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Hammer Time…

That link comes thanks be to the newest Cardinals blog: Dave Bell, World Series Hero.

I always had a soft spot for Hammer. He was huge when I was in Junior High, but fortunately I got into Black Sabboth and Led Zeppelin early enough to never think much of pop music. He did take care of his people though. The guy put himself into bankruptcy trying to support a massive entourage of people from his old neighborhood. He’s a minister, a patriotic fellow, (now) a blogger, looks to be a heck of a dad, and is a baseball fan. He’s nicknamed after Hank Aaron, for Pete’s sake. What’s not to like about the guy? (Aside from the Barbie doll, that is.)

Speaking of Barbie dolls, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m infatuated with Stacey Keibler. I could tattoo the insides of my eyelids with this picture and never tire of it. In fact, I’d probably alternate between leaving the left or right eye shut all the time and live the rest of my life without the faculty of depth perception. Go ahead and make fun. I don’t have cable and’ve been sick lately. And I’m a leg-man. She’s purty.

Being sick and without cable means that I missed watching Bruce Weber’s 100th game at Illinois on Saturday, the last home game of the 2005-06 season and of Dee Brown and James Augustine’s careers. I did get to listen to the end on the radio while parking my car before Illinois hockey’s final home game–a 10-1 walloping of Minnesota. Not this team, of course, but this one. There will be no missing tonight’s basketball game versus Minnesota, though. This one. They’re playing well right now, having convincingly won their last four at home, including victories over Michigan State and Iowa. It’s also their Senior Night, so they’re bound to be pumped up and ready to score some points. I’ll be watching it at Embassy at 8:00 on ESPN. (And rooting in vain for Northwestern to pull an upset in Evanston.)

Back in 2000 (March 12th, to be exact), a group of Houston Astros minor-leaguers were taken hostage in a robbery attempt on their hotel room. I knew that Morgan Ensberg, the current third baseman for Houston, was among those held at gunpoint from this article from last season. Ensberg uses that memory to keep his head level–that a loss is nothing compared to knowing that you might get murdered for nothing but a few hundred dollars.

Apparently Aaron Miles, who came to the Cardinals organization from Colorado in the Ray King trade, was also there, although when he got there later and eventually wrestled the armed robber to the floor.

The CSCHL playoff champion Illini hockey team has their final two regular-season games at 7pm Friday and Saturday this Mardi Gras weekend. Since New Orleans’ celebrations will be scaled down, I suppose that the Soulard neighborhood’s Mardi Gras festivities, ordinarily 2nd largest in the US, will be the biggest for this year, and this year only. I didn’t even realize that it was Mardi Gras weekend until I bumped into my pal Tim (who was recently recognized for being talented and generous dude that he is). Tim’s son is a smart guy about my age who buys poorly maintained houses in St. Louis with his friends. They buy a house, move in, fix it up in their free time, then sell the house and move on to another one. Huge profit potential in that–it’s very good business in St. Louis. At least one of the houses they’d done this with was in Soulard, so Tim’s very familiar with that party, saw I was leaving work early today and asked if I was headed down. In fact, I was leaving early so I could get the EGR valve in my motor-vehicle replaced by a different talented and generous dude (who’s still raising funds for Special Olympics). And while I was over there, he mentioned that this Mardi Gras weekend is the last of the Illini hockey games.(Something like a fugue, but more quietly.)

Also this weekend, Braveheart is playing on the big screen at Virginia Theater. And look there, I see Christopher Titus has a gig at the V the Saturday after next. Hansenelli was among the dozens who found his television show amusing. Which I find amusing. I also see they’re playing a movie called Casablanca on May 13th. I’ve never seen it before, and I imagine you’re shocked… SHOCKED to find that out.

This article, Ten Things I Didn’t Know…, was linked from VeB due to its inclusion of the impressive statistic that Larry Bigbie has lowest ratio of infield flies to plate appearances in MLB at 1:1,190 but there’s plenty of other good stuff in there too, including a mention that you can use Google Earth to estimate how far a home run ball travelled. Pretty neat, eh?

The subtitle for this article on using a straight razor for shaving is “Miter Saws are for Pussies.” While I disagree with that claim on its face, I think I’m gonna go ahead and learn to use a straight razor. My barber uses one on the bottom of the back of my head–I think that body part is called a “nape” in the English tongue–and also to remove the peach fuzz from my ears every month.

I can’t get a decent shave with safety razors, and they irritate the shit out of the skin on the front of my neck–I think we call that body part an exo-throat–so I’m gonna learn how to shave with a proper straight razor. Just thought I’d announce that.

Is that a sexy title for a post or what?

I’ve been very pleased with this search plugin for Firefox that allows me to search The Baseball Cube from the search tool in the right side of the Firefox browser’s toolbar. At work, I do a lot of PH queries, looking people up on the online university phonebook, and thought that I might as well learn how to write my own searchPlugins by making one for that purpose. So I dug around and figured out how they work and where to store them at. The baseballcube plugin source is based on the post-data template from this page. The PH system uses “get” data, where the information from the form is encoded in the URL string, so it’s a bit different. Not difficult at all to figure out.

So anyways, if you want to have a UIUC Phonebook lookup built into your browser, go here. Or, to do it the hard way, copy these two files: [ph.src, ph.gif ] (right click, save file as…) into the “…\mozilla firefox\searchplugins” directory, and restart mozilla. By default, in windows xp pro, it’s at C:\program files\mozilla firefox\searchPlugins\. While you’re in there, you can yank out some of the ones you don’t use. Just delete the .gif and .src files for the engines you don’t ever want to search with. Although it wouldn’t make much sense to install this little plugin unless you work at UIUC and have to look up email addresses all the time.

For non-UIUC people, it might be interesting to look at the simple plugin source (.src) file to see what the plugin does and how to make your own for some other purpose for which there isn’t one already. I’m a big fan of using plain-text files to do work.

It turns out that I’ve been pretty sick for the past month or so. I thought the aches, soreness, and inability to concentrate were indications that I was getting old. Turns out there’s a couple of nasty bugs going around. The first one’s had me for a month and the second one just whacked me a few days ago.

I saw a doctor for the first time since 2003 today, and he set me up with some pretty strong drugs. All the bacteria in me are dying a rapid death at this very moment. It feels pretty wild. I guess it’s a good idea to clean house every few years.

Although unlike last time, these worms are really quite amazing. (I promise there’s nothing nasty behind that link.)

Over at Play a Hard Nine, Erik’s discussing the Cards extension of a non roster invitation to Scott Spiezio. He’s got a mildly amusing picture of Scott’s tattoo… I’m looking forward to seeing a picture of Ty Johnson’s.

Erik drops the nugget that Spiezio, Adam Kennedy, and David Eckstein once guest-starred in an episode of She Spies, a silly Charlie’s Angels clone (get it! Angels! Charlie’s Angels!) starring The Chick From Species, also known as Natasha Henstridge. This information was easily verifiable, and in fact, the name of the episode was inspired by a Moody Blues album: “Daze of Future Past.” That’s too funny. Checking a few episode guides for synopses…

From the Just Natasha webpage:

Jack wakes up in a hospital and is told by a beautiful doctor that he’s been out for six months, or has he?

Interesting. The episode came out in 2003, the year after the Angels won the World Series. Maybe the episode was set in Octoboer of 2002, and “Jack” couldn’t believe it could possibly be then since the Angels were still playing. Wouldn’t be very funny.

From the Sci-Fi channel page:

Assassination attempts, comas, dodgy doctors, transsexual terrorists and celebrity cameos. What more could you ask?

Let’s just hope that the Angels were the “celebrity cameos” in the episode.

If this post doesn’t make any sense, it’s because I’m deliriously ill right now.

I started to get a sore throat on Sunday and it got progressively worse as the day wore on. Today was miserable. Couldn’t get much sleep last night, and couldn’t get any work done either. I replaced the filter in my furnace for the first time in over two months (it was practically black on the inflow side!) and downed a shot of ny-quil while cooking up some tasty shrimp scampi for supper. My bro said that ny-quil does the trick for him.

It’s starting to kick in now, big time. I feel almost drunk and wiped out. Haven’t had any cold medicine in a long time. That’s some intense stuff, dude. Think I’ll take another half-dose and crash early tonight. Maybe even sleep a full eight hours and wake up at seven. Hopefully this doesn’t make me groggy tomorrow. I’ve got a lot of work to do and a shoot at 10:30 on top of it

Before I keel over in my chair here, I’ve gotta point out some Rolen stuff. First, via Fungoes is this amazing and inspiring story about an Indiana ballplayer who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s. Read the whole thing. Also, the Cards Notes report that Matthew Leach filed tonight discusses Scott Rolen’s final checkup with Dr. Kremchek of the Reds organization, who performed Rolen’s and Kerry Wood’s shoulder surgeries in the offseason. He gave Scotty a clean bill of health and told him to work it as he normally would in Spring Training. That’s absolutely outstanding. It’s gonna be a fun year.

“On Monday, Rolen pronounced himself not just as healthy as he?s been in a year, but years.”

So says Derrick Goold after Rolen’s first batting practice of the Spring. He says Strass’ll have a story on Rolen’s shoulder in tomorrow’s Post-Dispatch.

AP story on The Shoulder here.

I forgot how much fun it was to watch Scott Rolen play baseball until watching a few 2004/early-2005 games the past few days. Can’t wait to see it again this season.

Prairie Biker’s holding his breath and refusing to bring the funny until he’s raised $500 bucks for the local district of Special Olympics. I just made a small donation towards the cause to almost double the contributions raised locally. If anyone’s got some spare cash lying around, Help the man out.

He will be jumping into a frozen lake for our amusement, after all.

I think every Cardinal fan had in mind some pitcher that they’d like to see the Cardinals add to the rotation. Most liked AJ Burnett, one was all about Jeff Weaver, none picked Sidney Ponson that I know of. I had Jamey Wright in mind, seeing an extreme groundball pitcher who doesn’t give up home runs and would be able to start a few games or pick up the long-man role in the bullpen, all for under a million bucks. I thought I’d check to see where he ended up tonight, and found that he was offered a non-roster invitation to the Giants’ camp. Good move for them, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he beat out Brad Hennessey for a starting spot out of Spring. The Giants’ middle infield is old, but still effective, and Mike Matheny briefly worked with Wright in 2002.

For the first time in a while, blogger ate one of my posts. Yesterday, I’d written about how I’d discovered a gas leak in the fittings to my kitchen range. I noticed it Thursday night, when I got home from pounding them budweisers with some phonologists. (Really they were Koenig Ludwigs and Victory Pilsners, but didn’t want to let down Joe Schultz.)

So I shut off the gas at the valve local to the range and picked up the replacement part last night. This morning, I installed it and tested for leaks. All’s well there. I’ve been feeling noticeably tired lately, and I’m wondering if it has something to do with breathing natural gas all the time I’m at home. It was a very slow leak, barely detectable, so I doubt that had anything to do with it.

Tonight, I finally figured out what was causing me all these problems getting tgrep2 to process a pair of corpora on my fancy new lab machine in Beckman into its searchable format. It would have been nicer had I figured out how to get it done on Thursday when I picked up the problem instead of taking until today, but at least I’ll have all of tomorrow to do real work on this stuff.

Tomorrow will feature that work and watching the Illini beat Indiana. And finishing up watching the 10-inning Mulder-Clemens masterpiece on DVD that I missed last summer.

You can add a Baseball Cube search to your FireFox browser using this plugin. It works, too! Just remember not to enclose the player’s name in quotation marks.

You probably don’t want to read this story about a woman with a worm in her eye. It’s not the famous loa loa, though-a though-a. This worm was an ascaris round-worm that lost its way.

Under ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCES are you to click on the first picture returned by google’s search for this beast.

I think I need to get back to work.

(Story also from Dave Barry)

(Fixed a link, too.)

I wonder if this place is downstream from Lake Vaginadentata.

Thanks be to Dave Barry for the link.

Over the past two weeks or so, Google has been rolling out its Talk application built into the left sidebar of the gmail web interface. Their plan is to blur the lines between email and instant text messaging. I don’t like it, and I imagine I’m not the only one. We use the google talk program at work for interoffice communication, so I’ve had it running in gaim for a while now. Inserting it into the webmail interface is a bad idea for at least two reasons: one is that some companies might not want their employees doing the instant message thing on the clock, and so they’ll have to end up blocking access to the gmail webpages; the other is that some gmail users might not want to get involved with the instant message thing–they might not want people to know when they’re checking their email, for whatever reason. They don’t, at the present time, have a sufficiently obvious way to disable the feature. On the settings page, there’s a radio button you can select to disallow people from seeing when you’re online, and you can sign out of chat from the main panel.

It strikes me as a heavy-handed way to roll out a new feature–forcing it on users who may not want it.

I was just up in the Linguistics Reading Room and picked through a stack of papers to find something worth reading. What I found was the catalog for the local YMCA’s Communiversity program. Let’s make some jokes at its expense, shall we? Along with classes in the Alexander Technique and classes on Polynesian fire dancing are a few real winners. One I got a kick out of was First Aid w/ Homeopathy. Homeopathy, if I recall correctly (which I always do), is a sort of alternative medicine where you treat disease by conditioning the patient to the disease by ingesting minute amounts of it. So to cure beestings, you have the patient drink some tea that’s got bee sting poison in it. Sort of like vaccination except it doesn’t work. Now how do you use homeopathy to treat a broken bone or a piece of pot roast stuck in the throat? Condition the patient to small bone breaks? Feed them smaller pieces of pot roast?

The other one that gave me a kick (ha!) was on the previous page, a class on Ninjutsu. NINJA! When I was a kid, I wanted to be a ninja when I grew up, or a wizard. American Ninjas I and II were some of my favorite movies. The second was slightly better in that Curtis Jackson, played by Steve James–also of Weekend at Bernie’s II and I’m Gonna Get You Sucka’ fame, inexplicably became a ninja in between the first and second movies, and also for the reason that the American Ninja’s foe was an army of mutant ninjas. Truly brilliant. To date, my favorite James Bond movie is You Only Live Twice, in which Sean Connery is “turned Japanese” by making his eyebrows bushier and going through an “authentic Shinto wedding ceremony.” Incidentally, this also made him a “ninja commando” and he storms a volcano alongside his ninja commando brethren. The volcano, it should be noted, also houses a rocket ship that the criminal organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. uses to gobble up American and Soviet spaceships in order to foment nuclear brinksmanship. That one movie alone could power ten Austin Powers plots, with some poop and fart jokes tossed in.

On both a non-mocking note and page seven of the catalog, the YMCA is also offering a free class on Sabermetric analysis.

Update: My colleague Hahn agrees that learning Ninjutsu would be a useful skill for a graduate student. If, during your doctoral defense, the questioning should prove too difficult, you’d be able to throw down a smoke bomb and disappear into thin air… to defend another day.