Arrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!

The LSU Tigers lost their football game with Ole Miss today by a score of 25-23. Reason for the loss is squarely on the miserable, totally inept job of coaching by Les Miles. You can read the game account here. Over the past couple of years, Tiger watchers have been given more and more reasons for doubting whether this guy is all there. Play calling and clock management. Team discipline--how many delay of game penalties this time? This writer is kind by spreading the blame. To my mind, it's Miles' fault. Period. Sphere: Related Content

It's Probably Abnormal . . .

. . . but I cherish my little Boston terrier, a birthday present two years ago, (that's her on the right, if you haven't guessed), perhaps beyond the point of reason. I'm sure that dog lovers will empathize. Those benighted souls who don't love dogs will think this is just so much foolishness. Well, they have my sympathies.

But be that as it may, herewith a tale of woe with a completely unexpected twist and happy ending. Last evening my niece, who works in a neighboring state, stayed over after a nice supper, wine, and great conversation. Her job requires her to come over here to Oklahoma every now and again, and it's our pleasure to have her over for supper and visiting and catching up on extended family.

Anyway, if ever you have lost your dog and couldn't find her, you know that terrible feeling. I experienced it again earlier this morning. I helped my niece load her car for the airport, and my wife came out to say her goodbyes. She admitted to seeing Prozac, the Boston terrier who's the subject of this post, scoot out of the house. Now I should interject here that this is not uncommon behavior for the dog, but the human involved in this case, Susan, said spouse, is under strict instructions to always have the dog on a leash because she will run away from her and not come back. Prozac listens to me, but with Susan . . . not so much, especially with the possibility of an outside adventure in the offing.

You can probably guess what's coming. We wave our goodbyes, Christine drives off, and . . . no Prozac. I go down the street calling, I go up the street calling. Susan follows me going up and down the street calling. Now, when this has happened before, Prozac always comes running when she hears us. Not this time. No dog shows up. At this point I'm getting really worried, imagining the worst: dog hit by a car on one of the nearby streets, dog stolen by some heartless person, or any other of a number of equally horrifying scenarios. So now I get in the car and decide to drive all around the neighborhood, but even as I do so, I'm in despair because I realize the odds of this search being successful are slim. I was right. I didn't find the dog on this drive. And I'm very glum, to say the least.

So I come in the house and am greeted with Susan's excited news: "Sweetie, you have to call Christine! She found Prozac in the trunk of her car!" Yes, you are reading that correctly. As she was packing up, Prozac simply leaped in and made herself comfortable for the trip. Christine reports she just wagged her tail when the truck lid opened, figuring no doubt that she had arrived at her destination.

Well, not quite. Prozac's back where she belongs now, and Christine is on her way once again, but the dear brought the dog all the way back to the house from the airport and had to rearrange her schedule to do it. I don't know if a timeless dog story was worth it, but somehow, maybe so . . . who could make this up? Sphere: Related Content

Give Peace a Chance

I watched a movie today about John Lennon: "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," a Dutch-produced documentary about Lennon in his immediate post-Beatle phase, roughly 1969-75. It was a period in his life marked highly visible activism promoting peace, most notably the famous "bed-in's" in Amsterdam and Montreal. I can remember the reaction of people such as my parents and many people like them who if they ever gave John Lennon a thought, it was to lump him in with the incomprehensible collection of nut cases who were, in their minds, destroying the very fabric of the United States. I doubt if many of them could have identified Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as coming from him. What they would say, though, is that it was a subversive song, and that radicals like John Lennon, a damned foreigner anyway, should be thrown out of the country. These were core supporters of the Nixon-instigated proceedings by the Immigration Department to deport Lennon using as a trumped up cause his conviction for marijuana possession back in England.

I cannot help but recall the polarization of the country during the Nixon administration. I was still in the Air Force when Lennon and Ono were staging these protests, and to tell the truth, I don't recall even hearing about them at the time. I was in Turkey, a crucial formative experience for me. It was there, I'm sorry to admit it, that I first realized what "poor" really meant. It was there that I saw with my own eyes how truly ugly Americans could be in the behavior and attitudes of my fellow servicemen. My experience there profoundly changed my outlook about everything: morality, politics, civil and human rights, war. So in some way, even if indirectly, Lennon, too, helped change me from the complacent, somewhat smug, unthinking U.S. occupant I was into the thoroughly engaged, and more often than not outraged, citizen I've become.

Fact is, we, the United States, have not given peace a chance. We don't believe in it; we don't revere it; we don't practice it. Peace is the furthest thing from our minds. Our persistence in the always-fruitless venture of war and destruction is, as I'm sure John Lennon would say, insanity. He wondered then, in the midst of the murderous disaster of the Vietnam war, what it was that the governments of the world actually wanted. It was a good question then, and now in the midst of our murderous disaster in the Middle East, it's a good question now.

These sentiments are of course dangerously radical, as dangerously radical as John Lennon or anyone else who challenges us to imagine a world without war. Sphere: Related Content

More Baseball Numbers

With apologies to my faithful readers with no interest in baseball. Sorry to inflict this subject upon you again for the second time in three days, but I just had to answer a question on Allexperts about the following subject, and getting the answer ate up all my blogging time. Which is the truth, although it certainly has not escaped my notice that wrapping myself in baseball is an excellent way to avoid having to deal with all the oppressive news of the day. I promise to get back on a more familiar beam next time.

Steals of Home

Lifetime Leader: Ty Cobb, 54
Leader List: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/recbooks/rb_stbah.shtml

In World Series
Brad Fullmer, LA Angels, 2002, 2d game
*Tim McCarver, St Louis Cardinals, 1964, 7th game
Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers, 1955, 1st game
Monte Irvin, NY Giants, 1951,1st game
*Hank Greenberg, Detroit Tigers, 1934, 4th game
*Bob Meusel, NY Yankees, 1928, 3rd game
Bob Meusel, NY Yankees, 1921, 2nd game
*Butch Schmidt, Boston Braves, 1914, 1st game
*Buck Herzog, NY Giants, 1912, 6th game
*George Davis, Chicago White Sox, 1906, 5th game
*Bill Dahlen, NY Giants, 1905, 3rd game
*part of double steal
Source: "STEALING HOME IN SERIES." Chicago Sun-Times. 1988. HighBeam Research. (November 18, 2009). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-3913231.html

Bob Meusel of the Yankees is the only player to do this twice. There are some unlikely names on this list. Tim McCarver was a catcher, and catchers are generally not known for speed and daring on the bases. In fact, McCarver had only two stolen bases in the regular season for 1964. And Fullmer, well, he was a big ole lumbering guy, another guy you wouldn't label a demon on the base paths.

Walk-off Steals of Home

Willie Davis, LA Dodgers v. Phillies, 16th inning, 9/19/1964
Vic Power, Cleveland v. Detroit, 10th inning, 8/14/1958
Frank Chance, Chicago Cubs v. Cincinnati, 1906
Jack Chesbro, NY Highlanders v. Detroit, 7/16/1904

There have to be more walk-off steals of home, but these were the only ones I could find tonight. Sphere: Related Content

Moron Culture

Here's a guy who makes me look like a raving optimist. Plus, he disdains sugar coating when it comes to characterizing the mass of the American people. 

      I'm fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as "an offense in the sight of God" has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

     Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on "TV dinners," motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy's day.  Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football.  It's hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

             --James Kuntsler, "The Fate of the Yeast People"

Harsh, you say? Well, yes . . . but is that the right question? Shouldn't we be inquiring how much truth there is here? Think about it. How many people around you read the signs of our times as something really ominous, and how many read those signs as some temporary setback on their own personal odyssey of consumption? How many don't evince the slightest concern about the state of perpetual war their country is in? Indeed, "moron culture" sounds unfair and mean at first, but all you have to do is watch about six hours of network TV, Fox News--don't miss Glenn Beck--or some randomly selected movie at your local 20-screen film emporium. Go ahead . . .

There. See what I mean?

Sphere: Related Content

New, Improved Play Index at Baseball Reference

I have to confess that my love for baseball statistics and facts is probably a sickness. I've had guys whom I know to be hard core fans, I mean really hard core, shake their heads over some of the little "studies" that I do just because I can or because somebody has inquired or wondered out loud about some obscure feat. As anyone with more than a passing interest in baseball knows, the mecca for baseball statheads on the web is the amazing Baseball-Reference site. It must be seen to be believed. I was delighted to discover that over the past couple of weeks--I really haven't been there much since the World Series--that substantial improvements have been introduced in the "Play Index" section of the site.

This is the by-subscription area where one can slice and dice the numbers in literally millions of different ways. So just for grins I ran a little query to find games, if there were any, where a team had grounded into six or more double plays in a single game. To my astonishment, I discovered that there has been one game since 1954* in which a team grounded into seven double plays in a 9-inning game in addition to a dozen more in which a team grounded into six double plays. The improvements actually allow me to show you the following table, something that I could not have done just a few months ago.

Teams That Grounded into Six or More Double Plays in a Game
                                   1954-2009

Rk	Date	Tm	Opp	Rslt	GDP
1	1969-05-04	SFG	HOU	L 1-3	7
2	2009-08-07	CLE	CHW	W 6-2	6
3	2009-04-30	TOR	KCR	L 6-8	6
4	2009-04-21	KCR	CLE	L 7-8	6
5	2003-06-17 (1)	TBD	NYY	W 11-2	6
6	2003-05-17	PHI	HOU	W 9-4	6
7	1996-04-16	DET	TOR	W 13-8	6
8	1990-07-18	BOS	MIN	W 5-4	6
9	1988-05-08	MON	HOU	L 2-7	6
10	1984-04-13	BOS	DET	L 9-13	6
11	1975-04-29	CLE	NYY	W 3-1	6
12	1972-05-06	BAL	KCR	L 1-9	6
13	1966-05-01 (1)	BOS	CAL	L 1-6	6

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 11/16/2009.

Baseball's such a weird game. Notice that 3 of the 12 times a team has grounded into six double plays in a game, one-quarter of the total, occurred this past season. Also, this particular event is decidedly something more likely to happen in the American League rather than the National. If you click the dates in the first column, you'll get a box score and play-by-play of these games.

OK, OK. I'll stop. But I promise you, I could go on and on about this. I love this stuff!

*If you're interested in an individual player's numbers for a season or a career, these go all the way back to the beginnings of the game in the 19th century. So, you can find out that Babe Ruth, for example, stole 123 bases in his career, that his best year for stolen bases was 1921 & 1923, when he stole 17. Box scores and play-by-play are available for all games played since 1954. This data allows a fantastic array of different kinds of findings, like a breakout of the circumstances of each of the 34 triples the Dodgers had as a team during the 1963 season, for example. If you want to play around with this wondrous tool, you can access the play index at baseball-reference for free until November 20. 

Sphere: Related Content

Costly Benchmark Almost Here

For regular readers, all few of you, you may be with Powderfinger when the "Cost of the Iraq War" widget to the left turns over to $700,000,000. It surely cannot be missed that this amount was too huge for a lot of legislators, typically Republican, to swallow when it was what was required for the bailout some months ago. But this monumental amount, and more, mind you, is just fine for war, the most destructive and least constructive activity human beings have ever devised. We're hearing the same whining from the same people about the cost of healthcare reform. I'm continually amazed that we can always afford war, even at the absurd way of paying for it that the former vile little pretender in the White House specified--no taxation to pay for it and, indeed, a monstrous tax cut for the rich--and we can never afford programs designed to help vast numbers of needy people in U.S. society. Oh, by the way, in addition to the $700 billion for Iraq, we've also spent $231.5 billion for the war in Afghanistan. That's almost $1 trillion. But we can afford that, no questions asked. Sphere: Related Content

Why Are We So Mean?

I sat for a couple of hours this evening at a panel discussion sponsored by The Conscious Living Institute of Central Oklahoma (a kinda cumbersome name that immediately raises the question in my mind about whether there be such institutes in eastern and western Oklahoma; seriously doubt it, so why "central Oklahoma?<<==you see how my mind jumps everywhere?). It sounded interesting when I read the email announcement. The subject was "Why Are We So Mean?" The panelists were three PhDs--philosophy types--and an engaging Baptist minister--who hastened to assure us he is one of the "ecumenical kind" and went on mention "a two-glass of wine" question; so this guy was OK from the git-go.

Anyway, this discussion, I thought, had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it quickly got bogged down in what I regarded as talk about the symptoms and not the problem. Instead of sticking to a focus on the question, the short presentations and the audience-panel exchange that followed circled around all the manifestations of rudeness, lack of respect, and meanness we constantly encounter in daily life. The question supposedly being addressed got lost in a lot of kinda pertinent palaver. Audience comments in some cases were either inane, unduly verbose, or ridiculous (one person, who taught yoga, felt it necessary to speak about four times, and on one of those times dilated about proper diet, and how our bad eating habits might be ultimately to blame). You get the idea. After about an hour of a two-hour program, it was obvious that we were going to stay in these superfluous veins. The moderator of the program was virtually silent throughout, so nothing kept the discussion from getting out of hand.

At one point I tried to get the focus back on the question, suggesting that perhaps we should look at our character as a people and our history as avenues of explanation, i.e., we are both a violent and an ill-educated people. This went over like the proverbial screen door in a submarine. But it wasn't really all that different from the other promising lines of inquiry that surfaced occasionally. The "flattening of language" brought about by the technological advances in communication, for example. Times of profound transformation according to this thesis produce disintegration of language. Hmmmm. Interesting. But this subject stuck up its head only a couple of times after it was raised.

Bottom line: you put three academics on a panel and give them no script, you are asking for a lot of posturing and pontificating. They immediately deviated off the path in favor of listening to the sound of their own voices. The most interesting person on the panel was the non-academic, and he spoke the least. A shame. This discussion might have been fruitful. Sphere: Related Content

Victims Day

Herewith, with a minimum of editing, an email exchange I had today with my daughter:

She: Am  I an ass for not jumping on the Facebook  “Thanks to all our fabulous vets for serving our country freedom isn’t free we love you God bless the USA”  bandwagon?   Even my liberal buddies are doing it. 

I refuse. I'm an ass, right?

Me: You most certainly are not an ass, my girl. I of course am not jumping on that particular bandwagon either. In fact, I think that along with the huge sidle to the right the country did in electing and then deifying Ronald Reagan, it also went way overboard in elevating the military to some sort of exalted status. This status has only gotten higher since. I wince when the president and just about any other politician from senator to county clerk just gushes himself half to death talking about the troops. Why this overblown praise for an institution that our revolutionary forefathers feared and mistrusted? I really don't know, but I regret that the country's original stance toward the military has been altered. It is correct to fear and distrust the military establishment. Just the other day, I read for the first time an American who speculated that a military coup in this country is not beyond the realm of imagining.

I would venture to say that the vast majority of the "volunteers" in this all-volunteer military are there because they could not find gainful employment in an economy that just grinds down the poor and the people from the wrong side of the tracks. So where else could these people go? Societies from the beginning of time have used their mudsills to do their dying for them. Ours is no different. Rather than praise beyond the skies for these poor wretches and the blizzard of American flags on the countless graves from coast to coast and in God knows how many foreign countries, we should drape in black mourning the headstones of all the victims our country has sent to war to die too young and for trumped up causes. It's valiant and false to say one died for his country; it's infuriating and true to say one died for the interests of the rich and powerful. So what do you think relatives of the victims of war plus those whose interests are served by war will say? What do you think the powerful who send people to die for their advancement and security will say?

The correct stance on Veterans Day should always be pity for victims and anger at the people who sent them to die.

Here in Oklahoma the fever of rabid patriotism is high all the time, but probably out of control today. Every little bit I can do to lower it, I will. So I will definitely help you to do that very thing today. Sphere: Related Content

The American Way

Some thoughts about the massacre of people at Ft Hood. President Obama was there today to eulogize the dead and injured and comfort the grieving. It's a real horror and tragedy, with a host of victims beyond the shot. Thirteen killed, with another 30 wounded by a gunman who was: a field grade officer in the Army, a psychiatrist, a Muslim. Guess what aspect of this guy focuses all the attention. Who knows, maybe the shooter, Maj Nidel Malik Hasan, is connected with terrorists. If that's the case, I'd sure hate to be named Muhamed or Hasan in any of the services, much less in the civilian population. 

But likely he's another product of the war-loving country we've become. Why are we shocked when the institutions to which we devote 57 percent of our national budget produce unreasoning violent people? Why should we be surprised that individuals we've sent repeatedly into war zones come home all bent out of shape? The killer here had not even been to Iraq or Afghanistan. He was slated to go, and apparently that's what sent him off the cliff. Obviously this guy was a nut case. Isn't anybody who guns down a bunch of unarmed strangers a nut case? But if you think about it, isn't blowing strangers away the whole business of the army?* And given that, just how likely is it that you're going to have horrific violence by servicemen returning from combat? Indeed, there's been an upsurge of such violence everywhere, and Fort Hood has not been immune. Ten suicides there so far this year. Domestic abuse, divorce, crime in the surrounding community: all are up. 

So there will be investigations, congressional hearings, several reports, grave pronoucements, and "corrective actions" in the wake of this event, but don't expect anything dramatic to happen to change the root causes of stuff like this. We're a violent people; we've been socialized that way, and our foreign policy ensures that we always have some war somewhere to keep us sufficiently blood-thirsty and xenophobic. It's the American way.

*The fact that enemies in war are also armed and trying to kill you is not the point. The point is there's a large spectrum of activities in which we kill people we don't know: war is on one end with mass murder somewhere in the middle. It's hardly arguable that war and mass murder don't share many characteristics. Sphere: Related Content