Birthdays start with the indescribable George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic:
Rick Davies played keyboards for Supertramp:
No comments on Presty the DJ for July 22
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It figures after yesterday’s encyclopedia of music knowledge that there are no interesting moments in rock history today and only three birthdays of note: Larry Tolbert, drummer of Raydio …
… Taco Ocheriski, an ’80s one-hit wonder …
… and Yusaf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens:
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Today in 1968, Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-da-Vita” reached the charts. It is said to be the first heavy metal song to chart. It charted at number 117.
At the other end of the charts was South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela:
Quite a selection of birthdays today, starting with T.G. Sheppard:
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This weekend is the La Follette High School’s Class of 1983 reunion, followed by my alma mater’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Since we Lancers were asked to publicize Saturday’s Fifty Fest, let us start by doing my part:
I have written about my alma mater and specifically the Class of 1983 here before, including arguably La Follette’s greatest accomplishment of the 1980s, the 1982 state boys basketball title. (Read the blog and you’ll see that the entire experience was, to use the phrase of the era, choi to the max.) I’ve also written more generally about the Madison (including, of course, its media) we grew up in, as opposed to the Madison that exists today.
I wasn’t able to find La Follette’s fight song (an original composition by La Follette’s first band director) online, but I did find two songs that seem appropriate for those of us eightysomethings, one from the era …
… and one of a more recent vintage:
Here is photographic evidence that I actually was a Lancer:
This is from the aforementioned state championship game, a 62–61 finger-biter (because your fingernails went away long before this game) over previously undefeated Stevens Point. The complete ensemble, from head to toe, was (1) paint hat, a tradition going back to La Follette’s first state title in 1977; (2) sunglasses at night (remember, this is the ’80s); (3) band sweater (which, truth be told, didn’t match the official school cardinal, but whatever) over white shirt, both of which my mother washed each night after state games; (4) my trumpet, which was actually my father’s trumpet, which was actually my father’s high school band director’s trumpet; (5) white pants and (6) white tennis shoes. (Brooks, I think.)
Reunions include three groups of people — people you want to see, people you don’t want to see, and people you forgot were classmates of yours. (Or, in the case of a large high school like La Follette, people you didn’t know were classmates of yours.) I keep in touch with a lot of my classmates and other Lancer alumni via Facebook since I joined two years ago. (They belong to the first group, though some used to belong to the third group.)
There are superficial realities that are less than pleasant in class reunions. We’re all in our late 40s, so gravity and genetics have done what they can to us. The most unpleasant reality is that there are fewer members of the Class of 1983 since 2008. That obviously is always the case, but the Class of 1983 experienced no deaths while we were in high school. One of our classmates, who was deaf and attended La Follette with a sign-language interpreter, died with her daughter in a house fire earlier this year. Another classmate died 16 years ago in a race car accident. One died of cancer far too young. One died of the effects of alcoholism far too young. The morbid might observe that everyone at a class reunion goes with the reality that he or she might never see someone in that room again, but that’s the reality of any part of our lives.
I had a good time at my 25th reunion. But I’m not going to this weekend’s festivities. Other priorities interrupted — namely, work, our youngest son’s acting in the UW–Platteville Heartland Festival’s “Fiddler on the Roof” (he plays the Rabbi’s son) Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and all three of our kids swimming in an invitational meet Saturday. I suppose I could go to the festivities by myself, but that doesn’t strike me as festive, so I’m passing on the weekend. Put another way, our kids’ present trumps my past.
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Regular readers know that one of my stranger interests is in athletic uniforms.
I have argued, though generally without evidence, that there is a link between the aesthetic appeal of a uniform and how its wearer performs in athletic competition. That has led me to rant against such obscenities as black basketball shoes, the Michelin Man look (all-white uniforms, mainly in football), and uniforms without player names on the back.
SportsLogos.net has taken on this general subject by measuring, of all things, the win–loss records of baseball teams by uniform combination:
Have you ever thought to yourself, “it seems like those guys always lose when they wear that jersey”? Well, it turns out there may be some underlying truth to your sartorial assumption.
Over the past three-and-a-half months we here at SportsLogos.Net have been tracking each and every cap, jersey, and pants combo worn by every team in every game of the 2013 Major League Baseball season. We’ve cross-referenced that data with wins and losses, resulting in what I’m pretty sure is the first ever batch of MLB wins-per-uniform stats ever.
Of all the major professional sports, baseball has been the most, shall we say, color-challenged. Every other sport has had some combination of white uniform and colored uniform. Football usually wears colored uniforms at home and white on the road. Basketball wears white (or a light color) uniform at home and colored on the road. Hockey has gone back and forth.
Until the early 1970s, baseball had two uniforms: White at home, gray on the road. (Baseball also is the only professional team sport that doesn’t mandate player names on the back of uniforms, which tells you all you need to know about how baseball feels about fan-friendliness.) White-or-gray changed in 1971, when the Baltimore Orioles trotted out …
One year later, the Oakland A’s offended and/or blinded the purists by outfitting his team in, besides white — to be precise, “wedding gown white” — kelly green and “Fort Knox” gold jerseys and matching pants, thus creating …
(I’ve never seen an all-green A’s photo. Pitcher Vida Blue wore the all-gold ensemble in the 1975 All-Star Game in Milwaukee.)
That was matched by Pittsburgh, whose colors are, as is obvious, black and gold:
Other teams didn’t go as far as matching non-white pants, but did their own uniform thing. Some call the 1975–86 Houston Astros uniforms the “Tequila Sunrise” look; others call these the “Rainbow guts” uniforms:
The uniform train derailed in Chicago in the late ’70s:
What’s worse? White pinstripes on powder blue uniforms? Or the White Sox’s softball uniforms? (Including, in one game, shorts.)
Most of this went away in the ’80s … until, that is, baseball marketing entered the 20th century and the financial types figured out that baseball fans buy baseball jerseys. Now, the number of teams that regularly wear just white at home and gray on the road is limited indeed. (At the moment, the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis are the only teams to have not worn a third jersey, not counting the “holiday” uniforms every team apparently wore once this year.) Teams wear white pants (or cream in the case of San Francisco and Philadelphia’s alternate uni) at home and gray on the road (powder blue having almost completely gone away), but after that …
SportsLogos begin with the winningest, and losingest, uniform combinations in the baseball season before the All-Star break:
Here’s some irony for you. During the 1970s …
… early 1980s …
… and later 1980s …
… the Brewers wore two, and only two, uniforms: white at home, and gray, then powder blue, then gray uniforms on the road.
Which makes it ironic that apparently Milwaukee is the uniform capital of Major League Baseball:
Milwaukee has worn 10 different jerseys during the 2013 season, we’re not sure but that’s probably a record-breaking pace, however if they want to play good baseball (and let’s face it, this has not been their year) they should stick with the standards when playing at Miller Park. For home games the Brewers are 12-7 when they wear white, 10-19 in anything other than white. They’re a combined 0-5 when wearing special one-off jerseys, and a combined 0-6 when wearing anything other than their primary or alternate cap. Keep it simple Milwaukee, it’s working better for the club when you do!
Truth be told, this looks to me to be a couple uniforms short, because this graphic doesn’t include the Mexican …
… German …
… or Italian jerseys, which they may or may not be wearing this season.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of the Brewers’ look, though it’s better than most of their previous looks. The name on the back and numbers are Times, last seen in your local newspaper. (Really.) The blue and gold color scheme was inherited from the Seattle Pilots, whose purchase and move to Milwaukee was so late in spring training that there was no time to design new uniforms. (The Milwaukee Braves, remember, were navy blue and red, and the literature from the late ’60s post-Braves pre-Brewers games held at County Stadium had Braves-color logos.) The colors were changed from royal blue and athletic gold (that is, yellowgold) to navy blue and metallic gold in 1994. (Green was added in ’94, only to disappear a few years later.)
Brewers tradition is that, other than on special occasions for which jerseys are made, the starting pitcher gets to choose which uniform is worn that night. The gold jersey looks just awful. The blue jerseys look good, at least, and the Brewers are doing marginally better wearing the blue road jerseys than the dull gray uniforms. If the Brewers wanted to emulate an actual winning Wisconsin sports team, the answer is obvious:
A team representing a town with German heritage should, you’d think, trot out the Old English/Germanish fonts. (Assuming they can find a legible one.) Too many baseball teams wear blue (including every iteration of the Brewers and Milwaukee Braves except apparently the pre-Braves Brewers), and blue is not a color one associates with beer anyway.
In fact, if I were outfitting the Brewers, they might look like …
… beer colors. The home unis are cream, because Milwaukee was known as the Cream City. Metallic gold looks like beer, and black looks like dark beer. The road pants are the tannish-gray San Diego used to wear. (You may be able to tell I quickly recolored this based on something I did several years ago, hence the player depicted.)Back to the hideous white pinstripes: The Cubs may have started the trend toward alternate jerseys because they unveiled these in the ’80s …
… the decade in which the Cubs actually played postseason baseball. (Twice!) And then they got rid of them …
… and returned to their usual ineptitude, until back came the blue jerseys …
… and the Cubs won every half-dozen years or so.
As for their crosstown rivals, after uniform choices ranging from uninspired …
… to excessively contemporary …
… the White Sox (not that you could tell their name from some of their uniform choices) finally settled on a look …
… with which they finally won a World Series, and from which they should never deviate again. This look is great enough to almost make you forget the worst announcer in baseball. Almost.
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David Bowie might remember today for two reasons. In 1974, his “Diamond Dog” tour ended in New York City …
… six years before he appeared in Denver as the title character of “The Elephant Man.”
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The past few days have shown two examples of government’s trying to take for itself a journalistic role.
First is from Foreign Policy:
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.
The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.” …
BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA “present fair and accurate news.”
“They don’t shy away from stories that don’t shed the best light on the United States,” she told The Cable. She pointed to the charters of VOA and RFE: “Our journalists provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate.”
A former U.S. government source with knowledge of the BBG says the organization is no Pravda, but it does advance U.S. interests in more subtle ways. In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. “Somalis have three options for news,” the source said, “word of mouth, al-Shabab, or VOA Somalia.”
This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul, Minnesota’s significant Somali expat community. “Those people can get al-Shabab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn’t get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia,” the source said. “It was silly.”
Lynne added that the reform has a transparency benefit as well. “Now Americans will be able to know more about what they are paying for with their tax dollars — greater transparency is a win-win for all involved,” she said. And so with that we have the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, and went into effect this month.
So far, there is some validity to this. Larger metro areas do have significant populations of those who came to America to escape, for instance, Somalia, who don’t know English very well yet. I bet at least half of Americans don’t even know what Voice of America is, since they can’t hear it here. There is truth to Weil’s statement about “what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate,” though that is not for the Obama administration to define.
The problem is …
Last year, two USA Today journalists were ensnared in a propaganda campaign after reporting about millions of dollars in back taxes owed by the Pentagon’s top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan. Eventually, one of the co-owners of the firm confessed to creating phony websites and Twitter accounts to smear the journalists anonymously. Additionally, just this month, the Washington Post exposed a counter-propaganda program by the Pentagon that recommended posting comments on a U.S. website run by a Somali expat with readers opposing al-Shabab. “Today, the military is more focused on manipulating news and commentary on the Internet, especially social media, by posting material and images without necessarily claiming ownership,” reported the Post.
… that if you give the government an inch, as with too many areas to count, it will take 10 miles. One commenter presents a scenario:
Soon we’ll see the “suggestions” to run this “content” getting stronger. Between license renewals, environmental impact statements for new studios or antenna installations, access to lawmakers and the President, press junket invites, and all the rest, if the government wants stations to run it, they will. Keep in mind the increasing media consolidation too – most “local” TV stations, and even more so, local radio stations, are not truly local. There are only a few big companies that have to be influenced in order to get the latest from VOA into the news. Regarding that consolidation, the anti-trust division of the Justice Department gets its yea-or-nay.
As it is, there are too many journalists who take anything said by or at any level of government without any questions at all.
Which brings us to something I’m not leery about at all, reported by Wisconsin Reporter:
The federal government is handing out $1.77 million to 16 community health centers throughout the Badger State to help promote Obamacare.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the health centers “expect to hire 40 additional workers, who will assist 26,474 people” in enrolling in Obamacare or other government health coverage like BadgerCare.
HHS announced the grants on Wednesday. The federal government plans to spend more than $150 million in grants to 1,100 heath centers and clinics across the county.
Yes, I’m not leery about this all. “Leery” means you have doubts. I don’t. I know this is a horrible idea. It’s domestic propaganda meant to make ObamaCare popular with the public that sees “Free!” and nothing else. And at $44,250 per job, that’s pretty good pay in a state where the average income is about $20,000 less. Perhaps that’s the Obama administration’s definition of job creation, but with our tax dollars, of course.
When I correctly observe that government is too large, I’m occasionally asked, and often in a snarky manner, what I’d favor cutting. The snarks usually don’t expect an answer, but I have several. In addition to everyone with the title “executive assistant” (political appointees of their boss) who works in state government, the state should eliminate most, if not all, positions with titles similar to “public information officer.” Media relations — that is, self-promotion of your little corner of the bureaucracy — is not a core function of government. Making the media’s job easier by spoon-feeding information to reporters is not a core function of government either.
Maybe if the media had to work harder to get information from the government, the media might take its proper role as skeptics of what government does more seriously.
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Former Gov. and UW–Stevens Point Chancellor Lee Sherman Dreyfus coined the term that, believe it or don’t, the City of Madison, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, is ready to use as its official motto: “77 square miles surrounded by reality.”
This news has generated at least one harrumph and at least one huzzah. (I wonder myself if the city should have to pay royalties to the Dreyfus estate, but that’s their problem.) The Yes vote comes from Tom Breuer:
While the proposal has garnered mixed reviews (Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce President Zach Brandon told the Wisconsin State Journal, “Maybe we should figure out the square footage of the City Council chamber and use that”), I think the slogan could stand as a winking acknowledgment of our, ahem, uniqueness.
As a Madisonian in good standing, I understand that the rest of the state has a bit of a jaundiced outlook when it comes to our little burg. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s fretful characterization of New Yorkers’ image problem in his movie Annie Hall: “Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re leftwing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”
Soglin said he will be proposing the motto to the City Council on Tuesday, and we’ll see where it goes from there.
Alas, I’m guessing it will fail. If so, here are a few more suggestions we can try:
- The Land Where Bicycles Don’t Stop
- 7,700 Vegans Surrounded by Cow Methane
- Hey, Milwaukee: Our Cars Burn Less Fuel Than Your Bloated Livers
- Madison: Where Fox Valley Liberals Go When They Want to Feel Like Republicans
- Hey, Imagine if That Weird Kaukauna Smell Was Sage Incense, Patchouli, and Gluten-Free Mocha Hazelnut Cupcakes!
- Visit. Stay. Play. Get Your Car Towed Around the Corner
- Madison: Where Any Kid Can Grow Up to Be Mayor as Many Times as He Wants
- Come for the Past Life Regression Therapy, Stay for the Thong Cape Scooter Man
- You’re Driving Through the Forest Wearing a Bright Orange Hat With a 200-Pound Animal Carcass Strapped to the Roof of Your Jetta and You Think We’re the Strange Ones?
- And for all those who’ve swum in our town’s lakes when they probably shouldn’t have: Alcohol and Night Swimming; It’s a Winning Combination.
The opposing view comes from Caffeinated Politics:
Mayor Soglin will offer a resolution establishing Madison’s motto as “77 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality,” with a provision to change the size as the city continues to grow. While everyone who loves this city understands the joke that has long been referenced since the days of Governor Dreyfus’s playful comment, there should be no serious consideration of making this our city motto.
This is a vibrant, eclectic, intelligent city that has often been derided by those living elsewhere, and are miffed that we have so much going for us here. So it is understandable why so many Madisonians are opposed to the idea that Soglin has bounced around to the point that he is going to take city time, and resources to debate it.
“I have a sense of humor. I have my pink flamingo. But I don’t think it’s a good motto to have for the city,” said Council President Chris Schmidt, who intends to vote no. “We’re feeding a meme. This is more harmful than helpful to us.”
As the news story notes other places have mottos that lift the sails, and accentuate the positive. This feeble attempt at finding a city motto for Madison says much about Soglin’s waning leadership abilities.
The comment of Brandon, formerly a Madison alderman and the secretary of commerce for Democratic Gov. James Doyle, is ironic. Breuer speaks from experience about “Fox Valley liberals,” although in my 18 years of Fox Valley experience finding left-wing wack jobs was immensely more difficult in Northeast Wisconsin than in Mad City, where you bump into five of them walking 10 feet.
Deke also grossly overstates the People’s Republic of Madison’s attributes. Vibrant? Nearly any university town is; that’s not really an accomplishment by itself. Eclectic? In some ways, but certainly not in ideology, where libertarians are only accepted for their anti-Drug War views and conservatives would be lynched were it legal. Intelligent? Ask yourself how many brilliant ideas of Hizzoner Da Mare for Life and the Central Committee — I mean, the Common Council — have been adopted by other government bodies outside those 77 square miles.
That part about “reality” doesn’t merely reference Madison’s flakiness, such as the Common Council’s expressing its (majority) opinion about every U.S. military involvement from Vietnam to now. (As if anyone in Washington cares what 12 or more Madison “alders” think.) It also reflects the reality official Madison refuses to acknowledge, such as the negatives that growing past 200,000 population have brought to the city, including increasing crime, increasing violent crime, real estate that is now so expensive that the middle-class can no longer afford to live in Madison, decreasing school quality and the gap between white and minority student achievement.
One of Deke’s commenters suggests:
I get that Soglin is trying to be ironic and use “reality” as a pejorative, but I don’t think most people will get it. Plus, you sound like a snob when you try to insult the rest of the state. How about “Isthmus of Ideas”
That works, because those of us in Realityland can change it to “Isthmus of Bad Ideas.”
Truth be told, I think this is a great idea, independent of my antipathy to my home town and its negative-IQ politics. One thing marketing experts tell you is you have to be authentic. Madison is authentically bizarre, similar to Austin, Texas or Berkeley, Calif. (Either of those two has better weather, however.) Madison might as well embrace its inner freak.
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You will be shocked — shocked! — to find out what Mortimer Zuckerman thinks of our economic “recovery”:
The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.
The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.
That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.
The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines. …
At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees. …
What’s going on? The fundamentals surely reflect the feebleness of the macroeconomic recovery that began roughly four years ago, as seen in an average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters at a miserable 2%. That’s the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Over a similar period in previous recessions, growth averaged 4.1%. During the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, the GDP growth rate dropped below 2%. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP for four consecutive years. The misery is not going to end soon.
ObamaCare is partially to blame. The health-insurance law requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker. Under the law, a full-time job is defined as 30 hours a week, so businesses, especially smaller ones, have an incentive to bring on more part-time workers.
Little wonder that earlier this month the Obama administration announced it is postponing the employer mandate until 2015, undoubtedly to see if the delay will encourage more full-time hiring. But thousands of small businesses have been capping employment at 30 hours and not hiring more than 50 full-timers, and the businesses are unlikely to suddenly change that approach just because they received a 12-month reprieve.
These businesses’ hesitation to hire is part of a larger caution among employers unsure about the direction of government policy—and which has helped contribute to chronic long-term unemployment that shows no sign of easing. Unlike those who lose a job and then find another one in a matter of weeks or months, fully a third of the currently unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. As they remain out of the workforce, their skills deteriorating, the likelihood rises that they will be seen as permanently unemployable. With each passing month of bleak job news, the possibility increases of a structural unemployment problem in the U.S. such as Europe experienced in the 1980s.
That brings us to a stunning fact about the jobless recovery: The measure of those adults who can work and have jobs, known as the civilian workforce-participation rate, is currently 63.5%—a drop of 2.2% since the recession ended. Such a decline amid a supposedly expanding economy has never happened after previous recessions. Another statistic that underscores why this is such a dysfunctional labor market is that the number of people leaving the workforce during this economic recovery has actually outpaced the number of people finding a new job by a factor of nearly three.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 