Eric The Blue

Twins in September

In September, the Twins won 18 games and lost 9. Fifteen of the games were against the White Sox, Royals, and Tigers, the weak sisters of their division, and they won twelve of those, which I guess means they were 6-6 against the Red Sox, Nationals, and Indians. It was their second best month of the season, behind only May, when they won 21 of 29 games. Looking back, it must have been sometime in May that people realized, or should have, that the Twins had a really good team. The schedule wasn't easy. On May 1 and 2, they were finishing a home stand with games against the Astros. They then went to New York to play the Yankees, had a west coast trip in the middle of the month in which they pummeled the Mariners and Angels, and finished up with series against the Brewers and Rays: 21-8, sterling.

The highlight of September, probably of the entire regular season, was a doubleheader sweep of the Indians on Saturday, September 14, in Cleveland. The Indians had won two of three at Target Field earlier in the month, and were only three games out of first when the Twins arrived for a weekend series. The Friday night game was rained out and rescheduled as part of a doubleheader the next day. In the first game, Jorge Polanco hit a homer with a man on base for the only runs of the game. He also made a diving stab of a liner with two out and the bases loaded that saved at least two runs. The tattered Twins starting rotation took a game off and four relief pitchers—Littell, Duffey, Romo, and Rogers—backed up three shutout innings from Devin Smeltzer, a September call-up who was the beneficiary of Polanco's diving catch. In the nightcap, our starter was another September call-up, the Australian Lewis Thorpe, who struggled, but in the top of the eighth the Twins perpetrated one of their patented muggings, scoring five times highlighted by a grand slam from Miguel Sano: Twins win again, 9-5.

So the two biggest games of the season were played on one day and our starting pitchers were Devin Smeltzer and Lewis Thorpe. We won them both, one a pitcher's duel, our bullpen topping Indian ace Mike Clevinger, and then a come-from-behind job in which the Twins clubbed the back end of the Indians' bullpen for the doubleheader sweep. I remember nursing a few beers through the Sunday game at my favorite neighborhood joint and feeling disgusted that we gave away a game that the Indians tried to give us but, due to our even worse play, couldn't. It looked like both teams thought the divisional race had ended the day before, a reasonable assumption in retrospect. It's hard to catch a good team that's playing only the White Sox, Tigers, and Royals for the last two weeks. The Twins finished the season with 101 wins, only their second 100-win season in their 59-year history.

Who is the Twins' MVP for the season? Kind of an interesting question. Kepler fell  out of contention when an injury kept him in the dugout for most of September. I'd give it to Polanco over Cruz, because he (Polanco) went out and played shortstop almost every day, whereas Cruz, who had league MVP-like batting numbers—average of .311 with 41 homers and 108 RBI—was "only" the designated hitter. I'm tolerant of divergent opinions on this question. If the upcoming playoff series comes down to one at-bat in the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium, and the home team is thinking about walking Cruz to pitch to Rosario . . . I think I'm cool with whatever they decide to do. Actually, I'd be cool with the series on the line and Luis Arraez at the bat, and will be heartsick if the ankle sprain he suffered on a freakish play yesterday prevents him from playing against the Yankees.

Impeachment notes

Just some notes about the documents that have now been made public and are at the center of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry—the memo, in transcript form, of Trump's phone conversation with the president of the Ukraine (read it here) and the whistleblower's complaint (read it here). 

1. First time I read through the phone conversation, I became too nauseated by the Ukrainian president's wheedling tone to notice any evidence of the American president's corruption. "Yes you are absolutely right, not only 100% but actually 1000%." "Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower." And so on, and so forth, ad nauseum, too many instances to quote. While gagging, I might have given assent to the conclusion that, as evidence of an impeachable offense, the conversation is a "nothing-burger."

2. But the source of the Ukrainian president's flattery is of course his desperation. The Ukraine is under attack from Russia. It desperately needs the aid that has been approved by the Congress, though delivery has now been interrupted by the Trump administration. When he leaves off fellating Trump over the phone line in order to gingerly introduce this topic, the first words out of Trump's mouth are, "I would like you to do us a favor though."

3. At this point, the graphics on news shows sometimes introduce ellipses, skipping over the next confusing hundred words or so to get immediately to Trump's request regarding the Bidens. Some of Trump's defenders have argued that this is dishonest and unfair to Trump, but the elided material is actually evidence of how zany our president is. The material is confusing because it relates to an incoherent conspiracy theory about how the computer security firm CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC after its servers were hacked during the 2016 campaign, was in on a sinister scheme to frame Russia for the hack and that the server, which is in Ukraine, would show . . . ach, it's too bizarre for words, but, if you're interested in the details, it's pretty thoroughly described and debunked here, by Rachel Sandler, writing in that well-known purveyor of left-wing apologetics, Forbes magazine. The condensed version is that Trump's mind is not lucid and he's eager to believe crazy shit if it's flattering to him and tends to be reassuring on topics about which he's insecure, like his election victory.

4. On the topic of ellipses, they appear in the text of the document released by the White House, too. It doesn't seem likely that Team Trump is concerned about taxing our attention with chatter about the meteorological conditions in Kiev compared to Washington, D.C. It seems more likely that they want points for being transparent without actually being transparent. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump, in the call, pressed the Ukrainian president eight times to investigate the Bidens, a detail that the evidently abridged version of the conversation fails to corroborate. Hmmm.

5. The whistleblower, in his complaint, writes: 

In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to "lock down" all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room.

If this is true, then an official word-for-word transcript exists. Yet the released document contains ellipses. Does the Trump team think its reputation for honesty and straight-dealing will stop people from making the obvious inference?

6. In retrospect, it's sort of amusing to recall Trump talking about how his conversation  with the Ukrainian president was "beautiful" and "perfect." It's such an odd, unnatural way to talk.  Now we know that the "perfect" conversation was so "perfect" that the "perfect" details likely had to be hidden away on a server otherwise reserved for the country's top national security secrets. Cover up. Consciousness of guilt.

7. It's natural to wonder about the identity of the whistleblower. He certainly has access to the minds of a lot of "high-ranking officials," a circumstance that elicited a theory from a guest on one of the cable news shows yesterday—I think it was MTP Daily, though I can't remember the name of the guest. His surmise, however, was that a group of national security professionals had finally had enough. Like, maybe the misuse of the national security server put one of them over the edge. They decided to get together, pool everything they knew, and produce a complaint under the Whistleblower Statute. Then they drew straws, and the loser, as they had agreed beforehand, had to go forward as the whistleblower. Ingenious! It would be the short-straw person who had to go forward. Yesterday, Trump likened the whistleblower to a treasonous spy who deserved the death penalty. Witness intimidation qualifies as one of his relatively minor offenses. 

On tv

The Twins! Country music! Impeachment! Who says there's nothing interesting on TV?

The Twins last night won their ninety-seventh game of the season. They're four games ahead of the Indians and, as both teams have five to play, the Twins can clinch the divisional title by winning two more games. They would clinch tonight if they were to win and the Indians lose. All is not tulips and roses, however. Through the long season the Twins have relied on five starting pitchers. Here they are, with their ERAs for the month of September: Odorizzi (3.3), Berrios (4.6), Perez (7.0), Gibson (9.9), and then Pineda, who hasn't pitched on account of the season-ending suspension he incurred for using a banned diuretic. This is not what's called "peaking at the right time." Last night, when Odorizzi was removed after pitching six innings, Gibson was inserted to try and protect the 4-1 lead. This was a little eye-opening, inasmuch as the day before the team hadn't played, so the bullpen was somewhat rested, and the Indians are still within range. The only thing I can make of it is that Gibson was auditioning for a spot on the post-season roster. He pitched the seventh and eighth innings, allowing one run. We're headed into the playoffs with a starting rotation of Odorizzi, Berrios (who's been shaky), and . . . there isn't anyone else with experience who over the past few weeks has been able to get major-league hitters out once in a while.

The highlight for me in Episode 6 of Ken Burns's country music film relates to the unusual biography of Kris Kristofferson. He was born at Brownsville, Texas, into a military family: his dad was an officer. The family moved around a lot, and Kristofferson graduated high school in San Mateo, California, before enrolling at Pomona College, a very selective and highly regarded private school in Claremont. He excelled, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in addition to playing football and running track. He then attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After finishing a degree in English literature at Oxford, he continued the family tradition by enlisting in the US Army. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant, trained as a Ranger and helicopter pilot, and eventually attained the rank of captain. Upon completing a tour of duty in 1965, the Army assigned him to teach English literature at West Point, but instead he left the military and moved his young family to Nashville to pursue his interest in song writing and music. He scuffled for years, working at such menial jobs as janitor at a recording studio, where he would press his song sheets on unsuspecting stars. His wife divorced him. His parents thought he was acting irresponsibly and disowned him. By this time, Kristofferson had made the acquaintance of Johnny Cash, and, in the movie, he describes showing to Cash the letter he had received from his mother in which she lays out her opinion on his "career moves" and concludes that, if he persists, he will be dead to her and his dad. Cash scanned the letter, then looked up at Kristofferson and said, "It's always nice to get mail from home." 

So that is about the first 30 years in the life of the man who wrote "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Sunday Mornin' Coming Down"—not to mention scores of other hit songs, and his very distinguished career as a recording artist, and his equally distinguished career as an actor in motion pictures. Phi Beta Kappa. Rhodes Scholar. Army Ranger. Janitor, struggling artist, family outcast.

I'm sure there is a lot to say, and being said, about the "transcript" of Trump's phone conversation with the Ukrainian president. I've read it, here, and if the whistleblower's actual complaint is even worse for Trump, I can see why the Administration is declining to deliver it to Congress as the law requires. Apparently this Maguire guy, the acting Director of National Intelligence—they're all acting—was advised by the Department of Justice not to forward the complaint to Congress for investigation.  Now we see that in the phone conversation Trump told the Ukrainian president, in the context of this "favor" he was seeking, to expect a call from William Barr, the attorney general. Barr of course is the head of the Justice Department—which advised the acting DNI not to deliver the whistleblower's complaint to Congress. The stench is general. If only Trump would put on a tan suit.

Off my normal beat: country-western music

I haven't been watching Ken Burns's film on country music now airing on PBS because, you know, the Twins, whose "magic number" is down to two, but yesterday was a day game and I stumbled on the half-completed fifth episode while eating a late supper, watched to the end, and then filled in the first half on the replay that immediately followed. I think you can stream the episodes that have already aired here. The whole shooting match is eight episodes, 16 hours.

Episode 5 includes the film's treatment of Merle Haggard, whose biography sounds like the lyric to a country song. His Okie parents moved to Oildale, California, just outside Bakersfield, at the height of the Depression in 1934. Haggard was born at Oildale in 1937. His father died eight years later, whereupon his mother went to work as a bookkeeper. Left to his own devices while his mom worked, Haggard in his adolescence compiled a substantial rap sheet and a succession of temporary addresses at juvenile detention centers. The crimes weren't awful—truancy, burglary, petty larceny, assault—but there were lots of them, and he was eventually sentenced to hard time in San Quentin. He had also, however, been gifted a used guitar, which he taught himself to play while listening to records of country artists like Hank Williams and Bob Wills. Also, Bakersfield—this was news to me—was in the 1950s a kind of outlaw satellite to Nashville, and "the Bakersfield sound," a reaction against the over-produced Nashville sound, influenced the young Haggard, who just happened to be from there: he had made himself enough of a musician to perform in the innumerable honkytonks when not pursuing his main career as a minor, teen-aged criminal. In prison, he was for a time a member of a group of inmates planning an escape, but the leader, having heard him play in a prison band, advised him to drop out, do his time, and make something of himself in the music industry. Haggard took the advice. The break-out actually occurred, more or less as planned, but in the subsequent man hunt Haggard's mentor was captured after shooting a police officer. He was returned to San Quentin, where Haggard, before being paroled in 1960, the year he turned 23, watched as his friend was escorted across the prison yard to the execution chamber. The stardom that followed soon upon his prison release did not discharge the demons spawned during his troubled early life. From the Wikipedia article:

In 1983, Haggard and his third wife Leona Williams divorced after five stormy years of marriage. The split served as a license to party for Haggard, who spent much of the next decade becoming mired in alcohol and drug problems.

The "third wife" was only number 3 of 5, and the substance abuse, not necessarily a neat fit with his criticism of the counterculture in such Silent Majority anthems as "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me," is so pervasive in country-western bios as almost to have attained the status of a cliche. Hank Williams, who I assume received his due in Episode 1, had one divorce and a resume filled with job terminations for the same cause—"habitual drunkenness"—despite dying before his thirtieth birthday. The Wikipedia article about Williams rises to the occasion when describing his death, from heart failure in the backseat of a car being driven by one Charles Carr, who had been hired to get him to a New Year's Day concert in Canton, Ohio, after planned air travel was cancelled due to an ice storm:

At around midnight on Thursday, January 1, 1953, when they crossed the Tennessee state line and arrived in Bristol, Virginia, Carr stopped at a small all-night restaurant and asked Williams if he wanted to eat. Williams said he did not, and those are believed to be his last words. Carr later drove on until he stopped for fuel at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, where he realized that Williams was dead and that rigor mortis had already set in. The filling station's owner called the chief of the local police. In Williams' Cadillac, the police found some empty beer cans and unfinished handwritten lyrics.

Then of course the man in black, his amphetamines and his booze (and prison concerts, one of which had been attended by Haggard in his convict days). One of the interviewees in Episode 5 describes some lesser star, can't remember which one, who made a point of keeping his pills in one pocket and his change in another, because once in his confusion he'd "taken" thirty-five cents.

More homework

I know it's counterintuitive, but millions of devoted readers have expressed interest in my 6th-grader's math homework, and comparatively few in, say, Israeli electoral politics. Whoever pitched "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" as a game show idea may have been onto something. As it happens, I've been consulted again regarding (b) in the picture. The context—"learning objective," I think they say in ed-speak—concerns the geometry of circles. This mysterious number pi (π) is the ratio of the circle's circumference to its diameter. Half the diameter is the radius. The area of the circle is the product of π and the square of the radius. From the definition of π it follows that the circumference is equal to π times the diameter. I don't think you can see in the picture that they are given the information that the squares are 1 unit long on a side. The problem is to find the area and perimeter of the figures.

Lydia could do (a) and (c). Maybe you can see enough of them to agree, with me, that (b) is indeed a little harder. To find the area, you have to satisfy yourself that there are two partial circles of the same size, plus the square, and no overlap between the three—a little tricky, perhaps, since the circles, if whole, would overlap. The radii of the circles are the same as the side of the square, length 1 unit, and, since it's a square, the missing portion from each circle is a 90-degree sector. Then you just have to put all that together. The individual circles, if whole, would have an area of π square units. Since 90 of the 360 degrees (one-fourth) are missing, they both have an area of 0.75 π square units, and together, an area of 1.5 π square units. Plus 1 square unit for the square containing the two missing sectors: 1 + 1.5 π, or about 5.71 square units. 

I beg Lydia to consider, once she has an answer, whether it makes any sense, a habit that tends to guard against errors in number grinding or keying on a calculator. I might as well beg Kyle Gibson, through the tv screen, to "work quickly and throw strikes." In this case though, it seems that a useful observation might be that, since the circles if completed would slightly overlap, there is a portion of the square within both circles. Therefore the final answer should be a little less than the sum of the areas of two full circles, which would be 2π, or about 6.28, and 5.71 satisfies that check.

Regarding the perimeter: it's three-fourths of the way around a circle with circumference of 2π, and then the same trip again, so (1.5)(π)(2), or 3π, about 9.42.

More on Israel and its election

The Israeli election that I previewed here has now occurred, the results are 90% or more tabulated, and the result . . . inconclusive, again. But it appears that Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party slipped. First time around, it won more votes than any other party, but not a majority, and the do-over election was called after Netanyahu could not make a deal with any allied party to form a governing majority. This time around, the two leading parties switched places:  without winning a majority of seats in the 120-member Knesset, the more moderate Blue and White party appears to have won two more Knesset seats than Likud, and to have outpolled Netanyahu's party by about one percent of the vote.

For Netanyahu, this result is roughly analogous to taking a mulligan after a bad golf shot and then hitting one that, from the tee box, looks to be if anything even worse. After the vote last April, he couldn't or wouldn't make a deal that would have been unsavory to him personally and to his hard-right constituency. Instead he gambled on a new election, and now it's Benny Gantz, the leader of Blue and White, who might—might—be able to form a government with himself as prime minister.

I'm not diving into the weeds of the different factions and the difficulty of forming a governing coalition after a split vote because

a) I am insufficiently informed; and

b) from what I can tell, becoming sufficiently informed is a fool's errand, since the only people who really understand have been inhaling and exhaling the complexity of Israeli politics for years and an outsider might as well undertake to teach himself Hebrew in late middle age.

Nevertheless, the high-level outlines of the debate are interesting to me, partly because they resemble the political fault lines here in the US. Israel has Arabs and the dispossessed Palestinians; we have brown-skinned immigrants with or without papers. The question is how accommodating we should be toward these others. Both Trump and Netanyahu, with nothing even resembling delicacy, assert that the others are an inhuman menace and that the party of accommodation is weak, unpatriotic, a grave risk to national security. There is a large audience for this message in both countries and, what might seem odd, its voting constituency includes the unusually high percentage of religious zealots within the respective populations—conservative Christian evangelicals in the US and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel.

But these blocs, while large, are not a majority.  In both countries, the divide is geographical and cultural. In our country, the wingnuts complain of the "coastal elites" who, in Israel, have their counterpart in the residents of the urban centers along the Mediterranean coast, from Haifa to Tel Aviv. These Israeli Jews are educated and generally secular in outlook—Tucker Carlson might say that they are "cosmopolitan." They like the warm weather, Starbucks, smart phones, and, in general, the modern, interconnected world. It's conceivable that one could be a baseball fan, in which case he'd have more in common with me than he'd have in common with settlers trying to eke it out for God and country in occupied territory. The Israeli "elites" aren't against national security, but the ultra-Orthodox party that's aligned with Likud would like to shut down all commerce on the Sabbath, including even public transportation, and you can imagine the disdain with which they regard that prospect. In Tel Aviv, lots of people like to go out for dinner and drinks on Friday night.

There are so many political parties because there are so many different opinions among Jews in Israel. They may agree that Israel should be a Jewish state without agreeing about what makes the state Jewish. The power base of one of the minor parties, Yisrael Beitenu, is made almost entirely of secular-minded Russian Jews who moved to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are wary of non-Jewish citizens, hawkish on defense, and support the settlement movement and the annexation of disputed territory into Greater Israel. In all these respects, Yisrael Beitenu is a natural ally of Likud, and could after the first election have supplied the extra seats to allow Netanyahu to form a government. Yet it didn't happen, and one factor among others was that the party of Russian Jews of secular sensibility would not make common cause with a coalition that included the ultra-religious ultra-Orthodox. It's really hard to form governing alliances across party lines when there is a reason these different parties exist.

I've tried to emphasize the difficulty of conforming the idea that Israel is a democratic state with the idea that it is a Jewish state. American support for Israel is so strong, almost reflexive, that it sometimes seems we have no interest in what goes on one side of the scale and what on the other. Here is Paul Mirengoff of the right-wing Power Line blog analyzing the results of the election:

In view of the results, I see three possibilities going forward: (1) a government led by Netanyahu that would rely on support from right-wing and Orthodox religious parties, (2) a government led by his opponents that would rely on support from Arab parties, and (3) some form of coalition party in which power is shared between Netanyahu's party and the center-left opposition.

The second option seems untenable. It would make the government of the Jewish state hostage to Arab interests, which are inimical to a Jewish state. Israeli Jews could not be expected to tolerate such a situation.

This is somewhat candid if only one notices that the last sentence, though intended to read smoothly, is the functional equivalent of: "Israeli Jews cannot be expected to tolerate equal citizenship rights for non-Jews under a democratic government." Is that really what the US supports, too? Remember that the people for whom a democratic Israel barely attains the status of a talking point are the same ones who want to annex all the disputed territory, thereby foreclosing on a two-state solution as well. It isn't clear to me what they expect the sojourning strangers mentioned in Leviticus 19:34 to do.

Election Day in Israel

Today is Election Day in Israel. It's a "do-over" necessitated by the inconclusive outcome of their last election held only last spring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party got the most votes, but not a majority, and Likud then failed to strike an agreement with any of the minor parties that would have allowed Netanyahu to forge a governing coalition in the Knesset. Without any such coalition, the Knesset dissolved itself, and Netanyahu had to call for a new election.

Does that sound odd? I do not know what happens in the event of another inconclusive outcome. It seems as if Israel could have a Groundhog's Day election season with Bill Murray as Bibi Netanyahu. Who has changed their mind since April?

A good preview of today's election, and of the political climate generally in Israel, is "Why Bibi fears Arab voters," by Yardena Schwartz, in The New York Review. One of her main points is that, while people may not have changed their minds, they may be changing their voting strategies, especially the non Jewish part of the population that has in the past voted for minor Arab parties—or, more frequently, just not voted at all. In this way, they have succeeded at making themselves politically irrelevant, a significant achievement considering that there are close to 2 million of them in a country of less than 9 million. 

But that may be changing, the principal factors being:

• The policies pursued by Netanyahu and Likud—preeminently, the drive to annex all the territory on which a second state might plausibly be established, thereby foreclosing the possibility of a two-state solution—are detested by Israel's Arab citizens
• Netanyahu and Likud could be ousted, with relative ease, if Arab voters marked their ballots for the centrist Blue and White party, the main Jewish opposition to Likud

I guess we'll see whether anything like this happens. There are obstacles that will remove from possibility the "relative ease" part. One is that Arab Israelis don't particularly like Blue and White, either. Another is that the very prospect of a coalition of Arabs and Jewish moderates permits Netanyahu to stoke the fire on the right. It's rather like Trump huffing and puffing at his MAGA rallies. Even the subject matter is similar. Netanyahu's Jewish political foes are unpatriotic and are making common cause with the debased Arabs, whose polling stations should be monitored by cameras in order to detect their cheating. Et cetera. There is no evidence of Arab cheating, however—only of their nonparticipation, which, if Likud is to prevail, must persist. In his personal affairs, Netanyahu is possibly as corrupt as Trump, and has in fact been indicted for bribery.

Schwartz's article—I'll link to it again—has the strength of bringing into view an essential fact, or dilemma. Israel is meant to be a democratic, Jewish state. But these two characteristics exist together in tension. If it is truly democratic, it loses its Jewish character, for non-Jews are then free to exert their due influence. The two-state solution is a way out of the box. But Likud doesn't want that, either. To achieve the dream of a "Greater Israel," it wants to annex all the disputed lands on which another state could be established. It's not hard to see why Arab Israelis should conclude there is no place for them in the Likud scheme of things.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Being older, I am slow to realize what the Internet offers. Yes, I've heard there's porn, but did you know you can watch all the episodes of "The Mary Tyler Moore" show on YouTube? Its run on CBS, from 1970 to 1977, coincided almost exactly with my teenaged years. I didn't know about it at first. As near as I can remember, the show crossed into my consciousness for the first time when a Sports Illustrated article about the suddenly competitive Gopher basketball team made a somewhat lame joke about how Minnesotans would even give up watching Mary Tyler Moore in order to go to the games on Saturday evenings. That was the 1971-72 basketball season. It wasn't long before SI ran another article about the team, "An Ugly Affair in Minneapolis," that made no mention of plucky, decent, lovable Mary.

So it was probably in its second or third season that I started watching MTM. The hook was just the knowledge that a popular network sit com was set in Minneapolis. This, I now understand, was almost accidental, as Minneapolis was settled on when one of the writers went on a long jag about the strengths and weaknesses of the Vikings football team. The show's creators, in other words, seem to have been quite indifferent about the geographic locale. If so, I think it was a happy accident that a Vikings fan was among the writers. The show doesn't make a point of developing the back stories of the various characters, but in Season 1 it does make plain that Moore's character, Mary Richards, is a native Minnesotan. She moves to Minneapolis from an unnamed smaller Minnesota town after breaking off an engagement. In one of the earliest episodes, the fellow tries to edge back into her life, and she is interested enough to meet him—whereupon she remembers what she didn't like. The purpose of this seems related to the original idea that Mary would be starting a new life after a divorce. But there was some fear that viewers would then be confused and think that Mary Richards, played by an actress most famous for having played Laura Petrie, had divorced Dick Van Dyke, and would dislike her for it! Thus the effort to establish that she's a native Minnesotan, never married.

She's also the smartest, most decent and psychologically fit character on the show, a foil to the often buffoonish men and oddly (considering their buffoonery) man-crazy women. That this "together" character is the only one who clearly hails from Minnesota plays into a popular mythology, unless it helped to create the myth that we denizens of the most frozen part of the Midwest are among the best specimens the country has to offer. The Coen brothers' Marge Gunderson is a younger cousin of Mary Richards, and I bet Garrison Keillor was a fan, too. I shouldn't say it, because it's what lawyers call a "statement against interest," but one uniting trait of these various women characters is that they are smarter and abler than the men in their lives, and undertake themselves to disguise this fact in order to keep everyone happy. It's wrong that they should feel they have to do it, but we'd be very thankful if only we were smart enough to notice what's going on. 

Final note: it's an enjoyable fact that the show's fans connect Mary to the city of Minneapolis so intensely that the people who lived in "her house"—the one at 2104 Kenwood Parkway shown in the opening sequence—were beset by tourists and, to discourage picture taking and filming, though also I hope because it was the right thing to do, hung an IMPEACH NIXON sign below Mary's big upstairs window during the height of the show's popularity.

While watching tv

The Republican, Dan Bishop, won the Special Election for the seat from the 9th congressional district in North Carolina that I wrote about the other day, here. It was close, 51 to 49 percent, in a district Trump had carried by more than 11 points.

I get a kick out of the things cable news "analysts" say as the returns come in. When it looked like the Democrat might win, narrowly, there was talk about "alarm bells" and "hair on fire" at the White House. Then the Republican ekes it out and "a win is a win is a win." The idea is that the Special Election is an early test of Trump's strength in one-thirteenth of "the battleground state of North Carolina," and apparently a decline of 12 points warrants an F, whereas if the downturn is only 10—passing grade and nothing to fear! That Trump won North Carolina by only about three-and-a-half points seems like a relevant fact. Consequently, if you accept the premise that the Special Election result foreshadows the 2020 outcome in North Carolina, and your "hair is on fire" at -12, perhaps it should still be smoldering at -10.

Trump tweeted that his rally in North Carolina earlier in the week saved the day for Bishop. It's more likely, however, that he's a narcissistic dope.

Of course the same cable news "analysts" have opinions on the contest for the Democratic nomination. I was watching last night when one of them said the race hadn't changed for weeks: Biden still in first, Warren still surging. I wonder how long a candidate can "surge" and remain in second place? Considering that she's been "surging" for weeks, you'd think that by now Warren might have "surged into the lead." Maybe more modest verbs don't deliver as many eyeballs to the advertisements. 

And maybe I shouldn't channel skim between innings of the Twins' game. They beat the Nationals last night, 5-0, to remain five games ahead of Cleveland. Speaking of advertisements, Bob Eubanks, looking like a display in a wax museum, is on every channel. Do you owe Uncle Sam more than $10,000?  Call this number to convert it into a refund! We won't stop running this ad till we've heard from everyone who was ever enrolled at Trump University.

North Carolina's Special Congressional Election

Tomorrow is the Special Election to fill the congressional seat from North Carolina's 9th district, which has been vacant since the apparent winner, Republican Mark Harris, was never seated. A bipartisan commission directed that a new election be held after investigating allegations of absentee vote fraud on the part of the Harris campaign. I wrote about the scheme here. In North Carolina, lists of voters who have requested an absentee ballot is public information, and, during the absentee voting period, the names of voters who have not yet returned their ballot is public as well. Harris had hired an operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., who, according to testimony before the commission, paid associates of his to visit the homes of people with unreturned absentee ballots and offer to collect them. This violated a state election law concerning who may handle an absentee ballot. The pay rate was $125 for every 50 ballots illegally collected, a detail that reminded me of what James Carville once said can be drudged up by dragging a 20-dollar bill through a trailer court. Dowless is pictured above, along with some of his "campaign workers," including those who did the "leg work." They look like the last thing you saw before waking up in a bloody bath tub with one kidney.

Dowless, who was subsequently indicted, pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the commission, and the details of what happened to the illegally collected ballots aren't certain. However,  Dowless only operated in two counties—the only two counties in the district in which Harris won a majority of the absentee ballots cast. Moreover, those same two counties had an unusually high percentage of unreturned absentee ballots. It seems likely that the illegally collected ballots that were marked for Harris were witnessed and mailed in from a post office near the voter's home, and that those marked for Dan McCready, the Democrat, were ashcanned. In the election night count, Harris won by 905 votes.

In tomorrow's Special Election, McCready, an Iraq war veteran, is again the Democratic candidate. Harris is obviously damaged goods and has been replaced by Dan Bishop, who, if the Wikipedia article on him is half true, qualifies as a recognizable type of right-wing nut job: LGBT activists are the American Taliban, Black Lives Matters is a neo Nazi movement, etc. Trump carried the district by a double-digit margin, but his statewide margin was less than 4 points, so another close outcome in the 9th district tomorrow would suggest that both he and incumbent Republican senator Thom Tillis are in for tough fights in the state in 2020. According to civiqs, 47% of North Carolinians currently approve of Trump's performance as president, compared to 51% who say they disapprove.

Homework

In case you're wondering what kinds of math problems sixth graders in the Minneapolis public schools are working on these days, I recently heard Lydia FaceTiming a friend about what turned out to be:

A farmer is taking her eggs to the market in a cart, but she hits a pothole, which knocked over all the containers of eggs. Though she is unhurt, every egg is broken. So she goes to her insurance agent, who asks her how many eggs she had. She says she doesn't know, but she remembers some things from various ways she tried packing the eggs.  

When she put the eggs in groups of two, three, four, five, and six there was one egg left over, but when she put them in groups of seven they ended up in complete groups with no eggs left over.

How many eggs were in her cart?

First, let me put my Old Fogeyism on hold and admit I think it's cute when kids use their smart phones to put their heads together about math homework. It's when they spend hours playing Roblox that I get pissed off, except for when it allows me to watch Twins games on tv without interruption. Lydia and her friend didn't have a better idea than to "horse it": that is, work through all the multiples of 7 until they came to one that satisfied all the other described properties. This was proving tedious, and leading to "Eurekas" that were then discovered to be mirages, and ultimately there was frustration and despair. Their worksheet more or less predicted this process, for another instruction stated: "Describe what you did in attempting to solve the problem. . . .  Include things that didn't work out or gave you unexpected results."

The "trick" is to use the supplied information to proceed with efficiency, instead of "horsing it" and just hoping you will soon hit on the answer. If there's one egg left when they're placed in groups of five, then the answer must end with 1 or 6 (since multiples of 5 are 5, 10, 15, 20, &c). But it can't end in 6, because when placed in groups of two there is also one left over. So the answer ends with 1 and is divisible by 7. The first possibility is 21, which doesn't work. The next possibility is 21 + x, where x is a multiple of 7 (so that the number is still divisible by 7) and a multiple of 10 (so that the number still ends with 1)—in other words, x is 70 and the next possibility is 91, which fails the test since 91/4 yields a remainder of 3. What about 161? No, divide it by 3 and you have 2 left over, not 1. We're still "horsing it," sort of, but considering only one out of every ten multiples of 7 is way more efficient. The next possibility, 231, doesn't work on account of being divisible by 3—no remainder at all. But 301: ding! ding! ding! ding! Sixth grade gonna be fun for dad!

I think Lydia is okay with the help and simultaneously a little exasperated about   the old man being such a dweeb. I tried to explain that I come by it honestly. When as a kid I asked her grandpa for math help, he would peruse my book, to get the lay of the land, and then begin grousing about how he had half a mind to call school since it was obvious the author of the textbook "knows nothing of mathematics." Good grief, I just want help with this one problem, don't make it an issue in the next school board election, for God's sake. He would regale my sister and me at supper with math anecdotes, like the one about the child prodigy who, during an elementary school arithmetic lesson, was disrupting the class by tapping his pencil loudly on his desk. The teacher told him to stop several times before finally admonishing him, "I don't want to hear another peep from you until you've summed the first hundred integers." He stared at the teacher defiantly, still tapping his pencil. "I mean it!" the teacher said. "Five thousand fifty!" he said.

And my dad explained that rather than thinking "one plus two is three and three is six and four is ten"—"horsing  it," and soon having to sharpen your pencil while risking confusion and error—the "prodigy" thought of it as:

(1+100) + (2+99) + (3+98) + … + (50+51). 

That is, 50 paired sums of 101, so that the solution is 50 x 101 = 5050. And my sister and I, forebears of Lydia: "Great, what's for dessert?"

Twins. Grammar.

I knocked some sense into the Twins with that rant the other day. Since then, they've hit just one more home run while winning two games. Not that it's safe to conclude that a team is just fine because they won a couple of games against the Tigers (whose record stands at 40-95).

The Twins' only homer in the last two games came today, from Ehire Adrianza (pictured), whom I took a cheap shot at for his poor play in right field three games back. Gonzalez is injured, Buxton is injured, the manager inserts Adrianza in right field because he's a versatile player, and then, playing out of position, he kicks it around and of course some smart ass with a blog notices. Adrianza is an able, solid, hustling player, and I like him a lot. But I'm not going to apologize for what I said about Cron, even though I see his fielding percentage is .991, which sounds pretty good—less than one error every hundred chances! But first basemen have high fielding percentages because they get a lot of chances, most of them easy. They hardly ever have to throw the ball very far. The other infielders throw it to them, and they just catch it. If the throw is low, and they can't come up with it, the error belongs to the guy who bounced it to them. Pretty sure Polanco has more throwing errors than he would if, say, Hrbek or Mauer were the first baseman. Plus, Cron doesn't get to balls it seems to me he should get to. Today a foul pop over his head landed on the warning track—my daughter calls it "the worry trail"—at just about the same moment he looked down to see whether he was running out of room.

Well, he's got 20-some homers, so whatevs, I guess. I will apologize if he gets hot and finishes the season with 30 homers and 100 RBI, which would be a lot of production from a guy who only plays about three-fourths of the time and usually bats toward the bottom of the order.

Did you notice my use of whom above? Pretty sure it's right, though it sounds a little unnatural. This business of grammar and how things sound is somewhat mysterious to me. Got asked by someone at Lake Harriet recently if I would take a picture of "my friends and I." That's wrong, right? You should ask whether someone will take a picture of "my friends and me." You can tell what's right by taking out "my friends." You would never ask someone (if English is your first language), "Will you take a picture of I?" It's, "Will you take a picture of me?" So it's also, "Will you take a picture of my friends and me?" My question is: Why does the ear of a native speaker protect against error in the one case but not in the other? Why does one mistake sound ridiculous but not the other?

It's a holiday, so the second-stringers are on the cable news channels, and I obsessively notice their language tics, too. A meteorologist reported,

The storm is moving slowly toward Florida's Atlantic coast

and, a minute later, under cross examination from the anchor, repeated herself (nearly):

The storm is moving painfully slow toward Florida.

Is there any error here? If we're just talking about what sounds wrong and what sounds right, I'd say

The storm is moving slow toward Florida

sounds wrong. You should definitely say "slowly." But the following also sounds wrong (though more modestly):

The storm is moving painfully slowly toward Florida.

But where is the logic? If you only care about rate, it's "slowly," but, add an interest in the emotional response caused by the rate, and now "slow" is suddenly correct? How about this:

The storm is moving—painfully, slowly—toward Florida. 

Can the form of the word you choose be right or wrong depending on how fast you talk, the inflection you give it? I also would like to know which of the following is correct:

She's smarter than me

or

She's smarter than I.

(Don't say both are correct no matter who she is!) The former sounds better to me. But for sure you could also say, correctly, "She's smarter than I am." So it seems maybe you should say

She's smarter than I

(since you can't say)

She's smarter than me am.