I did not know Kaleb Horton and, though I read and admired his work at times, his was not a name that I remembered well enough to seek out or follow around over the web enough to keep up with. Nevertheless, I find myself significantly saddened by his unexpected passing as I’ve been reading through various tributes from writers whose names I do remember well enough to seek out and follow around the web. In particular, this quote which Luke O’Neil shared in his tribute has me wishing I’d have paid closer attention before now.

If we have any imperative, it’s to keep life going, to stop it from being destroyed. Something turns to nothing constantly. Something came from nothing only once.

Absolutely loved this interview with Leo Mazzone in The Atlantic today.

An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So by Michael Powell

No one knows, objectively, what’s best for the health and longevity of baseball pitchers, and there’s certainly something to be said for all the new fangled metrics we have to measure pitch effectiveness like spin rate and movement, etc. But, as a fan, I so miss the days of the dominant starting pitchers who could go 7, 8, 9 innings at a time and put a whole team on their back in some of the most important games¹. Mazzone is, from a coaching perspective, one of the best representatives of the 1990s iteration of that era of dominant starting pitching. At the time, I hated his Braves teams–but even then I couldn’t help but respect the impressive rotation and pitching staff that they’d put together. Mazzone no doubt had a big hand in that. And he sure can provide a good quote.

Here’s one of the better stories from the piece, featuring the great John Smoltz.

In 1987, the Braves traded a fine but aging starting pitcher, Doyle Alexander, for John Smoltz, who came from the Detroit Tigers’ Minor League system. People chattered that the Braves had been fleeced. Take the kid out back to a pitching mound, then–General Manager Bobby Cox told Mazzone, and tell me what we’ve got. Scouting reports suggested that the 20-year-old Smoltz had a lively but erratic fastball. Mazzone and the kid walked to a back lot in the Braves training complex. “I told Smoltzy to just throw natural,” Mazzone recalled. On the fourth or fifth pitch, Smoltz shook his head and muttered,: “This ain’t right.” “What ain’t right?” Mazzone asked. “Well, my left leg has to go here, and my right leg has to go there,” Smoltz said. “When I was in Detroit—” Mazzone cut him off. “You’re not in fucking Detroit. Throw natural.” Smoltz—who has recalled their conversation similarly—calmed down and tossed one fastball after another across the plate, beautiful as could be. From there, Mazzone worked on developing Smoltz’s off-speed pitches. A year later, Smoltz reached the majors at age 21. A year after that, he pitched more than 200 Major League innings. “I said to myself, Damn, this was too easy,” Mazzone recalled.

The whole thing was a really fun read and, if you’re a baseball fan who’s nostalgic for those starting pitchers of yore, I encourage you to check it out.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything with any of my various blogs. I got super busy with work and, since a lot of that busy-ness deals with writing words and thinking about topics, the blogs tend to suffer when it picks up like that. But since things have slowed back down a bit, I’ve still had a hard time getting back into the habit (not that it was every anything approaching _regular_​). Part of that, I think, is the initial hurdle of thinking of something worth writing about. Then I read this post​ from Thomas Rigby today and figured it was as good a time as any to take a shot at a public day note. I’ve kept day notes in Obisidian (or before that, Notion/Roam/BuJo, etc.) for things I’m working on but haven’t ever tired combining them with the more personal “whats-going-on-in-your-life” kinds of notes. I don’t know why. So, with that preamble, here are some notes from today.

​👌 3 Good Things

1. On the way home from school pickup, my daughter was asking for a song but didn’t really know any of the words or the melody or really anything about it other than the singer’s voice being “so smoothing”¹. We tried the whole way home but didn’t get anywhere. I love this game and get a little obsessed with trying to figure it out, so I kept thinking about it while we prepared dinner. I eventually got it. Mel McDaniel’s “Louisiana Saturday Night​.” What a trip.

2. ​When I arrived to pick up my son from his after school program at the community center, he was in the middle of coloring an Adventure Time coloring page and he was so excited about it that he talked about all of the characters the whole way home (sometimes over his sister’s descriptions of the song with the smoothing vocie). He has this way of getting so excited about something–could be a picture he’s drawing or coloring, or a Lego set he’s working on, or an obstacle course he’s built, or whatever–that he strings words together like he’s sprinting downhill… It’s pretty great.

3. Yesterday, I bought a set of hair clippers for about $30 and decided to start cutting my own hair again. As a kid I almost always just let mom or dad or a friend’s dad cut it with clippers, then I started doing it myself as a young adult while in college, and had gotten away from it for the most part (with a short pandemic-related exception), but I’ve always liked the look of it and hated going to the barber even more. So, I’ve embraced it again. I cut it yesterday and did a pretty nice job. If I stick with it, the one-time cost of that pair of clippers is about the same as one haircut but I can use them again and again for years.

⭐️ Bonus Good Thing

4. There’s been a coolness to the air throughout the day that feels amazing. ​Now that the sun’s down it feels almost like fall is rolling in. I’m sure it’s short-lived, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

Of the many Willie Mays tributes I read through today I, unsurprisingly, thought Ray Ratto’s at Defector was the best. 

Willie Mays, who died Tuesday at the richly merited old age of 93, was baseball itself, more than anyone else ever connected with the game. Not just the best player, which he was. Not just the most joyful great player, which he also was. Not only the most extravagantly gifted of all the five-tool players that played during the richest era in the game’s history, although he absolutely was that as well. He was baseball, period, full stop. 

Born in 1984, I never had the pleasure of watching Willie Mays play. As a lifelong, die-hard fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, if given the opportunity to watch any player from the past I would choose Roberto Clemente. But there’s no doubt that Willie Mays would be the undisputed top choice among players who did not play for the Pirates. 

Here’s Ratto again. 

Mays was there at the moment when talent replaced race as the sport’s prime directive, when even the most recalcitrant segregationist owners finally found the time and financial inclination to teach their scouts color blindness; when the sport finally became what it could be, Willie Mays was something very like the living fulfillment of that promise.

Had a great time celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Blue Plum festival last night. Great food and music, lots of fun stuff for the kids, cool stuff from local artisans, and friendly people.

The festival has changed quite a bit over the years since I first moved here more than 20 years ago, but it seems to have regained a lot of its old momentum since Covid.

I’m consistently reminded of how grateful I am to love the place we live.

After getting hooked on @adam ’s St. Vincent playlist and the rest of their “Finest Hour” series in which they “compile [their] favorite of an artist’s songs into a playlist not a minute longer than 1 hour in duration¹,” I decided to take the format for a spin myself, starting with Oasis.

Gtting this playlist under an hour was an excruciating task. I had to cut a dozen or more songs that I consider among my favorite by any artist. Initially, I had almost four hours. But I’m proud of what I ended up with. I love having the constraint of an hour… takes me back to the days of recording cassettes or burning CDs and being by their capacity.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.

–Igor Stravinsky

This is now my fifth post of WeblogPoMo across three different sites. Maybe I’ll try for four by the end–I’ve heard great things about Pika. There are things I like about each of the trio of micro.blog, weblog.lol, and scribbles.page. I guess it’s nice to have options. Maybe through sheer volume I’ll have some semblance of a plan or path by the end of the month.

As a kid whose most formative years fell in the early 90s, I missed some of the Star Wars craze, and might have missed it altogether if not for my friend Geoff. He had a couple older brothers who I think had introduced him pretty early on and he was obsessed. I remember watching the original trilogy on VHS at Geoff’s house many times (Star Wars and Sega and Space Hog), and I know for sure that was my initial introduction. At the time–I think I was maybe 8?– Return of the Jedi was my favorite.

The “Special Edition” theatrical releases came out while I was in junior high and by then Empire was my favorite (of course). I remember going to the theater with Geoff and several other friends to catch these and it really took the experience to another level to be able to watch on the big screen. I wasn’t attached enough to the originals to take offense to any of the changes, but I empathized anyway.

The prequel trilogy debuted around the time I started high school and I also remember going to see all of them in the theater with groups of friends. I did not care for them, but I had one friend who really loved them.

We had this super cool theater in the town where I grew up that was kind of a dump–a relic of another time. One screen. Old, saggy seats. Bad concessions. But it was in our town. And it got new movies. And a bunch of us could meet up there and watch something and then use the pay phone on the corner to call for a ride. It was amazing.

I never got into any of the animated series, and kind of let Star Wars as an entity fade from my mind in the years after the prequels, but I was, somewhat surprisingly, super excited about the announcement of the new sequel trilogy and have really liked several of the films and tv series. Anyway, all of this is intended to lead in to my (a relatively casual fan who needs to do a lot of catching up on stuff) completely non-definitive ranking of my top ten favorite Star Wars properties, in terms of how much I like them on this May the Fourth of 2024.

1. Andor, s1
2. Empire
3. Rogue One
4. TLJ
5. A New Hope
6. The Force Awakens
7. RotJ
8. Mandalorian, s1
9. Mandalorian, s2
10. Solo

I realized recently (or, maybe just remembered) that learning is one of my favorite things in the world. This week, it came up in a work context wherein I volunteered to cross train with another department despite being completely buried with my own work at the moment and having already committed to other similar opportunities that haven’t even begun. I’m fortunate enough to work in a role and for a company that values learning and puts enough priority behind it that we can actually take advantage and build some new knowledge within our company and field. It’s the most excited I’ve been for a new project in quite a while.

A shocking look at the inner workings at Boeing from Maureen Tkacic at The American Prospect.

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor.

What will it take for corporations like this to start putting something–anything! safety! literal lives!–ahead of stock price?