Doubleheaders

There are no more doubleheaders in Major League Baseball. For the past several years, there have been “day-night doubleheaders” or “split doubleheaders” or some other linguistic concoction to indicate that there will be two games on one day, but that they will be several hours apart and require two separate admission fees, as well as usually two parking fees, programs, and any other costs the team might be able to extract from the gullible. According to the rules of Major League Baseball:

4.13 (c) The second game of a doubleheader shall start 20 minutes after the first game is completed, unless a longer interval (not to exceed 30 minutes) is declared by the umpire-in-chief and announced to the opposing managers at the end of the first game.

But for the past 20 years or so, MLB has done all it can – from these non-doubleheaders to $100+ tickets to merchandizing of multiple uniforms (two or three caps at $30 each, three or four jerseys at $90 each) per team (collect them all!) to $8 beers to $40 parking to I don’t know what else because I’ve been priced out of MLB for at least the past decade – to turn baseball into a TV program with a live audience of those willing and able to be seduced into paying over $100 per person per game to serve as props for the cameras.

Things I Don't Need To Know

'Brady Bunch' mom got crabs in affair with NY mayor

Politician sent Florence Henderson flowers to apologize

I once believed in freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I believed in complete accessibility to as much information as possible as long as it didn’t compromise national security or endanger the lives or reputations of innocent people. I believed that the Internet would make available an avalanche of information available to us, much of it, yes, of little consequence to any one person, but in total of potential consequence to all of us. But as I read the opening graphs of the article linked to its headline above, I began to have serious doubts about my position:

LOS ANGELES — This would have made an interesting episode of "The Brady Bunch."

Florence Henderson, the actress who played perky mom Carol Brady in the beloved family sitcom, says she once got crabs after a one-night-stand with career politician John Lindsay, who was the mayor of New York City at the time.

There may well be some things no one needs to know about. This is one of them. And I don’t want to know about any others.

Near Death in Belize

The closest I’ve come (yet) to dying (as far as I know), was while I was teaching in Belize a few summers ago. Here’s what I emailed back a couple of days later:

This past week provided the most excitement of the trip so far, though not the kind of excitement I’d prefer. On Friday I went on a tour of Tikal, over in Guatamala, the largest Mayan ruin. On the way back we got into a bad accident. Coming over a hill, the driver tried to brake for a slower car at the bottom of the hill, but the brakes failed. We began fish-tailing, then at the bottom of the hill spun around 180, slid off the road, into a ditch, and as we started to roll, slammed into a tree. Everything and everyone was thrown to the left side of the van (we weren’t wearing seatbelts, as that is not the custom here). I was in the passenger’s seat and hit the lower back of my neck hard on the driver’s seat. People from the slower car stopped and pulled us out. I was shaky and couldn’t stand for awhile. My back was incredibly sore, but nothing was broken. There were a couple of others with minor cuts and bumps on the head, but being in the passenger seat, I ended up the worse off. When we got back to San Ignacio (we took a cab back to the border and the tour company picked us up there) I went to a doctor, but he wasn’t in (it was 6 pm Fri.). But I was feeling a bit better. By Sat. morning I felt much better than I thought I would. And by this morning, have only a stiff neck and a bit of pain in my lower left ribs, where I must have hit the gearshift. It was a bad accident that could have been worse, if we would have rolled or hit the tree head-on, there would have certainly been one fatality (me), and probably others. As I said, it’s the kind of excitement I’d just as soon not experience.

There’s much more to this story of course than the email account. I was in the front passenger’s seat because as the oldest of the eight on our tour, I was sore from our long hike through and climbs up the ruins, and the others took pity on me. The driver (near my age) had apparently been drinking for the three hours that our group had been out on the tour. As he was passing the slower car, pumping on the failed breaks, he yelled out “Help me! Help me! I can’t stop! I can’t stop!” I don’t recall being pulled from the van, but I ended up sitting on the side of the road, across from the wreck, not only in pain in my neck but also with a cut on the back of my leg. Someone had a bandaid and put it on me. When I had my senses, I immediately began calling out that I’d lost my glasses and couldn’t see. Someone found them in the van, a huge relief. A group of locals quickly gathered. Someone in our group had his passport stolen from the van, but soon after, one of the locals returned from across a field with it. For a while, while I was still on the ground, no one could find my backpack, with my passport and camera, and I worried that it had been stolen as well. But once I was able to get up and search the van I found it in front of the driver’s seat, littered with bits of glass from the driver’s window (that I would be finding for months afterward). The cab the driver got for us (after about an hour) took us not directly to the border crossing, but rather to the souvenir store just short of the border crossing. Somehow I just didn’t feel like souvenirs.

That night in San Ignacio, our wreck was the talk of the town. Passing people in the restaurants or bars, I’d be asked if I was in the accident. There was disagreement as to what the cause was, break failure or a drunken driver. I knew it was break failure, as I was sitting there watching the driver pump the failed breaks. He might have been drunk, but that wasn’t the cause of the wreck. There was a meeting of some in our tour group who started talking about a lawsuit. I was just happy to be alive. The owner of the tour group was also the owner of the restaurant where I ate, and he was the one who wanted me to go to the doctor and had one of his employees drive me there. But when we got to the doctor’s, I could see that it was little more than a clapboard house, and I just didn’t have faith in good coming from it, so I asked to be taken back to town. By then the talk of lawsuit had heated up, but I just wanted to have dinner. The owner bought me a Scotch, appreciating (and no doubt trying to influence) my not joining the lawsuit talk. After dinner I went to the Internet café to email my wife about what had happened (not the above). I bought a bottle of rum on the way back to my room, though still didn’t sleep all that well.

Popcorn Brain

As if I needed another malady to worry about, apparently I now suffer from something called “popcorn brain.” This is a condition discovered (or at least championed) by researcher David Levy of the University of Washington who defines the disorder as “a brain so accustomed to the constant stimulation of electronic multitasking that we're unfit for life offline, where things pop at a much slower pace.” I didn’t realize that things “popped” offline or on, slow or fast, but then I’m not a professor in the Information School (aren’t all schools “information schools” in the broad view of things?). The threat is that all the digital stimulus that most of us are constantly and simultaneously engaged in – email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, surfing the net, iPod, etc. – is basically feeding our brain’s inclination to instant gratification and zapping us of our ability to engage in face-to-face human interaction. As Stanford social psychologist Clifford Nass warns, “Human interaction is a learned skill, and [multitaskers] don't get to practice it enough."

There may well be something to this – I’m not one to argue with scientists and PhDs – but I’ve been a multitasker since long before computers. Back in the olden days of the 1960s and 1970s, during my high school and college fog, I don’t know that I ever was not doing at least two, and often three or more things at a time – reading (a textbook or comic book as the case might be), watching TV, listening to the radio or stereo, sometimes typing a paper (the night before it was due), and/or talking on the phone (a black rotary).

And there have for ages been warnings about the dangers of new technologies on the human brain and human interactions. Not to get too Greeky, but in Phaedrus, Plato complained that the then-new technology of the written word threatened the interactive quality of the spoken word as well as the need for memory, that people would “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction” and “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” Similarly, when Gutenberg unleashed his printing press in the 15^th century, Italian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico argued that making books easily available to all would lead to “less studiousness,” mental laziness, and a general weakening of minds. And we all know the ravages that movies, TV, and rock-and-roll were going to bring upon our civilization in the past century.

Truth be told, whatever brain we have now – popcorn or popover – is the brain we’ve had for hundreds of thousands of years. The brain of the genius who discovered fire or invented the wheel is much the same as the brain of Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Einstein or Stephen Hawking or Dylan. We evolve. Our technology evolves. But my hunch is that our brains remain pretty much the same, wonderfully able to adapt to whatever messes we happen to get ourselves into, technologically or otherwise.

Oligarchy

There is no democracy when corporations have the ability, through their monied influence (“speech,” the Supreme Court calls it, because corporations are of course “people”), to forge policy. This is not democracy but rather oligarchy, most recently made explicit once again by the Supreme Court’s decision to block the sex-discrimination case against Wal-Mart. What the corporations want, the corporations get. They pay for it. When wealth drives decision, there is no democracy.

Weiner's Wiener

I didn’t want to write about the Anthony Weiner sexting and texting scandal. Over the past couple of years I’ve respected Weiner’s positions on issues and especially his impassioned harangues against the ideological idiocy of the Republican right (is that redundant?). But his sending semi-nude photos of himself via the Internet to women he’d never met face-to-face was unseemly at best, tasteless, improper, inappropriate, all of that. And it certainly demonstrated a base ignorance of web technology; as I learned long ago, and instruct my students regularly: assume that any and everything you throw out into cyberspace stays there forever and is available to anyone anytime, no matter how “private” you may think your platform might be. But what he did wasn’t illegal. (At least as far as we know at this time.) He never even explicitly propositioned any of the women for sex, at least beyond the virtual kind (which I’ve read about for three decades and still can’t wrap my mind or any other part of me around). And none of the women came forward charging abuse, threat, or offense, and certainly no crime. Just slime. And just how many politicians do we still have in office who are slithering through their own slime?

I don’t want to defend Weiner (there is no defense for what he’s done), and I don’t want to argue with those who demanded his resignation, most agreeing with President Obama that his actions were “inappropriate” and “a distraction.” What I do what to point out is something I haven’t seen in all the coverage of the scandal: How much did Weiner’s name play in the inappropriateness and distraction? From the beginning, even Weiner himself acknowledged the humor-laden possibilities in his name (hell, he’s probably lived with it since he was in junior high). It could only be worse if his first name was Richard (though he goes informally by Rich). I don’t recall hearing any of the late-night comedy show jokes that didn’t play in some way on his name (though I only heard a few hundred from what I understand were several thousand).

I remember the first media political sex scandal, Gary Hart’s 1987 dalliance with Donna Rice on the boat Monkey Business. But what brought Hart down wasn’t the dalliance per se, but his challenge to the media in the wake of rumors about his extra-marital affair to “Follow me around. I don’t care.” So they did. And they found him with her on (of all places) the Monkey Business. It’s hard to sift through the mess to see how much the extra-marital affair had to do with Hart’s downfall and how much had to do with his challenge to the media (not to mention the sweet frosting of the boat’s name). And in much the same way, I can’t sift through the Weiner mess (at least the “distraction”) without wondering how much had to do with the confluence of his surname and his unfortunately homonymic organ (or “member,” if we want to move on to another pun that was front and center, so to speak, in this whole package, so to speak, etc.).