A Piper Cub Lands in Philistia

The baseball season is hitting its stride. Atlanta has a team with 14 straight division titles, and some very interesting developments in its team this year, including a start to the season that was an exact opposite of recent years (the starting rotation stunk, the bullpen was solid, and the offense was on fire).

The NHL playoffs are underway. Granted, the Thrashers just missed them, but I’m still interested, especially while the Flyers are in them.

The NBA playoffs are underway. Granted, Atlanta doesn’t even have a pro basketball team, but I’m still interested, especially while the Lakers are still around to root against.

So what has been the primary (and, at times, only — and they’re proud of it) topic on sports radio in Atlanta for the last month?

The NFL draft.

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Sorry, I fell asleep and my face hit the keyboard.

Even on television, the NFL stupidity is all around. I had lunch in a restaurant on Friday that had lots of TVs in it, most tuned to sports stations. What was on ESPN? An hour-long re-run of NFL players playing Madden Football (the video game) at Super Bowl XL. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing entertainment, multi-millionaire athletes sitting on their glutes, just like you.

Was out at lunch again today in another restaurant with a few TVs on. The Braves were about 30 minutes into their game, but the only TV tuned to sports was on the coverage of the NFL draft, day 2. They were — quite literally — on the 149th pick when I finally got a waiter to change the channel to something relevant.

IT’S APRIL, YOU MORONS !!!!

As he did for the Shepherd’s Conference last month, Tim Challies is live-blogging the Together for the Gospel conference this month.? Apparently, age is creeping up on him, as he’s only averaging 31 billion words-per-minute this time.

I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet, but the whole coverage starts here.

Devil Rays prospect Delmon Young didn’t like a third strike call yesterday in his AAA game, so he just stood there in the batters’ box. The ump told him to move on. He stood there for a while still and so the ump tossed him from the game as Young was (finally) walking away from the plate. In response, Young threw his bat at the umpire !!

As part of his “apology” released through his agent’s office (because why would he want to take any actual responsibility himself?), Young claims:

Yeah, right. He threw the bat in the direction of the plate from 15-20 feet away, and it just coincidentally hit the ump. I’m actually kind of surprised that he didn’t somehow try to blame the ump. Then again, maybe he did, but even a sports agent knows when something goes too far.

Proving that Mark Twain was right and even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Bud Selig said something today that actually made sense (for once):

This in relation to the fact that MLB is not planning any celebration for Steroid Boy if and when he tops Babe Ruth’s mark of 714 home runs.

Today is National Pretzel Day. As a Philly boy, I felt obliged to share that.

When we need to receive large files, we instruct the customer to place them on an FTP site, rather than attaching them to an email. This reduces the load on the mail infrastructure and also allows the recipient to win the lottery (or get hit by a bus) without the rest of his/her team not having access to the file. So we had a situation like that yesterday, and I sent the FTP instructions to the customer. This is what I found in my mail today:

Why Is the Foul Pole Fair?
(Or, Answers to the Baseball Questions Your Dad Hoped You Wouldn’t Ask)
Vince Staten

I picked this book up at a clearance/used bookstore for $3. Having read it, I think I would’ve paid full price. (But don’t tell the store owner.)

At first blush, it looks like a book that would appeal to a baseball fan, like myself. And one would (somewhat, but not entirely) surmise that it is full of trivia. But this book is largely not about the game, but moreso about the things that surround the game.

In the book, Staten chronicles a Reds game that he and his college-age son attended, but that game is mostly a framework around which the book is built. The book is mostly about the origins/evolution of everything around the game. Staten even spends 3 pages on the origin of the turn-stile (after noting his trip through one at the ballpark) — and makes it interesting! I don’t even particularly like history, and I still found this book fascinating.

Staten covers the history of the tools of the game — ball, bat, glove, uniform, catcher’s equipment. He also describes the evolution of baseball cards, vendors (both stationary and those that roam the stands), and press coverage — just to name a few of his topics. He even spends a bit of time on queueing theory, a passage the Reds may want to read, as they apparently do it wrong when you pick up tickets at will call.

Several of the passages also recall the days of his youth — either as he played the game or the pro stars that he admired. This part especially appealed to me, as one of many curmudgeons out there that feel that pro sports have changed a lot — and not for the better — “since I was a kid”.

Baseball fans and history buffs will definitely enjoy this book, but I think many others would, too. I wouldn’t recommend it to David Wayne, but he’s one of only a few.

By the way, the answer to the titular question is found on page 223 — the foul pole is on the foul line, which is actually fair. Why the foul line is fair is left as an exercise for the reader.

What a surprise — Micro$oft has messed something up again.

I use RSS Bandit for my feed reader. It’s a pretty cool tool, and it’s open source.

Suddenly, one of the feeds to which I subscribe quit working. It’s from a blog hosted at Blogger (or BlogSpot, depending on how you hold your mouth). It turns out that if the author uses Micro$oft Word and then copy-n-pastes the text into their post, it introduces Micro$oft Word tags into the entry and invalidates the XML (and it’s off that XML that the feed for any BlogSpot blog is produced). See this link for further details.

It appears that the RSS readers that are more strict about getting valid XML (of which RSS Bandit is one) quit reading the feed altogether if the XML is invalid.

If you are a BlogSpot author and want to use Word to compose your posts anyway, there’s a tool that will let you use it without introducing all the bogus junk. Even if your feed is currently invalid, using this tool will eventually create a valid feed (as soon as you’ve created enough new posts to make the invalid stuff roll off the feed — usually that’s 15 posts).

Philips has developed a technology to prevent you from changing channels when a commercial come on. But …

And if you believe that …

A Penitent Blogger draws an interesting parallel between Mary Magdalene on Resurrection morning and our own lives. It reminds me of a part of the Caedmon’s Call song, “This World”: