This week I saw a thing on the Smithsonian Channel about Lead Belly which included a clip of Eric Burdon and the Animals performing The House Of The Rising Sun which I found stunningly powerful. It started this old boomer a remembering so you guys will just have to suffer through.
I was so much older then when I was young.
The Brewers have the best record in the National League
Cubs 3 Pirates 1 | Giants 9 Nationals 5 | Brewers 12 Phillies 4
Like I said the Brewers have the best record in the NL
And they’re doing it with speed, defense and a rough tough bullpen instead of we make ball go far
Here’s the breakdown over at Fivethirtyeight
As of the article date (June 5) the Brewers are 27 – 0 this year when going into the 6th inning with a lead. They’re doing well on the bases and on the field but not so much with the dingers. The article points out striking statistical similarity between them and the 2014 – 2015 Royals.
Refreshing.
Since the best the Twins could do against the supposedly woeful White Sox was a split their win against Boston actually makes me feel better (a little). They shut out the highest scoring team in baseball and beat Chris Sale. Lordy
Blue Jays 5 Orioles 1 | White Sox 1 Red Sox 0 | Indians 4 Tigers 1
Adolescent Angst or Adolescent Arrogance?
Cardinals 7 Reds 6 | Yankees 4 Mets 1 | Marlins 4 Padres 0
They can make gasoline out of thin air.
This is just so Jee Weez. Seriously, there’s a startup which is building a facility which will suck our carbon polluted air into a processing facility which will extract the carbon from the air. The carbon can then be combined with hydrogen to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. They’re projecting that they will eventually be able to extract the amount of carbon released by the burning of one gallon of gasoline for a cost of between $1 and $2.50. They’re shooting to begin production by 2021.
I don’t have the educational background to personally assess its viability, but if it was Pollyannaish science fiction I wouldn’t expect a favorable review of it to appear in The Atlantic.
This isn’t like trying to achieve cold fusion. The article provides a detailed explanation of how they plan to combine already developed technologies used by paper mills and the petrol-chemical industries along with already known chemical properties to suck carbon out of the air and essentially recycle it. Since it is physically impossible to achieve 100% efficiency in any process, it wouldn’t by itself halt the rise in atmospheric carbon levels, but it could eventually slow it while simultaneously making oil exploration drilling much less necessary. Combine this with continued expansion of wind, solar, nuclear and other carbon free energy sources and maybe our grandkids aren’t doomed after all.
The angel meat wasn’t as tasty as I hoped.
Mariners 4 Rays 3 | Astros 7 Rangers 3 | Angels 4 Twins 2
Memories Memories
Life begins as an adventure and ends as a surreal stream of memories.
I hope you guys appreciate how much effort it must take scouts and prof to provide detailed, informed and usually funny commentary on all of the approximately 65 individual games that are played between Sunday and Thursday night. I know that if I tried to do it for the 15 games played on Friday by the time I got this up the Saturday scores would be starting to come in.
Diamondbacks 9 Rockies 4 | Dodgers 7 Braves 3
Fan Interference 
Interesting commentary as is you habit, HTF. And I second the motion to applaud our hardworking weekday leadership, the most excellent Prof and the social commentator Scouts. If it’s not said often enough I love you all and appreciate what you do!
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Thank you Angel. 🙂 It’s a true labor of love, both of baseball and the Fam here.
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Thanks for the Animals clips. I had forgotten about When I Was Young, nice to hear it again. Fiddle man was a little late with his bow sync.
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Eric Burdon was underratedly intense and ahead of his time. (And a great voice to boot.) Maybe he just got lost among the likes of Jimi, Janis and Mick? Whyever, he’s never really gotten his due.
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Whereas I agree about Burdon’s musical perspicacity I also met him several times when he was touring with The Animals and on his own, and I was writing music criticism for a long defunct Macond music and arts weekly.
I found him to be a sententious, abject asshole.
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Like some great ball players, a great ball player but an asshole, the asshole part sometimes being part of what made them a great ball player. “Musical perspicacity”, a beautifully perspicuous phrase. Is it of your own invention or one commonly used in music criticism?
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It has been my experience that no phrase of more than three syllables is “commonly used in music criticism.” I would make an exception for Thomas Mann’s essays about Wagner, though.
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In addition to being a sententious, abject asshole, he was also the Eggman. Goo goo g’joob.
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In 1970 the Animals came through Houston and were scheduled to play a Friday night in my old high school cafeteria. Albeit it was a large urban high school, this was quite a lowering of standards.
Eric Burdon refused to show up. He would not perform in a high school cafeteria. I sympathized with him, but after all it wasn’t OUR fault they had reached the nadir.
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The Nationals’ pitching staff is starting to fray around the edges.
Strasburg left Friday night’s start after two innings with what’s being called inflammation in his right shoulder; MRI showed no structural damage, but he’s now on the DL nonetheless.
He’s likely to be joined there by Brandon Kintzler, who pulled up lame in his appearance yesterday, pointing at his elbow when talking to the trainer. Current diagnosis is forearm tightness, but it doesn’t look great. Thankfully, Justin Miller looks like he might be able to step into Kintzler’s setup role.
The good news for the Nats is that Adam Eaton returned on Saturday and looks like he might really be healthy this time, so they now have a surplus of outfielders for the time being. Although he’s been hitting well as of late, Michael A. Taylor was the odd man out on Saturday, with Bryce Harper playing CF and Eaton playing RF. I’m sure there’ll be lots of mix and match going forward.
All of the above has been overshadowed by the Capitals, as they continue to celebrate their Stanley Cup win in ways that might kill ordinary men. Saturday’s original plan was for the Caps to come to the Nats game (12:05 start time), bring the Cup, Ovechkin would throw out the first pitch, and the Caps would depart. Plans changed quickly, however, and our heroes decided to hang around and watch the game while the beer flowed freely, and from there, things just continued to include impromptu swimming in a fountain, tattoos that seemed like a good idea at the time, and more. Fan site Russian Machine Never Breaks has many of the sordid details if you care – https://russianmachineneverbreaks.com/ – and that’s the last I’ll mention hockey here until the Nats’ season ends.
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I would say that everyone’s pitching staff seems to be fraying at the edges. It’s just a sign of the times that UCL/TJ injuries (and their associated cautionary DL stints) are popping up more than weekly, and the playoffs are starting to look more like the NBA’s: the winner depends on whose stars don’t get injured that year.
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And also whose bench can perform just that much better than someone else’s bench. 😛 It also proves that a team sport actually requires a team (waves at the Cavs). Which is why I hate when people say that Mike Trout isn’t the best player in baseball at the moment because he’s never been to the World Series. Like, please, if Mike Trout had not been in Anaheim for the last five years he’d probably have at least one title already. It’s ridiculous.
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If not saddled by a contract for an aging Pujols and the 100 million to Hamilton, the Angels might have made better use of Trout. The old argument was that MVP was about the player a team would fail without, which definition is not the best of all players. It is a specious argument.
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Not the Twins, they’re just fraying every where else. That’s the beauty of playing the whole half year every year. Things gradually even out and before the cold hell of winter sets in we find out who’s really the best.
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For some reason, your commentary put me in mind of that great old Byrds song…
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
God knows I’ve felt like that a few times in the last couple of years myself.
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Dylan wrote “My Back Pages”; the Byrds just did it better than he did.
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Most people who cover Dylan songs did it better than he did. Uh oh, hot take?!?!?
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Wake me up when The Byrds win the Nobel Prize for covers.
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Respectfully, Dylan’s Nobel prize was for literature, which means it’s the words. He is a great songwriter but his voice drives me up the wall.
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Hendrix’ cover of “All Along the Watchtower” is the gold standard by which all covers are to be judged.
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Sinead O’Connor did a Prince song better than Prince. That is sorcery lol
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Also, my favorite cover of all time is Bryan Ferry….covering himself. His orchestra did a 1920s jazz version of “Avalon” and it’s so great.
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Someguy, I’m still partial to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt by NIN, mostly because it’s Johnny F’in Cash. Disturbed did an intense cover of The Sounds of Silence.
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Good answer!!!
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Linda’s gonna be hard to catch. Or maybe she shouldn’t count since she never wrote anything herself?
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The Feesh tanked twice over the weekend and are now back to their accustomed 19 under the strange attractor. Lewis Brinson continues to wear his collar (0-4) which, in that odd way things have of reminding me of odd things, recalls when Orson Welles as Cardinal Woolsey in A Man for All Seasons tells paul Scofield’s Thomas More “You should have been a cleric” and More respondes wryly “Like yourself, Your Grace?” While you folks are worrying about the Gnats’ pitching staff (and subliminally worrying about their vulnerability to the resurgent Barves), the Feesh are getting pounded deeper and deeper into the NL East drain trap at 14 out. It can only be a matter of time before the cess closes over them in mute nostril agony.
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