I grew up listening to Ernie call games—sometimes in bed, having smuggled a portable radio between the sheets; sometimes with my grandfather, on summer nights at a house in northern Michigan that had no television. Harwell’s distinctive voice—nasally, with the hint of a southern twang—was unforgettable. The sound of my mother’s voice will stay with me always; so will Harwell’s. Like all great radio men, he had a few special phrases. Home runs were “looong gone!” A batter who took a called third strike “stood there like a house by the side of the road.”
The habit that amazed me in my early years occurred after foul balls at Tiger Stadium. A ball would fly into the stands and Harwell would announce that a lucky fan from Owosso or Wyandotte or wherever was going to take it home. For years it puzzled me: How does he know that?
Those are my summer memories, too. And I wondered the same thing. I hate to say that he was making it up, but I’d like to see another explanation. All I know is that I’d like to think that he did know it. Who did it hurt?
I’ve discussed this before, but here are some thoughts on one of the dumbest songs ever written (Give Peace A Chance is a runner up). It never previously occurred to me, though that Lennon might have actually been mocking his own fans with it. I suppose it’s possible.
War has probably advanced technology more than any other human endeavor, except when it comes to communications technology. There the driver has always been porn.
The fact that fundamentalist Islam isn’t that old should make it a lot easier to knock it out of the culture, but we’re too politically correct to even talk about how to do so. Unfortunately, though, it is older now than Nazism was in 1945.
Oddball thoughts from Lileks. Yes, I’d never thought about it before, but he’s right — unless Samaritans are truly notoriously bad people, “good Samaritans” is sort of like “compassionate conservatives.”