Wayward Landlubber

     If you Google it, the oldest recorded joke was told in 1900 BCE. It was written on a Sumerian tablet. We will have to trust the experts on this because I wasn't there to download it. And you know how unreliable those Sumerian tablets can be. The subject of the joke was a woman sitting in her husband's lap--- and farting. Let us pause here for a moment to consider how you tell a joke by scratching glyphs onto a clay tablet. About farting, fachrissakes. We also might consider how those glyphs were translated from a language spoken nearly 4000 years ago. I wonder if the grandpa joke about "pull my finger" had been common in those days. And how was it recorded?      Using that same time frame, let us try another joke that may have been told in that time but was too long to scratch onto a tablet. A sumerian charioteer returns from a long campaign against Persia, or some other warring nation. In the time he had been away, his hut had developed a crack in the...

     Historians have this annoying thing. They look at historical events from the point of view of the conquering peoples. Twisting themselves into pretzels to find a positive.The Mongols did a lot of bad stuff but they United the plains of Eastern Europe. Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world around the Meditterranean sea and Indian Ocean. Persia brought stability to the Middle East. No one looks at it from the point of view of the conquered nations. Perhaps they were a loose collection of warring tribes before they were conquered. Perhaps their engineering skills, their language sophistication, their social organization were not as great as the cultures that conquered and enslaved their people, but they were free-or perhaps freer- than they were as conquered people.       Maybe, as in the case of the Roman Republic, they were presented with the popular vote, used by Athens before the Peloponnesian war. But it was still only available ...

     May 26, 1993, Jose Conseco made baseball history doing something no outfielder wants to see on film. He was chasing a high fly ball in the rightfield and lost it in the sun. The ball bounced off the top of his head and went into the stands for a home run. It went down in baseball lore as "the doink". Consecco had some pretty good stats until his career was ruined by steroids. Perhaps his one defensive weakness was in fielding, which is why he played right field, the one position which required the least defensive talent.       The first thing you learn in Pee-wee baseball, someone has claimed, is to put the least capable player in right field. In politics the same claim can be made. Rightwingers are the fat kid with the big mouth and the weinie-arm. They do have an offensive talent but in being offensive, not for being enlightened. Republicans are the fat kid in rightfield watching all the other kids fielding hits. Even worse, Republican politics ...