Once you let hatred into your heart, it’s over. It’s heart cancer. And so Kristi Noem, South Dakota gov and possible Trump VP pick, can write in her memoir (like she’s proud of it) that she shot her dog because it was “untrainable” and she “hated” it. It attacked some chickens. She also mentions that she shot and killed a goat. Can you hate a goat?
Colleen O’Brien of PETA criticized Noem for allowing “this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home.”
We have a spot for you in Owl Chatter’s Hall of Shame, Noem. Settle in.
Art Schallock is the oldest living former major leaguer. Kinahora, he’s turning 100 this month! He came up with the Yankees and pitched for the Orioles too. He played just before my time of baseball consciousness — I didn’t recall his name. He roomed with Yogi: the hope was Yogi would share wisdom on how to pitch to opposing batters. Schallock remembers Yogi was a genius on batter weaknesses, but on some he just said “try to hold him to a single.”
He was only with the Yanks from ’51 to ’55, shuttling up and down, and made only 58 appearances, but played alongside DiMaggio, Mantle, Ford, and the other Yankee greats of those years. His lifetime record was 6-7 with a 4.02 ERA. He pitched three complete games. He faced Ted Williams twice and got him out both times! He recalls only throwing slow stuff for strikes against Williams and fastballs off the plate, thinking he’d kill any fastball of his. Even so, one of the outs was a screaming line drive that knocked the first baseman down and tore the glove off his hand. But he picked the ball up and threw Williams out. Ha!
Art met his wife Dona on a blind date. They were married for 76 years, until she passed away on his 99th birthday last year at the age of 97. They had two kids and five grands.
He made it to the World Series three times with the Yanks, but only pitched in one. It was Game 4 in 1953. The Yanks were trailing the Dodgers late, and he pitched the last two innings and gave up a run. The first five batters he faced were Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, and Carl Furillo.
When asked about his favorite baseball memory he said: “The height of my career was just walking into Yankee Stadium. It was a thrill just to be on the mound.”
I can’t even imagine it. I can close my eyes and picture the scene. But I can’t imagine the feeling.
I don’t have his autograph in my collection. So I checked on eBay and there are nice ones on index cards for under $10. Before I splurge, though, I’m going to send him a note wishing him a happy birthday and see if he’ll sign a few cards for me. (The name of his nursing home in Sonoma was in the NYT.) I’ll let you know if he replies.
This piece from tomorrow’s Met Diary should help get the taste of that first item, above, out of your mouth. It’s by Shanti Norris.
Dear Diary,
It was the late 1960s and I was attending Cooper Union at night and living in a tiny shared apartment in the East Village.
I had become interested in Eastern thought and was trying to learn how to become kinder in my life. As part of that effort, I had just started attending yoga classes.
One day I took the bus between home and school because of heavy rain. The bus was crowded but I found a seat.
A man got on the bus and was standing near me dripping wet. He was muttering to himself, and I strained to hear what he was saying. He was complaining about his life.
“No one cares about me,” he said. “I am alone. No one cares. I don’t have anything.”
He mentioned that he didn’t even have an umbrella to protect him from the rain.
As he spoke, people looked at the floor or looked away. His voice got louder. My stop was coming up, and I didn’t know what to do.
Then, as I stood up and got ready to move toward the door, I handed the man my umbrella.
He shouted at me, asking me what this was.
This is for you, I said.
He asked why.
“Because I love you,” I mumbled.
What, he asked — as though he hadn’t heard me.
“Because I love you,” I shouted before jumping off the bus.
The playwright August Wilson (born Freddy) was born on this date in 1945 — he’s from Pittsburgh. He dropped out of school at 15 when a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper he wrote on the grounds that a Black can’t write that well. [I was ten years old, fat and comfortable in fifth grade at the time.]
So he was self-taught, spending his days at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. He became close friends with the shusher. Do you like the blues? This is what Wilson said:
“My greatest influence has been the blues. And that’s a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. […] Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture.”
Happy Birthday AW! George made this cake a few days ago, but I think it’s still good — Georgie! — bring in some Diet Pepsies! And try to find an ash tray somewhere.
The puzzle was murder today, or, as Rex put it — medium. What!! C’mon man! I’m not complaining (much) — I finished it. But it was hard.
At 1A, “Small-town issue” was LOCAL PAPER. Here’s egs on the matter: If you don’t want to get fat from eating your own words, write them on LO-CAL PAPER.
At 20A, did you know the “Pistol used by James Bond” was the WALTHER PPK? Seriously.
“Regatta leaders” was COXES. You know, like the coxswain.
How about 35A? — “Hybrid shape with straight edges and rounded corners.” Answer: SQUIRCLE. New to me. Didn’t help that the Q crossed with SQUEE another term I didn’t know, clued with “Excited outburst.”
Here’s a pretty one:
At 41D, CIRRUS was the answer for “Ice crystal formation.” You’ve probably heard of cirrus clouds — well, they are made of ice crystals. Who knew?
“Capital on the Gulf of Guinea” is LOME. Fuhgedaboutit, right?
When I started teaching and giving exams, I soon saw there was an art to making up a test — it had to be just at the right level of difficulty to break the class up into four groups: A, B, C, and YUCK. Too hard or too easy and it doesn’t serve its porpoise. Puzzles are the same way, with the added element that each day imposes a different standard. So I like the Saturday puzzle to be very hard — but gettable. They had been getting too easy under Will Shortz. His temporary (everyone hopes) replacement Joel Fagliano is tightening up the ship, I am happy to see. In any case, it’s not just the one person — a whole staff works on them.
I remember an early test I gave, one poor jerk got a three on it, out of 100. He came to beg for a passing grade, noting he did all the assignments. And I said — Yeah, and I’ve been telling you you’re getting them all wrong and to drop the class. In fact, his answers on the exam were totally nonresponsive to the questions: not even in the ballpark. He kept making his hopeless case and I finally said, “Mr. XXX – I couldn’t possibly give you a passing grade — you’d have to improve a great deal just to get the answers wrong.”
Great moments in academia.
Back to the puzzles for a moment — as I’ve noted before, some folks find the Mondays too easy to provide a challenge. So to make them more of a challenge, they solve them using only the down clues. And if they post a comment on Rex’s blog, they start by saying they solved the puzzle using only the down clues. One funny fellow recently opened his comment by saying he solved the puzzle “using only the down and across clues.” Damn, I wish I had thought of that.
Have I started rambling? It may be time to go. Sam and I were at an Alasdair Fraser concert in Ann Arbor once — the great Scottish fiddler. He’s also a composer and runs a school for fiddlers. In between songs he started chatting about the music and he suddenly realized he was talking about technical fiddle things — at a level more appropriate for a class than for the audience he was facing. And he stopped, looked up at us, and said: “I’m sorry — are we not all fiddlers here?”
He is one of those performers it is hard to see and not fall in love with. Linda and I have tickets to see him in Sellersville PA on May 9th, a Thursday night. If you’re in reach and can go, you won’t regret it. He tours (and records) with cellist Natalie Haas. On this exquisite piece, the cello starts and then Alasdair comes in. It’s called “Josefin’s Waltz.” It will send us off tonight. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 