Bruce the Blog

Nostalgia is over-rated. Baby boomers riding off into the sunset years can be big babies, period. Sure, we can reminisce about how great it was when we’d sneak a transistor radio earphone (one earpiece, please, stereo sound and Walkmans didn’t exist) in class to listen to day games of the World Series.

That’s fun to talk about now, but there’s no question World Series games played in prime time at night are more theatrical. They also, not so coincidentally, generate a lot more revenue for team owners and players and Major League Baseball and TV networks. Gordon Gekko was right — greed is good!

But wait a minute. Not so fast. The current edition of the fall classic is fighting the elements as much as the American and National leagues’ champions are fighting each other. As if it’s not bad enough that the same greed that has given us an all-night-game Series since who-remembers-when-without-stopping-to-Google-the answer also has given us a World Series that turned the sublime balmy weather of autumn into the absurd nickname earned by Derek Jeter — Mr. November! — now we have a series that is seemingly endless after only four games and has substituted a meteorologist for an umpire.

Why is it that football games are played under any conditions while the national pastime turns tail at the sight of a few frozen drops of rain or just heavy rain? I’ll pass along the answer as soon as Commissioner Bud Selig returns my text message.

In the meantime, I’m sort of long in the tooth — if you don’t remember Yankee 1B Moose Skowron and 2B Bobby Richardson and 3B Andy Carey and pitchers Ryne Duren or Bob Turley, trust that I’m older than you — and I gotta say that the closure of this WS was the weirdest and most anti-climactic I’ve ever seen.

Among other things, it’s not every day that the deciding game of the World Series lasts less than three innings. Technically, it was 8-1/2 innngs, spanning three nights mind you, but it seemed like two mini-games and the audience got seriously short-changed on the back end.

Just keep extending that postseason, Commissioner Selig, and pretty soon, the Series will be played during the NFL playoffs and take about a month to finish, with time off for bad weather. Good going!

Okay, so impeach me, because that admittedly is a trick headline.

Let me explain. 7-Eleven is where I buy my coffee on the way to work.
There is a variety of brews that are hot and fresh and flavorful, it’s fast in-and-out, owner Ahmed Bash is always a friendly and talkative host, and you’re bound to see somewhere you know. What more do you need.

When I saw the red McCain and blue Obama cups that 7-Eleven hauled out to capitalize on election season, my guess was they weren’t popular with customers. Would a worker want to advertise a Presidential preference in front of the boss, who might be rooting for the other guy (or gal)? Shows how much (or little) I know.

Bash told me the cups are selling very well. At the convenience-store chain nationwide, he reported, Obama cups outsell McCain cups 60%-40%.

In Yorktown, though, McCain’s not so down in his cups: they runneth over Obama’s by about a 5% margin.

A couple miles up the road, as the crow flies, the students at Yorktown High School voted in a mock election that gave Obama a landslide margin of 66.8%, or 656 votes out of a total of 982 students and faculty polled by The Voice, the school’s award-winning paper (that is printed by our sister company, Chase Press).

The paper did a great job of breaking down the vote by grade and by class according to teacher. Sophomores gave Obama the smallest percentage, at 63.7%, while Staff ballots gave him the widest gap, at 72.7%.

One teacher’s classes nearly split the vote, with Obama garnering 60 votes to McCain’s 57, while in another teacher’s classes, McCain attraccted only 10 votes out of a total of 70.

Most surprising, considering the sky-high profile of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the paper did not break out votes by gender.