Eric The Blue

Dorothy Parker says happy new year!

Ninety-five years ago tonight Dorothy Parker sent this telegram to her friend Robert Benchley:

Figures. She was a failure at suicide, twice, as well as the author of this poem. She had her good days. Once, when asked by her editor why she’d missed a deadline, she is said to have retorted: “Too fucking busy and vice versa.”

Happy Jaded New Year!

Getting up there

I wish the packaging for such around-the-house products as smoke detectors and keyless locks did not advertise EASY INSTALLATION. Because then you’re playing the team in last place and even if you win the commentators are all, like, Sure but it took three YouTube videos and a 4th-quarter rally when a Phillips screwdriver was all a man needed. If I ever have to set up a smart tv … screw it, I’ll watch the Twins at a bar. 

Different topic. It makes me feel old to think that Jimmy Carter was 100 and that I voted for him, twice. Here’s the electoral map for the first presidential election in which I cast a ballot, Democratic challenger Carter versus Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976:

How old am I? Old enough to have voted in a presidential election in which the Republican candidate carried Illinois and California—and lost, because except for Virginia [sic] the Democrat swept Dixie [sic]. 

Fans of Slim Dunlap

For years I’ve been a member of a Facebook group, “Fans of Slim Dunlap.” In the days since Slim died, it’s functioned as something like an ideal online community where friends and fans express sympathy, buck each other up, swap stories and fond remembrances: like going to a wake without leaving home.

For me it’s also been occasionally revelatory. In one post, a fan reported seeing Slim play near his home on the east coast. Toward the end of the show, Slim said that he’d be driving home to Minneapolis the next day and wasn’t looking forward to all the lonely road time. So if anyone wanted a ride to Minneapolis . . . . And this guy had thought, I can maybe drive into Minneapolis with one of the Replacements, and all I have to do is get back to Boston—I think it was Boston—on my own. He hadn’t pursued it, because his job, but it made me think that if you live here you don’t realize the place Minneapolis holds in the imaginations of lots of music fans. This guy would have been in a car with Slim for about 20 hours and his leading thought was: The Entry Into Minneapolis, like it’s Mecca.

Nor had I known that Bruce Springsteen was a big fan of Slim’s. He covered one of Slim’s songs, “Girlfriend” (or “Girlfiend”), and talked him up and played his songs on a Sirius XM radio show, “From My Home to Yours,” that he sometimes hosted. A list of the songs Springsteen played on these shows, and what he said about them, makes interesting reading. Of Slim, he said, before spinning “Times Like This”: 

Slim Dunlap, in my opinion, is simply one of the best rock-‘n’-roll songwriters we have. He deserves a much, much larger audience than he’s gathered.

And he introduced “Rockin’ Here Tonight” by saying:

Slim Dunlap was born in Plainview, Minnesota, and is best known as a member of the Replacements with Paul Westerberg. He released two albums, The Old New Me and Times Like This, both required listening for any true-hearted rock-‘n’-roll aficionado. 

This general topic of Springsteen paying tribute to Minnesota musicians reminds me that he played a scheduled concert with the E Street Band at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, two days after Prince died. The stage was lit in purple and they opened with a cover that needed no introduction:

 

In the comments someone mentions that Nils Lofgren’s mannerisms while playing mimic Prince’s and were intended as part of the tribute—to which I’d add, also the hat.

Winter break

Probably a good idea for me to have a part-time job at a school, since I can't deny that soon as it's winter break I sleep till 9 after watching Seinfeld re-runs into the small-numbered hours. In the last one I saw last night, Jerry and Elaine set up George with Elaine's jaded friend. There are hilarious alternating scenes in which they are making their respective pitches, Jerry to George, Elaine to her friend:

Friend: What's he look like?

Elaine [after a pause]: Well, he's somewhat short, but stocky and strong. In fact quite powerful. He can lift a hundred pounds!

Friend: Stocky? He's fat! I bet he's bald, too!

Elaine [with a crinkled face]: Bald-ing.

They go out on a blind date, which culminates with some off-screen sex that's described diversely by the participants in separate conversations with Elaine and Jerry. The site evidently was George's kitchen, not because they were too over-heated to make it to the bedroom, but because the bedroom triggered George's masculine anxieties, so he suggested the kitchen, "a more sociable room." 

In the end, there is a pregnancy scare, thanks to a deficient condom supplied by Kramer. "My boys can swim!" exalts George when he hears the "bad" news, jubilant relief over the validation of his powers as a man defeating for the time every other self-interested consideration. Then Elaine's friend gets her tardy period and I went to bed before the next episode could start.

No matter how late it is, I always read a little in bed, and currently I'm working through Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. Last night by chance the 10 or so pages I read included the following account of how "our kind" of sexual reproduction likely evolved from that of, say, fungi:

In the days when all sex cells were interchangeable and of roughly the same size, there would have been some which just happened to be slightly bigger than others. In some respects a big isogamete would have an advantage over an average-sized one, because it would get its embryo off to a good start by giving it a large initial food supply. There might therefore have been an evolutionary trend towards larger gametes. But there was a catch. The evolution of isogamete which were larger than was strictly necessary would have opened the door to selfish exploitation. Individuals who produced smaller than average gametes could cash in, provided they could ensure that their small gametes fused with extra-big ones. This could be achieved by making the small ones more mobile, and able to seek out large ones actively. The advantage to an individual of producing small, rapidly moving gametes would be that he could afford to make a large number of gametes, and therefore could potentially have more children. Natural selection favoured the production of sex cells which were small, and which actively sought out big ones to fuse with. So we can think of two divergent sexual 'strategies' evolving. There was the large investment or 'honest' strategy. This automatically opened the way for a small-investment exploitative or 'sneaky' strategy. Once the divergence between the two strategies had started, it would have continued in runaway fashion. Medium-sized intermediates would have been penalized, because they did not enjoy the advantages of the two more extreme strategies. The sneaky ones would have evolved smaller and smaller size, and faster mobility. The honest ones would have evolved larger and larger size, to compensate for the ever-smaller investment contributed by the sneaky ones, and they became immobile because they would always be actively chased by the sneaky ones anyway. Each honest one would 'prefer' to fuse with another honest one. But the selection pressure to lock out sneaky ones would have been weaker than the pressure on sneaky ones to duck under the barrier: the sneaky ones had more to lose, and they therefore won the evolutionary battle. The honest ones became eggs, and the sneaky ones became sperms.

So that explains how George probably got his sneaky swimmers.

Perp walk

People have been having fun with this pic  but what you can’t see is that the perp walk passed within a half mile of one of those e-bike rental stations.

Slim Dunlap, 1951-2024

Slim Dunlap died today. He had something like a cult following among local music fans, and it was for the right reasons: great guitar player, wonderful song writer, and, according to all who knew him, a sweet, sweet guy. He had suffered a terrible stroke about a dozen years ago that ruined his health. He was 73.

I have one small bit of insider knowledge about Slim. He was a golfer! It’s not a common pastime for those in his line of work, but I ran into him once at Rich Acres. This was the public course in Richfield, on the east side of Cedar Avenue. Not very bucolic. As you lined up a putt, planes would be coming in for a landing above you at approximately tree-top level. The course is gone now—airport expansion.

The day I saw Slim was warm but he had on his uniform—jeans and a long-sleeved, button-down, plaid shirt. Tennis shoes, not boots, because golf is a sport so you wear your Chuck Taylors. I made a joke about it being nice to see him outside a bar. No doubt he reported that one-liner to his loved ones later in the evening. I’m guessing this was about the time of his greatest fame, late 1980s when he was in the Replacements. Before that, I wouldn’t have recognized him. I don’t think I saw him swing at a golf ball, only because I don’t think I’d have forgotten what that looked like.  

Of course I reported my Slim-sighting to the only Slim fan I know who golfs. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I’ve seen him there a few times.” So, not a one-off. Slim was a golfer. Here’s a Richfield public links guy doing my favorite of all his non-hits, “Times Like This”:

 

 

 

 

Luncheon

I stopped for lunch at Emily’s Lebanese Deli on my way home from school yesterday. I’m not sure how good it is, but the fare isn’t like anything I’d make at home, and for $20 you get a million calories plus a little Turkish coffee (so, closer to 1.1 million calories). I hope they’re doing ok. I noticed that the laminated part of my table top was peeling away from the unfinished layer below. Then I noticed that other tables were like that, too. There are only maybe ten tables in the cramped space. 

It was around 2 o’clock and the lunch diners had left. By the time I ordered, there was just one other occupied table: two elderly Slavonic ladies. I say they were Slavonic only because, to me, they resembled what Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev and Mrs. Leonid Brezhnev probably looked like: stocky, plain, well dressed but more for the cold weather than for style. Without doubt they were elderly. 

They chatted animatedly. It’s a small space and I heard most of it. Family, kids and grandkids, a friend they hadn’t seen, a swipe at the president-elect whereby they further endeared themselves to me. When their bill came, they each immediately produced a calculator from their respective purses. The rapidity of the retrievals contrasted humorously with the somewhat laborious keying of the numbers. My guess would be that the waitress got 15 percent, not 16 percent.

I paid right after them. There’s no parking lot, and I passed them on the sidewalk as I walked to my car. They weren’t moving too fast. My car was 30 yards ahead. Could I give them a lift? “No, no, we have only a block to go!” I felt the twinge experienced by noncriminals upon realizing they are being regarded with suspicion. I had the thought to drive around the block to see just how far they were really going. My next thought was: I guess now I’m stalking elderly ladies in Lower Nordeast Minneapolis. So I drove straight home. Soon as the old ladies were out of my head I thought that in about six hours I’d probably wish I’d brought home some flat bread and tabouli from the deli. I’m like the so-called lower animals, taking about 15 minutes off after a meal before starting to think about the next one.

The CEO killing

Seems everyone is choosing a side, either the CEO or his assassin, but to me it’s like when Notre Dame plays Duke: can’t cheer for either one of them. Here, though, are some scattered notes of things I’ve thought to myself, or wondered, that aren’t routinely taken up in all the breathless coverage.

1) Just the name, “United Healthcare”: a lie of marketing. Health care is delivered by doctors and nurses &c. United Healthcare is an insurance company. The only blood they draw is through their claims department, or other euphemistically titled department that “examines claims.” Often, as in the case described in the above letter composed by an exasperated pediatric oncologist (actual “health care worker”), this means the denial of health care treatment.

2) In a pep talk to United Health employees after the killing unleashed a wave of online bitterness directed at the health insurance industry—“my sympathy is out-of-network”—one of the few execs higher up the chain than Brian Thompson, the murdered man, said their company functions as a safeguard against unnecessary and costly treatments. Like anti-nausea drugs for kids with cancer? Something about the letter’s tone makes me think this wasn’t the author’s first bad experience. Anyone with an internet connection can collect similar complaints almost indefinitely. 

3) The exec who made this pitch to underlings is the subject of an insider-trading investigation, as was Thompson, who sold more than $15 million in stock options two weeks before the Justice Department announced an anti-trust probe into United Health’s acquisition of a hospice provider.

”But he was a family man,” say his defenders, “the father of two kids!” By this standard, you can’t criticize my blog posts either.

4) From here below, it looks like the shooter and his victim were socioeconomic peers. The private school from which Luigi Mangione graduated as valedictorian charges $35k per year. His family owns nursing homes, country clubs, and a radio station that purveys conservative talk. One of Mangione’s cousins, Nino, is in the Maryland state legislature and was co-chair of Baltimore County’s “Trump Victory Leadership Team.”

My kind of people!

5) Apparently a fast-food worker at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, made the connection between a customer and the pictures of a “person of interest” released by the NYPD. Were none of the killer’s upper-crust family members able to recognize him in these widely distributed images?

6) Now that I think about it, this McD’s employee is someone to root for. 

More of all the best people

Pete Hegseth is the Fox News personality Trump has nominated to lead the Pentagon. I wrote about his criminal law problems, here. Turns out that, according to contemporaneous complaints of people who worked with Hegseth, the man’s entire adult biography is basically outtakes from Animal House. Were you to undertake his defense, you might have resort to such rhetorical questions as: Who among us has not been hammered at a strip club with some of the gals from the office? A senator willing to cast the first stone would be in line behind Hegseth’s own mother, who in 2005 e-mailed her adult son: 

You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. .  . .

I don’t want an answer to this … I don’t want to debate you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But … On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself …

Mom

Hegseth’s only management experience is some brief stints running small veterans’ advocacy organizations. He left these positions after mismanaged finances came to light. Or maybe it was the gross character deficiencies that did him in. He’s definitely failing upward. The Pentagon has about 26,000 employees and a budget of about $850 billion. It would be bad to turn it over to some DEI darling. Luckily, Hegseth is available.

Though allowing for disparate tastes in these matters, I don’t think Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary is as outlandish as, say, that of Charles Kushner, father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, to be our ambassador to France. (Matt Gaetz for attorney general is out of the running since he withdrew.) Kushner is, like the man who nominated him, a felon: in 2005, he pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns (thereby saving about $300,000 in taxes owed), retaliating against one of the government’s witnesses, and lying to the FEC. The tax evasion and other miscellaneous lying was vanilla pudding compared to the details surrounding Kushner’s retaliation against a government witness, which was described in the following manner by a Justice Department press release:

Kushner further admitted at his plea hearing that he devised a scheme to retaliate against a cooperating witness—his sister—and her husband by having a prostitute seduce the husband and covertly filming them having sex. Kushner admitted that he paid a private investigator $25,000 to arrange for the seduction and videotaping of the cooperating witness’ husband. Kushner admitted to personally recruiting the prostitute and instructing that the videotape be mailed to the cooperating witness. 

This is the Joe Friday-Dragnet version of events. The case was prosecuted by the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey—at the time, Chris Christie, who of course would later become the Republican governor of New Jersey and a presidential aspirant himself. But by the time Christie was competing in Republican presidential politics, the party had gone full-on MAGA, and the prosecution of a Trump family member, albeit through marriage, required justification. Thus Christie once elaborated on his office’s press release, telling an interviewer:

Mr. Kushner pled guilty. He admitted the crimes. And so what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor? I mean, if a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that? I mean, it’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney.

Kushner’s “rehabilitation” began when Trump, at the end of his first term, pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law for these “loathsome, disgusting” crimes. Now he’s nominated him to be ambassador to France! I get a kick out of the outrage over Biden granting his son a pardon. It’s an ass move, sure, but if Hunter was MAGA he might be next up for secretary of defense.

(I’ve learned from my daughters to use “ass” as an adjective expressing generalized disapproval.)