Stroller: Baseball, criticism and hospitals and cigars

TODAY’S WORD is antihero. Example: Despite his questionable methods and morally ambiguous choices, the antihero of the story captivated audiences with his complex personality and unconventional approach to justice.

SATURDAY’S WORD was quiddity, meaning the essential nature of a thing. Example: Understanding the quiddity of the problem is key to finding a solution.

Major League Baseball has been around for 147 years, and there have been a little over 23,000 players who have played a professional baseball game.

To put than in perspective. MLB’s smallest stadium by capacity is Progressive Field at 37,830. If every player who’s ever put on a big-league uniform from 1876 to 2023 and sat in the stands, the stadium would only be at 61% capacity.

Tejvan Pettinger, a teacher at Oxford, offered seven suggestions for dealing with criticism, noting that responding without careful consideration can easily lead to unnecessary suffering.

Pettinger’s suggestions are allowing criticism to be an opportunity to learn and improve, detach from the emotion by responding to the suggestions and not the tone of the criticism, value criticism equally with praise, don’t take it personally, ignore it if it is false, wait a little before responding, and smiling will help psychologically.

The Stroller has always valued the words of Morgan Freeman on the subject: “Some of the best advice I’ve been given: ‘Don’t take criticism from people you would never go to for advice.’”

Andrew Doss recently shared a picture he has from 1963 of Candystriper Joan Joyce giving J.D. Bassett Sr. a copy of the Martinsville Bulletin while he was a patient at the Martinsville General Hospital. Bassett is seen in the photograph looking up a Joyce with a smile of thankfulness and a lit cigar in his hand. John David Bassett, Sr. died in 1965 at a time when Bassett Furniture was the largest manufacturer of wooden furniture in the world. Born in 1866, just after the Civil War, he started the furniture company in 1902.

How does a lumberjack know how many trees he’s cut down? He keeps a log.

Did you hear about the broken guitar for sale? You can buy it with no strings attached.

Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. The value of an education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. — George Carlin

SATURDAY’S TRIVIA ANSWER: In the traditional song, the children danced around the mulberry bush “on a cold and frosty morning.” “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” is an English nursery rhyme and uses the tune which Nancy Dawson danced into fame in The Beggar’s Opera in mid-1700s London.

TODAY’S TRIVIA QUESTION: Which Scandinavian country awards the Nobel Peace prize?

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TODAY’S WORD is quiddity. Example: Understanding the quiddity of the problem is key to finding a solution.

TODAY’S WORD is legerdemain. Example: The audience was mesmerized by the performer’s legerdemain as he made a coin disappear and reappear from…

TODAY’S WORD is ahu. Example: The ahu stood at the center of the stone-lined clearing overlooking the shoreline.

Announcements may be sent to [email protected], brought to the newsroom at 19 E. Church St., Martinsville, or mailed to P.O. Box…

TODAY’S WORD is nibling. Example: My niblings are coming to visit us next week, and we are taking them to a water park.