Monday Marty Mini-rants

If someone tries to frame you into a Catch-22, do what's right and don't worry about them. No one has the right to put you in an impossible situation. It's the very heart of gaslighting.

If you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, don't. No point working towards damnation.

A stitch in time saves nine. Yeah, I never got that one either.

Sometimes the best thing to do is walk away. You can't let another person's bad attitude affect you.

Lincoln was right: never argue with a fool. People might not be able to tell you apart. 

See what a sleepless night can lead you?

MiLB

The Ohio Cosgriffs and I went to the Columbus Clippers game last night. The Clippers play in the highest baseball minor league, the Triple-A level. It's pretty good ball.

Huntington Park is their home field. It's cozy; seats around 10,000 I'll hazard to guess. It's a nice stadium, pretty much downtown in Ohio's capital.

Baseball brings out the kid in you. Just setting foot in a new arena brings back all those memories of going to games with me Pops and me family. Looking over the old baseball uniforms and equipment on display; the smell of the food; the deep, lush green grass, the bright white bases against the well raked brown soil on the diamond; there's not much better places on Earth than a ballpark. 

I think I'll go again sometime.

82 years

D-Day: June 6, 1944. More than eighty years ago today began the largest amphibious landing of an armed force in world history. As Allied troops hit the beaches at Normandy in the wee hours of the morning, at points code named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, the liberation of Europe was begun. The high point of the Greatest Generation was underway.

The Greatest Generation stands now at its wane. Its members are all in their 90s now. The celebrations of their accomplishments are becoming fewer, smaller, and less intense. Even with improvements in medicine and diet, only a mere handful will still be around in a decade. Most of their number are gone already.

It is no small compliment to call them the greatest. Has there been any other challenge successfully met by anyone else in any other time? True, we are dealing in immeasurables when we say such things. Yet it's still pretty clear that nothing anywhere close to the magnitude of World War II has occurred in all of human history. Might a greater threat and a greater harm rise? Yes, of course. Indeed, I would expect it at some point. But to date, this is it.

What can we learn from these people? We can learn perseverance, we can learn faith; we can learn to believe that, when a serious threat to home and hearth nears, humanity can rise to meet and defeat it. We can learn the humility which so many of the Greatest have displayed when speaking of their efforts in later years. We can learn that all of history teaches us to respect and remember what those who have gone before us have done for us. We can remember that our lives are here today only because of what they did with their lives, and against terrible odds under unspeakable conditions.

We can learn to respect heroism. We can learn to revere the heroes.

Never forget.

Own It

I recently read an article which claimed that the two sports with the oldest average fan base are baseball and golf. The average baseball fan is 58; for golf, it's 62.

What are two sports I watch far and away more than any others? Baseball and golf.

Old age. I am owning it.

Just Trying for a Picture

As I was enjoying my daily constitutional this morning, I reflected on how pretty nature can be even in the big city. The wispy red clouds which greeted me as I left my house were sublime; a thin mist held sway just above the grounds of nearby Wayne State University. A few minutes later I noticed the morning Sun shining straight down Warren Avenue, wonderfully illuminating even the asphalt pavement in a yellow glow. I decided to try to get a picture of that.

Taking out my phone, I tapped on the camera icon. I sought the best angle for the shot without the bright Sun obliterating the scene. Too much Sun and you wouldn't see anything; it would overpower the lens. Once or twice I tried but things weren't quite right. A third attempt seemed to offer the best picture. 

As I began to take it, other sweet morning sounds came to my ears. There was the blaring of a bugle which may have been a car horn; there was an earnest voice which offered, "Hey old man! Get out of the street you're gonna get killed!"

So maybe morning rush hour traffic isn't the right time to catch nature's beauty. At least not in the middle of Warren in the city of Detroit.

Perchance to Answer

Me Grandpa Joe had a welder rental business which me Pops by and large ran. Dad frequently spoke about two calls. One he refused on principle, the other he nearly refused on a different principle, but took. 

One large company would only call Joe Cosgriff Welding Machine Rentals on weekends, and I mean late on weekends. They'd call at, oh, 11 PM on a Saturday night, all in a dither over some presumed emergency. Joe would grumble, but dutifully take the order and fill it, delivering whatever in the wee hours of a Sunday.

He happened to be out of town one weekend. That company called, and me Pops answered. He refused the rental. "You call somebody else during regular hours but us at off hours. We're not doing business that way," Dad blithely explained to the company rep.

Pops worried a bit what Joe would think, but grandfather sided with his son. Say what you want about Joe, and much can and has been said, when he delegated authority to Pops he never questioned what Dad did. Joe figured, "I told him to run it, so I gotta let him run it."

Another time we were in a recession, and business was bad. That wouldn't stop Joe from taking his trips, so he decided one day to go off on an adventure. Dad, of course, took the reins of the Shop.

He took a call from a very large company (you would recognize it but I won't tell you, just for safety's sake, discretion being the better part of valor) who were notorious for being slow to pay. Me Pops did not like dealing with them. Yet they wanted ten machines asap and there wasn't much other work. Dad opted to take the chance and fill the order, which ballooned into almost every one of the welders Joe owned at the time. At the height of the job, they had 210 units rented.

And, they paid promptly. "I'm glad I took that call!" Dad would say in telling the story. I know Joe did not question his decision on that one.

Poison Girls

I will venture out and say that we have all occasionally heard song lyrics wrong. At times it's simply an honest mistake of the ear. Me brother Phil for example heard the lyric at the start of The Beatles' track Savoy Truffle, which is 'Cream Tangerine, and Montelemar (a French sweet BTW) as, 'Cream Tangerine, go tell your mom'. You get the point.

One of the funniest of such instances came from a friend of mine, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a  name, over the Three Dog Night hit Joy to the World. You know, the song which famously begins, Jeremiah was a bullfrog! The chorus starts, Joy to the world, all the boys and girls. Yet Cloyce heard it as, 'Joy to the world, all the poison girls'.

So there's my gift to you today. An earworm with the wrong words. You're welcome.