The 2024 MLB season is down to four teams, and many are hoping for a reprise of the 2000 Subway Series (NY vs. NY), but longtime readers, or short-time readers, or people who barely glance at this blog, will know that that's not me. I want the other matchup (LA vs. CLE), for many, many reasons, and start with the obvious: Yankees Suck.

Here are the familiar numbers again, 40 and 27, the pennants and titles the Yankees hold, which is way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, WAY ahead of any other team. Second place for titles is the St. Louis Cardinals with 11, and no other team is in double digits. And, again, the Yankees have *27*. Comparatively, the Dodgers, who have had their successes, have only seven, while Guards and Mets are at just two apiece. Plus if we keep the World Series Yankee-free another season, I think we'll set a post-Babe Ruth record for pennant futility: 15 straight seasons. C'mon, people, we can do this! We're so close!

But there are other reasons I want LA-CLE. Those teams have the lowest payrolls. I mean, the Dodgers are fifth overall, and I guess Ohtani's contract is mostly deferred and so uncounted, but the two New York teams are 1 and 2. It's easy to forget, too, since they're such underdogs, but the Mets are No. 1 in payroll. The Mets. I guess they're still paying Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer? Yes and yes. They're also still paying Bobby Bonilla, who retired in 2001 and who's getting paid through 2035. Lesson there, kids: get a good financial planner.

But I also want the Dodgers because of Shohei and I want Cleveland because they haven't won it all since 1948—the longest title drought in the sport. Second place is a tie between the Padres and Brewers: est. 1969, never won. Then it's my Mariners: est. 1977, never been. Just think of the distance we've come since 1948. Rock 'n' roll didn't exist. Elvis Presley was 13 and in junior high, Martin Luther King was 19 and graduating from Morehouse College. Donald Trump was just 2! Temperamentally the same, of course.

Maybe best of all, an LA vs. CLE World Series would not only reprise the 1920 World Series (Brooklyn Robins vs. Cleveland Indians), it would be a matchup of the first two teams to break the color barrier. That'd be cool. I'm not saying the Yankees and Mets would be racist if they beat them, and denied us this, but it'd be close.

EXTRA READING:

• At the start of the season, Joe Posnanski counted down from the worst team in baseball (the Rockies) to the best, and this is where the remaining teams ranked per Joe: Dodgers (1), Yankees (10), Guardians (17), and Mets (18). This is the Poz who predicted great things for the Mariners, remember, to which Michael Schur deadpanned “Really,” speaking for everyone in Seattle. 

Per IMDb and its dipshit algorithms:

All good movies. But when Robinson (née Emmanuel Goldenberg) died in January 1973, The New York Times ran an obit on page one below the fold, which read:

Edward G. Robinson, 79, Dies; Famed as Films' 'Little Caesar'

Fuckin' A. A few other newspapers put that role in their headlines, too, while most merely said, “Hollywood Tough Guy” which is the same thing. Here's UPI's example:

“His greatest role.” Sometimes the culture changes, of course, and the hidden is elevated and the celebrated lowered, but I don't think that's happening here. I don't think IMDb is tapping into any culture. As the man said: I don't see any method at all. 

Mother of mercy.

I wish I knew more about this photo. It was taken by my father on Camera Day, August 1970, at Met Stadium in Bloomington, Minn. Tiant was one of a dozen players with whom we got our picture taken that day, and he seems very chummy, not aloof at all, but I don't remember the moment. I do remember liking him. I do remember wondering why he only stayed with the Twins for a little while. Why did he come? Why did he go? 

He came because on Dec. 10, 1969, the Twins traded Dean Chance, Bob Miller, Ted Uhlander, and Graig Nettles*, four players in all, to the Cleveland Indians for pitchers Stan Williams and Luis Tiant. It's an odd trade. We seem interested in pitching but gave up two pitchers in the process, while the pitchers we got were coming off of off-years, Tiant particularly. In 1968, he had a season for the ages, going 21-9 and leading the American League with a miniscule 1.60 ERA. But he didn't even get one Cy Young vote because the Tigers' Denny McLain went 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA and won the Cy unanimously. Tiant's miniscule ERA wasn't even much talked up because Bob Gibson's was minisculer: 1.12 ERA, the modern record. Gibson and McLain not only won Cys but MVPs, while Tiant was all but forgotten. And the next season, after they lowered the mound, Tiant led the league in a bunch of stuff you don't want to lead the league in: walks (129) homeruns allowed (37), and losses (20).

* Yes, this was a bad trade or the Twins. Over the next 20 years, Nettles would accumulate 65 bWAR and become a legendary hot-corner defender in the World Series. He should be in the Hall of Fame—or at least have his number retired by the New York Yankees.**

** Yes, his number (No. 9) IS retired by the New York Yankees, except not in his honor. It's for an earlier wearer, Roger Maris, and I guess you can't retire it twice.***

*** Actually, you can, and the Yankees have. No. 8 is retired for both Yogi Berra and his mentor Bill Dickey. Anyway, onward.

I'm curious if Tiant was considered the big get for the Twins in that trade. Stan Williams wound up having the better season, going 10-1 from the bullpen with a 1.99 ERA. Tiant started well, going 6-0 through the first two months of the season with a 3.12 ERA, including a shutout of Detroit in April in which he gave up as many hits (3, all singles) as he got himself (3-4, including a double); but in his last start in May, he heard something pop in his right shoulder and x-rays revealed a fractured scapular. Out for two months. (Who did the Twins call up to replace him? A 19-year-old curveball pitcher named Bert Blyleven. Welcome to the Show, kid.)

So did the Twins lose confidence in Tiant after all that? They outright released him in March 1971, he was picked up by the Atlanta Braves, they released him in May, at which point the Boston Red Sox picked him up, and, into his 30s, Tiant showed everyone what they'd missed. Eventually. That year, 1971, he went 1-7 with a 4.85 ERA, but the next year he again led the Majors in ERA, 1.91, and for the next four years won 20, 22, 18 and 21 games for a Red Sox team that kept challenging for the pennant. He also went 1-0 in the '75 ALCS and 2-0 against the vaunted Big Red Machine in the magical 1975 World Series. That's when Tiant, with his twisting, second-base-facing windup, truly became a legend. He won Games 1 (five-hit shutout) and 4 (CG), and, after several days rain delay, started Game 6. But in the 5th inning, the Reds scored 3, the big blow a triple by Ken Griffey (not yet “Sr.”), and they got 2 more in the 7th. All of which set the stage for blasts by Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk. In other words, the only games the BoSox won that Series were games Tiant started. Wait, it's better: the only games the Cincinnati Reds lost in both the 1975 an '76 postseasons were those three Tiant starts. Otherwise they swept the table.

Should he be in the Hall? He lasted with the Sox until 1978, went over to the Yankees for two years, Pirates for one and Angels for one, and retired with a 229-172 record, a 3.30 ERA, an 2416 Ks, at a time when just Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson were north of 3,000. His bWAR is right on the cusp, 65.6, and Joe Posnanski, for one, thinks he should get extra points for character—as in being one: the windup, the cigars, the jovial nature, selling sausages outside Fenway. Part of Pos' argument is that guys get dinged for bad behavior (cf., Curt Schilling) so why not the opposite for good guys? Just look at that photo. If that's not an ambassador of the game, I don't know one.

FURTHER READING:

• “Despedida, El Tiante” by Joe Posnanski
• “It's October!”: The Poscast, Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur
• “Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83,” The New York Times

Above title credit for the magazine article? Those were the days. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

A publishing giant, Lawrence Fellowes (Lewis Stone), hires Kate Halsey (Blanche Friderici), a cigar-smoking, suit-wearing woman who wants to be the next Ernest Hemingway, Jack London or Jim Tully, to write a book about the phenomenon of businessmen romancing their secretaries, or some such. He has to convince her to do this since she has no interest in the subject. And he does this even though he has no interest in his own secretary—a mousy thing named Miss Andrews (Dale Fuller) forever trying to entice him. In fact, when Andrews discovers the boss is getting married, to someone else, she faints in his office then leaves the firm. 

She’s quickly replaced by Anne Murdock (Dorothy Mackaill), a Constance-Bennett-looker who rose through the ranks via hard work. She’s reminded of this by her fussy office manager, J.P. McGowan (Hobart Bosworth). “Anne, you got this on your work. What I mean is, charm counts, but you got this on your brains. Don’t forget that Anne. … Now run along, fix your face.”

Nice mixed message. So what happens? She tries to seduce the boss, of course: bringing in flowers, hiking her skirt above the knee, showing off those gams. It’s a 180-degree turn that makes no sense. Is she suddenly enamored of him? Was Lewis Stone, the future Judge Hardy of the Andy Hardy movies, considered the Robert Redford of 1930? No clue.

Anyway, very shortly, he’s interested in her, too. Yes, him, the newlywed workaholic. But can they make it work? They can! His wife is already sick of him and fooling around with some other schlub. The whole thing is icky but love wins.

As for the book Fellowes commissioned? Forgotten. Poor Kate and her cigars.

“The Office Wife” is not a good film but it’s been preserved by the Library of Congress—I assume for this reason: it's the feature-film debut of Joan Blondell. A few months earlier, she’d been in “Penny Arcade” on Broadway, Al Jolson saw it, bought the rights, and recommended two of its players to Warner Bros.: Blondell and a short guy named Cagney. Cagney didn’t debut until the screen version of “Penny Arcade” (retitled “Sinners' Holiday”) later that year, but Warners stuck Blondell into a bathtub as soon they could.

Feature-film debut of Joan Blondell: Get that girl into a bathtub STAT!

Playing Anne’s sister Katherine, Blondell is the best thing in it. She shows up every so often to lay down the truth. When her sister, distraught over her love for Mr. Fellowes (or Fellows, it’s spelled both ways), reminds her that she’s never loved anybody so what does she know, Katherine responds, “Nothing. And I hope I stay dumb. One sap in the Murdock family is plenty.” Katherine also says this about Ted, the guy Anne is dating, a real pill who thinks highly of himself and not-so-highly of Anne: “Ted wants a parking space for a couple of babies and free laundry. If you want to learn what the word lonesome is, take him on.”

All the names are wrong, by the way. “Katherine” sounds way too patrician for the straight-shooting, working class Blondell. Anne should be Katherine and Katherine should be Anne (Blondell wound up playing three Annes before 1933), or anything else, really, while McGowan would’ve been better suited with the actor’s real name. “Hobart Bosworth” is too good to just sit there.

I am intrigued by the obviously lesbian Kate Halsey, who doesn’t seem at all like Faith Baldwin, whose Cosmopolitan magazine series the movie is based on. But, as mentioned, she's quickly forgotten. Four years later, she wouldn't even have made the cut.

After various machinations, our principles fall in love, and the movie ends on a moonlit beach with this dialogue:

Anne: Will you do something for me, Larry?
Fellows: Anything in the world.
Anne: Then let me pick out your next secretary.

Was this the first of the “I want to schtup my secretary” movies that became popular in the early 1930s? Cf., “Behind Office Doors,” “Big Business Girl,” “Baby Face,” and “She Had to Say Yes”? And has anyone written about them? Feels like an intriguing area—mixing post-suffragette feminism, the necessities of the Great Depression, and that old standby: sex. Or maybe it was just Hollywood moguls creating movies out of their own wish-fulfillment fantasies. Although, one suspects, given the times, most of the wishes were already fulfilled.

Honey, you're never going to be the next Jim Tully this way.

“As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

”Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. ...

“The unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.”

-- “Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says” by Isaac Stanley-Becker

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is this the first in-your-face Minnesota accent in a movie? The kind the Coens would make famous, or infamous, with “Fargo”?

More, the guys who sound Minnesotan are the Hanson brothers, bespectacled enforcers on the ice, the opposite of Minnesota Nice, who help a moribund franchise, the Charlestown Chiefs, become relevant again. They help them win games, fans come out, and at one point we hear the following conversation: 

Woman #1: Aren’t those Hansons something?
Woman #2: Aren’t they, though?
Woman #1: They’re sort of funny looking.
Woman #2: Real funny looking.

No way the Coens didn’t see this growing up.

Bad News Chiefs
“Slap Shot” would make a great double-bill not only with “Fargo” but with the original “Bad News Bears,” which was released about a year earlier: April 1976 rather than Feb. 1977.

There, a disinterested coach takes over a moribund little league club that can’t win a game, but the losing, and the damage it’s doing to the kids, eventually gets to him. So he hires some ringers and does what he can to win. They make it to the championship game, where, halfway through, he realizes what an asshole he’s become and puts in all the lesser players he’s held back; they wind up losing, but poignantly. The ending is joyous.

Here, player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) slowly realizes that when the steel mill in Charlestown closes, the moribund Chiefs aren’t long for this world. He also realizes that the weird nerdy guys the team has hired at a discount, the bespectacled Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson), are ringers who bloody noses and win hockey games. And that becomes Reggie’s mantra. The team becomes nasty and brutish, and they make it all the way to the championship game. Except beforehand, Reggie talks to the owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker), who thanks him for making her franchise profitable, but she’s still going to fold the team. Because she can make more money with the Chiefs as a tax write-off than as a championship franchise. So now Reggie decides to go out the right way, and that becomes the mantra. And in the first period they get clobbered. So second period, they come out bloodying noses. Which is when the team’s moral authority, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), decides to sell sex rather than violence: He does a striptease on the ice, which so disgusts one member of the opposition that he punches the ref. Meaning that team forfeits and the Chiefs win! Plus Reggie gets hired by the Minnesota hockey club! Happy ending!

It's basically the same storyline except for when the coach sees the light and what happens afterward.

“Bad News Bears” is better to me—more poignant—because it’s one of those “we lose but really we win” movies. In “Slap Shot,” the team wins via technicalities, and Reggie wins via another technicality: an 11th-hour job offer in Minnesota.

But it’s still fun. The shocker? This violent, profane film was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She grew up in New England, and her brother played hockey for one of these leagues, and she put it all down. “I used the exact same language that the players do,” she told The New York Times in 1977, adding:

“The world has a weird view of women. People seem to believe that we have to write about divorce or suicide or children—so‐called ‘women's topics.’ But we've been around. … You know, when the script first went out in Hollywood. there was talk around town that ‘Nancy Dowd’ was really a man using a pseudonym.”

Shame she didn’t do more. She went uncredited on “Straight Time,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Ordinary People,” “Cloak & Dagger,” and “White Nights.” She got credits for this, “FTA,” “Swing Shift” “and “Let It Ride.” She won an Oscar for “Coming Home,” which was based on her years as an antiwar protester and living in military-base towns, but she hated how they mangled her original script. “It’s message seemed to be that doves are better than hawks in bed,” she apparently said. “And it was pious as well as sentimental.” 

Redford, Newman, Chase
Newman is great here but the part is definitely not tailored for him. At one point a woman tells him, “You look a thousand years old,” which makes you wonder how the rest of us look. Plus, let’s face it, he doesn’t have the legs of a hockey player. But he makes do. He acts. It’s the kind of role Newman seemed to prize: a dude who wasn’t particularly educated but with some smarts, and some persistence, fighting a battle against the powers that be. Cool seeing Strother Martin, Newman’s bête noire in “Cool Hand Luke,” as the hapless, dead-weight manager of the Chiefs.

“Slap Shot” was directed by George Roy Hill, who directed Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting,” then directed Redford in “The Great Waldo Pepper” and Newman in this. Not a bad run. The ’80s were less kind. After completely reversing course two years later with “A Little Romance,” he had the impossible task of converting John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” onto the big screen, then did a Diane Keaton-led Mossad movie. Four years later, he directed Chevy Chase in “Funny Farm.” He deserved a better end than that. We all do.

I read this bit the other night in Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” about the period in the late 1960s when Francis Ford Coppola was trying to put together his Zoetrope commune, and George Lucas was his protege with a sci-fi script, “THX-1138,” based upon his student film, that had already been rejected by Warner Bros., the studio Coppola was working with:

But the savvy Coppola knew something Lucas didn't: Warner Bros.–Seven Arts was about to be bought out by Kinney National Services, which until 1969 was known largely for its parking lots and cleaning services. “What we'll do is we'll wait until these new guys come on board,” Coppola told Lucas. “We won't tell them [THX] has already been turned down. We'll just pretend that we've already started it.”

Which is how the career of the man who changed Hollywood began.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

This is pretty superficial criticism so bear with me.

When hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) leaves for a new assignment, he goes through various machinations to make sure he isn’t followed. He quietly steals a car and takes it to a back-alley garage, where a man with a cigarette dangling from his lips wordlessly changes the license plate. He gets his woman to provide alibi #1 and the poker-playing men in the back room to give him alibi #2. (Though if he hadn’t been there, would he have been picked up in the first place?) Only after all that, does he go to the nightclub to kill the target. All of it is very smart, very careful, very methodical.

So why does he wear the fedora?

I get it: It helps hide his face. But it’s Paris in 1967. The only men wearing fedoras anymore are ancient, not handsome hipsters like Alain Delon. He stands out like a sore thumb.

Yes, there’s that scene in the police station where all the suspects show up with their own trenchcoats and fedoras, but that’s really the only time we see anyone else wearing one. In the scenes in Paris? On the streets or in a nightclub? Nobody’s wearing one. Jef wearing one is like a flashing red light to any passerby. Notice me! I don’t fit in! You expect someone to ask, “You heading to a costume party?”

In a way, he is. It’s the French New Wave, and they want to Bogart up the joint. But it makes everything else nonsensical. 

Ce n’est pas lui
I keep wanting to like the movies the cool kids like, like this one, which was shown in a 4K restoration at SIFF Egyptian last month. And I liked it well enough. “Le Samourai” is a not-bad procedural, and I like procedurals. It’s a procedural from both the criminal end and the cop end. I liked the parrot. I liked the girl. All the girls, really: Jane (Nathalie Delon), La pianiste (Cathy Rosier), La jeune fille du vestiare (Catherine Jourdan).

But did I like Alain Delon? Did I like the cop (Francois Perier playing Le Commissaire)? I guess I liked how unlikeable the cop was. He's not exactly Louis Jouvet in “Quai des Orfevres.” 

So Costello does the hit, he’s seen by both the pianiste and the hatcheck girl, he goes to the card game for his alibi but is immediately picked up by the cops. In the round-robin version of “Is this the guy?” some finger him, some shake their heads, nah, while the pianiste totally refutes what we know she saw: Ce n’est pas lui. Jef is released.

Except the next day, when he goes to collect his payment, he’s nearly killed by the courier. Apparently the bad guys now see him as a liability. And he doesn’t know who the bad guys are. He doesn’t know who hired him.

So he returns home, treats the wound in his arm, returns to the club to meet the pianiste, Valérie, because he figures she didn’t finger him because she knows who hired him. She doesn’t deny it but delays her response. She says call me in two hours. Not sure why he agrees to this but he does. And when he does, there’s no answer.

All this time, people are breaking into his nondescript flat. The police plant bugs, bad guys hole up there ready to ambush him, and his parrot keeps letting him know—by being agitated, losing feathers, etc. The bird is the smartest thing in the film. The bird and Jef’s bird—Jane. The cops try to squeeze her but she ain’t having it. She remains loyal. That’s a good scene.

Eventually, the courier pays him and offers another gig. Instead, Jef forces the name of his employer from him: Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier). Sure. Jef evades half the Paris police force to go to Rey’s place, which also happens to be Valérie’s place, and kills the guy. Then he shows up at Valérie’s job and seems ready to kill her, too. Was that the secondary job? Except from the get-go it’s more suicide mission: he gives up his beloved fedora, hangs next to Valérie’s piano in full view of everyone, and pulls his gun. After he’s mowed down by half the Paris police force, it's discovered that the gun was empty.

So it was a suicide mission. Because? French shrug.

Trente-neuf
Anyway, it’s got a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and all the cool kids like it. In 2010, it was ranked the 39th greatest film of all time by Empire magazine. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote:

 “Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of Le Samourai before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words.”

The light thing is true, and that's a good description of it. But I’m curious if the young cool kids consider the title cultural appropriation. Not to mention Bogie’s fedora—if cultural appropriation goes in that direction.

Except for a makeup doubleheader this afternoon between the Mets and Braves (currently tied for the second wild card spot with identical 88-72 records), the 2024 regular season is now over. Amazing things happened: things that have never happened (50-50) or rarely (Jarren Duran leading the league in doubles + triples). But one thing remained dully the same. 

This is a list of teams with the best record in the American League who fell short of the postseason:

• 2020: Seattle Mariners
• 2021: Toronto Blue Jays (Mariners second)
• 2022: Baltimore Orioles (Mariners make the postseason for the first time since 2001!!!)
• 2023: Seattle Mariners
• 2024: Seattle Mariners

Cue Seinfeld: “Of all the losers, you came in first—of that group. You're the No. 1 ... loser.”

I found this piece via that SFGate piece on how self-satisfied The New York Times is its coverage of Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential race. And you could sub in the 2020 race, too, or the 2016 race, or go back to 1973 and the first time they covered him, via an article on his father, and how they bought the lie and printed the lie and didn't correct the lie, because just look at him, just look at that blue-eyed boy, Mister Death.

Anyway, in that SFGate piece, there's a reference to “sanewashing,” a new term for me, that was linked to a website called the defector, and an article by Tom Scocca entitled “Where Racism Goes to Become Rhetoric.” The “where” there, well, that, too, is The New York Times, or the mainstream media generally. It's about something Scocca heard Donald Trump say that he thought was the most racist thing he'd heard any major presidential candidate—including earlier incarnations of Donald Trump—ever say. He said it to a crowd on Long Island, N.Y., about how the U.S. is being overrun by immigrants released from prisons in other countries:

“They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from all over the world—Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia. And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

Scocca initially thought someone was simply exaggerating what Trump was saying, since no one was reporting on it; and when he found the speech verbatim on C-Span he dug further and discovered that Trump had been saying this exact thing for months. And no one was reporting on it simply because he'd been saying it for months. It wasn't news. When they wrote about it, they wrote to dismiss it:

The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March (“no such decline in Congo's prison population is shown in the data”); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a “Critic's Notebook” item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: “A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America's streets.”

Yet the Times hadn't ever directly reported on those remarks, and it still hasn't. In its story from Nassau Coliseum, the paper wrote that Trump had “continued to stoke fear around immigration,” and then quoted only the later part of the passage: “We're just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats' immigration policies. “And we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

But the truly telling point, which I admit I missed on first glance, is the part I've highlighted, which isn't a quote from Trump but reportage from the Times, so supposedly a fact. But it's the opposite of a fact. It's the Times doing Trump's heavy lifting for him. “What Trump was referring to,” Scocca writes, “in the literal text of his speech, was some agenda by which the United States is importing convicted criminals released from other countries' prisons. The Biden administration has no policy that does anything like what Trump was talking about.”

That said, that Times article by Michael Gold on the Long Island rally isn't bad. I like the lede:

On the day that he was originally set to return to his hometown and receive the sentence for his 34 felony convictions, former President Donald J. Trump found himself a few miles east, basking in the raucous adulation of a packed arena on Long Island.

Standing in front of thousands at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., Mr. Trump received a local hero's reception, as he drew an exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline, made false claims and hammered Democrats over crime, inflation and immigration.

Even this, though, makes you wonder. An exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline? Meaning it's only slightly in decline? Or is it not at all in decline and Donald Trump is a big fat liar?

But again, the article isn't bad: “exaggerated attacks,” “exaggerated claims,” “exaggerated depiction,” “false claims,” “falsely maintain,” “exaggerated claims,” “debunked claim,” “debunked claims,” and “misleadingly claimed.” They're so close.

Who loves Lucy? Not IMDb and its algorithm.

I'm gonna do the conversation bit again. Imagine someone, maybe someone young, asks you what Lucille Ball is known for. What would your answer be? Would it be this?

IMDb: Lucille Ball? Yeah, she's known for producing various Lucy-themed TV shows, such as 'I Love Lucy,' 'The Lucy Show' and 'Here's Lucy.' Often uncredited.
Someone young: So were they named for her? I mean, did she also star in them? 
IMDb: If she did, it's not what she's known for. But she was an actress because she played the seminal role of Tacy Collini in “The Long, Long Trailer.” That is the role, as an actress, that she is known for. 
Someone young: K.
IMDb: But mostly she's known as a producer.
Someone young: Of various Lucy-themed TV shows.
IMDb: Now you've got it.

Remember in “Calvin & Hobbes” when Calvin's dad gave him false history and science lessons—for fun? IMDb does that with our cultural history through sheer ineptitude. And none of it is fun.

It seems everyone is as sick of Times/Post/NPR coverage, particularly RE: Donald Trump, as I am. This article came through the social media transom the other day via historian Kevin Kruse (who, not for nothing, has zero fucks to give): “The New York Times is washed: SFGATE columnist Drew Magary is done with caring about the Times, and you should be, too.”

(I love including author and source in the subhed but couldn't it have used a better hed? What's washed? As in brain-? Is it new slang from the kids I have to look up? Alright, I'll look it up. And it's ... apparently short for “washed up.” Got it. Way to go, kids.)

So Magary begins with the poll numbers, and this one says that or the other, and whatever. But he gets at the heart soon enough, calling the Times, “an institution that has never met a story it couldn't water down” with “its patented strain of prestige clickbait.” Then he gives a brutal example: HOW J.D. VANCE'S COMBATIVE CONSERVATISM IS SHAPING TRUMP 2.0. Good god, that's awful, but they've been doing it for years. Remember this Rick Perry hed from 2011?

Magary is a little too chummy for me, and assumes a little too much about his reader, but he's not wrong. He writes:

“[Readers] understand that the Times has so thoroughly isolated itself from the zeitgeist that it's written itself right out of it. ... In the process, they've left the New York Times alone on its bespoke soapbox, screaming centrist nonsense into the void. I'm done listening to any of it. I'm not going back, and neither are you. The Times doesn't matter anymore, and they're the last people on Earth to realize it.”

Yep. And what a shame.