Nicholas (age 5) spilled something this morning and Gail got a paper towel to clean it up. Nicky asked if it was Bounty, and Gail asked with a chuckle “You mean the quicker picker-upper?” Nicholas immediately said “Yes. With cloth-like durability”.
The Ford C. Frick award for excellence in baseball broadcasting was handed out yesterday by the Baseball Hall of Fame. The winner was Dave Niehaus, one of the Mariners’ broadcasters since 1977. Not to take anything away from Mr. Niehaus who is certainly deserving, but as a Jays fan, I’m disappointed once again that Tom Cheek has yet to be named to the Hall of Fame. He has been nominated in each of the last four years, which is good; hopefully that will translate into a win one of these years.
Tom started with the Blue Jays the same year that Niehaus started with the Mariners (1977, the inaugural year for both teams), and announced every Blue Jays game, including all pre- and post-season games, from then until June 2004, a streak of 4,303 consecutive games. He began his streak five years before Cal Ripken began his, and ended it six years after Ripken’s had ended. Can you imagine not missing a day of work, despite working almost 7 days a week for over seven months a year, for seventeen years?
Cheek died of brain cancer a year and a half later and has been honoured by the Blue Jays with a banner on the Level of Excellence. During the 2006 season, all the Blue Jay players wore a patch on their uniforms with the letters “TC” in honour of Tom Cheek.
I grew up listening to Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth (who is still a Blue Jays broadcaster) doing Jays games on the radio. For me, Tom was always the “voice of summer” (I stole this phrase from Mike Wilner, another Jays broadcaster, because it couldn’t be more fitting). When driving somewhere in the car, I’d ask my dad to put the Jays game on. When doing homework, I’d have the Jays game on. When hanging out in the backyard or helping my dad in the garage, we’d always have the Jays game on. When the irritating Tony Kubek or the inane Fergie Olver were doing Jays TV broadcasts, I’d sometimes even turn the sound down on the TV and listen to the radio while watching the game.
Cheek was the consummate professional — he had a great voice, knew baseball inside and out, and obviously loved the game as well. He wasn’t one for “catch phrases”, though Jerry had a couple. I remember going to games at Exhibition Stadium and a bunch of us yelling “Swing and a miss, he struck him out!” on opposing team strikeouts, or “There she goes!” on Jays home runs.
Anyway, congratulations to Dave Niehaus on his award, and hopefully this time next year, I’ll be able to congratulate Tom Cheek on his posthumous election to the Hall of Fame.
Raymond Chen’s popular blog The Old New Thing has an entry that describes these fake automated blogs that I wrote about a week or two ago. Turns out the whole idea is to host Google ads on these sites and make money that way. Strangely, the ones that I’ve found that link to my postings do not have ads on them, so once again, I don’t understand the point.
After years of saying “I’d like to take the boys out skiing some time” and then not doing it, I finally did it on Saturday. Gail had lots of school stuff to do, and Sunday and Monday were supposed to be rainy and crappy (it’s Sunday afternoon right now, and it’s currently rainy and crappy — attaboy, weatherman), so we went out to Chicopee on Saturday afternoon. I looked at Glen Eden as well, which is about the same distance from home, but they only had full- and half-day rates and rentals, and Chicopee had 2-hour rates and rentals. For their first time out, I figured two hours would be plenty, and it turns out I was right. It was an expensive two hours ($45 for the three lift tickets and $66 for rentals), but the boys and I had fun.
The rental line was very long, and by the time we actually got our boots on and picked up our skis and got out there, we had already used up 20-30 minutes of our two hours. We headed over to the bunny hill where I gave them a short lesson on standing on skis, slowing down and stopping (the “snowplow”), and turning (again, the “snowplow”). The lift was a magic carpet, which I had never used before. It’s just a conveyer belt that you stand on, so it’s about the easiest lift possible. The boys both did very well — I’m not going to say either one was a natural, but Ryan didn’t fall at all, and by the end, he wanted to try the bigger hills. Nicky had a couple of very small spills, but he was in more danger of falling while standing still than while skiing. Ryan would just point his skis at the bottom of the hill and go, while Nicky got frustrated because he couldn’t go as fast as Ryan, and I kept having to slow down so he could keep up with me. He wasn’t trying to go slow, and I couldn’t see any reason why he would be, so maybe his skis weren’t as tuned as mine and Ryan’s. I asked Ryan to practice some turns by doing a zigzag pattern down the hill, and he did it perfectly. I was very impressed.
When we had about 15 minutes left on our two-hour lift ticket, Nicky started to get cranky and I figured he’d about had enough. We did one more run and then returned our stuff and went to the snack bar for the obligatory après-ski french fries.
It is an expensive sport, but the boys had a lot of fun, so I think I’m going to look around the classifieds or used sporting goods stores for some used equipment for the boys and myself (Gail has zero interest) so that we can bypass the rental lines in future.
The kids have a little robot thing that they got for Christmas last year. It rolls around and waves its arms and shoots little disk things and blinks its lights — and speaks in this very thick Japanese accent in the worst Engrish I’ve ever heard. It’s hilarious. Some of the more amusing phrases:
It also says a bunch of other things that I cannot understand. Whenever I read or hear these kinds of things, I always remind myself that as broken as it is, their English is still better than my Japanese or Chinese, so I shouldn’t laugh. But I do.
The NLL has lifted the suspension of Rock coach Glenn Clark after charges were dropped by Toronto Police last week. I wrote about this issue last month; the Rock got beaten by Minnesota in overtime, and after the game, Rock head coach Clark punched a Minnesota player in the hallway near the Rock dressing room. Charges of assault were filed against Clark, and the NLL suspended him indefinitely, which was their way of saying “We’ll let the legal system do our work for us, so that we don’t have to bother investigating anything.” Three weeks later, the charges were dropped, and today the NLL decided that if it’s good enough for Toronto Police, it’s good enough for them. Clark’s suspension lasted all of four games.
If the league is trying to shake of its “bush league” reputation, this isn’t going to help. A coach hit an opposing player here — I don’t care how much he was provoked, he just can’t do that. Another article quotes Clark: “…you’ve gotta be very careful because you can’t put yourself in harms way. You have to be very careful to avoid these types of situations. …the game is performed by passionate people and sometimes those passions get the better of us. The lesson I learned is that you really have to be careful not to put yourself in that position.” (emphasis added) Nowhere does Clark take responsibility for his actions. Nowhere does he apologize. The most important thing is not to get into that situation? How about not to lose your mind when you’re supposed to be in charge?
I still don’t think the police needed to be involved, but I think Clark should have been suspended by the NLL for the remainder of the season and fired by the Rock. I’m disappointed with both the league and the Rock for giving Clark what amounts to a slap on the wrist. He’ll be back behind the bench this Friday when the Rock take on the Buffalo Bandits at the ACC, but I will not be among those cheering his return.
On the heels of my last entry only two days ago, I can officially report that it is now spring! That’s right, pitchers and catchers report today to spring training in Florida and Arizona, and they wouldn’t call it spring training if it didn’t happen in spring, right? Time to put the heavy coat in the closet, put the hats and mitts away, and get out the spring jacket!
…says the guy who had to shovel the snowplow droppings at the end of the driveway this morning in order to get out…
Nice thing to see first thing on a Monday morning:
I have my blog “claimed” at technorati.com. I can use this to search around to see if anyone has linked to my blog entries on their own blog / web site. This is how I found out that I’d been quoted by slate.com.
I did a search last night (for no good reason — same reason people Google themselves), and found several of my postings linked to really weird blogs. Each blog is a collection of articles about a certain topic — my posting on security podcasts is linked to in a blog called “Anti-Virus” (I’m not going to link to any of these potentially evil blogs here), the one on skiing is in one called “Ski Resorts”, and the one about Gail being on the TV news is in one called “The Latest Premieres & Debuts”. In every case, the format of the blog posting was exactly the same:
Unknown wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
Several lines from my posting
Read the rest of this great post here
“Unknown” and “here” are links to my posting, and the title of the posting is the same as mine. Apparently the bot that created these postings has bugs in it; the bit about “wrote an interesting post today on” never has anything after it, and one of the blogs even has SQL errors on the page because the title of the posting they’re hijacking contains quotes. Each of the blogs I’ve found has hundreds or thousands of postings, all in the same format, and all listed as “uncategorized”. All of these “fake” blogs seem to be “Powered by WordPress”. I don’t remember ever seeing these before I created my own WordPress blog as a backup for my existing blog. I have the wordpress blog marked as “block search engines but allow normal visitors”, but it seems to have found its way onto someone’s hijacking list somewhere…
Call me naïve, but I don’t understand the point of these fake blogs with no original content. I’ve heard of “splogs” (SPam blOGS), but these doesn’t appear to be splogs — there are no ads, no links to anything but the blog articles, nothing that might make someone money, as far as I can tell. Now, I’m running Firefox with NoScript installed, so whatever JavaScript is on those sites is not run in my browser, so maybe there is something nasty in the JavaScript.
Or maybe I’m just being cynical. Maybe it’s just someone who’s written a bot that gathers together blog postings in certain catgeories as a public service. And he’s not that great a programmer or hasn’t done enough QA on the bot. Yes, I’m sure that’s it.
Gail and I were supposed to go to the Air Canada Centre last night to see John Mellencamp, but because of the storm, we had to miss it. We had the babysitter lined up, the boys were excited that she was coming over, we had dinner done early, the tickets were in my wallet, everything was ready. We waited as long as we could to make the decision, but the snow kept getting worse and worse as the day went on, and there were some ice pellets and freezing rain mixed in as well. Around 5:30 we made the decision that it was just too risky. If the show was in Hamilton, we probably would have gone, but downtown Toronto is a 45 minute drive with no traffic. With the weather as it was, it would have easily been an hour and a half, if not longer, and getting back after four more hours of snow would have been brutal. So, there’s almost $180 in concert tickets down the drain.
Earlier in the day, I had checked the ACC web site on the off chance that they had cancelled the concert because of the weather (they hadn’t) and was found out that Tom Cochrane and Red Rider were opening the show. I ordered the tickets back in November or something, and had completely forgotten about the opening act, which is surprising, since I was a big Red Rider fan back in the 80’s. They opened for Rush at my second-ever concert at Maple Leaf Gardens back in 1984. I’ve seen Tom Cochrane live a couple of times as well, though I think half his backing band on his “solo” tours were members of Red Rider anyway.
I’ve been a big Mellencamp fan since the early 80’s as well, and last night would have been my fourth time seeing him. He always puts on a great show. I haven’t been all that thrilled with his last couple of albums — the John Mellencamp album had a few good tracks on it (“Your Life Is Now”, “Eden Is Burning”), and Mr. Happy Go Lucky had a few as well (“I Saw You First”, “Just Another Day”), but the rest (including the entire Cuttin’ Heads album) was forgettable. I bought his latest album Freedom’s Road shortly after getting the concert tickets, and I think it’s his best album since Human Wheels Whenever We Wanted.(Update: I listened to Human Wheels again yesterday, and I think this new album is better.) “Someday”, “The Americans”, “Forgiveness”, and “My Aeroplane” are all really good, and “Our Country”, “Ghost Towns Along The Highway”, and “Freedom’s Road” are all flat-out great tracks.
Seeing how much snow fell last night and how bad the roads still are around here tonight, I don’t regret the decision not to go, but it still sucks. I called the ACC last night just before we made the decision and asked if the concert was cancelled and was told that it was not. I then asked if there was any possibility of a refund since we weren’t going to make it, and he confirmed my suspicions that I was SOL.
If Mellencamp comes back to Toronto (or even better, Hamilton!) on this tour, or even the next one, I’m sure we’ll try to go again. I just hope that it’s sometime between May and September.
Aside: For those of you who are not big Mellencamp fans and are curious (or frightened) about the title of this post, Dance Naked was the name of a 1994 John Mellencamp album.
Cut The Chatter, Red Two 