Zorn: Rabbit Rabbit! I can't believe it's August already

& I also can't believe that the official story about the police shooting of Dexter Reed has changed

8-1-2024 (issue No. 152)

This week:

• Last week’s winning quip — The winner in a contest among 10 dad jokes

• What’s with this ‘rabbit rabbit’ nonsense?

• Term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices is an excellent, popular idea — But there’s only one way it has a chance

• What stopped StopShotSpotter from responding to last week’s posting?

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked on Stacy Davis Gates, Donald Trump, Dexter Reed and more

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• WordWheels with two solutions

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week when I’m on vacation

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual joke and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — Why must women gymnasts dance when men gymnasts don’t? A gripe about media spoilers regarding the Olympics. And my weekly update on the interestingly dreadful White Sox

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

Midsummer break

I’m in the middle of three weeks of vacation and travel, so posting will be lighter than usual.

Last week’s winning quip

I’ve asked tons of people what LGBTQIA+ stands for and no one’s given me a straight answer. 

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-jokes poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll of summer rerun classics from 2015.

What’s with this ‘rabbit rabbit’ nonsense?

A while back I was reminiscing with our family friend Elizabeth Pierson about her late father, my musical mentor, Bill Pierson, and she remembered how he’d always remember to come into her bedroom on the morning of the first day of every month and say, “Rabbit rabbit.”

Somehow the tradition of having these words be the first words you speak every month had totally escaped my notice. Here is an explanation from the Farmer’s Almanac:

The origin of the superstition in the United Kingdom may have been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (1865) in which a young girl is “luckily” guided by a white rabbit through fantastical adventures.

The first written record of the phrase being said for luck was in the English periodical Notes and Queries (March 27, 1909). A parent noted that his children spoke “rabbit rabbit” up the chimney on the first of each month, in the hopes of receiving a present. Over the following decades, the expression was said by many people in hopes of making other wishes come true, bringing financial prosperity, and encouraging general monthlong good luck.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt claimed to say “rabbits” on the first of each month. He was known to carry a lucky rabbit’s foot during the 1932 presidential election, which he won by a landslide—becoming the first Democrat to win both the electoral college and the popular vote in 80 years.

During World War II, many British fighter pilots opted for even greater luck by using the phrase daily–notably, the Royal Air Force successfully repelled the German Luftwaffe in both the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

Other notable figures to practice the superstition include “Saturday Night Live” actress Gilda Radner, who used to say “bunny bunny” for luck.

Dictionary.com adds:

What if you forget to rabbit? (Yes, we’re going to go ahead and use rabbit as a verb here.) Are you just out of luck? Nope, according to some, if you say “rabbit rabbit” backwards, you’re safe. So, if you ask for coffee before you remember rabbits, then tibbar, tibbar it is.

I’m not superstitious in the least, but I do like ritual and tradition. Plus I like the idea that a new month, like a new year, is a reminder of opportunities ahead and worth taking note of.

The only way we’ll get term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices is if we grandparent in the existing justices

President Joe Biden promoted an idea this week that I’ve been championing for at least a quarter of a century: Eighteen-year term limits for U.S Supreme Court justices.

Such a change might require a constitutional amendment, though Fix the Court and the Brennan Center for Justice think a new law that would allow former high court justices to serve in “senior status” would not violate the portion of Article III of the Constitution that says federal “judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior.”

To get Republican buy-in to such an idea, though, such a law or amendment would have to be written so as not to apply to those sitting on the court at the time of enactment.

Each new justice appointed would get an 18-year-term or, at first, slightly longer so that, ultimately, terms would regularly expire every two years to assure some continuity on the court and assure that no one president would see a spate of expirations during one four-year term that would give him or her disproportionate influence on the future of the court.

A court this powerful needs to be refreshed regularly, and presidents should not be averse — as they are now — to appointing judges in their late 50s or early 60s.

The public evidently agrees:

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in July 2022 found 67% of Americans support a proposal to set a specific number of years that justices serve instead of life terms, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans. (AP)

A UMass Amherst poll last year found 65% support for the idea, while a Fox News poll in July found 78% percent support.

Here is why you’re not seeing a reply from StopShotSpotter to last week’s podcast transcript

A week ago Wednesday, I contacted the StopShotSpotter organization to offer them space here for a response/rebuttal of up to 1,000 words to the transcript I was about to post of an interview that Mike Pesca and I conducted with Tom Chittum, vice president with SoundThinking, Inc., the company behind the controversial gunshot-detection technology. That interview aired on Pesca’s popular New York-based podcast “The Gist.”

A representative from StopShotSpotter balked, saying the organization would prefer to get “the same courtesy” that was afforded to Chittum — an appearance on Pesca’s podcast. I responded that such a request would have to be between them and Pesca, but the offer stood for space in the Picayune Sentinel.

“We have campaign priorities right now with canvassing, building community relationships, and addressing gun violence,” came the reply. “We will be happy to provide you with a statement as soon as we can meet as a campaign and discuss.”

It’s not a standing offer. If the organization generates a statement in response to the interview transcript I’ll be happy to link to it here and at the end of the transcript, but the Picayune Sentinel is moving on. Meanwhile, perhaps “Four Problems with the ShotSpotter Gunshot Detection System” from the American Civil Liberties Union will help balance things out.

News & Views

News: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates rips Gov. JB Pritzker for not taxing the rich enough to pay for education.

View: SDG is exhausting. Here’s her statement, offered in the context of those rumored to be potential running mates for likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris:

We're glad the presumptive nominees list includes governors in other states who have taxed the rich, placed social workers in every school from a central budget, and aggressively leaned into investing in education. Governor Pritzker should see those as examples to follow.

Good lord. Illinois ranks eighth in K-12 per-pupil spending on public education, ahead of Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Kentucky, whose governors are also said to be under consideration for veep (though I don’t for a second think Harris is going to choose Pritzker).

And Pritzker spent $56 million of his own money in 2020 on the failed campaign to amend the Illinois Constitution to allow for progressive income tax rates that would have placed additional burdens on the highest earners.

Her antagonizing snark seems as reflexive as it is ill advised, since the CTU is going to need Pritzker’s help prying cash support out of the General Assembly.

News: Donald Trump tells Christians that if they vote for him this fall, they ‘won’t have to vote anymore.’

View: Yawn. An explosion of alarmed commentary followed Trump’s rambling remarks last Friday in Palm Beach in which he told assembled Christians: “You gotta get out and vote. In four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Some took this to mean that he intends to do away with elections if he wins. But as much as I loathe Trump and believe he has designs on eliminating free and fair elections, that’s not what he was saying. Clearly, to me, what he was saying or trying to say in his blunt, oafish way, was that he believes he will be so successful in imposing Christian values that the nation will be transformed to the point that there will be no need for them to vote.

A different kind of scary thought, and one that certainly invites the observation that he already had four years as president and did very little of what he promised in his first campaign.

News: City lawyers have a new story about why police pulled over Dexter Reed in March before killing him in a gun battle.

View: More bullshit. I was very skeptical of the initial claims that police had stopped Dexter Reed, 26, for not wearing a seatbelt — see “Four questions about 96 shots” in the April 1 Picayune Sentinel and “Why the 'seat belt violation' question is important” in the April 16 Picayune Plus.

In the latter post, I examined surveillance videos frame by frame to illustrate that it would have been impossible for police to have seen whether Reed was wearing a seatbelt from their vantage point in a distantly trailing car. So now, in a court filing this week, city lawyers are offering a just slightly more plausible story — that the windows in his car were illegally tinted — to explain what was clearly a pretextual stop of someone guilty of driving while being a young Black man.

I wouldn’t have bought that claim even if police had made it at the time. But four months later?

Also bullshit, however, is the claim in Reed’s family’s suit that police should have recognized Reed’s refusal to cooperate with them as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. As the Sun-Times reported, lawyers representing the city have “pushed back on what they described as a ‘spurious claim’ that a ‘reasonable officer’ would have known there was a ‘strong likelihood’ Reed had PTSD.”

To refresh: Five plainclothes Chicago police officers in the Humboldt Park neighborhood pulled over an SUV driven by Reed. He refused to cooperate with them and ultimately responded to their aggressive demands by firing his gun, wounding in the hand an officer standing near his passenger door. How many shots Reed fired is still undetermined — some reports said 11 — but firing even one shot at a police officer is an invitation to draw significant and likely fatal return fire.

I’m not defending Reed or siding with his family’s attempt to get a cash settlement. That’s for the courts. I’m arguing for honesty and speedy transparency from our police in the wake of such incidents, not four months of relative silence and an oddly changing story.

Mayor Brandon Johnson should be making that same argument.

News: A man who has pleaded guilty to randomly striking three strangers and is accused of striking a fourth is facing misdemeanor battery charges.

View: As CWBChicago reports, Azzam Qattoum has been opening up cans of whupass on Chicago pedestrians (see the video of one such attack here). This would not normally be a story but for the fact that Qattoum is only facing misdemeanor battery charges for the offenses to which he’s pleaded guilty and one in which he is accused. But meanwhile, as noted here, a man accused of dousing Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx with a soft drink during a street altercation in June is facing felony charges.

The soft drink case is being handled by the office of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. Is the felony charge a bit of professional courtesy for Foxx? Sure looks like it. A spox for Raoul’s office told me they don’t comment on pending cases, which makes them unlike the U.S. attorney’s office and Foxx’s own office.

Land of Linkin’

• “‘I Have To Find Work’: Day Laborers Face Steep Competition, Slim Job Prospects” by Stephen Franklin and Abel Uribe in Borderless begins with a scene outside a Home Depot in the1900 block of North Cicero Avenue.

• Steve Chapman: “The false alarms about socialism keep coming as Kamala Harris campaigns.” He writes, “Harris has been a key part of the current administration, which has been so fanatical about dismantling capitalism that the stock market has boomed — with the S&P 500 up 45% since Joe Biden took office. … Harris is merely a liberal — meaning she believes in protecting the rights of women, people of color and LGBTQ Americans, maintaining a sturdy welfare state to curb poverty, combating climate change, strengthening unions, preserving the Affordable Care Act and reforming the criminal justice system.”

• Inside Higher Ed “explores some of the terms and phrases that are too often co-opted, misused or mangled in academic language.” These are “continuous improvement,” “utilize,” “data-driven,” “FASFA” (sic) and “best practice.” About the latter, essayist Paul T. Henley writes, “From daycare providers to accreditation liaisons, the term is bandied about as though whatever it describes is common knowledge as the best. In reality, it often serves as a mask to cover what is nothing more than a lack of research.”

• “Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons” on WBEZ-FM: ”As the American population ages, caregiving gets complicated.”

• In which I pester the Tribune and Sun-Times to little avail about why they allow JD Vance to dispense with the periods after his initials but don’t afford the same courtesy to JB Pritzker, who also doesn’t use the periods.

• Nick Quah, a critic and journalist who covers the podcast industry for Vulture, is out with “The Best Podcasts of 2024 (So Far).” I will simply list them here in the order in which he describes them, with the most recent releases first:

Hysterical (Pineapple Street and Wondery)
Embedded: Tested (NPR and CBC)
Shell Game (Independent)
Animal (The New York Times)
Primer (Maximum Fun)
Hang Up (Radiotopia)
The Case of the Tiny Suit/Case (Independent)
Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) (Cool Zone Media and iHeartMedia)
Broomgate: A Curling Scandal (CBC and USG Audio)
The Curious History of Your Home (Noiser)
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (Rabbit Grin Productions)
You Must Remember This: “The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak” Remaster (Independent)
Truth Be Told Presents: She Has a Name (APM Studios and TMI Productions)
Serial: Season 4 on Guantanamo Bay  (Serial Productions and New York Times)
Finally! A Show (iHeartMedia, Little Everywhere, Lea Pictures)
Beyond All Repair (WBUR and ZSP Media)
Valley Heat (Maximum Fun)
99% Invisible’s “Power Broker” Series (SiriusXM)
Ghost in the Machine (Stak)
Things Fell Apart, Season 2 (BBC)
Club Shay Shay: “Katt Williams” (The Volume and iHeartMedia)

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: “Now (Donald Trump’s) got to run against that black lady—and everybody loves the black lady. It’s so unfair.”

■ Reader columnist Ben Joravsky gives Trump running mate JD Vance the prize for “the year’s most insincere political apology.”

■ The American Prospect: Vice President Harris’ choice to vet vice presidential candidates—a veteran of “the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, which served the country so badly under Clinton and Obama”—needed more vetting himself.

■ Abortion, Every Day columnist Jessica Valenti: “If the vice president is willing to leave behind Biden-era defensiveness, she can destroy conservatives’ most powerful abortion talking point.”

■ Political analyst Nate Silver says Harris faces “one big problem”: the Electoral College.

■ The Daily Beast: Why the veteran Democrats who host “Pod Save America” refused to cover for President Biden after that disastrous debate showing.

■ Law professor Joyce Vance hails “good news”: a key step by Biden toward the ouster of Trump’s monkey wrench of a postmaster general.

■ Columnist Rafi Schwartz: “The ‘Tired of All These F**king Guys’ vote is real.”

■ Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow reflects on the political chaos of the last month: “Too many things are happening.”

■ Can you name the anchor of the “CBS Evening News”? That person’s out after five years, in what CNN’s Oliver Darcy calls “a massive demotion.”

■ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis shares a pissing match with an MSNBC reporter over her assemblage of a #sowhite focus group of Wisconsin voters.

■ Who needs a booster? In the face of a summer surge, Bloomberg updates counsel on who should be getting a fresh COVID-19 shot.

■ Wired: “You’re probably using your air purifier wrong.”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Another two-solution WordWheel

I have a weakness for the WordWheel puzzle in the Tribune; a quick, simple challenge each morning to identify the missing letter that makes a complete eight-letter word read either clockwise or counterclockwise. Every so often the puzzle has two solutions. Below is the one from Wednesday and one from May 2021.

See below for the dual answers.

Minced Words

Marj Halperin, Cate Plys and Austin Berg joined host John Williams for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals.” Topics up for discussion included

Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, the Paris Olympics’ controversial opening ceremony, the Democratic veepstakes and various local stories, including the new reason being given why police pulled over Dexter Reed. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

Schrodinger's Immigrant: A person who is simultaneously too lazy to work, but is also stealing your job. — @theliamnissan

Don’t like abortions? Ignore them like you do school shootings — bumper sticker

Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose — ending recreational sex and senseless use of birth control pills. — The Heritage Foundation

I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends — Joel Webbon senior pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas

Unlike JD Vance, I have great respect for people who choose not to be parents rather than become parents because of stupid societal pressure from people like JD Vance. Parenthood is a blessing. Vance wants to turn it into an assignment. — Mark Jacob

She doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it. — Donald Trump on Kamala Harris, who is married to a Jewish man

I love when Republican women call me a liberal, like it’s a fucking insult. Bitches, you'd be nowhere without liberals. Liberalism is an ideal, not a political party. It just so happens that the checklist of liberal ideals tends to align with the Democratic Party. But without liberal ideals, you'd still be living in a fucking cave. Shall we start a checklist list? The reason you can vote. The reason you're not considered your husband's property. The reason you can get a driver's license. The reason you could get a credit card. The reason you could take a loan out in your name for a home or a car. The reason you can work. The reason why your husband can go to jail for beating the fuck out of you. The reason you're not discriminated (against) in a workplace for being pregnant or discriminated in a workplace in general. The reason you could take an international flight without your husband's permission. The reason you could file for divorce. Basically, every right that has ever been afforded to you as a woman is thanks to a liberal. The only reason we've ever progressed as a society is thanks to liberals. So you can call me a liberal like you're calling me a see you next Tuesday all you fucking want. At the end of the day we both know that you'd be nowhere without people that fucking think like I do. -- @SJMendelson1

Quips — summer reruns

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite quips that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

This was a good set — check them out!

The new nominees for Quip of the Week are a list of weekly winners from 2015, in the spirit of summer reruns:

• Does everyone get “take by mouth” printed on their prescription pills? Or did the pharmacist look me over and think “Hmm, this guy might go the other way? — @GiantsofDiving 

• Bugs Bunny turns 75 today. Now when he says "What's up, Doc?" he's legitimately concerned. — @Home_Halfway   

• Church is the worst book club ever. We've been talking about the same book for 2,000 years and most of us still haven't even read it. — @POOPSCRUFFIN4U 

•  “Can I get two boxes of Sudafed?”“Sorry, by law you can only buy one at a time.”“Okay then just the one box of Sudafed and these 7 guns.” — @TheNardvark

• Walked into Olive Garden, yelled "I WISH I'D NEVER BEEN BORN," then stormed out and slammed the door, because when you're there, you're family.— @NicCageMatch  

• God, give me the strength of a woman with good ideas and the confidence of a man with bad ones. — @julieklausner

• Do you, Karen, take David the Optometrist to be your lawfully wedded husband, for better or worse? Better... or worse? Better... or worse? — @ojedge 

• Number of people who called him “The Space Cowboy” — 1. Number of people who called him “The Gangster of Love” — 1. Number of people who called him “Maurice” — 4,783 — @jwPencilAndPad 

•  [feeding baby] Wife: “Here comes the airplane.” Me whispering in baby's ear as he swallows his food:  “That was a spoon. Her lies don't end there” — ‏@david8hughes  

• Never trust a man wearing more than zero necklaces. — @audipenny  

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why the new name for this feature? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.”

Good Sports

Why must women gymnasts dance?

Here in the midst of my quadrennial week of interest in gymnastics I am beyond stunned at the grace and athleticism of both the men and women competing at the Olympic Games in Paris. But, as also happens every four years, I have to wonder why so much focus is placed on the attire of the female competitors, and why they must perform their floor exercise routines to music while the men do not.

Vestigial sexism? Why, yes! In 2021, CNN reported:

Male gymnasts competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1896. Women’s gymnastics made its debut more than three decades later, in 1928.

When women started competing, the sport was tailored to fit the preconceived gender roles at the time, experts say.

Back then, men’s gymnastics routines were expected to highlight strength while women’s routines emphasized grace and femininity, said Georgia Cervin, a former international gymnast and author of “Degrees of Difficulty: How Women’s Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace.” …

Between the 1910s and the 1960s, vigorous exercise was considered bad for women and their reproductive health, said Jane Rogers, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“Even physicians thought strenuous exercise was bad for women since women were supposed to become wives and mothers,” she said. “Sports might physically injure women and leave them unable to perform their housework.

But is there anyone in the world who, when U.S. superstar gymnast Simone Biles appeared to tweak a calf muscle Sunday during warmups, thought, “Uh, oh. Now she’s going to have trouble pushing a vacuum cleaner”?

Business Insider adds:

So while the men get to show off their power and strength during their routines, the women must do the same while also showcasing grace and poise. That's why you'll see moves like hand flourishes emphasized in women's gymnastics that you'd never expect to see in men's gymnastics.

At this level of skill, requiring hand flourishes for women but not men is downright offensive.

No spoilers, please!

 I'm a sucker for the drama and melodrama of the Olympics, even though the Games are basically a fortnight of competitive circus stunts. The results are newsworthy, but they're not breaking news. The names of the winners are like the plot twists and resolutions of books, movies, game shows and reality TV — information most of us prefer to learn only after enjoying the buildup and the delicious unfolding of events.

This is difficult when events air in prime time here even though they finished long ago in Paris, where it’s seven hours later than in Chicago.

Treating the results like, say, plane crashes or political coups is wrong — just as wrong as it would be if feature writers ruined the endings of all the films they wrote about with such lead sentences as, "'The Sixth Sense,' in which we learn at the end that the character played by Bruce Willis had been dead all along, had opening weekend audiences buzzing."

I'm usually such a skilled self-sequesterer that I can avoid the final score of a football game I've taped long enough to enjoy it a day later, but I've had a hard time avoiding Olympics spoilers.

All day Tuesday, for example, I did my best to try to avoid learning the results of the women’s team gymnastics final that would play out on tape delay that night, but in the middle of the afternoon when I clicked on a link to an Associated Press story about Kamala Harris, I was hit with a “Breaking News!” banner telling me the U.S. women had won gold.

The evolution of women’s skills on the balance beam

This video shows the remarkable difference between today’s balance beam competition over the last 70 years:

Along those same lines, I noted that the top female swimmers of today are now very very close to the gold medal, record-setting performances of the legendary Mark Spitz 52 years ago in the 1972 Summer Olympics:

The No-No Sox

As long as the race remains close, I will offer you comparison standings of the 2024 White Sox with the 2003 Detroit Tigers and the 1962 New York Mets, teams that have defined futility for more than 80 years, and a comparison to the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, the worst team in baseball’s modern era (20th century on).

After 111 games:

As others have pointed out, even if you don’t count the Sox 14-game losing streak earlier this season and their ongoing, team-record 17-game losing streak, their record would be 27-52 for a winning percentage of .342, still the worst in Major League Baseball this season.

Some in sports media are saying or writing that the Sox are “on pace to finish with the worst record in baseball history.” This is not quite accurate, as you can see above. They remain several games ahead of the .235 winning percentage of the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.

But they’re now well on pace to better (worsen?) the futility mark of 120 losses in the era of 162-game seasons held by the 1962 Mets — though that mark ought to have an asterisk, since the Mets played only 160 games that year due to two rainouts that weren’t made up. Given how lousy that expansion team was, it’s reasonable to expect they would have lost at least one of those games if they’d been made up, with even odds that they would have lost both games and finished 40-122.

A fellow online who goes by @WhiteSox_Jack posted this graphic of the Sox all-time record relative to the .500 mark. I didn’t check his research, but according to him, the team is now 9,580-9,575 and about to dip below the break-even line for the first time in some 70 years.

The 1916 Philadelphia A’s played a 153-game season and finished 36-117. Out to another decimal place, that’s a winning percentage of .2353. The Sox play in a 162-game era. If they go 38-124, that will be a winning percentage of .2346. So the magic number of victories needed for the Sox to end up with a better winning percentage than the 1916 A’s is stuck on 12 with 51 games to go.

To go 12-39 requires the team to play .235 ball, just a bit worse than they’ve played so far this season. So watch this space.

If and when the Sox have at least a three-game lead over this dreadful field, I’ll discontinue this weekly feature.

Request for Tunes of the Week

No tune this week. I’ve been opening up nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’m asking readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers or to email me to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you.

Dual solutions

Regarding the above WordWheel puzzles:

Wednesday’s WordWheel could either have been “gazettes” — the plural of a synonym for newspaper — or “galettes” — the plural form of a french pastry.

The solution to the WordWheel from May 2021 could have been either “stampede” or “pedestal.”

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