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What If Astros Added BB Movie Heroes to Roster?

February 16, 2019

“Now listen up, Lanigan! ~ Once we join the Astros, try not to draw everyone’s attention to that hole in the pocket of my glove, OK?” ~ Pitcher King Kelly.

 

What If the Astros Added BB Movie Heroes to Roster? More correctly, what if they had the magical power to add some of the great fictional baseball movie characters to fill their few weaker roster spots on the 2019 “Take It Back” Astros roster that is currently taking shape.

Yeah, we know, the real world doesn’t turn on the presence of movie magic. In MLB today, you have to have General Managers like our Jeff Luhnow and his Army of Analytics to churn out data on what’s needed and who’s available to meet those needs, but this the first Saturday after Valentine’s Day ~ and this 81 year old kid is playing with the idea of how great we could really be in 2019 with just a little magical help with the roster in a few places.

Limiting myself to fictional movie characters only, I drafted seven players from the movies that I felt we could go to Opening Day with right now, if we were given the magical signal that all the changes here had been approved and made real by the baseball gods.

If you know these characters, you will have some idea of why the fellows shown in bold type below could help the Astros “take it back” in the next World Series this autumn.

You may even want to leave your own suggestions for change or additions to this talent infusion in the comment section below. If you do, please stick to fictional baseball movie characters. We’re not looking for the reincarnation of Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig.

What follows is the 2019 Houston Astros “TAKE IT BACK” Roster, as we see it:

R# POS NAME MLB/MOVIE MOVIE TITLE
1 SP1 Justin Verlander MLB
2 SP2 King Kelly MOVIE It Happens Every Spring
3 SP3 Gerrit Cole MLB
4 SP4 Wade Miley (L) MLB
5 SP5 Nuke LaLoosh MOVIE Bull Durham
6 SP/R Collin McHugh MLB
7 SP/R Brad Peacock MLB
8 R Will Harris MLB
9 R Ryan Pressly MLB
10 R Rey Guduan (L) MLB
11 R Chris Devenski MLB
12 Clr1 Roberto Osuna MLB
13 Clr2 Ricky Vaughn MOVIE Major League
14 C Crash Davis MOVIE Bull Durham
15 C Rob Chirinos MLB
16 C Monk Lanigan MOVIE It Happens Every Spring
17 1B/IF/DH Yuli Gurriel MLB
18 2B Jose Altuve MLB
19 3B Alex Bregman MLB
20 SS Carlos Correa MLB
21 DH/OF/1B Roy Hobbs MOVIE The Natural
22 LF Michael Brantley MLB
23 CF/UTIL Joe Hardy MOVIE Damn Yankees
24 RF George Springer MLB
25 OF/DH Josh Reddick MLB

Here’s just one lineup that could hit the ground running in the second game of the season. In dutiful respect to Justin Verlander, Mike “King” Kelly ~ the guy with the wood repellent stuff that repels all bats trying to hit it once Kelly doctors each baseball prior to each pitch’s delivery from a sponge that rests behind the large hole in his pitcher’s glove pocket:

One Houston Astros Lineup

Springer, RF

Altuve, 2B

Hardy, CF

Hobbs, DH

Bregman, 3B

Correa, SS

Brantley, LF

Gurriel, 1B

Lanigan, C

 

Kelly, P

 

How do you like dem egg rolls, Mr. Goldstone? ~ Could the Astros become the first undefeated baseball team in MLB history with this magical lineup? ~ When you play with magic, even the impossible downshifts to the only highest levels of improbability. 🙂

In the end, any possibility is better than none.

******************************

Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

 

Tags:
Posted in Baseball, culture, humor | 2 Comments »

Houston Weather Pretty Good By Comparison

January 23, 2019

A Highway in Pennsylvania
January 20, 2019
By Casey McCurdy

Our son Casey McCurdy sent us this photo from where he was driving on the roads of southern Pennsylvania Sunday as we sat at home in Houston, comfortably watching the NFL Playoff games in 72 degree comfort from the mildly annoying temperature outside of a brisk 48 degrees.

The temp along this particular pictured SoPA Expressway was 8 degrees with an outside reading of 20 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale at the time it was taken.

Houston, indeed, is much better located on the human comfort range than the great northeast most of the time. We may sleep with our shirts off in the summer at times ~ but that beats the heck out of trying to put on every shirt you can find on a rare cold Houston winter night when the temps are way down ~ and the power goes out.

An acquaintance from New York recently asked me how we locals stood the Houston summer heat and humidity prior to the 1957 coming of mass available home window ACs. My explanation was simple ~ prior to 1957, we just didn’t know any better. Our homes were natural air temp, as were our cars, our schools, and most of our work places. We had internal home attic fans that sucked the humid air through our open windows during the hot months ~ and helped a lot. ~ It was what we were used to.

When you walked out the home front door during the summertime pre-AC days, there was no big sense of temperature  change ~ as there is now ~ when you walk out of a centrally cooled home. Prior to AC, you were in heat then too when you went outside into the Houston August heat, but it was a far less radical change of the conditions you had vacated by moving from the inside to the outside than it is today.

Back then your first outside thoughts were to get to the locked car in your driveway and get those windows rolled down as soon as possible. That hot-as-fire dashboard chrome has to cool before your hand or arm bumps into a serious burn on a hurried backing-up exit from a late to work or school rolling retreat from the short driveway.

..and you had to roll down the car windows as quickly as possible to remove the chrome-aided bakery conditions that were hot as hell there. Ignore that step and you left yourself vulnerable to serious chrome burns on the hand and arms as you backed out of your one-car driveway.

The movie theaters, some of the downtown stores and banks, and River Oaks were our only air-conditioned respites from the heat, but since most of us didn’t have enough money to bank or do much shopping downtown, that only left River Oaks and the neighborhood movie theaters as the possible cooling off spots.

Again, most of us east enders didn’t have the kind of friends in River Oaks that would invite us over to swim or get out of the heat, so we just played sandlot baseball all day ~ except for the so-called polio dangerous “heat of the day” hours of 12-3 PM time-out that our mothers enforced upon us as “attic fan home arrest time.”

When we could get there, we swam our hearts out in the pool at nearby Mason Park, but we almost never got to see Galveston until we were old enough to work, buy a jalopy or borrow the family car for the trip on our own gas and then drive south to the Gulf of Mexico and Stewart’s Beach, pulled mostly by our adolescent hormones to meet girls.

ice-storm

1950 Houston Ice Storm

The Houston Ice Storm of 1950 did supply us with a rare weather extreme, of the type they seem to continue having back east on a fairly regular basis. Most of our normal weather extreme brushes tend to occur with stuff that comes our way in summer, from the supposed gates of hell. This one came at us from the north pole during the winter.

Here’s a link to the column I wrote several years ago on the Houston Ice Storm of 1950:

https://bill37mccurdy.com/2011/02/02/the-houston-ice-storm-of-1950/

Those were the days, my friends!

 

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Posted in culture, History, Houston, humor, Pecan Park Days | 1 Comment »

Time Travel Tease: The Ruth-Gehrig Film

January 20, 2019

Babe Ruth (L) and Lou Gehrig
(You didn’t really need the help, did you?)

It happened on April 11, 1931. The New York Yankees made a short trip to Brooklyn to play the Dodgers in an exhibition game at Ebbets Field and Fox Movietone was there to get this great film footage (with sound) of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig taking batting practice prior to a growing stadium crowd. It’s just what it appears to be ~ a fortunate capture of the two great Yankee sluggers back in 1931, simply doing their ordinary pre-game routine for the action to follow.

The Gehrig-Ruth BP Film Link:

Video of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig's batting practice shows how bizarre their swings were

Filmed from behind the two left-handed batters as they took their cuts, we also get a pretty good view of the lower near home plate left field side  of home box seats and the stir of early fan and concession sales personnel. Hardly anyone seems to be paying much full attention to either of the two swat-meisters taking their practice cuts. That’s right! Even though they may have not bragged about it even then, New York fans always have been self-entitled to more than one team “sultan of swat” at a time. And besides, nobody pays big-ticket bucks just to go watch batting practice anywhere ~ even at these exhibition games. ~ Unless ….

Unless what? ~ We’ll get to that question soon, but just a word or two more about the crowd first.

People are dressed to the nines. Women are adorned in beautiful stepping-out long skirts and caps; men are dressed in suits and ties and hats. The food sales guys are the younger worker and older rummy type men in the white jackets and caps who all seem to share the ability to statue-of-liberty a hot dog with their shouts of “right here” appeal to the fans.

Many people in the stands sit and talk in twos and threes, with eyes facing each other, while others stare out beyond the infield on a thought path that may run as short as ~ “should I eat now or later” ~ to ~ “is baseball the meaning of life for everyone that it is for me?”

The fans in the Ruth-Gehrig film clip also share another common trait that is immediately noticeable to all of us who’ve almost made it through the first decades of the 21st century. ~ No one is talking or playing digital games or texting or taking selfies on a cell phone. If they are not watching Ruth and Gehrig take a few knob-nubber hacks, it’s as we said at the start here, these early 20th century fans didn’t come to the ballpark to watch the big boys practice. In 1931, If they were Yankee fans, they came to watch their club destroy the not-so-good Brooklyn Robins, whose 1931 nickname for the eventual Dodgers trademark moniker was still in use as an homage to their revered long-time manager, Wilbert Robinson.

Now let’s get back to our “unless what” qualifier from above.

Maybe a fan, or a small group thereof, wouldn’t pay more for their best tickets unless this one trip to see Ruth and Gehrig was possibly going to be their only opportunity to ever see them live again! ~ And why so? ~ Because of the possibility that these rare game viewers were time travellers from the future who might either get lost when they tried to return to their own future era of origin. Look for the ones who seem to be paying constant attention to Ruth and Gehrig as much as you or I might.

Now, before you call to place my commitment in action, please be aware that even the great genius mind of the late Stephen Hawking conceded in his last book that time travel to the past is theoretically possible. In fact, the light from earth for every second in history already recorded still exists at an unspeakably high number of light years away from us now ~ and all we have to do to retrieve it is to bring our time and space technology up to the task of its full recovery and then take the next step into energy conversion that will allow us to enter into those recovered fields as though we were already there when they originally occurred. Congruent time and space travel will make that possible, if we can work out some of the bugs that got in the way of that basic step attempt in the 1958 Vincent Price movie, “The Fly”.

Simple as that! ~ Simply enjoy this gift to our times. The short film shows two of the greatest players in baseball history going through “a day at the office” in their very different era.

As for the present or near availability of time travel, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. By now, we all know from both fictional and philosophical works that the major danger of time travel at full interactive capacity with people or past events is that anything we might change ~ changes everything else ~ and all it would take is for our presence in the past mix to alter the conditions that made our existence today even possible.

And why in the world would any of us want to be rendered non-entities by time travel when anyone among us can stay in their own time zone and be rendered has beens or non-entities in our normal flesh location?

It ought to be a no-brainer! 🙂

” Two words about me going back in time to correct my mistakes and then becoming the greatest pitcher in history ~ ‘You never know!’ ” ~ Anonymous.

******************************

Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Baseball, culture, History, humor | 3 Comments »

The 2019 Astros Are Gonna Need a Bigger Ring

January 19, 2019

REPORTER: “SIR, YOU JUST CAME FROM ASTROS GM JEFF LUHNOW’S OFFICE. ~ DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE’S FOUND TO MAKE THE 2019 ASTROS LINEUP MORE POWERFUL AND KILLER AGGRESSIVE AT THE PLATE THIS YEAR?”
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HUGE STRANGER: “YOU WILL HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE! ~ IN THE MEANWHILE, TRUST THE ORANGE SEA FORCE ~ AND DON’T GRAB MY TAIL AS I SWIM AWAY FROM YOU FOR AN IMPORTANT BUSINESS LUNCH WITH ASTROS CLUB OWNER JIM CRANE!”

 

******************************

Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

Tags:
Posted in Baseball, Houston, humor | Leave a Comment »

Fearless Houston Pro Sports Predictions

January 1, 2019

The Pecan Park Eagle will celebrate its 10th online anniversary on July 21, 2019. Thanks to all of you for making our journey such a fun ride. We’ll make it too ~ as long as the old guy’s heart holds out ~ and the creek don’t (doesn’t) rise.

 

Happy New Year, Everybody! ~ And thanks so much for all the Happy Birthday wishes that so may of you sent my way yesterday by Facebook and personal e-mail. It makes this one old guy out here very happy that so many of you cared enough to drop an electric buzz on me ~ one way or the other. I literally could not answer them all personally today and also have had much time remaining for anything else.

Today’s prognostication column should cover some ground on reducing the message toll next birthday New Years Eve ~ if there is one for me to celebrate again at age 82 ~ but it’s best to take nothing for granted. All of us, at any age, only have one day to start with each 24-hour cycle, and that’s the one our eyes awaken to behold each time.

When that happens, measure it with fragility, treasure it wholly, and use it for all we’ve got to give in the moment at hand. ~ But, as we’ve already said once ~ and also with a nudging, murmuring cry for repetition ~ never take it for granted.

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Our Pecan Park Eagle Houston Pro Sport Outcome Predictions for 2019 by Date

I. February 3, 2019: Behind four Watson-to-Hopkins TD passes, the Houston Texans will defeat the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl by a score of 28-24 to become the 2018 NFL Season Champions of Professional Football.

II. Some Time in March 2019: Houston’s Dynamo and Dash men’s and women’s soccer teams will be named as the 2019 champions in their respective gender fields of competition as the result of a complex formula for evaluating team style points during a double season in which no actual goals were scored by any teams in either the male or female brackets of play.

III. June 11, 2019: Boosted by a 53-point James Harden triple-double Game Four sweep, the Houston Rockets shall roll to a crunching 122-101 win over the Eastern Champion Toronto Raptors in Houston to claim the NBA Championship for 2019. (We had seen this originally as a win over the Golden State Warriors, but as Rick B. so keenly observed in the comment section, that could not be ~ given the fact that they and the Rockets both play in the Western Division. ~ Wait a minute. ~ Now the true story is coming through in a fully corrected telepathically driven imagery. ~ The Rockets will reach the Western Division finals by beating the Golden State Warriors in a record scoring 149-112 rout.)

IV. October 28, 2019: Led by AL Batting Champion Jose Altuve (.368) and Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander, the Houston Astros sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers of the NL to regain their title as World Series Champions of the Baseball Universe for the year 2019.

That’s it, but that should be enough. Try not to break your necks getting to Vegas and putting some money down on the successful outcome of all these sure-thing calls.

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Bonus Prediction in College Football:

January 7, 2019: Regardless of who wins the 2018 NCAA, Division 1 Season Title ~ Alabama or Clemson ~ ‘Bama Coach Nick Saban’s post-game comments will include the qualifier statement that he “saw some things we could have done better.”

On this totally light note, let’s get this 2019 new year started. ~ In Houston Sports, we could use one that floats a little more fun than frustration this time around the sun.

 

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“Hello There, 2019!”

Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

Tags:
Posted in Baseball, basketball, culture, Football, History, Houston, humor | 5 Comments »

Nostradamus and The Crimson Tide

December 30, 2018

“I SEE SOMETHING WE COULD DO BETTER!” ~ Lou Saban.

Shortly before I slipped into something like a weekend coma with flu-like symptoms early Saturday morning, I had been working here and there on a coach-speak article that focused upon what we constantly hear college football coaches say in these fifteen second pre, middle, and end game statements they make to the sideline TV reporters as their teams are running on and off the field.

Thanks, Coma! ~ You caused me to miss out on a pre-event publication of a pretty much literal peg on what Alabama head coach Nick Saban had to say last night about the Crimson Tide’s 42-31 win over Oklahoma last night. It wasn’t anything Nostradamus would have e-mailed home, but even these no-brainers are an act of artful pride out here in the boonies of 21st century blogging.

When asked by ESPN what he thought of Alabama’s performance in their win over Oklahoma, Nick Saban said, “I saw some things we could have done better, but I was pleased with our overall effort.”

What I had written at least sixteen hours earlier in my unfinished draft read as follows: “Win or Lose the 2018 National Championship, Nick Saban of Alabama will humbly express his final post-game view that he saw some things the Tide could have done better.”

As I watched the game bedside in the second half, I recall seeing Saban barking at one of his players that he had just removed from the game for causing the Tide to miss the benefit of a completed pass deep into the Clemson red zone because of an illegal procedure move he made in the ‘Bama backfield on the same play.

The rapidity of Saban’s speaking lips and the lurching motions of his body toward the player suggested that he was trying to be instructive on some level, but the coach’s general demeanor suggested that the subject was along the lines of the player’s need to re-locate his head from some dark nearby crevice and get it refocused on his duties in the game.

Forgive me. I’m going back to bed now.

Since tomorrow is New Year’s Eve ~ and also my friggin’ birthday and a planned reunion with an ancient cousin on my mother’s side ~ I will be quietly busy through New Years Day and not catching up on non-urgent calls until Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year, Everybody! ~ Please know that you are both loved and appreciated!

As long as they are making new baseball seasons ~ and as long as we can keep our head clear and our eyes open ~ there will always be a sandlot game going on of some kind here at The Pecan Park Eagle.

Come by anytime.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2019!

Regards,

Bill McCurdy

 

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

Tags:
Posted in Baseball, culture, Football, History, humor | 1 Comment »

A Century Ago in America

December 10, 2018

Sigmund Freud, The Father of Psychiatry
**********
Steven Spielberg should produce, direct, and star in
the bio-movie of Freud’s life.

 

Thank you, fellow St. Thomas High School classmate Ed Szymczak from the Class of 1956 for sending me this list of everyday data on different aspects of Life in America back in 1917. Even though these reports are from an era that transpired only a little more than 100 years ago, it’s still hard to wrap the mind around how much life has changed since that version of everyday life was regarded as someone’s “good old days” ~ and even more mind-staggering to consider how things may be from now ~ for those heading into the Christmas of 2118. ~ Do you think there will still be something called “Christmas” that people celebrate a hundred years from now? ~ Well, if Christmas remains tied to the retail gift industry, or whatever they call it in another hundred years, and why would it not be still so joined, my guess is “yes” ~ there will be.

Here’s The 1917 List of Facts about their era. (I have no idea about their efficacy, or who put them together, but they do sound credible):

The average life expectancy for men was 47 years

Fuel for cars was sold in drug stores only.

Only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of homes had a telephone.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.

The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.

The average US worker made between $200 & $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year

A dentist $2,500 per year.

A veterinarian between $1,500 – $4,000 per year.

And, a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births took place at home.

Ninety percent of all Doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION! Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND the government as “substandard.”

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once a month, and, used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.

The Five leading causes of death were:

  1. Pneumonia and influenza
  2. Tuberculosis
  3. Diarrhea
  4. Heart disease
  5. Stroke

The American flag had 48 stars …

The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was only 30.

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn’t been invented yet.

There was neither a Mother’s Day nor a Father’s Day.

Two out of every 10 adults could not read or write

And, only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at local corner drugstore. Back then pharmacists said, “Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach, bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health!”

(A TPPE Addition): Back then, Dr. Sigmund Freud prescribed cocaine to patients suffering from depression.

Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help…

There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

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Posted in culture, History, humor, Movies | Leave a Comment »

A Few Baseball Team Mascot Names

December 1, 2018

Works as a soft drink. As a baseball team plural nickname ~ not so much.

 

Baseball team mascot nicknames have been a long-time interest and amusement here since my childhood day trip journeys viv-a-vis The Sporting News during the post-WWII era. That’s where I began to get the lesson that small town American baseball teams used the nickname aspect of their clubs to advertise everything from their own notions  of tenacity to getting the word out about their smaller community’s commercial interests.

The Mayfield (KY) Clothiers were an excellent example. They manufactured everyday clothes for people and wanted the world to know where they could do their wholesale shopping. The same state Hopkinsville (KY) Hoppers may have been so-named to communicate their energy for movement, but maybe they also manufactured those clothes hopper receptacles that could hold those dirty Clothier products once they had been through the sweat and dirt grill of actual game play.

The Terre Haute (IN) Tots and the Hancock (MI) Infants may have been trying to tell us that they were new to this game of organized baseball, but maybe ~ just maybe ~ they could have joined with the Houston Babies ~ and all of the other small towns that began in the game with that “Babies” sobriquet to form something colorful like the Delivery Room League.

Orange, Texas and Alexandria, Louisiana  both fielded clubs in the early 20th century called the “You Hoos”, but we don’t know if this had been two separate franchises or one that moved elsewhere in a vain effort to elude failure. Either way, on the surface of things, the idea seems more laughable than it does funny.

In 1905, the Paris (TX)/Hope (AR) Parasites failed after one season played out in two small towns. Folks should avoid naming their baseball teams “Parasites.” It’s a little hard to build anything that wins on the backs of people who, by their shared name, are all simply a bunch of hangers-on.

Muncie (IN) Fruit Jars? ~ They had to be kidding! ~ Just as you can’t go swimming in a baseball pool, you can’t find a pennant in an old fruit jar!

The Iola (KS) Gasbags, the Garden City (KS) Wind and the South Georgia (GA) Waves are a good start on building a league in which everyone else gets blown away by the strongest member. Among these three first members, the Garden City Wind has the early money as pennant favorites, but we all know too that there may be other stronger nicknamed winds out there that could come along and win in a greater frenzy of breeze.

Bottom Line. Seventy years ago, when I was ten. I spent a lot of musing time with stuff like this bizarre baseball team nickname business when the weekly Sporting News came in ~ and what do you know? ~ Here I am ~ still mind-doodling away with it today.

Have a nice weekend, everybody! ~ And please forgive us for an occasional meandering column on a laid back Saturday that just happened to fall at the end of a very busy and joyous week of family commitment beyond baseball.

 

******************************

Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

 

Tags:
Posted in Baseball, humor | 3 Comments »

Mr. Daddy Long Lead

November 27, 2018

Ty Cobb Stealing 2nd.

 

Mr. Daddy Long Lead

 

Mr. Daddy Long Lead ~ was a surefire crash and burn,

He stole a lot of bases ~ with a low crouch start and churn.

Once the pitcher raised his foot ~ to let the next ball fly,

Off would go old Daddy man ~ kicking sand back to the sky.

 

And as he ran ~ his speed would grow ~ as would his eagle eye,

To race with love ~ toward fielder’s glove ~ where all the chips would fly.

Left or right ~ high or low ~ decisions without thought,

Were matters that unfolded now ~ from all that time had taught.

 

~ It could have been written in 1905, but it wasn’t. It was written five minutes ago. Have a nice day and remember to mark your calendars. Although it has not been officially announced, spring training for the Houston Astros probably starts on February 13, 2019 ~ when the pitchers and catchers probably show up. ~ That’s 79 days from today, Tuesday, November 27, 2018.

Harmless Useless Trivia Question Parody: As improbable as this deal might be, if Mr. Gonzalez of the Astros were to end up playing for that far south Florida National League team in 2019. would they change their name again ~ this time to ~ The Miami Marwins?

Have a nice day, everybody!

 

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

 

 

 

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Posted in Baseball, culture, humor | Leave a Comment »

Happy Thanksgiving 2018

November 21, 2018

 

Classic Thanksgiving cartoon by Glenn McCoy.

Dear Pilgrims ~ Hail Ye! ~ Hear Me!

This is the Voice of the Future speaking to you from the year 2018! We may sound to you that we are speaking in a strange new form of English usage ~ but that’s cool. ~ We’re down with that!

Our time/space broadcasting technology may also resonate into your neck of the woods ears like the always booming Voice of God ~ but hang tight ~ we are not God ~ nor any other spirit that your own ladies in those black pointed hats has conjured up in one of those big boiling plots! ~ No way! ~ We simply are who we say we are ~ The Voice of the Future ~ and we are here to give you a shout out about that not-so-fast first Thanksgiving cartoon that you dudes have decided to publish! ~ You know the one! ~ The one that shows all the female Pilgrims sweating their hearts out over the preparation of that first turkey day dinner of gratitude ~ while the male pilgrims cavalierly engage the even then famous Washington Redskins in the first Turkey Day football game in history!

Just hold the presses right there, folks!

My wife saw that cartoon all the way up here in the 21st century (thanks to an ancestral aunt who lives among you in 1621 as one of the black pointed hat ladies who witch-crafted it all the way up here to her) and now she wants me to do what I can to dissuade you from letting this new practice of an annual thanksgiving day upon which the men get to play while the women slave away fixing them a scrumptious meal as the whole thing unfolds into the shocking tradition it is likely to become!

“I’ve never seen such rampant sexism and racism in the act of getting started from the very first day as an American tradition ~ while everyone just moves around ~ filling all the necessary roles ~ and making it happen!” So said me deary ~ and in a fomentation of fury I’ve rarely seen in this once sweet image of youthful saucy energy that she truly is!

“Me neither,” I said ~ and in my strongest voice of concisely chiseled emotional support.

“William,” Norma continued, “I think we should try to do something about it with our present level of understanding, need, and technology! ~ DON’T YOU?” ~ She added, in a voice that reverberated like a bolt of runaway thunder.

“Me too!” I quickly answered. Then I looked into a nearby mirror and smiled, as I also mutely formed the sound of those two glorious words of courage again ~ this time, mimed and so silently whispered into my own smiling face ~ as I watched the formation of each facial muscle I was required to make to have pitched and flat-out delivered the first aloud expression of these great liberators ~ the ones that came instants earlier with credible affirmation oozing from both my words of response to my dear wife Norma’s strongly emphatic request for support of her opinion ~ and my own desire to do the right thing.

“Me too!” ~ Gee, I thought! You did sound great, kiddo! Then I uttered those same two turn-key words again ~ and this time ~ more softly ~ and to my own congratulatory ears.

Norma wanted more.

“Well, what are you going to do about it,” Norma demanded. ~ “Are you going to do one of your time travel broadcasts ~ one that shakes the leaves of every apple tree in the valley during their harvest time season? ~ ‘Cause, if you do, let ’em think you’re God all they want. We sure know you’re not, but they’ve never met you ~ and it wouldn’t hurt them to worry about an invasion of bugs for a while ~ and, at least, until they mend their ways!”

“Me too!” ~ I said again, in even greater focus. ~ “But I cannot tell them an untruth. And besides, I’ve already told them the truth in the part you walked in and heard.”

But here’s what I will tell them, sweetheart ~ even if the word “commandments” does fall a little bit on the heavy-handed and unenforceable side: …..

Male Pilgrims Behold ~

And Heed These 11 (ahem) Commandments

For Pilgrims on Your Next & 2nd Thanksgiving Day:

1. Put away that oblong-shaped ball.

2. Only pick it up when its freezing outside.

3. Send the Redskins home to help their squaws.

4. Never play football on Thanksgiving Day again.

5. Make baseball your Thanksgiving Day tradition.

6. First find 4 trees that are 90′ apart in a diamond shape.

7. Make sure you can hear the dinner bell from that spot.

8. Cut down the trees, but leave the stumps in place.

9. Use the 4 stumps as home plate and the 3 bases.

10. Play ball ~ if you can find the balls to do so in 1622.

11. When dishes are invented, men should help wash them. *

* And, if ever there were a new 11th General Commandment, this one about the dishes ought to be it. If it weren’t for the more general “raise and lower the toilet seat with the ladies in mind,” it probably would be #11 among the new general commandments too.

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Norma to Bill: “I’m grateful that our relationship always has been based on giving each other the mutual right to be different from each other!”
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Bill to Norma: “Me too!”

            ~ from Everyone at The Pecan Park Eagle!

 

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

 

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