Pass the hash - much ado about... not much

Brother Tim went with a "potpourri" approach to his irregular blog last week, though he did find clever ways to pull various scenes and memories together in the end. We were in Iowa City last Friday so I skipped a week of my own feeble musings, but I admired Tim's inclusion of several items.

In fact, it got me thinking of the sports columnist I grew up with: Al Grady of the Iowa City Press-Citizen. He covered everything from Iowa athletics to local high school sports to professional baseball, football, etc. Nice beat: pretty much the wide world of sports. He retired in 1987 and died in 2003, but I still remember fondly his wit and wisdom and evident love of athletics.

His daily column was cleverly titled "Al Grady's Column," but my rapidly declining memory maintains that it morphed into "Pass the Hash" or at least that become an occasional title. When he had a little to say about a lot of things, he would begin his column with, "It's all hash today." Each short section of the column would end with three asterisks... likely as sophisticated as newspaper design would get when I was young.

So, thanks, Al, for caring about all aspects of sports and for trying to give readers a little something to think about on a variety of topics. 

It's all hash today.

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Recent surveys show that young people are as confused but passionate about politics as earlier generations, with expectations of about 50 percent of eligible voters age 18-29 for the 2024 election. President Biden leads among young women by over 30 points, while only leading by 6 points among young males. 

Many 18-29 year-olds would love some other choice beyond Trump or Biden, at least right now, and a chunk of the non-Biden males are looking at Robert Kennedy, Jr., and his wacky independent candidacy. 

Yesterday, almost every ambulatory Kennedy relative stood behind Biden in Pennsylvania and not only endorsed Joe, but made it a point to explain that no one in their right mind should support their brother, cousin, uncle, whatever. 

He revealed last week that Trump had reached out to him re: a possible VP slot. Oy!

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The Rockies are off to an historically bad start, now sitting comfortably in last place in their division with a 4-15 record. When they pitch well, they don't hit. When they hit well, they don't pitch. Mostly, they find interesting and unusual ways to lose games, often in the last inning.

On the other hand, they have only scored first in two of their first 19 games, so you can't say they are blowing many leads. Mostly, they tend to rally late only to come up short. 

There is snow in the air today as the Rox prepare to begin a home stand against the Mariners. There is no joy in Mudville...

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Caitlin Clark is on the verge of signing a $10 million plus endorsement deal with Nike, augmenting her $75,000 rookie salary to play for the Indianapolis Fever. No athlete "deserves" big bucks, BTW, but the disparity between mediocre men's players in the NBA and the very best female athletes in the WNBA is embarrassing for all of us.

The good news may be that Ms. Clark's successes will raise all boats, so to speak, and the 144 WNBA players will eventually all see their compensation get higher. Trickle down economics rules!

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It's judging season for high school media and I have been frantically trying to turn around several assignments from various states over this past week. The news from our young journalists is, well, mixed. They are clearly passionate but just as clearly pressed for time and energy.

Lede writing continues to be a mystery to almost all of them, though they certainly like to provide endless context and personal insights for their readers before they finally get to their first direct quote. 

First drafts are clearly enough for many of our young writers and their advisers, just as they are for the vast majority of the college writing students I am working with -- hey, it's Week 13 of the semester, so this too shall pass. 

I continue to be surprised by how few students can be bothered to run spell check or grammar check (or just ignore those squiggly lines) and how few seem interested in another option: running a draft through Chat GPT. AI does a lot things poorly, but it's really good at grammar and spelling and simply organizing language.

That enticing TikTok personal feed cannot be resisted.