Agent Palmer

There are two reasons I picked up Confessions of a Baseball Purist by Jon Miller with Mark Hyman. One, Jon Miller was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles during my formative years listening to games on the radio and two, he really knows his stuff.

The book originally released in 1998 and the updated edition from 2000 may appear dated, but it is not antiquated at all. In fact, more of his observations are proven out than those that aren’t in the 18 years since this text has last been touched.

Recently I watched The Matrix for the first time. Yes, in 2019 I watched 1999’s The Matrix for the first time. Twenty years is a long time to be late to the party on something but I shouldn’t be vilified for not being a part of it, I should be welcomed to the party.

As I write this, I don’t know what the reaction will be, because I sat down with Bill on The Wicked Theory Podcast to discuss my first reactions to this twenty-year-old film, and that episode has not yet dropped.

Len Deighton’s Blitzkrieg is a focus on the many pieces of innovation, lessons learned, battles fought and won that lead to blitzkrieg, which “was quite different from anything ever experienced in previous wars.”

Deighton doesn’t go into much about the origin of the word, but he doesn’t mince words when describing what the short success of the blitzkrieg has been made of in hindsight where he writes “German triumphs in this campaign have caused their military recklessness to be hailed as genius, their dangerous gambles to be thought of as miracles.”