Progress, sort of

 They still can't draw flies, except in places with names like "the Indianapolis Motor Speedway". But out there in Long Beach, Calif., over the weekend a few things happened that made you think someone cares about IndyCar racing, even if it's in a sick kind of way.

What happened was, Scott Dixon and Pato O'Ward got into each other on Lap 20.

What also happened was, Callum Illott used the subsequent caution to unlap himself, then held up teammate Agustin Canapino to try to stay on the lead lap. Canapino had opted to stay out during the caution and thus had inherited the lead.

Canapino then crashed himself shortly thereafter.

And what happened after that?

A torrent of social media abuse, including death threats, directed at Illott and his loved ones. Also, Dixon fans and O'Ward fans got nasty online after Dixon blamed O'Ward for their incident, and O'Ward basically replied "Wasn't my fault, dude."

Now, none of this should be news to those of us who regularly traverse the social media landscape these days. It was, it sometimes seems, invented for asshats and jackwagons, after all. And of course America's healthy population of closet racists and bigots love it, because it enables them to stay in the closet and still proudly fly their racist/bigot flags.

But rarely do the asshats and jackwagons get so riled about IndyCar racing that IndyCar itself has to put out a statement condemning online viciousness. And, I don't know, I see this as progress in a weird sort of way.

I mean, if someone -- apparently a lot of someones -- gets so passionate about Callum Illott and Agustin Canopino they'll actually take the time to compose vile spew and hit "Send," then IndyCar has achieved a milestone of sorts. Because in the years after the Split, and in the residue of disinterest that to one degree or another lingered long after IndyCar reunited, who would have bothered?

The sport still hasn't achieved the the kind of open warfare that existed in NASCAR between the Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon camps, when Gordon fans dismissed Earnhardt as a backwoods bully while Earnhardt fans openly questioned "Jeffy's" manhood. Same goes the  impassioned allegiance to Ferrari or Mercedes or Red Bull that exists in F1 today. As far as I know, Chip Ganassi and Bobby Rahal aren't publicly sniping at Michael Andretti yet, the way some team principals are sniping at RedBull team principal Christian Horner overseas.

Still, online spew, disgusting, gutless and occasionally criminal though it is, mean IndyCar might be catching up. Or catching on.

Boston and the illusion of safety

 Ten years on now, and today the forecast calls for 50s and rain for the Boston Marathon, and the runners will glide and lope and in some cases stagger along that old, old route from Hopkinton to Boston, and the hills around Newton will take their old, old toll. 

Ten years on, and everyone will pause to reflect on the day the bombs went off and downtown Boston became Baghdad 2004, with blood and screaming and the awful realization that we are never really safe, not anywhere nor at any time.

Ten years on ... 

And we should have learned that by now. Or even by then.

A nation awash in military-grade weaponry and madness should have taught us that by April 15, 2013, but it took two brothers with their minds twisted by hate to drive home the point. And if we've forgotten it because no one since  has left two backpacks full of death at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, surely the America of 2023, with its This Week In Mass Shootings ambience, should be a sufficient reminder.

On the 10th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the ensuing manhunt that had the greater Boston area living with its heart in its throat for five days, I looked up what I wrote about it. And, sadly, it is no less true now than it was then:

This is why the metal detectors are there now, beeping and buzzing us into the places where we play our games. It's why we hold out our arms and unzip our jackets and spread our legs while the wand passes up one inseam and down the other, while it travels from armpit to fingertip and then (please, sir) from the other armpit to the other fingertip.

The illusion of safety. That's what we're all after here.

And so the metal detectors and the wanding and the bag searches -- some perfunctory, some not so -- and, if's a Super Bowl, the bomb-sniffing dogs. Because these are our spectacles, our circus, and with spectacle comes dark opportunity. And once that dark opportunity is acknowledged or assuaged or dealt with, at least in our minds, then the games can begin ...

Ten years on now, and it's as if I wrote that yesterday, or today.

Ten years on, and now I'm remembering not April 15, 2013 in Boston but a warm summer night there nine months ago, when my wife and I were standing in a queue to get into Fenway Park for a Red Sox-Yankees game.

The metal detectors. The wanding. And then my wife being told she couldn't bring her handbag into the game, because it was too big. 

Instead of leaving it with security, she simply dug everything out of it she needed and pitched it in a trashcan. She needed a new one anyway, she figured.

The illusion of safety. Ten years on, in Boston and elsewhere, we still chase it. 

And live our lives anyway, because the alternative is no alternative at all.

Cruds break!

 ... and let me start by saying, yes, I see you in the back there, with your hand already up.

"May I be excused Mr. Blob?" you're about to say. "I have a note from my Mom that says I don't have to listen to anymore of your boring Pittsburgh Pirates crap."

Fine, then. You're excused. But you're gonna miss a lot, and it'll all be on tomorrow's pop quiz.

You're gonna miss me saying I thought my Pirates were headed back to Crudsville after what happened on Easter Sunday, when they fell victim to a typical bit of Cruddy luck. What happened was, star shortstop Oneal Cruz slid awkwardly into homeplate, collided with the catcher, and fractured his ankle. So there goes the Cruds best player for a bunch of the summer.

But then the weird stuff started happening.

The Cruds did NOT, as expected, lose every game for the next week and move back into their accustomed residence, the NL Central cellar. They got walloped 8-2  the next day by the defending World Series champion Houston Astros, but then they beat the Astros 7-4 the day after that, and two days later they shut out the Cardinals 5-0. 

Now it's a week after Easter, and the Cruds are .500 since Cruz went down. They're three games above .500 at 9-6, and they're in second place in the division, just a game behind frontrunning Milwaukee.

And now I'm starting to have heretical thoughts.

I'm starting to think, 15 games into the season, that the Cruds might not be as Crud-like as usual.

I'm starting to think .500 might actually be their wheelhouse this summer. 

I'm starting to think they aren't going to haul off and lose ten games in a row, or 12 of their next 15, or something more traditionally Crud-like. I'm seeing that they've taken two of three headed into the last game of the Cardinal series, and that it's the Cardinals who are in the cellar right now, not the Cruds, and maybe that's a sign that baseball is going to tilt weirdly on its axis this season.

Shoot. I might even break out the Clemente jersey, the way things are going.

Uh-oh.

Was that the baseball gods I just heard, laughing and pointing?

The world we live in

 The Miami Heat knocked the Chicago Bulls out of the playoffs last night, which means Bulls star DeMar DeRozan's kid can rest her vocal chords. She can also go back to at least a semblance of blessed kid-like anonymity, which is just fine with DeMar.

See, because this is the world we live in now, Diar DeRozan's screaming support for Daddy the other night landed her all over social media.

Because this is the world we live in, she -- a nine-year-old girl -- therefore became what passes for an overnight sensation these days, with United Airlines offering to comp her flight down to Miami so she could be at Daddy's next game.

And because this is also the world we live in, on the night she became famous up in Toronto, security escorted her out of the building after the NBA notified the Raptors that there had been online threats directed toward her.

Threats. Against a nine-year-old girl.

I would ask what sort of subhuman creatures would do such a thing, but because this is the world we live in, I don't have to. I know those creatures exist. They live in mom's basement or somewhere similarly subterranean, eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos and threatening children because, really, what else do they have in their lives? 

I mean, it's not like they've ever been on a date with anything that wasn't inflatable.

But you know what?

DeMar DeRozan does not live in the world we live in.

He lives in the world where a dad -- i.e., him -- turned down United's offer to fly Diar to last night's game, because Diar had already missed one school day to go to Toronto, and she wasn't going to miss another to go to Miami.  And besides, she had her own basketball game to play that night.

"She's still a child, you know what I mean?" DeRozan said Friday morning. "I don't let her get caught up in the outside fix of it."

And the online threats?

"It's crazy," he said. "No matter how good something could be, you still got miserable people that just don't have a life, honestly."

Sad but true.

A Ray of something

 Your Tampa Bay Rays whupped the Boston Red Sox 9-3 last evening, and now only the St. Louis Maroons stand between them and immortality. They're 13-0 to start the season, and only the Maroons did it better in the entire history of baseball.

The Maroons once started a season 20-0, see. Way back in 1884, as a matter of fact, when Chester Arthur was president and the Maroons played in something called the Union Association.

The Union Association was comprised of 12 teams and lasted just that one season. St. Louis won the league title and then joined the National League -- which had a guy named Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn, who, in that same year of 1884, pitched for the Providence Grays and started 72 games (some say 73) and won 59 of them (some say 60). 

"Borrrr-ing," you're saying now. "Enough history. What about the Rays?"

Well, they're pretty darn good, obviously. But the Blob wouldn't be the Blob if it didn't drop a shower or two on the parade. 

A 13-0 start is an achievement by any measure, but the Rays have gotten some help from the schedule-makers. Those 13 wins, after all, have come against the oops-I-stepped-in-something Oakland Athletics, the what's-that-smell Detroit Tigers, the swing-and-a-miss Washington Nationals and the oh-god-we're-gonna-suck-again Boston Red Sox.

All four of those teams are in last place in their respective divisions. Their combined record as of this morning: 15-36.

So it's not like the Rays have been doing this against the 1927 Yankees. Or even the 2023 Yankees.

On the other hand, no one else has started 13-0 since the Milwaukee Brewers did it 36 years ago. And it's a pretty safe bet a number of teams have been as similarly blessed as the Rays in all that time.

So hail to these Rays of sunshine. Or Rays of something.

When L is really a W

 I want to be Daniel Snyder when I grow up.

No, not a creepy, money-grubbing crud who sued sick old ladies over season tickets, moved money around like a carnival huckster and clung stubbornly to a racial slur of a nickname. And who oversaw an organization full of creepy guys like himself -- an organization that used to pimp out its own cheerleaders, and that treated its women employees the way men do who likely think it's A-OK to call women "skirts."

I don’t want to be that guy.

I want to be the Daniel Snyder who just got run out of the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League and still won.

You might think it's a terrible thing to lose an NFL franchise, but in a world where money's how you keep score, Snyder's scoreboard reads something like Snyder 48, All Those Other Chumps 0. He's laughing all the way to his yacht in the Mediterranean, Dan-O is. 

This is because, for "losing" his franchise, Snyder got a record $6 billion. That's the reported price for which Snyder and his wife Tanya sold the Washington Commanders to a consortium headed by Philadelphia 76ers co-owner Josh Harris and including NBA Hall of Famer Magic Johnson.

Which means Snyder walks away with even more eff-you money than he had before. And all for being one of the worst NFL owners in recent memory.

Because, see, even without the rampant culture of misogyny that Snyder oversaw for so long, the Commanders were a dump site on the field, too. Both literally and figuratively.

Literally, in the sense that the Commnders home digs, FedEx Field, became a dump on Snyder's watch.

Figuratively, because in the 24 seasons Snyder owned the team, the Commanders (nee Racial Slurs) made the playoffs six times. They had three double-digit win seasons, none in the last ten years. They never made a Super Bowl, never reached a conference championship game, went through 27 starting quarterbacks -- that's more than one a year to you and me, kids! -- and 10 head coaches.

For that level of epic failure, Daniel and Tanya Snyder walk away $6 billion richer.

Accountability?

Pffft. That's for the little people.

And so on ... and so on ...

 So remember yesterday, when the Blob wrote about San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich being fed up to here with America the Calibrated, all those unhinged gunslingers shooting up schools and places of worship and businesses on a damn near daily basis?

Well, yesterday it came home.

Wednesday evening, over on Raymond Street on Fort Wayne's east side, friends and family gathered to remember a 19-year-old who'd died from gunshot wounds just the day before. And then the guns came out. Again.

When the shooting stopped, one more person was dead and three others were wounded.

While they were remembering another shooting victim.

Who'd been gunned down -- and we can't emphasize this enough -- just the day before.

It happened amid children's playground equipment in McCormick Park, which the Blob knows very well. Passed it a million times growing up in the years my dad worked for International Harvester, one street over from the park.

I can't even. Cannot. Even.

When does it stop? 

Will it ever stop?