Eric The Blue

True confessions &c

 

True confession: I record Jeopardy shows, and sometimes I'll watch the same contest back-to-back, just to experience the sensation of burying the actual TV contestants with my trove of knowledge. I don't know what it is about me, no doubt something bad, but I find that my enjoyment is only mitigated, not erased, by the knowledge that I'm, you know, CHEATING.

Another idiosyncrasy: when reading a newspaper or magazine article, or even the work of a famous author, the last few days Mark Twain, I will copy edit as I go along, noting to myself that a sentence, in my opinion, might be better if this word or that phrase were eliminated, or the sentence split in two, or recast entirely so as not to be structured exactly like the one two before it, etc., etc. You can imagine my pleasure when I come across a mistake that is obvious and sort of funny, the kind of thing that human intelligence but not spell check would catch. For example, the other night I was reading about the band Green Day in Wikipedia, and there was a sentence in which the context clearly required the word "causal," but it was spelled "casual"—by chance, an error making a different word that changed the meaning of the sentence to something not intended. I've gone looking for it now but I can't find it, mainly because I can't remember what article it was in—could have been the one on Green Day, or the one on Billie Joe Armstrong, or the one on American Idiot, or the one on Mike Dirnt, or maybe one I can't even now think of . . . I just don't know. 

But, since I tried to find it, I think I could now make some money on a Green Day category in Jeopardy. The band name, for example, comes from Bay Area slang—Armstrong and Dirnt are from there—for a day devoted wholly to smoking pot. Armstrong's dad, a trucker and a musician, died in the September that Armstrong was 10, a traumatic event: the song "Wake Me Up When September Ends," from American Idiot, is a memorial. Dirnt isn't Dirnt's birth name, but he would go around elementary school playing chords on air guitar, accompanying the theatrical striking of imagined strings with the sound "dirnt," "dirnt," "dirnt." So the name he acquired is an onomatopoeia. Armstrong's wife of 28 years is from Minneapolis and her brother is a famous skateboarder. He (Armstrong, not the skateboarder) made a record, Foreverly, with Norah Jones—it's a reinterpretation of the Everly Brothers 1958 album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. You can listen to Foreverly on YouTube, here. I did not expect ever to see Billie Joe Armstrong, Norah Jones, and the Everly Brothers within one Wikipedia sentence. Reminds me, however, of my favorite odd couple of musical collaborators: Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, and blue grass vocalist and fiddle player Alison Krauss. Here they are performing "Killing the Blues." If you click on it, pretty good chance it's the most beautiful thing you hear until 2023. Happy New Year!

 

 

 

 

 

Musky

You can tell that Elon Musk is one of these think-outside-the-box, business geniuses because a person of ordinary abilities who ran an electric car company would never think to overpay for a social media company and then while away time shit-posting on his new toy about the people most apt to buy an electric car. The car company's stock has taken a hit—

—but the market is checkers and Elon's one of these guys who strolls from table to table playing chess games simultaneously against 24 overmatched grandmasters. If he were president of Ukraine, instead of that badly dressed fellow, Putin would beg to touch his robe. 

Playing catch with dad

Thinking about my dad, who died Thursday. Feel like I must have asked him to play catch with me 10,000 times before I was 10 years old. Though he'd likely point out that 10,000 is impossible, since there are fewer than 4000 days in 10 years, many of them in winter, etc., etc. Whatever, lots of times, and I can't remember him ever saying "No" or even "In a minute"—just dropped what he was doing and got his glove. ("Look, if the ball is above your waist, and you try to catch it with your palm up, there's no place in your glove for the ball to go. Fingers up on high ones!") 

He was a physicist, and seems to have had a successful STEM career, but I'm pretty sure he was a better dad than scientist. Chuckling now to think how, in my early memories, he comes home from work wearing a thin dark tie with a white short-sleeved shirt accessorized by the pocket protector. Central casting! He played a lot of catch dressed like that, because he never said, "Let me change first." Full obit here.

 

 

I try to answer questions

Somewhat relieved that the World Cup is over as I can now get back to having answers for my kids' sports questions. It's one of my unambiguous strengths as a parent but for a couple weeks there it was all, like, "Offsides in soccer? I dunno, google it."

Math homework getting dicey, too. Sixth grade I'm still fairly proficient but when the ninth grader seeks a consultation my reaction, on seeing the problem, is often along the line of, "Yeah, um, let me think about that for a minute." Then I take around a half hour at the dining room table to figure it out, sometimes with an assist from the Internet, and when I return to her room to present my solution she breezily informs me that her classmate CeCe just showed her how to do it over Facetime.

I hope CeCe doesn't tell her about how the Eskimos supposedly set their elders out to sea on a raft. 

 

Drinking with DeSantis?

"I voted for the one I'd rather have a beer with" must be among the dumbest justifications of voting behavior you hear—although, now that I've typed those words, I'm thinking that if I had heard all the justifications this one about a tavern partner might have to be moved far, far down the list. It's among the dumbest of the ones that is regularly spoken out loud. I believe I first heard of it in connection with George W. Bush's supposed high "likability" factor—anyone would rather have a beer with him than with stiff wonky Al Gore, it was said. Did anyone at the time point out that you could not have a beer with Bush, a dry drunk?  It says something that the impossibility of it is just the beginning of the problems. Actually, I think I'd rather drink alone, since presidential candidates self-select for possessing unattractive quantities of ambition and self-regard. Fine. It's an unusual job, so maybe an unusual person: the exact opposite of what is indicated by "someone I'd like to have a beer with." 

Such were my desultory thoughts after seeing recently on the news a clip of Ron DeSantis snarling at someone. For the people who'd want to have a beer with him, the attraction could only be the pass to get all mean and bigoty even before alcohol starts abetting the nastiness. Putting to one side the meaning of his words, I doubt most people could stand to listen to that high-pitched, nasally whine of complaint for the time it takes to slam one and head for the door, let alone for four years. Yet among Republicans he currently occupies an exalted slot between the angels and Trump. What is the high-minded reason for the cachet? I predict he flames out, like Scott Walker, the former boy wonder governor of Wisconsin who so far as I know does not these days even have a show on Fox. Whom the gods would destroy they first allow to win an election or two. 

 

Low energy

What do people who don't like to read do when they're sick? Watch TV I suppose. I did some of that yesterday, too—the Timberwolves' game against the inaptly named Jazz of Utah. (The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City from New Orleans, like the "Lakers" from Minneapolis to LA.)

I follow the T-wolves just closely enough to have formed the impression that they've been winning more games since Karl Anthony Towns, supposedly their best player, was sidelined with an injury. Checking now to see to what degree my impression conforms with reality, I see that Towns was injured in a game the Wolves lost on Nov. 28, which dropped their record for the season to 10-11. Since then, they've won 3 of 4. I know, not much of a sample size, and it might be that I'm not a KAT guy. He's always whining to the officials—seems to think he's never committed a foul, and that all his missed shots should be attributed to a swallowed whistle. Just play! When Anthony Edwards thinks he's been screwed, he looks at the ref and laughs. 

Also, my sentiments to the side, it might be that the things KAT's good at, mainly scoring, the T-wolves can get from other sources. What they really need is rebounding and a defensive presence near the basket. The guy they acquired in the off season, Rudy Gobert, gives them more of that than KAT does.  Last night, Gobert scored 22 points (despite trying just 11 shots) and led the team with 13 rebounds. D-Lo put on a 3-point shooting exhibition in the fourth quarter, when he scored 20 points without missing a shot, but who is this Kyle Anderson (pictured above) guy? He's taken KAT's place in the starting lineup and last night he had 15 points, 7 rebounds, and 12 [sic] assists. He made 4 of 5 field goal attempts and 7 of 9 foul shots. I'm taking this from the box score, obviously. Wouldn't mind watching the game again to try and figure out how a guy who shoots just 5 times is awarded 9 foul shots. The box scores at ESPN.com now have a +/- column indicating the team's net points when each player is in the game. While Anderson was playing, the Wolves were +12; they won by 10, so they were -2 when he was out. Watching on TV, I hardly noticed him: some good passes, and one defensive play when he denied a would-be dunker at the rim. D-Lo scored 30 points but was just +4. The NBA has a lot of bedazzlers but that ain't necessarily what wins games. 

According to my at-home covid test kit, I'm negative. Still possible to get sick in the boring old 2019 way, I guess. 

Herschel sprints to the wire

 

If there's a loving and omnipotent God who cares about America, today is the last one in which making fun of Herschel Walker will seem like permissible fair play instead of the kind of easy cruelty that causes smart asses to make fun of kids who ride to school on the short bus. For today it's still possible that Walker could be elected to the US Senate. Here he is, countering the suggestion of a political reporter that Georgia Republicans might not vote in today's runoff election since Democrats have already clinched majority-status in the Senate:

They're not [less motivated] because they know right now that the House will be even so they don't want to understand what is happening right now. You get the House, you get the committees. You get all the committees even, they just stall things within there. So if we keep a check on Joe Biden, we just going to keep a check on him. 

This is just barely coherent enough to persuade me that Walker doesn't know that he's running for US Senate—which, you know, is different from the House of Representatives, not that he's up to speed on the partisan alignment of the incoming House.

Ladies, cut us some slack, not all men who beat up the women in their lives are this dumb.