Author: Alan

Three Signed Balls

So we are out early at the ball park to get a good seat behind home.  We are all covered in red to fit in with the minor league Red Sox crowd.   The kids say they want to get the balls signed.  I had three that I had bought for 500 Up and the kids wanted to bring them just in case and away I go, off on a fool’s errand, thinking that I would get some old guy selling programs to sign when a nice lady in a staff shirt tells me to stand over there.  “Over there” is a little pen with guys with big cameras and other guys with binders of memorabilia.   So we stand and we wait and after a few minutes the kids start to complain.  A lesson in patience or a lesson in dashed dreams.  I know not which but either is good for a kid in grade three.  Then a Reading player comes over, a memorabilia guy shouts Michael, he signs and turns and his back says “Garciaparra” – Michael, not Nomar however.  The kids aren’t satisfied.  They don’t want no stinking Reading players autograph.  So we wait.  Nothing.  Then a guy walks out.  A kid.  A tall skinny kid with 11 on his back.  He lifts a finger and then walks away.   “Awwww” the kids say.  I hear “awwww” again and a huff for good measure.   But then Mr. 11 comes back, signs a memorabilia thing for a memorabilia guy and I hear myself say from the back “can these three kids get their balls signed?” and he says sure and a path opens to the front.  Three red dressed kids are scooted forward and he signs each one with a neat and natty signature but I can’t read the name and he walks away in one direction and the kids and I go in another.

Back in the stands, we show the balls and say who is number 11?   Apparently Clay Buchholz was Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year in 2006 and he beat Roger Clemens in his last start.   More ball cases now needed.

Three Signed Balls

So we are out early at the ball park to get a good seat behind home.  We are all covered in red to fit in with the minor league Red Sox crowd.   The kids say they want to get the balls signed.  I had three that I had bought for 500 Up and the kids wanted to bring them just in case and away I go, off on a fool’s errand, thinking that I would get some old guy selling programs to sign when a nice lady in a staff shirt tells me to stand over there.  “Over there” is a little pen with guys with big cameras and other guys with binders of memorabilia.   So we stand and we wait and after a few minutes the kids start to complain.  A lesson in patience or a lesson in dashed dreams.  I know not which but either is good for a kid in grade three.  Then a Reading player comes over, a memorabilia guy shouts Michael, he signs and turns and his back says “Garciaparra” – Michael, not Nomar however.  The kids aren’t satisfied.  They don’t want no stinking Reading players autograph.  So we wait.  Nothing.  Then a guy walks out.  A kid.  A tall skinny kid with 11 on his back.  He lifts a finger and then walks away.   “Awwww” the kids say.  I hear “awwww” again and a huff for good measure.   But then Mr. 11 comes back, signs a memorabilia thing for a memorabilia guy and I hear myself say from the back “can these three kids get their balls signed?” and he says sure and a path opens to the front.  Three red dressed kids are scooted forward and he signs each one with a neat and natty signature but I can’t read the name and he walks away in one direction and the kids and I go in another.  

Back in the stands, we show the balls and say who is number 11?   Apparently Clay Buchholz was Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year in 2006 and he beat Roger Clemens in his last start.   More ball cases now needed.

Is China Monitoring Dullards?

Maybe it is just a state plan to keep an eye on the yakky dullards amongst the citizenry:

New rules by a Chinese government-backed Internet group maintain strict controls over the country’s bloggers, requiring them to register with their real names and identification cards. The guidelines from the Internet Society of China (http://www.isc.org.cn), a group made up of China’s major Internet companies, contradict state media reports this week claiming that China was considering loosening registration requirements for bloggers to allow anonymous online journaling.

Well, fat chance of that. Given what might be called “unhealthy content” by a blutocrat working in a dictatorship one can only presume that the search to squash it is really just a great make work project. Which may make it more honest: in dictatorships, people are paid to idly read the web while in the free world people are paid while they idly read the web.

Facebook Thoughts

Now that I am obsessed with Facebook and expect the feeling to continue for the next sixteen days or so, it gets hard to actually read news and, you know, blog. Blogs have readers and hits but I have friends at Facebook – including that guy who insists we took a course together in New Jersey last summer. But you can understand entirely why sensible employers are cracking down as it is an utter time suck with little or no real productive use. Not the greatest co-worker though there is that picture of the guy you did not keep up with from the time he ate pickled eggs and took off his pants.

Apparently Facebook may have a death wish, however, as it wants to reinvent itself:

Facebook Inc. has bucked the Silicon Valley acquisition trend, remaining independent of larger technology companies. Now the social-networking start-up is seeking ways to reach the big leagues on its own. On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.

Translation? You are about to be spammed. Yik…it’s going to get on my favorite t-shirt and everything. But with a really useful interface, an explosion of activity recently as well as talk of billions and billions of revenue from the stock market who can blame the 22 year old geek who created the thing. Show him the money.

Oh, well. Like most things it will be fun for a while then work then moved on from and then an embarrassment then forgotten then remembered then finally forgotten and one guy in his mid-forties with wads of cash will tell his pals at the yacht club again about how he made a killing when he was 22. Unless he doesn’t take the cash.

Group Project: Giambi’s Slip or Blurt

Last night, listening to the ever excellent Tony Paige on WFAN at 3 am, I was listening to callers list any number of reasons to support or decry what Jason Giambi said last week and what should be done about it. It struck me that we’ve been though quite distinct waves of sports and drugs over the last few decades, according to that most important personal characteristic – my foggy memory:

  • 1970s: when I was a kid in school, steroids were what East German swimmers and other Soviet athletes took. We didn’t know their names and could never think of them as heroes as they were cheaters plain and simple. They bad, we good even when we lost to them.
  • 1980s: Somewhere in here Sports Illustrated does a huge article on how high school and college kids in sport are using steroids regularly. In 1988, Ben Johnson certainly let the world know that it athletes from the west used steroids. Sports illustrated posted comparison photos of changes to his shoulder mass. Saturday Night Live did comparison photos to US women sprinters upper lips.
  • 1990s: Lyle Alzado admits doing steroids before the NFL player dies. The early ’90s baseball strike leads amazingly (and quite unexpectedly to everyone everywhere…like…you know…pixie magic dust had settled on the game) to the late 1990 home run boom by all these big guys.
  • The new millennium: Jose Canseco proves you do not have to be clever to be an author and everyone almost admits that people they knew when they were young knew people who did steriods. Barry Bonds approaches Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record. Giabmi now says all of baseball should apologize.

So, it is pretty clear that we’ve known about steroid use for a long time and anyone who thinks Mark McGuire’s surprised look means anything is nuts. But why do we care? We like people being able to do amazing things and steroids let them do that even if it later on robs them of their health – after all it’s a free country, right? If we now celebrate the baseball players who came out of the late 1990s, should we not allow the Soviet-era swimmers back into the pantheon, too? And how different is it from Michael Vick hosting dog fighting, anyway? Where do ethics fit in in all of this? And whose ethics? Do we take apart baseball because we want it pure even though we loved the home runs when everyone knew the players were on the drugs? Isn’t it just entertainment and we are all consenting adults?

Group project rules apply.

Shot put 2007: Day one, 21 May 2007 – 16 lbs, 22 feet or 6.7 metres. Day two: hit 21 feet twice. Herself at 8 got 16 feet with the 2 kg shot. Day three: hit 22 feet three times. Day four, 16 July: 22.5, 23.5 and 24 feet. 24 is 7.32 metres. Day five, 13 August: a bunch of 22 footers and a 24.5 – best yet. Compadre started hoisting them 32 feet but he is a pup at 35. Day six, 20 August: a bunch of 22 and 23 footers and a 24. I am now sneeking in the low end of provincial championship results for men under retirement age while having no style at all. Someday, I could be on Throwers Club.

Planted So Far This Weekend

This is the first spring with a yard since 2002 and – even though the property is about a tenth of the size of the 165 by 600 foot patch remaining around the old farmhouse in PEI – I seem to be working, which was never really the plan. I got collard greens, purple potatoes, yellow onions and even yellow beets in the ground out at the borrowed plot north of the 401. That certainly added unexpected labour. Here in town I am working more on pots and seed starting, though the sugar snap peas have joined the radishes.

The pear tree and the apple tree we inherited are in bloom, likely in vain both starved though bad planning of the right sort of companionship. I should especially find the pear a companion seeing as they only pollinate off of another variety but, as we all know, he who plants pears plants for his heirs and I’ve only so much time.

A Tiny Bit Of Hope For The Yankees

You know it must be bad when the good news for the Yankees is that they avoided a sweep. The real news for them, however, is that they discovered that they discovered they have a pitcher called Tyler Clippard, a 22-year-old right-hander throwing down in triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He was on fire and even hit a bunt and double in his own cause. Funny seeing someone with bad acne playing baseball – something you see in soccer or hockey all the time given how quickly kids are promoted.

But they now have to get back to reality and play the Sox for the next three evenings. It will be interesting to see if Johnny Damon can turn making yesterday’s catch at the wall (as opposed to Saturday night when he just helped it on its way over the wall) and that bloop single into the start of turning his year around. So far on the Coco v. Damon trade, the Soxs are looking very clever. Both have underperformed expectations but Coco has done it for far less – and has maintained his position as a positive force on the team though his attitude and effort. Coco has also added to his average in the last month, outbatting Damon .261 to .250 during that stretch.