Pop Culture Affidavit

If you’re interested in listening to the songs that we talk about and are featured on this episode, here’s a YouTube playlist:

Fat Bats and Invisible Runners

They were a sign of spring, popping up like tulips or daffodils out of their white pots, inviting every kid to grab one. The setting might have been different for each of us–a supermarket, a stationary store, a 7-Eleven–but we all saw the same skinny yellow stem with a red, white, and blue cardboard flower that read “Wiffle.”

I have no idea how many sets I owned as a kid but Wiffle ball had a constant presence my childhood, and was something that everyone wound up playing at some point or another. Very often, I’d be bored on a Saturday afternoon, get chased out of the house by my mom, and at some point, would rummage through my garage for the bat and ball with whichever friend happened to be around. Eventually, we’d get a game going with friends, neighbors, or even people we barely knew in whatever yard or empty street was available. Every game started the same way: we would plot out where the bases were using fence posts and bushes as bases and trees as foul poles, divide into teams, and play.

I never gave much thought to where Wiffle ball came from, and figured that it evolved from the games of stickball on the streets of Brooklyn that my parents’ generation played until they moved out to the suburbs in the 1950s, trading shadow of Ebbets Field to the shadow of a maple tree on the street of the same name. But it is a decidedly suburban game, created in the summer of 1953 in a Fairfield, Connecticut backyard. Two kids really wanted to play baseball, but the constraints—not enough people, not enough space, too much property damage—and made it impossible to get a good game going, so out of that, a new game was created. According to an account by David J. and Stephen A. Mullany on Wiffle ball’s official website, their father and his friend approached their grandfather—who himself played semi-pro ball—and:

He picked up some ball-shaped plastic parts from a nearby factory, cut various designs into them and sent Dad out to test them. They both agreed that the ball with eight oblong perforations worked best. That’s how the WIFFLE perforated plastic ball was invented. To this day, we don’t know exactly why it works… it just does!!

The ball they designed was easy to make curve and harder to hit, with lots of strikeouts. In our Dad’s neighborhood, a strike-out was called a “wiff”, which led to our brand name and federally registered trademark “WIFFLE”.

They also came up with a formal set of rules that designated distances for singles, doubles, triples and home runs, something I didn’t know about until recently because I don’t remember seeing any instructions with that sparsely packaged ball and bat. Plus, since there was no Internet, we just followed the rules of baseball when we played, putting as many people on the field as we could, and creating invisible runners when necessary.

Ah, the invisible runner, the universal placeholder for a small-sized team of kids, and the source of 99.9% of Wiffle ball arguments. I can’t count the number of times I hit the ball, rounded first, stepped safely on second and declared that another run had scored because I had invisible runners on second and third, only to have that disputed. Thankfully, most of those arguments were over quickly, but every so often I had to hear a sniveling “It’s not!” from That One Kid.

I don’t know how he always ended up in our group, but no matter the backyard or pickup game, That One Kid went 110%, pitching like he was Roger Clemens and swinging like he was Babe Ruth, although his only discernable skill was trash talking like the bear-drenched Yankees fan he was fated to become. I grew up hating this kid because it always seemed like he was out to make me feel terrible. Every remark he made had a snide tone of superiority, especially because of his athletic prowess or knowledge of the game. Plus, he didn’t seem to realize that we were playing for the fun of it. Wiffle ball allowed us to practice curve balls, sliders, and knuckleballs. Plus, if I really thought that we were playing the seventh game of the World Series, would I thrown so many eephus pitches (which we called “folly floaters”)?*

And by the way, since the ball was designed for better pitching, that made the game freaking hard. A good curve ball and an incredibly thin bat meant that we spent more time swinging and missing (with the occasional foul tip) instead of smacking the ball across the lawn. So when we got tired of sucking at the plate we would switch to “home run derby” mode, busting out the “illegal weapon”, which was a giant red fat bat left over from a preschool-aged baseball/softball set that had been in my garage next to the big wheels that were nearly destroyed and collecting dust. We’d ditch the rules and strand the invisible runners, designate a home run marker, and say “First to twenty wins.”

Well, that or whomever was winning when the ball got eaten by the huge tree in my parents’ yard. In those moments, I could step up to the plate and greet the underhanded pitch the way I wish I had been able to face the hardballs on the actual baseball diamond, hitting moon shot after moon shot and celebrating while my friends retrieved the ball from our neighbors’ lawn, not wanting it to end, even when it was getting dark and my parents were calling me in for dinner.

*Deep down, I knew that he wasn’t worth my aggravation, but the Little League years were hard for me and largely contributed to my insecurities in sports. In fact, years later, I would spend a lot of time in intramural and rec league softball hearing the voice of that one kid in my head as I tried desperately not to embarrass myself.

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 136: Teen TV Movies from 1988

In 1988, NBC produced three television movies starring a gaggle of teenage stars from some of the most popular sitcoms of the day. And for this episode, I sit down and talk about them. So strap in for “Crash Course,” get on the floor for “Dance ’til Dawn” and set sail on a “Class Cruise!”

You can listen here:

After the break, here are some extras

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 135: Time-Traveling Teens from 1988 on TV

We’re back to the world of Paper Girls with the release of Amazon Prime’s new series. Once again, Stella joins me to talk about the show and we give our takes on the characters, the story, and its faithfulness to its source material.

Warning: Spoilers abound!

You can listen here:

A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union

While I am in no way an anthropologist nor an anthropology student (even if I did take a couple of intro classes in grad school), I am fascinated by the concept of culture. I don’t know where it comes from and this is not the moment I am going to explore it, but I enjoy looking through the windows of others’ societies to see how they live their lives in ways that are both unique to them and common to so many of us. As I have been reading about America and exploring our history and culture on my podcast, I have come to appreciate our differences and similarities even more. Due to to our vastness, the nuance that you can find in our people is amazing.

Vladivostok, 7:30 a.m.: Sunrise over Golden Horn Bay. Photo by Lev Sherstennikov.

Why, then, I often wonder, do we assign a monoculture to a group that’s not like us?

I know the answers to this question involve one’s ignorance, prejudices, or hate. It’s even to think of, say, Black Americans as acting or living a certain way when you’re a racist; it’s simple to assign characteristics or behaviors to Latinx people when you’re xenophobic; and when you don’t know much about another country, it’s easy to make assumptions based on what you see in the media. Thankfully, there is travel as a way to erase that ignorance, and if you don’t have the privilege or luxury to travel to France or Morocco or India or Japan or anywhere else, there are plenty of travelogues to read or shows to watch.

Sometimes, though, the monoculture is the result of politics, a way of seeing a supposed “enemy” in only one way so the government or a particular political party can gain or maintain power. That can be easily wrapped together with racism and xenophobia, as we have seen throughout our history when it comes to countries with predominantly non-white populations. In fact, we wrap entire continents into said views–I have lost count of the number people who act like Africa is a country or anyone who comes from a country south of the United States is a “Mexican.” But then there’s the Soviet Union.

I spent the better part of two years taking a look at how Americans viewed the Soviet Union during my Fallen Walls Open Curtains miniseries, and came across so much media that basically described the average Soviet citizen as a bloodthirsty commie zombie ready to destroy America on command. At least, that is, until Rocky Balboa defeated Ivan Drago … I mean, until the mid-1980s when Gorbachev came to power and enacted Perestroika and Glasnost. Then, the media turned toward building a bridge with the USSR. The Russians (never mind that there were multiple Soviet republics, they were all Russians) liked blue jeans and Coca-Cola and rock and roll just like us!

Of course, looking at the people of the Soviet Union through that lens is just as ignorant because you’re grafting your own cultural identity onto them and therefore dressing them up in your own monoculture. To truly remedy the ignorance we all had about the people of the Soviet Union, we would have had to actually go there and meet people from all over the place. But that wasn’t possible for the average American in the 1980s (and is still well out of reach these days). Thankfully, we got A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, a project conducted by 100 photojournalists on May 15, 1987.

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 134: A Day in the Life

It’s second of a series of three episodes about America: its history, its people, and its culture. This time around, I am looking at A Day in the Life of America. My coverage includes a 1968 Department of Defense film called “A Day in America”, the 1986 photo book A Day in the Life of America, the 2003 photo book America 24/7, and the 2019 documentary A Day in the Life of America. What do they capture and tell us about ourselves? Listen and find out.

Content Warning: This episode includes me sharing my political views. Listener discretion is advised.

You can listen here:

After the jump, there are a few extras …

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 133: Some Kind of Wonderful

After four years and six films, John Hughes left the teen movie subgenre behind in 1987, but not before producing one last film, Some Kind of Wonderful. Join me as I take a look at the film, its novelization, the soundtrack, and evaluate its place in the teen movie canon and 1980s film history.

You can listen here:

After the jump, there are a few extras …

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 131: Hail! Hail! Corporate Rock and Roll

It was generic. It was kind of lame. And it was everywhere. From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, “Corporate Rock” ruled the airwaves. But what, exactly, was “Corporate Rock”? Join me as I plumb the depths of middling rock radio with a playlist of mid-tempo rockers, power ballads, and the ultimate Corporate Rock song.

And for fun, here’s a playlist of the songs in this episode:

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 129: Continuity, Sagas, and Histories

When you start reading comic books decades into a character or even an entire publisher’s existence, how do you go back and find out all of the stories that got them to that point, especially when it’s 1991, you’re fourteen, and you don’t have money, a car, or the Internet at your disposal? Well, join me as I talk about how I learned about Marvel and DC’s histories through their “official” history accounts: The History of the DC Universe, Marvel Saga, The History of the Marvel Universe, and The Other History of the DC Universe. Plus: listener feedback!