Eric The Blue

Buckeye brief

As a Gopher fan, it would be a waste of time to study the occult science underlying the selection of teams that get to compete in the mini-tournament that crowns a national champion. The shouted criticisms and recriminations reach my ear nevertheless: Georgia and Florida State were snubbed, if Washington had any decency their coach would call them in sick with Imposter Syndrome, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe someone who follows it more closely than I can explain why, among the uninvited, Ohio State seems to have no one pleading their case. I say this as someone whose hatred of Ohio State goes back to the days of Woody Hayes. I've never perceived a reason to repent, but the brief on behalf of the Buckeyes seems to me straightforward: they lost just once, and that was on the road, by 6 points, to Michigan, the consensus #1 seed. 

Put undefeated Washington off to the side. Two teams with one loss are in, and Ohio State is out?

Calm down

To the over-reactors who live with me, I sometimes advise, "It's not the end of the world; in fact, only the end of the world is the end of the world." Does not qualify as "memorable speech," one straightforward definition of poetry. But on a similar note, though tilted toward grown-up over-reactors, I recently stumbled on this, by the poet William Stafford:

It's All Right

Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work--better than some others'--has languished,
neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you've lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren't so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, "Hi!"
Slowly the sun creeps across the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

John Prine, visibly scarred on the occasion by more than one cancer surgery, has a song I like on the same subject:

 

The lyric to the second stanza goes:

I was sitting in the bathtub counting my toes
When the radiator broke, the water all froze
I was stuck in the ice without my clothes
Naked as the eyes of a clown.
I was crying ice cubes, hoping I'd croak
When the sun come through the window, the ice all broke
I stood up and laughed, thought it was a joke
That's the way that the world goes 'round.

As has been pointed out, saying "Calm down" has had the desired effect never, for no one, but maybe these can help. 

War in Gaza

Sometimes, I'll turn on the TV, start watching a football game, and, to work up a bit of artificial engagement, try to persuade myself that I like one team more than the other, so that I have a rooting interest, but usually I soon give up and just start vacuuming or something. It's a little like that when I contemplate the war between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force, only instead of running the vacuum I just wish they'd both stop killing the other side's civilians.

But some people are really determined to have a rooting interest, and in our country, the home team is Israel. Here is right-wing blogger Paul Mirengoff trying to persuade us, or maybe himself, that the civilians of Gaza are not wholly innocent since—it has to do with their responses to public opinion researchers soliciting their view of Hamas. By the same logic, Jewish civilians of Israel aren't innocent, either. Here is the conclusion to an interview Daniella Weiss, a leader of Israel's settler movement, gave journalist Isaac Chotiner:

Chotiner: When Israel pulled out of Gaza, in 2005, it also closed down settlements in the region. This was under the Sharon government. And there's been talk by some settlers since October 7th about the need to repopulate Gaza with settlements. What are your feelings about what should happen with Gaza?

Weiss: Right now, I'm on my way to a TV interview where I'm going to speak about our movement's efforts to return to Gaza, the entire Gaza, and build settlements. 

Chotiner: So you think it was a mistake to pull out of settlements nearly twenty years ago?

Weiss: It was a mistake. The whole world is crying because of that. The whole world suffers from Hamas's rise. Not my problem. It's your problem. No country in the world said they were going to accept even a thousand people from Gaza. The world hates them. It was such a mistake to let them rise. 

Chotiner: Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?

Weiss: To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.

Chotiner: They're not Egyptian or Turkish, though. Why would they go to Turkey?

Weiss: O.K. The Ukrainians are not French, but when the war started they went to many countries. 

Chotiner: Their country was being bombed, and so many of them fled west.

Weiss: And the Gazan people want to get bombed by us?

Chotiner: Maybe one option, other than bombing them, would be to help try and develop a society for them in Gaza, right?

Weiss: O.K., I wish you luck. Go ahead. Go for it. 

Chotiner: Do you feel that Netanyahu and the people in his government are sympathetic to you and your cause?

Weiss: He's very sympathetic, but he is not as brave as we are. . . .

Chotiner: We saw some horrible images on October 7th of what happened to Israeli children, and now we see some horrible images in Gaza of what is happening to Palestinian children. When you see Palestinian children dying, what's your emotional reaction as a human being?

Weiss: I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.

Chotiner: We are talking about children. I don't know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here.

Weiss: Yeah. I say my children are first.

In another part of the interview, she refers to "the Jewish nation," causing Chotiner to ask what the boundaries of this nation are. She answers that it extends from the Euphrates River in the northeast to the Nile in the southwest, so I guess it's not just the Gazans who will be relocating. When someone in Hamas says that a Palestinian state should extend "from the river to the sea," meaning from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, he's condemned for endorsing the removal, or even the extermination, of the Jewish people in Palestine. I don't know why Daniella Weiss and her fellow settlers get a pass—if anything, her views are, morally and practically, even more outrageous. And it's not as if she's a crazy outlier. She correctly points out that her preferred candidates are in power in Israel. 

Some of MLB's great MVP debacles

As a teen, I read a jillion of those "as told to" sports autobiographies, including My Turn at Bat, "the Ted Williams story," so I knew that on two occasions, the 1942 and 1947 seasons, Williams won the Triple Crown but not the American League's Most Valuable Player award. It happened that in both seasons Williams led the American League not only in the Triple Crown categories (batting average, homers, and runs batted in) but also in runs scored, walks, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and total bases. Here are his numbers in the Triple Crown areas compared to those of the MVP. First, 1942:

Williams             .356    36    137    

Joe Gordon        .322    18    103

And 1947:

Williams            .343    32    114

Joe DiMaggio     .315     20      97   

I had always supposed that these were the two greatest MVP snubs of all time, but, rooting around on the Internet in the wee hours of the morning last night, I learned that in 1934 Lou Gehrig won the Triple Crown and yet finished fifth [sic] in the MVP balloting. Here are Gehrig's Triple Crown numbers for that season, compared to those of the MVP, Mickey Cochrane of the Detroit Tigers:

Gehrig                .363    49    166

Cochrane            .320     2      75

What gives? Well, Cochrane's Tigers won the pennant, and he was both their catcher and their manager. But so what? The "P" in MVP stands for "player." If you were a sportswriter with the view that the MVP should be from the pennant-winning team, then it should have been Tiger Charlie Gehringer, who finished second, behind Cochrane, despite batting .356 with 11 homers and 127 RBI. He also led the league in hits (214) and runs scored (135). Had Gehringer won the MVP, I'd say the writers were guilty of a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The other two players who finished ahead of Gehrig were both pitchers, Lefty Gomez of the Yankees, who went 26-5 with a 2.33 ERA, and Schoolboy Rowe of the Tigers, who was 24-8 with an ERA of 3.45.

Gomez, Gehrig's Yankee teammate, finished third in the MVP balloting, and Rowe, the teammate of Cochrane and Gehringer, finished fourth. This seems apt inasmuch as Gomez pretty clearly had a better year than Rowe, the best pitcher on the pennant-winning squad. But why then did Gehrig's performance not lift him above all the Tigers? The gap between Gomez and Rowe was nothing compared to the chasm between Gehrig and Cochrane—or, for that matter, between Gehrig and anyone playing baseball in 1934. 

The Yankees won the pennant in both of Williams's Triple Crown years, and of course the MVPs for those seasons, Gordon and DiMaggio, were both Yankees. I don't know how the idea that the "most valuable player" almost necessarily had to play for the pennant-winner took root. That the notion has been retired is proof that not everything is getting stupider. 

They wouldn't, would they?

UPDATE: Answer turned out to be HECK.

KOK's spring creek

I'm around a hundred pages into the above immense work, Book 1 of six autobiographical novels by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. Around a decade ago, when first published, the phrase "literary sensation" usually accompanied reviews of the work, which sold in Norway, a country of around 5 million, 450,000 copies. I have to say that the cover is false advertising. My Struggle, Book 1, the first of six chronicles, and the opening 440 pages out of 3500. It must have been quite a struggle, and indeed the author pic makes it look as if he's been living in the forest with wolves for awhile. Nevertheless, the last big episode I passed concerned the 15-year-old Knausgaard maneuvering and dissembling in order to get to parties, without his parents knowing, where kids drank liquor. I see that a critic, James Wood, says that even when bored he was interested, and for now I feel similarly. I think there is a cinematic genre in which the film maker purports to make "art" just by running his camera in front of people who are living their lives. Writing words is different from following people around with a camera but you get the idea: the first 100 pages of My Struggle called to mind such a movie. Here is a poem, by William Matthews, on a similar theme, though it's somewhat more concise (title is "Sad Stories Told in Bars, the 'Reader's Digest' Version"):

First I was born and it was tough on Mom.
Dad felt left out. There's much I can't recall.
I seethed my way to speech and said a lot
of things that were deemed cute. I was so small
my likely chance was growth, and so I grew.
Long days in school I filled, like a spring creek,
with boredom. Sex I discovered soon
enough, I now think. Sweet misery!

There's not enough room in a poem so curt
to get me out of adolescence, yet
I'm nearing fifty with a limp, and dread
the way the dead get stacked up like a cord
of wood. Not much of a story, is it?
The life that matter's not the one I've led.

I think the odd "matter's" in the last line is a kind of shorthand for the sense, "The life that matters isn't the one I've led," which has one too many syllables? Anyway, my favorite part is where the poem finally seems to be rising to the level of an English teacher's idea of "poetry" when the promising simile, "like a spring creek," gets immediately filled with . . . boredom. 

Running the numbers

When informed that Taylor Swift is now a billionaire, not a mere multi-millionaire, I hatched a plan to "make math fun" by fashioning a lesson around the difference between a million and a billion. The calculation we ran through related to time, seconds to be precise:

seconds in a day: 60 x 60 x 24 = 86,400

seconds in a week: 86,400 x 7 = 604,800

seconds in 12 days: 86,400 x 12 = 1,036,800

seconds in a year: 86,400 x 365 = 31,536,000

seconds in ten years: 31,536,000 x 10 = 315,360,000

seconds in thirty years: 315,360,000 x 3 = 946,080,000 (we're finally getting sort of close to a billion)

seconds in thirty-two years: 31,536,000 x 32 = 1,009,152,000

This shows, I told my fifth graders, that if they had a million dollars, and they spent a dollar every second, they'd be out of money in less than two weeks. But if they had Taylor Swift money, a cool billion, they could then spend a dollar a second for over 30 years before beginning to "run low." 

I had given my phone to one of them so that she could use the calculator to generate the figures set out above. At what I considered to be the climax of the lesson, I said that a billion was almost too big to comprehend, and isn't it fun to try and fathom what "a thousand million" actually represents? By this time, though, she had moved on from the calculator to my camera roll. "Is this your dog?" she said.

They all clamored to see my dog, and I didn't disappoint. I have about a million pics of him. 

Watching cable news

How much cable news do I watch? Enough to know by heart the practiced speeches of a "former federal prosecutor," now "legal analyst," about SOP in racketeering cases, such as might be pursued against a crime family like the Trumps. But not enough, apparently, ever to hear the interviewer ask my question, which would be something like:

Ok, the rubes at the bottom of the pyramid who heeded Trump's call to come to the Capitol and be "wild" have been prosecuted. Many are in prison. Now, as you describe it, the people toward the top of the pyramid are feeling the heat and taking pleas. But unlike the rubes, they aren't going to prison. No, they are suffering a worse fate, such as being compelled to write letters of apology to "the people of Georgia." I wish I lived in Georgia because it must be deeply affecting to receive a court ordered letter of apology from a gangster with a résumé. Would it violate the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment if they had also been forced to write on the chalk board ten times, "I will never again try to overturn the result of a presidential election"?

More like another speech than a question, I know, and it's a Promethean board, I'm dating myself. But, so far, if you're unburdened by a legal education, it looks as if criminals like Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Kenneth Chesebro have traded their status as top mob lieutenants for a get-out- of-jail-free card. Who's higher up the pyramid? Maybe only Meadows, Eastman, Giuliani, and Trump himself, whom the Republicans are going to anoint again. The number of scoundrels who might possibly be held accountable, in any meaningful way, looks to be small and dwindling.  

What do the "legal analysts" think about that?