Eric The Blue

Second chance in Jeopardy, with a dig at Lauren Boebert

Some online training I had to take included the above image from a Jeopardy college tournament show. The picture isn't clear, but the category the young Caucasian brainiacs avoided for as long as they could is "African American History." You'd think the political indoctrination and Woke dogma that Republicans assure us kids are subjected to at college would make them all eager to shout, "Who were the Tuskegee Airmen?" But, no, TikTok celebrities for a thousand, Ken.

Speaking of Jeopardy, there is a Second Chance tournament going on right now. Contestants who lost close games to Super Champions like Amy Schneider have been invited back to play against one another in a sort of Noble Losers bracket—two brackets, actually, with the winner of each advancing to the upcoming Tournament of Champions, where they will have a chance to avenge themselves further. I have a crush on the first Second Chance qualifier, Jessica Something-or-Other from Nashville. (Forty-five years ago I knew the full names of my crushes.) I got used to cheering for Jessica when on her first show she was giving Matt Amodio, who had won like a thousand games in a row, a run for his money. Then in Final Jeopardy Matt implausibly couldn't answer a question in the geography/history field, and Jessica didn't bet as much as the other challenger, who won the game. Then that "other challenger" won like ten more games in a row, so you could say that, without ever winning a game, Jessica played .500 ball against Super Champions. Now she lapped the field in her Second Chance bracket, and she seems like a normal person, not an idiot savant or any of their near relatives. 

My favorite in the other bracket is Do-Hyoung Park, a St. Paul native who studied computer science at Stanford and now covers the Twins for mlb.com. Renaissance man! He had the misfortune of going against Amy Schneider, who, assuming Ken Jennings has no secrets, is the greatest transgender Jeopardy player of all time. Do stayed with her throughout the game and would have won if she'd drawn a blank in Final Jeopardy. She didn't, of course. Do's Second Chance game airs tomorrow (Wednesday the 26th). I'm glad he wasn't in Jessica's bracket as its torture when ambiguity infects your rooting interest. 

Someone who's not a candidate for Celebrity Jeopardy? Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado. Can someone explain to me why this data reflects poorly on Biden?

Here’s how many individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list CBP arrested over the last 6 years:

FY’22 : 98
FY’21 : 15
FY’20 : 3
FY’19 : 0
FY’18 : 6
FY’17 : 2

Border security is national security, and we’re all in more danger thanks to @joebiden.

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) October 24, 2022

He arrests terrorists and has also been caught on tape telling his son that he loves him. Scandalous! Boebert was recently reading a Bible verse off a teleprompter when she became confused by the phrase "wanton killing." She interrupted herself to admit she was clueless about the connection between homicide and the Chinese menu item known as a wonton. According to the polls, Kevin McCarthy has only a few more weeks to wait before he can make her the chair of a congressional committee. 

Facts versus the crime "narrative"

 

I pointed out, here, that homicide rates are highest in red states. Since Republicans try to win votes with tales of out-of-control violent crime in big bad blue cities, I have often wondered to myself why a Democrat never seems to cite data pertaining to the issue. It's just a fact, for instance, that the states with the five highest homicide rates are, in order, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas. Maybe hot weather causes armed citizens to shoot one another? I don't know, and neither do Republicans. Illinois, a favorite whipping boy of the Republicans on account of Chicago, does crack the top 10 at number 9—which means, by the logic of the complaint, that it's doing better than the bottom five and also better than South Carolina and Tennessee (numbers 6 and 7, respectively). 

I doubt it was because she received my telepathically transmitted advice, but I see now that the Democratic challenger in Oklahoma's gubernatorial race pointed out in a debate that, under the Republican incumbent, the state has higher rates of violent crime than either California or New York. The video of the entire debate is above; the exchange I'm referring to begins at the 41:00 mark. The reaction of the Republican governor is sort of funny. He laughingly denies that it's true and appeals to the audience: "Oklahomans, do you believe that we have higher crime than New York or California?" The audience, and even the debate moderators, seem to think it's a wild charge: "We'll fact check that," says one of the questioners. When he does, he'll discover that she's right. Of course there are fewer homicides and other violent crimes committed in Oklahoma than in New York or California. But the number of these crimes per 100,000 population is somewhat higher in Oklahoma, and an Oklahoman is more likely to get shot than a Californian or a New Yorker. 

Actually, I think the fact checking has occurred, because the other day Marc Thiessen, a wingnut columnist whose delusions are published on the editorial page of the Washington Post, wrote a piece dismissing "the red state murder problem" as a "bogus claim" intended to divert attention from a raging crime epidemic in Democratic cities. He doesn't deny that violent crime rates tend to be highest in red states, but argues that this is because of all the criming in "Democrat-run cities" like New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Birmingham, Alabama. Without these cities, says Thiessen, crime rates in the red states would drop significantly.

But this is no argument at all. Blue states have "Democrat-run" cities, too. St. Louis and Kansas City are in Missouri; New Orleans is in Louisiana; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland are in California; and New York City is in New York. Rates of violent crime are considerably higher in Missouri and Louisiana than in California and New York. Why? Thiessen's column is just gaslighting, but, if I was determined to take him seriously, I'd say his solution to the riddle must be that blue cities in red states are hell holes compared to blue cities in blue states. If you value your life and live in Birmingham, move to L.A. before it's too late! 

Johnson on Shakespeare at work

No doubt the literary world is anxiously awaiting the promised sequel to my mini essay on Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare. I discussed briefly there Johnson's defense of Shakespeare for having violated the "dramatic unities"—the idea that, in a play, the elapsed real time while the audience watches in the theater must match the elapsed time depicted in the stage action. Shakespeare obviously cared nothing for this dictum. In Othello, for example, the action begins in Venice and then shifts to Cyprus, at the other end of the Mediterranean, where the same leading characters reconvene. It is today about a 3-hour flight from Italy to Cyprus, so several hundred years ago the journey could not have been achieved while an audience took in the action of the play. In Shakespeare's history plays, of course, wars are begun and ended within the same drama. We are not supposed to believe that Macbeth killed Duncan and then was killed himself around three hours later. According to the theory of the "unities," the theater experience is diminished by these obvious corruptions of "reality." 

I did not mention that Johnson takes up the question of whether Shakespeare was even aware of violating theater convention:

Whether Shakespeare knew the unities and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. [The word "want" is here a synonym for "lack"—Johnson is saying Shakespeare likely received the conventional advice of "experts" and rejected it.]

This is interesting to me mainly for the suggestion relating to Shakespeare's character and private views. The suggestion is of the impatience of a professional practitioner for the theories of "scholars and criticks." He knew what worked, at least for him (and his audience). He wouldn't have wanted to discuss the question. He had no time for that—too busy—and would just have ignored the advice.

This suggestion, admittedly slight, lines up pretty well with several other small details Johnson has gleaned from his reading of Shakespeare. Here he is criticizing Shakespeare for what we might call general sloppiness:

The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which are more easy.

It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and, in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

If we can put aside the tendency either to concur or disagree, and just allow that Johnson might be on to something, it seems worth noting that there comes into view a picture of a man with much to do and not enough hours to do it in. It is easy to imagine such a man being impatient with the learned views of theoreticians about matters on which he, without formal education or privileged background, had built a busy and successful professional career. Johnson, in a mode still generally critical, then observes:

I am indeed far from thinking, that his works were wrought to his own ideas of perfection; when they were such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the writer . . . .

It does not appear, that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of posterity, that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had any further prospect, than of present popularity and present profit. When his plays had been acted, his hope was at an end . . . .

So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those that had already been published from the depravations that obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to the world in their genuine state. 

Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions, the greater part were not published till about seven years after his death, and the few which appeared in his life are apparently thrust into the world without the care of the authour, and therefore probably without his knowledge.

It seems Shakespeare just didn't care about the things we contemporary people think an author must care about. He didn't care about the "unities," sure, and he also didn't care that his plays weren’t as good as he might have made them, if he'd had more time and fewer obligations, or that there was no published collection of his plays, with the text as he had originally written it, that would project into the future his genius. He was a professional theater person who had begun as an actor, had acquired an ownership interest in an acting company and, eventually, the theater in which they performed, and by the way was simultaneously supplying this company, from about 1590 to 1610, with one or two new plays per year in order to attract the public to their theater. He pursued these activities in London while keeping a family and a big house back in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon, about a hundred miles away. The plays, widely regarded as among the greatest works of the world's literature, as they encompass everything that humans have thought or felt, and express it memorably, were pretty clearly regarded by their author as nothing too special, just one facet of his professional activity in the theater biz. He made a good living at it.

Passing my goal

I can usually make my daily step goal (8500) with miscellaneous moving around plus two outings with the family dog. To fly past it like this requires something unusual, like October golf. We ride in carts, but when you hit the ball off line and have to find it so you can hit it off line again, there's nothing to do but walk back and forth in the leaf litter. The chance of spotting the ball and stepping on it are approximately equal. They clear the leaves off the fairways but that ain't where I hit 'em.  

Get quite a lot more exercise my way. Let the other fellas go for a low score.

If today turns out to be my last round of the year, I finished the season with a bogey 5. Fairly representative. Drove it a decent distance but—surprise!—off line into the right rough. There was a tree in my way but I could aim at the left edge of the green. I hit it quite a bit left of that. Then I pitched it all the way across the green and off the other side. Then I made a half decent putt from the fringe before holing around a 3-footer. Apparently my playing partners cannot concede a putt while shivering. 

He's just a kid who's 4!

 

I mentioned, here, Jennifer Senior—mostly her journalistic accounts of the social science relating to human happiness. She's also the author of a book about parenting called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting. She took the title from a chance conversation she had at a playground with a new dad who, when she asked how he found fatherhood, replied that it was "all joy and no fun at all." Well do I remember wanting—yearning—to be left alone on the playground bench while the kids played, but of course someone's unhappy every other minute, and then they want to be pushed on the tire swing, and then someone falls and gets hurt, and then, and then . . . no fun at all. I think the "all joy" was mainly the guy's way of acknowledging how he knew he was supposed to feel.

But the playground was no match for the peculiar, numbing torture of children's TV programming. The worst show ever was Caillou, about this Charlie-Brown looking boy and his perfect little kids' world, the loving parents, the doting grandparents, the friendly townspeople, and, above all, the grating jingle:

I'm just a kid who's 4,
Each day I grow some more,
I like exploring on Caillou!
So many things to do,
Each day is something new,
I'll share them with you on Caillou!
My world is turning, changing each day,
With mommy and daddy and finding my way!

In the typical climactic scene, Caillou visits, say, the fire station, where the firefighters invite him to climb aboard their biggest truck and toot the horn while working the steering wheel. They tell him he'll be a great firefighter one day, if he wants. They give him a fire helmet and everyone beams and laughs. After he's climbed down, his proud parents embrace the little egghead as the theme song kicks in. He's just a kid who's 4, each day he grows some more, Caillou!

I suffered this vivid flashback while watching political news on TV. It seems that Herschel Walker, the Republican US Senate candidate from Georgia, has gone on some field trips to police stations and the nice cops gave him "badges" that he now displays to anyone who'll listen to a potential senator's version of show-and-tell. Well, it's probably better for him and his campaign that people are talking about his toy badges rather than his secret children, the women he's beat up, and the abortions for which he's either advocated or paid. His official position on abortion is evidently that he's pro-life except in those cases where he's the one who knocked her up. Our country has a population of 330 million, a hundred of whom are members of the Senate, and there's about a 50-50 chance that he'll be one of them. Feeling small for having been nauseated by Caillou.

Dr Johnson's Shakespeare

I've been reading Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare with considerably more enjoyment than I can remember deriving when, years ago, it had a place on a syllabus in a folder in my backpack. What did I make, back then, of the defense Johnson offers against the charge that Shakespeare violated the dramatic "unities," a critical standard holding that if the running time of a play is three hours then the action depicted on the stage must represent three hours in the lives of the characters?  This obviously precludes travels of any distance or scenes involving the same character set in different places. Any familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, including some of the very best known ones (say, King Lear and Othello), proves that he cared not at all for this standard, if he even knew about it. Here is Johnson's version of the complaint:

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theater, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality. 

His rebuttal begins:

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theater has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. 

And he proceeds energetically in the same vein for a few pages, with the result that one is surprised when, indent, new paragraph, Johnson suddenly admits:

Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but recollect how much wit and learning may be produced against me; before such authorities I am afraid to stand . . . .

But he's just demonstrated that he's not afraid to stand against them. Is the above admission actually a sneer, the intended meaning being that there is no wit or learning on the other side of the argument? The content indicated by the ellipses tends to disprove such a notion, as does Johnson's essential conservatism, which led him to defend, on many questions, the judgments of time. The question relating to the aptness of the dramatic unities appears to be a case of his intelligence defeating his reactionary impulses—reluctantly, but with verve, and not only in this instance, he defends a view that but for his honesty and mental vigor he'd be inclined to reject. It's one of his endearing qualities. 

Just how conservative his judgments could be is on display when, having summarized aspects of Shakespeare's genius, he comes to his reservations:

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. . . . [H]is precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good and evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better. . . .

This seems to approach the view that only sermons and moral exhortation are permitted, and indeed Johnson went so far as to give his imprimatur to a 17th-century adaptation of King Lear in which at the end Cordelia marries Edgar, the king vanquishes his foes, and all is well in the world. The conclusion to Johnson's discussion of Shakespeare's greatness—

This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

—appears to refute his leading criticism, inasmuch as a drama that is "the mirrour of life" will inevitably offend the sensibilities of a Christian moralist. One can imagine Shakespeare replying, "Sorry, Sam, it's not me but the world that's indifferent to the progress of good and evil."

The most interesting parts of the Preface (to me) concern the passages that touch on the vexing question of Shakespeare's biography. But . . . another day. 

Pariah

Today while walking the dog I had a conversation with one of the neighborhood's young kids. I believe he's a 2nd-grader. For sure he broke his arm about the time school started. I remember one of his buddies, who was on the scene when it happened, gravely reported to me that "you could see the bump where the bone pushed his skin up." He needed surgeries, pins . . . yech. I asked today if I could see his cast, which is smaller than the one he had last time we talked. While displaying it for me, he volunteered that it was coming off in about three weeks, and that his mom had said they would have a "cast off party." He then fell silent for a second or two, and I thought I could see the wheels in his head spinning. Next thing out of his mouth was, "She says I can invite a lot of people, but not the whole neighborhood."

I guess I'm out! 

My WASPy kids in the diverse Minneapolis public schools

I'm no parenting expert, but I know you have to feed them, and I feel intuitively that it's probably good to have conversations with them, too. Thus at our house such supper-hour repartee as:

"How was school?"

"Fine."

"Have you been advised by an attorney to keep your answers brief?"

"You always say that. It's not funny."

Sometimes she—the middle-schooler—does better. Minneapolis public schools were closed this past Wednesday.

"Why no school on Wednesday?" she asked.

"It's Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday." (I have all the answers.)

"I love the Jews," she says.

I then launch into an explanation of why Sandy Koufax did not pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series, Dodgers versus Twins.

"Dad, dad, I don't care!"

I talk to her older sister, too. 

"How's school?"

"Fine. But I don't know what to write an essay about."

"What class?"

"Social Studies. It's called 'Race and Identity.'"

"Well, do you have to choose among options, or is it completely your choice?"

"My choice. Problem is, I'm a Basic White Girl with she/her pronouns." She gestures toward the heavens and whines, "I got nothin'!"

She ended up getting a 98 for an essay about her 50% Norwegian heritage. I read it before she turned it in. Fairly solid effort, though the part about making lefse with her aunt was a fabrication. She's been invited to help make lefse. Only thing she's ever done is eat it. Delivery system for butter and sugar. I suggested a paragraph concerning how, back when "our people" came to America, immigrants were so despised that the federal government gave them 160 acres of rich farmland. She said her paper was already long enough (2 pages, double spaced). 

Twins at the end: shit the bed edition

Lots of ways to describe the Twins collapse, but to me perhaps the most vivid is suggested by this tweet from Aaron Gleeman, who covers the team for The Athletic. On May 24, the Twins beat the Tigers, 2-0, in a game at Target Field. The win lifted their record to 27-16, eleven games over .500. They lost their next two games and were never again eleven games above .500. They hung around first place into September, because divisional rivals Detroit and Kansas City were hapless, and the division's better teams, the Guardians and the White Sox, were, like the Twins, stuck around the .500 mark. These circumstances tempted some, certainly including me, to think that the Twins were possibly the best team in baseball's weakest division. But if you throw out those first 43 games, the Twins have to be grouped with the Tigers and Royals, not with the Guardians and White Sox. Here are the records of the division's 3rd- through 5th-place finishers over the season's last 119 games:

Twins     51-68
Tigers    51-68
Royals    50-69

I know, the first 43 games count too, but, from the time the weather warmed to the end of the season, the Twins were as bad as anyone in baseball's worst division.

Yes, injuries. I was watching one evening a week or two ago when, trailing by a run with the opponents batting in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Twins brought in a new pitcher, which elicited from play-by-play guy Dick Bremer the hopeful comment, "If Thielbar [or whoever it was] can work out of trouble, the Twins have due up in the ninth the middle of their order." I can't remember if the pitcher got out of the jam, but it hardly matters, because "the middle of the order" was Gio Urshela, Jake Cave, and Gary Sanchez. You can imagine the fire power lurking in the bottom of our batting order, on the off chance one of those guys reached base! Actually, Urshela had a nice year for the Twins, but he's not anything like a major league cleanup hitter. Cave and Sanchez? Nothing against them, but neither one hit .215 or had an on-base percentage of .285. By this point in the season, of course, the team on the Injured List could have beaten the team we were putting on the field, as Team Can't Play included outfielders Buxton, Larnach, and Kepler, middle infielders Polanco and Lewis, first baseman Kirilloff, catcher Jeffers, and most of our best starting pitchers: Maeda, Mahle, Paddack, Dobnak (and relievers such as Coulombe, Alcala, and Stashak). 

I don't know what to say about injuries. If you're hurt and can't play, you're hurt and can't play. See what I mean about having nothing to say? But I will say that guys sure seem to get hurt a lot! I feel guilty about enjoying professional football, as it's obvious the players are damaging themselves, but maybe I should feel similarly about baseball? Also, my dim fan's impression is that when a guy gets hurt, there is an official announcement concerning the nature of the injury and how long the player will be sidelined. Then, if it's two weeks, the two weeks pass, and then two more weeks pass, and when a month after that he still isn't playing, I've mostly forgotten the guy's on our team as there has been no updated diagnosis or prognosis that I'm aware of. It's as if The Injured List is a waiting room in another galaxy. 

I'm happy that Luis Arraez won the batting championship (though I can also imagine Aaron Judge complaining in his soul that he was deprived of the Triple Crown by a banjo hitter). The other Twin postmortems I've seen invariably name Jose Miranda as a bright spot, and who would disagree, but is rookie reliever Jhoan Duran invisible? He appeared in 57 games, pitched 67.2 innings, allowed just 14 earned runs (about one every five innings), had 8 saves, no blown saves, 18 holds, a WHIP of 0.98, and 5.6 strikeouts for each walk issued. Deserves a mention! 

Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in about four months.

Electoral data points

1. 

If I'm clicking about The Web at night and discover suddenly that it's 3 in the morning, the site I'm most likely at, if not baseball-reference.com, is this "extremely detailed map of the 2020 election." It shows the result of the last presidential election at the precinct level—that is, the vote totals reported out of every polling place (almost) in the land. It's full of curiosities, like the one pictured above, which displays the result in one of the rare precincts in Los Angeles County carried by Trump. As you can see, it's in Beverly Hills. You can make out two main roads within the precinct. The east-west one that divides the precinct into a northerly and southerly half is Sunset Boulevard. The north-south road that intersects Sunset Boulevard near the precinct's eastern edge is Rodeo Drive. If you use the above link to go to the site itself, you can zoom in to a level where those street names are labeled. I wanted to stay out far enough to suggest how anomalous the Beverly Hills result was, compared to the surrounding territory. Biden carried Los Angeles County by 71 to 28 percent. In the dark blue precincts, his advantage was no less than 85 to 15 percent. But in the Beverly Hills precinct where the head of the National Rifle Association buys his Italian suits—your dues hard at work, schmucks!—Trump won by 19 points.

I admit that highlighting the result in a single precinct (though in the context of the ones around it) is a pretty sketchy method of rebutting the frequently heard claim that Democrats are "elitist snobs" while Republicans are the party of "working people." More scientific methods might include, for example, exit poll data indicating Biden carried voters earning less than $50,000 per year by 57 to 42 percent. He also carried those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 by a nearly identical 56 to 43 percent margin. Trump, however, won voters with 6-figure incomes by 54 to 43 percent. These macro data points tend to confirm the micro one from Beverly Hills, though in my opinion the micro one is a little more eye-catching—like the shoppers along Rodeo Drive.

The exit poll data, overall, are about as interesting as the extremely detailed map. Here's just one more revealing bit, out of many. "Are you white and a born-again Christian?" Of those answering No, 62 percent voted for Biden. Of those answering Yes, 76 percent voted for Trump. It's easy to see why.