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Afternoon Links: A Bill Murray Baseball Show, Killer Robots, and the Army’s Trove of Nazi Art

By Jim Swift

Don’t you miss baseball? Yes, the people who update you constantly, starting in November, about how many days until spring training are a little weird, and you should have an offseason, but it’s easy to miss something once it’s gone. To that end, Bill Kristol announced the two winners of his newsletter’s World Series contest:

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The two prophetic readers who picked the Astros over the Dodgers in seven games in our World Series contest are Bill Gleason and Timothy Murphy. Bill lives in the Bay Area and describes himself as “a diehard Giants fan.” He says “[I]t’s axiomatic that I despise the Dodgers.” The Astros became his favorite around June when the Giants headed south, and, as Bill puts it, “the mighty José Altuve caught my attention.Then the hurricane Houston suffered made an Astros win particularly important to help lift the region’s spirit.” Timothy is a Braves fan, but, he writes, he became “really enamored of the Astros and the success they have had with their rebuild. An admirable organization.”

Now I have to cook up a nice gift for each. Ideas?

Speaking of baseball, tell me you wouldn’t watch a show with Bill Murray touring the country’s minor league stadiums. (Murray owns a minority interest in a minor league team.) Readers of Jonathan Last’s newsletter knows he loves his Potomac Nationals. I love minor league baseball because I spent a summer in college working as a security guard for the Lake County Captains back in Ohio. A member of of the Substandard Extended Universe, Jerry Jeff Jennings suggested that Murray should visit Kokernot Field in Alpine, Texas. It sounds awesome, per this old SI article. (Here are a few pics.)

One of my new year’s resolutions is to attend more baseball games. Especially the minor league kind.

Let’s pivot to something scary. This video about the future of autonomous weapons. It’s intense, and probably how SkyNet begins. But it’s meant to be: once we take the decisions about whether or not to kill away from humans and put them into the hands of robots, it’ll be hard to take back. Imagine if this weekend’s silly Keurig drama happened with autonomous killer robots? It’s like iRobot would come to fruition in an instant.



There’s a trove of Nazi art in Northern Virginia at a U.S. Army Base. Right in my backyard, Washingtonian’s Andrew Beaujon has the story on “[T]he 70-year odyssey of a collection that few want and even fewer get to see.” Beaujon’s interesting item is well written and beautifully photographed.

One of the big items? A bust of Hitler himself from the “Eagle’s Nest” hideout:

The imposingly big Hitler bust, meanwhile, was bound onto a rough pine frame by some buff-colored straps, cushioned by foam. Tied up like this, the Führer seemed less than menacing. Still, you don’t really ever expect to find yourself staring at a larger-than-life sculpture of one of history’s worst mass murderers. Certainly not in an Army base off Route 1 in Woodbridge, not far from a Wegmans. This particular bust came into Uncle Sam’s possession seven decades ago. At the end of World War II, Allied soldiers seized it from the Eagle’s Nest, the Führer’s Austrian mountaintop redoubt. It was more than a simple piece of war booty. Seventy-two years after V-E Day, the Army still owns the statue as well as hundreds of other pieces of German propaganda and wartime art—all of which reside on post at Fort Belvoir. The collection includes four watercolor paintings by Hitler himself. They’re under lock and key in a flat file inside a vault.

Ft. Belvoir’s a pretty big base, and while it has lots of neat secrets that are part of it (spy bases, an abandoned nuclear reactor), it’s pretty accessible. I play golf there. Beaujon informs that, in 2019, the Army “will open the vast National Museum of the United States Army in Fort Belvoir, but it’s unclear whether much of the Nazi collection will see the light of day.”

Given the rise of neo-Nazism, probably best to keep those items out of sight.

Speaking of art, Kentucky Fried Chicken rewarded a Twitter user who discovered their secret gag: following the five Spice Girls and six men named Herb. (Get it?)

He wasn’t rewarded with the Colonel’s secret recipe, but with a year’s worth of gift cards and a customized painting: of the Colonel giving him a piggy back ride.

Turns out being observant can get you free things from food chains a lot easier than having to get millions of retweets.

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