Mental sorbet, 10

Less politics, more stuff. Like mental sherbet, but with special consideration for the lactose intolerant.

This was a tough week for both Boomers and Gen Xers, who learned of the deaths of legendary baseball broadcaster and actor, Bob Uecker, and legendary surrealist filmmaker, David Lynch.

Uecker, and inductee into the broadcasting wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, was a marginal major leaguer, but a favorite of teammates. Tim McCarver, whom Uecker backed up while with the St. Louis Cardinals, called him a comedic genius — a reputation that propelled him into stardom as a favorite of Johnny Carson. Carson bestowed Uecker his tongue-in-cheek nickname, “Mr Baseball,” and Uecker went on the parlay his popular appearances on “The Tonight Show” to some of the most iconic sports roles in American culture. From Uecker’s loyal but steadily cynical Indian’s broadcaster, Harry Doyle, in Major League — which gave us the classic lines, “Juuuuuuuust a bit outside” and “he threw at his own kid in a father-son game” — to his turn as the optimistic, self-deluded, third-tier baseball schlub in Miller Light beer commercials, Uecker’s supporting roles became instant classics, with “I must be in the front row” and “He missed the tag! He missed the tag!” becoming punchlines those of us who grew up with them ourselves used to punctuate self-effacing jokes.

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The late, great comedian, Norm MacDonald, a longtime friend of Uecker’s, shared a hilarious Uecker broadcast booth story on “Late Night with David Letterman,” in which he highlighted Uecker’s penchant for the curse word.

Uecker was a national treasure. And at 90, he still left us too soon.

David Lynch, conversely, produced enigmas. From the haunting Eraserhead (1977) to the bizarre Lost Highway (1997) to the wicked Blue Velvet (1986) and the mesmerizing Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch combined ethereal dreamscapes with paranoid realism, producing some of the most memorable films of the last 50 years. His landmark television series, “Twin Peaks,” remains one of the greatest cult shows in television history.

But Lynch wasn’t, as some like to cast him, and inscrutable one-trick auteur. His The Elephant Man (1980), shot in black and white, deploys largely mainstream story telling, and garnered five Academy Award nominations at a time when that actually carried significant critical weight; in 1999, The Straight Story — another relatively conventional piece — earned the late Richard Farnsworth and Academy Award nomination.

My favorite Lynch film, however — and this puts me squarely at odds with other fans of Lynch’s work — is 1990’s Wild at Heart, which paired Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern with Dianne Ladd, Willem DeFoe, Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover, and Lynch regulars Sherilyn Fenn and Isabella Rosselini. It’s Cage at his over the top best, and Dern at her most sultry. If you haven’t seen it, take the time to check it out. Without this film preparing the way for him, it’s a debate whether Tarantino’s early work — especially True Romance (1993), which he wrote but didn’t direct — would have hit the way it did.

David Lynch was 78. Rest in peace to both great entertainers.

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You probably know that the Shah of Iran was installed by the US in an operation orchestrated by the CIA. But did you know that the man who ran that operation was the grandson of former US President Teddy Roosevelt?

It’s true. The operation was called “Operation Ajax.” Its architect was Kermit Roosevelt. And here’s the fascinating story.*

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Thomas Sowell on the Eugenics movement in the United States. Born from early progressivism, the Eugenics movement in the US played a significant role in the thinking of Adolf Hitler.

Race consciousness has existed for as long as one race of people saw another race of people and noticed differences between the races, but the science of race was the result of hereditary categorizations that were mapped to perceived intelligence as causal — and much of that is thanks to genetics, as understood (incompletely and rather poorly, it turns out) by American progressive intellectuals.

Woodrow Wilson, a famous progressive, famously screened DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) at the White House, and re-segregated the federal government. In this film, the Ku Klux Klan — whom Wikipedia lists as a “far right hate group,” despite its longtime home in the Democratic Party — are horse-riding heroes and civic saviors, which tells you much about racial thinking in the times following Reconstruction and the subsequent onset of Jim Crow.

Sowell’s excellent lecture walks you through the thinking that even to this day is rampant in certain intellectual spheres and online chat rooms.

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Turkish Only Fans “star” Azra Ay Vandan has been arrested. Turkey, it turns out, frowns on certain behaviors that we here in the West — for good or ill, depending on who you ask — leave up to individuals, provided they stay within legal limits. The “adult model”

who streams on the platform OnlyFans, was arrested by the police in Turkey for announcing that she and her husband, Pedram Behdar Vandan, plan to sleep with 100 men in 24 hours and stream the encounters. She claimed that she would become the first Turkish woman to do so. A video surfaced on social media that showed Turkish authorities dragging Azra Ay Vandan out of a building where she could be seen resisting arrest.

Different cultures have differing ideas on propriety, and different methods of enforcing those ideas. We can complain — or cheer — but in the end, it’s an issue that the Turks will have to work out.

Personally, I’d like to see Only Fans disincentivized; but I wouldn’t outright ban it — relying instead on its inability to properly screen out kids to bring lawsuits that hopefully bankrupt the rot.

That said, I know an armadillo who thinks I’m “a big, sanctimonious girly pussy” for writing that last paragraph.

— which, okay. But I’m a big, sanctimonious girly pussy who has a credit card and the ID it takes to buy the cigars and tequila the uppity Panzer rat has been bugging me for all week.

So there’s that.

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Have a great rest of your weekend, all!

*an earlier version of this post had Teddy Roosevelt misnamed as Teddy Kennedy. God forfend. Sorry for the brain fart. Have Hart-Celler on my mind quite a bit recently.

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Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car? Or buy me some beer. I avoid prescription opioids.