Too many Easter baskets

By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:

We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.

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Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone uncrowned for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Each one of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Penn State – has lost in the championship game at least once since MSU’s victory.

UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.

There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)

(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)

I did predict that Michigan would reach the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”

Eclipses

Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.

I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.

My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.

And now, the business on everyone’s mind: Monday’s eclipse.

Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.

As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.

Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.

I read this, yesterday, in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):

The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.

Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.

My bracket, pt. 2; Beast; Orwell; the clink

Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.

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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”

Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.

Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.

Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.

My bracket; Mitfords, pt. 7

Well, obviously, I picked: (1) UConn, to repeat (one of every three bracket-fillers has done so); (2) Creighton – UConn’s conference rivals – to reach the final; (3) Nebraska, because wouldn’t it be silly if two teams from that state reached the Final Four; and (4) New Mexico, so that the UConn Huskies might compete against other “canines” (it was a toss-up between New Mexico and Nevada).

When these four pieces have fallen into place, the windfall will be mine.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Daniel tipped himself headfirst off the bed, but I caught him just in time. I had been absorbed in Mitford novel no. 6, Love in a Cold Climate; when I lurched after Daniel the volume flew out of my hands and across the room, landing hard.

“My book!” I cried out.

“See, your father loves you dearly,” Karin told Daniel, “he dropped his book to save you.”

I rushed to my book; the landing had cracked its spine. But not fatally.

More marriage-woes in Mitfordania. Jane Austen has her detractors, notably Mark Twain; I think she’s fine to read, but not by herself (not even within her narrow field). N. Mitford is a necessary corrective.

Warning: oblique spoiler (but no worse than on dust-jackets).

Think of LCC as if the respectable Jane Bennet, not Lydia, were to have run off with Wickham – not Austen’s dashing Wickham but a dowdier one, more like Mr. Collins, with pedophilic urges.

The sports

We’re all still sick, but we feel much better – except for Karin, who feels poorly again. She did go to the office today.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I picked these teams to reach the Final Four:

Indiana, because of my loyalty to the state. ELIMINATED!

Purdue, also because of my loyalty to the state (not to former University President and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels). ELIMINATED!

Kansas, because I used to live near the Kansas-Missouri border. ELIMINATED!

Mizzou. Ditto. ELIMINATED! Who’d’ve thought Mizzou would finish second to Princeton in the Battle of the Tigers.

Now I’m cheering for Kansas State. It’s a respectable prairie team. I saw Kansas State beat Kentucky in the Battle of the Wildcats. I’d like the Big 12 Conference to secure its third straight title, or at least its fourth straight title game appearance.

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The schedule has been set for the quarterfinals, semifinals, and final of the UEFA Champions League:

In the top half of the bracket, Chelsea will play against Real Madrid, and the winning club will face either Manchester City or Bayern Munich.

On paper, the bottom half is much easier: Napoli will play against Milan, and Benfica will play against Inter.

I’m pleased that Napoli is likely to scale greater heights than ever before in this tournament. I’ve seen Napoli play in several games. The players are smart, they work hard for each other, and, skill-wise, they range from excellent to breathtaking. Look out, especially, for the Cameroonian, the Georgian, the Nigerian, and the Pole.

The ghost of Maradona is smiling down …

The sullied and the pure

A good article by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! :

“NCAA in a Nutshell: Bill Self, Kansas Win National Title with Infractions Case Still Pending.”

Good game, too. The 16-point comeback was breathtaking.

I’ve always liked the Jayhawks. They’re probably my favorite cheaters.

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Now, a dose of anti-cynicism. These videos are by the hero who unclogs drains.

In this episode, he travels north through New Hampshire, unblocking culverts as the snow melts.

And in this 44-minute video, he climbs into a culvert to clear away a beaver dam.

He is an amazing narrator. His sentences are punchy and staccato. He says his consonants crisply. He wastes no words.

In the first video, he peers out over campers on a frozen lake and describes the peril of driving on it as the weather warms. You can feel the ice melt beneath you.

In the second video, he is silent for long stretches while he clears out debris. The rhythm is lovely. It’s more like Terrence Malick than like Stanley Kubrick.

He concludes the video with scenes of bear tracks and chipmunks.

Same old, same old

I don’t care about college basketball anymore, but I do still enjoy the collision of mascots, cultures, and uniform colors in the NCAA Tournament. And so I liked this Yahoo! article from March 22:

“The 16 Most Interesting Potential Final Four Combinations.”

Ah, yes, I thought, reading through the list.

The “brainiac” Final Four.

The “party school” Final Four.

The “all-Catholic” Final Four.

The “‘when’s spring football practice?’” Final Four.

Any of the sixteen combinations would have been good, except the “blue blood” Final Four (Duke, North Carolina, Villanova, Kansas).

Guess which Final Four we’re getting.

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My two cents on the SCOTUS confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Senators Blackburn, Cruz, and Graham were in fine form – by which I mean, despicable form.

My right-leaning Facebook friends loved it, though.

Whine, whine, whine.

One wonders: if they don’t want a judge whose position is, Womanhood, as understood in the law, is not something for judges to define outside of the specific context of a court case informed by expert testimony of biologists – which is the long way of saying what I take Jackson’s quick and concise response to mean – what sort of judge could they want? Don’t they realize that Jackson’s response is friendly to conservative views of womanhood, and of the judiciary? Are they too busy scoffing to notice this – or to care?

(Notice, Jackson’s crucial qualifier, in this context, is omitted above.)

I am reading Proverbs, which says harsh things about scoffers and how to talk (or not talk) to them. And on Sunday, I heard a sermon about Luke 20:

One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?” He answered them, “I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” They discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
[NRSV]

A few points (not exactly the ones from the sermon, but not too different, either):

Jesus tells good news. Still, the religious leaders are determined to challenge him.

When they discuss how to answer Jesus’s question, they don’t consider which answer is true. Instead, they worry about saving face.

So, they don’t really care about finding out the truth.

So, Jesus doesn’t owe them an answer.

Even so, in the following verses, Jesus gives an answer (though he addresses it to the people). He tells the parable of the wicked tenants. This parable implies that his authority is from his Father (God); and that the leaders have no regard for this authority, though they’ve just made a show of asking about it.

November’s poem

It’s been several days since the temperature descended from glorious heights. Almost all the leaves have died. We’ve had several frosts. The wind howled all of today; it is still howling.

Now that the porch is uninhabitable, Karin & I are making plans to clear out the spare bedroom and turn it into a play room for Samuel.

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Stephen David showed me this video of Brazilian referees discussing whether to award the penalty kick that led to Ecuador’s third goal against Bolivia.

The Bolivian almost surely didn’t handle the ball deliberately, but in this era of the VAR, that hardly matters. You can hear these referees talking about the defender’s having abierto la masa corporal – i.e., he had extended his bodily mass (of course, the operative concept is surface area, not mass). It’s notable that the defender “enlarged his body” before the shot was taken. The video shows the ball striking the arm after a ricochet, but the arm had occupied its “enlarged” position for some time.

If such refereeing were applied consistently, defenders would have to train themselves to keep their arms next to their sides inside the penalty box or else risk conceding a penalty kick for involuntarily handling. This would make it harder for defenders to balance themselves inside the penalty box. This, in turn, would allow attackers to easily dribble or pass around them very near to the goal.

I wonder if it would gradually improve the sport. Teams would have a strong incentive to defend well outside of the box.

Defensive bunkers might be abandoned or at least moved farther away from the goal, toward the middle of the field. There would be less clustering at either end.

Soccer would again become a full-field game – less like basketball, more like itself.

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This month’s poem – from the movie We Are the Best! – is called “Hate the Sport!”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Nature is fully polluted
But you only care about the recruited
Children cry and scream
You only care about your soccer team
The world is a morgue
But you’re watching Björn Borg
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Your team is winning
Oil companies are sinning
Hate the sport
Time to abort
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
People die and scream
But all you care about is your high-jump team
Children in Africa are dying
But you’re all about balls flying: hate the sport, yeah!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(English subtitles – translated from the Swedish)

The back porch; the back lawn; 1990s NBA

We’ve cleaned up the spacious, shaded, screened-in back porch, and I’ve been trying to spend time on it each day, out of doors but not really out of doors. Samuel is very interested in what he sees outside. Jasper and Ziva also like to explore out on the porch; I must supervise them, however, because Karin keeps a dahlia there, which is poisonous to cats.

On Saturday, we all gathered on the porch with Mary & Martin and Stephen & Edoarda. Each family stayed some ten feet from the others.

Then, on Sunday, I had to mow in the rain.

(It really is a soggy lawn. I understand why on Midsomer Murders the English are always wearing Wellingtons. Everyone says our tree looks like a willow, and then remarks that willows don’t usually grow away from water. I think there’s plenty of water.)

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The outstanding documentary series of the quarantining period isn’t Tiger King; it’s The Last Dance, about the 1990s Chicago Bulls. I haven’t seen a single episode of The Last Dance – we don’t have cable – and yet I know it’s good because every day my Facebook feed is crowded with articles riffing on this or that point it raises. I’ve been inspired to rewatch quite a few old basketball games on YouTube. (Samuel likes them, too.) These are the three conclusions I’ve drawn:

(1) The Chicago Bulls were awesome (pick any year).

(2) The 1994–1995 Houston Rockets were awesome, though they didn’t win many games in the regular season. Hakeem Olajuwon was just tremendous: powerful and very smooth (and a crafty ball stealer).

(3) The 1997–1998 Indiana Pacers were as good as I remembered them (i.e., very good). Would they have beaten the Jazz in the final playoff round? I don’t know.

These impressions are borne out by two fine articles by Sam Quinn: one about the Rockets, and one about the Pacers.

Hoosiers

Karin & I watched Hoosiers tonight. It was the first time Karin had seen it. I’d seen it many times, but not for several years.

The kitties watched with us.

John-Paul: “Jasper, are you a Hoosier?”

Karin (for Jasper): “Yes, I’m a son of the state.”

The last time I’d seen Hoosiers, I was living in upstate New York. Somehow, this time, I didn’t recall that Norman Dale (the Gene Hackman character) had coached in Ithaca.

On this viewing, I was unsettled by how awfully the Indiana townspeople treat Norman. What always used to seem like a plot device or local color or even comedy this time impressed me as straightforwardly realistic. The self-loathing townspeople are suspicious of any assured outsider who’ll settle among them; they set themselves against Norman from the beginning. “Upstanding” citizens, men who hold power, nearly run Norman out of town; but the same poisoned attitude is evinced by an “enlightened” schoolteacher (Barbara Hershey).

Yes, I thought, I’ve seen this sort of thing in Indiana (and not only in Indiana).

Of course, by the end of the movie, Norman has repaired the basketball team and steered it toward glory, gaining the town’s allegiance and pulling up some of its sad-sacks (the players, the aforementioned teacher, and, especially, the town drunk, movingly portrayed by Dennis Hopper). It’s hard not to rejoice in the conclusion. “That was such a nice movie,” Karin said; and I agree.

Whether the ending is credible depends on whether one believes in divine grace. Norman isn’t much of a Christian; apart from that detail, though, he is a tenacious missionary.

Let me be clear that I haven’t intended to denigrate Hoosiers, even if this time I’ve viewed it with a jaded perspective. This is my dear grandpa’s favorite movie – and with good reason. What it celebrates about Indiana, it shows lovingly and truly. The best thing about the movie is its compassion – for a people, and for the worker who goes to them. This is evident from the first shots of him traveling, lonely, between fields at dawn, surveying the countryside, hoping for a new beginning.

Ill and pregnant and ill and pregnant and ill (and a trip to Muncie)

Karin has been ill since the weekend, with symptoms of cold and fever. She began feeling especially poorly on Saturday after we completed a six-hour parenting class. She rested all of Sunday and returned to work on Monday.

On Tuesday, after seeing a doctor, she felt well enough to go with me to Muncie, Indiana, about three hours to the southeast, so I could interview for a job. Afterward, we toured the town to get a clearer idea of what it’d be like to live there. We saw the fringes of Ball State University; Muncie Central High School, which lost to Milan High School in the famous Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament of 1954; numerous statues of a Native American warrior; and occasional references to Garfield, which is set in Muncie (its cartoonist, Jim Davis, is from that region). We also became very familiar with the scenery between Muncie and South Bend.

Our son behaved normally through all of this. Karin & I received no indication that he was silently experiencing Karin’s illness. (This evening, watching House, M.D., we were reminded of that possibility when we observed Hugh Laurie try out a medicine by inducing a migraine in a comatose patient.) Our boy’s organ systems have developed about as much as they will inside the womb. Now, he’s putting on fat and enjoying a few more days of peace.

Final Four, pt. 2

At halftime of the championship game, Kenny Smith and Sir Charles pointed out that the teams – especially Virginia – were so used to bleeding out the clock that they weren’t taking open shots.

But the game’s real howler occurred in overtime. A Red Raider dribbled down the court on a fast break. A Cavalier knocked the ball out of bounds. Everyone saw this. But cue the replay review anyway. Frame-by-frame analysis. Yes, the Cavalier touches it last. But look more closely. There. In a single frame of the video, some electrons orbiting the little finger of the Texas Tech player appear to touch the ball.

Honestly, it was like the famous photo reconstruction scene in Blow-up.

The refs reversed their call and awarded possession to Virginia. The Red Raiders were never able to regain control of the game. The Cavs held on for their third straight deeply controversial victory (and the national title).

Did the Red Raider touch the ball last, using a few subatomic particles on his pinky? Maybe so. It shouldn’t have mattered.

One critic tweets:

For 100 years of basketball and on every pickup court in the country this is off UVA.

Slow motion replay changing the game by changing from who knocked it out to technical last touch is something I don’t think I like.

I agree.

It was like last summer’s World Cup final. All that time looking at video, and the refs still got it wrong.

Oh, and on the same play last night, the Red Raider dribbler was fouled. Indisputably. (See the previous link.) But that more important factor wasn’t considered, whether or not the rule allowed it to be.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One of my colleagues is scheduled to have his gallbladder removed next week. The hospital sent him a letter saying that the night before the surgery, he shouldn’t eat or drink anything besides, “water, taki, and coffee.”

Takis?

I looked up the word “taki.” Wikipedia says it’s Japanese for “waterfall.” So maybe the hospital is telling my colleague that he shouldn’t have anything besides water, waterfall water, and coffee.

Final Four

I shouldn’t be watching, but this year’s NCAA Men’s Final Four is pretty good.

In the first game, Virginia bled the clock on each possession and carried a ten-point lead into the last five minutes. It seemed Auburn wouldn’t have enough time to erase the deficit. But then the Tigers went on a tear, overtook the Cavaliers, and looked set to win the game. At the very end, the Cavs went back on top due to some clutch three-point and free throw shooting – aided, also, by the refs’ no-call of a double dribble.

Sir Charles’s Tigers had previously KO’d a series of bluebloods – Kansas, North Carolina, and Kentucky – and they matched Virginia’s will, though the Cavs set the pace through most of the game. The blown call resulted in a heartbreaking elimination. Afterward, Sir Charles said he was close to tears.

Right now, it’s halftime of the game between Michigan State and Texas Tech. The two ferocious defenses have kept the score down to 23–21 (in favor of the Red Raiders). I don’t think either of these teams will pull very far ahead, which should make for another good ending. The winner will be a nightmare opponent for Virginia.

The nighthawk

Last night, I had one eye on philosophy and one on Karin and the kitties and one on the NBA Finals. I watched Stephen Curry drain his nine three-pointers (a Finals record). I am for Curry and his Warriors when they play against the Cavs; and, it seems, so are the referees. Perhaps, when the series moves to Cleveland, the calls will go the other way.

The game finished before 11:00pm. I finished writing around 2:15am. Karin and Ziva had gone to sleep. Jasper was begging for attention, and he’d torn open a bag of Doritos.

I wonder how long I’ll keep going to bed so late. Apparently, when they’re tired enough, writers lose their inhibitions and become more able to add words to the page. It certainly has proved true with me in the last month or so. This has been one of the most productive periods of my career. For years, I used to reserve the night hours for entertainment, thinking I’d be too tired to get anything done, but that was exactly the wrong way of going about it. (I should’ve known better since I write so many of my blog posts late at night.)

Warriors vs. Cavs

Karin & I have been watching the NBA finals. There’s a lot about basketball that I don’t pretend to understand. But one thing seems clear: the Warriors are better now than last year. (The Cavaliers also seem to have improved, but it’s harder to be sure of this since lately they’ve been getting thrashed.)

The Warriors were excellent last season, but this year their winning percentage may actually turn out to be higher. Which makes sense, because this year, as perceived by my own innocent eyes, the Warriors are playing better.

Let’s count up the Warriors’ victories and defeats from these seasons.

Last year’s regular season: 73 victories, 9 defeats (the best-ever NBA regular season).

Last year’s postseason: 15 victories, 9 defeats.

This year’s regular season: 67 victories, 15 defeats (very good, but well below the all-time summit).

This year’s postseason, so far: 15 victories, 0 defeats. A victory in Game Four of the finals would secure a perfect 16–0 postseason for the Warriors, which would be an NBA record.

Also notable, however, are the Warriors’ combined victory-to-defeat ratios in each of these last two years.

Last year, in total, the Warriors won 88 games and lost 18. That is, they won just above 83% of their games. And this year? If they win Game Four, their combined record will be 83 victories and 15 defeats. They’ll’ve won above 84% of their games. And even if they lose Game Four, they can still finish with a better percentage than last year as long as they win Game Five.

These Warriors still wouldn’t have as good a combined percentage as the 1996 Chicago Bulls, the team whose famed regular season (72–10) the Warriors eclipsed a year ago. That’s because, in the 1996 postseason, the Bulls won 15 games and lost 3. Their combined record that year came to 87 victories and 13 defeats. That is, they won 87 games out of 100.

And those SuperSonics whom the Bulls played in the finals, they weren’t featherweights, either. One of them was a thorn-in-the-flesh perimeter defender, and the other was an all-around beast of a player from Elkhart, Indiana, just down the road from us.