If you’d like to hear more about the themes of this post, I hope you’ll listen to my hour-long conversation with Eli Lake on his podcast, which was posted on Friday. It was a lively and illuminating discussion. An alternative title for today’s post might be: “What ‘centrism’ means to me.” The occasion is a tweet of mine from Saturday afternoon that’s gone viral—and provoked furious anger on both the right and the center-left.
The Pittsburgh Pirates have been aggressive in the International market and have even started to explore the Asian market more consistently. Two of their top international prospects - Tsung-Che Cheng and Jun-Seok Shim - were signed over from Asia, with Po-Yu Chen being another recent one. Even Ji-Hwan Bae was signed from Asia, working his way to the majors recently after being one of the system’s better-hitting prospects. The Pirates haven’t had the greatest success getting the players to the majors and having success, but that’s a topic for another day.
Listen to the girl The love song is its own meta-genre, a bundle of tropes that cuts across eras and styles. Songs about loves lost, found, and unrequited have been popular music’s most prevalent theme since it was first put down on wax; the slower ones get called ballads, which carries it back even further, to the oral storytelling traditions of folk culture. That makes the modern love song both easy and very, very hard to do.
On Saturday, William and Kate visited the Windsor Farm Shop, a bit of a permanent farmer’s market situated just at the edge of Windsor Home Park—just about a mile from Adelaide Cottage. Initially, the news spread that they had been seen there, which was great to hear all by itself. Then on Monday, the the Sun and TMZ ran pictures and video of a dressed down William and Kate leaving the store.
Luke Fickell and the Wisconsin Badgers football team — coming off their worst loss of the season — will host Matt Rhule and the Nebraska Cornhuskers at Camp Randall Stadium on Saturday. Nebraska comes into this game with a record of 5-5 and has lost their last two contests against Michigan State and Maryland. But Coach Rhule has the Cornhuskers playing respectable football — and one could argue that Nebraska is on the upswing under his leadership.