Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

One Hitter

It was a pitchers’ duel last night between the Sox and the Mariners. Dice K was really good but Seattle’s Felix Hernandez was an entire class better. It was quite the thing to see screw ball action pitches in the top of an inning being followed by 99 mile an hour fastballs in the bottom. Hernandez’s calm no-hitter was broken in the eighth. He’s had only four hits against him this year and at 21 may be the real phenomenon of the next couple of decades.

Matt Campbell’s photo above (European Pressphoto Agency) was in The New York Times this morning and continues the paper’s dedication to great baseball photography. The interesting thing for me is how it captures how the green of Fenway acts as sympathetically to highlight the colour of the grass and the red dirt. A classic shot, given the location of the ball and Ichiro’s foot.

Camera Bombs

This story reminded me of an idea I had years ago:

Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.

My idea? After Rwanda and the Bosnian war and news of slaughter and the concentration camps, I wondered why it was that there were no camera bombs out of which hundreds of little C-U-See-Me style cameras on parachutes are deployed over sites of atrocities broadcasting direct to satellites, landing unseen or picked up by those on the ground to record what was happening to them. The lack of video for CNN to show over and over has been as much the difference between the war on terror and larger human rights disasters like Darfur.

Group Project: What If Kaiser Meant More Than A Pickle’s Neighbour?

Marvel Comics had a comic series in the 1970’s called “What If…” or maybe it was “What If???” I actually have a box of comics within reach that likely has a copy but I am too lazy to reach out my arm to answer the punctuation question. Which goes to show I have my priorities and values right on track.

But all the ceremonies and discussion about Vimy Ridge got me thinking. And not thinking about what if the radioactive spider bit Aunt May instead of Peter Parker. People sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Soviets had, say, taken West Germany or if the Nazis had beaten back D-Day or even if Napoleon had taken Moscow. But what would have happened if the Germans had won WWI? What if the Americans never entered the war, Mexico aligned with Germany in secret, Belgium disappeared, France lost its top chunk but moved on, Britain kept its navy but never had the General Strikes, maybe the Whites won or never fell in Russia and Nazism never popped up as a reaction to the economic ruin that was imposed on Germany.

What kind of world would we have today? Would it be in any way recognizable? Is it the part of recent history that most changed the world?

Sports Pool 2007: Morton And NHL Playoffs

I woke up this morning too early. I was thinking, as The Smiths played in my mind, “why am I running a sports pool that there is a 50-50 chance I won’t see out, won’t tally up the points, have lost interest in?” Is it because I have not watched one NHL game this whole season? Maybe it’s because it is so virtually assured that the Morton will be promoted that I can’t use that as a question…unless:

6. Morton needs just one win to automatically move up next season to the SFA First Division. When will Morton secure promotion?

  • a. 14 April against Raith?
  • b. 21 April against Stranraer?
  • c. 28 April against Ayr?
  • d. Morton will choke but be promoted through the playoff.
  • e. Morton will not be promoted.

Twenty five points for the right answer.

7. NHL playoffs:

  • a. Which eight teams advance to the second round? Five points each correct.
  • b. Which four teams advance to the semi-finals? Ten points each correct.
  • c. Which two teams are in the finals? Fifteen points each correct.
  • d. Which team wins the Stanley Cup? Twenty-five points each correct.
  • e. Pick a goon. Two points for every penalty minute.
  • f. Pick a goalie. One point for every thousandth their save average is above .850. Goalie must play three complete games.
  • g. Pick five scorers. One point for every goal and one for every assist.

Like when the heck am I ever going to have the time to ever figure out all the scores for that many questions? Sure I can post all these questions but it is actually tallying up that takes the time. And it will be spring. And warm. And there will be gardening to do and stuff. Good luck to you.

Answers in by 7 pm tonight. Catch up with the sports pool with all the questions to date here

Saying Rude Words On The Radio

The only time I have ever had the Don Imus show on was when I left the radio WFAN on all night. It is a weird show and that essentially because it is unfunny. And not just in its current embarrassment for using a racial slur so much as the second year undergrad quality of the slur and all the other largely insult-based humour that goes on the show day after day. I don’t know who needs to hear that in the morning, just as I don’t know who needs to hear Rush Limbaugh and his apologism for anything that can hover before the addled mind behind that microphone. Is it that people in cars and with insufficient caffeine need to wake up to thoughts of superiority over over-paid idiots…or do people actually associate themselves with dolts like these and their mental wrongness?

I watched that new TV improv comedy show on NBC last night, Thank God You’re Here. Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall hosted. It was actually funny and funny in a way that was even more genial that Whose Line Is It Anyway, the last great stab at improv – especially the US version hosted by Drew Carey. Imus is essentially improv of a sort. Political audio improv. So is Limbaugh. Like the Second City sort of comedians, they really come armed with no clue as to what politics will thrust upon them on any given day (or apparently much background on the reasons behind what happens) and they have a regularly recycled set of knee-jerk reactions. Yet unlike Foley and Limbaugh, they are not witty – there is no gleam of a telling truth. Why? The inherent rut and dolt as much as anything. Can the two converge? Could John Stewart do unscripted political radio on a daily basis? Is it inevitable that there would be a wallowing in “guy laugh” – the sound unassociated with a joke – and simple vacuous nastiness? Hard to say as it as never existed otherwise.

Thank God for sports talk radio.

Iranian Suit Breakthrough

Styling. That is what it was all about. Not the need to protect Iranian waters. Not the pressure coming from the UN. It was the need to get a higher profile for the Iranian men’s suit industry and I have to say Mr. Ahmadinejad has a point. Those are some manly shades of grey and choosing the uniformity in the shirt rather than the suit itself was something of a master stroke.

Tough work being a prospective dictator given the neighbourhood.

Seeking Analogies Like “Impending Trainwreck”

Maybe it’s just yesterday’s fifteen hour day in a tie and black shoes but the impeding battle of the D-graders against the C-graders is already looking really messy. Not only do we have the embarrassing specter of the “Tory war room” which is just a communications center slash celebration of the Prime Minister’s control freak obsession with ensuring only his words are uttered by every single person waving a blue pin and placard – the UniMindCentre. Now we have this:

The Liberal Party has declared an “electoral urgency” in Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan, ordering workers in the three provinces to nominate candidates as quickly as possible in case there is a spring election.

That’s inspiring. Because you know the best people are attracted “as quickly as possible”. I’d care if it weren’t that both of these parties have established by their own track records that each will race to download services and disassemble the Federal Government in its own way leaving the civil services as no more than one guy called Luc with a call centre and another guy called Vic with a cheque book. Unnation making. The National Undream. Next thing you know we are going to have a plan to the return to “traditional regiments” in the form of Provincial militias representing local values and local standards. Or maybe different provincial central banks with different prime rates and fiscal policies.

Once again I wonder – who the heck am I going to vote for?

Lessons Not Quite Learned

This is quite bizzare:

Argentina has renewed its claim over the Falkland Islands on the 25th anniversary of invading them – and losing a subsequent war with Britain. “The Malvinas are Argentine, they always were, they always will be,” said Argentine Vice-President Daniel Scioli, using the Spanish name for the islands.

Has the world changed that much in 25 years? More than half my life ago there was the cover of the Halifax Herald with, on one side, a line-up of Argentine recruits lined up in civilian clothes and on the other Royal Marines doing drill on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Ships sunk, hundreds dead, war lost. I remember watching a show years ago about the culture of Argentina, about how like Finland it had something of a streak of gloom, sort of an anti-Serbia with an expectation that things will not pan out, that it was somehow cursed despite all the wealth potential. If course this could all be mixed up in my memory, based only on half truths and rumour as usual, but it does make you realize people have to have something to talk about given the prospect of enhanced squidding opportunities.

Alou! Mets! Baseball!

Good to see Moises Alou in the Mets uniform tonight. He has cemented my satisfaction that one should have both a favorite American League team and a National League team. Why? Better chance of having former Expos to root for. Also usually provides you with something to watch when Boston is playing Tampa.

Resources for starting or enhancing your own joint obsession:

That’s a start. Who other than Pedro has been on each of the Expos, Red Sox and Mets? Not Moises. Not Bill Lee. Kirk Bullinger can live that dream if he were only to pull up his socks and get back into the game.

Fact: Julio Franco enters his 30th professional season tonight.

Seeds

I set about picking the seeds for the garden this morning. Seeds and even fruiting bushes and trees are the perfect e-commerce product. Neat, compact and modest in price. One of the nice things about some sites is the ability to spend about 50% more – three bucks instead of two – and get the small commercial producer’s size of any seeds you particularly covet. For me, that is Genovese basil to blend with olive oil for a winter’s worth of green sludge but I am also getting super-sized on the sugar snap peas. I will squeeze the peas into every spare sunny wall and trellis. Between them will be pots of the basil and even a couple of figs amongst them, ordered on-line and shipped bare rooted by courier.

Why? I plan to gorge, of course. Gorging is an under appreciated activity and, frankly, is wasted for the most part on things we later regret – hot dogs, cheezies, booze. There is nothing, however, as puritanically lustful and the gorging on sugar snap peas when they are perfectly ready to be separated from vine and joined with your obsession. Except maybe the anticipation of that moment. There may even be a day or perhaps a week, global warming willing, when there will be figs – more figs than one ought to eat. Chomped right by the plant, sliced and layered with ham, stewed with port and poured hot on vanilla ice cream.