Have You Noticed That The Milkman Doesn’t Come Every Morning These Days?

Everybody’s making fun of the wistful hope that a military coup might come and wash the trash from the sidewalk expressed by Thomas Sowell. I’m amused because it particularly sticks out in what is otherwise a classic example of columns being a sinecure that can apparently never be taken away no matter how often a pundit has said the same uninteresting things and no matter how bad the prose. It wasn’t so much phoning it in as barely raising a finger to signal your servant to phone it in for you. (Call it the Buchwald/Broder rule.) Reading it was like a right-wing version of Norm Macdonald’s classic parody of Larry King’s alternatively banal and crazy observational columns and show segments. (“If you only see one film the rest of your life it should be Mickey Blue Eyes.” “I have no tolerance, gang, for anyone who commits arson.”) I can’t pick out my favorite one–maybe his claim that there have been only two instances of Republicans expressing outrage since Teddy Roosevelt? Or how about “Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.” Thank God a conservative pundit finally got around to expressing that sentiment! I think my favorite example might be this:

The home run records that made Babe Ruth famous have been broken but one of his records will probably never be broken — pitching the longest shutout in World Series history, 14 innings. Few pitchers go even nine innings these days.

I know! Any have you noticed that games are no longer played exclusively in the afternoon by white guys wearing heavy flannel uniforms? They don’t even leave their gloves on the field between innings anymore!

All of this is just an excuse to link to the classic Onion column “In My Day, Ballplayers Were For Shit.”

…oh, and Ruth didn’t even pitch a 14-inning shutout. Instead, in his next column he should talk about how these modern ballplayers will never approach 749 complete games again.