brainsplotch

I'm writing this from my phone, while watching Gangnam Style on  New Years Rockin' Eve or whatever it's called these days. This television experience is not one I've chosen myself--I want to make that clear. I just want to wish everyone out there a Happy New Year.

I'm taking a break from politics to switch gears entirely, (though it could be argued that this post is somewhat political). First a little background. In 1988-1989, when I was a junior at Michigan State, I took a particular interest in the 1961 Detroit Tigers baseball team. The '61 Tigers were quite possibly the greatest 2nd place team in baseball history, winning 101 games but still finishing 8 games behind the pennant winning New York Yankees. '61 was also the first year that the Tigers had prominent black players who made significant contributions to the team. The Tigers were, unfortunately, tardy to the integration of baseball. Almost every evening from autumn 1988 through almost all of 1989, I spent a minimum amount of time on my school work and trudged over to the MSU Library to study microfilm. I took voluminous notes on the '61 team, from infomation gleaned mainly from microfilmed back issues of the Detroit Free Press and a few other newspapers. I have ove...

At home with a sick kid, watching A.N.T. Farm on Disney Channel. I'm still thinking about Friday's horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, though I have done my best to avoid the news and I reflexively turn away when I see school photos of the little children who were murdered. I just can't take it. Like I wrote in my previous post, I am cynical and question whether anything will be done legislatively after this incident. Is it that much to ask why ordinary citizens need to own semi-automatic weapons? Here is how I see it: Those who argue that it's perfectly fine for civilians to own semi-automatic assault weapons are those who swear by the Second Amendment, and are also distrustful of the federal government (the "tyrannical government") and feel that they need these weapons in the event that they need to defend themselves from the government if and when it becomes "tyrannical." To be blunt, I think there is a lot of (unjustified and irr...

Dick DeVos, Rick Snyder, and the conservative contingent in Michigan got their way. They have made the first step in undoing everything that this state was built on. Let the union busting begin. I attended the protest at the capital building for about an hour on Tuesday morning. The union crowd was spirited and a little raucous, but I didn't experience any of the violence that allegedly took place later. My impression is that most of that violence was overblown. I'm now coming to you in the wee hours of Saturday, the 15th of December. The Michigan state legislature passed several bills that, in my opinion, set the state back many years. Most of these bills went through in a marathon session late last night. To top off this bad week, the U.S. had yet another mass shooting, this time at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. I suppose unless you've been living in a cave, you already know. As usual, there is the usual hand-wringing and calls for gun control by the...

(NOTE: Apparently, somebody in cyberspace doesn't like the photos I took of the Tragically Hip show, because they vanished). On Wednesday, L. and I went down to see The Tragically Hip at the Fillmore (formerly the State Theater) in Detroit.  As I've gone on ad infinitum in this blog, I am a huge fan of The Hip, so I was giddy for this show. Unlike the last time I recounted a concert experience in this blog (our aborted attempt to see Meat Puppets last November) we actually saw the band we intended on seeing.  The Hip had no opening act and hit the stage at about 8:15 PM. Negotiating the freeways in Detroit always leaves me a little frazzled, so I was a bit dazed when we finally parked the car in the structure across the street from the Fillmore. We went from one confusing line outside the theater (guys strapping paper wrist bands on those who intended to drink alcohol) to several take-no-shit security people in the theater who were way more intense than any airport se...