Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

Newsday sportswriter emeritus and adjunct professor in the Hofstra University school of communications.

On the road again

Leave a reply

There is no Oakland in Oakland anymore. At least in terms of a major professional sports team. No “here” there on the home schedules of long-term Oakland tenants in basketball, football and baseball. A sort of Gertrude Stein take on the vanishing past.

The Warriors left Oakland in 2019 for San Francisco, their first Bay Area location. The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020. And now the A’s, committed to settling in Vegas three years hence, have commenced doing current business in Sacramento (without acknowledging that city’s existence in their official title; the organization simply is branding itself “the Athletics” or “the A’s”).

Business is business and the grass always appears greener somewhere else, of course. In that sense, it figures to have this geographical reversal of the California gold rush phenomenon that was triggered by the 1848 eureka moment at Sutter’s Mill (just up the road from Sacramento).

The Eastward-Ho fortune-seeking not only has led to Oakland’s loss of three Big League teams in five years, but also the monetary scramble by two major college operations away from the vicinity last year: The University of California, based five miles from Oakland in Berkeley, and Stanford, 34 miles away in Palo Alto, both absconded to the Atlantic (Atlantic!) Coast Conference, while eight other schools were fleeing the Pac-12. (“Pac” for Pacific.)

There goes the neighborhood.

For fans, such wanderlust obviously is disorienting, though Oaklanders have been through this before with these pro franchises. The basketball Warriors, who had been based in Philadelphia since 1946, first set up their West Coast shop in ’62 at a joint called the Cow Palace—technically located in Daly City, Calif. (though the Cow Palace parking lot was intersected by the San Francisco city line).

Then it was on to the University of San Francisco campus and the S.F. Civic Auditorium before relocating to Oakland in 1971 while taking on their current “Golden State” name. The team also spent a couple of years playing home game in San Jose, 40 miles from Oakland while the Oakland Coliseum was being renovated, then returned to San Francisco and its Chase Center six years ago.

More footloose were the Raiders, who spent the 1982 NFL season working daily at their old practice site adjacent to the Oakland airport—in view of the Oakland Coliseum that had been home since ’63—but played their “home” games in Los Angeles, 365 miles away. Almost all of the players lived in Oakland, a couple full-time in L.A. Among those rattled by all the travel was Dick Romanski, the Raiders’ equipment manager at the time, complaining that airline flights necessary even for “home” games “screwed up my whole golf game.”

A “permanent” move to L.A. was finalized the next season but ended after 13 years, and it was back to Oakland for the next 24. Until at last reaching Paradise. (That’s the official name of the Raiders’ most recent digs on the southern edge of Las Vegas.)

So now the Athletics’ fortune-seeking ghost ship has landed them in a small minor-league park—technically in West Sacramento, across the river from the city proper—in what a Sacramento radio host described as an “Airbnb” while they await the construction of a Las Vegas stadium. The players, as something of a GPS aid, wear a “Las Vegas” patch on one uniform sleeve.

The franchise was founded in Philadelphia in 1901, transferred to Kansas City in 1955 and to Oakland in 1968. Of the Majors’ existing 30 teams, the Athletics are one of only nine to leave their original port of call, the only one to do so three times, and one of only two (the Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta) to do so more than once. And virtually all of that other traipsing around happened from the 1950s into the early ‘70s.

But for this team, the wandering in the wilderness goes on, and the interim stop halfway across Northern California has mystified at least one opposing player, Cubs pitcher Ryan Brasier, who wondered during a television interview why the Athletics didn’t remain at “maybe not a perfectly good ballpark in Oakland, but a big-league ballpark….I really don’t get it; not playing in Oakland as opposed to playing in Sacramento.”

Then again, the sellout crowd of 12,119 that fit into Sacramento’s minor-league park for the Athletics’ 2025 “home” opener out-drew the A’s 2024 Oakland average of 11,628—last in the Majors. Anyway, everything is temporary.

Great expectations

Leave a reply

Here’s proof that expectations—and, therefore, potential criticism—of any sports team are based on the degree of interest among the populace. Exhibit A: The American soccer community is beside itself with the U.S. men’s national team’s lackluster performance in a fourth-place finish at last week’s four-team Nation’s League mini-tournament.

The Yanks were beaten by Panama and Canada—there’s some political irony there, in terms of who owns whom, no?—and are being lambasted by pundits and fans. For the fourth-place match against Canada, L.A.’s 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium was virtually empty at kickoff.

And it’s one thing for self-proclaimed experts—commentators and that lot—to be throwing brickbats. But retired national team players from recent years, fellows who had something to do with America’s overdue arrival to top-level international soccer competition—have been among the most prominent disparagers.

Landon Donovan: “I’m so sick of hearing how ‘talented’ this group of players is and all the amazing clubs they play for. If you aren’t going to show up and actually give a [deleted] about playing for your national team, decline the invite. Talent is great, pride is better.”

Clint Dempsey: “You would hope that they would get up for [these games], that there would be more pride to try to get things back on track and try to get this fanbase behind them…”

Tab Ramos: “….all of the important guys are saying ‘We need to … work harder.’ Well yeah, of course. But you need to stop talking about it. You need to start doing it.”

Alexi Lalas: “Does this team even care?”

The going up—our lads won the previous three Nation’s League titles—certainly didn’t make the coming down any easier.

Exhibit B: This is what being labeled the “golden generation” of U.S. men’s soccer talent will get you in dropping two of three matches last fall while hosting Copa America and now going 0-2 at home. It pretty much wipes out the fact that it hasn’t been that long—a mere generation or so—since the Yanks could have suffered such setbacks and no one on these shores would have noticed.

The angst over recent failures, with next summer’s World Cup returning to the United States (as co-host with Mexico and Canada) is a reminder of how dramatically (and how quickly) soccer has progressed on these shores.

When the World Cup was last here, in 1994, the U.S. soccer federation was still trying to scrape together a national team with a jury-rigged collection of recent college players. There was no U.S. professional league because there was no demand for one. The rag-tag team that had qualified for the Italy-based 1990 World Cup—the Yanks’ first World Cup appearance in 40 years—did so, in large part, because the region’s perennial power, Mexico, had been banned for using ineligible players.

Even so, the Yanks barely squeezed into that championship tournament and were promptly destroyed by Czechoslovakia, 5-1. The most skilled player on that U.S. team was Ramos. And, after that 5-1 thrashing in Florence, Italy, in 1990, Ramos was one of only a few U.S. players brave enough to face reporters’ post-game interrogations: If he somehow could have known beforehand how disappointing his World Cup debut would be, might he have preferred to take a pass?

“This,” he said then, “is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

It was, after all, 1990. Frontier days. “It’s not something to be ashamed of. If we lived in another country and lost, 5-1, we couldn’t go home. But we’ll go home and walk through Kennedy Airport and no one will recognize us, anyway.”

Ramos, born in Uruguay and settled with his family in New Jersey when he was 7, knew very well the pecking order of American sports at the time, when soccer was “a way of life everywhere but in the U.S. Everywhere else, your team loses, you cry and stay home from work the next day because you’re so upset. Your team wins, you don’t go to work because you’re so happy.”

There was no need to feel sorry about having been an “American soccer player,” because that was an oxymoron—like “living dead” or “definite maybe”—in those days.

Now, the reality is markedly different. Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, is in its 29th season, with 30 teams. American players regularly star for top European club teams. Soccer, as a spectator sport in the States, now is on the order of ice hockey, just behind the big three of football, baseball and basketball.

A run of seven consecutive World Cup qualifications—interrupted in 2018—has caused enough Americans to care enough that the national team has gone through five coaches since then, expecting bigger things. Mauricio Pochettino is the sixth and, after just six months and eight matches, already is hearing grumbles, much of it questioning his ability to generate more player effort.

Now, U.S soccer’s problem not only is qualifying but also making some impact in the 2026 World Cup. Because, it the Yanks don’t, a lot of people will notice. (And they will recognize the players walking through any airport.)

Don’t forget

Leave a reply

Last week’s erasure of Jackie Robinson from the Department of Defense website, as brief as it was, amounted to the latest example of Donald Trump’s dystopian vision of American society. If the President’s edict against all forms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is to rule the day, then an historic figure such as Robinson—who served in World War II, became the first Black man in the most significant professional sport of his time and spent his life fighting racial discrimination—apparently had to be disappeared.

The blowback to that act of moral turpitude was immediate and widespread, prompting administration officials to clumsily shift blame to artificial intelligent tools for the “error.” But the message had been sent and was perfectly clear.

It summed up Trump’s long personal history of disparaging minorities. It signaled that DEI has become, as The Nation’s Dave Zirin wrote, “an all-purpose term to demonize anything that promotes the histories and experiences of Black and brown people.” It broadcast, as Zirin put it, “that Robinson’s accomplishments are fraudulent and exalted only because of the color of his skin.”

Veteran Atlanta journalist Terrence Moore pointed out that, beyond Robinson’s Hall of Fame baseball career, which was so visible in embarrassing the country’s Jim Crow leanings, “Robinson was Rosa Parks 11 years before Rosa Parks,” who famously refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955. Robinson had declined to leave the front of an Army bus during military service in ’44 and was court-marshalled for it. (He subsequently was acquitted and received an honorable discharge.)

When Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 on his solitary mission to personally integrate the Major Leagues, baseball was a central piece of American culture, legitimately the “national pastime” to a populace barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA.

Joe Dorinson, the prominent Jackie Robinson scholar who co-coordinated a massive Long Island University academic conference on the 50th anniversary in 1997 of Robinson’s breakthrough, noted that “Babe Ruth changed baseball. But Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.” At that LIU event, Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.” Turning the other cheek to vile racist treatment and carrying on.

The late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in that Robinson symposium) believed that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”

Major League Baseball, in retelling Jackie’s story, officially retired Robinson’s uniform No. 42—leaguewide—in 1997 and, since 2008 has marked the anniversary of Robinson’s debut, April 15, by having every player on every team wear Robinson’s uniform No. 42 on that date.

But given the White House’s chainsaw attack on DEI, its monetary bullying of any organization that continues to traffic in diversity, Terrence Moore wondered if Jackie Robinson Day “might be “going, going, gone….”—that “just to make sure the U.S. government doesn’t unleash its considerable wrath on their industry that made a record $12.1 billion last season,” MLB could pull the plug on such a celebration.

MLB indeed might be hinting at that, having already removed references to “diversity” from its home page and issued a statement that it is “in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward.”

If there is some positive to be found in these dehumanizing, history-cancelling actions by the reigning President, perhaps it was provided by veteran Minnesota Twins reporter La Velle E. Neal III of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who wrote that he would like to “express my gratitude toward the Department of Defense for reminding us of the impact of one of our greatest Americans.

“Because of the DoD’s reckless slicing and dicing of everything it deemed to fall into their diversity, equity and inclusion danger zone,” Neil wrote, “webpages lauding the contributions of many who proudly fought for this country were erased.

“One of those histories was of Jackie Robinson. A man who lettered in four sports at UCLA, served his country during World War II, then broke baseball’s color barrier while fighting discrimination and segregation the entire way.

“Because of the DoD’s gaffe, Robinson’s legacy is back in the conversation. And just in time for the approaching baseball season. And in time for Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, when his career will be remembered across Major League Baseball.

“Jackie should be celebrated with more gusto than ever this year.”

Then again, as Joe Dorinson emailed upon the news of the temporary Robinson benching, “Fascism’s footfalls grow louder each day.”

Money in this piggy bank

Leave a reply

I consider the hero of this story to be, at the very least, terrific. Radiant. Humble.

Some pig.

With apologies to E.B. White, and a nod to those exalting descriptions in “Charlotte’s Webb” of White’s protagonist barnyard critter Wilbur, I am speaking instead of an anonymous real-life porker. Mine was a domesticated, omnivorous mammal belonging to the genus Sus who lived, I assume, somewhere in Iowa (based on the odds, since that is the leading state for hog production) .

That particular pig somehow had been designated an organ donor. And when—on the medical advice of my cardiologist, given the heart murmur I developed several years ago—I was judged in need of an aortic valve replacement, the aforementioned swine (and I use that term with ultimate respect) supplied the needed equipment.

That life-sustaining procedure indeed became a variant on bringing home the bacon. Not that I will tolerate any petty puns related to my circumstance or my benefactor. To eat ham or pork or sausage—which I rarely do, anyway—does not make me a cannibal. I do not have increased leanings toward a chauvinist pig. In basketball, I believe is passing to the open man, eschewing the role of ball hog.

Of course I am fully aware that, as a cultural symbol, the pig is employed as a stand-in for many human aspects, often derogatory: As slang for police (a “pig” is on the dismissive level of “the fuzz”). As an informal insult of someone perceived to be disgusting or greedy.

In George Orwell’s 1945 satire “Animal Farm,” about anthropomorphic creatures who rebel against their human farmer in hopes of creating a society of equal, free and happy animals, a pig named Napoleon is the bad guy, emerging as the dictator who causes the farm to wind up in a state worse than before. (Orwell was referencing Joseph Stalin of the early 20th Century Soviet Union, but his allegory somehow feels relevant to the United States in 2025.)

Meanwhile, it could be argued that the Looney Tunes character Porky Pig, with his terrible stutter, was not such a good model for an earlier generation of cartoon-watching children. And, in the Chinese Zodiac legend, the Year of the Pig is last in its 12-year calendar cycle because, when the Emperor organized a race to ascertain the order of animals in the Zodiac, the pig arrived late—last—and was thereby termed the “lazy pig,” who had stopped to eat and fell asleep.

Then again, the third of the Three Little Pigs was resourceful and brilliant, clever enough to fortify his house against the wolf with bricks. Miss Piggy, of Muppets lore, may have been a bit temperamental, a diva superstar, but knew a little French and was a terror in karate. Hiiii-YAH!

I never quite got the nursery rhyme about little pigs who respectfully “went to market, stayed home, had roast beef, got nothing at all and cried all the way home,” paired with a grownup simultaneously pulling on a young child’s toes. But let me be on record as a fan of the Beatles 1968 song “Piggies,” a George Harrison number which has been interpreted as a metaphor for human nature, in which the big guys lord it over the lesser folks. (2025 again?)

Anyway, to dismiss the contribution of my Iowa patron, whose aorta valve has kept me rolling along these last six years; who has, unknowingly, allowed me to feel as normally active as any septuagenarian around? In a pig’s eye!

Tick tock

Leave a reply

First of all, Daylight Savings Time doesn’t save any daylight; it just moves it. For one day. What’s the big deal? If you don’t want to change your clocks twice a year, from Standard to Daylight Time and back again, there is the option of relocating to Quito, Ecuador, 14 miles from the equator. There, from early November to early March—and all year, really—the time of sunrise and sunset varies by roughly one minute. Up a bit after 6 a.m., down shortly after 6 p.m.

On the other hand, think of this: Residents of Utqiagvik, on the northern tip of Alaska, have sunshine all day at the beginning of Summer, and darkness all day when Winter commences. Clocks’ impact on behavior becomes sort of academic. (No wonder the Alaskan Senate has introduced a bill to exempt the state, hardly in need of more sunshine in summer months, from Daylight Savings Time altogether.)

All the bi-annual weeping and rending of clothes over turning clocks back one hour in the Fall then ahead one hour in the Spring, seemingly worthy of some Great Debate between Lincoln and Douglas, has been going on a long time. A passionately partisan dispute, so pervasive that a few years ago, there was a New Yorker cartoon of a fellow on display as a circus “oddity” with the invitation, “COME SEE THE MAN WHO HAS NO OPINIONS ABOUT DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME.”

So it’s an old, old story. But there is a body of thought that, when Ben Franklin proposed in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784 that clocks in France be re-set—calling out the Parisians’ perceived laziness by suggesting the locals wake up an hour earlier—he was kidding!

Clocks were changed in World War I, first in Europe and then the U.S., with the intention of saving energy. The practice was reinstated during World War II and institutionalized in the United States by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which set specific dates for beginning Daylight Savings Time on the last Sunday in April and ending on the last Sunday in October—though individual states could pass laws not to participate. (Two states, Hawaii and Arizona, still stick to Standard Time year-round and, just to complicate matters, several states are split by time zones, leaving some people forever an hour ahead or behind their neighbors, all year.)

In 1974, during the energy crisis, clock-changing was suspended but soon reinstated. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act extended Daylight Savings Time from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. And in 2022, the Senate passed legislation to make Daylight Savings Time permanent, calling it the Sunshine Protection Act—which sounds as if the opposite of sun block is being applied.

But that never was approved by the House and, since then, there have been rumblings for a law to instead stick fulltime to Standard Time, a theoretical Keep-Your-Hands-Out-of-My-Pocket(watch) Bill. There have been studies contending that year-round Daylight Savings Time would make people more productive, well-rested and happier, but also opposite claims by sleep scientists that it would be better never to venture from Standard Time. (Which would have benefited Lewis Carroll’s forever tardy White Rabbit.)

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in the previous century, who declared that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” But that was advocating for transparency and accountability—a belief that making government actions more public would help stamp out corruption, (and which might be applied to a certain so-called “efficiency” movement afoot now). It wasn’t about what time the sun should rise and set.

More appropriate to this discussion could be the 1969 rock group Chicago song: Does anybody really know what time it is.

Canada builds a wall

Leave a reply

If hockey goonery is your cup of tea, then the Four-Nations mini-tournament between the United States and Canada certainly provided. As much off the ice as on. Beyond the fairly predictable player fights—that’s hockey!—leading up to the championship final were the partisan fans booing the opposing national anthems, triggered by the gasbag Trump administration’s belittling of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and his sovereign nation—“soon to be known as governor of our 51st state.”

Canadian fans, in the end, weren’t shy about interpreting their Four Nations title as a triumph over their potential “11th Province,” and Trudeau got in his shot by declaring, “You can’t take our country—and you can’t take our game.” At the title joust, singer Chantal Kreviazuk made her own statement regarding independence by massaging a line in “O Canada!” from “in all our command” to “that only us command.”

But, too—and this saved the event—there was the best of the sport’s delightful, excruciatingly entertaining on-the-fly drama, and a respectful acknowledgement by players on both sides that the sport survived the political toxicity to cultivate new fans. There was the traditional post-championship handshake, hockey’s unique version of respect and diplomacy.

The final was the fourth most-watched NHL-affiliated game in history and biggest draw since the modern Nielsen era began in 1988.

Certainly, there was the reminder that sports always is political and that national rivalries add plenty of juice. For the Empire State Building and Toronto’s CN Tower to be lit up in the championship combatants‘ respective national colors was a nice touch, even as real hockey fans—while taking their patriotic sides—were fully aware (and appreciative) of crossover loyalties to the athletes.

The U.S. team was filled with players who work for Canadian-based NHL teams, and visa versa. And it hasn’t been that long—maybe 50 years–since Canadians overwhelmingly peopled all NHL teams, the majority of which represented U.S. cities. A New York Rangers fan, Chicago Blackhawks fan, Detroit Red Wings fan, Boston Bruins fan, in rooting for his or her home team really was rooting for “our Canadians against your Canadians.” The father of superstar Connor McDavid, whose overtime goal won the Four Nations trophy for Canada, in fact was reportedly a big Boston Bruins fan. Cross-border allegiance, neighborly appreciation.

I thought of Corky DeGraauw, who was a 20-year-old from Toronto playing for the minor-league Long Island Ducks in 1971 when I was assigned to the team’s week-long bus trip to North Carolina and Pennsylvania. DeGraauw thought of how he would prefer flying to road games, “because it’s nice to look down at the ground that you’ve always seen before on maps, and see that there really isn’t a big red line which separates Canada and the U.S….”

We’re neighbors. L Cavanaugh’s Four-Nations summary in the Los Angeles Times mused that “Good neighbors are always there for each other.” He cited how the forestry minister of Canada’s Alberta province had sent firefighters to Los Angeles last month, returning a favor from 2023 when “California firefighters bravely supported Alberta in a time of great need.”

Cavanaugh wrote of “the goons who fought in Montreal” during the preliminary U.S.-Canada match, that “instead of playing their hearts out for their country, they deliberately put themselves in the penalty box. All pain, no gain. But that’s what goons do. They choose the performative over performance, spectacle over contribution, me over we—the exact opposite of what the legendary gold-medal winning 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team was all about” amid its “Miracle on Ice” upset of the Soviet Union, that real Evil Empire.

Cavanaugh cited Canadian columnist Pete McMartin of the Vancouver Sun lamenting, “Goodbye America. … I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.”

The New York Times quoted a Canadian fan in the crowd for the final that “Canadians are so pumped to win this game. Because we can’t beat Trump, right? It’s the only thing we can beat them at — hockey.”

The match was enormously appealing theatre, given the showdown between the world’s two best national teams on such a highly visible stage—as big as the Olympics, in some ways. “With more than a decade of built-up tension between the two rivals, heat on the ice was inevitable,” according to the New York Times. “But for many, the championship game wasn’t about bragging rights alone.”

That clearly was because of the Trump administration’s economic and geopolitical bullying—the lack of statesmanship and tact fouling the North American air. It was a reminder, as the L.A. Times’ Cavanaugh put it, of goonery in the mix. “Goons never really win,” Cavanaugh wrote, “because they’re all about pulling down others.”

Some light on the subject

Leave a reply

“Strong winds and rain today and tomorrow,” the local energy company texted this week. “We’re ready. Report an outage.”

This brought a shrug, mostly. Until I went to fire up the coffee maker and realized that having electricity may not be a basic need in life, but is most certainly a luxury. Then reached into the refrigerator for cold milk to go with the breakfast Cheerios. And plugged in the toaster.

The morning shower, a good hot one to counter the nine-degree wind-chill outside, was just completed. Hearing aids extracted, full strength, from their overnight charger. Clean plates, utensils, glasses and pots retrieved from the dishwasher’s hands-free chore.

A person can have only glancing familiarity with the science of energy—currents, power, amperes, coulombs, farads, ohms—to be confronted, upon having the lights go out and so many other indispensable devices inoperative, with a sudden reminder of electricity’s place in one’s routine.

I remember being smote by a total blackout when Super Storm Sandy hit these environs in 2012, rendering 11 days of cold and darkness to our homestead. Quite a shock, if I can use that term for a voltage-free jolt. A feeling of overwhelming powerlessness.

In such a situation the smite-ee finds himself without juice for the bedside lamp, laptop, cellphone, landline, oven, TV, radio, washing machine, dryer, paper shredder, dehumidifier, microwave, laptop printer, wall clocks, garage-door opener, water-pump system….(In the summertime, there is the additional denial of a sprinkler system, power trimmer, ceiling fans and air conditioner.)

For a few days, it is relatively easy to survive a power outage, which is usually all that most of us must endure. So the general advice is to keep flashlights handy. Avoid opening the refrigerator and freezer to keep things cold. Use a battery-powered radio. Cook on an outdoor grill. It’s just camping out, really.

On a small scale, I learned via the Internet, enough electricity to power small LED lights can be generated by employing a hamster running on its little wheel attached to a generator. (If you have a hamster. Anyway, for the existence that most of us have become accustomed to, it would demand a lot of hamsters.) A person’s own vigorous exercise reportedly can produce up to 30 watts with a half-hour of continual pedaling on a generator, though that would require maintaining a heart rate up to 120 beats or so; better be in reasonable shape.

Then, of course, venturing away from home means dealing with stoplights and other conveniences—necessities, really—that have blown a figurative fuse. A real glimpse of 19th Century existence, before Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla got figurative lightbulbs over their heads—bright ideas which eventually led to the grid becoming a dear friend.

You like movies? Concerts? Broadway shows? Commuter train and subway transportation around the Big City? Shopping in clean, well-lighted places with check-out computers that are operative? In 2024, U.S. electric consumption totaled roughly four trillion kilowatt hours, about 14 times greater than the figure from 70 years earlier.

To be from the generation whose parents had gotten through the Depression is to have heard constant reminders to “turn out the lights when you leave a room.” There’s a joke about the old fellow who was dying and looked around his bed, wanting to be assured that all his family members were in the room—each of his children, his wife, aunt and uncle and close cousins. Each query brought a reassuring “yes.”

“All here?” he confirmed. “Then why is the light on in the kitchen?”

In a way, that energy company text sent out during the recent high winds was saying: Take nothing for granted.

Bread and circuses

Leave a reply

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Especially if you are a Roman from, say, the 14th Century and therefore still favoring the system of counting that uses letters to represent values—as opposed to how everybody else does math. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5….

This is not to bury the National Football League for its self-important employment of Roman numerals; it obviously is a blatant strategy to add grandeur to its annual Super Bowl, and no other organization does exaggeration better. But it is a reminder not to accept the league’s early arguments that Roman numerals were meant to avoid confusion over staging the championship game in the year following its regular season. The contention is that the title decided in February 2025 was the culmination of competition that commenced in the early September of 2024, so instead of “Super Bowl 2024,” it was “Super Bowl LIX.”

Note that the NBA, NHL and college basketball are among the major sports whose seasons overlap calendar years, without the need to gussy up their championship games with ancient lettering normally limited to showy landmarks such as Britain’s Big Ben clock. (And to World Wars.)

Anyway, what is the clarity in reporting that Denver defeated Atlanta in Super Bowl XXXIII? When was that? (Hint, there was partying later that year like it was MCMXCIX.)

If the purpose, as once suggested, is to liken the Super Bowl to virile do-or-die contests featuring Roman gladiators—some modern version of the old Christians vs. Lions battles in the Roman Colosseum—then might the NFL stick to its bilingual form and have calculated Sunday’s final score as XL-XXII?

The use of Roman numerals in fact is directly connected to Fox network having paraded Tom Brady into its Super Bowl broadcast booth. Not because Brady’s rookie season in that role could guarantee much to offer in terms of analysis or insight—“As Game Analyst,” a New York Times headline declared, “Brady’s Performance Is a Lot Like Kansas City’s” 18-point loss. Brady, who quarterbacked more Super Bowl winners (seven) than anyone else, instead “was brought in,” the article noted, “to make everything feel bigger….”

Yes, Major League Baseball went around claiming its post-season championship game was the “World Series” for 66 years before the league at last included a non-U.S. team (Montreal in 1969), and still has had only one team from outside the States (Toronto in 1992 and ’93) that could come close to claiming itself “world champion.” (More accurately, North American champion.)

So NFL marketers felt—and this was stated clearly in the past—that it deserved to righteously put the Super Bowl above all other sports extravaganzas, and one way to so brand it was with something as exotic as those Roman numerals—which weren’t in fact adopted until Super Bowl V (5).

It happens that the generally indecipherable use of a system at least 700 years old has run into translation issues along the way. In 2016—MMXVI, on your Roman calendar—the NFL chose to avoid presenting a “Super Bowl L.” There reportedly were 73 versions of an “L” logo to be attached to that game, until someone among the league tub-thumpers realized that an “L” in football was shorthand for “loss.” So that game was presented as “Super Bowl 50.” Pronounced “fifty.”

Close attention to the just-concluded title game revealed that English-speaking commentators repeatedly referred to it clearly as “Super Bowl 59.” As opposed to the grandiose NFL graphics relentlessly labelling it “Super Bowl LIX.” (Pronounced, one would assume, as “El-Eye-Ex”? Or “Licks”?)

In the end, the event remains America’s most popular form of escapist entertainment, the Great American Spectacle. It is the Great American Conversation Piece. The Great American Timeout (maybe even more so now, in the midst of political division).

The Super Bowl’s exalted position in our national culture can be explained, at least partially, by the phenomenon that hot air rises; this Great American Sideshow is inflated. Its scale is exaggerated; the Great American Fish Story.

And really not Roman at all.

It’s only geography

Leave a reply

Does it say anything about a person’s character or beliefs if that person happens to hail from the same home state as the individual who ascends to the Oval Office? People love to generalize about regions and ethnicities, but if a President comes from the same neck of the woods as you do, does that somehow imply anything about you?

In 1977, the humorist Roy Blount Jr. wrote an amusing book whose premise, essentially, suggested that fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter’s Presidential victory could provide Blount a sense of vindication, an antidote to the cliché of Deep South racism and Confederacy.

“I come from people who have been blithely called rednecks, Crackers, white trash, Snopeses, and peckerwoods, people who have been put down from without and within,” Blount wrote in “Crackers.”

“You may not realize,” he wrote, “what a rousing moment it was for me, ethnically, when Daddy King stood up there in Madison Square Garden in 1976 at the behest of a by-God-country white Southerner and led all the states in singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ A Southern Baptist simple-talking peanut-warehousing grit-eating ‘Eyetalian’-saying Cracker had gotten the strongest and most nearly leftward party to nominate him for President. Of the United States…”

The book is typical Blount, occasionally absurd, with plenty of puns, silly country song lyrics and signature Blount wisecracks. There’s a whole chapter on Jimmy’s smile, another on “Being From Georgia” and “Trash No More,” with repeated, sly rejections of the rest of the nation’s perception of Blount’s people based on their accents and occupations. Comedic stuff that really is serious.

So now, applying this non-relationship in reverse, we have this fellow from New York assuming (and relishing) power over the less advantaged. A by-golly born-to-money, the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me, anti-intellectual, morally suspect nefarious prevaricator who wants everybody off his lawn. Is this (borderline) human being a New York prototype? Could his behavior, in any way, be considered standard in the nation’s largest and widest-known city?

I am, sort of, a New Yorker. Not a native, but a resident of The Big Town—and mostly its suburban environs—for more than a half century. And I will not countenance any hint that there is a Trump gene dominant in the local populace.

This hardly dismisses conventional depictions of New Yorkers. Pushy, blunt, impatient. New York has its imperfections—New Yorkers themselves are quick to confirm that—but, come on. New York is the very realization of diversity, equity and inclusion. You can’t walk a block without bumping into someone completely unlike yourself—and, more often than not, not the least bit contrary.

New Yorkers—surrounded by dozens of immigrant sub-communities, coming face-to-face with all kinds of people from all kinds of places on a daily basis—generally are open-minded, live-and-let-live citizens. Busy, yes; and quite demanding. You got a problem with that?

I’m in the camp of former New York Times superstar journalist George Vecsey, who grew up blocks from the family of one Donald J. Trump in the New York borough of Queens and, a couple of years ago, posted an essay on his website headlined “Please Don’t Blame Queens for Trump.”

Vecsey cited the vast ethnic and professional variety of his neighbors and friends while reminding that, “in the big picture, nobody is typical of Queens”—a truism, really, for any city or state. Or country. He marvelled that “somehow the lumpen masses of Queens County…are still being connected with the disturbed, amoral thug who has terrorized the U.S. and the world since 2016.”

That self-styled emperor doesn’t want to exist among the hoi polloi, wherever he finds himself. He wants to exist in an exclusive golf club, a gated community, a gilded mansion. And give orders.

Of the Presidents during my lifetime, who were closely identified with the home states of my youth—California and Texas—none especially embodied the presumed lifestyle of his state’s citizens—and certainly not mine. George W. Bush, born in Connecticut but raised in the Texas, did embrace the he-man cowboy thing, and I once bought one of those jokey Republic of Texas passports sold at the Dallas airport that reinforced such an archetype. Two bits of personal data on that (worthless) document already were filled in. Height: 6-foot-2. Sex: Yes.

Lyndon Johnson was in most ways very Texan but, like Carter, his stance on civil rights put him at odds with many white Southerners. The other Texas President, George H.W. Bush, always came across as a New England elite—hardly a Texas trait—and neither of California’s Presidents brought to mind a beach boy or hippie model (Nixon!?!?). Though Reagan was, well, an actor who demonstrated an ability to remember his lines.

What’s the validity, though, of painting folks with the same brush of as their home-grown President, or vice versa? “The thing is,” Blount wrote in “Crackers” of his fellow Georgians, “we’re very strong in the field of condescension-avoidance when we’ve got a Georgia President, because a Georgian hasn’t got any real business condescending to anybody.”

News flash!

Leave a reply

For a while now—OK, for years—the bimonthly magazine AARP has been arriving in my mailbox. But surely it was meant for my father. (I’m a Junior, after all; same name.) And, since opening another person’s mail is a federal crime, that periodical—it targets old people, no?—went right into the circular file. Never looked inside.

Until just now (and I’ll get to that).

Humorist Bill Geist, I read somewhere, described his original post-marked greeting from AARP—at 50, everyone becomes eligible for membership—as receiving the most feared piece of mail that a person can get since the end of the Vietnam War draft and the arrest of the Unabomber. (Ask your grandmother.)

Not that there aren’t plenty of other hints when one is inexorably approaching geezerhood. Being addressed as “sir.” Having to ask one’s wife to identify those people winning movie and music awards on television. Checking the calendar for this month’s doctor’s appointments (plural).

It’s just that hearing from AARP seems an announcement that you’ve really turned the corner. You’re a fossil. A museum piece. Possibly in need of a phone call from the governor.

To look on the bright side, though, I have now lived a couple of years longer than both Albert Einstein and John Updike did; 11 years longer than George Washington; 17 more than Hemingway and 36 more than Elvis. If I hang on, I could pass Mahatma Gandhi later this year (not that I have a vote on that). With life expectancy in the United States having crept above 78, I’m beginning to play with house money.

Well, then. Let’s have a look at that magazine.

The cover story for the December/January issue is on actress Michelle Yeoh. (Have to admit the name didn’t ring a bell, though my wife provided an ID on Yeoh and her key roles.) There is a related piece on “Movies for Grownups,” and that too was informative because the films cited were mostly news to me. I have heard about one of the pics noted, about Bob Dylan—”A Complete Unknown.” It’s on my to-do list.

And I lately have become aware of movies and books featuring what might be defined as “elderly” protagonists, including the entertaining Netflix series, “A Man on the Inside,” with Ted Danson playing a retired professor hired by a private investigator to go under cover in a San Francisco retirement home.

Coming soon to Netflix is a show based on British author Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club,” about a group of pensioners who set about solving a case at their luxurious retirement village. That’s the first of three Murder Club books and, in a rare instance of Keeping Up, I’ve read all three. (Again, tipped by my wife.)

The latest AARP mag, by the way, quotes a D.C. neurologist’s recommendation for –ahem, “mature” folks—to read a novel, because he says fiction “is a challenge to your working memory,” requiring one to follow a plot and keep track of characters. Nonfiction, he said, isn’t so helpful, allowing the reader to skip around and skim.

Some more of my AARP current-issue discoveries: There is a fun interview of Danny DeVito; health tips on keeping limber in icy weather; money-saver ideas that financial ignoramuses like me could use (if I could pay attention to the subject for the first time in my life); an article on aging survivors of mass shootings; suggested travel destinations “for older Americans;” and the predictable ads—for hearing aids, cruises, life insurance. And one for a “safe walk-in tub.” (There’s a new trick for an old dog.)

All in all, it’s a publication I shouldn’t have been ignoring all this time. As someone who made a living as a journalist, I appreciate AARP’s tailored reporting and fact-checking, the bits of revelatory insight.

Also, its endurance: It’s 67 years old.