farlane.blog

Lars Jensen is one of my favorite photographers. He should be one of yours too.

Except its mongers…

I believe this photo, Every Young Man’s Dream by Ryan Southen, is my favorite baseball photo, ever. And I have seen a lot of baseball photos, probably more than most of you. I say this not to brag, but as fact. My father, Allan L. McFarlane loved the game of baseball in a way that brought him and and out of close dancing with the game.

His dad caught for GM’s semipro team and he was a good enough pitcher to get a scholarship … then blew his arm out. Tommy John surgery had not yet been invented. He attended hundreds of games and brought me to many as well. I saw one of Ron Leflore’s first home games and can still hear my dad say after LeFlore beat out a hard infield grounder “You’ll never see a man run that fast on a baseball field again because I never did until today.” He had a sports TV show and I met folks like Al Kaline and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych as his rookie season and brief legend was born. He schemed with Bill Veeck to have a White Sox catcher catch a ball thrown from the Sears Tower (they had to give it up when informed the ball would have killed the catcher). He was the GM of the Wausau Timbers, a Class A ball club in Wisconsin that somehow had 12 future major leaguers including Harold Reynolds for one magical season.

Beyond all that, he taught me to play the game and love the game. I was a cheap date as a kid. A tennis ball, my glove, the barn wall and my imagination were about all I required to stay amused - enraptured with the myth of the greatest game.

I tell you this so you might know how happy I am that these magical Detroit Tigers are starting the World Series tonight. And also how sad I am that my dad can’t be here to watch just one more Series.

This is pretty darn good and since only 2,000,000 people have seen it, there’s a chance you haven’t. Seems to me that productions like this will be what drives the success of GooTube.

There were (at time of posting) 4 Episodes.

Sigh. I remember when I used to be funny. Now it’s nothing but articles like this one where Lou Dobbs tries to rally the middle class to charge up Porkchop Hill and take the US back from the forces of the Kaiser (played artfully by Dick Cheney with a huge supporting cast from both sides of the aisle. This isn’t Republican v. Democrat, it’s special interests v. the disinterested. Dobbs’ quite excellent piece talks about how our elected officials are swamped in an army of lobbyists (just 63 in DC in 1968, now over 34,000 spending over $2 billion per year), how politicians love to focus on distracting wedge issues like gay marriage, the pledge of allegiance, school prayer, judicial appointments, gun control, stem cell research and welfare reform, and how disengaged our electorate has become. He concludes:

Without that strong, clear and vibrant voice, all the major decisions about America and our future will be made by the elites of government, big business and the dominant special interests. Those elites treasure your silence, as it enables them to claim America’s future for their own.

PHOTO CREDIT: Unknown 6th grader. Person who posted this and other flags by kids said…

“The split red and blue on the flag shows how America is split by the current government. The faces represent other nations and the headphones represent America’s closed mindedness to other nations.”
–Student artist’s own words.

This art was exhibited on a bulletin board of a gifted and talented magnet shool in the US. I won’t name the school for fear that it might alert federal agents to investigate and intimidate the teacher or the school for being “anti-american”.

Dammitall. I am sick of this. Can we please have our country back?

When Garrison Keillor is pissed, you know things are bad. He has a very brief article saying that with our suspension of habeus corpus, we take a step toward totalitarianism. You really should read it but if you’re too busy,

It’s good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this (vote by 65 senators) would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 — Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright — and you won’t find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. (more)

Regarding this photo, KB8WFH, a shortwave operator says Barry Goldwater, former senator and presidential candidate was a ham. I have a card from his memorial radio station.  The “QSL” cards are post cards that Ham Radio operators send each other to confirm contacts with each other.   Read more by visiting him.

Rolling Stone has an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr titled Will the Next Election be Hacked?  It also makes a pretty compelling case that our last election was hacked.

Much of this hinges on Diebold employee Chris Hood who says (in part) “We ran the election. We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it.”

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a “patch,” a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. “We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,” Hood says. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.”

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox’s agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. “It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state,” Hood told me. “We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level.

At some point, this crap has to stop. I for one have had more than enough of black-ops style antics in American politics. I call for a grand jury investigation because this is a hell of a lot more serious than a president diddling an intern.

I found this photo called 1915 by Mike Welfl in a search and it was so cool that I don’t even care if it has nothing to do with the subject.