Our daffodil shoots have been emerging around the yard for awhile, so I’ve been wondering where the crocuses are. Wonder no more. They’re here. Yellow. Purple. White (shown above).
Daffodils next. Tulips. Peonies. Roses. Well, no rush. But the process has begun.
In his blog two days ago, NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a post, Throwing Schools out the Window, that opens with the observation, “So this is what the Senate seems to be coming down to: keeping bridges and throwing students out the window. The effort to prune the stimulus package to make it more palatable to Republicans is focused on slashing money for education.”
Let me quote more from Kristof, since his remarks made a strong impression on me:
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Kellogg announced Thursday that it would not renew its contract with Olympic swimming hero MIchael Phelps,in the wake of his being photographed with a marijuana pipe. The NYT quotes Kellogg spokeswoman Susanne Norwitz’s statement that “Michael’s most recent behavior is not consistent with the image of Kellogg.”
Over at the Huffington Post, Lee Stranahan prepared a petition to boycott Kellogg for its treatment of Phelps. The petition notes in part that “Kellogg’s has profited for decades on the food tastes of marijuana using Americans with the munchies. In fact, we believe that most people over the age of twelve would not eat Kellogg’s products were they not wicked high.”
I read about the petition yesterday morning from an Andrew Sullivan blog post. Last night I mentioned it to Gail, focusing on the notion that one can’t eat Kellogg products unless one’s high. She said that’s right, and gave a real-life example.
As you may know, Gail is the chef two days a week at a residential treatment center for women who have young children or are pregnant and are dealing with addiction problems. One such client, a methadone addict, was not doing well in the program. And not eating well either. All she wanted was Rice Krispies. After she left, an illegal stash of Rice Krispies was found in her room.
Stranahan was onto something.
A week ago I had a post about John Updike that focused on his famous 1960 New Yorker article about Ted Williams’ final at bat. I noted that my favorite sportswriter (Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star and SI) and my favorite radio host (Jonathan Schwartz of WNYC), in reminiscing about Updike, focused on this article. Now the greatest of all living baseball writers, Roger Angell, has weighed in, in a lovely short piece in the current New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, and he too speaks of the Ted Williams article.
Angell, of course, is the embodiment of New Yorker history: son of early New Yorker writer and editor Katharine (Sergeant Angell) White, stepson of fellow New Yorker writer E. B. White (yes, that E. B. White — Charlotte’s Web, Strunk and White, etc.), long-time New Yorker fiction editor himself, and starting in 1962, unparalleled baseball essayist in the pages of the New Yorker.
In the current New Yorker remembrance of Updike, Angell notes that they were “Colleagues for more than half a century, writer-editor partners for more than half that time.” I close with Angell’s account of Updike’s Ted Williams piece:
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In my previous post, I mentioned a correction that appeared on the NYT’s op-ed page Thursday and raised the question of whether they do fact-checking anymore. I saw the correction in the morning. Coincidentally, when I got home Thursday night, I opened the newly-arrived issue of the New Yorker and found an article on fact-checking by John McPhee. (My link goes to the abstract only, since the article isn’t available for free.) It’s a short piece about New Yorker fact-checking policies and some of his own experiences over the years. And of course it’s a delight to read.
If you have access to the article, be sure to read it. Here’s a taste:
The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of [fact-checker] Josh Hersh, “It really annoys them.” [Famed New Yorker fact-checker] Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.
Two days ago, on its op-ed page, the New York Times had one of the most stunning corrections I’ve ever read. It had to do with an op-ed piece on the Heimlich maneuver by noted food writer Joan Nathan that had appeared the day before. I had seen Nathan’s article but didn’t pay it much attention, since I imagined that the headline (“A Heimlich in Every Pot) and the blurb (“Every chef should be able to save a choking victim. I should know.”) said everything that needed to be said. But the correction led me back to the article to see the two errors in context.
You won’t find the errors on line anymore. They’ve been corrected. I’ll describe them in a moment. But first let me say a few words about the incident that led to the article. Ezra Klein, noted blogger on health and food policy, wrote about it the next day, and I’ll quote his account.
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I’ve had a long post brewing in my mind since December about the mainstream media, the effect blog reading has had on my newspaper reading habits, and why I find myself missing certain aspects of daily newspaper reading less and less (even as we continue to take three newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — and even as I spend more time reading news on line than I may ever have spent reading the papers). That post may yet get written. But in the meantime, I will quote from a blog post this morning of Paul Krugman, who in turn refers to a blog post yesterday of Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
The starting point is remarks the Washington Post’s David Broder made about the stimulus package in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. See the video above. Key quote: “it’s much better off if it includes the best thinking that’s available in both parties, not just one party.” Once upon a time, I liked reading David Broder. That time ended years ago, and this quote is as good an example of why as any. But let’s listen to Paul Krugman.
… the part that really got me was Broder saying that we need “the best ideas from both parties.”
You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.
Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground.
This post is for baseball fans. If that’s not you, you can skip it. And in any case, I have nothing original to say. I simply want to draw your attention to Joe Posnanski’s latest post at his blog today. In it, without naming names until the end, he lays out the case for a particular contemporary baseball player to be regarded as “baseball’s greatest winner.” As one reads along, one’s thoughts may drift to Derek Jeter, but Posnanski anticipates this and says no, that’s not who he’s talking about. Finally, at the end, he reveals the player’s identity. Go to Posnanski’s post for the details. Below I will get you started. And if you don’t want to go to Posnanski’s post, after the jump I’ll tell you who Posnanski is describing.
I’m thinking of a baseball player who has never played for a losing team. Not even once. Well, that’s not technically true: He played very briefly for a terrible team when he was 21, a team that had been terrible for a very, very long time. Then, the next year, his rookie year, that terrible team became instantly great. And he helped lead his team to the World Series the very next year.
The guy has never, ever played for a loser since. Not ever. He carried his teams to the playoffs 10 times in his 15 full seasons, and four times those teams went to the World Series. His teams, over his rather lengthy career, have a .578 winning percentage, which is rather incredible. …
But it’s even more than his winning percentages. He helped turned around the fortunes of one dying franchise. He helped end one of the longest droughts in American sports. He turned around a third team instantly after being traded there. This isn’t like the story of Derek Jeter, who wins every year but always for the New York Yankees. No. Wherever this guy goes, no matter the tradition, no matter curses, no matter anything, his teams win. HIs teams win big.
You could argue based on all this, that this player is the greatest winner of his generation. We all know that one player in baseball cannot make the whole difference, one player cannot turn a bad team into a good one. But you can’t argue with the man’s record. He’s a winner. He might even be THE winner.
I was sorry to read today that the composer-conductor-pianist Lukas Foss died yesterday. I never saw him conduct, and I heard very little of his music, but I have the fondest memories of him. He spent the 1970-1971 academic year as a visiting faculty member at Harvard, and by happy coincidence that’s the year I took the year-long survey course Music 1. David Hughes was the instructor, but Hughes would bring in guest lecturers on occasion, and Lukas Foss was a regular guest. His appearances were the highlight of the course. Well, that’s not quite true. The highlight of the course was the music. Every day brought new discoveries for me, immersed as I was at the time in rock music and ignorant as I was of classical. I would sit in the language lab in the basement of Boylston Hall and listen to tape after tape. But the highlight of my time in the Paine Hall lecture room was Lukas Foss, with his warm personality, sense of humor, impromptu playing of pieces at the piano, and delightful accent.
Reading the obituary, I see that his year at Harvard was the year between his service (1963-1970) as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and his becoming principal conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra (1971–90). The following two paragraphs from the NYT obituary give some idea of his significance:
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I joined Gail to watch the Super Bowl coverage yesterday just as the coin-toss participants come onto the field for the pre-game ritual. Having not read about the special guest coin tosser, I was surprised to see General Petraeus being introduced in that role. And disappointed. I would prefer that football just be football, not an exercise in patriotism and support for the troops. Today I read the article at the US Army news website by Staff Sgt. Michael J. Carden about the coin toss. Below are quotes from an NFL spokesman:
“The NFL has had a longstanding tradition of supporting the military,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told American Forces Press Service during a phone interview. “We have a great appreciation for what the military does and feel honored to include the military in the Super Bowl.” …
“[The NFL] feels that the 70,000 fans attending the Super Bowl this year should be cheering louder for the military than the two teams playing,” he said. “It is, indeed, very important for the NFL to look for every opportunity to support the troops.”
It’s hard to take this quote seriously. Indeed, the NFL doesn’t even look for every opportunity to support its own former players with medical problems. And anyway, what does it even mean for the NFL as an entity to have great appreciation for what the military does?
In any case, here’s an idea. Why doesn’t the NFL have each team donate some modest percentage of its profits to the welfare of our veterans?
