Author - Paul Schatzkin

commentary

Once upon a time, a poet philosopher (and former Yale University president) named Bart Giamatti (and, yes, the father of actor Paul) served briefly as the Commissioner of Baseball. A heavy smoker all his life, Giamatti died at age 51 after serving only 5 months as Commissioner.

Despite his brief tenure, Giamatti left a lasting mark on the game, In addition to being a scholar, a tough negotiator and a stalwart Defender of the Game (Giamatti oversaw the permanent exile of Pete Rose), Giamatti also wrote extensively about the game. His writings were compiled in a 1998 book called A Great And Glorious Game.

Somewhere – it might have been at the Baseball Hall of Fame fame in Cooperstown NY, or maybe it was somewhere in Ken Burns “Baseball” documentary, I encountered the opening paragraph of that book. Now that another baseball season has come and gone, that opening passage comes to mind once again:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Last night, it stopped again. The seasons now – like the games – seem to go on forever. Maybe it’s fitting that these interminable seasons, with their interminable games, stretch into November. The World Series ends now just a few days before we return to “standard time” –and the darkness descends before the afternoon is over.

Roy Campanella – the second black player in the Major Leagues, seen here with the first.

I used to be a big baseball fan. I grew up with the “Mantle/Maris Yankees” of the 1950s and 60s. I became a “closet Dodger Fan” in the 4th grade after reading a biography of Roy Campanella – the second black player in the major leagues. I became an Atlanta Braves fan when I moved to Hawaii in the 1980s and Turner’s TBS was the only “live” television station. TBS carried all the Braves games in those days, and I watched as they compiled one of the worst records in baseball through the 1980s. But for that dedication the Gods rewarded me with tickets for the first World Series game ever played south of the Mason Dixon Line – Game 3 of the epic 1991 World Series between the Braves and the Minnesota Twins.

And I’ve always been a Cubs fan. I believed for a long time that all true baseball fans were cubs fans, because you always root for the team that has “gone the longest without” winning the whole thing. And until 2016 that was the Chicago Cubs. Somewhere there is a photo of me throwing a shoe at at TeeVee after the Cubs lost the 1984 NLCS to the San Diego Padres…

But somehow over the past few years I’ve become less of a baseball fan. I was still a Braves fan when I moved to Nashville, but Ted Turner sold everything Time-Warner and eventually the games stopped showing up regularly on TBS. They were moved all over the dial.

And then… TiVo. I think it was TiVo that wrecked my ability to watch long baseball games. Because TiVo made it unnecessary to watch commercials. And if you’re going to sit through a four-or-five hour baseball game, you’re going to have to suffer through a LOT of fucking commercials.

But I did watch as much of this year’s World Series as time would allow, and even though Houston was the team that “has gone the longest without” (like, forever), I was disappointed when the Dodgers couldn’t get out of the dugout in Game 7 last night.

And now the season is over, and the darkness descends.

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot…

November 1, 2017

commentary

…. like the morning after Halloween… as the Christmas kiosks and decorations start showing up all over the Mall.

And probably not much longer before the relentless mind-numbing reputations of “barumpa bump bump….” etc.

Just shoot me now.

Yeah, bah humbug. Riiiiight….

Time Capsule 1969:
*PIF and The Delaware Water Gap

October 31, 2017

Digest, Writing

above image credit: Matichon
_________

It’s been a LONG time since I dug into that Epic Memoir I started working on like two years ago… based on the journals I started during my senior year in high school and first year of college – 1969 and ’70.

click to embiggen

But this morning I spent a little time re-learning a Phil Ochs song that I first learned… well, just a little over 50 years ago. I know because I wrote down all all the chords and lyrics in a spiral note book. And the date above “Power and Glory” is July 18, 1967. I probably haven’t played the song since 1968, but I played it today.

And I think that inspired me to open the file for “Time Capsule” for the first time in a long while.

I’m still not entirely certain what this project is supposed to be. I vacillate between concepts: Is it a book? The concept seems dated. Could it be some kind of web-based, multi-media, interactive…. something or other? That might actually might be interesting: availing myself more fully to all the stuff that is readily available via YouTube, etc. Or could it a “one man show” in which I read and recite passages from the text and (finally!) get to and perform the songs of the era that I still remember how to play and sing?

Maybe it’s all three.

But it ain’t gonna be much or anything if I don’t actually work on it.

So today I worked on it. I opened the Scrivener file ad landed on a chapter I’d already written about my first experiences with the demon weed. So I posted that as a new “chapter” called

*PIF and The Delaware Water Gap

And if you’re wondering, here’s a recording of the Phil Ochs song that got me started. It struck me as a useful reminder of what we’re actually trying to save while the institutions around us are crumbling…

Mama Barn and Her
Two Little Baby Barns

October 27, 2017

Digest, photography, travel

I made a “painting” today.

This original photo is from a road trip that Ann and I made around Lake Michigan in the spring of 2009. We went up the Michigan side, stopped at Mackinac Island for a couple of nights, then crossed over the Upper Peninsula and went down the Wisconsin side.

This scene was somewhere on the Leelanau Peninsula.

All digital, of course.

But hey, at least I’ve got something too show for my day off…

Click to embiggen:

The old Day Farm in Sleeping Bear Dunes Park

Dispatches from the Outskirts
October 27 – #TMITM Edition

October 27, 2017

I encourage you to read Andrew Sullivan’s latest at NYMag.com:

The money quote:

It turns out that Mark Zuckerberg’s real achievement will be the collapse of a rational public dialogue and the empowerment of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Our sacred institutions are at risk not only because of the would-be tyrant who sits atop them, but because of the technologies that put him there

Every time we post something, or comment on something, or reply to a comment, we are complicit in sustaining an rogue ecosystem that undermines both our selves and our nation.

Facebook cannot go the way of MySpace fast enough. How do you say that in Russian?

And no, the irony of putting that on Facebook – even “indirectly, i.e. by “lobbing it over the wall from my own website – is not lost on me. I just really have no idea what else to do about it.

We are all hoist on our own petard.

Neener Neener

October 27, 2017

I got mine. Did you get yours?

Of course, I had to stay up until 2AM to get it.

And the whole time I’m wondering, “is this really going to make my life better?”

I guess we’ll find out in a week…

But hey… it’s my job! (said the master of rationalizations…)

From “Halt and Catch Fire”
You Are Not Safe

October 24, 2017

The show is called Halt and Catch Fire.* It depicts the early days of what we now call “the tech industry,” first in Texas and then in Silicon Valley, in the early and-mid-1980s (when what we now call a “notebook” was known as a “luggable.”

I watched the first two seasons a couple of years ago. I started to watch Season 3 last year, and have finally gone back and watched the entire season, and will soon start watching the fourth and final season which ended earlier this month.

One of the themes in the third season involves what can best be called “the pre-emergence” of the Internet. One of the characters has discovered ARPANET and has contracted with a similar network hosted by the National Science Foundation.

[spoiler alert for H&CF S3 E8]

In the closing minutes of the 8th episode, one of the characters leaves a suicide note. He is in legal jeopardy for having released into the wild the source code for a valuable security software product. The Feds are closing in, and he has decided that going out a high window is better than prison. Before his departure, he leaves this warning on the dominant public BBS network of the day:

YOU ARE NOT SAFE

I, Ryan Ray, released the MacMillan Utility source code. I acted alone. No one helped me, and no one told me to do it. I did this because “security” is a myth. Contrary to what you might have heard, my friends, you are NOT safe.

Safety is a story. It’s something we teach our children, so they can sleep at night. But we know it’s not real.

Beware baffled humans. Beware of false prophets who will sell you a fake future – of bad teachers, corrupt leaders and dirty corporations. Beware of cops and robbers. The kind that rob your dreams. But most of all, beware of each other. Because everything’s about to change.

The world is going to crack wide open. There’s something on the horizon – a massive connectivity. The barriers between us will disappear. And we’re not ready.

We’ll hurt each other in new ways. We’ll sell and be sold. We’ll expose our most tender selves only to be mocked and destroyed. We’ll be so vulnerable and we’ll pay the price. We won’t be able to pretend that we can protect ourselves anymore. It’s a huge danger. A gigantic risk. But it’s worth it.

If only we can learn to take care of each other. Then this awesome, destructive new connection won’t isolate us. It won’t leave us in the end so… totally alone.

He says it will be worth it… and for the most part, it is.

But how much do we feel “connected” when in fact… we are alone?

And we are just beginning to get a sense what the Trojan Network has unleashed inside the city gates.

Ryan’s soliloquy sounds prophetic. It is “sent to us” from 1986 – but was probably written sometime last year. The episode first aired on October 4, 2016 – before we had any real sense of what how the Russians had weaponized our “social media.” So it actually seems even more prophetic, anticipating as it does the condition we find ourselves in just a year later – as we begin to learn of the vulnerabilities hidden in these networks.

The tech oligarchs who have brought us this “open and connected” environment have also unleashed the most pervasive surveillance system the world has ever seen, to which we willingly and gladly contribute. Not even Orwell could have imagined…

And now begins “the tech backlash” – as leaders of all stripes try to get a rein on the beast.

The post and the several that precede it are a part are probably part of that backlash. Now I have to wonder if I’ve left one mob and joined another.

*The title “Halt and Catch Fire” refers to an early bit of code that could shut down a computer’s central processing unit.

Dispatches from the Outskirts of Facebookistan – October 23 Edition:
How To Self-Deport From Toxic Town

October 23, 2017

Facebook, meet MySpace. Only… how do you say that in Russian?

I’d like to be able to say I started something, or at least that I’m an early un-adopter.

Then along comes this item from ReCode to tell me that maybe I’m just part of a growing trend:

How to quit Facebook (if the time suck, Russian ads or political noise has become too much)

There are many valid reasons you might want to quit Facebook. Maybe you spend too much time there. Maybe you’re tired of its cluttered app. Maybe you’re unnerved by all the Russia stuff.

I was an avid Facebook user for more than a decade. But due to a combination of the reasons above, I’ve almost completely quit Facebook over the past three weeks. No surprise, I have been much happier for it.

I haven’t actually taken any of the steps recommended above, but I have managed to reduce my visits to nearly nil. I’m not really missing it.

I did stick my head through the portal this morning, and saw pretty much what I’ve been seeing for the past two or three years – the same handful of people saying pretty much the same things.

And expecting different results?

And that’s definition of…. oh yeah… right.

I rest my case.

Dispatches from the Outskirts of Facebookistan – October 16 Edition

October 16, 2017