I posted this a few months ago to my other blog, which is mostly about having cancer. I thought it belongs here as well. Body Chemistry A few weeks ago I started chemotherapy again for the second time, the first being in 2015 when I underwent twelve rounds to treat pancreatic cancer. It went about as I expected. During the 48 hours of infusions and the following two days, I felt heavily drugged and crushingly fatigued, and my stomach churned with nausea and diarrhea. I spent most of five days in bed. Since the fifth day I have gradually gotten better, though my energy level is still low and I continue to have stomach discomfort. I feel pretty good now, nine days since the infusions ended, so I was recovered enough to do it all again the following Monday. But chemotherapy certainly hasn’t gotten any easier this second time around. I’ve been thinking a lot about the chemicals in our bodies this week, and coincidentally I read a couple of interesting articles that furt...
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How To Fix Baseball Baseball has never been more popular, if you measure it by gross revenues. Local TV revenues are soaring, and teams are flush with cash. Nevertheless, there are trouble signs on the horizon. Games are interminably long, there are too many home runs and strike outs, and not enough base-running. Relief pitchers are beginning to dominate the game. Fewer young people are watching, the game is boring in the age of exploding entertainment options. So, I have a few modest proposals for how to fix baseball. I doubt the powers that be would consider many of them, but they should! Here they are: Move the fences back. There are too many home runs and not enough doubles and triples. Do it now where possible, and create bigger parks over time. Go to electronic pitch calling behind the plate. The modern pitch tracking technology is very accurate. I’ll bet the umps miss at least 15% of ball/strike calls. The systems would not replace the umpi...
This is my dog. His name is Dusty. He is a 4 year old Wheaten Terrier. He is adorable, right? No, he isn't. I don't really know how to make sense of Dusty, so I am going to just describe him for you. He likes nothing better than to put his head in your lap and be scratched around his ears. If a perfectly nice man comes to the door he will try to bite his leg off. If I take him for a walk with his training collar on, the kind that fits over his snout, he will walk placidly beside me and mimic my stride. If I walk him with his regular collar he will try to yank my arm from its socket. If he sees we are going for a walk, he will run laps around the house, jump in the air and spin a 360, and bark excitedly. But if he sees the training collar he will cower under the table and whimper, ignore my pleas, and refuse offers of filet mignon. He can poop 5 times on a single walk. He will not allow an electric trimmer to get within 10 yards of him. We can trim him with sci...
Just Say No So I find that don’t watch much pro football any more. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since pro football is the King of All American Sports, and I am one of the Baby Boomer generation that crowned it. But apparently lots of loyal subjects are like me, because the TV ratings are plummeting and the end of their reign is nigh. There are lots of reasons for this, and I was questioning enough to list a few to see why you other peasants aren’t watching as much either. Is it because the owners are the scum of the earth ? Probably not all of them are, but our local owner certainly is. You can read about him here, this article is a classic: https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13039846/the-cranky-redskins-fans-guide-to-dan-snyder . But he’s only one of the 32 greedy grubbers who hold their communities for ransom so they can build new stadiums full of luxury boxes; or lock their players out so they can grab over half of the gross revenues and share al...
The New Blog One of my New Year’s resolutions was to start a blog and actually post regular pieces. The idea was to write a little bit every day. Now that the year has started its time to give up on that fantasy, but I think it might be realistic for me to try to post something once a week. I’ll probably write mostly about sports and politics since those are my primary interests, one in a good way and the other with dumbfounded morbid fascination. (Yes, isn’t the Patriots’ domination sad, like watching a train wreck?) Anyway, the goals of the blog are to be frequently entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, so those are topics with plenty of grist for the mill. Here are a few thoughts and articles that piqued my interest this week. This article about how the Buffalo Bills’ coach built team camaraderie was inspiring and wise: https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/12/01/buffalo-bills-sean-mcdermott-team-building-through-storytelling . It’s about sports, but it’s really more...