Happy Kitty Birthday!

Today it's my cats's birthday's! They're two years old. Judging by Lucy's behavior this morning starting about an hour before my alarm went off, they are either entering their terrible twos or their rebellious teenage years.

I made them party hats using the outline from this template, scaled down to fit a cat-head instead of a person-head. I personalized them with photos of each of them:



And then I added some happy birthday messages and taped them up:



I experimented with chin straps, and it just was not happening. So I had to try to get a hat near one of their heads and then snap a picture before they batted it away. The perfect ensemble portrait I had pictured in my mind was clearly an impossibility.





Happy birthday, Lucy and the Colonel! I love you guys!

Zoning

Matt Yglesias discusses how zoning can work against a vibrant urban environment. I think this is one of those cases where a thinking person should be able to look at the rhetoric in support of certain policies, contrast that with the undeniable reality of their effects, and infer that the true motivations are something else. Zoning regulations have been recognized as a destructive force for decades, and the fact that they persist, and that well-connected developers continue to pocket piles of public money because of them, might suggest that the people who maintain them are perhaps not interested in urban vibrancy at all.

Not really related, but Harper's has publicly posted their article on "The next bubble." It's supposed to be a warning against buying into whatever mania takes the place of real estate, but my take-away is to invest in green technologies right now, then cash out in five years and buy a cheap-ass house. Can't fail.

Senator Clay Davis Ringtone

I couldn't find one of these anywhere: "Shyeeeeeeeeit."

Non-water liquids as beverage media.

I've had this idea before that one could make a cape codder with extra cranberry flavor by starting with pure cranberry juice and diluting it to drinking strength with vodka rather than water. The resulting drink would be as flavorful as a regular cranberry juice cocktail and as alcoholic as a normal bar cocktail. You might want to add some sugar as well.

Anyway, my lover and I were recently discussing coffee brewing. She was a big proponent of brewing methods that keep the coffee hot, so that it doesn't end up being too cold after you add a lot of milk. One solution is to steam or otherwise heat up the milk before you stir it in.

I was mulling this over, so to speak, and it struck me that you could do something similar to my cape codder variation, brewing the coffee directly in hot milk (or a milk/water mixture) rather than water.

You would probably want to use a manual drip brewer or French press so you don't have to worry about getting old milk all up in a machine that's not easy to clean. Then just heat some milk up on the stove and pour it in. You could even try milk in a Moka pot.

This approach is preferable to water brewing and adding cold milk in that it doesn't cool off the final beverage. It is preferable to heating up milk separately in that it only requires one heating step. And it is preferable to either in that it does not dilute the coffee.

I'm a Terrible Roommate

I frequently feel the urge to vent about some supposed impropriety perpetrated by one or the other of my roommates. But I'm aware that pretty much everyone does things that will get on someone's nerves if they live together, and it has a lot less to do with what the offenses actually are than it does with their being repeated over and over and how you can't really do anything to get away from them.

So I decided that any time one of my dear roomies moves my favorite oven mitt and I'm all full of righteous anger about it, that instead of venting I'll try to put myself in their shoes. I'll think of something I do all the time, obliviously, that might plausibly drive one of them up the wall.

The point isn't too identify personal shortcomings in myself for the sake of fixing them—because really, what are the chances that I accurately stumble across one of the many potentially annoying behaviors that actually bugs one of my roommates—but merely to remind myself that living with relative strangers is always difficult and takes patience.

So with that explanation out of the way, here's the first reason I'm a Terrible Roommate: I never ask my roommates' permission, or even offer a heads-up, before inviting people over, letting friends from out of town crash on the couch, dog-sitting, or any other act of hospitality on my part that could reasonably be understood as a huge imposition on my cohabitants.

Not sure if I screwed this up.

So I'm playing a scrabolous game with Nate. He had just played JOG hanging over the bottom triple word:



I was holding ROASTED, which I saw I could play along the left to make STAG. But if I could bingo by hooking my S onto JOG instead then it would be a 100+ point play. I couldn't find an anagram, though, so I did this:



I think it's the first time I've been holding a playable bingo and not played it. And I burned my E,R, and S. My reasoning was: it was worth almost as much as the bingo would have been (60 vs. 66, if I recall); leaving JOGS open would risk most of my bingo points anyway if Nate was holding an S; and I could land my D on the double letter and leave myself with A and T on my rack.



And Nate makes a play on a whole different triple as I draw...another bingo!



Not a very valuable or safe one, admittedly. But still pretty lucky. I think I may have not made the best choice with DOERS, but since I lucked out and didn't get punished for it at all, I'm afraid it might encourage bad habits.

Update: I ran the board past Quackle. DOATERS and TROADES are both valid. None of the AIs recommended DOERS.

Update: Also since Quackle counts tiles for you, I noted that at the time I was deciding whether to play DOERS, I was holding the fourth and final S. You'd think I would have thought to count those since blocking JOGS was a big part of my calculus. I'm an idiot.

3-2-1 Compact

I never fucked around with Compact Fluorescent light "bulbs" before. My thinking was that as a single non-homeowner, my lifestyle doesn't really justify buying anything that's going to last five years. But I have cats, so I guess that reasoning doesn't really hold up. And then a couple recent events caused me to take the plunge and pick up a couple.

First, Rob Cockerham posted quantifying the efficiency gains of CF over incandescent, which I found pretty persuasive. A couple days later he posted again with some negative feedback he'd received in response to his CFL essay. These responses set off my right-wing bullshit detector (my detector of right-wing bullshit, that is) right away. They all consisted of lists of the same "gotcha" objections (e.g., you can't use a CFL in your oven) without ever challenging the central assertion (that CFLs are far, far more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs).

It's exactly the style of argument used to dispute the veracity of global climate change, evolution, or the Holocaust: the point isn't to actually win the debate, but rather to make it appear to the casual observer that, first, there is a debate to be had; and second, since it seems to involve all these highly technical points regarding flagella or mercury disposal or whatnot, the layman had best just leave the whole thing alone and not pass judgment one way or the other. "Opinions Differ on Shape of Earth," as the joke goes.

Anyway, down towards the end of the response page someone gives the game away by linking to a WorldNetDaily article (duly sadlynotified later that day). So while I haven't talked to anyone who can figure out what's motivating right-wingers to go after CFLs aside from sheer misanthropic orneriness, it seems pretty clear that I'm now obligated to use CF on principle.

Oh and then when I was helping Andrew move he revealed that he had a couple in his apartment. I had been worried about the light quality of CFLs, but as an artist in the medium of light, his endorsement carries a lot of weight. So I picked up a couple and put them in both my bathrooms.

I'm pretty happy with them so far. They seemed dimmer than the 75W bulbs they replaced at first, but then when I gave them time to warm up they looked okay. Here's my downstairs bathroom, pictures taken just after flipping the lightswitch, and then every 10 seconds after:



So it's really yellow at first but pretty white by the time you're done brushing your teeth or peeing, and you can put on your makeup or artificial tan without concern.

Also the incandescents I had been using were those full spectrum or "daylight" ones, so that's part of the difference. They also have CFLs like that, but they were like twice as expensive, so I went with the regular ones.

Next up will be my bedroom, where I have three incandescents (plus two track lights that I think are halogens) right now. I have one 3-way lamp and one with a dimmer, but they have fancy CFLs on the market for both of those situations. And then my other floor lamp's socket is recessed so far that I couldn't get the ones I got to screw in, so I'll have to see if I can find one that's shaped differently.

The future is now, in any case.

Elite Opinion and Policy Versus Politics

Ezra Klein comments on the emerging elite consensus in favor of Obama, and describes how he perceives the Obama/Clinton choice:

My basic belief is that Obama is more progressive on foreign policy, [Clinton]'s more liberal on social policy, but he's more likely to lead towards a more progressive moment on social policy, almost in s[p]ite of his own policy shop.

Or as he puts it in his longer piece (nullus):

The promise of [Obama's] presidency is less its capacity to change our policies than its capacity to change our politics.

I think I basically agree. I'd elaborate that, first, policies matter, especially to non-elites; and second, politics don't seem to ever much change, despite many smart people's best efforts at various significant points throughout history (not least the election in 1992 of William Jefferson Clinton, whose triangulized policies progressives are still trying to get out from under).

What it do, Travis!

Since I've been playing Scrabulous on Facebook, I've always noticed, and been mildly annoyed by, the little foreign-language greetings they use to welcome you to the main screen:



For some reason it never really occurred to me that Flickr has always done the same thing:



Is this some sort of Web 2.0 standard or something? Does Ruby have a library function that returns a random international salutation?

Thinking about this also rememberized me to the fact that the school computer system in college named its individual servers this same way, each one a different word for "hello" in some other language. So when you'd telnet to cunix.cc.columbia.edu, it would actually connect you to, say, aloha.cc.columbia.edu if that had the fewest users at the time.

Anyway, so I guess it's just some geek thing thought up by dorks.

Democratic Primareez Nutz

It seems like everyone is supporting Borat Obama now. I think he's great, and I'll gladly vote for him in the general election, but despite all the adoration people have for Obama, I'm still pretty sure I'll be pulling my lever for Hillary on Tuesday.

But I'll also be voting for her. Amanda and Ezra both linked to an essay in the Nation, that makes the argument that (roughly) the president has more leeway in setting foreign than domestic policy, so you should support the candidate with the preferable foreign policy, Obama.

I'm sympathetic to that sort of argument, since it's along the lines of my original support for Chris Dodd, but I'm ultimately unconvinced. Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war is admirable, but it came in a context (as a representative of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate) where it carried little political risk. While he has made much of that stance as public opinion on the war has soured, he has not shown the willingness to counteract the broad Democratic Party foreign policy views that let so many Democrats sign off on the war in the US Senate.

And so I would expect him to more or less follow the establishment Democratic opinion. It would be perhaps marginally more humane than Clinton's, but not the radically saner alternative that a Dodd or Kucinich could really get me excited about. Nullus.

On domestic policy, in contrast, I think Clinton is far more credible. She cut her legislative teeth tackling health care before she was even in office. She knows better than to even hint at fucking with Social Security. She will not be an echo of her husband: Bill Clinton came to the presidency with a background as a pro-business Democratic governor, while Hillary will come to it as a solid Democratic legislator with a history of support for traditional Democratic constituencies.

Recent Obama converts make a big deal about how presidents don't get carte blanche in implementing domestic policy. But they do set priorities and wield the bully pulpit. Whether they ended up succeeding (the Assault Weapons Ban, No Child Left Behind) or failing (health care reform, Social Security privatization), nobody can honestly look at the Clinton and Bush presidencies and say that the president's impact on legislation wasn't enormous.

So that's it: whoever is president will doubtlessly continue to fuck up the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, and Africa. This is what American presidents do. Domestically, Clinton wins on both policy and politics.

Some people also argue that Obama has vision, or is a symbol of a better tomorrow, or will usher in a new era of progressivism or what have you. Whatever. JFK had all that too and he gave us Vietnam. Johnson was an unlikeable asshole who passed the Civil Rights Act and did more for social democracy than anyone since FDR. I'll take tangible results over symbolism any day.

Hillary Clenis for Nominee!

Biking Loses an Advantage

I hate owning a car. There are any number of annoying aspects of urban car ownership, but one of them is flyering.

Just about every week when I go to move the car for street cleaning (most weeks this is the only time I even look at my car) there is at least one advertisement tucked under the windshield wiper. Postcards and letter-sized sheets are the most popular formats, though business cards show up on occasion, and they're often filthy from enduring several nights in the open.

Yet another reason to prefer a bike, right? Well so I thought. Yesterday evening I was running errands in the city and I came back to my bike only to find that I'd been flyered:



It was an ad for some retail promotion where you get a free dinner or something. Ridiculous.

So there you go. One less advantage of cycling over driving.

And while I'm posting pictures from my cell phone, here's one of Nate with a dead salmon:

Meanwhile, in the world of baseball...

Since I only ever check in on baseball news every couple days, I didn't even know that Tuesday was a thrilling day to be a Mets fan. But I am excited now, anyway.

When I was first reading about who all the fans wanted to pick up for 2008, Santana really seemed like pie in the sky. Like, yes, I agreed that he would be just what the Mets needed for a contending pitching staff, but giving the Mets a contending pitching staff was not on the Twins', or any of the competing bidders', list of priorities. I dismissed it as wishful thinking and that the shot we got in 2007 was not to be repeated in the near future.

But what I don't know about the baseball business could fill a book (or at least an infrequently-updated blog), and I'm happy to be proven wrong. 2008 should be a fun year.

Civics Noob

If Joe Lieberman attends the GOP convention, then will he still be available to keynote at the Connecticut For Lieberman convention? They are running a candidate this year, right?

Warshington Noob

I came across a blog post that mentions Aplets & Cotlets. Horrible name, I know. "Cotlets." Jesus. But the blogger claims that, "growing up in Washington State, [she] always got [Aplets & Cotlets] as Christmas presents" and she hated them.

I have never heard of such a thing. The only holiday candies I associate with the Evergreen State (that's us, right?) are Almond Roca and the chocolates you get at Nordstroms's. Or possibly the Bon Marche. But they are basically less flavorful versions of fudge. I think she's from Eastern Washington, though, so maybe they do things DIFFERENT out there.

"Aplets." Christ almighty.

It looks like Turkish delight, which I don't find terrible. I do remember that it was immensely disappointing after only knowing about it from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Definitely not worth selling one's soul for or whatever.

Home Economics Noob

I brew my tea by the cup, boiling the water in a small electric kettle. I have always overfilled it slightly, so as to avoid any risk of not being able to fill my cup adequately. Last week I switched it up, so that now I may come up short once in a while, but I'll only rarely end up with too much.

I'm not really concerned with wasted water so much, but I'm worried the energy used to heat up the water might add up over time.

I figure I probably have an average of two cups a day when weekends and days I'm not working at home are factored in. So call it 700 cups a year. If I was overshooting by 20%, or two ounces, then that's 1400oz of water each year that I've been heating to boiling from room temperature.

A BTU is the energy it takes to heat a pound of water a single degree Fahrenheit. Each year I've been heating 87.5 pounds of water a whole 140 or so degrees, for a total of 12,250 unnecessary BTU each year, or about 13 million Joules.

My kettle is rated at 1000 watts, and since it is probably close to perfectly efficient (it's small and plastic, and the heating element is fully immersed), that means I'm wasting, uh...13,000...seconds. Each year.

That's three and a half hours! At minimum wage it would buy a nice lunch for two! I'm glad I've change my ways.

Comics Nooby

I took a sketch pad and my new brush pen home with me over the holidays, hoping to get in some good practice time. I wanted to both practice laying out full comic pages as in my baseball drawing, and to get a little more comfortable with the brush pen.

The second day I was home, I drew a couple panels portraying part of the previous day, when my mom took Nate and I on a walk down to the creek to see where the salmon were all dying after spawning:

It was a nice little vignette, I thought, so I decided that each day I would do a full page depicting something I'd done the previous day. I was laying out the panels, drawing in blue pencil, and then inking only with the brush pen.

Unfortunately, because of how vacations tend to go, most of the rest of my days were not nearly so exciting, and rather than drawing little episodes, I tended to just summarize each day with a bunch of confusingly juxtaposed panels. So the result is neither coherent nor really very interesting.

Also, the first page gave me practice drawing from different sources: the establishing landscape panel I drew from real life, then the second panel was from memory, and I used a reference photo for the third. Later pages tended to be almost all from memory. Here they are:











I also noticed that while I didn't have any trouble coming up with different facial features for made up characters in Night-Wight, I have no clue how to look at an actual person's face and distill their features into a drawing. So everyone looks exactly the same in these drawings, and going back I probably couldn't even tell you who is supposed to be who.

Was this exercise a success? I don't know. I didn't even really do any shading after the first three, so I don't know that I actually got any better with the brush pen. But I did come up with a good variety of panel layouts that I think mostly worked pretty well, and I know that I need to work on looking at faces and figuring out how to portray them (or rather, how to model them in my mind so that I render them as accurate portrayals). It was fun, too, so I'm glad I decided to do it.

Noob of All Trades

I have non-baseball stuff I want to post. While there's no technical barrier to creating a "*n00b" blog for each of my new enthusiasms as they come up, I don't want to mess with my technorate scores and affect my ad rates.

So I've decided instead to embroaden the scope of this here blog to include any topic on which I am a clueless nooby. Which for the time being is probably going to be stuff related to Scrabble or comics or bikes or whatnot, and who knows what all else in the future!

For example, here's some crap I made for playing Scrabble, both PDF files: a score sheet, and a 2- and 3-letter word cheat sheet (from the SOWPODS word list). There are two per page, and they line up if you want to do a score sheet on one side and the cheat sheet on the other.

The score sheet is designed for two player games where each player records their rack for each move, folding the edge of the paper over to obscure the rack columns. That way you have a full record of a game played in real life, and can record it later in something like Quackle and have it tell you all the 100+ point bingos your stupid ass missed. It's great!

Capitalism 101: Fuck the Yankees

Putting together dominant teams by luring in the best performing players with enormous salaries creates an incentive for players to enhance their performance through any means necessary? No shit?

I'm mystified by all the Sturm und Drang surrounding the impact, e.g., Roger Clemens' steroid use will have on "the kids," who are getting the message that it's okay to abase oneself
and risk one's physical health in pursuit of material reward. Yes, using steroids to improve your athletic performance is risky to your health and career prospects. You know what else is? Trying to make a living playing professional baseball.

In terms of eventual outcome, the aspiring pro ballplayer is probably better off washing out sometime early in college, hopefully not by an injury with a severe impact on quality of life. That way you've got your fond memories of high school stardom to look back on, you've got a couple years left to decide on something to study for real, you probably know a couple people who have a shot at the Show (valuable contacts regardless of your own personal future), and you're not staring at the prospect of toiling for years in the minors and never breaking out. True, you'll always wonder what coulda been; but realistically, it probably wouldna.

It's just another example of the US schizophrenia regarding economics and consumerism. Up to a certain point, the quest for material comforts at any cost is the very lifeblood of our nation. Past that, it's a dehumanizing corruption of all that is decent. It comes up in the eternal debates over whether rap music is a positive or negative force in our society (answer: rap music is our society).

"The kids" get the message: everyone's for sale, and your primary goal in life should be to make sure you get a good price when the time comes to sell out. Revelations like the Mitchell Report simply make explicit the tacit implications of our social order. It's no wonder they're so unsettling.

I had no idea.

I was out on my lunch break and stopped by the little tea shop by my house to pick up some key staples (while passing on some others that they also carry). The radio was on in the shop, but since it is my habit to tune out radio broadcasts of anything other than rap music, I wasn't listening to it. Then as the owner was ringing me up he commented that he was hoping listening to talk about baseball would warm him up.

Baseball! They were talking about baseball on the radio! It's the middle of winter! But of course, this is what's known as the "off season," when all sorts of trades happen. So I came right home and checked to see if my beloved Mets were up to anything. And they traded Lastings Milledge!

Reading some of the discussion, a lot of people seem to be concerned with the race angle. I think the notion that the owners or management want a completely non-black team is pretty far-fetched, but I do think it would be worth enduring insults from the slavering racists at the Post (seriously, when did it become common knowledge that Don Imus recorded the first rap record?) to have a shot at bringing up a homegrown African-American superstar.

The small number of blacks in baseball means that the ones who become great have that much more star power. The Mets would have done well to stick with Milledge and try to benefit from that potential, better representing the city and broadening the fan base as they have done with Latino players.

Anyway. Did not expect to be thinking about baseball other than in video games or drawings for several more months. But there you go.

Katie Casey was baseball mad

I finally got around to going by Peter's place to watch the third disc of Ken Burns' Baseball. This was a good one...I think we each only started nodding off once or twice. It started with Ty Cobb, continued on through World War I, and then wrapped up with the Black Sox. Pretty fascinating stuff.

After it was over, we looked up the full lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," sang a few rounds, and then played the trivia game that's part of the special features of each DVD. For the first time so far, we batted a perfect 1.000! I think we only had to guess on like one question.

Drawing

I got some new pens and paper the other day. The paper is just a cheap sketch pad, but at 11" x 14" it's big enough to draw a comic-sized page with bleed at 125% real size. I almost went for the 14" x 17", which would let me draw at 150% real size, but I don't really have the desk space to even use that, so I decided not to bother.

The pens include the Japanese Pentel brush pen that everyone loves. It's fun, but it does put down a ton of ink and I'm still pretty shaky with it. The bristles are really infinitely better than the crappy felt-tipped "brush" pen I was using before. I also got some smaller sizes of the regular Pigma pens, and then I stole a Sharpie from work.



I just wanted to block out and draw a full page on one sheet, and I think Peter inspired me to do a little baseball scene. I'm not working on a longer baseball story or anything: I just wanted to try out the format, and a squeeze play seemed like something I could portray on a single page that would cohere in the absence of a larger narrative context while also giving me a couple interesting backgrounds and figures to draw from a few different angles and positions (nh).

I'm not sure the three bottom panels really make sense the way they're drawn. It might work with color (panels brighter than the background?), or it might be something I'd have to do over.

Update: Those last three panels kept bugging me, so I went back and fixed them. I cut a piece of the same sketch book paper down to fit in my printer, blew the image back up to 125%, and just printed out the bottom part, landscape mode, in very light cyan. I only reinked the panel borders and the parts inside the old panels, then scanned it back in, lined up the new layer, and erased the unneeded lines.



I should have done this as a new post, rather than an update, just so I could title it "Back to the Old Drawing Board...Literally!" Oh well. I just noticed that I left the catcher as bare line art, and it looks kind of out of place. I'm not planning on fixing that, but if I do then I guess I have a title for the blog post.

Whee, baseball!

After brunch yesterday, a couple of my usual cronies went by to play with Gabe's Wii (nullus). Peter immediately noticed that the sports game had a baseball mode or level or whatever.

Andrew: Oh, Baseball's really boring.
Me: I know baseball's boring. That's why I like it.

Needless to say, Peter and I played at the first opportunity. He took an early lead with a single-run homer in the bottom of the first. I tied it up in the next inning and left a man stranded, but then fanned three batters to end the inning. I went scoreless in the third, and then Peter stepped up and won the game with a two-run walk-off home run. Pretty dramatic! I believe I hit for .222 and struck out five or six batters.

One funny thing was that Peter was striking me out throwing the same outside breaking balls that earned him so many K's in the wiffleball park.

I was also no good at Boxing. Video games!

More Baseball, and other stuff

Peter came over on Tuesday night with the second disc of Ken Burns' Baseball and we enjoyed it alongside some beers and Middle Eastern food. The further hijinx of tremendous asshole John McGraw—on the one hand carrying a piece from a noose used in a lynching for good luck, on the other (?) hand trying to sneak a black player onto his team by calling him "Chief John Tokohama," supposedly an Indian—were of course entertaining, but the highlight for me were the clips from a DeWolf Hopper recitation of "Casey at the Bat," a poem whose charms have always eluded me.

The pictures in the Wikipedia entry show him as a young man, and it says he was only thirty when he first performed the poem. But given that that was well before the turn of the century, I suppose it isn't surprising that by the time the film used in the documentary was recorded, he was pretty creepily ancient. I wish I could find a YouTube of it, but his lipstick alone is spine-tingling, and that's before he even begins his Cryptkeeperly melodramatic delivery. Ugh. I can't tell if the repulsiveness of the performance indicates the wide gulf between what was then and what is now considered entertaining, or if rather it suggests an element of the freak show in vaudeville that modern audiences only look for in reality television.

Hm, Wikipedia also says Hopper had (at least, I suppose) six wives. Interesting that as I watched the clip, some of my thoughts were along the lines as "so sad that this is what gays once had to resort to to make a living."

On the topic of oldish film clips (and gays, and tremendous assholes), a blog discussion of a debate on 9/11 conspiracy theories led me to discover clips from one of a series of debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential election. So many awesome things about these.

First, I love the rhetoric. Buckley's intimations of treason are of course not so different from what we hear from the bloodthirsty right today, with standard issue red-baiting standing in for contemporary accusations of Saddam-loving and terrorist-loving. But Vidal's side, damn. I realize that this one debate, taking place as it did during the unrest of the Chicago Democratic Convention, is unique even for the time, but the idea that the whole issue of the debate is framed from the beginning as essentially "yes or no: we are now living in an authoritarian police state" speaks volumes. Coming from a world in which Russ Feingold's is a champion of the left for quietly opining that perhaps millionaires should not be able to buy their way into political office, it's refreshing (and depressing) to see that national television once made room for a genuinely left-wing point of view. Vidal is still around, but he's so old

Second, there is the part where the two "nearly come to blows," as it seems to always be described. It is basically just Gore Vidal calling William Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and then Buckley calling Vidal a "queah" and threatening to punch him, but it is awesome. Again, you have to love the willingness to casually accuse someone of harboring fascist tendencies. Try to get a public intellectual (do such beasts still roam the world?) to apply the f-word today to even such a worthy target as, say, Rudy Giuliani. Here's the episode from YouTube:



Finally, it's fascinating to hear conservative cant from a source other than a faux cowboy jes' talkin' common sense. This predates the conservative movement's rebranding as an ideology of the working man. It's the same apologetics for the rich and powerful, but actually voiced by someone who is unabashedly rich and powerful. Which should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but because of how successful the right wing has been in burying the realities of the movement, it comes across almost as a put-on. Clearly this upper-class twit cannot really be a Nixon supporter.

Also while looking for those videos, I found a two-part debate from 1969, between Buckley and Noam Chomsky. The subject was US imperialism and interventionism, and how the two might be distinguished, if indeed they can be. Again, you have to love Buckley's shameless effete upper-classness. Chomsky comes across, appropriately enough, as a real professor type just trying to get down to the hard facts of the matter, in stark contrast with Buckley's high-flown rhetoric. It's in two parts:





The old-fashioned days, guys. So awesome.

All the rest of baseball

I forgot to post about watching game deuce, which we also did at Floyd. It was much more exciting than the first, of course. I didn't see any of the last two games, just overhearing some TV viewers' cheers during a party on Saturday and then catching only the final pitch as I came home last night from another. Would have been nice to have had more of a contest, I think, but at least the sad, misguided Yankees fans of the world will be upset. The Red Sox are now beating them 2-0 in World Series this century.

Red Sox vs. Rockies

Peter and I enjoyed a viewing of the baseball starting in the fourth or so...I remember Varitek had just driven in two runs on a ground-rule double as Peter arrived.

I had the idea that Jason Varitek might be a bit on the tall side for a catcher, but none of the baseball stats sites had a search by height. Then google provided me with only a handful of players thus described, all measuring in at 6'4" or 6'5", so I guess Varitek's 6'2" is considered within normal parameters. Ah well.

Not really too exciting of a game. Seeing all those Boston runs scored with two already out brought back some painful wiffleball memories, as Peter helped me remember. I did enjoy Matt Herges's relief pitching (nullus). He seemed to be throwing a lot of dramatical curves.

Do I have to support my League?

So this is hilarious that Rudy[eez-nutz] Giuliani[eez-nutz] is now claiming to be a Red Sox fan. I like also that the Republican fascists at his hate rally applauded him for it. Or, more likely, they applauded the (again, hilarious) spectacle of a Yankee[z-nutz] fan shaming himself. Beautiful.

But in the TalkLeft thread there is this idea I have never heard about before, that when your team fails to make or gets eliminated from the playoffs, you're then supposed to support whoever wins your league, the exception being crossing the lines of the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry.

But I don't want to root for the National League, because a) I don't really care about the Rockies, b) I have lots of friends from Boston, c) I also like the Mariners, so I can choose which league I root for in the Series, and d) a Red Sox win would piss off Yankees fans and force them to throw away their "1918 - 2004 - 2090" t-shirts, which event must be considered a universal Good.

So, go Red Socks.

Red Sox vs. Indians

Some friends and I managed to watch most of Boston's ALCS win on the big screen at Floyd's. The Cleveland fans sitting in front of us made themselves scarce around the seventh inning, I believe.

We had a good discussion about the Indians' horribly racist "Chief Wahoo" emblem, and this morning Peter came across a good blog post on that topic.

I was also going to post an update to my last entry, but I think the embedded map has confounded Blogger and I can't seem to edit the post. I wanted to note that my defeat in wiffleball yesterday was not as bad as the 22-0 drubbing the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club experienced at the hands of a bunch of cricket players in the first officially recorded baseball game in history. Thank you, Ken Burns, for providing me with some historical perspective.

More Wiffleball, Baseball

Peter and I played a seven-inning wiffleball rematch yesterday. Cadman Plaza was full of people, so we headed down to DUMBO and found a great spot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.


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Somewhere around the fourth inning, Peter figured out how to hit my high faster pitches, and I just fell apart. With the wind at the batter's back, fly balls were more often doubles and triples than anything catchable, and I was only able to get swinging strikes off my changeup. Meanwhile, no sooner had I learned to stop chasing the high and away sliders Peter had relied on for K's last week, than he started fanning me on the inside breaking balls, plus a wicked off-speed pitch of his own. It was brutal. If I don't start getting some more movement on my full-speed pitches, I don't think I'll be able to compete. When the carnage was complete, I believe it stood at 23 runs to only 3. Though, understandably, I may have missed one or two in there. Ouch.

Afterwards we took up some food from Rice and went over to Peter's to watch the first disc of Ken Burns' Baseball, which was so awesome. I thought it would be dull, but of course it was just hilarious and actually really informative. The labor stuff is fascinating. I love the implicit critique of state capitalism in the history of America's pasttime. I was disappointed to hear about the National League's puritan bourgeois history: the American "beer and whiskey" League sounded like much more my speed. The first disc only got us through the turn of the century, so I don't know what would eventually lead the AL to stray to evils such as the DH rule, not to mention the hated Yankees.

Meanwhile, there was apparently some actual baseball being played yesterday. Sounds like it was dramatical!

Oh, and I did a little illustration of a character I came up with called The Umpire. He's a villain or antihero type who casts judgment on people and vigilantifies their asses with a chest protector. SO AWESOME RIGHT. I wasn't sure how to show someone wielding a shield-type implement, so I did an image search and did the pose after this still from Captain America. Lines need some cleaning up, but I think you get the idea:

Wiffleball!

On Saturday Peter and I hit up the new artificial turf at Cadman Plaza for a little wiffleball:


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Or that was the plan, anyway. We traded one- and two-run innings for a bit until I broke out and took a 9-4 lead in the top of the fourth. A scoreless fifth, and then Peter came back with nine runs in the bottom of the sixth inning, a 13-9 lead. We hadn't decided on an official game length beforehand, so I kept asking for just one more chance to come back, and before we knew it we had played through the top of the ninth, with Peter taking it 16-9.

We were playing with no strike zone and no balls, and no strikeouts on fouls. So aside from a few short at-bats where the ball was put into play early, most of them were easily going to ten or fifteen pitches. I think we probably each must have thrown around 250 pitches.

You don't really think "physically exhausting" when you think of wiffleball (or I didn't), but after more than three hours of playing I was spent. I crashed pretty early, and was really sore yesterday. Not just my entire arm and shoulder (which still hurt today), but even my legs and "core." I had no idea.

It was super fun, though. We were both getting a bit of movement on our pitches, and Peter got me to chase his riser many times (nullus). I did benefit from his tendency to look way too sneaky and then crack up whenever he tried a knuckleball.

Ouch

That was ugly. RIP 2007 Mets.

I will never believe in anything again.

Mets vs. Marlins

So painful. A rare treat really, as recently we've only been able to watch a single Mets starting pitcher blow it in each game. Perez was unbelievable. Really, though, that 7-4 score was up there a long time, and our bullpen held it down while the offense failed to deliver. It's always one or the other.

Hats off to the Phillies. I mean, screw them one level, but it also sucks to have it come to a point where a team that's worked so hard needs to fuck up for my poor, hapless Mets to succeed. That's just the way of things, I suppose.

Dallas Penn had some good video clips from his birthday at Shea, where he sold his "Vote For Pedro" t-shirts to get money for a ticket. Bummer about the game.

Mets vs. Nationals

Oh man, what a brutal game. Once again, solid-looking offense that still fails to deliver while our pitching falls apart. Pelfrey was looking so good at the beginning. It just seems weird that the Mets could outhit Washington and yet end up nine runs down. I mean, we had a bunch of walks, but nine runs' worth? I guess we were making hits when they didn't matter, while the Nats made theirs count. And how is Ronnie Belliard so good against the Mets defense?

One of the viewer questions answered by the broadcast team was about the OPS offensive stat, which I hadn't heard of before. At first it sounded pretty reasonable from a math standpoint—a sum of two percentages, which isn't extremely rigorous as far as quantifying events, but comes pretty close for disjoint events (e.g., the percentage of days in which I play tennis plus the percentage of days in which I play squash is very close to the percentage of days in which I play racquet sports, since I don't play other racquet sports and very rarely play both in the same day) and is very easy to calculate.

(I don't have a problem with the loose application of terms like "average" and "percentage" in baseball stats. Bad assumptions about what these kinds of terms say about the underlying data is already a huge problem in the general population's understanding of things like economic data ("the median income is rising!"), so the more we can encourage people to think about what dynamic is actually driving a given number, whether it's called "average" or "percentage" or something else, the better.)

But if you actually start to think about what the two stats that are added together to get OPS, on-base percentage and slugging percentage, actually stand for, the meaningfulness of it starts looking a little questionable.

Slugging percentage is pretty straightforward: it's a hitter's total number of bases gained on hits, divided by their at-bats. As a predictive metric, that's easy to understand: we should expect a player slugging .500 to get about five bases in ten at-bats. The stat appears to say something very simple about a player's hitting ability, and only their hitting ability. In statistical terms, it's the expected value of bases a runner will hit for in an official at-bat.

On-base percentage is a little more subtle. It's a ratio between two multiple-term expressions, but basically what it boils down to is, absent any mistakes or decisions made by a manager or a defensive player other than the pitcher, how likely is it that a given batter currently at the plate will end up on base? This means that on-base percentage incorporates some offensively valuable metrics—the ability to draw a walk, for example—that are not accounted for by slugging percentage. But note also that, statistically, on-base percentage is a probability, not an expected value.

So what do these things say about a player when they're added together? By the admission of the people who came up with OPS, nothing real. But the OPS does represent something like "offensive value" that neither on-base nor slugging percentage captures on its own: a given player may get more extra base hits than another, but their greater ability to draw walks means that in the end they bring a similar offensive value to the team.

Is there a more meaningful way of calculating that same information? I'm not sure. Wikipedia makes it sound as though OPS was conceived as a more easily calculated alternative to SLOB (the product of the two stats instead of the sum) and "runs created" (the product of SLOB and at-bats). Simple addition "works" as an alternative because the two statistics are of the same order of magnitude. But neither SLOB nor runs created deals with the problem of trying to combine an expected value and a probability.

I might prefer instead to replace the "hits" term in the numerator of the on-base percentage with the "total bases" value used to measure slugging. The resulting figure would be a valid expected value, but taking into account plate appearances, such as walks, that are excluded from official at-bats. At the very least, we should no longer allow difficulty of calculation to limit the statistics used for comparing aspects of play. There may be any number of reasons for eschewing SLOB, but the fact that it requires a sliderule to determine should not be among them.

Anyway, all of that aside, OPS as a measure of offensive value reminds me of IQ as a measure of human intelligence. Indeed, there is even a statistic called OPS+, which measures on-base and slugging percentages against the park-adjusted totals for the league, and then scales them so the league average is at 100. A player with an OPS+ over 150 could be said to have a genius-level offense, while one with an OPS+ of 50 might be considered an offensive imbecile.

In fact, the original purpose of OPS+ was to identify challenged players who required extra instruction during batting practice. Then later it was misapplied in an attempt to demonstrate that Negro League batters were innately inferior to their Major League counterparts. (Okay, this paragraph is made up.)

OPS and OPS+ are useful metrics for comparing the offensive abilities of different players. OPS+ probably correlates pretty well with RBI and does a fair job of predicting career runs, not to mention player salary. A pocket calculator with access to the statistics could be programmed to organize starting batting orders strictly by OPS+ and probably come pretty close to making the same decisions as a Major League manager. If you had to guess which non-pitchers (nullus) on an A-class rookie squad would go on to make the big leagues, you could probably do worse than to pick the group of players whose OPS+ figures are over, say, 125.

And yet, OPS is not something unknown that we've managed to measure with some sort of test and then stuck with because it's just so damn useful. There's no mystery behind what OPS "is": it's just something we've defined arbitrarily, this formula of different well-understood concrete statistics cobbled together, and which we know for a fact has no intrinsic meaning except as an abstraction. It's a convenience, a tool for making comparisons without having to get into the fine details of the fundamental attributes (both inborn and learned) like upper body strength, mental reaction time, experience at the game of baseball, and sprinting ability, many of which might prove difficult to measure, if not impossible. We would be mistaken to take the utility of OPS as evidence of an underlying phenomenon of the baseball player body, some organ the fitness of which determines offensive ability.

Implicit in our OPS-centered discussion of "offensive value" is the knowledge that no single figure can hope to sum up all of what makes a given player valuable in an offense, and that real offensive value is only truly meaningful in the context of an actual in-game situation. We have no reason to consider the existence of "general offensive ability" anything other than a statistical abstraction; and certainly not as the product of some "general offensive ability factor" behind all the various quantifiable and non-quantifiable aspects that figure into offensive value.

With one exception, everything that I've stated about OPS and OPS+ applies analogously to IQ. Both can be useful metrics for making comparisons, can be used to estimate or predict more concrete information to which we may not have access, and can lead to poor decision-making when misapplied or taken out of context. The exception is that whereas we can say exactly how we determine OPS, how the actual figure, devoid of intrinsic meaning though it may be, is calculated from raw data. In contrast, we have no real idea what an IQ test measures. We call it "intelligence," but there's no breakdown in terms of rates of neural activity, or brain volume, or anything measurable beyond the fact that it correlates with a bunch of other things to an extent that we find it useful in making comparisons and predictions. We give it extrinsic meaning, but there is still nothing at all to believe that IQ "is" anything, that it comes from anywhere, that it is anything other than a statistical abstraction, like OPS+, useful to us only because our limited minds cannot deal with the whole array of information, some of it perhaps not even quantifiable, that lurks behind that single figure.

Mets @ Marlins

Some great baseball this weekend! Yesterday's game wasn't particularly suspenseful, but Oliver Perez was incredible and it was just fun to watch. Today's contest was exactly the opposite. What did the Mets go through, nine pitchers? Crazy. Great game, great win.

In other sporting news, Peter and I picked up a wiffleball set after brunch today. We got to throw the ball a round a little bit before he had to take off for his hockey game. I'm at about 50% with some shoulder pain, and as a result the ball and I were not matching on the issue of control. Other than that, we were both (me and Peter, not me and the ball) able to get some movement. Can't wait to find some time and space to play a bit of a game!

Mets @ Nationals

I watched through the top of the fifth, so I got to see my Mets playing solid baseball and taking the 4-2 lead.

At that point I went over to S     's to watch not just Top Chef this time, but also Gossip Girl, which was premiering the hour before and which I think she will also be recapping each week. This time, in addition to a bowl of delicious guac, she had also prepared a tasty peach sals. Friends Kate and Peter were also there, and everyone brought beer, so it was a fun evening.

Gossip Girl was pretty terrible, and not in the way that I think it could become a guilty pleasure of mine, but just in the way that I do not want to see any more of it. I don't really understand the appeal of stories about the lives of the ultrarich, except as targets of satire (that may be going over my head in this case), but I guess there has always been a solid demand for this kind of thing. I was sort of hoping that the cultural milieu might have been shifting in favor of the class-conscious Veronica Mars type of show, but it looks like not.

The paper-thin conceit of making the omniscient narrator a blogger is an embarrassingly transparent grasp for relevance that is already dated. Likewise the "kids these days, with their texting!" gags (does that count as satire?): the current crop of college kids are of the constantly texting and blogging and IMing cohort, so this gee-whizziness is about half a decade late. The depiction of the kids' hedonistic partying somehow manages to be simultaneously hysterical (will there be a rainbow party this season? I wouldn't put it past them) and naïve (drinking champagne and casually abusing...marijuana?).

Anyway, it irritated me. I'm sure it will be a hit.

Top Chef was pretty awesome, at least. I think it's interesting how the regular judges and the single-episode guest judges differ in how they evaluate the dishes. Really I think it's just the difference between having some idea of how each chef approaches different challenges, versus the guest judges coming at it with a blank slate as far as expectations. I don't really have a specific example, but it seems like the guests are more likely to issue judgments that come as a surprise to repeat viewers and regular judges.

There is also an interesting dynamic where Tom looks like he's holding off on saying anything concrete, lest he be contradicted by a guest judge that the show has already established as a voice of authority. It then seems like he'll try to massage the guest's opinion to match up with his own. Again, no really hard example, and I'm just interpreting facial expressions and stuff at various points.

It's been a couple years since I've watched Project Runway, which I think was the loose model for this show, but as I remember it, all the judges would score entries numerically on secret ballots beforehand, and only then would they hold a verbal discussion and then take a final vote. I may be wrong about that, but either way it would be a better mechanism, I think. Also making the entries anonymous would be a more fair approach, as I think it's pretty unavoidable that the regular judges establish attitudes towards different competitors that cannot help but color their subsequent judgments. I understand that these changes would reduce the producers' ability to direct the competition for maximal dramatic effect, but I would hope that the added credibility of the competition would make up for that, especially among regular viewers and fans.

But again, what do I know about television.

Wow, it has been several paragraphs since I typed anything about baseball. So I will bring it home by noting that I have finished "sharing" the episode of Little House on the Prairie that Peter told me about, where the plot centers around playing old-timey baseball. It's called "In the Big Inning" (groan). Not sure when I'll get around to watching it, but there you go.

Mets @ Nationals

Wuuuugh. John Maine. Can't believe it. When he shows up with his A game the rest of the team can't hold it together, and when the offense is delivering he blows up. Nuts! Fun ninth, though...so close. Big psychological hit though, this one, I'd think.

Wiffleball

I've been feeling like I want to play some wiffleball lately. I had been thinking that it might not be very fun without any baserunning, which I think is one of the most interesting parts of baseball. But as I thought about more, the level of any baseball I would conceivably be playing is not such that anyone would be executing a hit and run. So something like wiffleball actually makes a lot of sense. Yes, I'm a genius.

So I've been reading about different junk pitches one can throw with a wiffleball, and it sounds super fun. I found this ridiculous video of a dude throwing knuckleballs:

I also found this product for sale, the Junk Ball. I'm not even really sure what the thing is, but the customer testimonials there are incredible. This is from the very first one on the page:

I can beat my dad and friend all the time with junk ball! I'm the BIG DOG and I'm gonna hit a Doggy Ding Dong Bomb!!!!!!!!!!

You cannot argue with that. Actually it sounds awesome.

Yes, I am looking at YouTube videos of wiffleball junk pitches to distract me from the Mets game. Come on, guys!

Uh, Mets?

The Nationals? What? Don't make me nervous.

Red Sox vs. Yankees

Last night some friends and I went over to Max's place to watch the hated Yankees play at Fenway. Sachar brought delicious sandwiches from the unfortunately named Columbine, and as the Red Sox saw their lead crumble before their eyes, we turned to paper airplanes to soothe our pain. What started as a challenge in aeronautical engineering quickly became a fashion shoot, as we all tried to get our likenesses captured in mid-throw. Hopefully the photos will all be available on the internets soon.

Also the Cyclones lost, so my tickets to what would have been today's deciding game will be refunded. And I believe my Mets lost as well, though I don't think that really matters at this point. And the Mariners appear to have won, but I'm pretty sure they need Yankees losses more than their own victories, so that's thin gruel.

Baseball!

Update: Max posted the pictures. Amazing.

Cyclones @ Doubledays

I listened to most of the first game of the New York–Penn League championship series via internets radio last night. What's to be said, we just pretty much got out-pitched. Dillon Gee pitched an awesome start, but when you aren't scoring runners then that's a lot of pressure to leave to your bullpen.

Friends came over for a TV watching party, so I only heard part of the carnage in the eighth. Hopefully we'll do better tonight at home!

Where's my Cyclones at?

Why is SNY not showing game one of the NYPL championship series tonight? Sure it's just single-A, but there's no Mets game tonight, no live coverage of anything in the 7-10 slot, and they're playing for the freaking championship. I realize the 'clones don't have a camera crew and broadcast team that travels around with them everywhere, but they do televise the odd game so it's not like they can't work something out. Ah well.

Also, I've had so much going on lately, I never got to see them play with Ramon Castro on rehab assignment. I'm not sure if he's still going to be playing with them even.

Mets vs. Braves

I caught the first half of the Mets game on TV. It was good to see John Maine get in trouble but then recover for a change. He didn't get the win, but just seeing him have such a bad run in the fourth, and then be able to rein it in and settle down was reassuring. Shawn Green's hitting against Smoltz was pretty entertaining, and then it was pretty funny when he caught Smoltz's hit to add insult to injury. It's too bad I missed his game-winning RBI in the eighth. He's a good egg.

During the game, the broadcasters also mentioned that the Phillies had started their game off with a triple play, so this morning I looked around to find out what happened. Story here, video worth checking out.

I cut my viewing short to grab a burrito and head over to S     's house to watch Top Chef. Social interaction must always trump TV, even baseball on TV, and watching TV with another living human being counts as social. These are my rules. Not only did she have beers for me to consume, but she even whipped up a badass guac for my burrito (that is not a euphemism for anything, it was literally guacamole that I put on my chicken burrito). So now I owe her for Mets tickets and guac. The debt mounts! And here's her recap. I liked the show a lot, but her recaps are probably better.

And one final thing, which I don't know why I didn't link to this earlier, but Dallas Penn has made "Vote For Pedro" shirts. Awesome idea.

Mets vs. Braves

S      did indeed hook me up with tickets to last night's game, so I got to enjoy my poor, hapless Mets going down in defeat, 78-2. Sachar came along and the seats were really good! I snapped this picture before the game got underway, as El Duque came to take the mound (nh).



The cloud-obscured sunset provided a nice backdrop for this view of the construction equipment for Citi Field:



About halfway through the fifth inning people began leaving in droves. Friend Lee had even better seats from work and had spotted some empty ones nearby, so we moved down closer to the field to watch the massacre continue:



Pretty awesome! In this picture you can just make out Gary Cohen's shiny dome:



Sachar and Lee react to another brill Mets play:



Reading the game coverage today, I realize that I'm an idiot. I had been referring to this as Hernandez's second post-injury start, whereas it was actually his first. It sounds like everyone is taking his performance in stride, but I still would have liked to see him get a win.

Other than the actual game, it was a totally fun first visit to Shea. Sachar and Lee grew up going to Mets games and know their baseball. I always have fun trying to speculate about stuff that doesn't make sense when I've gone to games with Peter (how can the broadcasters tell what pitch he just threw?) or Kate (what's "BB" mean?), but people who actually know what they are talking about are good resources to have available.

On a related note, did you know that a bag of peanuts is supposed to be six servings? Ugh. I pretty much eat a whole bag every time I attend a game. And the ones at the Mets and Cyclones games are really salty and delicious (nullus). Ugh ugh. I had enough salt that my calf cramped up painfully in the middle of the night. That's a salt thing, right? Maybe in the future I will try to smuggle my own, smaller sack of nuts into the game.

Anyway, mad propers to S      for the tickets and to Sachar and Lee for the entertaining company. I will never forget my first time to a Mets game.

Mets vs. Astros

I got home from a weekend biking in Chicago (a 10-person century ride on Saturday) just as the game was starting, so I tuned in with my television set to watch Pedro's first post-injury start at Shea. He shut out Houston for five innings for the win (ftw?) and the final game of the sweep. I did end up leaving to meet friends at the park during the seventh, but I caught all the runs. Which I always say are not the important part, but dammit, sometimes they are.

During a snack break near the U of Chicago campus on Saturday's ride, I checked in with MLB-GO for a score update and announced to all present my Mets' victory over the Astros on that day. Friend Andrew was quick to berate me for distributing this information to an audience even less interested in Mets scores than I would have had back in NY. But our friend Nate (originally from Cleveland, schooled in Cincinnati, currently residing in Chicago) chimed in to say that he was a Mets fan and was glad to hear the game outcome! Mets Nation, everybody!

Friend S      has come into possession of a pair of tickets to Tuesday's game against Atlanta, so hopefully I will be attending that. Very psyched!

Mariners @ Yankees

Andrew and Peter came over to finish boxing up Andrew's and my bikes for our journey to Chicago this weekend. We had the Wankees game on in the background, and I despaired as I watched what appeared to be a repeat of the exact same shit that happened the night before: a perfectly reasonable starting performance, and then just when our offense is about to kick in, the guys start streaming out of the clown-car that appears to have replaced Seattle's bullpen and we are awash in their zany antics. Balls fly hither and thither, batters run in endless circles, scores climb ever upward.

Reading the post-game coverage, I hadn't realized (though I'm sure even the pathetic Yankees broadcasters would have mentioned it) that Molina had caught for Washburn for like three seasons. I hadn't considered that dynamic before. Playing against former teammates always introduces an interesting dynamic (though is anyone who played for the Mariners last night old enough to have been burning A-Rod in effigy in the dugout?), but I had not considered the unique circumstances when a catcher goes up against a former batterymate. I liked Washburn's response, that if anyone has to homer off him, he's glad that it's Molina. Nullus on all of this, of course.

Mets @ Reds

John Maine! You let me down again! How's the televised day game supposed to help get me through my work day like that? Joey Votto's first big league hit being a home run was pretty neat, though. I also thought Humber looked good when he first came to relieve, but then he also gave up a couple. The Mets' fielding was pretty disappointing all round, actually. Bah. Two running sweeps was a lot to hope for, I suppose.

And as I type this I'm watching my Mariners having another go at the hated Yankees. GO EMS!

Mariners @ Yankees

It sucks to watch a game slip away like that. I don't know that I agree with the post-game coverage that puts the blame on the M's's third-base coach Carlos Garcia waving Beltre home on Johjima's single, which should have loaded the bases with no out in the fifth. The out at home was disappointing, but you're still left only one run back with two on and one out, and Wang is still "on the ropes" having put three men on base in three plate appearances. Lopez's hitting into the double play seems like it should bear at least equal responsibility for the failure to capitalize.

And the bullpen was just embarrassing. So frustrating. Fuck the Yankees.

At least the Mets dominated.

Cyclones vs. Yankees

Our friend Sachar hooked us up with free tickets to Monday's day game against the Yankees, so Peter and I roused ourselves in the early light of morn (I was still reeling from a late night of partying the night before) to bike down to KeySpan. It was a beautiful day, and our last chance to catch the Cyclones hosting Staten Island in the regular season.

At some point during the game, Peter noted that the two umpires both adopted a wide stance before each pitch. As the pitcher began his motion they would squat down, but for a few seconds they'd just stand there in their wide stances:



Here are some details:



Pretty impressive! I tried to watch some of the game in a similar wide stance, but was not able to hold it for very long at all.

The game was really good...there were lots of weird errors by the Yankees and awesome plays by the Cyclones. I was buying hot dogs and missed the 3-6-3 double play that finished the top of the first. I did catch the DP to end the top of the third, when second baseman J.R. Voyles fielded a grounder, tagged out the runner with an awesome spin move and then threw it to first in the same motion. And the Cyclones caught two runners trying to steal second. Pretty sweet.

There was also a weird disputed call. Looking at the game log, I think it had to have been in the bottom of the second. I believe what happened was that Bouchard tried to check his swing on a 3-2 pitch that wasn't in the strike zone, and the plate umpire called him out while the infield ump said he had not come all the way around and it was ball four. So Bouchard took his base and Voyles advanced to second, there was a little discussion, and Bouchard was called out. The Cyclones' manager came out to argue the point, to no avail. Then the Yankees' manager came out to argue that Voyles should have to return to first, since there was no walk. The umpire let Voyles keep second, scoring it a stolen base. Weird!

Towards the end of the game, Peter enjoyed a helmetful of ice cream:



After the game we went to the beach to fly Peter's kite. I fashioned a parachute device out of some paper clips, rubber bands, and a couple napkins, and we were able to send it up the kite string and have it come drifting gently down onto the beach. Really cool. I didn't get a picture of the parachute, but here's Peter flying the kite:



Update: I put together a little web page about the parachutes we made for the kite.

Update: So Sachar made a video of one of the parachute launches, and I had linked it here because I was drunk and forgot that one could just embed that shit. Check it: