Moan Day

Trump's Lie du Jour*

"If I don't win, there must have been cheating!"

The latest idiocy from asshat
Donald Trump and his moronic spokespeople is the claim that delegate selection processes in Colorado and Wyoming recently were "rigged," and "cheated" him out of delegates he deserved.





When you hear moaning about "voterless victories" benefiting Texas Senator Ted Cruz, keep in mind that such talk is just spin, with no basis in reality. The Trump campaign still assumes that voters are too dumb to use Google.

Here, for instance, is
a delegate-selection meeting in Laramie County, Wyoming.

Does this look "voterless" to you?

Here is a delegate-selection meeting which occurred in Arapahoe County, Colorado.

Again, there sure seem to be a lot of folks participating in this "voterless" process, don't you think?




*This section's title is making fun of Trump's halfwit campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has demonstrated that he doesn't know what "du jour" means.

"In fairness, he doesn't know what a LOT of words mean."

That is certainly true...

Travel Day

Averaging a strikeout per inning, 2.38 ERA to date

My beloved Kansas City Royals are heading home after completing a 4-3 road trip to Houston and Oakland, so there will be no game today. That might be for the best.





The day off may help me get over yesterday's bitter 3-2 defeat by the Athletics, in which an excellent performance by starter Kris Medlen was wasted due to a weak offense, slipshod defense (the tying run was unearned, and scored on a passed ball by C Salvador Perez), and ineffective relief pitching by Kelvin Herrera and Joakim Soria.

Soria was the losing pitcher, and his ERA is now up to 6.75. I don't know how much longer we can afford to use him in high-leverage situations...

"Would this be a good time to bring up that 'you can't win 'em all' thing?"

No...it would be a good time for you to STFU, though...

Wild Kingdom Bed & Breakfast Update

"Just checkin' things out. Got any invertebrates?"

One of the cool things about the B&B is when I spot a new species that I haven't seen around before.

Yesterday morning, when I checked the patio for the first time, I spotted a couple of common starlings. They were on the ground, just off the edge of the patio, and they weren't eating. They were gathering some twigs and such for nest-building.


They had relatively brownish plumage, which according to Audubon means they're younger birds.

Starlings will eat seeds, so perhaps they'll come back around to check out the offerings at the B&B. All are welcome, of course...

"You know most people consider starlings to be a nuisance, right?"

I'm not most people...

Donny Really Is Special

From the mighty pen of Michael Ramirez, whose editorial cartoons you should read often, as I do.

Until Next Time...

Motion picture soundtracks have been an enthusiasm of mine ever since I discovered that you could actually buy record albums that had the music from a movie on them. Today I'm celebrating the birthday of one of my favorite cinematic composers.

On April 18, 1907 Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest, Hungary. He began scoring motion pictures when he was just 30 years old, and by the time he was 37 he had been nominated for six Academy Awards (scores for The Thief of Bagdad, Lydia, Sundown, Jungle Book, Double Indemnity, and The Woman of the Town). His first big success, oddly enough, would come from his least-favorite movie collaboration.

In 1945 director Alfred Hitchcock's favorite composer Bernard Hermann was unavailable to score Hitchcock's new film Spellbound due to other commitments, so Hitchcock hired Rózsa for the gig.

Original 1945 "one sheet" poster

Contrary to the glamorous mythology surrounding Hollywood, more often than not even successful projects are troubled by clashing egos. Spellbound was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Rózsa's ground-breaking music received the Best Original Score Oscar, but Hitchcock hated the score, and Rózsa hated working with Hitchcock and "hands-on" producer David O. Selznick so much that he never worked with either of them again.

In one of Hollywood's stranger quirks of fate, Rózsa's Spellbound score won the Academy Award over two other Rózsa scores which were nominated the same year (The Lost Weekend and A Song to Remember). He is the only composer ever to have won an Oscar by beating two of his own scores for the prize.

The winning Spellbound score was hugely influential, and among other things introduced the use of a gadget called a theremin to achieve some spooky atmospherics (Rózsa relied heavily on the theremin in his score for The Lost Weekend also). The theremin is still around today, as my hero Joe Bonamassa demonstrates. 

Today's send-off is a suite of themes and motifs from Rozsa's first Oscar-winning score, paired with Salvador Dali's famous "Curtain of Eyes" painting made specifically for the film. Enjoy...