Friday, March 18, 2005
Oh Thoughts, How Random Are Thee!
Well, Stu has resorted to peer pressure to get me and Marmar to post, and, though there may not be many peers reading this, it worked. Since this is a spontaneous reaction to Stu's plea rather than a planned, one-topic post, I offer up an assortment of goodies.
- We really don't talk sports much around here these days, but as the baseball season crawls into gear I'm sure it will pick up. For instance: I recently had the pleasure of soaking up the sun and baseball of the Cactus League. One day during batting practice Ichiro decided to embarrass the Beltre and Sexson by knocking ball after ball out of the park. And these were not your little grandma's homeruns; they were crushed well over the wall in right. In one of his last rounds, he smoked a couple balls down the line and in the gap, then absolutely crushed the last four out of the park. As the fans cheered, he stepped around the cage, rolled up his sleeve, and flexed his pedestrian bicep for the crowd, making a face that was a mix of laughter and faux strain. I know this has been said before, but why does MLB not invite him to the home run derby during the all star break. Yeah, people like seeing performances like Sosa in Milwaukee, but seeing that performance lose to a little 180 pound singles hitter would be quite a show.
- More baseball!!! I got to see King Felix warm up in the pen, then fool some Padres hitters during the game. As I neared the pen, I thought "no way is this kid 18." He is huge. But when you get close, as I was just a few feet away watching him warm up, you realize he's just an oversized kid with a jaw-dropping curve. The fastball might be jaw-dropping too, but I couldn't see it well enough to tell. When he keeps the curve down, there's just no way to hit it and little chance of laying off. And from what little I could make of the blur, it looked like he could let his fastball tail in to the righties or cut it a bit away. Of course, that could have been his changeup.
- Aren't there more important matters for our government to tend to than grandstanding as moral superiors and chastising MLB and baseball players? Come to think of it, as long as this current Congress is running the show, I'd rather have them waste time on something as shallow as this instead of performing a more substantive undoing of our country.
- Which brings me to ANWR. No one knows for sure how much oil is there. Even the rosiest forecasts allow only 2 years of oil at our current rate of consumption (10.4 barrels is the highest projection for ANWR; we import 9.7 million barrels/day; we import 70% of our oil). Further, that 10.4 figure has been debunked, and the ceiling of most projections of recoverable oil hovers around 5-8. In the meantime, we scuttle 1.5 million acres of wildlife reserve, endangering hundreds of species and setting a bad precedent of selling out the environment instead of more effective, but politically unpopular, measures like increasing standards for auto manufacturers and developing new sources of energy, or (gasp!) highly taxing gas guzzling SUVs. Drilling in ANWR will have no significant impact on our dependency on foreign oil, and, as Stu said below, dependency on oil in general is the real problem. Its always going to be foreign. This also will not affect gas prices, since it will be roughly 10 years before a drop of this oil hits your local Shell station. So, to sum up: Our government just put a plan on the budget to destroy a 1.5 million acre wildlife reserve for between 0-2 years of gas that we can start enjoying 10 years from now. If that's not enough, there is this: the budget for 2006 includes over 1 billion in profits from this oil, which may not exist, may not be profitable, and cannot be pumped, packaged, and consumed for 10 years. You can forgive the President, though, for not wanting to project a $391 billion deficit for the upcoming year. $390 billion looks a lot more acceptable.
# posted by Anonymous @ 2:19 PM 
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Ichiro is to the All-Star Home Run Derby as Dee Brown was to the Slam Dunk Contest in 1991.
Let Ichiro Bash!
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Let Ichiro Bash!
# posted by 
: 5:41 PM
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