Phthursday Musings

I'm trying something new here. Maybe it’ll last one week. Maybe it’ll last seventeen years!

I'm writing musings! On Thursdays! And my initials are PH! Look at all the extra exclamation points!

And so just like how the word PHTHALATES inexplicably exists and the PH is silent, or even more stupendously PHENOLPHTHALEIN, which you might recall from high school chemistry class, well, I figured PHTHURSDAY MUSINGS was a dandy name for this.

As we used to say on the radio: If you're offended, call now!

This week I stumbled upon a disc on my CD shelf called GOAT-SPIEL: LOVE AND HATE 02-11-02. It was a pre-prepared mix for me to have some sort of Valentine’s Day themed show for that date. Some songs are about love, some are about quite the opposite, and some occupy a really ambiguous place. I think many of us seek out that ambiguous place in art.

(An aside: I should clarify that my radio show was called GOAT-SPIEL. I’ve discussed this in a previous META-SPIEL. But, in case you missed that… yes, GOAT-SPIEL.)

And so I put this disc in and played it start to finish, and about half way through a song I hadn't heard in years drew me in: Matthew Sweet’s “We’re the Same” from his 1995 album 100% Fun. It’s a pop-rock masterpiece. He plays every instrument, and as I recall, he did all of the production work as well. Oh, sure, the album was top heavy and somewhat redundant, but look: only a handful of people ever pulled off a song like this.

In turn it reminded me of another, more obscure song, which came out right around the time of that GOAT-SPIEL show. In 2002, Jay Bennett and Edward Burch released an album, The Palace at 4am (Part I). This was Bennett’s solo debut, coming shortly after a highly publicized departure from Wilco. I remember almost nothing about this album, except the lead track: “Puzzle Heart”, another one of those perfect pop-rock songs that can so easily fade away.

There’s no real sharing of stuff like this anymore. It used to all be so easy: to share a song, I’d just play it on the radio. Or if I wanted friends to hear it, I’d ship it off as an mp3 via a fileshare. I suppose that today I could share a YouTube “video” of the song to Facebook or Twitter, or I could encourage people to look it up on Spotify, but COME ON!: YouTube is crap for stuff like this, and Spotify is not at all the same thing.

If someone’s got a better suggestion for how to meaningfully share, I’m all ears. For that matter, if someone’s got a suggestion for a better Internet, lay it on me. I’d love to pivot from the one we’ve got.

A few weeks ago I floated the idea of listening to albums which were really well-known, and familiar to me via their singles, but which I’d never actually listened to before. I've listened to a couple since and have written some things up, but have been a little lost as to how exactly to post the write-ups. Well, I’ve decided to group some toegether and just have them be META-SPIEL posts. Look for the first installment ver ver soon.

Journalism Wednesday was this week. You should know this, because I sent out a post about it just yesterday - on Journalism Wednesday!

I miss having more of a connection to journalism / journalists. For a few years now I’ve played in the Chicago Media Softball League, and I’d also been on three different teams in the Chicago Media Bowling League. Both leagues had to take this year off, of course, but even before that I was out of the bowling league for a few different reasons (none of them nefarious, mind you!), and then the reality is that I’m 44 now and am not exactly going to suddenly become a late blooming dynamo at 16 inch softball when we’re able to play in. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m 44. Except in the neck, shoulder, knee, and ankles. Plus, absurdly, our softball team had gotten to the point where almost nobody left was actually involved in media at all - myself included!

Which leads me to muse: Does META-SPIEL qualify as media? In a very strict, technical sense, sure! But I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to make that call.

As for Journalism Wednesday itself, well, I went ahead and made a flurry of donations, and I had a number of my subscriptions automatically renew. I didn’t get any tips to any new outlets but I wasn’t necessarily expecting any. I have loads of things piled up to read around here as is so I suppose it’s all good. Hopefully though I’ve tipped somebody off to something.

The White Sox non-tendered Nomar Mazara and Carlos Rodón. Neither are a big surprise. It’s especially unfortunate about Rodón. Hopefully he can turn it around somewhere.

The bigger news is from the North Side, where the Cubs non-tendered Albert Almora Jr. and Kyle Schwarber. I won’t belabor the point here, I’ll just say, non-tendering Schwarber is asinine, precisely the kind of crap move that a franchise like the Cubs just should not be doing. Maybe it’s all ultimately because of the financial pinch from the pandemic, but with their new network… look, Schwarber should have been the Keith Moreland that was actually good, sticking around with the team for a long time, hitting 37 home runs every year from now until 2028 or so. Oh well. It’s the South Siders in the ascendency now! Hey Kyle, come on down to 35th and Shields, win another ring!

I’m not sure how long these musings should be. I’m also not sure whether to get too deep into politics. I try to maintain a certain kind of voice, and I feel like if I really dive into political issues, that requires a different voice.

That said, I’ve read some of what Zeynep Tufekci has written lately, and she’s really, really good. If this piece I’ve been trying to write about my Election Day exploits actually gets done, I’ll mimic a line of argument she made recently about using policy to speak to Republican voters instead of obsessing over one-on-one interactions.

Finally, now seems a good time to mention two of my more esoteric and least-time-consuming pursuits.

First, I fancy myself an amateur vexillologist. No, not a mere vexillophile, I! In other words, I think of myself as a student of flags, not a mere admirer.

Second, I maintain a Facebook page named Transnistria-Based Page. It is a dumping group for the occasional shared article about - you guessed it - Transnistria.

These are musings, and really, Transnistria deserves its own post, so briefly: Transnistria is a sliver of land on the east side of the Dniester River along the Ukrainian border of Moldova. (Trans = Beyond; Nistria = Dniester; get it?) It is a breakaway territory, having claimed its independence from Moldova many years ago. No country actually recognizes Transnistrian independence, but what do they care? They fly a flag anyway, and, well, see for yourself:

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this was the flag of the Moldovan SSR. When Moldova became independent, they adopted their own flag, which is basically the Romanian flag plus an eagle.

Ahh, but the Transnistrians wanted nothing to do with that. They embraced the old SSR flag, hammer and sickle and all. It’s one of the most gloriously ridiculous flags used in the world today.

The most ridiculous of all, however, belongs to another breakaway territory, one which has been in the news lately: Nagorno-Karabakh. Here again we have a post-Soviet setup, where an ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan declared its independence, and nobody recognized it. Nobody except for… Transnistria.

Maybe the reason nobody was willing to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh was because this is the flag they adopted:

It’s essentially the flag of Armenia, as attacked by a pixelated less than sign.

Look: I have great sympathy for the long-standing plight of the Armenian people. I wrote papers about the Armenian genocide in college. I find so much about the Nagorno-Karabakh situation profoundly sad.

But COME ON!: Couldn’t you have just put on a hammer and sickle or something that looks like it’s not from a Commodore 64?

Anyway. I’ll share more about Transnistria in upcoming weeks. I hope one day I can visit there. It may be one of the most fascinating places on Earth.