The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal)

Occupy Mitt Romney

2012-01-10T10:08:00.000-08:00

The signal advantage of a Mitt Romney candidacy is that he is so archetypically the 1% Occupiers have wanted everyone to talk about all along. Let's turn our attention to what Mitt Romney and the 1% mean for ten months, please.

A Sand By Any Other Name Would Still Stick Swell

2012-01-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

My mother, as a recent Albertan Chemistry graduate in the 1950s, published research on petroleum extraction from what back then was unhesitatingly referred to as the Tar Sands. If you’ve seen that shit, what is technically and politely referred to as Bitumen, you’ll understand the usage. Hint: Don’t step in it if you value your footwear.

Since then, in an effort to turn black sticky sand into clean refreshing profits, there’s been a furious re-branding in favor of “oil” not “tar”, ignoring what it looks like when it’s in the ground. In practice, this means that when anyone uses the term “oil sands” you can safely assume they’re in the pay of the pipeline promoters.

— Tim Bray, ongoing.

2012, Yours To Assemble. Have a Happy!

2012-01-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

The Occupy Santa Cruz encampment on the San Lorenzo River benchlands below the County Government Center, Santa Cruz, Ca, December 7, 2011.

The Occupy Santa Cruz encampment, on the San Lorenzo River benchlands below the County Government Center, Santa Cruz, Ca., December 7, 2011.

Other people peaceably assembled, San Francisco, Ca., October 2, 2011.

Warren Hellman, July 25,1934 - December 18, 2011

2011-12-18T23:48:00.000-08:00

Warren Hellman is the only billionaire I've ever said a word to, and it was complimentary, mostly. I didn't bring up the part about the mayonnaise, which I abhor. His Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was a grand patrician gesture, a weekend of free music in Golden Gate Park which greatly pleased the hundreds of thousands of people who attended each year. I don't know what provisions he's made for continuing the festival after his death, if any, and losing that would be a sad thing. I'm pretty sure they'll be putting his damn mayonnaise on everything forever and ever, though.

Mr. Hellman is wearing a red shirt and a two-tone ball cap in this photo taken at the Strawberry Music Festival, Camp Mather, California, 2007

Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011

2011-12-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens was an extremist steeped in the refinements of London literary culture. He wrote well, especially in the key of opprobrium. He eviscerated Kissinger in print, and even took on recieved wisdom regarding Mother Theresa, complicating her sainthood with a contrary reading of her place in India.

Galvanized by their plight under Sadaam Hussein, Christopher Hitchens strongly favored the cause of the brutalized Kurdish people. It's a mugs game to pick sides in the Middle East, locus of the greatest concentration of aggrieved peoples per hectare in the world, and Hitchens saw the logic of his alleigance [sorry but i cant even spell the word —p.r.] put to the ultimate test in the runup to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He couldn't help but hope the despised Hussein would be removed, and favored the war. He didn't relent when the causus belli was shown to be so much whole cloth soon after the invasion, followed almost immediately by years of score-settling on the part of all the aggrieved of Iraq, whose balance sheets stretch continuously back five millennia in recorded history now, creating, for example, in that band of foothills sloping eastward from Asia Minor to Persia north of Mesopotamia a coherent swath of culture that flowered emphatically with Urartu all those long years ago and by virtue of the vicissitudes in that same place became what Hitchens cared to call the Kurds, holders of the debt owed to them by their history, aggrieved to this day by its denial, who may yet benefit from what's said to have ended yesterday. But still.

Public argument has long been an institution in London, and Hitchens was a master of argument there before his arrival in America. In public Hitchens spoke with lucidity and force. His rhetoric was full of the jugular-seeking barb. Speech for him was often enough an offensive weapon pointed at his opponent rather than the topic at hand.

He was not a fool. He was widely read and could write coherently about the books he confronted. He liked to drink and smoke. He became a U.S. citizen after long residence here persuing a career as a renowned journalist. Cancer of the throat killed him. He died yesterday.

"When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again."

2011-12-02T17:30:00.001-08:00

—via Alex Ross

Details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars…

2011-11-27T19:25:00.001-08:00

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.—Bloomberg

Do tell.

Sarah Vowell

2011-11-18T09:47:00.001-08:00

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Triumph of the Will

2011-11-13T07:55:00.001-08:00

What it takes to have a good time these days in State College, Pennsylvania.

Hail, Hail, Rock 'n Roll, Deliver Me From…

2011-10-18T22:55:00.000-07:00

Chuck Berry is 85 years old today.

hashtag revolution

2011-10-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

"Do you understand that 400 people in this country have more wealth than the bottom 150 MILLION? Does that sound fair to you?"
—fervent comment found here.

It depends on how well the bottom 150 million are provided for. For my money, the 400 can go ahead and be that wealthy if and only if the needs of those 150 million are adequately met, and when that happens, the 400 can go ahead and try to be as wealthy as the bottom 250 or 300 million, on the same plan, for all I care. It doesn't matter to me how much the 400 are worth compared to any other fraction of society so long as the 150 million, the 250 million, the 300 million, the 99% of us, don't have to eat shit for that to be the case.

The Polo Field To Date, October 2011

2011-10-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

A View of the Polo Field From The East
October 2, 2011

Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1961, the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park was occupied by one of the largest crowds in San Francisco history. By most accounts half a million people gathered there that day. I was one of them, squatting on the grassy berm above the playing field far across a vast sea of people from the stage where Father Peyton led us in the Rosary.

A View of the Polo Field From The North
October 7, 1961, via

A little more that five years later I was at the Human Be-in, held on that same field. It was a much smaller crowd that day, but in many ways equally impressive. There was a great deal of chanting on both occasions, I seem to recall.

Record Of A Pleasant View

2011-10-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

Gig Harbor, WA August 2011

Steve Jobs, February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

2011-10-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

Jerry Leiber, April 25, 1933–August 22, 2011

2011-08-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

As much as anybody, he deserves thanks for rock 'n roll.

"Corporations are people, my friends."

2011-08-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

So is Soylent Green, my hearties.

August is Weedmonth

2011-08-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

A dog, snarling with bared teeth, charges you. You have a heavy stick in one hand and a gun in the other.

Do you …

A. Thwart it with the gun.
or
B. Thwart it with the stick.

There's a distinction to be made between reason and logic. Some might hasten to work logically through to an irrefragable argument for A over B, trusting that reason might prevail in reaching a solution to the dog's threat, so that the matter, succinctly decided, might shine as a beacon of best practice in all such future encounters. Others might contrarily chose to support preference B, no matter what, traditionally favoring a cudgel in hand in every dealing with a dog from the get-go.

In this narrowed window of rational choice an argument might be made. Marshalling all the main and ancillary points required to support positions for or against one or the other of these fundamental choices will take a non-trivial amount of time and effort. N.B.The stipulated dog does not inflict itself, but remains suspended in all respects while this sort of argument runs its course.

Individuals entering into such an argument become attached to, proprietary of, the logical structures the've contributed or endorsed in searching their way through to what they submit is a reasonable end to the matter, and often enough are so willingly invested in supporting the logic that leads them to claims about the fairly decided thing they strive for that they will continue to defend that logic long after it has become abundantly clear that an encompassing view of the list of alternatives to the leading question Do you …, has not yet been exhausted, with all the explanatory material inserted here in the text merely serving to approximate the effect of the great opening intercessionary salvos of argument arising whenever gun or stick is called for, but which alternatives must at the very least include

C. Trust the fence.

D. Profit!

BREAKING: After 168 Years, Britain's News Of The World Vomits Its Last Edition

2011-07-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

Mr. Murdoch and his son discussing the British phone hacking matter with Paul McMullan.

Egypt

2011-07-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

…as it ever was:

Four months after the fall of Hosni Mubarek, the winners have begun to take shape. The military averted the prospect of a Gamal Mubarek succession and maintained the power it has held since Nasser’s coup d’état of 1956. The Moslem Brotherhood has emerged from decades of persecution to potentially become new Egypt’s new powerbrokers, and the Salifist groups, once outlawed, are now organizing political parties. So far, Egypt’s revolution has bolstered the standing of all parties, except the young, secular, progressive activists whose dreams and courage first ignited it.
—Christian Vachon at The Rumpus

Independence Day, Almost

2011-07-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

The Half-Life Of Other News

2011-06-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

“Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska…and maybe for more than one state. Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway – but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it’s going to make Fukushima look like an x-ray.”

—Tom Burnett on the underreported story of Nebraska's Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant, currrently submerged beneath a national wave of weiner jokes. Presumably Burnett is concerned that the flooding Missouri River, adjacent to the plant, will wash away some, or even lots, of the spent nuclear fuel stored in outdoor pools around the plant, where an electrical fire in the control room interrupted the regular order of business a week ago.

Bloomsday! For Reals!

2011-06-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

It's all aligned now, you see, the proper anniversary of Bloomsday, when the calendar comes round as it will from time to time, with the day of the week, Thursday, and the month, June, and its sixteenth day, all three essential components matched up once more, identical to those canonically given in the famous book "Ulysses" by James Joyce.

Here's the fabulous RTÉ Radio dramatization, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

I'll be over here leafing through the thing as is my way on Bloomsday.

Flag Day Observed

2011-06-14T20:02:00.000-07:00

Argumentum ad Tabula

2011-05-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

— via Kieran Healy

Gil Scott-Heron, April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011

2011-05-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Bob

2011-05-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

He Walk On Gilded Splinters

2011-05-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Dave Bry at The Awl posts "13 other songs about Voodoo, Juju, Mojo, and Witchcraft" to go with a video by Random Axe called "The Hex" and fails to include a song by Dr. John. Specifically, this song, "Walk on Gilded Splinters," a seven-and-a-half minute discursus on just those matters.

Buildings Facing West in Davenport, California, March 2011

2011-05-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

DOM

Homegrown in Davenport

Yep

2011-05-14T01:40:00.001-07:00

A List of Analogies

2011-04-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

Happy Computus

2011-04-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

Putting Easter where it belongs was as grave and momentous a battle as the Roman-inspired calendar has ever experienced, with the class of those who cared to note the event eventually splintered into factions which continue to this day to maintain their own prescription for dating each year's Easter.

To say "Happy Easter" today of all days perhaps inadvertently endorses an argument that had them shouting from the lecterns all over Christendom some time ago and hasn't ended yet. To say "Happy Computus" is much more even-handed.

Hazel Dickens, June 1, 1935-April 22, 2011

2011-04-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

Daddy died a miner and grandpa he did too,
I'll bet this coal will kill me before my working days is through
And a hole this dark and dirty an early grave I find
And I plan to make a union for the ones I leave behind

Stand up boys, let the bosses know
Turn you buckets over, turn your lanterns low
There's fire in our hearts and fire in our soul
but there ain't gonna be no fire in the hole

tl;dr

2011-04-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

Self-fullingness from sfgate:

Human minds evolved to constantly scan for novelty, lest we miss any sign of food, danger or, on a good day, mating opportunities. But the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts,...

Closely Watched Flowers

2011-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Technically A Gaze

2011-04-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Dogview

What mockery of Louis Quatorze could frame thy fearful symmetry?

2011-04-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

furniture hardware

With Sufficient Cowbell

2011-04-07T22:11:00.001-07:00

Sunlit

2011-04-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Still Life with Tomatoes

Some Last Notes Before Leaving

2011-04-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

I see more than one site pointing to this video of of LCD Soundsystem's last show, performed awhile back at Madison Square Garden, almost four hours of that kind of music. Here they are more briefly on the Colbert Show in their very last television appearance:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

LCD Soundsystem - I Can Change

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Recorded Yesterday

2011-04-02T20:46:00.001-07:00

Capital Crime

2011-04-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

People are subject to the death penatly for some crimes. Not infrequently, innocent people are convicted of capital crimes, and if the Supreme Court is any judge, they are not entitled to any recompense should prosecutors proactively interfered with their right to a fair trial.

Not all people are subject to the death penalty, which in theory should weigh upon every person equally. Corporations are a class of persons who can do anything they choose without fear of extirpation. But if it makes sense for other people, it makes sense for them. There are some crimes they should be made to die for. To be fair.

Rueful emoticon goes here

2011-04-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

This past weekend Talk of the multiverse by Brian Greene on C-SPAN [rebroadcast tomorrow, April 2, 8a.m. PDT] lit on the notion of a great set of universes expressing all possible paths of physical progress emanating from whatever beginning we may choose to assign. Each outcome has a range of possibilities (built on the existential premise that something will eventually happen) and each probability, in a suitably ergodic setting, is eventually expressed, each leading off into its own range of possible universes in turn. Probablities collapse around some value in the event, and off each universe goes from there on its own peculiar way.

Something will eventually happen is the existential premise of baseball, too.*

So, for example, Edgar Renteria's home run in the deciding game of the 2010 World Series had a probability of occuring before the fact, along with the more or less knowable likelihood of each and every other possible outcome of his at-bat as well. In the event, in our universe, he hit a home run, I'm pleased to note, and in that moment of decoherence denied every other universe where some other probable outcome obtains, where Renteria is not even a baseball player, or hits into a double play instead. All possible alternate iterations of universes are counter to our fact, since he did hit that thing, we know for sure, a home run once improbable improbable no more, forever, for us.

Our universe is the universe in which redoubtable Renteria did so stroke that decisive shot. All those other universes are all well and good in theory, but in practice, in the universe we've got, that homer is the done deal, I'll have you know. Such knowledge emerges from the well-recorded resolution of a set of probabilities into that singularity of a stroke put on the ball by Renteria. We must believe that anything probable may well occur in the future. It is the nature of probabilities to probably happen at their naturally given rate, and we can know that any of them might naturally occur, without being able to do more than believe in the likeliest outcome with any certainty at all. Nevertheless we can rightfully put aside impertinent universes that do not carry us along with Renteria's known home run to our present state.

*The highlight of Opening Day for the Giants was the play of Brandon Belt in his first game in the majors, who played a highly credible first base and went 1 for 3 with a base on balls at the plate, battling Dodgers closer Broxton through an eight-pitch at-bat that ended the unfortunate game with a liner to third.

[In many universes it is said catcher Posey does not make the rookie mistake of trying to force a play with bases loaded and two outs. He's got Tim Lincecum out there on the mound in all pertinent universes up til then. Insert for crying out loud here. All he needs to do is corral the ball and get it back out to his pitcher. A flub on Posey's part, pure and simple, leading us to the present sad state of our known universe…]

Big Ball Down in LA

2011-03-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

Go Giants

—via Metafilter.

Nearing the Real 2010

2011-03-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

Spring Training is over, the stiffness of a winter away sluffed off now by vigorous repetition of all the characteristic motions of the game in preparation for the actual Season, the one ending with what those in baseball call a World Championship.

The World Series trophy won by the San Francisco Giants in 2010 was sent out on a long proud progress by the club, visiting among other spots the site of the last Polo Grounds the Giants played in before leaving for San Francisco. And, as it turned out, the thing itself came to Santa Cruz as well.

The Santa Cruz Boardwalk is the perfect house for such a public spectacle. It's got gaudy public celebration built right in. Two lines formed .

The Tour reached all the way to Santa Cruz

Lots of people lined up to have a photo taken with the Trophy

Others formed a shorter line for the chance to merely sidle by at a respectable distance from the thing itself

The photographer kneeling right is, I aver, in the very instant during which the official photographer busies himself picturing the same happy people, recording for the public his best view of what will appear on the front page of the next day's Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Mis-en-meta-abyme?

CSI: Edwardian London

2011-02-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

From The Case of Oscar Brodski (c.1912) by R. Austin Freeman:

"May I trouble you for your lens, Jervis?" he said; and, as I handed him my doublet ready opened, the inspector brought the lantern close to the dead face and leaned forward eagerly. In his usual systematic fashion, Thorndyke slowly passed the lens along the whole range of sharp, uneven teeth, and then, bringing it back to the centre, examined with more minuteness the upper incisors. At length, very delicately, he picked out with his forceps some minute object from between two of the upper front teeth and held it in the focus of the lens. Anticipating his next move, I took a labelled microscope-slide from the case and handed it to him together with a dissecting needle, and, as he transferred the object to the slide and spread it out with the needle, I set up the little microscope on the shelf.

"A drop of Farrant and a cover-glass, please, Jervis," said Thorndyke.

I handed him the bottle, and, when he had let a drop of the mounting fluid fall gently on the object and put on the cover-slip, he placed the slide on the stage of the microscope and examined it attentively.

Roundup of Today's Authentic Roadrunner Sightings

2011-02-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

From Norwood (1966) by Charles Portis:

"…I like the Road Runner."

"Yeah, I do too."

"I could watch that scutter for an hour."

"I believe I could too."

The bread man began to rumble with quiet laughter. "That coyote or whatever he is, a wolf or something, every time he gets up on a cliff or somewhere with a new plan, why the Road Runner comes along on some skates or has him some new invention like a rocket or a big wrecker's ball and just busts that coyote a good one." He laughed some more, then fell into repose. In a minute or two his face clouded with dark memory. "Noveltoons are not any good at all," he said. "It's usually a shoemaker and a bunch of damn mice singing. When one of them comes on I get up and go get me a sack of corn or something."

On Wisconsin

2011-02-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

This Year's Model

2011-02-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

I ♥ U

"Atum" of the Patriarch, heh heh.

2011-02-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

Atum (Ra manifested at sunset)
by way of Wikipedia.

Hosni Mubarek, deprecated as ruler of Egypt, has transferred himself to Sharm el Sheik, which is a lot like not being in Egypt, for most values of Egypt, and probably as far as he might be expected to get away from Egypt for now given the understandable reluctance of other nations to take him in and the countervailing bulk of Egypt's people insisting that he must nevertheless go.

He didn't take his form of government with him, but rather left it in the hands of the military. The state of emergency persists as the sun sets in Sharm el Sheik.

Atum goes off. What will replace him but Ra again in the morning?

Civilization 6000

2011-02-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Currently Cairo deserves attention. Egypt has been expressing civilization in an unbroken sequence of daily events for more than six thousand years. People who've inherited what's resulted from that prodigious expenditure of time and effort are not presently satisfied with their lot. People of Cairo have dragged with them to Midan al-Tahrir [Liberation Square] for the past couple of weeks all the burden of influences those six thousand years of events have bestowed on them thus far, and have demanded, as immediate recompense for the condition in which they now find themselves, that the one in charge of Egypt, Hosni Mubarek, be removed.

There are other demands that may or may not have unconditional support from everyone in Tahrir Square. Oh, sure, cancelling the State of Emergency declared by Mubarek shortly after Sadat's assassination and under which he's ruled as he sees fit for the past thirty years. That. Probably only the revanchist few in the crowd who think that a permanent state of emergency is as likely an organizing principle of civilization as any other, would argue that, yes, Mubarek must go, but the state of emergency should continue with somebody else in charge of it. It's really not that kind of crowd. Not that such calculation is absent outside Tahrir [COUGH USA COUGH].

Mubarak, at any rate, is scheduled to ease himself out in less than half an hour. Yet another in that yet unbroken line of momentous Egyptian events to add to the thus-far continuous lot of them.

UPDATE: Mubarak draws the line at relinquishing power, admits that the state of emergency just might be eased eventually at some unspecified future date given suitable conditions down the road. Ahem.

Happy Birthday Jimmy

2011-02-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

Every year on this date James Joyce's birthday pops up to remind us that there will be at least six more weeks of Logos.

Drawing by Augustus John

Charlie Louvin, 1927-2011

2011-01-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

Concealed Carry

2011-01-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

How's that working for you, AZ?

One One One-One

2011-01-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year anyhow.

Happy New Year, it says here, again. . .

2010-12-30T22:52:00.000-08:00

This old world's had a hell of a year. Off with it, now. A new year for everyone, on the house, is what I say.

Don Van Vliet, January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010

2010-12-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

Watering the Central Coast

2010-12-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

The poisoning of the Salinas Valley aquifer may be irreversable by now.

Irrigation runoff, liquid mixed with the residue of powders and oils and potions habitually spread over the staggeringly rich agicultural acres of the valley, leaks down water's inexorable gradient to the lowest available spot, the aquifer, where that liquid is lifted by pump back again to the surface to collect the residue of yet another round of agricultural chemistry. It's hard to say at this point what sort of remediation could make some of the valley's water supply non-toxic again. The threat to Monterey Bay goes without saying: all these waters leak in that direction.

Aiming to clean up some of the most toxic water in California, regional water quality officials are considering new rules to control polluting runoff from agricultural fields.
[…]
Water samples from the Salinas Valley were among the worst on the Central Coast.
[…]
After more than two years in development, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Board will consider adopting the new regulations in March.

This is what happens when lawyerly types are left to design an agency. The Water Quality Board should act more like a fire department than a circuit court, immediately acting to shut down identified threats to the water supply with all the tools of the trade, rather than engaging in two years of hearings that may yeild some mitigating results in March.

But, no.

An Oirish Lament

2010-12-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

Epilogues for Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010)

2010-11-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

Austerity at-a-glance for the Irish

2010-11-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

The saving move, which will keep a lot of banks from losing money, is to make Ireland a poor country again, as it's been before and ever shall be, world without end, it would seem.

When the Squirrels Get Tough, The Tough Get Squirrelly

2010-11-14T18:22:00.000-08:00

On What's Drawn From Our Sabers At Baseball-Reference.com

2010-11-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

It's put down as a strikeout on the scorecard, the backward "K" signifying a called third strike to end the game.

The record of the event doesn't admit the batter's angry glance back at the umpire, however integrally bound to the moment as it actually transpired.

"Glanced angrily at the umpire" must go and live in the realm of yarns about the game, where all the narrative threads that lead to and then out of that angrily given glare at its end can be found, tellings associated however loosely with the game noted in the record.

The yarn, given what people are willing to listen to over and over, may or may not last. It's nice to have a basic record at the very least, and what baseball-reference.com makes of baseball's basic records is an invaluable aid to anyone experiencing the rarely exercised impulse to make informed comment about the game, for whatever good that ever does.

What I Won

2010-11-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Many's the night I'd trudge the upper deck of Candlestick Park with the coffee urn strapped to my back, the heavy metal cylinder filled with a couple of gallons of atrocious once-hot miner's-camp-quality coffee I was expected to sell to the sparse crowd of regulars already overly familiar with its flavor who populated the upper deck of the place in those years. My supply had its uses in the mixtures they'd make of it with their bottle of something or other pulled as easy as you please in public from a pocket and poured into the solution of melted styrofoam and Foster's Restaurant Blend Coffee I had to offer. And of course there were always the innocents, the ones I'd never yet served the stuff, thinking to cut the uncanny chill of a nighttime game at Candlestick Park with what they'd soon realize they'd expected to be a much, much hotter fluid, however palatable. Even with all that I could expect to make $3.00, or, with a little rushing around from point of possible sale to point of possible sale, as much as $4.00 a night vending the stuff.

[In the freezing chill of the second deck at Candlestick at night, the starched white of the vendors uniform was soon enough splattered with errantly dispensed coffee. No matter how closely the cup was held to the spigot, there was always enough intervening wind to affect the discharge of the liquid stuff. Wet cold coffee covered the clothing of the coffee urn carrier at Candlestick.]

For most vendors, the night was done by the end of the seventh inning, all the crowd's appetite for popcorn or programs or peanuts or hot dogs having been pretty much accommodated for the night, the peak of demand settling in the third through fifth innings, then tailing off to the ignorably few potential customers in the eighth or ninth who weren't worth the trouble anyway. At the end of the seventh, most vendors would cash out and go home for the night, or come back out to the far end of the right field stands and watch what was left of the game if it was at all interesting.

Oh, the beer vendors, serving a constant demand, would come early and work as late as needs be, all through extra innings, sure, stationed at the exits to the parking lot at game's end in any case to get the last wave of customers before shutting down for the night.

But for the lad toting the coffee urn up and down the steps of Candlestick's steep upper deck, any hope for the immediate sale of a supply of coffee large enough to justify cashing out by the end of the seventh was met for most of the game with an informed resistance to the stuff among the regulars who made up the overwhelming majority of the smattering of people who ever sat in the second deck in those years.

Only with the passage of hours and innings, under the very predictable onslaught of a night's weather at Candlestick Park, colder and windier and somehow wetter without exactly raining, and, of course, as the night gets, darker, too, all on matching gradients running up through the innings, would even the most recalcitrant of regulars finally reach a point where they might seriously consider coffee, even knowingly cry out for some, if only for the cup to pour something stronger in. But that's the way it was every night. Aw, the coffee urn carrier in his coffee-soaked clothing, waiting through the long cold innings it took to make customers out of that crowd.

Worth it now.

An Uncountably Large Crowd Celebrates Its Giants

2010-11-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Victory

Subhead Frustrates Understanding

2010-11-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

No, You Go Crazy

I get why these two guys are joyously embracing. They're teammates, San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series Champions, and this page from the San Jose Mercury News is the front of a whole special section on the Series and its deciding game, the line score of which is printed above the picture of the two guys hugging. Fine.

But what's all this about 58 years of frustration? What frustration, and who held it all these years and for what exactly? I'm sure commenters have somewhere gnawed this question to rags and I'll add this:

The subhead reads, GIANTS END 58 YEARS OF FRUSTRATION, but of course the Giants won the World Series 56 years ago, in 1954, meaning that the frustration referred to in the subhead that is now ended must lie two years further in the past than that, not to be resolved by a mere World Series Championship in the meantime, but going back as far as some pivotal moment in 1952 in fact, 58 years ago, just as DeLillo would have us believe in Underworld, some irksome something persisting until this year's historic season put an end to it.

The precise nature of this frustration is left as an exerise for the reader.

52 years in the Making

2010-11-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

World News Tonight

2010-11-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

For a lucid account of game five of the 2010 world Series, I recommmend the BBC.

Giants 11- 7, Giants 9- 0, Rangers 4-2, Giants 4-0, Giants 3-1

San Francisco Beat

2010-11-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

Here's Henry Schulman, the San Francisco Chronicle's Giants beat writer, the fellow whose job it is to follow the team around all year long reporting, by way of the Chronicle's Sporting Green, and in fewer than 600 words if at all possible, on almost every game the San Francisco Giants play throughout the lengthy Major League Baseball season. This is the last Giants game he'll have to report on this year, because, improbably, but according to Schulman's witness, known for its probity lo these many years on the beat, the Giants have won enough of them to become champions of Major League Baseball this year and won't need to play any more to prove it.

FREAK OUT

2010-11-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

Halloween: The Rangering

2010-11-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

World Series Game Three: Sanchez Walks Molina and Opens the Door . . . To Hell!!

2010-10-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

Texas Tagged Twice: Giants Lead Series 2-0

2010-10-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

So far, in two games the Giants have connected for eight 2-out base hits. This is about, oh, a month's ration of 2-out hits for our lads. Nice.

Study Shows Probability of Something Eventually Happening in A Baseball Game Approaches 1!

2010-10-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

Last night Freddy Sanchez, appearing in a World Series for the first time, hit a double in each of his first three plate apearances, something no one had ever done before. Any batter who hits three consecutive doubles is realizing a marvelous improbability. Hitting two in a row is a rare event itself in regular play. But now there's a unique record of accomplishment against which to measure the first three at-bats of every future first-time batter: can you clear the unlikely bar that Sanchez set with his three World Series doubles?

2010 World Series Game One: Giants Tag Lee

2010-10-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

A World Series Factlet: Attention Umpires

2010-10-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.

You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.

Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.

Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.

Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.

It's Pronounced "Yay!"

2010-10-23T23:11:00.000-07:00

That is all.

Game On!

2010-10-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

O Giant Thumb of Victory, Play For Us!!

Work On The Old Home Acres

2010-10-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

Church and 30th St. San Francisco MUNI Construction from Ken Murphy on Vimeo.

Solomon Burke, 1940-2010

2010-10-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

He was the King Of Rock 'n Soul.

Baseball !!!

2010-10-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

A Lesson in Lens Flare From The Giants' Official Photographer

The San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division Sunday, the last day of the 2010 regular season. They improved on last year's record of 88-74 by an additional four wins, ending the season with the second-best record in the National League at 92-70. This is a good thing.

The National League's Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball's weakest club, won 57 games this year. It takes, unarguably, the assembling of a fair amount of talent to win more than a third of the games your team plays against the best ballplayers in the world. Sadly for true Pirates fans, a fair amount of talent is no match for the exceptional amount of talent assembled on the better teams in the National League.

Giving the Pirates a pass, the worst teams in baseball will win roughly four of every ten games played each year, and the best teams not quite six of every ten, with all the other middling teams spread somewhere in between. Every additional win over 81 wins is harder and harder to achieve. Winning 100 games in a 162-game season, just a fraction more than six of ten, is a relatively rare phenomenon in baseball, rarer than a pitcher winning 20 games or a batter hitting 50 home runs, singular accomplishments in themselves, and it didn't happen this year. The Philadelphia Phillies won 97, not quite as good a season as Pittsburgh's was bad, but certainly marking them as the favorite to advance in the playoffs leading to the World Series.

Great pitching, solid defense and some timely hitting is an age-old formula for winning baseball. The Giants benefited from the best pitching in baseball this year and a surprisingly solid defense, but only an average offense.

The San Diego Padres, built along the same lines as the Giants, had superior pitching and defense this year as well, and only five percent fewer runs scored than the Giants — not a horrible offense surely, not Pittsburgh horrible or Houston horrible or even Mets horrible at scoring runs, but no dynamo of offense like Cincinnati or Philadephia or Atlanta, either, — and it was almost inevitable that at least one team of that sort would advance to the playoffs. Being in the same division, the Padres and the Giants met 18 times during the year, and the Giants very average offense showed, throughout the season and again this past weekend, that it could win one of three games against the very best pitching in baseball. The Padres took the season series against the Giants 12-6, and they won this past weekend's series 2-1. Even excellent Giants pitching wasn't enough against the Padres this year: Jonathan Sanchez gave up one hit, a single, in seven innings against the Padres back in April and lost 1-0 to Matt Latos. A few weeks later he faced the Padres and Latos again, and gave up three hits in eight innings and lost 1-0 again, too. Latos, the Padres pitcher, won both games, and drove in the only run himself in the second game with a two out basehit. In the last game of the season Latos and Sanchez faced each other yet again, and this time it was Sanchez with the unexpected hit, a triple (!) that positioned him to score the first, and as it proved, the only necessary run of the game that clinched the National League West Division title for the Giants.

Giants Baseball: Torture

2010-10-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

The Giants spotted the San Diego Padres six runs by the fifth inning and I made a quick retreat to the garage and succumbed to the ministrations of some Van Morrison: I found echidne's YouTube link to "Into the Mystic", and it was a balm. I looked on ESPN's MLB scores page and saw that the Giants had pulled four runs out of their hat to make a contest of the thing: 6-4. When "Into the Mystic" ended I used the little pictorial index of Van Morrison tunes at the bottom of the YouTube screen to scroll over to "Sweet Thing and The Way Young Lovers Do and I played those two, opening up a window with just YouTube in it, and playing Ballerina again in that window, too. By then it was the eighth inning and the ESPN Play-by-Play page showed the Giants had a couple of guys on base, two outs, and Torres, this night's Wille Mac Award winner for 2010, up at the plate.

This is a post about a news website article about a scientific paper

2010-09-27T15:06:00.000-07:00

This is the body of a post about a news website article about a scientific finding.

Annals of the Long Now

2010-09-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

Among the interviews collected at the Paris Review site is a recent interview with John McPhee, where he allows that the sense of geological time he rubbed up against for twenty years creating Annals of the Former World (1998), associating with geologists who say a million years is the smallest plausible unit they can think in, has taken its necessary toll on his own perspective:

The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing—and I mean nothing. It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re a hundred years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s a hundred years? Nothing. And everything, it doesn’t evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it’s going to do.

Is That My Shoe You're Eating, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

2010-09-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

Two idiosyncratic masters of filmmaking, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, appear in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival [via kottke]:

The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.

My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.

Baseball (!!)

2010-09-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

With 15 games left on the schedule, the San Francisco Giants (83-64) took over first place in the National League's West Division last night, demolishing the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles 10-2. It's there to be found out in the forthcoming final two weeks of play whether this proves to be the high point of the season for the Giants or instead a local maximum on a path ascending to the global maximum of the Championship of Major League Baseball itself.

Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.

Baseball (!)

2010-09-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Popular Game of Baseball

Sam offered me a ticket to tonight's Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Years ago, with my father and my mother's father, I went to a Giants-Dodgers night game at Seals Stadium. I don't remember how we got there, drove down Harrison and parked on some side street maybe, or took a jitney down Mission Street and walked. Today I'll be taking the bus over Hwy 17 to San Jose's Diridon Station, and from there the train to AT&T Park.

So there we were, sitting high up above and well back from the field not too far down the right field line, a young guy named Sandy Koufax pitching a pretty steady game for the Dodgers into the ninth inning that night, the Dodgers sitting on a two-run lead when lo and behold a rally broke out and the Giants loaded the bases. Koufax was done. My grandfather, who brooked no dispute when it came to baseball matters, begrudged, "This young guy's a good pitcher, Koufax" as Koufax walked off. Subsequent events proved the rueful truth of this judgement to all those who despise the Dodgers of Los Angeles. They brought in Art Fowler to face Leon Wagner, pinch-hitting for the Giants. Wagner, observing as he later put it that "the bags was bulgin'," stepped up to the plate and hit a grand slam home run into the right field stands that won the game for the Giants, 6-4. It remains to be seen what tonight's game has in store. Another wondrous victory for the Giants over the Dodgers would be fine by me.

Department of Unlikely A. mississippienses

2010-09-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Claude the Albino Alligator is 15 years old tomorrow. This is a picture of him from December of 2009. He's more than eight feet long now. I don't know how much that is in handbags. He lives in strictly observed comfort at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Happy Birthday, you terrible thing.

The Boat Fished Out of the Sea

2010-09-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

For a number of decades lots of boats (like the Santa Cruz, seen here parked on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf) plied the waters of Monterey Bay and beyond, harvesting the rich established fisheries along the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. Agriculture, fishing, and the relict of the redwood lumber industry still gnawing away at the county's remaining hills and dales were the bastions of what local economy existed during those times in Santa Cruz. Fishing boats like the Santa Cruz helped boats from Monterey and elsewhere empty the waters of sardines as fast as the loggers could clip the hills of trees, and eventually there was hardly a sardine left to fish for, and like the loggers and millhands who dispersed, having little left to do once most of the forest had been seen to, the fleet of fishing boats tied up near the Wharf dwindled in number before relocating to the friendlier confines of an improved Harbor just down the coast, leaving the Wharf in the main to the customer-friendly uses of shops and restaurants.

My father knew a guy in Santa Cruz whose business was shrimp cocktail, packaging small shelled shrimp in little glass jars with some proprietary red sauce or other, cases and cases of the stuff he sold to grocery stores and delis, and handed out to pals when they showed up. I have a haze of a memory of going along on a visit to the guy one time in the earlier 1950's, Dad working the waif angle maybe to pry another carton of the things out of his pal. I've always wondered where they scraped the little shrimp up from, some nearby spot crawling with the things at the time, I suppose. Dad's pal worked out of a big warehousey sort of place hard by the old Union Ice Company's plant on Chestnut and Laurel streets in Santa Cruz. They don't do that sort of business near Chestnut and Laurel anymore, selling shrimp surrounded by some tomato-based something of a sauce in little glass cylinders. Whoever's selling shrimp, from wherever it comes from now, has another way to get it to market these days. And the Union Ice plant is long gone, the need for a facility to produce the vast quantities of ice demanded by the best practices of fishmongering on the enormous scale supported by all the fleets of boats identical to the "Santa Cruz" melting away years before the structure exploded and burned during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.

The Reported Explosion

2010-09-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Within just a couple of hours, news cobbled together of the the explosion in San Bruno had gained the attention of the entire world. The BBC News RSS headline, linked to an article on its website, stated, inaccurately, Blaze engulfs San Francisco homes and continued, inaccurately, "Dozens of homes have been set ablaze near San Francisco International Airport, after a reported explosion."

Residents and travelers alike have long noted that San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco, but on the shore of San Francisco Bay miles south of the city. If the body of the RSS feed is accurate, and the blaze, caused by a reported explosion, caused dozens of homes near the airport to be engulfed in flames, then its headline is simply wrong, as there are no houses both in San Francisco and near its airport. Complicating matters, the actual homes set ablaze in San Bruno are not only not in San Francisco but not particulary close to the airport, either.

The BBC's RSS feed makes for a crude approximation of the event it points to. "San Francisco" BOOM! would do as well. But it's notable that even garbled word of this local catastrophe was reverberating in London less than three hours after the terrible explosion.

Argument: On History On

2010-09-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer:

That Old Refrain

2010-09-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!

Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.

Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.

For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.

Weedmonth Fall Preview 2010

2010-08-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

This Week in Rick Puchalsky

2010-08-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

[For a much fuller discussion of the removal of Mr. Brent Lindsey from the rolls of the Cato Institute, FWIW, see this post and its ensuing cascade of comments at Crooked Timber]

I find myself at odds with Henry Farrell when he argues this way:

If an actual causal relationship had obtained, one would expect that if one subtracted Brink Lindsey’s influence, one would see, at the least, a marginally appreciable difference in the likelihood of war.

This is the "he was just a raindrop in the gathering stormcloud of war" argument in different clothes. Add or subtract Mr. Lindsey from that cloud and it retains its full force, yes. The influence of that one raindrop eludes measurement. But logically we could turn to any other raindrop of punditry in that cloud and say the same: subtract it and one would see no appreciable difference in war's likelihood. The gathered cloud was a mighty cloud, and made up of more than pundits. Even if Thomas Friedman himself had shut the fuck up, that stormcloud of war was set to break.

And yet somehow, every participating raindrop did share an irreducible responsiblilty for constituting the cloud's being. Brent Lindsey participated in a collective call for war, lending his agency to the project of creating the proper atmosphere for waging the thing like so many others did at the time. Later he admitted he was wrong about that.

I'll pass on the politics of atonement in Mr. Lindsey's case. Like so many others unaware of what he'd said, I was unimpressed at the time by his pro-war pronouncements and by his many recantations later. I don't know what the benchmarks for quality and frequency of expression are when repudiating the wrong a person has previously advocated, but I note that Henry and others seem to agree Mr. Lindsey has met their standards in this.

But what are we to think of anyone who, presented with the greatest, most momentous global challenge of a generation, the choice of whether or not the US should plunge into a vast open-ended foreign military adventure, chose freely and horribly and proactively wrong? What's the half-life of justified opprobrium for Lindsey's irreducible role in promoting the thing in the first place? What's the justified level of suspicion that Mr. Lindsey's thought on any subject is congenitaly faulty thought, inferior when put to the test, given the evidence of his expressed thoughts on going to war?

This Week in Weedmonth

2010-08-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

SUPERWEED!!!1!

via Tristero at Hullabaloo

August is Weedmonth

2010-08-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

Gould Adopts Piano

2010-08-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

Gould suggested by Atrios

Saturday Morning Cartoon Carnival

2010-07-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

Not Contrary to Public Interest, Report Claims

2010-07-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

Top Banks Paid $1.6 Billion in Excessive Bonuses, U.S. Finds

Opening A Bottle Of Wine The New French Way

2010-07-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ah, you'll be pounding away at a jeroboam wrapped in a workboot before long, the way these French Ways go when brought over to America, is what I'm saying.

Death in the Gulf

2010-07-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map
The orange tab labelled "A" is meant to indicate the whole Gulf of Mexico. The green arrow points to the place where the Deepwater Horizon once drilled.

image via NOAA

Keep in mind that all the estimates of probable landfall in the map created by NOAA are based on an assumption that the equivalent of 33,000 barrels of oil a day is gushing out of the ground a mile under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster took place, when it is currently agreed that two or three times that much oil is erupting into the waters every day.