Looks like the RFT got us worried about the Ballpark Village unnecessarily. The Cardinals website is reporting that the Ballpark Village will be built in a more traditional fashion.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 28 October 2006 at 10:51 PM

WORLD CHAMPIONS!

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 27 October 2006 at 10:42 PM

A fan brought a sign to the game tonight that read "The Experts are Idiots." Here's what they were talking about:

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 27 October 2006 at 8:41 PM

When all else fails, the GOP likes to play the bigot card: G.O.P. Moves Fast to Reignite Issue of Gay Marriage

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 October 2006 at 11:54 PM

Safire on email salutations. I've been going with no salutation recently, but I like the name and a colon as well.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 October 2006 at 11:23 PM

NL CHAMPIONS!

(previously)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 October 2006 at 2:01 PM

Mike Shannon is funny. The Frank Gehry-designed Ballpark Village is awful. Put them together and you get this RFT article.

Also, who would have ever suspected that Mike Shannon knows how to send emails.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 18 October 2006 at 8:26 PM

Don't get me wrong, everything about the Cardinals post-season run is unexpected (see the experts' NLDS and NLCS predictions, for example), but who would have thought that two of our (so far) three wins in the NLCS would come from pitching gems by Jeff Suppan and Jeff Weaver? Or that the Cardinal bats would have to (and be able to) bail Chris Carpenter out of a tough spot in game 2? Everything about this post-season run just seems a little different than the last two runs. The underdog status for starters, but Tony LaRussa seems to be doing things differently as well. We haven't yet had the all second-stringers game where Tony starts all the subs at the same, something that had become a staple of Cardinals NLCS runs. And Tony seems to be pulling the right strings with his relievers. But he's not playing the match-up game that he normally plays. There's the occasionally lefty-lefty match-up sure, but most of our relievers seem to be in for an inning or more. It's amazing that Tony has confidence in this very young bullpen when the knock on him recently has been to value veteran talent over rookies. All of this is almost certainly a by-product of the position the Cardinals find themselves in, but its refreshing to see.

As Will Leitch wrote in the NY Times today, the post-season is all about luck. And the Cardinals seem very lucky right now.

On to game six.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 18 October 2006 at 10:15 AM

Okay, so So Taguchi, who has been brought into games primarily as a defensive substitution recently, is 2 for 2 in the post-season. Thos two hits? Both were home runs.

So isn't the lone reason the Cardinals won tonight. The real key to the Cardinals success was the production from the top and the bottom of the lineup. Pujols bat was finally connecting, Spiezio had a triple and a bunch of other hits, and even Yadier Molina went 3-5 with 2 RBIs. This was the missing element during the slump. Pitchers would go out and throw bad but not awful games, but the Cardinal bats could never, ever bail them out. Even in the NLDS, we had two strong games against the Padres before our bats fell silent. The question now is whether we'll be able to keep this momentum going.

On to St. Louis.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 October 2006 at 11:26 PM

FYI: The AP reports that John Stewart will not be making a presential run in '08. "Nothing says 'I am ashamed of you my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08,'" Stewart is reported to have said.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 9 October 2006 at 5:14 PM

Daily Round-up

• The Cardinals beat the Padres to win their NLDS match-up in four games. Here are the ESPN experts' play-off predictions. One of the 19 predicted a Cardinals win. One might be tempted to question the collective expertise of this group, but I'll abstain for now.

• North Korea test fired a nuclear weapon late last night. Odd that we invaded Iraq because we thought they might be getting close to having nuclear weapons, but preferred to (not) hold six-party talks with N. Korea about their nuclear ambitions. If Iraq really was about the WMDs, we've made a gross miscalculation.

• Seniors in Levy County, Florida are rebelling against mandatory drug testing for library volunteers. The library system's pool of 55 volunteers worked 330 hours in September 2005. This past September two volunteers logged 11 hours of time. Now the libraries "are struggling to get books checked out or reshelved" without the volunteers.
  (via obscurestore)

• In New York magazine, Kurt Andersen has a great piece on the NY Times handling of the Duke lacrosse case. The Times does not come out of it looking good.
  (via Romenesko)

• Google/YouTube Rumors: If google really does want YouTube, I guess we can call google video a bust. Also, Forrester's Charlene Li has a good analysis of the whole thing: Why google wants YouTube, Why YouTube wants to be bought by google, and is YouTube worth $1.6b.

• The NY Times Magazine had a very thoughtful piece on Will Wright's (of SimCity and The Sims fame) new videogame, Spore. The entire article is worth a read, but I was especially taken with the part that points out that

  Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games -- like World of Warcraft -- where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design -- the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 -- was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore "massively single player."

  I'll probably post a follow-up to this, but it comes back to the idea that gaming needs to be opened up to the masses. And not having a whole community of active, highly-skilled competitors is one way of lowering the barriers to entry.
  

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 9 October 2006 at 12:48 PM

A device that didn't need to exist: the George Foreman USB iGrill. It draws current through the USB connector, meaning it doesn't need to be plugged in to the wall "making it perfect for dorm or office cooking." And you can turn it on from any internet connection. Because what you really want is a hot kitchen appliance operating unattended.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 October 2006 at 9:16 PM

Does anyone else get the feeling that "Boston Legal" might be setting things up for James Spader to leave the show?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 3 October 2006 at 10:30 PM

I don't mind the new "Veronica Mars" title graphics, but the new cover of the theme song sucks.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 October 2006 at 8:15 PM

TV Picks for Tuesday

• Cardinals @ Padres, NLDS Game 1, ESPN, 3:00 pm CT

• Friday Night Lights -- The trifecta is complete: book, movie, tv show.

• Veronica Mars -- Nowhere to go but up. Perhaps college and shorter mystery arcs will be the key to keeping the writers engaged in a way that the conclusion of season 2 leads you to believe they weren't last year.

• Boston Legal -- Still the best show on television.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 October 2006 at 10:20 PM