Ho Hum.

A lot of teams would have been well over the $42 million celery cap. I
wonder how that would have played out… Would the Blues have just
dumped Keith Tkachuck and a few other players? Would rich teams have
cut players and put them into a pool to be drafted from by the below
cap teams, and make up the difference in revenue sharing? I don’t
know. Don’t care, neither.

Cardinal pitchers and catchers report the day after tomorrow.

Illini Basketball at Penn State tonight, opening up our only back-to-back
road games of the season. Tonight’s tavern selection is the Esquire.

On the way in to work, I was thinking of how I’d found noteworthy Jose Canseco’s use of the expression, “no ifs or buts,” instead of the more widespread colloquialism, “no ifs, ands, or buts,” but his version might make more sense, in terms of directness from compositional form to idiomatic interpretation. The expression is used to mean something like, “without qualification” or “no excuses for failure will be accepted.” My experience with the phrase usually came by way of my mom’s incessant nagging of my youthful, lazy self, as in: “you’ll have your room cleaned by lunchtime, no ifs, ands or buts about it, Liam Gerard.” My mom uses middle names when she’s angry, and cycles through a list of male names in the family when she’s infuriated. So when I’d really get in trouble, she’d start yelling: “Edward, Marcus, Jason, Napolean (the dog), Liam…” Back to the issue at hand, her use of the NIAoB expression indicated that her demand had to be fulfilled. Canseco’s use of the alternative NIaB expression came in this context:

“You say this, ‘I would never have been a Major League-caliber player without steroids.’ Right,” asks Wallace.

“Well, it’s a true statement. No ifs and buts about it,” says Canseco.

In this sense, he’s not demanding that something happen, but emphasizing the unqualified truth of the preceding sentence (or the sentence to which this phrase is adjoined for syntactians of a certain bent). That the two usages are clearly related is beside the point. Let’s take as the interpretation of this expression: “without qualifications.” The truth of some sentence can be qualified in many ways, the most obvious is using a conditional, like “If I had been born without testosterone-producing testicles, I would never have been a Major League-caliber player without steroids.” Another way is to use “but,” a conjunction operation with some strange polarity effects, as in “I would never have been a Major League-caliber player without steroids, but I overcame my limitations with ten hours of batting practice per day.” Isn’t that a strange sentence? The “possibility” modality of the first conjunct is overpowered by the counterclaim in the second conjunct of this “but” coordinate sentence. In a traditional possible-worlds semantic framework, the sentence says that there exists a possible world in which Jose wouldn’t have been worth beans as a ballplayer without cheating, but this is not such a world, since excessive practice allowed him to become a great hitter for a time. Note that it doesn’t work with “and” as the word coordinating the two sentences.

Thus, Jose Canseco’s expression better reflects English usage patterns of sentence qualification, since “if” and “but,” but not “and” are useful for qualifying the truth of propositions in the discourse, i.e. bullshitting your ass off.

But that’s just what this data suggests.

Anheuser-Busch aired their fantastic advertisement during the Super Bowl, and there’s a bit more to the story. All Anheuser-Busch amusement parks are offering free admission to any serviceman and up to three of his children: that’s Sea World, Busch Gardens, and Sesame Place. (Doesn’t mention Discovery Cove. One of my co-workers went there a while back and had a great time.)

So here’s my nit to pick: I above used serviceman and his to be interpreted as gender-neutral terms. The HeroSalute.com website describes program eligibility in this way: (link may require cookie, just enter state and click “eligibility” at the top) “Any active duty, active reserve, ready reserve service member or National Guardsman is entitled to free admission under the Here’s to the Heroes program.” Doesn’t strike me as a problematic way of saying what you mean. But here’s how it was put in the A-B corporate press release: “Any active duty, active reserve, ready reserve service member or National Guard is entitled to free admission under the program.” It brings snickers to consider how uptight whoever ordered that change must be. And no doubt he considered “National Guarders” or “National Guardsmen or -women” before settling on the unintended interpretation that any national guard is entitled…, i.e. the Finnish National Guard or so forth. Wimpy, PC jokers…

Aside from that bit of silliness, a fine show of appreciation from the company, though.

Kerry has a fantastic post about teacher salaries and the concept of performance based teacher salaries, something Minnesota is considering experimenting with. In her post, she links to this page, which interfaces with a database of Illinois teacher salaries.

I googled about for a Missouri equivalent, with no luck. There aren’t too many teachers I’d be interested in learning the salaries of. Well, there was one English teacher in High School who I didn’t see eye-to-eye with, and later gave my sister a hard time to exact her revenge. Once I snuck out of class to go home to pick up a report I’d left on the kitchen table for a class that I actually cared about. I snuck out by wriggling along the ground in the back of the room, and when I returned to school, I grabbed a pencil from my car’s glove compartment. She looked up to see me at the door, sharpening my pencil–never noticing I’d left. What a buffoon she was.

Quoted in his interview with Mike Wallace on the discredited “60 Minutes” program: (Just Kidding, Mike) “Well, it’s a true statement. No ifs and buts about it,” says Canseco.”

My mom uses the expression “No ifs, ands, or buts about it.” I’ve never heard this variant. Doing some Language-Log-wannabe research: 629 hits for Canseco’s version; 8,990 for my mom. Therefore, I conclude that my mom talks more like everyone else than Jose Canseco does.

I’ll forgive him this one, since I believe he comes from Cuba, a worker’s paradise free from pressures to conform.

I subscribed to Popular Mechanics in college, and looked forward to each month’s issues at least as much as we all awaited each month’s Playboy, a vestigial gift from the previous tenants. It’s sad and frankly infuriating that they had to write this excellent article debunking many of the 9/11 conspiracies.

A blog that showed up in my “recent referrers” list, no doubt coming in through the “next blog” feature had a link to one of the websites debunked. Pathetic. What a joke.

Hat tips in the general direction of Instapundit by way of Austin Bay, who I should have blogrolled by now.

Trying to decide whether I want to actually use this thing:

Here’s a story that tugged my heartstrings in all directions. An 18 year-old in 1984 was hit by a drunk driver, was severely damaged, and somehow recovered her speech last month. She guesses she’s 22 years old now, but is 38. I have no knowledge of neurolinguistics, but I’m sure the case is unprecedented.

Len Pasquarelli wrote a column about how a bunch of NFL teams are switching to the 3-4 offense. The typical defensive scheme in recent memory involves four lineman, three linebackers, and four defensive backs; the 3-4 defense uses three lineman and four linebackers. That gives you more speed, obviously, but less muscle. And lots of flexibility–your pass rush is based on confusing the O-line with linebacker motion instead of overpowering it with your defensive snot blowers. There’s a whole lot to the column. Lots of work obviously went into it.

Contrast: My favorite local radio station fairly recently switched their late night programming to FoxRadio, which is awful. Tonight they had a guy on that was absolutely the worst sports commentary I’d ever witnessed. His name is Bruce Jacobs, and he has no business being paid to talk sports. All his show seemed to consist of was him briefly mentioning some sports-related story and than repeating a few times the line, “This guy’s a joke. This guy’s pathetic.” After he went through the sports news of the day like so, he ran down the outcomes of today’s college basketball games. Just the outcomes: no scores or recaps, just “Illinois beat Wisconsin. Maryland beat Duke.” (Found out later they beat Duke in OT to sweep the season series. Go Terps!) I also recall he told an off-color joke, the punchline of which was that when Madonna opened her legs the NBA fell out. I mean, seriously, who’s entertained by this horsecrap? Maybe that kind of content-free nonsense would fly with certain regional audiences who care less about athletics than they do about harassing opposing teams (he’s a New Yorker), but how is this appealing to a national radio audience? There was literally no analytical contribution requiring a human operator. It would be trivial to set up a finite state transducer that would do his job at least as well: pick names from headlines, say that person is a joke and is pathetic; pick scores from RSS feed, read outcomes. Insert dirty joke. FOX attitude!

Sarah Hey posts on her first trip to the Hobby Lobby, where she was amazed at the variety of junk they have. She also notes something that I do everytime I go there (my girl’s quite a fan of the joint), and that’s that they have a lot of decorative rooster statues available. So I follow her around the store making remarks like, “Whoa, hon’! Look at the size of that cock!”

She bought me a bunch of rooster themed kitchen towels for Christmas. No, it hasn’t gotten old for me. She also foolishly bought a rooster-decorated potholder for her house. Since I was born without shame, without fear of reprisal I’ll point out to her that I’m picking up a pot of boiling water with my cock, and that’s when her mother is visiting.

It’s especially funny to me. My friend Jess (recently married, congrats) and I went shopping for his mom’s christmas present many, many years ago… probably 13 or 14 of them. She had recently changed her kitchen decor from calico cows to roosters, giving us the opportunity to walk into stores in the mall and ask the teenaged girls working there if that had anything shaped like, or depicting, a cock that we could buy for his mother’s christmas present. Good times. Didn’t score us any dates with girls that could drive, though.

He ended up buying her a doormat for the front patio. “C’mon, wipe your feet off on my cock before you go into the house.”

It’ll never get old.

Pitchers and catchers report one week from today to open Spring Training for the 2005 season.

STL Post-Dispatch has two items of note today:

Top Prospects in the Cardinals Farm System

The Foot Report

I had some intense dreams last night. The first one was truly disturbing. Last night, I drank some Rogue Brutal Bitters and a weissbier that had passed its prime, and woke up at 3:00am with a rather vile headache. I’d been dreaming that my girlfriend and I were in this kinda spaceship thing full of waterfalls and reflective walls. And we were shooting ourselves in our heads with futuristic handguns. All it was doing was giving us headaches.

Naturally, I woke up feeling very disturbed and unhappy, and not just because of the very real headache. When I was a little kid, I read a book called Tuck Everlasting that greatly effected me. It’s a book about a family that drinks from a spring under a tree and they end up immortal–their bodies cannot sustain damage and their aging process stopped. It was a sad story about friends outlived and so on, and when I was a kid it bothered me greatly. At the time, I had an intuitive understanding of entropy and that one day, long in the future, the sun would go red, then cold. It was really sad for me that Tuck and his family would eventually end up forever suffocating and freezing, clinging to some shard of the lost Earth. I think that’s what the dream was: we were immortal and everything was lost to us, but we’d built a ship to try to find something new. Still, disturbing and unpleasant. I think the topic was recalled in my because I’d just finished reading Ender’s Game the other day. Part of the story involves moving at relativistic speeds and losing everyone you know to old age and death, while you stay young, and the enormous loss of it all.

Thankfully, the rest of my dreams were much more pleasant, while equally intense. Most were work dreams–dreaming about semantics and logic. One dream involved a strange logic that I’d read a few papers on two years ago or so. I remember little about the dream, and less about the formalism at issue, but it was a polarized logic and involved an operator called “bowtie” and was written like this: . I don’t even remember what problem that logic looked like it would be useful for dealing with, so will have to dig up the paper again.

Update: Well THAT was easy. The author was Albert Visser in Logic, Language, and Computation; the article was called “The Donkey and the Monoid: Dynamic Semantics with Control Elements.” It appears that I’ve learned a few things since I last read it. I wonder if it impresses ol’ Albert that someone’s out there dreaming about a paper he’d wrote, and that person hadn’t seen the paper in two years.

The baby bears traded away their best arm in the bullpen, Kyle Farnsworth, for three prospects from the Detroit Tigers. The Cards tended to hit his stuff well. So Taguchi homered off him.

In other Chicago sports news, the Bears signed four-year Illini starting quarterback Kurt Kittner the other day. Pete mentioned this to me, but I didn’t recognize the significance at the time. Head coach Lovie Smith recently hired Ron Turner to be his offensive coordinator, and nobody could be expected to know his system better than Kurt, which would make him an extremely useful man to carry the clipboard, and imho, a credible backup to Rex Grossman. The Bears are poised to surprise some people next season. I see them taking the NFC North.

Illinois beat Michigan tonight. I expected a rout, got a game. I’m not kidding, Dee Brown had three steals leading to layups in a row. Shortly afterwards, the sweetest behind the back, no-look pass to James Augustine I’d ever seen, followed by a Head to Williams Alley-oop, however you spell that shit.

It were pretty, and my mental faculties aren’t peakin’.

Nobody stepped up to win the game but Weber. This was his game. He had the defense play tight, and he had the offense drive.

Not to make this a total BS post:

My favorite google hits in the past few are …

Boobies and Spatzle

Girl with Discolored Anus

Ugh.

One article and a column in today’s Post-Dispatch about Jose Canseco’s claims that Mark McGwire was ‘roided up during his baseball career. In the article, Tony LaRussa takes a break from his vegetarian ways to chew Canseco a new one. In the column, Jeff Gordon points out that even though Jose Canseco is a has-been and assclown, Mark McGwire’s image will nonetheless be damaged by the allegations. I doubt that. I don’t know either way whether Mark McGwire took steroids during his career, and I don’t care going into the 2005 season. I do know this about McGwire: he came into the big leagues a phenomenal power hitter, and left baseball a phenomenal power hitter. Since his retirement at the end of 2001, he’s been keeping to himself and playing golf, and he’s still a ridiculously strong human being and could probably knock out some souvenir balls in BP if he felt like it. Cardinals fans have already decided for themselves whether they believe McGwire when he says he only used andro or whether they don’t believe him. Jose Canseco’s claims won’t change anybody’s mind on that account.

When I first heard about it though, I was fairly steamed. Thought about mailing my Canseco rookie card to him with a note saying, “I wish you’d never played.”

For some good news: with pitchers and catchers reporting a week from Friday, Albert Pujols’ plantar fasciitis has received another sonic treatment, he feels good, and all involved are hopeful that it’s been finally taken care of.

The sysadmin renamed my office computers the other day and it changed some system policies in ways that displeased me. One I just got rid of was that it wasn’t leaving my name (or last user name) on the login screen. This makes good sense if multiple people use the ‘puter, but in this case, I’m the only one, and if someone else logs in to the machine, I’d want to know if it happened and who it was that did it. And also, when I come into the office in the morning, I want to be able to give the three-finger salute, type in my password and have the desktop come up by the time the monitor turns on from power-saving mode.

So here’s the hack: type in “regedit” (without quotes) into cmd or the “run” command line. Export your registry to a file in case you screw something up royally.

Then search for the string lastuser using the find utility (ctrl-f, then F3 for next)to find the key you’ll need to modify:

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system, change dontdisplaylastuser from 1 to 0 (true to false).

Voila!

It was a great game, both teams played well. It started out looking like a defensive game, where the final score could have ended up 9-6. I was stunned when the Eagles scored on their far-too-slow drive late in the fourth to bring the game within a field goal. I like the Pat’s defense–starting four linebackers gives you so much flexibility, so many ways to confuse the passer.

The rest of the spectacle: Timothy Goddard liveblogged the commercials, all of which can be seen here. I’m in agreement with his picks–my favorites were the AB commercial where the troops receive a welcome home in an airport, the Ameriquest: Cat Killer, and I also liked the FedEx commercial, which wasn’t mentioned in Goddard’s liveblogging. (This last sentence contained an interesting coordination structure, do you see it?) The FedEx commercial was especially effective because it was so early in the game. To recap, it learned from last year that a great superbowl commercial needs ten things–among them talking animals and attractive women. The FedEx commercial stuck with me because I kept seeing those things and recalled their spot.

The pregame was cool, although Alicia Keyes didn’t seem to know all the words to America the Beautiful. I hope those kids enjoyed themselves as much as we did their performance. Michael Douglas isn’t half as cool as his pop. I never watch the halftime shows, but I caught the end of Paul McCartney singing “Hey Jude.” The production company did a great job with crowd effects, although I expect much of it involved the same technology that brings us the yellow first-down line–they had Na Na Na Na painted on the crowd in blue and red. It would be a logistical nightmare to get that many people to hold up colored, reflective cards in such a perfectly choreographed manner. Fine work.

Great Superbowl. Well done, Fox.

Update: Just rewatched the FedEx commercial from the IFilm link above… they make you watch a 2 minute trailer for the Fantastic Four. That movie looks awesome! Sweet!

Weekend plans were screwed up by a nasty gut bug yesterday. Barely made it out of bed. It felt like I had an angry swarm of sea urchins in my innards. If I’d lay perfectly still for five minutes or so, the pain would settle down quite a bit. I tend to roll around a lot in my sleep though, so it was a rough day. Needless to say, I didn’t make it out to work on my crib in the unseasonable 55 degree weather, nor did I make it outside at all. Feeling all better today, and am all ready to cook up some buffalo chicken wings.

Unlike my friends in the Lou, I won’t be rooting for the NFC team, the Philly Eagles. A Patriots win will make Colin happy. And having the Patriots win yet another Super Bowl helps to argue against the NFL’s socialistic economic model in contrast to MLB’s relatively more free market style.

Parity, schmarity.

Slate featured a fine piece about energy the other day. The topic hasn’t been on my mind much since Den Beste hung up his spurs. I always laugh a little when I hear of people making dire predictions about future gasoline costs and other things like that. ($5 bucks a gallon within ten years!) The less artificial drag we put on the economy by restricting the power supply, the faster we’ll come up with ingenious new ways to break the myopic assumptions that would have justified the drag. I see the majority of petroleum use thirty years from now going mostly towards plastics. My guess is that nuclear power will be the big, necessary addition to the grid, although it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some bright engineers and physicists about my age have bolder ideas that will end up doing the job better and safer.

Stlcardinals.com has a nice article about Adam Wainwright, the big righty prospect who came over from Atlanta in the JD Drew/Marrerro deal. Our farm system is in surprisingly good shape at this point, pitching-wise. Wainwright might make it up to the bigs for a few starts this season, or possibly Brad Thompson for some BP work.

Tomorrow night, Mardi Gras, there’s going to be a collegiate semifinal competition for Acappella groups from around the region here on campus. Represented will be three teams from the U. of I., including The Ripchords, No Strings Attached, and Guys n’ Dolls. Amongst the out-of-town competitors will be a team from my Alma Mater, Truman State University, what goes by the clever moniker, True Men.

I’ll have to pass, though. I’d rather work on the outside of my crib in the warm 55 degree weather during the day and spend the evening drinking hurricanes, eating muffalettas, and playing bingo. More bingo cards here, here, here, here, and here.