Biiiiig Show

There’s not much of Las Vegas’ usual entertainment that interests me, so I don’t know that I’ll ever visit. But I’ve been watching videos of U2’s show at The Sphere, a Vegas domed venue covered with video screens inside and out, and if I had the bucks…

Loud, Plaid and Called

Today is the Feast Day of St. Andrew, who was deemed the Patron Saint of Scotland in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath. Your humble Friar has some Scottish heritage -- of which he is proud, aye! -- and so he enjoys noting this day, which is not observed nearly so widely as good old Patrick from the nearby Emerald Isle.

St. Andrew's day has nothing analagous to Paddy's green beer and, frankly, your humble Friar would advise against consuming any beverage which looks like it might be plaid. But following Andrew's footsteps as an apostle is an outstanding idea worthy of consideration.

Too Long Gone

 

 

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Buck O'Neil, one of the finest people on or off a ballfield whose absence from the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a reflection not on him but the hall. The song was a collaboration between Kansas City area performer Bob Walkenhorst and a class of elementary school students.

"I want to play on Buck's baseball team."

The Men on the Moon

This being the 52nd anniversary of human beings first landing on the moon, and also the day in which yet another billionaire used his money to finance a private flight beyond the edge of the atmosphere, there were of course complaints. These focused on the way that the government spending on the Apollo program was not spent on alleviating poverty and hunger, and that the billionaires spent their money to get themselves into space rather than fixing earthbound problems like poverty and hunger.

Some of these critiques throw figures around that decry the massive dollar amounts spent on space exploration and space travel, although the comparisons usually overlook the fact that the government has spent immensely more money on programs to eliminate poverty and hunger. Which, by the way, still remain. Articles around the internet will counter the comparisons by quoting figures; others will point out that the billionaires both a) spend quite a bit on programs helping folks in need and b) got their money when they created products and services that lots of people wanted to buy and use. In other words, if you don't want Jeff Bezos spending his money to fly into space, don't use Amazon and give your money to him. 

The thing that struck me this time was the idea that the money spent on the space program was somehow unavailable to alleviate poverty seems to treat these funds like they were stuffed into the Apollo 11 capsule and dumped out onto Mare Tranquillitatis. Money spent on the space program was, um, spent on the space program. Things were bought. Things were built. Things were designed. The people who bought things, built things and designed things were all paid for their work -- and as we have been reminded of in recent years, among those people were women from minority groups who played significant roles in the project. I may have it wrong, but I am willing to bet that the money space program employees were paid kept them from being hungry and kept them out of poverty -- and the money paid to those employees today does the same thing.

In fact, those joy-riding billionaires' rocket planes were also designed, bought and built and I'll go so far out on a limb as to say that the people paid for doing so were probably kept from being homeless as a direct result of the money they received. In fact, I think they're probably kept from being homeless right now.

This probably oversimplifies things but it really seems sometimes that the main gripe of people who level their accusations at governments and people who spend their money on traveling to space is that they didn't give any of it to the people griping. But other than in movie reviewing, griping never has paid much.

Omission

I don’t think that President Joe Biden is a secret socialist or a dementia-riddled puppet mouthing whatever Kamala Harris wants him to say.

But I do think that his press office and chief of staff have served him poorly by omitting any reference to the anniversary of D-Day in official communications. When people accuse you of thinking mor about your country’s faults than its successes, it’s a good idea to not hand them ammunition.

So, for reference, this is what a President says about the day the Allies started to reclaim Europe.

Freedom Rules, Commies Drool

The Hong Kong Police prevented citizens from gathering at Victoria Park to commemorate the hundreds of lives lost when the ruling Chinese Communist Party cracked down on protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

So people held their vigil outside the park instead.

Can't do it with tanks, can't do it with cops...you'd think they might try just letting people do and say what they want for a change and see if it helps them suck less.

Up Front There Oughtta Be

Today has been the birthday of the late, great Johnny Cash. Wearing black was, of course, encouraged but need not be carried over until tomorrow. Being reminded of the ones who are held back, on the other hand, is a recommended ongoing activity.

Rabbie!

January 25 was the birthday of Scotland's national poet, the great Robert Burns. In his "Extempore Epistles to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.", grouped as one of the "Stanzas on Naething," we find him anticipating Seinfeld by 203 years

Burninatin' the Ballot!

Today, Trogdor becomes a legal adult and registers to vote! Predictably, he kept his party affiliation secret but he did receive a new Homestar homepage design in his honor.

Remember

 C'mon, you know the drill.

As I asked on my FB news feed, how bad could 2020 be? It still has a "21st night of September."

Ba di ya.

Honorees

I think I’ve referred to this before, but this event right here is one of the biggest reasons there needed to be a season for Major League Baseball. I’m glad it’s been included in the short season.

Big Ol' Small Step

Today, of course, marks the 51st anniversary of the first moon landing. Recent developments make me think I might live to see us go back, and maybe even farther out. Fingers crossed, knock wood, etc, etc.

Honoring the Unbowed

Major League Baseball has developed its plan for a shorter season in the midst of the pandemic that may yet get derailed by events. If it were any other year I'd almost be OK with no season, but this year is the 100th anniversary of the first meeting among potential owners that would create what we today call the Negro Leagues.

The Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City has been having short videos posted that feature a "tip of the cap" from different people to those historic players, honoring their refusal to be sidelined from an important part of American culture by the limited vision of too many owners and players. Ex-big leaguers, former presidents, four generations of the family of integration pioneer Jackie Robinson and more offer a brief salute and a literal tip of the cap to these players and managers.

So in this year it seems as though, despite all of the problems we're having, baseball should play a season of some kind. Even if it's short, even if it's in empty stadiums, even if it's weird -- they played in spite of monumental opposition. Giving it a shot seems like the right thing to do.

You Were Fantastic...And So Was I

The character of the Doctor in the British sci-fi program (or maybe "programme") Doctor Who has been played by many different actors over the show's decades-long run. Rather than pull a Bewitched Darren switcheroo, the different actors are written into the story as "regenerations."

A new actor arrives, develops a new persona, new wardrobe, new way of doing things, but is still the Doctor. In the original version of the show there were supposed to be only a dozen regenerations available per Time Lord (the Doctor's species). This works great when you have an actor stick with the role for, say, seven years like Tom Baker and his extraordinary scarf. It'll take a long time to run out a dozen cast changes with that kind of tenure. But then things happen like ratings dives, cancellations, very brief tenures and aborted reboots, so you wind up burning through the first part of your second half-dozen pretty quickly. So the showrunners found some wibbly-wobbly way to remove the regeneration limit -- there's no telling how many Doctors there have been or will be. Although if the ratings from the most recent series -- the word British TV uses where we would use "season" -- don't turn around, we may not see very many more of them.

In any event, when the show rebooted in 2005 it featured the Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston. His tenure was just one season, the briefest of all of the Doctors of the "Nu Who" era except for the late John Hurt's one-episode War Doctor. His regeneration happened 15 years ago today, with Eccleston leaving following disputes with the BBC and showrunners. The actor brought a haunted quality to the character, reflecting his experiences of seeing his home planet of Gallifrey destroyed along with their greatest enemies, the Daleks, in a "Time War." He's also responsible for some of the revival's best moments, especially his joyful shouted declaration in "The Doctor Dances:" "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!"

Do Not Forget

Though time and the COVID-19 pandemic make the official observances smaller than ever before (or, let us hope, since), today is the day, 76 years ago, when doughboys and dogfaces and grunts and various other self-deprecatingly-nicknamed individuals starting sizing the Third Reich up for its own particular dustbin of history.

Thank you, gentlemen. Indeed you left that air signed with your honor.

Centenary

The above is one of my favorite pictures of the late Saint Pope John Paul II, whose 100th birthday was marked on Monday. Born as Karol Wojtyla in Wadowice, Poland, he was elected to the papacy in 1978 after his predecessor, Pope John Paul I, died just 33 days after taking on the role. He served until his death in April of 2005.

John Paul was only 58 when he became pope, and many pictures of him during that time highlighted his high activity level -- see the pope ski! Or, if you were into making some jokes about his heritage, see the popeski ski! Those attributes seemed to be what people focused on at first, but as time moved on John Paul played an increasingly larger role in pushing back against communism in Eastern Europe, especially his homeland. In June 1979 he visited Poland with the agreement of its communist ruling officials, who believed they could demonstrate that though he might be the head of the church they were still in charge of the government. He defeated them utterly by agreeing with them and speaking to his fellow Polish Catholics as a pastor to his flock, urging them to stick together, not compromise the values they learned from their faith and look to God for guidance. He didn't call out the regime, speak against it or direct any resistance to it; he just showed that its leaders were ultimately irrelevant to what really mattered -- and because of his charisma, faith and the wild enthusiasm that Polish Catholics felt about one of their own leading the church, the people listened.

John Paul II never officially "teamed up" with the leaders of NATO and western countries that opposed communism and the USSR to defeat it, but as he continued to demonstrate its irrelevance while they showed its rotten core of bullying oppression, he helped create a two-pronged offensive that would bring down the Berlin Wall and the entire Soviet empire.

The reason I like the picture, taken later in his life as he suffered the effects of Parkinson's disease, is that for all of his earthly power as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, he did not stand unless he leaned upon the cross. I am not of the communion of Rome and I don't ascribe to Rome's bishop any authority other than earthly, save that which is granted any human being by the Holy Spirit to proclaim, through word and deed, the message of the gospel. Because he did so, and because he did so fearlessly and faithfully, great good happened in the world. The picture above just illustrates something I think he would have said himself -- that he could have done none of it had he not leaned upon his Savior for guidance and strength.

PS -- I also like the picture from 1999 when His Holiness tried on Bono's shades.

Learn Something New

We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of one of sports' great moments, in which the United States Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union Olympic hockey team in what is called, thanks to Al Michaels' joyous question, "The Miracle on Ice." Sports writer Joe Posnanski put together a sidebar list of "10 Interesting Facts You May Not Know About the Miracle on Ice" for his Sports Illustrated article.

The one fact that anyone who remembers the game knows, of course, is that the commies lost. But then again, they've made a practice of doing that everywhere but the faculty lounge, so I suppose it's not that interesting.

A Century

A hundred years ago today, representatives from eight clubs met at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, to organize what would become known as the Negro National League. The first regulated group of baseball teams for African American players excluded from major league baseball, it would last until the beginning of the Great Depression.

Other leagues would follow, some of them formed around the teams that survived the NNL's demise. A Negro American League began in 1937 and ran until desegregation and economic realities forced its disbanding in 1962. A successor Negro National League formed in 1933 and played until 1948, when surviving teams joined the NAL.

The history of the teams, leagues, champions, statistics, stars and such is complicated. Had the most powerful owners banded together in the years prior to Jackie Robinson's signing by the Brooklyn Dodgers, could they have forced better terms from the major league teams and created an arrangement in which some of the storied franchises like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, Newark Eagles and Indianapolis Clowns continued to exist? Could a more visionary major league owner demonstrated the folly of excluding gifted players and a devoted fandom by recruiting legends such as Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell or Satchel Paige?

Perhaps. History proceeded as it did, though, and we can't know what the "what-ifs?" might have meant for Negro League baseball teams and their stars, we can only know what was real. Which will be enough, because the teams were real, the players were real, and the example of human beings refusing to accept the idea that they were "second class" in any way was real as well.

Should your travels, O Tolerant Reader, ever take you through Kansas City, Missouri, and should you have the time, you could do worse than visit the Negro League Museum and perhaps see for yourselves what those players knew and tried to say: Sure, it's about baseball. But it's always about more than baseball.

Nuts!

What became known as the Battle of the Bulge began 75 years ago today during World War II. German forces moved strongly against the Allies through the Ardennes Forest in an attempt to split Allied forces.

The battle was one of the costliest in the war in terms of lives and while the high body count delayed the Allied invation of Germany for several weeks it may have hastened Germany' defeat because of their own severe losses in men and matériel. A successful counteroffensive might indeed have split the Allied forces, but Germany faced the same kinds of problems that eventually doomed its Reich. It lacked the immense resources the United States could bring into the war and had no ability to project power against the strongest member of its enemy coalition, the United States. A different outcome for the Battle of the Bulge might have prolonged the loss, but in the end the fatal flaws of the Axis Powers would probably have proved too great to overcome.

Anniversary

So 78 years ago today, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service visited Pearl Harbor and asked to have their collective ass well and truly kicked. Although the request was more than a little impolite, the United States generously obliged.