The Wild Winds of Fortune

In 1986, the Rocket Scientist and I were living in married student housing at Georgia Tech.  We had been watching the Series. He was pulling for the Red Sox and I for the Mets, a team which he hates even more than I hate the Yankees.** 

 I had been fighting a migraine all day.  I get killer migraines now, but they could be even worse back then.  This one was horrific.  By the seventh inning of the game, I had started throwing up and the light coming from the television felt like needles being jabbed into my brain.  I reluctantly got a warm compress for my head and went to bed in an absolutely pitch dark bedroom.

Some while later, the door opened, and I groaned as the light from the hallway hit my eyes.  “The Red Sox are up by two, and there is one out left.  Want to come watch your Mets lose the Series?” The Rocket Scientist was positively cackling.

“F*** you,” I responded in a typical Met-fan fashion.  He let out one more chuckle and went back to the living room. 

I was lying in pitch black darkness, in too much pain to even care about the game.  Through the wall, I hear a groan, then another, and then a few minutes later, a gasp.  I could hear shouting in all the apartments around ours.

The door to the bedroom opened.  RS was standing in the doorway, shaking his head in disbelief.  “They…won.  They won…”  he said in a stunned voice. And then, as quietly as he had shown up, he closed the door and went back into the other room.

And I lay in the dark, and through all my pain, smiled.

*I started to put this as a footnote to the previous post, than decided it was too long.
**He was a Braves fan, and the hatred extended back to 1969, when the “Miracle Mets” swept the Braves in the league championship series on their way to winning the World Series.

[Note: this may be the first of several baseball posts. I’m not quite sure.  It’s a little silly to do this now, since the Series has ended and we are well and truly into football season, but it’s what is on my mind after seeing Moneyball last Friday.]

As many of my friends can tell you, I have a penchant for stating the obvious.  It’s not because I’m not bright, but because I don’t always self-edit as much as I could.  So, once again I am going to state the obvious truth:

Bill Buckner did not lose the Red Sox the World Series in 1986.

I have always hated the Blame Bill Buckner theory, because a) it’s not fair to Buckner and b) it belittles exactly what the Mets did to win the Series. In order for it to make sense, you have to ignore several crucial facts.

Fact 1: Baseball is a team sport.  No one person, generally speaking, loses a game for a club — unless it’s a pitcher that gives up 5 runs in an inning, and even then, the manager bears some responsibility for not yanking the guy.

Fact 2: The poor performance of the Red Sox relievers.  The Mets were behind 5-3 with one out remaining. The Red Sox relievers gave up not one, not two, but three singles to let the Mets tie the game.  If any one of those singles had been an out, then the Sox would have won the Series, and saved the rest of us from having to hear their fans crying about it to this day.* And that is even overlooking Bob Stanley’s wild pitch that allowed Kevin Mitchell to score the tying run.  So Mookie Wilson’s slow grounder to first went through Buckner’s legs?  Mookie Wilson should never had been up to the plate in the first place; the relievers fell down on the job.

Fact 3:  This was only Game 6.  There was another game. I mentioned this to a Red Sox fan in the mid-1990s, and his reply was that it was simply a foregone conclusion that the Sox would lose Game 7.  They would simply be too demoralized.

Baloney.  The Red Sox led through five innings, and it was tied in the sixth. I remember: I was sitting chewing my fingernails watching the game.  Fortunately, Sid Fernandez (on whom I had a major league crush at one time, heh) held down the fort so that Jesse Orosco, who Bill James names as one of the best left-handed relievers in baseball history, could close out the game.  Also fortunately, the Mets bats finally came alive.

Great teams come back from humbling defeats.  The fact that the Sox were able to get a lead and hold it for more than half the game showed that they were a great team, that they had not been beaten down by the loss the night before.

They were simply beaten by a greater team.  The Mets never led the series until they won it.  They had been down two games to none and they battled back.  They were down three games to two, and they battled back.  They were down to their very last out, and they scrapped out a win.

So no, Bill Buckner did NOT lose the Series for the Red Sox in 1986.  If any of their players were responsible, it was their relievers.  In reality, though, no one lost the ’86 Series for the Red Sox…

The Mets won it for themselves.

*Although since 2004 they’ve cried about it a great deal less often.

It’s Halloween.

I don’t have to help anyone with their costume this year, not even to the point of taking them to the Party USA store to get fake swords.  I don’t have to carve the pumpkin.  I don’t even have to hand out candy. The kids will take care of those things.

I was planning to post a long rant about adults co-opting Halloween and making it all about parties where one dresses up like a hooker and gets drunk, but I realized that that might be seen as sour grapes from someone who simply had no party to go to.*

Over the years I have made some very good costumes.  One year in college, I went to a party as I-75. Really. I won the best individual costume; best group award was won by six people who went as the Golden Gate bridge. And no, we did not coordinate our costumes to have some sort of roadway theme.

For the kids, I have made devil costumes (the Red-Headed Menace went as a devil for four years straight — and a disturbing number of adult friends said, “Yeah, that fits”).  I have made hobo costumes.  A few years back, in the last significant costume year for me, both Railfan and the RHM were, at their request, Link from Legend of Zelda.

My best costume, though, was a costume I made for the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy, back when he was in third grade.  He went to school as a mummy: I had taken white sweats, and spent hours hot gluing strips of torn bedsheets in rows to them.  People were generally impressed; so much so that I thought I would simply keep it for the next year.  That would have worked, had I not accidentally gotten it mixed up with a load of whites, and washed it in hot water.  All that was left after the washer was through was a nicely clean pair of sweats and about twenty feet of inch and-a-half strips of bedsheets.

As much as I griped over the years about the stress of coming up with a great costume, I miss it.

I want my Halloween back.

*And yes, there is a fair amount of truth to that.

This is just a note to myself here to remind me about the post I mean to write on the Billy Beane approach to baseball and what it means to all of us who were not traditionally the baseball in-crowd, and the one on why I love Bill James. These may take a while to take shape, but I am sure I will be posting lots of little things in the meantime — I am practicing for NaBloPoMo. (National Blog Posting Month.)Of course, both of those may be delayed even more because I am running a low-grade fever, sneezing, and feel generally like I am coming down with a cold. I think NyQuil and Coke, and possibly food, as well as whatever is showing on Food Network, may be in order.

Since the RSS feed goes out very soon after the posts are published, it is imperative that you let very emotional posts like this one sit for a while so that you can make sure that you can tone down the overheated rhetoric and make sure what you have written accurately reflects what you see in the news. (Even edited now, the post is a bit melodramatic, but I am going to leave it.)

You sat on the Troy Davis/death penalty post for a month for just this reason, remember.

When I was eleven or twelve, I asked for, and got, for Christmas a book of baseball history covering from the mid-19th century to 1972.  It was a hefty volume.

I awoke at five. I beat everyone up by at least an hour.  I unwrapped it and began to read.  A very fast reader, I was done by noon. I reread it.  And re-reread it.* 

I have been a baseball fan for most of my life.  My first love was my beloved Mets.  And then the Red Sox in college, who were supplanted by the As when I went to law school.  And then, miracle of miracles, the (Devil) Rays were spawned, and I have been their staunch supporter ever since, even when they were at their worst.

Tonight I saw Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as As General Manager Billy Beane during the 2002 season.  And I say to you, as someone who remembers this period in As history, and who actually owns a copy of Bill James…

If you like Brad Pitt (I don’t, but at least I respect him now), go see this movie. If you love the Oakland As**, go see this movie.

But most of all, if you love the game, go see this movie. 

*One of the only times I have completely run a round at trivia was “Match the nickname to the baseball player.”  This book was a big reason why.

**I do love the As, only not so much as the Rays.  The Rocket Scientist and I saw two of the games they won during the Quake Series of ’89.  We had tickets to games six and seven, but the As swept the Series. They are third on my list of favorite teams, after the Rays and Mets and before the Red Sox.   The other local team (the one in orange and black) is high up on the list of teams I actively dislike. That list is headed, of course, by those damned Yankees.

It is hard not to notice something new is happening.  Actually, it has been happening for a while now, only with a different group of people.

The citizens of this great nation are getting royally pissed off about the way things are.  Although they have vastly different — and opposing — viewpoints of who’s to blame and how to fix things, they are making their voices known. OWS supporters, Tea Partiers: they have the same underlying message.

Things suck. We cannot go on this way. Change has got to happen.

Of course, there is bitter disagreement about many things between the two.  Many of us who support OWS are quite frankly scared of the Tea Party and what seems to be their tenuous grasp of reality.  Their willingness to support radical extremists worries us, not to mention the occasional willingness of their leaders and politicians to a) make things up and b) urge actual harm to the United States. (The “do anything to make the country fall apart so that Obama won’t be re-elected” attitude seen during the debt crisis is terrifying.)  What seems to be their inability to recognize that other people’s lives are through no fault of their own much more difficult than theirs, is infuriating. (That “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality only works if you have bootstraps to begin with.)

I am sure that they have similar issues with us.

I am not going to engage in the spurious “the truth is in the middle” charade.  The truth is frequently not in the middle.  This is not to say the OTW people are always right about everything, just that I think we are right much more often than the Tea Partiers, and when we are wrong, we are much less dangerous to the welfare of the Republic.

But we live, as the Chinese curse says, in interesting times:  the status quo may not hold, one way or another. If it does hold, it will have to do so on the backs of everyday people, much as it is now. Change has to occur: many everyday people fall farther and farther into the abyss.  But if the status quo fails…

Years ago, someone I know pointed out that in the wake of the 2000 election there were no riots in the streets.  Transition was orderly.  Who we were as a nation won out over what we wanted or needed as individuals.

What gives me nightmares is my worry that the sense of us as a nation, rather than simply opposing entities each claiming the moral and political high ground, has eroded past the point of where it can be recovered. That entrenched governmental and corporate interests will fight tooth and nail before they give way, and that there will be those who will defend those interests no matter what the cost. That the demand for change — and both the opposing visions of that change, as well as the defense of the current system — will grow more violent.

The result may be more Oaklands.

I am an imaginative and, I admit, melodramatic person.  But I would not have imagined an Iraq War veteran* injured by police action against peaceful protesters.

I worry about what might be next.


*My thoughts and prayers go out to Iraq War vet Scott Olsen and his family.

On September 21,  Constitution Day, Troy Davis sat in his cell on Death Row in a Jackson, Georgia, waiting to hear if his last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court would be successful in postponing his execution. It was not. He was executed at 11:08 pm, Eastern Standard Time.

I find his execution on Constitution Day to be grimly ironic. (This is even though I know the rights afforded criminal defendants are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, not the body of the Constitution.) What happened to Troy Davis brings into question the entire system of capital punishment in the United States.

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Davis was convicted in 1989 for the killing of an off-duty police officer. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime: he was convicted on the word of nine witnesses who claimed to either have witnessed the shooting or that Davis had confessed to them in jail. Over the years seven of the nine have recanted their testimony, in some cases indicated that they had been pressured by police or prosecutors.

In 2009, Davis’s case reached the Supreme Court. The Court ordered an evidentiary hearing on the new evidence. The case went back to the district court, which held the evidentiary hearing and found that the recantations were not enough to order a new trial. David was ordered to show that there was no way that a jury would have convicted him.

As Bob Barr, former prosecutor and U.S. Representative said,

Proving innocence is far more difficult than establishing doubts as to one’s guilt and flips our system of criminal jurisprudence on its head. Instead of the American system’s presumption of innocence and a requirement that the state prove guilt, Davis’ evidentiary hearing began with the court presuming guilt and required the condemned to prove his innocence.

Even though the judge in the evidentiary hearing denied Davis a new trial, he conceded the standard was “extraordinarily high.”

Davis was unable to meet this nearly insurmountable task. But while he fell short of “proving” his innocence, he established doubts as to his guilt, prompting the judge to concede the state’s case against him was “not ironclad.”

Proving innocence is a far higher standard than that required of prosecutors in criminal case, that the defendant be shown to be guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge decided that the defense’s case for a new trial was largely “smoke and mirrors,” finding only two of the recantations credible.  I have heard a number of people say “he had 20 years to prove his innocence” — but how could he prove his innocence with evidence that was not available?  How does one prove a negative, especially in the face of existent but unknown evidence?

The entire case shows gaping holes in the American system.  Firstly, there is the issue of eyewitness testimony, which studies have been shown to be unreliable.  (The police did not include in the lineup of photos they showed to witnesses the other suspect in the case, Ronald Coles, who turned himself in and fingered Davis.)  Then there is the use of jailhouse informants, who have something to gain by providing evidence of guilt. (Both jailhouse informants later said they were lying.)

Davis’s case is not, unfortunately, unique. In Texas, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in spite of expert witness coming forward to state that the forensic evidence which was the backbone of  his conviction was seriously, seriously flawed: in fact, it had been discredited.

These cases demonstrates the capriciousness that underlies our system of death penalty justice:

If he had been alleged to have killed someone other than a police officer (or, to a lesser extent, a child) Troy Davis might not have received the death penalty. If Cameron Todd Willingham had not been accused of murdering his whole family, likewise.

In another state, they might not have been convicted.

In another state, they might have not been sentenced to death.

In another state, the state courts might well have ordered new trials.

In another state, they might not have even have faced the death penalty.  Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the most heinous murderers in our nation’s history, the sort that death penalty proponents point to when arguing in its favor, died at the hands of another inmate instead of the state because Wisconsin has not had a death penalty since 1853.

Had either of them been a very popular ex-athlete, the prosecutors might well have decided not to even try for death.*

You are much better off being accused of murder in Colorado, New Hampshire or Kansas than  Oklahoma, Texas, Delaware or Virginia. And even within states, there are discrepancies.  You are much better off facing a murder prosecution in Santa Cruz than in Bakersfield.

There is something seriously flawed in our system of justice when a man who cut up young boys and stashed them in his freezer faces a lesser sentence than the getaway driver in a gas station robbery that goes wrong. Or when a man who is fingered as a murderer by the other person accused of the crime, who has everything to gain by the blame falling elsewhere, is sentenced to death. When the Supreme Court’s decisions that hold that it is unconstitutional to execute the mentally ill and mentally retarded results in arguments about whether an inmate is retarded enough or mentally ill enough to escape execution.

How can the death penalty fail to be cruel and unusual punishment when it can be so arbitrary?

No other Western country executes people.  They view it as barbaric. Given the state of the death penalty in our country, we would do well to emulate them.

*It was the O.J. Simpson case which cemented my opposition to capital punishment.  Regardless of Simpson’s guilt or innocence, you cannot convince me that another defendant, charged with lying in wait and brutally murdering two people, would not have been facing death rather than life in prison, especially in Los Angeles County.  The experts mentioned in the LA Times article state that the death penalty is not generally sought when the victim is a spouse, or when there is no prior felony record.  Oh, yeah? Tell that to Scott Petersen, who, in a similarly high profile case but without the “star defendant” factor, was sentenced to death even though he likewise had no felony record and was convicted of murdering a spouse. Ironically enough, I think had the O.J. prosecutors gone for the death penalty, they would have been more likely to have gotten a conviction: death-qualified juries are both more likely to trust law enforcement and to convict.

The Red-Headed Menace keeps wanting to be a comedian, and failing miserably.  His attempts at jokes are sad.  All the while, he is capable of coming up with amusing statements that come out of nowhere.  One that I loved, although I admit your mileage may vary on this:

Railfan: “Emo is just wanna-be Goth.”
RHM: “Nah, being Goth just means you sacked Rome.”

If nothing else, it shows he was paying attention in World History.

I know this is a bore.  I know few people read this.  I am assuming that those who do care, although maybe not as obsessively as I do.

Some more false statements out there:

First one that is very close to my heart, an email is circulating including the claim that Barack Obama was the first president who terminated America’s ability to put in space.  Politifact rates that as “Pants on Fire.”  This is hardly surprising — ask any NASA employee, or space buff, and they will tell you that Richard Nixon killed manned exploration after Apollo.

From the other side of the political spectrum, Rachel Maddow (whom I usually love) claimed that “A recent Department of Labor study guessed Wall Street fees cost a worker 28 percent of the value of your plan over the span of your career.” While granting Maddows’ larger point, that fees eat up a lot of money, Politifact reported that her numbers were way higher than reality, and rated the claim “mostly false.”

And from Snopes, the truth behind the email/Facebook post supposedly from Warren Buffet.  The upshot?  The quote by Buffet about fixing the deficit in 5 minutes by making all members of Congress ineligible for re-election anytime there was a deficit more than 3% of the GNP was real. Most of the  rest of the email is a repackaged version of the “28th Amendment” crap that I reported on earlier.

There are so many, many others, such as Newt Gingrich’s repeating of Sarah Palin’s lie about “death panels,” to a claim that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s bill freezing state employees’ salaries included a 5.4 raise for himself.  Politifact labeled those “Pants on Fire” and “False,” respectively.

I have to remember that I am not responsible for correcting everybody’s misstatements and outright lies.  Or I am going to burn out on this, quickly.

It’s just that this sort of thing bugs me.  If “We the people” are going to influence policy and political decisions, if we are to be an informed citizenry capable of fixing what is wrong in this country, we need to deal in reality. And sooner, rather than later.

For myself, I want truth.  I want accuracy.  I have an idea where facts will lead me in the end, but I need my decisions to be grounded in the way the world really is, not the way other people would wish it to be.

QOTD, from “Does installing a GPS device on a car constitute a Fourth Amendment search or seizure?” at SCOTUSblog:

If you really want to get into the weeds on the question of whether accessing the undercarriage of the car is a search — and the Internet isn’t running out of electrons, so why not — you can see the uncertainty of the question by noting that the Court has had a very hard time applying the Fourth Amendment to similar types of government efforts to access parts of cars.

No, the Internet is not running out of electrons, and I find this approach refreshing enough that I’ll probably read this section of the post.

As I have said, this is a personal blog.  You guys get hit with whatever is on my mind.  It may be what is going on in my life, funny things my offspring say, pictures of me in low-cut clothing, or recipes.

It is by no means a political blog, although I talk politics a lot.  I’ve always been a political animal.

Perhaps because of the foregoing, I have a pretty low hit count (although I know a number of people who follow via RSS feed).  I’ve never been too worried about this; I don’t do the work needed to get people beating a path to my door.  I am not really interested in making the changes that becoming a more popular blog would probably require, as far as I can tell by reading books on how to create popular blogs. I inhabit a backwater of the blogosphere, along with all the other people with very small blogs, although I rarely post pictures of my cat. [Edited to add: Yes, the cats are on the sidebar.  Or at least two of the cats: my owner Penwiper and the dearly departed Chocolate.  Pandora — who was given that name because she was beautiful and always getting into trouble, but who has turned out to have an obsession with boxes — has never been shown.  I do not generally post new pictures of my cats.]

The Wild Winds of Fortune is my sandbox.  My escape valve.  My canvas.

My voice.

I love the fact that there are at least a few people who follow me:  I can be talking to you rather than simply myself. I think of you as my invisible friends.

It was quite a surprise to discover that I had been quoted in an article at journalism.org. Journalism.org is the website of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. They apparently found the last paragraph of my post “Class Warfare” worthy of being included in an article called “Bloggers Back the Occupy Wall Street Protests.”*

This makes me inordinately happy.

Although it does make me sort of regret having posted the corset picture.


*Fittingly, given my penchant for footnotes, they had a footnote following the quote: “For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from online postings.” Oh, well.

Heavenly Father, why do you let bad things happen?
More to the point, why do you let bad things happen to me?*

“Man Up,”** from The Book of Mormon

*No, nothing terrible, life is just generally not wonderful right now.  I know I should count my blessings, and I do, and there are a lot of people (some of whom are sitting in various city parks around the country) who are facing much more serious problems than I am.  I just had to laugh when I heard this line this morning — or reheard it, since I have listened to the song before — because there are times when I think this.

**There is an entirely separate rant in here about both the ridiculousness and the sexism implicit in this ludicrous phrase.  Not to mention the other phrase in the song, “grow a pair” — why would anyone want to who didn’t already have them? Testicles are notoriously fragile organs.  Kick me where you suppose my ovaries to be, and it will  hurt; kick a guy in the crotch and you can do real and lasting damage. (I am not the first woman to think this, of course. Betty White is reported to have said “Why do people say ‘Grow some balls’? Balls are weak and sensitive! If you really wanna get tough, grow a vagina! Those things take a pounding!”)

When I look at my post Eleven for ’11, I see many things — most things — I have left undone, sadly.  But there is one area where I have had a significant improvement.

One of my resolutions was to write or blog every single day.  I have not done that (early in the year was very spotty) but I have come closer than any year I have had this blog.  Significantly.

In 2006, my first year with this blog, I wrote 123 posts (and average of one post every 3 days.  Blogging was very sparse the next three years, and then in 2010 I picked up the pace, posting 152 times, or an average of one post every 2.5 days.  October 26 is the 299th day of the year.  Thus far, not counting this post, I have made 203 blog posts in 2011, or an average of one post every 1.5 days.

While I admit this is very misleading in some sense — I often post multiple times in one day and skip others, it is still better by a long shot than other years. (For example, although October has been a very chatty month — I have 46 blog posts thus far — only in January, June and July did I post more than a dozen items (33, 31, and 33, respectively).  )

The length and quality of posts varies considerably. Nonetheless, I am working towards a discipline. I am doing other writing* as well, and am trying to make my writing smoother and more controlled.  I am not sure that I am doing at all well with that last part. 

Go me.




*Nope, haven’t worked on the book.  Oh, well.