I had barely made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we could do without baseball umpires when Brayden King and Jerry Kim, in the Sunday New York Times, suggested just that when they claimed that their research, about to appear in Management Science, shows that "about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously" and that Major League Baseball, with its high-speed camera system, could "enforce a completely accurate, uniform strike zone." Now if we could only find a way to get rid of the greedy, steroid-ridden players we could have completely mechanical baseball!
It is a good month on Turner Classic Movies, with tributes to John Wayne and Samuel Fuller. Fuller was the great American director who famously appeared in Godard's Pierrot le Fou and said "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word; Emotion." Of the eight Fuller films that Turner is showing I particularly like Shock Corridor (1963) and Naked Kiss (1964), two films about madness that accurately reflect the chaos in society at that time, as well as the chaos in filmmaking brought on by the death of the studio system. As for John Wayne, I have become tired of defending him against those who say "he can't act; he always plays John Wayne" and I can only suggest that one watch him in the Ford films, where he goes from an exuberant outlaw (Stagecoach,1939) to an obsessed racist (The Searchers, 1956), to a defeated representative of an elegiac past (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962). I also recommend the films he made with director Howard Hawks (Red River, 1948 and Rio Bravo,1962), in which he plays a determined professional.
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