Before this, I'd held out hope that maybe, just maybe, TLO would change her mind about the Bloomington job, that she'd re-start her efforts to find gainful employment somewhere around Louisville.
Ain't gonna happen.
Ah well, there's always the Cubs. Hungry Jim Hendry peddled Felix Pie to his (Hendry's) old pal, Andy MacPhail in Baltimore. If you've paid any attention to these screeds you know that Felix Pie is yet another in a long, long, long line of highly touted position players to come up through the Cubs farm system and flop on the big league stage.
The boys over at Goat Riders of the Apocalypse relate a story that the Cubs' Latin American region scouts discovered Pie as a teenager in the Dominican Republic. Apparently, he was such a superior athlete with jaw-dropping physical skills that the Cubs inked him in the snap of a finger. Only he'd never played baseball before. The scouts and the front office figured, We'll teach him how to play baseball.
This decision, I remind you, emanates from an organization that is notoriously inept at the arts of teaching baseball skills and developing players. This is the organization that, except for a blip here and there (most notably during the Dallas Green and John Holland regimes) hasn't been any good at producing position players since the 1930s.
Nineteen thirties. One, nine, three, oh. As in Oh my god.
Suddenly, a hundred years without a World Series championship doesn't seem too outlandish a thought, does it?
Speaking of outlandish thoughts, the Bush gang has vacated the White House this week. It hit me just last night. Sort of like when someone wins the Nobel Prize or the Oscar, they often say, It didn't hit me until days/weeks/months later. So it is with me and the end of Dubya's reign.
The former president (man, that sound good!) met with the press one last time before he lammed to Texas. This is the same press he and his plug-uglies had stonewalled, scammed, manipulated, lied to, bullied and otherwise treated like yard fudge for the last eight years. He told them he really respected them. It's like the man who beats his girlfriend and then tells her she's the prettiest thing he's ever seen.
Anyway, the ex-prez gifted us with one last Bushism, sort of a punctuation mark for his era. He said a lot of the wags and critics "misunderestimated" him. This coinage, I remind you, from the most powerful human being in the world.
Well, it turns out that misunderestimated wasn't the last Dub flub. His gang had one more exclamation point for us. That came when Georgie-boy's hand-picked Chief Justice of the Supreme Court tripped over his own brain while giving the oath of office to Barack Obama. The John Roberts gaff will forever be the unintentional definitive statement of the Bush people: We weren't very good at all at what we did. Not a one of us.
The US citizenry has no one to blame but themselves. Sort of like the successive brain trusts that have run the Cubs since 1909.
