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Friday, July 24, 2009

This video hits close to home in more ways than one.



Credit goes to The Glorious Hum, and in turn to Ryan's Smashing Life.

This team needs to have a melee...

...similar to this one.



Found this goodness over at SawxBlog.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Wake to DL, smells fishy but I'm cool with it

Back to blogging with a Sox-related post...

Call me crazy, but given Wake's history the past couple of seasons of breaking down in the second half, it's no surprise to me that the Red Sox today placed him on the 15-day DL with a "lower back strain." Sounds like they wanted to give him some recovery time tacked onto the All-Star break. Meanwhile, it's nice to see Buchholz getting a few more starts to prove he belongs, and hopefully nail down a rotation spot for the second half. Smoltz has not been a significant upgrade from Dice-K to this point, Penny has slipped a bit, and Wake, sorry to say it, is due for a bit of additional regression in the 2nd half, so nice to see Clay come up and hopefully strengthen the rotation. Letting him rot at AAA was stunting his development at this point, honestly. While not stellar, last Friday's 5 2/3 inning, 1 ER performance against Toronto was more than good enough, and better than what we've seen from anyone else in the rotation thusfar in the second half. That said, the Sox could still use a bat, but that's a discussion for another day.
[UPDATE: I was super wrong about Wake. He ended up having ugly bone chips in his back and only made four starts of progressively declining quality down the stretch.]

Sunday, July 19, 2009

A pseudo-intellectual analysis of the demerits of microblogging

Of late, it would appear that I have filled the void left by my temporary abandonment of the blog by resorting to micro-blogging via Twitter, which is all well and good except that I frequently find myself going over the character limit, which forces me to make a statement over multiple posts or to my original statement in such a way as to distort or diminish its meaning and impact. My experience with Twitter over the last month has reinforced in my mind the fact that I thoroughly dislike saying something in the bare minimum of words needed to say it. For the better part of a decade I have been self-taught in the art of rehashing material and employing lofty word choices in order to get that all-important paper within striking distance of the minimum page requirement. These devices first employed at school have carried over to my other forms of expression, so much so that as the years have gone by I have developed an almost conversationally crippling predilection to give long rambling answers to simple questions in which I very frequently say little of any real value.

As such, the limits that Twitter (and to a lesser degree, text messaging) imposes on my communications are a drastic change from my expressive norms, and whose negotiation proves cumbersome. While I suppose that tweeting has its place, I have a certain fondness for the grandiose phrasing and wandering prose that have now become permanently cemented as trademarks of my communications with the outside world.

And so I blog.

(And that whole narcissism thing's a turn-off too. Which is not to say that I won't continue tweeting, I just don't want it to become a problem.)