At Home in Hespeler

Back on April 2nd, Gerry Nicholls offered what he opined to be the best five baseball movies:

• The Natural
• 61*
• The Rookie
• The Sandlot
• For the Love of the Game

Then, for good measure, he threw in a link to Abbot and Costello’s who’s on first.

I piped in that he missed Bull Durham, and offered a couple of routines to back me up:

And talk about great comedy routines, the meeting on the mound:

Larry: Excuse me, but what the hell’s going on out here?
Crash Davis: Well, Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here. We need a live… is it a live rooster?
[Jose nods]
Crash Davis: . We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose’s glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present.
[to the players]
Crash Davis: Is that about right?
[the players nod]
Crash Davis: We’re dealing with a lot of shit.
Larry: Okay, well, uh… candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let’s get two! Go get ’em.

This ones not bad either:

Skip: You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry!
Larry: Lollygaggers!
Skip: Lollygaggers.

Then yesterday the Toronto Sun ran this quote in a small caption they call Say it Again:

Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring; besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some more ground balls. It’s more democratic.

Strikeouts are fascist; ground balls democratic. You would think that would be the kind of line Gerry Nicholls and myself would remember. Considering the nature of our blogs, you would think that this might have been mentioned.

Aand you would think wrong. Consider the record straightened.

A Day At The Movies, Baseball, classical liberal, Funny., Gerry Nicholls, YouTube

Nice article today in the National Post by former vice-president of the NAC Gerry Nicholls:

If Prime Minister Stephen Harper deserves credit for uniting the Conservative Party of Canada, he must also take the blame for dividing the conservative movement.

And make no mistake, Harper’s deliberate strategy of diluting conservative principles and moving the party to the left has split the movement into two factions.

The members of one faction, who might be dubbed the “Tory Partisans,” support the Prime Minister as they would support their favourite sports team. Ideology doesn’t necessarily matter to them. What matters above all to Tory Partisans is winning.

The other faction, which might be called the “Principled Conservatives,” are horrified with what Harper is doing; they believe the Conservative party must actually stand for certain values and ideas.

In other words, the Principled Conservatives want the Conservative party to be truly conservative– that is, a party which stands for free enterprise and less government.

I have long struggled with the political question of what I am, trying to define myself within our limited system. For a while I felt I was a libertarian, but those guys are somewhat anarchistic for my taste. Small ‘c’ conservative seemed a good fit, but was terribly unimaginative. Lately, I have settled on ‘classical liberal.’ Individual freedom within our political and economic system, government that should show an explicit reason for ever involving itself in peoples lives, and evidence that such involvement will solve, or at least improve, the problem.

While defining what I am has been recent, I have always known where I stand. No party has ever truly spoken for me and that is as true today as it was in 1977 or 1997. I actually thought Stephen Harper could be the guy, would be conservative fiscally, liberal in everything else (liberal, not Liberal. Two very different things). So far, the evidence is not good.

My lot lies with the Conservative Party, I don’t see how that can change, not in the near future. But boy they are making it hard. So yes, Principled Conservative fits, but it does imply association. So if you don’t mind Gerry, you can use my name to bolster your argument, but I think I’ll stick with classical liberal.

classical liberal, Conservative Party, Gerry Nicholls, NAC