IdahoBert

A little less than one hour before game time and in Philadelphia in a stadium without a roof it’s 46° and it feels like 33°. Now that is football.

No, I haven’t. I hope he’s OK.

If I were drinking man, which I’m not, I would be reaching for a drink right now to drown out the sound of the crickets because of the inactivity in baseball news affecting roster changes.

I admit, I am somewhat desperate for entertainment. I even paid a visit to the Lions board.

Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about science books, don’t know much about the French I took, but with all of the injuries, and on the road against a team, that’s the reigning Super Bowl cham-peen, our prospects for this game are not ideeel…

This is a picture of me and my friends in 1973. I’m seated in the lower right hand corner. I was 21 and had narrowly escaped the jaws of death from the London Flu epidemic six months earlier. I was lucky to be alive and grateful. Two of these guys have already died and a third is on the verge undergoing his third bout of chemo. The guy doing the chemo treatment was the only chainsmoker among us. Go figure. We lived in a former African-American brothel on 5th Street in Lafayette, Indiana, a street in a shabby lumpen proletarian neighborhood. which had a train track running right down the middle of it numerous times a day. After the first day, you never noticed the noise anymore, and it became white noise that blended in with the hi-fi that was constantly playing the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Captain Beefheart, and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. Unsurprisingly, the house had a dozen barely larger than closet sized rooms and rent was $10 a month when previously across the river at Purdue University in an off-campus neighborhood I had spent $80 a month. it was a layabout’s paradise. We were legends in our own minds.

Watching all these old local Detroit ads on YouTube, I realized that when I watched the TV series “Detroiters“ about the ad agency that it wasn’t far off the mark at all. They weren’t making this all up.

When I was in New Mexico sometime in the 1970s I purposely hiked up a mountain side because it was covered in clouds, and I remember being somewhat disappointed when I entered the cloud bank because it was nothing more than fog. It’s not like I thought it would be the texture of cotton candy or anything, but it had never occurred to me before that clouds are nothing more than fog.

Blue Ice! Magnets! Pluribus!

When I was a kid, there were certain players I’d check the box scores for and for Earl Wilson it was to see if he’d hit any home runs. I would also check the box scores to see how many guys Ferguson Jenkins had struck out, and in NFL football it was to see how many yards the Bears’ Bobby Douglas had scrambled for and sometimes it was more yards than he had passed for.

I remember perusing the Sporting News Baseball Register when I was a kid and seeing that D*ck Stewart had hit 66 home runs for the Lincoln Chiefs in the Western League in 1956 and I was absolutely dazzled by that.

Did you make this all up, Mark? If you did, I’m impressed. If you cut and pasted it from somewhere else, thank you nonetheless it is kind of interesting.

Thank you for including me. I will sleep better tonight knowing this.

This is one of those rare games I can watch because it’s on NBC Peacock instead of Fox, which only lets me watch games in the West locally. It’s nice on occasion to be included in what is important to all the rest of you. I hope the Lions don’t screw the pooch and disappoint me.

Wow. If we still lived in an era where players were property on the plantation or at least clubs had more continuity, it’s interesting to conjecture what the team‘s overall record would’ve been.

Two Cy Youngs in a row. Snore… This was yesterday‘s news before it became today’s news. This was inevitable. Not a lot of speculation about who would trip up his chance this year either. Last year it was Clase. Ha!

I’ve always wondered about this. From what I can tell, during the season, these guys don’t have a bushel load of free time that makes living in the city you play for that big of a deal. If you have a wife and a family and you want to have some semblance of normalcy and be a good husband and a father, does the family live in the city you play for? At least when school is out for the summer? I’m not sure if this is the norm or not. And after a night home game, a player might have to psychologically unwind in some manner or other, then get the sleep they need then get the ballpark, from what I’ve read, four or five hours before the game begins. That doesn’t seem conducive to the city you play in being that big of a deal. And your home city doesn’t mean anything when you’re on the road half the time. It doesn’t sound like a congenial lifestyle unless you’re a young single man.

Wondered about that. Clase was doing pretty well contract wise. Why would you need more unless there was some sort of experimental rat hitting the pleasure button thrill to being involved in it?

This is a cruel time of year to be a fan. During the regular season, you can share in the superstitious group mind fantasy of fandom that somehow you have an effect upon events. But it’s hard to support that fantasy when it comes to the arcane machinations of wheeling and dealing in the off-season.

Last night I tried to watch the TV series “Invasion“ on Apple TV about an alien attack on Earth. And initially I thought the low ratings from critics claiming the series’ great flaw was its “slow burn“ pacing was due to their impatience. But I now think they’re right. The series methodically follows a series of unfolding events within several clusters of individuals and situations, and the repetition and the not knowing becomes tedious. What I learn about the human condition and human motivations from Invasion - allegedly one of its goals - seems unworthy of the time spent. And it is so slow that it even undermines its capacity to entertain. I ended up watching a 25 minute summary of the first two seasons of Invasion on YouTube and that was more entertaining than any of the individual episodes I ended up watching. Now that I know what’s going on, even though some of the “suspense“ will be undermined, I might try to go back and watch it and perhaps I’ll find it less annoying.

Or not….

And apparently Vince Gilligan, who did Breaking Bad and Saul, etc. really likes Albuquerque because a big part of this story is taking place there.

Apple TV+ series Pluribus is pretty cool and I’m watching the first two episodes that dropped simultaneously. The “hive mind” thing is pretty salient and gripping.

Thanks. So people are merely being playfully talkative so that’s cool.

People keep talking about Bichette coming to Detroit as a live possibility. I haven’t thought of Detroit as a free agent destination city in a long time. Has he in someway indicated that Detroit is on his map as a prospective destination?