ESPN SportCenter highlights from May 6, 1998.  The Cubs’ 21-year-old pitching phenom Kerry Wood strikes out 20 in one of the most dominant pitching performances of all time – and against the winningest Houston Astros team ever. Check out the break on the slider he throws around 1:30 – it broke so hard it crosses the plate and ends up behind the hitter! That year, he pitched 167 innings and struck out 233 – almost 1.5 an inning. His elbow would later revolt.

While desperately searching for some Fantasy Baseball advice this evening, I stumbled upon a magnificent thing: The Library of Congress’ News from the 1910s photoset at Flickr.

Of particular interest were the large number of baseball-related photos from that set.

You see, I’m currently reading Eight Men Out – one of those must-read baseball books that I’ve never-read. It details the fixing of the 1919 World Series (“Say it ain’t so, Joe! Say it ain’t so!”), and baseball of that protean period is truly fascinating. Played in parks that Single-A ballclubs would snub today and attended by men in suits and snappy bowler-hats. Rough and tumble men with weathered faces and hard hands who played for peanuts. One of my favorite photos is seen below: People choking the streets in NYC to see a telegraph-fed “play-o-graph” of the 1911 World Series. That was the sports bar of the day!

In many ways, though, baseball hasn’t changed much since then. It is a uniquely American game, and thus captures our attention like few other things. Iconic, beautiful.

The early days of baseball were played in lots that would make most high-school coaches grumble. Glorified sandlots with fences. But it had reached most Americans by this time, even if on an average American would only see a game once every 30 years. There was nothing else like it. It was raw, crude by today’s measure, but in those sandlots and in that violently slow game, American found it’s pastime.

Can you tell it’s almost time for Spring Training to begin?

Link found over at BaseballMusings.com.

Listening to National Public Radio during my drive this morning (as I normally do) I heard the last installment of a series running on the Morning Edition program – the audio diary of a young dentist in Iraq detailing his daily struggle to live in Iraq.

The previous 4 installments ranged from the jubilation of Iraq’s win in the Asian Cup Football tournament to his feeling over his parent’s insistence that he leave Iraq – and them – for a country where being a doctor will not get you killed.

The final chapter was aired this morning – Iraqi Dentist Learns of Torture, Death of Friend. A good friend of his is abducted and ransomed. $70,000 is the fee, which is negotiated down to $20,000. Not a paltry sum by any means, and one that must be scrounged from neighbors and family members. The ransom is paid – an unthinkable action if it were to happen in the United States – and after a week or more of waiting to hear from the kidnappers… his friend is dumped in a local market, beheaded, tortured and broken.

Just imagine for a moment living in such a world. A world where doctors live in fear and grown men are snatched from the streets by gangs of men. NPR reported that 650 Iraqis in August alone were killed in Baghdad in this manner.

In the end, the dentist attempts to leave Iraq for Jordan, but upon landing in Amman, he is denied asylum and is put on a plane back to Iraq, where he is forced into hiding, where he remains today.

All of this serves to remind me that despite my own personal struggles – I am blessed in comparison – and it strikes me like a hammer every time I think of it.

Synopsis: Norweigan FM Pirate explains his buriable transmitter from 30 years ago while inside his homebuilt cat-cage (complete with hamster wheel). A fascinating contraption! He is nutty as squirrel poop, and I love it.

Those of you who knew me when I was younger knew that I worked at the Dairy Queen in Middletown for most of my college years. Working at a restaurant offers interaction with a good number of people – but there are always a few that stand out, the regulars. One of my favorites was Carroll King. He was a man who did odd jobs for us on occasion or sometimes just sat in the back booth sipping coffee, always ready with a “hello” and a too-good-to-be true story. He was a bow-legged story teller, always dressed in black. He was a good man, but deeply flawed. Carroll died on January 4th, 2007 in a wooden shack in Middletown, Kentucky.

Carroll was a man about Middletown. He was known by all and was as close to a fixture as Middletown has ever had. Carroll was also homeless by choice and an chronic alcoholic. You could make reference to the loveable Otis the Drunk from TV’s Mayberry, and you’d be about half-right. Carroll, like Otis, was harmless and had a heart that, while weathered like the wrinkles on his face, was still good and true. But to romanticize him would be overlooking the crippling addiction that Carroll faced day-in and day-out. He was unapologetic in his poverty, and squandered much of what he received on alcohol. He seemed to accept his lot, and turned away offers for a place to stay. He was wild at heart. He won’t be missed by some, but he will be missed by many.

He was, in the end, a bridge to a lifestyle and a disease that no one would ever normally wish to associate with, but he managed to do so without force with so many people in Middletown that he had become part of Middletown.

Article: Homeless man had a place in friends’ hearts


Gallery: Memorial for Carroll King


Video: Carroll King’s Memorial Service


Obituary: Carroll M. King

Kelly and I got married waaaay back on April 26th, 2002, and the next day we set off on our “Out West Road Trip” of a honeymoon. I made travelogues each day and uploaded photos at night from our hotel rooms, but had never entered them into the ‘blog until just now.

So, without further ado:

Honeymoon Day #1: Giant Ketchup and St. Louis, Gateway to the
West

Honeymoon Day #2: Beneath the arch, above the city

Honeymoon Day #3: Albino Squirreltown #1, OKC

Honeymoon Day #4: OKC to Albuquerque, NM via Amarillo, TX

Honeymoon Day #5: Wrong turns in Albuquerque, Navajo Radio, Meteor Crater and White Buffalo

Honeymoon Day #6: Grand Canyon, Tuba City, Navajo Country, Squeaking through Wolf Creek Pass

Honeymoon Day #7: The Genoa Wonder Tower Oddyssey, Kansas, Spiderman

Honeymoon Day #8: Hays, KS to St. Louis, MO

Honeymoon Day #9: Busch Stadium, Squirrelville #2, and home.

I suggest you start at the beginning and use the new, handy “Back to previous entry” and “Onward to next entry” links to get to the next day! And for more travel excitement, you can also now browse the blog by topics.

For the visual lot, there is also the Honeymoon Gallery with pictures from the entire trip (but that has been there all along).

Enjoy!

Today is the 35th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing. In honor, I suggest you check out this kick-ass full-screen Quicktime panorama of the moon and the Apollo landing craft.

There are still some conspiracy folks questioning “Was it faked?” but there are heaps of evidence that say “it was it real!” I think I’d have to side with the “NOT FAKED” camp on this one. Mostly because the science is there, and maybe just a bit because Buzz Aldrin throws a mean left-hook.

NASA has a nice gallery of Apollo 11 photos, and you should check them out. After that, why don’t you take a look to the heavens this evening (link to Louisville-specific data at Heavens-Above.com), and wonder what it must have been like to be there on the moon.

I’ve had this story rolling through my mind since last night whilst I was making spaghetti (the tie-in is later revealed, dear reader). It is a story of innocence and odd mental pathways of our elders, oh yes. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time, so this is probably riddled with half-truths and filled in with egregious lies. But I bid you read on…

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So, I was in the Boy Scouts as a young man — an experience I very much value to this very day. (Ed: It should be noted that the lowest levels of the BSA are quite OK, but the upper levels of administration have shown themselves to be homophobic and exclusionary). But that is neither here nor there. Up until I was about 14 we lived in Middletown, a suburb in Eastern Jefferson county (now Metro Louisville) and I was a member of Troop 71 which was sponsored by the Epiphany Catholic Church. One Thursday, at our weekly meeting, we had a visitor from another Troop — an elderly man whose name escapes me, but suffice it to say he had been scouting since the 20′s or 30′s. I remember him as a slightly Wilford-Brimleyesque man replete with white moustache. He was here to talk to us about the stamp collecting merit badge as he was apparently quite the philatelist. We quickly went through our weekly points-of-business, and then we all congregated around this gent (who also reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt) to have him talk to us about the ways and means of the philatelic hobby.

As we all settled around him in a semi-circle with his back to one of the windows in the youth center we called home, he began to explain to us that anyone and everyone collects stamps. Old, young, black, white, rich, poor. He could have left it alone with that, but no, gentle reader, he did not. He began scuttling down a side-road of conversation that I’m sure we’ve all encountered. We being young Scouts had no reason to wonder why we started to turn down the grisly road that I am about to explain, so we followed the leader.

“You see, young masters, that I sometimes work with retarded and otherwise slow children. Some of them have been abused by their no-good parents or perhaps just neglected by people of the same sort. One of the sorrier examples of these children is a young child that we have taken to referring to as the ‘dip baby’. You see as a young babe he was often inflicted with cholic, a malady that haunts many a young child. Cholic causes a child to be most cantankerous and will cause the child to cry for hours upon end. As you could imagine this can be most irritating.”

“One unfortunate day, the mother of this child had reached her pitifully low tolerance for the bellowing of this sorry child, and decided to attempt to soothe this child of his contemptuous malady. Normally, this can be achieved by running a vacuum-cleaner or a trip in an motor-car. This mother, however, chose a method of cessation known only prior to medieval torturers and the cannibals* of Darkest Africa. She chose to dip this child into a pot of boiling water.”

Needless to say, we were taken aback at where this old man had taken us! We had somehow strayed off of Main Street, Anytown, USA into some horrible and macabre back-alley. Why had he brought us here? What was to happen next? He continued…

“Children, you see the mother was quite possibly insane — Perhaps she was syphilitic or had forsaken proper child-rearing instinct for the lure of some chemical retreat — I cannot say. The mother was quickly imprisoned, and her child made a ward of the state. He has since made a very painful recovery, and lives everyday in near-constant agony. His one love in this terrible world? Stamp collection. I hope this goes to show you that anyone, even a child dipped in boiling water, can enjoy the wonderful world of stamp-collecting.”

So, there we were finally were, back onto the safe road, having been dragged through the twisted wood of this man’s horrifying yarn. We were all fairly shocked, I think, but he continued on to explain to us the ins and outs of stamp collecting, and soon enough it was all over. I don’t remember much of what he said about stamps that night, but I certainly learned a lesson about innocence and the odd mental pathways of our elders. Perhaps you have as well.

* – it should be noted that he had, many years earlier while I was a Cub Scout, stood in front of a large audience of Cub Scouts, ranging from Tiger Cubs (6 to 7 years of age) to Webelos (11 to 12 years of age), and detailed the process by which he had seen Congolese cannibals make shrunken heads.

Just a quick link — here is a decent article on Louisville Mojo, a great local web site that has grown quite a bit in the last year or so. Turns out, I have two (tenuous) connections to it. One is Michael Briedenbach, with whom I worked at Corvus, and the second is Chuck Burke, the founder and el presidente of Louisville Mojo and also had a hand in Dance of Shiva, a wildly popular BBS here in Louisville in the early 90′s where I was a member. They had newsgroups there! It was all very exciting. BBS’ing was very much a “community” sort of thing, and it’s taken a while for the Internet to finally find it’s foothold in the culture to support communities. That’s all really, just thought I’d remember them good old days.

I was tipped off to
Retro Crush’s 50 Coolest Song Parts by the venerable Memepool yesterday. It’s a pretty good listing of the cooling “parts of songs” ever. I’m all for listing stuff, but certainly not taking them as gospel. My stance on this is ever-so-bluntly pointed out by Retro Crush listing a Phil Collin’s song as the “#1 Coolest Song Part” ever. EVER. I couldn’t hardly agree more with Mr. Jackson Cooper‘s assessment: “Bullshit, I say.”

The end result might very well have been “bullshit”, but the whole notion of “cool song parts” is still wickedly valid. I think about cool song parts all the time. The #2 song on that list — “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who — was a prime example that was the first song I associated with “cool song parts” when I read the title of this well-conceived and ill-concluded list. As I was chatting with Jackson, I noted “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat in the car [with Kelly] and had her just listen to that keyboard solo [and resulting scream from Roger Daltrey],” and then stated “Kelly — this is what the end/beginning of the world will sound like.”

I know a cool song part when I hear one — there is something about the perfectly placed drum solo, the rising crush of an orchestra, a well placed lyric or perhaps a “ROCK!” that sends a shiver up my spine. It’s almost like I’m scared, excited and incensed all at once — such is the sway that music has o’er me. It’s not like I’ve always had this reaction to music, though. I clearly remember the first time it happened, and it was a bit of an odd circumstance for a revelation.

Cue wavy fingers of a man going back in time…

Well, I was working at Dairy Queen, washing dishes on a weekday night, possibly winter (winter fits the story, anyway). I was in my late teens, early twenties.

It was late at night, and we’ve got the radio tuned to some family-safe radio station — probably 107.7 WSFR — the best hits of the 70′s 80′s and today, played in a pseudo-random order, but with a very small sample of songs.
Considering the length of time I had worked at this restaurant, I’ve heard just about their whole playlist at least a hundred times over (all Jackson Brown songs are inexplicably played with twice the frequency, I don’t know why).
I know all the lyrics to every hit Kansas and Boston ever had — you know the one about “I done the rancher’s daaaaughter, and I sho’ did hurt his priiide”. Yeah, LOVE IT.
So anyway, it’s safe to say I’ve heard every hit song from the 70′s by now including Springsteen’s “Born to Run”.
There I am, attempting to scrape day-old burnt gravy out of the bottom of a stainless steel container.
Greasy Adidas Samba’s on my feet, black pants, apron and ball-cap, red shirt, pony-tail at the time.
…And that song comes on and, at that moment, I finally pay attention to it or perhaps, we paid attention to each other, I don’t know for sure.
But that opening of that song (the audio of which is sadly missing from it’s entry on that list) just grabbed me and I listened to the lyrics of hope and desperation on “mean streets”.
Streets that i’ve never tread, but the lyrics hit home, and hit home hard.

"Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run"

"Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
and strap your hands across my engines"

His voice rising in intensity like a man trying to race up the stairs of a subway tunnel. The decrescendo of the middle of the song with Clarence’s sax going bum bum bum bu-bu-bu-bu-ba-bum. The dark before the dawn, and then that explosive rip of “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes…”
And i couldn’t help it — I let the dish fall in the sink, and I put my hands on the edge of the sink, and I just started to cry.
Not tears of sadness necessarily or even joy. Not the uncontrollable sobbing of terrible weight — just enough to know that I had been bested. Bested by a song that had hit me right square in the chest.

I think that might be where it started. A particular piece of music — just like these little chunks on the list — can hit me like a ton of bricks.
Like I said, a shiver up my spine, usually, but some things hit me right square and cut through all this flesh and bone and emotional defense, and POW. Right in the kisser.

So, yeah, from that point on, I’ve been a fan of Bruce Springsteen.

Why did it happen *right then*? When I know I’ve heard that song a million times? I’m not entirely sure, but I think I know myself a little better now.