FlaSoxxJim

That's Dorothy the Dinosaur, silly. You must not have a four-year old child to keep you informed of these things...

FARK had a bunch of really good Photoshop'd submissions for the hat-throwing Dusty Baker ejection aerly in the season. There are some pretty sharp contributors there sometimes. I hadn't actually noticed that the buttons on Southpaws jersey are the scoreboard pinwheels until I took a closer look. That's pretty cool, whatever he's supposed to be.

Nothing in the ad campaign strikes me as odd, compared to the simultaneous campaign they are thinking about launching in West Virginia. The billboards there will simply read: "DUDE, NOT WITH YOUR SISTER! OR YOUR COUSIN!"

Only if anybody bothers to read it.

Some friends just moved into a house and found a stairway to a 50s-era bomb shelter under the kitchen. It actually appears like some previous owners also found it and used it to grow shrooms in. There are potting trays and milorganits bags down there but no windows and no electricity for grow lights either. To see the post WWII houses with the shelters and all the educational film reels showing people assuming a 'bomb position' and whatnot to best survive an attck really underscores how little people understood even then about what had been unleashed in August 1945. Brando I'm sure has seen a powerful little 'cartoon' called "When the Wind Blows" (1986-1987?) about an elderly english couple wither their bomb shelter so ill-prepared for a nuclear atttack. I haven't seen the film since it came out and have looked from time to time for it at the viseo store, but it is brilliant and fairly distressing. Bowie and Roger Waters (mostly) contribute to the soundtrack, but it worked well with the film at the time. I reccommend it if you can find it.

Wilbur with 22 (!!) complete games... What a workhorse. How blown away would people be today if a starter came anywhere close to that?

There's nothing inherently wrong with being damn smart monkeys though. We only get in trouble when we're so "smart" that we really screw up the neighborhood for the rest of the animals are that are so "dumb" that they've never do it for themselves.

We haven't gone far enough in our protections in general, we rarely do. I don't know the specificics here but often riparian rights and landowner rights conflicts comr about when landowners try to develop the land in ways they knew they would likely be prohibited from doing, but for favorable local or fedaral political climates (see the Bush Sr. administration redefining wetlands, largely for the sake of people who wanted to make a killing developing or selling formerly protected lands). New genetic and molecular tools are awesome for figuring out phyletic relationships and will revolutionize systematics. But lumpers versus splitters is nothing new in biological classification. regardless of the tools used, one generation of systematists will see two subspecies, and the next will see one, and maybe the next will see distinct sunspecies or even distinct species again... etc., etc. It takes a minimum of 5 years to even come up with a federal recovery plan once a species is listed, and maybe another 5 more before it is approved and put into action. There's a big logjam of species waiting to be listed now - primarily because of conflicts like this one. With all the time it takes to get a species listed, the EPA and state agencies would do well to move a little slowly here before considering delisting. At any rate, I see little compelling reason for delisting even if those two subspecies are thus far genotypically indistinguishable. There are over 2 billion nucleotides in the mouse genome, and the fact that a few loci, or few doxen loci, or a few hundred loci have been compared is statistically irrelevant. If Diversa or Celera decides its worth several millionj dollars to completely sequence bothe genomes then a cogent argument can be made. At the same time, we differ from chimps by less than 0.1% genetically - according to the standerds applied for most other animals we're the same species. Does anyone agree with that assessment?

I am impressed. I hear Finnigan's Wake is even denser, if such a thing is possible. I'm scared of getting almost all the way through Ulysses and then running into the last chaptter that I have heard is really 8 looooooong sentences of Molly's stream of consciousness lying in bed that lasts for something like 40 or 50 pages. My wife and I went to Davey Byrne's about 10 years ago on a literary pub crawl, a historic Dublin pub that shows in the book. We had cheese samiches and burgundy like Leopold did there 100 years ago, and I promised myself then I would beat that book (I had tried and failed once before). A decade later I am still trying.

You're right about the Dubliners being more managable being in bite-sized chunks. It also helps that it seems to have enough punctuation, unlike Ulysses sometimes. TThe size of Anna Karenina scared me away, but I id like Tolstoy's short stories that I have read – bite-sized chunks again.

Oops. Innacurate U.S. report on terrorism was 'big mistake', Powell says. I guess it sucks when people actually bother to check the numbers you put out in a report, especially when that report is the basis for administration claims that we are winning the war on terror. Excerpts:

With the 100th anniversary of Leopold’s and Stephen’s famous day and night around Dublin just three days away, I’m sure folks around here can hardly contain themselves. And so I prepare for my annual to semi-annual attempt at actually get through the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses… I’ve only made it to chapter 11 (Concert room and liver for dinner at the hotel) before throwing in the towel. I’d have to start over again and try to get a head of steam going, but don’t have time to commit to it. I’ve resisted the audio book approach but I think I’m finally going to succumb to temptation. There’s a 5-hour version for about $20, and an unabridged version for $100 (on sale) that I will catch serious crap about from the wife if I buy. I have a bottle of Crested 10 Irish whiskey that my folks brought back from the Jameson’s distillery last year, and good store of the ‘blonde in the black skirt’ (Guinness) as well to fortify myself, but it’s going to be an uphill battle unless I cheat and go the audio route. Has anyone here gotten through it? If so, you have my profound respect. Slainte’

Paulie has a handful of games at third under his belt, mostly with the Reds but a couple with us in 2000 as well. The bunted to death notion is a little unsettling though.

Great to see a good crowd out there on the TV tonight!

Bob, your original statement suggested that men of God should never have feelings of anger. I pointed out a couple high falutin' men of God and a facet of the Christian tripartete Divinity as well for good measure, to posit that it was in fact that simplistic viewpoint that was 'absolutely laughable'. "Pot shots" inplies the statements are not deserved and not true, and tthat's not the case here. It doesn't matter that someone has been out of office 16 years if the nation and the world is still living with the consequences. We're just shy of the 60th anniversary of our dropping atomic bombs on civilians in two cities. Is it taking pot shots to still comment on that sin and crime against humanity because some statite of limitation on outrage has transpoired? To be fair to FDR, he was kept completely in the dark on most of the Manhatten Project, as was Truman until a couple weeks before we nuked fellow human beings.

No, anger and religion shouldn't ever go together. Martin Luthor should have kept his 95 stupid ideas to himself and not rocked the boat. Moses should have stopped at "Let my people go... pretty please and only if you really want to," and not been so forceful. That Jesus was a real pain in the ass when he turned over the moneychangers' tables in the temple. Anger management class is most definatele in order you silly Messiah you...

They're not so complicated after all, are they? Dress it up as 'enlightened self-interest' and you can get away with it though.

Wave that flag. Don't question why, just wave and smile. I don't consider treating the world as our personal Risk boardgame as in any way commendable, and the beginnings of the Pax Americana/New World Order/New American Century or whatever you want to call American Imperialism are at Reagan's feet. We continue to pay for the national arrogance that Reagan legitimized and the current administration consider's our divine birthright..

That's true enough, he did reap the benefits. But he reaped the benefits of 40 years of Soviet overbuilding overspending overexpanding topheaviness, not just the 8 years of Reagan's administration. I'll check back when you've gotten a chance to defend the social politics and policies of the man, I understand it takes some time coming up with anything on that score.

The Cold War ended because the Soviet machine had overspent and overbuilt the military and had spread themselves way too thin for way too long. Clinton detractors have no patience for people that credit the strong economy during his tenure to his policies and contend he was merely in office at the right time. If you want a case study on someone truly in office at the right time, it's Reagan at the time of the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union. Then again, maybe they really did tear down the wall because Reagan asked them to. How about taking a stab at defenfing his attacks of civil justice, starting in 1964 with trying to help Barry Goldwater "preserve the Southern way of life" by fighting the Civil Rights act right through his time in office? It's a harder proposition than just waving a flag and talking about restored American pride. Then again, "Facts are stupid things," right? That's some President. And as far as God throwing his hat in... If he sent Jesus, I assume it would be you that had the beef with him since he was an advocate of a strong centralized government – "Give unto Caesar" and all that...

I caught your typo Nuke. You must have meant to say 'Reagan did more TO this country in his 8 years than any other president this century...'

I'm not going to get into the rights or wrongs about waiting 1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week after the 'national week of mourning' ended to try to set the record straight. For the record, there was a great measure of civility here this last week while people basked in their revisionist history of the Reagan years. Reagan was a bad President and we're still dealing with the consequences of his myopic policies, as has already been said here. Sadly, he was at the same time charming and disarming and fatherly and lots of people people bought into everything he said. Ask the NAACP or civil rights activists about what they thought of the "Great Uniter." Ask them what they thought about Reagan essentially launching his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi – where 4 clack civil rights proponents had been lynched as recently as 1964 – by talking about his belief in 'state's rights' (read: the rights of states to decide to roll back 20+ years of social reform as they felt like it). Then again, he ran in 1976 essentially as Goldwater's heir to the southern Republican voters, and was right there in 1964 with Goldwater trying to kill off the Civil Rights Act before it got passed. Ask anybody who cares about social justice about what they thought of Reagan going to bat for the segretationist southern Bob Jones University, trying to get them federal funding that hed been denied because of their racially descriminatory admission policies. Ask poor southern single mothers what the thought about being referred to by Reagan as "welfare queens driving around in pink Cadillacs." Ask the world what they think about Reagan's staunch support for the government of Apartheid South Africa. Ask any physicist what they think of throwing billions of dollars into a 'Star wars' Strategic Defense Initiative that no independent scientist thought would work. Sadly, we are now pouring billions into our own satar wars progrram that won't work. I'll let others debate the economics, some people may see a hidden benefit of the balloning of trillions of dollars of National debt.

Mr. Megadittos can't badmouth drug addicts anymore, and he can't talk about outside asaults on eh sanctity of marriage eiter. With less and less to feel superior about, you's THINK he'd run out of stuff to yammer on about.

Have a good one Danman!

0.6 L is just over 20 US fluid ounces. That's a dollar in a soda machine in my neck of the woods. And as far as answering the question... "Beer is proof that God lovves us and wants us to be happy" --Ben Franklin