I have had a line in my head to put in the blog. Even with the stark recognition that my mental acuity is waning and that I need to put things in writing in order to remember them, I never sent this line to myself in an email. Of course, this morning I cannot remember it. When did my brain turn into molasses?!
I used to have total recall, literally. For example, when I would write a scouting report on a baseball player I would include their date of birth. I wound up being able to recite the birthday of hundreds, if not thousands, of professional baseball players.
Once on a team flight a Padres player walked past me and asked, “When is his birthday?” pointing to the player behind him who was Trevor Hoffman. Hoffman was a great closer who was inducted into the Baseball Hall Of Fame in 2018. By the way, he was also a very good person who treated everyone with respect. (I’m sure he still is, but I have not had any interaction with him in 25 years.)
I answered “October 13, 1967.” When Trevor walked past me he asked, “Where was I born?” When I answered, “Bellflower, California” he just smiled. Oh, my nickname while I worked for the Padres was “Rain Man” and most of the players knew it.
To go from that level of recall to not being able to remember something I wanted to write, to picking up my phone to look something up on the Internet but forgetting what it is in the short time between reaching for the phone and actually picking it up is beyond frustrating. Sorry, but ads for products that claim to improve your memory are neither science nor truth. They are marketing, communication that usually stretches the truth, sometimes until it breaks, in order to get you to buy something. Yes, maybe marketing itself is part science.
I would like to rage against the dying of the light, but sometimes I can’t even remember where the spare light bulbs are. Remind me to write about the Lou Whitaker story one day because I might not remember.
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Here is something scary from Forbes:
“In the meantime, the platform [TikTok] has more U.S. users than people who voted in the 2020 general election—meaning it will almost certainly play a role in which candidate prevails on Tuesday.”
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To hell with political correctness…here is a short snippet from a recent Free Press article:
But in recent years Title IX has been “weaponized” against students, often male, for offenses like drunken sex, stalking, and “emotional distress,” sometimes even by former girlfriends, KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College specializing in Title IX disciplinary proceedings, told The Free Press.
“Savvy students recognize that they can use the Title IX bureaucracy to punish opponents on campus, or simply people that they don’t like,” he said. “Instead of resolving issues through dialogue, or saying, ‘Hey, you’re a jerk,’ it’s become, ‘I’m going to invoke the power of the school against you.’”
I believe Bill James once wrote that Title IX was one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed because it assumed that women had the same level of interest in sports as men. The mainstream media loves to tout the “explosion” of interest in women’s basketball. Uh, football–NFL and college–sells out huge stadiums and draws many millions of viewers on TV. No women’s sport comes close to that.
In a 2015 poll, 48% of men claimed to be avid sports fans compared to just 19% of women. Yes, it is a badge of American manhood to think you know more about sports than you actually do and you can’t “know” sports if you say you’re not a fan. (Of course, that’s actually true about cars as well.) Former major league player Wes Westrum is supposed to have said, “Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand.” I think many things in life, including all sports, are like baseball.
I think I have written about this before, but please indulge an old, forgetful man. I once had a boss who loved to say, “There’s a thin line between being a novice and being an expert.” He used to argue with me about baseball until one day I brought in a baseball encyclopedia to show him where he had been wrong.
I really don’t remember the exact timing of the following events, but at some point on a later date after he made his “thin line” remark again I said to him, “There’s a thin line between being a novice and thinking you’re an expert.” Sometime thereafter, not surprisingly, I was fired. The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss. How I wound up here from Title IX is beyond me. Does stream of consciousness imply consciousness?! 🤪
#MondayBrainMolasses
#TrevorHoffman
PS, another thing that WordPress has screwed up is that the Related Posts at the bottom are now only from either half of the posts from 2018 or those from November 1 of this year and onward. Therefore, I am going to show links to posts from the rest of this blog’s history until/unless they fix it.
PLEASE click on the links to any or all of these posts. Thanks.