brainsplotch

I'm watching the Major League Baseball playoffs as I write this (Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Cincinnati Reds in the National League wildcard series), but it's the rare time recently that I have had a baseball game on.  The sports that I have enjoyed in the past just don't excite me much these days. Maybe my break from baseball has to do with my favorite team, the Tigers, being essentially unwatchable for the last month or so of the season (though they did actually beat the Cleveland Guardians today in the first game of their playoff series. So maybe there is life in them yet). Football--or as the rest of the world outside of the U.S. knows it--"American football," hasn't grabbed me either. What it really comes down to is this: I am increasingly reluctant to sit down and watch a game that takes 3 1/2 hours to play with almost constant commercial interruptions. Over the last three years, in a change that has been gradual, my sport of choice is Premier League footbal...

I will not be writing about the hatemonger and his demise last week. Instead, I will begin by writing about George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London . Well, for four days I have been away from working on this post. In that time, the guy whose name rhymes with "Gnarly Jerk" has been elevated to martyr status by dear leader and his rogues gallery of sycophants. And just yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel was, for all intents and purposes, canceled for having the audacity of joking about dear leader and Jerk. The dark cloud of fascism is right on top of us. It's deeply disturbing. Back to Orwell. I liked Down and Out. The best   part was his description of working as a plongeur (dish washer) at an upscale hotel (the Hotel Lotti) between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. The hotel is still in business and looks to be still upscale. If I'd known about in when we were in Paris, I would have sought it out. The book gets bleaker in the second half when Orwell leav...