An outlook that fits me to a tea?

True baseball fans will remember Jim Abbott. Even those just casually acquainted with the sports world will recall hearing something about "that one-armed pitcher" who became a Major League sensation for a time. In reality Abbott was one-handed, which is to say, his right arm ended just below the wrist. He pitched successfully for a decade, 1989-1999, after devising a brisk and efficient way of transferring his glove from his right stump to his (left) throwing hand after delivering each pitch.* He even tossed a no-hitter in 1993. Just as impressive, perhaps, Abbott collected two hits of his own during his swan-song year with the National League's Milwaukee Brewers. He'd spent the rest of his career in the American League, where pitchers generally don't bat.

This morning I was reading an article about Abbott and what he's up to these days, and I was at first dismayed to learn that what Abbott is up to is motivational speaking. That's not to say I was surprised. If you think about it, who better personifies the standard Sportsthink mantra—"It's all up to you! You can do anything if you really put your mind to it!"—than a one-armed ballplayer?** Well, I'm here to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by what I actually heard from Abbott (or at least what was quoted in the newspaper. For all I know, his actual seminar audiences may be treated to an hour's worth of Lasorda-style magical (sports)thinking). Abbott points out that in the game just prior to his no-hitter, he'd had a terrible outing, so bad that he wondered how he was going to right the ship and become a successful pitcher again. And what does he conclude from this astonishing game-to-game turnabout? "You might be down now but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow." Or—to paraphrase—if things went from good to bad, they can go from bad to good again.

Now that's a terrific motivational message—not just because it's uplifting, but because it's likely true in most settings. Also notice what Abbott doesn't say, at least in this passage. He doesn't try to blur the distinction between the possible and the probable. He doesn't lapse into Byrne-ese and start blabbering about how, if you believe it, it will happen. He just says, in essence, that you shouldn't give up too soon. Point is, we don't know what's going to happen next. Ergo—if I may be permitted to supply my own expansion on Abbott's thoughts—while there's no reason to expect life to suddenly shower us with abundance, there's no reason to expect life to keep kicking us in the ass, either. But if you don't at least strive for greatness, then you're probably going to get a lesser result than someone who tries really hard.** So just go out and keep striving and maybe, just maybe, you'll be rewarded.

File that under "What Steve's self-help book would sound like, if he wrote one, Chapter 5...."

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And then, at the other pole of the vast attitudinal continuum (I would say "on the other hand," but I don't want to be accused of having some tasteless fun at Jim Abbott's expense), there's my youngest son. This morning he phones his mother from Vegas, where he lives these days, quite upset about the fact that Wendy's doesn't offer iced tea (at least not at 8:12 a.m. his time). I'm not overstating. He was indeed quite upset over this, my wife reports. I think the message here is this: If you're the kind of person who gets "quite upset" because there's no iced tea at your local fast-food joint—upset enough to phone home at 8:12 a.m. specifically to complain about it—you could probably use an attitude adjustment. Hell, maybe even a one-on-one with Tommy Lasorda.

* "Normal" two-handed pitchers, of course, wear the glove on the non-throwing hand, which Abbott was unable to do because he lacked any fingers with which to control the glove. It should be obvious that a pitcher requires a glove not just for defensive purposes—to field the ball as part of his team's overall effort to retire the opposing batters—but also for self-defense, in the case of laser-shots that come back at him at speeds well in excess of 100mph.
** Even though the odds of any given one-armed ballplayer making it to the Major Leagues are probably 5 million to 1, no matter how much he "wants it."
*** though even then, the link between effort and outcome is far from conclusive, especially in a sport like baseball, where totally random events play a key role in separating winners from losers.

Of long-ago loves and loose latter-day lips.

We'll start with a little trip down memory lane. When I was 17 and still a sweet and trusting young man, I fell head over heels for a Jewish girl named Zandra. (The ethnicity is relevant here.*) I thought we were soul-mates in every respect, from our spooky-similar tastes in jazz and literature right down to the fact that we shared the same date of birth—March 1, 1950. Naturally, this meant that our love couldn't be allowed to last.

Zandra warned me from the outset that there really wasn't anywhere for the relationship to go, given her parents' image of the boy she was "meant" to marry: First and foremost, as well as last and utmost, he would have to be Jewish. But being Steve, I insisted on setting myself up for failure and heartbreak anyway, and we managed to hold our star-crossed** love affair together, in mostly clandestine fashion, for almost a year. In the end, her parents, who were not only Jewish but practicing Orthodox Jews, so abhorred the prospect of their daughter pairing off with a gentile that her dad actually planned and executed a top-secret exodus late in her senior year of high school, spiriting my beloved away to another neighborhood in the dead of night so that we could no longer see or even locate each other. (Note to younger readers: Believe it or not, there was a time before AIM, texting and Facebook.)

In postscript, I should mention that four years later I ran into Zandra one evening in the Brooklyn College cafeteria—she'd recently enrolled to get her Master's at night—and I couldn't help noticing the glittering rock on her left hand. She smiled sheepishly. I smiled back, though I'm not sure my eyes participated. We both kind of shrugged. "It is what it is" wasn't yet in vogue in those days, but it should have been, as it was the perfect expression for the moment.

The thing is, Zandra's parents' objections went beyond religion. She had explained that they harbored deep prejudices against Italians in particular, whom they viewed as being immoral, vaguely subhuman, and frankly dangerous. Whenever Zandra tried to edge into the subject with them, her father would pound his fist and start thundering names like "Capone! Luciano!" It didn't help matters that one of the major New York crime bosses of the era also happened to be named Salerno, as in "Fat Tony."

Apart from the aforementioned heartbreak, I had two levels of reaction to all this. As someone who had long ago rejected race and ethnicity in my own life, I resented being lumped together with the Sons of Italy en masse, especially when it was being done to tar me with the same brush. But on another level, the human level, I understood Zandra's father's fears. Though his attitude seemed unfair and dismissive of my individuality, it did not seem wholly unreasonable in a big-picture/experiential sense, because when you heard Italian names in the news in those days, there was often some sinister Mob connection. Certainly there was no shortage of high-profile hoods whose names ended in vowels. Even in just a local sense, it was clear that too many of the rough-hewn, tee-shirt-wearing Italian kids from Flatbush made a favorite sport out of picking on the docile Jewish boys coming home from Yeshiva. In that context, could I really have expected at least some folks—above all, those with a strong sense of their own ethnicity and shared cultural values—to feel differently about "my people"?

And that's my long-winded anecdotal way of wading into the latest Don Imus flap. No doubt you've heard by now, so I'll treat this in "second-day format" (you can get the particulars here). According to the Authorized View of the matter, Imus once again inserted foot firmly in mouth, then arguably made things worse the next day by offering an explanation that not a few observers considered pretty bogus. And yet I find myself wondering—applying the same standards of judgment that my teenage sweetheart's dad employed in critiquing Italians—what was so cosmically unforgivable about what Imus said in the first place, even if he made no subsequent effort at CYA? What is the color of many of the professional athletes who break the law, after all? And wasn't it the Rev. Jesse Jackson himself who (in)famously conceded*** that if he hears footsteps behind him at night, he feels relieved when he turns around and sees a bunch of white kids?

Look, by now you probably know my basic stance here. I'd much prefer that we abandon the entire concept of race. Just scrap it. Trouble is, we live in a society that has an obsessive-compulsive fascination with race in all its manifestations; a society that's determined to add an overlay of race/racism to any situation involving a diverse array of people, even when no plausible reason for that overlay readily suggests itself. So if we insist on giving race the exalted role that it clearly plays nowadays (and that it's sure to play much more of, as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up), then you cannot view it through a lens that selectively filters out the negative shadings.

Once again here, I'll be purposely provocative in making my point. The numbers tell us that, while blacks constitute just 12.4 percent of the overall U.S. population, they are arrested in just under half (47.7 percent) of the total number of murders nationwide. To put it another way, in 2005, blacks were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested and prosecuted for a homicide. That skew has remained fairly constant, ebbing or flowing a few points one way or another, for more than a quarter-century, according to breakdowns by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This could indicate a grievously racist system. That is in fact the explanation that receives the most frequent play in mainstream media. It could also indicate that the social dynamic acting on young blacks is such that they come of age having a lower boiling point than their white counterparts. That possibility is somewhat more controversial, but is still acceptable in public discourse, as it basically blames the environment in which many blacks are forced to live. There is, of course, a third possibility, and it's the one that you cannot publicly utter without being attacked, marginalized and ultimately silenced: that black Americans may have a lower innate boiling point, merely by virtue of being born black. In other words, there is something about being of the black race that makes you genetically more violent.

Let me restate: I am not saying that I believe this to be true. I'm merely saying to the folks who champion race—who talk endlessly about racial role models and glory in all the milestones, the first this and the best that—that you can't have it one way only (just as my own dad couldn't have it one way in talking about DiMaggio and Fermi; if he wanted to be identified with the stars, he had to be identified with the thugs, too). You can't go around picking and choosing the characteristics by which you want your race or ethnic heritage to be represented. You take the whole mix, or you take none of it.

Which is why I say again: Let's have none of it. Or let's leave the Don Imuses (and parents of young girls like Zandra) alone, sad as that seems. No middle ground makes much sense.

* Yes, technically, I know, Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. But in New York especially, many people of orthodox Jewish faith treat their religion more as an ethnic way of life that governs all aspects of lifestyle and social behavior.
** and, I might add, sexless. Zandra, the last of a dying (and now dead) breed, was committed to "saving herself" for her husband.
*** albeit with much chagrin.

Dude, at least change your name to Chuck Leathery.

Often when I write an item like yesterday's last one—where I went off on "push presents"—someone will accuse me of misogyny. Believe me, I sympathize with what American females are up against in certain respects. As I pointed out to one of my anonymous critics, I've blogged about the burden our culture imposes on women in such areas as body image, overall appearance, even personal hygiene. As it happens, I have another beef on that score.

How many of you have seen that grating and fundamentally stupid spot for Ocean Potion anti-aging sunblock, starring game-show bobble-head Chuck Woolery and those two sun-worshiping cuties, Megan and Jill? Clearly Ocean Potion went out of its way to make its new ad even more grating and fundamentally stupid than the old ad, also starring Woolery. (Here's a link to that previous ad. I couldn't find the new one online. Maybe one of our readers can?) Anyway, in the key action of the current ad, Woolery—ever the mischievous imp—decides he's going to prove the efficacy of Ocean Potion by asking both girls to sunbathe, but allowing only Megan to protect herself with the product. There's a quick dissolve, and then our hero is back for the big reveal. Megan's all bubbly and doing just fine. But Jill erupts in horror, clutching at her dessicated visage. "My face!" she shrieks, "my beautiful face!" That's because she now looks like...Chuck Woolery!

Maybe it's just me, folks, but every time I watch that ad (which runs every 19 seconds on Lifetime), I can't help being struck by that very thought: Doesn't anybody even notice what Woolery looks like? Here's a guy who resembles a freakin' Shar Pei—who could give Kevlar a run for its money when it comes to sheer toughness-of-hide—and he's smugly passing judgment on poor Jill. (He actually grimaces and turns away from her in disgust at the moment of truth.) You'd think Ocean Potion would pick a guy with skin like a baby's butt for a spot like that. But apparently smooth skin is not something we require of men in this culture. If you're a guy, you can look every bit as wrinkly as the sun-scarred Jill—and even be the public face of the anti-aging product!

I guess it's a testament to the gender skew in the way we regard aging in this culture that I'm probably one of the few people, male or female, who sees it that way.

P.S. I'm not being holier-than-thou, either. My face looks like Chuck's.

Celebrating Carlin. Pricey pushes.

Was it just last Monday that we met in this space to talk about the death of Tim Russert? Today we have a somewhat more momentous death to discuss—the loss of a man whose life actually stood for the sort of "no spin" commentary about American mores that O'Reilly, Russert and the rest of their peers merely preach (and yet tirelessly pat themselves on the back for).

You weren't ambivalent about George Carlin. You loved him or hated him. My mother-in-law, for instance, couldn't even stand to see his scruffy face on the tube; she'd groan as if her sciatica were acting up and instantly change the channel. But regardless of how you felt about Carlin's comedy—and despite falling into the "love" category, I thought his routines were uneven—you had to give the man his due for "going places" that few other mainstream comedians (and zero journalists) ever went. I have to laugh every time I hear Anderson Cooper say that he and his CNN news team are "keeping them honest," as if Cooper's show owns the franchise on discerning truth from lies, good from bad. Carlin's entire career was devoted to devil's advocacy: exploring the Givens. In every single one of his highly rated HBO comedy specials, there came a moment when he sliced-and-diced some absurdity of life with a painful acuity that the Coopers and Russerts could only dream about.

The eulogies I've heard so far today have tended to summarize George Carlin via his "seven words you can never say on television," as if the comic peaked with that controversial routine, which he first unveiled in the early 1970s. ("Seven words" later landed on the Supreme Court's desk, inspiring a landmark free-speech ruling.) Carlin never stopped courting controversy. In more recent times he notably lampooned America's own warlike tendencies ("And if your country has brown people in it, we’ll bomb the shit out of you! We love bombing brown people…"), the nation's schizophrenic posture on guns ("We're gonna ban toy guns...and keep the fuckin'* real ones!"), the Dr. Seussian gibberish of corporate-speak and ad copy, the inherent paradox of today's Nanny-state-ism, which seeks to protect everybody against everything, and, maybe above all, our abiding faith in faith. A few years ago the Catholic-born Carlin had his audience shifting in their seats with a bit in which he grew serious towards the end and just said quietly from the stage, "There is no God, folks. Never has been…." The point is that for all his silliness and oft-excess in the area of bathroom humor, Carlin got us thinking about politics, people and life itself, and he did it routinely. The average journalist could only hope to have such an impact even once.

P.S., 11:38 a.m. When I first posted this, I somehow forgot to include my all-time-favorite Carlin line, where he's riffing on the contemporary depression epidemic and white people who get the blues: "What the hell do white people have to be blue about? What, did Banana Republic run out of khakis....?" As they say in those VISA ads, priceless.

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By the way... I'm also looking into another noteworthy death—one that you probably haven't heard about, and that's tied to the SHAMscape in a subtly significant way. I may have more on this soon, depending on what I find.

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Finally, for today, I've been hearing a lot of late about so-called "push presents"—gifts given to women, by their husbands, to commemorate a birth. Typically these gifts take the form of jewelry; typically it's assumed that such jewelry will be expensive. (Just as one doesn't give a cheap engagement ring, one doesn't give a cheap push present. The word "Tiffany," for example, makes a cameo appearance in this morning's article on the trend in my local paper.) I could go on, but perhaps it's best that I just invite those of you who're interested to read the article, paying particular attention to the quotes from some of the women, which I found to be almost nauseatingly materialistic and, for want of a better word, girlie.

I say again: Nowadays there is very little that men do to women to perpetuate gender stereotypes that even comes close to some of the practices that women gleefully embrace for themselves.

* I took some leeway for myself here in quoting the line verbatim.

A Hill slides further down a slope.

So now ESPN has suspended columnist Jemele Hill (shown right) for typing out a piece in which she compared cheering for the Boston Celtics to apologizing for Hitler. Specifically, Hill wrote as follows: "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim. It's like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan." (Here's a denatured version of Hill's column; ESPN removed the offending language within hours of the Celtics' stunning rout of the Lakers in the NBA Finals this past Saturday.)

Hill, in turn, has now apologized as follows: "I deeply regret the comment I made... In expressing my passion for the NBA and my hometown of Detroit I showed very poor judgment in the words that I used. I pride myself on an understanding of, and appreciation for, diversity—and there is no excuse for the appalling lack of sensitivity in my comments. It in no way reflects the person I am. I apologize to all of my readers and I thank them for holding me accountable. This has been an important lesson for me and illustrates that, like many people, I still have a lot of growing and learning to do."

Oh please. Does it not tell us everything we need to know about how absurd things have gotten when the apology drones on for about ten times longer than the embattled verbiage itself? Jesus Christ, I'm almost surprised that the Detroit native didn't end her overwrought mea culpa by offering to hang herself in front of the Ren Center!

I grant you, Hill's analogies were a bit odd. But I'm not quite sure who was supposed to be so grievously offended. "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim." Ohhh-K... So if you root for the Celtics, you're the kind of person who apologizes for mass murder. First of all, clearly she's not praising Hitler; she's denouncing the people who praise him. So the worst we can make out of that analogy is that Celtics fans are hateful people. (Where does the "diversity" come in? Can ESPN actually be saying, in censoring Hill, that you can't even make a semi-jocular reference to Adolph Hitler anymore without offending Jews? Somebody needs to get out and see The Producers.) And just as clearly, I think, if you read her column in toto, she's not speaking literally. When did we get so thin-skinned in our approach to sports, of all things! Hill is using a mild form of the kind of language that, say, fans in Boston and New York commonly use to describe each other. In fact, I invite anyone who thinks this is strong stuff to hop on the No. 4 train to the Stadium sometime when the Yanks are playing the Sox, and you have both contingents of fans pushed up against each other as if in a long, noisy, sweaty, mobile mosh pit. Trust me, it's an NC-17 experience that is not for the faint of heart.

More to the point, where does this constant scrutinizing/sanitizing of public speech end? If it wasn't clear with Don Imus, it should be clear by now that we're tumbling full-speed down that slippery slope wherein decorum in speech (and, of course, the thought that produces it) is not only encouraged but enforced. Seemingly not a day goes by that someone isn't apologizing profusely for his or her "appalling lack of sensitivity." We'd do well to remember that America's founding laissez-faire stance on speech and expression was designed to protect the outrageous. (Popular, namby-pamby public speaking requires no protection, after all.) We have strayed quite far indeed from "I despise what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it."

Once we get to the point where the only remarks that can be uttered publicly are things that represent the authorized, consensus position (and/or could not possibly offend anyone else), in effect if not in practice we'll have outlawed not just originality and personality and imagination...but also dissent.

Which, by the way, is what Hitler did.

Rethinking Russert. Selling Starvation.

By now you've heard about Tim Russert—probably to the point of overkill (no pun intended). Apart from being inherently sad, Russert's sudden death has generational significance. The man was 58. I am 58. Lots of people I know are within a few years of 58. Though there have been recent deaths of men even younger, Russert's shocking demise serves bold-face notice that the Grim Reaper is now stalking Boomers. One by one, give or take a few years or (if we're lucky) decades, we'll all have our turn. Quite possibly, the seeds of the maladies that will kill us are already going about their nefarious business inside our bodies, just as Russert's fatal malaise was silently at work in his coronary arteries.... Now there's a cheery thought going into the new week, huh?

The loss of Tim Russert also represents the end of an era. His Meet the Press was considered a clinic in high-level interviewing as well as a journalistic masterpiece that could be compared, for sheer gravitas, to Cronkite's oeuvre at CBS. Beyond that, Russert's MtP had a certain all-knowing, inside-the-Beltway inflection that we may not see equaled in our lifetime. But again, there's a deeper/bigger meaning here. If you watched the weekend's coverage to any degree, you noticed that many of the longer retrospectives on Russert's place in journalism became, in effect, meditations on the nature and very purpose of the news media. And if Russert was the best at his craft, it must be said that he was the best of a bad lot. Indeed, it could even be said that, as the best in the business, he was by definition the apotheosis of all that's wrong with modern journalism.* Thus one can hope—or at least I do—that these earnest discussions of Tim Russert serve as the springboard for a huge leap forward in the perpetration of daily journalism, especially in broadcast. (But I'm probably just kidding myself.)

To be a bit more specific: If there was one accolade we heard heaped on Russert time and again this weekend, it's that he was a hard-nosed, relentless interviewer—a guy who "wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions." I disagree. Vehemently. It's not that I'm calling Russert a wimp; I do think he was intrepid, as far as he went. He just didn't go far enough. Not even close. Modern journalists as a class simply don't ask tough questions. They probably don't even think of tough questions, because such questions are not in their frame of reference. To the extent that they play devil's advocate, it is only within a narrow range of ideas and possibilities.

That's because, at least here in the U.S., the journalist's brand of so-called toughness is circumscribed by The Givens: those knee-jerk assumptions about life, truth, morality and justice that "inform" (which is a nice way of saying corrupt) the news. The Givens dictate the way in which any specific event is—and must be—covered and couched in major media. Nor does the problem end (or perhaps I should say begin) there. Long before The Givens exert their corrupting effect on coverage, they have a decisive impact on "news judgment," dictating which items are considered newsworthy to start with. This short-circuits the mere presentation of news that doesn't fit the American consciousness or American journalism's established world-view. All of this (a) robs news consumers of the right to react to stories in a personal manner and/or make up their own minds about what's really happening, and (b) marginalizes and even disenfranchises people who already hold an opposing point-of-view.

Like virtually all of his peers, Tim Russert approached reporting with a distinct sense of What It Means To Be An American (and, for that matter, a journalist). He assumed certain things to be true and certain things to be false, certain things to be good and certain things to be evil. Such prejudgments (as well as entire other categories of value judgments) have no place in honest journalism. Honest journalism has no country, no allegiances, no sympathies. (Obviously the journalist as an individual is going to have such feelings...but they should never be visible in his work.) Honest journalism is amoral. Honest journalism does not assume that the U.S. Constitution is the ultimate, unimpeachable legal and moral authority. (It is simply a document that codifies what we believe—but what we believe is not universal truth, and should not be interpreted or reported as such. Besides, laws change; the Constitution itself changes. Would "ultimate truth" be that malleable?) Honest journalism does not even assume as basic a thing as that "all men are created equal," regardless of what it may say in one of America's founding documents. "All men..." is a philosophical ideal, not a proven, empirical scientific truth. That last thought alone would have major implications for the coverage of civil/gay rights, racism, etc.

And—to be as controversial as possible in order to drive home the point—honest journalism would not assume that the 9-11 hijackers were bad and that the 2973 or so Americans killed that day were heroes or martyrs. If you find that statement repellent and odious, ask yourself this: Did all people everywhere think that 9-11 was a terrible tragedy? No. Certainly not in Tehran or Tikrit or Kabul or Palestinian areas of Jerusalem (and in many other places where they wouldn't admit it, like, perhaps, some Parisian cafes). Don't those people's feelings "count"? More to the point, were the people who celebrated 9-11 "wrong"? Intrinsically wrong? I don't see how anyone can say that. Remember: It wasn't that long ago that Americans danced in the streets after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of roughly a quarter-million Japanese civilians (and whose repercussions continue to be felt to this day). The privilege of deciding when slaughter is just does not reside uniquely with Americans. And honest journalism understands that it never gets to decide what's right or wrong. It just reports and tries to illuminate in a fair-minded, unbiased manner. Honest journalism understands that it can't even turn to god/God in its search for answers to today's journalistic dilemmas. The reasons should be obvious, but to belabor that obviousness for a moment: Whose God would it be? The "American Christian" God? Allah? Jehovah? And who says there's a God, anyway?

An old saying in journalism goes as follows: "If a reporter's mother tells him she loves him, he checks it out." Point being, the good journalist makes very few (if any) assumptions about the material s/he's covering, and takes almost nothing for granted.

It's a wonderful, trenchant observation...that hardly anybody in journalism observes or applies nowadays.

More on this next time.

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On in the background as I write this is a Lifetime movie, Hunger Point. It chronicles one family's experience with anorexia/bulimia. This is a very sober-minded "message film" that clearly is meant as an attack on the social and cultural forces responsible for the extreme weight-consciousness of our young females. But here's the kicker: Though I'm paying attention with just half an ear as I dive into my Monday's workload, already I've had my concentration broken by ads from three different advertisers pushing weight loss; all three ads were patently and cannily designed to make viewers worry about how they'll look in their swimsuits, come summer. Two of the ads featured rail-thin models, and the other spokesperson is the aptly named pseudo-actress Jillian Barberie, whose Barbie-doll figure is probably unattainable for 97 percent of American women sans surgical intervention. (That's Ms. Barberie at right.)

You wonder: Is there no shame over this at the self-described network "for women"? I say again: Unreal.

* Worse, by being hailed as the gold standard for tough interviewing—this is important—he became a role model for thousands of young J-school graduates who believed that if they simply patterned their journalistic behavior after Russert, they were doing their jobs.

By that same logic, apples + oranges = apples.

Finally, CNN asks the question I've been asking around here for a good 18 months: How is Barack Obama "black"? You gotta wonder—PC sensitivities aside—what the hell took them so long?

And God-be-praised, could this mean that someone in major media will soon, or at least eventually, find the cojones to question the role black racism is apt to play in the Obama presidential run?

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P.S. No, I'm not cracking...yet. (Though I must admit I do like the sound of "SHAMblog Mondays." Or maybe "Sundays": more alliterative.) For now, we'll just put this down as a pertinent follow-up that I couldn't resist.