That was one beautiful baseball game the New York Yankees and the Anaheim Los Angeles California Angels just played, wasn’t it?
It had everything – fabulous performances and fumbled performances, spine-tingling plays and boneheaded plays, close calls and clueless calls.
In short, neither team deserved to win, and both teams deserved to win.
I’m just glad the Yankees did.
The Coca-Cola Company is officially on the run.
The soft drink giant ran another full-page ad in Friday’s Wall Street Journal as part of its Live Positively (read: Don’t Ban Us from Schools) campaign, which features a series of “Real Savvy Families” videos (they don’t drink too many carbonated beverages), and a series of newspaper ads.
The latest salvo from the sugar-industrial complex carries the headline, “Listening to the people best equipped to make decisions for kids.”
First paragraph of body copy:
We understand that parents and caregivers prefer to decide what to serve their children, and school leaders are the experts when it comes to educating our nation’s youth. Here’s what we’re doing to help support them.
Those bold steps include: Responsible Marketing, School Guidelines, and Physical Education Programs.
Wake me when kids stop drinking soda.
Back in the ’50s and ’60s, Manny Ramirez wouldn’t have gotten away twice with that bush league bat-drop whenever he clocks a home run.
Where’s Sal (The Barber) Maglie when you need him?
Nothing like a good slapfight between the Boston Globe’s editorial board and its newsroom to get the juices flowing.
The back story:
On Tuesday the Globe’s Metro section featured a report on the demotion of a senior Boston police commander who happened to supervise Detective Thomas M. Menino, Jr., the son of Boston mayor Tom Menino. The piece called the demotion “a surprise decision that has sparked questions among the ranks over whether City Hall was exerting an unusual level of influence over the management of the police department.”
The piece – how to say this? – hung together like the Red Sox after Game 3 of the ALDS. There were a lot of “members of the department hypothesizing” and there was confusion and conjecture among members of the commissioner’s command staff.” Oh, yes – and did I mention that the demotion occurred four-and-a-half months ago?
(On the same day the Globe also ran a story with this lead: “The Menino administration approved a $120,000 payment to a Quincy drug suspect in 2001 to quietly settle a federal civil suit that accused four Boston police officers – including the mayor’s son – of fracturing his skull while arresting him in Quincy, nearly a mile outside the Boston city limits.” Despite the eight-year lag,though that was new old news, since ” the details were never publicly disclosed until the Globe requested information last month.” All in all, not the Menino family’s favorite edition of the Globe.)
The front story:
Fast-forward to today’s Globe, which featured an editorial headlined, “Police flap isn’t Menino’s fault.” The piece defends Menino and attacks the story, asserting that:
Mayor Menino would have been especially naive to pick this fight . . . It would make sense, however, that the department’s superior officers’ union, which endorsed mayoral challenger Michael Flaherty, might be stoking this fire.
And then, for the coup de grace, this:
Lately, Menino has been dismissing any criticism of his administration as so much election-season mischief. In this case, he has a point.
Yikes! It’s all so . . . Wall Street Journal.
Wonder who, if anyone, is going to fire back in defense of the newsroom. Or maybe they’ll just take it outside during recess.
Ever since the New York Times ran a piece last week on the artwork the Obamas borrowed from several Washington museums to decorate their private White House residence and the West and East Wings, there’s been a raging debate in the artosphere about the First Couple’s choices (Times slideshow here).
Wednesday’s edition of the excellent daily digest ArtsJournal provided a representative sample.
First up: Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout’s About Last Night blog, which cast a gimlet eye on the White House artorama.
While it would please me to know that the Obamas genuinely like modern art, long experience has taught me that no public act by a politician, least of all one that bears on artistic matters, can ever be taken at face value. Rarely do successful pols permit their personal tastes (assuming that they have any) to interfere with opportunities to show solidarity with their supporters.
Unfortunately, Teachout notes, others do take the Obamas’ choices at face value. Here’s Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik’s take (at face value):
Then there are [Giorgio] Morandi’s mild-mannered paintings of bottles and jars. Those shouldn’t raise an eyebrow…unless a viewer cares that they were painted by a once-proud fascist who’d sucked up to Benito Mussolini. It’s not far-fetched to see something fiercely reactionary in Morandi’s work. Even the fiercest Blue Dogs might wince.
Terry Teachout also winced:
Anyone seriously interested in learning about Morandi’s involvement with Italian fascism can read all about it in this excellent book. Anyone who believes that it matters in the present context–or who is capable of using the phrases “mild-mannered” and “fiercely reactionary” to describe Morandi’s visionary, intensely concentrated art–is a philistine . . .
The fact that two Morandi still lifes now hang in the White House tells us nothing more about Barack Obama than the fact that Jacob Lawrence’s “The Builders” was added to the White House art collection in 2007 told us about George W. Bush. It is a symbolic gesture pure and simple, one for which a modest amount of gratitude–but no more–is due.
For a purely political take, Wednesday’s ArtsJournal steers us toward the blog Modern Arts Notes, which notes the following:
Instead of congratulating ourselves that the Obamas are art people, we should be demanding that the White House innovate, that it create new, progressive federal arts policies and initiatives. Maybe the White House should make it possible for every museum in America to offer free admission to its permanent collection? Maybe there’s room for the humanities in a new Peace Corps or Americorps program?
Old Conventional Wisdom: All politics is local.
Even Older Conventional Wisdom: All art is political.
New York Times legal beagle Adam Liptak had a column on Tuesday examining a federal law that makes it a crime for public officials to “deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”
As Liptak notes, what “honest services” means is anyone’s guess:
If you can make sense of that phrase, you have achieved something that has so far eluded the nation’s appeals courts.
Regardless, the U.S. Supreme Court “[has] agreed to hear not one but two cases exploring the scope of the honest services law,” Liptak writes.
In his examination of the pesky legal standard, Liptak quotes Boston uber-attorney Harvey Silverglate:
The honest services law is but one example of what Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, calls “an over-criminalization problem.”
What Liptak fails to note is Silverglate’s previous criticism of the “honest services” prosecution of former Massachusetts House Speaker Sal DiMasi.
A June 22, 2009 Boston Globe report about the effort by DiMasi’s lawyers to mount a counter-attack on the honest services law said this:
Harvey A. Silverglate, a prominent Boston civil liberties lawyer and frequent critic of federal prosecutions, called the statute a “garbage pail’’ and said the Supreme Court has signaled that it is troubled by how prosecutors apply it.
We’ll see what the Supreme Court verdict is.
Meanwhile, the verdict on Adam Liptak is in:
He didn’t do his homework.
Almonds.
That’s the last nut I remember having its own ad campaign. It was – I dunno – 15 years ago that the Almond Board of California ran TV spots plaintively asking me to buy one can of almonds . . . what? A month? A year? I forget.
I also forgot to buy the can of almonds.
Now comes an ad campaign for another nut – Wonderful® Pistachios – employing the theme, “Get Crackin’.” According to Reuters:
The $15 million Wonderful Pistachios campaign is the first campaign for the category and features eight celebrity figures demonstrating how they crack open a pistachio, each in their own unique, light-hearted way, through a series of commercials airing on national prime-time programming.
Featured celebrities include Olympic swimmer and record-setting medalist Dara Torres; Brady Bunch alum Christopher Knight and America’s Next Top Model wife Adrianne Curry; Jackass prankster Wee-Man; The Sopranos actor Vincent Pastore; former Miss South Carolina Teen USA Lauren Caitlin Upton; the Denny quintuplets; father of Sarah Palin’s grandchild, Levi Johnston; and a real-life dominatrix.
That gives new meaning to Eight Is Enough, yes?
One TV spot has The Sopranos late, unlamented Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore) using a guy’s head to crack open a pistachio while an announcer says, “Mobsters do it with muscle.”
Another ad features Bristol Palin’s arm candy Levi Johnston, who appears with a big black baldheaded bruiser accompanying him. As Johnston eats a pistachio nut the announcer says, “Now Levi Johnston does it with protection.”
Bada boom, as Big Pussy would say.
From our Late to the Party bureau:
The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider has tried its level best to keep up with Roman Polanski-palooza, but this (via Sunday’s New York Times) had totally escaped us:
Mr. Polanski . . . charged with both rape and sodomy involving drugs . . . fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor.
So he spent three decades on the lam to avoid a month-and-a-half in the sneezer?
Roman Polanski’s not just a rapist. He’s a moron.
UPDATE: As one splendid commenter informed the hardworking (but not enough) staff at Campaign Outsider:
No, he did not flee to escape a 48-day sentence. He was worried that the judge would not stick to the plea-bargained sentence and instead sentence him to up to 50 years:
http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2009/10/12/couples_retreat_tops_the_weekend_box_office/
It’s amazing the level of misinformation that floats around there about the case. Even the 50 year sentence belief itself might be hyperbole; the judge is no longer alive to provide independent corroboration.
The (not so) hardworking staff stands corrected.
All due respect to the fine participants in Saturday’s Spectacle Island hot dog eating contest, but really, this (via the Boston Globe) is what it takes to win?
[Robert] Lavallee, an 18-year-old who likes his dogs with steak sauce, Dijon mustard, and relish, sprinted and stretched before devouring seven frankfurters and a big bite of his eighth to win the 10-minute competition.
Seven-and-a-big-bite hot dogs in ten minutes? Not to get all New York on you, but at the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, they down almost ten times that number of franks in the same amount of time.
Regarding the most recent Nathan’s eat-off:
Joey Chestnut today won the Nathan’s Famous July Fourth International Eating Contest by eating 68 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, 3 1/2 more than Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, his arch-rival.
Personally, I don’t eat hot dogs (long story, rather not tell it).
So I say this More in Sorrow Than in Anger to the Spectacle Island doggers:
Weenies.
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