If you’re in the public eye or, in this case, ear, you really need a good filtration system. Jarren Duran of the Red Sox was being heckled by a fan at Fenway. The fan suggested that Duran needed a tennis racket in order to hit the ball. Duran told the fan to shut up. Even that is probably not cool. Probably best to ignore a hostile fan, not to engage him. But the sh*t really hit the fan (not the person-fan — the proverbial fan), when Duran called him a “fu*king fa**ot.” You know it’s bad when it takes three asterisks to write it out. And it was all picked up by the broadcast. Everyone watching the game on TV heard it. Ouch.
Cut to the apology. So Boston suspended Duran for two games, which seems to be the going rate for homophobic slurs, and his pay for those games was donated to a gay charity. He also issued a well-drafted apology. The next step was to face the press, appropriately contrite. But according to the NYT, for his meeting with the press he wore a “F*ck ’em” t-shirt. The Times thought it undercut the apology. On the other hand, it’s a t-shirt he often wears under his uniform to battle his mental health demons, saying he doesn’t care what other people think.
We don’t care so much about Duran. Ideally, he learned something about human decency from it all. Maybe he did maybe he didn’t. Here’s the kicker though — since the incident, sales of his jersey have skyrocketed. His jersey is currently the top-selling jersey on the online MLB shop, surpassing Ohtani, who’s in second place. Similarly, the jersey sales of the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ivan Provorov skyrocketed after he refused to wear pride-themed merchandise during warmups, citing his religion. Harrison Butker of the NFL also saw a rapid increase in jersey sales following his anti-gay speech at Benedictine College.
When Duran’s suspension ends he’ll be in the lineup for the Sox against the Texas Rangers — the only team in MLB that refuses to host a gay pride night. There has still not been an openly gay active MLB player.
God Bless America.
Yesterday’s puzzle centered on the Nobel-prize-winning writer Toni Morrison. Her full name was one answer, along with the titles of six of her books. Solvers were impressed that they could be integrated into the grid symmetrically. (You may have picked up by now that crossword people are insane.)
Rex was unimpressed with the theme, since it was no more than a list. But he went on to say:
If you’re going to bore me with a list, I’d say this list is about as interesting a way as there is to do it. I enjoyed taking the trip through Morrison’s back catalogue. As an English major who was in college at the peak of Morrison’s productivity and fame (i.e. just after BELOVED came out), these titles all came to me very, very easily. Lots of my friends were Women’s Studies majors of one kind or another (English, Sociology, etc.), so I became very familiar with the Morrison bibliography very quickly, and though I’ve only read two of these books, I filled in every title in today’s puzzle without any difficulty at all. So I liked this puzzle insofar as I like TONI MORRISON and enjoyed briefly reminiscing about my college days, when she first came to my notice and when I first read her work. And yeah, SONG OF SOLOMON, man. It’s a life-changer. A disturbing, even horrifying work, but a warm and wise one as well. And a page-turner! I might pick it up again soon…
If you’re up for a bouncy pop tune, he shared this one with us, I guess as a nod to his college “days?” I can use it, after that heavy Duran material.
Here’s Kirsty MacColl. She was British and, sadly, passed away when she was only 41. She was diving off the coast of Mexico with her teen-aged sons when a powerboat entered the restricted area. She managed to save one of her sons, but was hit herself and killed instantly. Sheesh, sorry we’re such a downer today.
The New Yorker’s humor issue (8/19/2024) repeats an article from 2002 by Tad Friend on scientific attempts to define what is funny. A British scientist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, undertook a project to identify the world’s funniest joke. Part of it involved a website where he had people submit jokes and rate other people’s jokes. Friend writes:
When the experiment began, Wiseman posed for publicity photographs wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard as he scrutinized a student wearing a chicken suit who was crossing a road. One photographer shouted, “Could the guy playing the scientist move to the left?,” and Wiseman cried, “I am a scientist.”
He concedes the concept of the world’s funniest joke is ridiculous, but there is much that can be learned.
“We’ve learned one thing for sure,” he said. “Comparing scores for the same joke with different animals inserted in it, we found that the funniest animal of all is a duck. So science has determined that, if you’re going to tell a talking-animal joke, make it a duck.”
Good to know. And you thought this whole project was just quackery, didn’t you?
Tired. See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 