Open thread 3/30/22
I’m left-handed, and in my family three out of four of us were lefties. My mother was left-handed but was switched as a child, so she wrote and ate with her right hand but did just about everything else with her left.
I’m not sure I buy the theory advanced in this clip about why left-handedness has persisted in a certain percentage of humans, but it’s interesting:
I had an epiphany when I was about 40 that I was likely a natural lefty and my mother forced me to be right-handed. Once the idea popped into my head and I examined the evidence it was so overwhelming that I can’t believe it took me 40 years to figure out. I don’t want to go into specifics, I prefer to remain somewhat anonymous on social media, but it is almost a certainty. And it’s precisely the type of thing my mother would do.
In some ways it led to some interesting quirks that some folks find interesting, amazing, but I really enjoyed competitive athletics, and still do, and I was always less than great at things like throwing a baseball, shooting a basketball… So I wonder if I would have done better at those things had my mother not made the switch?
Geez, who knew evolution could be so prescient, so as to give lefties an advantage – 100,000 years later – in golf, baseball, boxing, etc.
If all humans could run the 100 yard dash in 9 seconds and run the mile in under
4 minutes, I think we all know what explanation would be provided by “experts” explaining why this were so (e.g. more adept fleeing from predators or hunting game for sustenance).
While it is important to try and understand why things are the way they are, studies that are not amenable to controlled experiments can / do produce an explanation that appear plausible but can be totally wrong; but there is no way to “prove” that it’s wrong or correct.
While this is no big deal most of the time – like this video about lefties – it can be when spurious correlations or plausible (but not provable) explanations are used to establish social or economic policies.
neo’s prior post about Biden’s budget and what’s in it has brought me down, quite a bit.
Our Founders (and others before and after them) logically pieced together that there will always be a struggle for power among people (even Karl Marx figured that part out).
There really are only two choices: every human is free and sovereign, or we are governed by other humans.
The more power and control you give a person or group of people, the more that power will be used to attempt to gather more power.
Our Federal government has already grown far, far outside of the 14 enumerated powers. When the checks put in place to restrict Federal power (State’s rights primarily) do not combat this usurpation centralized power is inevitable.
We need 49 more Ron DeSantis’.
JohnTyler,
I don’t think it’s evolution being clever enough to figure out how humans would entertain themselves in the 21st century, but humans enjoying activities that correspond with evolution.
Of course boxing and other types of combat would have mattered as much in 1,000 BC as they do now, but wielding other hand held weapons; clubs, spears, rocks, bows and arrows… would have given lefties the same advantage.
So today it’s a baseball bat swinging at a curve ball instead of a club swinging at a combatant clutching a shield with his left hand.
If you’re naturally left-handed and live in places like India, etc. then you’d have to learn pretty quickly NOT to eat with your left hand.
– – – – – – – –
BTW, has there ever been a Major League pitcher that could pitch with both hands (i.e., arms)?
Be kind of cool to bring in a right-handed pinch hitter to bat against a leftie only to have the leftie change over to become a righty…as it were (though I suppose he’d need a “uni-glove”…).
Not sure if he made it to the majors, but there has been such a pitcher. Most famous for the announcer’s call: “So-and-so is relieving himself on the mound.”
Barry Meislin,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Venditte. He had two gloves on the mound and would wear the correct one on his catching hand.
We have twins. At about age 10, one started to favor their left hand. They never became good at writing left-handed, but they played softball, and that one could pitch and catch with either hand to the extent that a couple of times we used her as a switch pitcher. Both of the twins could switch hit. I think the one is back to right hand dominance and neither have played softball in over a decade.
I wrote the above before seeing Barry’s comment. Girls 12U and 14U softball isn’t so competitive that you can’t get away with trying new techniques. I’m fairly certain as competition gets tougher, it gets harder to pull off. Then there is the mechanics of switching the pitcher’s glove during the inning (and expense for the parents). Multi-dexterous bats are easier to come by.
Fascinating!
Thanks very much…
I guess the key is which hand he signs autographs with…
Though I guess when you think about it, a knuckleballer is for all practical purposes “ambidextrous”…as long as he throws knuckleballs… (So is a Nolan Ryan-type flamethrower, I suppose—since what difference does RH or LH make if you can never see the ball?…)
I tend to be able to do most things with either hand, but naturally use one or the other by preference. For example, to throw a ball, I am strongly left-handed. To hammer a nail, I will use my right hand, as it feels more comfortable to exert strong force with it, although the left may be a bit more accurate. I eat with my right hand and drink with my left.
Playing racquet sports, I switch hands, so I seldom have to hit “backhand”. Playing doubles, I was once asked by a new opponent if I was left-handed. My teammate interjected “No, he is just confused!”
Ps. Did you know that boomerangs are left- or right-handed? They are. A lefty cannot it throw the average right-handed boomerang (without contortions).
It’s not unusual (rare, but not unusual) to find a pitcher at the High School or College level who can switch throwing arms, but you see it less as competition increases. As others pointed out, when competition gets really tough someone not completely focused on a single technique (throwing lefty or righty) likely won’t be able to compete.
Ray Van Dune,
I also find it is fairly easy for me to switch hands in racquet/paddle sports, even with consecutive shots. Surprisingly pocket billiards feels really awkward switching hands. Odd since it’s such a stationary thing.
Since having my epiphany I’ve been itching to get my hands on a set of left-handed golf clubs to see how that feels.
Both my wife’s brothers are lefties. Requires appropriate seating arrangements at dinner.
As competition shooters know, there is also right and left eye dominance, a condition that creates problems for people who are not similarly-handed. That is, a right-handed shooter who is left eye dominant, or vice versa, either has to learn to compensate (by covering the dominant eye, for example) or have a rifle with an off-center set of sights. This leads to additional expense for a person in that situation, or else learning how to overcome the dominant eye.
Apropos of Neo’s being a lefty– I always knew there was something sinister about her before she moved to the dextrosphere.
And then there is THE Lefty– Steve Carlton, the master of the slider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7xsdUOEnvg&ab_channel=scottyballgame1
Here’s a link to a YouTube video explaining how Japanese women train for a visit to California (https://youtu.be/1BrpZe8PUBI).
Highly recommended.
I was waiting to see if someone would mention legs and eyes. Way to go F.
Soccer, football, slalom water skiing, goofy foot skateboarding usually bring out a leg preference.
This Disney zoom call stuff Chris Rufo* is publishing is bizarre. I guess it’s not really news to any of us who have been paying attention, but it’s still just so creepy to see.
I assume I was like most people as a child. The nature of sex was not in my comprehension until I was maybe 12, 13 years old. Then something happened (hormone related I’m sure) and I saw girls and women in a different light. I’m sure the age that happens is not completely set in stone and I am also sure that not everyone has the same lightbulb come on the same way it did for me.
But regardless of who or what you end up being sexually attracted to after you hit puberty WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANY ADULT WANT TO INFUSE CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT WITH ADULT, SEXUAL THEMES?!?!?!,
What’s next, genitalia on pantsless or nude children’s characters like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Donald Duck?
A culture that does not protect children is dangerously broken. This has to be addressed. The perverts working for these corporations will not be silent. They will force management to take a stand. Any corporation that chooses to side with those who want to damage children and harm their innocence will get as little of my money as possible.
*And thank God for Chris Rufo!
I am a Lefty too. I remember getting my first Baseball Glove. It was for me, a Lefty. This would have been in the early 50’s and a Lefty glove was rare. Yes, sitting arrangement are fun, but I get more room by being on the end. In school those desks always made it hard to write because they were made of the others. When I got to college and was buying books and supplies I was amazed and very much surprise to find spiral notebooks for Lefties. A lot of things are made for the “others” which makes it hard for us Lefties.
Years ago I read something which claimed that the possibility of left-handedness is genetic; that is, most of you are genetically programmed to use your right hands. Lefties, like me, lack that genetic programming, and may be either right or left, with the reasons for that being somewhat unclear. I can’t find that study, but here’s a recent news item about it:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/05/health/uk-left-handed-genes-brain-structure-scn-scli-intl/index.html
We lefties are very slightly more likely to become schizophrenic, but very slightly less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease. Having avoided the former, I am glad for the latter.
My parents and grandparents were all right-handed, but two of my paternal uncles were lefties. This supports the genetic idea; I got a recessive from both sides. I am strongly left-handed for writing, throwing, and batting/golfing, but like most lefties, I can do most other things with either hand. When I paint walls, I climb the ladder, paint with my left, transfer the brush, and paint just as neatly with my right.
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/03/30/we-all-hope-clarence-thomas-dies-ucla-faces-new-free-speech-controversy-over-social-media-posting/#more-186565
Guess what sort of person UCLA hires…
SHIREHOME, I still have my Moose Skowron first baseman’s softball glove, for my right hand.
Let’s see now…could April 1st have arrived early this year….
“Scoop: FEC fines DNC and Clinton for Trump dossier hoax”—
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fec-fines-dnc-clinton-for-trump-dossier-hoax
+ Bonus: From the “Move-Along-Nothing-To-See-Here” file—A blast from the past….
“Exclusive: How The Bidens Made Off With Millions In Chinese Cash;
“New documents show that as regulators closed in, Hunter struck a fresh deal with his Chinese partners”—
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/exclusive-how-the-bidens-made-off-with-millions-in-chinese-cash/
But Lee Smith believes Hunter’s gonna skate….
https://twitter.com/LeeSmithDC/status/1509196380421734408?cxt=HHwWkIC-9ZSH3_EpAAAA
JohnTyler said:
Geez, who knew evolution could be so prescient, so as to give lefties an advantage – 100,000 years later – in golf, baseball, boxing, etc.
Actually it said lefties are worse at golf, due to clubs being made mostly for right handed people.
In things like boxing, or fighting with clubs or spears left handed people would have the advantage of being an “unusual” opponent, and hence have an edge.
If you read the works of Napolian Chagnon, you will find that violence is very common in primitive people (the people he studied had a 30% homicide rate for males), and he also discovered that men who killed had more children. So violence is very much what made us what we are.
Of course he’s going to skate. The Department of Justice is one of the lawfare arms of the Democratic Party. He’d only be prosecuted if he’d run afoul of some Democratic faction or if he were a person of scant consequence who’d committed an uncomplicated crime with unmistakable evidence (e.g. a chest freezer full of cash in his basement).
If you read the works of Napolian Chagnon, you will find that violence is very common in primitive people (the people he studied had a 30% homicide rate for males), and he also discovered that men who killed had more children. So violence is very much what made us what we are.
A lawyer friend of mine is a blanket skeptic of cultural anthropology as a subdiscipline consequent to contentions like this. (“They’re making statements about humanity based on the study of the world’s least accomplished peoples”).
Rufus T. “I assume I was like most people as a child. The nature of sex was not in my comprehension until I was maybe 12, 13 years old.”
Exactly. Girls were odd creatures in my mind until one day in junior high (eighth grade – age 13) at a meeting presided over by an attractive senior girl. Something unusual occurred. I noticed for the first time how shapely she was, how attractive her hair was, how intriguing her eyes were. Thus began an interest in the fairer sex that continues to this day.
It all seemed quite normal. I was in my twenties before I learned about homosexuals. That knowledge baffled me because I could not believe there were men who could be attracted to other men. And women who were attracted to other women. As I went along in life, I encountered a few homosexual men, but no lesbians that were openly gay. I feel very sorry for them because they have been dealt a hand that is so out of the norms of human sexual proclivities. Most of the gay men I’ve known were not very happy and I could see why.
That the progressives are pushing this agenda in our schools is disgusting and depraved. Let nature take its course and hormones/genetics will sort things out. Respect the LGBTQ community as people, with different sexual psychologies, but not as special groups commanding our rapt attention and approval.
In today’s wired world, children learn about sex at much too early an age anyway. Any organized attempt to indoctrinate them is wrong and unnecessary.
Yes, kudos to Chris Rufo.
I’m left handed. And a lot of everything I’ve read here mirrors my life. In shooting eye dominance is most important and by luck my father knew that, so I shoot right handed. I fenced in college and sometimes won bouts simply because I was a lefty. My father was right handed but had a bad stutter. I read somewhere that forcing a child to change from left to right can give a child a stutter
I was told by my mother that I began as a lefty in childhood but my father insisted I use the right hand. Thus, I have always believed that I was “right brained and right handed,” as neurosurgeons describe it. However, two years ago I had a small stroke involving some mild clumsiness of my left hand. An MRI showed a very small infarct, probably from a tiny embolus to my right motor cortex. Thus, the story was wrong and I have normal distribution of motor function in the brain. I don’t recommend this as a way to find out but I had no choice and had wondered about my handedness. Plus the clumsiness with the left hand was gone in 2 days.
I had a high school friend whose father was a maniac Marine drill sergeant who was a big baseball fan. My friend was naturally left-handed but his father forced him to be right-handed because the only infield positions a leftie would be chosen to play were first-base or pitcher.
So my friend ended up mostly right-handed, but could be ambidextrous in some cases.
I’m right-handed, though for some reason, I surf left-footed, i.e. my back foot is my left, which handles the delicate angular shifts of the surfboard during turns.
A left-footed surfer is consequently called a “goofy-foot.”
Everyone I know is right handed. All my siblings. All my relatives. All my children.
Notice that I left a somewhat significant other out of that list. My wife is left handed.
But all of her siblings, relatives or children (duh!) are righties.
No one tried to ‘change’ her handedness. I don’t even notice it any more. Except we prefer to have me sit on her right side when eating so our elbows don’t … interact.
She is also smarter than I am. I got the better part of the bargain.
“My mother was left-handed but was switched as a child”
That was my dad…but he did everything right-handed from childhood on & it seemed to really mess up the way he spatially saw the world…as if he looked at the world through left-handed lenses but approached things from the other sphere of his brain. We had some interesting adventures…
One item I always found strange: there are no lefty catchers in MLB, and practically none in MiLB. This was explained by a former catcher on YouTube: If you have the ability to play catcher, you have the ability to play pitcher. In High School especially, everyone plays pitcher sometime, because of rules against playing pitcher too long in a stretch, so even the catchers have had to do it a bit. If you don’t have the arm strength and control to pitch, you can’t be precise enough to be a catcher either. (You’re probably headed to first base or getting waved, at that point.)
A lefty pitcher is just too valuable an asset in professional baseball. A lefty catcher is getting converted, practically whether they want to or not.
“What’s next, genitalia on pantsless or nude children’s characters like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Donald Duck?”
Rufus…dude…that image I did not need trying to creep inside my head…I had a trying enough time when Jessica Rabbit hit the big screen 😉
I watched a documentary on Frank Frazetta, a top artist for science-fiction/fantasy illustrations, such as the movie poster for “Conan the Barbarian.” Incredible technique.
Frazetta was a natural right-hander. However, later in his life his right arm was paralyzed by some strokes. Probably had something to do with his heavy use of amphetamines, common among creative types in the 50s/60s.
So Frazetta taught himself to draw and paint left-handed! Almost as good as right-handed. No prob, Bob.
OK, the video is completely wrong about baseball. The reason left-handers have an advantage is due to physics, since it is impossible to throw a ball directly ahead with any significant force. Consequently pitches from a right-hander tend to move slightly towards a left-handed batter and away from a right-hander making it harder to hit a pitcher with your same handedness. It’s almost always harder to hit a pitch on the outside of the plate. Hence the SAP rule, Same Assists Pitcher. Also a left handed batter is standing on the first base side of home plate, so he gains a step on the right hander.
Next there is the problem of opposite handed sword (or club) fighting. Since the opponents face each other, the sword is on the same side as the opponent. I believe the physics would dictate that both opponents have an advantage in defense over offense in that case. Awkward for each. Not sure either is particularly advantaged.
As to the rest of the video, it is standard argumentum pro darwinum lazy malarkey. Show me the genes! Many studies looked for the homosexual gene, but I believe scientists have finally settled on born-with-it homosexuality being epigenetic, that is influenced by hormones/pheremones in a child’s early environment, perhaps in the womb.
John Guilfoyle:
My mother had serious left-right confusion as well as spatial and directional problems.
WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANY ADULT WANT TO INFUSE CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT WITH ADULT, SEXUAL THEMES?!?!?!,- Rufus T. Firefly
As I have been around far to many people who think like this. I have noticed a pattern. It usually to justify something happening, or has happened in their past. Either to them, or someone close to them. It is an odd sort of coping mechanism where they seek the approval of others. And feel the need to impose this upon others so that what ever has previously occurred is not stigmatized or wrong.
For instance the executive in one of the videos who has one “trans” child and one “Pan” child. She is now an advocate for this as to be otherwise. Would imply there is some other issue behind her children’s choices. Which may reflect badly upon her or her actions.
As someone of a libertarian bent I think adults should have the ability to do as they wish. Even if that means self destructive behaviors. But I draw the line at children. Who should be raised in as supportive and normal an environment as is possible. And that the rapid and even eager acceptance of these forms of behavior. Should elicit at least SOME additional though on if this is actually helping the person who is in their words “coming out”
Neo-
I have been extremely right hand dominate for years. My father was very much left handed.
Most people who met us both noticed we were extremely alike. In nearly every measure. I was simply a much younger version of him. Even down to genetic medical issues. We are nearly identical.
And yet when it came to capabilities. We were extremely different in interests and capabilities. My father was a talented artist and musician. Though fiercely private about it. We often had what I thought were unplayed instruments about the house he collected. It was only much later in life that I knew he could play them ALL. And most quite well. And his portfolio of charcoal drawings was quite fascinating. As I had never known they existed.
I have zero talent or ability in all these areas. And yet in the hard sciences I or technical pursuits I have excelled in areas in which he was very challenged.
I have always felt the generalizations about left handed and right handed people were on some level correct. That they tend to illustrate some basic difference in focus and aptitudes in many people. And many things that may come easier to one group than the other. But one some level there are some basic differences in how to approach succeeding for each group.
I had a 22 Bolt action rifle. I would reach over with my Left Hand and work the bolt while holding the rifle with my right. Did OK. As I got older I had to watch the shell casing ejection into my face on my Winchester Model 94. I am very dominate Left.
Frank,
Another area you should look at is the very basic action of shooting a basketball. Most successful right handed shooters have a very very similar form. It is usually described as the “textbook” shooting form that players work on for years.
You would think lefties would simply mirror this to be successful. But that does not seem to be the case. Lefties have a much wider set of successful forms. Many that appear to be completely wrong are highly effective. If you get a moment look at the shooting form of two professional lefties with decades of tape. Shawn Marion and Tayshawn Prince. They an many others have a seemingly odd, elbow out method. Which would be more akin to pitching sidearm.
Left — Right
“The New Authoritarians;
“Woke professionals acting as the indentured servants of a fearful oligarchy have become everything we were told to fear from Trumpism”—
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-authoritarians
H/T Powerline blog.
Key graf:
“…After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right….”
Because we’re better.
Not you, Clinton.
My right-handed, normal-vision parents had 3 left-handed, very-near-sighted children (and no more). One thing I cannot do lefty is throw a frisbee. It just wobbles and falls.
I am right handed. When I learned to fence in college I occasionally fenced against left handers. It was generally agreed among fencers that being a lefty gave a fencer a small but real advantage. A left handed opponent presented a right handed fencer with a reverse of the stance he was used to dealing with. And that slowed responses and could lead to mistakes. And, of course, for a lefty would have most of his experience fencing against right handers. However, the better the fencer the less advantage a left handed fencer had in a match.
Pianists and typists can be equally adept with both hands, no matter their handedness in other pursuits.
My father was left handed and forced to write and eat with his right. He was a very good left handed pitcher in baseball, though never made it far into the professional ranks. Two of my five siblings are left handed (I am right handed) so 1/3 of us. In my wife’s family her father was left handed, mother is right handed, and neither she nor any of her siblings are left handed. We have two children, both right handed, who are married to right handed people and that have produced four right handed grand children. It would seem left handedness is gone from our family.
I am not ambidextrous but able to do most things with either hand (or foot). Never learned to write, cursive, left handed but can print with that hand. Fascinating stuff.
The Boston Red Sox had a relief pitcher named Greg Harris that could pitch with either hand/arm. Wiki says: “Though he spent his career as a right-handed pitcher, Harris threw left-handed to two batters in a 1995 game (the penultimate game of his career), becoming the first switch pitcher to pitch in a Major League game in the modern era.”
Pianists and typists can be equally adept with both hands, no matter their handedness in other pursuits.
The additional complication for pipe organists is the need to be equally adept with both feet as well as both hands. Bach’s organ works in particular are not for the slow of foot or the faint of heart.
PA+Cat: As a Philly guy and southpaw pitcher from age 7 through college, I’ve nothing but respect for the great Carlton. But as you’ll likely concur, the honorific of THE lefty must be reserved for the son of a Brooklyn dentist I hardly need to name.
s
Pa
As a rock fan I’ve long been curious about Jimi Hendrix’s famous lefty guitar style.
They make left-handed guitars, which allow a lefty to play exactly as a righty does, except in a mirror image. However, left-handed guitars are specialty items, therefore tend to be more expensive.
When Hendrix was beginning, he couldn’t afford a left-handed guitar, so he just took a right-handed guitar and flipped the string order top to bottom and visa-versa. So he could play regular guitar chords, but it meant that the strings were in the “wrong” order for the guitar design.
As a result, the tension on the low strings were tight and the high strings were loose, changing their sonics, thus giving a Hendrix a distinct sound. It also changed the relationships of the strings to the guitar pickups, with another set of differences.
So Hendrix’s left-handedness doesn’t really explain his unique genius, but it did add something special to the mix. Leave it to Popular Mechanics to provide the inside dope on this question:
–“Here’s Why Jimi Hendrix’s Backwards Stratocaster Was Awesome”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/music/a17922/jimi-hendrix-backwards-stratocaster/
John Guilfoyle,
Jessica’s not bad. She’s just drawn that way.
huxley,
Doesn’t Paul McCartney (a lefty?) also play a right handed bass flipped upside down?
It always seemed to me that guitarists have it backwards. The hand on the neck ought to be the dominant, most dextrous hand and the one strumming ought to be the weakest. Or was early guitar only about finger picking and no strumming?
J.J.,
It’s just very, very odd that so many adults want to talk to kids about sexual subjects, especially children other than their own.
The Florida bill goes to 3rd grade, right? And as far as I know it does not prohibit a teacher offering help if a child approaches him or her with questions, concerns.
Have we really gotten to a point where the lessons in reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies are so effective we have to find other ways to fill the school day?
In High School my AP Biology instructor allowed us to choose our own lab partners so I naturally partnered up with an attractive, female classmate. We got along very well, became good friends and even became romantically involved, but there were times when we were listening to a lecture or watching a presentation on the sexuality of human biology when I scooted my chair away from her and sat far away. We were the only mixed gender lab partners and the teacher and class got a kick out of my occasional distancing, and I was partially doing it for humor, but I also was doing it to respect her (and myself). We were 16 or 17 and dating and it was still awkward sitting next to one another when a teacher talked about sexuality, even in a very clinical, sterile sense.
Re: Chagnon and Art Deco, who has an anthropology skeptic friend. Chagnon is now politically incorrect; he worked before most social sciences were thoroughly corrupted. I worked in a college bookstore in the 70s and “The Yamanamo” was a common text. It’s now probably banned as, we all know, the only violent cultures are white, straight and Christian/Zionist.
Doesn’t Paul McCartney (a lefty?) also play a right handed bass flipped upside down?
Rufus:
My understanding — he’s left-handed and started on a flipped right-handed guitar. When George joined the band as a guitar player, McCartney switched to bass. I guess he flipped that one at first, then later, with fame and fortune, switched to left-handed versions.
McCartney also says he can play a right-handed guitar right-handed, but not nearly so well.
I concluded a while back that McCartney is a mutant who can do whatever the hell he wants to do musically, but mostly he wants to have a good time and charm your socks off rather than impress anyone with his genius.
Mythx, thanks for the info about basketball. I’m not as familiar with that sport. I also remember a TV report where they analyzed the famous Marathoner Frank Shorter who was known for having bad technique. After studying his anatomy on a treadmill, they concluded he was absolutely optimizing the use of his own body by breaking all the “rules” for doing it the right way according to trainers. We do great harm by not treating individuals as individuals, and even if we can train most people to be better by “optimizing” them to the best way for the average person, we should be humble enough to recognize when it doesn’t work.
It always seemed to me that guitarists have it backwards. The hand on the neck ought to be the dominant, most dextrous hand and the one strumming ought to be the weakest.
Rufus:
So it seems to me as well. After all piano players generally play the melodies with the right hand and the rhythm with the left.
Though the times I’ve picked up a guitar and fooled around, knowing only a few chords, it just seemed natural to pick notes on the left and strum on the right.
Le mote juste, I totally agree. Carlton was great, but until arthritis stopped him, Mr. K. was like the comic book creation of 2 boys from Cleveland who shared his heritage. Watching him and Juan Marichal pitch was spellbinding TV when I was a sprout. It was early times in televised baseball (Saturday mornings), and they occasionally experimented with camera angles. I vividly remember they tried one from over the catcher’s shoulder when Marichal was pitching. There was 5 seconds of stunned silence after a curve, then the first announcer to recover said, “Let’s try that again, I think something went wrong with our camera,” and it happened again. I could not believe anyone could possibly hit a pitch with that kind of movement. I swear it curved left at the tip of the plate and then curved back right as it crossed!
I got to see the Jews in Baseball exhibit at the Jewish Museum in LA a number of years ago and was fascinated. Learned about Moe Berg, the catcher who spied on Japan for the US preceding WWII after learning the Japanese language on the ship over for a baseball tour of Japan. As a tourist, he got great pictures of the Japanese Navy at its berths. Later at a pre-war conference in Geneva, he picked the brains of German physicists to give us intel about where the Germans were in their atomic research. The exhibit also had the actual bill of sale of Ruth’s contract from the Red Sox to the Yankees on display. My wife was a little bored, but she had actually found the exhibit for me and indulged my fanboyishness. We were actually there to see a Tibetan temple exhibit at the Getty (just down the canyon) the next day to indulge her interests.
BTW if you are (or were) a baseball fan, I offer this little story as a humble contribution: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cPuhLzjgSAhWCZ7fg8eRH5p8pvm5nPPz/view?usp=sharing.
@ Rufus > “Or was early guitar only about finger picking and no strumming?”
Yes.
See the lute players at work.
No strumming, or very, very little.
Same as the very early guitar, the vihuela, and of course the Spanish school of acoustic guitar.
Also, it seems to me that banjo picking is more common than strumming, unless you are the back-up band for someone else.
Lute – Julian Bream, virtuoso guitarist as well.
Excellent views of the instrument and the playing technique.
Fastest-moving piece is Dowlande’s Fancy at 8:56.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCvIc36Bik
Vihuela – La Capilla (The Chapel)
Performed by Gaspar Ruiz Cardona
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmyxnLmy0jY
This picture (in reproduction, of course) hangs on my parlor wall.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Orazio_Gentileschi_-_Il_suonatore_di_liuto_%28National_Gallery_of_Art%29.jpg/440px-Orazio_Gentileschi_-_Il_suonatore_di_liuto_%28National_Gallery_of_Art%29.jpg
Information on the instruments
https://takelessons.com/blog/what-is-a-lute-and-how-is-it-different-from-the-guitar/
NOTE: Bream’s 2nd piece, the King of Denmark’s Galliarde, is frequently played by Spanish guitarists; we have one of his CDs that includes it.
These are treats, discovered in the sidebar to Bream’s lute post.
Clearly, players of the Spanish guitar repertoire are ambidextrous.
Julian Bream & John Williams, Enrique Granados, Danza Espanola No11 (Part 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAVpqfAaReE
Julian Bream (Consort) / The Earl of Essex’s Galliard by John Dowland (lute and small chamber orchestra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbpJoLUmPdY
Remember the old TV show?
Julian Bream, This Is Your Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAgFFIDexEk
Ah yes, the great Moe Berg, who inspired one of baseball’s better jokes (i. e., not by Yogi Berra): Berg could speak seven languages but couldn’t hit in any of them…
Yo Frank — (tardy) thanks for that Moe Berg stuff. One fascinating dude. Shared it with my brother, who like me played a lot of ball (and also had Latin and ancient Greek shoved down his throat by Jesuits).