“North Carolina Gun Group Raffles Off AR-15 With Portrait Of Hillary Clinton“
What could go wrong?
Read about it here.
Month: September 2016
You CAN Take It With You
Yogurt and the Jihadi Threat
Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya bought a closed Kraft plant in New Berlin, New York. Chobani hired some of the ex-Kraft employees and launched his “Chobani” – derived from the Turkish word for “shepherd” – brand of yogurt in 2007. This Greek yogurt brand grew to be the largest-seller in the U.S. Near the end of 2012 Chobani opened a 300-employee plant in bucolic Twin Falls, Idaho. As we know, no good deed goes unpunished.
Still Fighting Change
A couple decades ago I played third base on a fast-pitch softball team. In fast pitch there is a lot of bunting and the third baseman has to play in shallow, close to the batter. I was never mistaken for an all-star, but I still have all my teeth, so I consider myself a success at that position.
One season, we had on our club a recent college graduate, who was a pitcher on her college softball team. The “her’ became the problem. There was controversy and outrage and meetings about whether she should be allowed to play. Keep in in mind this was a purportedly adult league. As we were in the Portland City League and played on Portland city-park fields, she played. And guess what happened: nothing. The league survived and the sports world kept going as usual.
Well into the twenty-first century, you would think this is not an issue. You would be wrong. Soccer teams in Phoenix are trying to maintain the purity of the sport.
From Juanita Jean’s.
Postscript:
The Sonoma Stompers minor-league baseball team made news 
this summer with a woman on the pitcher’s mound. Earlier this year, the Stompers were the first team with an openly-gay player on the field.
Shouting Darkness into Darkness
From the Oxford American magazine:
There is a remarkable story tucked halfway through Bessie, Chris Albertson’s biography of the blues singer Bessie Smith, in which Smith approaches a circle of robed North Carolina Klansmen, places one hand on her hip, and begins shaking the other in the air. She hollers obscenities at the men—who were disassembling the tent her touring company had erected earlier that night, in a particularly childish bit of public dissension—until “they finally turned and disappeared quietly into the darkness.”
Read about Bessie Smith.
Beer and Bourbon and Rye and Millennials
My father was a Jack Daniel’s man. Not that he drank a lot of it, at least not when I was around. He mixed it with 7-Up and once in a while would let me have a sip. (He also sprinkled salt into his infrequent Miller High-Life beer, poured into a tall pilsner glass. But we won’t dwell on that.)