Really, my headline pretty much says what I mean to say. But of course, I’ll elaborate a bit.
The above ad was in an email I received this morning from The Boston Globe. And I’ve had it with these. I’ve been seeing such ads for a decade or two now, and I’ve reached the end of my tolerance.
First, do any of you refer to what you’re wearing between your waist and ankles “a pant?” Or has a friend asked, “Hey, what do you think of my new pant?”
No, you don’t. And no, no one has (I hope).
This is exclusively something that comes out of the clothing industry, or perhaps the advertisers who tout clothing for that trade. It’s not anything any of us out here who wear the things say, near as I can tell.
We call them “pants.” And Italians say i pantaloni. Plural. Speakers of Spanish say los pantalones. Again, plural. OK, so the Dutch for some reason use the singular form (de broek). Fortunately, when I was in Amsterdam, everyone refused to speak Dutch to me, so I was spared the pain of hearing people say such a thing in real life. Maybe they do it because of the influence the textile industry once had on the country.
As for the industry, I suppose they say it because to them, a pair of pants is a singular product more than something they wear. It’s one item, and if they used a plural term it might confuse their accountants.
But I don’t know, and I don’t care, why they do it. I just want this to stop. Now. Before somebody starts wearing “an underpant” beneath the aforementioned….
This will be the second, more tangential, such post.
Paul shared this brief anecdote:
In another bookstore mentioned above, the name of which I shall not reveal, I was speaking to the owner about the new pope. The owner is a bit older than I and said, “I‘ve always thought of popes as very old men… but I just realized… I’m older than the pope!”
This caused me to check Wikipedia, and find out that I am indeed older than Pope Leo XIV. Not by a lot — we would have been in school at the same time; I was just a couple of years ahead. So obviously popes are not “very old men.” Of course, I realized long ago that this was the case. It was fairly obvious when the startlingly young Pope John Paul II came along. He was only 58, and obviously in his prime. I had just turned 25 when he took the chair of Peter, but you didn’t have to be older than he to perceive his youth to be exceptional.
But then Benedict and Frances were obviously up there, with Benedict retiring at 85, and Frances dying at 88. So at 69, Leo stands out a bit, but not the way John Paul did.
And like the man in the bookstore, I find it slightly jolting on a personal level to suddenly be older than the pope. But not as much as when I realized, back in September 2023, that I was older than three of my grandparents had lived to be. That was when I was the same age as Pope Leo.
And not as much as the moment in 1994, when David Beasley was meeting with the editorial board to seek our support in his bid for the governor’s office, and one of our members (technically an emeritus member, I suppose you’d call him) brought up the candidate’s extreme youth. I realized in that moment that he was only about 37 (I say “about” because I don’t recall the date of the interview). I was 40, and in that moment I was quite shocked that someone younger than I was seeking such an elevated office. The presumptuous puppy! That was a bit of a personal landmark.
That experience was repeated when Barack Obama came along. I mean, a young governor was one thing, but president of the United States? Come on. For reference: Obama moved to Hawaii about the time I was graduating from high school — but he didn’t graduate (from the posh Punahou across town from my public school) until eight years later. (That didn’t keep me from backing him for the Democratic nomination in 2008, although I went with the far more experienced John McCain in the general.)
Life can be described in many ways, but one way would be as a process of constantly modifying one’s sense of time. So having a pope roughly, but not quite, my age is not the surprise it might once have been. Governor, president, pope… there seems to be a pattern here, and I’m getting used to it.
And obviously, Pope Leo is not a “very old man,” even though he’s the age of the oldest of those three grandparents who did not live to be as old as I was when I wrote this. One’s own perception of human longevity is not the only thing that changes over time. Those three grandparents passed away in the 1950s, ’60s, and 1971. We lost my last grandparent in 1985, when she was 95. My father was three weeks short of 93 when he died in 2021. My mother is still very strong, physically and mentally, at 94. So it’s hard for me to think of myself — or the pontiff — as “very old” yet.
Today, we’re remembering my father-in-law, whose 102nd birthday this would have been, if we hadn’t lost him at 86. God bless you, Mr. Phelan, and thank you so much for all the ways you blessed us in your long life….
My relationship with that store began before it existed. Several years back, my daughter gave my wife and me some gift cards to Odd Bird Books, which existed in the tiny Arcade Mall downtown. When we heard it was about to close, and we still hadn’t used our gift cards, we made a point of visiting that shop for the first and last time.
We picked up several books that day. I believe one of them was the third book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy, Colonel Roosevelt. But the main thing I remember about that visit was how very impressed I was by what was being offered in that diminutive space.
The shop was only about the size of my home office — maybe smaller. So there were not that many books. But the place possessed a virtue I’d never encountered in any bookstore, whether independent or chain — more or less every single book was one that I would like to read, if my life should last so long. It was like Ben Adams, the proprietor, had been asked to collect every book he wanted to have with him on the proverbial desert island — and he happened to have excellent taste.
In other words, all good books. No junk at all. There wasn’t room.
So when Ben teamed up with Clint and Jenna Wallace to open a new store, naturally it bore that name (although they didn’t get it from me — see the Hemingway quote in the picture below).
And it lives up to that name. Of course, since it’s bigger and there are many more books, they’re not all books that I particularly want to read. But we should consider that I’m not the only reader in the world (or even here in Columbia), and different strokes and all that.
Still, I’m deeply impressed by the selections. And if I happen to want something that’s not on the shelves (an astoundingly high percentage of what I seek is on the shelves), the folks behind the counter will quickly get it for me. And I’d certainly rather do that than order it from Amazon.
Oh, and there’s always coffee and other refreshments. And you may think this is odd to mention (you’ll understand if you’ve spent huge amounts of time in bookstores), but a very nice restroom. That’s essential, don’t you know.
I hope to see you at All Good Books sometime. It’s located at 734 Harden St. Now that Yesterday’s is gone, it’s my one motivation to visit Five Points.
One could argue that independent bookstores are a luxury. You can summon books to your doorstep with a few clicks, sometimes the same day. Or, if you have an E-reader, in seconds. So why do bookstores continue to survive?
As Blockbuster faded in the 2000s, I worried that bookstores might suffer the same fate. But here they are still, and they seem to be making a resurgence. According to the American Booksellers Association, more that 200 new indie bookstores opened in 2024. We are seeing a similar renaissance locally. Since 2023, three new bookstores have opened in the Pee Dee – Jack’s Books in Florence, Foxes Tales in Marion, and Our Next Chapter in Conway. It’s worth considering why.
First, I think, are the owners. Their identities are palpable within the walls. You feel as if you are walking into an extension of their homes. I can tell you the name of the owners of almost every independent bookstore that I have frequented more than once: Gwen at Foxes Tales, Jack (Ok, that’s a gimme), Wendy and her daughter Olivia at Litchfield Books, and Clint at All Good Books in Columbia. I fondly remember Rhett and Betty Jackson who founded the Happy Bookseller in Columbia which closed in 2008. And I look forward to meeting Bob and Lisa Martire at Our Next Chapter, whom I called for this column.
Second is the product itself. There is just something about books: their personalities on a shelf, their weight in your hands, the curve of the pages, the smell of the bindings. We connect with books in a different way from the way we do with VHS tapes or DVDs. Is an E-reader more economical and practical? Undoubtedly. But after a day full of screens, can you find repose and escape in another screen? Many of us cannot.
Third is the community bookstores create. If you are new in town, where would you go to meet people? Church used to be the answer, but less so now, particularly for young people. Bars and clubs, of course. If I were young, I would head to the local coffee shop first, and the bookstore next. Shopping for books is different from shopping for groceries. You don’t always have a plan, and you aren’t focused on getting home to cook dinner. People relax in a bookstore; their minds are open. Children peruse, curious and wide-eyed.
In the past month I have had the following conversations in a bookstore: As I was entering Litchfield Books, a woman I had never met engaged me in a five-minute conversation after I bent down to greet her dog. Inside, I had a long chat with Wendy and Olivia about books, bookstore dogs, bookstore swag (I love a good bookstore T-shirt and baseball cap) and the possibility of adding a coffee bar (I voted a loud “Yes!” to coffee). In another bookstore mentioned above, the name of which I shall not reveal, I was speaking to the owner about the new pope. The owner is a bit older than I and said, “I‘ve always thought of popes as very old men… but I just realized… I’m older than the pope!”
I met a new bookstore friend recently during a trip with my wife, Debbie, to Decatur, Georgia, for a wedding. Debbie is a nurse but could have been a librarian. She was always ready with a fun, age-appropriate bedtime story for me to read to our children. That was precious time, with a little head against each shoulder.
When she saw that the wedding venue was near a children’s bookshop called Little Shop of Stories, we knew we had to visit. Which brings us to the last reason why we can’t let bookstores go. Every one has a vibe, an ambience, much like a restaurant. At Little Shop, soft Saturday afternoon sunlight flooded though the glass façade into a welcoming space that was filled with perhaps a dozen patrons milling and talking. A father and daughter sat in a chair as he read to her.
When it came time to pay, the young woman at the counter mistakenly input my transaction as a credit rather than a charge. When I discovered the error on Monday, I called and spoke with my new friend, Heather, at Little Shop, who straightened it out. She was lovely; she was kind; we laughed. It was the best customer service call I suspect I will ever have. A few days later, a care package arrived with a Little Shop mug, a tote bag, and a half dozen books.
Take that, Amazon! Yes, you will pay slightly more at an independent bookstore. But we have already made this bargain with coffee shops. We understand that we are paying too much for the liquid in the cup. But that’s not all we are buying. We are renting a small portion of the shop, that favorite table where we like to sit. We are maintaining a relationship with the shop owner (Hi Liz at Groundout and Mel at Bear Bar) or our favorite barista that would end if the shop closed.
We have a choice. We can pay the minimum and have the lonely convenience of books at our doorstep or on our screen. Or we can choose a better way. We can support a small business that provides livelihoods for its staff and weaves a beautiful thread into the fabric of a neighborhood. Find an independent bookstore, and you’ve found a place that cares about its future.
I hope the Boston Globe won’t mind my using this. I’m trying to create more Globe subscribles.
Remember when I published one of these — or earlier on, a Virtual Front Page — pretty much every day? If you do, you’re showing your age, because it’s been awhile.
But here’s one for today, anyway…
Yankee beaches — Since a lot of y’all are probably at the beach, and bemoaning the fact that there’s not enough room to walk, be glad you’re not up north. It’s getting ridiculous up there with the tent cities being set up everywhere. See the picture above. My daughter who was in Rhode Island last week said she saw a lot of that on Block Island. Why am I sharing this? Because I enjoy news that makes S.C. look good. We don’t get enough of that.
You are contaminated — This is a tad depressing — talking about how such things as plastics permeate our bodies and those of all living things on the planet. But it’s a moment of nostalgia for me. I remember the old days when we worried more about old-fashioned pollution than climate change, which sometimes seems like the only ecological problem young folks know about.
Your choices for governor — How bad can they get? Well, Nancy Mace just made her campaign official, so… Not bad enough for ya? Well, consider that Ralph Norman has also raised his absurdly unqualified hand. I was glad to see that Pam Evette was running, because it lets us know she’s still among the living — our Gov Lite is so invisible that I tend to think of her as the Ghost Who Walks. I don’t know Josh Kimbrell, but that alone would dismiss him from my consideration. The only Republican running with anything like credible credentials is Alan Wilson. But that still puts the GOP one viable candidate ahead of Democrats. Perhaps things will improve. Perhaps not.
Joy in Beantown — This is the thing that most motivated me to post an Open Thread. I wanted to say something before the moment passed. The weekend just past was a great one at Fenway. The Red Sox are now ahead of the Yankees in the AL East, and only 3 games behind the leading Blue Jays. And I’m digging it, whether you are or not.
This isn’t the same Democratic Party as Trump’s first term — I posted this just to react to the headline by saying, “Yeah, crushing defeat can do things to you.” I probably won’t read the rest of the story. Y’all can tell me if there are any surprises. I haven’t seen anything in politics to surprise me since last year. I suppose I could have said what I’ve already said frequently in recent months: “Ya think?”
I’ve got on my walking shoes. And long pants. And look what this rain has done for my lawn!
When I’ve mentioned it, other people have told me this happens each year. Not that I’ve noticed. This is the first summer it’s made an impression on me, anyway.
By “it” I mean this: We don’t have cold water anymore. You turn the handle with the “C” on it, and you get a liquid that is only slightly, if at all, cooler than the blood in your veins. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for some time, but I know a lot of y’all are numbers people, and I couldn’t quantify it. I couldn’t find my old thermometer that I used to use for developing film at home. The ideal temperature for developing Tri-X — which is what I usually used — was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know how warm this water is, but I assume I’d have to greatly reduce development time to use it without cooling it somehow, with a likely loss of image quality.
And it’s cloudy! I love cloudy…
(I found one on Amazon, and it was pretty cheap, but I didn’t want to spend even that for one blog post.)
Anyway, have y’all noticed it? And is it news to you, or did you notice it years ago? (And no, I’m not talking about the usual slight warming we get every year, but something so far beyond that that I think maybe the “hot” is also on — but it isn’t.)
I might be more conscious of it because unlike most members of the fam, I’ve been here all summer (except for a few days in Memphis, which ain’t exactly the arctic.) My wife spent a week in Alaska with a bunch of friends from the all-girl high school from which she graduated. One daughter and two of her children have spent a good bit of time in Canada, when they weren’t in New York. Her other daughter lives in Asheville, which is like being in a different hemisphere from here. Another of my daughters just came back from a week in Boston and an island off the coast of Rhode Island. My third daughter has stayed closer, but did spend a few days in New York. My boys have stuck close to home, although one took his family to Costa Rica. That, of course, was a great trip, but not the same as these journeys north that turn me a bit green, while of course I’m happy for my loved ones.
Right now, though, I’m able to look back on that envy with shame, because now I’m as blessed as anybody.
Can you believe this weather? It’s felt like fall, or maybe Amsterdam, where we spent a week last summer. It’s truly wonderful. Sure, those Parisians I wrote about recently might complain that it’s getting up to 80 today, but you and I know that 80 is a treat at this time of year.
And we’ve got several days coming in this same balmy mode. it’s not going to get above 90 until next Wednesday.
And I am grateful. That God should reward me (and my neighbors) this way after my grumbling (a bit) about missing out on the Great White North, or about the lack of cold tap water, is a glorious example of His infinite forgiveness.
The last couple of days, I’ve even resumed walking outside. And I intend to do it again today. I can’t wait…
After all, I sort of did write that because I was looking for a quick-and-easy thing to post about, to assuage my guilt about not posting more often. And, I told myself, not everything has to be as long and complicated as the post that preceded that “silly” one(1,736 words, yikes!).
But… ultimately, I don’t consider the subject trivial. To explain…
Years ago, when Umberto Eco (the Italian semiotician and author of The Name of the Rose) was still alive, I saw something he wrote (or perhaps he was just being quoted) in a magazine. He predicted that our species was moving back toward nonverbal (or perhaps you would say post-literate) modes of communication. And this was years before emojis, in the ’90s or maybe the ’80s.
Anyway, I think of his prediction frequently these days (as I’ve mentioned before in a related rant). My question about the thumb-up emoji arises in that context.
My concern is that I see our ability to communicate flattening, becoming one-dimensional. The English language (the only one in which I am sufficiently literate to be able to perceive subtle distinctions) is amazingly versatile, flexible and able to communicate an apparent a galaxy of things with a single word, depending upon its context.
But I’ve seen a marked tendency to reduce in recent years. Sixteen year ago, I wrote about the absurdity of having my wife ask me why I was not her “friend” on Facebook. But I didn’t consider my wife absurd for wanting to include me in something she was enjoying. My problem was Facebook’s reduction of human relationships to one word. On that medium, you were either a “friend” or you were not, (which makes sense only if you haven’t advanced past the kindergarten level of social interaction). Obviously, my wife was and is much more than that to me. And yet in the years since then Facebook, in its hyperbureaucratic, ones-and-zeroes-obsessed manner, has dutifully labelled her, my parents, my children, grandchildren, cousins, acquaintances, and people I didn’t even know but approved to be polite (and no, I don’t do that any more) have all become my “friends,” without any elaboration or explanation or qualification or enhancement — without any of the things that make life rich and full.
I am reminded of the Newspeak Dictionary from Orwell’s 1984. Each edition is smaller, thinner, containing fewer words. The idea is to reduce the number of concepts a human is capable of generating or communicating, so that ideas that are troublesome to Big Brother’s state simply don’t arise or spread. As the dialectic of Oceania proceeds, language gets flatter and flatter. A thing that is in some way very, very bad is “doubleplusungood,” rather than horrible, evil, shocking, abominable, mortifying, putrid, appalling, disgusting, or … well, you get the idea, comrade.
When I first read that as a kid, being a word guy, I found the idea of such a dictionary, steadily shrinking, more terrifying than what Winston found in Room 101. Although what he encountered there was pretty doubleplusungood as well.
As these modes become common, even universal, we become less intelligent. And humanity sinks into the mire. It’s one of the reasons that “Idiocracy” arrived centuries earlier than the silly film predicted…
I ask because when I use it to respond to a text, my phone will tell me “You liked…” whatever I was responding to.
Is that how you would translate this nonverbal communication into words? That seems to me to reflect a very limited understanding of the symbol and its vast usefulness.
Sure, it can mean “like,” in certain circumstances. But if that’s what I need it for, I can just type “I like it!” easily enough. Nevertheless, I do use it for that quite frequently, and it works in the right context. I see others doing the same.
But to my point, it is far more valuable and essential for saying something that words can’t say — or can’t say without hurting feelings. To express it briefly in words, it’s something like one or more of the following:
“Check!”
“Got it!”
“Received!”
“10-4!”
“Roger!”
Or, at greater length:
“OK, you’ve sent it and I’ve seen it, and I have nothing to say about it, and certainly no value judgments to make regarding your important missive. So, with all due respect, please go away without asking further about it, so I can try desperately to dig my way out of this mountain of actual, important work I need to do…”
Employed that way, it is enormously useful.
I learned this almost immediately after joining James Smith’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018. From the first day, I was hit by a tsunami of texts that went exponentially beyond anything I had seen or imagined before. I don’t know quite how to fully convey the quantity I mean. I could easily have done nothing but read and answer texts all day long, and still not do full justice to the task. And I had a universe of other things to do, as a more or less one-man communications department in the last months of a statewide campaign.
It was immediately as horrible as email, but more immediately demanding, since most people know it’s crazy to expect a prompt reply to an email. When you got one of those back in the ’90s, you were excited. Not anymore.
Part of this was that for the most part, James and running mate Mandy Powers Norrell communicated only by text. Sure, there was the occasional phone call while they flitted daily across the state, but no emails — which sort of drove our campaign manager nuts. He’d never encountered anything like it, and his campaign experience was much greater than mine (which is to say, he’d served in a bunch of them, and I’d been in zero).
But our two principals texting all the time would have been tolerable had that been for all the other people that constantly peppered me with information and observations that seemed to them critically valuable at that moment. I’m talking about not only fellow campaign staffers, but friends and contributors and well-wishers from across the state and beyond.
Worse, it wasn’t just individuals. There was also that cruelest invention of the 21st century — the GROUP TEXT! The kind that just keeps coming at you, with multiple responses from various recipients, all day long. The emoji was magnificently effective with these. It said, with all due politeness, “Acknowledged.” But it gave no one anything to respond to, so no one noticed when I removed myself from the group.
Finding that mode of communication was, for me at that moment, as wonderful as finding a cure for the common cold. I’ve used it that way many times since. Not to be rude or dismissive — just to get on with what I need to do, without hurting feelings.
So what does it mean to you? Or perhaps I should say, in what way is it most useful to you?…
I frequently say something here and there about what’s wrong with journalism today (as opposed to what non-journalists tend to think is wrong).
Yesterday’s New York Times offered some good illustrations of two of the main problems with the reporting we now receive from what used to be called “newspapers.”
Not that the NYT isn’t still an excellent newspaper (as the word is now used), and possibly the best left in the country. But while cranking out some wonderful content and doing a better job than most in employing new technology constructively, it still prominently displays some of the worst habits of the medium today.
Before naming them, let me mention the one guiding principle that guided journalism in my day — that is, the late 20th century (and maybe the first few years of the next, but from 2006 on, everything was falling apart). We saw it as our job to inform the reader as much as we could as quickly as we could.
That meant telling the moderately interested reader everything he (or she) wanted to know about a story in the headline — and to tell a reader who couldn’t care less that this was not what he’d picked up the paper for. If you couldn’t do that in the headline, you did it in the first paragraph, the lede. By that time you had communicated the who, what, where, when and how, and maybe even a bit of why. The paragraphs after that were arranged in descending order of importance, in terms of the reader’s ability to understand what was going on. (Think “inverted pyramid.”)
This was based in respect for the busy reader. That respect is now gone, trashed, mutilated, completely irrelevant.
And so we have the present situation. The “murder of the inverted pyramid,” as one blogger has put it. I just ran across that after writing what I did above. Here’s what that writer said:
Once upon a time, when newspapers were both noble and strong, editors and publishers regarded readers’ time as very valuable. Editors and publishers understood that newspaper readers were trying to absorb as much information as possible in the least amount of time. They knew that most readers would not finish most stories. Readers would read until they had absorbed enough of a story to meet their needs, then they’d move on to another story, or move on with their day. Once upon a time, editors and publishers did not try to manipulate readers to rip off readers’ time and attention.
Indeed. Anyway, there are two maddening, insulting, stiff-arming ways that newspapers now play keep-away with the news, day after day, story after story:
The say-nothing headline. You know those little teasers that essentially say, We know something and you don’t, and you have to click just to start to get the tiniest hint of it. They tend to be shockingly frank about this, starting with such phrases as “What we know about…” and “What you need to know about…,” rather than telling you what you want to know.
The “live updates” structure. This is used on the biggest story of the day, and is usually played as the lede on a newspaper’s app or its main browser page. You know the form. You call it up, and the top item is the absolutely latest thing the reporting team (this tends to be on an “all-hands-on-deck” story) have learned. Which means the “story” leads with some low-interest detail that would have appeared in about the 20th graf of a normal, coherent news story — if at all. This is completely useless to a person who has a life, and therefore only a moment to learn about this subject. The only person who could benefit from it would be someone following every hiccup on this story since the instant that it broke — in other words, someone without a life, or someone who is somehow peripherally involved in the story. Everybody else is out of luck, and therefore uninformed, and so more likely, say, to vote for Donald Trump.
Whenever confronted with that second atrocity, if I really want to know the essentials, I look at a sidebar to the main story, and usually find something resembling a news lede within the first few grafs.
Anyway, to illustrate these phenomena, I offer you a big story out of New York from two days ago, as reported by, as I said, probably the best newspaper in the country.
It’s the shooting of three people in an office building on Park Avenue Tuesday evening….
And now, you are missing something you would no doubt find entertaining on a surveillance camera: my head is exploding. Because after starting this post yesterday and getting distracted, I’m going back to grab the screenshots I had saved yesterday to illustrate what I’m talking about. And they’re not on my iPad… or my phone… or my Mac. Well, one of them is… As for the others…
Since the image of the shooting story as it dominated the NYT app yesterday morning is gone, here’s a lesser example of it — the tariffs story currently at the top of the browser version of the Times:
You’ll see examples of what I’m talking about in the shooting case — the incoherent item labeled LIVE in red, and below it the sidebars, the related stories. It’s not a great example because it’s a calmer story; it hasn’t caused the paper to send every reporter all over Manhattan trying to discover what the hell is happening on the park. So it doesn’t lead with a breathless paragraph about the latest minor fact to slip out of a source during a press conference. It even has a nice lede-like summary at the top of it.
But it shows the typical layout. And here is the latest version of the “LIVE” story of the shooting, which now is much calmer than it was yesterday morning. But you see the pointless structure for anyone with limited time — the latest developments, rather than a summary of the important points.
Anyway, with the shooting story, I was more motivated than usual to get to the fundamental facts, because two of my grandchildren were staying with friends in Manhattan. Turning away from the mess in the NYT, I texted my daughter, their mother, who told me that their hosts lived a good distance away. That was reassuring. Not so reassuring was the fact that their daily routine up there took them right by where the shooting happened. But they were fine, thanks be to God.
Meanwhile, I had turned to the sidebars, in search of news. And I found a perfect illustration of the “say-nothing headline:”
After that, it was kind of like a real news story, except for being broken up by subheds into chunks, instead of rationally assembled in inverted pyramid. Subheds like “What happened?” and “Who were the victims?” and “Who was the gunman?” Note how the subheds also conform to the “say nothing” principle.
It was only by accident that later in the day, I happened to run across a real news story about the shooting, with a real headline, in The New York Times. I wasn’t looking for news. I had clicked on the “SECTIONS” link on my app, as a quick way to get to the opinion content
What’s that I see? A real news story?
Look, right there next to Gwyneth Paltrow! A headline! Not a “say nothing” headline, but one that actually relates the essentials! Here’s the story, so you can judge for yourself:
Presumably, lots of people had managed to find it, or else it wouldn’t have made the “Most Popular” category. But how? I had been looking at both the app and the browser version of the paper, and had seen not a hint of it — at least, not at the times I was looking. All I can guess is that people weren’t looking at the digital version of the “newspaper” at all, but coming in by direct links from social media.
Still, I was glad to see it. It was like discovering an old friend I had thought was dead. Of course, the headline was a bit long, because headline writers today are no longer restricted by limited space. I would have said something more like “Gunman kills four, self, in New York.” You could cram that into a one-column, three-deck format if necessary. It was good that they got the police officer in, though.
I was curious to see what they had done in the print version, under those restricted conditions, but I ran into another depressing fact about newspapers today. Here’s the front of that morning’s paper. If you click on that, don’t bother searching for the story; it isn’t there.
The shooting broke at 6:28 p.m. on Tuesday. But people who bought a paper the next morning wouldn’t see a word about it. That’s because putting out a print version is today an afterthought, something for those few doddering ancients (as opposed to with-it 71-year-old youths like me) who still demand a dead-tree paper. And, to save some of the ungodly cost of producing such a product (that insane $4 rack price doesn’t cover it, folks), the paper rolls off the presses at a stunningly early hour. (Maybe not “stunningly” to i, but to a guy who spent all those years working until 2 a.m. getting out the city edition containing the very latest, it’s unreal.)
(By the way, I currently subscribe to six newspapers, and read them all on my iPad. I’m not going to deal with frustration, not to mention expense, of having a hard copy delivered to my house, just so I can see what happened two days earlier.)
Anyway, as a postscript… of course, the story leads today’s print version. But it now has a second-day, or perhaps I should say third-day, headline. It was still worth four columns, giving more room than the usual one-column lede in the NYT.
Bottom line, as a reader who subscribes to six newspapers, I don’t think it’s too much to expect at least one of them to show me, at the top of its homepage, what I most want to know about the biggest news of the day. But that’s not what the business is about any more…
I don’t go see many movies in theaters. There was a time when I went to pretty much all of them, back when I was a copyeditor in Tennessee and was the paper’s film critic on the side. I wasn’t paid to do that additional work, but it wasn’t really work to me. Besides, the paper made it more than worthwhile by reimbursing me for the tickets. Not that the tickets cost much then. Fact is, I probably would have done it without the reimbursement. If, in my continuing project of cleaning out the garage, I run across a copy of my 1977 review of “Star Wars,” I’ll show to you. But I’ve promised to show it to my kids first.
Now, when I do go to a movie theater — once a year or so — I feel the need to take out a mortgage, to spread the payments out in easy installments. First, there’s the cost to get in. Of course, I can get the senior discount, but that discount is so inconsequential that the difference between that and full price is no more than the cost of a ticket in my youth. But hey, that’s just inflation over time, right? If you go to the CPI calculator, you’ll see that that the cost is about the same. Bu if you want to experience highway robbery, try to get some popcorn and a drink.
And no, the fancy recliner seats with the gigantic cupholders, arranged stadium-style, aren’t worth all that extra cost. I find myself wondering why, after the trauma of COVID and the ongoing existential threat posed by streaming and gigantic 4K screens at home, theaters didn’t go the other way — rock-bottom prices to sit on wooden benches or something. My buddy Tony and I used to go to a theater like that in Ecuador when we were about 10 to see Italian Hercules movies and “The Three Musketeers” in French (with Spanish subtitles, in case we wanted to follow the dialogue). It cost us 40 centavos to get in, which in those days amounted to about 2 cents American. And we loved it. A Coke — in a bottle — cost another 2 cents.
About now, I should start getting to my point, which is that my son who is an avid collector of Marvel comics and I were planning to see the new Fantastic Four when it comes out this Friday. (Or a few days later. You’re kind of crazy to go on opening night.) Even though we had just been to see the new Superman a couple of weeks back!
But then I found that “Happy Gilmore 2” was coming out on the same day — July 25! So what was I going to do?
OK, a word about “Happy Gilmore.” Of course, the original flick was overwhelmingly silly. But it worked! I’ve got this thing about movies (and books and other things) that work. They might be the stupidest plots acted out by actors I would never go to see under normal circumstances. But if, somehow, everthing clicks, I will watch it again and again. “Happy Gilmore” is a perfect example. “Old School” is another. They sound so stupid that you’re put off just hearing about them. But the actors — and director — take that stupid idea and make it brilliant. At least, that’s the way I reacted to it. I don’t think I’ve ever done a “Top Five Sports Comedies” list yet, but “Happy” would definitely be on it. In fact, it would be competing with “Major League” for the top spot.
And yeah, I know about sequels made 30 years after the original. They’re often sad — like that made-for-TV reunion movie for “The Beverly Hillbillies” in 1981. Buddy Ebsen had forgotten how to be Jed Clampett! But I’m not expecting brilliance — just a little bit of fun nostalgia. And I know for a fact that “Shooter” McGavin will appear!
But shell out money for a third theater visit in a year?
So imagine my joy when I got an email today from Netflix telling me it will be streaming “Happy Gilmore 2” starting Friday! I was already thinking I might wait for it to be streamed for free at home, and now I don’t have to wait! (Oh, and it had better be “free” to subscribers! They’d better not use this occasion to usher in a new class of premium “world premieres” or some such thieving gimmick!)
Well, I’m happy, and looking forward to Happy 2.
I wonder — how much longer will actual movie theaters continue to exist? The business model seems almost entirely unworkable now…
In modern writing, it’s standard to use one space after a period at the end of a sentence, not two. While two spaces were common with typewriters due to their monospaced fonts, computers and proportional fonts have made a single space the preferred and recommended style.
But could that really have been the actual reason? Could people really not see that, when a period appeared — and had a space after it — and the next word was capitalized, the old sentence had ended, and a new one begun?
Of course, I realized, as soon as I typed “and the next word was capitalized,” that a huge portion of the American population (practically everyone who had not been brought up on AP style) capitalizes words at random — which is another form of insanity, to be dealt with another day.
But let’s say that was the reason. Why do people who weren’t alive back in the days of monospacing still do it?!?!?
Perhaps it’s because they’ve grown up in the utterly undisciplined online era, which has no limits whatsoever. You can type all day for the rest of your life, and never fill the available space. In fact, “space” is no longer a concept that defines the life of a writer.
But I was brought up right, and therefore have a semi-religious horror of wasting that precious resource. Or perhaps I should say I had it. Twenty years of blogging has undone me (or undun me). Now, I vomit forth words at a phenomenal rate (when I get around to posting), and feel little or no obligation to tidy up the mess. Back in the day, I spent half my “writing time” cutting what I had initially written, stream-of-consciousness-style, down to fit. Now, I just take the first step, and move on.
Not back then, though. Back then, a good journalist would embrace discipline, thinking “I must not kill any more trees than necessary!” Or more likely (and practically) thinking, “If I don’t cut this to the assigned length, some unfeeling monster on the copy desk will slash it in the middle of my very best sentence, and toss what follows it into the composing room trash bin!” (Which has happened to me.)
But you don’t have to be a journalist who remembers having to shout over the noise of the linotype machines to see that the double-space thing is wrong. Google’s AI feature didn’t exist until last year, and yet it clearly states that “In modern writing, it’s standard to use one space after a period at the end of a sentence, not two.”
Well, I could go on, and probably would, except that I want to get back to my original question:
Why do people still do this? I’d really like to know. It’s one of those human pathologies in which a take a morbid interest…
Well, today is the day (as you know I love to tell people over and over) that was supposed to be forever cherished as our national Day of Independence. That’s what John Adams expected, and predicted at the time, because that was the day that the Second Continental Congress actually voted to separate these 13 states from the British Empire.
What happened two days later was everybody lined up and signed a piece of paper saying so. And sure, you can call that Independence Day, too, for that very reason. No argument about that. But Adams has always been my favorite Founder, so this date causes me to want to stress his achievement, which was more significant than what Thomas Jefferson did. And yet everyone associates this big move with ol’ Tom. It’s almost like his personal holiday. But come on, people. Jefferson never opened his mouth during those weeks that Adams harangued the Congress so furiously to get them to step off and make the decision. Jefferson wrote the hard-copy version because Adams persuaded him to, because he admired the Virginian’s ability to turn a phrase (and also thought it would help that Jefferson was way more popular in the Congress than he was, since Tom didn’t make such an effort to tick everybody off), and he did it not alone, but as a member of a committee including Adams, Ben Franklin and a couple of other guys.
And I’m afraid that far too many of my favorites Americans, when they think about something beyond hot dogs and fireworks at all, think of the Declaration as somethign that genius Thomas Jefferson dreamed up on his own in his hotel room in Philadelphia, and then unveiled to the whole world’s enduring admiration and gratitude. Or something like that. Which isn’t right, and doesn’t give credit where due. Y’all know that no one respects a well-turned phrase more than I, but Independence was the result of more strenuous efforts than applying quill to paper.
I could go on, but now I’m going to switch to the subject of popular music….
I’ve been sort of halfway following a newsletter feature in The New York Times called The Amplifier. Well, “follow” is a bit strong. Basically, I sometimes look at the song lists they regularly email me, and have frequently been impressed by the selections I find. These folks are widely knowledgable, and you can’t pigeonhole them. They’re neither desperately trying to convince us that pop music in the 21st century is seriously wonderful, nor stuck in 1973 and telling us that all music has been crap since Lester Bangs died, if not earlier. They have a much broader perspective.
… so I thought I’d share that with you for your enjoyment, or serious appreciation, or whatever.
I gave you the link for that list above, and I hope it works for you. If not, these are the songs:
Tracy Chapman: ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’
The Isley Brothers: ‘Fight the Power, Pts. 1 and 2’
Public Enemy: ‘Fight the Power’
Michael Franti & Spearhead: ‘Yell Fire!’
Bob Marley & the Wailers: ‘Get Up, Stand Up’
Mavis Staples: ‘Eyes on the Prize’
Patti Smith: ‘People Have the Power’
Björk: ‘Declare Independence’
Rage Against the Machine: ‘Know Your Enemy’
Antibalas: ‘Uprising’
I looked at the list eagerly, having enjoyed past ones, but then I realized something… As much as a lot of people may dig those songs, they’re not really in my wheelhouse, to my knowledge. I haven’t even heard a bunch of them, but that’s beside my point.
My point is that as an Independence Day list, well, it really doesn’t work. But don’t blame the NYT folks. As much as I love American pop music, and have since “Hound Dog,” it’s just not the medium for addressing the American Revolution. Pimply-faced outcries against the Man are certainly within the reach of pop music, but that’s not what this country’s revolution was.
If you even want to call it a “revolution,” which I tend to doubt. You want a revolution? You want something that fits the tone of these kinds of songs? Well, the French had one of those, perhaps the ultimate one. And now that they’re on their Fifth Republic, I’m still not sure think they ever got over the trauma of it. The Russians, in their way, had one, too, and Vladimir Putin still isn’t coping with it in a well-adjusted manner.
Not that I’m running down our own, or anything — certainly not in this first year of our 250th commemoration. No, the American Revolution was one of the most significant and positive developments in the political history of the human race, which is why I am so grief-stricken now as I watch what it produced, all those things I love, being so rudely, stupidly and cruelly dismantled.
What do I call it? Well, one way to describe it is as a parting of the ways between a unique new country that had come into being and the country that had fostered it. This was not about oppressed people (paying taxes on tea? call that oppression?) rising up to destroy the established order, murder the royal family, obliterate religion, and that other sort of carrying-on we’ve seen elsewhere.
And it certainly wasn’t some class uprising by the sans cullotes against the rich and powerful. If you look carefully, the same people, in terms of social class or property or education levels, were in charge after independence as before. People of all classes took part, on both sides. But the guys who initiated and led this were people who knew how to run a city or colony or country (or a business, for that matter), and had been doing it in the past. Which, all the noble (and they are noble) words about freedom aside, is one of the very biggest reasons why our republic worked so well until very recently.
No. Our “revolution” was about serious people who had followed their fathers and grandfathers in building a new kind of country in what was to them (although not to, say, the Hurons) a New World. And they were pretty satisfied with what they’d built, and wanted it to continue. They saw themselves as Englishmen, but they were getting the strong impression that the British Crown didn’t really get them any more, and didn’t fully appreciate what they had become, and how they deserved to run it themselves without increasingly pesky interference from London.
Well, KIng George wasn’t going to go for that — certainly not after having expended all that treasure to protect the colonies from the French a few years earlier, as any Tory could have explained to you at the time. So yeah, there had to be a rupture, a ripping-away of the ties that bound. And eventually, starting a year before the Declaration (which continues to make me very uncomfortable, as I’ll explain again if you need me to), there was a very serious war. A particularly nasty war if you were down here in South Carolina (and elsewhere) — not a simple ones-and-zeroes matter of Patriots vs., Redcoats, but bloody, fratricidal violence between people who lived side-by-side. And (with the help of the French, of course), that war had an astounding outcome, with the world’s great superpower losing to a bunch of farmers, lawyers, shopkeepers and the like with a minimal amount of military expertise.
And the world was never the same again, and in so many ways, I thank God for that.
But “revolution?” In the French sense? In the sense of someone with such a pimply moniker as Rage Against the Machine? No. I don’t think so. It was something far bigger, far more important to human history.
But as I’ve probably also said before many times, I do have a favorite rock song about revolution. When the 45 came out, it seemed that the juke box in the cafeteria of Robinson High School in Tampa was broken. Whenever I was in there, whenever I walked by, I would hear the sweet sound of “Hey, Jude.” Which was wonderful because it’s truly one of the greats, and I love it.
However, I was frustrated because I didn’t think I was hearing the flip side nearly enough, certainly not as much as the tune deserved. So after the bus took me back home to MacDill Air Force Base after school, I made a habit for awhile of walking over over to “the Wherry.” That was a small building a couple of blocks from our apartment that contained two things — a sort of convenience store run by the Base Exchange, and a tiny snack bar where airmen, dependents and such could stop in to order a burger or hot dog or whatever.
And this snack bar had a juke box, which was very well stocked (I can’t remeber all the tunes, but I remember being impressed perusing the choices). At that time of the day the place was pretty empty, but I’d plug in my change and sit and listen to that song, which rang out with all the raw energy of its title. And then do it again. And again.
Mind you, it wouldn’t be all that long before I outgrew thinking John Lennon was a particularly wise political analyst (“Imagine” was a beautiful song, but the lyrics were vapid, which I realize I say in contradiction to wide and fervent popular opinion), but I always thought that he — in his instinctive cynicism — pretty much had the more fiery, self-righteous sort of revolutionary pegged. And he wasn’t buying. I mean people like John Adams’ cousin Samuel, or Robespierre, or certain adolescents who knew little beyond three guitar chords, but felt passionately. In this song, his was the more reflective attitude that there was a lot to consider beyond the romantic notion that revolution, per se, is necessarily a good idea, much less the perfect solution that its enthusiasts so fervently imagine:
You say you want a revolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world…
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out?
You say you got a real solution, well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution, well, you know
We’re all doin’ what we can…
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait…
But if you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…
Hey, let’s put in a quarter and listen to it AGAIN…
Yeah, I know this is a couple of days late, but when the heat was at its peak, I didn’t feel like writing about it. It had to get a little cooler first.
A week or two back I was at the beach, and since the Surfside Beach library is constantly getting rid of books, bless them, I picked up some they were selling for about three for a dollar, and one of them was The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. I’d never read it before. For the uninitiated, it’s fiction, but it’s based on (or perhaps I should say it opens with) a real-life attempt to kill Charles De Gaulle. Not one of those lone-gunman things, but a whole team of conspirators who hated him because he had given up control of Algeria. Really, they felt that strongly about it.
Anyway, I just started reading it last night, and was struck by a seemingly mild description of the weather on page 4, reproduced above. Note the key sentence: “Even at 7 in the evening of the hottest day of the year the temperature was still twenty-five degrees centigrade.”
I’ll wait a moment while you look up how “hot” that is in real temperature. When I did that, I learned that 25 degress C is 77 degrees F. I just now glanced at my phone and see that at 8:40 p.m., it’s 85 degrees here. And to my memory, this is the nicest day we’ve had this week. I’ve been out working in the yard, and am sitting here typing hoping to cool off a bit before showering. But Parisians were abandoning the city because on Aug. 22, 1962, it was 77 degrees and they couldn’t bear it. “Hottest day of the year.”
Maybe that was one of the fictional parts of the book. I hope so. Otherwise, we must believe one of two things: Human expectations have changed more dramatically than I had thought, because of global warming. Or, we must assume that when a character on the Simpsons called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” he was actually referring to their wimpiness regarding weather.
Alas, it’s likely the former. When we visited Boston in July 2022, it was delightfully cool in the mornings and evenings and nicely warm at midday, and it was even cooler in Amsterdam last summer. So you can still have nice weather, from a South Carolinian’s perspective, if you go way up north.
But a couple of days ago, it was 102 in Beantown. That same day, it was 100 in Philadelphia. (And last night when I started reading that book, my phone told me it was 78 in Paris in the wee hours of the morning. In June. So, way warmer than 1962, although not impressive to us.)
It wasn’t that hot here — 99 yesterday, I believe, and 98 the day before — but it was miserable enough. Inexplicably. My phone weather apps kept saying the “air quality” was fine, but for me, that was a lie. The Post and Courier was more honest than that a couple of days ago.., Of course, being an old newspaperman I may be prejudiced but for me, it’s been like trying to breathe green pea soup for about a week. Last week, I started having the first asthma trouble I’d had in a very long time. I started taking prednisone this week. I hate the side effects, but it’s got me breathing again. Still, I’ve been staying indoors, until today.
Today was nice. Really nice. I haven’t been sleeping much, thanks to the steroid, but when I got up this morning a little after 6, I didn’t mind. I started picking up branches that had fallen all over the yard, and when I found what I thought was a gumball tree that had come crashing down out back (actually, it was just a tree-sized branch of a huge one in my neighbor’s yard), I attacked it with relish. A brush saw, a pole saw, two pairs of loppers and a chainsaw, which I wore out. Had to order a new chain. Filled up the bed of my truck, and there’s enough left to fill it again after I haul it to the recycling center this weekend.
While I was working in the morning, it was about 73, I think. (My phone, to my great disappointment, never tells me was the weather was, it just makes predictions about the future, and doesn’t own up when they turn out to be wrong. Kind of like a lot of political writers.)
I hope you had a good day, too….
Edward Fox was the Jackal in the 1973 movie, which was odd. He’s usually a good guy, right?
Baseball wasn’t just always there for me, it was always there for my family. That’s my grandfather squatting to the right in this picture. He had been the captain of the team at Washington and Lee, and after college he was always playing on multiple teams in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He only worked for the Post Office so he could play on this team. You’ll notice that others on the team played for other teams as well — they wore the wrong uniforms on picture day, without the Post Office ‘P.O.’
When I was a kid, baseball was always there.
It didn’t matter my age or where I was. As a preschooler, I always had one of those skinny little wooden bats that were later outlawed by the worrywarts. I think it came with those old solid rubber balls that didn’t bounce much, but since my Dad was a tennis champion, there were always cans full of balls around the house that really traveled when you hit them. I loved that, although Ring Lardner, the enemy of the “lively ball,” would likely have harrumphed.
When we lived in Ecuador from the time I was 9 until I was 11 and a half, I missed out on a lot of critical time for developing basketball and American football skills (which I regretted when I started 7th grade back in this country, in New Orleans), but I didn’t lose ground on baseball. We played it — or at least softball, at recess — whenever were weren’t playing fútbol (which is what we used the school’s concrete basketball court for).
My one regret was that I didn’t get to play Little League (on account of my family always traveling during baseball season) until I was 15, my last year of eligibility for Senior Little League (in Tampa). And by that time, I just hadn’t had the practice trying to hit a ball that someone was deliberately trying to throw past me. The point of “pitching” in sandlot play had always been to let somebody hit the ball, and put it in play. I did manage on one occasion that year to break up a no-hitter in the fifth inning, with a solid base hit to the opposite field. I couldn’t have hit it to left or center, because the red-headed southpaw I was up against had the sort of fastball that nightmares are made of. But I got my single, and they took that pitcher out of the game. It was my one, brief moment of baseball glory.
After that, I stuck to slow-pitch softball — in college intramurals, with the Knights of Columbus team in Jackson, Tenn., and with the Cosmic Ha-Has, a self-deprecating name for the loosely organized team of journos from The State (mostly), sponsored by the now-defunct Mousetrap restaurant and bar. That was more my speed, in the literal sense.
Now, I’m at an age when I’m finally ready to enjoy my sport vicariously. I’m ready to watch the games on TV, the way my elders did when I was a kid. Back then, even though we seldom lived in a place with the three basic channels (and sometimes only one, and that barely visible), baseball was always on the tube. And it was free. But at that age, I considered it boring to watch other people play a game — I wanted to go out and play it myself. Oh, I watched it sometimes, but I wasted a lot of time not watching it, back when it was so easy to find. My parent, grandparents, uncles and such got full enjoyment from it, but I was probably out in the heat whacking at a tennis ball — or inside reading a book. I was a mixed-up kid, right?
And then I grew older, and started wanting to watch it all the time, and it was gone. Especially if you’re like me and long ago cut the cord to cable. (Not being a consumer of TV ‘news,” I had little use for live broadcasting, other than baseball, which was too seldom on offer). Suddenly, even if you still consider it the national pasttime (the pasttime of the country that I love, anyway) you could find no evidence of it by turning on the tube.
You’ve heard me complain about this multiple times on the blog, but not lately. Because now, I have access to more baseball that my elders ever dreamed of, and on a 4k color flat screen rather than a snowy black-and-white that only worked if someone (often me) stood outside turning the antenna atop the house back and forth.
It started late last August, when I saw a promo from MLB.TV offering to let me watch the rest of the season — meaning 10 or twelve Big League games a day, for $29. It seemed worth it, and it was, even though “season” didn’t include the playoffs and World Series — which was OK, because those actually get shown on other platforms that were free to me.
A few months later, I thought a couple of times whether I ought to go in and quit that subscription to keep from being charged for the following season, which I figured would be a LOT more than $29. But I sorta kinda forgot to do it, accidentally on purpose, and next thing I knew, I was informed that $149.99 had already been taken from my account by MLB. Which was bad news. But they also told me I now had access to the whole MLB 2025 season, which was great news. I then confessed to my wife, who is responsible for handling money in this house (on account of being married to a doofus who does things like that), about my failure to prevent it from happening. But as I hoped, she didn’t make me go demand the money back, probably because she knows how much I’ve missed baseball.
I also pointed out that $150 was a lot less than it cost us to see one game at Fenway in 2022. Two seats in the right-field bleachers for about $200. That was just to get in; I paid extra for the peanuts and Crackerjack, and the Polish sausage I had for dinner. But we got to watch the Sox beat the Yankees that night, and beat them soundly! And we had either Jackie Bradley Jr. or Aaron Judge playing right field right in front of us! So it was worth it. But not something we could do every day, or perhaps ever again. Whereas with the MLB deal, I see baseball every day. So, you know, we’re saving money. You see why I don’t handle the accounts?
Anyway, it was and is really great news.
It’s been wonderful. It really has. I’ve loved it, and there’s far more there than I can ever hope to watch. I feel blessed by that. So I just watch a few teams, as I can — the Red Sox, the Phillies, the Dodgers and the Yankees, mostly. What I don’t watch is the Braves, which a few years ago I would have said was my favorite. I don’t say that now because I’m so out of touch with them that I’m not sure that I can name or picture any current players.
Why, you wonder, have I turned away from the Braves? I haven’t. They’ve turned away from me. Or rather, the MLB has separated us. All of their games are blacked out. I thought that at first they were doing that because I live so close to the ballpark. It’s only an 80-hour walk from my house, after all, according to Google Maps. But it’s more complicated than that. MLB also blacks out other games occasionally, ones that I might really, really want to watch — like the Sox playing the Yankees.
But I’m still having a great time. Alas, this is the first of a pair of posts on the subject of baseball, and the other will be less cheery, with the headline beginning “The bad news…”
That’s partly because of a piece I read in the NYT by Joon Lee, headlined “$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now.” It’s not just about the money, or the blackouts. It’s also about how the new business model of professional sports has destroyed the sense of community across the country. In other words, Mr. Lee takes a communitarian approach, as I would. More on that in a day or so…
A picture from our expensive bleacher seats in right field at Fenway. We had a great time.
I haven’t given up on electoral politics, even though we’ve seen results now that could tempt even a passionate small-R republican to ask King Charles III to come on over, and resume reigning where George III left off. Because our system of choosing leaders has been doing a shocking job of showing off its failings lately. (And the word “shocking” is an understatement here. I guess I’m just trying to be cool about it.)
I haven’t given up because there are still people out there worth electing, if only we could elect enough of them. And if only enough of them would run, because these days we’re talking about only a very tiny percentage of those who make themselves available. The good people are probably down in the single digits, because so few good candidates are willing to subject themselves to the process.
But as I said, we have some, and I’m grateful for each one. You’ll recall how pleased I was when Russell Ott became my state senator back in November. I had done what I could to help make it happen — doing such pitifully small things as going around and talking neighbors into putting up yard signs for him, and introducing him to friends and family a couple of times. Maybe I got him one vote, or even two — for which, if it’s so, I’m proud. But obviously, a lot of people were doing small things like what I did. And Russell was doing plenty all by himself.
Anyway, I’m very pleased at the result. So even now, I occasionally make a tiny gesture toward helping the occasional good candidate — even when I can’t vote for that person. So it was that some weeks back, I sent a miniscule cash contribution to Abigail Spanberger, the former congresswoman who is running for governor in Virginia.
I’ve never met her, but I’ve liked what I’ve read about her. My friend E.J. Dionne up in Washington has said a lot of good things about her, and sometime back he told me I would like her. I’m pretty sure he’s right.
Anyway, I bring her up today because I got an email from her campaign unveiling the first video ad of her campaign. You can watch it above. There’s not much to it, but what little there is reinforces my existing positive impression. My favorite factoid? When she boasts of having been named the most bipartisan member of Congress from Virginia. The fact that she wants people to know that is what’s important. What makes her appealing to me is that she aspires to such recognition. Almost no one else running campaigns these days would care about that. Too many ads tend to boast about how much the candidate hates the “other side.”
(My second favorite thing is that throughout the ad, she’s doing that “walking and talking” thing that we all know from “The West Wing.” But you know, I’m kinda West Wing crazy.)
But whether I liked it or not is beside the point. She didn’t spend all that money on an ad for me. She did it to try to explain, as well as anyone could in 30 seconds, who she was to people who have never heard of her — despite her having served three terms in Congress from the state.
She has to do that because of what has been, historically, the greatest flaw in democracy. Sure, there are plenty of people in Virginia — especially northern Virginia, where she’s from — who know far, far more about her than I do, and will vote for her as a result. By “plenty,” we’re talking a number somewhere in the thousands. But that’s not nearly enough. More than three million people voted in the last Virginian gubernatorial election.
You’ll recall, I hope, that when someone reportedly told Adlai Stevenson that “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you,” he replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do — I need a majority.” Well, he didn’t get that, losing twice to Dwight Eisenhower for president in the ’50s. Hey, I probably would have voted for Ike, too, given the chance. But I do appreciate a smart, perhaps too-honest candidate like Stevenson.
In his day, and even more in our own, the necessary majority contains a staggering number of people who don’t know who you are, don’t know much (if anything) about the powers and responsibilities of the office you’re seeking, don’t know the relevant issues, and have no overall understanding of how our political system works. I can’t cite you a percentage or anything, but there’s enough such people that you can’t win your majority without a large number of them.
You can only do so much toward turning those folks into “informed voters.” The first and most essential step is simply to expose them to your name, because a shocking number of them will vote on democracy’s most embarrassing basis — name recognition. And then — because your opponent will be grabbing for name recognition too — you’ve also got something to give them some kind of idea who the person behind that name is.
It was our biggest challenge when I was on James Smith’s campaign in 2018. I don’t have those polls we did in front of me, but I seem to remember learning from them that among voters who knew who James was, he was winning. But that number was too small, so we knew that our only chance at victory was to greatly increase it. But we could never afford to do that. We especially couldn’t do it after Henry had a week or so of giving lengthy hurricane briefings every day on TV, which didn’t cost him a dime. I’m not criticizing Henry for that, not a bit. He was doing his job, and our position on it was the say people should listen to the governor. But the political fact is that Jeff Bezos would probably have to scrape to pay for that much exposure, and every bit of it had the subtext, “I’m Henry McMaster, I’m the governor, and I’m keeping you safe.” Them’s the breaks, huh? We could never catch up with that.
Hey, I like Henry. But I knew James was the better candidate. Indications were that most people who knew both men agreed with me. But in our system, the people who actually know enough to be informed voters are too seldom enough for victory.
Just as was the case with Adlai Stevenson. But he lost to a great American. Poor Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. So did Hillary Clinton.
So why are things so much worse today than in Stevenson’s day? After all, today we’re all drinking “information” from a fire hose, in a volume unimaginable in the 1950s. Trouble is, most of it is junk that comes at us because an algorithm has determined that this is what we want to hear, as opposed to what we need to know to be good citizens. And even the tiny remnants of legacy professional media — the kind people relied upon a generation ago — is affected by that poisonous distortion, in a couple of big ways (another long blog post, alas).
Anyway, to get back to Abigail Spanberger… I’m encouraged that as a congresswoman who served six years in Virginia’s 7th District, she’s got more of a head start than James ever had as a state lawmaker of 24 years. But introducing herself is still something she must do, successfully, to win.
So while I know I won’t ever be able to do enough to help her achieve that goal, I do like to chip in. If I can come up with a few (very few) more bucks, I’ll contribute again. I like to do my infinitessimal bit, when I can…
There was Henry on the telly ever day, telling us how to survive the hurricane…
I haven’t posted much lately, but of course I feel compelled to say something about this.
But what should I say? I don’t feel qualified to express an opinion about it — yet. I might have in the past, but I’m hobbled by two things:
Donald Trump is president of the United States. He and Pete Hegseth are the main sources available right now as to what just happened, and I can’t trust a word either one says about it. When I say “can’t trust,” I’m not so much talking about lying — although we all know Trump does that almost each time he takes a breath. The thing is, he and Hegseth could be tellling the absolute and complete truth. And from everything I’ve seen, neither one of them understands what’s going on — especially not Trump (I don’t know Hegseth nearly as well).
Second, the way news is reported these days, it’s difficult to get a coherent picture of what has happened from major newspapers. A few years ago, those papers spent the hours before their daily deadline distilling all that was known into a single, coherent story arranged with all the key information in the first paragraph (the lede). You read the first few grafs of a story back then, and you had a pretty decent idea of what had happened. Now, whenever something big happens, you get these moment-to-moment update strings, such as this one and this one. You have to read every update from the last to the first (sometimes stretching over 24 hours) to get anything like a handle on the story, and even then it’s difficult. When something of moderate importance happens, you still get the one, coherent story — with new ledes added as necessary. With the big stories, such as this, newspapers are little help, because you get the “updates” string instead. They no longer focus on helping readers understand; they’re too busy making sure they throw out the latest factoid.
So… that means I turn to the journalists who still write in the old style — and that means opinion writers. Of course, since I know who they are, I look for the ones I know are trustworthy — again, not so much in terms of not being liars (although, of course, that’s a prerequisite), but because they have consistently displayed deep understanding of such matters in the past.
Unfortunately, not many have weighed in yet. For the moment, I recommend checking out Nicholas Kristof (“The Three Unknowns After the U.S. Strike on Iran“) and Max Boot (“Iran badly miscalculated. Now it’s paying the price.“). And while he’s not one of my trustee regular voices, you might want to read this piece (“Why Israel Had to Act“) by Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence. It was written before the U.S. joined in, but I still learned some things from it that help me understand Max Boot’s points.
That’s of course assuming you can read them. If you can’t and you want to, I can try to give you “gift” links. (I’ve tried in the past to share those with you, but I haven’t gotten enough feedback on them to be sure whether they even work when sent to more than one person.)
So I’m waiting to read a lot more, from smart people who’ve been following all this far, far more closely than I have.
But I should say something, right? But all I have now is random, chaotic, piecemeal reactions — which is probably what you’ve seen elsewhere at this point, whether those offering such reactions tell you that or not (especially if you’re someone who forms your impressions of such events by watching television, God help us).
So here you go:
I’m very, very worried. Smart leaders (pretty much everyone who’s been in relevant office before Trump was elected) have avoided war with Iran for very good reasons. One of the biggest is something Kristof mentions: By and large, the Iranian public is quite pro-U.S. What they need is new leaders, if they can manage to get them. And the fastest way to turn them against us is military action. That change in Iran public opinion would be disastrous.
That said, it is indeed essential to make sure that Iran, whose current leaders hate the U.S. almost as much as they do Israel, does not obtain nuclear weapons. If you look at that and only that, these U.S. strikes are good news — if they were effective, by which I mean they set Iranian nuclear efforts back many years without killing civilians. That’s a big “if.”
The one thing that makes me tentatively optimistic (and only slightly) on that last point is that Iran can’t hide facilities essential to its own Manhattan Project in tunnels under civilian dwellings, hospitals and schools — they way we know its ally Hamas does. At least, I don’t think so. But I don’t know that.
As much as I may search for reasons not to be terrified at this point, I know that even if all the steps taken up to this point by Trump and Netanyahu (and there’s a fragile liferaft to cling to), have been wise and correct, I know that Trump, at least, is capable of turning in another direction in a split-second, prompted by something as idiotic as a social media post he doesn’t like.
That’s the situation that a majority of U.S. voters put us in on Nov. 5, 2024. And the only recommendation I have for dealing with that is to pray. If you don’t know how to do that, it’s past time to learn…
A few days back, I missed mentioning D-Day the way I usually do, so I’ll try to make up for it by saying something about the famously misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill that occurred on June 18, 1775.
Actually, I’ll share several somethings about it, since it’s been on my mind lately…
First, the easy one… this fight mostly occurred on nearby Breed’s Hill, not Bunker — although the Patriots did end up retreating over Bunker at the end of the battle.
Second, I’ve mentioned that I’ve been helping the Relic Room with its frequent Noon Debrief free lectures, at the museum itself, and at Richland and Lexington County libraries. We’ve had some good military history programs, and lately we’ve been rewarded by growing crowds of attendees. Anyway, the latest one, just this past Friday, was about “Bunker Hill,” and it was delivered at Richland Library by our own inimitable Joe Long, curator of education at the museum. I had helped set it up, but missed this particular program. So I’m going to go back and watch it, which you can do at your convenience at this address. I hope you enjoy, and decide to come to a future program. Here’s some info about our next one, on July 11. You can also read about other recent programs at this address.
This being the first year of the big Sestercentennial, you’ve probably already heard about South Carolina being the place where the most Revolutionary battles occurred. Of course, the Boston area had a little to do with it, with this battle being firm evidence of the fact. Today, the Boston Globe had a story touching on that, headlined “The Revolutionary War was more brutal than you probably learned in school.” This battle was a prominent example of them of that — for the Patriots, who were forced to give up their position on Breed’s Hill, but especially for the British, who “won” a particularly costly engagement. They suffered 1,054 casualties to the rebels’ 450, with a total of 226 killed compared to 115 American lives lost.
Those numbers convinced Britain, the world’s greatest power, that this was going to be a real war, and would take a lot more to win than anyone had imagined. They were up against a determined enemy that wasn’t just trying to register a protest. The colonists famously waited (although scholars doubted anyone actually said it) until they saw the whites of the British regulars’ eyes, and shot to kill. This was more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.
It also helped solidify resolve among American onlookers. The Washington Post ran a piece today by the historian Joseph Ellis, who has begun a series in the paper based on the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams. John was off doing his thing with the Continental Congress in Philadelpia (a year later he would convince his colleagues that independence was necessary). Abigail was home in Braintree (now Quincy), a few miles south of the battle in Charlestown, but she and eldest son John Quincy watched it from a height near their home, a good four-hour walk south of the fighting. They couldn’t see much from there, and they didn’t know until later that their family doctor Joseph Warren had been killed, shot between the eyes as the third wave of redcoats attacked, and the Americans had run out of ammunition. Abigail wrote to John that ““Our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more… but fell gloriously fighting for his Country.” The thing her husband was debating in Philadelphia was intensely personal back home.
I’ve been both to Quincy and Breed’s hill, where I saw the Bunker Hill monument. Seeing that obelisk from the banks of the Charles River, I had thought “not much of a hill…” I was wrong. On our last day in Boston, with my wife resting back at the B&B with back pain, I went to see the USS Constitution for a second time. When I had walked her decks long enough (not that I won’t go back if I get the chance), I looked up the hill and decided to climb it. I assure you there was plenty of hill for a July day, even in that mild Massachusetts summer.
After I had respectfully considered the battle site and descended back toward the Charles, I still had my mixed feelings about what happened up there. Y’all know I’m a pretty patriotic guy, and deeply love this country that is fading now before our eyes. Some of my post-Vietnam friends out there even see me as jingoistic, a war-monger. But I remain torn about those early events in Massachusetts, such as the “Boston Massacre,” the Tea Party, and those shots fired at Lexington and Concord some weeks before this battle. Well, more than torn. I’m unable to justify taking up arms against the duly consituted authority and shooting and killing draftees from Liverpool and such places because of a few unpopular taxes. King George had his faults like all of us, but he was no Hitler, or even a Saddam Hussein.
Being a Rule of Law guy, I feel differently about the war that continued after the Declaration. A definite course of separation had been decided upon after due process and prolonged deliberation. And if I’d been in Congress, I think I’d have been persuaded by Abigail’s husband. After all, he was a rule-of-law guy himself, who had even defended the soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. He was nothing like his cousin Samuel. In fact, I don’t think anyone but John Adams could have convinced me.
And I can understand why Abigail felt as she did. After all, their friend the doctor would still have been alive if the Brits hadn’t insisted on taking that hill.
I admire the doctor’s courage. I’m just not sure I’d have been able to justify, at that particular point in time, before the Declaration. I really, really wish I felt differently, though.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I have all these arguments with people who think our involvement in Vietnam, and later Iraq, are The Worst Things That Ever Happened and totally unjustified. I disagree almost completely with them, yet here I am, having all these doubts about the steps that led to the country I love so much….
In the summer of 2022, I visited the Bunker Hill monument, hiking up from the Navy Yard.
Jesus said to his disciples:
“You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
After reading that, I watched the video reflection on the U.S. Catholic Bishops site. I almost skipped it when I saw that today’s commenter was Deacon Arthur L. Miller from Hartford. I love the guy and also gain value from his insights, but they tend to be about twice as long as those from others. I listened anyway, and once again gained value.
That happened when he shared a thought that was the same thing I had wondered about when I had read the passage. As you may have noticed, Jesus frequently used this rhetorical device in which he would cite Scripture (Old Testament Scripture, from our perspective) and then add a new insight into its meaning. (He had done it earlier in this same sermon, with such concepts as “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”)
Deacon Miller was thinking the same thing when he read, “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” As he said:
You know what dawned on me? … I looked up where was it that Scripture said — you know, in the Hebrew text, in the Old Testament — where did it say that we are to hate our enemies? Well, it doesn’t say that.
Then he realized that what Jesus was saying there was, “you have heard it said.” In other words, “something that was often used by the people of that time…”
Well, that certainly sounded familiar. But it didn’t make me think of “the people of that time.” It made me think about a certain person in our own time who uses a similar phrase to justify the things that he chooses to believe. This was first widely noted early in the 2016 campaign:
In case, like that certain person, you prefer video to the written word, you can look at this NBC clip from 2018.
I suppose the folks I’m obviously addressing here are those who say they are Christians, and yet have voted for that certain person on multiple times. Basically, a guy who justifies himself by saying that a lot is a guy who follows the precise opposite of Christian teaching, which is that we are to “love one another as I have loved you.” And not just your friends, but also “those who persecute you.”
That is the Christian message boiled down to as few words as possible. The rest is elaboration on the idea that we are to love God, and love each other as ourselves.
So I’m harrumphing at the MAGA people, there’s no denying it. But I’d be pretty thick if I didn’t see that the rest of us are enjoined to love the MAGA people, too.
That’s the tricky part, you see. Simple concept, difficult to carry out. I expect to be working on that for the rest of my life. I am obliged to do so, to put it mildly…
All of us probably get spam claiming that we owe a fine for, say, traveling on a toll road, and if we don’t pay right NOW, all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly penalties will be imposed upon us.
I had an uptick of those last summer, shortly after we’d spent a week in Florida (where they actually have such roads), so just to make sure, I scanned them… and saw that they not only failed to mention Florida (or ANY state) or its state government, but had no mention of a date or location where said offense allegedly occurred. I’d received legit notices (by snail mail, I believe) correctly mentioning my having actually traveled on this or that toll road on such-and-such a date, and had paid them. (I wonder what happened to all those folks who used to staff tollbooths….)
So, spam. Perhaps directly seeking my money, but like as not just wanting me to respond so that my identity might be stolen.
So I ditched them, and all the similar nonsense I’ve received since then.
But this one today was interesting. Here’s the whole text, although I urge you NOT to go to the URL mentioned (I’d like to, out of curiosity, and in case the state of South Carolina actually has switched to such an idiotically suspicious mode of communication, but worry that that’s just what the scammers want):
South Carolina Department of Vehicles (DMV) Final Notice: Enforcement Penalties Begin on June 5.
Our records show that as of today, you still have an outstanding traffic ticket. In accordance with New South Carolina Administrative Code 15C-16.003, if you do not complete payment by June 4, 2025, we will take the following actions:
1. Report to the DMV violation database
2. Suspend your vehicle registration starting June 5
3. Suspend driving privileges for 30 days
4. Transfer to a toll booth and charge a 35% service fee
5. You may be prosecuted and your credit score will be affected
Pay Now:
https://scdmv.gov-xfpp.cc/pay (I post this not for your risky use, but to see if you’ve seen this same ploy before, and can shed light)
Please pay immediately before enforcement to avoid license suspension and further legal disputes.
(Reply Y and re-open this message to click the link, or copy it to your browser.) (Uh, no — don’t do that.)
Are you getting that one? Or does the DOT really want my money, or else? And if so, for what — seeing there is no mention of the specific offense, or when or where I supposedly committed it?
The alarming “Final Notice” is entertaining, though — seeing as there were no previous notices.
It came, by the way, from “websterisabel@marchmail.com.” Shame on you, Isabel! (Unless, of course, this is legit. In which case I await notification — first notification — of the specifics. You know how to reach me.)
Coming home from Mass Sunday night, I saw what you see in the picture above — a strange, dull, red sun in a hazy sky, far too high to be that color.
Stopping at a light to take the picture, I pointed out that there was an odd haze in the air, “and not a purple one, either.” It wasn’t just the sun; it was barely detectable as I looked down Sunset Boulevard ahead of me. I asked my wife to check her weather apps.
She said one of them reported that wildfire smoke could be expected Monday morning. “Well, it’s here now.”
I suppose it’s a measure of how little I pay attention to news these days, so when I ran across this in The Washington Post this morning, I had to look for something tying it to South Carolina. I found this:
Smoke from Canadian wildfires moved into the Palmetto state this weekend. Most of the smoke particles and ozone associated with the fires are present at higher elevations in the atmosphere, but the added pollution from the fires also contributes to an increase in ground level ozone. Local weather conditions are also contributing to an increasing in ground level ozone. The stable layer of air near the surface and the light winds in the upstate Monday are preventing mixing and allowing ozone levels to build up.
I guess that’s what it was. There was a time when I would have been aware of this earlier, not because of looking for it, but because, well, local newspapers used to go sort of nuts over weather phenomena, so I couldn’t miss it. No more.
But the world is still with us, whether covered or not. Interesting that I could see what was happening in Manitoba just driving through West Columbia. Perhaps that red sun had given me, temporarily, one of Superman’s powers.
At least we’re not in North Dakota, something for which I am constantly grateful, whenever the place comes to mind. Which isn’t all that often…
