I had a call this morning from someone asking if I would like to answer some public opinion questions, and since I’ve got enough shit to do that I don’t feel the need to have a prolonged telephone conversation with a stranger, I said that I wouldn’t be too interested in that.

The headline from this story is “Poll Finds Americans Don’t Mind Jury Duty.”

This was obviously a poll of people who don’t mind having prolonged telephone conversations with strangers. The writer of the ABCNews article did enough research to unearth the fact that in spite of the poll’s findings, “courts report low response rates for people called to jury duty.” What a mystery.

As predicted on Saturday, Rick Ankiel was promoted to the AA Smokies yesterday, according to this article.

Rick Ankiel’s numbers on the Class A leg of his rehab assignment: “In three games for Palm Beach, Ankiel was 0-1 with a 2.08 ERA in 8 2/3 innings. He had 11 strikeouts, no walks, and surrendered just five hits.” (Quotation from article)

Not too shabby. I’m telling you, he’s gonna come up to the big leagues again next month, and he’s gonna have an impact.

How can I get rid of the blogger ads at the top like all the cool kids? Jeff and some other people have this “blogger bar” up there, but I must not have made it through the velvet rope. Lessee if a template tweak does the trick.

Oh yeah, apparently Jim Treacher invented another character, Iraqwarwrong. Fairly funny, but Puce himself is impossible to top.

Update: 2 minutes later… Awesome!!!

One of the regular features over at Language Log is the collection of “Eggcorns,” when a common phrase has a word replaced with another word, while preserving somewhat the way the phrase sounds. “Eggcorn” can sound like acorn and so forth. As I write this, two of the most recent posts there are about eggcorns, the first “binding my time” for biding my time and the other addressing the controversy over “butt naked,” or naked to the butt, presumably; versus “buck naked,” or naked as a deer in the woods, or possibly as a young Indian was depicted in old media, or as a variation of the word “buttocks.” I noticed one (almost certainly not for the first time) that’s achieved widespread use, to the point that it’s a trademarked eggcorn, Duck Tape. The universal fix-it-all, duct tape is called duck tape by a lot of people. That’s almost always how I’ve heard it pronounced. The [t] onset of the second word, tape, makes it likely that the [t] coda on duct is left unreleased in natural speech in all but the most careful of pronunciations. The existence of the brand name renders the google technique suspect, but for what it’s worth, google returns 32,600 webpages mentioning the phrase “duck tape” (at my security settings) and 422,000 for “duct tape.” Most interesting, duct tape is absolutely worthless at doing any duct work. It’ll dry up and fall off, leaving a mess behind. Not that I’ve ever made that mistake.

Heard about this one on Rush Limbaugh when I was out paying my sewer bill. It’s about John Kerry embarassing his staffers by trying to pretend to be a regular Joe. In his defense, pheasant hunting is pretty popular around here. I know a guy who raises pheasants and sells them to people for hunts. He says business is very good, with a great profit margin.

Another one from the American Spectator is this column defending Alan Keyes’ candidacy for the Illinois senate seat being vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. Not exactly a thorough defense, but his point that doing all the mudslinging for the other guys is stupid is right-on. Is done with sentence.

Here’s an article suggesting Pope John Paul II, he of the triumverate with Ronny and Maggie who broke the Soviets, is nearing his death, long suffering from Parkinson’s disease and arthritis. The source of this claim is Cardinal Godfried Daneels (Olivaw?) one of those on the short-list of papal candidates. As this article, which provides a pretty good profile of Daneels (Olivaw?), points out, it’s not the first time the Cardinal has jumped the gun in anticipating his chance to assume the big hat. (I saw a standup comedian once on Dr. Katz who made a joke about how the Catholic hierarchy seems to be related to hat size. He inductively reasoned that God wears a sombrero.)

This article is a little scary. It doesn’t seem right that American citizens can move to a foreign country and then continue to vote for American leaders whose policies they feel will best affect their adopted country. Doesn’t seem right at all. Obviously, military members deployed overseas, citizens on extended business or pleasure trips, and students studying abroad should be allowed to vote, because they’ll be coming home eventually. But people that don’t like this country enough that they’d leave it should give up their say in how we who stay behind do our thing. Too bad there’s no reasonable way to implement that, since we can’t expect our customs and immigration agents to be telepaths. Bobby Fischer abandoned his citizenship, so he doesn’t get to vote. I understand the reasons many people emigrate from the US aren’t because they dislike the place, especially in the case of Israelis. I’d like to go live in Australia for a while myself. But the article makes all the expatriate voters motives seem less-than-admirable, and not in the intent of the founders for sure. Maybe we should go back to only landowners (and residents on them) being allowed to vote. I’d be safe, screw you renters.

And finally, here’s Bernie Micklasz’ newest column, in which he contrasts the Cardinals’ team attitude with the Cubs. The Cubs need wins, but Sosa refuses to give up the cleanup spot, in spite of the fact that he’s stinking up the league, and everyone knows it, meanwhile Mark Prior can’t stop fantisizing about facing the Cards in the NLCS, even on game days when he ought to be focusing on more important things. Then you have the Cards, where Scott Rolen approached La Russa to be moved out of the cleanup spot to make room for newly acquired Larry Walker, in spite of his monster season that if not for the other candidates on the same team splitting votes is assured winning the MVP finishing the season in the 4-spot; not to mention Renteria moving from an RBI position to hitting 2nd.

I missed this Mark Steyn column from a few months back. It’s a discussion of how Germany has been subsidizing the costs of the EU for the rest of the continent, and includes the ironic figure that Germany has spent as much on the EU as the Versailles treaty ending WWI charged her in war reparations, inflation notwithstanding. This is much like the way the US paid for the military deterrence that kept the Soviets out of Europe during the Cold War.

But that is coming to and end, as the US is announcing plans to withdraw 100,000 troops from Germany, more than half of the 175,000 we have stationed at bases throughout the country. The economic consequences will be severe for the Germans, and thus for all of Europe. Especially since it might mean the Europeans will be forced to field credible militaries again. Sure, the French have nukes, but the whole point of having them is not having to use them. There may be no aggressive nation-states anywhere within marching distance to Europe today, but the world is not a safe place, by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s a shame, Germany is a great place, and the soldiers who I’ve spoken about being deployed there uniformly enjoyed living there.

Rick Ankiel had his third start against the Vero Beach Dodgers today. I can’t find a boxscore, and the game is in the fifth inning with the Cardinals up 4-2. It looks like another good start for Ankiel, the first three innings were scoreless, and the Dodgers only have two hits so far in the game. I’m sure there’ll be a writeup later. The journalists down there in Florida might have more important things to be writing about though.

Details: Here’s the article, excerpt:

Ankiel worked 3.2 innings allowing two unearned runs on two hits with no walks and four strikeouts in a 54-pitch no decision. The left-hander threw 10 of 14 first pitch strikes and retired the first nine batters he faced, throwing 36 strikes. His top speed reached 93 MPH, averaged 91 MPH and continued to showcase his 12-6 curveball ranging from 68-74 MPH.

Another solid start, showing control and strength. That’s three A-ball starts. I expect he’ll be promoted to our AA affiliate today or tomorrow, where he’d make his next start against the Greenville Braves either Thursday or Friday. Unless they start transitioning him into a relief pitcher right away and have him work in that role in Palm Beach first.

My mom, who had four kids; and my brother and sister, both recently become first-time parents, might find it interesting what mustard is called in Carrier, a language of the Athabaskan family, as noted by Bill Poser at LanguageLog.

My mom still can’t eat mustard.

My new roomie paid her rent yesterday, so I had enough money to fix up the main bathroom a bit. When my last roommates moved out, I did some late-night celebratory demolition, tearing out part of the ceiling in there, the walls making up a small and completely useless closet in there, ripping the sink and housing cabinet, and tearing down parts of the walls. I bought some concrete wonderboard to lay a strong enough subfloor to carry ceramic tiles without flexing and letting ‘em crack.

Then I did nothing. The ceiling and walls are still partially torn down and there’s no sink in there. Just a big room with a bathtub/shower, a toilet, a sink drainpipe sticking out of the floor with a towel stuffed down it, and three sheets of concrete board leaning against the wall. I got a whole ‘nother bathroom in my bedroom and only use that room for showering off. Not much necessity to get it done, and I had other things to spend my money on. But that’s changed now, thank goodness.

So I bought a really nice pedastal sink made of vitreous china and installed it. Looks real sharp and, although the basin is very big, gives the effect of not taking up too much room like the old cabinet-borne sink did. Alas, the hot water line doesn’t reach it, so it’ll not be complete until tomorrow or later tonight, whenever I can get to a store selling water lines. And I still need to caulk it to the wall and floor. There would be a picture, but my monster batteries finally croaked after more than two years of use.

Tonight, I’m grilling up some steaks over at my woman’s for her roommate and family. They’ve been marinating in this Omaha steak recipe’s sauce overnight and should be delish. Then she’s taking me on a date: I get to drink beer and take batting practice on her dime. Life is good.

Here’s some pictures of me playing around with my nephew, to illustrate:One Two Three.

My brother sent out some gi-farking-gantic pictures the other day of his new baby. He figured me and my pops have broadband connections and big mailboxes so he’d send ‘em our way. Unfortunately, his email service foolishly zips all attachments. Since the pics he sent were in Jpeg format, and thus compressed lossily, zipping ‘em did nothing. But it did get in the way of my viewing them right away, since his email company didn’t tag on any .zip extensions.

Anyways, I got the pictures, shrunk ‘em with Photoshop and have uploaded ‘em. View here.

I neglected to include one picture. My niece will be a teenager someday long, long off. She hardly needs a picture of her on a scale haunting her.

Do you see disaster or potential?

The preview for tonight’s Cards at Marlins game mentions that we’ll be adding a pitcher to the roster.

It’s Jason Simontacchi. His numbers are comparable to Alan Benes, who I’d prefer to bring up. Simo-man has proven stamina though, which may come in handy with the bullpen’s 7 2/3 shutout innings last night, and Suppan on the mound, who has the fewest IP/GS in the rotation with 6.10, and yes I calculated that myself. For those curious, the other pitchers IP/GS stats: Matty Mo – 6.48; Chris Carpenter – 6.55; Jason Marquis – 6.28; Woody Williams – 6.15 innings pitched per game. I could use those numbers to figure an average ER/S. The formula would be something like: ERA/9 * IP/GS * (9-IP/GS)* (Bullpen’s aggregate ERA/9). The formula assumes that the bullpen is uniformly stingy, a false assumption since middle relief can be expected to give up the most runs, so the formula would give inflated performance metrics for pitchers who routinely leave games early and punish starters who don’t hand the ball off until the closer takes the mound. Therefore, the formula is useless. A better way would be to average the totals runs allowed in each game that the pitcher in question started. Duh! But seriously, IP/GS is a stat ESPN should start calculating.

One more stat-geek thing to point out. Jason Marquis has our lowest ERA among starters with 3.58 and also the highest BA, with a hair-raising .300!

Update, 10:35pm: Forget that statistics crap, Suppan is da man!

Amritas gives a brief etymology of the word jungle, from Sanskrit for “desert, wasteland.” One of my professors here is a Sanskrit scholar and teaches the classes in it. I’ve considered auditing it, if only for the satisfaction of one-upping my friends in Classics. Amritas also has a post poking fun at Bruce Springsteen and continuing on his theme of trivialities masquerading as authenticity.

For a long time, he was the only linguist blogger I knew of, aside from that one fellow, (who in this post claims that Israel’s disruption of Hussein’s nuke program by destroying the Osirak reactor, succeeded in “setting-off Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.) But I recently found out about a whole bunch more that are now listed in the sidebar. Expanding my reading list to extend to things that will hopefully increase my interest in that which I have set out to do.

Dean Esmay has a worthwhile and thoughtprovoking article written about Sex, Porn, and the Relationship of Exposure to the Aforeunmentionables and Violence that is worth reading. Especially the comments. And he’s got some great pictures linked for you to look at when you get home. I agree with the contrary position taken by Wild Monk in the comments (not at his own page, that I noticed), that the “porn” Dean links is obviously tasteful and so not a useful jumping off point for a realistic discussion of the damage potential pornography has for the way young men and women view sexual relations and the opposite sex as human beings of worth and potential. I’ve seen some awful, awful stuff and consequently have no interest in porn or even your typical rap video (and still see it sometimes when I’m deleting spam). Anyone who thinks porn simulating incestual rape or the sort of ding-dong-face-slapping crap that’s out there is super-sexy and a desirable way to culminate lustily intertwining with your beloved will be woefully incapable of carrying out a healthy relationship with a person they consider an equal, who is to be supported and encouraged in all her ambitions.

I guess it all turned sour when Hustler started filling their magazine with pictures of naked women going to the bathroom in inappropriate places. That sure confused me.

But those are some really nice pictures he linked.

And yes, he called the hangdown, a “pee pee.”

In the likely case you don’t regularly read all the websites I do, you might have missed the problems Operation Give has encountered with an international shipping company located in Atlanta Georgia, Atlas Lines. To make a long story short, they pocketed $30,000 dollars from a non-profit charity started by Chief Wiggles, an intelligence officer in the Utah National Guard, that distributes toys and personal hygiene kits to impoverished children in Iraq. And now they’ve fled their offices. Talk about scumbags.

Yesterday, I skipped work to do chores around the house. I’m technically not supposed to work now, my contract ended on Saturday and I’m unemployed for a few weeks. (But I’ll be busy finishing up my paper on modelling cataphors; and also working on some phonetics research, which will involve more programming and writing flash for perception study tools than writing a paper). But there’s a lot of video work to do, since two of the classes in the department I’m working for as my second job are continuing through the break. It’s cool, they paid me well enough during the contract period that I’m not about to complain.

But anyways, I took yesterday off so I could clean out my gutters, mow the lawn, work on my new flowerbed (I’ll take a picture once it starts growing in… basically I’ve got about three or four annual flowering species and these very cool looking ornamental red peppers, and I kept the purple grasses. My old flowerbed is pictured here.) Also cleaned up around my house a bit, since I’ve got a roommate moving in. So I had just finished cutting the lawn, and had run into a really strong spiderweb while cutting underneath some branches hanging over the fence from the neighbors yard. My roommate came up to me and said something along the lines of, “Holy Shit! You’ve got a big f@*cking spider in your hair!” And looking up, I surely did. Right there on the front of my head was a very large spider. I removed it and put it back in the tree where it’d unfortunately snared me. The spider was a micrathena, a beautiful specimen with a white, black, and yellow speckled shell. I don’t believe they possess any venom dangerous to man. And I’d rather have her around than the ‘squitors, who like to hang out in the shade under the branches where I found her. Feast on, little beauty!

This post inspired by Jeff’s girlish arachnophobia.

Just kidding about that girlish bit, Jeff… and, uh, girls.

Caleb shot me an email a few days ago asking me what happened to Wayne Hagin. Wayne is the KMOX/Cardinals Network play-by-play man who took over after Jack Buck’s passing. He hadn’t been doing the calling over the weekend. Turns out he has some throat problems, damaged blood vessels in his throat that could turn into non-cancerous polyps. The specialist suspects it’s an allergies related problem involving his body’s transition to the wet St. Louis air. I’m sure he’ll pull through and get back to one of the best jobs imaginable in no time.

If we can sweep florida and win the first v atlanta, or take 2/3 and sweep atlanta, we’ll be double over .500 with a record of 76-38 or 78-39, respective of scenario. Currently Arizona is double below with a 35-78 record. KC and Seattle have shots at sharing the dubious honor with records of 39-71 and 41-70 respectively.

Not pointing that out to be meanspirited, but sometimes when things are going real bad, it’s a good idea to throw your hat in the air and scream, “Yeeee-haaaaw!”

Rick Ankiel had his second rehab start on Saturday, I was out of town so I’m mentioning it late… Here’s the scoop:

Ankiel (0-1) took the loss after hurling three innings allowing two singles accounting for one run, a stolen base while striking out four. The left-hander threw 49 pitches with 33 coming via strikes. Ankiel threw eight first pitch strikes out of 11 batters and was hitting 88-92 MPH with his fastball, 69-73 on 13 curveballs and two change-ups registering at 79 and 81.

In the top of the first inning, Alex Requena hit a flare to centerfield on a 2-2 fastball, stole second base and was driven home as Delwyn Young connected on a hit-and-run up the middle. Ankiel retired the next eight consecutive batters as no balls were hit solid and four strikeouts were recorded with two down looking.

Sounds like his control and arm strength are good. Another promising start. I’m guessing his next will be Friday.

I think this is a great and long-overdue research project. The website has lots of cool videos to it. It’s a shame I had to hear about it from Dave Barry.