Slow Starts

Clincher appears to be reaching the age where it is difficult at best to organize a good game of mushball among the peer group out here on the fringes of suburbia. It was fun playing in a downtown league last summer, but most everybody was about half my age. Still, it seemed that every team we faced had one obligatory old guy on it as well, and I was determined all through last winter -- and on into this spring -- to get the word out for some local ball playing.

Alas, as we so often hear, "when one door closes, another opens." There must be a good reason that such expressions become Old Sayings. Because in the absence of regular softball action, I find more time to spend in the saddles of my bicycles.

So, recently and finally, I rode my first loop of the season on the Illinois Prairie Path: about 25 miles eastbound to Villa Park on the Main Stem, and back along the Great Western. There are many miles of ex-railway to the Prairie Path. Much of it is the old electric Chicago, Aurora & Elgin line.

The Great Western presents a subtle uphill grade most of the way, and a 10 mph headwind offers a quality workout. I chose the 1972 Schwinn Varsity, and its forty pounds of rubber and electroforged steel, for my season opener. I have a genuine fondness for the old Varsity that I picked up about five or six years ago for fifty bucks at a little bike shop in Glen Ellyn. I also have what should be a 1969 Varsity that I acquired from a friend and fellow Metro rail commuter as he retired and moved to Austin, Texas (hello, and thanks again, Leroy!). The brakes still need a little work, but the gears and derailleur are in great shape and it's another solid ride with many miles in its future.

If softball can't keep my aging frame in shape this summer, then the venerable Chicago-made frames of these classic Schwinns will have to do the job....

Guilty Pleasure

Clincher enjoys a perpetual project, collecting autographs of Jewish-American celebrities in an Army-Navy surplus prayer book for Jewish Armed Forces Personnel.

It has taken perhaps more than four years to get only three signatures up to this point. But it's a labor of love and a guilty pleasure. Those who you will find inscribed in this Book of Life (click on image to enlarge), so far, in order of appearance are:

• Kinky Friedman, founder and leader of the seminal outlaw hard-country band Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys, author of many many entertaining hard-boiled detective mystery novels and unsuccessful candidate for governor of Texas.
• Marv Levy, Pro football Hall-of-Fame inductee (2001 CE), coached the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls, only to lose them all. A real mensch -- who achieved a monumental if bittersweet accomplishment -- and an example for us all.
• Marc Maron, comedian and radio personality, currently co-hosting the pioneering internet show Breakroom Live with Sam Seder on Air America.

Clincher doesn't travel in the kind of circles with access to many celebrities. So, we wait for the club appearances and book signings of those whose crafts enrich our lives, and seize those kinds of opportunities to honor them as they present themselves. And for no better reason than to celebrate, with as much well-intentioned irony as you can stand, the achievements of shamelessly secular American Jews and the contribution of our extended family to a greater American heritage.

UPDATE: Marc Maron talks about signing Clincher's Prayer Book for Jewish Armed Forces Personnel, for nearly a whole minute, 6:16 - 7:14 on the counter. But I encourage checking out the entire show if you have the time.

"Tinker to Evers to Chance," Or 6-4-3

An overcast sky on a chilly morning can only mean that baseball returns again to Wrigley Field. This particularly local harbinger of Spring is celebrated in many novel and innovative ways. But one particularly unfortunate and overall trend in baseball observation, which some of us have noticed over the past several seasons, is the decline of fans at the games keeping score.

A written record of the game is hardly a vital necessity in our age of instant gratification and global communication. However, it is a grim downside of our technological progress as pencils and scorecards fade into anthropological relics and the art of scorekeeping becomes ever more arcane.

Above we present a rare Wrigley Field scorecard (click on image to enlarge) from a game in 2006 CE, clearly filled in by two distinct individuals. Each square denotes the result of each turn at bat by every player in the lineup. Obviously, the pair of fans who had filled out this scorecard had learned the process in separate environments. The fan filling in the play-by-play for the Cubs is likely to have been a native north-sider while the fan working the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates learned their technique elsewhere, possibly on the south side of town. Note how the visiting team's marks are distinguished by a primitive, cartoonlike quality as compared with the complex and more highly evolved geometro-numeric symbolism marking the hometeam Chicago Cubs' at-bats.

It may not solve the greatest mysteries of human civilization, but we risk losing valuable insights into our local heritage if we allow the scorekeeper's craft to fade into oblivion. Clincher urges fans of the game to seek out the elders of their respective tribes, and strive to sustain the written traditions of Baseball Nation.

And make sure to show up early enough to get the lineups.

The Last Great American Jobs

All good merchants understand that in real hard life there are no problems, only opportunities. With an eye to the near future, auspicious from the ubiquitous signs of socio-economic downturn, where are the opportunities of tomorrow...?

Prison Guard: With increases in crime, implementation of ever more laws and the rising need for three squares and a roof over your head, only the public burden of maintaining corrections facilities keeps the noble turnkey slightly outside the realm of sustainable job security.

Gun Sales: With no end of the breathless rumors of an inevitable liberal Democrat gun roundup in sight, firearms sales presents a bright future in a time of hoarding and stockpiling. Dynamic self-starters can even work their way up to the lucrative international arms trade.

Grave Digger: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, union scale.

Feel free to add on to the list in comments....

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt...

Last weekend on a rightwing talk radio program Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) declared herself a foreign correspondent, behind enemy lines, hoping to keep her constituents "armed and dangerous" against the impending "energy tax," as she refers to the proposal of industrial cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. Clearly, as Bachmann's spokesperson explained, the Representative was speaking metaphorically. But there is a pattern of violent metaphor developing in the rhetoric of the minority party's leadership.

Last month, Sean Hannity's website featured a users' poll discussing the best ways to violently overthrow the government, given the choices of military coup, armed rebellion or war of secession. Now a reasonable interpretation is that this is all just fun and games. But if we stop to consider the size and tempramental diversity of their audiences, the proliferation of firearms and the passions animating the margins of our politcal discourse, it is not beyond the range of possibilities that individuals and/or groups will eventually act out these goofy fantasies with violence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports a rise in the organization of active hate groups in the United States from 888 in 2007 to 926 in 2008. Americans are no strangers to our own brand of modern terrorism, from the anti-government militias that produced Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh who slaughtered 168 people with a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to racist pseudo-religions like the World Church of the Creator that produced Benjamin Smith who murdered Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Birdsong and shot up ten other people in a shooting spree from a north side Chicago Jewish neighborhood to rural Indiana.

Not long after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) had a wild idea. On Friday, January 30, at the House Republican retreat at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, Rep. Sessions said that Republican legislators ought to start thinking of themselves as "insurgents." Spurred on by the angry debate over the finer points of the economic stimulus bill, Sessions went even deeper into his quest for a GOP structural model telling editors of National Journal's blog Hotline, "Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes."

Pressed for clarification, Rep. Sessions clarified, "I simply said one can see that there's a model out there for insurgency."

I admit to thinking it's clever, if even a little bit hyperbolic, to draw comparisons between the Republican Party and Hezbollah. The self-righteous faith and aggressive dogma shared by both Lebanon's "Party of God" and our own GOP remain something of an open invitation to comparison. Both parties tend to elevate religious dogma over civil law and both parties tend to indulge their militant nature, but only Hezbollah clearly did not care who got hurt. Reps. Bachmann and Sessions, however, wander carelessly from their public responsibilities the more comfortable they get with their metaphors. And their colleagues and constituents ought to say so now.

Meanwhile, Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm of Nisour Square massacre fame has rebranded itself as Xe, and is still trying to open a training camp in Illinois.

My Bloody Valentine

Happy Valentines Day, sports fans....

As pitchers and catchers for the Chicago Cubs reported for spring training yesterday, Friday the Thirteenth, Manager Lou Piniella held forth with what the monumentally dysfunctional Cub Nation may appreciate alternately as hope, excitement and furiously bitter sarcasm,

"I learned a lot," Piniella said. "I'm 0-6 in the postseason [with the Cubs].
There's room for improvement."

At the start of the last year of the first decade of the 2000s, this much we know. Hot on the heels of the Cubs' best regulation season in a hundred years, only to forget how to pitch, hit and field just in time for the playoffs, we now have a strong nomination for the understatement of the 21st Century.

Roll With It

On August 13, 1935, at the old Chicago Coliseum, Roller Derby was introduced to the world of American sports. The brainstorm of promotor Leo Seltzer, the first roller derby took the form of a race between one man and one woman on a banked track.

As a kid, I remember watching the roller derby on its banked tracks featuring brutal clothesline hits on the "jammers" and theatrical fights on the grainy UHF channels of our black and white portable TV.

The derby has come a long way, through the twisted peaks and valleys of American culture, from adolescent guilty pleasure to righteous competition. Today, Chicago features not one, but two roller derby leagues. Both Windy City Rollers and Chicago Outfit Roller Derby race on a flat track, which liberates the new game from much of the pro-wrestling aura of the old game while preserving a wild spectacle of controlled abandon.

Whether you have to ask some old geezer like me what a UHF channel is, or if you have your own memories of the ultra-high frequency broadcast spectrum, nowadays you can catch up with the Roller Derby action on the Windy City Rollers' YouTube channel.

[Pic h/t National Roller Derby Hall of Fame]