In surveying the field of battle, a competent commander finds ways to transform obstacles into fulcrums to most effectively lever his victory.

The four 7/21/05 London transportation bombers are all in police custody now. These are presumably the button-men, low-level operatives in the cell that’s attacking London commuters. With the almost cartoonishly anti-American press pervasive in Great Britain, getting them to roll on their handlers and bomb-makers may be as simple as telling them, “We are preparing a plane bound for Guantanamo, gentlemen.”

I stumbled across this new blog today. It’s good. Makes me wish I still blogged about politics and my disdain for pinkoes and commies of all stripes.

At work today, I edited a mini-movie for some students in one of the summer courses from a client department. It was a fairly challenging job, since the camerawork was amateur and the students didn’t check their equipment, so sound was missing from about half the footage. It worked out OK. I only mention this because there was a section of video where I had to add in some background music to take attention away from the shaky camerawork. I ended up using a song by Desafinado, a local bossa nova band fronted by a lovely woman finishing up her PhD in the Portuguese department. It’s a great tune, and works perfectly in the movie. She’s gone for the summer, but I figured I’d check to see when they’d be playing again. Good news! They’ll be back doing their happy hour show at Cowboy Monkey next Friday (free show). I’m there, man.

I just noticed that at this point in the season, struggling with serious injury problems, the Cards are exactly matching their pre-season Diamond Mind projection. DM predicted the Cards would finish up 103-59, winning 63.6 percent of their games. The Cards now stand at 63-36, winning 63.6 percent of the games played thus far.

Here’s an interesting thing to note: “General manager Walt Jocketty said last weekend the trade market was “not even lukewarm,” but by Monday had intensified his search for outfield help.”

Has anyone noticed that Khalil Greene looks a hell of a lot like Jeff Spicoli? They have? How about Randa and the Joker? They noticed that, too?

Well then, the post must be at least somewhat substantive. The Cards beat the Padres 4-2. Both starters pitched themselves out of trouble quite a bit, it was a fun game to watch. Akinori Otsuka looked very good out of the Padres’ ‘pen, and not goofy like Greene or Randa. John Gall had his major league debut, and performed well, going two for four with a double, reaching on an error, and scoring the game’s first run. Dan interviewed him afterwards as the player of the game. John Rodriguez came in as part of a double switch and flied out to left. He is thus hitless since his career long hitting streak came to an end when he sprained his ankle on Saturday, striking out in a pinch hit appearance on Sunday. It’s too early to panic, though. I’m fairly excited to see if a trade goes down with the Cards this week. The Post-Dispatch writers seem to be ready to freak out if Jocketty doesn’t make a deal before the deadline. I’d be happy enough if he doesn’t, and if he does make a move, I hope it addresses our future needs as much as our current ones. Those are pretty high standards, and so if nothing comes up like that, I’d rather he do nothing than something that would sacrifice one of the two. In a perfect world, I’d most like to see us engage in a four-team megatrade in which we send Marquis to some NL team (outside our division) and Diaz to Texas, and we bring in Alomar Jr from Texas and Jonny Gomes from the Devil Rays. If this hypothetical world were truly perfect, the NL team would be the Phillies, whose GM would panic at the last minute and send Billy Wagner to the Cards, Jon Lieber to Texas, and Ryan Howard to Tampa, where he’d singlehandedly turn the tables on the AL East with his combination of immense talent and St. Louis-born heart and love for the game. (And Marquis would lead the Phillies over the Braves, who’d given up on his career, only to crumble before the Cardinals in the NLCS).

What this post lacks in substance, it makes up for in imagination, right? Right?

I’m certain someone is going to use that line as a cheeseball title for some story about the Cardinals today or tomorrow. I go off into the woods and the craziest things happen in civilization. Larry Walker has gone on the DL I find, and John Gall is finally brought up to fill his spot. Gall was a promising first base prospect with a reputation for clutch hitting who has been learning the outfield since Albert’s long term contract has made the club’s need for a AAA first base prospect quite low. This should be interesting.

My trip into the forests and wetlands of Southeastern Missouri concluded this morning. Let me recap my weekend for your reading pleasure.

I woke up on Saturday morning at 7am and set out for Vandalia, IL. After a four hour refresher course, I performed my fifth skydive–my last practice ripcord pull–and then my sixth skydive, which was my first freefall jump. Now that is a whole lot of fun. The freefall only lasted about five seconds, but it felt like a lot longer. Great time. Saturday night was spent in the Lou with some of the fam and then hit the hay early after a long day in the heat.

Sunday, we split the Lou around 11am for Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park. My pals Pete and Lindsay made the trip as well. We had a good time spending the ridiculously hot day swimming around in crystal clear, cool water and leaping off those bluffs. I jumped off the one that’s about 20′ high or so twice. Cass said I flapped my arms on the first jump. It didn’t work, and I hit the water nice and hard. But feet first and together, so no damage done. Sunday night was spent pounding ice cold Budweisers in the relatively cool evening air while listening to the baseball game. Until some commie-broad strolled over to ask me to turn the radio down saying without sarcasm, “the commercials are disturbing nature.” Nature had its revenge the following night, unfairly, as Pete and I listened to the rest of the game in my car. (It was a heartbreaker loss. We tied it in the ninth, and Tavarez intentionally walked Derek Lee and Aramis Ramirez to load the bases. Neifi Perez made us pay for it, big time, with a grand slam.)

On Monday, we went to nearby Elephant Rocks State Park in the morning and then swam around the Shut-Ins in the evening. Driving around, I noticed that people down there have a whole lot of trouble with apostrophes. I saw one sign that read, “Support the Troop’s.” I hate to mock the one who wrote a sign of a worthwhile message, but it gave me a nerdy laugh anyways. Support which troop’s what? Another one–far funnier and less noble–read, “For Sale: Mattress’es.” Pete had to work at 6am today (Tuesday) so he split Monday evening after supper, leaving Cass and I alone to battle nature. Nature came out swinging that night.

We’d seen raccoons prowling around campsites in the daytime, investigating the trash the losers at neighboring campsites had left after checking out. (Damned hippy-crites!) And they’d managed to attack a bag of tortilla chips from our site that we’d stored up high, but apparently within their reach. Monday night, they started to attack our campsite in earnest. Cass and I were sitting around in the soft glow of the campfire, chatting away peacefully and commercial-free when I started seeing grey shapes moving around. The fire was pretty smoky, it was dark, and copious amounts of ice cold budweiser had been consumed, so I was willing to accept that my imagination was getting the best of me. But I yelled at one shape and it ran off, and lunged at another, which ran off too. At this point, I began questioning my sanity, especially since Cass couldn’t see them. Trying to get a grip, I stopped actively searching for them and turned away from the fire. The conversation stopped when I saw one moving quickly behind Cass. The creatures were circling us like sharks. I leapt up and chased him, and the little bastard found the shadow of a post to hide in and follow to safety hiding underneath my car. Now Cass thought I was truly losing my mind, since I was sitting there on a camping chair, cigarette hanging out of my mouth, (ice cold) Budweiser in one hand, a handful of gravel in the other, and my eyes peeled wide, darting about in the gloom, chasing after grey shapes that disappeared into smoke and shadow. So she tossed a cookie out onto the ground. And nothing happened. At this point, I began to agree with her Liam-loses-his-mind theory until a raccoon leapt off a table in our campsite, snatched the cookie and disappeared in a flash. He must have been hiding behind a cooler. I figured the raccoon was hiding just beyond the shadows, so I let a handful of gravel fly, not hard enough to damage the animal, but hard enough to discourage their ballsiness in the face of humans. I’d estimate from the ensuing sound that at least three racoons dashed off into the fen behind our campsite. We put the cookies we were eating away so that there would be nothing at our campsite to eat and hit the hay not much later. Every once in a while, I’d hear something and sit up in bed and look out the window to see a raccoon scurrying across the campsite.

All around, a great extended weekend. Tonight’s game will be tough to watch. Our beloved former pitcher Woody Williams will take on newcomer Mark Mulder, who is dramatically recovering from a lousy June and pitching well of late. Before the game tonight, more fickle Cardinal “fans” than me will be muttering about how much better we’d be with Woody Williams, Dan Haren, and Kiko Calero instead of Mark Mulder.

I just noticed that Matthew Leach, STLcardinals.com beat writer, has started a blog titled Obviously, You’re Not a Golfer. The title is a reference to the other Lebowski‘s answer to Woo, who asked the Dude what his bowling ball was. I’m pretty sure this is after Woo’d peed on his rug, which really tied the room together. I’m excited about it, Leach did a good job covering camp.

That was the best baseball game I’ve seen this season. Truly, a thing of beauty; a joy to behold.

Rolen was DLed, and Seabol brought up to replace him.

John Rodriguez’ hitting streak is intact, with his first inning homer. I dislike his stance and the way he throws, but he covers the field and is still hitting hot. I’d like to see Mabry start in his place to cool his ego. If he runs into Edmonds pulling some hot-dog bullshit, he can kiss his call-up goodbye.

I’ve been struggling with these cgi files today and finally figured out what’s going wrong. I’d ftped them to a windows machine and then emailed them onto a linux machine, and so the formatting was left as DOS. That’s it. Just ^M carriage returns at the ends of lines screwing things up.

Fixed now!

Here’s a nice set of solutions for such things if you don’t have dos2unix or recode on your system.

How many ways can you find to smite this frog. I’ve knocked his melon off in two ways, popped his helmet off, and sent him into the ceiling. I’ve got a team of researchers searching for new methods.

Tonight will be the first game of a nasty weekend series against the Cubs in the Lou. Chris Carpenter faces off against Carlos Zambrano tonight. Zambrano tends to pitch pretty well against the Cards. It’s supposed to be insanely hot at tomorrow’s 2:15 start. Matt Morris will take the mound for us against Jerome Williams, a game in which I predict John Rodriguez will hit very well. (Seeing as John’s a lefty and both are minor leaguers.) Unfortunately, there’s a good chance I might miss the last two games of the series, since I’ll be falling from 5,000 feet during the second and camping during the third. Hopefully I’ll be able to listen on the radio.

Keep an eye peeled for Cardnilly’s series preview, which I shall go out on a limb and guess will be located here.

I tried my best to get into a Tom Clancy book, but it wasn’t to be. I read about 150 pages into Teeth of the Tiger before giving up. Reading those Amazon customer reviews, it seems like I’m not the only one who found the book to be dull and implausible. I did like the Caruso brothers though. Problem with all fiction like this is that there are real people out there much like them doing more interesting things. The best book I’ve read in the past few years was Blind Man’s Bluff, a truly exciting book of true stories. But I’ll try one of his older books. I rented the Patriot Games movie a while ago, and liked the Hunt for Red October movie, so maybe I’ll try one of them. Or some Dean Koontz. My pop likes him too.

The only fiction I really dig is science fiction, and I recently re-read the first Star Wars trilogy from Timothy Zahn, which although not as good as I’d remembered it, were far better stories than Lucas’ recent abominations. Since I’d read them the first time, back in High School, he’s written quite a few more, so I picked up the next in the series. Also checked out Crypto, Steven Levy’s book about amateur cryptology. I’ve heard real good things about his Hackers book, but the Amazon reviews for Crypto scare me. Two of the five stars reviews on the first page have titles like “I suck at math!” and another reviewer says the book feels like reading newsweek. I don’t think I’ll get past fifty pages if that is so.

My fall class schedule looks to be figured out. I’ll be taking one class on data mining raw text for Question-Answer systems, something I’d worked on in my first summer of grad school; also a class on computation morphology. I’m pretty stoked, just gotta finish up my summer research project. And jump out of an airplane and camp in one of the most beautiful sites in southern Missouri.

Update: Another book I’ve been reading off and on is Marine Sniper, about Sgt. Carlos Hathcock.

John Rodriguez just hit his first major league home run in the first inning of tonight’s game.

I wish I spoke Korean. It would be fun to know what these comics depicting the six MLB races say. The pictures are amusing enough on their own, though.

Link courtesy of Viva el Birdos!

He dropped his wedding ring. He wanted it back. Real bad.

Tomorrow is my lovely girlfriend’s birthday. She’s out in the field, actually surveying wetlands near East St. Louis. I offered to lend her a gun for the trip, she declined. I’m planning on heading down there for her birthday, and possibly to catch tomorrow’s Cards-Brewers game, which would be Mark Mulder v. Ben Sheets. Whoa! On Saturday, we’re planning to head to Vandalia, IL to leap out of an airplane. I’ll be making my fifth and sixth jump, presumably… the sixth being my first off the static line. She’s pretty terrified, but wants to do it. I’ll go out the door first!

Then on Sunday, we intend to do some camping at Johnson’s Shut-Ins for a few days. I’ve got a new roommate moving in tomorrow, so I’ll be busy tonight preparing his room.

Set phasers to Fun, away team. Language Log links to American in Lebanon’s reproduction of a Chinese-pirated version of Revenge of the Sith.

Now that’s some good comedy!

Not as funny, but LL’s also looking into the etymology of the handtool referred to as “dykes.” I’ve always referred to my linesman’s pliers as “dykes” and I call diagonal cutters “diagonals,” but I guess it makes more sense for DIagonal Cutters to be called Dikes. Learn something everyday, dontcha?

Always wear clean underwear and pack a spare t-shirt. Failure to heed my advice bears serious consequences.

First off, TOLAXOR at the Birdwatch links to a nice MSNBC article making predictions about the second half. They pick the Cards to beat the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the World Series.

I watched last night’s excellent 11-4 thrashing of the Milwaukee Brewers of Milwaukee. John Rodriguez had his first hit, a hard hit grounder that the 2nd basemen couldn’t come up with cleanly. Mike Mahoney started his third game in a row, throwing weight behind my theory that the Cardinals don’t trust Einar behind the plate. Either that or they don’t want him to get rusty when he’s sent back down, which could hurt our prized AAA starting prospects’ confidence. I think it more likely that they think he’s a better catcher than Einar. His defensive skills are most impressive, he was blocking some nasty breaking balls very well. His hitting is not good, but Pujols was making a big deal about his sac fly to advance Nunez from 2nd to 3rd in the third inning. After the flyout, Pujols was whistling from the dugout, and went over to the stairs to give Mahoney a fist-knock. I know Pujols is a team leader and all, but it seemed odd how much effort he was making to encourage Mahoney’s hitting confidence if he’s just going to be sent down when Molina comes back. By the way, Wayne Hagin said that Molina will likely not be back for two weeks. I hadn’t heard that anywhere else, but thought it pass-on-worthy.

Tonight, the Soup attempts to become the fourth Cardinal starter with double digit wins in the 2005 campaign.

When Indepundit linked to the article, The Sandbox Left is Killing the Democratic Party, I hadn’t heard of the “Sandbox Left” before and assumed it would refer to left-wing veterans of the GWOT, and guessed that the article would be about these men leaving the services over the next few years and taking the Democratic party back. Instead, the “sandbox left” are the more infantile and nutso of the lefties like propagandist Michael Moore and linguist Noam Chomsky. Interesting piece, although about a year old.

I checked out the front page of the New Editor, the blog that hosted that column, and found at the top today an article about another sandbox left linguist, George Lakoff. (I don’t like that SL description, and so will stop using it. Unless a Sandbox Left like I’d envisioned returns from war so we can return to a sensible two-party system.) I was taking a class with one of Lakoff’s former students in the Fall of 2001, and she handed out copies of the paper he’d written on 9/16/01. I read through it, and expressed my disdain for it in a crude and inelegant manner to my prof, something I have regret for now. It’s a rather vile paper, to say the least. George Lakoff works in a sort of cognitive science on the periphery of linguistics, advocating for the adoption of “frames” as the rudimentary form of knowledge representation and metaphors as the basis of human reasoning. This isn’t my area of expertise, although I’ve taken classes in both Knowledge Representation theory and Lakoff-style cognitive semantics. There are serious acadmeic arguments about these things, with different sides seizing on supportive experimental data and attempting to discredit unsupportive experimental results to argue that their cognitive theory, and their theory alone can account for human behavior. (If forced to take a side, I’d be with Barsalou and his Perceptual Symbols, which incorporates a variant on frames.) What pissed me off about Lakoff’s 9/11 paper, linked above, is that he was going beyond this–arguing that a terrorist attack on his own country, which had killed thousands of unsuspecting people, supported his theory of frames and metaphors. From my summary of his paper, 9/11 hurt the average American because the World Trade Center collapsing was metaphorical for castration and an airplane crashing into the Pentagon, due to the shape of the building, was metaphorical for rape. What’s left of the original paper that my prof had given me remains in the trunk of my old Nissan. I would use pages from it to check her oil level at gas stations.

All that being said, check out the Times’ article on Lakoff linked in that New Editor post. (Use BugMeNot if you are not signed up with the Times.) He discusses frames, and how brilliant conservatives have unlocked them as the key to controlling mankind’s behavior with almost psychohistorical certainty. It sounds like the cart is ahead of the horse to me, but according to that article, the Democratic party seems to have accepted Lakoff’s theory of Frames much more easily than did the Cognitive Science community.

Political bullshitting just became a science.

Fungoes led me to this nifty database of baseball uniforms which allowed me to answer a question Cass had asked me, “When did the Cardinals where those awful blue uniforms?” Ans: 1973-1984.

The uniforms from the nineteen-teens and some years in the ’20s are interesting for not having anything on their fronts. Wild.

And laughing at Houston’s hideous uniforms from 1975-1986 is a good time, too.