Eric The Blue

Professor pipes up for Pete

I understand there was political news out of Washington, D.C., yesterday, but my niche is the sports-politics nexus, with a sidelight in handsy drunks, which accounts for my interest in Pete Hegseth. And there's minor news on that beat, too. Patrick Deneen, a political scientist at Notre Dame and proud member of Academics for Trump, took to Xwitter recently with the following defense of the Fox News weekend anchor whom Trump has nominated for Secretary of Defense:

I didn’t watch today’s hearings, but I’ve now watched many of the highlights (and lowlights) that have been posted here. Many questions about @PeteHegseth’s character have been raised by his opponents, and one counter that I saw by one Republican Senator was to charge the other…

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) January 15, 2025

 

It's amusing to note that you can look stuff up on The Internet. Hegseth played two seasons for Princeton, 2001-02 and 2002-03. The legendary Pete Carril—one "l"—was not Hegseth's coach. According to his website, Deneen started teaching at Princeton in 1997, by which time Carril had taken a job as an NBA assistant coach. And Hegseth didn't come along till a few years after that.

It's amusing to note, too, that Hegseth's career stats do not tend to redeem Dr. Deneen's memory. In Hegseth's two seasons on the varsity, the Tigers played 55 games. Hegseth entered less than half of them. In his career, he logged about 85 minutes of playing time—just over 3 minutes per game in the 25 games he entered. He scored a total of 31 points, 21 of them on 3-pointers, for an average of 1.2 points per game. Let’s assume that the games Dr. Deneen took his kids to were representative of those contested while Hegseth was on the team. If the Deneens went to a dozen games, they then would have been lucky to see “Microwave” Pete Hegseth make two 3-pointers—because, on average, he made one every eight games.  In his Princeton career, he was 7-for-23 from behind the arc. 

I’m persuaded that Hegseth's “clutch” 3-point “daggers” were mainly a highlight of mop-up time. Since I would never accuse a distinguished professor of being a liar, I’m going to attribute the glaze in Dr. Deneen’s memory to a wingnut’s desire to associate himself with a MAGA celeb. Pete Hegseth, the future “Mr. Secretary,” was one of the budding scholars under his tutelage!

But poor Pete. It seems his defenders have no recourse but to take a deep dive into irrelevancies—and then it turns out that even those "credentials" are bullshit.

A day in the life of a health nut

I was at the health club yesterday during the restricted hours when “silver sneakers” members—complimentary for Medicare recipients—can exercise. My stationary bike was in the interior of the walking track, and I tried to make the gauge for “calories burned” go up by 25 every time a certain silver-haired walker passed in front of me. There were a lot of walkers but he’s the one who attracted my attention. He had The Look many in my demographic are headed for—bird legs, no ass, but a considerable torso, and, in the case of this gentleman, a t-shirt that fit back when his torso was considerably less considerable. It had a message across the front that I could read even though his girth stretched the letters, distorting them. It said SEX PACK. Not “six pack,” get it? It took me a few laps to get it: I’m especially slow on the uptake when my brain is deprived of oxygen on account of the effort to get to 25. I tended to ease up when he was out of sight behind me and then I’d have to haul ass when he reappeared at the top of the straightaway. I believe this is referred to as “interval training.” Just a killer pace, but after about 20 minutes he gave up trying to beat me and left the track in shame.

Afterwards I met some friends for dinner. Feeling pretty good about having defeated SEX PACK, I celebrated by consuming about 3000 calories of food and probably 1000 more in Old Fashioneds. You can eat a lot while simultaneously depressing the part of the brain that says, “Stop, you’ve had enough.” I then drove home and vegetated in front of televised sportz for 4.5 hours before turning in.

My new year’s resolution was “healthy living” and … so far, so good.

Walk the line, a play in 3 acts

Republicans when the Mideast ceasefire agreement was announced: Wtf Biden, there are still 27 Gazan civilians left to kill!

[Trump takes credit for the agreement.]

Republicans: [Quizzical gestures and the sound of a light breeze tickling the leaves of an aspen tree.]

Alice Munro, sh*tty mom

The above catchy heading was suggested by a book, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by a comedian, Laurie Kilmartin, whose stand-up always makes me laugh. She has also live-tweeted her mom's last days, dying remotely of Covid on a screen Kilmartin held, and written a "joke book" about her dad's time in hospice with terminal cancer. Hilarious!

Oh, and the part about Alice Munro, Canadian short story writer and Nobel laureate, is because after her recent death it became widely known that she had stayed with her second husband after her daughter had made it plain to her that he had sexually abused her when she was a pre-teen. Without getting into the details, the daughter basically took a him-or-me position, and the winner of the Nobel Prize chose him. It wasn't a he-said, she-said. He acknowledged that it had happened, and his accounts attempted to impute blame upon a 9-year-old. 

Munro's many admirers have taken the news hard. Her status as a Canadian cultural icon has suffered. University literature departments are re-evaluating her place in the curriculum. In a way, this seems silly to me. Not a word in her fiction is altered. If it was this good then, that's still how good it is now. Yet as a reader I feel a twinge, too. It's akin, I think, to the sensation of watching on TV a superlative athletic performance, and then feeling disappointed when, in the post-game interview, the hero reveals himself to be a dope or a crank. 

The error seems to lie in a tendency to think that human excellence flows across borders between different realms of activity and competence. The opposite might more nearly be true. Blind people tend to develop other senses well beyond what's normal. What if people born with unusual gifts in a certain direction end up stunted elsewhere? They can't escape the tunneling effect of their "genius." In this regard, I always think of Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists ever, but he also believed in alchemy, possessed religious beliefs considered bizarre by atheists as well as the orthodox, and, as a man of science alive during a time of plague, put forward the following therapy:

. . . the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with varied insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.

An odd detail in the journalistic exposures of Munro's private failings is that she never learned to drive. She couldn't, or wouldn't, protect and nurture her daughter, nor could she get herself from Point A to Point B. It seems the two were related. Her second husband might have been at least a part-time monster, but over time she got comfortable with him, and she also depended upon him to cope with all the ordinary challenges of life that a genius couldn't be troubled with. On a second marriage in middle age, her mind probably on fire with her own projects, she wasn't going to start over again. 

Election notes

I usually love poring over election results, but this year it seems the outcome was too distressing for the pastime to be indulged. Avoidance has been my strategy. Yet a few morsels have leaked through my defenses, and this weekend, laid low by a GI bug, I've searched up enough of the details to make a report.

(1) The Republican advantage in the electoral college disappeared.

I think the way to measure this is just to observe that Harris lost the national vote by 1.5%, and, had she done 2% better everywhere, her electoral vote total would have come in at 270, the minimum needed to win. So a minimal popular vote victory (half of 1%) would have yielded a minimal electoral college victory (270-268).  If you're interested in the details, her three narrowest losses were by less than 2%, in Pennsylvania (1.8%), Michigan (1.4%), and Wisconsin (0.9%). These three states have 44 electoral votes, which, added to the 226 that she won, make 270.

Four years earlier, the same kind of analysis yielded quite a different result. Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5%, yet Trump, by doing just 1% better everywhere—losing by 3.5% instead of by 4.5%—would have flipped the result in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The electoral votes of these states would have lifted him into a 269-269 electoral college tie and, eventually, the White House after the provisions of the 12th Amendment provided a final boost. 

So the Republican "tilt" to the electoral college went from 3.5% in 2020 to essentially zero in 2024. This tends to support my view that our system for electing the president requires us to insert the actual election result into one end of a rickety, 18th-century machine, turn a wobbly crank connected to its side with duct tape, then wait for something different and unpredictable to be ejected from the other end. 

(2) There were four states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada—carried by Trump that nevertheless elected a Democrat to the US Senate. No Republican won a Senate race in a state Harris won, but 4 "split decisions" is still, by recent standards, a lot. In 2020, there had been only one such state, Maine, where Republican Susan Collins was reelected to the Senate even though Biden prevailed in the presidential contest. Two years later, only Wisconsin elected a senator (Republican Ron Johnson) from a party that had lost the statewide presidential race two years earlier. And then, this year, 4.

Maybe this is just happenstance, the random results of a random walk through electoral history. But suppose you deeply resent Biden's inner circle of advisors indulging his wish to seek reelection and hiding, kind of, his cognitive decline from the public. The high number of split decisions—all in the same direction, R for President, D for Senate— suggests to me that an open Democratic primary might have spared the country four more years of Trump. The Biden Administration was unpopular. Democrats in general did okay.

You do have to wonder about, for example, the Arizonans who voted for both Trump and Kari Lake's Democratic opponent. Are they just randomly filling in ovals?

(3) Of Minnesota's 87 counties, Harris carried just 9--the three in the Arrowhead above Lake Superior, the county where Moorhead is, the county where Rochester is, and then four counties in the Twin Cities metro, including the Goliaths of Hennepin and Ramsey by more than 2-to-1 margins. She won the state by fewer than 140,000 votes but Hennepin County alone by more than 300,000 votes. Her statewide margin was roughly half way between Clinton's narrow one in 2016 and Biden's relatively easy win in 2020.

In our Senate race, Amy Klobuchar got 56% of the vote, down from 60% in her last race, and 64% in the one before that. Does the quality of the Republican opponent account for the slide? Uh-uh. Unless, for a Republican, the more outlandish, the better. I don't know what's going on. 

I had guessed, based on the volume of TV advertising, that the race in the 2nd congressional district, between incumbent Democrat Angie Craig and Republican Joe Teirab, might be close. It wasn't: Craig won by 17 points. But that was the closest of the eight congressional races. Though the state as a whole leans Dem, it appears unlikely that our 4-4 delegation to the House of Representatives is going to change anytime soon. James Carville once said that, politically, Pennsylvania is three states named  "Philadelphia," "Pittsburgh," and "Alabama." Since Minneapolis and St. Paul are so close together, we really only have "the Twin Cities" and "Alabama." Apologies to a few college towns. 

 

Dorothy Parker says happy new year!

Ninety-five years ago tonight Dorothy Parker sent this telegram to her friend Robert Benchley:

Figures. She was a failure at suicide, twice, as well as the author of this poem. She had her good days. Once, when asked by her editor why she’d missed a deadline, she is said to have retorted: “Too fucking busy and vice versa.”

Happy Jaded New Year!

Getting up there

I wish the packaging for such around-the-house products as smoke detectors and keyless locks did not advertise EASY INSTALLATION. Because then you’re playing the team in last place and even if you win the commentators are all, like, Sure but it took three YouTube videos and a 4th-quarter rally when a Phillips screwdriver was all a man needed. If I ever have to set up a smart tv … screw it, I’ll watch the Twins at a bar. 

Different topic. It makes me feel old to think that Jimmy Carter was 100 and that I voted for him, twice. Here’s the electoral map for the first presidential election in which I cast a ballot, Democratic challenger Carter versus Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976:

How old am I? Old enough to have voted in a presidential election in which the Republican candidate carried Illinois and California—and lost, because except for Virginia [sic] the Democrat swept Dixie [sic]. 

Fans of Slim Dunlap

For years I’ve been a member of a Facebook group, “Fans of Slim Dunlap.” In the days since Slim died, it’s functioned as something like an ideal online community where friends and fans express sympathy, buck each other up, swap stories and fond remembrances: like going to a wake without leaving home.

For me it’s also been occasionally revelatory. In one post, a fan reported seeing Slim play near his home on the east coast. Toward the end of the show, Slim said that he’d be driving home to Minneapolis the next day and wasn’t looking forward to all the lonely road time. So if anyone wanted a ride to Minneapolis . . . . And this guy had thought, I can maybe drive into Minneapolis with one of the Replacements, and all I have to do is get back to Boston—I think it was Boston—on my own. He hadn’t pursued it, because his job, but it made me think that if you live here you don’t realize the place Minneapolis holds in the imaginations of lots of music fans. This guy would have been in a car with Slim for about 20 hours and his leading thought was: The Entry Into Minneapolis, like it’s Mecca.

Nor had I known that Bruce Springsteen was a big fan of Slim’s. He covered one of Slim’s songs, “Girlfriend” (or “Girlfiend”), and talked him up and played his songs on a Sirius XM radio show, “From My Home to Yours,” that he sometimes hosted. A list of the songs Springsteen played on these shows, and what he said about them, makes interesting reading. Of Slim, he said, before spinning “Times Like This”: 

Slim Dunlap, in my opinion, is simply one of the best rock-‘n’-roll songwriters we have. He deserves a much, much larger audience than he’s gathered.

And he introduced “Rockin’ Here Tonight” by saying:

Slim Dunlap was born in Plainview, Minnesota, and is best known as a member of the Replacements with Paul Westerberg. He released two albums, The Old New Me and Times Like This, both required listening for any true-hearted rock-‘n’-roll aficionado. 

This general topic of Springsteen paying tribute to Minnesota musicians reminds me that he played a scheduled concert with the E Street Band at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, two days after Prince died. The stage was lit in purple and they opened with a cover that needed no introduction:

 

In the comments someone mentions that Nils Lofgren’s mannerisms while playing mimic Prince’s and were intended as part of the tribute—to which I’d add, also the hat.