VOICE OF L.A. DODGERS
STILL GOING STRONG
AFTER  64  YEARS
 
Games available on MLB
Extra Innings package
 
By David Maril
 
There’s no end these days to the programming that sports fans can purchase on satellite and cable television or for their computers.

If you’ve got the time, interest and money, telecasts of every NFL game can be brought into your home.

If you are an Orioles’ fan living outside The Land Of Pleasant Living, most of the team’s broadcasts are available on the MLB Extra Innings package [click here for schedule].

One of the best parts of the baseball package is you hear the broadcasts with local announcers.  This means when the Los Angeles Dodgers are shown, you experience the greatness of Vin Scully if the Dodgers are home or on the West Coast.

Listening to Scully announce a game is a rare privilege for any baseball fan.

At age 85, the only concession Scully has made in his 64th season with the Dodgers is to cut back on his travel schedule.

He primarily broadcasts from Dodger Stadium and restricts his travel to the cities on the West Coast. But when he broadcasts, he works the entire game without a partner, whether nine innings or 25 innings, calling every pitch.

It’s ironic it takes the futuristic technology of cable and satellite television to make it possible for fans all over the country to receive a taste of old-fashioned baseball announcing. While Dodger games have the typical modern-day overblown production values, with distracting graphics and annoying background music, Scully’s eloquence remains the focus of the broadcast.

He shows no signs of slowing down. His voice sounds very much today as it did back in 1966 when he shared TV and radio network World Series duties on NBC’s coverage of the Orioles winning their first World Championship, sweeping the Dodgers in four games.

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BALTIMORE CITY POLITICIANS
HOPE  WATER-RATE  HIKES
WON’T DAMPEN SPIRITS

When you comin’ back, Lone Ranger?
— with apologies to Red Ryder
 
By David Maril
 
While wondering if the 40 percent increase in Baltimore water rate fees over three years would have been necessary if the more than $10 million still owed the city by some businesses, nonprofits and government offices had been collected, it’s interesting to note the following:

  It’s hard not to believe that the tax and fee hikes Marylanders will be facing this year, including gasoline and stormwater, would be lower, or even unnecessary if finances were managed more responsibly and agencies supervised more stringently. No matter how much more revenue is generated out of the pocketbooks of taxpayers, it will never be enough if the elected politicians don’t manage the finances better.

  Have the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives ever had two more ineffective leaders at the same time than Harry Reid and John Boehner? Reid, abrasive and condescending, has all the charm of a telemarketer. Boehner is in over his head and can’t keep his party in line.

  How skewered is our financial structure when signs of a better than expected economic recovery cause a dip in the stock market because of the fear that if things improve quickly there will be less control over interest rates by the feds?

  The way things are done in Washington, it’s surprising that Congress, which refuses to address the U.S. Postal System’s growing deficit by dropping costly Saturday delivery, doesn’t counter by demanding seven-day-a-week service.

  The big news coming out of the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston isn’t about the conduct of the alleged mob boss and murderer. Bulger is not really on trial. Everyone assumes, even before the verdict is delivered, he’s guilty. The big story is that this case puts the FBI on trial and under the microscope. The level of corruption in the law enforcement agency’s dealing with Bulger is the interesting part of the case. It wouldn’t be surprising if there are many in the FBI who hoped Bulger would never be caught and all this unsavory information would have disappeared with him.

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RENOWNED JOHNS HOPKINS NEUROSURGEON
WOULD BE ILL-ADVISED  TO RUN FOR OFFICE

Should stick to medicine and helping people
 
By David Maril
 
I’ll never forget the only time I ever met Dr. Ben Carson.

It was on a tension-packed late-night visit to the intensive care unit of Johns Hopkins Hospital a long time ago, back in May of 1983.

My father, artist Herman Maril, had undergone surgery several days earlier and the procedure had not gone well.

He had decided to try a new carotid artery surgical procedure that seemed extremely promising. He’d only be in the hospital several days and then be less susceptible to suffering a stroke in his later years . He was 74 at the time but had longevity in his family, with three sisters and two brothers, all older, who lived into their late 80s and early 90s.

But everything seemed to go wrong once he entered the hospital.

He turned out to be allergic to the dye used in testing before the surgery and had a severe reaction. Then after the surgery he came down with pneumonia.

During the week following the surgery, I was called down from Massachusetts, where I was working at the time, twice, because it didn’t look as if he was going to make it.

On my first trip down, it appeared he’d suffered a heart attack, but fortunately those symptoms subsided. The second time I jumped on a flight to rush down, he was extremely weak and struggling with his breathing.

My mother, Esta Maril, was maintaining round-the-clock visiting duties. A psychiatric social worker, she’d bring a book, notecards to write letters, and folders of work with her, spending the whole day in the waiting room, forcing her way in to see him the few minutes allowed for visiting in the intensive care unit.

When I arrived on my second emergency trip, at around 8 p.m., my father’s condition seemed to have worsened, and my mother had been there all day and didn’t want to go home.

That was when a distinguished looking, very composed young black doctor approached us in the waiting room.

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REMEMBERING  SKIPPER,  A BLACK LAB
WHO UNDERSTOOD HOW TO GET OVER
WITHOUT EVER HAVING TO ROLL OVER

TYDTWD, a/k/a Take Your Dog To Work Day
 
By David Maril
 
One thought  crosses my mind every year when I hear of special event dates similar to last Friday’s Take Your Dog To Work Day:  I wonder how, even with the best-trained dogs in the world, order is maintained with so many breeds in closely confined public workplaces.

I can just picture the tremendous chaos that would have ensued if I’d ever brought my dog to the office on a “TYDTWDay.”

Reflecting on my own limited experience in dog training increases my appreciation that these type events can take place without ugly, noisy dogfights in the office.

However, it’s a different world than when I was a kid growing up with, first, a sloppy, always sniffing but gentle Beagle named Golly (Goliath) and later a gregarious, brilliant Labrador Retriever we called Skipper.

In those days, dogs ran loose in the city. Golly had free reign, making his daily rounds around the Mount Washington neighborhood and often returning home with a bag of discarded food he’d picked up after knocking over someone’s metal garbage can.

Poop bags had not yet come into vogue. There were not nearly as many dogs, less traffic and fewer rules and restrictions.

But one thing hasn’t changed — most family pets are intelligent enough to not let you know how smart they are. It works out better for them this way because your demands and expectations are not as controlling. They know how to make you work for them.

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PERSONAL TOUCH  REPLACED
BY PENNY-PINCH MENTALITY,
COST-SAVING TECHNOLOGY

Unhappy, stressed out bank president
opts to become a carefree bus driver
 
By David Maril
 
Saturday a Bloomberg News story appeared in the Baltimore Sun alleging that Bank of America had been rewarding employees with bonuses for meeting mortgage quotas on foreclosures, steering customers into losing their homes instead of helping them apply for U.S. loan assistance.

According to statements from former Bank of America employees filed in federal court in Boston, they were awarded $500 bonuses and given gift cards for putting at least 10 customers into foreclosure.

If this proves to be true, so much for friendly neighborhood banking. But is this type of policy so hard to believe?

Have you recently tried to conduct banking business with a familiar customer service representative?

Impossible.

Personnel are shifted around from branch to branch.  It’s amazing employees can keep track of where they are supposed to report to work each day.

The ultimate goal is to eliminate jobs and train all of us to do all banking either online or on ATM machines.

Every time I go into a bank, stand in line and make a deposit, the teller gives me a lecture on how I can save time and make the transaction outside of the bank at an ATM machine.

I reply that if people like me start doing that, people like her, or him, will be out of a job.

This type of corporate downsizing has been going on for years.

During a trip this April I was talking to a bus driver on a shuttle out of Logan Airport in Boston and he was telling me he’d been a president at two banks on Cape Cod but had walked away from the business 10 years ago.

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