The number one song today in 1955:
The number one British song (which is not from Britain) today in 1964:
Today in 1971, John Lennon released his “Imagine” album:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Oct. 8
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The Packers continued their two-decade-long regular-season streak of winning when the UW Band provides the halftime and Fifth Quarter entertainment.
Sunday’s 22–9 win over Detroit (which has not won in Wisconsin for the same amount of time) was marred by this unpleasantry from the mouth of Lions center Dominic Raiola, as reported by Tom Melton:
According to a Wisconsin tuba player, Raiola and his teammates were engaged in their pregame warm-ups on the field near the goal line when he turned around and called him and the other tubas “Fat mother f**kers” and told them that “they sucked.” According to that tuba player no one in the band had done anything to provoke him, and no other band members I spoke with witnessed anything that could have provoked Raiola. The tuba player I spoke with made sure to point out that the rest of the band hadn’t even been on the field yet, and none of the tuba players said anything to him, so no one in the band could have provoked Raiola prior to him making those comments.
As the band was preparing to play the National Anthem another band member told me Raiola was yelling at him, saying such things such as “Hey fat guy, you want a hot dog?” When this band member did not acknowledge him, he continued to yell at other band members within earshot of him until the band began to play. A third band member told me Raiola was calling a band member near him a “fat fu**” prior to their pregame performance as well.
After the band’s halftime performance multiple band members I spoke with told me he and multiple other band members vividly heard Raiola ridicule a trombone player’s weight while they were performing. One band member reported hearing a female member of the band say “Hey number 51,” referring to Raiola, which multiple band members told me he responded to by calling her “the c-word” as they were walking back to their seats.
This is all in addition to this facebook status which has been shared 243 times as of this writing:
According to this band member Raiola made comments regarding his sexuality, as well as other insults involving his sister and recently deceased mother. An additional band member confirmed this story, adding that one such insult was “[Raiola] was going to take his trumpet and shove it up his sister’s p***y” in addition to Raiola “repeatedly calling him a fag.” According to this band member “as soon as we stopped for our position to play the National Anthem I just heard [Raiola] yelling continually at him.” Multiple other members of the band reported hearing Raiola uttering homophobic slurs throughout his unprovoked denigrating of the students prior to the National anthem. …
It is worth noting that while Raiola’s comments were completely uncalled for, a band member confirmed to me that Lions safety Louis Delmas apologized to him and other members of the band for Raiola’s actions and assured them that he had spoken with him about it. He also added that he enjoyed their performance.
This strikes me as a sign that Sunday’s game was already lost to the Lions before kickoff. If Raiola (whose brother, Donovan, was an offensive lineman at Wisconsin) is focusing on the band, his mind isn’t on the game. The Lions are already known for self-destruction through lack of discipline, specifically stupid personal foul penalties:
This isn’t the first time the UW Band has gotten some non-performance notice during a Packer game. The book From Red Ink to Roses includes a phone conversation between Gov. Tommy Thompson and UW–Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala in which Thompson asks (somewhat tongue in cheek) what Shalala is going to do about the band’s chanting something along the lines of “Da Bears still suck” during a Bears–Packers game. To that, Shalala replied that she couldn’t sanction the band for telling the truth.
And speaking of the tubas, there was this during a Vikings–Packers game:
Note that the tubas’ target, former Viking wide receiver Randy Moss, th0ught it was funny.
If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is serious about improving player conduct, he needs to fine Raiola. And it seems to me that the Lions franchise should apologize to the UW Band by inviting them to play at the rematch Thanksgiving Day.
Afternoon update: From DetroitLions.com’s Twitter account:
We are aware of the reports involving Dominic Raiola and the University of Wisconsin Marching Band. Those reports are extremely inconsistent with the standard of behavior we expect from our players and from every member of the organization. We currently are gathering more information and will respond further when appropriate.
The writer later added about Lions coach Jim Schwartz:
Schwartz said he’d be disappointed if the reports about Raiola are true and said his players need to be “above that.”
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The New York Times’ Ross Douthat starts commenting on the federal government slowdown by quoting David Frum’s Dead Right:
However heady the 1980s may have looked to everyone else, they were for conservatives a testing and disillusioning time. Conservatives owned the executive branch for eight years and had great influence over it for four more; they dominated the Senate for six years; and by the end of the decade they exercised near complete control over the federal judiciary. And yet, every time they reached to undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — the work they had damned for nearly half a century — they felt the public’s wary eyes upon them. They didn’t dare, and they realized that they didn’t dare. Their moment came and flickered. And as the power of the conservative movement slowly ebbed after 1986, and then roared away in 1992, the conservatives who had lived through that attack of faintheartedness shamefacedly felt that they had better hurry up and find something else to talk about …
Douthat adds:
What this passage gets at is the deep, abiding gulf between the widespread conservative idea of what a true Conservative Moment would look like and the mainstream idea of the same. For the American mainstream — moderate and apolitical as well as liberal — the Reagan era really was a kind of conservative answer to the New Deal era: A period when the right’s ideas were ascendant, its constituencies empowered, its favored policies pursued. But to many on the right, for the reasons the Frum of “Dead Right” suggested, it was something much more limited and fragmented and incomplete: A period when their side held power, yes, but one in which the framework and assumptions of politics remained essentially left-of-center, because the administrative state was curbed but barely rolled back, and the institutions and programs of New Deal and Great Society liberalism endured more or less intact.
This divide, I think, explains a lot of the mutual incomprehension surrounding size-of-government debates. To liberals and many moderates, it often seems like the right gets what it wants in these arguments and then just gets more extreme, demanding cuts atop cuts, concessions atop concessions, deregulation upon deregulation, tax cuts upon tax cuts. But to many conservatives, the right has never come remotely close to getting what it actually wants, whether in the Reagan era or the Gingrich years or now the age of the Tea Party — because what it wants is an actually smaller government, as opposed to one that just grows somewhat more slowly than liberals and the left would like. And this goal only ends up getting labeled as “extreme” in our debates, conservatives lament, because the right has never succeeded in dislodging certain basic assumptions about government established by F.D.R. and L.B.J. — under which a slower rate of spending growth is a “draconian cut,” an era of “small government” is one which in which the state grows immensely in absolute terms but holds steady as a share of G.D.P., and a rich society can never get rich enough to need less welfare spending per capita than it did when it was considerably poorer. …
The right has had success restraining the federal government’s growth and frustrating liberal ambitions for new programs, but when it comes to the question of whether the state should meaningfully shrink its footprint in our society, American political reality really does seem to have a liberal bias. And so the process that Frum described well in the early 1990s has played out repeatedly in our politics: Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan … and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both.
So what you’re seeing motivating the House Intransigents today, what’s driving their willingness to engage in probably-pointless brinksmanship, is not just anger at a specific Democratic administration, or opposition to a specific program, or disappointment over a single electoral defeat. Rather, it’s a revolt against the long term pattern I’ve just described: Against what these conservatives, and many on the right, see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama’s first two years as well.
Frum’s and Douthat’s points about the 1980s could apply to Wisconsin today. The state budget is balanced (legally if not factually), but state government is not smaller. The 2013–15 budget was larger than the 2011–13 budget beyond what the Consumer Price Index would warrant, and this state has more, not fewer, government employees.
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If you wanted to increase your newspaper’s circulation, I’m not sure this, from Connecticut newspaper managing editor Chris Powell, is how to do it:
Journalism is hailing the acquisition of The Washington Post by Internet retailing entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, figuring that he has both the genius and wealth to develop a new self-sustaining model of journalism. This may be a bit presumptuous.
For as much as Bezos’ company, Amazon, has done remarkable things, its decisive business strategy was only sales tax evasion, an advantage that seems to be coming to an end as Congress prepares to enact legislation allowing states to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases. If the future of journalism rests with the Internet rather than with the old business models of declining profitability — newsprint and the broadcast airwaves — the Internet model of profitable journalism still hasn’t been invented yet. And if such a model was even close at hand, the Post under its longtime owners, the Graham family, could have well afforded to undertake it without any help from Bezos.
Further, while the decline of journalism coincides with the rise of the Internet, the Internet may not be the primary cause at all.
Certainly the Internet has given journalism a powerful competitor for public attention, just as radio and then television did. The Internet is a far more powerful competitor because, unlike radio and TV, it allows people to indulge their particular interests at any hour of the day to the exclusion of everything else, to live always in the narrowest of worlds rather than in a broad one. For example, thanks to the Internet someone well might know nearly everything about the Boston Red Sox, Miley Cyrus, and sunspots and yet be unaware that an airplane had just crashed a few streets away, that the governor had just been sent to prison for corruption, and that town government had just raised property taxes again.
That is, traditional journalism, especially newspaper journalism, remains indispensable for conveying local and state news and providing some understanding of public policy, there being few exclusively Internet-based sources of information about those things. But do local and state news and some understanding of public policy remain indispensable to most people?
Even in a supposedly prosperous and well-educated state like Connecticut, how strong can demand for those things be now that half the children are being raised without two parents at home and thus acquiring developmental handicaps; 70 percent of community college and state university freshmen have not mastered what used to be considered basic high school skills; poverty has risen steadily even as government appropriations in the name of remediating poverty have risen steadily; and democracy has sunk so much that half the eligible population isn’t voting in presidential elections, 65 percent isn’t voting in state elections, and 85 percent isn’t voting in municipal elections?
This social disintegration and decline in civic engagement coincide with the decline of traditional journalism just as much as the rise of the Internet does.
Indeed, newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households — two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population.
This, from Georgia newspaper editor Jim Zachary, is a better argument:
Newspapers are about our child’s first school field trip, a Friday night high school football game, a livestock show hosted by the agriculture extension office or an increase in our property tax rate. At least those are the things that a relevant newspaper is all about whether your read it online or sit down with a morning cup of coffee and enjoy the traditional printed edition the way it was meant to be. …
We hold public officials accountable, advocate for openness in government and champion the cause of ordinary citizens, because we are committed to the neighborhoods, cities, county and coverage area we serve.
Watered down editorial pages, articles that read like a public relations campaign for government and page after page of wire service content will never resonate in the same way as celebrating our own community and standing up for its citizens.
Newspapers hold public officials accountable because it makes the place we call home a better place to live and because it is the right thing to do.
Newspapers do not make the news.
They report it — all of it. …
The newspaper belongs to the community.
That is why we work every day to give citizens a voice, to empower them and tell their stories.
That is why we hold government accountable because at our very core we believe that government belongs to the governed and not to the governing.
That is why we embrace the newspaper’s role as the Fourth Estate.
According to historian Thomas Carlyle, Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke (1729-1797) said, “there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” (Heroes and Hero Worship in History, 1841).
Though in many places reporters have reduced themselves to simply being a mouthpiece for local government, reporting what officials want them to report and hiding what they don’t, a community and a democracy is best served when the newspaper provides a forum for checks and balances as the Fourth Estate of government.
Great newspapers, relevant newspapers that are embraced by their communities and consequently profitable, growing newspapers have not forgotten that role and have not abandoned these values.
We are not the enemy of government — rather we are the champions of citizens — of our community.
We know if newspapers do not stand up for citizens and protect the rights of free speech and the rights of access to government, then no one will.
We work each day to build a culture and incubate an environment where those elected feel accountable to those who elected them.
Newspapers should be the most powerful advocate citizens have and be their open forum for a redress of grievances.
Any newspaper that represents the interests of the governing, more than the interests of the governed, is not worth the paper it is printed on or the ink that fills its pages.
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Today in 1975, one of the stranger episodes in rock music history ended when John Lennon got permanent resident status, his “green card.” The federal government, at the direction of Richard Nixon, tried to deport Lennon because of his 1968 British arrest for possession of marijuana. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that trying to deport Lennon on the basis of an arrest was “contrary to U.S. ideas of due process and was invalid as a means of banishing the former Beatle from America.”
The number one British single today in 1978 came from that day’s number one album:
The number one album today in 1989 was Tears for Fears’ “Seeds of Love”:
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The number one song today in 1970:
The number one song today in 1973:
Britain’s number one album today in 1984 was David Bowie’s “Tonight”:
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The number one song today in 1959 came from a German opera:
The number one British song today in 1961:
The number one British song today in 1974 came from the movie “The Exorcist”:
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The headline is a quote from Vin Scully, who has announced Los Angeles (and before that Brooklyn) Dodgers baseball since 1950. (Yes, 1950.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvfYg_kNtTk
Scully worked for CBS-TV in the 1970s and early 1980s …
… NBC during the 1980s …
… and before and after NBC CBS radio.
But Scully is obviously best known for his Dodger work, which spans from Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and Roy Campanella to Adrian Gonzales, Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, with Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, SteveDaveyBillRon GarveyLopesRussellCey, two Mike Marshalls, Tommy Lasorda, Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser in between. (Listing three hitters in 1950 and two pitchers in 2013 demonstrates the difference between the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers.)
The greatest sports announcer of all time hasn’t had national work since CBS Radio lost the Major League Baseball postseason contract. He is, however, working this year because the Dodgers won the National League West.
What is Scully’s secret? According to Sports on Earth, work:
He will turn 86 in November. He will start his 65th season as the voice of the Dodgers next April. He lives with the abiding love of a sprawling metropolis. He has gone from Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella all the way to Yasiel Puig, whom he can cite as “a study all by himself,” comparable to none, with “his unbridled joy of playing, his enthusiasm, his recklessness.” Yet as another season depletes toward Game 162 and, in this Dodger year, beyond, Vin Scully still totes around a healthy fear of unpreparedness.
“Well, you can see what I’m doing and you can see all these notes, and this is a highlight pencil,” he says. “And it’s one of the things you have to do, because you’re overwhelmed with minutiae, and so I go through all this and I highlight a few things that I want to use on the air. So that at a glance, I will see, ‘Oh, I thought I would use this, so I highlighted this.’ But the problem with this is you start looking and you’re liable to miss a play on the field, and that of course is a killer, so in a sense you’re being lured onto the rocks by the Lorelei, you know, so you try not to do that.”
He still worries about missing a play, and that being a killer.
He continues: “As you can see, we have all kinds of notes, because of the computer, every team furnishes tons of numbers and notes. The first thing I do, if I can get the lineup, that’s the first, write the lineup in.”
He has done so.
“And then you start putting the record of the two pitchers. And then you write what the two teams have done against each other; in this instance, the Dodgers, they’ve won nine of 17, they’ve won four of eight here. You’re going to mention that sometime. And, if it’s a terrific pennant race of course, you’re going to talk about games in front or games behind, but since they’ve won the division, that’s superfluous now. Then you go in to check especially the visiting team, maybe somebody has a hitting streak, maybe somebody’s coming off a very hot game, whatever, then you try to make notes in your book. And eventually, by the time you prepare it’s about time to go on the air.
“I would say on average, I get here at 3:30, and I work somewhere close to an hour and a half. That gets it to five of five. I have to tape an opening. I have to tape a little thing they put on the board, notes on the game. I’ll come in and eat. I’ll be finished eating. If my wife isn’t at the game, automatically at six o’clock I’ll call her to let her know that I’m here and find out what she’s going through at home. And then after I make the phone call, I go back to look for any late notes, whatever. I might talk with one or two of the other team’s broadcasters, say, ‘What’s new, who’s doing what?’ And then, by the time you’re ready to go on, you have a head full of stuff.” …
Listeners often relish Scully for his storytelling. He provides living, compelling evidence that stories enthrall human beings long after the bedtime-pajama phase. So it’s curious to mull the fact that Scully does spend most of his broadcasts on the mandatory rudiments.
Now, there’s no one we’d rather hear explain how Zack Greinke hasn’t made an error since July 2010, or outline the biography of Juan Nicasio “from San Francisco de Macoris in the Dominican Republic,” including the scary August night in 2011 when a line drive hit Nicasio’s head. (Scully: “The screws and plate, by the way, are permanent. There he is out there, in danger again. It’s his livelihood.”) There’s nobody we’d rather hear call a Todd Helton first-pitch groundout, then lament that “we didn’t have a chance” to read off Helton’s career stats, then read those stats, then wryly lament not getting to read those stats because, “Darn it. Swung at the first pitch.”
The truth is, you wouldn’t mind listening to that voice read the earned-run average charts, which would come as a melody, but really, the ear seldom feels more pleased than in hearing Vin Scully say, “Wow, sunset time in Los Angeles and in Southern California, seventy-nine degrees and there the mountains are… What a view we should never take for granted.”
Still, it’s interesting to remember that while the storytelling helps make Scully great, he seems to spend more time making sure he’s good.
“Well, I think first of all, the average baseball fan knows a great deal about baseball,” he says. “I mean, he really does. He’s extremely knowledgeable. And unfortunately, it’s almost by rote, every day, ‘Ball one, strike one, foul ball…’ And I’ve always felt that part of the job, certainly, it’s impossible to entertain (except) to a limited degree. I mean, I want to be accurate. I want to be factual. I want to be interesting. And then if I can just drop in a little something once in a while, I like to do it, and since it’s hard to do, I mean I can do it once in a while, the stories, a lot of times I’m not even aware I have them in my head. Something happens and it triggers the story and it comes out, as natural as that.”
“So you haven’t jotted down…”
“Oh no, no. So what happens a lot of times is I’ll do the game, I’ll get in the car, I’ll start going home thinking about the broadcast, and I’ll think, Gosh,” — and he claps his hands — “why didn’t I remember (a certain story)? And you could kick yourself. No, it’s really all the stories, really, come out of the past and your own experiences, but what’s in there, it’s like a mine, you don’t know until you find it.”
“So they’re all impromptu…”
“Yes, which makes them a little difficult. I don’t want to be, what was it Mark Twain said, I don’t want to remember things that never happened, which is a good line, but yeah, I’m careful. I have to think through the story to make sure it’s accurate and that I can remember all the names in the story, and then I’ll tell a story.”
Such sustained humility of purpose stretches beyond the broadcasts.
Scully, by the way, will be the grand marshal of the 2014 Rose Bowl parade.
Let’s hope this marching band is also in the parade.
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I’m announcing football tonight — a must-win for Platteville at Dodgeville (the first meeting: Dodgeville 48, Platteville 45) — and Saturday afternoon — UW–Platteville against UW–Eau Claire from the sidelines at http://www.theespndoubleteam.com. (But you knew that.)
The Badgers don’t play Saturday, but most other college teams do. And the Packers host Detroit (and the personal foul-accumulating Boy Named Suh) Sunday.
Which makes this from Daniel J. Flynn appropriate:
Amazon’s one-time chief financial officer, Joy Covey, who joined the $60 billion company in 1996 when its annual sales reached $16 million, tragically left us last week. Covey, like about 700 other Americans this past year, died in a bicycling accident. …
More Americans died from cycling accidents last week than died from football hits during the last three seasons combined. The tragedies led no one to call for a ban on bikes. Everybody seems to comprehend that the positives in health and transportation outweigh the considerable negatives of the pedal-powered vehicles. This measured perspective doesn’t extend to our collective view of tackle football, a far less deadly activity that, like biking, provides myriad social and health benefits. …
One thousand times more Americans die from swimming than from football hits. Last year, skateboarding collisions killed 15 times as many Americans as football collisions did. About twelve times as many people die annually from crashes on the ski slopes than die from crashes on the gridiron.
If you’re wearing a Riddell or Schutt helmet when you die, the Drudge Report surely will highlight your passing. If you’re not wearing a helmet in a fatal riding or skiing crash, Matt Drudge probably won’t notice. The war on football is as much a clash between perception and reality as anything else.
When journalists do notice serious injuries in sports not named football, calls for abolition do not usually follow. After Michael Ybarra, a Wall Street Journal“extreme sports correspondent,” died from a climbing fall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Yosemite National Park last year, no national debate emerged over the wisdom of mountaineering. The celebrity skiing deaths of Michael Kennedy, Representative Sonny Bono, and actress Natasha Richardson thankfully led to an uptick in helmets on the slopes but not in calls to abandon the sport. Caleb Moore’s death while snowmobiling at the Winter X Games earlier this year hasn’t led to a lawsuit against the event or equipment manufacturers. Football plays by a separate set of rules.
If the debate over football were about safety, then the scolds seeking to prohibit the game would table their ambition until after doing away with skiing, skateboarding, cycling, and dozens of other deadlier sports.
Safety works as a false front for what’s really motivating the attacks on America’s game. Rough and muddy football clashes with our increasingly risk-averse, passive-aggressive, unsoiled society. It doesn’t fit in a world of parentally monitored play dates, Xbox babysitters, and trophies for everyone. The war on football is a cultural tic calling itself a public-health crusade.
Football competes on a rigged playing field vis-à-vis other sports. Our standards for it, partly because of its popularity, are more stringent than our standards for other sports. If a fatality occurs in cycling, it doesn’t register unless it happened to Amazon’s CFO or someone similarly famous. When such an injury claims the life of an anonymous football player, every journalistic outlet runs with the story in part because it plays into an existing storyline.
This creepy exploitation of tragedy reinforces an impression about football that is at variance with the facts. Football is safer than it ever has been — and safer than many uncontroversial pastimes ever will be.
(Before you ask: No, I didn’t play football other than in my yard or at the park. The combination of lack of athletic talent and height but not weight would have gotten me broken in half.)
Commenters on Flynn’s post castigating him for not including the effects of concussions. Concussions are a problem in all sports, not just football. To say that concussions are a reason to ban football requires you to agree that concussions are a reason to ban women’s sports, since some studies claim girls get more concussions than boys.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 