Month: April 2012

Connie Marrero: Oldest Players

Connie Marrero: Oldest Players

¡Ex ligamayorista Marrero cumple 102 años!

“He threw every­thing toward the plate but the ball.” —Ted Williams

Con­ra­do Euge­nio Mar­rero, the old­est liv­ing major league base­ball play­er, cel­e­brat­ed his 102nd birth­day in Havana on April 25, 2013 with one of his patent­ed cig­ars. Con­nie passed away just short of his 103rd birth­day on April 23, 2014.

Con­nie Mar­rero pitched 735 innings for the Wash­ing­ton Sen­a­tors in 1950-54, com­pil­ing a W-L record of 39-40. He was named to the 1951 All-Star team but did not play. He left after being scratched from the 1955 ros­ter.…

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Mussolini’s Consolation (Churchill Quotes)

Mussolini’s Consolation (Churchill Quotes)

Is Wikipedia right that Churchill admired Ital­ian dic­ta­tor Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni for hav­ing the “good sense to shoot his son-in-law”?

It’s a great crack, but it is not verified.

Churchill had called Mus­soli­ni every name in his book: ”whipped jackal”…”organ grinder’s monkey”…”absurd imposter.” In 1944, after Mus­soli­ni exe­cut­ed his son-in-law, for­mer Ital­ian for­eign min­is­ter Count Galeaz­zo Ciano, Churchill said in a broadcast:

 …the suc­cess­ful cam­paign in Sici­ly brought about the fall of Mus­soli­ni and the heart­felt repu­di­a­tion by the Ital­ian peo­ple of the Fas­cist creed. Mus­soli­ni indeed escaped, to eat the bread of afflic­tion at Hitler’s table, to shoot his son-in-law, and help the Ger­mans wreak vengeance upon the Ital­ian mass­es whom he had pro­fessed to love….…

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Churchill on Democracy

Churchill on Democracy

Not by Churchill: “The best argu­ment against Democ­ra­cy is a five-minute con­ver­sa­tion with the aver­age voter.”

Desert News in Salt Lake City is the lat­est to pub­lish this red herring.

Com­mon­ly attrib­uted to him, but with no author­i­ty, this is not quite as cyn­i­cal as Win­ston Churchill could be—but not about Democracy.

Though he some­times despaired of Democracy’s slow­ness to act for its own preser­va­tion, Churchill had a  more pos­i­tive atti­tude towards the aver­age vot­er. On 31 Octo­ber 1944, for exam­ple, in the House of Commons:

 At the bot­tom of all the trib­utes paid to democ­ra­cy is the lit­tle man, walk­ing into the lit­tle booth, with a lit­tle pen­cil, mak­ing a lit­tle cross on a lit­tle bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or volu­mi­nous dis­cus­sion can pos­si­bly dimin­ish the over­whelm­ing impor­tance of that point.…

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