Own Goal Ends EU Role

Brexit is a Go

Ralph Stanley (February 25, 1927 – June 23, 2016)

Ralph eulogizing:

Today's 42

What findings can be gleaned from our previously published report are comfortably vague.

The Giants 41st win was achieved in the seasons's 62nd game in 2014, and in the season's 91st game in 2013. 2014 turned into a very good year, culminating in a a World Series victory, and 2013 into a 76-86 failure.

The 2010 season ended with a World Championship, too, but the 41st win of the 2010 campaign came almost a month after that of the 2014 season.

The 2010 team, with its lackadasical 41-39 record after 80 games, on the eve of the Fourth of July, the traditional date on which the actual play of the clubs thus far can be taken seriously as an indication of their viability in that year's pennant race, parlayed a mediocre first half into a Wild Card slot in the playoffs by the end of the season, and from there, luck and talent rode them to the club's first Championship in 56 years, and first ever since arriving in San Francisco 52 years before.

No matter how quickly the club ever reaches 41 wins, they'll do no better than that club, with its 41-39 mark and World Championship, pretty much the minimum a club can do and still eke out a World Series victory, playing barely better than .500 ball as late as the Fourth of July.

This year's club reached 41 wins in it 67th game, the second quickest pace in our record of seven recent seasons. This puts the club in a favorable position to reach this year's playoffs, which, of course is better than the position, genrally agreed to be supine, of the 2013 team by the time of its 41st.

Department of Relatively Obvious Tentative Conclusions, Buttressed by Facts

The earlier in June the Giants reach 41 wins the better, and the later in July the worse for them. Mostly.

Season	Won-Lost	Date of 41st Win
2010	41-39	July 3
2011	41-34	June 23
2012	41-33	June 25
2013	41-50	July 11
2014	41-21	June 6
2015	41-35	June 27
2016	41-26	June 15

Beach House

Houses Along The Bluff at Seabright and East Cliff, Santa Cruz, CA, May 2016

Looking West Past The House On The Corner of Seabright and East Cliff, Santa Cruz, CA, May 2016

The Satisfactions of a Well-Won Game

Until the tenth inning of today's game between the Giants and Dodgers, the Giants had three hits, all stroked early in the game against Dodgers starter Scott Kazmir.

The pitchers who replaced him yielded no hits, so the Giants went into the bottom of the tenth inning having produced just those three hits and facing a one-run deficit following Adrian Gonzales's solo home run that led off the top of the tenth inning for the Dodgers.

Then, with one out in their own half, the Giants strung together four straight hits, scored two runs and won the game.

An altogether entertaining game overall, during the course of which the Fox TV announcers noted the presence of Dodger right fielder Trayce Thompson's brother, Klay, the Golden State Warriors player, whose club is now one win away from bringing consecutive NBA championships to the Bay Area. Up there in the stands Klay was wearing a Dodgers cap, and when his image was shown on the scoreboard screen the assembled crowd booed heartily. One analyst wondered if anyone wearing a Dodger cap would go unbooed, proposed the Pope and immediately allowed that the Pope would likely get booed, too. Giants fans. Tough crowd, satisfied tonight.

Marginalia

I see that Duf Sundheim captured 8% of the vote in California's Senate Primary this past Tuesday. Sundheim isn't a name familiar to many Californians, though even given an understandable amount of puffery, Sundheim's CV suggests a string of professional accomplishments that would have made him prime Republican material 40 years ago. But this is not your father's Republican party anymore, so even an endorsement from George Schultz himself could do little to collect the fractious shards of the state party together behind him. He led all twelve declared Republican candidates for the office with his 8%, but together they mustered only 27.9% — a fringe party percentage — of the vote.

Only the top two vote-getters in California's June Senate runoff move on to the general election. Both of them are Democrats this year. For the first time ever, no Republican candidate will appear on the ballot for U.S. Senate in California since the passage of the 17th amendment made popular election of senators possible.

I Voted And All I Got Was This Lousy Senate Majority Leader

Mitch McConnell gave a very odd interview to Judy Woodruff of the News Hour on PBS tonight, an interview ostensibly about his newly published memoir, the Long Game, but turned instead to his position on the candidacy of Donald Trump, freshly recognized presidential nominee of McConnell's own party. The people who voted for Trump in the Republican Party's primaries really want something different, advised McConnell, allowing as how they seem to have succeeded with their chosen candidate. McConell took the occasion to upbraid Trump for recent remarks that even elected Republicans were inclined to label racist. McConnell is inoculated against charges of racism himself by virtue of being married to an immigrant Asian American, and we can be assured that his refusal to let immigration reform advance in the Senate, for example, is a matter of politics, and nothing personal.

Can he inoculate his party's current Senate majority against the strong tide of revulsion directed at Trump and the party that would nominate him which, for all we know, the general electoral may demonstrate in November? This is what the boys in the back room are wondering.

Iconography of the Greatest

Muhammed Ali (January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) and the Beatles

Muhammed Ali Photographed by Malcom X

Swoon-Be-Gone!

An observation made Monday which profits from its own skepticism, since the W-L records of the clubs no longer balance in precisely the way they did only days ago as shown here, nor are those records likely to resume anything like this sort of balance anytime soon:

A note on Memorial Day in Major League Baseball:

Thus far this season in the National League, the New York Mets have won 14 games at home and 14 on the road, the Washington Nationals have won 15 games at home and 15 on the road, the San Francisco Giants have won 16 games at home and 16 on the road, and the Chicago Cubs have won 17 games at home and 17 on the road.

Some statistics are so transient that there's no profit in collecting them for the purpose of making some point, though it can be a chore to distinguish between stats to be rightfully ignored and those which may be harbingers of some truly useful understanding of the game, when a subject like baseball propagates sets of stats so readily.

Looking North

Kingston Ferry at its berth in Edmonds, Washington, April 2016

The Sinking of Boaty McBoatface

In an ill-concieved attempt to raise public support for the construction of a £200 million Arctic research vessel, the Natural Environment Research Council of Britain engaged the public in a contest to nominate and vote for the name of the new ship. James Hand, exercising what he later came to regret as an excess of whimsey, offered the name "Boaty McBoatface" for the vessel, and the public, responding to the poll with a resounding unseriousness, voted overwhelmingly in its favor.

Embarassingly, nothing in the remit of the Natural Environment Research Council encouraged whimsey. They had a fallback position, which they hastened to exercise: ignore the poll result completely and go with their own choice in the matter.

Thus Sir Other Attenbourough was called in from the bullpen to lend his anodyne name and its associations to the ship, which even James Hand allowed was probably for the best.

Arbitrary Harbor View

Harbor Dredgers, Santa Cruz, February 2016

An Even-Numbered Year in Song And Story

A month into this year's baseball season the San Francisco Giants are the only club in MLB's National League West Division with a winning record at home. In April the Arizona Diamondbacks staggered around the unfriendly confines of their own home Chase Field for a stretch of 17 games of which they won only five. The Dodgers gained but five wins at home during that time, too, losing eight of the 13 they've hosted so far. All the teams in the division have lost at least eight games at home, except, of course, for the San Francisco Giants with their winning record, who have lost only six at AT&T Park a month now into the season.

Jazz Is Never Out Of Date

MENDACITY (1961)
by Max Roach and C. Bayen

Mendacity, mendacity, it makes the world go round.
A politician makes a speech and never hears the sound.
The campaign trail winds on and on in towns from coast to coast.
The winner ain't the one who's straight, but he who lies the most.

Now voting rights in this fair land we know are not denied.
But if I tried in certain states, from treetops I'd be tied.
Mendacity, mendacity, it seems is everywhere.
But try and tell the truth, and most folks scream "Not Fair!"

Jazz, The Early Years, On International Jazz Day

Knee Drops Louis Armstrong

Ain't Misbehavin' Louis Armstrong

Jumping At The Woodstock Count Basie

Minor Swing Django Reinhardt

Ornithology Charlie Parker

Senor Blues Horace Silver

Take Five Dave Brubeck

Giant Steps John Coltrane

Lotta Shaking

Here are 40 remarkable photos of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco, curated by Alan Taylor at the Atlantic. As of April 18, 110 years have passed now since that day.

All of my grandparents were on the far end of the Mission District, a mile south of the furthest reach of the fire that levelled much of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. As for the earthquake, one grandmother never spoke of it, and the other always called it "The Fire," preferring, like so many who lived through it, to memorialize the enormity with that all-consuming word instead of the other.

Merle Haggard (April 6, 1937 – April 6, 2016)

I'll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle

Merle's was a music of crushed lives, prison time and poverty, busted romance and drinking steady to smooth out the day's ragged failures. Always the music of that underclass of perpetually dispossessed Americans, generations of originally rural whites broken and uprooted, decade after decade spilling West, like Haggard's people, who found themselves discarded in Bakersfield, California by some rude gesture of history, with all the regret and resentment and determination to get by goddammit you might expect of their kind. He had a straightforward plain genius for making music of all that.

An Unsuccessful Bit of Camouflage

Dog View 2016

Noted in Passing

That night Matt Duffy of the San Francisco Giants dove for a ball headed down the third base line, snagged it while prone, and in righting himself rotated completely around to throw across on one bounce to Brandon Belt at first base beating the Oakland A's runner for the third out of the inning: just getting in some practice before the start of the season.

Today, in Milwaukee, opening day of the 2016 season for the San Francisco Giants, Duffy went 2 for 5 with 4 RBI. Kid just might make the team after all.

April Noted Once More

Again With the Flowers

Noting The Condom-Shaped Safety Zone of Santa Cruz Harbor

Advisory Notice Posted At the Santa Cruz Harbor, March 2016

Remembering Those Who Did Not Make The Cut

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery 2

Florescence Alert

Flowering Stuff, September 2013

Arbitrary Coastal Pine

San Mateo County, July 2014