November 28, 2010
November 24, 2010
Austerity at-a-glance for the Irish
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.
November 14, 2010
November 08, 2010
On What's Drawn From Our Sabers At Baseball-Reference.com
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.
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.
November 07, 2010
What I Won
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.
[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.
November 04, 2010
Subhead Frustrates Understanding
 |
| 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.
November 02, 2010
World News Tonight
For a lucid account of game five of the 2010 world Series, I recommmend the BBC.
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| Giants 11- 7, Giants 9- 0, Rangers 4-2, Giants 4-0, Giants 3-1 |
November 01, 2010
San Francisco Beat
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.
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