Eric The Blue

It might get worse

These website designers and wedding cake bakers—why is it always the money of homosexuals that's too dirty for them to take? I'd think there'd be artisans whose faith barred them from working for people "living in sin," or people who have been divorced (unlike homosexuality, flatly condemned by Jesus himself), or who mean to marry someone of a different race, or a different faith, or are known to have met their beloved at a swingers' convention, or whose faults combine items from this extremely abbreviated list in ways that overwhelm the pious businessowner's impulse toward charity (and profit).  

I'm tempted to say it's just homophobia, but maybe there are plans to "call my bluff" by recruiting bigots from some new taxonomic categories for more Supreme Court fun. Let's hope not. I saw today that the Supremes have agreed to hear a case next term about whether the Second Amendment can abide a federal law, on the books for 30 years, that requires someone under a restraining order arising from a domestic violence complaint to surrender his firearms.

The case was brought by a Texas man who was indicted by a federal grand jury for violating the 1994 law that prohibits gun ownership by a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order. The man, Zackey Rahimi, was under a restraining order granted to his former girlfriend in February 2020 when he threatened another woman with a gun and was involved in a series of five shootings in December 2020 and January 2021. 

When police searched his home after identifying Rahimi as a suspect in the shootings, they found a .45-caliber pistol, a .308-caliber rifle, pistol and rifle magazines and ammunition. 

Rahimi attempted to dismiss the indictment against him, arguing it violated the Second Amendment. A federal district court denied his motion, noting that a federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of the firearms law in 2020. 

Rahimi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 73 months in prison, but appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals [for] the Fifth Circuit. While the appeals court initially affirmed the lower court's decision, it withdrew its original opinion after the Supreme Court last year invalidated New York's rules for obtaining a license to carry a concealed handgun in public. 

After its additional review, the 5th Circuit reversed course and held that the 1994 gun restriction for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders violated the Second Amendment, as the government failed to meet its burden of showing that the law is "consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."

That should be enough fun!

Crossword logic

Because "bullshit" doesn't have enough letters.

Kennedy boy goes to the gym

I've been wasting my time being interested in the Robert F Kennedy Jr kerfuffle, the one arising from the shirtless photos of him circulating on social media. It might not have been the Ur tweet, but my first notice came when I saw some nut had posted this picture of Kennedy (left) alongside one of Dr Peter Hotez, a medical researcher. Kennedy is a notorious anti-vaxxer, and Hotez, a professor at Baylor University's medical school who resembles a standard-issue doughy middle-aged American, predictably is not, because . . . education, knowledge, expertise. The tweeter, who thinks that Hotez should debate Kennedy on vaccine efficacy, asserted that the side-by-side pictures of the two men clearly showed who knows more about good health. In my favorite response, someone said that the professor obviously had flunked the dead lift component of organic chemistry class. 

Seriously, though, the anti-vax idiots are really tiring. As far as I can tell, what they have going for them are a couple of facts:

i. humans are subject to illness and death

ii. most Americans are vaccinated

It follows, naturally, that vaccinated people get sick and die, which, when it happens, proves how deadly the vaccines are. Latest example is Madonna. Sixty-something woman hospitalized with illness! And she was vaccinated! Connect the dots, fool.

By this kind of "logic," every day on the nation's streets and highways people are being killed by seat belts. (I can almost hear the wingnuts now: "Yes, and it's pretty ironic if you think about it, because the elites persuaded them that seat belts made them safer.")

While it's not my area of expertise, I'm inclined to think that a physique like Kennedy's on a 69-year-old is a sign not of health but of an unhealthy obsession. He wants to be president? Ok, he's got the last name for it, but maybe, if he'd spent less time at the gym, he could have made some modest incursions upon the impressive facade of his stupidshittery. 

Local church jumps into brave new world

I took the above pic this evening while out walking the dog as it put me in mind of how, around 55 years ago, when it was too hot to sleep, my mom and dad put my sister and me in our pajamas and we'd go to the drive-in movie (100 Twin in Fridley). Saw some movies, like Paper Lion, that they would not have taken me to at an indoor theater. Also distinctly remember Love Bug. Always double features. Idea was that we'd fall asleep in the car and that by 2 in the morning we'd stay asleep in the hot house.

But even we got air conditioning by about 1970. Lutheran, but suffering ain't that good for the soul. 

Don DeLillo does "what color is your parachute" &c

My enjoyment persists, more or less unabated, as I've been proceeding through DeLillo's Underworld. But I think my first notice, insofar as it highlighted a satiric undercurrent in Underworld, may have given a false impression. Such an "undercurrent" exists, yes. Yesterday my eyes passed over the following as one of the characters, Nick Shay, who works in waste management, aka garbage, attends a corporate conference in the American sun belt:

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the subject.

I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speech writer and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace. . . .

Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mostly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white-haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. . . .

I was the juniormost fellow with the fixed smile. There was a spirit of generous welcome, the spirit of one-of-us and how-many-kids and let's-have-lunch. I wanted to be bound to the company. I felt complicit with some unspoken function of the corporation. I stayed late and worked weekends. I corrected my foot-drag step. I heard my own voice and saw my smile and earned an office at the end of the hall, where I wore a crisp gray suit and grew stronger by the day.

But the novel, which is sometimes described as "post-modernist," includes a lot of old-fashioned pleasures, such as characters with whom one sympathizes, or even loves. I mentioned how it begins with the baseball game in which Bobby Thomson hit a 9th-inning, rally-capping, game-winning homer to secure the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants—the "shot heard 'round the world," in baseball lore. Running through the novel, and occupying the place of the grail in a medieval quest narrative, is the question of what happened to the ball Thomson hit after it landed in the left-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds: who got it in the scramble? who ended up with it later? what's the full story, the chain of custody? how to be sure a ball is that ball? And so it happens that one of Nick's colleagues (the one who's screwing his wife) finds himself one day in the basement of an elderly and dying widower, a collector of baseball memorabilia who lives in the greater New York City part of New Jersey. This basement is a museum and DeLillo exercises his considerable linguistic resourcefulness in describing the diverse exhibits. Why would anyone go to such lengths? My initial reaction was: one more grotesque and damaged American to add to the dramatis personae. Then the novel traces the widower's journey into the city one day to buy pastries at a particular bakery on the Lower East Side. He has to pass a lot of bakeries to get to this one, and one would think that crossing the Hudson, navigating in Manhattan, parking, getting from parking spot to bakery door and from there back to car and the return trip to Jersey, especially for a man of his age and failing health, would be a prohibitive hassle. It isn't at first apparent why he's doing it, but then it develops that he and his wife, when they lived in the city, had patronized this bakery, and loved its products. The bakery has been in continuous operation, and eating those same pastries now is a remaining connection to her, and then one is gradually made to understand that the compulsive researching and collecting has a similar explanation: having lost her, he's now trying to hold on to things that matter to him. 

There is also a retired public school science teacher, kind, intelligent, decent, an American Leopold Bloom.The description of his habits includes this:

He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.

His wife left him to pursue her avant garde art, a whole other story. At least his marital status allows him to be his sister's caregiver and co-tenant. She's sunk in deepening dementia, and like a repeated contrapuntal theme in a musical work DeLillo repeats their absurd, identical conversations and gestures: she begs him to tell her when he's going out, else she doesn't know, he tells her he did, and will, removes her smudged eyeglasses, carefully cleans the lenses, gently replaces them on her face. 

Three in a row!

Unlike 10,000,000 tweeters, I'm not an expert on Russian mercenary forces, their motives and the likely outcome of their march toward Moscow, so let me say a word about "my Twins," who last night beat the Tigers in Detroit, their third win in a row.

One good thing about being at the game, which I wasn't, having been sentenced to house arrest made torturous by Taylor Swift surround-sound augmented by the commentary of idolaters, is that you can look wherever you want, as opposed to being limited to what the camera shows, usually the lane between pitcher and batter. In last night's game, Tiger designated hitter Miguel Cabrera, a future first ballot Hall of Famer who's past the sell-by date, looped a soft liner to left that bounced ahead of Willy Castro. Base hit, Cabrera's on first, where he stays until there are two out and the count goes full on the batter. I should say that Cabrera, who's 40, looks like he spends his entire per diem, and then some, on steak, loaded baked potatoes, and pie ala mode, with cheesecake for dessert. Probably washes it down with a few IPAs. In this situation, guy on first, two outs, full count on the batter, basic baseball strategy calls for the "runner" to "take off" on the pitch, since if it's ball four he's entitled to second base, if it's strike three the inning is over, and, if the ball is hit fair, he has a head start: there's no risk of being put out, in other words, only the advantage of a head start. 

The batter hit, I believe, four foul balls in a row, which means, even though you couldn't see it on TV, that Cabrera "took off" on four consecutive pitches, only to have to return to first base so that he could "take off" again around 20 seconds later, as there is now of course a time limit between pitches to add stress to Migi's workout. It must have been quite the sight but on TV all we saw was the foul balls.

Aaron Gleeman covers the Twins for The Athletic. I don't subscribe, but his Twitter feed is a good source for statistical nuggets regarding the Twins. I learned from him this morning that, of Twin hitters with a qualifying number of at-bats, only Byron Buxton has an OPS (on base plus slugging percentages) above the league average—Byron's at .758, while the league average is .728.  On the bright side, our staff ERA is 3.67, the lowest it's been this many games into the season since 1992. As for individual pitchers, Griffin Jax, over his past 14 appearances, has not allowed a walk or an extra-base hit. He has struck out 13 and posted a "batting average against" of .133. He and Duran are a formidable combo toward the end of the occasional game in which we score as many as 3 or 4 runs and have a lead. 

Sam in Alaska

Did they even go fishing? I ask because the picture accompanying the story in Pro Publica looks like a print ad for Marlboro Man wear in an online catalog. Maybe the guy on the left, never so far as I know identified, is a little chubby for the role. The other two are Justice Samuel Alito and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, whose business plan involves frequent appeals to the Supreme Court. But Alito doesn't know about that. Says so himself in the Wall Street Journal. 

Even after a long day in the boat, their nearly identical fishing wardrobes appear pressed, dry, and unsoiled. This could be explained by guides having done the work or, in the alternative, the resort's amenities might have included outer wear, photography services, and props, such as big fish. I'm pretty sure that the ranch on which Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face imports birds for the "hunt," a possible source for my cynicism re the manly activities of right-wingers. 

It's all on the up-and-up, however. As Alito explains in his essay, the seat on Singer's private jet would have been empty if he hadn't tagged along. It was him or nobody (as opposed, say, to him or someone without a vote on the Supreme Court). 

 

Humble brag

I also played golf on Sunday and nearly pulled off the same feat. Might have detoured around some fairways, but I hit every green, and, not to brag, this was in just a single, 18-hole round. 

On the first 60 pages of DeLillo's Underworld

I saw the same edition of the book I'm reading, pictured above, for $2 on a clearance shelf at Magers & Quinn this afternoon. It was Cormac McCarthy who died, not Don DeLillo. Two dollars must make Underworld less per pound than anything at the grocery store. It's 827 roughly 7 x 11 inch pages. Medium-sized print. I read recently that McCarthy's Blood Meridian, published in 1985, just attained best seller status for the first time.

Underworld begins at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan on October 3, 1951, the Wednesday the Giants won that season's National League pennant, in a playoff against Brooklyn, on a homer by Bobby Thomson in the bottom of the ninth inning. The play-by-play aspect of the chapter is historically accurate, as far as I can tell, but DeLillo pretty clearly has more than baseball on his mind. In his telling, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover are sitting in box seats with tickets they got from Giant manager Leo Durocher. During the game Hoover, the director of the FBI, is informed that the Russians just successfully tested an atomic bomb. Two shots heard 'round the world. If the question is what's Underworld "about," the best answer is probably America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Another DeLillo touch concerns a bored fan in the upper deck who tears pages out of a Life magazine and sends them fluttering down on the fans below:

The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskeys. Piping times, an optimistic bounty that carries into the news pages where the nation's farmers record a bumper crop. And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola. And here's a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn't know he was in this week's Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason's face. Here's a Budweiser ad, pal. In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to identify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents. Not that Jackie's in a mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings.

Yes, Jackie, not much of a fan, has overserved himself beer and ballpark fare, and he vomits on Sinatra's shoes, hosiery, and pants cuffs just before Thomson hits his homer. It later develops that one of the character's elderly mother is a huge fan of Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners. This character works in waste management and whenever he shops can't help but see the shining merchandise as future garbage. What besides ads for shining merchandise was falling from above in the Polo Grounds? The Life feature story was about the Prado art museum, and it included a reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. The torn facing pages of this image land on the breast of J. Edgar Hoover, who studies it and is repelled. 

Times considers whether therapy really works

Some of my favorite moments in Shakespeare plays occur when a soaring speech, often quoted, I think with the suggestion that the character is speaking for the playwright, is immediately undercut by a terse and usually forgotten reply. For example, in The Tempest, when Miranda is for the first time contemplating human beings, she enthuses:

                                            O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

Her father's terse reply to these famous exclamations is, if known, rarely mentioned:

'Tis new to thee.

I thought of another one, from Macbeth, when reading this New York Times article on the efficacy of therapy, or its lack thereof. That someone was even willing to consider in print, in The New York Times, the possibility that there might be some claptrap involved seemed to me kind of exciting, though the author, being a true journalist, plays it down the middle in recommended on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other fashion. Nevertheless, the evidence for therapy is in my view pretty thin.  A study finds, for instance, that "among the 'neurotics' and 'psychotics' who had undergone various kinds of talk therapy, the typical patient fared better than 75 percent of those with similar diagnoses who went untreated." Is this impressive? Seems that if therapy was completely worthless, the "typical patient" would fare better than 50 percent of those with similar diagnoses who went untreated.  So therapy lifts you past another 25 percent. I wonder how many percent are netted by a placebo effect—you feel better because you believe you are taking steps to help yourself, and besides, diplomas on the therapist's wall. Maybe it helps just to rant aloud to someone, even if they don't bill you or an insurance company to listen. And bill, and bill, and bill. Is the point to get better, or just to be "in therapy," a status marker like season tickets in the NBA?

I'll admit to a certain antagonism. Maybe it's mainly the social media world, but people seem almost aggressively happy, like there's something desperate about it. Everyone must recognize the absurdity of

I was a really distasteful person, so I got into therapy, and now I've accepted my distastefulness.

The therapy vocab is impenetrable, so I could be wrong, but I think that's what a lot of them are saying, and they were less unpleasant before they were pleased with themselves. 

In Macbeth, the title character is beseeching a doctor to help his wife, whose neuroses are connected to an overpowering sense of guilt (the source of which is her actual guilt for a hideous crime). He famously pleads:

                                Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that terrible stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

And the doctor less famously replies, "Therein the patient must minister to himself." 

Don takes a dump

Tip o' the hat to the clever people writing captions for the above FBI photo of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom included within the pages of the Trump indictment:

Don's Document Dump
The Seat of Power
Republicans Suddenly Silent on Proper Use of Bathrooms
Trump Esthetic: Bathroom Overfilled with Crimes & Chandeliers
Bed Bath & Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Presumably the documents of highest sensitivity are secured behind the tension rod. 

In news "below the fold"

For those of us already persuaded of Trump's criminality, yesterday's newsworthy news was that Kavanaugh and Roberts joined the Supreme Court's reality-based minority to strike down Alabama's congressional maps. It's the 7th congressional district, the only one represented by a Democrat, and pictured at left, that triggered litigation. The population of Alabama is 27 percent African American, but the 7th district is 57 percent African American. That's partly because most of the district's land mass is made of a huge chunk of rural west central Alabama that's sometimes referred to as the "Black Belt." But suppose that a computer was asked to generate a million different divisions of Alabama into seven districts of more or less regular shape and equal population. In how many of them would you have one district including a large swatch of the rural Black Belt together with much of the (heavily African American) Birmingham metro and much of the (heavily African American) Montgomery metro? On account of the "more or less regular shape" requirement, I think the answer to that question is zero. In its actual man-made configuration, however, Alabama's 7th congressional district pulls of this feat: Birmingham sits near the terminus of the narrow weird arm extending northeasterly in a kind of anterior tail to the main part of the district, and Montgomery is at the little bulbous dragon's head forming the district's most easterly point.

I've only scanned some journalistic accounts of the Court's reasoning, but my probably unusual initial take is that in this case we got the right conclusion for the wrong reason. The Supreme Court has in the recent past exhibited an extreme reluctance to interfere with the effort of state legislatures in red states to screw over Democrats. That's what's going on in Alabama, but because of political apartheid in the American South—virtually all the African Americans are Democrats and virtually all the whites are Republicans—screwing over Democrats means screwing over African Americans, with the result that a partisan gerrymander in Dixie almost by necessity, and plausibly by accident, runs afoul of the Voting Rights Act. In other words, I think an honest defense by Alabama might be: We're not limiting the clout of African Americans by packing them all into a single district, we're limiting the clout of Democrats by packing them all into a single district, which in the recent past this Court has indicated is fine. Evidence for such a defense might be that the district includes—just to the south of a northerly boundary at about the point that the odd tail begins its northeasterly stretch to Birmingham—the city of Tuscaloosa, which is home to the University of Alabama and many of the few white Democrats in the state. "See? It's Democrats, of any color, that we want to screw over! It's not our fault that most of them are black!"

Well, I would have guessed that a majority on this Court would have resolved the issue by raising a middle finger to the Voting Rights Act, and Kavanaugh and Roberts deserve credit for not doing that. No doubt it's in the dissents. 

Though I think any partisan gerrymander, not just a racial one, violates constitutional principles, this Supreme Court decision, for the reason mentioned above, will shift the political ground in the South. When the ruling was announced, Cook Political Report immediately changed its characterization of the "partisan lean" to five Dixie districts in the Democrats' direction: two in Alabama and two more in Louisiana went from "solid R" to "tossup," and one in North Carolina went from "tossup" to "lean D." These changes are made without knowledge of how the new maps will be configured and reflect, mainly, expert opinion on how difficult it is, given voting patterns and the location of population centers across southern states, to draw (for example) six districts in Alabama that can be won by a Republican: a 4-3 Republican advantage is natural, and 5-2 might be possible, but 6-1 requires the above monstrosity. 

The situation is almost identical in Louisiana, where the only district represented by a Democrat, the 2nd, is shown below. The two biggest cities in Louisiana are New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Since they are about 80 miles apart—for local reference, it's about 65 miles from Minneapolis to St. Cloud—it would seem natural to have one congressional district centered on New Orleans and a second on Baton Rouge. But in that case both districts would elect a Democratic representative. That's why the 2nd district is thin and oddly elongated—in order to take in both cities without surpassing the population limit for a congressional district, thereby ensuring a 5-1 Republican advantage in the state's congressional delegation. The Supreme Court seems to be saying this would be okay if it could not plausibly be understood as an effort to diminish the voting power of African Americans, who are 32 percent of the statewide population but 62 percent of those residing within the 2nd congressional district. 

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is so slim that, holding every other factor in place, it will be wiped out by this decision. 

Frisbee fan

The parent of one of the above girls took this pic just about exactly two years ago, at the end of the Middle School Ultimate Frisbee tournament in St. Paul. I spent this weekend in Blaine watching them play in the high school state tournament, and it didn't occur to me till just now that I should have made them pose for me in the same formation. That would have been "cute." And their smiles might have come easier, since a couple years ago they lost all five of their tournament games, whereas this year, after going 5-0 over the weekend, their team, Minneapolis Washburn, advanced to the championship match Wednesday evening against archrival Minneapolis South. When those two teams battle it out, the parking lot is jammed with hybrids and EVs.

I'm slowly slipping into Ultimate Frisbee aficionado-hood. The game has a little bit of a hippie vibe. South has some tall, athletic girls who remind me of Randy Moss playing football—the frisbee gets tossed deep down the field, they race after it, then pluck it from the air above the reach of the defenders. Score! I remarked admiringly to one of the other frisbee dads that if the South High basketball coach knew anything about the frisbee team, she'd want to introduce these kids to a new sport. He pointed out that they might have started playing basketball and at some point switched to frisbee, "the superior game." As you can see, there is between us only one real "frisbee dad."

Sad to say, it's the sportsmanship code that I can't get past. There are no referees in Ultimate Frisbee. The players just resolve their own disputes, and then play on. Nice, but as with everything else here below, imperfect: a team more willing to call fouls, and insist upon them, can gain an advantage, no matter the merits of the case. Washburn is the #4 seed in the tournament. On Sunday, we had an exciting game against the #1 seed: stormed back from a 6-3 deficit to go ahead by two points near the "time cap." The other team was now in a somewhat desperate situation and suddenly started calling fouls after unsuccessful plays. Gimme a break—I shouted something sorta like that from the sideline. Yes, I'm that dad, trash-talking the teens on the other team. Apparently it is not against Ultimate Frisbee's "spirit code" to call imaginary fouls when you're in a tight spot, but it is against the code for anyone to complain about it when you do. Anyway, I was reprimanded by my daughter afterwards:

Her: Dad, you can't do that. Everyone could totally hear you out on the field. 

Me: Cool.

Her: The girl guarding me was like, "Tsk, there's always someone like that, it's so annoying."

Me: You say anything to her?

Her: Nope. Shoulda told her she wouldn't wanna watch a Gopher game with you. 

After the game, there is a "spirit circle": the players stand around in a big ring and say nice things about one another before passing out "spirit awards"—crackerjack-box type trinkets that supposedly recognize the skills and good sportsmanship of opposing players. Lydia says it's cringey, fake, embarrassing, and that she hates it. That's my girl!

UPDATE: The team I was pulling for lost, 14 to 13, in a thrilling game that came down to "universal point"—the Ultimate Frisbee version of sudden death, as the time cap has expired and the score is tied, so that the next point wins. Washburn was behind 8-3 at halftime and still trailed 13-9 about two-thirds of the way through the second half. Lydia threw a nice pass to her friend Eve for the point that tied the score at 13, but all she could think about afterwards was the subsequent universal point. Washburn advanced the frisbee to about the South 5-yard-line, and Lydia and Samantha, the girl to Lydia's left in the above pic, then worked a little give-and-go that would have won the game (and state championship). Lydia was open, but the girl guarding Samantha managed to get a finger on her throw, deflecting it slightly, and as the pass was so short it was past Lydia before she could adjust and lunge at it. 

As fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers used to say . . . wait till next year! Lots of underclasswomen on Washburn's team—and around half of them are, like Fin, Lydia, Samantha, and Charlotte, 9th graders. 

In school

I work on about 80 percent of school days, and park next to the above van on about 80 percent of those days. I think Ron's guy is there as often as I am. There are around 500 kids in the school, ranging in age from 5 to 11, so it's probably not surprising that plumbing events are common as spilt milk in the cafeteria, especially considering that supervision tends to be light in the rest rooms—the boys might be more culpable, and elementary education is a female dominated profession. More than once have I been recruited, while strolling down the hall, to check up on Aiden or Avery or Juan or Jamal, who has been about his business in there for a suspiciously long period of time. Usually I end up playing the part of the home plate umpire breaking up a confab on the mound, which in this case is sometimes a wet one, though I don't investigate. That's for Ron, the sewer rat.

I have to say that these mostly 30ish women teaching in the school are doing the lord's work. My boss, for example, seems to be kind of a utility all-star. Just one of her tasks is evidently to fill in at a moment's notice when another teacher doesn't make it to school in the morning. Kids can manipulate subs, but they don't conduct their experiments on her: more like, there's a new drill sergeant on base and she's known to be tougher than the regular one (to say nothing of knowing all the lessons for every day in every grade, and the name of every kid in the school, their test scores, the language they speak at home, the family background if it's notable, the teachers they've had in prior grades, the trend of their academic performance, probably the number of ribbons they won on track & field day). She might think I'm better at my job than I am, because her attendance at tutoring sessions changes everything. Suddenly the kids are well behaved and I can teach instead of just try to impose a semblance of order. If someone's attention wanders, she doesn't say a thing, just aims an irritated look in their direction and the behavior ceases. To mortals, she possesses a super power, and no doubt I'm fooling myself to think that she might not know that I just get to borrow it when she's around. 

Her "office" is an unused classroom she shares with me and a bunch of others. Her "desk" is a table top that has an area roughly twice that of her chrome book. She's about 30, has a master's degree, and probably earns less than people I used to work with who were perplexed by 5th-grade story problems such as

If Mike owns a one-third interest in a parcel of real estate, and he conveys one-fifth interest to Jim, who also has a one-third interest, how much interest does Mike now own? And how about Jim?

Yet these stumped colleagues of mine went through the schools before there was a crisis triggered by "woke" ideology, the teachers' union, etc., etc., blah, blah, whine, whimper, triple exclamation points. I'm not buying it. If teachers could "indoctrinate" and "groom" kids, they'd take a spare moment to groom them in the proper use of the apostrophe, too. This complaint concerning "the youth of today" goes back centuries and yet somehow the world keeps creaking along—maybe in part because some people, instead of freaking out about same-sex greeting cards for sale at Target, throw themselves into important and challenging work that's grossly undervalued by the vaunted market.