Question: What has Joe Biden done every day of his presidency?
Answer: Set a record for being America’s oldest President.
Reply
Every so often I like to keep up with what “the masses” are reading, embarking on a fiction journey worthy of third-grade prose and soap opera substance.
That’s me reading 28 Summers, the 2020 beach book written by the dean of all beach book authors, Elin Hilderbrand.
I think my opinion of its literary merit is already clear, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t enjoy the guilty pleasure of such artistic slumming. The book is not without its amusing sections. And I love how the conflicts last only a few pages, like a series of rom-coms all with happy endings.
Case in point, when our protagonist (who, ironically, would laugh at beach books) meets an apparent Mr. Right at a Nantucket bar. (A few pages later it’s revealed he’s married… whoops!) Suitor discloses he doesn’t read much fiction, perhaps only that related to sports or history or other unwoke subjects. I should have known he was not a perfect mate when he admits his favorite book is David Halberstam’s October 1964.
Ha!
My favorite book!
One of the funnier bumper stickers I’ve seen in recent years reads: “I’d rather be living in an Elin Hilderbrand novel.”
That does sound great…
though I’d probably be the bad guy!
I used to see a house in my neighborhood selling for 400 grand and think what kind of gold-plated underground secret fortress is that place hiding?
Now when I see a house in my neighborhood selling for 400 grand I think…
What’s wrong with the place?
I knew the deGrom jinx would work.
Walking off the mound Wednesday evening, having given up an awful one run in six innings, deGrom’s otherworldly ERA+ had fallen to 744, only about triple that produced by the greatest pitchers in the greatest seasons of all time.
DeGrom has given up exactly two earned runs this season in 35 innings. Both have resulted in losses. His record is 2-2, probably the most spectacular 2-2 in history. He’s pretty much been snakebitten his entire career; remember, this guy won two straight Cy Youngs being a total of four games over .500.
Several times this season deGrom has helped himself at the plate. (Maybe that’s the only way he can get a W.) Alas, ol’ Jake was 0-2 with the bat on Wednesday, his average crashing down to .462.
Still not bad, I guess.
I know, I know, small sample size, but you gotta love this one, from the world of baseball.
New York Mets (and former Binghamton Met) phenom Jacob deGrom’s first four starts this year have yielded an ERA+ of 1227.
(Dramatic pause.)
A little context on what that actually means.
Your average pitcher has an ERA+ of 100. There’s a little more to it that this but let’s go with the following, that an ERA+ of 200 means one is twice as good as the average pitcher, and an ERA+ of 300 means he’s three times as good.
So yeah, deGrom is 12 times as good as the average pitcher so far this year.
(Pause again.)
A little more context…
The highest single-season ERA+ in modern times is Pedro Martinez’s 291 in 2000. Greg Maddux approached 300 a couple times in the ’90s as well. A paltry sum compared to deGrom.
Sandy Koufax in ’66 had a 190.
Bob Gibson in ’68?
258.
So yeah, deGrom’s about five times as good as that.
Whoa.
And he’s hitting .545.
I can see it now… those Standard Time diehards, protesting the state of Georgia’s proposed legislation to make Daylight Savings Time permanent. Pretty soon they’ll be canceling Atlanta sports contests and boycotting peaches and such over it.
I tried to attend one of their rallies but I mistakenly showed up an hour after it had already started. Or maybe I was an hour early. I was pretty confused about the whole thing.
Don’t look now but my hometown NBA team (that would be the Washington Wizards) are in sole possession of 10th place—and the final playoff spot—in the Eastern Conference.
Tonight the Wiz take on the once formidable Oklahoma City Thunder. OKC has lost 12 straight games and is ripe for unlucky number thirteen. Washington, meanwhile, has won eight of 10.
A few more and even I’d vote for DC statehood.
An all-too-popular conspiracy theory, floating through the American psyche and blogosphere since March 2020, is that COVID-19 is actually some grand government plan to expand the size of the state and keep citizens subservient for the rest of human civilization.
None of us is allowed to go anywhere or do anything or conduct any business. (Not quite, I know, but it’s not exactly 2019 here.)
Interesting theory.
I think the greater danger today and moving forward is that it is not a government edict keeping us from interacting with one another. We’ve just gotten so comfortable being distant (in all senses of the word) and having excuses for not doing things that the effect is the same as the giant boot of the state.
Dang.
(And if the conspiracy theory is true… wow, that worked out better than they could have imagined, eh?)
Let’s prove them wrong.
As of tomorrow I go from seeing a quarter of my students a quarter of the time to seeing half of my students half of the time.
Tell me how that math adds up and you can take over my classes for me.
I’m in the middle of two stories right now, both related, I suppose, to the idea of manhood. One more explicitly than the other. The first is my new book, To Raise a Boy, by Emma Brown, she of I-broke-the-Brett-Kavanaugh-
Speaking of sensitivity, or being “woke,” or New Age, or whatever our definition of non-traditional maleness may be these days, there is the documentary I just began. It’s Ken Burns’s Hemingway, and details the life and work of a man and era when “woke” meant something you did every morning, not something you blogged about.
Is there any more traditional American tough guy male than Ernest Hemingway? (John Wayne? Theodore Roosevelt?) That’s where the film starts of course. But if you’ve ever seen or read anything about Hemingway–who hasn’t?–you know that his biographers have identified soft spots in Papa’s behavior, sometimes looking no further than his own writing.
I’ve only just begun both pieces. If either or both are worthy of further comment rest assured it will find its way here.
How to raise a sensitive Hemingway in a world in which every man is feared as the brutish Hemingway. Might be an impossible dream.
But isn’t it pretty to think so?