It was an afternoon in July of 1981. I was getting on a bus heading towards downtown Chicago. As I walked towards my seat in the back of the bus, I recognized Chicago Cubs shortstop Ivan DeJesus. It was the first time I had ever seen a professional athlete riding public transportation. I had no idea where he was going; I only know where he should have been. That was Wrigley Field. The Cubs had a game scheduled for that day, but it was canceled due to work stoppage.

Major League Baseball lost seven hundred-thirteen games that year. When the season resumed in August, the solution was to split the schedule into two halves for the first time in major league baseball history. The first round of the playoffs featured the first-half winner of each division against the winner of the second half. This led to the two teams that had the best records in the National League, The Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals, both not making the playoffs because neither won a half. What a mess!

As far as the monetary losses, the players lost a total of $4 million a week in salary. The teams lost a total of $72 million.

You would have thought the owners would have learned something from this, but……

Fast forward to August 12, 1994. Thirteen years after the 19981 season came another work stoppage. This one not only put an end to the regular season, but it led to the cancellation of the World Series.

One of the teams most affected by this was the Montreal Expos. They had the best record in baseball. It looked like this was their best opportunity to play in the World Series. They never got the chance to find out. Many think that the team never recovered from the loss of the 1994 season. They moved to Washington D.C. in 2005.

In the American League, the New York Yankees owned the best record. The cancellation of the season cost their leader, Don Mattingly, his best chance to play post-season baseball.

When the work stoppage ended the following April, fans did not easily forgive both the owners and the players. Attendance at games was down twenty percent. Those who did show up were vocal in their disdain for both sides. Television ratings plummeted. It took until 1998 and the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run race for baseball to regain its popularity.

The monetary damages in 1994 were astronomical. The players lost $230 million in salary. The teams lost $580 million in revenue.

You’d think that after this the owners would have again learned their lesson, but…..

That brings us to yesterday. Actually, it began on December 2, 2021. That’s the day ownership locked out the players. Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement had come to an end. Instead of negotiating a new contract, management decided a lockout would be the best solution. MLB’s first proposal to the players was made on January 13, 2022, almost six weeks after the lockout began.

When negotiations did begin, they were contentious from the start. I never got the feeling that ownership was serious about making a deal. It looked like they were more interested in showing that they held all the power over the union.

Yesterday, when everything broke down, commissioner Rob Manfred announced the cancellation of the season’s first two series of games. Most likely there will be more games lost. None will be made up.

While we don’t know what the monetary damages will be, plenty of people who can’t afford this will take a hit. Businesses in cities that host spring training sites will lose much-needed income. Vendors will lose game opportunities to sell products and make money. It’s only a matter of time until teams start to lay off front office staff.

The pandemic years have been horrendous for baseball. The 2020 season had only sixty games played; all without fans. The 2021 season had a full schedule but for much of the year, only a limited amount of fans were allowed to attend due to the pandemic.

2022 could have been baseball’s chance to get back to normal. It was a chance for an entire schedule with the stadiums full of fans. It was a chance for teams to recoup some of the pandemic losses of the last two years. And now, for no real legitimate reason, baseball’s owners have decided to give that up while simultaneously angering their fan base. That doesn’t seem to be the smartest way to run a business.

It’s 2022 and by now you’d think that baseball’s ownership would have learned their lesson, but…..

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

It was quite clear to all that attended, or live-streamed, the show at The Riviera on Friday night, that Hippo Campus was ushering in a new sound.

“2 Young 2 Die” opens with atmospheric keyboards, triggered beats, and a healthy dose of autotune on Jake Luppen’s voice, which we started to hear on his solo record, Lupin, and we’d continue to hear throughout the night.

Quickly they revert to their guitar-driven style with “Ashtray,” and this feels more akin to what we are used to. The pop of “Bad Dream Baby” gives way to more drum loops and autotune on “Blew Its,” both of which I could do without, simply because their catalog is so deep.

Halfway through “Semi-Pro”, there is a medical emergency inside the Riv, and it seems a fan has passed out. The boys restart the song after a crowd request to “play it again,” to which Lupin replies (for the second time), “This one’s about sports!” While I enjoy sports and small doses of this song, it just feels too easy for a band who wrote the likes of “South.”

“Bang Bang” is growing on me and I love “Sex Tape,” it’s super fun, but at this point, it seems that some of the musicality is lost amongst the autotune and the guitars as they become washed away with other noise. Thank god for the trumpet playing of DeCarlo Jackson who brought a seriousness and legitimacy to many of these new tunes.

It’s hard to remember that these guys are still basically kids and that they should be having fun, otherwise there wouldn’t be any new music for us to look forward to.

“We’ve entered the chill part of the set,” says Lupin. “So if you’ve got’em, smoke’em. Smoke’em, if you got’em.” “Listerine,” was the highlight of the night for me. It’s an incredibly beautiful love song, wherein Lupin exclaims, “You can’t wash the fucked up out of me tonight/No matter how hard you try.”

Lupin opens himself bare for the whole world to see, and his band gives him a subtle but colorful canvas to paint over. As a fan, I want more of these moments, this is the band I love. While he did use autotune on his vocals, the melody and instrumentation were on par with some of Hippo’s best.

Now it’s time for the band to “play some old ones,” like “Warm Glow,” which sounds big and soothing. “The Way It Goes” and “South” are played to raucous cheers, and then we finally get “Boys,” which is the best song on their latest album, LP3. “Deepfake” contains one of the more memorable moments of the night as the whole band gets in on the fun and sings, “You’re cool, you’re really on a roll/I want to be like you when I get older.”

Another of my favorite moments was the retro-sounding “Where To Now,” where Nathan takes the lead, and they all back him up. It reminds me of The Psychedelic Furs, or The Cure, and feels like a product of their early musical influences.

I can’t exit this post without mentioning, “Understand,” which feels like a church hymn or a prayer being sung. This is the future of Hippo, soulful and grown-up. But I don’t want them to grow up quite yet, I like them making sex tapes, and experimenting with different sounds. Let’s put off the parent trap for a few more records, and let them imbibe in creativity and joyfulness.

Though they ended with incredible versions of “Bambi,” and “Buttercup,” it’s apparent that things done changed, and that’s ok…for now.

Subscribe To My Blog, PLEASE!

Watch the show featuring Dabrowski by clicking here.

Dabrowski discusses w/Jeff Berkowitz how to:

1, Stop violent crime in IL: arrest, detain, convict and imprison dangerous career criminals; treat them as criminals, not as victims.

2. Cut the heck out of IL’s property taxes, the 2nd highest in the nation.

3. Reform IL education by empowering parents w/school choice.

4. Decrease 8th highest K-12 education spending, which is driving the 2nd highest property taxes in the country.

5. Re-structure IL public sector pensions, starting w/ converting them all to 401(K) style defined contribution plans and amending the IL Constitution to allow cuts in COLAs and other reforms.

6. Promise never to impose again anything like Pritzker’s covid mandates or his use of emergency powers to emasculate the IL legislature.

You can watch the Dabrowski show 24/7 by clicking here.

Would an IL Gov candidate who adopted the above platform be on a path to victory? Is the Pope Catholic?

Our show featuring Wirepoints’ Ted Dabrowski airs tonight in 25 Chicago Metro North and Northwest suburbs, 8:30 pm, Comcast Cable:

 ––Ch. 19 in Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, parts of Inverness, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles, Northfield, Palatine, Rolling Meadows and Wilmette and on

-– Ch. 35 in Arlington Heights, Bartlett, Glenview, Golf, Des Plaines, Hanover Park, Mt. Prospect, Northbrook, Park Ridge, Prospect Heights, Schaumburg, Skokie, Streamwood and Wheeling and

–in the City of Highland Park tomorrow night, 8:30 pm on Comcast Ch 19.

An Atlas V rocket launched the GOES-T weather satellite to space from Cape Canaveral at 3:38 pm CST today March 1st, 2022. The satellite is currently traveling through space on its way to orbit, which is about a three and a half hour mission after launch.

Following the successful launch by ULA and NASA’s Launch Services Program, the rocket and spacecraft will enter a coast phase before GOES-T separates and reaches geostationary orbit. Currently vehicle performance is nominal and the Centaur still needs to perform a third burn.

GOES-T launching from the pad at Kennedy Space Center. Photo Credit: Sophie Sanchez/Cosmic Chicago

Once in orbit GOES-T will be renamed GOES-18 and begin gathering weather data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA has maintained a geostationary weather observing system since the 70s and the GOES R-Series of satellites are a continuation of that program.

Artist rendition of GOES-T in orbit. Credit: NASA

NASA will continue to deliver coverage of the mission as it proceeds through each phase. You can view live coverage of spacecraft separation at 7pm CST at nasa.gov/live.

Learn more about what was wrong with GOES West and why NASA had to deliver another satellite to orbit here: The Problem with GOES West

All I have now is the spring.

I’ve been overwhelmed by death for the past two years. Family members, old friends, acquaintances from work. Just a wave of death.

In this wave, I turn on my television to find more death. I open Twitter to read more about death. Our dearly deceased show up on Facebook even when we don’t ask for it.

It’s inescapable.

Just as the ashes of COVID began to clear up, a balding madman from halfway across the world dredged up memories of nuclear war that were supposedly tucked away in a manila folder from 1989.

And now, we face death. Again…Only on a grander scale with less time for an Instagram obituary.

So, here is March.

The clouds are heavy. The sun spends hours trying to sneak through.

My life is a petition for sunlight. It comes and it fades.

There is always a sunset, somewhere. God, give us enough light to enjoy a spring.

It’s all we have.

In the 1930s, Stalin killed 5 million, 10 million or as many 20 million.

The Holodomor, as the Ukrainians called it, in pure numbers rivals the Holocaust–the Hitler genocide of six million Jews.

Not many America’s are aware of the Holodomor, the man-made famine engineered by USSR tyrant Joseph Stalin the killed millions of Ukranaines by starvation or forced dislocation in the 1930s

Exactly how many died is a matter of scholarly debate, but the devastation of the Holodomor is not in doubt. Estimates range from 5 million to 20 million fatalities.

Brittanica describes it this way:

Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russiaand Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).

Causes of the famine

The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. It also sparked a series of peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.

The comparison of the Holodomor with Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is arguable. But consider: Putin justifies the invasion by arguing that Ukraine doesn’t exist, and by extension, its people. Putin ignores the different cultural, language and other characteristics of Russians and Ukrainians as if they weren’t real.

As genocides go, Putin’s determination to exterminate Ukraine is both similar to and different from history’s previous genocides. But one thing they all have in common is the human suffering. For that, Putin deserves a place in the Pantheon of the world greatest criminals.

Photograph gallery of Holodomor: