Eric The Blue

Some notes on the debating Repugs

1. First, I'm surprised that Trump didn't time his date with the authorities in Fulton County to coincide with the debate. Seems unlikely his rivals would have had much of an audience if Republican primary voters could instead have watched his motorcade cruise Atlanta's freeway system. 

2. Nikki Haley doesn't appear to be crazy. I conclude she has no chance.

3. She did say, however, that voters, not courts, should determine Trump's fate. Probably focus-group tested but it's stupid. There was an election. Trump lost. So the voters did decide. He then committed crimes in an effort to retain the office that the voters had denied him. How many cycles of losing and criming does she recommend?

4. Most representative moment: earnest appearing college-aged Republican lad asks question about climate change. Candidates take turns telling him to f-off. 

5. Of the eight debaters, six say they'd support Trump if he's the nominee even if, on election day, he's been convicted of felonies. Just as strategy, I don't get it, unless they're all angling to be his running mate. (Though that doesn't explain the case of Pence.) Generally, you criticize the front runner. Only way to catch up. Some might say that his criminality provides a possible opening. 

6. I'll never understand those who continue to carry a torch for DeSantis. But so what? I'll never understand any of it. See (2) above. 

7. Tim Scott says that, if elected, he'll replace the current attorney general. Whoa, Tim, slow down!

8. The debate occurred in the evening of the day on which Putin murdered Prigozhin and seven others. When Haley chastised the tech bro guy for taking the side of a murderer in his war with our ally, Ukraine, the audience of Republican primary voters loudly booed her. 

9. There's a lot to dislike about the tech bro guy, but the thing that'll sink him with Republicans is when Trump makes fun of his name. 

10. That Pence is too proud of having done the obviously right thing on January 6 reminds me, vaguely, of the DeSantis ad wherein his beaming wife says that, after her cancer diagnosis, "He took care of my kids when I couldn't." 

6-3, 215

After watching my Twins rally for a win, I switched over to cable news: Trump being booked, ho-hum, it happens twice a month. I did get a kick out of the booking paperwork, however—the part where the defendant's height and weight are given as 6-3, 215. According to the Tale of the Tape, Cassius Clay was 6-3, 215, on the night he knocked out Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship. This is a useful metric insofar as it allows one to gauge what a little rounding off can look like to the naked eye. 

 

Some song lyrics

Listening to music, probably over-analyzing the lyrics, but maybe it's fair considering that Dylan won the Nobel for literature. One of John Prine's great songs is "Angel from Montgomery," about a woman in a stale marriage in Montgomery, Alabama. Her complaints include this about her husband:

How the hell can a person
Go to work in the mornin'
And come home in the evenin'
And have nothin' to say?

Bonnie Raitt, when she covers the song, seems unanswerable, but if you just set down the words, and think of jobs you might have had, I feel like the poor guy deserves a defense. I've now come to the end of my complaints about the lyrics to John Prine songs.

I have zero niggling complaints about the lyrics to this song on a similar theme, by Emmylou Harris. I'll set them down, but first, the footnotes. The "Indian" in the song refers to a motorcycle make, like a Harley, except it's a 1949 Indian. Meridian is a town in eastern Mississippi. Its population is only about 40,000, but if you make it the center of a circle with a radius of 85 miles, Meridian is the biggest town in the circle—it's 88 miles to Hattiesburg, which has a population of about 47,000, and around 20 miles east to the Alabama state line: "a little southeast of Meridian" puts you in rural west central Alabama. The annual college football game between in-state rivals Alabama and Auburn is called the Iron Bowl on account of the high iron content in the state's soil, which gives it a red tint. The song's lyrics:

Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon
Sitting on the front porch, cooling in the shade
Singing every song the radio played
Waiting for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town, me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.

She loved her brother, I remember back when
He was fixing up a '49 Indian
He told her, little sister, going to ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again.
But he never got farther than Vietnam
I was standing there with her when the telegram come 
For Lillian. Now he's lying somewhere
About a million miles from Meridian.

She said, "There's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound.
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm going to swing my hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm going to make a joyful sound."

She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush at the back of the yard
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line
Just a little southeast of Meridian.

Well, she tried to love him
But it never did take
It was just another way for the heart to break
So she learned to bend
One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got them
You keep on falling, there ain't no bottom,
And there ain’t no end. At least not for Lillian.

No one could tell when she started her skid
She was just 27 and she had five kids
Could've been the whiskey, could've been the pills
Could've been the dreams she was trying to kill
But there won't be a mention in the News of the World
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther
Across the line than Meridian.

Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid that hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground.

I guess Harris was the valedictorian of her high school class and, at college, an English major, which may account for some compositional aspects of the song—for example, the way in which the theme of stunted lives is introduced in the brother's story and then, in the longer account of Lillian's life, deepened with details related in parallel phrases: "going to ride the wind"—"going to make a joyful sound"—"never got farther than Vietnam"—"never got farther across the line than Meridian." Here is a video of her performing "Red Dirt Girl" for a live audience in . . . 2000 (yikes). 

 

 

TDS relapse

Some pretty large part of the sensations Trump's legal troubles stir within me arise, I've come to believe, from my immature notion that corruption at the highest levels, while expected, should possess a certain elevation, dignity, and sophistication, as befits the lofty positions of the criminal plotters. But it's never like that, apparently. Just before I was old enough to vote:

Setting: Oval Office

Minions: These guys could squawk. 

POTUS: It wouldn't be hard to raise a ton of hush money, pay them off.

Minions: OK, sure, yeah, we can do that. 

And now, a week into my life as a Medicare beneficiary, I still feel a slight twinge when, on the morning after a former president is indicted in Georgia for trying to steal 16 electoral votes, he announces:

It's just embarrassingly shoddy and threadbare. When you zoom in, you notice the 8th-grade, C-level language errors: for example, if the report is complex (or Complex) and detailed (or Detailed), that would obviously make it harder to refute (more Irrefutable), and the conjunction therefore should be "and," not "but." Of course it's worse when you are zoomed out. I guess we're supposed to believe that, nearly three years now after the election, and on the morning after the indictment comes down, he's putting the final touches on the magnum opus proving that he won Georgia. What a coincidence! If the Irrefutable EVIDENCE had taken a week—or 30 months—less to develop, things would be different. Though inevitably, two days later:

He's sometimes been called a "con man," but if you're this bad at it, do you even deserve the title? The stream flows continuously. "I have people in Hawaii investigating whether Obama was really born there, and let me tell you, the stuff they're finding is amazing." I think it's been more than a couple of weeks since the details of his health plan replacing Obamacare were to be announced in "probably about two weeks." Et cetera. 

 

Lexicon of the overrated

Random thought of the day:

I think the word “forgive,” probably on account of its religious colorings, enjoys a status it doesn’t deserve. Often it functions like an advertising slogan, covering up a gambit that is essentially this:

Yes, I treated you like crap. Now I want you to say that’s okay. And, if you don’t, you’re the a-hole.

Strange how some word-charms can wipe from view such a slimy manipulation. You must forgive. What does it even mean? It's as if the aggrieved party should wave their wand, pronounce talismanic phrases, and thereby banish the harm done. The person who caused the harm isn't proposing to do anything about it. 

Robbie Robertson, 1943-2023

I like to take note when notable people—notable to me—pass on (as we say), and, on August 9, it was Robbie Robertson, who wrote most of the great songs recorded by The Band. My fave will always be "The Weight." Don't really know what it's about, but, in college, an old-fashioned professor made us memorize—he would have said "learn by heart," suggesting it should be more an act of love than our academic duty—passages from Paradise Lost, including this one, which I only think of, in a compare-and-contrast manner, when trying to make out the lyrics to "The Weight":

But rise, let us no more contend, nor blame
Each other, blam'd enough elsewhere, but strive
In offices of Love, how we may light'n
Each others burden in our share of woe. . . .

Here’s Robertson, at age 77 looking hale with Ringo Starr just a few short years ago, during "high Covid," performing "The Weight" with a large ensemble of musicians from diverse locations around the globe:

 

Something about the song lends itself to a joyous sing-along, many voices, crowded stage, a pretty decent percentage of all the musical instruments ever invented—for example, this mass performance, which gains in poignancy on account of being intended as a tribute to Robertson's bandmate Levon Helm, who died in 2012:

 

Brittany Howard on the Crazy Chester verse—if that doesn't steal the show, it's a good show. 

Robertson wrote at least two other songs that everyone knows without, however, knowing that they were written by Robbie Robertson: "Up on Cripple Creek" and—despite being a Canuck, Toronto-born—"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." 

Upsetting the routine

For the first Sunday in many Sundays I'm not playing golf tomorrow. Just mentioned this to the kids, ages 15 and 12, and they seem put out. Lots of anxious questions.

Why not?

So you'll be around all day? 

It's just for this Sunday, right?

Will you be making supper yourself then instead of taking us to Boludo?

Were it not for the ATM aspect of parenting, my work would be done.

 

Listening to public radio on the way to the golf course

I'm usually not disappointed to arrive at a golf course, but yesterday while en route I was listening to this interview on public radio, and the prospect of hitting my first drive into lush fescue seemed like an inadequate compensation for having to miss the last minutes of the show. I've heard the whole thing now. If you don't want to click, the executive summary is that the interviewee, Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor in Nevada, is the author of a book, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, and she has views about language usage that a lot of earnest people find disagreeable. 

I think I liked the show so well because a credentialed expert was putting into words vague reactions and annoyances of mine. If you've studied "English," people think you must be an expert on lay or lie, and have a strong opinion about whether "hopefully" can be used for "I hope," and "they" for one person of indeterminate gender, and can a respectable sentence ever end with a preposition, and so on, and so forth. I could care less. Wait, that's not exactly right. It's more like the people who care a lot annoy me, with the result that I care enough to take the other side.

That is the kind of English up with which I will not put. Hopefully, you can see it's dumb to talk that way. Like, seriously, what kind of person is offended by "Me and the kids went to the game"? 

The professor's niche is sociolinguistics, which seems like it's largely the wine/beer thing applied to language. If you frown on "Me and the kids went to the game," that's wine. If you don't care or didn't notice, that's beer. Judging by the calls and tweets and emails from listeners, wine drinkers are overrepresented in the public radio audience. But the professor amiably held her ground. I formed the idea that nettled listeners were particularly nettled on account of the insult to their comfortable assumption about whose side an enlightened arbiter, such as a professor, is sure to take on a question relating to proper language use. Delightful to behold wounded pride.

The correct, approved language of carping grammarians has to bear the weight of politicians avoiding questions and ambitious underlings replying to the boss, in the boss's own style, "As per your memo of August 10. . . ."  Who wants to sound like that? Not anyone young and aspiring to be cool. I remember eating breakfast one Saturday morning long ago. In the booth behind me two young Black women were talking about the problems of the Vikings quarterback, Warren Moon. His wife had recently called the police to report that he'd physically assaulted her. She subsequently withdrew the complaint, said that she'd provoked him, and that they'd reconciled. The booths were high-backed, so the young women couldn't see that someone who looked like a public radio listener was about 3 feet away. I could hear every word, and I remember how one of them put a bow on their discussion, concluding, "Bitch hasta leave. He beat her once, muthafucka beat her a thousan' time." Compare: "She should consult a competent family law attorney as the undesirable behavior is apt to persist into the foreseeable future." 

These women would in time be proven correct about the probable course of events in the domestic life of Warren Moon. And they weren't just right: they were memorably, dazzlingly right. I'm old but it's not that hard to see why kids are attracted to, for example, hip-hop. It doesn't hurt that respectable people hate it. 

Down goes Anderson!

I watch a lot of baseball, and I can't remember seeing two guys assume the position of boxers and then start throwing punches—until José Ramírez of the Guardians confronted Tim Anderson of the White Sox at second base a few days ago. This may not be the best video, but it's surely the best live audio "call" of the play, or fight, courtesy of Tom Hamilton, the Cleveland radio guy: 

 

On January 23, 1972, I happened to be at Williams Arena, in Minneapolis, for the Gopher-Buckeye basketball game that ended in a brawl. When I got home, my dad had 10 million questions about what had happened, because he'd been listening on the radio and the announcer, Ray Christensen, could not bring himself to describe the riot. According to my dad, he just did his imitation of a morally shocked Scandinavian, repeating over and over again such phrases as "Oh my, this is terrible!" and "This isn't what college athletics is about!" (Actually, it wasn't an imitation: Ray was Scandinavian, and shocked.)

Cleveland fans listening on the radio, on the other hand, had a pretty good idea: "José and Anderson square off! They're fighting! They're swinging! Down goes Anderson! Down goes Anderson!"

Maybe it's because I've long loved Ramírez as a player, while something about Anderson rubs me the wrong way—I get the idea that he'd like to take a selfie of himself in the batter's box—but it was for me satisfying to see José, while being pulled backwards by a teammate, still land a blow of sufficient force to put his antagonist on the ground. They play a lot of games, and some of them seem pretty sleepy, so it's oddly reassuring to see evidence of competitive zeal, even over-zeal.

As exemplars of the Scandinavian race, Ray Christensen probably laps a guy who enjoys the occasional fist fight. 

Turned on the TV and in the third inning the Twins are ahead of the Tigers, 8-0. I rely on Aaron Gleeman, who covers the Twins for The Athletic, to keep me abreast of Twin bytes. Jeffers continued the hitting jag he's been on lately with a 3-run homer in the first inning. His on-base percentage is now .388. Joe Mauer, who was inducted into the team's hall of fame on Sunday, is the only catcher in Twins history to have a .388 on-base percentage for a whole season. Mauer did it several times. In fact, his lifetime on-base percentage was .388. Has to be a first-ballot Cooperstown inductee.

Earlier today Gleeman tweeted:

MLB just handed down the White Sox/Guardians suspensions. 

Tim Anderson got six games for starting the fight and José Ramírez got three games for ending it.

If you like baseball, especially the Twins, Aaron is a good social media follow.