How famous are these celebrities to you?

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Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho on Celebrity Jeopardy.

Here’s another one for my “Aging” catergory — although I suspect that’s not the whole story.

For quite some time — for decades, really — I’ve had this happen a lot: I’ll see someone on a magazine cover, or on a TV screen. This person is being presented in a context that indicates that he or she is a celebrity, and I as the beholder am expected to know who that is. There are hints. For instance, the magazine will be one that pretty much only features “celebrities” on its covers. Or the person will be identified by first-name only, as though I were a fantasist who imagines that I am on such intimate terms with that person. Or, the writer of that text believes that I would be insulted by anyone assuming that I would need to see a surname to know who it is.

As for television… I’ll give you an example from this evening. I was over visiting my mother, and she was watching “Celebrity Jeopardy.” Only I didn’t know who the people were. There was a man flanked by two women. The man looked familiar, but I couldn’t name him or recall where I had seen him. I had no clue with the women.

Fortunately, there’s the Web. I looked, and saw they were Robin Thede, Patton Oswalt, and Margaret Cho. Patton was the guy who seemed familiar, and now that I saw it, so was his name. And I had heard or read Margaret Cho’s name quite frequently in recent years, in connection with comedy, but I could not have identified her by her image. This was worsened by the fact that when I Google her image, she looks different. But I wouldn’t have recognized her when she looked like that, either.

I thought “Celebrity Jeopardy” had more recognizable names and faces. Admittedly, I’m basing that on those SNL spoofs, which at least in the past have been hilarious. My favorite might have been the one with “Sean Connery,” “Burt Reynolds” and “French Stewart.”

And I actually knew whom they were impersonating.

Now I’m going to really embarrass myself. When I was quite young, I watched pretty much everything on the three channels available, and that includes the game shows. And I knew who all those people were — even on “Hollywood Squares.” Do you know who all these people were?

Well, I did. Even though that’s a very blurry picture. (I probably wouldn’t have complained about that in 1968, though. I was also watching it in black and white.)

I’m pretty sure that if I were younger, I would have known who those affable people were on Jeopardy tonight. After all, I knew the guy’s face and one woman’s name! I must apologize to Ms. Thede, though — I had no idea.

But I knew all those people on the Squares, and looking back, some of them were pretty marginal celebs. But I knew them, and could tell you where I’d seen them. For instance, Wally Cox had once played a birdwatcher on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I think I’d also seen him do standup. So there.

There were some people who were famous to me simply because they were on game shows a lot. I’d known Kitty Carlisle and Orson Bean for a couple of decades before I learned they were actors.

So some of it’s age. But here’s something I think is a significant contributing factor. I’ve mentioned this before in a different context:

It’s the profusion of available media in the post-cable, streaming world that makes it impossible to see and know everyone being beamed at us. So many people who are intensely famous within genres and subgenres of public entertainment, but not as known to the full population.

Back in the day, we ALL knew who all the “famous” people were.

I wasn’t the only person watching those three stations all the time in the ’60s. Everybody was, to some extent. Even old people saw The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, Robert Goulet, the inescapable Topo Gigio, and the guys who spun plates atop sticks. And with the possible exception of the guys with the plates, people of all ages could probably name them. That’s because they HAD to come to their fans and everyone else through the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Smothers Brothers, or Dean Martins’ show, or Andy Williams’, or Merv Griffin’s daytime talk show.

The supply was limited. That’s my excuse for sort-of knowing who “Charlie Weaver” was.

 

 

What do you trust AI to do?

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Real vs. AI. AI is so dumb, it ‘thinks’ it was being racially sensitive.

The pictures above are from one of texts from my linguistics course. The one on the left is real. The one on the right was created by artificial intelligence.

Don’t blame AI entirely. As we learned from Hal, who explained his behavior in “2001” in the sequel, “2010,” you have to be really careful how you program these machines.

Hal was programmed to remove any obstacle that threatened the success of the mission to Jupiter. If that meant killing those pesky astronauts on board, so be it.

The AI (Google’s LLM Gemini) that added a black member to the Wehrmacht “was apparently trained to generate (racially and ethnically) diverse, but had no way to know in what actual, factual contexts such diversity existed (or did not exist),” according to the book.

This happened in 2015. We know that AI is exponentially “smarter” today. But we would still do well to be careful in what we trust it to do.

Seeing that reminded me of something I recently realized about my own attitude toward artificial “intelligence.”

I’m not engaged in creating fake images that look real (although sometimes I do play around with Photoshop), so I’m not really concerned about ending up with fake black Nazis.

I write and edit. And ever since people around me (people who are not writers and artists) started using AI to generate text, I’ve thought, “I would never do that.” And not because I feared losing my job; I’m basically retired.

But I’ve avoided saying that, because I knew how people would react: “Look at the old Luddite who started out writing on manual typewriters!” Which I did; but I’m not a Luddite. I’ve enthusiastically embraced every new technology that has come along since those early days. I was usually at the vanguard of each change, and coached others in how to use it.

But not this. And one day recently, listening to some other people talking back and forth about the advantages and disadvantages of using AI, it suddenly hit me why I refused even to think about it.

No matter what technology was involved, I have never entirely trusted anyone else to express something I wanted to say. Oh, sure, I trusted my reporters and my associates on the editorial board. But I coached them ahead of time on how to write it, and as editor had complete control of the final form.

Sometimes I would rewrite it completely. Not because I was smart and they were dumb. I did the same thing to myself. Over and over, I would write an entire column and then throw it away and rewrite it entirely — sometimes I’d be so disgusted with the draft I’d even abandon the subject and write about something else.

No matter how much I fed to the machine ahead of time, when it was done, I’d be dissatisfied and rewrite it, taking pretty much as much time as if I were rewriting something I or a trusted subordinate had written.

So where’s the advantage in doing it in the first place?

So I basically just use AI to help with searches, and I apply plenty of caveats to that. Just as a way of sniffing the air as I start out on serious work; I always dig deeper than Google’s AI shows me.

So what about you? In what ways do you use AI, and to what extent do you trust it?

Remember Hal?

One of my favorite Bible passages

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The Flight of the Prisoners (1896) by James Tissot; the exile of the Jews to Babylon

I said I’m getting close to finishing James Kugel’s book about How to Read the Bible, and I am. I’m in the last 100 pages. (It’s taken me months because I just read a few pages at a time during meals. Just a few pages give you a LOT to digest. It’s very deep.)

Anyway, over breakfast this morning, during a chapter about Jeremiah, I ran across one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. I wrote about this bit before in 2009. Right after I got laid off, Rep. Nathan Ballentine brought it to my attention, for which I am grateful. I’d never read it before.

It’s in Jeremiah 29. Here’s the part I got from Nathan:

11 For I know well the plans I have in mind for you—oracle of the LORD—plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.

But I like the whole chapter, which Jeremiah aimed at the Hebrews during their Babylonian exile. Especially this part:

4 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon:
5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their fruits.
6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters. Increase there; do not decrease.
7 Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare your own depends.

In other words, however bad you think things are, don’t give up on life. Embrace it, wherever you are. Build houses. Have children. Marry them off so you can have grandchildren. Don’t moan about being so far from Jerusalem. Stand in the place where you live. In fact, you should even “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you.”

This may look like the end, but as long as you engage life positively, things will be better someday.

The people of Judah returned to Jerusalem about 70 years after Nebuchadnezzer dragged them away, thanks to Cyrus the Great.

These are good words to ponder in the Trumpist era. Maybe I won’t get to return to the America I knew all my life before 2016. (The problems that caused his election are complex, and likely to outlive him.) If not, I still hope for my children and grandchildren. In the meantime, I’m living my life in this world with joyful gratitude for my blessings, and all the energy I can muster…

Remember that noise on ‘Lost?’

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After the infinitessimal bit of “rain” we got this morning, I went out to look at the garden — my fig trees, and the okra I recently planted.

And it was nice out there, with the world slightly moist, and everything green except the grass.

But it was hard to fully enjoy for the noise. I shot some footage (above) of the “forest” behind our deck, which has a sort of subtropical lushness, to capture the difference between that and the obscene, crashing mechanical noises filling the area.

It immediately reminded me of the bizarre noises the people on “Lost” kept hearing in the jungle, before they ever knew about the “smoke monster.”

That’s not what this was, though. About two houses away from us, workmen with large, clanking vehicles — including a huge, self-propelled chipper-shredder — were chewing up some trees that were recently felled in a neighbor’s yard.

Sounded like more than that, though…

Uh… what’s that noise in the jungle?

And now, my SECOND favorite team…

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Bad news for the Phillies, but good for the Braves.

This one almost snuck by me yesterday, until I ran across a live press conference about it on my MLBtv app…

You know about the Saturday Night Massacre in Boston. Just three days later, the bosses in Philadelphia got rid of the manager of my second favorite team — which was at the bottom of its division in the NL, just as the Sox were in the cellar of the AL East.

I’ve told you about my hierarchy of fave teams. Now I’m starting to worry a bit about Dave Roberts. But not really. They’re not only leading their division, but they’re tied with the Yankees for the best season so far in the big leagues, at .667. Which is good. I like Dave.

You know who’s got the best? My former favorite team, the Braves (see image above). They’re at .700. You know, the team MLBtv won’t let me watch, ever. It’s gotten to where I don’t think I can name a single player I used to watch who’s still in Atlanta.

At least I can still see Freddie Freeman out in L.A. — along with Mookie, who of course should still be in Boston…

The Dodgers are more than OK…

Great game, Alex! Yer fired!

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Just before Cora got fired.

I was pretty excited yesterday when the Red Sox stomped the Orioles, and kept on stomping: 17-1. I joined the game late. In the 9th inning, for some reason, the Orioles pitcher was throwing like a slow-pitch softpall pitcher.They must have told him not to waste his arm when there was no chance. I’d never seen anything like it, but maybe that happens a lot. It was only recently that I got to see baseball again on a regular basis, after decades of deprivation.

The Sox had gone into the game 9-17, and were in the cellar of the American League East, so I was very happy. So were the players.

An hour or two after the game, my phone informed me that Red Sox Manager Alex Cora and six of his coaches had just been fired by the front office.

Great game, guys! Now go away, all of yez…

I’m still not sure what happened. Sure management was unhappy with the way the season has started. So was I. But what timing! Surely the decision had been made ahead of the game. Do you suppose there was a discussion along the lines of, “Do we want to fire him right now, after THIS game?” If there was, we know the answer to the question.

Did Cora know during that game that this was coming? Did the coaches? Taking it further, did the players? Is that why they won so big? Were they winning it for Alex?

Again, I dunno. But when I saw this headline, I was anxious to reach Shaughnessy’s take on it:

It wasn’t Alex Cora’s fault the Red Sox roster stinks, and he shouldn’t have been fired over it

Before reading it, I agreed (on an emotional level; I can’t say I KNOW how much of the fault was or wasn’t his) that he shouldn’t have been fired over it. I like Alex.

But I disagreed that the Red Sox roster stinks. Except for Alex Bregman, it seems to me that they had all their best players still — and Roman Anthony was back from his injury. This was the same team (except for Bregman) that won all those games in that surge last summer, after they got rid of Devers.

The first game of this season, I saw what I was hoping to see — the Sox doing what I thought they could do. But I hadn’t really seen that team since then. Not until yesterday.

So yeah, there was a problem, and something needed to be done, but this?

Shaughnessy’s column, like the headline, swung back and forth between things that I agreed with, and things that ticked me off. Shaughnessy’s good at that.

I enjoyed his lede:

There you go.

The Saturday Night Massacre.

Settling All Family Business….

Yep.

But then it’s back and forth, good and bad (from my perspective). Examples:

I’m all for shaking things up, and understand that you can’t fire all your players in late April, but put me down as one who did not think Cora was the problem with this Fenway F Troop.

It’s the roster. It’s the 26 guys Henry and Breslow gave Cora. That’s the problem…

F Troop? Getoutta here!

Cora is the same manager who won 119 games for you in 2018. He’s the third-winningest manager in franchise history, a guy who relates to players, knows when the other team is tipping pitches, and is better than most when it comes to situations, matchups, and day-to-day lineups.

Cora is not the one who traded Mookie Betts, let Xander Bogaerts walk, and got no players in return for the salary dump of Rafael Devers….

I’m with ya! As long as you’re not saying they should have kept Devers, and I don’t think you are…

Cora’s not the one who spent on the wrong players (Masataka Yoshida, Trevor Story), traded Chris Sale at exactly the wrong time, and pulled away from every big-name free agent last winter.

Hey! Trevor’s one of my favorites! He’s a clutch hitter, time after time!

Cora is not the one who failed to give Alex Bregman a no-trade clause, then said, “If Alex Bregman wanted to be in Boston, he’d be in Boston.”

OK, if that’s the way you heard it, and it’s right, I agree. I’m ever-mindful you know a thousand times as much about the Sox as I ever will…

But you know, this was uncalled-for:

Is it Alex Cora’s fault that a Red Sox third base position once filled by the likes of Frank Malzone, Wade Boggs, Devers, and Bregman is now manned by 5-foot-6-inch Caleb Durbin, he of the .165 batting average and one home run (off a utility player in mop-up duty Saturday)?..

Hey, I miss Bregman, too, but that’s just mean. No wonder so many don’t like Dan. He didn’t need to mock the new guy like that.

Anyway, to update, the Sox won again today, 5-3. So I’m happy about that. But everybody should note: This winning streak — if that’s what it is — started with Alex still in the dugout. And that was a big win…

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Are you getting more cold-call emails lately?

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‘Why do you keep sending me emails?’ asks Will Robinson.

I am. And I assume AI is to blame. At least, I hope it is. If actual humans are sending these mindless, hopeless missives, they have my sympathy. Well, a little sympathy. Not enough for me to respond to them.

The sympathy is because, well… during my newspaper days, I used to tell people that there were a lot of things I could imagine myself doing other than journalism, but there was one thing I knew I could NEVER do: sales. (I have a horror of the idea of making a pitch to someone that I wouldn’t want someone to make to me. And I almost never want to hear a sales pitch.)

Having my impression is that the most miserable kind of selling cold-calling. So yeah, I pity the humans who have to do it.

But I think these are bots. I think they’re a reflection of the trend toward more and more businesses turning to AI. Here’s a recent example I just dug out of my trash folder:

Brad,

Unlike most banks, we can give you funding that matches Adco Ideas’s timelines.

Upto 250K-5M USD approved in just 24 hours (as a revolving line). No collateral required.

And interest applies just on the amount you use.

Can I tell you more?

Best,

Xxxxxx

I don’t take the utter cluelessness (the name of the agency is ADCO, not Adco Ideas. They’re getting that from the URL. And there’s not a single word indicating awareness of what ADCO is or does) as proof that this is AI. A lot of humans are that unobservant.

I think it’s AI because since about the first of the year, I’ve been getting so MANY of them on my ADCO email.

How about you? Are y’all seeing the same?

The Red Sox didn’t need this right now

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Here’s what I was worrying about earlier today:

 

That’s a notification on the lockscreen of my phone. It came across awhile before tonight’s game started. It shows the odds for the game. I don’t remember signing up for these, but I like getting the reminder that a game is coming up.

The bad thing is, as lousy as Boston’s start has been this season, up to the last few days, they were still being shown as likely winners. But not now. Not against the Yankees. Not after last night’s game — which was at Fenway, and the first of the season between these ultimate rivals.

Then, about an hour later, I saw this update:

 

You’ll note that was just in the first inning. Dare I watch the game?

Before I decided, I thought I’d take a glance at my email, and encountered this from The Boston Globe:

An ‘iconic image’ or ‘white supremacist propaganda’? It’s not clear why DHS posted a photo of Fenway Park.

I went to the story, and it seemed to be about this tweet:

ICE, a wholly owned subsidiary of DHS, is not terribly popular in Beantown, and that prompted this from one of my fave local pols, Seth Moulton:

“This is our [expletive] city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom,” Representative Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat, wrote on his repost of the DHS meme. His comment echoed David Ortiz’s famous declaration in the first Sox game at Fenway after the 2013 Marathon bombing.

“They’re trying to get under our skin, and they’re trying to poke us to see if we’re willing to stand up,” Moulton told the Globe Wednesday. “And we need to show that we as a city and as a community are not going to take this [expletive]. We’re going to stand up.”

But if you think that’s bad news, check out what appeared on the Red Sox’ own Twitter feed before the season started:

Hey, y’all know I love baseball, and am fond of history and nostalgia as well. Those two things feed into why I love baseball. But you can imagine the stir that video clip caused in our troubled times:

Ahead of the Sox home opener, a team account on X posted a reel of old footage from Opening Day in Boston in the 1950s, presumably to invoke fond nostalgia at the timelessness of America’s Pastime.

Instead, the clip went viral among right-wingers for a different reason: the all-white crowd at Fenway, representative of the idealized country they want to “return” to through mass deportations and curbing immigration. Some made explicitly racist comments about how much more diverse the country and Boston have become since…

That’s the thing, see. I was wondering whether Seth and the rest were overreacting to the DHS post — although I didn’t like it, either. But I guess they had the context of knowing about the reactions to the previous post.

All I know is that America really doesn’t need this stuff right now. And the Red Sox — the team I love, the team of people like Willson Contreras, Cedanne Rafaela, Andrew Monasterio, Wilyer Abreu and, going back a bit, David Ortiz — really, really don’t need it.

We REALLY don’t. As I sign off, here’s the score:

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How do you get a seat in this restaurant, anyway?

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‘No dice over here! How does it look on your side?’

An update on events on our backporch bird feeder…

For years, we’ve had a pair of doves hang around our deck, eyeing our feeder, which is designed for much smaller birds. They can land on one of the little perches, but can’t get their heads down to the seed without pushing themselves off.

They haven’t give up. A couple of days back, they both managed a landing on the roof of the feeder, then for several minutes kept sneaking peaks over the edge, trying to figure out how to get down there and enjoy a meal. Eventually, they gave it up as hopeless.

NOTICE: Diners must be this small or smaller.

As usual, I felt bad for them. They reminded me of paupers gazing hungrily through the windows of a fancy restaurant. I did what I could — I scattered a bunch of seed on the ground below the feeder. Happily, my wife noticed at least one of them eating on the ground later.

They were both terribly genteel about the injustice of it all.

Not this guy below. He doesn’t care how fat his arse is; he will leap to the feeders, grab on with fingers and toes, and chow down. I’m guessing these rats with fluffy tales consume about two-thirds of the food we put out for birds.

He doesn’t care. And he’s not a gentleman about it. Nor are the other squirrels. And after all that free insulation we let them have when it was cold…

If you’ll notice from the doves pic, this guy or one of his thieving brethren had already cleaned out the bottom chamber of the feeder. Now he’s working on the top.

Is forgetting the past particularly an American thing?

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I often rail about the lack of interest in history, which seems one of the defining characteristics of most modern humans. (The lack of interest, not the railing about it.)

But is it modern humans in general, or particularly an American thing? I suspect it’s both.

I started thinking about this this morning because I recently returned to reading a book I started to read last year, but didn’t finish. I’m now getting close to finishing How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James Kugel.

Anyway, toward the end Kugel’s writing about some puzzling things about the book of Isaiah, and wondering why it was written/edited that way, and then jumps back to raise the same points with regard to the Pentateuch. That takes him to talking about how so much of the Torah started as short, etiological (his favorite word) stories told orally from generation to generation, long before they were put together in early Hebrew.

And I paused to imagine American families doing that. I couldn’t.

Oh, there are exceptions. Alex Haley said Roots came from stories his family told about Kunta Kinte and subsequent generations. But it’s generally hard to find examples among descendants of people who came here willingly, on purpose.

I think there’s something in the makeup of a person who decides to take a hazardous journey across the ocean in a frail wooden ship, leaving all he or his ancestors ever knew, that causes him to want to forget all that went before. I don’t get it, but I know that’s a thing.

Such people passed that on in their DNA. The ancient Israelites passed on stories about ancestors, and even memories of the switch from foraging to agriculture 10,000 years earlier (hence the Adam and Eve story). Americans — I mean deliberate, voluntary Americans — seemed to pass on forgetfulness.

I’ve traced every line in my family — save one, that of my mother’s father’s mother’s father, who created a dead end when he died during the Siege of Petersburg — back to the old country. But I’ve never found a single story clearly answering my biggest question about them coming here: Why?

Why did they pull up stakes and come here? Oh, I know all the standard answers from the elementary school — freedom, especially of religion. And if you were a Pilgrim, that’s a good answer. I suspect most people came for economic and social opportunity — a chance to get out of the box in which their old, established societies placed them. They came for land and upward mobility, or so I gather. Of course, some did have an anarchic streak that had to do with not wanting to be told what to do, but I suspect that was a side benefit, and wasn’t quite the refined sense of liberty that Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison left us.

I do have a hint from one immigrant ancestor — John Barton Wathen (the R was added by my branch a century later) came over as an indentured servant in 1670. That’s seems a clear indication of A motive, if not necessarily TH motive. It seems to have worked out for him — after his servitude, he acquired and passed on a good bit of land.

But I’d still like to have a chat with him. I’m glad that I’m an American. But I still want to know why I’m an American.

And you know what? As much as I know about John Wathen, I still have no idea what his life back in England (or perhaps Wales) was like.

Which makes me like most Americans. But I wish I knew much more…

Impromptu Top Five List of Favorite Painters

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This is not a thoughtful list. I’m just throwing it together because something made me think about John Singer Sargent, and that made me want to do a Top Five list, so I’m assembling this hastily because I’ve got a lot to do today.

It’s also not an honest list, because an honest list of favorites would consist entirely of people in my family, but my wife would give me trouble if I showed any of her watercolors, so consider this a Top Five List of Painters to Whom I Am Not Related by Blood or Marriage.

Maybe I’ll do a more thoughtful one later.

Here goes:

  1. John Singer Sargent. Y’all are probably tired of him because I know I’ve mentioned him before, such as when we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Now I’ve gotta to BACK to Boston because I just learned about his Triumph of Religion set of murals that he spent the last 29 years of his life trying to finish. I love his range, as well as his mastery in achieving he’s trying to do. He’s called an impressionist, but he’s good at whatever style you choose. Check out his use of light in this, or the hypnotic eyes in this. And dig the shadows in my very favorite, El Jaléo, which I encountered at Isabella’s museum.
  2. Caravaggio. I learned about Caravaggio from a print that hangs in a hallway of my church, The Calling of St. Matthew. That’s it at the top of this post.
  3. Vermeer. Everybody talks about the Girl with the Pearl Earring, but my fave is Het melkmeisje, which I saw at the Rijsmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s not very big, but it is very impressive. I saw a lot of Rembrandt there, too — some greats including The Night Watch and those dudes from the Dutch Masters cigar box, but that would be so cliche to choose him, right?
  4. Anders Zorn. OK this is almost the same as picking Sargent, because I mistake his work for Sargent’s sometimes, but I like his work on its own. Especially his portait of the aforementioned Isabella (which is better than Sargent’s portrait of her), and The Omnibus. Although, as I’ve said before, I like George William Joy’s version of the omnibus them better (more communitarian, or something — more people, anyway). Y’all know how I love public transportation. And though I definitely don’t love tobacco, I like this one as well.
  5. Boticelli. Nope, not the Venus one. My fave is Primavera, especially this detail.

That’s it. Thoughts? I know a lot of this is repetitive, but I don’t remember doing a Top Five on painters, and am curious to see what y’all will tell me I left out.

Don’t mention Michelangelo, though. I’ve got a bone to pick with him, which I’ll explain in a subsequent post…

A moment to recall ‘a previous America’

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I’m very busy — which is why I generally restrict myself to simple posts that take less time and don’t say much — but I want to mention this before it gets too far in the past.

This was three days ago.

About the only time I see anything that falls within the definition of “TV news” is when I’m checking in on my Mom at an hour when she watches it. On this occasion, it was something worth watching, and I would have missed it otherwise.

I had heard about Artemis II, in passing. What I heard made me promise myself to pause and read more about it, but with all I’ve been doing, I didn’t get around to it. And now, it appeared, the spacecraft was coming back. We watched the whole re-entry and splashdown, and I was struck by how I was seeing something I hadn’t seen in many a year.

I had watched some of the shuttle launches in the ’80s, especially after the horror of Challenger. I felt I had to keep an eye on these strange things that landed rather than splashing down, if only in case we were going to have to scrap our plans for the next day’s front and whole A section.

But they lacked the excitement of the launches in the ”60s. After all, while the new craft was higher tech and carried a larger crew, these shuttles were just tooling around in low orbit, the way John Glenn had done in 1962. And I’d seen that. Everybody had seen that. My 3rd-grade class — indeed, I suppose the whole school — assembled in the auditorium to watch it live. The black-and-white TV was on a wheeled trolley placed down in front of the stage, to bring the small screen a bit closer to us. It was the biggest thing that happened that year, even bigger than Mantle and Maris vying to beat the Babe’s record back at the start of the term.

What was interesting about this Artemis II return over the weekend was that… well, it was a bit like that day in the school auditorium — or at least it seemed to be to the people on the screen.

There were differences, of course:

  • The screen itself. HD, and rich color that none of us could have imagined back in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days. Better sound, better everything — except, no John Glenn, the Single-Combat Warrior fighting the godless Soviets in the Heavens, as Tom Wolfe would later describe it.
  • Instead of Glenn, there was a group of four I’d never heard of. Of course, this being the 21st century, there was a lot of hoopla about one being black and another being a woman! Like we hadn’t seen that before. You know what “diversity” point meant more to me? At least three of the crew were military — and two of them U.S. Navy pilots. Ike wanted astronauts to be military test pilots, and I’ve always agreed with him. They tend to already meet many prerequisites, and they take orders well.

But the most startling thing to me wasn’t those minor differences. It was the sameness. The breathlessness, in every voice that came on the air. For instance… people kept saying, over and over, that there was going to be a terribly suspenseful few minutes during re-entry when we wouldn’t be able to communicate with the capsule!!!! Also the capsule will turn into a ball of intensely hot fire as it entered the atmostphere!!!

Like no one had ever seen such a thing before. Like it hadn’t been standard in all those flights in the ”60s. Like Hollywood Opie hadn’t Apollo 13, in which the most suspenseful moment was the one in which the capsule was making its re-entry, and the loss of signal was longer than expected.

Finally, of course, it dawned on me that most people hadn’t seen this before, as unimaginable as that was for me. Only 12-15 percent of people today were even living in 1962, much less in the 3rd grade. Only about 22 percent here living on the planet the last time we sent astronauts to the moon.

For that matter, only about half today’s population was even around when the heavily nostalgic “Apollo 13” came out!

So this was a complete, unprecedented novelty to most people watching — as well as to the network TV folks and possibly everyone at Mission Control, and even the astronauts themselves!

Which was weird.

This was underlined by one young TV guy who had drawn the job of interviewing regular folks who had gathered to watch the spectacle. He spoke of their awe at witnessing such a thing for the first time. And he was particularly impressed to have spoken to a man who was so old he could  actually remember the early flights back during the Space Age!

But then the young man with the microphone said something that made him sound older and wiser himself. He said that to the people with whom he had spoken, what was happening “seems like something a previous America would have accomplished.”

And he was right. I remember that America. Early in my career I referred to the WWII generation as “the America that got things done.” Later, I realized that generation was still accomplishing things for decades after 1945, because at that point they were still in charge of this country. And they were still pulling together across the lines of division we know today, to get one tough thing after another done. So we got things like the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Peace Corps, and… the Space Program.

JFK and his veep got the Moon Landing done, with the whole country dedicated to the goal after Kennedy’s assassination. We were still pulling together then, even as Vietnam was starting to tear us apart.

You know who launched the Artemis program? Trump. Really. Of course, to the extent that he actually deserves credit for that, I suppose this is the ONE way in which he has acted to, in some way, make America great again.

But of course, he is still someone who owes his prominence to division — to the way Democrats and Republicans view each other as members of different species, to the rally crowds that roar approval when a speaker says things about OTHER people that no politician would have dreamed of publicly uttering when when we had some mutual respect, and got things done together.

(Of course, he didn’t inspire the nation with a speech like this. He couldn’t, both because he lacks the ability and inclination and because this isn’t that America. But hey, he signed the paperwork.)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Artemis program served somehow as a portal that led to us being that country again. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished…

The Mercury Seven

Maybe not a dream cure, but at least I’m learning stuff…

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My dreams aren’t as bad as Scrooge’s, but they’re tiresome…

Remember, when I told you I was taking a linguistics course this semester, I expressed the hope that it would have a secondary benefit?

Perhaps I can even do well enough to put an end to those dreams. You know, the ones in which you have to go take your exam at the end of a term, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea where the class meets, because you haven’t attended it even once. You’d meant to, but somehow never got around to it.

Well… that might have been a wish too far. I’ve had variations on that dream twice in the past week. The first one had an interesting twist.

In that one, there was an awareness that I’m actually currently taking a course, and doing pretty well at it — which is the way I’d describe how things have been going in this linguistics course. So the dream began with a “this is working as hoped” sort of vibe.

But then I experienced that evil moment common to these dreams — the point at which I am suddenly reminded that I’m actually taking a full load, and while I’ve been engaging this one course fairly well, it has caused me to completely forget the other four or so. I say “four or so” because I absolutely couldn’t find the slip of paper (like the kind we might have had in the ’70s) that listed the courses, the professors, and times and locations. Like this one, although I seemed to remember the one in the dream as being neatly printed, with no handwritten entries.

In the dream, it was a Monday, and in the real world my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays — but now I felt sure that I had classes, maybe two or three of them, on Mondays. And I had never been to them, and had no idea where they were, and I was panicking.

There was no resolution of this problem, of course. That’s one of the rules in this sort of dream.

The second dream was less interesting — just a standard “panicking because I’ve never been to class” dream, with no reference to the one course I’m actually taking.

So maybe I’m not going to get that side benefit. I’ll just have to be satisfied with learning stuff. And I am.

And it’s stuff that I wanted to learn (or some of it is — this being an intro course, there’s a lot of material from sub-fields aside from the stuff I like, but that’s fine). These last weeks — since this post about accents — have been very good. The next week we were on language change — things such as why Beowolf was so different from Shakespeare, and why so many can’t understand Shakespeare today. And this week we’re doing names — looking at given names in various languages, the development of surnames in various cultures in recent centuries, and so forth. Good stuff, if you’re me and you have a family tree with 10,000 people on it — so far.

Just four classes left — today, Thursday, and the two next week. And I have part of a project due Friday, and the full project due a few days after the last class.

In my slacker days…

So. I plan to enjoy these last days, and do well on the project, and get a good grade. Maybe then the Superintendent of Dreams will decide that I’m no longer the slacker I was back in the early ’70s, and he can give me a break on the stress dreams. After all, aside from grades, I’ve made it to every class — although I might be a bit late today (but it’s excused).

Maybe. But I suspect those dreams are just a fact of life. I’ll just have to be satisfied with having learned things I wanted to know about. That will be sufficient reward…

 

 

 

The best week yet: accents and dialects

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A meme referenced in Understanding Language Through Humor.

Now, this is one of the reasons I took this linguistics course. This is the good stuff.

It’s been getting better week by week. This being an introduction course, it’s bound to cover things that I’m less interested in, and we got that in the first couple of weeks — stuff like mechanics of speech, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. But now it’s getting good.

The week before this past one, we were studying how children learn to speak, and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff — stuff I didn’t know, despite having five children and five grandchildren. (I’ve already bored one friend with advice about her toddler’s linguistic development, so if you have any tots at the moment, you might want to steer clear of me.)

But this week that just ended was the best so far, and I hope for more like it. It covered accents and “varieties” of languages (which is what linguists call dialects because calling them dialects might hurt some people’s feelings).

I mentioned in my Christopher Guest post what a fascination accents are to me. I love them as living demonstrations of the seemingly infinite diversity of human beings. If I go to another country or part of this country, I want to hear those local accents — the more stereotypical they are, the better. When I’m in New York, I love hearing the cops talk like the ones in the movies. And one of the most delightful moments of my first morning in England in 2010 was when I asked a copper for directions and he answered me in perhaps the first Cockney I’d ever heard in person. (My joy was increased by the fact he was wearing the traditional Bobby uniform with the oddly shaped helmet. They do that in London, at least in areas frequented by tourists, unlike in other parts of England.)

At the same time, I marvel that people still speak with such accents. Why on Earth do people speak that way? When I was young, I figured that I was a member of the last generation that would hear the really thick ones. And we’d only hear them from older people — the rest of us would have our accents ironed out by TV, radio and movies. And that was true for military brats — we all had flat, regionless modes of speech, unlike the older people around us. But there are still plenty of people out there who can be hard for folks from elsewhere to understand. And I wonder at that. I suspect it’s now one of two things: The first is that it’s like any other physical ability, such as being able to hit a curve ball. Some have elastic speech abilities and can smooth out their accents (or imitate the accents of others) at will. Others are stuck with the way they first learned speech from their parents.

Lately I’ve been giving more creedence to the second theory: The people with the accents are clinging to them deliberately — or at least semi-deliberately — as a means of expressing their membership in a particular group, and boosting the degree to which they are accepted in that group. There’s also a related, but more personal, emotional motive: “Talking like this was good enough for my momma!”

I grew up in the postwar period, when a uniform sense of American identity was strongest. It’s been eroding ever since, and America is more tribal today than ever. So people want to sound like members of subgroups.

I suspect both of those theories — the physical and the group identification –are at work. But I’m eager to learn more about these things I enjoy hearing.

I’m also interested in learning more about how people in different regions or demographic groups speak aside from accents. We actually concentrated more on that than accents in the class. Since I’ve moved around, I was familiar with most of what we discussed, but was shocked by other things. For instance, in some parts of the country, such as Indiana and much of Pennsylvania, people actually think these are logical sentences:

  • Your car needs detailed.
  • The baby needs changed.
  • The baby likes cuddled.

(To the people who say this things and their neighbors, it makes sense to leave out the words “to be.”)

This caused one of our liveliest  discussions. I was shocked by those nonsentences. The student from New Jersey next to me was practically outraged that anyone thought such abuse of the language was acceptable, and I wasn’t far behind her. But the Hoosier across the room found that useage quite normal. (And I had thought Indiana folks were relatively normal speakers, compared to those of us in the South, or Boston, or another of your more colorful places.)

Yeah, I know. Most of you don’t care. But I do. And I share these things for those who find similar things interesting.

I just wanted to share the fact that I’m enjoying this limited return to college. I’d go on about it further, but now I’ve got to work on the assignments for the coming week…

I’ll end with one of my homework questions from last week. The image above is from a new book by my professor. It’s called Understanding Language Through Humor. I enjoy our reading from that. Unfortunately, most of the homework comes from our stultifying main text — which I didn’t mind as much this past week. Note item C:

The survivors in their new homes

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Here they are, right after I planted them Tuesday.

Some of you may wonder what happened to those fig trees I was trying to grow from some cuttings I got from our friend Scout.

OK, so maybe none of you have thought about it except Scout, and maybe not even her. But I have. Unfortunately, for about a year all I did was think about it. Yesterday, I took action.

It was more than a year ago that I got the cuttings — four of them — from the bountiful trees in Scout’s yard (with her permission, of course). And I went through the myterious procedures needed to get those twigs to sprout some roots, and then planted them in small pots.

But then by May, two of them had given up the will to be fig trees. But I put the two viable ones into larger pots, and for a while they produced leaves with great abandon.

Another angle.

Then, I came to a standstill. I couldn’t decide where to plant them, and I got conflicting advice from different folks. One credible source told me I shouldn’t even THINK about it until they’d gotten a lot bigger, which could take the rest of the year.

So I hesitated. Next thing you knew, the weather turned cool enough that I saw the need to bring them in. But I think it was before that that the leaves fell off. Anyway, for months, I was back to sticks that were just somewhat longer than the cuttings I had started with.

Then, a month or two back. Leaves appeared on one. No leaves on the other, but the tip of the dead-looking gray was green — for weeks. Finally, leaves there, too.

My wife told me it was time to plant them in the ground, and she wasn’t planning to use her raised beds this year. (You have to have raised beds in our yard; it’s all hard, red clay.) So I had a place.

So there they are, looking… hopeful. As soon as I see some definite growth, I plan to fertilize. Chicken manure, of course. When I was a kid, my grandparents had this fluorishing, abundant fig tree. They always told me it was growing out of where the chicken coop used to be, before I was born.

Anyway, that’s what’s happening with the fig trees. Yeah, they’re pretty small, but very green. And they’ve got loads of room for growing roots…

The post I took down too late

EDITOR’S NOTE: I initially posted this on Opening Day. I turned to start doing other things, but then looked back and didn’t like what I saw. I decided to take it down. But I was too late. At least a couple of you have tried to comment on it, but been frustrated. Sorry about that. But I looked at that original headline — “First nominee for worst political ad of 2026 so far” — and the prospect of provoking multiple discussions of perfectly sickening stuff just made me decide I didn’t want to go there. In the past, I have relished such debates, but I have found that in this new Age of Unreason, you get nowhere trying to preach sense to nonsense. Everyone just gets all dyspeptic and goes away muttering. So, I’m not going to invite nominees to offer ads that sicken them, too. Then we’ll all be unhappy. Anyway, I didn’t mean to deprive you of anything. I just decided not to go there. I turned to something that might spark more pleasant interactions with my fellow humans.

Happy opening day! Baseball has begun! The Red Sox face the Reds in Cincinnati at 4:10 today!

If there’s a drawback to the return of baseball, I suppose it’s that I’ll start seeing a lot of TV ads again. I seldom watch live broadcast TV otherwise — I prefer streaming. But watching sports means ads. The good news is that I generally watch through the MLB TV app, and they block out a lot of them.

Unfortunately, that is not the case with TV news, or the game shows that come on at about the same time. I don’t usually watch those on my own, but I see them frequently when I go visit my mother in the evenings. And last night, I hit my limit of tolerance with the repeated airing of the latest from Ralph Norman.

I’m not going into details, except to say that this is a particularly offensive example of one of the most tiresome tropes in American politics. It tends to go something like, “Politishuns is a bunch a crooks, so y’all gotta elect me so I can go set ’em straight!”

Donald Trump’s “clean up the swamp” nonsense is perhaps the best-known recent example of the genre, but this was a standard approach long before he befouled our politics. The approach dates at least back to Andy Jackson’s day. His election was the first landmark in the development of our country’s more offensive forms of populism.

Don’t think I’m exaggerating in describing it. The title of the ad is “Crooks.” That’s it. Nothing like “I will make South Carolina better by doing X or Y.” Just “Crooks.” You know, subtle…

I’m not going to go into details on Norman’s proposals, because they’re all things I’ve addressed many times before. Or at least I won’t go beyond this: The core of his campaign seems to be the oldy in which he offers himself as someone who, as a “businessman,” is obviously better than “politicians.”

I don’t know anything about his business or how it has endowed him with superior character, but I do know that he:

Was a state legislator from 2005 to 2007, and apparently liked it so much that he came back in 2009 and stayed until 2017, at which time he went up to Congress — that monument to character and rectitude — and has stayed there ever since.

And yet, somehow, things didn’t get better.

But don’t worry! It’ll all get fixed when he’s governor!

That’s all I have to say about this ad that’s irritating me so much at the moment. There are probably worse ones out there, although it sickens me to think so. I’ve seen some awful ones recently from Henry McMaster’s lieutenant governor, whose name it always takes me a moment to recall because Henry elevated her from obscurity, and I can’t think of anything she’s done since. Pam. That’s it. I’d have to Google her other name.

But this is the one bugging me right now.

Maybe some of you who see more TV ads than I do have worse examples. Share your own nominees, although I don’t know whether I’ll have the stomach to go watch them.

I’m going to watch some baseball. I hope I get back from class today in time to catch the last innings…

 

Another Twitter account is officially Xed

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Buh-bye!

That’s a very blank, colorless, bloodless, soulless, bureaucratic, rubber-stamp sort of notification, isn’t it? The Middle Ages had beautiful, lovingly hand-drawn illuminations; our age has this.

That’s what ADCO received today upon doing away with its account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter (which is what I still call it, on the rare occasions when I mention it).

I got a call this morning from ADCO’s Lauren McAlexander. It seems ADCO is building a new website, and she and Lora Prill agreed there was no reason to have a link to this particular social medium any more. When I asked why, she said we hadn’t used it since 2019. Twitter was no longer strategically useful or effective for ADCO.

She reached out to me because the system was emailing me with a code that she needed to kill the account. Note the equally uninspiring email notifications below, the back-and-forth during several attempts to get in and ditch the account before we got through.

Why was I needed for that action? Because I used to do most of the Tweeting for ADCO. I’d sort of forgotten that until Lauren reminded me.

You may not know anyone, personally, who was as crazy about Twitter as I was. In 2009, went almost instantaneously from being a detractor of Twitter and all that social nonsense (I particularly thought it was a hoot when I first saw Andre Bauer’s MySpace page), to being an addict.

I still laughed at MySpace, grumbled that I was forced to deal with Facebook (because that’s where the masses were), was only briefly fascinated by Pinterest, turned up my nose at Instagram, and had no interest in TikTok or Snapchat.

But I was nuts about Twitter. It’s not just that it was an irresistible form to someone who started writing headlines for a living in 1975 — I was very much used to expressing things that way. It was also useful. There were people that I found I could reach more quickly with a Twitter DM than through other means. They checked Twitter that often, as did I.

I commented on everything happening, as it happened. I would live-tweet big political event, generally writing more than 30 tweets during a debate or major speech. I wrote haiku. Harking back to front-page-editor days in Wichita, I created the Virtual Front Page. I was named one of the Twitterati (and yeah, I get that that was kind of a joke on Corey’s part — Hey, look at the old guy tweeting! — but it pleased me).

Twitter was so straightforward and logical — the very latest Tweet among accounts you followed would be right there at the top, unlike the bewildering order of Facebook posts that made it hard to find something you had just been looking at. It was also relatively free of obvious ads.

Those things — the unmysterious ordering and lack of ads — started changing somewhat Before the Fall. I found that Tweets from accounts I read the most would appear at the top, regardless of when they were posted. I did not like that. Nor had I liked the move from the 140-character limit to 280. It’s like they were throwing discipline and artistry to the winds, with no respect for tradition. But I adjusted, remembering that I was maybe better at writing blurbs than headlines. (In my newspaper days, other editors would ask me to look over and write blurbs for projects I’d had nothing to do with; I just had a knack for summing up complicated content in a few lines.)

But what was most wonderful about Twitter was that everybody was there! That is, everybody in my world — journalists and politicos. And when I say they were there, I mean they were always there. There was always a party going on, of the 18th century salon variety — neverending interaction with smart people who knew their politics. It was addictive to a lot of people because of that, and as a result of that.

That’s not the case anymore, with a few exceptions. People have wandered away, and if I bother to look at the medium now, it can make me kind of pessimistic about the state of humanity. Not always, but a lot of the time.

I’ve tried alternatives. I signed up for — I have to pause here to remember the name of it — Bluesky right when it came out. It offered promise, but didn’t deliver because it never reached critical mass. I found a few Twitter friends there, but the energy was missing along with the numbers. The moment had passed for a medium such as this to really take off.

I’m not canceling my Twitter account. It’s still there if I need it to contact someone or whatever. But I don’t look at it on a daily or even weekly basis — when once I would do so multiple times in an hour.

I still smile when I look back and see myself with Joe back in 2018, there at the top of my feed. But then, after a glance or two, I move on. I have a lot of other things to do…

 

DeMarco: Ozempic and related drugs are tremendous game-changers

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The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

EDITOR’s NOTE: What? Three posts from Paul DeMarco in a row? No, the good doctor hasn’t quit practicing medicine to blog full-time. But he had saved up these three healthcare-related columns and sent them to me a couple of weeks back, and to my shame, I’m just getting around to posting them. Thanks so much for sharing your professional perspective on these important matters, Paul!

RFK Jr. promised radical positive change for American health care. So far, he has weakened the CDC’s vaccine advice, presided over the nation’s largest measles outbreak in three decades (the current epicenter of which is Spartanburg), and made inconsequential changes in the food pyramid and food additives.

The real opportunity to MAHA is to increase access to drugs such as Ozempic, Mounjaro, Zepbound, and Wegovy. These drugs are in the class of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s). They stimulate the production of GLP-1, a hormone produced by the gut and brain that stimulates insulin secretion, helping lower blood sugar. In addition, they reduce mortality from heart attack and stroke and show promise in preserving kidney and liver function. They rank as one of the most consequential drug classes of the last quarter century.

I’ve spent my entire career trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to help patients lose weight. I started in the 1990s giving out quixotically restrictive diets (a half grapefruit, a slice of toast, and one boiled egg for breakfast, etc). Then in the 2000s, I hoped we could educate our way out of obesity. All we needed to do was put nutrition information on menus. I predicted (obviously incorrectly) that once people realized that a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese, large fries, and a large Coke was north of 1,500 calories (which is more than half of most people’s daily requirement), they would be running out the door and making a bee line for the nearest grocery store’s produce section.

Obesity is less a personal defect than the natural consequence of a country’s abundance. Once food becomes accessible, inexpensive, and engineered to be delicious, most of that nation’s people are going to eat too much of it. Remaining lean in this environment is possible – about a third of Americans manage it – but it requires a combination of favorable genetics, resources, education, and sustained restraint.

I still encourage my patients to do all the things they already know to do – break up with Little Debbie, eat more veggies, and stay active. But those tired instructions usually fail to make a difference. After decades of futility, I’m glad to finally have something to offer patients that works. The typical weight loss with sustained use of a GLP-1 is 15-20% of a patient’s body weight. For someone weighing 200 lbs., that’s 30 to 40 pounds.

Do I wish that the standard advice was enough? Yes, I would love to have a population of patients that crushed a kale smoothie every day after their 45-minute work-out. But most people don’t, or can’t, live like that. Now we have a drug that gives us the power to navigate the modern food landscape without falling into its many ravines.

Currently, most of my patients taking GLP-1s are diabetics. Watching A1Cs magically normalize is a wonder. For most of my career, we treated Type 2 diabetics with insulin. However, in Type 2, the primary defect is insulin resistance rather than insulin deficiency. If you give a patient enough insulin (sometimes hundreds of units a day), you can overcome this resistance and normalize blood sugar. However, insulin is an anabolic hormone which often causes weight gain.

The great advantage of GLP-1s over insulin is their ability to control diabetes while inducing weight loss. It’s now commonplace for one of my patients to walk into the exam room feeling both healthier and lighter. A weight, literally and figuratively, has been lifted off their shoulders. Some obese patients are not too bothered by the number on the scale. But for others, the lifelong struggle with their weight is shame-inducing. Patients are dogged by feelings of helplessness and unworthiness. I have shared my patients’ joy in both the physical and emotional boosts that GLP-1s provide.

There are, of course, cautions. Not everyone can take these medications. The most common side effect is nausea but there are a host of others, including serious ones like pancreatitis. However, overall, about 9 out of 10 people who start GLP-1s can tolerate them.

Ironically, while RFK Jr. has often criticized reliance on drugs like Ozempic, the administration he serves is moving to decrease their price. The administration has announced agreements with GLP-1 makers Novo Nordisk and Eli Lily to lower prices. One proposal seeks to lower the Medicare co-pay for GLP-1s to $50 a month. RFK Jr. should be championing that and similar ideas. He should intensify the pressure on the companies by educating the public about the economics of the GLP-1 market.

A recent peer-reviewed cost analysis published in JAMA Network Open estimates that GLP-1s cost less than $5 a month to manufacture. To be fair, this does not include research, development, distribution, and capital investment costs. But it’s clear that these companies are generating billions of dollars in profits, much of it from the U.S. market. Over the last several years, prices for GLP-1s have been roughly 5 to 10 times higher in the United States than in other developed nations. For example, in Britain last year, prices were approximately $100 per month compared to $1000+ in the US.

RFK Jr. could be leading the way on increasing accessibility for GLP-1s, rather than being a reluctant follower of a rare sound policy proposal coming out of the Trump White House.

Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, SC. Reach him at pvdemarco@bellsouth.net.

A great start, featuring the debut of ABS

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Now this is what I call a sports page…

Well, I managed to rush home from school fast enough to catch the last inning-and-a-half of the Red Sox opener in Cincinnati. Consequently, I got to see a bit of baseball history as it happened.

I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t know about this ABS thing. (Oh, I remember talk about it, but I missed when it became a done deal.) But it came up in the ninth, to the benefit of the Sox.

Roman Anthony had been living up to the hype all through the game. With Bregman gone and Anthony back from being on the injured list, the scribes down in spring training had really been building him up, with such headlines as:

‘He looks like a superhero’: Roman Anthony is already the face of the Red Sox. He hasn’t even played a full season.

When I saw him come up in the ninth, I learned that he’d already had three hits in this game. He was about to do something else, something that no member of his team had ever done.

He had a full count on him, and then the ump called a strike to ruin the outfielder’s excellent day. Anthony immediately appealed the call. I was all like “What?,” but it turned out this was a thing. The verdict of the machine was clear — the pitch was a couple of inches low. He took his base.

Consequently, he and Marcelo Mayer ended up scoring to increase the Boston lead from 1-0 to 3-0. Then Aroldis Chapman took the mound to make the end of all Reds hope official. Very satisfactory. Everything went just as it should, unless you were a Reds fan (which I used to be, back when Johnny Bench was a rookie and Pete Rose still sported a crewcut, but no more).

But back to this ABS thing. I’m trying to make up my mind.

On the one hand, I generally don’t like innovation in baseball. Far as I’m concerned, the last good change in the game was when Branch Rickey brought up Jackie Robinson. That was six years before I was born. Beyond that, I like the old ways. You know me Al.

Sure, umpires experience fits of blindness, but I feel that respecting their calls is like respecting the game. I don’t like to see them dissed like this. I’m a law-and-order guy.

On the other hand, it clearly was a ball, so truth won out. Should we defer to the ump to the extent of denying Anthony his rightful walk?

I dunno. I guess I end up on the side of the machines here, but I don’t feel good about it. Although something the announcers said makes me feel a little better. They noted that Anthony has a great eye, and they speculated that any time he appeals a pitch, he’s likely to come out on top. (He’d been looking forward to the new rule.) And isn’t that fair? If the kid has an eye like Ted Williams, shouldn’t we respect that?

Setting this historical footnote aside, let’s turn to the game, and where we now stand for this season. Dan Shaughnessy allowed himself to indulge in a bit of encouragement today. After 12 grafs of sharing historical anecdotes showing what an old hand he is, he condescended to toss this bone to the fans:

Overreact all you like, Sox fans. After one game, The Red Sox are tied with the Yankees and Orioles for first place in the AL East, Crochet’s ERA is 0.00, Chapman is tied for the MLB lead in saves, Anthony is batting .750, Marcelo Mayer is hitting 1.000 and Sonny Gray — who has never lost a game with the Red Sox — gets the ball Saturday against a Reds team that hasn’t scored a single run this season.

Yeah, I’ll settle for that. Let’s keep up the good work.

A good start…

DeMarco: The Best Model for Primary Care (part 2 of 2)

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The Op-Ed Page

This is where Paul’s HH practice is located, at Francis Marion University.

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

My tens and tens of readers out there might remember how I ended my last column, about the pros and cons of concierge medicine. My bottom line was, though concierge medicine is a benefit to the physicians who choose it and to the patients that can afford it, it is ultimately corrosive, ignoring patients with limited means whom physicians have historically had a strong ethical imperative to serve. I ended with a mild teaser: “If you think community health centers (CHCs) are just safety net clinics for those who have no other option, stay tuned.”

Spoiler alert: they are not. Certainly not in Florence County, which is served by HopeHealth (HH), one of the finest CHCs in the state. Again, I will admit my bias – I work for HH. But let me try to convince you that CHCs are the best primary care delivery system.

CHCs are the most accessible, affordable model. We see everyone, we take almost every insurance, and we have a sliding scale for those without it. If you have ever approached the front desk of a medical office other than a CHC without insurance, you know the anxiety that can produce. Some practices refuse to see you unless you pay a certain amount up front. Others immediately put you on a payment plan. At CHCs, you are not treated as unworthy because you don’t have insurance. We say, “No problem, let’s get some financial information so we can place you on our sliding scale. Your co-pay may be as low as $20 a visit.” We also make it our business to help patients obtain the medications they need. HH operates a pharmacy with a team of pharmacists who are well versed in low-cost options for patients.

Although HH is clearly a great place for uninsured and Medicaid patients, it is also an outstanding option for patients who have Medicare or private insurance. Nationwide, of all patients seen at CHCs, roughly 20 percent of CHC patients have private insurance and 11 percent have Medicare. At HH, those numbers are significantly higher – roughly 37 percent of our patients have private insurance and 30 percent have Medicare. That’s a testament to our leadership and the care that we provide. Many patients that can choose any provider they want choose us.

That’s why I work at HH. It aligns with what I thought I was signing up for when I was in medical training. During those days, powered by sense of idealism, I had dreams of how to make a difference in the world. I regularly have medical students in my office now, and I watch them make the same kinds of calculations I was making 40 years ago. I tell them that my idealism has been tempered but remains intact, and that if I had to do it all over again, I would again choose to work at HH.

One of my core principles when I was in their shoes was that I wanted to work in a practice that saw everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Once you crossed my threshold, your treatment came first, and how we were getting paid would come later. The community health center movement has exemplified that ethic since CHCs were founded in the mid-1960s as part of the War on Poverty. My guess is that without the CHC system, I would not have been able to uphold my principles. I doubt, without an MBA, that I would have been willing to take on the challenge of opening and running a practice that would take all comers.

It is important to acknowledge the federal government’s role in supporting CHCs, which are also called Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Federal grants (Section 330) provide 10-25 percent of most center’s budgets. FQHCs receive a higher Medicaid rate than other providers. Those with pharmacies are eligible for the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program that allows us to reduce costs for those who struggle to pay for medications. In return for this support, CHCs are obligated to care for any uninsured patient who seeks care with them.

CHCs offer a wise and effective approach – a partnership between taxpayers and health care organizations dedicated to serving everyone. Anyone can walk into a CHC and be treated, without compromising on quality. CHCs, including HH, deliver high-quality care that compares favorably with other primary care models.

It’s astonishing that in the 15 years I have worked for HH, we have grown from a staff or about a dozen providers when I started to more than 100 providers serving more than 85,000 patients in 2026.

CHCs in general, and HH, in particular, are not perfect. There are ways we can and should improve. But in a health care system that is fraught with fragmented care, perverse financial incentives, and profit-over-patient mentality, it provides a welcome respite, a place where the mission is still clear and the patient remains at the center.

I’m not a big fan of corporate mission statements – they are often empty words. But I like HH’s, especially the part that says we try to “exemplify love for people and passion for their well-being.” Those are not empty words, and could apply to any CHC. They have allowed me and more than 300,000 others across the country – physicians, APPs, nurses, mental health professionals, dental providers, pharmacists, and support staff – to care for patients in a way that has kept our ideals about what medical care could be untrampled.

Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, SC. Reach him at pvdemarco@bellsouth.net.