Sean Casey
Personable, caring, and loyal describe a person you can look up to, so Sean Casey’s jersey is the one for you.

By wearing #21, you demonstrate a commitment to community, friendship, and the American way. But Casey’s not a Red anymore, you might say. That’s OK. No one else is going to be wearing #21 in Cincy for a long, long, long time.

Your fortune: An old schoolyard crush has been thinking about you and will be looking you up soon. It’s probably about time you took those pictures off your website.
Which Jersey Should You Wear?

One of us Cardinals fans should steal this here idea from Red Hot Mama.

(Hat tip to Scott for the quiz-link.)

Made it safely back from DC. My sister called this morning to let me know that her son was looking around the house for me. Apparently when I’m not around, he refers to me as Lee Lee, so he was walking around, looking under blankets and calling out, “Lee Lee?” Adorable, no? I’ve never heard him say Lee Lee, but last time I was down, he managed to say Uncle Liam once, which was amazing.

Got to briefly see my brother, sister-in-law, and niece last night. The niece still doesn’t like me. I’d thought it was because I had a beard last time she saw me. It turns out she doesn’t like any men except for her daddy. Kids are crazy, I tell ya. She’s got the coolest uncle EVAR and does nothing but cry when I’m around.

According to Wikipedia, It’s a Wonderful Life is in the public domain.

So where can I download it?

I haven’t gotten to see it for a year and about five hours.

My present came early last night, when I checked my grades online and discovered I’d gotten all A’s. Hooray for me!

Had a good time at church this morning playing with my nephew outside. Mass was at St. Mary’s, the oldest Catholic church in Virginia. One of those who helped found the church was a friend of George Washington, Col. John Fitzgerald.

I finished reading a truly amazing book today, A Deepness in the Sky. It’s a story of mankind’s first encounter with an intelligent, technological alien civilization on the periphery of the galaxy. Unfortunately, two groups of humans show up at the same time, one of them a group of horribly evil enslavers of minds. The bad guys are bad enough to turn your guts. An amazingly imaginative story, this is the sort that makes aspiring SF writers give up their dreams and stick to their day jobs.

It’s that good. And it’s the prequel to a book written back in 1991, A Fire Upon the Deep, which I’ll be looking forward to picking up once I finish the other book I’ve got on me.

Some interesting things about the book: the writer’s a professor of CS and Math at SDSU, and he remarks that practical machine translation is one of the computational dreams that was eventually given up by humanity. So is artificial intelligence. He must never have played against the GoMoku agent I built a few years ago. That bastard was hella smart! A nice touch: the human Qeng Ho, who fly around the human explored sectors of the galaxy seeking technological human civilizations to trade with, use a metric system of time. They measure time in kiloseconds or megaseconds, which makes sense since their time can’t be measured by rotations of local heavenly bodies. (Since there are none). In this book, faster-than-light speed isn’t possible. People fly around between stars at 0.3c, cryogenically frozen most of the time, and so the different human colonies aren’t in meaningful contact with one another. And so they collapse and rise to greatness in chaotic cycles that the Qeng Ho must do their best to predict in order to know which markets to set off for.

In any case, it’s a great story set in a rich universe and raises profound questions. I recommend it to anyone who likes these sorts of things, and has time to read.

Seeing the Cubs making foolish outfield acquisitions, the ‘birds went ahead and signed RF Juan Encarnacion to a three year, fifteen million dollar contract. I was high on Encarnacion earlier in the offseason, thinking we could pick him up on the cheap and see whether Pujols could screw his head on straight and turn him into a real ballplayer.

Fifteen million bucks is a lot to stake on that gamble.

This displeases me, but my faith in Walt Jocketty is near-absolute. Encarnacion has his work cut out for him, and there’s a good group in place to get on his ass if he starts doggin’ it.

In happier news, 2B Junior Spivey also signed for 1 year 1.3 megabucks.

Update: Just to clarify… In spite of the stoopid title this post was given, I’m looking forward to rooting for Encarnacion.

Car alarms and 19-month-olds.

Sheesh!

(Honestly, it surprised me, too.)

Yesterday, my sister gave birth to my second niece at 4:44pm. Her name’s Caroline Grace Miller, and as of yesterday was 19 inches long and weighed 6 lbs, 15 oz. She’s a cute little gal, the spittin’ image of her older brother when he was born, except with darker hair and long fingernails.

Colin’s a whole lotta fun to hang out with, even if he didn’t like my grilled chicken.

Wowie! I get off the ‘nets for 24 hours and the Cards go and sign Sidney Ponson to a base 1 megadollar contract with the opportunity to earn another 1.5 in incentives. Scott and Viva el Birdos are all over things. A friend of mine worries that with Ponson signed, we’ll flip Marquis right away. I’d like to see us do that, but only after signing a cheap insurance policy in Jamey Wright for around his salary of last year ($550,000). At the end of the season, the Rockies moved him to the bullpen to help his chances getting signed elsewhere in ’06 in that role, believing his value as a starter to be nil. He was fairly effective out of the bullpen for the Rox in that small sample size, would cost barely anything, and could be an effective fill-in starter or long man in the ‘pen. The only problem is whether we have a spot on the roster for him, remembering that we’ll have to protect Mateo back there with middle inning relief.

I’m also not sure how much value other GMs put in Marquis and what decent corner outfielders would be available in the NL, where his trade value would be highest, given his bat-swingin’ skills.

Big news on the family front. I’m an uncle again. I’ll publish the details here when I get the go-ahead that my sister has alerted everyone on the telephone already.

Don’t miss the annual Braggin’ Rights game between Mizzou Tigers and the Fighting Illini at the Kiel Auditorium Savvis Center.

I’ll be in the Lou watching it, but am not sure at which bar. I’m off to a late start and have a lot to do before I can sit down and throw back any cold coldies.

First of all, FoxSports.com and SI.com are doing a great job filling up the online sports news vacuum caused by ESPN and the content black-hole they call “in.” My eyes lit up when I saw on the SI rumor round-up page that the Cubs were considering trading Kerry Wood to the gNats for Jose Vidro and Ryan Church. Church is a pretty good outfielder, though there aren’t too many left-handers for him to face in the NLC. Even more pleasing was the next bit on the page, that the Cubs had formally made an offer to Jacque Jones.

In a post at Birdwatch examining the conventional wisdom that Walt Jocketty is better at swinging advantageous trades than signing good free agents, Rob links to a stat page from the Puerto Rican Winter league, something I’ve been looking for. Yadier Molina is down there, showing little plate discipline yet still batting .330 and slugging .464 in the DH role. Somehow he managed to be charged with an error, as well. Mysterious.

An eyebrow raising line down there with the Manati team:

.378BA 45AB 5HR 16RBI .733SLG .463OBP 1.196OPS

That’s our very own John Rodriguez, tearing the cover off the ball.

Another Cardinal who’s doing nicely down there is Bill Pulsipher:

2.63ERA 41.0IP 0HR 8BB 25K .266OBA

Waydago, Bill!

Here are batting stats for the Dominican League. Our hulk at AA, Juan Cruz, is batting .308 with a home run every fifteen at-bats. Luna’s stinkin’ it up, unfortunately. Here’s the pitching stats, although I don’t see Carmen Cali on there. The page says that it was compiled 11/27/05, but I’m not sure what exactly that means.

Something of a chiding for Cards fans by Bobby Jones, talent scout extraordinaire.

Lots of interesting stuff there: Larry Bigbie’s to be expected as the everyday left fielder, and the 2005 draft was a lot better than most fans are aware.

Right click this link and save it to your desktop. Do it now before the Commissioner of Major League Baseball swoops down and stops this unapproved dissemination.

Ken Rosenthal says in a column today:

Free-agent left-hander Kirk Rueter could land with the Cardinals, competing with right-hander Anthony Reyes for the final rotation spot if the team doesn’t trade a starter or possibly working out of the bullpen. Rueter, 35, lives in Nashville, Ill., about 60 miles from St. Louis.

While Rueter won’t be making the $6,928,685 he was paid last year, and knowing he’s a local fella and a heckuva guy, wouldn’t it still be smarter to sign up Jamey Wright as a fifth starter? He made $550,000 last season. Here’s their side-by-side stat comparison. Wright’s a better pitcher in all respects, except for BB/9.

If we’re going to sign a cheap fifth starter and deal one of our more expensive pitchers, I’d prefer it be Wright, who’s undervalued after a bad year in Colorado.

Turned in my last two reports a half hour ago. I’ve got a lot of work-work to nail down this weekend and on Monday before I can go visit some family and meet the new niece or nephew.

I’m very happy to have this semester behind me, and I think it was a pretty successful one.

Completely off topic, but make sure to check out this interview with Kary Booher, the beat writer for the Springfield Cardinals by Ryan at Cardinals Diaspora. He thinks that Rick Ankiel could very well make the Cardinals out of Spring training with his combination of athleticism, hitting power, and good attitude. Also, he doesn’t expect the Cardinals to want to risk passing him through waivers after the promise he showed last season at AA. It would be pretty awesome to have his cannon in RF, can you imagine the standing O he’d get for throwing out a baserunner trying to take home on a line drive? Unless he really stinks it up in Spring Training, I have to agree with Booher on this one. And it’s very good to hear Ankiel’s got a good-guy reputation down there after some of the character-issue nasty rumors that had swirled around him in the Lou.

A friend of mine is having a theme party tonight, the theme being “Holiday Huxtable Bash,” replete with goofy christmas sweaters and jell-o jiggler shots. I was chatting with him about this and suggested he go Leonard Part 6 and dress in a silver body suit and ride around on an Emu. This fellow is a bit younger than me, so I had to dig up a website praising that fine film, and found this one instead.

Truly hilarious review/scourging, and makes a mention of one of my favorite bad movies of all time, Mac and Me, on the first page.

So, there I was, watching this movie for the first time. I was only a scant minute into the film, and it was already as horrible as everything I ever imagined. I had no clue what was going on, what I was looking at, or why I was looking at it, and it only got worse from there.

That paragraph comes on page 2 of 12.

So this module of the project I’ve been working on queries an electronic dictionary called wordnet to get synonyms of verbs it encounters. Do a query of ‘love’ at the online interface to wordnet to see for yourself what it includes as a synonym for the fourth sense of the verb love.

It’s kind of surprising when you watch the debugging dump scroll by and spot lines like: f@&k(john, mary,…

It also lets you know that this isn’t exactly the ideal way of doing what I’m doing.

Over at Baseball Musings is a very nice post about baseball and softball making inroads in Iran, something that I think is fantastic. The Iran Today article linked at the bottom of the post cites a desire to field Olympic softball and baseball teams as a long-term plan for baseball development in Iran.

Too bad the f’n IOC decided to abuse their authority by kicking baseball and softball out of the Olympic games after the 2008 games in that one police state.

But the IOC doesn’t stop there. In their bid to piss me off completely, an IOC member from Canada now says that excluding Cuba’s team from the World Baseball Cup tournament means no hosting the olympic games in US cities anytime soon. Kinda makes you want to ban Curling, if our women’s team wasn’t so damned good.

One more thing… The Canadian IOC jackass’s name is Dick Pound. Dick Pound!

Next Tuesday is the non-tender deadline, when a teams need to offer contracts to the players they have control over or allow them to become available to other teams’ offers. A player who I think we could give a shot to, given the awful crop of outfielders out there, is Eric Byrnes, if he’s non-tendered. Byrnes is a speedy outfielder whose performance has dropped off badly after being traded from Oakland. (Fancy that!) I remember when he was traded from Colorado last season thinking how we’d passed up a golden opportunity–I mean, Baltimore got him for Larry Bigbie! If he can regain the comfort level he had in the Oakland of 2004 and re-learn how to hit right-handed pitching, he could be a 20/20 everyday outfielder for us, and a decent replacement for Reggie Sanders.

The guy needs a fresh start, and could be a nice pickup at a reasonable price. The fans would love him. Check out his MLB.com page to see some fielding highlights.

Update: Someone Walt ought to make sure to sign before the 20th would be So Taguchi. There’s a shortage of consistent-hitting outfielders who can play all three positions, and his presence on our bench next year shouldn’t be taken for granted.

There’s an infomercial on right now for a workout video called Yoga Booty Ballet. The desperate actresses doing their paid testimonials are trying to do the whole serious ACTING!!! act, which crumbles when they have to say “Yoga Booty Ballet.” These women come in two classes. Some try to maintain their serious, authoritative speech throughout saying “Yoga Booty Ballet” and the others speed up their speech to get through it faster.

Either way, it’s asinine; but the existence of Yoga Booty Ballet may very well be a good indicator for the health of our civilization. Somebody’s making a good living off this silly idea. There must be sufficient excessive wealth lying around to support several thousand ambitious entrepreneurs with better ideas. If I hadn’t been pulling an all-nighter, I wouldn’t have seen the ad, and thus would have been less certain that Western civilization would pull it off after all.

That’s my unpaid testimonial to Yoga Booty Ballet. And aside from my booty never having looked better, I feel so relaxed and balanced!!