Category: Uncategorized

A Kick In The Teeth

Amongst all the insane middle-of-the-night thunder and lightning – again – I turned on the radio and heard that the Yankees were tied at six in the 6th inning in Detroit…because, due to rain delay, they only started at 11 pm and finished in extra innings around 3:30 am. Smile and back to sleep.

I wake to find the Yankees lost. The Yaa-aaa-aaa-aaa-kees lost. Which means they are 6.5 back as the Sox swept the Sox in a double header on the road for the first time since the time of the dinosaurs and grass that looks like tiny little palm trees.

And so off to find a growler of mild in old Galt.

Friday “After The Thunder” Chatfest

Don’t expect much from me today. What a thunder storm. Like the 1812 Symphony without the orchestra: boom, blam, whammo. What with the many mouths a wailing, not a lot of sleep. I almost wrote “flat chest” up there. One more week in August and therefore in summer. Summer really ends around here in October compared to the Maritimes but you know what I mean:

  • Update #2: A neato series of photos from the collection of a new technology museaum in the UK with photos of things like a lump of concrete from 1899 and early 1900s analogue computers including one called “the totalisator” which is my new nickname for me.
  • Update: Brendan Carney, subject of last fall’s overly wrought series on the SU football team, made the pros.
  • Nice to see the scoffing one dimensional right wing bloggers were wrong – again – as the police did infiltrate the wacko protest group at the summit. Darcey’s comment makers display an interesting learning curve but Darcey’s own response is gold:

    Wouldn’t it be crazy if they were undercover protesters pretending to be police officers pretending to be protesters? That would be the ultimate…Or wouldn’t it be weird…if they were police who wanted to be involved in the protest? Maybe their overwhelming zeal was too much for some of the more moderate protesters on the line. This is a good story.

    Cheeky monkey. Far more entertaining that the scoffing one dimensional left wing bloggers

  • What started as a funny idea for naming a sport team seems to end up in a grade seven locker room.
  • If you ever worry about your own beer intake or, conversely, consider it boring check out Ron’s series of posts of drinking his way thought Germany’s Franconia region. Plenty of gems like this:

    Andy met someone he recognised. It turned out to be Dan Shelton and his wife. He was making a documentary about Bamberg or something. I wasn’t concentrating that much on the conversation. I was in my beer zone. Feeling the warm glow of contentment that comes after a morning’s drinking. Very tall. I can remember that. Dan Shelton’s very tall. And annoyingly skinny for someone who works with beer.

  • Amy Winehouse update. I sent portland a copy. Let’s see what happens.
  • The Australian government has been tidying up wikipedia, too.

That is it. Not caffeine in the brain yet.

Group Projects: What Will Happen To The Giant Leek Contests?

I know I go on but all this digital stuff is a bit depressing. Just look at these British stats:

The average Briton now spends 50 hours per week on the phone, using the net, watching TV or listening to the radio. However, the mix of how much time is spent on each one has changed radically over the last few years. Daily mobile phone use is up 58% on 2002 and, over the same period, net use has grown 158%. By contrast Britons spend far less time watching TV, listening to the radio or chatting on a fixed line phone.

But what else are they not doing? Talking to people face to face? Playing games? Planting giant vegetables? With the collapse of content in favour of Web 2.0 flashing lights and curved edges, it is getting harder and harder to see any societal shifts or any new generation as empowering so much as distracting and that reminds me of one thing – the fall of Rome. Sure you can compare the fall of Rome to just about anything but that does not mean I can’t pull out the old chestnut for present purposes. So a few questions:

  • What new non-digital activity have you taken on to balance your life…or even to unbalance it?
  • What non-digitalness would you like to take on if you have the resources or the guts?
  • What would you rather compare to the fall of Rome?

There you go. Pure brilliance once again in the seven minutes before I have to rush out the door.

Soviet Bombers

Much in the news about the Soviet era bombers again floating around international airspace. Apparently all that windfall oil revenue that is floating into Alberta is also floating into Russia – mention that next time a Calgarian gives you the lecture on the moralnomic superiority of western Canadians – allowing them to spend spend spend on expeditions to claim the Arctic, on joint military exercises with China and send out the long-range bombers. Excellent. So 1975. A reminder that there are scarier things than wingnuts with dirty bombs.

As a lad near the Greenwood air force base, the local military newspaper (was it called The Argus after the submarine hunter?) often had close up pictures on the front page of the Soviet bomber crews waving to their Canadian escorts on the front page. There is even a Russia-Canada hockey series this fall – note all Canadian games are played out west. Expect the minders and “cultural officials” to be taking note of oil well infrastructure locations.

Six Up

Like most Yankees individually, I have a lot of respect for Mike Mussina who may have pitched his worst game in his worst year last night:

Mussina lasted one and two-thirds innings, giving up seven runs. At the outset, Mussina could not throw strikes. Then he started throwing strikes and got bludgeoned.

The Red Sox won but, as portland would note, it was only the Rays. You sit there and think “don’t put in Gagne” – then you wonder when they are ever going to put him in. Willi Mo’s player to be named later has never played in the majors.

And, yes, the Angels are clearly so much better than either the Sox or the Yankees.

Knuckleballer Kicks Devil’s Arse

So why do the Tampa Bay Devil Rays call themselves just the “Rays” and not the “Devils” as New Jersey’s hockey team does? Dopey and pandering. Who else would a real athlete fear to face more than the Prince of Darkness. Apparently one knuckleballer with his game on:

With Tim Wakefield’s security blanket on the shelf for the first time in more than 15 months, it appeared early on at Tropicana Field last night that Kevin Cash’s attempt to act as a substitute would provide no comfort for the Red Sox knuckleballer. Cash, who was called up from Triple-A Pawtucket when Doug Mirabelli landed on the disabled list with a strained calf on Friday, failed to catch five of the first 11 pitches thrown to him in the opening inning.

“After the first inning, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little rattled with what was going on because I hadn’t done that in the minor leagues,” Cash said. “I didn’t know what was going on.” Everything changed in the second, however, and from that point on, the only ones who got rattled were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who again couldn’t touch Wakefield in the Sox’ 6-0 victory.

It was magnificent. At one point a perfectly respectable batter swung and then just stopped a bit past mid-swing when the ball he thought was going to be waist high hit the dirt about two feet in front of the plate. A knuckleball is a beautiful thing. Plus the Yankees lost. Five up again with ten days to September.

Blogging Convention With Low Ambitions

I noticed this brief article at the NYT about a blogging convention and thought that was a little weird. Blogging conventions sorta died in 2004-2005 not long after they started. But at least this one has some admission in its own blog that things are different in a post entitled “Is Blogging Dead?”:

Not according to Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void. In two recent posts “Why We’re All Blogging Less”, and “Blogging Isn’t Dead It’s Just a Subset of Something Much Larger and More Important.”

More important??? The hobby of the masses is a direct extension of pen-pal-ing that President Eisenhower encouraged the people of the world to take up in his inaugeral speech of 1953. What could be more important.

The funniest thing about that post is the thing that is supposedly “more important” is content-less web stuff like Twitter and Facebook. Apparently the revolution is truly here and all the pages are blank after all. Ever get the feeling that Web 3.0 will all be about masking household odors?

The NuGovernment Loves Wikiality

You know, it is a great idea to set up something that sounds like an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It just has to turn out to be the best source of truth going. And Canadians are sooooo trustworthy. Dudly Do-right picked up a Canadian Federal government wage, right? Just like the people doing this:

A website that tracks the origins of millions of edits to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, shows that computers inside federal government offices are responsible for more than 11,000 changes to articles, including some significant edits of entries about parliamentarians. WikiScanner, a website launched on Monday by a U.S. graduate student, shows that changes to articles originated from computers inside a variety of government offices, such as the House of Commons, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Environment Canada and the Auditor-General of Canada. The site, however, does not reveal the identity of the individual who made the edits.

Thankfully, it is not just Canadians who are shuffling the cards mid-game. The same report shows that the CIA is involved and it even “purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.”

Excellent.