(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
A most melancholy ceremony was conducted this week in Connecticut. Newtown High School held its graduation. Among the graduates were survivors of that awful day in 2012 when Adam Lanza blasted his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot and killed twenty-six people, including twenty children between the ages of six and seven. Those twenty students should have graduated this week. From NBC Connecticut:
The Newtown High School graduation started with a tribute to the 20 students killed at the school on December 14, 2012. Their names were read aloud, followed by a moment of silence. “Today we celebrate the Class of 2024 with excitement and pride, but also with sorrow knowing that 20 former classmates who were tragically lost on December 14th will not walk across the stage tonight. We remember them for their bravery, their kindness and their spirit. We strive to honor them today and every day,” said Newtown High School principal Dr. Kimberly Longobucco. Many students were wearing green and white ribbons in honor of their classmates that are no longer here.
The massacre turned so much of daily life, especially the special events, into great tangles of sorrowful ambiguity. From The New York Times:
Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was 6 when he was killed in the shooting, said the high school had been considerate to the victims’ families, offering remembrances in the yearbook and inviting them to Wednesday’s ceremony, which she decided not to attend. She said in an interview that she did not want to bring anyone down as they prepared for the excitement of their graduation. “It’s a strange day, in all honesty, because I’m super happy for all of the kids that are graduating,” Ms. Hockley said. “But obviously at the same time, it’s tugging at my heartstrings,” she said. “I wish Dylan and all the other kids that were killed at Sandy Hook were also there today.”
Mark Barden, who lost his son Daniel, 7, in the shooting, said the emotional weight of graduation day had caught him off guard. As the years have gone by, with each passing milestone, he has wondered what his son would look like now, what he would be doing, what would be ahead of him. The graduation “wraps all of that up and puts a point on it,” he said. “My heart goes out to that class who was there and survived that horrible atrocity and have to live with that for the rest of their lives,” said Mr. Barden, who also declined to attend the ceremony.
Two days later, the United States Supreme Court ruled that citizens had a right to make improv machine guns out of semi-automatics, which, as God and the people of Newtown know, are lethal enough to put cobwebs on the future like few other things.
Back in my daily sportswriting days, I was lucky enough to be assigned every year to the opposition locker rooms for the NBA Playoffs. Times being what they were, I got to know the Hawks, Bucks, Pistons, Rockets, and especially the Lakers as well as I knew the Celtics. It was during this time that I made the acquaintance of Jerry West, because if you hung around the Lakers, you met Jerry West, because Jerry West could talk.
I’m old enough to remember him as a player—a wiry guard with an impeccable jump shot and an almost fanatical need to win—who was stifled, year after year, by Bill Russell and the Celtics. It burned in him and it was never quenched, not even when a Laker team he built as general manager finally beat Boston in the Finals in 1985. I asked him once if that had made up even a bit for all those series in the 1960s. His eyes burned through mine all the way to the back of my collar. “No,” he said, and said no more.
He was always free with his time and his insights. In fact, he and Bob Cousy had one thing in common. I never talked with either of them without getting up knowing more about basketball than I did when I sat down. My favorite conversation with West came much later. I was working on a magazine piece on Shaquille O’Neal, and we were talking about the damnable time the big fellow was having with free throws. “You wouldn’t believe the suggestions we’re getting,” he said. Crystals. Chanting. Meditation. Herbal concoctions. West started chuckling and could hardly stop. “Crystals,” he said, shaking his head. I mean, the guy had been in L.A. for forty years at that point and the place seemed to still amaze him, the kid from West Virginia, Zeke from Cabin Creek, the Logo. RIP.
We also lost Howard Fineman this week. When I opened the shebeen in the fall of 2011, I met Howard in the lobby bar of the Marriott in downtown Des Moines. All around us, young reporters were tweeting or filing, and the two of us, geezers from the days of Royal manuals, got a serious kick out of that. In fact, Howard showed many of us the way during the transitions forced upon the industry by the Intertoobz. He took a job as political editor of the Huffington Post when that seemed like an exotic career move for a guy so solidly entrenched in print media. Turns out that Howard was a great friend of the blog, and we’d spend a lot of time talking whenever we got together about how these new media were a fountain of youth for the likes of us. May his memory be the blessing his life was.
Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Gentilly Groove”—the New Orleans Nightcrawlers. Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit to the Pathe Archives: Here, from 1945, the president of Iceland visits President Roosevelt in the White House. A year earlier, on June 16, 1944, Iceland had declared its independence from Nazi-occupied Denmark. Which means this coming week is Iceland’s eightieth birthday, so til hamingju með afmælið to our favorite footie smiters from the North. Also note that the voice-over on the newsreel is done by Bill Stern, the most famous sportscaster of his time. (Stern had the call on the first televised baseball game.) Stern was notorious for not copping to his own mistakes. He famously misidentified a football player who had broken away on a long touchdown run. Stern realized his mistake while the fellow was still running so he simply told his audience that the guy had lateraled the ball to the correct player for the touchdown. Later, when Stern was chaffing racetrack announcer Clem McCarthy for having misidentified a horse during a race, McCarthy shot back, “Bill, you can’t lateral a horse.” History is so cool.
Watching the Republicans squirm like bait on a hook over in vitro fertilization was some prime entertainment this week. They all refused to vote on a bill from Sen. Tammy Duckworth that would have protected IVF from the angry fetus-fondlers. (This week, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose IVF.) Having done so, they then fell all over themselves talking about how important IVF is to young families and signing onto a cosmetic IVF bill pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz. Don’t worry, they say. We’ll never vote to ban IVF. I’ve heard this song before.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From the BBC:
More than 18,800 artifacts were discovered by Border Archaeology at Calthorpe Gardens, in Bretch Hill, Banbury, Oxfordshire, including necklaces, weapons, and pottery. The Anglo-Saxon cemetery contained the remains of at least 52 individuals. Janice McLeish, director of post excavation services at Border Archaeology, described it as a “career-significant experience” for her team. The settlement at the Orbit Homes site dates from the Late Bronze Age to Middle and Late Iron Age. It was discovered during a test dig by archaeologists in the early stages of the development, which led to wider excavations.
Some ambitious young barrister is roaming the countryside, trying to find descendants of these people so he can help them sue the developer for the land. I wish him luck.
Hey, Reuters, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
Scientists have announced the discovery in the Australian state of Queensland of fossils of this creature, which lived alongside the dinosaurs and various marine reptiles during the Cretaceous Period. Called Haliskia peterseni, its remains are the most complete of any pterosaur ever unearthed in Australia. It had a wingspan of 15 feet (4.6 meters) and lived about 100 million years ago, making Haliskia a bit larger and older—by about 5 million years—than the closely related Australian pterosaur Ferrodraco, whose discovery was announced in 2019. Haliskia means “sea phantom,” and this creature may have been a frightful sight airborne above the waves. “The Eromanga Sea was a massive inland sea covering large parts of Australia when this pterosaur was alive, but both have vanished. The ghost of both of these is evident from the fossils found in the area,” said Adele Pentland, a doctoral student in paleontology at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Haliskia’s remains are more complete than those of Ferrodraco. Both are members of a pterosaur group called anhanguerians known from remains found in China, the United States, Brazil, England, Spain and Morocco. The three other named Australian pterosaurs are known only from partial jaw bones, Pentland said. After dying, the Haliskia individual’s body ended up buried under sediment at the bottom of the Eromanga Sea, allowing its fossilization. The creature’s name also honors Kevin Petersen, an avocado farmer turned Kronosaurus Korner museum curator who discovered its remains in 2021.
One day, I have to visit Kronosaurus Korner, if only to get a T-shirt and make my friends jealous. That’s how Haliskia can make me happy now for having lived then.
I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the good people in south Florida, which is now a lagoon only Martha-Ann Alito could love, and for the people of Iowa and across the Plains states who have been living under the gun of all the tornadoes, especially the folks in Texas, who are staring down the barrel again this weekend. And for the people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
