Cup of Coffee

October 15, 2021: Picked A Peck Of Pears And Apples

23 Comments

Last weekend we went to nearby(ish) orchard for apple picking, plus a pear tree or two they had on the side. On the way out they were also selling whole sunflower heads for $3 a pop. We scooped one up because it sounded fun.

While I did see some interesting grill recipes, I went with a more traditional boiling and roasting method. I used about a 1/4 of the salt the recipe I found called for, and it was fine. One mistake was too many seeds on the roasting pan. For reasons too long to explain, we ended up counting all the seeds (minus the crappy, puny ones) we harvested from this head and it came in a 2,214 (I had guessed around 2,300!). Even though I mixed the seeds several times in the oven, I found the ones that got stuck in the corner and roasted more were way better. Live and learn.

23 thoughts on “October 15, 2021: Picked A Peck Of Pears And Apples”

  1. I'm not going to do full winter baseball reports this year, but I am planning to provide updates on how Twins players are doing in the Arizona Fall League. Our team this year is the Scottsdale Scorpions

    Wednesday--Glendale 4, Scottsdale 3. Matt Wallner was 1-for-4. Zach Featherstone struck out three in a scoreless inning, giving up two hits.
    Thursday--Mesa 13, Scottsdale 5. Michael Helman was 1-for-2 with two walks and a run. Kody Funderburk pitched two innings, giving up four runs on four hits and a walk and striking out two. Cody Laweryson struck out six in 2.1 scoreless innings, giving up no hits and two walks. Evan Sisk pitched 1.1 scoreless innings, giving up a hit and two walks.

  3. Trever Bauer employers
    Tomahawk Choppers
    Cheaters
    Red Sox

    Well, that's bleak going forward

              1. And I've spent less time invested in the Twins since. And while it's not a determining factor, it would also be false to say it's been a non-factor.

                And if I knew more about the other teams, I'm sure they'd have similar players that would have me react in the same way. I just happen to know Bauer is a piece of work that Dodgers decided to employ anyway.

                Overall, my interest and enjoyment of sports is way down over the last 5 or so years largely because it gets harder and harder to square my beliefs with how the sports world works.

                1. And the reverse of "Don't root for a team for their players" of "Don't root for a player for the team" is exemplified with theoretically wanting to root for Rosario and Adrianza but for the Tomahawk Chop

        1. There was an okayish piece in The Athletic exploring why the Dodgers’ Brooklyn years are more romanticized than the Giants’ tenure in Manhattan (and the weird way the Mets have aligned themselves with the Dodgers’ history & identity). It posited that a significant component of that nostalgia has to do with the post-relocation fortunes of both teams. I wonder how the young fans of today will feel about the Dodgers, for exactly the reason you point out. (eschapp: fixed the link)

  4. This article in The Athletic on fan-driven umpire grading is fantastic:

    An old Acer laptop sits on top of a mini fridge in a 17th-floor dorm room at Boston University. It has one job. Every morning, at 10:30 a.m., the laptop whirs to life and runs some simple Python code, scraping data from an internet library, generating graphics and spitting them out to more than 140,000 followers on Twitter. Then the laptop goes to sleep. This is a day in the life of a bot.

    Its creator is often in class at that time of morning. Ethan Singer is a sophomore studying statistics, computer science and public policy at BU. He never imagined this many people would follow an account about umpires.

    The @UmpScorecards bot is the result of a project Singer started three summers ago when he was still a high schooler in Bethesda, Md. A friend showed Singer a study from BU lecturer Mark T. Williams that found MLB umpires had missed 34,294 ball/strike calls in 2018. Singer wanted to know more about the impact of incorrect calls — quantifying their value over sheer volume — so he created a tool to analyze how individual missed calls change run expectancy and, after two years of tinkering, took it to Twitter.

    “Now,” Singer says, “the tweets just send themselves from my dorm room.”

    2. that kid needs a sponsor. Twitter should be paying him a fat salary for the traffic he generates.

      1. In the article comments, one reader suggested the young fella has a job offer in hand before he graduates. But yeah, he’s giving it away for free while Twitter takes its ad cut.

  5. Heh, I just realized "a peck" is accurate because the four of us all got the smallest possible size bag required to go pick, which was 1/4 peck.

Comments are closed.