* I can’t claim to have been a particular fan of Harry Kalas, but my heart goes out to two generations of fans who don’t know the Phillies any other way. In a world where, as Jerry Seinfeld memorably said, we wind up “rooting for laundry,” the voice of the play-by-play is often the heart and soul of a franchise. Ask the Dodger fans about Vin Scully, or Cal fans about Joe Starkey. For me, obviously, it’s Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff, two old guys from another NFL era whose style and sensibility is largely borrowed from those two old Muppets up in the balcony – imagining the Redskins without them is something I’d rather not consider without a stiff drink to hand.
* If a bank is so bothered by restrictions on CEO compensation that they’d rather just give their bailout money back, I question whether they ever needed the money in the first place.
* The old family team is safe in the Scottish First Division, two points behind Partick Thistle. The dream of the SPL will have to be deferred another year, but then, Celtic are only on a one-point lead over the Hun at the moment.
* Speaking of the Hun, I’ve been giving the Anglican Communion another look, albeit from a safe distance – having done the Catholic thing at Easter again, I’m starting to get the sense that I might just want to throw in my lot with a leaner, whippier version of the same. And, I’ll be brutally honest here, one that has a lot lower barrier to entry…although I think that my urgent need to have something, anything, to say I belong to – well, it’s less an issue than it was previously.
* Now that you’ve climbed up there, it’s a hell of a lot higher than it looks, ain’t it? If you seriously think the DHS report about right-wing terrorism* is directed at you, I would strongly suggest you’ve got a tin ear for all the people who spent the last few years saying “what are you gonna think of this kind of government power when Hillary’s President?” Or a guilty conscience. But hey – if you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? (disengage sarcasto-drive)
* Nothing more annoying than being in IT and having someone else’s major IT system go out. Nobody says “Wow, those dumbasses at Core don’t know how to keep an SMTP system running,” they say “Hey you, my email doesn’t work!” Then again, I do have a lot of people who can magically negotiate Yahoo Messenger, AOL Radio and some entertainment blog at once without a hitch – and then, when I ask them to go to a URL and change a setting, they turn into Sammy Sosa testifying before Congress. “Ahh…ummm…no habla Computer.” Say what you like about the youth of America, but I never have this conversation with anybody under 30.
* You know, I think all the coverage of Bo the First Dog is just fine, for two reasons: 1) The dog is named indirectly after Bo Diddley (pray for us) which is an unalloyed good. 2) Covering pictures of a cute puppy is just about the level of intellectual challenge that cable news is capable of handling without hurting themselves. I get the feeling that if I ever kicked down Wolf Blitzer’s door and demanded to know the three constituent parts of the Iron Trangle, he would burst into tears and piss himself.**
* It’s really not good for IT to be regarded as some kind of weird clan of magicians. Largely because people who believe in magic have a poor grasp on things like cause and effect, not to mention the limitations imposed by natural phenomena like time, space, and budgets. Yes, I am very very good at what I do. No, I cannot raise the dead. And even if I could, I wouldn’t start with your Dell POS.
* Dell is shit. That’s right, I said it. If I get my hands on our Dell rep, I’ma give him an Irish blanket party and a wood shampoo that even the immortal Marc Radi would bow before. Dell rep, DEAD. Dell tech, DEAD. Marmalard, DEAD – no sir, Dee Snider ain’t gonna take it anymore and neither are we, sir, brace yourself, for the storm is coming, and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Chitwood and John Cougar are riding its cresting wave, and by the time you make it back to the surface we’re gonna wing it over to London and jam with Mick and the Stones.
I woke up in a great mood. I don’t know what the hell happened.***
* Bit of a sore point for me, as my hometown is singularly defined by right-wing terrorism to the point that it was nicknamed based on the number of acts that went on routinely.
** As defined in classic political science and public policy, an “Iron Triangle” is the interdependent contrivance of an issue lobby, a Congressional committee, and the executive-branch bureaucracy, the latter two specific to the issue at hand. Go re-read Wildavsky’s book on policy implementation, cleverly titled “Implementation.” See, pretty smart to come up with shit like that, right? Hold the applause…
*** Mike Damone gets a nickel. He probably needs it.