There’ll be two buses leaving the hotel for the park tomorrow. The two o’clock bus will be for those of you who need a little extra work. The empty bus will leave at five o’clock. –Dave Bristol, San Francisco Giants manager, 1980 I watched last night’s game in a motel room, with the sound on … Read more
Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime. —Simone Weil, The Need For Roots How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o … Read more
Our distaste for the sordid fare of daytime cable TV news may not be well documented–now that would really be wasting your time–but we do get interested in some of the more broad-ranging dinner-table conversation about what gets played large and what doesn’t. About a year and a half ago, our man Clinton Collins had … Read more
For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing. It had probably been at least seven … Read more
One of our pet peeves is private corporations who do legal and grammatic violence to the language. One sin leads to the other. We cringed when Lutheran Social Services coined the new name “Thrivent,” just as we had a nails-on-chalkboard response to “Xcel” and “Qwest.” It would seem that current trends in corporate branding are … Read more
Liberals are all “Mr. Poopy Pants” Thanks to Cheri Pierson Yecke for truly raising the level of political discourse on not just the local, but even the national scene, in today’s Strib. It seems Cheri, who undoubtedly is still smarting from being called “Yucky” when she was up for the State Education Commissioner job, takes … Read more
How strange. Do you see how much that poor creature has in its hands? And yet you’ve never known anyone with emptier arms. Look Closely: This Picture Is A Metaphor Is anybody alive out there? Would you care to show yourselves or produce some general murmur to announce your presence? This darkness is oppressive, and … Read more
That sort of felt like a punctuation mark, didn’t it? A big, loud, red, emphatic something right there in the middle of the schedule. I don’t know. Maybe the Twins will bounce back and have one of those sustained hot streaks they had so often in the last several years but which have resolutely eluded … Read more
I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the … Read more
What comes out of the south end of a north-bound whale? The Pioneer Press (yeah we do read it occasionally, but mostly for nostalgic reasons–it used to be quite good before being taken over by the corporate creeps) had a story today about Mark Kennedy’s recent voting record. (Ok, it was from the Associated Press, … Read more