Once again, I am skeptical that there is anything of importance here. It’s all based on what Stone claimed.

Sure, if you believe all the things that Stone claimed over the past years – his contacts with Trump, Assange, Guccifer – he might be the greatest traitor since Julius Rosenberg, but I’ve never seen any reason to believe a single word that guy ever uttered. He’s just a major bullshit artist who likes to make himself seem important. It is not illegal to be a total bullshitter, as evidenced by the fact that Donald Trump is in the White House rather than Leavenworth.

29 of the 30 voters chose de Grom, and I’m OK with that choice, but …

He finished the season with a 10-9 record. No starting pitcher has ever previously won a Cy Young with fewer than 13 wins.

If we could look back upon this from 20 years hence, I don’t think this would be viewed as an exception, but rather as the start of a new trend. As I’ve noted previously, the pitchers’ W statistic is becoming increasingly irrelevant as starting pitchers face ever fewer batters.

Meanwhile Blake Snell won in the American League with 180 innings pitched. No starter had ever won with fewer than 198 innings, but there’s no question Snell was the right choice. Innings or no innings, he had one of the greatest seasons in modern history.

* He was 21-5 with a mediocre team. They Rays were 68-63 in games not started by Snell.

* His ERA was 1.89. Only four American League pitchers have gone below 2.00 in the DH era. I think you have heard of the others: Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Ron Guidry.

* Get ready for this one, because it sounds like a misprint. Opponents batted .088 against him with runners in scoring position.

The reported details of this allegation have so far been contradictory or just plain incorrect. The original TMZ report was immediately refuted, except for the part about Avenatti being taken into custody, and the internet has been abuzz with totally unfounded partisan-based rumors on both sides.

The one thing that has been confirmed is that LAPD did take him into custody based on a Domestic Violence charge.

Lara Flynn Boyle in a scene from The Road to Wellville (1994)

It’s a movie about corn flakes. Sort of.

Dr. John Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes and granola, conceived them as health foods in an era when there were insufficient standards about bacteria in fresh food.

A man named C.W. Post was once a patient at John Kellogg’s health retreat in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg was quite open about the process of creating flaked cereals, and Post was impressed with what he saw. He realized the commercial potential of toasted flakes, and developed a major food company based upon Dr. Kellogg’s processes. When Post first marketed Grape-Nuts, he used to include in each box a small brochure he had written based upon John Kellogg’s theories. The name of that brochure was “The Road to Wellville.”

Meanwhile, Will Kellogg was quite upset that his brother had not kept the flaking process a secret, and decided that the Kellogg family should be reaping the benefit of John’s invention. At first the Kellogg brothers worked together to form a company to market toasted flakes, but the brothers came to disagree on product extensions. John wanted to market solely healthful items, while Will saw the commercial potential in adding sugar and using the resulting delicious taste as an additional selling point. Will broke off from the brothers’ original venture to form what was eventually to become Kellogg’s Cereals.

(The brothers feuded. As time went on, John Kellogg, the genius who patented the process of grain flaking, was prohibited from using his last name to market his own cereals because his brother had the sole right to sell “Kellogg’s cereals.”)

I’ve actually gone off the track. Very little of that is in the movie, which centers on Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium, and is essentially a satire of American life at the turn of the century, symbolized by a Battle Creek full of charlatans of every description, possessing none of Dr. Kellogg’s expertise or good intentions, trying to hustle the wellness tourists. My female roommate, who grew up in the USSR, loved the movie, and said, “It doesn’t seem that America changed much in that past century.”

The film is about 90% fictional. It does include nudity from four different women, so in this case I approve the fictionalization, because Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium was actually NOT a co-ed facility, and I like to look at naked women.

Examples:

* Claimed that “DNA evidence collected in 2013 proves that Bigfoot does exist”; had a website selling Bigfoot paraphernalia.

* Tried to raise money using bitcoin for time-travel research.

OK, maybe he should not be an Attorney General, or an attorney, or even a salesman for General Tires … but I love this guy! He is the ultimate symbol of truly representative government. Where is someone to speak for the country’s crackpots, for those who have been anally probed inside UFOs, for those who think 9-11 was an inside job, for those who believe the moon landing never happened, for those who think the earth is flat? There are a lot of crackpots in the country, and they have never had anyone in Washington powerful enough to give them a voice.

Their time has come!