RUBBERY SHRUBBERY Post 39
This is the Rubbery Shrubbery (RS) blog, your update of the efforts of Yachats (YAH-hots), Oregon, to acquire a Major League Baseball franchise. To learn more about Yachats and its inhabitants—called Yachatians (yah-HAY-shuns)—please go to this page or go to GoYachats.
Today’s post comes to you from Wart Wallow, Oregon, where Edgar Allan Spindlehopper reports on how that small bedroom community is coping with the decision of Duck Egg’s minor league team to play all its home games in Wart Wallow.
O Brave New Wart Wallow
by Edgar Allan Spindlehopper
WART WALLOW, OR — It wasn’t easy, I can tell you, but this afternoon I hiked over the hill from Duck Egg to Wart Wallow, a pleasant town scattered among the firs, aspens, and woolly mammunks in a valley of the Coast Range. In Duck Egg it was suggested to me that I should look up Lenny Bruesteen here, he being the most cordial of the Wart Wallowers.
When I found Lenny leaning against a lamppost, considering collywobbles, imagine my surprise. Buck-eyed, cross-toothed, with apprehensive gizzard, he was the most unlikeliest of people. I opened our conversation by asking him about the woolly mammunks, but we soon moved on to serious baseball issues.
“That’s Condorcet’s Paradox*, that’s what that is,” said Lenny when I told him how Duck Egg failed to come up with a nickname for its team. (See Fig. 1.) Flipping a coin to choose between the three final candidates led to Smog Sox is better than Soot Sox is better than Toxic Sox is better than Smog Sox. A three-way draw.
Figure 1. Marquis de Condorcet (1743 – 1794).** Famous for the definition, “Philosophy is kinda like science but sloppier.”
“How can we fix it?” I asked him.
“Nothing to be done. You can’t have three nicknames. It’s a hopeless situation.” He thought for a moment. “Wait a minute! This is crazy, but it just might work. You could keep flipping through the pair-wise whatsits until you break the tie.”
Clearly, Lenny was some kind of genius, and I’d picked the right guy to interview regarding baseball coming to Wart Wallow. I’d heard rumors that Wart Wallowers weren’t pleased about Duck Egg playing their games in this quiet bedroom community. I asked him about this.
“Duck Egg has been nothing but trouble from day one,” he replied. “We’ve had it down to here with them.”
“Bad neighbors, huh?”
“I’ll say! They think they can get away with anything. Like sneak here in the dark of night and let the air out of our pumpkins.
“Have they actually done that?”
“Well, no, but they think they can, and that’s what matters. And then they had the nerve to come and say, ‘Oh, pleeeease take care of our tourists. Duck Egg mustn’t let anyone know where we are.’ Then they dumped their whole tourist industry in our laps.”
“But you agreed to host their tourists?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. Looking into damp puppy eyes, how could we say no?”
“And the tourists have been a problem?”
“Sure. They swipe squares from our hopscotch courts and swing in our birches.”
I replied, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
“Yep, and they do. Thrice they’ve run our local cougar up the flagpole.”
“Really?”
“You bet! Turns out he likes it, and now he makes a real pest of himself.”
“But about the Duck Egg baseball team…”
“Yeah, that’s all we need…baseball fans heaped on top of tourists. We don’t want to resort to ugly violence or even rather attractive mayhem, but we will if we must.”
I responded, “I’d think you’d welcome baseball here. It would be a source of entertainment.”
He studied me with quizzical squinty eye and tilted head. Then he said, “You do know we are a bedroom community, don’t you?”
* Condorcet’s Paradox is named after the Marquis de Condorcet, French polymath cheated of a Nobel Prize in economics throughout the 18th century because Alfred Nobel didn’t get around to it until 1895. (Also, there was that matter of performance enhancing drugs.) During his classic study of scissors-paper-rock, Condorcet made his famous observation, “If A > B and B > C and C > A, then D must be bumfuzzled as all get-out.”
** Portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
Next time: We’ll talk to Wart Wallow mayor Cramp McSnort and find out about his town’s future or otherwise.
NOTE: A later, abstruse Condorcet (Skippy) famously snickered, “Metaphor is the philosopher’s Q.E.D. when push comes to shove,” and died in a duel as a result.
NOTE AGAIN: Eric Sallee and Dave Baldwin are as aware as anyone of the national tizzy regarding the extended absence of Wumpy Mugwump and Phyllicida Thronk from Rubbery Shrubbery. You might recall that the vacation plans of Wumpy and Phyllicida went pair-shaped, and they have been dancing dances no one has seen before at Shaggy’s Shady Dump and Ballroom up in Cannibal Mountain. They don’t even return our calls.