I read Bill Russell's book "Second Wind" in 1979, still on my shelf. I read his book "Red and Me" still on my shelf. Growing up in the 60's a fan of the Cincinnati Royals with Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas I hated the Celtics, Eastern Division rivals of the Celtics. His teammates said he was aloof, rarely said anything in practice like he expected them to automatically have the unquenchable desire to win that he had; otherwise what were they doing with the Celtics? Bill Russell was the greatest winner in sports history.

Bill Russell

 

Bill Russell, basketball great who worked for civil rights, dies at 88

Mickey Mantle's Cow Story

 Mickey's standard opening story when he was speaking was his cow story.  He and Billy Martin had new rifles and wanted to try them out hunting deer.   Mickey knew a doctor who had a place around San Antonio.  With Billy still in the car the doctor says they can hunt on his property but first he tells Mickey that he has mule who is old and needs putting down.  Mickey decides to play a joke on Billy, tells him the doctor is mean and won't let them hunt so Mickey tells Billy he is going to shoot the doctor's mule.  So he goes to the barn & BLAM down goes the mule.  All of a sudden BLAM BLAM BLAM!  Billy comes running says I just shot three of his cows for good measure.

 The Apocalypse of Peter: A Book That Nearly Made It

In 1887 a French archaeological team digging in an ancient cemetery in Akhmim Egypt, about eighty miles north of Luxor, made a remarkable manuscript discovery.  In one of the tombs, taken to be that of a Christian monk, they discovered a sixty-six page book, written in Greek and containing an anthology of four ancient texts.  One of these described a guided tour of heaven and hell  , allegedly written by Peter.  Scholars had long known that this book – the Apocalypse of Peter — had once existed: some early church fathers of the second to fourth centuries had counted it among the books of Christian Scriptures, either in addition to or instead of the Apocalypse of John.   But for some reason it had fallen into disfavor, and after the fifth century it was no longer known to be in circulation.  And no one knew exactly what as in it.

Once deciphered it received considerable scholarly attention.  The account begins with Jesus delivering his final sermon to his apostles, an alternative version of the “apocalyptic” discourse found (in various forms) in Mark 13and Matthew 24-25.  In all the canonical accounts, Jesus explains to his disciples what will happen at the end of the age.  The disciples, understandably, want to know when this will be and what it will be like at the end.  In the New Testament Gospels Jesus tells them what to look for, but in the Apocalypse of Peter, he gives them an actual preview.  Jesus shows Peter the respective fates of those who are in the depths of hell and others enjoying the glories of paradise.  Peter enters into these realms and describes what he sees.  In detailed and lurid terms, Peter describes the torments of the damned: sinners are tortured according to their characteristic transgressions while living (adulterers, murderers, blasphemers, idolaters, etc.).  The saints, on the other hand, experience a glorious existence in the world above.  Peter’s description, however, is surprisingly bland. Possibly once the fantastic climate, sights, and smells are mentioned, not much more can be said about eternal bliss.  The account ends with Jesus being transformed into a glorious being in the presence of his disciples.

The first reference to this Apocalypse of Peter occurs in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, who regards and treats it as a book of Scripture.  Writers after that continue to treat it as a divinely inspired sacred text up through the third century.  In the early fourth century the church historian Eusebius indicates that various Christian communities continued to see it as canonical, even though others had their doubts.  Soon after that the book falls out of sight and is lost to history.  But why?

The explanation has to do with the contents of the book, as scholars recognized from subsequent discoveries.  About two decades after the Greek version of the Apocalypse of Peter appeared in Akhmim Egypt (in 1887), a different, fuller, edition of the book was discovered in the ancient Ethiopic language.  Soon after that two tiny fragments of the account appeared from the sands of Egypt.  These various accounts all differ from one another, often in small ways and sometimes quite significantly.   It is now clear that the Apocalypse went through at least two new editions over time, as ancient editors changed a number details of its narrative and some of its most important claims.  In the now oldest version of the text, as found in one of the Greek fragments, “Peter’s” description of the torments of the damned come to an entirely unexpected conclusion.  When Peter and the other apostles see the horrifying sufferings being inflicted on sinners, they cannot hold back their tears and plead with Christ to have mercy on these souls damned to eternal torment. In the end, Christ cannot resist the pleas of his faithful.  He reverses his judgment, takes all the sinners out of hell, provides them with a baptism in the heavenly realm, and leads them to eternal glory.  All sinners, in the end, are saved.  The original version of the Apocalypse of Peter taught universal salvation.

The idea that God’s mercy would ultimately triumph over his judgment was held by some Christians in the early church.  After God doled out sufficient, often long, punishment, he would relent and provide salvation to all.  In support of this view, some Christian leaders pointed out that even the apostle Paul makes universalistic claims in some of his letters (Rom. 5:18; 11:32; Phil. 2:6-11; 1 Cor, 15:25, 28).  The majority of Christian teachers, however, condemned such views and proclaimed their proponents to be “heretics.”   Sinners would be severely punished for all time, world without end.

In the revision history of the Apocalypse of Peter, the later editors attempted to salvage its now-out-of-favor universalistic conclusion by changing its ending, as evidenced in both the surviving Ethiopic version and the Greek text originally discovered in Akhmim Egypt.  But these editorial efforts came too late.  The book was already in broad circulation and was known to teach salvation for all sinners. Church leaders were repelled by the idea and so rejected the book.  The Apocalypse disappeared from the scene, until discovered by archaeologists fourteen centuries later.

The textual history of the Apocalypse of Peter reveals one of the main criteria church leaders used to determine if a book could be considered canonical Scripture.  It had to be “orthodox,” teaching the “correct doctrine.”  Otherwise, it didn’t have a chance.

July 28th, 2022|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum

-Bart D. Ehrman

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States - Notes

 For thousands of years before the European invasions the Americas were peopled by millions of natives who were here first.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism---the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.

The author came to this perspective not in graduate school but in her studies outside of academia.

Would the diseases that the Europeans brought with them have genocided the natives by itself?  Although it was a powerful killer, diseases alone would not have done it, but added to colonializing violence, slavery, and trickery with the colonializing techniques already learned from European precedents, the natives never had chance.  P. 39-40

Rebel with a Clause

 

Reader does this question need a comma? A new book offers grammar help.

Roving grammarian Ellen Jovin helps settle questions about commas, split infinitives and more in “Rebel With a Clause”

Review by Dennis Duncan

July 26, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

(Brandt Johnson; Mariner Books)

Comment

I invited Rona Jackson, my former roommate, and my boss to the party. How many people did I invite? Two or three?

The answer depends on what role the second comma is playing. Is it an Oxford comma? Or is it there to enclose a restrictive appositive (in other words, to tell us that Rona used to be my roommate)? In “Rebel With a Clause” Ellen Jovin offers this example to show how, even when grammar rules are applied rigorously, we can still run into trouble. Besides, even the rules are merely conventions. “There’s no official, is the great thing about English,” she writes, in a sentence that wryly practices what it preaches. “It’s like the Wild Wild West.”

But, of course, clarity and tone matter. For two decades, Jovin has run a communication skills company aimed at business professionals, training them to express themselves more effectively. Then, in 2018, she decided to bring her expertise to the public at large. Packing her style guides and a folding table, she hit the road, parking herself on sidewalks across the country — 47 towns in 47 states before covid intervened — and offering grammatical instruction to passersby. Part-manual, part-travelogue, “Rebel with a Clause” is the story of the Grammar Table, a kind of linguist’s version of Lucy’s Psychiatric Help stall in “Peanuts.”

Who cares about hyphens, commas and capital letters? You should.

Author Ellen Jovin (Brandt Johnson)

As far as advice goes, Jovin situates herself at the less prescriptive end of the grammar spectrum. “Mine is not the Grammar Judgment Table,” she writes, and whether it’s the great fewer/less debate or the abbreviations of online conversation, Jovin remains generously noncommittal. “You can do it either way,” she says of whether to use the Oxford comma, and she refuses to denounce the “Ghostbusters” for using who instead of whom or the makers of “Star Trek” for boldly splitting their infinitive.

Not everyone Jovin encounters, however, has such a Zen approach to the language. In many of the book’s anecdotes, people approach the Grammar Table in groups, calling on Jovin to officiate a dispute. Others vent about family members or friends (who may or may not be standing right next to them). And yet, as Jovin presents them, these grievances sound rehearsed, well-aired, largely cheerful. In terms of low-key rage, they belong to a different order from the colleague taking credit for your work or the neighbor parking in your space. In Jovin’s transcriptions, grammar quibbles seem on the whole to be implicitly ironic, or at least aware of their inconsequentiality. They are reliable staples, just some of the ballast with which families and long-standing friendship groups make up their daily conversation. Maybe, even, they are stand-ins, part of the psychopathology of everyday life. Perhaps that irritation with your husband who pronounces nuclear as nucular, or with the aged relative who still types two spaces after a full stop, is simply the visible tip of a deeper frustration. In New York, someone tells Jovin that she fired her therapist for saying “between you and I” (using the subject pronoun Iinstead of the object pronoun me). I would love to know how the therapist interpreted that.

(Mariner Books)

The format of “Rebel with a Clause,” however, does not lend itself to sustained contemplation. Jovin’s journey is narrated in brief vignettes that highlight her own dogged buoyancy and the competitive pedantry of the people she meets. The most interesting moments are when her patients, such as they are, begin to consider their relationship to grammar: often a sense of memory fading, of knowledge lost, the wistfulness that a middle-school sharpness has become blunted with time. Some, to their surprise and Jovin’s delight, pull up mnemonics acquired decades ago (fanboys for the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so); others are suspicious of novelty, as when Jovin defends her up-to-date “Chicago Manual of Style” only to be told that her interlocutor’s mother would “probably prefer an older edition because it would be more purist.” There is so much about language and authority rolled up in this statement, but Jovin’s narrative has already moved on to the next scene.

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For a book on grammar that runs to nearly 400 pages, actual advice is fairly scanty. Many of Jovin’s 49 chapters squeeze considerable mileage out of relatively minor points: past vs passed; than vs then; affect vs effect. Jovin has written usage manuals, but with its folksy, peripatetic arrangement, “Rebel with a Clause” isn’t quite one of them. Strong on charm, then, but without enough of either prescription or reflection, the “Grammar Table” finds itself falling between two (grammar) stools.

Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and author of “Index, A History of the.”

Rebel With a Clause

Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian

By Ellen Jovin

Mariner. 400 pp. $26.99

 

Biden poised for big wins in Congress

Republicans Embrace Violence

 

On the campaign trail, many Republicans talk of violence

By David Weigel in the WaPost

Tony Castro-Mantle:The Best There Ever Was - Notes

Not a straight-forward biography, this book I would call a psychological profile of the great Mickey Mantle, certainly the most famous baseball player of the 50's and 60's.  The book is stirring, poignant, and full of interesting details.  The author knows his man.

Casey Stengel originally called him Mickey "Mantles."  No one knew why except that maybe it was Stengelese.  P. 59

Mantle came to the Yankees as a shortstop but he was a liability at that position.  Stengel committed to transitioning him to the outfield.  P. 60

Why did Mantle become such an icon.  It's Darwinian says Tom Wolfe.  He said that God is dead.  He meant it as a warming.  Who will take his place?  Who or what will fill the void?  Shamans, faith peddlers, mindless entertainment.  You gotta have some new Christ to believe in.  Why not Mickey Mantle?  P. 126

Mickey's standard opening story when he was speaking was his cow story.  He and Billy Martin had new rifles and wanted to try them out hunting deer.   Mickey knew a doctor who had a place around San Antonio.  With Billy still in the car the doctor says they can hunt on his property but first he tells Mickey that he has mule who is old and needs putting down.  Mickey decides to play a joke on Billy, tells him the doctor is mean and won't let them hunt so Mickey tells Billy  he is going to shoot thee doctor's mule.  So he goes to the barm BLAM down goes the mule.  All of a sudden BLAM BLAM BLAM!  Billy comes running says I just shot three of his cows for good measure.

Mickey asked Paul Simon why he didn't use his name in "Mrs. Robinson"rather than Joe DiMaggio and Simon explained it was a matter of the syllables of Mickey Mantle's not being right.  P. 139

Wrote Talese?  P. 140

Mickey Mantle's rise to fame was so improbable that he saw it as divinely ordained; the friend who suggested he might become a great ballplayer but nothing more; the doctor who intervened and who saved his leg from amputation with a miracle drug; and the actress he met in his rookie season and regretted not having married and told him he reminded her of King Arthur.

He had a passion for golf.

Mickey could play the game, but he knew he wasn't smart enough to manage.  P. 148

Joe DiMaggio could sit in the clubhouse for hours and not speak to anyone.  P. 179

Mickey didn't know what to do in retirement.  Do any of us?

"I didn't know I raised a coward."  Mutt Mantle to Mickey when Mickey talked about quitting baseball and returning to Oklahoma.

Casey had trouble managing Mantle because he couldn't reach him.

Nellie Fox said that on two legs Mantle would have been the greatest ever.

Mantle led the American League in strikeouts five times.  P. 197

Some say that Mickey was the son that Casey Stengel never had.  If so, he was a difficult child for the Case.  Mickey did no rehab when he needed to or keep himself in shape like he should have.  Must have  old Case in perpetual turmoil.

His long marriage with 4 sons  to Merlyn yet a long-term relationship with Holly Brooke are unexplainable.

At a Mickey Mantle Day in 1965 DiMaggio was there but so was Sen. Robert Kennedy.  DiMaggio avoided shaking the senator's hand since he hated the Kennedys over Marilyn with whom he was married for nine months in 1954.   

The author is from Waco where he and Mickey played golf.  Amusing to hear him talk about driving up and down what ultimately became I-35 between Dallas and Waco.

Great stories of Billy shooting the cows and Mickey hitting a homer hung over.    

It is disappointing that the author does not talk about 1961.

One big factor in the Mantle Cult is that Mickey was white, very white.  Mickey said that Hank Aaron was thee best he ever saw.  No real mention of Mickey and Willie.  They were compared in the 50's and 60's.  Race was a factor in Mickey's favor.

Mutt Mantle was hard, domineering father.  It amazes me how he drilled his son into being a switch-hitter.  Mickey always wanted to please his father and could never stand up to him.  The impression of this reader is that he married his childhood sweetheart Merlyn rather than his true love Holly because this is what his father wanted.

The author refers to Harry Truman as a "caretaker president."  How silly, Mr. Castro.

Upon being told that he is a writer, Yogi asks Ernest Hemingway, "What paper are you with?"

How good could Mickey Mantle have been if he had taken better care of himself?  We will never know.  This was once a hotly debated subject, not so much I assume now unless amongst aged baseball fans.  The Mantle name will never equal that of Babe Ruth.  Just how good could Mickey Mantle have been if he had stayed healthy?  That question has been debated forever.  My point is that as time moves on the question will be less and less discussed except for old-time baseball purists.

Is Mantle's combination of power and speed unmatched?

The author makes the case that 1957 was his best year and maybe the best year ever in the modern era.  His onbase pct. was an astounding .512

Check out John Thorn and his new way looking at baseball statistics.

                    .

Tony Castro - Gehrig and the Babe - Notes

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth are the most storied baseball teammates in baseball history.  Ruth came to the Yankees first followed by Gehrig who had attended Columbia University.  I can't tell from this book whether Gehrig actually graduated from Columbia.

Whereas Ruth was larger than life, Gehrig was the quiet one who played ball but did not attract attention off the field.  In the language of the time, the Babe was colorful.  Lou was boring. 

They were Yankee teammates from 1923 to 1934.

The Babe made fun of the Gary Cooper film Pride of the Yankees.  They had to film Cooper hitting right-handed and by trick photography make him appear to be batting left-handed.  The Babe didn't understand movie making.  Gehrig's own Tarzen movie appearance was an embarassment.

The Babe's hero was Shoeless Joe Jackson.  He imitated Jackson's pigeon-toed batting stance.  Even though he was acquitted at trail, Jackson's. lifetime  ban from baseball was never lifted by Judge Landis.  The Babe helped save baseball after the Black Sox Scandal.

The lazy Babe called everyone "keed."

The author apparently believes that the Babe did call his shot in that famous '32 Series game.

The author can come to no firm conllusiions on th 5-yr feud.  When the Babe famously greeted Lou on Lou Gehrig Day at the Stadium in July of 1939 it was the first time they had seen each other in five years.  Elinor and the Babe knew each other before she and Lou wed.  There was the question of what happened on the Japanese trip.  Then there was Eleanor who ran Lou's life and Lou's excessive devotion to his mother.  Who knows for sure.

Gehrig was known for his power at the plate.  He had a habit, not mentioned in this book, of dropping his right front kneee to the ground in his swing.  I do not understand how a power hitter could do that and still hit the ball hard.

Late in his career Gehrig was consumed with maintaining his consecutive game streak though he did not get as much recognition for it as he would have liked.  Ruth even criticized him for it saying he would be better off physically to take a day off now and then.  By the rules Gehrig could play just one inning and get credit for a streak continuation.  He was criticized, rightly or wrongly, for taking advantage of this rule.  This might have been a part of their 5 yr. estrangement.

Gehrig never earned near the kind of money that the Babe made.  I think the Yankees did not treat him right financially.  He had financial difficulties at the end of his life.  He knew he was dying but had to hide it from the Yankees hoping they would give him a front-office job, but they never did.  The Gehrigs lost their house before he died.

The  Babe desperately wanted to manage the Yankees but the Yankees were never interested.  He was shunted to the lowly Boston Braves after the Yankees ran him off.  A sad end to his baseball career.

The Republican Party in Revolutionary Mode

 Today's Republican Party is in revolutionary mode. They are escalating their more than 50 years-long campaign to take away the human and civil rights of women, non-whites, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, the poor and others deemed to be the enemy in their "real America."

As the country becomes more racially diverse, younger, forward thinking and pluralistic, the American right wing is attempting to force the country back to the 19th century and the Gilded Age. Such moves are generally unpopular with the American people en masse. The Republican Party and the larger right wing movement dismiss such protests because they reject the basic principle of a true "We the People" democracy and are earnestly working to create a herrenvolk, apartheid, plutocratic, Christian fascist new America that will be ruled by a small number of white men and their allies.

As seen on Jan. 6 with Trump's coup attempt and the terrorist attack on the Capitol by his followers, such political violence will become the norm as the Republican-fascists expand and consolidate their power and target the Democratic Party (and liberals and progressives more generally) as illegitimate.

How have Joe Biden and the Democrats and the so-called "resistance" responded to this assault on American democracy and society? They have been largely uncoordinated, hapless, lacking the urgency of now, and in total failing to rise to the challenge and demands of the crisis.

In so many ways, Biden and the Democrats remain beholden to — and therefore hamstrung by — a type of American politics and its faith in centrism, bipartisanship and institutions that no longer exists in the Age of Trump and ascendant fascism. This means that the Democratic Party's (and the larger pro-democracy's forces) plans and strategies and norms are of little use in this fight. Democrats are also being held back by self-inflicted injuries such as infighting about President Joe Biden's leadership (or lack thereof), horrible messaging and Vichy Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin who consistently sabotage the party's agenda.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

 

They say it's never too late to do something meaningful with your life, which is a nice thought, but I think I'm only gonna give it about 9 more days and if nothing changes I'll forget about it and keep doing what I'm doing.  No need to be a fool about it.

 I'd rather be alone than be with people I do not wish to be with.

I'd rather see the forest than get bogged down in the trees.

I prefer silence rather than noise just for the sake of noise.

I'd rather see clearly what is right in front of me than the glory that might lie in the distance.

No need to get it to go. It's now or never.