Pathetic.

Pop the bubbly. The Cardinals magic number is now zero, after beating the Cubs in an extremely well-played baseball game today. Mulder was incredible, as he has been lately.

Slackware 10.2 was released on Thursday. I’ve got it installed on my laptop just the I want it now, and couldn’t be any happier. I couldn’t get my sound and wireless working under the 10.1 release, and wasn’t having any luck working on it. My desktop has been running slackware for quite a while, and I’m very happy with that. I was running a distribution called Mepis on my laptop. It served it’s purpose in that it helped me figure out which drivers would work for my machine, but it was not at all something I was happy working on. The 10.2 release is perfect, and discovered all my hardware without any problem. And the price was right!

The Illini are up 14-7 right now, in the second quarter, against the #15 team in the country–the California Golden Bears. Wow. The talk on the radio was that the Illini would have to come out of the gate fast. Dave Loane said it was important that we land the first punch. We scored on our first drive. Very nice.

Update: Up 17-7 at the half, and the Illini dominated Time of Possession in the first half, 21:35 to 8:25. But holy cow! The ending of that Nebraska/Pittsburgh game! Pitt was down by 1, 6-7. They muffed a snap on a field goal attempt and didn’t get the kick away. The refs gave them a second attempt with one second left in the game (instead of calling intentional grounding) and the kick was blocked. Amazing! Damn, I wish the Illini game was on.

Update2: Tough second half, and Illinois lost the game 35-20. They did better than expected, and came out looking very strong. On to Michigan State!

“On the DL” is a groupblog written by baseball groupies who know a whole lot of baseball groupies (I’m guessing). Baseball players haven’t looked like such a bunch of lowlifes since Ball Four.

Kind of disturbing. Possibly pure bullshit and empty gossip.

(Note to self: when talents appreciated; million$ in pocket-do not nail groupies.)

Via Deadspin via Cardinilly.

From this STL Today article:

He took over the National League strikeout lead and became the Cardinals’ first pitcher to move past 200 strikeouts for a season since 1989. He did so while being denied his 23rd consecutive “quality start,” leaving him in a tie with Bob Gibson for the longest such run by an NL hurler since 1968.

So Carp didn’t get his 22nd win, but the Cards won–that’s all that matters. It matters because it makes me 4 for 4 on my rest-of-the-season predictions, which are silly in that I “predicted” a sweep for the rest of the season.

Marquis is pitching right now. He gave up a solo homer to Jason Bay in the top of the first. Grudzielanek and Pujols are both back in the lineup. Eckstein is the only other opening day player on the field. I remarked last night that while I like having Luna up on the active roster, it’s not pretty watching him play in the outfield. He started in right tonight.

Oh yeah: The Cards have a chance of clinching the playoffs today, if Marquis can keep the Pirates from scoring too many more runs and the Memphis Redbirds can score some. Also, the Astros have to lose their pitching duel tonight between Clemens and Burnett.

Update2: Interesting play. With Diaz at first, Luna was hit by a pitch. Diaz was advanced to third and Oliver Perez ejected, bringing in Ryan Birdsong. Why was Diaz advanced to third? I thought HBP were the same as walks, where runners had to be forced to advance; unlike balks, where everyone advances.

Update3: Rats. We had the tying run at second with 1 out and couldn’t get any runs there in the ninth. Reggie’s got a lot more rust to shake off than I’d hoped. Today’s game was carried on the local WB tv station, too. Wish I could have watched it, although it would have been painful. So now I’m four for five predicting outcomes for the last twenty games of the season.

An explanation of the strike zone for the benefit of Sen. Joe Biden at Radio Blogger.

Here’s a really asinine sound-bite from Sen. Arlen Specter during his questioning of Chief Justice John Roberts today: Would you think that Roe might be a super-duper precedent?”

It’s taken completely out of context, so he may very well have been joking. (Please. Please?) But judging from what I’ve read of the rest of the proceedings from today and yesterday, I’m not too hopeful about that.

Albert Pujols caught up to Derek Lee in the batting race last night. The two first basemen are tied at .338 with 17 games left to play. Those paying close attention will note that Pujols rested last night with a day-to-day groin injury (and hopefully another Ossatron treatment). So how did he manage to catch Lee on a day when he was cheerleading a great comeback victory? Lee is four for his last twenty at bats, and 0-7 in his last two games.

Lee’s hitting 3-14 (.214) with 2 homers against Eric Milton, the starting pitcher for Cincinnati that he’ll be facing tonight. Pujols will sit again with the possibility of getting a pinch hit at-bat tonight. The game preview for tonight’s game, featuring Chris Carpenter going for his 22nd win, mentions the possibility of using Pujols if Mesa comes into the game, since Pujols is hitting .667 (6-9) against him with a 1.222 slugging percentage, which measures average bases per at-bat. If you hit a home-run every time you don’t walk, your SLG is 4.000; if you hit triples every time, you’re 3.000; and so on. If a guy’s slugging over 1, on an average 4 at-bat night, he hits either a home run, two doubles, a triple and a single, or four singles. In short, he’s an amazing hitter. For comparison, Pujols is hitting .632 on the season.

Later: The Bot points out that I’m the one who’s not paying close attention. Pujols helped out his own average last night with a pinch-hit single.

According to this article, Reggie Sanders will make his return tonight against the Pirates.

I didn’t pay much attention to (pro) football last year, and probably won’t this year either. I did watch Sunday’s loss by the Lambs to the Forty-Niners though. It reminded me of how annoying NFL games are. After every play, there was either finger waving by the defense or varied yet uncreative showboating by the offense. And Illinois alumnus Brandon Lloyd’s endzone dance was about the silliest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Was he pretending the football was a microphone or a trumpet? Real F’n silly, either way.

I was impressed with San Francisco’s use of a 3-4 defense, which I consider superior to the four-man front. The Rams defense was good at stopping the run, especially inside the two minute warning in the fourth quarter. Too bad the offense couldn’t reward their efforts by keeping the ball.

Ben Goldacre writes a column bashing away at science journalism, and it’s quite lovely. He even writes about the insulting practice of suppressing evidence or any specific details about the actual experiments that were performed, replacing them with expert (dowdified) testimony by scientists, something I complained about a month ago:

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. “Scientists today said … scientists revealed … scientists warned.” And if they want balance, you’ll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why. … One scientist will “reveal” something, and then another will “challenge” it. A bit like Jedi knights.

I urge you to read the whole thing, although this paragraph is certainly not to be missed:

[P]apers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages.

The only sections of a newspaper where bullshit editorializing is confined to its properly designated columns is in the Sports and Business sections. Predictably, these are the only two places where there are actual beat reporters who know a bit about their subject areas. The rest of the news is covered by hysterical, beatless reporters who frankly don’t know which facts are relevant to report or how to find them, in any case.

Jeff Suppan, who very nearly went hitless in 2004, just hit his first career dinger.

Way to go, Soup. Cards are up 3-1.

If the Cardinals play .500 ball the rest of the way out, we’ll finish 100-62. Let’s look at the schedule and see how we could reasonably finish up. I’m thinking the rotation has never been stronger all season. Soup’s looking very sharp, Mulder’s unbelievably good, Carpenter gives you a guaranteed win, and Marquis appears to have figured out how he’s built to pitch. Our remaining schedule is quite weak, and our secret weapon, Reggie Sanders should be back on Monday to give some badly, badly needed relief to our outfield, not to mention a right-handed bat with some pop to compliment Pujols and Molina. (No offense meant to Gall.)
I give the date, opponent, who our pitcher would be sticking to the current rotation, and an optimistically plausible outcome that I pulled out of my ass.

• 9/10: vs. Pond Scum — Soup pitches, Win
• 9/11: vs. Pond Scum — Morris pitches against Martinez, Loss
• 9/12: vs. Pirates — Mulder against Redman, Win
• 9/13: vs. Pirates — Carpenter, Win
• 9/14: vs. Pirates — Marquis, Win (Oliver Perez starts, snicker.)
• 9/15: vs. Cubs — Suppan, Win (C-Bot points out we need a sweep here to win tie the season series… I dunno about it, but anything’s possible.)
• 9/16: vs. Cubs — Morris, Win
• 9/17: vs. Cubs — Mulder, Win
• 9/18: vs. Cubs — Carpenter, Win
• 9/20: vs. Reds — Marquis vs. Luke Hudson, Win
• 9/21: vs. Reds — SOUP!, Win (Ramon Ortiz)
• 9/22: vs. Reds — Morris, Win (Pickles)
• 9/23: vs. Brew Crew — Mulder, Win (No Ben Sheets, we sweep)
• 9/24: vs. Brew Crew — 2005 Cy Young Recipient, Win (Capuano on schedule to pitch against us, unfortunately for him, he’s facing Carp.)
• 9/25: vs. Brew Crew — Marquis, Win (Day game. Lefty Doug Davis gives up four RBI to Reggie Sanders alone)
• 9/27: vs. ‘Stros — Suppan, Win (Roy Oswalt)
• 9/28: vs. ‘Stros — Morris, Win (Brandon Backe, our two game sweep puts their wildcard hopes in Jeopardy.)
• 9/30: vs. Reds — Mulder, Win (Same pitching matchups as before)
• 10/01: vs. Reds — Carpenter, Win (And I’m at this game! Woo Hoo! Win #25!)
• 10/02: vs. Reds — Marquis, Win

Of course, we’ll probably shuffle our pitchers around, one of them will have a bad game, the bats might go cold, rookies will be used, and we’ll lose more games than this. We’ll lose some games that on paper, we really should win. (And the Cubs series was a complete pantload. I’d be surprised if we took two in that series the way we’ve been playing against them. And the Mulder game is an early day game; Morris has a 3:00 start.) But the impact that Reggie Sanders is liable to be make is huge, says me. So let’s just lie to ourselves and surmise that we win all these games that we should win–the Cardinals would go 19-1 down the stretch to finish 109-53. Realistically, I think we can finish 15-5 down the stretch, at about the double over .500 pace we were playing at when everyone was healthy. That would put the Cardinals at 105-57.

Yeah, it’s Saturday and I got tired of working. Sue me for wasting an hour of my time.

The Illinois game isn’t on TV, so I’ve got that on the radio and the Fichigan/Fighting Irish game muted on the tube.

Illinois is whooping some ass: they’re up 24-7 and playing well on both sides of the ball. Brasic has yet to throw an incompletion and the Illini D even managed an interception, something that rarely happened last year. Our first possession of the game was horrific, aside from a great kick return. It ended with a blocked punt that allowed San Jose State to score easily. I don’t remember the last time the Illini scored 24 points in the first half, but I’d guess it’d be this game.

The Irish look very strong too with their new former Patriot coach. They’re up 17-3 at the moment and making the Wolverine offense look downright impotent. Notre Dame’s quarterback is either nervous or has bad hands. He’s dropped two snaps. I’m guessing he’s not looking the ball into his hands and checking out the defense instead.

Update: With the game winding down, and the Wolverines looking to fail to score a touchdown for the first time in a decade, the Fichigan mans have begun throwing trash on the field. Sore losers. Michigan’s marching band annoys me.

Update again: Illinois won 40-19. Mighty impressive to get our revenge from our last meeting. (I was there! It sucked!) I said before the season that it would be an amazing one if we could win four games. We’ll need to double our total of conference wins from the last two years to make that happen. (Unless we beat the Golden Bears next weekend, which would be amazing and call for more ambitious expectations for this team.)

Your Summer Anthem is Speed of Sound by Coldplay All that noise, and all that sound, All those places I got found. And birds go flying at the speed of sound, to show you how it all began. You’re out of your mind this summer, in a good way.

Everyone knows that MY Summertime Anthem is by Mungo Jerry.

That or the number by the Gershwin bros that everybody from Billy Holiday to the Zombies has got their own cover of.

Seriously, I didn’t know half the shit bands that quiz asked about.

This is really funny too: Effort: Hard Work Never Killed Anybody… The rest is good, trust me.

I found both o’ them at This Life, from a bit further downstate from me.

The Blues called at 2:30 press conference today so Al McInnis could announce his retirement from NHL play.

Jeff Gordon wrote a nice column about Al, although couched in his rightful criticism of Blues management.

On WDWS 1400am radio today, their most recent news report involved two stories: one was the situation at the Illini Terminal, processing hurricane refugees to the area (they’re out of gift cards and are giving out travellers cheques and they still need volunteers); and the fire last night that I unsuccessfully attempted to help out with.

Note that these are the topics of my two most recent posts. The police are investigating the fire as an arson, reasoning that the sofas that they believe started the fire were too far from the road to have been started on accident by a lit cigarette tossed out a car window or something. I agree. My guess is it was a really stupid prank by some drunken fools in the neighborhood. Back when I was in school, we were sensible enough to burn our old couches far away from wood structures (except the time when we wanted to throw it off the roof on fire, an idea Brian vetoed much to everyone else’s displeasure). I’d be surprised if a resident of the building had started it. There were quite a few people there when I arrived on the scene, and none of them appeared to feel any guilt. Most of them were awe-stricken. Except for the mexican guys who ran out of the house with their suitcases, and then disappeared by the time I returned from my failed expedition to find a Spanish-English bilingual. The fire chief said ten people were originally in the building, and it was a bastard to put out. The attic of the building was converted into apartments, leaving a dead space between the roof; soffit and ceiling of the apartments below; and their outside walls, which I would imagine to be about half the height of the room ceiling, with an angled wall up the rest of the way in those areas of the apartments. So anyways, the fire licked up the inside of the framing and took over those dead areas, and the firemen had to tear out those half-walls to get access to the fire in the dead area. One fireman had to be taken to the hospital to treat heat exhaustion. Like I said, that was one hot fire. Damage to the building was estimated at $50,000.

Whether they catch the assholes who started the fire or not, I hope they know better than to do something like that again.

Faced a very minor crisis situation tonight, and I give myself a D+ grade.

Cass and I were going to get a couple ‘dwiches. Driving down Springfield Ave in Urbana, we saw a house beginning to be engulfed in flames. (Corner of Springfield and Birch or Cedar, vaguely Spanish-style architecture.) They had a large dumpster in the backyard and there were what appeared to be a stack of couches up against the building that were on fire. The exterior was stucco, so that wasn’t burning, but the ivy running up the building was, and the soffit appeared to be wood, so the roof was endangered to my untrained eye.

I parked the car nearby and Cass pointed out that I’d be in the way of firetrucks where I was at–so I moved it to somewhere a reasonable distance away. (The parking lot of the Greek Orthodox church there.) Then I grabbed a softball bat out of my trunk, since that was the only reasonably long tool I had in there that might be of some use in dragging fuel away from the fire. I talked to a dude that was standing there and asked if he had a fire extinguisher or a garden hose that we might use to suppress the flames until the fire department showed up. He correctly remarked that it probably wouldn’t do any good at this point, but no and no. So I said, let’s pull that sofa away from the rest of the fire so that it stops fueling it; then did so on my own. I attest that I was not endangering myself in any way by doing this. There was nothing above me to fall on me, and the sofa that I grabbed, while on fire, was not near enough the heart of the blaze to cause me anything more than mild discomfort. That fire was surprisingly hot though.

That was all I could do to remove fuel from the fire. Some fellows ran out of the house with suitcases and I went over to talk to them. “How many people are left in the building.” Six, they said, then started speaking Spanish. “No Englais.” So I ran down the alley to where a Spaniard friend of mine used to live, and called up the only person I knew who knew him to make sure he still lived there. Nobody was home, and the friend on the phone told me he’d moved and she didn’t know any Spanish-English bilinguals in the area that could help inform the firemen. She offered to come over to do it herself, but the need would have been over by the time she got there, if not by the time I got back with my Spaniard friend.

So how did I do?

• My first point of attack was to do something that couldn’t be done. It was a wasteful effort.

I failed to do the most important thing for an untrained person to do in the situation, which would have been to gather together the residents so the firemen wouldn’t have to look for them.

• I do get points for not endangering myself. I safely pulled fuel away from the body of the fire, and I didn’t run into the building and pound on doors.

I grade myself a D+.

But the other bystanders had already called the fire department, who did a great job when they showed up (quickly). A+ for them.

I’m late to linking it, but local blogger and teacher Foleyma lists some immediate needs for hurricane relief in Champaign.

Read what he says, but some things that would help out most right now would be: gift cards to local restaurants or stores, to be delivered to the United Way at 404 W. Church in Champaign; or drop by the Illinois Terminal with a sack of apples, box of granola bars, or other such healthy-ish food and see if Andrea Rundell there has any work for you to do.

Foleyma gives her phone number, and it sounds like she’ll be needing warm bodies there to help out for some time, so you can make yourself useful by calling her up and scheduling a few hours of your day fulfilling a significant need.

Something nice you could probably do would be to cater a hot meal for Andrea and her volunteers, who’ll be working twelve hour days to keep everything running smoothly. It’s as easy to cook for five or six as it is to cook for two. Make sure to schedule it with her though. It’s never a great idea to surprise busy people.

When I mentioned politics (especially the completely ignorant political beliefs popularly held around me) being far too ugly to concern myself with lately, I was referring specifically to horseshit like this column in today’s Daily Illini. It’s a student paper, so you know it’s gonna have a lot of crap writing, especially in the editorial columns; but this is just unbearably clueless and hateful. That’s not even mentioning the fucking moral mountaintop that this dope thinks he’s sitting on, looking down on everyone who disagrees with him.

There’s NO room for disagreement anymore. Politics has always been ugly, I’m well aware of that. But when a natural disaster happens, and a wide swath of people (especially around here) are so blinkered by their hateful, condescending political worldview that the only response they have is to blame conservatives, there’s a serious problem.

It’s a weird sort of post-theological George Berkeley style anti-materialist idealism where all of reality is sustained by the new god–the U.S. government. And they’ve got a Manichaean, Zoroastrian way of looking at the government: the good god is the Democratic party, and the bad god is the Republican party. If only the good god were behind the wheel, all would be right in the world.

And they call conservatives simple-minded, un-nuanced sorts.

There’s very good analysis of the Katrina response at Jason van Steenwyck’s Countercolumn, formerly “Iraq Now,” from when he was deployed as a logistical officer.

With Yadier Molina’s cannon behind the plate, and aided no doubt by Carpenter’s quick style of playing, the Cards are on pace to allow only 31 steals this season, the fewest ever in the division-play era, and second only to the ’72 Reds with Johnny Bench behind the plate.

Most impressive.

Tonight begins a four game series against the Pond Scum. Kris Benson, whose wife isn’t shabby although not Jose-Lima-Wife-Esque, takes the mound for the Mets to lose to Chris Carpenter.

(I’ll take any excuse to link that picture of Jose Lima’s wife. Hilarious!)