A happy anniversary

Today is the 40th anniversary of the one of the happiest days I ever spent at an athletic event. On this day in 1968, I took a bus down to Tiger Stadium to watch the Tigers play the Red Sox a doubleheader. We got there in time for batting practice at 11:30 a.m. ... and left at 9:05 p.m. after the home team rallied for four runs in the bottom of the ninth for a 6-5 win.

The first game went 14 innings and saw Detroit rally to tie the game on a rare Don Wert triple in the eighth inning (It was his only one of the season) and then win it on a Gates Brown pinch-hit homer in the 14th. (Not that I am anal about such stuff but he hit it off Lee Stange into the lower deck in right.)

In the second, they trailed twice but rallied both times with Brown getting the winning hit in a wild rally.

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I think the only time I ever left my seat in the upper deck behind third base was to go to the bathroom.

My wife says that I explained it how this can happen one day. She asked me how it was I could remember such an event but forget to take out the trash. The explanation was simple: I don't have a passion for the trash.

Now I grant you I might have a hard time sitting at a ballpark now for 9 1/2 hours watching a baseball doubleheader. But the memory of this one on August 11, 1968 will stay with me until my final out. And it never ceases me to make me smile. Any memory that does that is worth every minute to get there ... all 575 of them.

It hurts to admit this truth

There are literally hundreds of folks around the country who serve as marriage counselors. Then there are the Dr. Phils of this world, the person who thinks (s)he can get into every person's soul and tell us if certain couples are compatible.

I am sure they are all fine people and some of them may even make sense. But here is a subject that never gets covered in these sessions. Mastering it can help a relationship immensely.

I speak, of course, of laundry.

There are a lot of potential land mines for couples doing things together. Wallpapering is a well known battle spot. Ever try painting together? (My neighbor had the best idea. She painted upstairs by herself while he went solo downstairs.)

Laundry? I am here to report that, with a few exceptions, it is best to let everybody do it on their own.

Currently, we are sans washer and dryer because we are redoing our basement. As a result, we have using the local laundromat the last couple of weeks. While it has gone better than anticipated, it is still an adventure.

You see, men compromise easily when it comes to laundry. (It becomes even easier to do this at $2 a load for the washer.) Women, for some reason, do not. For example, women don't think grays can be allowed to mingle with whites. Women also don't like to share the washer with their male counterparts when it comes to ... er ... unmentionables. A waste of two bucks perhaps. The again, what price do we put on for peace in the household?

Men shrug off potential landmines. A stain that didn't quite get eliminated doesn't bother us because we'll get it next time. And is there any real reason a shirt has to be totally wrinklefree? Men say no. Women tend to disagree. And so it goes.

It's not all bad there. I have learned to like the fact you can use several washers at once. Getting all the clothes done in less than two hours is a good thing. The laundromat we go to even has a Ms. PacMan machine. Revisiting your youth now and then is okay, too.

But here is something I never thought I would say and may get me demoted in the man union: I miss having a washer and a dryer at our immediate disposal. One can only wears the same pair of socks for so many days in a row.

Why Sean Hannity et al. is ruining journalism ... and other things

I am glad my old journalism teacher, Fr. Whalen, is not around to see what has happened to the profession these days. He wouldn't like what he saw. Thanks to verbal bombers like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, reasonable, thoughtful prose is geting pushed aside in favor of vile vitriol.

Don't misunderstand. There have always been a few wild-eyed political commentators. But they were the exception, not the norm. These days, you are either for us or against the country. There is no middle ground. And you have to be flamboyant in your support. None of this "Well, it could be ..." crap. Responses must start out like "Your guy is wrong on the issue and hates the country he lives in ..."

The latest flap is over the New York Times turning down a John McCain Op-ed a few days after running a Barack Obama piece. Hannity and his fellow rightwingers, who spend much of their time telling us what a lousy, biased newspaper the Times is, suddenly are mad the paper didn't run the McCain submission. Of course, they overlooked the fact this piece as nothing more than simple talkback to what Obama had said ... and, unless it is something like USA TODAY does on its editorial page (where it is set up in advance), papers just don't do it that way.

It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them the ad department and the editorial department are actually mortal enemies, the right wingers stil think they work together because the NYT once ran an ad criticizing Gen. Petraeus. It doesn't matter if the paper says nine nice things about a Republican. The fact they didn't do it 10 times is a conspiracy, according to the right wing talkie crowd.

There are times when it is truly a black and white world but the fact is most of the time it is gray. Many of our work decisions aren't crystal clear -- many circumstances cloud every issue.

So it is here. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of the right wing crowd refuse to admit there is ever a moment when decisions are not based on ideology. I am guessing that is because every decision they make is done so that way. That may work in the blurry world of talk radio/TV, which has a lot of time it needs to fill. But, with newspaper space at a premium already, hard decisions have to be made every day as to what runs and what doesn't. Reasonable people should be able to disagree aabout this and other subjects without getting yelled at for doing so.

When guys like Hannity railabout the conspiracy and bias of the media all the time, it may make for entertaining radio/TV. But it's lousy journalism because it isn't true. Even worse, it is turning us into a lousier society because this mistrust is now seeping into other aspects of life. We argue more now than we ever did on different topics, ranging from recipes to stop signs.

Damn them for doing that to us.

How to be humbled ... in four short lessons

I played golf this morning with three old friends. There was glorious sunshine and it was a very invigorating walk. In the process, I got another quick lesson in humility.

My goal is to break 100 for 18 holes. In this manner, I succeeded by rolling in a 10-foot putt on the last hole for a score of ... 99.

It might have been a lot better if I had remembered a couple of things.

Guys like me are streaky at best. We'll hit some good shots and then we'll snap off one that goes, say, 10 yards or so.

Today got off to a great start. I rescued a wandering tee shot on the first hole and made a par. On the second hole, I rolled in a decent length putt for another par. However, before visions of running out to Blaine to challenge the Seniors who are in town this week for a tournament could take hold, I recorded three triple bogeys and a solo bogey in a span of four holes. So, after six holes, I was 10 over, which is par for the course for me.

The rest of the day was spent with a good shot here and good one there mixed with two bad ones here and a horrendous one there. Somewhere after the first two holes, I forgot what I was doing and spent about six holes hating life.

What I had forgotten was golf is one of those games where you have to know your limits and measure yourself accordingly. I managed to do that a little better on the back side and enjoyed things a little more. I am just not consistently good at this sport and probably never will be. (It would help if I practiced a bit.) If I simply look at golf as a nice workout and time spent with friends, it will be just fine. If I look at it in any other way, I am an idiot because it won't be fun and I'll be wasting my (and other folks) time.

I didn't throw any clubs or utter any oaths today. So it wasn't all bad on my part. But it was a good reminder that we sometimes need to be reminded that we all have restrictions of some sort. It's something I have managed to do well at home ("Honey, I can't lift that dresser because of my bad back, remember?"). So why couldn't I remember it on the golf course?

Oh, to be young again

I am in Thunder Bay for work this weekend. When you go on the road, you never know what you are going to find. For example ... Tonight, I ran into a fellow named Ryan who is doing something many of us can only dream of doing.

Ryan, who looks like he is his late 20s, is biking across Canada. He started in his hometown of Calgary and says he will finish in Halifax. He is going at his own pace and his trip sounds like a Canadian version of John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley."

How many of us have yearned just to go see the country? This guy said he worked like crazy for three years and saved as much as he could. He is a tekkie and says he has three job offers "waiting" for him in Calgary. In the meantime, he is biking with friends and occasionally hooking up with various people as he moves across the land.

I haven't decided if I envy him or hate him. But it was a fun time talking to Ryan and I was happy to buy him a beer. I do know this, though: He looked like the happiest guy I have seen in a long time.

A thought for the future

To me, Garrison Keillor frequently comes off as a bit of stuckup blowhard, a limousine liberal of sorts. But he intersperses those moments with common sense thoughts. So it is with this item from his current column. He was somewhere in Massachusetts and stopped in to watch a little league game. As luck would have it, he ended up sitting up to a fellow whose 10-year old daughter was playing in the game.

It led to this observation:

"I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain."

There, in a nutshell, you have one of the big problems in this country. For every Limousine Liberal (and there are a lot of them), you can find twice as many people who are simply struggling to get along. There are a lot of us thousandairres who are making do in whatever way we can. We are scrimping when needed, running all the errands at the same time and looking for bargains at the store.

The expensive suits in the right wing crowd don't worry about this sort of thing. Recently, Norm Coleman, the senior senator from our state, tried to tell us he is not a wealthy man because he "only" has $500,000 in total investments and bank stuff. Sen. Coleman says that, when he is in Washington, DC, he lives in a basement where he pays $600 a month. And he gives you the impression he is doing it this way because he has to. That is, of course, nonsense but it does give you an idea how he got $500,000 in the bank. And it gives him the chance to give us dire warnings about an economy that he had a big hand in forming.

The senators and representatives who are telling us that everything is going to be alright are correct ... for them. They don't worry about gas because they don't drive (they have drivers) and it is all paid for. The expensive talking heads don't worry about this because they are making hundreds of thousands (if not millions) to give the opinion that everything is going to be okay. That may be true for them. But all I know is damn near every day I read about some company laying off more employees. Sooner or later, we are going to run out of potential taxpayers. At that point, we will become like France in World War I and will have a true missing generation.

We're busy people, aren't we?

I needed to get some stamps at the lunch hour today. So, I took the two block walk to the post office on a beautiful, sunny afternoon. In that short time period, I made the following notes:

People talking on cell phone: 7

People listening to Ipods: 2

People reading blackberrys or doing some sort of text messaging: 2

People reading blackberrys and listening to Ipods: 1

People on cell phone, listening to Ipod while smoking a cigarette (at the same time): 1

We're a very busy society, aren't we?