes, everyone tested negative for Covid.
Managaire's Disease