Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Talk about life imitating art, are we due for The Mouse That Roared, the sequel?

In the mid-1990s, Canadian Bacon was a satirical movie offered up by anti-American, leftist, tub-of-goo director Michael Moore. Basically, an unpopular U.S. President initiates a cold war with Canada to salvage his popularity. Cue the guffaws.

Think of Moore’s offering as watery gruel compared with the filet mignon that was a mid-1950s satire, The Mouse That Roared. That movie’s premise was a fictional, tiny European country struggling economically that declares war on America, expecting to lose quickly and benefit from the foreign aid we tend to lavish on defeated adversaries.

Fast-forward to present times and Canada just might be trying to be the mouse that roared, literally. How else to explain the hostile acts from that country, more specifically the government of Mark Carney (Barker)?

Carney Barker and his cohorts supposedly labor under the presumption that their military, with the same number of fighter jets as one U.S. aircraft carrier, could stand up in a war.

Or maybe they are confident they could not, would be swept aside quite easily, and then President Trump would feel obligated to help rebuild Canada.

Canada is very protectionist when it comes to trade, but blanches at the U.S. reciprocating. No trade deal, sayeth the Carnery Barker and his court jester Ford.

No problem, counters Trump, 50-percent tariffs all around, eh?

Trump also is the master of the verbal jab. Remember talk of making Canada our 51^st state? That still is being tossed around and Carney Barker and his insecure types are quick to take the bait.

And the poor Carney Barker has no sporting straw men to promote. Recall him rooting oh so hard for Toronto in the 2025 World Series, only to see the Blue Jays crap their cage when it counted?

Carney Barker thought he could bank on his Olympic hockey teams to best the U.S. adversaries. Instead, USA, USA, both men and women’s gold for the good people of America.

Hell, even the Canada team has been booted from the Little League World Series this month and has been sent back to Hoser Land

Ah, but how about the World Cup of soccer? Canada had quite a team of imported talent, but failed to have a chance against our over-promising, under-delivering U.S. team this summer. That’s one Canada just might have won, but it didn’t happen. Both failed in the clutch. That should be small consolation for Carney Barker.

Instead, leftist cretins active in setting Canada broadcasting standards now have forbidden the country’s slave “journalists” from referring to 9-11 atrocities here as terror attacks. Guess they were just fly-bys gone wrong.

Seeing opportunity to tweak the folks with maple syrup coursing through their veins, Trump today has rechristened Lake Ontario as Lake America.

I have seen reliable reports that most native-born Canadians, all thousand or so of them, rushed to their social media accounts and wrote mean things about Trump and the U.S. in response

Pardon me while I watch replays of the Olympic gold medal hockey games before weighing in on that.

It’s late Sunday/early Monday morning and I can’t rest until I share some thoughts. In other words, time for an installment of Shooting From The Lip, sporting edition.

Bang. You would think the desperate Steelers fans, who were ready to nominate Drew Allar for Hall of Fame induction after a bit of work in his first preaseason game, would be more restrained after he wasn’t stellar in preseason game No. 2. And you would be wrong. Those fans, so desperate to find a Terry Bradshaw II, or Ben Roethlisberger II to quarterback their beloved team, or simply to yank the starting job away from geriatric Aaron Rodgers, went overboard on Allar and can’t be brought back to reality after his latest stumble. Allar is in the honeymoon period with those fans, which will last until he’s been installed as the starter and has a bad half.

Bang. Speaking of delusional fans, it was only about a month ago that rabid Pirates fans were telling me their downtrodden Bucs were a legitimate playoff team if only cheapskate management would get some help at the trade deadline. I wrote in this space then that there was no need to trade for help, say, in the bullpen, because this team has too many holes to plug overall. Well, entering play Monday, despite adding several bullpen arms at or near the trade deadline, the Pirates have faded to 8.5 games out of the third and final wild-card spot in the National League, with four teams between them and that playoff position. That is with just 30 games remaining in their season. If the Pirates somehow could win 20 of those games, a torrid pace, their most-distant opposition would need to win just 12 of 30 games to finish ahead of the Pirates. The Pirates are spotty defensively, have not been getting the starting pitching expected from stars such as Paul Skenes, and are the epitome of feast-or-famine offense. Consider, the Pirates were shut out yet again Sunday. They seem either to score in double figures, or don’t score at all. And the Pirates are a miserable 12-29 this year in games vs. left-handed starting pitchers. Once again, it’s wait until next year, despite yet another offseason pledge by Pirates management ahead of the 2026 season professing a goal of winning and making the playoffs. Period. Full stop.

Bang. I usually find something productive to do whenever the largely uncompetitive, boring IndyCar series is on TV. But today, with the Freedom 250 running through the streets of Washington, D.C., I decided to watch and I was rewarded on many levels. Pre-race flyovers by military aircraft, and an honest to God live bald eagle, were impressive. That the race was won by an American driver, Kyle Kirkwood, was icing on the cake. Also, I was pretty sure the political left would be going stark raving mad on social media over the fact that we were seeing this race celebrating this great land, with President Trump waving the green flag to get it started. I was correct. The Hate-America crowd whined about wasting money better spent feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, or providing student loan forgiveness, or perhaps making more handouts available for illegal immigrants here, or funding boondogle social engineering projects overseas. Let’s face it, Left-tards, if we sent the money to Minnesota, the Somali grifters would just be able to buy more luxury cars. Same if we gave the cash to any number of Left-tard approved non-profit social activist groups. The fact that Left-tards and the politicians they worship write laws to ban grassroots journalists from continuing to uncover the massive fraud tells you where their hearts are. Cry a little louder, Left-tards, I can’t hear you over the noise of those racing engines.

Bang. The latest absurdity for college football is that the Cleveland Browns of the NFL are waiving undrafted free agent tight end Dae’Quan Wright, and if he clears waivers, he has an agreement in place to go back to COLLEGE! That would be LSU. Browns coach Todd Monken captured the spirit of the thing when he asked rhetorically “isn’t this shXt crazy?” Yes it is. So is college players now having the ability to play six seasons and make more money in college due to Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals than they might make in the pros.

Bang. Is it Penn State, or Iowa State East? New PSU head coach Matt Campbell, late of Iowa State, brought in 39 transfers, including 24 from Iowa State. And still a betting preview story on ESPN, figures the Nittany Lions to top out at nine wins this season. The ESPN preseason power rankings have Penn State No. 15. And I ask, have they looked at the schedule? That Mr. Softy slate begins with Marshall, Temple and Buffalo, not exactly a Murderer’s Row. Notably, the Big Ten portion of the schedule doesn’t include conference heavyweights Ohio State, Oregon or Indiana. Winning just nine games against this dainty schedule would be, shall we say, uninspiring.

Bang. You are forgiven for believing the hapless WNBA has only the Indiana Fever and a rotating cast of teams playing the Fever. That’s the way it seems when you check out televised games. The omnipresence of the Fever on the TV schedule has everything to do with Caitlin Clark, seemingly universally hated within the league for reasons of race and sexual preference. But Clark draws viewers, including more than one million for a game on USA Network. I repeat, USA Network. Clark is the WNBA’s golden (pale white?) goose and the assorted WNBA hatchet people intent on punishing her physically in games ought to reread the golden goose fable to find out how wrong they are.

Chance, the wizard who wields a torque wrench as his baton, has performed magic on yet another of my vehicles.

This time, the subject was my 2005 Mustang convertible, whose top had ceased to function years back, pausing in mid-cycle during one attempt to close it. I’d been able to return the top to its down position by a combination of the power mechanism and brute force, and since had been using the car as a roadster of sorts – a permanent open-air vehicle.

Oh, I’d tried to address the problem over the intervening time by looking for professional help. Inquiries to area Ford dealers – I repeat, Ford dealers – had elicited the same response, that they didn’t do such work. I asked what this meant for people who bought a new convertible whose top malfunctioned, say, during the warranty period?

Silence.

Attempts to find small shops, perhaps restoration specialists doing such jobs, were futile.

Then, Chance was recommended to me by a fellow auto enthusiast and Chance proved his mettle by curing the ills of my 1984 Corvette that others had not deigned to address.

Earlier this year, I’d gifted Chance with the opportunity to contemplate woes on my 2004 Mustang GT, which included the need for a new intake manifold, and a massive leak of gasoline from the injectors onto said manifold.

Chance succeeded, with his typical absurdly low charge. It was then that I asked if he wanted to take a crack at the balky convertible top. He did.

Let’s not sugarcoat this, that convertible Mustang was at Chance’s garage almost long enough to establish the right to vote from that address – certainly longer than most Democrat illegal immigrant voters would need to qualify for such.

We’re talking months. Chance, you see, is a rare combination of value and competence. That means he’s very busy. Matter of fact, as I picked up the Mustang convertible, I noted to Chance he wasn’t charging nearly enough. Others, he said, have broached the topic with him, too, and he might be adjusting rates upward.

Regardless, I gave him a small cash bonus, beyond the amount on the bill, as a token of my esteem.

At the risk of boring you with the details, Chance had to remove lots of interior trim in the rear of the Mustang, remove the convertible top from the frame, remove the frame from the vehicle, and then discover and fix the problem before putting the car back together.

I was told a new frame might cost in the $3,000 neighborhood. But Chance, whose business is aptly enough Thomasdale Machine, was able to manufacture some metal parts, straighten others, and get that top functioning again.

While I had the car there, I had him do a state-required safety inspection, an oil change, work on malfunctioning gauges, and do some automatic transmission service.

The astoundingly low bill was only about $700 more than I customarily have been paying for the inspection and oil change.

During visits to check on the progress of the Mustang, I’d often used my quirky 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee as transportation to and from the garage.

It came up in our conversations that this vehicle also has problems, including rust. Chance crawled underneath for a firsthand look and, surprise, he can fix that too with his welder and replacement rocker panels.

So, it was arranged I’d drive the Jeep out to pick up the Mustang convertible and leave it there for its surgery.

I’m sure the Jeep is in good hands during its sojourn on the far side of Thomas Mills. It’s red, so wave if you happen to pass by along the Somerset Pike.

As for the Mustang convertible, I can’t wait for some nice weather to re-introduce it to my cruising collection.

Thanks, Chance, for daring to go where others feared to tread.

“Come on baby, let’s do the twist,” Chubby Checker crooned back in 1960, helping ignite a dance craze of that name and other twist-themed records like The Peppermint Twist.

About that time, the Federal Reserve adopted a yield-management program, naming it in honor of the dance, Operation Twist.

The idea was to flatten the yield curve, the relationship between short-term interest rates and long-term rates, by selling short-term instruments and using the funds to buy long-term government debt. Increased demand for the long-term debt decreased long-term interest rates; simple supply and demand Economics 101.

The dance fad passed, but Federal Reserve and Treasury Department finagling of the yield curve continue.

I awoke today to learn that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had announced massive buybacks of long-term treasury debt to address interest rates and general panic in the world-wide bond market.

This stuff interests me and should interest you. Recently, the U.S. has been intervening, along with the Bank of Japan, to halt a collapse of the yen.

Now, here’s another measure that might help that, and certainly will impact U.S. markets.

The usual idiots among the Democrat Party and Lamestream media have rushed out their Chicken Little, the sky is falling rhetoric. When in doubt, they blame President Trump.

Trump’s celebratory dance does look like a funky twist, but . . .

. . . how soon they forget the 2011 twist operation, while the country was headed by one Barack Hussein Obama. That was okay and just normal operations with a Democrat pulling the levers.

If the Trump administration does it, it is high treason.

Understand, no matter which party occupies the Oval Office, we spend as a federal government a lot more than we take in via taxes. The national debt – the one they actually admit to without including net-present value of obligations to Social Security and Medicare — is nearing $40 trillion.

Trump and Bessent are trying to keep your attention from that and preserve the financial markets. They didn’t create the problem, but they are trying to deal with it.

You should be at least mildly pleased. And, no, this isn’t going to cause runaway inflation, the 9-plus percent stuff we endured under Clueless Joe Biden. It might even help things on that front.

Janet “Mother Hubbard” Yellen missed chances while serving as Treasury Secretary to extend the terms of national debt, going to 30 years and such when interest rates were ridiculously low. Instead, she kept issuing very short-term debt. Now that rates are rising again, and all that short-term stuff is rolled over at higher interest rates, the payment for interest on that debt has reached about $1 trillion or so annually.

We are in trouble, with a capital T.

How do you protect yourself?

The way I do it is with gold, silver and miners of the shiny stuff.

News of another Twist operation today pushed gold up $188 or so an ounce and silver was plus-$3.68 an ounce.

This came after both had been clipped hard yesterday. Today’s rises more than made up for the fallback yesterday.

In the long run, price appreciation in the precious metals, although not as precipitous as today, should continue.

It’s enough to make a guy want to do a celebratory twist dance, with Chubby wailing his heart out in the background.

It is more than a bit ironic that leftist icon Maya Angelou gave us the game plan for dealing with Democrats, Islamic extremists and illegal immigrants.

Angelou famously observed, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Simply put, don’t buy their BS and, instead, trust your instincts when actions conflict with words. Angelou must be rotating in her grave over her prescription being turned back on her lunatic progressive crowd.

In reality, it is a universal fit for many of the ills infecting this nation and the world.

Begin with prominent leftists, currently trying to walk back their most strident rants. Think of the aging, giggling school girl that is AOC when she tries to laugh off those far-left ravings with the admission “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

Was? Wrong tense, AOC. IS CRAZY. Woke 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, also will be crazy. Bank on it.

But these anti-American types are learning that they must temper the verbiage until they are elected, just to run their scam past our admittedly less-than-vigilant electorate.

Did we say defund the police? Ah, just harmless hyperbole. Same with abolish prisons, no one is illegal on stolen land, communism and socialism are good and free-enterprise capitalism bad. Just kidding on all of the above. Wink. Wink.

Never mind their promises to kill the Senate filibuster rule, proclaim Puerto Rico as a 51^st state and claim two more Democrat senators, abort the electoral college, or kill the Constitution. Did we actually say those things out loud? Our bad.

But free housing, free food, free college, Medicare for all, and stealing is OK when you’re hungry or, as is the case in California, acceptable if you keep the total take under $2,000 per thieving spree, all remain on our list of demands

Some on the left just can’t help themselves. They didn’t get the memo to be less idiotic (read: honest) in their commentary. Examples include the Texas freak running for Senate who just decried Biblical lessons being taught in school – the same schools where trans indoctrination and drag shows are considered merely broadening the horizons of elementary students.

In New York City, where Mamdani the Commie keeps reneging on his free-stuff promises, his regime is continually being outed for the far-left kooks it employs. One of those just the other day was justifying stealing the necessities of life.

The great man himself was miffed when a request was denied for the NYPD to provide police security while his lady toured some Middle East hellholes he’d like to use as models for New York City.

Add that to the Mamdani threats/promises to do things he does not have the power to do. Think arresting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, or taxing rich folks unless they can prove residence at their NYC properties.

Someone ought to shove a slab of bacon in his mouth to keep him quiet.

Speaking of bacon, not a day passes without some Islamic leader speaking of taking over western countries, raping the cattle and stampeding the women (or is it the other way around), imposing Sharia law and killing all the infidels.

They are not kidding, people. Just keep electing them and you will discover that reality.

The Michigan Muslim is trying to moderate his mouth, but still keeps company with the guy who has said American deserved 911’s carnage and Jews got what they deserved a few years back in their domestic terror attack of similar scope.

President Trump has staunched the flow of illegals into this country, but is facing massive resistance to taking out the trash that got in under previous – Democrat – administrations.

You want to see America with unfettered illegal immigrant access, just take a peek at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta after a few weeks of criminal migrant invasion, ironically almost entirely young men. Makeshift huts, human feces on the streets, rampant crime, it’s making the once Eden-like setting look like most blue American downtowns, and that is disgusting.

You were right, Maya, believe them when they show you who they are.

It is important to recognize and note when things are going well, when the news is good and events unfold without disappointment. Wednesday was such a day for me, and my family.

Begin with the late beginning. Having stayed up to near 3:30 a.m. Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, I slept in past 1 p.m. just because I could and because I needed it. Oh, the freedom of retirement.

But there was a list of things I wanted to accomplish and so, armed only with some tea brewed for me by the wife, I departed the house.

Since it didn’t look like rain was imminent, I uncovered the 2004 Mustang GT and used it for a sort of multi-tasking of pleasure and work. I took along my Beach Boys Endless Summer CD to set the mood.

Nothing says summer like the Beach Boys playing while driving a vintage Mustang. Just firing it up and listening to the burble of the dual exhaust, before the CD cut in, made it a successful start to the day’s journey.

I fouled up – or so I thought – by driving Goucher Street toward my bank in Westwood. Goucher Street has been a morass this week with construction and poor flagger coordination. But, just as I nervously contemplated making the first available detour, I saw no construction and proceeded.

At the bank, where a wait for a teller has been standard operating procedure for the past year or so, there was no line and so I was in and done in minutes.

Then it was on to just past Thomas Mills, to check on the progress of work on the balky convertible top of my other Mustang.

The sun was shining as I arrived, literally and figuratively. There was my Mustang with its convertible top up and in place, which had not happened in the past two-plus years. Efforts to find someone willing and able to work on it had been frustrating,

But, Chance of Thomasdale Machine, whose praises I have sung here in the past and likely will sing again soon, was in the car, taking it for a short ride to check on some other work he’d performed.

He returned in about 10 minutes and proudly showed me that working top, for whose frame he had manufactured some bars to replace inexplicably bent items. There are still a few loose ends to tie up with the Mustang, but I should have custody of the convertible in a couple of days.

It was left only for me to return to the other Mustang, turn up the volume on the sound system and drive back home.

Upon arriving here, I was pleased to see gold and silver both up on the day, which means my net worth was up, more than likely easily by an amount exceeding the bill for the Mustang repairs.

They must have been contagious, all these pleasant outcomes. I learned my son and two granddaughters, along with their friend and a female friend of that child’s father, had experienced a glorious day hitting thrift shops and a playground.

My wife’s day had been productive, and included a stop at a neighbor’s to have her nails done by an 11-year-old entrepreneur who makes house calls to raise money to fund the purchase of items she desires.

The rest of the day was more of the same and I am writing this shortly before the clock strikes midnight and Thursday begins.

The hope is for it all to continue. There are plans for the family to eat lunch at Hoss’s, which seldom disappoints. Who knows what other blessings might be bestowed on us, before or afterward.

Of course, there will be bad days in the future. It’s inescapable. But, if you remember to be thankful for the good times, those bad days don’t seem as dark.

They brought down the curtain on this curious, fortunate and historic 81^st AAABA Tournament on a steamy Saturday night at Point Stadium, with Mainline Pharmacy emerging as an historic repeat champion representing Johnstown.

Considering the threatening weather forecasts as the tournament began, and the general difficulty of achieving repeat titles, one would be inclined to say things went much better than could have been expected.

And, after the game was over, the tournament hardware had been handed out, and the various speeches had been made, I stopped to say goodbye to a person who’s been working around this tournament for parts of six decades.

“Did you ever,” I began, “think you’d see Johnstown win this thing back-to-back.”

Replied the guy: “No, but I didn’t expect the tournament to become this weak, either.”

He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. Remember, I covered a lot of these events during my time in sports at what now is the Johnstown Woke Gazette. I am very much aware that the quality of teams and players is nowhere near what it once was.

But, to hear someone so closely aligned with the event make note of this as his first reaction to back-to-back titles was a bit surprising.

Mainline Pharmacy claimed the championship, dispatching New Orleans by a 5-2 score. It was an entertaining, yet stressful game, as walks and a misplay or two in the field kept giving a largely impotent New Orleans lineup chances to mount comebacks as it had in previous games vs. Johnstown Martella’s and later, Maryland State.

But, where those teams had succumbed in the clutch, Mainline’s players prevailed and I cheered their success, no matter that the quality of the event is not what it once was.

This just in, Johnstown writ large is not what it once was. The steel mills and mines that provided relatively good paying jobs to the blue-collar class are memories, sort of like the past Johnstown AAABA tournament teams that, at times, had numerous future major leaguers on the roster. I’m fairly certain no Mainline player is headed to the Majors.

Our population is not what it once was. Our economy is not what it once was. The Johnstown Collegiate League is not what its predecessor Junior League once was.

Society is not what it once was.

Another AAABA veteran was lamenting the attendance at the previous night’s game vs. Buffalo. Along that line, the friend I sat with Saturday night kept scanning the stands and complaining that it was nowhere near a full house.

I have no official figures, but my estimate was there easily were 3,000 or so people in the stands. Yes, if Johnstown had been playing for consecutive titles back in the 1970s, that figure easily would have been doubled, even tripled.

But oldsters such as me tend to forget that was more than 50 years ago and things were very much different.

With Mainline nursing a 5-1 lead, I told this guy I would love to see a few more runs put up, just in case. If it took errors by New Orleans and the like to provide the insurance runs, no problem.

He argued that he wanted to see a well-played game. I shot back that I wanted the home guys to win and I wasn’t worried about style points.

It strikes me that this is the way Johnstown fans should view the AAABA Tournament. It is not what it once was, but it’s better to have this than to have nothing at all to jump-start each August.

Johnstown is competitive these days and that’s a whole lot more interesting than when the tournament play was better, but Johnstown teams could only dream of winning the whole thing.

Customarily, when we have a multitude of topics coursing through our brain, we disperse them to you, dear readers, via the News and Views format, or even an installment of Answer Man.

But, right now there are so many notable current events, be they local, national or international, just begging for commentary, that we introduce Shooting From The Lip, in which subjects are addressed with a few sentences, tops.

Bang. Unsolicited advice to Mainline Pharmacy ahead of tonight’s AAABA Tournament championship game vs. New Orleans, don’t pull a Martella’s or Maryland State and become comfortable with any lead until the final out has been recorded. Think of New Orleans as so many vampires, requiring wooden bats sharpened into stakes to finish them off, or as a team of Rasputin The Mad Monks from Russian history, who is said not to have expired until after being stabbed, poisoned, shot and drowned.

Bang. Even as I write this, sore-butted Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who has been throwing sand in the gears ever since he was successfully primaried into retirement at the behest of President Donald Trump, has revealed he will vote for Todd Blanche as attorney general. Too bad, Bill, it took you this long to remember you were elected as a Republican, not a gutless fence-straddler.

Bang. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, whose face always looks like she took a long suck on the world’s sourest lemon, and Maine’s Republican Susan Collins, who never met a Democrat initiative she couldn’t get behind, won’t be voting for Blanche. And I continue to ponder whether it would have been better to have seen Nazi Graham Platner run against Collins, that horrific tattoo and all, and possibly spare us from more Collins betrayals.

Bang. Time for the WNBA to put up or shut up with its very vocal trans promotion. Take Clay Travis up on his offer of $10 million to the winner of a game between the WNBA champions and a high school boys team of his choice. Even better, draft former NBA player Enes Kanter (6-10, 250 in his playing days) who has gone public with his willingness to identify as a woman and so play in the WNBA.

Bang. Does anyone else see a similarity between Tony Fauci’s alleged fascination with gain-of-function research, which just might have led to the COVID-19 pandemic when it escaped a Wuhan lab, and the Democrat Party, whose flirtation with socialists, communists, radical leftists, Muslim extremists, trannys and general weirdos, that has seen these infect the party with a perhaps fatal case of Hate America virus?

Bang. It was heartening to see Mamdani The Commie booed off a Staten Island stage this week. It almost was as amusing as him backtracking from customers needing to present photo ID to get into one of the city-run grocery stores, which are alleged to be making big bucks for some of the communist’s family members.

Bang. The Senate cast is racing to take another break away from their do-nothing jobs, but can’t get around to attempting to pass the Save America Act, the greatest legislation yet offered to make elections secure. IDs for elections are preposterous, Democrats and RINOs argue, yet Barack Hussein Obama’s library still requires photo ID to get free or reduced-rate admission to the great one’s hideous Chicago monument to himself.

Bang. My condolences, Pirates fans, on your latest loss, the 9^th in the past 11 games. All those bullpen upgrades made at the trade deadline, and argued against in this space, only mean something if you are not consistently behind by hideously large margins early in games.

Bang. Enough of these stop-and-go Iran peace deals, President Trump. Return to your basic instinct and bomb them back into the Stone Age (a relatively short journey). Only then will these smarmy used camel salesmen totally understand their lot in life.

And then there was one, as in Johnstown entries remaining alive in this 81^st AAABA Tournament.

For the second consecutive day, I passed on attending the games, for various reasons. But I had an emissary at both.

While I skipped the afternoon game, I instead took my 2004 Mustang GT out for a cruise and, looking for an ironic twist, stopped by the observation platform at the still dormant Inclined Plane to take a peek at the game from on high. It was a quintessential Johnstown moment, with a rather rotund gentlemen sitting on said platform, beneath a sign prohibiting smoking or vaping. He was smoking.

I walked to the edge, where one could see most of the playing surface at Point Stadium down on the valley floor. There was a runner on second base, for which team I could not tell.

The call was made to my man in the stands and even as we spoke, Martella’s went up on New Orleans. We chatted for a time and then I headed back to the car. The smoking scofflaw offered to take my car for a ride and fill up the gas tank for me, but he couldn’t guarantee he’d bring it back. Even though I declined the offer, he did profess a like for the ride.

Later, back home, I checked online and found some videos posted to Facebook, apparently by a New Orleans fan. Martella’s eventually went up 4-0 through six innings and I stopped checking.

I did, however, call my guy for an update a tad later, figuring the game was over and the news would be good. It was not good news. This laid-back individual, who makes it a habit not to get worked up, was frothing at the mouth over how Martella’s had thrown away the game, literally and figuratively, losing 5-4.

I had told him earlier Thursday, when he’d tried to entice me to go, that I had a bad feeling about the game and would just as soon not see New Orleans win. The ending as described to me would have put me into a catatonic state.

This helped me decide also to pass on the Mainline nightcap at the Point because, simply put, I figured Mainline would make short work of the Altoona team it was facing and if I ended up being wrong about that, I’d rather not witness it.

This time I got it right, with Mainline advancing by virtue of a 12-2, seven-inning romp. The remaining Johnstown entry, the defending AAABA champion, gets to play Buffalo in a semifinal game Friday night.

I told my man I’d likely join him for that Mainline-Buffalo game Friday, which no doubt means much-threatened rain will at last visit us.

Life, and human nature, double-teamed me Wednesday, which is the convoluted way of saying I watched no AAABA Tournament games in-person.

The wife’s car needed inspected this month, a local shop had a 1 p.m. opening and I eagerly grabbed the slot to get those new stickers. Even though the car was done quickly, I punted on an afternoon trip downtown.

I wasn’t up for baking in the heat and humidity to watch Johnstown-2, AKA Martella’s Pharmacy, play a 2 p.m. game at Point Stadium. As it turns out, seeing Martella’s disembowel Brooklyn to finish second in Pool D and advance to the knockout round of tournament play probably wouldn’t have been that interesting. Plus, there was a Chicago Cubs-Los Angeles Dodgers game on the magic mirror at the same time. When in doubt, take the easy route.

The often-wrong online weather sites I’ve been monitoring again called for rain Wednesday and, according to the radio broadcast of the night game at the Point, some rain eventually did fall into the life of the tournament, But it was not enough rain to stop Mainline from beating Cleveland to claim the top spot in Pool C.

Because of the weather threat, the fact that many from my opening night posse opted for other pursuits on this evening, plus there was a Wacky Wednesday pizza deal offered at Papa John’s, and also the ability to watch the Pirates play Milwaukee on ESPN in a night game, with Paul Skenes pitching, meant after picking up the pizza, I sat in air-conditioned comfort and watched the Pirates lose, again.

I did monitor the progress of the Mainline game via the radio broadcast.

Back to the Pirates game, Skenes was not sharp and his Milwaukee counterpart, Kyle Harrison, just back from a stint on the disabled list, sparkled, including striking out the last eight Pirates batters he faced. The Brewers won, 4-2, leaving the slumping Pirates 4.5 games out of a wild-card slot, with three other teams between them and that third spot.

According to the good folks at fangraphs.com, the Pirates have about a 16.5 percent likelihood of making the playoffs as a wild-card team.

To borrow from the movie Dumb And Dumber, “So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?”

Speaking of chances, let us ponder the AAABA Tournament prospects of Martella’s and Mainline.

Martella’s (2-1) drew the short straw, facing perennial tournament heavyweight New Orleans (3-0) in a 2 p.m. Game Thursday at the Point.

Mainline (3-0) draws Altoona-1 (2-1) in the night game at the Point.

If either team is to win the tournament, it will require someone beating New Orleans in the knockout play. So if it is to be, it might as well happen in the quarterfinals. If not, such is life.

Mainline stands three wins away from defending the title it won last tournament.

No longer is there any margin of error, for any of the eight remaining teams. Lose and you’re done.

Let’s just hope the online weather gurus, again predicting more rain for throughout today, are wrong yet again.