Here’s our little pumpkin at the pumpkin patch today: Isaac, or Izzy, if you prefer, Caity’s youngest at 4.
Have I played this Chris Rock snippet for you before? It’s one of my favorites and it’s a good intro to The Poetry Foundation’s poem of the day today, by Lucille Clifton called “homage to my hips.”
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
Headline from The Onion: Both Campaigns Release Ads Showcasing Trump’s Most Racist Comments
Baseball fans old enough in 1981 remember Fernando Valenzuela, the joyful Mexican left-handed pitcher for the Dodgers who took us all for a hell of a ride that season. He won all of his first eight starts, five via shutouts. Seven were complete games and his ERA for them was 0.50. As luck would have it (bad), a players’ strike shut the season down for two months. He finished 13-7, with a 2.48 ERA, and copped both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards, the only time in MLB history they have been won by the same player in one year.
He was discovered by accident when a Dodger scout took a trip down to Mexico to check out a shortstop. Nando was pitching for the opposing team and struck out 12 batters. His signature pitch was the screwball. Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell had one the game’s greatest screwballs and he said of Valenzuela’s that it was the best he had seen “since mine.”
He had several stellar seasons and pitched a no-hitter against the Cardinals on June 29, 1990, a gleam in his by-then declining career. The Dodgers retired his number (34) last year. Dodger fans who fell in love with him during that blazing start in 1981 never fell out of love. He returned to the Dodgers as an analyst for their Spanish-language radio broadcasts starting in 2003. He held that position until he took a one-month leave this year for health reasons and was planning to return next year. He was only 63.
His wife Linda survives him, along with four children and seven grandchildren. Here’s the signed card of his from my collection.
Rest in peace, Fernando.
A small literary flap arose today regarding 49A in the NYTXW. The clue was “Genre for James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room,’ familiarly,” and the answer was GAY LIT. Things started heating up when Commenter CM wrote: “Giovanni’s Room as GAY LIT?? So reductive. I don’t think Baldwin would approve!”
If you’re like me, you don’t know what reductive means, so I looked it up. It means “tending to present a subject in a simplified form.”
Anyway, it raised Anony Mouse’s hackles. He or she wrote: Describing Giovanni’s Room as gay lit is reductive? Huh? That’s absurd. It is THE ne plus ultra of gay lit. Hell, it’s so prominent in that world that Philadelphia’s oldest Gay bookstore is called Giovanni’s Room. For the last 51 years. Sheesh.
To which we add: Hrrrrrrrumph!
Let’s end on a dull note. Steven Cox of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) writes: I felt a frisson of excitement this afternoon at ‘bagging’ my highest numbered UK motorway so far. I believe there is only the M898 numbered higher than this – can anyone confirm? (Incidentally, I was the passenger, my wife was driving).
David Edwards replied: Not quite right… there’s this little abomination up by Scunthorpe.
Scott Wilson: Alphabetically or Numerically? Where would the M9 sit?
Josh Sinnott: I think 9 is smaller than 876, might be wrong though
Scott Wilson again: not as a character string in a computer
See you tomorrow, Chatterheads.
The Wellington Files 