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I must be honest: I watched exactly zero innings of last night’s Phillies game. I tend to tune out of the West Coast swings, with the attendant 10pm starts, for the simple reason that I hate watching a few innings and then missing the ending. It’s like watching only the first half hour of “Twilight,” except that “Twilight” sucks and the Phillies are awesome (4 games up on the division! Woooo). So this morning I got up and checked the box score on my phone.
What the heck? Cole Hamels pitched a gem! A diamond, baby! As someone who prefers good pitching and smallball to “let’s all just swing for the fences and see what happens” (and who, while I’d never question a World Fing Champion manager and GM, frequently gets annoyed with the way the Phils play the game), I kinda wish I’d stayed up.
Oh right, my daughter kept me up all night the night before, and didn’t do much better last night. (She ended up sleeping next to us so that we could rub her belly anytime she started screaming with the gas and constipation she’s got going on this week.)
Anyway, what’s keeping Cole from doing this every night, or at least more frequently than once a month? It’s not like he was facing scrubs; the Dodgers have the best record in either league by a large margin. He shut them down. Is he finally in shape for the season? I’m not asking for a shutout every night, but I think we should expect more from our ace than a 4.40 season ERA.
Sigh.
A man who used a four-letter word to describe to his neighbors how their cat left feces in his yard was acquitted Tuesday of a disorderly conduct citation.
“A little piece of America died today when a jury of six says it’s OK to curse in front of a 13-year-old when asked not to,” Rainey said.
Really?
“It’s a sad day for morality, that this type of behavior is condoned,” Rainey said.
“We work hard to teach our children morals and teach them right from wrong.”
A little cursing is hurting the fabric of America? Given this fellows tenuous grasp of “morals,” one wonders what his opinion would be of Americans who order the torture of prisoners.
Heehee. Awkward Family Photos has been en fuego this week:
 Bob and family
I need to print out about a dozen of these:
 Formal Apology
We had a fantastic time at the Greek Festival at Holy Trinity on Tuesday:
Sarah and Josephine met Charles and me there, and my parents showed up later, so that we could all enjoy Greek beer, lamb sandwiches, Spanakopita, all that good stuff. Delicious, satisfying, and fun. Charles even picked out a cheap bracelet to give to his mommy, which was amusing. It even matched her shirt, somehow. That boy has STYLE.
The only complaint is that, just like every other year, the hired some half-idiot DJ to provide musical entertainment. The church has speakers on the outside through which they play light traditional Greek music (or so I assume; I’m not particularly versant in the genre), but apparently they decided to ramp up happy hour so we got to listen to two idiots do soundchecks while we ate. For 20 minutes. “Check…check one…check two…check-check…check one…” Then they put on mindless dance beats and fiddled with the volume, turning it on and off, adjusting God knows what because it all sounded like bass and hi-hat. Then they went back to “Check..check…check one…check one two…” until finally I had enough and yelled over “IT WORKS! STOP IT!” Which, despite my complete and utter lack of authority, they did, at least until about a half-hour later when they started playing Greek pop music at a volume designed to interfere with internal pacemakers.
If you’re not familiar with Greek pop music: it’s not very good. It’s mostly modern American pop instruments (guitar, synthesizers, drum machines), but intensely modal. It’s like if Schönberg and Justin Timberlake had a baby together, and that baby had Tourette’s.
Anyway, aside from that, the festival was great fun, just like every year, and we even managed to arrive just after Tuesday’s microburst storm, which cooled everything down and lightened the crowds nicely. You’ll find the usual lines at the gyro tent, but why would you bother, anyway? You can get a gyro anywhere.
My homegirl Raw Rach hath alerted me to a really nice Garrison Keillor column from the weekend. I find him a little insufferable at times, but this is nice:
And an intensely quiet blond girl, a math whiz, who, with no reluctance, sat down at the piano when I asked her if she played piano, squared her shoulders and played the exquisite Chopin Prelude No. 2 in A minor, the notes of the slow movement like raindrops on birch leaves, smoke drifting by, an anguished old man pacing in the grass, and played it so beautifully it transformed the entire evening.
A little overwrought, to be sure, but a pretty sentiment.
Are marching band geeks athletes? Heck yes. I do have some experience with this; I can report that my first year of college, after I stopped doing marching band, I gained roughly 40 pounds. Of course, most of my meals that year consisted of Corn Pops, but still.
Most of my readers are aware that I was in an a cappella group in college, the frequently-apologized-for University of Delaware Y-Chromes, which was obviously much fun and had some bearing on later musical endeavours (warning: ’tis an mp3). As an alumnus, it’s my responsibility to try and help the boys out whenever I can (it’s like being in a frat, but less stupid, albeit with a roughly similar amount of homoerotic behavior).
Another alum, Colin The Black (to distinguish him from a contemporary member, also named Colin, who is labelled The White), found out in March that he has leukemia, and has spent the bulk of his time since in the hospital getting radiated, chemo’d, and generally poked and prodded. A friend of his is running a lengthy charity race to raise money, in Colin’s name, for a search for cancer cures. If you have a few loose bills laying around, it’d be nice if you could chip them in.
Also: love to Colin, who’s fighting like a gladiator against a grizzly bear. Get well, doggle.
Andrew Sullivan is often my source for political analysis; I should probably look around for more pundits, but he tends to wrap up analysis from all over the spectrum, whether he agrees with it or not. I say this just to point out why, for roughly the 7,000th day in a row, I’m linking to him again, on the topic of this nifty gallup poll:
Andrew’s take:
If gays are really serious about marriage rights, they need to accelerate the process of coming out…
Yes, donate and campaign and blog. But for all of those of you out there who are gay and do none of this, one simple political act can do much more: let your family, friends and co-workers know who you are. If you don’t, please quit complaining about your lack of civil rights.
As a straight dude, I don’t quite have Andrew’s perspective. But he and I both live in parts of the country where homosexuality is more than tolerated; it is often embraced. I have dozens of gay friends; I like to say I was raised by a collection of gay “aunts.” If my son were to come out as gay, I’d be all for it. It’s not like that in every family on the east coast, but a gay man is certainly going to have an easier time coming out in New York or Philadelphia than, say, Patonga, Oklahoma. (I should point out that I know nothing about Patonga, Oklahoma; it might be the West Hollywood of Blaine County, for all I know. I literally went to Google Maps and found a random city in central Oklahoma.)
Any place where the majority of the population knows no homosexuals (either because they simply don’t live there, or are closeted) is a place where a gay man or woman is least likely to want to come out. So while Andrew’s solution, “Come out, dammit,” would probably do good things over the long-term, it carries with it a pretty high personal cost for the homosexual individuals themselves.
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