84. On the top five personal belongings given to me

1950s Dodgers baseball card collection: From my father-in-law, gifted ca. 1997. Ever the loyal fan, my father-in-law preserved only the cards of his beloved Dodgers (including Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Anderson, Ind. hero Carl Erskine); the rest his mother threw out. I can imagine him dutifully segregating his heroic Dodgers from those loathesome Mickey Mantles, Whitey Fords and Yogi Berras. My own father never really collected baseball cards, so I doubly appreciate God's providence and my father-in-law's kindness in granting my longing for having such irreplaceable cards from before I was born to add to my own humble collection.

Miami University sweatshirt: From Nicole Buck, wife's sorority sister, gifted ca. 1994. My wife had such sweet, kind and wonderful sorority sisters. For some strange reason, they actually liked me. At a beautiful fall afternoon football game in Oxford, we were all cheering in the stands and I complimented Nicole on her read Champion sweatshirt with MIAMI UNIVERSITY written in white block letters across the front. It was the quintessential college sweatshirt, which had the added bonus of being already broken in (a look that people actually pay extra for these days). My memory all these years is that Nicole gave it to me, though, after reconnecting recently on Facebook, she tells me that we actually traded sweatshirts. I can't remember which one I gave her, but I'm sure I got the better end of the deal. I wore it just yesterday.

F. Scott Fitzgerald coffee mug: From Deb Rogers, former work colleague, gifted ca. 1998. Deb was the senior art director at an ad agency where I first worked after college. She knew I loved Fitzgerand and brought in this mug one day. It's tan ceramic with a little black caricature of the writer on it. It's been my coffee mug ever since. When we actually use our Williams-Sonoma china for breakfast, my Fitzgerald mug is the one element that is allowed to stay at a table of otherwise matching cups and saucers.

Arial photograph of Miami University football game, ca. early 1960s: From Mr. Sutherland, father of wife's college housemate, gifted ca. 1995. My wife lived with five wonderful girls our last two years in college, and I came to know their equally wonderful parents. One, Mr. Sutherland, had also attended Miami and knew of my love for the school. One day, he gave me this black and white 8-by-10 photograph of the old football stadium, which at the time was the second-oldest college football stadium in the country (next to Yale's, I believe). The overhead view shows the band on the field forming the word HELLO (halftime shows were a little more modest in the '60s, apparently), along with a few adjacent residence halls near where I lived freshman year.

Joe DiMaggio model four-fingered baseball glove, ca. 1940s: From my dad, gifted ca. 1990s. My dad was always more of a football guy; growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the '50s, who can blame him? (From 1946-1962, the period of my dad's school-age youth, the Cubs never had a winning record.) But he always supported me in my baseball flights of fancy and never discriminated against me for not being a tough football jock. All the same, we never had a lineal sports link -- until I found his old baseball glove. I don't even think he remembered using it, but it was worn and old enough to conceal the signature inscription -- Joe DiMaggio -- which was embossed in black on the dark-brown leather. I restrung the little webbing patch and played catch with it. As an added bonus, it was in the same box as my dad's cousin's similar-vintage first-baseman's mitt.

83. On quantifying the Angry Left

Yuval Levin over at NRO's The Corner blog posted an interesting observation about CQ's "Bush Era Scores." I used the Presidential Support and Party Unity scores to come up with another score -- "Angry Left" rating (the difference between pres support and unity) -- to give us the most sectarian anti-Bushites in the Senate:

Senator	Pres Supp	Unity	AngryLeft
Brown	24	97	73
Cardin	32	94	62
Menendez	34	93	59
Whitehouse	39	97	58
Lautenberg	41	98	57
Klobuchar	37	93	56
Obama	40	96	56
Tester	35	86	51
Casey	42	93	51
Boxer	47	98	51

Obama is seventh.

82. On world opinion

If "those abroad" complain about America's intrusiveness in other countries' business, how is it that they are meddling in our presidential race? They've been falling all over themselves telling us whom we should vote for. (When was the last time anyone took a poll in the United States about who we wanted to be president of Germany?)

If the same world who thinks that America was responsible for 9/11 wants Barack Obama to win the presidency, I think we know whom to vote for. Can anyone explain why we concern ourselves with the political recommendations of the shrill, jealous and willfully ignorant hypocrites in Europe and other places around the world?

81. On WFB

I usually take the news of a famous personage's death with all the interest of seeing a penny on the sidewalk. But when I read that William F. Buckley, Jr. had died last Wednesday, I was moved to reflection, reminiscence and gratitude. Buckley seems to me to have led an ideal sort of human life: He was committed to the Lord, his wife and family and his country, among many, many other things.

No doubt, my interest in Buckley stemmed from a personal encounter. When I was a freshman in college, I had the unique pleasure and honor of meeting Mr. Buckley in a small reception prior to his speaking engagement on campus. A handful of the college Republicans were invited to the intimate little get-together, which took place in the darkly and warmly furnished living room of one of the college's oldest residence halls. We sat around Buckley, who held court as if he were at home talking with his grandchildren. It was one of those times in life in which one feels a bit guilty for an experience that one feels unprepared for, undeserving of, or too much of a neophyte for. But the memory is indelible: As he got up to leave for his speech, I shook his hand and he told _me_ how much of a pleasure it was to meet _me_, and -- I'll never forget this, silly as it sounds -- his eye twinkled. Here I was, an unserious if earnest freshman with long hair and wrinkled khakis who had read exactly zero of Buckley's books in their entirety. In that brief meeting with Buckley, I experienced a bit of what Fitzgerald had Nick Carraway say of Gatsby:

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."

After that, Buckley became a kind of model for me. I wanted to imitate him like a boy who emulates his favorite baseball player's batting stance (a few of us later created an alternative college newspaper, which we of course named "The Miami Review"). After being disillusioned with heroes of my youth, who failed to be real or enduring role models, I saw Buckley's intellectualism, pursuits and ideals as worthy of my attention. He was a flawless man, and yet, among mortals, he was someone to be emulated: Erudite, witty, someone with "a talent for friendship," intellectual in all the best senses of the word, and a bon vivant, someone who enjoyed so much of this earthly life and yet was completely ready to leave it, knowing that, as much joy, fulfillment and glory as this material existence can offer, it's only the beginning of the story.

Rethinking what we need to examine

In the wake of yesterday's tragedy in Finland, in which a deranged and politically motivated high-school student shot seven and killed seven classmates and a teacher, the headlines predictably are "Finland's gun laws to be examined after killings." The thing that I can't understand is why it's always the inanimate gun that needs to be controlled by a law and not the psycho behind it. Somewhere near the end of these inverted paragraphs of news reports is the not-insignificant detail that "Auvinen also posted a rambling manifesto online, describing himself as a 'social darwinist' and 'storm spirit.' Why doesn't anyone ever bother checking out whether laws regarding 'social darwinist' lunatics need to be examined after killings?

Outlawing only things that no one does

The WSJ's Best of the Web today carried a funny bit on a couple of pot-heads who want to get rid of some laws because people break them. James Taranto, editor of BotW, summarized their position:

If you pass a law against something that people do, you thereby turn people into criminals. Also, laws that are broken are much more expensive to enforce than laws that aren't broken. Why not outlaw only things that no one does?

According to The Wall Street Journal, many states seem to be doing just that:

The Humane Society of the United States last year mailed more than 50,000 people an urgent message, underlined and in bold type: "Such horrific cruelty must stop and stop now!"

The cruelty in question was Internet hunting, which the animal-rights group described as the "sick and depraved" sport of shooting live game with a gun controlled remotely over the Web. Responding to the Humane Society's call, 33 states have outlawed Internet hunting since 2005, and a bill to ban it nationally has been introduced in Congress.

But nobody actually hunts animals over the Internet.

Finally, something that explains those hilariously non-sequitur "I love animals ... and I vote!" bumper stickers!

Double-switch nightmare

Had an interesting conclusion to the Cardinal game last night. I did pretty well, until the patented TLR double-switch. Well, he fooled everyone in the press box. Gooch and Babyface came into the game in the top half of the ninth inning. The initial ruling in the press box was that Thompson was batting ninth, Gooch 3rd. But with the pitcher's spot due up 5th in the 9th, the Cardinal PR people figured that it must've been a true double switch, and that Gooch was batting 9th. So I then switched them in the scoring app. Because the scoreboard and press box were all under the impression that it was that way (they noted that the ump -- a former AL guy unaccustomed to as many double-switches -- failed to signal it) . Anyway, it was confusing to all -- including my supervisor, who happened to be my support person for the game last night -- that Wilson would PH for Taguchi. I assured him that that's what the scoreboard and the PR people had. Then the game ended, and all heck broke loose. TLR's postgame interview comes over the press-box sound system -- the first question is something about the lineup. TLR says that he kinda messed up and actually had Thompson batting 9th! So I inform my support guy, and he gets understandably irate, since I had subbed for a sub, a no-no in our app. To make matters worse, he's thinking that I just absentmindedly screwed up. Anyway, yada yada yada, he fixed it for me, and I think ultimately understood my predicament. I talked about it with the Cards' PR guys, who said that usually, if there's confusion, they call down to the dugout. But, with the blowout, they didn't want any part of what might await them on the other end of the line.