Bob Dylan... Dylan Thomas... what the hell's the difference? They were dying out there last night.
Here's the Dylan Scully quoted:
Here's the text of the poem, which I checked for the reason you might want to check. He doesn't say "fucked." It's "their words had forked no lightning." Also "Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay..." Green Bay! This poem is good for baseball and football.
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Nice to see Vinnie is still alive and working.
I remember his play by play for the Brooklyn Dodgers when I was a kid.
I'm a big fan.
Vin Scully is the best sports announcer in the history of sports. Nobody else is even close. I remember one day in the early nineties when he did the CBS game of the week with Joe Garagiola in Boston, then flew to Houston to do the Dodgers-Astros game. The game went to twenty-two innings. Vinnie was just as fresh and entertaining at the end of the game as he was at the beginning. Heck, at eighty-five I'm inclined to forgive him the occasional error.
Vinnie gets a free pass. To the extent, my lifelong passion for baseball equates to my passion for America, he's on Mount Rushmore.
Yes.
The Dodgers, after bailing out the Red Sox from $250 million in over-priced contracts, not only failed to win the NL West (losing by no better than eight games, depending upon today's game), but failed to win a wild card spot, courtesy of my 2012 NL West Champion Giants.
At the home stadium, no less. $250 million hasn't ever been so quiet.
Anyway, I hope Brian Stowe is happy with this win.
GO GIANTS!!
The voice reading "Do not go gentle into that good night" reminds me of the professor who taught a German Lit class I took in college. He was probably in his 70s, spoke fluent German and was passionate about the subject.
He read us Goethe's Heideröslein in German with such passion and strength that I loved the poem, although I knew very little German.
In the clip Vin Scully doesn't refer to the poet when quoting the lines, and assumes audience recognizes he is quoting Dylan Thomas. The copy editor errs in the headline. Bob Dylan nee Robert Zimmerman chose last name from Dylan Thomas.
Maybe Scully is just a really big Frankie Goes to Hollywood fan...
A swing of the bat
And
*Crack* the flight of a ball
Up and up and up
And
*Crash* into the tiered roof of the stadium
A shower of fire
Forked lightning
Thunder
Patter then pelting rain
Falling on the tired triumphant veteran
As he circles the bases
All the way home.
~~I knew a man, his brain was so small,
He couldn't think of nothing at all.
He's not the same as you and me.
He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that
When you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture,
But it's alright, ma,
Everybody must get stoned.``
"Vinnie gets a free pass."
Vinnie isn't at fault here!
It's a mistake in the headline.
I thought Dylan Thomas was before TV like 100 years.
It seems to me like Dylan is encouraging his father not to succumb, not for his father but for Dylan so that he won't have to live with his father's manhood being reduced, a now perhaps traditional Irish problem. In the current season I think of Obama's Irish father imagos, those the people he knew in his family mostly knew.
It's funny, I know the poem well enough to know the word is "forked" but when I heard it, I heard "fucked" and did a double-take.
It's unfortunate that this post got buried in the minutiae of the day. An opportunity to praise Vin Scully should not be passed by so blithely.
As an opportunity to find joy on this planet, listening to Mr. Scully call a game (solo from the booth mind you) on a warm summer night far exceeds seeing Bob Dylan live or listening to an overwrought reading of Dylan Thomas poetry. No disrespect intended to either Messrs. Dylan. In fact, I think they might both agree with me. One posthumously of course.
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