Weekly Mail July 14, 2019

SATURDAY JULY 13, 2019

I'm here in Manhattan during the power outage. These are always fun.

Apparently, a transformer blew on 49th between 11th and 12th, and now most of Midtown and the Upper East and Upper West Side are out.

Here at 48th and 6th the power generators are keeping us on line, and relatively cool. I went outside to get the lay of the land

So far everyone is behaving themselves. This is 42 years to the day of the big blackout of 1977.* This is nothing compared to that one, that one took out most of the eastern seaboard. This isn't even taking all of Manhattan.

But Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden and Broadway shows are all affected. It's the summer the streets are filled with tourists. There's never a good time for this to happen, but between the heat and the tourists, this is really not a good time. Again it was much hotter in 1977.

Bill DeBlasio was just on TV and said that the city's emergency response units were in place and working. The Dope from park Slope of course is nowhere near the city he is supposed to be running, he is out in Iowa on his Don Quixote like run for President. I mean in fairness, he had no way of knowing this was going to happen. I still feel like he's pissing in the wind, and this isn't helping him any.

J-Lo was playing at the Garden tonight and the power outage caused the concert to end. Thankfully it seems like the concert goers evacuated without any incidents. Also thankful that the Knicks and the Rangers were not playing. Not that they would be playing in July anyway, but lately they haven't made it out of April. And I figured that was once again worth mentioning.

Angry Andrew Cuomo called the fact that the outage happened "Unacceptable" He's right. What he going to do about it besides yelling and screaming is yet to be seen. I always crack up when he and TDFPS get into it.


The lights came back on near me a little before 11 PM. So at least I'll be able to get back home tonight. I was actually never in danger of being stranded because the LIRR didn't stop running.


All in a night's work.


***************************************************************************



Every 4 years we are told that this particular Presidential Election is the most important of our lifetime. You are going to hear it a lot this time around, I'll probably even say it myself more than once. It's important for both those who want to get rid of Captain Orange and those who want him to stay.

The fact of the matter is, anytime you are deciding who the leader of the free world is going to be, it's important. So it stands to reason that the current election cycle is the most important. Of course historians can then decide which of the past elections were truly important, or maybe a better word transformative. The first Presidential election I got to vote in was the 1992 election, and for my money, that was maybe the most important/transformative election. And it leads me to this weeks obituary


OBITUARY: H. Ross Perot


Since that 1992 election was the first I was going to get to cast a vote in**, I followed it like a hawk. I bought USA Today every day to see where the candidates were, I read Time, Newsweek etc., I didn't have cable so no CNN, but I watched as much news as I could. So maybe that's why I remember it so vividly.

But also, the country was 12 years into a Republican held White House, the first 8 of those had George HW Bush as Vice President, the next four he was the Commander in Chief, and going for another 4 years. He had a surprisingly tough time in the early primaries against Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, Bill Clinton was slugging it out with Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas and former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown. The Democrats were initially so uninspired by these choices, they were trying to draft New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a "favorite son" candidate.

Out of all this, a Texas billionaire businessman named Henry Ross Perot began to emerge as a third party candidate. In public he dropped the Henry and went by Ross Perot. He was a funny looking, funny sounding little dude, but nobody could question his self made success.

It became apparent by the spring of 1992 that Bill Clinton was going to emerge as the Democrats candidate. But as spring turned to summer, it was Perot leading the polls. He had bought a bunch of 30 minute infomercials using pie charts and graphs to explain what was wrong with the economy. And at that time the US was two years into a recession.

Right before the Democratic Convention that July, Perot dropped out of the race. His poll numbers had slipped, but were still strong for a third party candidate. Clinton who trailed both Perot and Bush, got a bounce from Perot dropping out and a strong performance at the DNC, and took command of the polls. Bush got a bounce after the RNC, but not enough of one to catch Clinton.

Lo and behold, Perot announced he was re-entering the race at the end of September, right before the debates were to start. His performance in the first debate charmed the pants off the media and much of the electorate. And up came his poll numbers again.

He chose retired Admiral James Stockdale as his running mate, and I'll admit I was one of those people who made fun of Stockdale after his debate performance. It wasn't until a few years later, when I read about what Stockdale did as a POW in Vietnam*** that I deeply regretted that.

In an interview after the debates, Perot said that the reason he dropped out in July was that he had information that the GOP was going to sabotage his daughter's wedding. Even I, who didn't put much past Bush's campaign found that awfully hard to swallow, and once again, Perot poll numbers slipped. As it was, he ended up with nearly 20% of the popular vote, and according to many experts, was the difference between Clinton taking over and Bush getting re-elected.

 I never considered voting for him. For one, he was great at describing what was wrong, not so much about how to fix it. When he said "First thing we gotta do is get rid of the national deficit, it sounded like "firstthingwegottadoisgetridofthenationaldeficit" He never said how he would go about doing that. Kind of like a Dr. who tells you your leg is broken, but doesn't tell you that you need to get a cast.

The other thing was that as the race rolled on, I started to realize that the last person who wanted Ross Perot to be President was, well, Ross Perot. Whenever he looked like he was gaining some momentum, he'd either pull out of the race or say something dumb and that would put him back where he wanted to be, a somewhat distant third. I felt Donald Trump tried to do the same thing in 2016, but dumb$$ that he is, he got himself elected.

I know a few people who voted for him. And you know something, as the years have gone on since then, I think they were onto something. Again, I really don't think he really wanted the gig, but he was truly a self made man, he served honorably in the military, he was devoted to his family, and I really believe he loved his country. He was what Republicans try to paint themselves as, with a Democrats sense of justice for all. In other words, I kind of wish he was running next year.

His passing this week at 89 brought back this flood of memories. Maybe 1992 wasn't the most important or transformative or even interesting election is our history.

But for me it always will be. And Ross Perot was a big reason why. RIP.


BASEBALL-RIP The Mets.

So Brodie Van Wagenen all but waved the proverbial white flag on Friday. I give him props for eating crow over his "Come and get us" statement, even if he didn't quite take the blame for the disaster he created. What with his bad trades and even worse free agent signings.

I'm sorry, but I still think this team is better than their record says they are. Like Karl (the Ace) Ludwig said the other night, "you tell me that the Mets would have the league leader in hitting, the league leader in home runs with this pitching staff at the All-Star break? I'd have signed up for that in a heartbeat."  So would we all.

Except that besides Jacob deGrom, the rest of the starters have been at best inconsistent, and the bullpen has been a disaster. I still believe a good manager could squeeze a few more wins out of these guys. But that might just be wishful thinking at this point. They probably should just join my other three teams and just go in for a full on rebuild, but I can tell you this..I don't want Brodie or Mickey Calloway as part of that. Let the Wilpons go find someone else to build this team. Not that I trust them anymore than I can throw them. but I don't have a choice there.


Alas there was some good news out of Mets land this week, as rookie sensation Pete Alonso won the home run derby. When your teams sux like the Mets do, you gotta take victories where you can find them and this was without a doubt the highlight of the year for us fans.

There was grumblings in some precincts about how Alonso won. The gripes weren't so much about Alonso himself, rather the rules of the contest. Vlad Guerrero Jr. hit a total of 91 home runs, but because it was set up in tournament fashion, he had to hit so many more home runs to beat the guys he was up against. Joc Pederson also had to hit a ton of home runs to advance. Alonso only needed 14 home runs to get out of the first round and 20 to advance to the finals. Guerrero was so spent by the time he got to the finals, Alonso only had to hit 23 home runs to beat Guerrero Jr.

It kind of reminded me of people who bitch about the Electoral College whenever their candidate loses the election.

You want to change the rules and make it whoever hits the most home runs wins the derby? That's fine with me, though if you are going to do that, I would limit the time. I would say Alonso still might have won except for the fact that his pitcher was awful. I mean at one point Alonso had to jump out of the way of an inside pitch! Who did this guy think he was Don Drysdale? To quote my friend Keri DeAngelo "He asked his cousin to throw for him....I'd kill him at Thanksgiving." 


But despite his cousin's best efforts and noise from the peanut gallery, we Met fans have something to hang our blue and orange caps on in 2019.

Stay cool!

and Have a Great Week



*Also the day my grandfather passed away (unrelated to the blackout) 

**That is, besides the vote I cast for Independent candidate John Anderson in 1980, in Miss Armstrong's second grade class.


***I forget where I read this, but apparently when Stockdale was being held as a POW, his captors wanted him to go on TV to show that he wasn't being tortured. He proceeded to bang his head against the wall and beat his face with a chair so that he'd have cuts and scars on his face. If you were going to rank VP candidates by guts alone, Stockdale could do what Larry Bird used to do during the 3-point contests and say "Which one of y'all is comin in second."