The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Tolerating the Intolerant

    Poor Michele Bachmann. Put upon again and again by the twin evils of gays and liberals. Thanks be to God she has Katherine Kersten to stick up for her.

    Now let’s put aside the easy target of Kersten herself (and the Star Tribune, who gives such a right wing lapdog a column,) and talk about tolerance. Indeed, let’s look at what Kersten says Bachmann is being besieged about: her introduction of two bills to prohibit gay marriage and to “protect students from ideological bias at public universities.”

    We may as well get the most damning thing Bachmann said (quoted by Kersten,) out there, too: “Judges have decided that legislators are good enough to decide issues like the load limits on turnip trucks. But they seem to believe that elected representatives can’t be trusted to determine the people’s will on big issues, such as marriage, abortion and the like.”

    Gee, where would judges get that impression?

    Maybe from legislators who want to impose their religion-based morality on the minority? You know, the founders suspected that might just happen when the legislature is elected by a religion-dominated majority. That’s why they tacked the Bill of Rights onto the Constitution, and stuck that damn First Amendment in there that gives religion-addled legislators so much trouble when they want to tell the rest of us whom we can marry or what we can say if we happen to be university professors.

    Maybe Bachmann and Kersten ought to stick to the turnip truck legislation. That seems to be what they fell off of when it comes to understanding that the supreme law of the land does not support the “will of the people” when those willful people are bent on intolerance of gay or liberal minorities.

  • Summer Rerun Season

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    –Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

     

    The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floating in thick fog, talking to God.

    Look, He says to me, I’m just hoping to catch a few fish. I didn’t come down here to listen to you bitch.

    I wouldn’t think you’d need to fish, I said.

    Very few people in this world need to fish, He said. But it just so happens I like to fish. I’m a sportsman, and though, yes, I could technically cheat –at this as well as at anything else I damn well please– that’s never been my style. I don’t much go in for flashy stuff and intervention. The fish don’t know who’s on the other end of the line, and that’s the way I like it. The truth is that if they did know, it would only make it all the more difficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fish down there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on my hook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs something virtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts –there are always nuts– but I think you know what I mean. You’re all fish to me –understand, of course, that I’m now speaking metaphorically, but that’s the way I’ve always thought of you– and when I go fishing it’s virtually always bad news for somebody. And I’m terribly sorry, my friend, but today that somebody is you.

    And with that God pushed me out of the boat.

     

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    –Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

     

    I can’t deny that I am offended when certain individuals question my credentials as an authority on the sedentary lifestyle. God knows, yes, unquestionably I am offended. I say let these critics come here and gaze upon me in my unlaundered pajamas, as I slump here on the floor eating Tootsie Rolls and composing lazy and, quite honestly, uninspired monologues to my dog. I lack the energy or attention span for television. I can’t be bothered by the weather, understanding as I do that in my present state it can have no bearing –I’ve no intention of setting foot outdoors any time soon, implying as such an adventure would that I have some destination in mind, something compelling enough to drive me up the stairs for a change of clothing. Not likely. Not likely at all.

    I suppose, though, that eventually –rather soon, actually– it will be necessary for me to venture out for a new supply of Mountain Dew.

    Time doesn’t stand still. It never does that. It dribbles along the floor like a capsule full of light, throwing off odd little wobbly shadows. When the arm of the turntable drifts slowly across the black surface of the record and settles in its cradle the silence sounds like a car alarm bleating across the muffled fields in the darkness.

    Haven’t moved. Sitting still. Some curiosity about that pile of books tottering in the corner. Looking for a moving surface, line, origin. Backspace. A clear dream would leave you even more confused than when you blank-screened your way through every flat stretch of darkness, with only some vague whoof booming in an otherwise empty fog.

    Fred’s infatuated, you recall hearing some stranger say, and you try to imagine the rest of the story, to no avail. Outside your windows the night is full of people with big plans, lashed to each other by the lunging insecurity of a big city. Lost luggage. Elder clutter. Monument. Why, I oughtta….hang on a second. Hang on a second….No, sorry, it’s gone. Lost it. I felt an idea creeping along the margins of my brain.

    I cannot the American say ‘piece of cake.’ Go far, I driving. Car has problem, slow, then not moving. My mother she mooing, with me unhappy. Things are problem. We must going a great distance away, life to do over. Beginning new, with family there in restaurant. Town is small. Wife she wants the television, things to sit.

    I miss my days as a juggler, when I had a little bicycle and a wagon and I went from town to town, camping under the stars at night and entertaining in the streets and town squares every day. Eventually, however, things changed and it became necessary for me to make some adjustments in my act. The city fathers wanted me to include a message, to lecture the local children about bicycle safety and kindness to the elderly. Before too long I was instructed to include information regarding the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, and to warn the children about the perils of unplanned pregnancy. I was told that I was no longer to camp out under the stars, and eventually the little town banned juggling altogether and I was conscripted to work in a local dental office.

    I get disturbed when clothes disappear. Everyone does, I know, but it’s not like I can, you know, tolerate much disappearance. I have no wardrobe, dammit. I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. And I have to be honest with you, I never expected to see Mark Trail’s girlfriend –actually, I think they might be married now– in a bikini. I was just so taken aback.

    I never learned how to say "These things don’t matter." I never learned how to sit still, to stare hard at one thing. I did, however, learn how to sit up all night, rocking in place, my mind a buzzing test pattern, the static symphony that follows "God Bless America" when the little local radio stations sign off for the night. But if you sit there on the floor for too long and for too many nights you start to lose touch with some of the old, vague stirrings, good feelings, what’s it’s like to walk in the quiet country, the stubbled fields dusted with snow, the hard gravel frozen under your feet. Walking the railroad tracks, the sky layered and gray and settling low over the landscape, the impressionism of late November, the muffled silence, a distant skreeing of a crow wobbling black above the trees. The murmur of a creek rippling through a fractured stretch of open water, the flat clanging of a railroad crossing further out in the country.

    The ceaseless rustling of grain elevators, the farm houses settled down the long driveways in the falling darkness, the sound of your own breath, the rough rasp of prairie grass and corn stubble, dog clattering in the ditches, the tiny snap of a shotgun someplace far off in the country, the distant scrape of a jet plane sounding like a moon-dragged, storm-tossed sea. Spires on the horizon along the town’s edge, water towers, gas signs looming. You start to lose touch with those things, with the person you once were in a long ago place.

    Now, back on the floor, Coltrane at his fattest and most mournful. Thick. Screwing higher, more lost, more puzzled, more hurt. Jimmy Garrison playing the bass like a talking drum. In the fog there is an automobile wearing a shroud, a casket wrapped in a flag, a large animal breathing through its nose, sinking deeper into the mud.

    The board of directors retreats to a backwoods resort, where they will drink all weekend and brainstorm names for funeral homes. Forest Park. Shady Oak. Final Rest. Comfort Care. Sounds too much like a nursing home. Meadow Wood. Paradise Valley. Ever Rest. These names, they will all agree, sound too much like cemeteries, so for a time they will simply make up names, fictional families and hyphenated partnerships with some suggestion of quiet, appropriate dignity: Birnstead and Mather. Hambrooke and Pierce. Junius-Peavy. Aarden and Sons (The double-a was a nice touch and would gain them prime placement in the Yellow Pages). The board of directors intends to buy up funeral homes in small towns all over the Midwest, and then to franchise them back to the yokels. Death was a growth industry in these towns –death and methamphetamine– and even as they drink themselves insensate they are secure in the knowledge that their plan is a sound one.

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  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

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    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Forgive me if you’ve heard this story before. I am a man of such unvarying moods and routine that it’s inevitable I’m going to repeat myself from time to time. I’m afraid I just don’t have an inexhaustible –however exhausting– store of life experiences that anyone in their right mind would classify as fresh material.

    Before I repeat myself, however, I want to point out that I –quite generously, I thought– offered to cover Zellar’s ass while he was off gallivanting around (and what kind of a baseball fan, I wanted to know, takes a vacation during the season, and when the Yankees are coming to town, no less?). No chance, I was told. Such an arrangement would have required Zellar to give me his precious access passwords, which he apparently thought would be an invitation for all manner of what he called “negative shenanigans.”

    If there’s one thing Twins Territory needs, I say, it’s more negative shenanigans. But who am I? Nobody, apparently. Not apparently, apparently. Nobody.

    Also, before I repeat myself, can someone with more smoldering brain cells than I have explain to me why Terry Mulholland was on the mound in the ninth inning of a tie game? Can anyone explain to me how this team can go from hitting the ball all over the place one moment to extended periods of collective and abject futility the next? Or how about this: what the hell?

    Anyway, years ago, many years ago, after I moved to the Twin Cities following my storied junior college baseball career in Kansas, I was living in Dinkytown and still harboring a dream of making the University of Minnesota team as a walk-on. I never actually did anything about this dream, of course, primarily because I could never quite manage to get myself enrolled in the damn college. There was too much paperwork, too much standing in line, too many places to drink cheap beer.

    I was also a complete moron, and my junior college transcripts read like so many completely inexplicable personal declarations: “I, C, C, D. I, D, I, C.” I piled up more incompletes in my two years in Kansas than I did doubles.

    My Dinkytown exile dragged on for years. Eventually those years added up to a decade, and then some. Everyone I might, however dishonestly, consider a friend, or even an acquaintance, eventually graduated and moved out into the real world. They got decent jobs, married, had kids.

    One afternoon I was doing my laundry –which I did every other month whether it was strictly necessary or not– in a campus laundromat when I had the terrible revelation that everyone else in the place was at least ten years my junior. There was, actually, one woman who was clearly older than me, and she was also clearly out of her mind.

    I guess I had a nervous breakdown. This was, of course, during the off-season, so I had absolutely no anchor. I ended up moving back to Blooming Void to live with my mother, which only made me crazier, drunker, and more malnourished. Every evening my mother and I would watch the Wheel of Fortune and gamble. We would ante with a buck at the beginning of the puzzle, and add a dollar with each spin of the wheel. The first person to guess the correct answer won the pot. I took hundreds of dollars from my mother that winter. She was quite possibly the most inept Wheel of Fortune player of all time, and I was merciless.

    Eventually my brother, Rich, staged an intervention, and talked me into seeing a therapist, a Dr. Grabow. Grabow was an imposter, I’m sure, but entertaining nonetheless. He would have me keep a journal of my daily activities, which I was to share with him on my visits.

    On one such visit, I recall, Grabow read to me from my own journal as I squirmed in an uncomfortable chair: “Ate a pot pie, took a nap. Ate a pot pie, took a nap. Did the crossword puzzle. Went to bed.”

    “You understand, of course, that this is not a journal?” Grabow said. “I am reminded of an old New Yorker cartoon that depicts the purported diary of a dog’s life. Certainly there are things you are leaving out.”

    There certainly were not, other than the Wheel of Fortune business, which I had no intention of sharing with the doctor.

    Another time Grabow asked me if I had any hobbies, and rejected my answer of “patty melts.” Eventually, for obvious reasons, we parted ways. I moved back to the Twin Cities when the baseball season started again, and settled back into the parking lot racket.

    Then, a few years later, completely out of the blue, I received a call from Dr. Grabow. It seems he was starting a company that would produce “non-traditional greeting cards, for dysfunctional families.”

    “This seems like something you might really be able to tap into,” Grabow said to me. Basically, he explained to me, these would be cards for people who had a difficult time finding anything in the Hallmark store that was suitable for their unique situation or occasion. These cards would say things like, “I know you’re not really my dad, but you live with my mom and I’m trying to make an effort to get along with you, so happy birthday anyway.”

    Some of the categories will give you a pretty good idea of what Grabow was up to: “You Drink Too Much.” “Lesbian Miss You.” “Troubled Marriage.” “Abusive Mother.” “Financial Hardship.” “Absentee Father.” “I Know It Doesn’t Look Good.”

    I don’t imagine I have to tell you how much I liked the sound of that last one.

    “Dr. Grabow,” I said, “You’ve come to the right man.”

    Shit, it really was a dream job –for about eight months, anyway, until I stopped getting paid and Grabow cleared out the office one night and disappeared.

    I was disappointed, of course, but disappointment comes easily to me, and, like I said, I always knew Grabow was an imposter.

  • Pride Before the Fall

    There has developed a little cottage industry in poo-poohing the Watergate scandal–and as a corollary, actually discussing whether Deep Throat was a hero or a villain in the annals of modern American history. (We won’t link to them, but they know who they are.) This is of a piece, we suppose, with various evil revisionists wondering out loud again whether Vietnam wasn’t such a bad idea after all. (Hey, maybe we won that war if we just say we won it–why didn’t we think of that before? Then we can go back to calling all those anti-war hippies traitors again! It was dissent that subverted our efforts in Vietnam, duh!)

    For anyone who hasn’t taken the time to reread “All the President’s Men” in the past year–or for those who have forgotten what all the fuss was about–we would have suggested last week’s rebroadcast of Frontline’s excellent “Watergate Plus Thirty: Shadow of History.” (We just got around to it on TiVo last night.)

    One word: Chilling. And we’re not talking just about Terry Lenzner’s glasses.

    The intentional recasting in the title–Watergate as history that seems to continue to haunt the nation, if not repeat itself–becomes especially concrete in the last five minutes of the show, where convictor and convict alike agree that between the Nixon Presidency and the present one there are striking similarities in spirit and deed.

    For anyone still not clear on precisely what all the fuss was about, let’s summarize: The President of the United States thought he was above the law. In fact, he believed he was the personification of the law, and that the same expectations of morality that applied to all other Americans did not apply to him or his inner circle.

    But that’s just the half of it. This arrogance coupled with deep suspicion and even enmity toward anyone who dissented with our sovereign leader is what, for a few dark moments in 1973, brought the US dangerously close to martial law at the hands of a President who may, for a few moments, have actually toyed with the idea of defying the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Supreme Court.

    It is a false sense of optimism that suggests that Watergate “proved the system works” to people of good will. On the contrary, Watergate’s main valent may have been teaching bad folks a useful trick or two. (Note to self: No secret tapes! No press access! No internal dissent! A vice president with that special John Ehrlichman sneer!)

  • What, They Don't Have Advance Scouts In The National League?

    I love Torii Hunter. He’s a genuinely fine character, and he had a tremendous game last night against the Diamondbacks. But, my God, why would anybody in their right mind throw Hunter a strike, let alone a hanging breaking ball?

    The man is up there to swing the bat, and he’s not exactly what I guess I’ll call particular, if you know what I’m saying, and I think you do.

    He’s also an entertaining and frequently confounding spazz on the base paths, and though everybody seems to want to give him credit for stealing a run on pure hustle last night, it might be worth pointing out that he could just as easily have been out twice. He certainly gave Arizona two perfectly good opportunities to nail his ass, and they simply couldn’t get the job done.

    Having to watch the Twins in Arizona the next two nights gives me an opportunity to recycle one of my enduring gripes about the game. This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote last year, but it’s as relevant as ever:

    One of the most reliable atrocities in Major League baseball is the wholly inexcusable batting stance of Arizona’s Craig Counsell. There have been some terrible batting stances over the years, but there has never been a stance that was such an affront to the dignity of the game as Counsell’s baroque sideshow. The man looks like a hemorhaging egret at the plate, and it takes every ounce in my diminishing reserves of self-restraint to keep me from removing my shirt, climbing over the railing, and tackling Counsell in the on-deck circle.

    I’m not going to do that, and I’d discourage even the drunkest among you from doing that, even though I will nonetheless continue to insist that I –or the drunkest among you– would nonetheless be providing a tremendous public service if we were to do so.

    That’s not our job, though. That is the job of Bud Selig, and the fact that Counsell has been allowed to continue to insult baseball fans everywhere –and to provide such a terrible example to young players all over the country– with his ridiculous stance is just one more example of Selig’s miserable failure as a commissioner. Forget about steroids, for God’s sake, if Selig is truly interested in preserving the integrity of the game he professes to love he would ban Counsell for life until he repents and learns to stand at the plate like a reasonably normal human being.

    It would be one thing is there was a single shred of evidence that Counsell’s stance was at all efficacious, but no such evidence exists. This scrawny little stain on the game is a career .265 hitter, with a whopping total of 17 homeruns in over 2000 at bats. So he’s clearly not up there to hit; Counsell’s vogueing, is what he’s doing, and his stance is obviously just a mediocrity’s desperate attempt to get attention. Why he’s not quick-pitched every time he goes into his spastic contortions is beyond me. A few judiciously placed fastballs in the ribs would put an end to his nonsense in a hurry.

    I hope you will join me in condemning this terrible man and the damage he is doing to the game’s increasingly fragile aesthetics. Write to the commissioner. Boo Counsell every time he comes to the plate. Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks until they do the right thing and give the man the walking papers he so richly deserves. But please, I’m begging you, do something. I can’t stand it anymore.

  • Those damn Clear Channel guys are at it again

    Ok, this is one of those times when a press release actually came to our office and didn’t go into the junk mail folder. It seems the local radio arm of Clear Channel, those whipping boys of the alternative press, are giving $93,000 this week to the School Arts Project to provide funding for music, art and theater programs in the Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools…you know, those programs which don’t help train people to be Wal-Mart checkers and so don’t qualify for actual funding by the state.

    Add this to the $25,000 they gave last fall as an emergency gift to KBEM, the Minneapolis Schools’ jazz station, when that station lost its state funding. And then throw in a few million they’ve raised for other Minnesota charities over the years with their Sampler CDs on Cities 97, and maybe you’ll want to ask yourself if they don’t deserve a little notice for that.

    Now, if they’ll just get Kenny G off their jazz station…

  • Is There a Doctor in the House?

    We’ve been catching up on “House” reruns, which started immediately after the season finale a couple of weeks ago. We rashly made the pronouncement that it was “the best show on TV” after seeing just half of one show. We’re willing to stick with that assessment, but it’s interesting how the show really picked up quality with each episode, the actors began to fit their roles, the dialogue–always well written–started fitting their mouths better, everything just began to run more smoothly. By the time the finale aired, the show had the feeling of a series hitting its mid-career peak, two or three years down the line. (We hope that doesn’t mean an accelerated lifespan, but great writing and acting tends to be unsustainable for more than a two or three seasons. Consider, for eample, Sorkin-era “West Wing” and the shows sad decline into mediocrity.)

    Of course, “House” would be just another general hospital potboiler if not for the brilliantly sketched character of the show’s namesake. Hugh Laurie has done an admirable job of creating a peevish, repellant anti-hero to enunciate all those clever put-downs, come-ons, and punchlines. We didn’t think it would be possible to see workplace sexism, dubious medical ethics, and persistent, recreational drug use as a relief, but after a harrowing season of “24” (which, in some aspects of its pro-torture, ends-justify-means agitprop, makes Leni Riefensthal look like Hitler’s biggest critic), we are–well, relieved.

    “House” is billed as a new twist on generic mystery-TV, and so it is–although it combines some prurient CSI-style interest in its actual medical footage (kinda gross; the wife covers her eyes in disgust and makes little wretching noises), as well as a tendency to point beyond itself to larger social and political issues like euthanasia, health insurance, gun violence, and so on.

    But we’ve had the sneaking suspicion for the entire season that “House” was actually an upscaling of an odd, uncelebrated, occasional front-of-book department in the New York Times Magazine, called “Diagnosis.” You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. This was an innovation of editor Adam Moss which seems to have been scalped by NTYMag’s old new editor, Gerry Marzorarti. Probably for the best. What that department really lacked is what the TV show has in aces: characters who instantly evoke a sympathetic response. Medicine as a whiz-bang diagnostic science has its appeal, of course, but it doesn’t sell beyond the pages of JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, or even Nature. What doctors count as an asset–the ability to distance oneself emotionally in order to actually get through the waiting room in one piece, makes for lousy general-interest reading, but we can think of several wonderful examples of medical journalism that achieve what “House” achieves.

  • Weekly And Monthly Rates

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    In room eleven there was an old snapshot with serrated edges taped to the mirror above the dresser, a photo of a dark-haired woman, her eyes closed and her head tilted slightly back, standing in a dark angle of shadow. Outside the shadow the sun was shining on an impossibly bright pastel world and a street lined with vintage automobiles.

    On top of the dresser was a rusty tacklebox, full of corks, keys, paper clips, and pencils; a bottle opener, screwdriver, fingernail clippers, pocket knife, and a few bucks in change. The drawers of the dresser held a disorderly sprawl of socks, underwear, tee-shirts, and a few pairs of slacks. Just inside the door was a clothing rod on which was hung a handful of snap-button western shirts, a blue windbreaker, a plaid wool jacket, and a nylon parka.

    On the bedstand were several pairs of fine sunglasses and an assortment of baby food jars, each of them blooming with an almost lovely green mold. Under the bed we found six pairs of shoes –sturdy, plain, solid browns and blacks– and a shoebox full of old photographs of horses. There was a battered leather suitcase stuffed with scandal magazines and paperback westerns.

    The man had a small refrigerator, inside of which were three ketchup bottles, eight cans of Budweiser, and an opened can of cling peaches.

    He also owned a nice Stetson Stratoliner cowboy hat and two pairs of worn boots. There were no paper documents, no letters, wallet, or checkbook; no reliable identification and not a single photograph of another human being other than the woman on the mirror. Were it not for a battered old Rawlings Enos Slaughter model baseball mitt with a name written along the fat thumb in black magic marker the man would have died entirely anonymous.

    The mattress was now stained with blood black as motor oil, and there were random splashes on the wall and bedstand that were dusty as powdered tempura.

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  • Is The Glass Half Full Or Half Empty?

    Each of the Twins three Division titles has been sort of strange, and in almost exactly the same regard. Every year the team confounds expectations every which way, and still finds a way to win.

    I don’t know why I expected this year would be any different, but I know I wasn’t alone. I watch a lot of baseball games, and listen to the rest, and maybe this is just the hyper-critical reaction of a fan who has seen too many games and been spoiled by all those titles, but this team just doesn’t seem like it should be as good as it is.

    Why is that, do you suppose? It’s certainly not because the Twins aren’t as good as they seem, because “good as they seem” doesn’t mean a damn thing in baseball. The numbers speak for themselves.

    The thing is this, I think: once again, as so often in recent years, the Twins have had to improvise to a degree that is both characteristic and uncharacteristic of winning teams. After all the hullaballoo coming out of spring training, the original starting shortstop is back in Rochester, replaced by a mix-and-match combination of journeymen. The starting second baseman –no real surprise here– has been supplanted by whichever journeyman isn’t playing short on any given day. The third baseman has been alternately dismal, encouraging, and erratic, and still doesn’t have numbers a major league third baseman should be proud of. The guy at first base continues to be snakebit, missed a big chunk of time after getting hit in the head, and was in a freefall before he got briefly shelved again by a bone spur in his elbow. The phenom catcher has also had a hard time staying in the lineup.

    Last year’s team, of course, also battled through injuries. Nothing you can do about that, as the old salts will tell you. No, but it’s the production of the guys who have not been injured that continues to puzzle. In 2004 the Twins didn’t have a single player with thirty homeruns, and nobody with either 100 RBI or runs scored. Shit, no regular hit .300. That seems highly unusual for a team that won 92 games and the division, particularly in this day and age.

    The Twins appear to be on a similiar course so far this season. Shannon Stewart leads the team in homeruns with eight, and is on a pace to possibly score 100 runs. It sure seemed for awhile that Justin Morneau was going to easily hit thirty homers and get that monkey off Minnesota’s back, but that’s no longer the lock it once was, and even twenty might be a stretch.

    The story, of course, is the pitching, which has been even better this year than last. The Twins lead the majors in ERA and fewest runs allowed, and they’ve got an unreal strike out-to-walks ratio. The starters have been tremendous, and the bullpen has been even better.

    Minnesota’s giving up fewer than four runs a game, and the magic number to win baseball games has been at four runs for several years now. The Twins definitely need that slim margin, because their offense seems determined to just squeak by.

    Consider this, though: Kyle Lohse has the highest ERA on the entire staff, at a more than respectable 4.25. Both Carlos Silva and Joe Mays have lower ERAs than Johan Santana and Brad Radke.

    The strange thing is that the White Sox have been a virtual carbon copy of the Twins, which was pretty much their stated goal coming out of spring training. They’ve scored almost the same number of runs as the Twins (as of a couple days ago Minnesota had actually scored more), and are second in the majors in team ERA.

    One of these teams is going to either have to step it up offensively or go out and get a banger for the middle of the lineup. Chicago seems far more likely to adopt the latter strategy, but if past performance is any indication they’ll accomplish nothing by doing so. They can’t very well find a way to swing trades for Carl Everett or Roberto Alomar again this year. The more plausible scenario –and it’s hard to say, really, how plausible this is– is that Frank Thomas comes back and gives the White Sox just enough offense to put them over the top.

  • Secret Signs

    God bless our man Chuck Haga, who like a friendly health teacher with a high beltline, a stylish combover, and a full quiver of PG-13 puns, has compiled a little refresher list of euphemisms for marijuana. Strib readers who receive their copies of the paper at their guard stations can thus be dutifully outraged today by the “dopers” who are “sucking up” street signs in rural Minnesota. (420th Street–get it? “High Street” has been a target for decades, of course, but the Strib is just getting up to speed here, so bear with ’em.)

    A couple quick observations on this. First, where is the Strib article decrying the well armed militia of gun-nuts out there who insist on blasting every rural stop sign out of existence? Is the $80 cost of replacing street name signs somehow more onerous than the $80 cost of replacing all those ventilated stop signs? Or is it just more fun to single out the harmless hippies rather than the trigger-happy rednecks? (Extra credit: the Strib has “no guns allowed on these premises” notices on all of its buildings and entrances. Everyone knows that this is a covert, liberal statement of protest about Minnesota’s soft-headed new conceal and carry law. When the editors hear about this, how long will it take them to remove the signage as a natural consequence of their ongoing Red Shift?)

    Second, why must local governments insist on naming every little dirt road through hell’s half acre as if this alone will make the dangerous outback safe for the McMansion developers?

    Finally, if this is truly the epidemic it appears to be, how about not naming any rural roads “420”?