Sby John Walters
A Medium Happy 62nd to Cindy Morgan, a.k.a. Lacy Underall. “I was born to love you/I was born to lick your face/I was born to rub you/But you were born to rub me first”
A Quick Salute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H22q1iDOKA
Starting Five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf59jkPxKM
Teix Message
Red Sox and Yankees celebrating on the same field at the same time?!? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Too little, too late, after that four-game sweep at Fenway two weekends ago, but the Yankees got a measure of redemption last night.
Trailing 3-0 heading into the bottom of the ninth—with only one hit, an infield number…Did Jeets return???—the Yankees scored five. Closer Craig Kimbrel walked three straight batters, walking in a run and leaving the bases loaded for Mark Teixiera, who then clouted a walk-off grand slam. It was the 409th career home run for Teix, who will retire after Sunday’s game, but the first walk-off. It’s also his second ninth-inning home run in a Yankee come-from-behind win in the past three days.
The Sawx celebrated because earlier in the ninth inning the Blue Jays blew a ninth-inning lead against the Orioles, lost 3-2, and allowed Boston to clinch the A.L. East. It’s the second time in the past five years that Boston has won the A.L. East after finishing last in the division the year before. The second time in five years! That’s wild, and a first.
In David Ortiz’s final series at Yankee Stadium, he is 0 fer 9. The win put the Yanks at 82-76, meaning for the 24th consecutive year, they’ll finish above .500.
2. Get Smart
This was the inspiration for the sneaker phone, no?
Here’s what Donald Trump said at a rally yesterday in Iowa.
Unedited, verbatim— Donald Trump on smart people at his rally in Iowa: pic.twitter.com/1HoDEpLxw1
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 28, 2016
3. Tebow Time
By now, you’ve seen this. The first pitch Tim Tebow sees in the Instructional League in Port St. Lucie, Fla., he hits out. I love the way the pitcher, John Kilichowski, turns to watch the ball sail past him. Very Charlie Brown. And that dude knows he’ll live on YouTube forever now.
Music 101
Portions For Foxes
Meet Rilo Kiley, if you haven’t before. The lead singer is Jenny Lewis, and the band’s name was simply made up, although they often told interviewers they’d found the name in a Scottish sports almanac (you probably have one sitting around your house right now). This song from 2004 helped them land gigs opening on tours for Bright Eyes and Coldplay.
4. Your Paul Harvey Moment of the Day
The wreck of the SS Central America
So I’m reading a book titled Ship Of Gold.
It’s partly about the wreck of the SS Central America, a ship that sank in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina in 1857. Some 469 lives were lost—it’s still the largest loss of life in an American shipping disaster unrelated to war—and the ship was carrying TEN TONS of gold (it was taking pilgrims of the California Gold Rush back to their east coast homes when it sunk).
Captain Herndon
Anyway, the ill-fated captain of the ship, William Lewis Herndon, had a few years before been possibly the first American to trace a route from the source of the Amazon to the sea, and had written about it quite vividly in a book titled Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon.
A young man in Keokuk, Iowa, was so inspired by the book that he quit his job at a print shop and decided to travel down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he would then embark on a ship to Brazil and retrace Herndon’s route. The problem? There were no ships leaving from New Orleans to Brazil. So instead the man just became…Mark Twain.
The author, very young
And now you know…the rest of the story.
5. Blake Bolts (as opposed to Blake Bortles)
Will Barnett go juco for a year, then play at Auburn? The Cam Route? Probably not. My guess is he goes Pac-12 next.
When you’re the No. 1 team in the nation and the dude who started your season opener at quarterback bolts before the end of the season’s first month, that’s kind of a big deal, no? Alabama quarterback Blake Barnett has left Tuscaloosa. The redshirt frosh QB will transfer.
Barnett, a five-star recruit from Corona, Calif., played the opening two series against USC without much success. He was replaced by true frosh Jalen Hurts and the Tide went on to win 52-6. Handwriting, meet wall. The Tide will roll on without Barnett. It always does. Not sure why he’d leave now, though.
Remote Patrol
Easy A
Oxygen 8 p.m. (and at 10:10 p.m.)
Wanna know when Emma Stone’s cute-and-adorableness first infiltrated the screen? Here it is, a satisfying twist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which you were forced to read in high school, as Olive (Stone), becomes the most popular girl at her high school after she is mistakenly thought to be a tramp. Besides, wouldn’t you have loved your movie parents to be Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson? And, oh, but doesn’t Ojai, Calif., seem like a lovely place to grow up. This is a charming film filled with charming actors.
4. What a fascinating story! And for more of the backstory…the origin of Samuel’s Clemens’ pseudonym “Mark Twain” is thought to come from the term “mark twain” meaning two fathoms, the depth at which a boat can safely move forward. Another unverified theory claims that “Mark Twain” was bartender code for “mark me down for two drinks on credit” (as was his wont).
One of the greatest non-fictional characters to walk the earth, Twain was born shortly after Hailey’s Comet, and predicted he would go out with it, too. He died the day after the comet returned.
Never a Twain like this–shall we meet.