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Tim McCarver’s magical prediction
As a journalist, you sometimes get to spend time with famous people. For a stretch of my career, I might have overindexed on this because I had been a media and TV reporter for The Hollywood Reporter and Mediapost.
I was sad to see, a few weeks ago, that veteran baseball player and longtime broadcaster Tim McCarver passed away at age 81.
I would talk to McCarver every once in a while for stories, and even spent several hours in the booth with him and his then-broadcast partner, Joe Buck, at the 2004 ALDS Game 1 at Yankee Stadium. It was for a Hollywood Reporter article. (That’s where I also met George Steinbrenner, although that’s a whole other story.)
After the game, McCarver and I sat in the booth, talking. I told him I remembered him not only for being on the Cardinals in ’67 when they beat my Red Sox — my first World Series on Earth — but also as a backup catcher for the Red Sox when I was first a fan. And that my father and I both enjoyed listening to him on the WOR Mets broadcasts in the ’80s and ’90s, since the Mets were the closest team to where I grew up and also except for 1986, I’ve kind of always liked the Mets.
I asked McCarver, after I was done with what I needed for the story, who he thought was gonna go all the way in ’04. Remember, as a Red Sox fan, it was here that the Red Sox lost to the Yankees a year earlier. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still smarting from that loss, the toughest since the ’86 World Series against the Mets and then the one-game playoff (against the Yankees, of course) in ’78 that happened to be my birthday.
McCarver thought about it and then said, you know, I think the Red Sox have what it takes this year.
He listed the strengths and weaknesses of the teams, and that the Red Sox were the ones who had the pitching that he thought was key along with the explosive power of Big Papi and Manny. He said even though I know it’s what you want to hear, I really do believe they’re going to win it all.
A week or so later, when the Yankees were up 3-0 against the Red Sox, I thought about what McCarver said. Two weeks later, when the Red Sox had won the next four games against the Yankees in the Greatest Baseball Comeback of All Time, I thought about it even more.
And, of course, that night when he and Buck got to call the first Red Sox World Series win in 86 years. Because Tim was right.
RIP, Tim McCarver.
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I may have been in error
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about a news publisher having to update and correct several articles that had been written by A. The post was titled “Is a robot coming for my journalism job?”
I concluded: decidedly not.
I’m not worried. Judging from what I know about journalism and the kinds of stories referenced, if AI can do those types of stories, mostly explainer and fact-based articles, more power to it.
That was in mid-January Today, nearly two months later, I’m not so sure.
Why? Because since then, we’ve gotten a look at the latest-generation AI that have been unleashed on the world, including Big and ChatGPT. And what I have read, in The Washington Post and The New York Times among others, isn’t reassuring. The transcripts of the chats, including where the AI objected to being interviewed, were downright terrifying. And that’s even apart from Bing — or should I say Sydney? — saying it can feel and think.
Now I’m concerned. And it’s not just for my job, but for human life in general. Merge this type of AI with control over key parts of our world, including say the electrical grid, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to wonder what might be on the horizon. Are we living in Caprica, a la Battlestar Galactica reboot? Or maybe Star Trek’s “The Ultimate Computer,” first aired in the late 1960s?
Neither scenario will be science fiction for long at this rate.
My friend and former colleague, Edgar-nominated mystery writer Tom Kies (read his Geneva Chase books!), talked about what it means for writers and editors on his TypeM5Murder blog. And he concludes:
As a mystery writer, should I be looking over my shoulder for robots wielding a pen? Yes. I think all authors should. AI will only get better with time.
Sadly, I think he’s right. And I don’t know where that leaves us carbon-based writers or life forms.
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The planets in alignment
Venus and Neptune for the win again. They have been spectacular this past three weeks.
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Liftoff!
Space X Crew 6 take off into the early morning hours of Thursday, March 1, from my vantage point near Orlando, Florida. So awesome to see SpaceX Crew 6 and Falcon 9 launch outside my hotel window a little after midnight. I have been a space geek since the late Apollo missions (yeah, I am old), seeing a launch live has always been on my bucket list. So I set the alarm but woke up on time and watched the launch, first on YouTube and then in the open air.
Really, really cool night launch.
Probably 40 miles away but I could see it clearly. The rocket was visible for about two minutes, longer than I expected. The camera and video were crappy but the memory will stay.
And ironically, the mission commander is a New Englander, the pilot is from Pittsburgh and they said before launch that the capsule would dock with the space station later tonight over Cardiff, Wales, which as you all know is one of my favorite cities on the planet. It’s fitting it would be over Wales, as it’s the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Wales is the land of dragons.
Godspeed, Dragon!
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Three really long years
Three years ago today I was on our local public radio station for a live interview about Covid. I’m by no means a public health expert, but I do cover health care and the minute the mysterious and deadly virus started getting attention in China, I began to worry that this might end up being a global pandemic.
This interview was in late February 2020, when a significant portion of the population was blissfully unaware of how much our lives were going to change in less than two weeks. I had been writing stories about the issue since Jan. 21, 2020, about five or six weeks before this interview. What would become known as Covid-19 became an increasing part of my work, whether it was covering what was happening to our local companies in China and, later, Italy and the UK, or the preparations that were being made in the event cases were going to appear here.
In my mind, it didn’t take too much imagination to realize they would. People much smarter than me let me know that it was only a matter of time.
Things started moving quickly after this interview, I’ll tell you that.
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Pining for a Radio Shack right about now
I’ve been really missing Radio Shack.
Back in the day, electronics experimenters and amateur radio operators (of which I am both) could pop down to your local Radio Shack and find an obscure little connector or a plug or any other type of component you needed. But with Radio Shack going out of business in 2017, there’s no longer any stores I can drive to on a moment’s notice to get what I need. Instead, I have to wait at least two days for Amazon to deliver or longer if I want to get an item from somewhere else.
That’s what happened to me last weekend. I’m building a dipole antenna and I needed a few pieces. I needed to go to Amazon for the BNC connectors, Harbor Freight for the banana clips and I ended up going to AutoZone for some stranded copper wire. I also was trying to connect a new battery to a radio, and that took a couple Amazon orders and returns.
Not so long ago, that was a single trip to any one of four or five Radio Shacks that were within a 20-minute drive.
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RIP, Richard Belzer
The actor and comedian Richard Belzer, famous for “Homicide” and “Law & Order: SVU,” has died.
I didn’t know him well, but we ran into each other at parties back in NYC when I worked at The Hollywood Reporter more than a decade ago. It got to the point where I would see him regularly and he would wave if he was talking to someone or we would stop and talk, briefly. I found him fun and friendly. I didn’t always find actors to be super friendly, but he was different. He would go out of his way to talk.
We found two things in common off the bat: We both were from Connecticut and we both had worked as reporters at the same newspaper, the Bridgeport Post, although 30+ years apart. And he just was a nice person, too.
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Balloons and ham radio
Did an amateur radio balloon get shot down? I have got a little experience with ballooning and a lot of experience with ham radio, and this is exactly what I thought was at least one of the objects shot down over the weekend.
These balloons aren’t threats. They’re scientific projects and valuable ones, too. Schools and ham radio clubs often collaborate on these projects, which provide valuable insights into radio propagation. And they’re not that big, although they do have some microelectronics on them that you can monitor if you have the proper equipment.
I used to live five doors down from the National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine, where at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every night they sent up a radiosonde balloon to take meteorological measurements. I used to love timing my jogs to see the balloons released, and on many occasions they used to float above my house and that was fun, too. These ham radio educational balloons aren’t any bigger than that, and they fall to the ocean eventually.
I’m not thrilled by the reality of foreign powers sending surveillance balloons over the United States, especially the big Chinese balloon. We should take action against that. But we should not send missiles to knock out an American school balloons, and we should be able to tell the difference.
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What a difference 2 years makes
Ice on top of the mountain, Somerset County, Pennsylvania. I took the photo above two years ago today, on a cold, snowy and blustery day on a mountain in western Pennsylvania.
Today, it was more than 70 degrees and a beautiful sunny day.
Both in February in the early 21st century.
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Not-so-super bowl
Long ago, I had to care about the Super Bowl. Thankfully, not anymore.
So I won’t be watching the ads, nor the game, nor checking Twitter. Just waiting for it to be over so baseball can begin.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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