Phthursday Musings: Pitchers, Soviets, Hurricanes

I had this thought, and yes, the thought was about baseball, but I’m not really musing about baseball up front… it’s more so that a baseball thing got me thinking about an everyday-life-for-everybody thing. And it goes like this:

I’ve watched a lot of baseball over the years. A common theme, usually when a starting pitcher is having a good day, is that commentators will talk about how “lively” his pitches are, how his “movement is good”, how “sharp” he is, etc.

When you step back and think about the work cycle of a starting pitcher, this is a professional athlete paid a lot of money to perform, and his job is to go out every five or six days and throw a ball. The idea that he might be “sharp” one day but not five days later is… well, have you ever really stepped back to think about that?

We all have good days and we all have bad days, right? And maybe most of our days are similar and we do kind of the same things, but how often do we have a day where it’s not just the outcomes, it’s our inputs that are exceptional? How often do we have a day come around where we’re especially sharp, where our pitches are especially lively? What does it look like when this happens? What does it feel like? Where is the commentator to tell us that we fried an exceptionally good egg, or that we designed a remarkably sharp spreadsheet?

This, I think, is one of the things which makes baseball so relatable… the idea of a “good day” or a “bad day”, especially for a pitcher, is something we can relate to, but beyond that, it can be like a heightened version thereof. And even when a pitcher is good, he might give up a couple of runs. And even when a pitcher is bad, he might make a couple of really good pitches to get out of jams. And he might be good and lose, and he might be bad and win, because that’s baseball, and that’s everyday life.

Ahh, we haven’t talked enough lately about Transnistria here at META-SPIEL. Well, friends, I am pleased to present this week’s Phthursday Flag, for Tiraspol, nominal capital of everyone’s very favorite unrecognized breakaway republic:

I trust content on find on Wikipedia as a general rule, but any information anywhere about Transnistria is always difficult to verify. It seems though that this wild flag, which kind of looks like a top secret Uno card, is supposed to represent:

• Red (scarlet) — confidence, energy, strength, courage, love of life.

• Green — hope, tenderness, softness, balance, growth.

• Blue — blue- truth, truth, credibility, reliability.

• Gold (light yellow)- openness, novelty, radiance, well-being.

• White — trust, purity.

And the blue, streaming through the middle, is the Dniester River. (For those of you who have forgotten, “Trans-Nistria” means “Across the Dniester”.)

The flag design is credited to one A. V. Narolsky. Best as I can tell, Narolsky was a late-era Soviet architect credited with, among other things, the “architecture” of this imposing statue of Lenin in Tiraspol:

He is also the credited architect for this statue for the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin:

In finding the Puskhin statue I also found, to my great intrigue, the website for The State Agency for Tourism of Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. It is as though the thought occurred to someone that the bizarreness that is Transnistria happens to qualify as something people might actually want to see. And, truly, who among us has not longed to encounter the “Planning and economic state farm” mosaic at the bus stop nearest the technical school in Giska?

But I greatly digress. The flag of Tiraspol, I have to say, is all at once a fantastic design and also a deeply confusing one, because if the blue is the Dniester, and the Dniester is the dividing line between Moldova proper and Transnistria (ahem Pridnestrovia), doesn’t the flag somehow represent division? And wouldn’t the red then reflect the quasi-Soviet republic, and therefore the green represent Moldova? And what should the takeaway be for such a thing?

For all the things I manage to go out and do, I think I made a mistake last week by not doing something. Neil Young is on tour, and Neil is 79, and this just might not happen again. But it seemed like it would be inconvenient and super expensive to go. And from reports from the Chicago and Milwaukee shows… I should have been at one of them.

My boy had his first soccer practice of the fall and the team got their uniforms, a shade of blue somewhere between sky and periwinkle, and the boys voted and named the team the Hurricanes, and so I told him, that’s great, you’ve already got a theme song!

Take your pick, 1978 from the Rust Never Sleeps tour…

… or from this April in Mönchengladbach:

Hey, there can’t always be a unified theme to this crazy thing. In lieu of any of this having anything to do with anything else, here is a random picture of some fun-colored mini taco shells: