Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • A little o’ this, a little o’ that

    It occurred to me yesterday, while watching the NCAA women’s tournament game between the Gophers and UCLA, that in basketball it’s helpful to be tall.

    Don’t look now but, for the first time since before last year’s all-star game, the Twins do not have a losing record. I saw that if you want to bet on the over-under for Twins wins this season, the number is 70.5. Seems about right since, if my life depended upon placing a winning bet, I’m not sure what I’d do. Seventy wins mean 92 losses, a bad season, so I’m not expecting much. Whatever, it’s still baseball.

    I went to the rally/protest at the Capitol today. Took the below picture of almost the first person I saw upon disembarking from the train at the Capitol station. It seems there is a perception among the MAGA populace that we’re all a bunch of commies, but, honestly, I’ve rarely seen a larger collection of normies. Two out of three males without a sign featuring one of the most well known Anglo-Saxon expressions look like retired Lutheran pastors. They’re out-numbered, however, by women who could be their wives. Perhaps actuarial science accounts for this. Just judging by crowd demographics, however, you’d say that older white ladies are at least as pissed as Bruce Springsteen.

    I’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet in order to talk about it with my 9th-grader, who, to her dismay, has to read it for school English class. My take is that everyone in the play except Juliet is ridiculous, and maybe she is too, considering that she falls for Romeo. “You woo by the book,” she tells him in, I believe, a forgotten line from the play’s most famous scene. This is after he says all the cliched things that lovers need to say, in rhyming iambic pentameter, which makes it even worse than in real life. Why doesn’t she tell him to shove off? It might be because Shakespeare, as usual, had a source, and, for purposes of plot development, she didn’t tell him to shove off in the source. The older generation–what a shit-show. Old man Capulet really likes to plan a party. The clergy: self-important bumblers. Who else? The nurse is a fool. So is Juliet’s mother, who resists only briefly her husband’s mindless, reflexive cruelty before adopting it herself. The best that can be said for Paris is what Juliet’s parents say in recommending him to their daughter, and that’s not much: nice looking, conventional young man. In other words, an incipient stuffed shirt. He is saved by the general slaughter from taking his place among the next generation’s mediocrities.

    The best scene in the play is the one in which Romeo buys poison from the keeper of the seedy apothecary shop, and he (Romeo) here has to step out of character in order to win my sympathy. At the end of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, you feel bad about everyone being dead.

  • Ski-u-mah!

    Wasn’t expecting to become so invested in the Gopher women’s basketball team this March, but hey, they have advanced into the Sweet Sixteen and are easy to like for a lot of other reasons, too:

    –Local kids. Of the five starters, four are from Twin Cities suburbs–Hopkins, Minnetonka, Wayzata, and Farmington (I think Farmington now counts as a suburb?)–and the fifth is from a small town in Wisconsin.

    –Very little “portal travel.” Those five starters are, by class year, a sophomore, two juniors, and two seniors, and I think four of them have only been Gophers as collegians. The fifth, one of the seniors, started out at North Carolina State and has now played three seasons at Minnesota.

    –They’re over-achievers. The phrase is sometimes deployed as a kind of backhanded compliment, but there’s nothing wrong with being determined and hard-working.

    –No star. Here are the points per game averaged by the five starters: 

    Tori McKinney (soph from Minnetonka) 12.9
    Grace Grocholski (jr from North Prairie, WI) 12.1
    Mara Braun (jr from Wayzata) 11.8
    Amaya Battle (sr from Hopkins) 11.3
    Sophie Hart (sr from Farmington) 11.1

    They exhibited their balanced strength in the game they won against Mississippi to advance to the regional semifinals.  After getting beat up to the tune of 25-14 in the third quarter, Minnesota still trailed by 8 points with around 4 minutes to play. Mississippi's best player then fouled out of the game on a charging call. (Taking a charge is something the Gophers are more apt to do than their opponents.) Without their star, Mississippi appeared lost on offense, and the Gophers just kept plugging away. Right before the above clip starts, Braun had made a 3-pointer to tie the score. After Hart scores the go-ahead bucket in traffic with her off hand, we allow a rare easy basket to re-tie the game with 3.5 seconds to play. Then Battle, playing her last game at Williams Arena, buries the winning shot a second before the buzzer. Check out the lift on her little base line jumper off the set inbound play. 

    The game clock was set to 0.8 second after Battle's basket, and Mississippi got a good look from 3-point land--which would have won the game--mainly because Battle, who is number 3, runs into two picks. She watches helplessly as the shot is launched just before the clock goes to 0:00, and it's fun to see her hands go to the top of her head in, I think, exhausted relief as the ball bounces off the front rim. In the game she had 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 5 assists. 

    Better enjoy it now. Unless there is a huge upset this evening, the regional semifinal will be against #1 seed UCLA. When the teams played earlier this year, in Minneapolis, the Bruins won by 18 points. But maybe that's good. If we're going to upset them once this season, better this coming Friday than back in January.



  • Theater of the grotesque

    I suppose that, for Kool-aid drinkers, the Trump administration suspending for 30 days sanctions on Iranian oil sales is another example of Our Dear Leader “playing chess, not checkers.” To me, it looks like desperation as the midterms loom and the price of crude rises. We might be a week away from offering Iran some anti-aircraft missiles in exchange for reopening the Strait.

    I saw recently that some MAGA nut in a high office said, in response to the charge that the U.S. was “going it alone” against Iran, that actually we have in Israel the best possible ally. Stories such as this one make me think that we may indeed have the ally we deserve. I think most of the article is behind a paywall, but, briefly, Alon Harel, an Israeli law professor, was sued for defamation by a Jewish settler in the Occupied Territories. The settler had published a screed in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and called for their collective punishment, with no distinction made between terrorists and civilians. His article was titled “The Law of Jit is the Law of Rafah”–significant, because it was published a day after some settlers entered the Palestinian village of Jit, on the West Bank, where they killed a Palestinian man and set fire to some homes and cars. In a social media post Harel, in the course of harshly criticizing the article, called the author a member of “the Jewish Hamas.”

    The Israeli court held in favor of the plaintiff and ordered Harel to pay the equivalent of $6,500 to the settler in compensation. Harel describes his reaction to the judgment in a subsequent social media post:

    In my view, the doctrinal details of the case, and even the judgment itself, pale in comparison to one fact that powerfully exposes the moral decline of Israeli society and of its legal system. Most astonishingly, the judgment manages to proceed from beginning to end without referring –even once and not even in a single word–to the content of the article that prompted my response. Not a single word is devoted to describing, acknowledging, or engaging with its content. To the credit of the judge, she is not in favor of murder, of course–but also not in favor of condemning it either. It is as if the commitment to legal neutrality had been carried to an absurd extreme. This is precisely what makes this judgment so exceptionally morally depraved and deeply grotesque.

    How can this be? How can a judge fail to express some resentment to an article which is calling for the mass murder of Palestinians? After all, such murder is not only morally depraved; it is also a crime under Israeli and international law. As a matter of fact, the article [by the settler] is defined as a crime under Israeli law (section 144 D2 of the criminal code–incitement to violence).

    In Israel, a criminal wins a judgment against a law professor guilty of criticizing his criminal acts. The U.S. lifts sanctions against Iran while simultaneously trying to bomb Iran into submission. The only thing about any of this that makes much sense is that Israel and the U.S. should be allies.

  • Lies, damned lies, and right-wing media

    If you read around very much in the right-wing media world–in my case, a guilty pleasure that’s yielded a metric ton of entertainment value–you soon comprehend that a leading theme, maybe the gold-medal winner, relates to the supposed liberal bias of what they sometimes call “legacy media,” which means New York Times, BBC, Reuters, NPR, Associated Press, CNN, your local big city daily, if you have one, etc., etc. I am among those who think by far the biggest part of the alleged “bias” should be attributed to honest assessments of the facts and evidence connected to a particular case. We have phrases that have attained the status of memes to illustrate our point–for example, “People trained in medical science and public health say that vaccines protect against disease, unnecessary suffering, and premature death, but at this diner in southern Indiana some old white men wearing red hats, and two young mothers who home school their kids, have quite a different view of the matter.”

    There follows a description, fortified by copious quotations, of opinions that might fairly be described as “completely bonkers,” delivered in sober tones by supposed left-wing employees of “legacy media” whose critical faculties seem to have been slaughtered by the salt-of-the-earth vibe emitted by numbskulls. The media is thus captured in a trap set by the wingers. The former task of evaluating the merits of competing claims has been abandoned, because it’s widely regarded as “bias.”

    A useful exercise, I believe, is just to pay attention to who turns out to be right. Along this line, consider the recent case of the missile strike on the elementary school in Iran on Feb. 28, the first day of the war. Wingers immediately claimed that the school had been hit, not by Israel or the United States, but by a failed Iranian missile that fell back to earth near its launch site. This wasn’t advanced as a hypothesis, a possible alternative explanation that should be weighed alongside the claims of Iranian state media, which blamed the US. It was asserted as fact. An X user with the handle Chaya’s Clan stated:

    A failed missile launch in Iran caused the projectile to fall on a school. Images captured the moment it failed, fell back to ground, and struck.

    This post, including the allegedly dispositive image, was then reposted by user David Khait with the comment, “It was a failed missile launch by the IRGC that fell back to the ground and struck the elementary school.” John Hinderaker, of the right-wing Power Line blog, then embedded Khait’s tweet in a post that, having excoriated Reuters for reporting on the claim of Iranian sources, concluded: “Not surprisingly, it turns out that it was a failed Iranian missile that hit the school.”

    The source for all this certainty goes back to the anonymous Chaya’s Clan and a picture that proves nothing. One of the amusing side notes of this episode is that after Hinderaker embedded the tweets in his blog post, a “community note” was appended to the original:

    This image has been geolocated to Zanjan, over 1,300 km from the girls’ school in Minab, by multiple investigations. It has nothing to do with the school.

    Hinderaker may or may not know that this community note now appears in his post, which credulously accepted Chaya’s Clan claim about a failed Iranian missile. As the “legacy media” pursued the story, it became increasingly clear that a US Tomahawk missile had hit the school and killed around 175 civilians, most of them young girls. In a post titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalism,” Hinderaker nevertheless disparaged a New York Times story revealing that, at about the time the school was hit, an adjoining target was struck by a Tomahawk missile. Since the US is the only party in the conflict with Tomahawk missiles, this seemed a significant development, but Hinderaker, following up on his post featuring the discredited photographic evidence, insisted it meant nothing: his point was that people were reading the story as if it said the school was hit by a Tomahawk missile, when actually it only said that an adjoining site had been struck by a Tomahawk missile at about the same time as the school was struck by … something. He congratulated himself for this subtle observation even while quietly retreating from his former position. He had put it forward as a settled fact that the school had been struck by a failed Iranian missile. Now he wrote:

    My guess is that the military investigation will conclude that the school was struck by an errant Iranian missile, but by that time the left-wing press will have firmly implanted the impression that it was ours.

    He wrote that on March 9. On March 11, the New York Times reported on the progress of this military investigation. Here’s the lede:

    An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.

    That was almost a week ago now, and I think it’s fair to say that Hinderaker, by his silence, is admitting that the the school was hit by a US missile. The sequence of events, then, looks like this:

    1. Elementary school hit by a missile, killing well over a hundred kids. Iranian sources blame US.

    2. Wingers berate press for reporting what Iran claimed. They say, with no evidence, unless you count an irrelevant photograph attached to a tweet, that the school had been hit by a failed Iranian missile.

    3. Subsequent news reports make it appear more likely that the US is at fault. Wingers insist this reporting is just more balderdash from “legacy media,” aka the fake news.

    4. Yet more reporting attributes to officials in the US government an admission that, according to the conclusion of a preliminary investigation conducted by our military, the school had in fact been struck by a US missile in an apparent “targeting error.”

    5. Without admitting their error, wingers fall into silence on the topic. Oh well, in a minute there will be something new for them to pontificate upon. In the fullness of time, they might be right about something.

    One more possibly unrelated point, though it does pertain to the war, or “excursion,” as Trump has begun calling it. (My guess is that someone in his administration told Trump that, for legal reasons, he should call the war not a “war” but an “incursion,” but he doesn’t know that word and so calls it the similarly-sounding “excursion,” which alas has connotations of casual travel.) Did Trump and his cabinet of geniuses not foresee that Iran, in response to being attacked, would try to close the Strait of Hormuz? Or did they foresee it but have no plan for preventing it, or for what to do if it happened?

  • Up late on a school night

    Last night, Timberwolves on the west coast, 10 pm local start on a school night, and I, apparently mesmerized by my faves’ poor play, did not rise from the couch and shut it off till around half way through the fourth quarter, or roughly 12:15 am, long past when the outcome was plausibly in doubt.

    Well, you are probably wasting your life doing trivial things you enjoy, whereas I’m wasting mine doing trivial things that even I hate, so, even? Doesn’t sound even.

    At least I share the misery with my roommates. From this morning’s family chat:

    On another note, I was today years old when I found out that you can bet, on Polymarket, on whether the Second Coming of Christ will occur before the year is out. The odds currently stand at 4%, which to me seems high, and I was thinking of betting against it till I learned of the complexities involved in setting up an account, and even then you might not be eligible to bet, depending on your location, etc., etc. Saved by sloth from betting against Jesus.

    Honestly, though, isn’t it a no-brainer? Money is only going to be of any use in 2027 if 2026 turns out to be another of those years in which he does not return in all his glory to judge us. The “affordability” issue, in other words, would be rendered moot by the Second Coming. On the other hand, if it develops that this year is in this one respect like the 2000 or so that preceded it, then you’ll still need to pay the bills, and it would therefore make sense to pick up some extra scratch by betting against the Second Coming.

  • Maybe only have to say no to the sealant one more time

    I bought a car today. Gazing into the foreshortened future–maybe have to do it one more time, according to the actuarial charts. That’s fine. It was at a dealership, so you will understand that I was reminded of this:

    I too passed on the sealant. It was around half way down the list of extras, about the time I said, “You know, I’m gonna pass on all of these.” The “finance manager” regarded me from on high. “Not your thing?” he asked.

    I agreed that it was not my thing. Pretty obviously his thing.

  • Whole child education

    I was looking at some 5th-grade math tests that kids took at school today. You can see how, after the above problem is set out, students are instructed, “Write your answer and your work or explanation in the space below.” The main exhibit of this 5th-grader’s response cracked me up:

    I can’t Explain, I allreaty am trying my best! and It’s hard

    Big circle around it. When I was finished laughing, I looked at the rest of his work, and it’s perfect. Easy to love a self-effacing 5th-grader who gets the right answer to a somewhat challenging problem. This was the twelfth and last problem on the test. He might have been coming to the end of his endurance.

    At Valley View, we learn firsthand to hate ICE, and also how to calculate the volumes of rectangular prisms. In Ed-speak, I believe this is referred to as “whole child education.”

  • A national treasure

    Now and again I’ll hear someone say something like, “Oh, yeah, The Onion is funny as hell,” which, as compliments go, seems to me a little limp: a phrase such as “national treasure” would be more apt. They’re currently running a story beneath the headline “ICE Agent Injured After Repeatedly Trying To Detain People In Neighborhood Mural.” The subhead declares, “Community Art Project Accused Of Assaulting Federal Officer.” The article includes the detail that the officer “was heard howling in pain after a punch aimed at a Hispanic child’s face fractured several bones in his right hand.” Whole thing here.

  • In re Ben Jonson’s beloved author

    The Guthrie is currently performing Macbeth, and I’ve thought about standing in line for a rush ticket one of these evenings. If I don’t get in, I could always have an over-priced drink before heading home. That would be a pretty big night for me!

    Macbeth is by a wide margin the shortest of Shakespeare’s great tragedies–I’m considering Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear to be the other members of that group–and it’s been speculated that part of the play Shakespeare wrote must have been lost. A better theory is that it was going to be performed at court, and James I was known to have a short attention span. Me likewise, especially when sitting with my chin too close to my knees, which is why I might see the tightly constructed Macbeth. Every inch a king.

    I’ve been reading around in all the supplementary material supplied by my Signet classic paperback of Macbeth, and I see that the editor, Sylvan Barnet, takes up the theory that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him. It was pleasant for me, a mere hobbyist, to see a renowned scholar say precisely what I’ve long thought to myself: that the appeal of the theory is essentially a snob appeal, since it arises from the notion that a bumpkin from the provinces could not have been the genius who wrote these works. Thus the proposed alternative authors are all university educated, or titled, or both. It reminds me that Melville said the sea was his Harvard and his Yale. No one thinks Moby Dick was written by the Ivy-educated son of an industrialist.

    Of course, Shakespeare lived longer ago, comparatively little is known about his life, and as a result there is room for invention. Or, at least, there was room for invention after more than 150 years had passed: Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have thought the idea of a different author odd, since they were in a position to know. The numerous contemporary references that take for granted that the playwright was William Shakespeare–which include Greene’s insult, Francis Meres’s assessment, Ben Jonson’s poetic tribute, and the preface to the First Folio by Shakespeare’s theater colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell–could not have been regarded as strands of an intricate conspiracy until Shakespeare had been long dead.

    Times change, and in 150 years a few people began to think it suspicious that so little was known about the life of a man possessing Shakespeare’s cultural status. But there’s a reason the Globe Theater was across the Thames from Westminster, in the district of bear baiting pits and other dubious entertainments. Shakespeare made a good living, but the prestige that sparks interest in biography came later. I remember being enrolled in Introduction to Shakespeare, and so was in attendance for the first lecture, on Shakespeare’s life and times, how the female parts were played by prepubescent boys, all of that, when during question time a student asked whether in Elizabethan England actors were cultural icons like they are today. This was in winter quarter, 1981, Reagan had just been elected, and the teacher, Lonnie Durham, answered, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Why, if Shakespeare could have known that one day an associate of his, a mere actor, would rise and become the leader of a great and powerful nation, he would have been astonished, and mortified.”

  • SOTU

    I tuned into the State of the Union Address last night, because I enjoy the absurd pageantry that precedes the actual speech, and, of course, once Trump starts talking anything can happen, and you might not want to miss it. Once he started talking, however, I was quickly bored, plus over on the Big-10 Network the Gophers were giving #3 Michigan a bit of a tussle in Ann Arbor. Before I switched channels, Trump had repeated his claim that, thanks to him, America is “the hottest country on earth,” but I was watching basketball by the time the flatter fest with the hockey players began. I guess the goalie is now going to get the Presidential Medal of Freedom? Good for him. He’ll be in the company of Rush Limbaugh.

    Regarding the claim that the country’s economy is HOT, I looked up the recent GDP numbers. Assuming the ubiquitous “AI overview” is reliable, the growth figures over the previous year, coming forward from 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, look like this:

    2.3%, 2.9%, 2.3%, (-3.5%), 5.7%, 2.1%, 2.5%, 2.8%, 2.2%

    So that’s 2017 through 2025: Trump’s first 4-year term, followed by the four Biden years, followed by the first year of Trump’s second term. We’re back! Too hot to touch!

    I don’t know what Trump said to wrap things up, probably about the time the T-wolves’ late game on the west coast was headed into halftime, but according to Ann Coulter it was “beautiful” and reminded her that to be President you should probably have to be at least a fifth generation American, since it takes awhile for love of country to get in the genes. Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his father’s parents were both born in Germany–circumstances that, in the world according to Ann Coulter, may explain some things.