The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Wait 'Til Next Year

November 03, 2016

Wait 'Til Next Year

No one can deny this years World Series was a corker. The Chicago Cubs ended their historically long World Series Championship drought with a seventh-game extra inning one-run victory over the Cleveland Indians, a club which hadn't won the Series itself since 1948, despite leading this year's Series 3-1 before the Cubs rattled off three consecutive victories to take it all.

The seventh game will be talked about endlessly by people who love to talk about baseball. It was so rich in incident, in catastrophic failures and galvanizing heroics, that the ten innings just bulged with them.

Thus closed the 2016 MLB Baseball Season, with an absolutely classic instance of the genre.

For fans of the club, there's still the rankling end to the San Francisco Giants season, which came earlier in the playoffs against these same Cubs in a game the Giants led 5-2 going into the top of the ninth inning. The Cubs, pitted against the gravely inferior San Francisco Giants bullpen [which had to that point blown 30 such save opportunities since the start of the season (leading the National League in that dubious category)], rallied to win the game, 6-5.

The season began to crumble for the Giants after the All-Star break, and they barely outlasted the St. Louis Cardinals in vying for for the final Wild Card slot into the playoffs. In various invocations of the multiverse the Giants survive the ninth against the Cubs and send Johnny Cueto out to the mound for the do-or-die fifth game, which path our universe did not happen to take.

2016 San Francisco Giants Season Evaluation Checklist

☒ A. Beat the Dodgers
☐  1. Every time
☑  2. Most of the time
☐  3. Foil them in their quest for the pennant

☒ B. Win all games at least half the time
☐  1. Half the time
☑  2. More than half the time

☐ C. Win The Pennant

☐ D. Win The World Series

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.