Cleveland

How Garrison Keillor is living at 83

I’ve been having a wonderful year since I turned 83 and decided to lighten up on world affairs and let other people agonize over corruption in high places and the fate of American democracy, which concern me too. But at this age one can only take on so much. Time is running out. Time to leave the problems to the young and energetic and devote myself to writing limericks. Better to do one thing well than wave your hands and yell at a brick wall. One day an old man in ManhattanSaid at the library he sat in,“Enough politics,I’ll write limericks.So light up your pipe and put that in.” A remarkable metamorphosis:One door opens, one closes.What a reliefTo give up that griefAnd happiness is the prognosis.

Cockburn’s Christmas party chronicles

Shaker Heights, Ohio This year, Cockburn’s annual call for Christmas party invitations took him all over the country: DC, New York, even to one to “the longest-running libertarian-hosted Christmas party in Ohio.” What type of libertarians were these? he wondered, as visions of a drug-laced hors d'oeuvre platter and laissez-faire lovemaking danced in his head. “The party has spawned one marriage and three children,” Cockburn’s invitation said, confirming his suspicion (and hope) that all libertarians are also libertines. The Ohio party was advertised as “multi-generational,” and Cockburn’s would-be hosts helpfully added, “We managed to kill no one attending during Covid years.

christmas party

The racist Cleveland Guardians baseball team must be renamed

This country is experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning — and the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball have failed another major test. The new name for the professional baseball franchise in Cleveland — Guardians — must go. As several states work to remove imperialistic statues of cis white men, the city of Cleveland has reached into its racist past to honor them. This is not the progress that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been dreaming of. The new mascot, for the team that will henceforth only be referenced as the ‘Cleveland Baseball Team’, is supposedly a reference to four giant stone statues that ‘guard’ the Hope Memorial Bridge just outside the city’s stadium.

cleveland guardians