Americans ever-so-slightly favored their music in digital rather than physical form in 2011. This is a first. It’s not a last. Physical albums declined five percent last year after declining 20 percent the previous year. Total digital sales rose by eight percent in 2011. Even Stevie Wonder can see where the trend lines lead. At about the same time that America embraced digital over physical, I said goodbye to my compact discs. Like any good atavist, I did not step willingly into the future. I was pushed there by Santa Claus, who left an iPod in exchange for my being good for goodness sake in 2011. Anticipating the future was much easier when I didn’t have as much of a past.
I like boxing. No apologies. I inherited the taste early from my father, who, along with all his blue-collar mates down at the plant, was a great fan of the sweet science in those pre-Marciano days. Some years back, one of my community college students in a writing course, apparently laboring under the impression that I had some wisdom to impart, asked on the last day of class if I had any final advice. I think he was looking for something more general, but I told him there were three rules he should always follow, (1) use your jab, (2) throw combinations, and (3) work the body. He left somewhat puzzled. Over the past half century I’ve watched some great fighters (and lots of palookas, of course). Smokin’ Joe Frazier, of Philadelphia and Beaufort, South Carolina, who we lost Monday to liver cancer, belongs in the first tier. A great fighter and a classy man, taken too early at 67. Frazier’s great boxing career has been much remarked on, in TAS and elsewhere since his death. TAS -reading sports fans know of Frazier’s 1964 Olympic gold medal, and his championship years. His career is highlighted by three stupendous fights with Cassius Clay, AKA Muhammad Ali, AKA a lot of other stuff that can’t be printed here. Frazier was the first to defeat Ali when he outpointed him in 1971, decking Ali with a monster left hook in the last round. The final Ali/Frazier fight in 1975, the famous “Thrilla in Manila,” is the most grueling fight anyone can remember. Joe couldn’t answer the bell in the final round of that one, and so lost. But it’s not altogether clear that Ali could have either. Post-fight, Ali said it was as close to dying as he had ever come. Doctors probably wouldn’t have given much for the chances of either of them at the end of what aficionados have no trouble calling the greatest fight in boxing history. Frazier was a great champion, one of the fighters who along with Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, George Foreman, Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns, et al., made the seventies, melancholy in so many other respects, a great boxing decade. Perhaps not as great as the fifties, but memorable. It was a time when Americans knew and cared who the heavyweight champion was.
I like boxing. No apologies. I inherited the taste early from my father, who, along with all his blue-collar mates down at the plant, was a great fan of the sweet science in those pre-Marciano days. Some years back, one of my community college students in a writing course, apparently laboring under the impression that I had some wisdom to impart, asked on the last day of class if I had any final advice. I think he was looking for something more general, but I told him there were three rules he should always follow, (1) use your jab, (2) throw combinations, and (3) work the body. He left somewhat puzzled. Over the past half century I’ve watched some great fighters (and lots of palookas, of course). Smokin’ Joe Frazier, of Philadelphia and Beaufort, South Carolina, who we lost Monday to liver cancer, belongs in the first tier. A great fighter and a classy man, taken too early at 67. Frazier’s great boxing career has been much remarked on, in TAS and elsewhere since his death. TAS -reading sports fans know of Frazier’s 1964 Olympic gold medal, and his championship years. His career is highlighted by three stupendous fights with Cassius Clay, AKA Muhammad Ali, AKA a lot of other stuff that can’t be printed here. Frazier was the first to defeat Ali when he outpointed him in 1971, decking Ali with a monster left hook in the last round. The final Ali/Frazier fight in 1975, the famous “Thrilla in Manila,” is the most grueling fight anyone can remember. Joe couldn’t answer the bell in the final round of that one, and so lost. But it’s not altogether clear that Ali could have either. Post-fight, Ali said it was as close to dying as he had ever come. Doctors probably wouldn’t have given much for the chances of either of them at the end of what aficionados have no trouble calling the greatest fight in boxing history. Frazier was a great champion, one of the fighters who along with Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, George Foreman, Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns, et al., made the seventies, melancholy in so many other respects, a great boxing decade. Perhaps not as great as the fifties, but memorable. It was a time when Americans knew and cared who the heavyweight champion was.
The sometimes organized Left has caught on to the big dirty secret about the Tea Parties and it is now blasting the news all over its blogs and media outlets : that conservative patrons exercise total mind and body dominion. Look, for example, at the weekend’s Lincoln Memorial rally hosted by Glenn Beck (from whom they take their cues ). Somehow the coercive Astroturf effect of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks made hundreds of thousands of people — from all over the country — appear suddenly in Washington. They spilled off the steps of the Memorial past the Vietnam War Wall, the Korean War Memorial, the Reflecting Pool, the World War II Memorial, and onto the hill in front of the Washington Monument. As leftists like the New York Times ‘ Frank Rich and the New Yorker ‘s Jane Mayer reported, the billionaire private oil profiteers Charles and David Koch enabled AFP/FW to make it all happen. You see, the Kochs have lots of money — intoxicating, limb-controlling gobs of it . With it they lured those flag-waving lawn chair-toters onto planes and buses from all over the South and Midwest to head to the nation’s capital. These zombies, after enduring long lines to obtain their Metro farecards, then rode the subway to the Mall where they could congregate in the August heat for several hours and listen to Beck talk about God. And everyone knows that’s the message the Big Oil Kochs are paying for everyone to hear. But it’s pretty hard to put a good conspiracy like that over the deep-thinking Left , especially the environmentalist ones — at least for very long. Now nearly all of them have caught on to the scheme: Greenpeace , Center for American Progress , Media Matters for America , Mother Jones , the Rockefeller Brothers Fund , MSNBC , among many others — oh, and the White House too:
