Casting Daddy’s ballot, 9:05 AM, November 4, 2008, St. Frances De Sales church basement:

Bob Dylan’s reply, ca. 1967, to reporter Michael Iachetta:

“What I’ve been doin’ mostly is seein’ only a few close friends, readin’ little about the outside world, porin’ over books you never heard of, thinkin’ about where I’m goin’, and why am I runnin’, and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowin’, and what am I givin’, and what am I takin’. And mainly what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on gettin’ better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about.”

cited in Anthony Scaduto, Dylan: An Intimate Biography, (NY: Signet Classics, 1971), 285.

So Ed Rendell and Michael Nutter have already called this week…that’s cool.

But Jimmy Rollins just called to invite me to hear Joe Biden speak tomorrow.

That’s more like it.

Via Gail Collins:

I believe we have met them before. They are the men and women who get up at a town hall meeting after the candidate had just made a 20-minute opening speech about his/her plans for health care reform, and say: “What I want to know is, what are you going to do about medical costs?”

There’s a great series of shorts essays here that describe the approaching election.

Ronald Dworkin makes this point about Barack Obama:

He has a striking, deep intelligence, and a gift for combining clarity and strong feeling in his writing and speeches; and he uses these qualities to expose and explain complexity rather than bury it under slogans. It is said that he lacks experience. On the contrary, he alone among prominent politicians has the experience that counts most in a threatening and densely interdependent world: the crucial experience of empathy. He has lived, and been poor, in both domestic and foreign worlds that few national politicians can even imagine.

From Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel; here’s two awkward, troubled kids talking to each other:

“What’s your point ?” Gordy asked.

“I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world. I use them to make fun of the world. To make fun of people. And sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them.”

“So you take your cartoons as seriously as you take books?”

“Yeah, I do, ” I said, “that’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?”

“No, not at all, ” Gordy said. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

Wow, this dude was a poet.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007).

“When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”

John Dewey, The School and Society (1899) in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1:19-20.

I found this essay while looking for good readings on the progressive era to accompany a batch of primary sources. I particularly like this quote:

We should realise that the school’s theoretical architecture, like its physical structure, is an historical construct crafted with a particular set of intellectual tools in response to social, political, and economic needs, and be alert to the fact that the common sense understandings this intellectual blueprint sustains are inherently problematic.

Thorndike and Dewey on the Science of Education, Oxford Review of Education 23, no. 3, (1997): 365-83

I’ve lived in the city of Philadelphia for eighteen years now and nothing I’ve seen quite captures what it means to live here quite like this story:

Why can’t us?

“Boston did it. The White Sox did it. Why can’t us? Why can’t us for once?”

will be off to buy this t-shirt later today.

George Vecsey, maybe the last sports editorialist in the Times who I can still stomach, offers this pearl yesterday:

Fans and bloggers and other outsiders who have no access to the mind-set of a professional athlete do not know how fully a young lifetime of pressure prepares athletes for the big game.

Given the resources of the Times, the access to athletes, and his years of experience, this is the best column he could come up with? Apparently his unique position allows him to say that athletes are actually prepared to deal with important games. Stop the presses, dude.

Apart from a few reporters, the sports punditocracy is in trouble. Only a few seem to understand that they should be using their ability to actually talk to the athletes as a way to gather unique information and to present it to folks who cannot walk into the locker room. Only a few reporters remain who offer thoughtful, viable alternative to the interpretations of those watching at home and hungrily building their blogs.

I’d rather read joyofsox or soxaholix any day; I don’t have time to keep up with the analysts at SOSH but they seem to ask the questions Dan Shaughnessy hasn’t thought about in years.