Orel Family

One month ago, it appeared as if the most interesting thing likely to happen on the last day of the season might be Adam Dunn's pursuit of history . The pennant races were dull, with clear leaders in every race. Little did anyone know... On September 9, the St. Louis hosted the Atlanta Braves in the first of a 3-game series. The Braves led in the wild card race by 7.5 games. Going in to the bottom of the ninth, the Braves were ahead in the game, 3-1. Their sensational rookie closer, Craig Kimbrel , took the mound. A win would improve the Braves record to 85-60 -- a .586 winning percentage -- and reduce the Braves magic number for a playoff spot to 10, with 17 games remaining. A .586 winning percentage equates to 9.97 wins per 17 games. With two outs, the Cardinals had a runner on first base. Rafael Furcal , hitting .217, came to the plate. Kimbrel prepared to close out the game, but then something strange happened: He went wild. He walked Furcal on 4 pitches. Then he wa...

A record was set tonight in Major League Baseball. It's a bit of a big record, though I'm supposing that the record-holder would just as soon not have it. And you wouldn't know it from that picture, either (that was a home run). In Chicago, the Designated Hitter -- and if ever there was a more ironic title, I'd like to know it -- Adam Dunn went 0-for-2 with a walk. For the year now, he has 66 hits and 75 walks. Not many players get more walks than hits in a season, though some of those players are very, very good. That list includes Rickey Henderson and Barry Bonds . But this in not about Dunn's ability to draw walks. Dunn has also amassed 174 strikeouts this season. That's 108 more strikeouts than hits; the record is 112, set just last year by Mark Reynolds , then of the Arizona Diamondbacks. The ratio of strikeouts to hits, 2.64, is a record for someone with as many hits as Dunn. But this is not about Dunn's impressive ability to miss the baseb...

In recent years, I have used this blog less and less frequently... but sometimes there are things, little things, I just want to remember. And if I just put it on facebook, I may never find it again. Tonight, I got home very late from work. Elianna was waiting for me. "Guess what?," she said. "Remember that spelling test I took??" "Did you get it back?" I knew she hadn't studied for it, because she lost the study sheet. The day of her test, I thought I had found it on her bed. There was a big yellow sheet of paper there, and in big letters, in her handwriting, it said, "SPELL WORDS." It had a lot of words on it, all scribbled down in her writing. So I had said, "Here are your spelling words! OK, now, accio?? " and at that point I gave up trying to help her for her test. But I digress. "I get to re-take my test!!" That was a prelude to, "I was close, I only missed that one by one letter!" Later, as...

I'm not much for attending major political events, or going to see big-name politicians. When I was at grad school at USC in 1984, I saw two campaign appearances. At the first one, Walter Mondale had to answer some particularly obnoxious hecklers by bellowing, "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. This is the school that produced Donald Segretti! " No, they didn't throw tomatoes, as Susan Estrich has recalled, or if they did, their aim was bad enough so I didn't notice. Then again, they probably didn't know who Segretti was, anyway. It was a great put-down, but the jecklers just kept on shouting, "Reagan Country!" Later that same fall, I saw a campaign appearance for the Republicans. Vice President Bush spoke. The USC mascot, Traveler , paraded around with its rider --presumably Richard Saukko -- in full regalia. The introduction was by Moses himself, Charlton Heston . It was all very... regal and distant. Politicians -- good polit...

During concerts on the Darkness On The Edge of Town tour, during "Growin' Up" Bruce Springsteen would tell a story about being sent by his priest to talk to God. It would go something like this: "... so I walk home, and try to figure out where I’m gonna find this God, you know, it’s like I don’t go to church... you know, I can’t go back there, I don’t know... said 'I know what I’ll do, I’ll go over to Clarence’s house ‘cause Clarence, he knows everybody.' So I go over there, I knock on the door, I say ‘Clarence, I’m in this fix. I gotta see God right away, can’t wait.' He said ‘Listen, no problem, I know just where he is.'" I remember how the story sometimes continued: "... so I figured I gotta go see God and all I have to go see Him in was my mother's Rambler, was all beat up, all smashed up, paint scraped off the side... He says, Well, you can't go in that car! 'So what do you mean I can't go in this, it's the...

For much of the last month, my commute companion has been Stewart Francke's new album, Heartless World. "Heartless World" was funded in part by a kickstarter campaign, in which fans who ponied up small amounts of money were promised an advance copy of the CD, and those who ponied up especially large sums were promised, "name it, we'll do it." I don't have much history contributing to things that don't have "501 (c)" next to them, and this definitely wasn't one of those. But then, I've also heard Stew's past releases. As Stew wrote in his kickstarter announcement, "These are exciting times for independent artists, musicians, and music business entrepreneurs." It was a no-brainer. More than 200 people chipped in, and happily, the album was fully funded. Happily, because this is the best album I have heard in a long, long time. Over repeated listening during my daily commute to downtown Detroit, I never once co...

Time was, seeing Neil Young was a very special event. Oh, I was never a Neil Young fanatic the way I am for Bruce, but I have many fond memories of seeing him live. He was one of the few major acts I saw while in college, back when he was touring behind Trans. That was nobody's idea of a great album, but it did yield a super-weird version of "Mr. Soul." Since then, I have seen Neil in several incarnations. There was the show at the Fox, in Detroit, in support of the then still-unreleased Harvest Moon that was pure magic, with Neil going back and forth between instruments and themes all evening long. And the show at Pine Knob with Booker T. and the MGs. And even the Greendale show, even if I can no longer remember any of its songs or much about its supposed message -- except I think it had something to do with being green and having dancers on the stage and a grandpa. Since then, though, I haven't paid all that much attention. Still, when my friend Judi came a...