Three sweet words: pitchers and catchers.
If you play one of those positions, today’s reporting day for most MLB teams. To a season which can’t come soon enough.
Man that’s a tough three days between the Super Bowl and Spring Training.
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With little on the schedule other than watching movies and ballgames on TV I’ve just completed one of my more enjoyable weekends in recent memory.
But shoot now it’s over, and as these things go nighttime doesn’t seem nearly as fun the morning after.
Mark my words, one day the NFL will either add another game to the schedule or shift the whole business forward one week so the Super Bowl aligns with President’s Day weekend. I’d like to say it’s all about the kids, but who am I kidding? It’s for us.
President’s Day is a silly holiday (more on that later), but Super Bowl Monday sounds completely legitimate.
You heard it here first.
There have been 56 Super Bowls played in NFL history. I’ve seen 33 of them, mostly in friends’ houses or on tiny kitchen TVs. (That would be tiny TVs. The kitchens have been big, as in restaurant kitchens.)
This one I’m watching at home, my new home with my wife and son. No doubt I’ll be regaling them with tales of Super Bowls past. Stories like these, heard on this week’s episode of Math and Musings.
The last few weeks I’ve been growing out my beard. No particular reason why, just something different.
Several years ago I’d stopped doing this because it was coming in the wrong color (“sparkly” was my son’s polite euphemism) but now I’ve embraced the grey.
Problem is I’m just not a beard guy, which brings me to my current problem.
Over the weekend I renewed my driver’s license and of course I was photographed–with the beard.
So now I kind of own in until 2027.
Whoops.
Well, by then my actual beard will be fully grey so it still won’t look like me.
Joke’s on them.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Located in the heart of the Inner Harbor, it truly is one of the great marine and architectural wonders of the world.
They’ve got thousand-pound sharks who will swim right up to you, giant tortoises a century old. The peacock mantis shrimp? They’ve got several. Ditto the white-blotched river stingray and the hyacinth macaw.
You can touch a jellyfish if you’d like.
The cafeteria’s got some pretty delicious wares…
but ask for a straw and they look at you like a 20th-century cretin.
Today’s date is February 2, 2023, or in numbers, 2/3/23.
I don’t have to explain how cool this is, but if you’d like an explanation of such, check out today’s episode of Math and Musings.
Seeing a Birthday Cake-flavored Kit Kat in a store is a little like seeing a unicorn in the wild. I know these things aren’t new, just rare, and when you see one you grab it.
It’s kind of fits the birthday cake creed, actually. Rule #1 with birthday cakes is: take a slice, find out whose birthday it is later.
Ernie Banks, Jackie Robinson, and Nolan Ryan, actually, from my quick search into yesterday’s birthday list.
Birthday Cake Kit Kats?
My local Walmart.
Great work, Kit Kats. Great work, Walmart.
One of my quests this year is for my son to watch all the classic movies from my childhood with me: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, etc.
Last night’s offering was E.T. Actually the name of the movie is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial but my son’s first lesson about the film was that no one calls it that. E.T. will do.
From time to time as we watch these movies I find myself having to explain various plot points. For example, the scene where Elliot is drunk because E.T. is drunk. My son had no trouble identifying the drunkenness, actually, but trying to explain how he and Elliot were sharing one another’s feelings I sort of muffed.
Me: Uh, they’re like, morphed together somehow?
My son: “They’re synced.”
Wow.
We definitely should have had that word in the ’80s.
Sometimes you just have to put a clickbait title on your podcast episode.
To find out the real topic, you’ll have to listen to today’s episode of Math and Musings.
I was born on June 7, 1982.
Until last night I never knew that on this date the most storied franchise in American sports drafted arguably the greatest athlete ever to don a baseball, football, or track and field uniform.
Bo Jackson never played for the New York Yankees, but I appreciated reading about the connection (among other things) in Jeff Pearlman’s new book, The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson.
Pearlman is the bestselling author of nearly a dozen books, among them The Bad Guys Won (about the 1980s Mets) and Winning Time (about the 1980s Lakers). Now writing about 1980s baseball and football–does this guy know me or what?–Pearlman has found another sweet spot.
He admits the phrase “last folk hero” isn’t his. Hot take from Joe Posnanski. And it is ever so apt. Before there was YouTube or the ubiquity of recording devices, one had to be seen to be known. Growing up in rural Alabama, dirt poor and Black (sorry, but it’s an important part of the story), not many people saw Bo Jackson. Just heard of him. Maybe. Heard from someone who heard from someone. Like stories about Paul Bunyan or John Henry.
Some of these stories are familiar. (Yeah, he could jump over a parked car.) Some of them are new. (Wrestling a boar hog? Bo‘ hog? That’s where “Bo” came from?) Some live in history books or can be documented now with this thing called the Internet. (Scored the game-winning touchdown in a one-point win for Auburn over Alabama, Bo’s freshman season.)
But some stories… well, maybe they’re just the work of folk heroes.