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Posts Tagged ‘Baseball’

Cam Cannon

Movies We Like: ‘The Bad News Bears’ (1976)

by Cam Cannon

Morris Buttermaker was a fair to middling minor league pitcher in his day, whose claim to fame was once striking out Ted Williams in a Spring Training game. Now, he’s a whiskey and beer swilling, filtered cigar chomping pool cleaner who’s at once soft-spoken and gruff. You love him already, don’t you?

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“The Bad News Bears” is subversive from the start, its characters realistic and flawed. Of course, the engine driving this train is the late Walter Matthau, whose  Buttermaker was hired to coach a team of misfits who are so bad at baseball they’re only in the elite league because one the parents sued the league. Most of the Bears’ parents are conspicuously absent at practices and are rarely heard or seen at games. Leaving them out of the movie is a stroke of genius – we’re constantly wondering why one of them didn’t step up to coach the team. (more…)

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Posted Oct 17th 2009 at 2:48 pm in Classic Hollywood, Film | 48 Comments

Burt Prelutsky

Burt’s Eye View: Blowing the Whistle on Waxman

by Burt Prelutsky

I have come clean in the past about having been friends with Rep. Henry Waxman.  We had met in the late 1950s at UCLA and wound up spending a lot of time over the following decade playing cards.  In fact, once, some years later, I received a phone call from a guy profiling Waxman for the Washington Post.  He wanted my impression of the young, pre-Congressional fellow.  I told him that Henry was a terrible poker player, but was very astute at hearts.  I said it made perfect sense because poker is a cut-throat game, every man for himself, whereas hearts is a game that involves constantly changing alliances.  I regarded it as a perfect metaphor for a career in politics.

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I knew from personal experience that Henry was a fish when it came to poker, but it was some time later that I found out how truly awful he was.  Before being elected to Congress, he had gone to Sacramento as a state assemblyman.  Wherever politicians congregate, you will find two things — poker games and lobbyists.  As you can imagine, lobbyists are not there to win money from those they spend their lives trying to influence.  But it seems that Henry was so inept that, in spite of their best efforts, they kept beating him.  This so embarrassed the lobbyists that they finally banished him from the game.  (more…)

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Posted Oct 1st 2009 at 9:51 am in Politics | 98 Comments

Burt Prelutsky

If I Were Boss

by Burt Prelutsky

I have always contended that anybody who seeks the presidency is an egomaniac, every bit as certifiably crackers as those poor souls wandering around the grounds of the asylum insisting they’re Napoleon. 

Still, I’m generally willing to cut people a reasonable amount of slack.  But it’s quite another thing to pretend that a community organizer with just four years in the Senate, two of which he spent on the hustings, is qualified to be the leader of the free world.  Even if I approved of his left-wing agenda, I’d find it impossible to make a case for him.  Frankly, if it were up to me, I’d send this Napoleon wannabe to Elba.  (more…)

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Posted Mar 11th 2009 at 9:19 am in Media Criticism, Politics | 79 Comments