Steve Butts

While never revered as ska, roots-reggae or dancehall, rocksteady is arguably the most loved of the Jamaican music forms. The genre, which produced a series of top-flight vocalists, harmony groups and musicians, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2026 and Observer Online marks that milestone with the 60 Greatest Rocksteady Personalities. Here are numbers 30 to 16. jamaicaobserver.com/2026/03/20/60-…

Babe Ruth (center) and the New York Yankees pose before an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Nationals in San Antonio, 1922. The game was played on Friday, March 31 of that year and was the source of a tremendous amount of excitement in the Alamo City. The Brooklyn Nationals was a National League team that eventually morphed into the Brookly Dodgers, which later moved to Los Angeles and became the Los Angeles Dodgers, so this was major league baseball being played in San Antonio. I found a bunch of articles about this game in the newspapers at The Portal to Texas History. The day before the game, the San Antonio Light hard an article that began like this: "Babe Ruth will be her Friday, and with Babe will be a great galaxy of other major league stars, men whose coming would be on every tongue were Babe not in the party. Just which of the star pitchers Manager Miller Huggins of the New York Yankees and Manager Wilbert Robinson of the Brooklyn Nationals will use in Friday's game at League Park remains to be seen. Fans will probably get a look at two of each team." The article goes on to say that the Yankees would be staying in San Antonio for a day, during which time they would have a busy social schedule, to include a noon-day luncheon at a Chamber of Commerce function on the roof of the St. Anthony Hotel. It also noted that, at the park, Ruth would be presented with a silver bat and ball by the local Knights of Columbus. As you can see from the Joske's advertisement that I clipped, Babe also made an appearance there, too. To top it all off, at the game itself, Ruth presented an autographed bat to a youngster under sixteen who wrote in the best letter to the San Antonio Light on "Why Baseball is the Great American Sport." I love what the paper wrote about this: "Imagine what a treasure Ruth's bat will be in your baseball outfit, boys. You'll be the big gun on the team, then, just as Ruth is the big gun with the Yankees. All the fellers will be wanting to use that bat, and the manager will probably move you into a clean-up position in the batting order." Can you imagine how excited the kid was when he got this bat, signed by the Babe himself? And can you imagine how valuable that bat would be today? It's mind boggling to think that a bat signed by Babe Ruth would be used in a little league game afterward, but that might have happened. I wonder where it is today. Goodness gracious I LOVE Texas history --- the more obscure the better!

BBC correspondent admits Trump is backing down and conceding defeat. Iran threatened to obliterate Gulf desalination plants. Without water the Gulf states collapse in days. They begged Trump to stop. Total humiliation for Washington.

@WWE needs to start selling the little Obamaniacs Oba Boba at the arena shows…

A radical history of the Mets insists that baseball can still be the people’s game. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Found this image in an old @baseballpro article (h/t @wezen_ball). It ran in Popular Science in 1939, which goes to show that, even way back then, people were thinking about "robot umps" and how to perfect ball/strike calls. Pretty fun.

My feature and tribute: RIP: The Life and Career of "Loverboy" Dennis Condrey open.substack.com/pub/tonyrichar…

@WWE Please Induct Cyndi Lauper and Chyna into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Roll Your Moneymaker 🎶 Hound Dog Taylor

New article: I celebrate the history and legacy of The Lovin' Spoonful @CherryRedGroup thestrangebrew.co.uk/legacy-the-lov…

UPDATED WITH CAREER BIO: DENNIS CONDREY, FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS PASSES AWAY Free: pwinsider.com/article.php?id… Elite Subscribers: pwinsiderelite.com/article.php?id…

Schlitz “Pop Top” beer commercial. (‘64)

What's wild is for some reason just looked up when was the awesome Bob Dylan Jokerman Letterman performance (to me, escape-hole-esque but like Universe level 😎) Was March 22, 1984 ! NIghts-wise an exact season - 42 years ago tonight (like on the tv)🩵

@WWFWrestling1 @TracesofTexas

📸 Willie Nelson chats with Kerry Von Erich and Ray Traylor prior to the WrestleMania VII pay-per-view. 1991. #WWF #WWE #WrestleMania #TexasTornado #BigBossMan #WillieNelson

EL PADRE DEL BEISBOL EN VENEZUELA Por Javier González Durante muchos años existió incertidumbre acerca de cómo llegó el beisbol a Venezuela. (Hilo)

Tim McIntosh was born on this date in 1965.

As discussed on the latest episodes of The Complete Hulk Hogan, Gorilla Monsoon - back when he still had points in the New York territory - played a big role in getting Hulk over as a giant slayer in his first months with the WWF, setting the table for the Andre clash at Shea. Here's Baltimore news coverage of Hogan's first match against Gorilla, Jan. 18, 1980 at the Cap Center. This match was not televised. It offers a tantalizing glimpse of Hogan's earliest house show matches, and we believe is the first time Hulk spoke on camera in an interview outside of promos on wrestling TV shows. We also believe this is the VERY FIRST time Hogan used the legdrop as a finisher. Prior to this, he used the bearhug (the "Golden Squeeze" on Georgia TV) or the Bruno-style, over-the-shoulder back breaker. Could Hogan have started using the legdrop finish because Monsoon was too big to credibly submit to the bearhug? Interestingly, Hogan after this match begins to oscillate between using the leg drop and the bear hug/back breaker as a finish. #thecompletehulkhogan

Before there was ZZ Top there was Moving Sidewalks. Traces of Texas reader Lee Ann Lavender graciously sent in this OUTSTANDING photo of Billy F Gibbons and his band in 1967. Billy is standing on the right, looking down at his guitar. The Moving Sidewalks were playing at a church dance somewhere on Westheimer. Lee Ann's mom, Carol Lavender, was Billy's girlfriend at the time and that's her dancing on the far right. This is so cool and so historic I can hardly stand it. Thank you, Lee Ann! This made my week!

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1