Ten Things I Think

   I had a bunch of random thoughts on my mind and decided to incorporate them into the blog.

I am hoping to make this a regular feature, so I am looking for a name for this- drop me a line through whatever avenue that you read this and if I select something that I like, I'll try to scrape up a prize of some type for the winner...

1) As an avowed mustard lover and one that usually has several in the fridge such as Cleveland's Bertman's, Harrisburg's Miller's, and others that look interesting in the store- a new contender has emerged- Plochman's "The Works".

The Works says it's a Chicago-style mustard with relish already in it and it is definitely a must (pun-intended) for those of you that like relish and/or dill pickles.

The lovely Cherie also swears by this one, and the only one of the local supermarkets that carry it is Weis Markets, so give the Works a try, should you see it available.

2) I try to watch fewer political programs of late mainly because I feel that so few are where I'm at politically and that few are able to play anything other than a game of "What About"?

Is it possible that maybe just maybe, one can believe that wrong is wrong for ills from either side of the fence and not make it only about ideological "friends and enemies"?

3) I suppose this is why I do like the Bulwark because it seems the closest to what I believe.

I'm maybe slightly to their left socially and pretty even up fiscally, but they are closest to my feeling of you can say the Andrew Cuomo's are awful as well as disliking the former president and not be wrong.

4) One final political note- I've also cut back my political podcast listening for a bit and why I haven't added any pay products of late, but I always stop and listen when Amanda Carpenter makes a podcast appearance (Or her CNN spots, but I've got that cut back as well).

I'm a big fan of her writing and I promise (on the word of my financial backer Fred Landucci! Ha Ha!) if the podcast returns, I'll take a shot at trying to get her to do it!

5) I'm not as down as many on Carolina trading for Sam Darnold for a 2021 6th and 2022 2nd and 4th with the Jets.

Matt Rhule and Joe Brady might have luck with Darnold that the Jets never had, but Darnold should have no excuses this time if his career doesn't progress.

6) One thing that I've missed from Covid-19 is a good Chinese food buffet.

Sadly, I'm afraid that few large restaurants will return from Covid.

Insurance will likely be higher and would-be owners will be more reluctant to open an already difficult business to start up.

7) I was really hoping that North Carolina would hire Steve Robinson to replace Roy Williams just so I could once again see Steve Robinson pull a "Steve Robinson".

8) For as much as I love the internet, the information at your fingertips, and all that you can read, it's sad that a generation will go by to not know the excitement of seeing a new sports magazine or comic book in a grocery store or pharmacy and have it be a complete surprise.

Looking for the latest boxing magazine, Street and Smith's sports preview, issue of Green Lantern, or a pack of Topps at a Sheetz or 7-11 was a thrill for a kid that loved to collect and read, and losing that is an underrated factor in why kids are losing interest in so many things that kids loved in previous eras.

9) The mail still is the main avenue that this country uses for getting packages and their needs.

No matter what the internet has improved on billing and purchasing, there still is a need to move those items from the start to your home or business.

The USPS has flaws, but they have been bloated out of control since Louis DeJoy was installed to "fix" it- His latest idea is to charge more, slow their service, and have fewer open hours for the various offices around the country.

The answer is plain- this is not how normal businesses are "fixed". 

It's time for him to go.

10) If I could change one thing to streamline healthcare, it would be to make a universal insurance/payment card that all companies would need to provide.

A friend's wife works at a local doctor's office and she reports that is the biggest hassle with multiple companies doing their cards in different formats, making them harder to decipher, slowing the process down, which can result in mistakes to squeeze between the cracks.

Is it asking too much for one format?

Hope you like this post, I haven't felt like writing about baseball with the Indians' gumball-like bats of late, so thought I would do something different.

Back later, with a turkey in the backyard and I was glad Fred Landucci wasn't driving in the area at the time!

Cleaning out the Inbox- Send it in Jerome Edition

I know this will be a non-sports edition with links from the political world and most of those are notes from The Bulwark, but one of the links by Amanda Carpenter "Mail It In" made me think of what I think of every time I hear the phrase "Send It In"- the 1988 backboard breaking dunk by Pitt's Jerome Lane with color commentator Bill Raftery screaming the phrase that lives on 32 years later.

We'll start with two Bulwark columns from Amanda Carpenter with the first being the aforementioned "Mail It In" with the discussion centered around having voting more accessible by mail for November's election.
Sixteen states currently require a "reason" to vote absentee and even though Maryland is not one of those states, I still think that giving voters more avenues to cast their votes can be a good thing.
I've voted absentee on several occasions and for a country that doesn't have a holiday to allow people to have the day off to vote, it only makes good sense.
While I understand that the chances of fraud do increase with paper/mail ballots, I'm not sure it is any higher than tabulating results via computer and we've seen how that can turn out.
With the almost guaranteed heat and fury that November's election is going to bring from supporters of and against the President, absentee voting might avoid some potential incidents at polling places and that alone might be worth the effort to expand the paper voting into all states for at least this November's election.

Carpenter also writes of conservative commentator Michelle Malkin and her gradual drift downstream from conservatism to radicalism.
Malkin, who once was a regular on cable news networks, has become almost persona non grata for television or even mainstream conservatives and unless you still read her column on a dwindling amount of news outlets, has faded from the scene.
Carpenter gives far more detail than I can in her article, but the article shows that no matter the topic or belief just how quickly one can fade from the scene.

More Bulwark as Richard North Patterson writes the six lessons learned from the Democratic primaries and how they could relate to the November elections.
The analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various candidates and how they define the party entering the next stage is quite interesting and could say a lot on the eventual message for the showdown with Donald Trump and maybe even 2024.

One final Bulwark note as Gregg Hurwitz tells the reader that "We can wake up now" from the Donald Trump experiment.
Many voting for Trump in 2016 did so because they wanted someone that would "blow things up", "wanted a businessman" or just plain couldn't stand Hillary Clinton.
While I could understand all of those various reasons, I couldn't seriously consider voting for Donald Trump and didn't do so (For the record, I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton either) because I knew the background, the record, and I wasn't remotely convinced that any of the hype was sincere.
I don't hold the Democrats innocent for 2016 for shoving a candidate to the forefront that was so disliked that they lost an election that was handed to them to win and I also hold the left accountable for being so stringent to their beliefs that they didn't bother to show up at the polls.
Hurwitz writes how it happened in 2016, how it led to where we are today, and what it will take to reverse the decision in November.

The Atlantic's Peter Wehner wraps us up with the temperament of the President for dealing with the Covid 19 crisis and why he is so ill-suited to lead in times of stress.
I'm not going to mention why this is so, although even the most fervent supporter of the President knows that these are the actual characteristics as in many cases it's those characteristics that earned their vote.
Covid 19 won't roll over in fear, it could care less about a nasty Tweet, it cannot be affected by changing its name and it will not give the time of day to "as I like to call" mundane nicknames.
Whether you think Covid 19 is a crisis or simply media-hyped flu (and I know plenty of friends and others that believe either side), the tactics of the last four years isn't going to stop it cold.
Finally, the President has to deal with something that will not be intimidated and won't dodge in fear or shame.

Cleaning out the inbox- Non-Sports version

After cleaning the sports portion of the inbox, we now move onto the non-sports chunk to be tidied up as we begin with some classic television notes.

As I was reading another classic television piece, I stumbled upon this one which was very well done on a long time TRS favorite "I Dream of Jeannie".
CloserWeekly.com is the host for the long and well-written article on the show, which I have loved since a toddler.
"Jeannie" is one of those 60s shows with a silly premise that much like pro wrestling that you have to set aside the ridiculousness and enjoy a show that just makes you laugh.
Sure, Barbara Eden is downright gorgeous (For my money, using sports style drafting such as I'd take 1968 Bob Gibson as my pitcher in any game, etc, 1966-70 Barbara Eden in Jeannie is my first selection in the beautiful actress draft without a doubt. Call me out now.), but Larry Hagman was terrific in his role as the leading man and pratfall taker and with several talented character actors in Bill Daily, Hayden Roarke and Emmaline Henry to name a few, Jeannie makes me smile and laugh as very few shows do.

What brought me to CloserWeekly was a similar article on "Nanny and the Professor", a show that I remembered faintly from my childhood.
While Jeannie ended in the 1969-1970 and my memories are all from syndication,  my limited memories of "Nanny and the Professor" were mainly from its placement on the ABC schedule in 1970-1971, exactly in between "Brady Bunch" and "Partridge Family".
The ratings in between those shows were good, but an FCC decision for the 1971-72 television season doomed this show which starred Juliet Mills (a long time TV veteran in the United States and the United Kingdom) and Richard Long ( who was a star on the 60s western The Big Valley).
Pre-1971, prime time television started at 7;30, not the current eight o'clock.
The change in prime time meant something had to go and despite Nanny being the eight o'clock program, it was the show bumped from the kid-friendly lineup.
After a move to the more adult Monday schedule, Nanny and the Professor didn't last long and was gone after that season.

We move to the Alzheimer's Association website as the daughter of the late Glen Campbell writes about some of the problems that her father struggled with.
Ashley Campbell writes of the battle and how Alzheimer's is such an insidious disease.
I cannot imagine what an afflicted person and their families have to go through when something like a brain disease strikes a person.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer writes of the recent 50th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River "catching fire" in 1969 and looks back at the event, the River's past and its present.
Even though the Cuyahoga didn't really catch fire (it was floating pollution on the top of it put there by industrial factories) and it was far from the first time that pollution had ignited, it was the 1969 fire reported nationally by Time magazine that woke people up to just what was being done to natural resources and in many ways could be regarded as the start of the environmental movement.
Today, the Cuyahoga has been improved significantly through regulation and cleanup to the point that in March, the Ohio EPA declared fish caught in the river between Cleveland and Cuyahoga Falls safe to eat for the first time in fifty years.

Two political notes that I found interesting with the first being an opinion piece in Politico by Republican commentator Amanda Carpenter on newly resigned White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Carpenter discusses Sanders role in not answering right-wing smears from the 2016 campaign from the Donald Trump team that Carpenter, who formerly worked for then-Trump rival Ted Cruz's Senate office and a "Never Trump" Republican, had slept with Cruz.
Carpenter rightfully calls out Sanders' remarkably high number of lies and then claims she is writing the column to place her version of the story to "warn the voters of Arkansas about Sanders".
Arkansas is where Sanders is rumored to be running for Governor in 2022.

The second goes to Vogue, who followed the controversial left-wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for 36 hours.
"AOC" has already become a polarizing figure in American politics and it is not difficult to figure out why that is with her ability to find cameras and her age, which has attracted many and repelled others.
No matter your opinion of her politics, it's interesting to see just how busy she is over a specified time period.

Dr.Lisa Alexander sent me this article from Rich Lowry and National Review on Oriole Park at Camden Yards and how it began the retro ballpark process for new stadiums.
The article reviews the new book "Ballpark" by Paul Goldsberger (who is an architectural critic and not a baseball writer)  discusses stadiums along the way and the impact that they have had on the urban surroundings.
One interesting note was how Oriole Park almost didn't become the standard bearer for ballparks as it was originally slated to be another concrete two-team stadium (having the ability to house a football team as the Ravens hadn't been stolen from Cleveland at that time) and might have been placed in a Baltimore suburb.
Count me out on the former and in on the latter- I like the television look of an urban ballpark, but despise all the traffic and urban issues that come with it.

We wrap up with a sad note on satire that's not satirical as it appears that Mad Magazine is about to be the latest casualty of the internet and all the choices that one has and will be printing its final magazine later this year.
I think almost every boy of a certain age read Mad or at least tried it with its satire on about everything from film and television to society at large and like so many things from childhood can be better remembered through memory.
My brother and I used to read Mad with some variation of its iconic face, the gap-toothed Alfred E, Neumann all the time and I remember passing around Mad (and its lesser selling challengers Cracked from 1958-2007 and Crazy 1973-1983) between just as we would the latest issue of World Boxing or Pro Wrestling Illustrated.
It's sad to see an icon of over 67 years go away, but Mad wasn't just another iconic magazine to go away, it was a sign of our changing culture.
I love the internet and all that it offers, but Mad was an object of a simpler time where kids ( and adults too) needed a satirical release that other outlets didn't cover.
I haven't read an issue in lord knows how long and I don't remember if even by Ryan's childhood that he was reading Mad, but I still feel like something tangible was lost today.
Changing times claims another.

Man, that was a lot of heavy lifting, but the inbox is now lighter.
I still have to put together a post that peeks at some recent passings and a recent day trip to a new ballpark, but without a boxing challenge this week, I might have the time to do something different as well.