Not to telegraph the punch too much but tomorrow at this time I'll hardly be paying any attention to our Boyz at all.
Yup. That's what Harry Frazee traded the Bambino for.
Now at 90+ minutes that's a little bit long even for a World Series game where they'll dust the plate after every pitch so that everyone gets their TV time so in addition to volunteers tonight I'm in the market for some kind of short and snappy YouTube vignette to symbolize the BoSox. You know, something like this-
The story behind the Rally Squirrel is this-
Rally Squirrel is the name given to an American gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) which appeared on the field and ran across home plate at Busch Stadium during a 2011 National League Division Series (NLDS) Major League Baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals on October 5, 2011. The squirrel captured American media attention, and was adopted as an unofficial mascot by the Cardinals and the populace of St. Louis. The Cardinals would go on to win the 2011 World Series.
On October 4, a gray squirrel appeared in the outfield during Game 3 of the Phillies–Cardinals National League Division Series, causing an interruption in play.
During the fifth inning of Game 4 on October 5, a squirrel again appeared on the field. Play was not interrupted, but the squirrel caused considerable confusion, running across home plate as Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt was delivering a pitch to Skip Schumaker. The squirrel then jumped into the stands. Umpire Ángel Hernández called the pitch a ball; Oswalt and Philadelphia manager Charlie Manuel argued, unsuccessfully, that Oswalt had been distracted by the squirrel and that "no pitch" should be called. Manuel later avowed that, if he had a firearm, he would have shot the obstreperous rodent. Some commentators speculated that the October 4 and October 5 squirrels were the same animal, but this was not proven.
Now I'll not be rooting for the Sox much I think, though I really have nothing against them except that the game they play is not Baseball but some kind of weenie contest where Pitchers hide in the dugout instead of standing at the plate and their at bats are given to overpaid has beens who are no longer good enough to take the field. Connecticut has always been a battleground between those who hate the Yankees with the burning white hot passion of a thousand suns and people who like their Baseball easy and are willing to let someone else bankroll it. Of course there is no arguing with the results- 25% of all Championships in the last hundred years or so.
The Cardinal program is kind of like the Senior League version of that.
So volunteers. Did I mention them?
Tomorrow and Thursday your guests look like this-
Jon hosts-
* Wednesday Charles Krauthammer
* Thursday Chiwetel Ejiofor
Stephen has-
* Wednesday Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff
* Thursday Stephen Fry
C'mon. Wednesday you have someone to hate and (depending how left you are and your PBS tote doesn't get the respect it once did in my neighborhood) two people to love.
You can do something with that. I know you can.
Tonight we have Malcolm Gladwell who'll be whoring his latest, David and Goliath. "I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is, I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap". His critics are not so charitable-
Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said that Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule." Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach. Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, Pinker sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning," while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value [sic] Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."
A. Scott Berg will undoubtedly be talking about
Woodrow Wilson in connection with his latest project. Wilson's association with "Progressivism" is one of the reasons I've never embraced that political label for my position, preferring "Liberal", "Leftist", or
Anarcho-Syndicalist.
The truth is I'm a "centrist" and a "patriot" as those terms were generally understood after the Second World War. I have not changed.