Farewell to the greatest broadcaster in baseball history, Vin Scully

It's very strange for me to think there is someone in the world who essentially has done their job for the entire time I have been alive, give or take a couple of months.

Queen Elizabeth

I always figured the one who came closest was Queen Elizabeth II, who became sovereign of the United Kingdom in 1952, when I was 2 years old.

She's still hanging in at age 90, and is the longest reigning monarch in British history.

I was born in December 1949, and it's not like I was aware of what was going on across the pond, even though I've got English ancestry I can trace back to the middle of the 14th century.

As it turned out, though, there is someone who started doing his job before the beginning of my life who is still showing up for work for another week.

Vin then

Vincent Edward Scully was born later in the same year my mother was born, and they graduated from different colleges the same year as well. He had only one job offer out of college, and he started working as a fill-in announcer for WTOP radio in Washington in 1949.

Legendary announcer Red Barber hired him to do some college football coverage on Saturdays, and Scully impressed him enough for his work at a cold November game at Boston's Fenway Park that he hired him as the No. 3 man on his team broadcasting Brooklyn Dodgers games.

Barber gave Scully three pieces of advice -- don't be a homer, don't listen to other announcers and keep your opinions to yourself.

Two new films you won't find in theaters, but you ought to see them

I saw two movies today that won't show up in many American theaters.

It's a shame. Both are fascinating movies, although one leaves me wondering why it was made.

"Ithaca" is an American film, a low-budget remake of a World War II movie. MGM's "The Human Comedy" (1943) was one of the very best home-front films. It starred Mickey Rooney, one of Metro's biggest stars, as a teenage boy whose older brother is in the Army and getting ready to go overseas.

It's difficult for us to realize, 70 years later, how good Rooney was. We know him as the little guy who was in movies in 10 different decades and was married a couple of dozen times. Or at least it looked that way.

But for a time in the 1940s, he was the most popular movie star in the world.

Mickey Rooney in "The Human Comedy"

In a movie based on William Saroyan's novel "The Human Comedy," Rooney plays Homer McCauley, a 14-year-old boy living in fictional Ithaca, California (possibly Fresno).

His father is dead and his older brother Marcus is in the Army getting ready to ship out.

It's a movie that was overly sweet even for its time, but it gives us a reasonably accurate look at what things were like at home when the boys marched off to war.

Some wonderful baseball movies, but 'The Natural' isn't one of them

In 1952, a writer named Bernard Malamud came out with a great book about baseball.

In 1984, with the '80s at flood tide, Barry Levinson made a film of the book and ruined the story.

Maybe it was the difference between eras, the difference between Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, the difference between the Red Scare and Morning in America.

Malamud wrote the book in an era when people still remembered Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

When it came to hitting, Jackson might have been the closest ever to a real "natural," but the story Malamud told included another one as well.

In 1949, Eddie Waitkus was a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies. During spring training in Florida, an obsessed fan shot and wounded him. While this is an element in Malamud's book, essentially it only sets up the story.

It seems silly to have to say this for a book published 64 years ago and a movie released 32 years ago, but if you're going to read and further, I'm going to tell the ending of both, so ...

Spoiler Alert:

What makes the book so wonderful is that in baseball, even the best hitters fail 70 percent of the time. so when the protagonist, Roy Hobbs, comes to bat in the climax of the story, he is trying his best to thwart the gamblers who tried to bribe him.

Ol' Gee Dubya missed his chance to be a truly great president

A reprint and reworking from 9/11/14.

***

Look at the headline on the Sept. 12, 2001, issue of Le Monde.

The leftist French paper, one of the most respected daily newspapers in the world, included in its wall-to-wall coverage of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., a story titled "Nous sommes tous Americains."

For the linguistically challenged, that translates as "We are all Americans."

At that point, most of the civilized world was on our side. Ironically, this came just three months after a dinner I had in Paris with some French friends and relatives, a dinner in which numerous people wanted to know how America could have elected a man like Gee Dubya Bush as its president.

This may be difficult to remember, but that summer, after Bush had been in the White House for half a year or so, pundits were already speculating that he would serve only one term. He had been that unimpressive in his first year as president.

It's time to stop letting the right wing demonize the word "liberal"

One of the things that fascinates me is how many people seem to see "liberal" as a dirty word.

I can't say I blame them. For the last 35 years, the right has been hammering away at the word, doing its best to equate "liberal" with "libertine" in people's minds, and completely ignoring the fact that there are shades of difference in those left of center on the spectrum.

One of the tactics squawk radio hosts and media whores like Fat Man, Little Boy and Loofah Guy have used for years is basically saying that liberal, socialist and communist are all pretty much the same.

Mike, who are Fat Man, Little Boy and Loofah Guy?

Three great heroes of right-wing media who never let facts get in the way of their arguments. Throw in Rabid Annie and you've got the foursome from Hell.

On the other side, there really aren't that many people except on the lunatic fringe who try to equate conservative with fascist and Nazi.

Well then, what have liberals done for America?

First and foremost, even though they were Republicans at the time, they fought to end slavery.

They fought for women to have the right to vote, and for a whole myriad of workplace rights from child labor to minimum wage to workplace safety.

They busted trusts and created the inheritance tax that at least limited the creation of a permanent American oligarchy.

Up to that point, most of the progressives were in the Republican Party.

They created Social Security and Medicare, and they led the fight for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

Two days before 15 years on, 911 attacks changed America

Exactly five years ago today, just before the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., I wrote this. Two days before the 15th anniversary, it doesn't seem as though much has changed.

***

In two days, it will have been 10 years since our world changed forever.

Sept. 11, 2001, began like any other Tuesday in late summer, but by mid-morning, two planes had struck the Twin Towers, a third had hit the Pentagon and a fourth had crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania.

Just like that, we were at war.

Ten years later, one thing is fairly obvious. Osama bin Laden accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish, and we lost.

If that sounds harsh, consider a few things:

We can start with that old proverb from Benjamin Franklin about how people who are willing to surrender some of their freedom to gain a little security deserve neither.

That one sort of speaks for itself.

But let's look at the country in which we lived on Sept. 10, 2001.

Our economy was strong, although it had gone through a slight slowdown after the Dot-Com Crash.

Some technological advances are definitely mixed blessings

Has there ever been a technological advance that was in widespread use that was later abandoned?

If so, it would have to be something that turned out to have unforeseen negative consequences, and at this point I can't think of one. I certainly think of things that have been far more mixed blessings than we originally thought, but they haven't been abandoned.

More often than not, progress comes in the form of mixed blessings. In the play "Inherit the Wind," set in the 1920s, the Clarence Darrow character tells the audience"

"You can fly in the air, but the birds will lose their mystery and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

Before the invention of the airplane, millions and millions of Americans lived their entire lives within 50-100 miles of where they were born. As recently as the end of World War II, nearly half of American soldiers being discharged said they wanted nothing more than to return to their home town.

But progress got in the way.