42

I have a couple of posts in the hopper about deep thoughts, about things like male psyche and ego trips that combine to make some dudes do horrible things (looking at you, Swalwell); another examining, of course, Felon47 and all the talk we hear about how he's losing his marbles; yet another that isn't especially deep but just about umping. But I find myself pressed for time and generally unfocused at the moment, so for now I will just say the following on this, the 15th day of April:

Happy Jackie Robinson Day to those who celebrate. Wear your No. 42 jerseys with pride. And happy Jackie Robinson Day to those who don't celebrate, too, but only those who don't because they're unfamiliar with it. As for the rest—if you're in Felon47’s regime or are pissed about Abigail Spanberger putting an end to taxpayer subsidies for the United Daughters of the Confederacy—then I wish you a day of thoughtful recriminations about the bad choices you've made in life and hope that the next time you are in dire need of help from someone the only people available are black.

Also, happy Tax Day and sympathies to those who didn't get around to filing before today. And congrats to my friend the accountant for making it through the season. Usually, I recognize taxes as what we pay to have a civilized society, but it's hard to keep that perspective this year since so much of what we're contributing on our 1040 forms is being misspent on things that are the antithesis of civilized. In some parallel universe the President Harris administration is using our tax money for good rather than evil, but as I read on a T-shirt the other night while umpiring, "we live in the darkest timeline."

Posted on April 15, 2026 at 6:11PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Artemis II, Congressional backbone, and a no-drama ump shift

I could do separate posts on separate topics tonight, but I'm not feeling really coherent about any of them so I'm just gonna wing it with a hodgepodge.

• ITEM: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Haven't We Put Anyone on the Moon Since 1972?

  Well, we're on our way to rectifying that with the success of Artemis II, which has been quite impressive and which has been a needed reminder in this age of chaos and idiocy that is the early 21st Century that we as a species and as a culture can achieve great things for the common good if we just choose to. The Artemis II mission went off without a hitch, with the Integrity spacecraft successfully testing and evaluating the launch infrastructure and vessel components as well as navigation to the moon and back. Thus providing key information on what needs to be tweaked and improved for the scheduled Artemis III mission next year—for orbital tests of new lunar landing craft—and Artemis IV in 2028, which will be a crewed lunar landing. Of course, I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of those schedules because the landing craft are to be provided by SpaceX. Any outfit owned and run by Elon Musk can't really be trusted, can it? So for that Artemis III mission I expect problems. We'll see.

  Seth Masket wrote this in his newsletter today and it resonated with me:

  One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project—this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me.

  Plus, the photos from Integrity are fantastic:

  

  

• ITEM: We Finally Have an Answer!

  Having asked the question for over a year now, we know the answer to "what has to happen before people in Congress call for impeachment?!!" What had to happen, evidently, is for the alleged president of the United States to threaten genocide. Good, yes, this is a war crime and undeniably an impeachable offense, but we all saw some version of this coming the whole way. It's not even his first war crime. But, OK, let's not get hung up on why you were late to the party and just be glad you finally got here. There are now dozens of Congressional Democrats calling for impeachment (or the invocation of the 25th Amendment, but (a) 25A isn't going to happen with this VP and cabinet, and (b) if it did happen it wouldn't work, though the chaos it would instigate would be interesting). I doubt any are under the impression it will go anywhere so long as Mike Johnson remains Speaker, but it's absolutely necessary for Congresspeople and Senators to be calling for the removal of Felon47, loudly and frequently, lest the public fall victim to the wider corporate media's repeated implications that this is all normal and acceptable behavior from any public official let alone a President. Calls for impeachment need to be in the news each and every time Felon47 does or says something criminal, stupid, corrupt, and insanely dangerous, which is basically every day. And the calls should be varied in their presentation—some should be emphasizing the utter stupidity and madness of his war, others the flagrant corruption of the entire regime, still others the abuses of ICE and DHS, still others the rampant racism and misogyny exhibited in all of the various atrocities the regime commits.

  As columnist Will Bunch put it: "We must stop the killing and the crime spree—not 33 months from now, as Trump’s mental health continues to deteriorate before our eyes, but today. The indisputable truth that the president took America into an undeclared and illegal war for no reason, and lost that war in barely a month, should be the wake-up call for everyone still in denial."

  Now, the remaining question is what has to happen before Republicans figure out he needs to be removed?

   

• ITEM: Still No Bingo!

  I had a three-game umpire shift at Capitol Hill last night, which had very little in the way of drama or oddities. Except that it was a championship series, and usually I have prizes to give out to the winning team at the end of such things. Certificates good for credit at a sponsor bar and a discount on future league fees, typically, sometimes along with a token like championship wristbands or T-shirts. Actually, we haven't had T-shirts since pre-COVID. Those might never come back, I don't know. Anyway, last night I had nothing. No prizes to be had. I presume this was an oversight, because some of the other, regular game stuff was also not present in my provided batch of gear, so I merely noted it in my report and assume that the winning teams will be given their prizes at a later date. Meantime, the Bingo card remains un-bingoed:

  

• ITEM: For All Mankind is Back!

  The brilliant alternate-history series For All Mankind is three episodes into its fifth season on Apple TV+ and it is, as usual, awesome. It's changed a lot since its first season, but that's by design—the show begins in 1969, when the Soviet Union is the first nation to land a person on the moon and thus history as we know it begins to diverge and the space race continues on in a much different fashion, with the US feeling the need to one-up the Soviets and vice-versa. (Technically, the point of historical divergence, according to showrunner/creator Ronald D. Moore, was in 1966, when Sergei Korolev survived a routine surgery rather than died from its complications; Korolev was the prime force behind the Soviet moon mission in both "our" reality and in the FAM history, where he was able to continue on.) Each new season begins with a time jump of about nine years, each season premiere showing a brief retrospective on what has happened in the world in the interim, where we not only see things like new technological advances borne of the continued space race, but what became of President Ted Kennedy (who due to the Soviet moon landing fallout canceled his trip to Chappaquiddick in 1969 and defeated Richard Nixon in 1972) and his razor-thin loss to Reagan in 1976; how the astronaut program forges support for the ERA, which is ratified in 1974; how the Camp David Accord meetings end in failure under President Reagan; how John Lennon survived an assassination attempt in 1980 and reunited the Beatles for a concert tour in 1987; that Blockbuster Video opens its first store on the moon in 2007; and so on. All that stuff is just background, though, the show is really about a cast of astronaut/cosmonaut characters and their support people and families, a few of whom appear in all five seasons (spanning forty-some years). Some of my faves aren't in season 5, but maybe they'll make appearances later on even though they'd be pushing 80. As the series goes on, life in space becomes more and more prevalent—by season two there is a permanent moon presence, by season three we have space tourism, season four establishes permanence of a sort on Mars, and here in season 5 we have a proto-Mars colony complete with refugee immigrants. It's more and more sci-fi as we get further and further from 1969, but the show is still, well, grounded in realism and logical politics and is just damn well written with compelling human dramas. It's an awesome show and you should watch it.

Tagged Umping, Politics, Space, TV, Posted on April 11, 2026 at 12:50AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Positive imagery

I thought about writing another political screed tonight, another exercise in venting my frustrations and outrage and dread over the collapse of America because the entire Republican party has switched sides and become fascist. But really, I've done that before. Repeatedly. It makes me feel better in the sense of having an outlet to vent my rage, but it also doesn't in the sense that it doesn't make any difference.

So I won't be doing that right now.

Instead, here are a few of photos that show the parts of my day not involving fretting over the state of the world. A microcosm of calm to the macrocosm of chaos, if you will.

Pre-dusk from an overlook at Boeing Creek Park (everything has a damn sponsor name these days), where I went for a lengthy walk today and was reminded just how out of shape I really am.

The front door of my place had somehow accumulated four doorbells for two units using the door. I spent some time disconnecting two of them and doing quick-and-dirty coverup of the mess left behind. Eventually it'll have to be spiffed up with matching paint. So now there's one bell for me and one of those creepy camera-doorbell things mounted at an angle above it for my neighbors.

Zephyr vies for attention as I'm trying to watch the ballgame. He will not be ignored.

Long-distance shot of Mizuki in her comfy hammock. The pic doesn't blow up very well, but I thought she was cute there. She and Zeph both like the hammock.

Posted on April 8, 2026 at 9:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Screaming into the void

As the outrages continue—as the military misadventures further destabilize the world, as the criminality rolls on mostly unchecked, as Felon47 demonstrates more and more insanity—I figured it was time for another letter to Congress.

It's not exactly a rewarding exercise. I've got the best representation in the House and pretty decent representation in the Senate, so I'm expressing my frustration to people who already share it. But what else can we do?

Anyway, here's my latest missive. If you are inclined to send one off as well, there's a link in the sidebar that makes it super easy. It might not help. But it can't hurt. Particularly if you have less principled or more malleable people representing you than those of us in WA-7.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Congress, Posted on April 6, 2026 at 11:19PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Once in a while, even I have to look up a rule

Thursday night I had a three-game umpiring shift at Cap Hill. All three games were blowouts and all involved teams I generally like to draw on my schedule. Nevertheless, by the time we got into the third game I wasn't in the mood to be there anymore for whatever reason. It wasn't especially cold, wasn't raining, I hadn't skipped lunch, I wasn't on short sleep, nothing like that, it was just one of those things. Might have had something to do with getting some lip from a few different players about ball/strike calls. Or it might not. I don't know.

The questioned strike calls I actually have some sympathy for because they came on pitches that I absolutely hate to face myself as a batter. Both pitchers in the third game were partial to very high arc pitches, ones that scrape 12 feet off the ground before dropping back down. I hate these. They always, always look like they're going to be high. And sometimes they drop right into the strike zone.

After doing the ump thing for several years, I've gotten better at ignoring the high arc when calling the pitch. It's hard, though. You've got to focus as much as your attention as you can on watching just the strike zone and see if the ball crosses it or not, but you can't totally ignore what happens before that because an arc can be too high (or too low) to be legal and you've got to call that too.

As a batter I've gotten a number of strikes called on me from such pitches that I (internally) groused about, but mostly because I just hate them. I mean, yeah, in my playing league we sometimes get Seattle Parks & Rec's answer to C.B. Bucknor as our umpire and I'm less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, but when I'm grousing it's not about the call so much as the super-high-arc pitch being legal. But it is, so you live with it.

Anyway, I called two batters out on strikes on such pitches. One, someone I see a lot of in this league, was cool about it even though she disagreed. We had a nice conversation about it when she came back out to catch the next inning and agreed that high-arc pitches suck. The other one was not cool about it and tried to start an argument. "How can that be a strike?!" I stopped short of being snarky and replying with, "well, you see, there's this thing called the 'strike zone,' and when the pitch crosses it..." and instead just said, in what I hope was a subdued manner, "really?" And she was ready to get into it until her teammates corralled her back to the dugout. (It's usually dudes that get in my face if anyone does, but hey, feminism.)

But those weren't the odd thing about that shift. The oddity came when, in a bases-loaded, two-out situation, the runner going from first to second base was hit by a batted ball; weird in and of itself because it was a high bouncer that took a few seconds to reach the basepaths, but she was still hit in the foot. By the time she was, though, the runner from third had already scored with time to spare. So, the runner is out for being hit, it's the third out so the inning is over, but does the run count? I did not know and just decided on the spot that it would. (It was a blowout, the run wasn't going to matter, and I had to decide, so...) But should it have?

I had to look it up later. And what I found in the rules was not helpful. Rule 5.09(b)(7): A runner is out when "touched by a fair [batted] ball in fair territory before the ball has gone by an infielder (other than the pitcher) and no other infielder has a chance to make a play on the ball. The ball is dead and no runner may score, nor runners advance, except runners forced to advance." (Italics mine)

The bases were loaded, so on a bouncer all runners were forced to try to advance. However, the runner from first was the one out when hit by the batted ball. In other circumstances, that runner being out (the third out) before reaching second base negates anything accomplished by other runners, but in runner-hit-by-fair-ball cases the batter is awarded a base hit rather than reaching on a fielder's choice, meaning s/he didn't hit into a force play. How does that come into play, if at all? Also, the rule says no runners may score except those forced to advance, and if we're using the any-other-circumstances force theory then in any case of a runner being hit by a batted ball there could never be a runner forced to advance. So why would the rule include that exception? Is it a convoluted way to say, well, if there are runners at first and second and the runner from second is hit by the batted ball, then obviously the runner from first gets second base because the batter gets a base hit and you can't have two runners at first? I guess that technically tracks, but it still isn't clear to me that "forced to advance" doesn't refer to where runners are at the start of the play, and the fact that the batter is not recorded as hitting into any kind of forceout but credited with a hit further screws it up.

If it happens again, I think I will rule differently—that such a run does not count and if not the third out then the runner must go back to third base (and runner going from second to third back to second) because the force would have been removed when the runner from first was declared out and therefore the runner from third isn't forced to advance.

But I still don't know if that's right or not.

Then there was something in tonight's game between Your Seattle Mariners and the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County Which Isn't Technically Los Angeles. Angel right fielder Jo Adell—who had already, by the way, robbed the M's of two homers—leaped into the right field seats to catch a fly ball that would otherwise be a home run. Adell went over the fence, tumbling into the first few rows of seats but did catch the ball. Still, he's off the field by that time. Is it a catch? I knew that it would be once Adell returned to the field never having lost or surrendered control of the ball, but since he took his sweet time doing so, and since there was a second or two that he was out of view of all cameras, it was questionable enough that the Mariners challenged the ruling of fair catch. In a search of the rules I didn't find any mention of catches by a fielder leaving the playing field other than as pertains to the dugouts, but I know from past occurrences that a fielder that makes a catch while one or both feet are on or directly above the field of play and falls into the seating area or a bullpen or whatnot has to maintain control of the ball and return to the field before the out is official, and since Adell stood there reveling in his catch for a bit before jumping back into right field it was a little murky. Or maybe the M's challenged on the chance that Adell only caught the ball after his whole body was past the field boundary?

In any case, the catch was ruled legal and thus Adell had accomplished the rare feat of catching three would-be home runs in one game. Incredible.

Tagged Baseball, Umping, Posted on April 4, 2026 at 10:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Art imitating life imitating art

After listening to some recap analysis of Felon47’s pointless address to the nation last night—no, I didn't watch the thing itself, that clearly wasn't going to be useful—I decided to switch gears into some comic-book inspired escapism and watch the latest two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again. But it turned out not to be much in the way of escapism.

The series reimagines a more-than-a-decade-old Marvel Comics storyline wherein Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, becomes mayor of New York City. It's good, well-done in a way that's true to the characters and compelling to watch (though brutally violent in spots), but also depressing because the parallels between Fisk's governance of New York and Felon47’s governance of the United States are a bit too on the nose.

Not intentionally, of course. The source material predates even the administration of Fraudster45, and the scripts for the series were being written before the 2024 election campaign. But how could it not parallel?

The premise of placing a career criminal in a position of massive political power demands plotlines and story tropes that show staggering corruption, manipulation of the press, mob-tactic intimidation, shocking levels of cruelty, even an extra-legal "police force" terrorizing the public. So it's really inevitable that the real-life career criminal given a position of massive political power mirrors the fictional one.

Thankfully, the real-life analog of Wilson Fisk is not nearly as smart. Fisk is a cruel, psychologically broken, utterly corrupt narcissist, but he has intelligence enough to be truly terrifying. Our alleged president is, by contrast, one of the stupidest people on Earth. Which is its own kind of terrifying, to be sure, but does set him apart.

Fisk is opposed by our hero, Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, a lawyer by trade and, despite his tactics of masked vigilantism, believer in the rule of law ultimately taking down Fisk and his corrupt empire. Also on the side of good is internet journalist BB Urich, who by day produces videos that show New Yorkers supporting Fisk's outwardly keeping-us-safe policies while by night making subversive videos that mock Fisk as "Mayor Kingpin," exposing what she can of Fisk's corrupt and violent underbelly. We don't have Daredevil to oppose Felon47, but we do have rule of law, at least for now. We don't have a BB Urich either, and we could use one; but there are journalists outside the mainstream that keep digging for evidence of criminality that might finally take the regime down.

As the series approaches resolution, we know Fisk will be deposed and receive some sort of comeuppance; sadly, we don't have the same surety for his real-life analog. But it does give me a weird sort of hope.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Daredevil, TV, Comics, Posted on April 2, 2026 at 4:56PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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