"The game is so repetitive, I think you either take an interest in the small details or you stop watching. I’m not sure what I like about baseball."

"I do like it, and I like drawing, and I try to draw baseball but find it difficult to capture. This is my most recent attempt and I will keep trying. I have learned some things about drawing by trying to draw baseball, and I might learn what I like about baseball from drawing it."

Says Edward Steed, interviewed about his New Yorker cover this week:



ADDED: I really like this:

In recent years, there’s been a lot of discussion about speeding up the game. Is it fair to say you are against such measures?

I don’t mind how fast or slow the games are. It seems that they are trying to market baseball to people who don't like baseball. I think they should just be trying to make the games more beautiful.

I like it as a general principle: It's not about how fast or slow anything is. It's about how beautiful...

"I’d like to offer a rule of thumb for evaluating political news: If a fact is reported the same by both the left-leaning and the right-leaning press, it’s probably a fact."

"If not, wait and see. It’s also smart to wait a week or two before you make up your mind, as the fog of war often makes early reporting unreliable. But after the fog clears, if all sides agree on a fact, it’s probably a fact. Or at least it’s credible, even if future reporting debunks it.... If you strip out the parts of the Ukraine story we can’t yet know to be true... Vice President Biden was handling the Ukraine portfolio while his son had a financial interest in Ukraine, and that is enough of a conflict to merit an investigation. We all agree that the sitting president is responsible for protecting the integrity of American elections and generally keeping foreign interference in U.S. politics to a minimum. That’s what Mr. Trump was doing on the Ukraine phone call.... All sides can also agree that Mr. Trump was serving his own re-election interests by asking Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden. But we also agree our political system allows that—even encourages it—so long as the president is also clearly pursuing the national interest.... What we all agree to be true about Joe and Hunter Biden is that they had the types of interactions with Ukraine that raise eyebrows and invite a closer look. We also all agree that protecting the integrity of American elections should be a top priority for a president."

Scott Adams at the Wall Street Journal (and apparently not behind the pay wall).

"She caught her fiance sexually assaulting a bridesmaid, police say. They got married anyway."

I only clicked through to that WaPo article to see how far into the comments you have to go before someone analogizes the fiance to Trump and the woman to his voters.

The first comment went up 6 hours ago. At 5 hours ago, you get: "This doesn't surprise me. After all, look who Melania married." Which produces: "Not relevant but funny"/"I think it's relevant. It shows how low women will go to get their man"/"I think you mean it shows how low Republicans will go to protect their man"/"Doubt that Melanie 'went low,' considering her profession and background. A perfect union of an idiot and a 'model' out for the cash. And an instant immigration citizenship card for mommy and daddy...and herself"/"Other than the nude pictures, and the photo shoot arranged by Trump, has anybody ever seen any shots of Melania 'modeling?'"

"Iran has arrested an Instagram celebrity famous for drastically altering her appearance through cosmetic surgery..."

"The social media star known as Sahar Tabar was detained on the orders of Tehran’s guidance court, which deals with 'cultural crimes and social and moral corruption'... She faces charges including blasphemy, inciting violence, gaining income through inappropriate means and encouraging youths to corruption," The Guardian reports, based on a report from the "semi-official" Tasnim news agency.

Here's the crazy-looking picture of her, which is said to resemble Angelina Jolie (in some zombie sort of incarnation).



Tabar does plastic surgery, and we're told "Cosmetic surgery is hugely popular in the Islamic republic," but there's also photoshopping involved. I'm not sure what part of all this is regarded as "blasphemy" by the Iranian authorities.

Tabar used Instagram, the only "major social media" available in Iran. It's accurate, I think, to say that this sort of thing entails "social and moral corruption." The problem is using criminal law to deal with it. The government's solution is worse than the problem. But it's amazing that a person was able to go this far in Iran without encountering a reaction from the government, and it's hard to understand, without living there, how much social media expression like this is a legitimate and admirable rebellion against repression. Without government repression, onlookers are free to simple express disgust at this sort of attack on one's own face.

ADDED: On the subject of plastic surgery in Iran, consider "Why Iran is a hub for sex-reassignment surgery/It is not because the regime is liberal" (The Economist):

"If you spend a career in the CIA, you see all kinds of subterfuge and lies and crime. This person went through a whole career and this is the thing he objects to?"

Said John Kirakou, "a former CIA Counterterrorism official who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture program," quoted in "The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t/It’s an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist" (by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone). Here's Taibbi:

It’s fair to wonder if this is a one-person effort. Even former CIA official Robert Baer, no friend of Trump, said as much in an early confab on CNN with Brooke Baldwin... "This is a couple of people. It isn’t just one.... You know, my guess, it’s a palace coup against Trump. And who knows what else they know at this point."...

The current “scandal” is a caricature version of such episodes. Imagine the mania on the airwaves if Donald Trump were to have his Justice Department arrest the “whistleblower” and charge him with 35 years of offenses, as Thomas Drake faced. ...

Trump almost certainly is not going to do that, however, as the man is too dumb to realize he’s the titular commander of an executive branch that has been jailing people for talking too much for over a decade. On the off chance that he does try it, don’t hold your breath waiting for news networks to tell you he’s just following an established pattern.

I have a lot of qualms about impeachment/“Ukrainegate,” beginning with this headline premise of the lone, conscience-stricken defender of democracy arrayed against the mighty Trump. I don’t see it. Donald Trump is a jackass who got elected basically by accident, campaigning against a political establishment too blind to its own unpopularity to see what was coming....

Too dumb? A jackass who got elected basically by accident?

A federal district judge orders Trump to turn 8 years of personal and corporate tax returns over to the Manhattan district attorney.

The NYT reports.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has been investigating whether any New York State laws were broken when Mr. Trump and his company reimbursed the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, for payments he made in the run-up to the 2016 election to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who had said she had an affair with Mr. Trump....

Mr. Trump’s lawyers sued last month to block the subpoena, arguing that the Constitution effectively makes sitting presidents immune from all criminal inquiries until they leave the White House....

Federal prosecutors are barred from charging a sitting president with a crime because the Justice Department has decided that presidents have temporary immunity while they are in office.... Local prosecutors, such as Mr. Vance, are also not bound by the Justice Department’s position....

No response from the President's lawyers yet. Presumably, they'll appeal (and win).

UPDATE: "The president's attorneys have filed an emergency order of appeal."

AND:

The Radical Left Democrats have failed on all fronts, so now they are pushing local New York City and State Democrat prosecutors to go get President Trump. A thing like this has never happened to any President before. Not even close!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019

UPDATE 2: Bloomberg reports:

Trump immediately appealed and in less than two hours won a delay to give the federal appeals court in Manhattan time for expedited review. The delay postponed what would have been a 1 p.m. Monday deadline for [his accountants] to begin turning over the records to prosecutors....

"The impeachment inquiry Democrats launched last month may ultimately hinge on a simple question: Did President Trump try to force a foreign power (or powers) to help him take down a political opponent, Joe Biden?"

Writes Lee Smith at Real Clear Investigations.

My instinctive answer to the question "did he?" is: Why would he? Biden is not a strong opponent, so what's the point of taking him out? It's what other Democrats want to do. Why would Trump want to help them? My hypothesis is that Trump has a more complex game that his opponents do not understand and that they are therefore making awful blunders.

Back to Smith:

[T]he backdrop of [the Democrats] effort is far more complex and convoluted, connected not just to Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine and related evidence but the three-year war of attrition the Democrats have waged against the president. Their main instrument was the Trump-Russia collusion story... [but] Ukraine was always at the center of the Trump-Russia affair....

"I wanted to go jogging this morning..."

A popular tweet gives a good "hack" for hotel guests — use the hotel's pants hanger to clip the blackout curtains all the way shut...

... and The Washington Post — hoping to get in on the popularity — assembles a set of travel "hacks" — like use the ice bucket plastic bag to enclose the remote control and protect yourself from whatever was on the hands of the previous TV-using room occupant.

That triggers a commenter:

Before you leave on travel, pack 20-30 Lysol brand wipes nea[t]ly folded into a large zip lock plastic bag. They will pass airport security.
1) Use the first one to clean the arms of your seat and the seat belt buckle and insert.
2) Use the second to clean your drop down tray table.
3) As soon as you arrive at your hotel, take another 3-4 wipes and use them to immediately clean the telephone in your room, the remote control, the air conditioner buttons. And yes - the faucets on the sink and shower.

This person is (as I see it) clearly joking, because there's no realistic sense of the capacity of a large Ziploc bag and the size of a pile of 20-30 Lysol wipes and because it's silly to specify the brands. But it's hard to see humor these days, when Glenlivet pods are not a joke, and 2 other commenter taunt with an accusation of OCD. The full fun of our ridiculous culture then pops out as the taunters are chided:

You clearly have no concept of what OCD is if you're criticizing someone for wiping down surfaces used by the public. Please read up on OCD if you really want to understand it (though I doubt you do--you're just the type of person who lobs mental illness diagnoses at people as a form of insult, which makes you nothing but a common bigot).

Or do you think that person is a satirist?

The joke is good, but what it jumps off of — intended as dead serious (I think!) — is funnier.

you know gen z is getting older when they’re selling alcoholic tide pods https://t.co/rJ0RBMRDYu

— jabookie (@jaboukie) October 5, 2019

Sitting on the rock of the creek...

A man waded to get to a rock in the middle of Boulder Creek. He stayed there a long time. I don't know what he was thinking.

Last week in Boulder, Colorado.

ADDED: See the bridge in the background? I walked up that way and stopped in the middle of the bridge to look upstream and then downstream. As I switched sides, I was surprised by a woman in tight black jeans carrying a large coffee cup and sauntering in a straight line who seemed determined to walk straight across the bridge in a manner awkwardly devoid of awareness of my presence. Then she stopped and apologized and, as I was thinking okay, that was weird, I noticed her companion, a woman with a camera. It was a set up shot. Wow — I thought — I have encountered an Influencer in the wild.

Such a contrast — the meditative man, barefoot on a rock in the stream and the tightly clothed and scripted woman on the bridge. The unbridgeable distance between them felt so funny and sad.

"'Joker' reflects political cowardice on the part of a filmmaker, and perhaps of a studio, in emptying out the specifics of the city’s modern history and current American politics so that the movie can be released as mere entertainment to viewers who are exasperated with the idea of movies being discussed in political terms—i.e., to Republicans...."

"[T]he movie plays into the hands of current-day political rhetoric—namely, the emphasis by Republicans who, when it comes to gun control, would rather deny weapons to the mentally ill than restrict weaponry for everyone. In the wake of Arthur’s killing spree, a public figure—Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a wealthy banker for whom Penny worked decades earlier, and who, of course, is the father of a boy named Bruce—speaks of killers such as Arthur as 'clowns.' This comment gives rise to a sudden mass movement of activists who dress like clowns and target the rich and the powerful. The trope resembles Hillary Clinton’s reference to many of the supporters of Donald Trump as 'deplorables,' a term that was adopted by some as a badge of honor—except in 'Joker' the epithet applies rather to radicals on the left, who loom as a menace waiting to happen...."

From "'Joker' Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness" by Richard Brody (in The New Yorker).

Brody is bothered by the movie's "incoherence," and I think he's mostly annoyed that the comic-book material isn't organized according to a comic-book politics of right and left. He calls the movie "empty" over and over, but it seems as though he's bothered by complexity — there's too much and it's not composed in a stark, easily recognized pattern.

"Phony as a horse"... is that an expression? Or is this just a stray inside joke for "Family Feud" fans?

Oh, dear! I'm so distractable, stopping in the middle of a sentence (in "The Hunter Biden story is a troubling tale of privilege" (WaPo)):

For all his barking and hucksterism, Rudy Giuliani is having limited success drawing the gullible into his sideshow tent. But the fact that Giuliani’s spectacle involving the Biden family is as phony as a horse...

I'm off chatting about it and laughing and googling "phony as a horse" — which is all about "Family Feud" to my immense delight —  but I finally come back...

For all his barking and hucksterism, Rudy Giuliani is having limited success drawing the gullible into his sideshow tent. But the fact that Giuliani’s spectacle involving the Biden family is as phony as a horse that does arithmetic does not mean there is no story worth examining. The real story of Joe Biden and his troubled son Hunter is full of pain and littered with questions and deeply relevant to our populist moment....

Oh! Phony as a horse that does arithmetic...  That's Clever Hans! I don't even have to look it up. I know all about the horse that supposedly did arithmetic. I read about that long ago in The New Yorker. Let me go get that for you. (I don't really care about the Giuliani-bashing in WaPo. That can go on just fine without me.) Ah! Yes! Here it is, "Questions About Language/I — Horses" by Vicki Hearne, August 10, 1986:





Ha ha, that was 33 years ago, and I still remember it so well. And isn't it refreshing to read a blog by someone who's 68 years old and talks like she's 68 years old?

"But that didn’t stop the New York Times, reprising their gambit with Brett Kavanaugh, from shouting that a second anonymous 'whistleblower' had been found who was just about to come forward and spew more malign anti-Trump gossip into the cloaca maxima of the effort to rid the world of Donald Trump."

There's the sentence of the day. Diagram that!

It's from Roger Kimball's "Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam/Donald Trump asked President Zelensky to help with the Justice Department’s investigation of efforts to subvert the 2016 election. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It is part of his responsibility to see that our elections are open and fair. Bottom line: not much to work with there for the anti-Trump fraternity."

I had to look up "cloaca maxima." Wikipedia:

The Cloaca Maxima (Latin: Cloaca Maxima, lit. Greatest Sewer, i.e. Main) has constituted one of the world's earliest sewage systems. Constructed in Ancient Rome in order to drain local marshes and remove the waste of one of world's most populous cities, it carried effluent to the River Tiber, which ran beside the city.

"Ginger Baker, one of the most innovative and influential drummers in rock music, has died at the age of 80."

"His style combined the lyricism of jazz with the crude power of rock. One critic said watching him was like witnessing 'a human combineharvester.'... Nicknamed Ginger for his flaming red hair, the musician was born Peter Edward Baker in Lewisham, south London, shortly before World War Two. His bricklayer father was killed in action in 1943, and he was brought up in near poverty by his mother, step-father and aunt. A troubled student, he joined a local gang in his teens and became involved in petty theft. When he tried to quit, gang-members attacked him with a razor. His early ambition was to ride in the Tour de France but was forced to quit the sport when, aged 16, his bicycle got 'caught up' with a taxi. Instead, he took up drumming. 'I was always banging on the desks at school,' he recalled. 'So all the kids kept saying, "Go on, go and play the drums," and I just sat down and I could play. It's a gift from God. You've either got it or you haven't. And I've got it: time. Natural time'" (BBC).

His natural time with us is now over. Goodbye to Ginger Baker.



ADDED: My son John blogs a commemoration of Ginger Baker — with a clip from Blind Faith's first concert and the comment "Ginger Baker's drumming added so much to this — it's hard to imagine it with a typical rock drummer":

"If there are any angels in heaven, they are all male and female nurses," says Joe Biden.

If there are any angels in heaven, they are all male and female nurses. pic.twitter.com/ImQGL8r04B

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 5, 2019

That's something Joe (or whoever runs his Twitter account) chose to feature, not just in a clip but in text, and it's a little disconcerting to experience such slap-in-the-face ineptness with language. I accept politicians using religion in their speeches to the general public, believers and nonbelievers, despite the principle of the separation of religion and government. It's an American tradition. Lincoln did it ("I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right; but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord's side"). But do it well. Do it carefully. Not everyone believes that after death they have a chance at becoming an angel in heaven. But who on earth thinks that only nurses go to heaven?! It's nice to hear that the male as well as the female nurses go to heaven, but what about everybody who's not a nurse? What a kick in the head! You lived a life of virtue, you served your fellow human beings every day of your life, you felt and acted upon the love of God continually, but — whoops! — you picked the wrong job! Nurses only!