Monday, April 05, 2010

Duck Season! Wabbit Season! Baseball Season!

Duck Season! Wabbit Season! Baseball Season!



You know your red states and your blue states, now in honor of opening day here's your baseball states. There's another version here that I linked to a few years back; you can still vote but the maps haven't been updated in a year or so.

Obama throws out the first pitch; they got him to wear the Nationals jacket, stumbling onto a pet peeve: "As White House senior adviser David Axelrod puts it, the president dislikes it when 'folks try to get him to wear baseball gear for teams other than the White Sox.'” That said, Obama still managed to keep his Sox hat on today.

As for tonight's basketball championship, I'm less interested in that than in any major sport (excluding of course the non-sport of NASCAR), for this reason: Q: What's the worst name you can call a Division I college hoops player? A: Senior. I'm so old I remember when freshmen weren't eligible in NCAA and Lew Alcindor had to spend a year on the UCLA freshman team. I'm old enough to remember when Jabbar was Alcindor for that matter. Now, of course, he would have gone straight from high school to NBA.

One of the most vivid sports memories from my youth was when dad (he was my high school's head coach at the time) took me and my brothers on his annual trip to Milwaukee with his players for a Bucks game. This was a year or so after their championship season so I was probably seven. They used to let you down on the floor before the game back then. We were standing right by the tunnel and all of a sudden there came the Bucks, running onto the court, with Jabbar first in line. He ran about three feet in front of me, and I swear I canme up to about his knee. And I looked up... and up... and up...



I don't have a good transition into my usual topics so here's the clips:

  • NPR's Ken Rudin rates the top ten US Senate primaries; Iowa's Democratic contest ain't on the radar.

  • On the House side Nate Silver looks at the turnout surge of 2008 and considers which incumbents may be vulnerable to lower minority turnout. Iowa, again, not on the chart.

  • Tina Fey is back on SNL this weekend; she claimed she was going to retire her Sarah Palin after the election, but the impression has become so iconic (how many people think Palin REALLY said "I can see Russia from my house"?) and the possibilities for humor have piled up for so long that she won't be able to resist: "I'm sure we'll be trying to write something about her."

    Read more: http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/04/05/snl_preps_another_palin_skit.html#ixzz0kGjFuqZ6


  • And I thought I was pop music obsessed but here's an unbelievably long analysis of Ke$ha's "TiK ToK."
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