brainsplotch

In the midst of enjoying a fairly relaxing, stay-at-home Memorial Day weekend. As usual, I'm feeling guilty that I have been so negligent with this blog that I'm trying to make amends by throwing something together at the end of the month. I continue to be depressed with the BP oil "spill" (which, let's face it, is more like an oil "geyser"). Is it just me, or the do the folks at BP come across as the most incompetent corporate boobs in history. I haven't decided if they're more reprehensible that the Enron people, but they definitely seem to have their head further up their a$$es. But that's just one man's opinion. I'm currently reading an excellent book called The Liberators: America's Witness to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsch. It never ceases to amaze me that, no matter how much I read about the Holocaust, I'm continually amazed at the sheer level of the atrocities committed by the Germans against their enemies, be they J...

The great Detroit Tiger radio broadcaster, Ernie Harwell, died yesterday at the age of 92. It was the news I knew was inevitable, since he had been diagnosed with inoperable bile duct cancer, but was dreading all the same. I knew it would be hard to take. If anyone seemed like he should live forever, it was Ernie. It doesn't seem fair that someone as gentlemanly and decent as Ernie Harwell should be taken away from us. Like generations of Michiganians, I grew up with Ernie's voice. He was one of the people that introduced me to baseball and the Detroit Tigers. He was part of my childhood and young adulthood. There are so many memories I have that are tied to that distinctive Southern accent: my dad outside working on the house or in the yard with his old paint-splattered transistor radio, and Ernie describing the action at Michigan and Trumbull; upstairs in my room on a warm summer night in the great year of 1984, the sound of crickets outside, a breeze pushing up the blind...