Basic information on the newest pope here.

Thorough roundup from whence that link came here.

My own mostly uninformed opinion: I respect a guy who learns the doctrine and lives them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he changed the rules during his papacy to ones that are more defensible–read less idealistic–given man’s tendencies towards sin.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an essay from Justin Regali on the choice of Benedict 10000.

Another effective starter emerges in the Cardinals rotation and Yadier Molina continues his transition in hitting from horrid to torrid. Cards win 7-1. It being Matt Morris first start back from rehabilitation, he pitched an efficient (72-pitch) six innings for the win, giving up but a solo home run to Daryle Ward leading off the second. His curveball is back too. Yadier was smiling ear to ear after stroking a double. I think he was happy just to have something to talk to Jose Oquendo about. Abraham “Oh!!!!” Nunez started at short and went 4-4, playing competent defense. His first AB was a single, his second a double. Yes, I thought to myself whether he’d hit for the cycle. Optimism is in my blood.

This short road trip should give us a lot to be happy about. Now let’s see what we can do to the Cubs. We’ve yet to actually win a game at home. That first game of the Phillies series was a case of the Phils losing the game, we didn’t beat them.

We especially have to play well on Thursday, because I’ll be at that game.

This is outstanding… My 5:00 hasn’t shown up yet, and I’m vaguely starting to remember one of the clients saying that they weren’t going to be doing it this week. This means that instead of being stuck here until 7:30 or 8:00, I can go home whenever I feel like I’ve accomplished enough. I predict this feeling will come to me with enough time to make it to Bunny’s by 6:05, when Matt Morris will throw his first strike past Matt Lawton.

This isn’t going to be a fun morning. Roofing with a hangover rarely is much fun. I had dreams last night that it rained hard overnight and trashed my crib. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow morning, so it’s got to get done today. And I remembered upon waking up that I’ve got a recording session at 5 today. Gonna have to work fast. Gonna have to stop writing this post. Gonna have to stop procrastinating altogether.

Update: It hasn’t too bad. It’s a freaking beauty of a day, not too hot at all. The only problem is that it’s awfully windy. If it weren’t for my olympian regimen of pounding them Budweisers into me, I’d have been blown off the roof. I’m almost halfway done with putting the caps on. Hopefully I’ll be done within an hour and won’t miss too much of my 1:00 class. Had to come down from the roof to rehydrate and check the time.

One thing I’ll point out is how great manual labor is for fixing up hangovers. I used to work with a dude named Winkleman, and he’d always comment that he’d be dead by then if he didn’t work construction. His reasoning was that a desk job wouldn’t allow him to sweat out all the booze he’d enjoyed the night before. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but I feel like a million bucks right now.

Update (2:06): All done. Time for a shower. Missed my class. If this fucker leaks, I’m burning the house down.

The Cards game was tonight was the greatest thing I’ve seen in a while. It was a pitchers duel with an offensive masterpiece tagged on at the end. The ninth was just beauty. The Cards batted around. Yadier Molina redeemed a run scoring misplay at the plate with 3 hits and two runs scored, two of them in the ninth alone. Mulder was amazing and Jimmy Journell came in to do mop-up. He threw hard. His changeup was coming in at 83. Great game.

I didn’t get up on the roof. The plan is to get up there early in the morning and finish up all the shingling, then put the caps on after class and a shortened work day. Then watch Matty Mo pitch tomorrow night.

I wholeheartedly recommend Bunny’s Tavern as an excellent place to watch Cardinals games in the Champaign-Urbana area.

Oh right! I titled this post with a Brickhouse theme. I went by there (formerly the location of TK Wendl’s) and they are still not open. They’re resurfacing the parking lot with asphalt, and just driving by, I noticed the bar was all put together, but didn’t see any seating inside. My guess is they’ll be open for business this weekend. They need to quit dicking around and open up pronto, even if the place isn’t quite the way they want it. They could have made some money this past weekend, even if they just served cans of beer off the back patio out of coolers.

Just to let anyone know who was interested. My nephew Colin spent last night in the hospital. He picked up a rotaviral infection and hasn’t been happy about it. It’s the first time he’d every barfed, and it doesn’t sound like he enjoyed it much. I imagine that would be pretty confusing. My sister and bro-in-law took him to the hospital to put him on an IV to replenish his fluids, and he’s doing much better now, although his squirts haven’t gone away yet. They were being released from the hospital when I talked to them about an hour ago.

The semester is winding down very quickly. I have two weeks to get my projects done. I just had the meeting with my prof and he seemed impressed with how the Computational Semantics project is going. All I have to do now is write a grammar and associated semantics for asking questions about baseball statistics. I’ll have a CGI up on my server for that before the end of the April. I think it might impress some of you more than the boxscore reader did, although this one is far simpler. The Intensional Semantics paper is coming along slowly, I told him my analysis might not be pretty. The paper will be done in time though.

This is going to be a busy week. I’m going to watch both games against Pittsburgh. Bunny’s Tavern had satellite TV installed over the weekend, so I’ll be there watching the Cardinals games, and scratching out notes for my projects. John at Birdwatch points out that Mulder’s first two starts last year were crap too, and that he settled in and finished April with consecutive complete games with 1 run allowed between the two of ‘em, so hopefully he regains his form tonight, and keeps the winning streak going. Matty Mo has his first start tomorrow night, so that’s a must-see as well. Wednesday night I’ll be coding up the grammar and semantic macros for the baseball statistics project, and also ice skating for a while. Thursday morning I’ll be driving to St. Louis to watch the Cardinals knock the shit out of the Cubs at 12:15. Chris Carpenter will start. Thursday night I’ve got tickets for Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill. No decision has been made as to whether I’ll stay in the Lou over the weekend. My mom wants to go to the Botanical Gardens on Saturday and so hopes I will stick around.

And of course there’s the matter of finishing up my roof. My back feels remarkably well today. I made sure to get a good night’s sleep, and stretched it out as well as I could last night. It’s 83 outside though, and probably close to 100 on my roof. I need to pick up some supplies and am still at work, so I don’t expect to get up there until after 2 when it’s started to cool down a bit. I don’t think I have enough shingles left to finish up the caps, and I’d mistakenly thought I’d had a few tubes of tar in my basement to seal things up around the chimney. Back to Menard’s I will go.

I started reshingling the Eastern side of my roof this morning. It’s going pleasingly well, although it’s gotten ridiculously hot in the last couple of hours. I’m taking a break. Fortunately, the Cardinals game is on the TV, and Pujols just scored the tying run on a Rolen popup that wasn’t caught by the Brewers’ center fielder. Crazy play. Rolen went to third, Pujols ran first to home.

I also tried drinking a glass of milk with ice in it to cool myself off. My grandpa used to drink milk like that. It works pretty good.

Update: Great game. Izzy sure does make the ninth exciting. The WB color commentator, I think his name is Bob Rick Horton, called Rolen’s go-ahead home run. He said, “If he gets one here, his slump is officially over.”

Oh well, party’s over. Time to get back up on the roof.

Another update: Ow. I helped put a new roof on a house last summer and by the end of the day, my back was so sore it hurt to be alive. I didn’t quite finish mine today and I’m feeling about the same way. I remember last year I was crippled for at least another day, so there’s a chance I won’t be able to get back up there tomorrow to finish it. That wouldn’t be too bad, although my neighbors might think I’m some kind of hillbilly, having a new roof half-put-on. As long as I can finish it up by Wednesday, when there’s a chance of rain. I think I’ll take tomorrow afternoon off either way.

The RFT has an article about Samir, the St. Louisan who dragged Saddam Hussein from his spider hole. The article goes into significantly greater detail than the Post-Dispatch articles I’d linked previously.

Some of my friends in St. Louis know him indirectly and had emailed around some of his pictures a while back. Note that he says that the pictures are all from Iraq. Pete, to this day, claims that the picture of him posing with Saddam’s money was taken in his apartment and that the military is stealing all sorts of money from people.

Found the link via the excellent Cardinals blog Cardinilly, which will soon be blogrolled along with the rest of ‘em.

Update: Man, read the whole thing. It’s six pages, but well worth it. “I guarantee you Saddam will never forget that experience. He’ll never forget Samir.”

Donald Sensing points out that cell phones numbers will soon be available to telemarketers, and that it would be a good idea to register them in the Do Not Call Registry, as well as your landline numbers if you haven’t already done so. I second that recommendation.

The Cardinals are putting Cal Eldred on the DL and calling up Jimmy Journell. Journell pitched for Illinois in college and was our top prospect for many years. His fastball supposedly reached into the high 90s, although his control was lacking for a long time. Here’s hoping he has some good innings.

And hopefully Cal gets well soon. They say he’s got an upper respiratory infection, not something that usually puts you on the disabled list. It must be fairly serious.

I got some big news this morning. My qualifying paper was approved, and so I’ve officially been admitted to the Ph.D. program. This means things are going to change for me. My years of free agency are over, and it’s time to sign with a big club. No longer will I get to study whatever I want and write papers and software about baseball. I’ll have to select an advisor and put together a plan and research project that will lead to a dissertation, and I’ll have to do it right away.

This makes me very, very happy. I’ve been frustrated with myself for a long time, due to my slow progress. I’ve always done things at my own speed though, and when I get rolling things come together quickly. And I’m greatly looking forward to my oral dissertation defense. I intend to do it in the style of Donald Rumsfeld. I’ll wear my spectacles and squint angrily at the committee when they ask questions. Memorizing the known-knowns answer would no doubt come in handy. That would be hilarious.

Claims by syntacticians that certain sentences aren’t spoken by speakers of a language are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are sentences we know we know are acceptable in a language. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some sentences we do not know the acceptability of. But there are also unknown unknowns — the sentences we don’t know we don’t know the acceptability of. Our intuitions being an insufficient substitute for corpus study and the finiteness of all corpora guarantee this.

Anyways, seeing that letter in my mailbox and an unexpected email from a very special person have made for a very good morning.

I’ve been getting my ass kicked at work for two weeks now. I’ve managed to get the stack of things to get done immediately down to a manageable height, and I’ll stay late tonight to make sure it’s all done by the time the weekend gets here.

Just how much capacity does a MiniDisc have? 160 to 320 minutes!?!? Let’s see. The audio capture is at 168 minutes now, so I can assume 320… I have ten minidiscs to process, and that works out to as much as 53 2/3 hours of capture time alone. Awesome!!!

In gooder news, I ported the module I wrote last night from Linux to Windows with the help of this fellow’s wget-for-Windows utility.

Haven’t been able to sleep well lately. This Mr. Miyagi inspired game should be good for occupying all that time.

Also helpful has been the best baseball book I’ve read yet, October 1964. Better by far than Moneyball and Ball Four, and no doubt the TLR hagiography that’s out now. Many thanks to my pal Murray for lending it to me. Allow me to excerpt a section:

That first year [after Gussie Busch had bought the St. Louis Cardinals] he visited the team in spring training, he asked his manager and coaches, “Where are our black players?” There was a long silence and one of the coaches finally said, “We don’t have any.” Busch said, “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play?” The silence hung heavily over everyone. “Hell,” he added, in words that clearly represented the end of an era, “we sell beer to everyone.”

The Cardinals then went on to sign Tom Alston, who was profiled on StlCardinals.com over the offseason. The book takes a harsh look at many of the personalities surrounding the Cardinals and Yankees in the early sixties, including even the great Branch Rickey, who comes across in old age as a tight-fisted control freak. Of course, this is to be forgiven in light of all the rest he did with his life. The book is packed with engrossing, sometimes charming detail. Now let’s see if I can fall asleep after reading a few chapters…

I’ve got a meeting with my prof on Monday, and need to have enough work done on my projects to convince him that I’m on schedule to have them done within the next three weeks or so. Needless to say, I hadn’t started seriously working on them until a few hours ago. I’m writing a set of scripts that downloads all the Yahoo pages of batting and pitching statistics for each team, parses the data out of them, and writes it all into a prolog database file. If I can have that working perfectly by Monday, I’ll be confident going into the meeting for that class. There’s still a lot of work left to do, I’ll need to write a query grammar and a presumably large set of predicates to support the semantics of that grammar. It should be a nice little system by May. The Yahoo pages are significantly simpler than ESPN’s were for the boxscore project, so the parsing procedure should be simpler. Also making this project a lot easier than that one is that lists of player statistics are considerably less variable than boxscores as far as information content goes. I think I’ll have this module done tonight, so I can spend the rest of the week working on the ‘cross-categorial/non-constituent coordination and underspecified subcategorization’ paper, where the problems are more involved.

Update (11:36): Do I rock, or do I rock? The database building module is all done. Python is my friend.

Steve Kline is frustrated in Baltimore, and wishes he’d stayed in St. Louis. As nice as it is to hear, that’s not going to ingratiate him with his teammates any.

Speaking of star left-handers, what’s up with Mulder? He gave up 6 runs in five innings today. Too bad Marquis can’t start every game. And too bad Reggie Sanders can’t hit and field for all other 8 positions at once. I’ve been impressed with the bullpen the past few games. Al Reyes is quite the bulldog. Matty Mo had his final rehab start in A ball this morning, striking out six and walking 1. Unfortunately, he gave up 5 runs for the 17 batters he got out.

Update: Man, what’s up with the Cardinals sucking up so bad? The Reds intentionally walk Larry Walker to load the bases with a one-run lead, hoping to get Pujols to ground into a double play. One out, down by one, bases loaded. All Albert had to do was get the ball up in the air and Taguchi would have made it home. Make ‘em pay Albert! Make ‘em pay! And what does he do? He swings at the first pitch–5-3 double play. Real nice, Albert. Real nice. The middle of our order looks like a steaming loaf of shit right now. They better get their act together before things get out of hand.

And behold: Baseball Genesis.

Thanks be to Belly Scratcher.

Update: I ought to keep a closer eye on this McSweeneys site… I’d linked them once before to their hilarious Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky Fellowship of the Ring Commentary.

This is funny. That’s all for now.

I was right, Pulsipher hurt his hammie and not his toe. Even if he goes on the DL and Carmen Cali is brought up to replace him while he heal, and even if Cali pitches great, I’d expect Cali to go back down to Memphis to continue working on his skills and Pulsipher to re-enter the bullpen. But I hope his leg gets better just taking it easy for a few days. Our starters are going to have to start pitching eventually, and who better to beat up on than the Reds. Looking ahead in the April schedule, the Cards have a good opportunity to go on a run and grab up a whole bunch of wins. More importantly, we badly need some momentum and swagger. This past weekend was some piss-poor baseball–Philadelphia has a great team, but they’re not that much better than us. The Cards didn’t show up.

Everybody loves Chewbacca. Back in High School, my friend Dave had never seen Star Wars, so naturally I forced him to watch all three original films. His favorite character, right when you first meet him, was Chewbacca. He wanted to pet him. Sure enough, in the scene when Han Solo and the gang hide out in the smuggling compartments of the Millenium Falcon after having been tractor beamed into the dock of the original Death Star, Han Solo pets his Wookie friend. Dave rejoiced.

I’d always wondered what the actor who played Chewie looks like. I’ve heard that the fellow who played Darth Vader was also Harry, in Harry and the Hendersons; as well as the Predator from the excellent film of the same name and its lesser sequel. (That turns out to be not true.) Chewbacca was played by Peter Mayhew, and it turns out that in spite of his 7′-3″ stature, he strikes somewhat of a resemblance to Igor from Young Frankenstein. Not that I’m making fun. Like I said, everyone loves Chewie, and by extension, Mayhew.

The link to the picture was found at Leaning to the Dark Side, as was this amusing and related story about a bunch of Star Wars dorks who think George Lucas cares about them and their ideas on how any aspect of the movies will end up, including in which theater the cartoonish soap-opera should debut.