Lancelot Links

Thursday October 09, 2014

Lancelot Links

Want to see someone steal a base? I mean, like, so ahead of the competition it's not even competition? Ladies and gentlemen, meet�Terrance Gore of the Kansas City Royals.�
Why are the Royals on such a win streak? What could explain their turnaround? Would you believe a visit from a longtime, optimistic fan from South Korea? The piece is from August, via my friend Andy.
If that's not reason enough to root for the Royals, there's this: Did you see the female fan who held up the sign at the Royals-A's one-game playoff, with an arrow pointing to her boyfriend: IF WE WIN, *HE'S* BUYING ME A PUPPY! Well, they won. So this.
Joe Posnanski has been strangely silent since the Royals victory over the Angels in the ALDS earlier this week. Is he writing a book? Holding his breath? Saving it all for the ALCS? But at least in this post, his only post-ALDS post, he gave us a new word based on the KC manager: Yostify (v.): to explain an irrational decision with an even more irrational rationale.�
Here's video of a�bunny in a bathtub. Because it's a bunny in a bathtub.�
Now to the serious stuff. Was the big bad U.S. government mean to poor li'l AIG and its shareholders when it bailed them out in September 2008 in an effort to prop up our entire financial system? Yes, that was the point. Was it a violation of the fifth amendment? I don't think so, but David Boies is making that argument for former AIG president Hank Greenberg. (Who, of course, is besmirching the name of the great Detroit Tigers slugger.)�
Kaleif Browder, 16, who lives in the Bronx, was arrested in May 2010 for assault and stealing a man's backpack, charges he denied. He was sent to the Robert N. Davoren Center for male adolescents, a violent place. He remained there, without a trial, until he was 20. Jennifer Gonnerman reports for The New Yorker.�
I'm fascinated by Nicholas Nixon's 40 years of photographing the New England Brown sisters.�For whatever reason, my eye almost immediately goes to the shortest and, I assume, youngest one (Mimi, second from left) or Laurie on the far right. I hardly ever look at the other two. Not sure why. And I'm particularly fascinated by Mimi. Because she has the hardest stare? Because she reminds me of girls I've had crushes on? Text by Susan Minot. I like her comment about the increasing “united front” of the sisters.�
Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone? Yes. In defense of Obama. Yes again.�
Finally, sadly, I never met Shelly Fling, who died of cancer on Sept. 21 at the age of 49, but I communicated with her often while writing two essays for the University of Minnesota Alumni magagzine, which she edited for 15 years. One essay was about the Marx Brotherhood, a 1970s U of M monthly club, and the other was about address books after the death of friends. I'm fairly irascible as a writer, partly because I've had bad experiences with editors in the past, and partly because I think I'm always right; but she was always willing to do back-and-forth, give-and-take, on edits. She listened.�She also knew what was good and what wasn't: accepting these pieces and rejecting lesser ones. I even wrote her once, after she apologized for rejecting a lesser essay, “Actually this is one of the finest rejection e-mails I've received.” We were forever talking about words. Now? No words.�