hawing

The only part that puzzled me is why the designation was retroactive to 7/31 when the injury happened 7/28. Though 14 days past the 31st does line up with when they'd probably most want him back.

The pop culture blows continue. Loni Anderson has died. Had she made it to Tuesday she'd have turned 80. AP story We have WKRP in Cincinnati on DVD, and while we always get it out at Thanksgiving for the Turkeys Away classic episode, I really should revisit the whole series sometime. That was a good show.

I kind of want to send Aaron Civale a nice fruit basket or the like for what he did for the Brewers.

What a great game for the Brewerfanatic meetup. At least as cool as that game in 2005 when Prince and Rickie hit their first MLB home runs.

They're celebrating 25 seasons of the current ballpark, bringing in alumni and having a home run derby after: https://www.mlb.com/brewers/tickets/promotions/25-seasons (Though it's still a stretch for day-job people, including those from outside southeast Wisconsin)

Five days late, but my observation on this game and how it ended: Remember the early April 2018 game when STL hit back to back home runs to lead off the game and Yelich and Braun hit back to back home runs to tie and then win it? The vibes in the park after this May 27 game reminded me immediately of the vibes that night. (That's good.)

Haha, you'd think I'd post here all the time, but all my library duties don't give me that much time to read. But I have been reading this: Funny Because It's True : how The Onion created modern American news satire . It's heavily in my wheelhouse because it launched in Madison right while I was in grad school at UW-Madison.

Congratulations! That's longer than Brewerfan(atic) has been around.

Loretta Swit, best known as Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan in M*A*S*H, has died. Washington Post story

Godspeed to fans attending tonight's game amid the cribbage board giveaway frenzy. This is an example of how I don't really miss moving almost all of the giveaways from Sundays to Saturdays.

I say "pray for mojo" all the time in other contexts, but it feels like it's been a while since I deployed it here.

Oh, you guys. I can't put this on other socials so you get to read it here. Some of you know that I work in a library on the UW-Madison campus and employ college students. One of them went through commencement on Saturday, looked at his grades yesterday, and realized he'd blown off Music 113 (Badger alumni might recognize this as Music in Performance, aka Clap for Credit) and got an F. He's now one credit shy of graduation and has to find something to take this summer if he wants to be done before his lease ends in August. All you have to do for that class is listen to music 50 minutes per week and write 100-250 words on what you heard each week. It's as close to a You Had One Job class as UW-Madison offers. I don't want to laugh at him, but I do want to laugh out loud. I did tell him it probably won't be terribly long until he can look back and laugh at this.

Oh, that's bittersweet, but I understand. Thanks for letting us know!

Do you remember Wink Martindale, of various game shows (like Tic Tac Dough and Debt)? He died on April 15, age 91: https://apnews.com/article/wink-martindale-dead-d2f333da86b6efb3b99b36bb7a71a7a4 (1) I hadn't realized he lived that long until I saw his obit yesterday. (2) I hadn't known he was a DJ for so long, nor that he was friends with Elvis. He also has/had a YouTube channel called Wink's Vault, that looks worth a peek to me. YMMV. But this video has Vin Scully in it!

The home opener was definitely a cluster in the Molitor lot (which has been our lot going back to the County Stadium era). About the front/southernmost third of the lot is now fenced off and designated for ride share business. The parking lot map (here) makes it look less disruptive than it is. For fans who park in the lot, besides the hassle of being no closer than about row 10, the only way to walk out of the lot now is the walkway closer to the interstate; and as Outlander pointed out, the only way to exit now is at the rear (northernmost end) of the lot. Additionally, at the home opener, the (lone) walkway to get back to parked cars was also blocked with people waiting for their rideshare rides . Those rides were probably delayed by the overall gridlock around the stadium. The specific gridlock of people standing in the walkway was improved by later in the first homestand when the Brewers moved some of the fencing to make more space for the folks waiting for rides. The single exit for the rest of the lot is not great, and the overall vibe of the Molitor lot has been marred. I realize these are extremely first world problems, but in some ways that was a bigger disappointment to me last Monday than the on-field results. At some point this season we're bound to be placed in a spot closer to Yount Drive and will have to walk around almost the entire rideshare area just to get out of the lot. It's disappointing that they couldn't preserve even a narrower walkway on that side of the lot.

The Brewers just announced that the public celebration of life for Ueck will be before/during the Sunday 8/24 game: https://www.mlb.com/brewers/news/bob-uecker-celebration-of-life-planned-august-2025 Tickets will presumably go quickly. And the prices are as sky high as our collective regard for Bob. This game happens to be in our loge package already, but if it weren't and we had to buy off the Brewers website, they're going for $95-$99 before fees! I hope the extra coin is going toward Bob's charities.

We saw Bill at the home opener. He is going a little more part-time this season. He's 80 now so I'm not going to question it. He told my SO he was planning to be off Tuesday and Thursday this (past) week.

As soon as I saw the word "hamate" I had Rickie Weeks flashbacks. 😐

Okay, I've overhyped this, but it bugs me that UW-Madison athletics places a low value on longevity when it comes to season ticket customers. We've had volleyball season tickets since 2000, and over that time our seats have come to be branded as premium. When it comes to the NCAA tournament, they have seated football ticket holders ahead of us and other volleyball ticket holders because the football tickets + seat license fees bring in more revenue. So we were seeing football and basketball fans who wanted to get in on the now-popular volleyball tournament matches primarily to boost their athletics spending, and maybe get them better football/basketball perks down the road. (Somewhat ironically, we weren't displaced as much for the 2024 tournament matches, likely because they started charging us a seat fee last fall.) Even the Brewers value longevity more. We are not their biggest dollar customer by any means, but we've been at it since 1996 (also 1993 and 1994, but we skipped 1995 because of the strike), and while we are not demanding front row field seats, we generally get our first choice of fan perks and our last few years of postseason ticket locations have been excellent. UW athletics seems like a giant rat race in which we have no interest in competing, and now it's even creeping into women's volleyball. We could empty out our savings and there would always be a deeper pocketed donor with one more dollar. I imagine this will only get worse as NIL continues. Anyway, even the Brewers organization of the 2020s has been more friendly.

Richard Chamberlain, arguable king of the TV mini-series, has died at age 90. Ahh, mini-series. I was a little young for things like Roots and The Thorn Birds when they aired, but I remember a big deal being made of them. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxe2nv0mdv2o

Mark was born 9/29/1957 (67 at the moment) and Rob was born 9/28/1958 (66).

Freddy will have a Freddy First Inning. That'll bring the negativity.

Forgive the buzzphrase, but I'll have to put a pin in this for whenever I have more time to write what bugs me about Badger athletics' priorities for season ticket holders. Watch this space, someday, for the rare hawing screed.

Both candidates' ads are terrible, for sure. Someone visiting and seeing them would conclude that Wisconsin has child assaulters around every corner in the state.