“With MLB adopting the universal DH, the era of pitcher hitting in the league is officially done. To say farewell, let’s hand out awards for the best, weirdest, and most magical moments produced by pitchers stepping up to the plate.”
“By applying the 2020 error rates to each state’s racial and ethnic makeup, we find that undercounts in the 2020 census deprived six states of a congressional seat; correspondingly, overcounts of white and Asian residents enabled six other states to gain one seat more than their populations warranted.”
“Since Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s borders at the end of February, colossal amounts of information about the Russian state and its activities have been made public. The data offers unparalleled glimpses into closed-off private institutions, and it may be a gold mine for investigators, from journalists to those tasked with investigating war crimes. Broadly, the data comes in two flavors: information published proactively by Ukranian authorities or their allies, and information obtained by hacktivists. Hundreds of gigabytes of files and millions of emails have been made public.”
“You would think: Well, that’s part of the story. But maybe it’s a needlessly narrow way to begin. That’s what I would think. I would also think: we know that journalism inevitably flattens reality. But you want to fight the flattening as much as you can. To me the joy of reporting, and its essence, is openness to the things you didn’t know until you showed up.”
Meet Emmett Ashford, the first Black umpire in Major League Baseball, who made his MLB debut 19 years after Jackie Robinson did.
Take all his money. Every last filthy dime.
“I am sitting here next to my gay husband living my gay life reading a gay novel as research for my new gay book…and yet I am not and will never be as gay as whatever is haunting Tucker Carlson’s fantasies.”
RIP, Liz Sheridan, actor best known as Seinfeld’s mom.
“A federal judge will allow a group of Georgia voters to move forward with a case to disqualify Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for a second term, arguing that her role in the Jan. 6 insurrection disallows her from appearing on the ballot.”
“In the end, the attacks failed to diminish public support for [Justice Ketanji Brown] Jackson, and her poised responses to questioning helped secure her nomination, by a vote of 53–47. But the fierce campaign against her was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.”
If I’m ever in a position to vote for Mallory McMorrow for something, I will.
The worst episode of Saturday Night Live is so much worse than you can imagine, and it’s all due to Steven Seagal.
“Mike Lee may want to pretend he had no role in this process, but the stone-cold truth is that he, and many other conservatives, breathed life into Trump’s schemes and made the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol possible.”
“Now we are at the point where to be a Republican means to believe the Big Lie. And as long as Republicans leading the party keep promoting and indulging the Big Lie, that will continue to be the case. If I’ve learned anything from my focus groups, it’s that something doesn’t have to make sense for voters to believe it’s true.”
I understand why Wimbledon would ban Russian players from its event this year. I can also understand the argument against holding individuals who may have their own opinions accountable for the actions of their country’s leader.
Who wants ads on Netflix? How about if it costs less?
RIP, Guy LaFleur, Hockey Hall of Famer, prolific goal-scorer, five time Stanley Cup champion with the Montreal Canadiens.
RIP, Daryle Lamonica, two-time MVP quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, nicknamed The Mad Bomber.
RIP, Robert Morse, two-time Tony Award winner best known for How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying and later for a role on Mad Men.
“On Friday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took the stand to give a foggy recollection’s worth of testimony in an Atlanta court hearing over whether she should be disqualified under the 14th Amendment from running for re-election this fall.”
“They’re dissolving something the size of the city of Orlando in 72 hours. This is not the way to run a state.”
“It’s ludicrous in retrospect: For almost 50 years, half of MLB’s teams played by one set of rules and the other half played by another.”
no, it was ludicrous even in prospect.
COLLECTIVE GUILT ASSIGNMENT NOT KOSHER
Re: “overcounts of white and Asian residents enabled six other states to gain one seat more than their populations warranted”
Respectfully, the term “overcount” should be limited to the scenario where a single person fills out two questionnaires at different addresses and the error isn’t caught and corrected. For example, a man with wife and a part-time mistress at a secondary place of abode (recalling an episode of Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s DNA-, census-, and historical-records-assisted genealogical inquiries into the ancestry of cooperating contemporaries. Or unmarried partners with separate households, where one includes the other, perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps even both do so. Or a college student getting reported twice, once by the parents, with a separate questionnaire filled out by the kid at the university location.
Just because certain neighborhoods (and other aggregates, such as cities or states) have better census compliance doesn’t warrant them being labeled overcounted, thereby being collectively denounced as having done something sinister to acquire more political clout than is due.
The incidence of overcounting (double-counting of the same person) is likely de minimis. The real problem is the undercount, which is strictly speaking a compliance issue, and also – in practice – a trust issue.
Verbo: your critique of the terminology used by the Census Board may reflect a misunderstanding of what they did/said. These latest findings are based on statistical analysis as compared to the actual results previously published that were based on counting responses received. Historically, their statistical analyses have proven more accurate (in both directions) than the official count, so that is likely true here as well.
So they really do mean “overcount” (as in, “the official count previously published is statistically implausible”). How the overcounts might have occurred is not part of that finding. The prospect that people were submitting multiple forms is only one of several possible explanations.
Apologies for the brevity.
The DH is a sure sign of the collapse of order and tradition – if not civilization itself – and likely a Communist plot as well. Its adoption was one of the bigger reasons I objected to the Astros being dragged into the AL. (after all, if $elig wanted to have another AL team in the Central time zone, he could have taken his Brewers over there – Milwaukee didn’t have near the NL roots that Houston does… no, mollusk does not hold grudges…)
Seriously, requiring pitchers to bat added another factor for managers to consider – particularly in late innings when they had to decide whether to pull someone who’d been pitching well as a McGuire or Sosa came up.
It also led to things like Randy Johnson having his first at bat since little league, holding the bat like some bizarre and possibly dangerous foreign object. I was at the St. Louis game when during one of The Big Unit’s first times at the plate he lost the bat up the first base line, and McGuire took a knee and fielded it – you could hear the laughter throughout the stands. The Dome had been kinda tense until that moment.