Game Over?

This might just be the end game for John McCain. Ever hesitant to acknowledge polls and mindful that John Zogby is 0 for this 2 in election predictions, it's pretty hard to argue with his numbers.

It's Alive ...

Sox win.  I went to bed.  Didn't see it.  Regretting the decision.

And this is really cool:

Dual role for Maddux?

The San Diego Padres have talked to Greg Maddux about of becoming a player-coach in the organization, general manager Kevin Towers said Thursday.

Pete Rose was the last player-manager in Major League Baseball with the Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1986.

Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre was a player-manager with the New York Mets in 1977.

Yet Towers anticipates that Maddux might retire instead.

Maddux, 42, whose 355 victories are the eighth-most in baseball history, has yet to make an announcement.

From USA Today

Where there's smoke...

... there is fire.

And possibly a bad omen for the Sox?

Torn...

....between rooting for the Rays because of this cool bit of wisdom...

and the Sox because my already harried mental state due to the Mets continuing ability to fail me will not allow a Phillies' championship without catastrophic results for both myself and those around me.

Such was the reaction on the first day of spring training when Maddon told his players that the slogan for the season would be 9 = 8. The room, full of furrowed brows, figured this just another oddity from Maddon, a fine-wine-drinking, good-book-reading Renaissance man in a baseball uniform.

“I like to be esoteric,” he said.


This however, makes me want to be Joe Maddon.

Money does not a ring make ...

Did you know...

That of the 13 highest paid players in Major League Baseball this year, only 3 made the playoffs:

1) Manny

2) Torii Hunter 

and 3) the Big Z

What does this mean? 

I have no idea.

No Corny Jokes

What’s the deal with the commercial with the couple sitting in a park and the guy gets offended when the girl offers him a popsicle that contains high fructose corn syrup? She reassures him by revealing that high fructose corn syrup is comparable to other sweeteners and is fine “in moderation.”  First of all, I didn’t know that high fructose corn syrup was a controversial sweetener.  (Compare this book title and cover design to this book title and cover design.  Has the state of artificial sweetener really gotten that much worse? Good grief.) Second, who is consuming high fructose corn syrup in dangerously large quantities? The Corn Refiners Association website, which pimps the use of high fructose corn syrup (in moderation, of course – everyone knows that!) notes in its chart comparing common sweeteners that sugar and honey may or even tend to come from foreign markets when the question of where it comes from is answered: “Domestic and imported sugar cane and sugar beets” is where sugar comes from, and honey comes from “Nectar from a variety of flowers and trees. Most honey is now imported from China.” These answers go out of their way to suggest the idea that these products are un-American, either by indirectly shipping jobs overseas or shunning the domestic economy.  Heck, I hear that terrorist training camps are now including beekeeping in the curriculum to keep steady the profitable flow of terrorist honey into the US.  High fructose corn syrup, however, is from “Yellow dent corn primarily growing in the United States.” Well thank goodness for that!

Mets @ Nats

Section 116, Row V, Seat 1

Things are ...

really bad in Pittsburgh:

"I'm probably not the guy to ask right now because I probably won't say ... it's just embarrassing. It really is. You've got three guys who run balls out right now. It's frustrating. Just frustrating. The whole thing is frustrating."

- The Guy with the Coolest Name in Professional Sports

really good in Los Angeles: 

(1) Ramirez recently joined Hank Sauer of the 1949 Chicago Cubs as the second player to hit at least 14 homers and drive in 40 runs in his first 40 games following a midseason trade and (2) with one more long ball, he will join Fred McGriff, Mark McGwire, David Justice and Carlos Beltran as the only players in history to hit 15 homers for each of two teams in the same season.

Morning Quiche

My blogging has declined so sharply recently perhaps because I have been insulating myself from the high tide of political media coverage that I normally subject myself to (“political media coverage” of course refers to this foolish presidential election, because God knows that nothing else in the world is happening, otherwise the press would be covering that too, right? Hello? Is this thing on?). However, I did a little reading this morning and have some links to share, as well as an abridged version of my impressions of Sarah Palin’s shaky performance last night in her interview with Charlie Gibson.

First, the links.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote an article about why some members of the media are getting very frustrated with this election, then a blog wrote a response to Kurtz, which is mostly a continuation but there’s some criticism thrown in for good measure. Both good reads.

In this space I would normally link to Krauthammer but today he is disappointingly predictable and is barely worth reading. I do have a reason for mentioning an article barely worth reading, however, and that is that the article is symptomatic of the reason for my self-insulation: nothing much is going to happen between now and the debates. Yes, Palin had her interview last night, so today we get to dissect and analyze obsessively, just as we will whenever Joe Biden makes an innocent comment, probably a joke, about women that will get blown out of proportion by the Republicans and whenever Palin makes an innocent comment, probably just a motherly reaction, about her family that will be blown out of proportion by the Democrats. But nothing real will happen: no one is going to develop and propose any new policies or solutions (Congress most certainly isn’t, despite the fact that that’s their job, but that’s an entirely separate issue, I’m talking about the candidates here). The four are just going to pound, pound, pound the same old drivel into the people who have been paying attention all along and have heard it all before. Do they not realize that even speeches about change (I use the term loosely and only because they do) can become static, in both a metaphorical and a descriptive sense?

I read this morning that Palin was in her element when discussing with Charlie the topic of energy. That’s nice, because she absolutely bombed when he was asking her questions about foreign policy. She had apparently been hastily coached to answer with party rhetoric. She was horribly nervous. She reminded me of a kid who had been caught not having done all the homework from the night before but was trying to skate through a question by the teacher. She did a good job in avoiding questions but not in being slick about it. Charlie Gibson is no dummy. She apparently didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is. I could imagine, when Charlie asked about it, her handlers in the green room smacking themselves in the forehead, saying “Expletive! We didn’t cover that!”

This is where I’m going to the trigger the abridgement of my opinion on this whole mess, and will hopefully get to the fuller version later.

One final link here. There have been many articles written about how the world outside of the US (such a thing is rumored to exist) will be disappointed if Obama loses. I understand the sentiment and it plays in a little into my own decision-making, but that’s another point that I’ll get into later. But I’m already sick of the articles, they’re all the same. This one is not the same. It’s from the London Times and actually explains to Europeans why Obama might not get elected, not just how crazy the Americans would be for not electing him.

Can't Resist...

wallowing in the a Phillie's fan self-pity: