I want a New Year Just Like The Old Year That Marred My Dear Old Dad

Merry Christmas

Waits

 

Spacious Thoughts from Anti Records on Vimeo.

 

Great Moments in Baseball

Farewell to Geocities

 
Geocities shuts down today, and xkcd offers an homage.
 

Postponed

A Blast From the Past

Twenty years ago today my friend Steve and I went to the second game of the '89 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. We sat in the right field bleachers, where we had a great view of a guinea fowl being tossed from the stands at Candy Maldonado as he chased down Dave Parker's wicked line drive in the corner. Then a walk to Dave Henderson, and I remember sitting down, almost falling over backwards like a puppet with cut strings, as everyone around me rose to cheer Terry Steinbach's home run leaving the park.

Mike Moore was on that day. What can I say? The Giants hitters were no match for him. The A's brought in Honeycutt and Eckersley to finish off in the ninth. Four hits for the Giants, and I left the park gloomy. Steve didn't rub it in. Too much. A's up two games, Giants not looking very competitive.

We drove back to Santa Cruz, wondering what fate might bring.

First Annual Nobel WTF?! Prize Awarded

I suppose if the Norwoogians can award their Peace Prize to renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger, they can award it to anydamnbody they chose, including a fellow whose chief recommendation is that he is not George Bush. Of course, with two wars of his own going on, it behooves our President to think hard about what he's going to say in his acceptance speech. He's got some 'splainin' to do, for sure.
 

Cassidy

 

 

September 1, 1939

 
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

–W.H. Auden
 

He's gone, and nothin's gonna bring him back (Fourteenth Anniversary Edition)

 

 

Beat don't quit

Babe Ruth corked his bat?!!*

 
A thoughtful and thought-provoking argument(pdf) by Bill James on baseball's Hall of Fame and performance enhancing drugs.

*Yep.
 

Ain't Nobody's

I would offer congratulations were it not for this tentacle gripping my leg.

 
A tribute to the great Jack Vance in the NYT.
 

Jock Drama

Jonathan Sanchez pitched a no-hitter last night for the San Francisco Giants. Ironically enough, he missed out on a perfect game when Juan Uribe, who had been moved to third base as a defensive replacement for Pablo Sandoval, bobbled a relatively easy grounder and allowed the only San Diego runner of the night to reach base. First no-hitter by a Giants pitcher in 33 years.

Bravo.

Geek Drama

A Practical Guide to Free Speech in Santa Cruz

Ali Akbar Khan, April 14, 1922 – June 18, 2009

At Land of Medicine Buddha

 

Koko Taylor, September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009

Bo gone one year today

Swine Pooh Pandemic

[Tip of the Hat to Mr. Folger.]

May Day, May Day!

"There is a grandeur in this view of life…"

Today is Charles Darwin's birthday.

Things have definitely changed since he was born.

camellia

Three Quarters of Football

The MSM is in lock-step, reporting that the Pittsburh Steelers "won" the Super Bowl the other day, beating the Arizona Cardinals by the score of 27-23, just one more instance of the Rust Belt bias of the old line liberal media with its historic East Coast Regionalist anti-American Desert leanings, is what I say. Reports that the Steelers "won" clash with the view of anyone who sees through the MSM's distortion field to what really happened: the Cardinals, pride of the Southwest, covered the 6½ point spread, but does the MSM bother to put that in your headline? Ha! Tell me what the score was while I wave this pile of bills in your face, NYT!

Arizonans hoping for a clearer Cardinals victory, local pride assuaged, the small comfort of being able to say, "O, rest of the nation, you've got your President Hussein Obamination, sure our guy took a pounding there, but we've got THE SUPERBOWL TROPHY BITCHESZZZZ!!!!11!!," saw those hopes evaporate, yes.

And, thirdly, Evangelicals eager to see their man Kurt Warner at the end of the game pointing a finger up to indicate to whom by the grace of which and all, instead watched devout Kurt Warner get totally punked by Touchdown Jesus. That pass, the one Warner threw, the one run back the entire length of the field for a Pittsburgh touchdown? A lesson to every Evangelical, and I'm pretty sure the last time any of them ever prays directly to Touchdown Jesus to intervene in Kurt Warner's life, if they knows what's good for him, is all I'm saying.

McGoohan

Patrick McGoohan died yesterday at the age of 80. He lived a decent length of a life, during which he created one of the true classics in the recorded history of television, the 17-part British series The Prisoner, which will earn attention for as long as people continue to watch whatever television has made of things down the years.

The Prisoner is a marvel of its time, a comedy of manners, of very strict, elaborately concieved manners aimed at bringing to conformity the contrary will of the character called Number 6, played by McGoohan himself. "I am not a number, I am a free man!" he proclaims over and over, and this is all very Howard Roark of him, standing against all, refusing to acquiesce, but finding himself detained nevertheless in a ludicrous yet inescapable seaside village where in each episode implacable, replaceable, number 2 leads the effort to break him.

Recently AMC made all the episodes of the Prisoner available for viewing on their website.

Happy New Year, it says here. . .

via Quick Study