By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
SEPT. 21, 2021 | Computer chips, we hear, are in short supply. It’s particularly hitting the auto industry hard, as some manufacturers have had to cut production because of a shortage of chips, including the Kia assembly plant in West Point, Ga.
But last week we found other shortages, where you might not expect them. Shopping for a replacement sports coat, what? Two places had none of the standard jackets in our size, which is not an unpopular size.
Then on a trip to a home supply store, we were instructed to get a particular Zep window
cleaner. When we got to where the item was stocked before, no cleaner. We also found our local supermarket didn’t have some items we wanted, included being out of Mother Geraldine’s Cheese Straws. (They’re good, are produced in Jasper, Ga., and the plant is the world leader in making cheese straws.)
Don’t think any of these local shortages we found are because of computer chips. But you never know. Yep, still jacket shopping.
Sunday 101 years ago (1920) Roger Angell was born in New York City, and became well known for writing essays on nothing less than baseball, in addition to his other writings. (His mother was Katherine White, herself an editor at The New Yorker, while his stepfather was E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, who was co-author with William Strunk The Elements of Style.)
Roger took writing about baseball seriously. He was good, and is the only person elected to both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Note his use of the language in this paragraph about the national game:
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut […] is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. […] It no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
Angell made an art out of writing about baseball!
Out of the mouth of babes: We heard this story this week of a mother driving her three year old, strapped into a car seat in the back seat. The youngster asked: “Mommie, what are those wires I can see at the top of those poles?”
The mother answers: “Those are the wires that bring electricity to us from the electric plants.”
The youngster was quiet for a while, then wondered: “Mommie, can we get some electric plants for our backyard?”
Then there are other babes. Mae West once was quoted: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Follow Us