Per repeated family members' requests, I finally got around to adding some recent photos to Amelia's site...

Kurt Vonnegut describes the sorry state of the world in Cold Turkey (In These Times)

We the people have absolutely no say in whatever [the President and his cohorts] choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you'll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

(Thanks to Hugh for the link)

Just Trust Us (New York Times)

If America's record is better than that of most countries -- and it is -- it's because of our system: our tradition of openness, and checks and balances.

Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn't believe in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has been "just trust us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of that trust.

Tim Wakefield is expected to start the next Sox game we're going to, and I'm very excited. Wakefield has been one of my favorite players for years now, and I've always wanted to see him throw in person.

Coincidentally, I was just pointed to an article on The New Yorker all about the knuckleball: Project Knuckleball. It's a great article touching on the history of the knuckleball, the physics behind it, knucklers past & present, the difficulty hitting (and catching) it, plus little facts like why knuckleball pitchers often wear number 49.

Update: This post used the word "knuckle" way too many times...

The Misunderestimated Man: How Bush chose stupidity (Slate)

Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor. ...

A second, more damning aspect of Bush's mind-set is that he doesn't want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism.

I know I'm going to need this information someday, so this is sort of an annotated bookmark: Capturing and Optimizing Screenshots for Print (at GraphicPush).

"Bill Brasky is a son of a bitch!"

"Bill Brasky was a two ton man-mountain who could palm a medicine ball!"

"He drives an ice cream truck covered in human skulls."

"Brasky's family crest is a picture of a barracuda eating Neil Armstrong."

"I once saw him scissor kick Angela Landsbury."

Bill Brasky Quote Archive

Well, the "jinx" is no more: the Sox finally won a game that we attended...

There's a proposal for a $1.1 million 40,000 square foot skatepark to be built under the Zakim bridge.

"It's definitely going to put the city of Boston on the map of skateboarding," said Jon Evjy, 21, who works at a Commonwealth Avenue skate shop called the Underground.

Naturally, I assumed that bikes would not be allowed in this new park. However, there might be some hope, since a member of the design committee is a BMXer:

It could draw thousands of skaters and BMX bike riders from around the country, sparking tournaments and national attention. Jody Stoddard, 34, a BMX rider and member of the conservancy's design committee, said he's taken road trips to skate parks in Toronto and upstate New York, and can see Boston becoming an East Coast skater haven.

Only time will tell. (Also, time will tell if the park eventually becomes a level in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 6...)

There's a good Yankees-eye view of what went down this weekend over at Bronx Banter -- check it out. In addition to some coverage of the weekend games, there's some commentary about idiot fans on both sides:

I don't know who is worse: the Yankee fans or the Red Sox fans. I've said this before, but I think they deserve each other. They are the two most self-aggrandizing, insufferable groups of fans you can find in the sport. When the Yankees beat the Sox, Yankee fans become shameless, entitled front-runners, rubbing tired slogans in the faces of the Sox fans. When the Sox beat the Yankees, Sox fans act as if the victory is a triumph of all that is moral and good, over all that is evil.

The only problem is that the people that read his site tend to be intelligent people who don't fall into the "bad fan" category. I can't wait for all the "Yankees suck" and "Red Sux" crap to go away, though realistically I know it won't be for a while...