Rant #3,017: Enough Is Enough

So, I hear that the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award.
 
After having a historic season where he broke the 61-year-old league home run record by swatting 62 into the seats, being in the Triple Crown chase—home runs, runs batted in, and batting average—the entire season, and for long stretches carrying the team on his wide shoulders, he deserved the award.
 
Congratulations!
 
But I am not getting excited over this, no way, no how.
 
Even though he plays for my favorite team, as long as he is a free agent, why should I get excited?
 
He may not be a Yankee come April, when the season opens, so a Yankee MVP playing for another team the season after he wins the award … ho hum. I will get more excited when the garbage gets picked up today.
 
Judge rejected the Yankees’ original contract offer before the past season began, betting on himself to make those numbers obsolete.
 
And he did just that, defining himself as Major League Baseball’s best player, a five-tool player who the sport can use as its face, just like it used Derek Jeter in that role years ago.
 
But since his contract situation is up in the air—can he get upwards of a $400 million contact, or maybe between $30 million and $40 million a year?—he is sort of in a gray area, a Yankee but not a Yankee ,,, until he decides what is the best contract for him and his family to agree to.
 
The Yankees will be no slouches here, and they have vowed to outbid everyone who tries to connect monetarily with the free agent.
 
But this might go beyond money.
 
Judge’s story is well known to even non-baseball fans.
 
He was adopted right after he was born—as was his brother—and this mixed=race kid was brought up in the San Francisco Bay Area by white, middle class parents.
 
He has no idea who his biological parents are, and at this stage of his life, he has said he has no need to search them out.
 
He is relatively newly married, and is very close to his parents and his adopted family, who just happen to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
The allure of the area—and his love as a kid for the San Francisco Giants—might be strong enough to pull him back home—even though he has said time and time again that he wants to be a Yankee “for life.”
 
And the newest wrinkle to all of this is that the Players Association is investigating a report that the Yankees and their cross-town rivals New York Mets are acting in collusion, based on a report on the Mets’ TV channel website, that the Mets will not make a bid to Judge because of “mutual respect” between the two teams.
 
In other words, the Mets’ owner, billionaire Steve Cohen, will not make and offer for Judge because he respects Yankees’ owner Hall Steinbrenner and does not want to upset the New York City apple cart.
 
The Players Association claims that this is collusion because with the Mets out of the bidding, Judge will not get a full value for whatever contract he eventually signs, because all 30 Major League teams won’t be bidding for his services.
 
I just think that this all is a cover-up by the Mets and their TV station, just in case the Mets don’t make a serious bid for Jidge and go elsewhere to fill their team’s holes.
 
This way, their fan base doesn’t get too upset if they don’t bid on him and don’t pry him away from the Yankees.
 
Nobody says you have to bid for his services—and there are plenty of teams that won’t for a variety of reasons—but when you have a billionaire owner, the Players Association feels that him sitting out because of “mutual respect” lessens the possible money Judge will get, so that is a no-no.
 
The begs another question: what amount of money is enough?
 
This is not Judge’s worry, but people are starving in this country, don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and he will be making between $30 million and $40 million a year to play a kids’ game.
 
When is enough enough?
 
That is the question that will be decided this off season.
 
Again, congratulations to Aaron Judge for winning the American League Most Valuable Player Award after an extraordinary season, but I can’t really get too excited at this point in time.
 
When he is a Yankee—if that even happens—then I will be happy.
 
Until that time … if that time comes … I have more important things to attend to.
 
Have a great weekend, and I will speak with you on Monday. 

Rant #3,016: I Believe In Music

After a couple of days of Rants that were kind of heavy hitting, I promise to write about things the next two days that are as light as air … and I hope that you are interested and intrigued by them.
 
Today, I am going to talk about something that I have spoken about countless times at this Blog, and that is digitizing music … but I am going to take it from a different angle.
 
Normally, when I talk about this at the Blog, I am digitizing my records, which involves turning the music on my vinyl LPs and 45s into MP3s using my turntable, my computer and software that allows me to do this.
 
I have converted thousands and thousands of records doing this, and stored on my computer alone, I have converted more than 800 albums and over 800 singles—and that does not include the thousands more that I have stored away on an exterior hard drive—so when you add everything up, I have digitized roughly thousands of individual songs to the MP3 format, which I put on a thumb drive and plug into the car, where I listen to all of this stuff.
 
It is a fun hobby, and keeps my 10,000-or-so records as current as the latest streaming release from Taylor Swift.
 
Of course, I do this during any down time I have, which right now, I don’t have very much of, but certainly, during the pandemic—when I was searching for work and finding nothing—the digitizing of my records kept me going.
 
And during a very disturbing period in my life, it was one of the only fun things that I could do to keep me engaged and hopeful that something would turn up.
 
Now I want to take you to another angle of this hobby, and that is the digitizing of cassette tapes.
 
If you can digitize vinyl records, you can digitize just about any music format—I dare say that you can digitize 8-tracks too, of which I have none in my collection—but you can certainly digitize cassette tapes with the proper equipment.
 
With my records, it was pretty easy to find a turntable and the proper software to be able to digitize vinyl, but it was a little more difficult to find just the right cassette player designed for this exercise.
 
I have to tell you, I went through about six different cassette players, and if they ended up doing the job, they were so brittle that they ended up busting on me, forcing me to search for something else.
 
I tried all different types of these cassette players, both those that hooked up to your computer and those that acted independently from a computer, digitizing your cassette music onto a thumb drive that was stuck into the side of the player.
 
Sometimes the music would transfer over fine, other times, even if you started it yourself—in other words, you would push “record” when a song started, not relying on a program to do it—you would get about a second or two of the beginning of the song chopped off.
 
When I purchased a turntable to help me digitize my records, I could have gotten a real fancy unit that would have cost me hundreds of dollars, but I settled on an Ion branded turntable, which is so simple and easy to use that it became second nature almost immediately.
 
As for software, I originally used something called Audacity, which is a great program, but I literally had to sit there and divide up the tracks of an album myself, which is OK but a bit of a time waster.
 
I finally settled on something called EZ Vinyl Converter, and while it does make mistakes here and there, it does divide up the tracks from an album with what I would say is about 75 percent accuracy, which is very good for this type of thing.
 
And if a mistake is made, I can always go back and re-record the track manually, and it comes out great.
 
And it all comes out in the MP3 format, which is good enough for me—some audiophiles prefer other formats where they get a better depth of sound--but for me, I am listening to this through a Kia car sound system, so MP3s are perfect.
 
So that brings me back to the cassettes—what hardware do I use to get the process going?
 
The best one for me at least is another Ion product, which is a cassette player/recorder that does exactly the same thing as the turntable does.
 
You plug it into your computer, use the same software as you use for the vinyl—it does give you different prompts when you are digitizing a cassette—and then you let it rip!
 
And yes, sometimes the program doesn’t divide up the songs properly, so like with the vinyl, you just go back to the song and do it manually.
 
Being able to do this has opened up a new world for me, because it allows me to listen to cassettes from 30 or more years ago that I haven’t heard since I first purchased them.
 
Most of them come from purchases I made at the old Caldor department store, which was always running tremendous sales on pre-recorded cassettes to their dying day as a shopping entity. I would pick up things I wanted for my collection, mostly fill-in stuff that I could get for about one-quarter of the price there compared to buying it on CD elsewhere

I also got a lot of them when I was reviewing music releases--the music companies settled on the cassette format for reviewers, to prevent easy duplication of music--so I have a lot of interesting cassettes, probably about 150 or so—not including cassettes I made myself during that time period.
 
So, right now, digitizing my cassettes now that I have a decent unit to do this on, I am just as apt to be digitizing a cassette as I am a vinyl record.

And by the way, both my turntable and cassette player are out of print and not made anymore by Ion, but you can find these units on eBay, often brand new in their original packing materials.
 
Now, I just have to find the time to do this exercise, because right now, I am literally booked solid.

Rant #3,015: Going, Going, Gone

So, former President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he is going to run again for the commander in chief spot.
 
That’s nice.
 
Anybody can run for President of our nation, even former Presidents like Trump.
 
Heck, even Jimmy Carter could run again if he wanted to.
 
Former Presidents can say that since they have been in the top spot before, they have just as much experience as the incumbent, in this case our current President, Joe Biden.
 
Been there, done that … that should be enough to get you across the furnish line.
 
But in Trump’s case, I do believe his race has already been run, and even though President Biden is older than Trump, his legs are stronger.
 
My prediction is that if Trump becomes the Republican choice for President, he is going to get his butt kicked by Biden.
 
And the reason is … not because he was such a terrible President, as a lot of people will claim—he wasn’t—but because Trump has way overstayed his welcome.
 
It was proved in the latest election, where many candidates who had even the slightest connection to the former President found that they were guilty by association, and lost their races.
 
Republicans—and I do mean any Republicans—were often unfairly labeled as Trumpsters, whether they were or not.
 
And those who voted Republican … we automatically were Trump backers, labeled as crazy zealots who had the brain power of a rock.
 
I voted for Trump twice, and with what happened after he lost the second time around, I vowed to never vote for him again, and I never will.
 
Instead of taking his loss gracefully—he did ring up an amazing vote total even in losing—he went nuts, literally, claiming that Biden’s victory was because of shady vote totals, and while that was never proven, he continues to this day on that rant, never accepting the fact that he put up a good fight, but simply lost.
 
And this nonsense was coupled with the final weeks of his presidency, which were as bizarre as could be … I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
 
He sicked his lawyers on his belief that the voting was rigged, had counts and recounts and whatever else he could muster to prove that he was the actual winner.
 
And then, he spoke to the extreme right wingers, those who have the brain power perhaps of a piece of wood, and pretty much urged them to take action against the government, and whether he says so or not, he egged on the January 6 insurrection in Washington, blaming Vice President Mike Pence for not overturning the election like he had ordered him to do … something that Pence had no power to do even if he wanted to, which he didn’t.
 
So rather than bow out gracefully, Trump lashed out at everyone and everything from his bully pulpit, and yes, he does have people who believe every word he said than and says now.
 
I thought Trump was a good President, He had the guts to do things that other commanders in chief would never do.
 
The word “inflation” was rarely used during his presidency; oil prices were low; our standard of living was better than it had ever been; Russia kept a low-key approach to the rest of the world; and Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.
 
Those were his accomplishments and there were others but generally, things were good during his presidency, which you cannot say about the presidency of our current leader, where inflation, recession and negativity are all byproducts of the current administration.
 
But what Trump did when he lost the presidency … no, that cannot be condoned, and I simply will not vote for him, and based on the latest election results, there are plenty of others like me who won’t have anything to do with him ever again.
 
And suffice it to say, I won’t vote for President Biden either, so when and if that time comes, I honestly do not know who I will vote for.
 
Maybe Snoopy, or how about Charlie Brown?
 
But it won’t be Trump.
 
I feel that he let me down, and I am sure I am not the only person to think that way.
 
His behavior since he lost has been akin to what a spoiled brat does when he doesn’t get what he wants, and you cannot have a President leading the greatest country in the world who acts like that.
 
So Trump will never get my vote again … and if more people—Republicans-- think like that, we will certainly “Make America Great Again,” and do it the right way, by choosing a candidate we all can respect and we call can put our faith in.
 
Sorry, Donald, you aren’t that person. 

Rant #3,014: Sleep Walk

I finally had a good night’s sleep last night.
 
After an extremely busy Monday—every day of the week is busy lately—I passed out at about 8:30 p.m. and ended up getting up at about 5:30 a.m., so except for a few times when I briefly woke up during all of those hours, I pretty much was in dreamland for about nine hours.
 
It is something I needed, because I have not been sleeping very well lately.
 
I have never been much of a sleeper, even as a child, but I think it has gotten worse as I have gotten older.
 
Some people need a lot of sleep, but looking back on myself, I guess that I do not.
 
And yes, I have been tested in the past for sleep apnea, and I do not have it, so it is just that I am, historically, not much of a sleeper.
 
I can tell you that throughout my life, I have done a lot of thinking when I am supposed to be sleeping.
 
I have trouble shutting off my brain when I try to go to sleep, and the wheels are turning all the time.
 
It seems to have always been that way for me, as I guess that when my body is relaxed, my brain is still moving every which way.
 

I remember that even into my 30s, I could stay up all night and not feel too many ill effects from not sleeping.
 
And as a teenager, I used to stay up to all hours of the night, with absolutely no ill effects.
 
And as a kid, even though I did have a bedtime,, I never, ever fell right to sleep. I used to read my comic books in bed, play with my toys … did anything I could do to stay up until I couldn’t anymore.
 
And as a baby and toddler, there was a point that I would only sleep outside in the carriage, according to my mother. Once I got in the house, I am sure I kept my parents up all night because all I wanted to do was go outside and sleep.
 
I remember one incident that happened when I was a young teenager,, maybe 13 or so.
 
It was the summer, and I was in Rochdale Village Day Camp, the day camp that my community ran and that I was in for just about all my years living there.
 
We went on an overnight trip to a dude ranch, and it was probably the first time I was away from my parents.
 
I was with my friends the entire night, none of us slept, I had the time of my life.
 
In fact, although many of the campers slept on the trip back home, I was up and about while others had passed out, never sleeping a wink in the bus.
 
When we finally got home, I think I went to bed almost immediately, and I slept through the next day of camp—which was the last day—and in total, I must have slept about 18 hours straight, which remains my all-time personal sleep record.
 
But again I was about 13, and as I got older, I went in the exact opposite directing, sometimes not sleeping one wink from one day to the next.
 
Look, I am not saying that this is healthy.
 
People need their sleep at any age, and certainly, old codgers like myself need to sleep a good amount of hours to stay healthy.
 
I don’t have a sleep disorder, so this is simply the way I am, and the way that I will probably always be.
 
And no, I will never use a sleeping pill if I can help it.
 
That is sort of an artificial way to fall asleep, and sure, you use it one day and it helps you to fall asleep,, but what happens the next day when you can’t fall asleep?
 
And the next day?
 
You slowly become addicted to these things, and in my more than 65 years of being on this planet, I have never taken a sleeping pill.
 
The way I am with sleeping makes me enjoy a night like last night, when I basically passed out.
 
I wish I could have more nights like last night, but I guess it simply is not in the cards for me.
 
My father could sleep a whole day if you let him, and my grandfather—his father—could do the same thing.
 
My mother slept but she never was much of a long sleeper in her prime, so I probably take more after her when it comes to sleeping.
 
I will take a nap here and there when I can’t help myself, but no, I am not much of a sleeper, no matter how many sheep I try to count.
 
And who ever came up with that idea to get you to go to sleep anyway?
 
I don’t get it.
 
And I don’t get very much sleep either.