Ummagumma

I was playing around with ChatGPT about baseball facts and stats recently. The Atlanta Braves are off to a fantastic, even commanding, start to the 2026 MLB season. I’m a happy fan. Best record in baseball. Best team batting average. Best team ERA. Baseball can be a complex sport but when are batting better than anyone and giving up the fewest earned runs you are going to win a lot of ballgames. During the course of a long chat, I wandered upon some team baseball stats that shocked me. Far more likely than not, any given team will lose any given game if they fail to score 4 runs or more. The opponent's score does not matter (except indirectly). Disregarding everything else, just looking at runs your team scored, there is a huge gulf between 4 runs and 3 runs. Even more important is the percentage of games you play while scoring 4 runs or more. Needless to say, the Braves are dominant here. Atlanta is the only team in baseball that scores at least 4 runs over 70% of the time (Tam...

Did this clown mask inspire The Dark Night ? It looks familiar. Long-time readers know that Stanley Kubrick is my favorite film director. But he had a rather mediocre start to his career. Fear and Desire (1953) is a struggle to get through. Kubrick later wanted the physical reels of film destroyed but, of course, some copies survived. I’m glad I watched it. There is a crude outline of who he was then. The Eisenstein editing techniques of cutting on the action rather than before it or after it are there. Other than that, the film is not worth watching. Killer's Kiss (1955) is eh. There is a bit of Kubrick humor and the room filled with mannequins as two men try to kill each other near the end of the movie is rather eye-popping and interesting. Otherwise, it looks and feels like the first movie in a random 1950’s double-feature. Then came 1956. Kubrick is 27 years old and climbing the ladder. Killer’s Kiss proved he could direct scenes. His partner at the time, James B. Ha...

My YouTube feed sent me another goodie recently.  The title was something about animal warfare and it opened with that Fallout  quote — "War, war never changes" — before pivoting to the paper just published in Science  about a chimpanzee civil war in Uganda. It was a reasonably good summary and I watched the whole thing. What it mostly did was make me want to write this post, which I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now since the study broke. Because this is not new territory for me. I have been looking into this particular mirror since long before I started this blog. Chimpanzee culture and behavior have always caught my eye for some reason. A natural curiosity. Jane Goodall’s first book gripped me in my college years. In 2009 I wrote about a BBC Planet Earth segment narrated by David Attenborough — extraordinary HD footage of 150 male chimpanzees in Uganda organizing themselves into a raiding party and attacking a neighboring group's territory. Several wer...

"It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate." — David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East We seem to have left the big action sequence opening of the movie and are now in the story development stage of the script. So what have Netanyahu and Trump stimulated with their attack on Iran? Stahel was writing about the Wehrmacht in 1941. About an army that won extraordinary battlefield victories and in doing so stimulated a Soviet mobilization Germany couldn't survive. Tactical brilliance was eventually overwhelmed by strategic catastrophe. We’re at the point where we can now ask what did Roaring Lion and Epic Fury stimulate? Well, the controlled closure of the Strait of Hormuz, obviously. The first sustained blockade of the world's most critical oil chokepoint in contemporary history. It stimulate...

"To Letha, Best Wishes Bobby Cox" Bobby Cox died yesterday.  He was 84. Why do we always give the age without thinking? I guess the age is the point to the living. I probably watched or listened to Bobby Cox manage close to 2,000 ballgames in my life. That number spans generations. My grandfather (who I called Pop) watched him. I watched him. The Atlanta Braves on TBS were the family's nightly summer entertainment long before I had any say in the matter. As long as MASH or The Waltons  weren't on or the score wasn't too lopsided, we were watching the Braves.  My mother was the baseball fan in the house. That's where I got it. Dad understood it. But he was more into horses and rodeos. Pop loved to watch Cox argue with umpires and get tossed. He would shake with laughter. It was comical to him. He'd start out with saying "Oh, now Bobby," to the TV set and then start rolling. I know what it was now. That hard-nosed, absolute refusal to let a possi...