Tag: News, Politics, Events

Four In A Row

First sweep of the Yankees at Fenway in 17 years, fifth time in history that any team hits four homers in a row. To be fair, it was also rookie Chase Wright’s, the pitcher, second game.

Without getting into a blow by blow, it was a bit funny when Wily Mo Pena, the fifth batter, did not hit a home run:

Only one other pitcher, Paul Foytack of the 1963 Los Angeles Angels, had ever allowed homers to four consecutive batters. But Foytack, at least, was pulled after the fourth home run. With Colter Bean just starting to loosen in the Yankees’ bullpen, Wright stayed in to face Wily Mo Pena with the ballpark buzzing. The fans gasped as Pena dribbled a foul grounder — what, not a home run? — and Wright finally ended the barrage with a strikeout.

And it was nice to see Varitek pound the fourth one, giving rise to A-Rod’s “holy-mo-lee-toe” grimmace caught in this picture as the last of the four home run hitters ran past his spot at third base.

A Canard, I Say!!!

While the story is interesting in its own right, the summation is the business:

The objection that reform would mean that rural interests would be ignored is a canard. The change would require candidates to present positions that galvanized all Americans. This is the truer and more certain path of democracy.

A canard! The claim to evoke rural interests is often a canard. A specious one, at that. I, in fact, am going to take up that accusation as a day to day sort of turn of phrase: “That, sir, is a most specious canard.” Like the continuing existence of the Electoral College itself. A specious canard and perhaps even a trumped-up one.

April Showers Bring Friday Bullet-pointy Chatt-a-ramas

This week. This was a short week. Short weeks are good in that Friday comes faster but it also has the air of less than a full week off as much as less than a full week of work. But was another week in your life. And it has passed.

  • Later Update: man’s only trump card soon to be lost thanks to science.
  • Lunchtime Update: NYCO knows where the bees are.
  • Update: please consider and vote for the best of beer poetry. The prize is a weekend of free beer so make your decisions carefully.
  • Speaking of passing, this was the week that Kurt Vonnegut died. I first read his books when one should – in my late teens. In my mind, I vaguely lump him with the also late Peter Sellers but he is almost the opposite. Sellers was a big jerk personally and only celebrated the absurdities of life as an angst-ridden professional. Vonnegut advocated contentment, humour and compassion for this life in all he did, even as he suffered from personal depression.
  • One of my constant bloggy reads throughout the years has been Ian at xtcian.com and he is celebrating his fifth bloggiversary today with a retrospective. I’ve followed him through his medicated post-9/11 volunteering singlehood to his medicated becoming a husband through his medicated struggles as a movie maker through his medicated struggles as a TV writer through now his days as Daddy. Because he comes to the game as a good writer he is, in my opinion, the best personal blogger on the net. And I say that even though his regular updates with pictures of his kids are the second nicest photos of family – after mine…which, of course, I never post because I have a clue about data mining and biometrics.
  • I have been trying to think of analogies in Canadian culture on the Don Imus now-firing. I think that it is a good thing that this pervasive voice was fired for saying such a foul thing – and saying it in such an offhand…even, dare I say, entitled manner – that was focused on a specific and small group of young people who achieved only excellence. The closest I can think of as an equivalent would be Don Cherry calling our national women’s hockey team Pepsis and sluts. But he never would. He may be a dope but he is not cruel. I think that is the thing and maybe it is the thing that broke the back of the shock-jock’s status even with all his good work for charity.
  • The Tiger points us to the photo of the week. I miss Jean like I miss Ed Broadbent.
  • The BBC is running an interesting series examining anti-Americanism. Being at a peak of pro-Americanism in my personal life these days (what with baseball being my main sport of obsession now, what with my upstate day-tripping, what with listening largely to NCPR and WFAN for my radio diet, what with my exploration of BBQ and what with the dreary nature of Canadian politics compared to the gold mine that is local New York state politics) I find anti-Americanism beyond my understanding. I am fortunate in what I am able to do and have a more than a couple of projects on the go that get me involved in cross-border discussions. But was not always the case – I suppose, like me, many more Canadians can say that compared to say in the 80’s. Is this, too, due to free trade?

What a load of bullets. Usually I struggle with these but those whipped right out. Now for coffee to be followed by spelling mistake correction.

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.

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.

Happy March!

Did I mention ever that I really do not like winter? Well, winter is about to DIE again in the vast fertility rite that we call the planet Earth. Screw you winter.

Many things happen in March. An inordinate number of birthdays, including this year the giving of the bitchin’ hardwood croquet set. Baseball is played. Shilling actually pitched yesterday. But best of all it is the time of the great melt. It has been dripping already but soon there will be puddles, streams of melt. With luck I could plant beets this month.

[Ed.: but…but:]

CHANGEOVER TO ALL RAIN WILL BE THE SLOWEST ACROSS THE NORTH COUNTRY
WHERE A HALF OF FOOT OF SNOW WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A SIX TO NINE HOUR
PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN WITH ACCUMULATIONS OF A HALF TO THREE
QUARTERS INCH POSSIBLE.

OK, sure we have an ice storm coming. Sure there are three weeks of winter left. Sure, sure, sure – blah, blah, blah. Old man winter is about to DIE!

The Endtimes Are Here!!!

Convergence is finally upon us!

  • Chinese overheating meet the West borrowing too much from China;
  • The Web 2.0 bubble is bursting and may well have entirely flopped by 2:37 pm this afternoon;
  • Tenuous consumer certainty in the stock market is evaporating again!

These are the sorts of days vacuous fear mongers like me love. I have been warning you all since the last day of collapse, through all the good times, the wealth generation, the happy years of saving, durable product purchasing and madcap luxury consumption. Now where are those days of plenty – those happy happy days?

Stock markets around the world plummeted yesterday in a wave of selling set off by a plunge in China that was reinforced by worries of weakening economies…

The NYT says it is like someone just snapped their fingers. Who snapped their fingers? Who was it? Was it you? Perhaps YOU!!! We will know better today if this is a blip, correction or the beginning of the endtimes which will see us all drinking tea and putting out but not eating maple leaf cookies at parties as we did back in the 1980s recession.

In other new, Castro’s getting better. Kind of a kick in the goolies day for capitalism all around.

Friday Bullets For Shane

When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.

Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:

Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.

Right?

You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.

  • US College baseball season has begun.
  • Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.
     

Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.

Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.

  • A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
  • Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
  • Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
  • I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?

That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.