Month: May 2009

Baseball: The Summer of 1960

Baseball: The Summer of 1960

As a sequel to 1960, let’s take 2019. See “Nats Win!

Until 2019 I was a frus­trat­ed fan of the Wash­ing­ton Nation­als, as I was the old Wash­ing­ton Sen­a­tors. As a New York school­boy in the Fifties, I’d go up to Yan­kee Sta­di­um to root for the Sen­a­tors when they were in town. Always wore my navy blue cap with the white block “W.” Big, scary Bronx voic­es would shout: “Hey, kid—the Wash­ing­ton section’s in the bleachers.”

The Sen­a­tors were peren­ni­al heart­break­ers, although in mid-1952 they were only five games out of first place and con­sid­ered to be pen­nant con­tenders.…

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Bulldog Not: Say it isn’t So

Bulldog Not: Say it isn’t So

“The clas­sic British bull­dog, a sym­bol of defi­ance and pugnac­i­ty, may now dis­ap­pear. A shake-up of breed­ing  stan­dards by the Ken­nel Club has sig­nalled the end of the dog’s Churchillian jowl. Instead, the dog will  have a shrunk­en face, a sunken nose, longer legs and a lean­er body. The British Bull­dog Breed Coun­cil is threat­en­ing legal action against the Ken­nel Club. Chair­man Robin Sear­le said: ‘What you’ll get is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent dog, not a British bulldog.’

I referred this one to long­time col­league, promi­nent motor­ing writer and bull­dog par­ti­san Gra­ham Rob­son, who writes:

As a long-time bull­dog own­er (you have met var­i­ous of my much-loved mutts) I am at once delight­ed and appalled by what is being pro­posed.…

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Black Swans Return to Chartwell

Black Swans Return to Chartwell

 

“All the black swans are mat­ing, not only the father and moth­er, but both broth­ers and both sis­ters have paired off. The Ptole­mys always did this and Cleopa­tra was the result. At any rate I have not thought it my duty to inter­fere.”  —Churchill to his wife, Chartwell, 21 Jan­u­ary 1935

Sev­en­ty-five years ago Lady Diana Coop­er observed that Chartwell’s birds “con­sist of five fool­ish geese, five furi­ous black swans, two rud­dy shel­drakes, two white swans—Mr. Juno and Mrs. Jupiter, so called because they got the sex­es wrong to begin with, two Cana­di­an geese (‘Lord and Lady Beaver­brook’) and some mis­cel­la­neous ducks.”…

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