Thomas Becket and Deflategate

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Richard Bowker

Everyone is asking me what I think about Deflategate.

Well, my wife asked me, so that’s a start. Anyway, my theory is that Brady is King Henry, uttering “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” in frustration at the actions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. In NFL-speak, this comes out as: “I sure like my balls underinflated.”

And the ballboys interpreted this innocent remark as a royal command: Tom likes his balls underinflated. We must make it so. So one of them takes the balls into the men’s room at Canterbury Cathedral and . . . well, you get the picture.

In this scenario, Brady is, of course, totally blameless. When he finds out what has happened — when he sees the infamously false Chris Mortensen tweet — he is outraged. They have gone too far! But what can he do? He is too noble to turn on his loyal retainers. So he maintains his silence as to their deed, and correctly asserts his innocence when brought to trial. Perhaps he gives the retainers some Uggs as a reward for their service. What a guy!

Really, he’s the one who should become a saint, not Thomas Becket.

Let’s all soar with Bobby Orr!

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Richard Bowker

Anyway, I’m tired of thinking about Islamophobia. Also Deflategate. So let’s celebrate the greatest moment in human history, which happened 45 years ago tomorrow:

And here’s the statue commemorating the event:

Here’s more about Bobby Orr, who is the nicest guy who ever lived.

Ou sont les neiges?

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Richard Bowker

Here is the last of this winter’s snow in my backyard.

It’s likely to disappear this afternoon. I will not miss it.

Fire and Ice

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Richard Bowker

It’s starting to feel like the end times around here. The heart of our downtown area is closed off because the weight of the snow caused a building to collapse. I went to a grocery store yesterday, and it was closed — because of structural damage, I assume. So I went to another grocery store, and couldn’t get into the parking lot. And today…another blizzard. The path I have shoveled so many times is disappearing yet again.

Here are the icicles on my house. I’d go knock ’em down, but the snow is too deep for me to get to them.

. . . which reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem (first published in 1920) about the end times. (Today, I’m betting on ice.)

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

This is my last snow poem

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Richard Bowker

The South Shore of Massachusetts, where I live, seems to have caught the brunt of the latest in our endless stream of snowstorms. Here’s my backyard, with the snow almost up to the top of that fence.

And here’s my driveway, looking across to my neighbor’s driveway:

Once upon a time I liked snow and I posted poems about it. Well, I just have one poem left. It was written by my son, back when he was young and cute and innocent, before we all learned about how evil snow is. It’s called “First Snow”:

I enjoy the first snow,
Even when other don’t,
The benches are layered white,
Everything changes overnight,
Snow puffed out like cotton candy,
Untouched by human feet,
Everything is perfect,
After the first snow.

He now needs to write a sequel called “Eleventy-First Snow” or something. Let’s find out how perfect everything is then.

It’s a good thing there’s more snow coming…

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Richard Bowker

It’ll keep our mind off the cold.

Snow is general . . .

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Richard Bowker

We’re in the middle of a blizzard hereabouts:

So it’s a good time to read the last paragraph of James Joyce’s “The Dead” (as if there were a bad time):

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Things are awful on this planet, but there’s always Saturn and its moon

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Richard Bowker

They look really nice in this photo, don’t they? But probably if we ever get there, things will suck on them, too. Also, they don’t have Tom Brady and Gronk.

Us lefties earn less because we’re more stupider

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This is the finding of a study by some Harvard guy reported here.

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

These problems only appear when the left-hander is the child of a right-handed mother. Like me.

Another study, reported in Wikipedia, came to a different conclusion:

In a 2006 U.S. study, researchers from Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University concluded that there was no scientifically significant correlation between handedness and earnings for the general population, but among college-educated people, left-handers earned 10 to 15% more than their right-handed counterparts.

I am not smart enough to figure out why the two studies came up with different results..

The Vox article does throw us this bone:

Data has also shown that lefties, for example, are highly represented among high SAT-scorers and people with high IQs. What it may mean, Orszag notes, is that lefties are overrepresented in the intellectual stratosphere, but that for the population as a whole, it’s better to be a righty.

The “intellectual stratosphere” — I like that. On the other hand, there’s this, from Wikipedia:

There is a general tendency that the more violent a society is, the higher the proportion of left-handers.

There is presumably some advantage to being left-handed in hand-to-hand combat, because your opponent is less likely to have trained against people like you. (There’s a comparable effect in baseball, where left-handed batters are often helpless against left-handed pitchers, because they mostly face righties. This has led to the ultimate in baseball specialization, the southpaw who comes into the game in the late innings to face one critical left-handed batter, get him out, and then head for the showers.)

All in all, it’s a hard world for lefties. Now, in addition to being sinister, turns out we’re also cognitively impaired and doomed to earn less than our right-handed friends. Unless somehow we find ourselves in the intellectual stratosphere.

Wanna see my son in a Jordanian sitcom?

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Richard Bowker

“Wait,” you say, “there are sitcoms in Jordan?”

Yes, there are. This one is called My American Neighbor. It’s a mild cross-cultural satire: Jordanians misunderstand American customs; Americans misunderstand Jordan. In this episode, the American guy living in Jordan is getting married to a local girl, and his family arrives from the States. They show up at around the seven-minute mark. His kid brother is wearing a Red Sox cap — hey, I recognize that cap! Later he wears a Celtics jacket, and in another scene he wears a green shirt with the Narragansett “Hi, neighbor!” slogan on it. I recognize that shirt, too! Clearly he’s giving off a New England vibe.

Here’s the show:

Anyway, I think James is pretty good (not that he got paid or anything). The best part of the show, though, is the Mona Lisa print on the wall with duct tape covering her décolletage.