Night Two of the Democratic Debate Is the Group of Death
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)
I have in my career as a sportswriter covered two major boxing weigh-ins, one World Cup draw, 10 or 11 NBA Lotteries, several professional drafts, and more NCAA Selection Sundays than I care to mention. (Not that there weren't unique experiences in each, mind you. The World Cup draw got me a free James Brown set in Las Vegas, and one of the weigh-ins featured Mike Tyson in leopard-skin briefs at 6:30 in the morning.) One thing I did not anticipate was having to draw on my lengthy experience at these kind of things in my present gig. But there are the upcoming Democratic primary debates, and there is the Democratic National Committee, so here we all are.
On Friday, the DNC announced the results of what is alleged to be a blind draw to determine who will be in which group and, therefore, who will debate on which night in two weeks. From the Washington Post:
Joining Biden and Sanders on the second night will be Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Sen. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.), South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.), author and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson and technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
The group debating on the first night will include Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), former Obama Cabinet member Julián Castro, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, former congressman John Delaney (Md.), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), former congressman Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.).
As should be obvious, the second night's lineup is the Group of Death. The two frontrunners mano y mano, as well as both Buttigieg and Harris. On the first night, Senator Professor Warren seems to have what March Madness savants refer to as a good path. After the announcement, of course, as is common to many of these exercises, there was the spinning and the spinning.
Delaney, who has struggled to gain traction in the polls despite extensive travel to early nominating states, wrote on Twitter that he is “pleased to be sharing the debate stage with many strong candidates, particularly Senator Warren who, like me, is talking about new ideas.”
"I look forward to a debate on issues and solutions, not personality and politics,” he added. Yang’s campaign manager, Zach Graumann, seemed to suggest Yang lucked out by landing in the field with more higher polling candidates. “This is definitely the debate everyone will be watching!” he said in an email to supporters.
And, of course, it was a show, as The New York Times reports:
A mixture of senior advisers, campaign managers and press representatives were in the room for the drawing. The names were drawn from two boxes wrapped in white gift wrap with gold polka dots. The names of the candidates who had received an average of 2 percent support in polls or higher were in one box, and the remaining candidates were in the other.
Totes adorbs, as the kidz say. At least nobody is claiming that one of the envelopes was frozen.
A lot doing from the Motherland in the news this week, including two stories on the tragedies inherent in emigration. The first is a remarkably touching story from Canada from the Washington Post, wherein we find that an Gorta mor continues to break hearts even centuries later.
After the squall ended, the damage was being documented when a surveyor spotted something sickeningly out of place among the pebbles and driftwood. Children’s bones. The grim discovery launched a years-long scientific quest to identify the remains and solve an intercontinental mystery more than a century and a half in the making.
Last week, Canada’s national parks agency announced that chemical analysis of the bones and others later found nearby indicate that they belonged to Irish immigrants who had fled the country’s Great Famine only to drown in an 1847 shipwreck, within sight of their new home. “It’s like an episode of ‘Columbo,’ ” said Mathieu Côté, a resource conservation manager at Forillon National Park, where the remains were found. “We now have all the clues together, and we can have some kind of conclusion.”
The "coffin ships" of the mid-19th Century are the most horrible parts of the Irish diaspora. (Of course, their horrors were nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands who died of starvation and disease back home.) People crammed into schooners, crossing one of the most dangerous seas in the world, often in winter, with disease running rampant below decks. And, then, a shipwreck.
In March of 1847, nearly 200 people crammed inside a small, two-masted ship called the Carricks of Whitehaven, which was bound from Sligo, northwest Ireland, to Quebec City in Canada. Many were women or children. Some were sick with typhus, cholera or dysentery. All of them were probably starving. They were tenant farmers who had tilled the fields of Henry John Temple, known as Lord Palmerston, then the foreign secretary and the future prime minister of Britain, according to a forthcoming documentary called “Lost Children of the Carricks.”
A survivor's account describes the ship's last few moments after it had run aground on a shoal in the middle of a blizzard.
“One stroke of the angry wave swept her clean,” MacWhirter wrote of the woman, whom she interviewed. “Comparatively few were saved, after hours of cold, hunger and fear such as may be imagined. The inhabitants came to the rescue, and treated the pitiable survivors with kindness. Truly the beach presented a gruesome spectacle the following day, strewn for a mile and a half with dead bodies. For a whole day two oxcarts carried the dead to deep trenches near the scene of the disaster.”
Meanwhile, in the Independent, there's a story about how current emigration, driven solely by a search for a better job, can tear out the heart of a small place.
The photograph of the fourth class of Lixnaw Boys' National School taken in 1996 starkly illustrates the wave of emigration from one village. The 11 boys pictured smiling in their grey-and-maroon school uniforms are full of hope about what the future holds in store. Today, only three remain – the other eight have all gone. The wave of emigration from the Co Kerry village has been watched closely and recorded by local publican, Paddy Quilter (left). Since his nephew Michael went to Australia in 2009, Paddy has kept a log of all the young people who have left from within a three-mile radius of his pub. His emigration logbook now holds the names of 65 young people who have been lost to the village, some members of the same family.
This story caught my eye because, in 1901, Mary Ellen Lynch, the oldest of seven sisters born to Michael and Ellen Lynch on a sheep farm in Lixnaw, booked third-class passage on the S.S. Cymric to Boston. Four of her sisters would follow. None, as far as we can determine, ever went home again. She married a policeman in Worcester and had five children, and one of them was my father, John. She half-raised me growing up and, when I went back to Lixnaw, I walked slowly through the streets and up into the hills and sat on the green and breezy slopes for quite some time. Then, I walked back down into town and grabbed a pint at the Railway Bar and felt myself at home.
(Brief historical note: the Cymric did long duty carrying Irish emigres to the United States. Then the ship, which was built by the same company in the same Belfast shipyard that had built the Titanic, got drafted into World War I as a troop ship. On May 8, 1916, it was sunk by the same U-Boat that had gotten the Lusitania.)
And, turning to the world of sports, there's a big one at Pairc Ui Chaoimh next weekend as Kerry and Cork play for the Munster Senior Football championship, which is as it should be. David Clifford is back. All is right with the world.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Good Morning Blues" (Count Basie and his Orchestra): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's the Cunard Liner Aquitania, fighting its way across the North Atlantic in 1925. Big props to the cameraman. Aquitania sailed for 36 years, the second-longest career of any passenger ship until the QE II went past it in 2004. History is so cool.
If I understand the situation correctly, Kevin Durant of the Golden State Warriors can take all of next year off to rehabilitate his ruptured Achilles tendon and still make north of $30 million bucks. And he's not going to do it. This is...FREE MONEY! Why do young Americans fail to grasp the concept of FREE MONEY!!? I fear for the future of the country.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Science Daily? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Trilobites, which had hard, calcified, armour-like skeletons over their bodies, are related to modern crustaceans and insects. They are one of the most successful fossil animal groups, surviving for about 270 million years (521 to 252 million years ago). Because of their abundance in the fossil record, they are considered a model group for understanding this evolutionary period.
"We decided to name this new species of trilobite Redlichia rex (similar to Tyrannosaurus rex) because of its giant size, as well as its formidable legs with spines used for crushing and shredding food -- which may have been other trilobites," says James Holmes, PhD student with the University of Adelaide's School of Biological Sciences, who led the research. The preservation of trilobite 'soft parts' such as the antennae and legs is extremely rare. The new species was discovered at the Emu Bay Shale on Kangaroo Island, a world-renowned deposit famous for this type of preservation. The findings have been published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology by a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, South Australian Museum and the University of New England.
Yes, yes, I know trilobites are not technically dinosaurs, but we include them here because these are GIANT TRILOBITES! They crushed their prey with their GIANT TRILOBITE LEGS (!) that had spikes on them. That is a cool way to kill your food and, therefore, they lived then to make us happy now.
The Committee had a hunch that this week's Top Commenter of the Week might be found in the responses to our post about the latest problems with the F-35 strike fighter, aka The Flying Swiss Army Knife. The Committee is never wrong. Top Commenter Kathleen Harrison came through.
Kathleen Hamilton: It appears the 2019 F-35 is actually a 1972 Chevy Vega in disguise...
In case you were wondering, here's why Ms. Hamilton picked up 81.99 Beckhams for her deeply informed wisecrack.
I'll be back on Monday to see who will be testifying in and around DC. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and eat with your silverware, not with the spikes on your thighs.
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