Bob Buhl: One of Baseball's Beauties

The Chico Carrasquel link brought an e-mail from a reader whose first mitt was a CC model. That got me to thinking about my first real mitt. It was six-finger Bob Buhl model. Bob was a lanky left-hander who pitched for the Milwaukee Braves in their heyday. We'd visit cousins in Muskegon who listened to Braves games that were beamed across the big lake by WOKY. We'd sit on the beach in Pere Marquette State Park and listen to the Mighty Braves. There was a summer that a Braves cap shared noggin time with my beloved Tigers cap.

Bob was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He had a lifetime 166-132 record. Check out the similar pitchers by stats and age on his reference/stats page. Click on the heading.  

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the 44th Diamond Classic. Regular reader Tom Fagan sent this article along. It features a run-down of the nines who would play in the premiere Classic. You'll find Tom's name in the highlighted box. Tom had the first hit recorded in the hallowed tourney. Thanks for sending the article along, Tom. 

Chico Carrasquel, Remember Him?

Chico passed away last week. The president of Veneuela went on televison and ordered two days of national mourning. If you remember Chico, click on the heading for a nice tribute article. If you don't know Chico, now's a good time to acquiant yourself with a good man, a good story, and baseball's ability to peg dates, time, and experience in the mind's eye.

Potted hibiscus with a couple of full blooms and few more rolled and on the way toward full bloom. This plant asks for full soaking every evening to support all of the blooms. It's a pleasure and a joy to accommodate this beauty. 

44th Annual Diamond Classic: LSJ Names the Top 10 Moments

They've been playng the Diamond Classic in Lansing for more than 40 years. In my day, it was the penultimate baseball experience. The diamond, Lansing's Municipal Park, was the only public park devoted exclusively to baseball. The infield, outfield, the warning track, the electronic scoreboard, and the PA announcer were big league luxuries that were rarely, if ever, present in the baseball diamonds where we played.

The game described below is number one in the Lansing State Journal's Top Ten Games in the parochial, yet serious, history of the Classic.

Unexpected gem

1968 - Eastern’s Tom Kiroff, a little-used pitcher at the beginning of his senior season, threw the first no-hitter in tournament history in the semifinals over East Lansing. The win came amid a string of 29 2/3 scoreless innings he threw at the end of that season

I played for East Lansing. We were no hit. I didn't play. I played first base behind the Ruthian Jimmy Brandstatter, a larger-than-life legacy from what was arguably the first family of East Lansing High School sports. Jimmy deserved to play. He was big, powerful, and avuncular.

I remember the day as being dreary and cold. We sat in the first-base dugout with our hands stuffed deep in our jackets. We kept up the chatter to keep warm and encourage our mates.

Kiroff had our measure that day. He triumph was splashed all over the sports pages. Later that summer during an anonymous summer league game that was played on a sultry night in Sycamore Park, we faced TK again. Big Jimmy was off to the UofM. We beat Kiroff and his team pretty damn good. Years later I found a journal that I'd been keeping from that summer. I kept records of where I'd been, what songs I liked, and on one page there was a notation that read: "went 2 for 3 off Kiroff."

Nice to meet up with you again Tommy, wherever you may be.

Click the headline for the Top 10 moments in Diamond Classic History.

Choppers remain in first. Have to wonder if a couple of the guys haven't abandoned their team. If they did, they should toss their players back on the free-agent market. 

Life, Liberty, Beaches, and Pie--Northwest Lower Michigan

Life, liberty, beaches, and pie--Northwest Lower Michigan is heaven on earth. This pohto of sleeping bear dunes highlights the majesty of the area. The orchards in the area produce the finest fruit ever to fill a pie.

The Mongeaus have been in Quebec, and working their way around the mighty lakes, since the early 17th century. I've stood on the Sleeping Bear Dunes and looked out onto the Big Lake. The wind carried the songs of the ancient travellers, those brave, strong souls who paddled their way into the unknown. I heard songs of courage, and songs of fear, and songs of wonder at the sights beholden. Timeless ground is difficult to find. The spirit of the old people is there. Go and listen for their songs before it is too late for you to hear them. 

Here's the portulaca (love that word) that I published last week. Portulaca loves the heat, which is fortunate because it's summertime in PHX. 

I've featured this pot in an earlier post. It continues to flourish with yellow mums, white petunias, blue lobella, white lobella, purple pansies, and bright red dianthus. It will be 111 degrees in PHX tomorrow, but these tough beauties are holding there own. 

Metis, Athena, & the Root Rep--Neal Stephenson: A Dude Worth Reading

Anther Trip to the Archives. Stay with this. It rocks. It's timely. Many thanks to WTF for turning NS my way.

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is an ambitious, dense, picaresque dance that weaves its way through three generations from WWII to present. Cryptonomicon is richly jewelled with interesting characters, cryptography and mathematics, the birth of computers and the modern electronics industry, and dawn of the internet.

Excerpt from Cryptonomicon By Neal Stephenson

[A conversation in a Manila jail cell between an old, defrocked priest named Enoch Root (Root is a time-travelling mystic who appears in many of Stephenson's works) and a young computer hacker named Randy Waterhouse. Root was a spy who worked with Randy’s mathematician/crypto-analyst grandfather in WWII.]

“Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,” Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with something startling written on it.

“Do you have some occult symbol there?” Randy asks, squinting.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can make out the word ‘occult’ on your medallion there.”

“It says ignoti et quasi occulti, which means ‘unknown and partly hidden’ or words to that effect,” says Enoch Root. “It is the motto of a society to which I belong. You must know that the word ‘occult’ does not intrinsically have anything to do with Satanic rituals and drinking blood and all of that. It—”

“I was trained as an astronomer,” Randy says. “So I learned all about occultation—the concealment of one body behind another, as during an eclipse."

“Oh. Well, then, I’ll shut up.”

“In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation," Randy says. It might seem like he’s beating a dead horse, except that he catches the eye of Enoch Root while he’s saying it, and gives a significant sidelong glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.

“Who’s the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?” Randy asks.

Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, “Reasonable guess. But wrong. It’s Athena.”

“The Greek goddess?”

“Yes.”

“How do you square that with Christianity?”

“When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?”

“I don’t know. I just recognized you.”

“Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn’t recognize my voice.

“Is this some roundabout way of answering my question about Athena worship v. Christianity?”

“Doesn’t it strike you as remarkable that you can look at a stream of characters on the screen of your computer—e-mail from someone you've never seen—and later ‘recognize’ the same person on the phone? How does that work, Randy?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird—”

“Some complain that e-mail is impersonal—that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that’s not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately.”

“So what’s your explanation of how I recognized you?”

“I would argue that inside your mind was some pattern of neurological activity that was not there before you exchanged e-mail with me. The Root Representation. It is not me. I’m this big slug of carbon and oxygen and some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root Rep, by contrast, is the thing that you’ll carry around in your brain for the rest of your life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to represent me. When you think about me, in other words, you’re not thinking about me qua this big slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep. Indeed, some day you might get released from jail and run into someone who would say, ‘You know, I was in the Philippines once, running around in the boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root Reps.’ And by exchanging notes (as it were) with this fellow you would be able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain and the Root Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of carbon and oxygen and so on: me.

“And this has something to do, again, with Athena?”

“If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus, you might—once you got over your initial feelings of superiority—discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that, though you didn’t name them Zeus and didn’t think of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek’s mind. And here we could talk about the Plato’s Cave thing for a while—the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors—it slices! it dices!”

“In which,” Randy says, “the actual entities in the real world are the three-dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude and I are the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on the walls, and it’s just that the shape of the wall in front of me is different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian—”

—so that given a shadow projected on your wall is going to adopt a different shape from the same shadow projected on his wall, where the different wall-shapes here correspond to let’s say your modern scientific worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview.”

“Yeah. That Plato’s Cave metaphor.”

……………
“Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn’t a supernatural being—”
—who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, or what-have-you that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena-the-supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet is of course nonexistent, but ‘Athena’ the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the—ancient—Greeks must have existed back then, or else the internal representation never would have been generated, and if she existed back then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably still quite valid.”

“Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?”

“Well, it’s a truism that you can’t understand a person without knowing something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of a quick Cliffs Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as a sea of white noise—totally random broadband static. And for reasons that we don’t really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this—Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of these as crystals—not in the hippy-dippy Californian sense, but in the hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings among such entities, you get Titans. And it’s arguably kind of interesting to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods—you’ve got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.

“A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one exception I’ll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling, either Titan-Titaness or God-Goddess or God-Nymph or God-Woman or basically Zeus and whom- or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day. Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance-you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn’t even fully a god—he’s half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

“Now what I’m getting to here is that Athena was exceptional in every way. To begin with she wasn’t created through sexual reproduction in any kind of normal sense; she sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. According to some versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked Metis, about whom we’ll hear more in due course. Then he was warned that Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate her, and later Athena came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis story or not, I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar was going on with the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin.”

“Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion.”

“Yes, Randy, you do have a keen eye for virgins.

…….
“So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts—such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics—why the redundancy? But a lot’s been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I’m trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That’s not what Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you’ll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby gods he’d swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia. So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious—crafts are just the practical application of metis.”

“I associate the word ‘crafts’ with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp,” Randy says. “I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?”
“It’s all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology.”

“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame, then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who’s supposed to be the god of war. And let’s just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with Athena even though—maybe because—they are nominally the god and goddess of the same thing—war. Heracles, who is one of Athena’s human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that he’s completely incompetent. He’s chained up by a couple of giants and imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He’s wounded by one of Odysseus’s drinking buddies during the Iliad. Athena knocks him out with a rock at one point. When he’s not making a complete idiot of himself in battle, he’s screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and—get this—his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.

“Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let’s not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And although both of them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself ‘sacker of cities’) it’s clear that they are being held up. in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring—Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares’s psychopathic sons. I mean, the records aren’t totally clear—it’s not like you can go to the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these guys—but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way, personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of Ares.

“So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon’s head on it, so that anyone who attacks her is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She’s always described as being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to Ares.”

“I don’t know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?”

“The distinction is overrated.

…….
“Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters—creatures full of cunning—like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology, yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “so obviously where you’re going with this is that there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as gods, heroes, etc.”

“Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that two persons with Root Reps in their mind might ‘recognize’ me by comparing notes.”

“So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods—which aren’t really gods, but it’s a nice concise word—all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures.”

“That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don’t. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil.”

“Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers.”

“That’s right.”

“Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper—seated.”

“In some cultures. The Vikings—to judge from their mythology— would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That’s how we get Athena.”

“I’ll buy that—but where does the war-goddess thing come in?”

“Let’s face it, Randy, we’ve all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted.”

……………..
“Who is going to fight them off, Randy?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to say we are.

“Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren’t going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.”

“Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—”

“Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That’s as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it’s the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world’s essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we’re in the thick of the Second World War, it’s accepted by everyone who doesn’t have his head completely up his ass that the war’s going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we’ve got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we’ve got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to’ the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?”

“I think you just told me.”

“Because we built better stuff than the Germans?”

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“But why did we build better stuff, Randy?”

“I guess I’m not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven’t studied that period well enough.”

“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.

Choppers in Detail vs. The League

Chopper stats in detail vs. the league. De Bacle is still not happy with the stolen base total, but it is nearly double what it was a week ago. "We finally dropped Piazza, He hit .134 for the last two weeks. Picked up the kid, Phillips from the Dodgers. He's hitting a more respectable .280." In another interesting move Izturis, another Dodger. has been moves to SS where Michael Young has been struggling. Ituris has been hitting over .320 all season long. Look for the SBs and BA to move up. 

Now a Weekly Feature--The Standings

Choppers still in 1st. Click on the league standing graphic for a closer view. 

California golden poppys, grown from seed, are flanked by purple Mexican Sage and purple lantana. Presently there are 8-10 poppy blooms with more on the way. Pretty happy to have seen these plants come from seed. 

Mimus Polyglottus: Here's Why the Night Bird Sings

He was at it again last night. Though this time I listened more attentively and acknowledged his genius. His song was long, proud, staccato, and syncopated. His genetic components perfectly wired to mimic. He’s mimus polyglottus, the northern mockingbird. He’s young, he’s unmated, and he must wait until all’s quiet for a prospective mate to be enthralled by his song. Here’s hoping that young Ms. Unmated Mockingbird is listening and interested, so that young master Mockingbird may find the sleep of the satisfied. It took 10 minutes with a birding guide and a quick Google search to make the ID. Click on the headline for some cool information on mimus polyglottus (cooler name than nothern mockingbird, right?)

Your Dilemna: What Do You Do?

You're going somewhere, you know where. You'll be gone for some time, you know why. You've got a portable music player--I Pod, MP3, etc. You've got room for one more song. Do you pick:

Major Lance's "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um"
Or
Otis Redding's "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)"

Hey, these are your choices. Choose one. You could do worse.

Major went to high school in Chicago with Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. Some Glee Club, eh?
Otis dropped out of high school and joined Little Richard's band. Yikes, talk about adult education!

Of course, Otis is a legend, yada yada yada. He's due his props; so, Otis, props to you dude. But Major Lance, when was the last time "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" didn't make you feel good?

Choose via the Comments button.

Here are the power alleys in the big ballpark. I am sitting down the right-field line looking across to left center. The BOB's pool is to the right of scoreboard. Friday's Front Row Bar and Grill is in the second deck in left field. Mark McGwire put out a light in the Friday's sign during batting practice. Barry Bonds hit one through the open panels above the pool. Ouch! Nah, nobody's doing steroids, right? 

After a week of fine pitching, timely hitting, yet no stolen bases, the Mighty Choppers have been in 1st place for two days. The "Chops" had drifted as low as 5th place with a season low sixty-some points. This morning, their second day as the lead dog, the Chop's point total stands above 90. "Everything's working as it should," said Dick De Bacle, C-Hop manager. "If we could steal a (expletive) base nobody would be near us." To remedy the situation, the Chops have added Willy Taveras OF (HOU) who has 10 SBs on the year and Brady Clark OF (MIL) who has a handful of SBs. Neither has a SB but Clark is hitting .450+.

The cause was furthered when Mike Hampton (ATL), Kenny Rogers (TEX), and Roger Clemens (HOU) combined to pitch 24 shutout innings over the last two days. The closer combination of Cordero (TEX) and Lyon (ARZ) are tied for the league lead in saves. De Bacle picked up John Garland (ChiSox) off
waivers. Brad Radke was dropped earlier in the year by mistake but was re-claimed when fellow league owners didn't realize he'd been let go.

The D-Hacks won last week's match-up 6-3. De Bacle was still unhappy about the week before when the D-Hacks hit .385 and lost to a team that hit over .400. "That (expletive) Tejada kicked our butts. The kid hit a home run every (expletive) time he stepped up to the plate. Nobody could get the (expletive) out." The D-Hacks are off to a good start this week with wins by Mulder (STL) and Wakefield (BOS) and the return to form of the wonderful Albert Pujols.

Re the Nash/Shaq racism claims: Apologies to those who suffered the true, matter-of-fact racism because their struggles have been cheapened and trivialized by a silly, shallow, provocateur. But that's the state of today's thinking, right? Institutional and cultural bias are to blame whenever we don't get our way.

Russ Ortiz kicks and deals to Pirate Pirate 3B Rob Mackowiak in last night's game at the big ballpark. Mackowiak hit a ground-rule double down the left-field line on the pitch. His line-drive bounced into the B-Backs bullpen, which is located under the Nextel sign. D-Backs caught a break because runner on first, Tike Redman could only advance to 3B. Ortiz survived the inning, giving up one run, but the D-Back lost to the scrappy Pirate 3-2. 

Craig Counsell about to be thrown out at first after hitting a routine groundball to Pirate SS Jack Wilson. If you look carefully (after double-clicking on the photo to enlarge it), you'll see the ball approaching the Pirate 1B. The Pirate outlplayed the D-Back but just scrapped by 3-2. We sat in the 2nd row of the upper deck. Great view of the entire yard. 

A pot full of portulaca AKA moss rose. These guys love full sun and he hotter the better. They'll last through November then it's adios until the days are longer and temps are hotter. 

Orange mums, blue lobella, and purple/red pansies. In the backgound is a terra cotta duck amidst a yellow lantana. Duck has unidentified blue guys and red/white diantus. Further back is a big pot full of mostly white dianthus.  

Mother Nature smiles on another of my flower pots. Thank you, MN for your largesse. There are 5 different flowers here: white petunias, red dianthus, blue lobella (and some white lobella with blue highlights, too), pansies, and yellow mums coming into bloom. We're having a mild, sunny spring after a wet winter. Life is good here. Hope the same for you whereever you are. 

The woman was scared by what she'd wrought and so she ran. It's a human trait, perhaps not our most noble trait, but human and basic nonetheless. The media firestorm that erupted in her wake is tragic and banal and a gross misuse of the technology. Cable Media outlets have taken Pegasus, shackled the mighty Pegasus to a plow, and then uses the rig to salt fertile fields. Is anyone else insulted by the continuous coverage of this story? When did being human become scornworthy?

I've had my moments of doubt and pain. I had a tough time of it in 2nd Grade. One normal school day I had a panic attack. As a result, I got up out of my seat, walked past Mrs. Pincumbe, and left the school. We lived @ 15 miles from school and I was headed home. I walked past a few Oldsmobile plants, past a public school, and was halfway home before I was intercepted by my mother.

Mom was pissed. She pulled the car over to the side of busy Saginaw Highway. The hills of Waverly Golf Course were just off the shoulder. During better times, we'd take our sleds to Waverly in winter. We had a riot shooting down and then trying to climb up the icy, snowy hills. Those better times were an icy counterpoint to what happened next.

Mom hopped from the car, pull down my pants, and spanked my ass right there in public. Traffic passed and MJ's Irish temper flared. There was no dicussion of what happened. That didn't happen in the 50s. Recrimination came first. At home, I was sequestered in my sister's room for the remainder of the day--the thinking was that if I was sequestered in my room I would have less time with my own thoughts. The trouble was I didn't have any thoughts. I was just scared, which festered into an inner anger.

Later, my dad and I had a conversation about what being a man meant. In this case it meant doing things one would rather not do, especially if they were unpleasant or treacherous--his WWII experienced figured here.

The fire at Our Lady of the Angels School in 1958 freaked me out. 92 kids and three nun died in the burning school. It added a heavy weight that I carried deep in my inner pit. I was watching the John Cameron Swayze news with my dad when the story came on. JCS told of a parochial school fire in Chicago. I asked my dad what a parochial school was. "A Catholic School," he said. www.olafire.com willl take you back to that horrible, sad, and tragic day. Take a look at the kids who died that day. They look like a lot of kids I knew. I was terrified I would be the next.

Anyway, the bright side for me is that there weren't any cable news stations, or news helicopters, or 24 hour newscast looking to exploit my joust with reality. My story was anonymous and personal. The way it should be. Too bad for the woman in GA. Here's hoping there's comfort in your future.

Perhaps not the best study of shadow and light you'll find on the net, but I was trying to capture the the feeling of manana that was wafting through a quiet Sunday morning in Taos, NM. As with all photos on the blog side of the page, click to enlarge.