I have to squeeze in some EA Catch-up today despite an unusual number of paid ethics work projects. I hope the forum takes up any slack.
Yesterday’s posts were truncated mid-day by my first excursion to a baseball game (Red Sox vs. Nats) since 2021, when I found having to eat a hot dog while wearing a stupid mask made the game unbearable. But there have been some alarming developments since then too…
Play Ball!
A funny thing happened on the way to this forum…about eight sudden deadlines raised their ugly heads, I had two genuine home crises to deal with, and the Ethics Alarms runways are packed with backed -up ethics issues. The week also featured “The Attack of the Banned Commenters,” WordPress glitches, and more. Meanwhile, last week’s forum is still bumping along, and I haven’t had time to read any of it.
Today is devoted trying to organize the rationalization list into a book outline (finally!), catching up here, there, and everywhere, and sending good thoughts to the Red Sox, who are in San Francisco where all sorts of bad things could happen to them before they even take the field tonight.
What do you want to talk about—respectfully, civilly, perceptively?
Here’s your chance to get in rhetorical shape for the ethics rigors ahead in what promises to be a challenging summer.
Baseball’s Spring Training has just six days to go, but it also is the only part of the 2023 season prep with genuine full-team workouts. This is because so many players participated in the World Baseball Tournament on teams ranging from Israel and Australia to Cuba and South Korea. In the finals, the Japanese team won it all this week in a close 3-2 win over the United States. Mike Trout, the best player on Earth, struck out with the tying run on base.
Meanwhile, MLB issued a bunch of rule adjustments embarrassingly—ridiculously, really– late, because, as is often the case when new rules and laws are passed, the people passing them didn’t think through all of the ramifications and unintended consequences of the changes they were making.
One piece of good news for MLB is that the institution of a time limitation on how long pitchers could take to throw the ball to the plate and limits on batters stepping out of the box to fiddle with their batting gloves or whatever cut more than 20 minutes of dead time out of the average game. That’s a lot, and infuriating, because the wasted time could have and should have been curtailed long ago without having to use a pitch clock.
But enough of baseball—the Red Sox will be fine, incidentally, don’t believe what you hear—it’s time to
Well, I can’t talk today. Celebrations in multiple venues are planned. Whether I can think or write is still to be determined, but that has been the case for a very long time.
So time to call up the Reserves, as we do here on Ethics Alarms every Friday when I remember to do it. Enlighten us with your analysis of anything, as long as anything involves ethics.
I’ll be here, watching, reading, and suffering bravely, sort of.
Or “open lines,” if you like anachronisms.
Assuming high schools can still do musicals, will be allowed to or want to, I wonder how the four classic high school musicals (all about high school) will fare. I’ve seen ’em all. “Grease” is tied with “Hairspray” for the worst (but is arguably the most fun). “Mean Girls” had its Broadway run prematurely killed by the pandemic, but the show is pretty slick and the book is the best of the four. That show’s biggest problem is the problem of the majority of hit musicals since the Seventies: the technical requirements to make it work are beyond the capabilities of most high schools (and community theaters as well).
That leaves “Bye-Bye Birdie,” the oldest of the shows and over-all, probably the best. But the Elvis craze is ancient history, high school girls don’t scream and faint any more (that’s progress at least), and much of what makes the show funny are references to Fifties cultural touchpoints (Ed Sullivan?) that today’s teens won’t appreciate or even understand. “Bye-Bye Birdie” also has a movie version that has aged badly, and was never that hot despite a great cast. Ann-Margret was never believable as an innocent high school girl. Not for a second.
All four shows are also very white—can’t have that! Rated by diversity points, the shows stack up as “Hairspray,” “Mean Girls,” and then the other two in a distant tie in Systemic Racism Hell. I suppose you could have Conrad Birdie, the Elvis character, be black, or even play him as a parody of another icons-of-color like Little Richard or Chuck Berry, but his songs would be stylistically alien to those singers.
Our last open forum was March 4, which was also my last live seminar before everything was cancelled. This seems like a good time for another one, especially since I have some consulting clients who are clamoring for ethics opinions, and I am on hod to report a fraudulent transaction while my bank plays intentionally loud, horrible music to make me hang up as I wait on hold.
I also will be cheered by the usual thoughtful, substantive posts the Open Forums here typically generate. I peruse other free-for-alls on various blogs, and almost without exception the result resembles graffiti, with memes, bad jokes, two-sentence snark, or worse. The commentariate here has always aimed much higher, and for that I am very grateful.
And let me say, we at Ethics Alarms in this difficult time are dedicated to doing everythingt we can to keep you safe. We’re all in this together, and together we will..
No, I just can’t go through it. I have never experienced such an avalanche of repetitive and calculated virtue signaling as the cookie cutter “heartwarming” TV ads. Anyone who thinks this crap wasn’t dreamed up by the marketing and PR departments has just been defrosted from a cryogenic state after missing the last 50 years.
Now get commenting, please…ethically, of course.
I’m stuck in seminars until this afternoon, and I’m hoping the commentariat here can get a jump on some of the ethics-involved news of the day, like this,
Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us
contrasted with this…
Former top FBI lawyer: I want Trump ‘to apologize to me’
contrasted with this… IG Report Confirms Schiff FISA Memo Media Praised Was Riddled With Lies
Keep on topic, don’t get nasty, and make Ethics Alarms proud.
I’ll be back soon.
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