April 10, 2026

PERAL BEFORE SWINE:

April 10, 2026

A Fan’s Notes on Earl Monroe (Woody Allen, November 1977, Sport)

Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

Monroe 34, Monroe 36, Monroe 24, Monroe 28, Monroe 40! I was impressed by the consistent high numbers and repeated his name every now and then like it was a mantra. It still sounded musical. Earl Monroe. I think I even recall seeing a picture of him on the cover of Sports Illustrated that year and thinking he was very interesting looking. I was, and I don’t know why, aware of Monroe in some special way. Although I didn’t follow his sport much then, if someone had awakened me in the middle of the night and said, “Quick, name your favorite basketball player,” I’d have snapped back: “Earl Monroe.” This was probably his first working of magic on me, though I had no real idea of what Baltimore Bullet fans were witnessing and feeling each night when they saw him play and referred to him as the Pearl or Black Jesus.

The first time I saw Monroe, an actor friend said, “Come with me to the Garden tonight. I want you to see this guy. You’ll like his style. It’s real herky-jerky.” That was in 1968. By then I was more interested in basketball and had begun following the Knicks a little. They had made the playoffs and had captured the imagination of New York. I went and saw Monroe score 32 points against Walt Frazier. This is Walt Frazier, mind you, who played the guard position as perfectly as it has ever been played and who was to be voted on the all-defensive team seven years running. Thirty-two points and Frazier said, “I had my hand in his face all night. He shoots without looking.”

I went the next night too and while the Knicks double-teamed Monroe at every turn, he tore the place up with a buzzer beater that he flipped in as he ran across the midcourt line at halftime, and he kept running right into the locker room.

My impressions of Monroe then? I immediately ranked him with Willie Mays and Sugar Ray Robinson as athletes who went beyond the level of sports and sport to the realm of sports as art.

Health

EMPATHY IS A LIE WE TELL OURSELVES:

April 10, 2026

Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?: Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences (Michael Pollan, 19 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

So is the effort of sampling inner experiences a game worth the candle? The half century Hurlburt has spent collecting samples of conscious experience has yielded some interesting and important findings. The first finding, to which I can personally attest, is just how little most of us know about the characteristics of our own inner experiences. “That’s probably the most important finding that I’ve got,” Hurlburt said.

Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are “inner speakers”. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re “likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought”. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true.

But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar – not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognise the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word – thinking – and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

Baseball

NO THOUGHT TERRIFIES HUMAN BEINGS MORE….:

April 10, 2026

The Bottom of the Ninth: In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence (Elizabeth D. Samet | March 26, 2026, American Scholar)

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.

PERAL BEFORE SWINE:

EMPATHY IS A LIE WE TELL OURSELVES:

NO THOUGHT TERRIFIES HUMAN BEINGS MORE….:

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