Play Ball!
With the temperature rising to a balmy 20ºF today, we can start preparing for spring. Don’t laugh — the NOAA forecasts a high of 58 Sunday. Time for me to dig out that old Mizuno third baseman’s mitt.
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A Tremendous Observation
Ken Tremendous*, pension fund monitor for Fremulon Insurance in Partridge, Kansas, is one of the brightest, most creative, funniest guys I’ve ever read on the internets. He is a baseball savant as well as an outspoken liberal/Lefty/progressive/whatever-the-fk-you-want-to-call-people-like-me.
With President Gag reacting to the apocalyptic deep freeze that’s strangled much of this holy land the last few days the way you’d figure some drunk, unread, bile-driven, wife-beater down at the lonely end of the bar would, I feel it’s a perfect time to dredge up one of Ken’s most trenchant tweets from some time last year. Here goes:
He’s not a genius. He’s not ‘crazy like a fox.’ He’s not a master strategist. He’s a 71 year-old below-average-intelligent, spoiled, trust fund-supported, born-on-3rd-thought-he-hit-a-triple, sexually harassing asshole in mental decline. Stop looking for what isn’t there.
Still, though, some 39.5 percent of this great nation’s populace actually approves of the job he’s doing.
538’s real time presidential approval monitor at 9:45am today.
Which, I suppose, makes perfect sense if what you want from a president is the dismantling of federal social services; the elimination of corporate regulations; the smashing of consumer protections, civil rights, and voting rights; scarcely literate direct messaging to his base via Twitter; a proud disdain for science and expertise; and pure, unadulterated greed at the expense of the public good. In that case, he’s our greatest president ever.
Of course, I’d rather have as my president Steve the Dog, who just got finished pissing on the kitchen floor because he has a bladder infection. At least Steve doesn’t disbelieve in the established fact that the planet is undergoing a radical climate change.
[ * A nom de plume — if you don’t know his real identity, go here. ]
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Pride Cometh
The sixteenth annual Bloomington Pride Film Festival kicked off this past Monday with a documentary on the life of Montgomery Clift at the IU Cinema. The big slate of more than 100 films, both short and full-length, begins tomorrow, Friday, 7:00pm at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. It continues through Saturday and, in the words of Pride board chair Janae Cummings, is “the best we’ve ever had.”
Cummings
Speaking of Cummings, she’s my guest today on Big Talk. The daughter of a couple of cops (her father went on to become a prosecutor in Anderson, Indiana), Cummings attended the Air Force Academy and then dabbled in law school before settling in as a professional writer. A gig, BTW, her daddy-o warned her against in the strongest of possible terms.
But Cummings makes a living as a writer/editor/marketer/PR specialist for the Hamilton Lugar School of Global & International Studies. That is, when she isn’t helping steer Bloomington Pride. Tune in this afternoon at 5:30 immediately following the Daily Local News on WFHB, 91.3 FM. The podcast will post at 6:00pm sharp.
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