Opening Day

Photos from the Boston Herald

Is there another day during the battered year that offers more hope than the Opening Day of baseball season? For one day, we have the unadulterated hope that this is the year for our team, that the players will answer emphatically all of the questions surrounding the club, and that each and every one of the ifs about the team are groundless fears that will be blown out of our minds by the breeze from that first pitch thumping into the catcher's mitt.

Sure, disappointment and disillusion will slowly set in one team at a time until only a few are left to play meaningful games in the September stretch run. In baseball, August is the cruelest month, the callous dog days that relentlessly expose every weakness until only the hardiest and luckiest teams remain. September is time when the best play through injury and pain, when a pitch that misses by inches can determine a season, when a brief losing streak into a test of mettle.

Writers have written about baseball as a metaphor for life to the point that it has become a cliche. They usually stress individual heroics and shortcomings and the supposed nobility of defeat, which I think misses the point. Of all sports, baseball is the most like life because they do it every day. Players report to work sick and hurt and perform anyway. A hard day at the office -- like the Seattle Mariners' brutal defeat yesterday -- gives way within hours to the next day at work. As in life, it's not so much the bad days -- because they always come -- that matter as much as how the team responds to them. A great day at the office -- like the one Josh Beckett had yesterday -- matters only if the team and player can capitalize on it. Otherwise, it will be as meaningless and forgotten as a team that finished sixth in 1955.

Among those teams playing meaningful ball in September, only a handful will go on to play in the post-season. Some of those will rapidly expose the weaknesses of others, and the survivors will in turn be exposed until one remains. That club and its fans will have a few months to relax and enjoy ultimate success while the other teams scheme to overtake the champions. Around mid-February, it all starts up again with magic words "pitchers and catchers report" to spring training. Once again, we begin the process of hope and loss, relearning the most useful lesson the sport has to offer: Don't get too excited by victory because defeat is as certain as the sunrise, and don't get beaten down by defeat because there will be another game...

Ted Kennedy threw out the first pitch yesterday at Fenway Pahk:

Schadenfreude Dept: Opposing groups of College Republicans at the University of California-San Diego have been brawling with each other for unclear reasons. Whether its about ideology or ego, the dispute had gotten nasty. For some good clean fun, read this post and the comments that follow. There's more here. The post that introduces the subject is tedious and convoluted, so read enough to get the idea then skip ahead to the comments...

Spring on the Cajun prairie...

Kids and grass: "An attractive force that cannot be overcome..."

Bob Dylan connects the dots between Barack Obama and Ulysses S. Grant.You can listen to a cut from his upcoming new album here...

Rushbo Stupidism of the Day:

You need men to fight wars, to be cops. You need men to carry hysterical women out of burning buildings -- just a joke, folks! It's more stereotypical humor. Just me being me, trying to get in a few laughs here. I think, well, men who don't -- who just -- who are not obsessed with discussing their feelings, they're always going to get grief for it.

Announcement

Today marks the first day of my new blog, Just A Song. Regular readers of Citizen K. know my love of songwriting, and Just A Song is a means of indulging that love. All entries will include the name of the artist and song, the albums it appears on, miscellaneous notes, the lyrics, and -- if available-- a video of the song. Some entries, like today's on Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will," will feature a brief essay about a particular song or annotations. I welcome you to join me on Just A Song, and I'm curious to know which of you can identify the origin of the blog name.

Sunday Funnies & Arts

Our lives...are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone.
EURIPEDES

As always, click to enlarge. For more Doonesbury, Tom Toles, Tony Auth, and Pat Oliphant, go here, here, here, and here...

And now, a word from our sponsor (Winstone taste good like a cigarette should):

Don't Do As I Do, Do As I Say Dept. Sometimes, life is sweet:

Bristol [Palin]'s focus will remain on raising Tripp, completing her education, and advocating abstinence [sic]...

Then when you think life can't get any sweeter, something like this happens...

Michelle Obama and Queen Elizabeth, new BFFs...

One man's trash fish is another man's choupique...

If you're ever in Richmond, VA, a trip to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to view this Mary Cassatt painting is a must.

A librarian's work never ends...

France has a cool First Lady, too...

Sunday Gospel Time: Pops Staples sings "Nobody's Fault But Mine":

Weekly Address: "The only way forward is through shared and persistent efforts to combat fear and want wherever they exist"

In this week’s address, filmed aboard Air Force One between vital diplomatic engagements abroad, the President discusses the breadth and depth of the global challenges we face. Recapping his trip, though, it is clear just how much opportunity lies in reshaping America’s relationships around the world. On everything from turning our economy around -- which shed hundreds of thousands more jobs last month -- to ending the threat of nuclear arms, "The only way forward is through shared and persistent efforts to combat fear and want wherever they exist..."

As is well-known, President Obama presented Queen Elizabeth with an iPod when they met last week. What inquiring minds want to know is, did he populate it with selections from his personal play list? From what I've read, she should be so lucky...

Up next, Jeffrey Lebowski...

683 Things About New Orleans...

There are fourteen -- that's right,  fourteen -- festivals in the New Orleans area this weekend, including the Old Algiers River Fest and the Lousiana Oyster Jubilee in the French Quarter. Is this a great town or what?...

Capture the Big Easy memory...

Hey, these people shouldn't have lived near a beaver dam. It's all their own fault:

A breached dam built by a family of beavers sent a 10-foot cascade of water, trees and debris crashing through a little beachfront community here Friday morning.

Eight homes in Clinton were hit, one left tilting after tons of water pushed it from its foundation.

Up the hill, the rushing water left a crater 60 feet wide and 40 feet deep where a blocked culvert caused the road to give way.

Green Onions

We're staving off a global depression and George Will writes about...light bulbs. If conservatism isn't dead, it's sure doing a good job of rendering itself irrelevant...

In a highly useful analysis, the great E. J. Dionne assesses President Obama's relationship to the status quo and his critics on the left:

Without question, President Obama’s tax and budget proposals are daring, and his unwavering commitment to passing health care reform this year is both honorable and gutsy.

But his plan to bail out the banks reveals a deference to the existing financial system, deep worry about further unsettling an already troubled market and a devout hope that the economic situation is not as bad as some economists, notably Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, fear.

Mami Wata...

Currently on Citizen K.'s album rotation:

• Leonard Cohen, Live In London. This guy is 73? You wouldn't know it from listening to this incredibly vital performance. As far reaching as this CD is, it merely scratches the surface of what Cohen has to offer. I can't wait to see him when he's in Seattle later this month.
  
• Asa, [asha]. Anglo-Nigerian singer-songwriter has a silver voice, a heart of gold, and the talent to make them shine.
• Indigo Girls, Poseidon and the Bitter Bay. They just keep getting better. Get the deluxe edition with the second CD that reinterprets the first with all acoustic arrangements.
• Gomez, A New Tide. Endlessly searching and creative, on this release they successfully probe their folk-rock side with an intricacy not often seen in that genre. It's their prog-rock roots that them do this, but who's complaining if it works this well?
• Femi Kuti, Day By Day. Fela Kuti's son comes into his own with this world music masterpiece that augment Afrobeat with robust horns, the Hammond B3, and ominous lyrics like these: "How the richest continent get/Majority of the poorest people/You better ask yourself." Indeed...

Friday's Choice: It's 1966 and Booker T. & The MGs play "Green Onions" on Shindig:

Novels To Read Before You Die: As I Lay Dying

The First Lines that I posted a few weeks ago -- the opening of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying -- contain a cornucopia of information about the remainder of the novel. For starters, in these two simple sentences, Faulkner reveals that he has set this novel in the poor, rural South. We know that the characters are poor because one of them wears a "frayed and broken straw hat," not the kind of haberdashery the well-heeled would wear. By referring to the cottonhouse, Faulkner informs us that is set in that part of the South that grows cotton. Further, we know that the setting is rural because because the two men walk through a field. Finally, the narrator displays the trait of detachment by describing how he would look to someone else. And, of course, we know that Jewel is tall. 

That these sentences convey a great deal of information is certainly no accident. Faulkner must have worked and reworked them to set the scene and tone exactly as he wanted. He tells the story of As I Lay Dying from the first-person perspectives of the poor white Bundren family, a story that descends from the detached to the macabre and that contrasts the corrupt and mad aspects of human nature with the tiny voices of resignation and decency. Faulkner thought it his best novel. That he successfully conveyed so many human truths through the story of an illiterate clan led by a venal and selfish patriarch is a tour de force. Read this book; it's one of Citizen K.'s Novels You Must Read Before You Die (photo by Carl Van Vechten)...

The Decline And Fall Of Newspapers Redux: David Sirota agrees that they have no one to blame but themselves:

Beltway scribes didn't have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren't compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates' positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn't need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren't obligated to focus on "elevat(ing) the most banal doings" in the White House to "breaking news," as The New York Times recently noted.

But that's what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper — rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere.

I'll go even further: There was a complete failure of imagination on the part of newspapers when it came to taking their product to the internet. Unable to see beyond their printing presses, they initially saw their internet sites as an adjunct of the printed paper instead of the other way around. As a result, the web sites simply reproduced the print version, which amounted to a dull and unimaginative approach that did not fully leverage modern technology. 

Moreover, papers remain stuck in a 20th Century business model that stresses competition with other papers instead of a cooperative amalgamation of news and opinion resources. For example, nothing that I know of has prevented Washington state newspapers from developing a single internet portal. This might have attracted more traffic and advertisers and still allowed for print editions. Something like this could have broadened reader perspectives by redefining the meaning of "local" for the 21st Century. Instead, as Sirota writes, we got fluff journalism that reduced the stature of the papers while providing information easily available elsewhere...

If you lived in New Orleans, you could spend this weekend Jammin' on Julia and stuffing your face at the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival with the new NOLA Brown and Blonde Ales as your constant companions...

Seattle actor John Aylward talks about his years as ER's Dr. Donald Anspaugh....

Newsweek's John Barry writes that President Obama must regain the trust of our traditional allies, and that this is a massive undertaking that won't be resolved at the G20 meetings:

It is hard to overestimate the damage that the Bush administration did to America's historic Western alliance. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's offhand dismissal of "Old Europe," as against the new states of Central Europe, set the tone. Rumsfeld later said he'd mangled his text; and in another circumstance the European allies might have accepted that. But Rumsfeld's misspeaking, if that is what it was, points to the real damage. At its root, the Europeans believe they were systematically brushed aside—even lied to. At the depth of the Iraq debacle, one senior adviser at No. 10 Downing Street exclaimed: "We've been betrayed by a bunch of incompetents in Washington." Tony Blair, Brown's predecessor and that official's admired boss, was effectively destroyed by his support of W. The same adviser is now in Britain's Washington embassy. Does anyone believe he has forgotten what prompted his outburst?...

Where is Diogenes when we need him?...

Rushbo Stupidism of the Day:

By the way, my firm belief is the stock market -- what is it up now? Waiting for the number -- it's hovering around 260, 265, 270, whatever it is. And I maintain this is because President Obama is out of the country. The market loves it when Oba -- oh, it's up 306. There must be news that he's extending his stay overseas. There must be news he's not coming back as soon as they thought he might be going back. I mean, the markets going nuts, and the only thing here that's different is that Obama's gone. He's out of the country. If Obama said that he'd stay out of the country for a month, the markets would hit 8,500 today. They'd jump another three or four hundred. In fact, all he would have to say is that he's extending his stay for maybe a couple of weeks.

One Reason Why Newspapers Are In Decline

Newspaper executives are like Republicans: They blame everyone but themselves for their declining constituency and show no respect for the adversaries -- in this case, the blogosphere -- who are kicking their butts. Take this Olympian drivel about the auto industry from David Brooks of the New York Times and Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times (here and here). Neither writer can remove his ideological blinders in the interests of providing serious analysis or looking at the human dimension.  

Contrast their nonsense with these posts ("Maybe It's Time To Talk About The 'B' Word" and "More On That 'Surgical' Bankruptcy") from Kathy at Stone Soup Musings. From "The 'B' Word":

I'm feeling a combination of anger and fear about our auto industry's future, but I also feel a sense of resignation. How much longer can we continue this way? We're dying slowly, one excruciating job loss at a time, and it's like torture. I'm beginning to think maybe it's time to call in the triage team, or in this case the restructuring team.

She then goes on to explain the intricacies of Section 363 of the bankruptcy code and why that might be the best course for Obama and the automakers. 

From "Surgical":

An auto bankruptcy could cost one-third of the three million people employed in the industry and shave four percentage points from our GDP according to a Deutsche Bank analyst. I guess that's why Obama called it a "surgical bankruptcy" in his address on Monday. Losing that many people would be like losing a limb in order to save your life. That's the bad news.

There is some good news though, at least for GM. An article in the NY Times reports the "government may seek to ease General Motors into what it calls a “controlled” bankruptcy, somewhere between a prepackaged bankruptcy and court chaos, by persuading at least some creditors to agree to a plan that would cleave the company into two pieces."

You don't have to agree with her conclusions to take the point that Kathy simply offers a more thorough analysis (not to mention a human connection) than a newspaper editor and a columnist writing from one of the most respected forums in the world.

There's a common-sense aspect to the auto companies' dilemma, something that no MSM commentator seems remotely aware of. Despite general mismanagement and inept boards, an awful lot of knowledge about car making has accumulated in Michigan, knowledge that we as nation should resist tossing into a junkyard. Properly led and with the right mission, the white- and blue-collar workers of GM and Chrysler could put the United States in a leadership position when it comes to the next generation of green cars. Why doesn't David Brooks write about that?...

Don't miss these incredible pictures from Chernobyl...

Bobby Jindal to the arts in Louisiana: Drop dead...

Norm Coleman (remember him?) is a sore loser. So why doesn't the so-called liberal media say so?...

This just in: GOP proposes tax cuts and a domestic spending freeze. Stop the presses...