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Thoughts on current events

This Jussie Smollett story: Know why I find this fascinating? Because now, all of a sudden, out of the blue … I’ve heard of him.

Never had before. Wouldn’t know him from Adam and still wouldn’t except that I “Get the papers, get the papers” (vague “Goodfellas” reference.) Now I know who this guy is.

So, if he faked this racist attack just to get my attention, it worked.

“Hey, guys, there’s some guy in New Hampshire who never heard of me so what say you slap me around a little, pour some bleach on me and hang a noose around my neck. That should get his attention. Oh, and see if you can get some of those stupid red hats. There’s gotta be a couple in Chicago somewhere. Maybe.”

Yep, he got my attention ­ or the real MAGA hat muggers did ­ after it first got the attention of just about every newspaper in the country.

So, friends, let this be a lesson to you, I just don’t know what lesson it might be. But it’s a lesson nonetheless. It better be.

* Here is why Kyler Murray was really smart to choose football over baseball. You know him: He just won the Heisman Trophy after a great year as quarterback of the Oklahoma Sooners, right. But the Oakland A’s wanted him to play baseball. Nah, he said. He said he’s going to play football and he was smart because. …

Just the other day, at the New York Mets’ spring training site, a snake crawled into the dugout. It was supposedly a harmless snake, if you believe in such unicorns, and it was quickly captured by a groundskeeper who obviously didn’t know any better, but still, it crawled into the Mets’ dugout.

Now you might be thinking, so what? They’re the Mets. Who cares? Not the point. The point is, it could have crawled into a dugout at the Oakland A’s training camp and Kyler Murray could have been there if he had chosen baseball. But he didn’t.

You will never, I promise you, find a snake at an NFL training camp and if any snake were stupid enough to slither around the Arizona Cardinals, well …

Stomp. Squish.

Stick with baseball, little

snakies.

Kyler Murray? Good choice.

• My favorite Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, just keeps getting herself into big, big trouble.

First, she gets praised by Republican Senate candidates for being someone who is reasonable and who can work with members of the other party to get things accomplished. Good for country, bad for candidate.

Now she has had the temerity to say “No” to at least three points of Dem orthodoxy ­ new orthodoxy. Let’s allow Adrian Walker, a Boston Globe columnist, to explain:

“Amy Klobucar might have just become my favorite candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, simply because she was the first to say ‘no’ to something … the senator from Minnesota said she is not in favor of free four-year college. She also gently pushed back against the notions of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.”

She made it clear, said Walker, that she supports all the ideas in theory but said the truth is that not all of those progressive dreams could become reality in the future.

Hear it? Those are the Warren and Sanders supporters excoriating Klobuchar as loudly as they can, because she’s refusing to stick to the script.

How about a Klobuchar-Kamala Harris ticket? Two women? Two women? Well, sure, why not.

Or Harris-Klobuchar. Either one would destroy Donald Trump in a debate and what nasty names could he call them? Well, we know what he’d LIKE to call Harris but he wouldn’t dare, not in public.

Speaking of orthodoxy, some New Hampshire residents are angry, because Sen. Harris won’t commit to spending every day of the next 10 months campaigning here. How dare she give more time to South Carolina or even her home state of California? We’re the First in the Nation Primary state, by gum. And she’d better not give more days to Iowa. We’re counting, you betcha.

• Oh, yikes, NPR for some reason just played a few lines from the chorus of “For What it’s Worth,” one of the top 10 worst songs in the history of worst songs and one that its writer, Stephen Stills, once called the most embarrassing song he’d ever written and he was right. God, it’s awful.

Doesn’t NPR know that?

But last week, WUMB, the station that plays contemporary (i.e., awful) “folk” music played Nina Simone cover of Janis Ian’s “Stars” and it was brilliant. It would have been Nina’s birthday. She was incredible and should still be with us, but even she couldn’t save “For What it’s Worth.”