If not, we have here an addition to UK patois, because baseball players do this a lot, and I am gobsmacked to see it as headline for a Times of London publication article.

Haruki Murakami
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Still swinging for the fences: Murakami in conversation

Roland Kelts talks to the novelist about his legacy, his critics and the pleasures of translation (see below)

OK. Looked it up and answer is yes.

Not to worry, then, about further corrupting the Queen’s English.

But baseball is older, right? Wrong.

And look that up for yourselves. It’s too rich and complicated an issue for this blog. Sorry.

Changed my mind about that:

Cricket is older, the first definite mention of the game is found in a 1598 court case concerning an ownership dispute over a plot of common land in Guildford, Surrey. A 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played creckett on the site fifty years earlier when they attended the Free School.

Derrick’s account proves beyond reasonable doubt that the game was being played in Surrey circa 1550, the first published account of baseball wasn’t untill 1744 where a publication in England by children’s publisher John Newbery called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book includes a woodcut and a rhyme entitled “Base-ball.” There were older games that can be seen as precursors to both games.

If you want the modern versions of the game, the first international cricket match was played in 1844 while the first official game of baseball played with codified rules was 19th June 1846.

OK!

The churchmen behind the Francis papacy.

On March 3, 2013, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor—an alumnus of the St. Gallen mafia—met with then-Cardinal Bergoglio over risotto and wine. It was the evening before the pre-conclave general congregations—as Murphy-O’Connor recalls in his memoirs—and the old friends were discussing “the sort of person we felt the cardinals should elect.”

A day earlier, an anonymous cardinal had been quoted saying, “Four years of Bergoglio would be enough to change things.” Later, Murphy-O’Connor would utter that same phrase, adding: “But pray to God we have him for much longer than that.”

A covering-up group:

Asked, before the conclave, if he’d advise that the new pope be “free from any kind of taint of cover-up,” Murphy-O’Connor at one point said: “You’re not going to get a saint straight away, you know; we’re all sort of, we’re all sinners” (31:31).

Murphy-O’Connor had himself covered up for a notorious abuser who went on to molest other young victims, some disabled.

Then?

One of the priest’s confirmed victims claimed that when he abused her Murphy-O’Connor and others were present and involved—yet the CDF’s [Congreg. for Defense of the Faith] 2013 investigation into Murphy-O’Connor was stopped because it lacked Pope Francis’s approval.

Sources for a respected Vaticanist claim that an angry Francis interrupted Cardinal Müller [CDF prefect, later demoted] while he was saying Mass, ordering the investigation’s shutdown.

Phew.

Source: Francis Allies Reveal Their Plans for Revolutionary Change – Crisis Magazine

Vatican AP report finds silver lining, noting that the just ended synod about abuse

was never going to meet the expectations placed on it by victims groups, the media and ordinary Catholics outraged over a scandal that has harmed so many and compromised the church’s moral authority so much.

Oh? AP predicted that? I mean if AP knew that, it made a great headline at the time, right? Or did they bite their tongues and save it for later? Is this a habit with them? In which case subscribers should ask their money back.

Meanwhile, some others:

* Wash Times:

Pope Francis closed his unprecedented summit on preventing clergy sex abuse Sunday by vowing to confront abusers with “the wrath of God,” but he did not offer any concrete protocols, an absence that won’t be missed by critics and victims, alike.

* Market Watch:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis closed out his extraordinary summit on preventing clergy sex abuse by vowing Sunday to confront abusers with “the wrath of God” felt by the faithful, end the cover-ups by their superiors and prioritize the victims of this “brazen, aggressive and destructive evil.”

But his failure to offer a concrete action plan to hold bishops accountable when they failed to protect their flocks from predators disappointed survivors, who had expected more from the first-ever global Catholic summit of its kind.

* Wall St. Journal:

ROME—Pope Francis on Sunday strongly condemned sexual abuse but offered no specific solutions, disappointing clergy and laypeople who had hoped for a breakthrough at an unprecedented global summit to address the crisis in the Catholic Church.

* On the other hand, via KCRA3, four days ago:

Pope Francis began an unprecedented summit in Rome to confront the Catholic Church’s clergy abuse scandal by saying that Catholics are not looking for simple condemnation, but concrete actions. [emphasis added throughout]

He just couldn’t pull it off.