July 2012 - Richard M. Langworth

Baseball: The Amazin’ Nats

28 July 2012 Comments 0 Comments

In 2012’s greatest baseball success story, the Washington Nationals went 60-40 on July 28th, having won more games as they won all year in 2008 and 2009. In the National League they’re first in pitching, tied for second in fielding, and seventh in hitting, although in the last month their batters have been on fire.

Tied with the Yankees for the best record in baseball, the precedents fall weekly. 2012 is supplanting 2005 as the best year since baseball returned to Washington. The Nats are now about five games better than they were at this time in 2005, when they dove from first to last place in the second half.…

“10,000 Regulations…Destroy All Respect for the Law”

24 July 2012 Comments 1 Comment

Today I saw on Facebook a quote attributed to Winston Churchill. “If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”I can find no documentation to support his saying or writing these words. Can you help me to verify it is an accurate quote or a misattribution? —Jenny via email

Jenny, Facebook and Twitter must be the world’s leading sources of false Churchill quotes, so thanks for questioning this one—which is, for a change, right (although his word was “make,” not “have”)….

From Churchill By Himself page 17:

Free Market

“If you destroy a free market you create a black market.”…

Straitjacketing Churchill (and the Truth)

19 July 2012 Comments 0 Comments

LONDON, JULY 19TH— In what were described as “guerrilla raids,” BBC Channel 4 “straitjacketed” the statues of four widely admired Britons: Churchill and Florence Nightingale in London, Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury and Samuel Johnson in Lichfield.

Each figure was “restrained” in a bespoke strait-jacket which had the mental illness they are reputed to have had stamped across it. Churchill’s was labeled DEPRESSION.

The straitjacketing was carried out to promote Channel 4’s season of prime-time programming challenging mental health stigma and discrimination, “4 Goes Mad,” which started on Monday 23 July. The stunt was also captured as part of a short film aired on Channel 4’s “Random Acts.”…