92 thoughts on “May 6, 2011: Momentum”

    1. That inspired me to Google search "raging tonsils". Most of the results are about tonsillitis, but there's also marijuana and raging cod in there, so at least I got a little enjoyment out of your misery. Enjoy your vacation time!

    2. I thought Raging Tonsils was an English punk band from the late 70's.

        1. My favorite part of the no-hitter was watching Raging Tonsils dive for a ball that Span caught on the run behind him.

  2. last nights NBC comedy block was fantastic. I even had some great laughs watching The Office, something that hasent happened very much this season. But man, Community and Parks and Recreation are hitting home runs every week. It stinks that its the end of the new episodes season because those two shows vibes are perfect

    1. That could have gone better. Coulda gone worse as well, I suppose. I absolutely hate talking on the phone in any context, much less with lots o' money on the line.

  5. A little treat for Friday: video of Hank Aaron and Sadaharu Oh in some kind of friendly home run derby.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBVvNBinpgg

      1. It sure is, I was looking at Henry and thinking "Wow, he sure was a small guy for hitting that many homers!" We've been brainwashed by the 'roids era.

    1. I shouldn't get bent out of shape since it's Heyman, but good lord, it makes more sense for the Twins than his dismissive one liner would suggest.

      However, the part about Ryan Howard being worth "every penny" of his $125 million extension because he has 29 RBIs a month and change into the season before the extension kicks in is mighty amusing. I didn't know Boras negotiated that extension.

      1. One good point he makes, even if it was obvious to everyone but Brian Sabean, is that swapping out Edgar Renteria for Miguel Tejada was...not brilliant. Both have been replacement-level (or worse, in Tejada's case). The Reds signed Renteria for $2.1M, compared to the $6.5M Sabean spent.

    1. When I was at Drake, Nightline filmed an episode on campus. They had a panel of James Carville, his wife (can't remember her name), and a few others. They took questions from the crowd and the president of the Drake Young Republicans tried to drill Carville. He got carved up pretty quickly.

      The next day, the student newspaper had an article saying that you wouldn't take a swing at Mike Tyson, why do you think you'd win a debate with someone like Carville?

    1. Sweet - I've only had responses from about half the field. Could mean AWESOME prizes if we only have a dozen show up!

    1. Sheenie and I will be driving to Omerha on the 3rd to visit the grandparents for the evening. Then, we'll drive down to KC for the games on the 4th and 5th. At some point, I also plan on visiting the Truman Library and hopefully the Negro Leagues Museum. Otherwise, we hope to meet everybody before the game on the 5th.

    2. I asked my buddy here to nail down tickets so I could let everyone know roughly where to try get seats, but haven't heard back from him -- I'll get on his case Sunday.

      We'll start getting the tailgating stuff together, too, and let everyone know what we have and how we'll send up the bat signal.

    3. Dang, I'm going to have to miss this. Our car club is having our spring autocross on the 5th and I can't miss that! Also if the Mrs. didn't have school on the 4th we'd probably be down in Overland Park with some friends that day for the Heartland MG Show.

    1. buncha savages in this town.

      i just had a dream that happened a couple of days ago. also, it did happen to me back when i was living in uptown. they nabbed my CD stereo, which pissed me off something awful (and a book of CDs that i'm sure they had no idea what to make of). however, they broke the small triangle window of one the back doors to unlock the car. it was the least expensive window to replace, so they weren't total dicks about it, i guess.

      1. My car got broken into the night of my wedding. They also smashed out the triangle window. There was nothing of value in the car itself, but they gained access to the trunk and took some CDs (UGK, The Night Marchers, and Young Jeezy I believe), a broken Playstation 2, and a hoodie. An auto glass place in Winnipeg quoted me like $600 to fix it. We found the window on eBay for like $40 and fixed it that way.

        It was still miserable.

        1. Been there on the thievery via broken triangle window, after they ruined the passenger-side lock. Thieves got even less value from me (they ripped out a 15-year-old cd player/radio and stole loose change, a pair of cheap sunglasses and a mini-bottle of hand sanitizer). I now drive with a gaping hole in my dash, which is awesome.

          Also, some punk ijiots DID half-heartedly try to break into my car during my wedding rehearsal. Messed up the driver's-side lock. Dickwads.

      2. Yeah, I always wondered what thieves would think of any CDs they stole from me... Probably just throw them away.

        1. I always joked that if I ever had my CDs gone through the only things they would steal would be the rap CDs. When I worked at the bank, one of the janitors stole my CD player and went through the 60 CDs in my desk. Sure enough the only thing stolen was The Blueprint. I was pretty amused.

      3. hungry joe, your story is exactly what happened to my car. Same window and same thievery (but they left Separation Sunday because apparently they don't even appreciate good music).

        1. My old pickup was broken into a few years back. They stole the faceplate to my MP3 player and 1 glove. They let me keep the useless MP3 player and the other glove.

        2. hmm. i didn't realize that the back triangle window thing was common. is it because that creates the least broken glass, so less chance of hurting yourself? or, is it out of something like, "dude, sorry, i'm gonna be a total dick and take a bunch of your stuff, but i'll try to do the least dickish thing in regards to having to replace your window"?

          2. Harder to see that it's broken out- won't get reported as quickly. Plus, as someone who has broken a few windows before (demo derby car prep), the triangle window tends to break easier than one of the door windows.

    3. That is a cr*ppy feeling. I've mentioned it here before, but since moving back to Minnesota 3 years ago, I've had my car broken into twice and vandalized/burglarized another time. They tried to take the car once, but were interrupted by my insomniac neighbor at 4 am on a Sunday. They'd managed to get the car in neutral.

      The most painful item to replace was the catalytic converter: ~$700 and that includes a nearly free install by my mechanic brother-in-law. The other times they took A PACK OF GUM (I sh*t you not) and a pair of Ray-Bans that had been sat on so many times you could barely keep 'em on your face. No interest in my CD collection I guess...how insulting.

      Oh yeah, once time they swapped my license plates too. Left me a nice set from some other stolen Civic...cops said they do that a lot.

      1. Spies and other good guy vigilantes often swap plates in thriller novels. Just pretend the people who did it are saving the world from the nuclear war.

    4. About 8 or so years ago now I had my apartment robbed, or least my bedroom. They took a keyboard, a drum machine, a carton of smokes, a receiver, cd player, speakers, and almost anything else that wasn't over 100 pounds. However they did leave my stack of cds.

      The album on the top?

      Bonnie Prince Billy- "Master and Everyone".

      1. I worry sometimes about all the CDs I leave in plain sight when I park my car in bad neighborhoods. I must remember that nobody's going to break into my car to score some Reba McEntire.

        1. I've probably mentioned this to you, but my friend Missy says that Reba is the nicest and most genuine person in all of show business.

          1. My wife met her and said the same thing. She also said that that woman is tiny!

            1. Yeah, as did Missy, who saw her on a regular basis. It's funny how people expect the famous to be impressive in height. I've met quite a few famous people, and only one or two was taller than I, and I'm not quite six feet.

    5. That sucks. Also, reading this thread makes me really happy that I park in a garage overnight.

      1. What's humorous to me is that I live in a pretty nice neighborhood. There are many, many more valuable cars containing more valuable belongings within a block or two of my house.

    6. Of course, my car is a Saturn that is 13 years old. Thus, all of the replacement pieces I need (and I need quite a few because this guy ripped apart the entire center console) have to be found on a scrapyard and will take awhile for procurement. Of course, the total cost also falls just below the deductible.

      2. See, the solution was to not replace the parts (I have a 16-year old Saturn). Of course, my guy was a little more surgical in busting out my radio/cd player.

        1. This guy wasn't surgical or else I probably wouldn't bother with some of the parts. However, it looks like a tornado went through.

  11. heads up to any Citizens into Civil War history and/or IT stuff: this NY Times blog post includes a couple archival maps from the Library of Congress and a neat zoom-on-mouseover effect. Plus the article is interesting.

    2. That's pretty cool. Back between quitting grad school and finding my actuarial job, I applied at the state house to be a redistricting assistant or something, because I just find that stuff fascinating. Geography + math = fun! I wish Excel had built-in GIS interfaces, where you could go from states, counties, or countries, and color them or something.

      I later found out that even though the positions were partisan (one for the minority and one for the majority), they both came through the same person. So it was probably a bad idea to apply for both positions, with identical cover letters and resumes, except showing how I'd been an involved D on one and an involved R on the other.

  12. Dido. I live in one of the better areas in Yakima, which is sort of like saying In the Name of the Father is the best Uwe Boll movie (okay, that's probably an exaggeration). I'm delighted that I have a garage; when the window was left unlocked, someone stepped into my house, and the one time the Milkmaid failed to close the garage door after work, someone came in, took my beer(!!11!1!) and wrote a strange non-sequitur on the wall in crayon.

    2. That was easily the worst (or second worst, Postal was terrible) Boll film. I wanted to claw my eyes out. The sheer length of the film made it intolerable.

    3. Isn't In the Name of the Father a Daniel-Day Lewis Daniel Day-Lewis (improper hyphenation) movie about the IRA bombings in Guilford?

  13. Plouffe at SS batting second, Revere in left batting seventh (I guess Gardy wanted to stick a righty among the lefties and vice versa). Casilla at second batting ninth courtesy of Joe C.

    1. Denard Span, CF
    2. Trevor Plouffe, SS
    3. Justin Morneau, 1B
    4. Jason Kubel, DH
    5. Michael Cuddyer, RF
    6. Danny Valencia, 3B
    7. Ben Revere, LF
    8. Drew Butera, C
    9. Alexi Casilla, 2B

    1. ahh, man. where's raging tonsils? i wanted to break that name in tonight (by the way, don't look that up on google images with safesearch off).

      1. I guess when I googled it initially, I just stayed with the generic search. I tend to avoid image searches.

    1. I have mentally prepared myself for a third-place finish. So anything better will be glorious.

    2. Except for Francisco Liriano's no-hitter, the rotation has been a huge disappointment

      Umm, isn't Duensing in our rotation? And Baker? You know, the two guys ranked at 19 and 25 on ERA+? Sheesh, that took me about five minutes to find those stats and I suck at using B-Ref.

      1. Former and current staff aces Pavano and Blackburn are sucking, therefore disappointment.

        1. Heh.

          According to Statcorner, Pavano has been within spitting distance of league average (pRAA of -0.7). Blackburn, not so much. And Spitshank really made an impression in one start.

          Starter xIP tRA pRAA
          Baker, Scott 31.2  3.96 +0.8
          Blackburn, Nick 34.1  6.17 -7.5
          Duensing, Brian 35.1  3.40 +3.1
          Liriano, Francisco 32.1  5.48 -4.6
          Pavano, Carl 38.6  4.35 -0.7
          Swarzak, Anthony  5.2 10.03 -3.4

          1. Yeah, rather than characterize the rotation as a "huge disappointment", I'd say other than Liriano, they've been mostly what I expected. Duensing's probably been a little better. I wouldn't say Baker's been better than I expected, since I expected him to be pretty good, because he is pretty good. Both of them are showing ERAs lower than their DIPS numbers, but those still look solid. I also didn't expect Pavano to strike anyone out, so he's about what I thought, too. And Blackburn is...Blackburn.

            1. and looking at those tRA values, I'd venture to guess that it will take about one more really good outing for F-Bomb to get down to "average" territory, and all the handwringing would quickly be forgotten.

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