Blooper Tuesday

The other day the Brahmin was woken by his clock radio to hear 1010 WINS (which I only listen to when NPR is in the middle of pledge week; but frankly after what I describe herein I think I'll go back to Mike & Mike on ESPN-1050). It gave a "nugget" (or perhaps, more accurately, a dried snowpea) on the Texas primary today. The reporter talked about how all the momentum was with Obama and just to prove it, it did an 8-second snippet with a presumed Texas voter, preceded by the reporter's assertion that the man had been for Hillary but had switched to Obama. Then we hear the guy saying, "I don't like Hillary personally. She's mean-spirited."

If you're like any regular participant in the crypto-democratic process we call the modern day US of A, especially if (like me) you wound up devolving to the two-party system over 95 per cent of the time, then granted, you wind up voting for the lesser of two evils. A lot. But saying someone is "mean-spirited" kind of suggests that you never were going to support the person in the first place.

And what balanced this interview in the 1010 WINS report? Nothing.

Pray tell, if come the fall, anyone does a story on the general election and they run an interview with a voter saying he doesn't like McCain because either (a) he's too old; (b) he was one of the Keating Five or (c) he looks like Burl Ives on crystal-meth, and its unbalanced by any countering view, guess what Glen Beck, Sean Hannity or Bill-O will do. If you hadn't answered the question before finishing reading the sentence, then I guess this blog is being read in North Korea. Thanks, New York Philarmonic.

The point being, that WINS farce is all that needs to be said as to the slant of the media in the Democratic field to date. In the law we call that slam dunk summary judgment.

And at last, the media is starting to get it. Lo and behold, the change you can believe in apparently made its way to the Canadian consulate a couple of weeks ago, and the Guru himself is groveling.

The weather today is very bad in Ohio. And let me assure you - there's not much worse than a wintry raw day in Ohio, save the odd "Supertrain" rerun. I lived through three of them. The Hillaryites are the die-hards. The Obama folk are the younger siblings of the Deaniacs who disappeared somewhere in the snow between Davenport and Des Moines in January '04 and who were back to their Madden NFL routine on the first Tuesday of the following November...ESPECIALLY in Ohio.

As for Texas, not much I can offer unique wisdom on. The one thing that is interesting is that Hillary could win the popular vote but the present-day scion of Banquo's (er...Rezko?) Ghost could come away with more delegates (by the way, that's exactly what happened in Nevada, but no one says anything about it). Kind of undercuts all that "will of the people" bit, don't ya think?

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Eastenders is a coffeehouse in Riverhead, New York. I often get stranded there for a couple of hours on a weekday morning because the Suffolk County courts are infinitely more efficient than their downstate brethren and because there are only three trains daily running east of Ronkonkoma on the Greenport branch. I down a refill of Java recuperating from the 7:41 out of Flatbush Avenue to get to a conference which either gets adjourned or resolved in 10 minutes. Then I read the paper, my Scotland guidebook, do work, or text (business and personal). Clearly its a musical place which has an open mic. Sometimes the occasional goof off comes in and plays a few bars of Mozart or Axel-F from the 48 Hours movie. Actually, one person played a little bit of both today. A nice place if you're ever out there.

On the SNY message boards (where I masterfully disguise myself as "RHodges42") someone posted an open letter to Isiah Thomas. He prefaced the letter saying, "I don't know much about basketball, but..." The Brahmin replied by stating that either he and Mr. Thomas had a lot in common, or that the poster had incredibly low self-esteem.

A bit untimely, but a good one: As you know, Bobby Knight retired from coaching. He thought it was time to throw in the chair.

Glad to hear 97-year old John Wooden is out of danger. Also good that the prognosis for Sillies' first base coach Davey Lopes is excellent. Hopefully, Bobby Murcer will meet a kinder fate than Tug McGraw (who for some reason my father, who deemed his contempt for sports as a badge of honor, liked).

The Brahmin hopes to see "In Bruges" this weekend, pending approval from she who is on his arm nowadays. At an otherwise nondescript East Village Bistro last Saturday following our viewing of "The Seagull", we each had mussels (different sauces for each of us). I regaled in a story of my one and only visit to Bruges as a youth, as part of our entire menage of four. We were passing between Brussels and the coast (one way or the other, I don't remember). In any event we went into a local restaurant. Now the one thing my father possibly loathed more than professional athletics was onions (I'm sorry he never made it to Bermuda - after I visited there several years ago with an ex I was delighted to assure him that contrary to common terminology the local onion had been long extinct there, but I digress). So he would not eat mussels. Which made me and my family the only four people in a restaurant of probably 250 diners not eating them that day, from what I was able to observe.

Proud to say my dinner companion had more courage. She had never eaten snails before Saturday. But never underestimate the persuasive power of...

The Brahmin

(P.S. - She liked them. Or so she said.)