How about this for a mega-trade? Boston sends Byun-Hyung Kim to the Rockies, get a minor league reliever from the Cardinals, and the Cardinals get Larry Walker from Colorado.

That’s essentially what went down, as the Rockies traded Chris Narveson (who they got from the Cardinals in a waiver deal for Walker late last season) and Charles Johnson, a ridiculously overpaid catcher, to the Red Sox for Kim.

Jeff sent me a link to this t-shirt website, which I found thoroughly amusing. There’s a possibility of my ordering a few. My favorites are “The Second Amendment” and “My other shirt has its collar up.”

That’s what Jeff and I discussed today, after I got home from work and then boiled up some macaroni and cheese, only to discover that my tub of Country Crock expired this past November.

LiamomaiL: finally lunch
LiamomaiL: not too shabby
LiamomaiL: I made mac n’ cheese
LiamomaiL: didn’t have no butter
RngofPower: ive done that befo
RngofPower: once i used a tad of crisco
LiamomaiL: used olive oil
RngofPower: once i didn’t have milk so i used water and a bit of cornstarch for a thickening agent
LiamomaiL: nick v once didn’t have either milk or butter
LiamomaiL: he used mayonnaise
RngofPower: fucking shit

My recipe, substituting olive oil for butter, turned out pretty tasty too. As tasty as powdered cheese on flavorless noodles can be expected to be. Nick’s mayo for cheese and milk recipe was edible, although I’ve never had the urge to give it a try.

Not really all that tense, though. Rick Ankiel has to be passed through waivers today as we send him down to the minor leagues. That means that every other MLB team has the opportunity to pick up his contract and bring him to their team, leaving the Cardinals with nothing but eleven wins to show for years of agony.

Of course, anyone who picks up Ankiel almost certainly won’t get a pitcher, and could make a formidable enemy of his agent, Scott Boras.

The Birdwatch is by far the best Cardinals blog around. It’s a group blog, so during the season I expect a wealth of different views on how players are performing and the season progresses. If you’re a Cardinals fan, you should read it every day. For me, it’s them, then the Official Site, then the Post-Dispatch.

I’m stealing two links from them for this post: one uplifting, one that would have brought me to tears, had the ducts required not atrophied during puberty.

Diamond Mind has published their 2005 Projected Standings. For those who don’t know, there’s group of people who call themselves Sabermetricians who are knowable by their pursuit of new baseball knowledge. The folks at DM run 100 computer simulations of the season to project how the teams will do. Their methodology is given in the article linked, I think it’s about as good as you can do, given the data you have. Their simulations predict the Cards going 103-59 with the Cubs 20 games back. (That’s with a full year of production from Larry Walker, adjusted for age.)

Another link is from an NPR story about the book Tony La Russa collaborated on, “Three Nights in August.” The destination of that link has an excerpt from the book about Darryl Kile’s final days. It was difficult for me to read. The writing is (shall we say?) rococo, but the facts of the situation cut my heart out, uncleanly.

And I will never, ever forgive Beau Duran, who I first posted on here. If I retire to the same home in Arizona as him, I swear to God above he will never step within cane lashing distance of me without taking damage.

The Cardinals are trading LOOGY Mike Myers back to the Boston Red Sox. No word yet as to who we’ll be getting in return.

It looks to my like Mike Myers was showing a little attitude and the Cards were either going to cut him or send him away for a sack of beans. We’ll probably pick up a minor leaguer or even just draft picks.

I still expect we’ll carry three lefties. Sweet Baby Ray King, Randy Flores, and Bill Pulsipher.

Blogger is royally screwed today. I’ve been trying to publish this post for four hours. (Off and on.)

Update: We got two minor leaguers from Boston, not surprisingly, neither listed in John Sickels’ overview of their top 20 prospects. One is the future Mike Myers, Kevin Ool, a 24 year old lefty relief specialist; the other is Carlos de la Cruz, a 20 year old switch hitting outfielder with power and a Roger Cedeno-like BB:K ratio (21:55 in 237 AB at class A in 2004). Good job, Walt! Cruz is only going to get better and Ool has a great name for a potential LOOGY.

Also noticed that Cruz is listed at only 160 lbs. Only going to get quite a bit better…

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The Washington Times has an article about the Minutemen vigil, and how the Columbian Salvadoran MS-13 gang intends to disrupt the vigil and target the volunteers. The purpose of the Minutemen project was to raise awareness of how great a threat the porous southern border is. As James Gilchrist, the organizer of the project, refers to the gang members, the “bunch of punks” played directly into their hands already.

Unfortunately, it looks to be a quite dangerous situation. The Minutemen volunteers can expect harassment by foolish protesters, in whose numbers the gangmembers could easily hide.

Update: Chris set me straight on the origin of MS-13. Interesting reading here.

Cleaning off my desktop at work, I ran across this movie. That sort of humor is right up my alley.

Want to know what kind of dork I am? I rented Zelda: Wind Waker (speaking of wind) over Spring Break. It’s a gorgeous game, which I used to own until foolishly lending it to someone I haven’t seen since. Just renting the game isn’t very dorky, but when I was doing a side mission, I saw something I hadn’t seen before–something that made me laugh out loud, and then redo it while recording with the VCR. And now, I share it with you. Let me set the scene: Link works for a merchant in the town by setting up trade agreements with traveling merchants around the world. The merchant mentions to him that someone is messing with his safe at night, and how happy he’d be if he knew who that someone is. There’s a creepy girl who works for him, and acts strangely at night. So I sneak around after her to see what she’s up to. In this video clip, you see what happens when she hears me sneaking around behind her, and Link’s clever deception to allay her concerns.

GLORIOUS!!!!

Luther Head had his A game. Illinois tried to rely on threes too much. AZ made us look silly in the paint. Our free shooting was horrific.

We won nonetheless.

If you can’t shoot, rebound. If you can’t shoot or rebound, steal. Else, be really, really lucky.

I dug how we defended the interior late, and forced them into perimeter shots.

Jack Ingram has excellent hands. He grabs everything loose that’s in wingspan.

ESPN Recap

Update: Big Ten Wonk has a typically excellent retelling of last night’s greatest game ever.

Spring Break sure went by fast. Once again, the basketball games have been nothing short of exceptional. Talk about an amazing showing by the “Down” Big Ten: three teams in the Elite Eight. On Thursday, I celebrated quite a bit too extensively. It wasn’t until around 6 or so Friday evening that my saliva stopped tasting like scotch. Very good scotch, admittedly, but a man can only take so much. I learned my lesson and will take it quite a bit easier tonight, when Illinois takes on Arizona. Louisville and W. VA get going in a few minutes. I picked Louisville to win. (Over Texas Tech.)

My apologies for any odd behavior coming out of this page over the past few days.

The NCAA Men’s basketball tournament resumes tonight. Illinois tips off against UWM at 6:27. Everyone says UWM doesn’t stand a chance, and Big Ten Wonk agrees:

Over the course of their two tournament wins, a not terribly good-shooting UWM team has ridden suddenly hot outside shooting (.511, a combined 23-of-45 on threes) and, of course, reaped the benefits of the many turnovers they’ve forced (over 20 a game the first two rounds). Take away either factor and they’ll lose. Take away both and they’ll lose badly….

That guy is one hell of a writer. My daily reading cycle will miss his stuff in the offseason.

Mark Tupper says it’s cold and dark in that thar cave, the All-State arena in Rosemont, IL where the Chicago Regional Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight games will be held. Sounds like a good place to hunt Panthers… and other Wildcats. (I picked Arizona to upset the OK State. Also Kentucky to upset Duke on Sunday. My bracket is hopeless…)

I’m stoked.

I heard about Jeff Weise’s shooting spree in Minnesota from the radio the other night, and the next day found out that he was some sort of Neo-Nazi from this article. He associated himself with a group called the Libertarian National Socialist Green party, whose internet forums he’d post on under the name Todesangel.

Here’s a paragraph from the article, excerpting from one of his posts:

“When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi’s were (are) evil and that Hitler was a very evil man, ect,” wrote Todesengel, in a quote not corrected for spelling and grammar. “Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich adressed, I began to see how much of a lie had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better.”

If the Nazis didn’t like your racial makeup or the job you worked, they would ship you off to a slave camp and work you until you died. Then they’d shave your hair off and stuff pillows with it. Then they’d skin you to make lampshades. Then they’d burn or bury the rest en masse. The Nazis were evil, and so was Jeff Weise–both for his beliefs and his murderous, suicidal rampage.

And another thing… where do people get off referring to Nazis as “extreme rightwing.” I’ve never understood that. I first learned political theory in a sophomore year history course in high school. The teacher was Tip-Toe Joe and he explained the political spectrum as it’s commonly known, with Commies on the left and Nazis on the right. It didn’t make sense to me, since Nazis were big government, worker-party socialists too, and moving further away from communism should mean less socialism, less government, and more individual responsibility and freedom. Moving to the extreme right, you don’t get Nazism, you get anarchy. I pointed this out, and he said some nonsense about the spectrum being circular, that the extremes end up being the same. True in the traditional sense, I guess, but the traditional understanding is clearly using obfuscatory language and doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s little more than a parable the lesson of which is to strive for moderation. The left-right spectrum, understood as I do, is this: moving to the right means more individual freedom and responsibility, moving to the left means more social freedom and responsibility. Right-wing politics empowers the individual, left-wing politics empowers the elite caretakers of society–whether they be technocrats or religious fanatics.

I imagine the confusion about what is right-wing comes from Europe, where political parties are right-wing if they are openly religious. To stereotype Germans, for example, George W. Bush is “extreme right wing” because he’s a born again Christian. Consider this, from Medien Kritik, as an example of Germans viewing American politics through the prism of German domestic politics. Another example would be when my former German exchange student visited me a year or so ago. He’d just finished up his “American Studies” degree, in which they learned about the moral equivalence between Hiroshima and the Holocaust. He capped off his studies with a road trip across America, in which he developed an even deeper disgust for the average American. By the time he got here, he had all sorts of stories to tell about the yahoos out West. The most confusing was when he was telling me about the “extreme conservative talk radio.” I assumed he’d meant Rush Limbaugh or something politically oriented, but he really meant the Gospel stations in the Southwest. But this explanation defies Nazism, since Hitler refuted Christianity.

Dave at the Greenside has probably rotated out of Iraq by now. If you haven’t already read it, make sure to read his final report from Fallujah before heading home.

It’s amazing what these men and women have accomplished.

At these Romance Novel Cover Spoofs.

Got ‘em from Chris…

Cocktail

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You are a Square. What a weirdo.

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The road is cleared, with Barry Bonds figuring to miss half if not all of the season.

Hate to hope for a great ballplayer’s health woes to continue, but my fingers are crossed for Albert, and also Henry Aaron.

Hey Illini fans! Having trouble getting excited about facing University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee on Thursday?

You shouldn’t be.

Linked from that highly motivating post about the UW-M coach’s past transgressions against Illini Nation was this prediction from News-Gazette sports editor Lorne Tate:

“You will never hear so many boos in your life. It’s going to get really personal. That’s the ugly part of it.”

You know your mission.

(Make sure to check out the comments to that post…)

I’ve gotten to like Cardinals play-by-play man Wayne Hagin quite a bit, so it’s disappointing to see that in spite of all his experience, he hasn’t learned not to talk to the media. (Dig the double negative?)

In other news, I’ve been trying to teach myself how to configure the apache webserver all day. If I learn it properly, I figure that’ll be a useful skill.

I also spent a lot of time making my desktops look nice. I dig the noia icons, which I’m using for my linux desktop and taskbar. Even added the noia theme on my windows OS firefox browsers, which makes them look pretty doggone nifty.

Unfortunately, all this stuff kept me from getting any real work done. But I have been doing a laudable job with objective 5 of my Spring Break plans. I’m not entirely pleased with the way the script that indicates when my (currently empty) server is online. When it’s offline, this page loads very slow, since the browser waits for the script to fail to load before loading up the rest of the page. I think I’m gonna replace it with a small image. So when it’s offline, there would be an X instead of nothing, as it’s working now.

Just thought I’d share.

The Big Ten sends three teams to the Sweet Sixteen next weekend, comprising 18.75% of the teams, as Big Ten Wonk pre-emptively calculated. Not bad for a Down and Weak conference.

The first weekend was Mad indeed. You can tell the Illini fans who are still bitter about Bill Self leaving for Kansas–they were going apeshit when Bucknell upset the Jayhawks on Friday night.

Louisville is looking strong indeed, blowing away Georgie Tech, 76-54, today.

Thursday’s games will be excellent this week: Illinois against Wisconsin-Milwaukee followed by Arizona v. Oklahoma State will be the games on TV here.