Base Ball (an unedited reflection)

Just before the 2012 baseball season began I declared, "I'm going to follow baseball again." I hadn't really followed-followed baseball for years prior to 2012. So I did and I chose the local national league team, the Washington Nationals, as the team I was going to follow. I could call them "my team" like people say about such things (even though I'm from LA and the Dodgers will always be my real team).

The Nationals 2012 wild ride was insane and the playoff loss to the Cardinals was brutal. I swore that I would never invest that much psychic energy into anything as basic as a baseball team (millionaires playing for billionaires and such). Same thing goes for politics. Not my ride or die, bruh. I'm not like most people, I know when to go too deep and when to not.

I continued to follow baseball pretty closely for all the years since 2012; watching the Nationals and the Dodgers and some other teams pretty closely but staying only generally aware of happenings from around the leagues. It's fun for me. I've been to a whole bunch of games, mostly with Makfu who is the absolutely perfect person to live sport with. I even went to a spring training a few years back.

But, things run their respective courses. I decided to pull back a little more from so closely monitoring baseball. I chose to pay attention but not to the same extent as before. I publicly disowned the Nationals as being "my team" (but continued to speak highly of the players and manager). I rooted against them early in the season. I wanted to see if they could play in the division which turned out to be a runaway for a deeply flawed Braves squad (and the tomahawk chop has got to go). But I have nothing against The Washington Nationals, I just gave them up as being "my team." I rooted for them to lose during the LA-DC divisionals. They beat my real team.

But I rooted for the Nats to beat the Cardinals and the NLCS sweep was hysterically fitting. I got people out of a talk I was giving early enough that they could watch the local team on the TeeVee.

So the Nationals are going to the Series? How do you like that? Good on them, they have a lot of delightful personalities. I may know this the team better than any. They are on an epic run, playing loose and having fun. That matters. Rendon, Soto, Howie and the rest. The playoff rotation? KuSuZu? Davie’s heart situation? They have nothing to lose. Baby Shark and dugout dancing? All expectations for this season were realized in July. And congratulations to the fans of the DC team. Good on you. Feels good, don't it? I hope you win it all. It’s good to see people have fun.

FMD2019

Untitled

Untitled

Autumn is Nostalgic (not Field Mowing yet)

OFR tKoL 2019

feed The gLOrious minK

eighT roOm dieseL funK

Tree Strike

Hash Tag

Sliding

This Thing With Pilots

so there's this thing with commercial airline pilots where there was formally a glut of pilots who were mostly former military and because there were so many pilots the salaries went way down because the air travel industry is horrible

because of the era of internet commerce and two day delivery standards the cargo industry needed pilots so badly that the salary of pilots went way up in the cargo industry and all of the commercial airline pilots started going cargo

hey wow cargo is awesome and the pilots can watch the game and listen to music and smoke cigars and the pilots don't have to wear captains uniforms because that's just a costume for the passengers and while we're on the subject of passengers there is so much less stress in the cargo industry because the pilots don't have the added moral weight of lives on board

and so all of the most experienced veteran pilots went to cargo and the people flying commercial are now the least experienced and most poorly vetted pilots and even though there is a huge need for new pilots the air travel industry refuses to pay commercial pilots more

at some point the air cargo industry will start to hire all the former military drone pilots and there will be an even lower salary for cargo pilots and the air travel industry will refuse to hire them back because they are horrible

nobody will know or even care if the new same day standard delivery cargo planes are flown remotely or even ultimately by computer overlords and nobody will know or even care if commercial flights are flown with AI and the pilots are just two minimum wage employees in costume sitting up front