Jane's Addiction – "Been Caught Stealing" (1990)

When I want something, man

I don’t wanna pay for it

Fifty years ago, legendary Baltimore Orioles skipper Earl Weaver became the first major-league baseball manager to use a radar gun.

But it was Danny Litwhiler, who played for four different National League teams between 1940 and 1951 and  later became a successful college baseball coach, who first had the idea of using a device designed to catch speeding drivers to measure how hard a pitcher threw.

A Danny Litwhiler baseball card

Litwhiler later told an interviewer the story:

One day in 1974 while I was the coach at Michigan State, I read an article in the student paper that said “Don’t Speed on Campus” and there was a photo of an MSU policeman who had just received a new radar gun.  That got me thinking – could we use it to check the velocity of [a pitched] baseball?  I found out that the cops’ radar guns were powered by the cigarette lighters in their police cars.  So we got an MSU police car to drive out on the field to time the pitches. 

Litwhiler then bought a used radar gun and had it modified to work on batteries.  He took it to spring training the next year and showed it to Weaver, who immediately saw the value of knowing exactly how fast his pitchers’ pitches travelled.  

The Orioles’ general manager was too cheap to purchase a radar gun for his team to use that season, but Weaver got his way in 1976.  Other teams quickly followed suit, and today radar guns are routinely used by baseball scouts and coaches.

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If you ask me, using a radar gun to measure the velocity of baseball pitches wasn’t Danny Litwhiler’s cleverest idea.

Litwhiler got to the major leagues because he was a very good hitter.  In 1941, his best season, he hit .305 with 18 homers.  Only two National Leaguers had more hits that year, and only three had more total bases.

But Litwhiler committed 15 errors that year, more than any other NL outfielder.  

The next year, he decided to connect the fingers of his glove with rawhide thongs – the first major leaguer to use such a glove.  Litwhiler’s innovation made a big difference – in 1942, he became the first player to play an entire season without making a single error, earning his newfangled glove a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

Litwhiler was later credited with dozens of other baseball-related inventions – including a special bat designed to help batters become better bunters, an unbreakable mirror that pitchers could use to watch their throwing motion, and a special clay compound that was used to quickly dry baseball infields and minimize the length of rain delays.   

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I know a lot about baseball history, but I had never heard of Danny Litwhiler until I read The Last Manager, John W. Miller’s new book about Earl Weaver.  

That’s not surprising because Litwhiler last played in the major leagues the year before I was born.  Also, he never played for the Yankees.  (I’m a lifelong Yankees fan, and I’ve read just about every book about the team – if Litwhiler had been a Yankee instead of spending his entire career in the National League, I’d probably have recognized his name.)

It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts is the title of Earl Weaver’s 1982 autobiography.  Sometimes I sound like I think I know it all, but I’m still learning – and I’m happy to have learned about Danny Litwhiler.

But learning about Danny Litwhiler also makes me sad because I know there are many, many other former baseball players out there who are just as interesting that I know nothing about – and never will know anything about.  

Not to mention all the great books I’ll never read, and all the great music I’ll never hear, and all the great movies and TV series I’ll never watch, and all the great bike trails I’ll never ride, and especially all the attractive . . . I think I’ll stop right there.  

Click here to learn more about Danny Litwhiler.

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“Been Caught Stealing” spent four weeks in the top spot of the Billboard  “Modern Rock” chart in 1990.

From Genius.com:

[Jane’s Addiction’s frontman] Perry Farrell has claimed this song is autobiographical, that he himself gets a thrill from stealing.

He’s also advocated unprotected sex, talked about enjoying hard drugs, and other taboo subjects.  But later he claimed he never intended people to take it seriously:

“I didn’t get into this to make sermons or set up structures for others to live by.  My intent has nothing to do with teaching. It’s to amuse myself on this completely boring planet.”

 

Click here to listen to “Been Caught Stealing,” which seems like a good record to feature in this post because Danny Litwhiler stole only 11 bases during his major-league career while being caught stealing 29 times.  

Click here to watch a detailed breakdown of that recording’s elements.

Click here to buy “Been Caught Stealing” from Amazon.

Dead Kennedys – "Holiday in Cambodia" (1980)

It’s a holiday in Cambodia

Where you’ll do what you’re told

Better Things is a TV series that aired on FX a few years ago.  It stars Pamela Adlon (who co-created the show with Louis C.K.) as Sam Fox, a divorced actress raising three daughters in Los Angeles.

There’s a scene in one episode of the show where the daughters are all talking over one another as Sam is driving down a busy L.A. street after picking them up at their different schools.  Each of the girls – a high-schooler, a middle-schooler, and a grade-schooler – is demanding that her mother do what she wants to do RIGHT NOW!

The Better Things cast

After putting up with the yelling for a minute or so, Sam loses it.  She pulls her minivan over and tells her daughters to get out and walk home.  When the girls protest that they are miles from their house, she points to a nearby bus stop and tells them they can get home that way.

Sam’s daughters are stunned into silence by her pronouncement – perhaps the only time in the entire series that none of the three are complaining about something trivial or otherwise being annoying.

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A couple of days ago, my daughter Caroline suggested that I take my seven-year-old grandson Sully and five-year-old granddaughter Eliza to see The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants at a local movie theater.  It was only the first day of their Christmas break, and I thought it might be wiser to save that movie for a rainy day.  But I try to mind my own business when it comes to how my kids are raising my grandkids.

Sully and Eliza, looking guilty

We saw the movie in the middle of the afternoon at one of those theaters with fully reclining seats.  I figured if it wasn’t any good, I could at least catch 40 winks.

But the movie was incredibly loud from beginning to end – I can’t imagine how anyone could have fallen asleep while watching it.

The highlight of the movie for me was a scene that was accompanied by a karaoke track of the Dead Kennedys’ fabulous 1980 single, “Holiday in Cambodia.”

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As I was driving home after the SpongeBob movie, the two kids began to bicker.  It seemed that Sully had placed his water bottle over the imaginary yet very important dividing line that demarcated Eliza’s half of the back seat of my car from his half – an unforgivable sin on his part.

A few minutes after I settled that dispute by quoting my favorite Ring Lardner line – “’Shut up,’ he explained” – my two little angels were at it again.”

“My real name is Elizabeth,” Eliza announced.

“No it’s not,” Sully demurred.  “It’s Eliza.”

“Yes it is!”

“No it’s not!”

And so on and so forth, world without end, amen. 

I thought about how the Sam character handled her daughters when they annoyed her while she was driving them home in the Better Things episode, and decided to see if her tactic worked on my grandkids.

“That’s enough,” I said.  “If you two don’t stop arguing right now, I’m going to make you get out of the car and walk home!”

We were in Frederick, Maryland – which is a far cry from Los Angeles – and much closer to my daughter’s house than Sam and her girls were when she threatened them with involuntary debarkation.

On the other hand, we were driving in total darkness, and my grandkids are much younger than Sam’s daughters – so I think my threat may have been even more frightening.

“Granddad, we don’t know how to get home!” they protested.

“Then I’d say you’d better be quiet,” I replied.

It worked like a charm.  Sully and Eliza didn’t say a word for the duration of our drive home.

I figured my grandkids would rat me out when they saw their mother – perhaps causing her to seriously reconsider the wisdom of ever letting them go anywhere with me again – so I came clean and told her exactly what I had said to them . . . but made the whole thing sound like a big joke. 

*     *     *     *     *

When I shared this story with my therapist, she said that my tactic worked because my grandchildren trusted me.

I found her use of “trust” in this context interesting.  By saying that my grandkids trusted me, she meant that they believed I would do what I said I would do  – not that they had confidence that I would take good care of them.

Before I said goodbye to Sully and Eliza that night, I tried to make it clear to them that I would have never put them out of the car and left them alone in the dark – that I just said that so they would stop arguing.

I think that was the right thing to do.  Plus I figured that they wouldn’t fall for the same trick again.

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Here’s the picture sleeve of “Holiday in Cambodia,” which depicts a crowd member using a folding chair to beat the hanged corpse of a dead student during the 1976 Thammasat University protests in Bangkok:

Click here to listen to “Holiday in Cambodia.”

Click here to buy “Holiday in Cambodia” from Amazon.

Sir Mix-a-Lot – "Baby Got Back" (1992)

So Cosmo says you’re fat

Well, I ain’t down with that!

You heard it here first: 26-year-old television personality Carissa Codel is blowin’ up!

Some people would say Carissa has already blown up because she weighs 180 pounds (down from 235 a couple of years ago).  

But her weight doesn’t bother Carissa one little bit.  (If it bothers you, that’s your problem.)

Carissa Codel

Carissa – who is a morning anchor at a Springfield, Missouri TV station – chooses the rudest comments about her weight that viewers post on social media and reads them on the air.  

Here are some examples:

“This is who Sir Mix-a-Lot was rapping about.”

“Dayuum Gurl, I want you to put a hurtin’ on me like you do those midnight snacks.”

“I ain’t ever worked as hard as her ankles.”

“Girl, you’re thicker than a bowl of oatmeal.”

“Thicker than a peanut butter milkshake.”

“She’s thicker than zoo glass.”

“Built like my grandma’s prescription lenses.”

“She’s like the only fat 9 I’ve ever seen.”

 Trolling the trolls

“Built for breeding.”

“Shawty obese.”

“The Ford F150 of woman.”

“She’s got enough muffin top to start two bakeries.”

And last but not least:

“I mean, she is overweight.  That being said, she’s an absolute smoke show.”

(True dat.)

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The nasty comments that Carissa reads on camera are (to quote my grandmother)  water off a duck’s back to her.  

Sometimes she offers a snappy comeback to the trolls whose insult her.  But usually she just laughs.  (And hen I say she laughs, she really laughs.)

Click here to watch one of her segments.

Click here to watch another one.  (Sorry, Josh – no cake for you!)

And click here to hear Carissa’s best laugh ever.

What may be even more amazing than Carissa’s sense of humor about herself is the fact that the news director at her station allows her to do this – I’ve never seen a local TV news show that was loosely-goosey enough to accommodate this kind of thing.

*     *     *     *     *

Sir Mix-a-Lot – né Anthony L. Ray –  released his one and only hit single,“Baby Got Back,” in 1992.

“Baby Got Back” was criticized for its buttocks-centric lyrics – e.g., “My anaconda don’t want none/

Unless you’ve got buns, hun!” – and blatant objectification of women.  (MTV briefly banned the “Baby Got Back” music video, which says a lot if you remember some of the music videos from that era that MTV didn’t ban.)

Sir Mix-a-Lot defended the song as being empowering to women who looked nothing the skinny models who dominated TV commercials and fashion magazines:

The song doesn't just say I like large butts, you know?  The song is talking about women who damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models that you see in Vogue magazine.

Click here to watch the official music video for “Baby Got Back.”

Click here to buy “Baby Got Back” from Amazon.