Meanderings, 7 January 2023
Good morning! Monday my DMin cohort begins and I’m excited:
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
First Israel-born person to play in the Major League:
KIBBUTZ GEZER, Israel (JTA) — Bill James, the influential baseball writer, historian and statistician, once described the great Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly in only four words: “100% ballplayer, 0% bulls—.”
The same can be said of Alon Leichman, the first athlete born in Israel to make it to the major leagues, having just been named assistant pitching coach of the Cincinnati Reds.
Under manager David Bell, Leichman will help instruct the team’s pitchers — including Chase Anderson, Luis Cessa, Fernando Cruz, Alexis Díaz and Hunter Greene — on mechanics, pitch selection, preparation, concentration and execution.
His journey has been unlikely, verging on preposterous: How could someone from Israel, where baseball is barely an afterthought, step out of the wheat fields of a kibbutz to the highest level of baseball in the world?
The 33-year-old Leichman is the product of Kibbutz Gezer, the youngest child born to two idealists who grew up in Zionist youth groups and helped found this kibbutz in central Israel in the 1970s together with other Anglo — that is, English-speaking — Zionists.
But David, Alon’s father, couldn’t leave it all behind in Queens, New York. He was a baseball fan, a big baseball fan — “I always knew that if, God forbid, there’s a fire in my house, I know where my baseball glove is” — and one day, he and his fellow kibbutz residents had an idea: Why don’t we cut off a slice of the wheat crop and construct a regulation-sized field in the southwest corner of the kibbutz, where we can all go play when we get off work?
That was 1983, and there wasn’t a single baseball or softball field in all of Israel. So David, who was in charge of construction on the kibbutz (Alon’s mother, Miri, is the kibbutz rabbi), built his field of dreams, just 450 yards from his front door and in the shadow of the 4,000-year-old archaeological site that gives Gezer its name.
And that’s where Alon Leichman grew up, first brought to the field by his father for the 1989 Maccabiah Games, five weeks after Alon was born on May 29.
HT: LNMM
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Blaine Gabbert, often in the background as Tom Brady's backup, is now gaining national attention for helping rescue four people in the water after a helicopter crash in Florida.
Gabbert was jet skiing with his two brothers in Hillsborough Bay, Fla., when he heard a "faint noise" to the west, he said at a press conference Friday. He and his brothers turned around and saw what looked like a "crew boat in the water that had broken up into four pieces" and two yellow life jackets.
It was actually a crash-landed helicopter. And it had been carrying a pilot and three passengers — a mother and father in their 60s and their son who is around Gabbert's age, he said. The pilot had conducted an emergency landing into the water near the Davis Islands Yacht Club after the helicopter lost power, according to the Tampa Police Department.
"It looked like they were in duress. We raced over there," Gabbert said.
The 33-year-old instructed the passengers how to inflate the life jackets based on his own experience on the water and got them on his jet ski as quickly as possible. He was able to get two of the passengers on his jet ski, while his brothers took care of another.
"It was pretty chilly yesterday in the water, so you didn't want to have them in there for too long," Gabbert added.
The pilot was still in water when first responders arrived seconds later, he said.
"I was in the right place, right time," he said. "The credit really goes out to the Tampa PD, fire department, sheriff's department, because they were there within five seconds. It was pretty remarkable."
Gabbert said the passengers were covered in oil and visibly shaken up, but he was thankful he was able to get the passengers to safety.
When was the last time you called someone a GOAT? Or declared an "inflection point," or answered a yes-or-no question with "absolutely"?
Probably too recently, say the faculty of Lake Superior State University, the Michigan college that releases an annual list of words that they say deserve to be "banished" from our vocabularies over "misuse, overuse and uselessness."
"Our nominators insisted, and our Arts and Letters faculty judges concurred, that to decree the Banished Words List 2023 as the GOAT is tantamount to gaslighting. Does that make sense?" said Rodney S. Hanley, the university's president, in a very serious statement announcing the new list.
"Irregardless, moving forward, it is what it is: an absolutely amazing inflection point of purposeless and ineptitude that overtakes so many mouths and fingers," Hanley added.
Here's the full list of the school's banished words for this year:
GOAT
Inflection point
Quiet quitting
Gaslighting
Moving forward
Amazing
Does that make sense?
Irregardless
Absolutely
It is what it is
John Hawthorne details the diminishing trend of millennials trending more conservative as they age:
Last week brought new evidence to bear on the life cycle vs disruption question. In a Financial Times article titled “Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics”, John Burn-Murdoch documented the end of the life cycle theory. While previous generations had followed a similar pattern of growing more conservative as they age, this was not at all true for millennials.
He illustrates that Millennials in the US began to show voting patterns similar to previous generations but that pattern shifted markedly in the last ten years. The changes are even more dramatic in the United Kingdom. Early indications from voting in the 2022 midterms suggest an even greater shift within GenZ. …
I think that much of the disruption is explained by 9/11 and Iraq, the financial meltdown, college debt, and a job market that promises more than it can deliver. Add to that the deep concern these younger generations have for issues of diversity, rejection of intolerance, matters of justice, and, surprisingly, a desire for a more hopeful future.
JERUSALEM — The Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel National Parks Authority and the City of David Foundation announced days before the new year that the Pool of Siloam, a biblical site cherished by Christians and Jews, will be open to the public for the first time in 2,000 years in the near future.
"The Pool of Siloam’s excavation is highly significant to Christians around the world," American Pastor John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, told Fox News Digital. "It was at this site that Jesus healed the blind man (John:9), and it is at this site that, 2,000 years ago, Jewish pilgrims cleansed themselves prior to entering the Second Temple.
"The Pool of Siloam and the Pilgrimage Road, both located within the City of David, are among the most inspiring archeological affirmations of the Bible. …
A small section of the pool, which has been fully excavated, has been accessible to the public for several years. The vast majority of the pool is being excavated and will either be opened piecemeal or once the entire site is unearthed. The archeological project to fully excavate the pool will last a few years. There is a plan for space for visitors to the pool to view the ongoing excavation.