So for the party Saturday, I dressed up as the Brawny Towel Guy, except I was wearing a Jack O’ Lantern on my head. Chris did this a few years ago, if memory serves. The pumpkin had to be enormous to fit my melon inside it, and so it turned out to be heavy and unwieldy, even though Cass and I spent some time scraping pumpkin rind out of the inside to lighten it and give me more headroom.

For santitation purposes, I wore a plastic bonnet to keep my noggin from directly contacting the inside of the squash.

Cass dressed up as Punky Brewster, and did again today for work. She’s got pics up of her costume, although we didn’t get any decent shots of me with my head in a pumpkin.

You can expect high-quality commentary about Samuel Alito from the Volokh Conspiracy, throughout the day. Also something that ought to be read and internalized are the details of his dissent in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision in 1991 that you’ll be hearing a lot of misrepresentations about in the coming weeks. As far as I can tell and as has been said by folks far better informed than I am, Alito sounds like a John Roberts, in that he’ll primarily concern himself with writing opinions that create clear tests for lower courts to use in applying the law.

The comparisons to Scalia are silly.

Just thought I’d say something about that. Back to work.

I haven’t yet watched a hockey game this season, not counting the win over Chicago that I went to in the preseason. It’s not looking good for the Blues, off to a 2-6 start and now with Keith Tkachunky out indefinitely with broken ribs. He hit himself with the butt-end of his stick. I’ve done that before. Your stick’ll get caught in a gap along the boards and you run into it. It hurts, but I was never a massive fat body that would run into it hard enough to break ribs. I figure the Blues could possibly get to .500 by the end of November.

The Blues are also ranked 27th on ESPN’s power rankings, and four of the six Canadian teams are in the top six (and Calgary’s better than their record).

Something else I noticed is that Roman Turek, the former Blues goaltender, has retired after 2005 seasons in the NHL to play for the HC Ceske Budejovice. And he needs a haircut.

I was invited to two Halloween parties for Saturday night. Here’s a picture from two years back, in which I flex my muscles and pull the ol’ bunny ears trick on some ridiculously bright fellow:

I dressed up as the Adam West-style Batman. Speaking of Batman, I finally got around to seeing Batman Begins last night. Great flick. Of course, I like any movie what’s got ninjas. Back to the now. One of the parties has a theme: dress up as a character from the greatest movie that everyone’s forgotten. I’m considering going as Tron. If I shaved off my beard, I could go as Nick Rivers. I pulled off Han Solo last year, but I don’t think anyone forgot about that movie. I don’t think there’s sufficient time to put together a Skeksis costume. My beard should be long enough to pull off Airk Thaughbergh, if only I had some armor.

How ’bout: Machine Gun Joe Viterbo?

Or maybe: This obscure character? … Nah.

Back to the Beard: Sgt. Oddball? Anyone? Anyone?

It’s very rare that I read the UofI student newspaper, but I did tonight. This column describes the shameful financial situation of the defending ACHA Championship University of Illinois Hockey team. Each player has to pay $1,200 yearly in dues, and the team is charged $2,000 bucks per weekend to use the Ice Arena facility for home games. I imagine they have to pay for their icetime used for practice as well.

That’s ridiculous. The hockey team has loyal and enthusiastic fans, and the University could easily recover their costs, if marketed properly. I suppose we’ll have to add a new female team to lift them out of club status though. Of course, I imagine adding a men’s soccer team would be first priority.

Just got off the phone with Cass, who’s doing research at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium. She’s not having as much fun as she thought she would, but ended up having dinner at a place I’ve been desirous of chowing at for some time now, Yemanja Brasil. It’s St. Louis’ place for Brazilian cuisine. She had the Salmão Barra da Tijuca. Loved all of it, except not so much the farofa.

I’m jealous.

During downtime at work today, I’ve been looking at Neal Boortz’ Redneck Scrapbook.

There’s some funny stuff in there, like this. A few pictures of inventions that actually make a job harder, and some that are just bad ideas for maintenance reasons.

Good for a few laughs, though. And that’s all that matters in the end.

Here’s one that might interest a Linguistic Pragmatist.

Come to think of it, this one might actually work. Wouldn’t be too stable, though.

Later that day: Forget the Redneck pictures… Head thee to the Hall of Technical Documentation Wierdness. Note that there are five pages, and they get better as you go along. Site internal navigation is unreliable, unfortunately.

Found it by way of Gail, who’s quite the crack-up herself.

Congrats to the White Sox in their World Series championship. Eleven and one in the playoffs ain’t shabby.

The post a few days ago about the Amarillo spoof some British soldiers had made was linked from this thread at the Military.com forums.

Anyways, the thread started with a link to a high-resolution video of the spoof, and it’s still available here. Get it while it lasts!

The Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computing looks incredibly useful. Makes you wonder why it wasn’t built into Quantian.

Yesterday, I read a paper written by this ridiculously bright fellow comparing different parameter estimation techniques for maximum entropy models. He used freely available tools like PETSc and the Toolkit for Advanced Optimization to get very good results using algorithms I’d honestly never heard of.

This post is a reminder to install those tools and play around with them once I get the chance.

I was talking to my wee sister last night, explaining how I manage not to be down with the Cards having been knocked out of a World Series berth by Roy Oswalt and Brandon Backe.

You see, I figure the Cardinals organization has a grave duty to torment the Cubs. The Cubs are a cursed organization, one with a highly un-sexy curse. Over the past two seasons, the baseball gods deemed that the Cards would best torment the Cubs by leaving them as the lone cursed team. The Red Sox overcame their Curse of the Bambino because the Cards were out of fight by the time the 2004 World Series rolled around. This year, the White Sox, cursed with the memory of the 1919 Black Sox, had their road to their first World Series championship since 1917 paved for them by the Cardinals. Albert Pujols single-handedly broke Brad Lidge’s confidence to such an extent that now even a fellow like Scott Podsednik to take him yard. We wore down their rotation so that Pettite and Clemens are either hittable or benched.* We failed, though, in that we weren’t able to break Roy Oswalt, who’ll likely win tonight. May the gods forgive us this trespass and not turn their favor upon the Cubs.

* In all honestly, the Braves deserve the credit for wearing out the ‘Stros rotation.

Update: That was some game last night.

A colleague showed me the video described in this article that was made by British Dragoons in Iraq.

It spoofs this clip by Peter Kay.

Quite funny.

Ooh ooh, ah ah! Observe my intelligence and gregarious personality!

Don’t believe the poo-flinging rumors.

And not old and messed up on “X” pills.

I was just looking through Dave Barry’s blog and spotted this article about a 93 year old man who ran into a 52 year old pedestrian and then kept driving, with the man sticking through his windshield. It’s unclear from the story whether the pedestrian survived the incident, although the short story is written to suggest he did not, in using the phrase, “his body,” which usually refers to dead bodies in stories like this.

It reminded me of the tale of Chante Mallard, who ran into a pedestrian while she was “messed up on ‘X’ pills” and kept driving home with him, alive and pleading for her to stop, halfway through the windshield. She parked her car in the garage and left him in the windshield where he died two days later. After he died, she enlisted her boyfriend’s help to inexpertly dispose of the body and evidence of her incredibly evil and inhuman deed.

She was convicted to 50 years for murder and 10 for concealing evidence.

To lessen the gloom of this terrible story, I provide you with another of Dave Barry’s links: Log Drops Out of Victoria, BC, Mayoral Race

My headline is funnier than theirs.

From yesterdays Cardinals notes:

Preparations for the demolition of Busch Stadium were already under way on Thursday. Workers had begun to take out seats, and several areas of the stadium had already been cleared of furniture.

On the playing field, however, was where the real action took place. A group of team employees played a pickup baseball game on the field. And then there was the outfield, where at least two different Cardinals players turned “doughnuts” with their trucks in the grass.

Lemme guess: Jason Isringhausen and Scott Rolen.

Lots of nice stuff in there.

About donuts though… my pal Chris is a big fan of turning ‘em when it snows. The best donuts I ever participated in were with my old friend Dan. His dad worked for TWA when there was a TWA, and had a beat up workvan that he installed some airplane seats in for passenger seating. Dan the man borrowed the tan van one snowy night and we enacted the master plan of turning donuts in some church parking lot off Manchester road near my mom’s house. He’d gun the engine until he got to about the middle of the parking lot, then spin the wheel around and throw it in park. The thing would spin around its midpoint while skidding across the parking lot. And since it’s a workvan, there aren’t any windows except in the front and on the rear doors, so inside all you could see was the spinning landscape illuminated by the headlights abow the windshield. It’s amazing we didn’t flip that damned thing, but it was a hell of a time.

I’m going over the output of a system for finding verb paraphrases that my team in one of my classes built. The corpus it’s working on is newstext from the AP wire dating to 1998 and 2000. One of the sentences that was output referred to a game pitched by Daryl Kile: “kile gave up eight hits , didn ‘t walk a batter and struck out four in 7 1-3 innings , throwing 88 pitches .”

During Wednesday night’s NLCS Game 6 broadcast on FOX, they showed a montage of the Stadium graffiti from fans writing their goodbye messages to Busch Stadium. One of the shots showed someone had written DK57 and it caused some nostalgia.

So did seeing that output.

It wasn’t this game, but what a beaut that was!

Ah, here it is.

I just realized that I forgot to pat myself on the back for passing the four year mark in maintaining this here weblog. It was on the Fourth of October, almost three weeks ago. Looking back, I see that I celebrated by leaving work at noon to go watch playoff baseball. Celebrations don’t get much better than that.

The first ever post I made was one of those “hello there” posts. The first actual content was this one, in which I talked about Barry Bonds hitting his 70th home run of the regular season, which went a week long after baseball wasn’t played for a week after 9/11.

The air’s in the low fifties today and it’s drizzly. The tree limbs are sagging under the weight of the raindrops on their leaves.

You see what you’ve done, Oswalt? Do you?

What a shit sandwich of an NLCS that was.

Now Ray King wants to be traded (although I thought we’d only had him signed through this past season) and Larry Walker is retiring as he’d said he would.

Update: Jeff Gordon’s got a rather unimaginative shopping list for the offseason. I figure Morris to be gone, maybe to Baltimore in a foolish bidding war. I don’t expect to be able to resign Grudz, and expect Nunez to get offers too good to refuse. I would have liked to see Polanco make a return to the Cards after his ill-advised arbitration contract in 2005 to play 2B and bat second against lefties, alas, he signed an extension with the Tigers through 2009. It might be Luna at 2nd, which might work out. With exceptional exceptions, he has a very good arm and with the usual caveats, is statistically comparable to Grudzielanek, as Robb pointed out a while back. When we signed Grudz, I recall quite a few Cards fans carping about the move. I don’t like Luna in the outfield, and he’s ready for the big leagues. He’ll free up some cash and his replacing Grudzielanek would reduce our susceptibility to the ex-Cubs factor phenomenon. Luna makes a third of what Grudzielanek makes, and at most a sixth of what Mark’ll earn next season. I agree with Gordo that Anthony Reyes gets a shot at replacing Matty Mo in the rotation. Our bullpen is the biggest area of concern. Jeff Gordon recommends moving Wainwright into the ‘pen. Tavarez’ contract is up at the end of the year and it’s doubtful we’ll re-sign him. He made $2.6 million this season. Al Reyes is out for next year. Raking wants to be traded. Tyler Johnson looked promising in his September call-up, and I expect he’ll make it into the ‘pen.

As for the outfield, I would hate to overspend on Giles. We can’t do any better defensively than Skip Schumaker. If we want a bigger bat, someone worth taking a look at would be Randy Winn if the Giants don’t pick up his option, although he would be a weak fielder in right. That’s assuming Adam Dunn’s price gets out of control.

It’ll be an interesting offseason, as usual.

Mid 2nd: Me likey what me sees. First Astros AB, Biggio tests Nunez with a good bunt to third. Nunez’ throw beats him to the bag. Mulder’s pitching sharp. No baserunners yet, no balls left the infield.

The livebloggin’ will have to be delayed. The laptop’s not finished yet.

Bottom fifth: Laptop’s ready, but this game is looking awful. Time to turn things around, and fast. I could see Molina doubling here.

Calling Molina out was a terrible call. Wayne and Mike agree. Let’s see if cool-headed Johnny Rocket makes ‘em pay…

Bottom Six: Obviously, I haven’t been into the typing thing. That hit by Larry was nice to see. Maybe we’ll be able to finally get something off Qualls tonight. Crazier things have happened, eh? Oswalt’s over 100 pitches now. 100 very good pitches.

End Six: Well, Reggie took a good pitch there. Suppose Marquis pitches a scoreless top of the seventh and we get a man on in the eighth. Would TLR pinch hit for Marquis or let him swing away? As long as he’s not bunting. Dude can’t get one down. Whoops, Biggio leads off with a basehit so it’s probably academic at this point.

Top Seventh: I like bringing in Flores here. Wonder if we’ll Ray King later on tonight. King hasn’t pitched in seventeen days. Flores gets the job done. Taguchi replaces Sanders in a double switch as Tavarez comes in to get Morgan Ensburg out with Biggio at second and two outs. Ugh. Ensburg doubles to score Biggio on a bounding ball to shallow center that gets away from Edmonds momentarily. Jason Lane up now. He’s already homered today.

End 7th: We’re getting out-hit 10-3. That’s just ugly. It’s about time we make some breaks go our way. Edmonds-Pujols-Walker and then a pinch-hitter up in the eighth. John Gall or Hector Luna. I like Gall. Wayne just noted that Ray King is warming up in the ‘pen.

Mid 8th: Nice inning by Tavarez. Go Cards! Back-to-back might change the tone of this game. A sustained rally would be a real peach.

End of season: Go give ‘em hell in the series, ‘Stros. Hell of a team you got there.