1978 WS Game 3

It Was 30 Years Ago

And that fact alone makes it harder for me to get my head around my own life. I saw this game; it was so memorable, it's probably one of 5 games I recall vividly from my childhood.

Here's Bruce Markusen talking about it.

With Ron Guidry less than sharp in Game Three—he would walk seven Dodgers on the night—the Yankees’ performance hinged on the acrobatic defensive play of Graig Nettles. Playing third base like no Yankee since then (sorry, Scott Brosius, Charlie Hayes, and Mike Pagliarulo), Nettles speared several hard-hit grounders and line drives, turning what should have been an array of singles and doubles into a series of outs. Without Nettles’ full-scale imitation of Brooks Robinson, the Yankees would have trailed by three or four runs early, Guidry would have given way to an inferior reliever, and the Yankees would have fallen into a 3-0 well that would have been almost certainly insurmountable.

None of that would have been avoided if the Yankees had done something that was rumored four winters earlier. According to a story that appeared in the New York Daily News on December 7, 1974, the Yankees had given serious consideration to a trade that would have sent Nettles to the Cincinnati Reds for Hall of Fame first baseman Tony Perez. According to the article, penned by longtime baseball writer Phil Pepe, the Reds wanted Nettles and another player for Perez, who had hit 19 points higher and slugged six more home runs than Nettles during the 1974 season.

---
Of course, all of that is merely speculation after the fact. The trade involving Nettles and the Reds never happened—and that turned out to be a good thing for both the "Big Red Machine" and the Bronx Zoo Yankees. Despite continual floggings from the Sabermetric community for being an undeserving Hall of Fame, Perez served the Reds well as their patented No. 5 hitter behind Johnny Bench, a capable everyday first baseman, and "keep-‘em-loose" clubhouse leader. As for the Yankees, it’s doubtful they would have visited three consecutive World Series without Nettles’ Gold Glove defense and abundant left-handed power, the latter characteristic making him an ideal sixth and seventh-place hitter behind the likes of Munson and Reggie Jackson.

One thing is for darn sure. No living third baseman in 1978—not an aging Brooks Robinson, not even Darrell Evans—would have been able to save Game Three the way that Graig Nettles did.

Yeah. I saw that game too and clearly I wasn't the only one who walked away marveling.

I've noticed this promo picture for Yahoo's Fantasy baseball season this year... and I swear that player looks like Nettles in his heyday to me. Stay with me on this; The pinstripes on the uniform look like Yankee pinstripes. The black under the eyes, the 1970s-style stirrups, the air-brushed logo from the cap... that's so 1970s. When I first saw the image, my first reaction was "Graig!" If it's not him, it sure is a dead ringer, because that's how I remember him, flying sideways like superman with a glove, nabbing line-drive balls.
You do something great people remember you a lifetime.

The Big Drought In Pre-History

We Were Down To 2000 once

This an amazing article about what happened to the human population in Pre-history. Homo Sapiens came very close to extinction, 70,000 years ago.
IT WAS a very close call. If a devastating drought that gripped Africa had lasted just a little longer, or been a little worse, we would not be here today.

There would be no humans, no cities, no art and no science. There would be no wars and no human-induced climate change. The world would belong to the animals.

An international genetics project has found that modern humans almost became extinct 70,000 years ago.

The Genographic Project, led by American and Israeli researchers, made the discovery after undertaking the most extensive mitochondrial DNA survey ever undertaken in Africa.

In 1987 a study of mitochondrial DNA, passed down the generations via the maternal line, revealed that every person alive today is descended from one woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.

The latest study shows that after the birth of humanity in eastern Africa, people quickly split into separate communities.

About 150,000 years ago humans, possibly pursuing animal herds, moved to settle throughout Africa. The number of people soared, peaking somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000.

But before the first person could venture out of Africa, the population suddenly crashed to just 2000.

"It could have been even fewer," said Spencer Wells, the Genographic Project director. "We were, in effect, hanging on by our fingertips.

"That's fewer people than there are Sumatra orang-utans today, and they are classified as extremely endangered and will probably go extinct in 20 years."

The crisis was probably caused by climate change. About 130,000 years ago the world started cooling and drying as it neared another ice age.

"There were massive droughts in Africa ... mega-droughts," Dr Wells said. With much of the continent barren and hostile, the tiny human settlements became isolated from each other.

As humanity hovered on the edge of extinction "a shift in culture began. People began making the better hunting tools they needed to survive the drought. Art makes its appearance. There is abstract thought," he said.

Then the drought broke. Isolated communities migrated and merged. With better skills and a friendlier climate, the population boomed again and people finally left Africa, spreading along the Asian coast, towards Australia.

Backed by National Geographic and IBM, the researchers, who have published their findings in The American Journal Of Human Genetics, identified humans' near demise after studying DNA mutation rates.

"By sampling people alive today, estimating how much genetic variation they have ... and knowing the rate at which variation accumulates we can say how long it took to accumulate the observed level of variation, and the size of the starting population," Dr Wells said.

The project aimed to discover what humans were doing before leaving Africa. "Three quarters of our history is virtually unknown," Dr Wells said. The research showed "there was lots going on".

He believes humanity's close shave should send a message to the 6.6 billion people alive today. "We should start to see ourselves as the lucky survivors."

Pretty interesting. Once upon a time, we were closer to extinction than the Orangutan population today.

Shrunken Heads

Witchcraft At Its Finest

Somewhere in Congo is an outbreak of mass hysteria.

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Darn. I quoted the lot. It did deserve preservation. This absolutely deserves a song.

My Song Of The Week

Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy

At long last I've finished my version of Frank Zappa's song off 'Bongo Fury'. Yeah, yeah, who else but Kim Basinger putting on her best "Fuck-me-face".

Here is the song page.

It's taken *months* to get around to finishing this thing. I've been piecing it together bit by bit, but nonetheless it has been a difficult track to do. Consider this version a sort of etude of sorts.
I thought the song was relatively uncomplicated but when you get down to the brass tacks of this song you find so much detail, it's amazing. That might be the last time I lightly and blithely go, "I know, I'll try and do that Frank Zappa song!"
Frank's stuff ain't easy.

Even so, I am tempted to think about 'Broken Hearts Are For Assholes' and 'Bobby Brown Goes Down'. Maybe another year. :)

Aliens!

Primitive Alien Lives May Exist According to Stephen Hawking

Here's the link.

Given the size of the universe, it is unlikely that Earth is the only planet to develop some sort of life, Hawking told an audience at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He added that humanity must embrace space exploration, if only to ensure its long-term survival.

"While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings," said Hawking during a lecture as part of a series commemorating NASA's 50th anniversary this year.

The lack of success by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to discover signals from an alien civilization suggests that none exist within several 100 light-years of Earth, Hawking said, though he offered three theories on the dearth of interplanetary communications.

The probability of primitive life developing on a suitable planet may be extremely low, or it may be high, but aliens intelligent enough to beam signals into space may also be smart enough to build civilization-destroying weapons like nuclear bombs, he said. More likely, he added, is that primitive life is likely to develop, but intelligent life as we know it is exceedingly rare.

"We don't appear to have been visited by aliens," Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. "Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes?"

I wonder what happens if Stephen Hawking had a UFO encounter. I wonder how his rationality would deal with it. :)

Grist For The Mill(s)

Kerry Packer's Call Girl

It's old news that there are allegations that Heather Mills was a call-girl. The new bit is that Kerry Pack may have been one of her clients, as well as Adnan Kashoggi.

A new documentary outs Kerry Packer as a "sugar daddy" of Heather Mills when the ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney was working as a high-class call girl, according to London's Daily Mail.

Denise Hewitt, who says she worked as a £10,000 escort with Ms Mills in the Eighties, makes the claims in a program to be aired on the UK's Channel 4.

Ms Hewitt, 44, is quoted as saying: "We went into high-class prostitution behind closed doors and nobody knew about it...[billionaire arms dealer Adnan] Kashoggi, Kerry Packer and one of the Royal princes of Saudi, they were the big fish and there were a couple of others that were classed as Heather's sugar daddies.

"We used to get a lot of jewellery as gifts - rings, watches, Bulgari bracelets, cars. The world was our oyster. We enjoyed it.

"No one knew what we did and we didn't expect it to come out. I don't look on it as sleazy."

Hooray for the freedom of press. This woman does attract a lot of vitriol. Down in the page concerning her public image on Wikipedia is this paragraph:

Criticism of the press coverage
The extent and nature of the British press coverage of Mills has been criticised. Publicist Mark Borkowski writes in the Independent on Sunday that, "Not since the cult of Myra Hindley have we encountered so much vitriol aimed at one woman."[55]. Feminist writer Natasha Walter has compared the coverage to that of Britney Spears.[56]while Kira Cochrane, writing in The Guardian, has said that "every misogynist epithet available" has been used against Mills. "She has somehow become the vessel through which it is acceptable for both pundits and the public to express their very worst feelings about women."[56]

It may be true, I don't know. When I quickly think about it, she strikes me as the archetypal 'Second Wife'. She seems to bask in the light of publicity yet we're not entirely sure how she came to prominence in the first place but for her looks. She's earned some kind of credibility through losing a leg and still insisting on her largely appearance-driven celebrity-hood, which is odd. Then she marries a Beatle for money, and insists on a huge settlement in the divorce - a demand the judge laughed out of court; then her ex-lover comes forwards with sordid stories of electric dildo collections. What's not to dislike?

What I find interesting is how of all these famous people with whom she brushed shoulders, none of them have really defended her except Sir Paul during their marriage. Which got me to ponder this question: Is a night with Heather Mills at the peak of her beauty worth AUD$25,000? For $25,000, you could perhaps do a lot more different things than shag Heather Mills in her 2-legged-phase of her *career*. It is distinctly possible that people simply do not like somebody who so blatantly can put a price on themselves - which is essentially what prostitutes do - which makes them uncomfortable in accepting her.

Never Meet Your Heroes

Over the years I've liked John Cusack. I admire his work greatly. He's got a charming presence on the screen which is hard to dislike, and he has a way of saying things in a way that we would all like to say them with much charm as we would take a tilt at hypocrisy or social mores. He's a Gen-X phenomenon all on his own, managing to mix a weird kind of conceit with a self-effacing humour. In a perfect world, we'd all like to be characters that John Cusack plays and deliver lines to our lives with much charm and sardonic wit.

So it comes as a bit of a let down to find out that he's a total and utter prima donna, who is insufferable and dislikeable for being so unlike his screen persona.

Travelling to oversee the Canadian production of The Factory with fellow writer Morgan O'Neill last year, Leyden said the American star cost the production with his diva antics and lateness.

"John Cusack was one of my favourite actors until I met him," Leyden said yesterday.

"I have to say one thing - and this is my favourite line when people ask me what I think of John Cusack - he plays nice guys on film. So, read between the lines."

Prodded by a radio interviewer to dish more dirt, Leyden accused Cusack of often arriving "hours late" for work.

"He cost us a lot of money and he was getting his biggest pay day on this film.

"He was getting paid a lot of cash and he would just be two hours late to set, wouldn't apologise for keeping everyone waiting in the snow . . . a real prima donna.

"Everyone thought he was a really nice guy (prior to filming) and all I can say is that it was a really nice day when he wrapped," Leyden said.

There you go. He's certainly not the first star not to live up to his screen persona, and you do take this stuff with a grain of salt. The lesson of the story? NEVER meet your heroes.

The Weirdness of 20th Century History

...As Told By Hollywood
I really like the following films:

The Good Shepherd
13 Days
JFK
The Fog of War
Nixon

However when you watch them back to back, you begin to get a feel for what US politics in the 1960s was like, and it starts to creep you out. Add in the Watergate incident covered in All The Presidents' Men, which gave us the character 'Deepthroat', and suddenly you get a miasmic sense that "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that we are foolish to believe any line of rhetoric that comes out of the US government to do with World Peace. As far as we can tell, War is the business of State (as Donald Sutherland's Mr. X tells us excitedly in 'JFK'), and Peace, most certainly is the enemy of the USA.

Maybe I'm simply allowing myself to be jaundiced and paranoid and cynical about political will but I've always been a great admirer of Machiavelli's works. I have a great deal of tolerance for the kinds of cynical things States do to preserve order or the status quo. Despite this I feel a little queasy about the nakedness of the drive for power that we witnessed in the mid parts of the Twentieth Century. But surely Art, it's all fictionalised movies, you say.
Even allowing for the substantial *characterisation* and *editorialising* that goes on in the creation of these films, it's also true that the writers go to great lengths to research their facts; and if the facts do speak for themselves, these films corroborate a picture that goes like this:

The CIA grows out of a weird varsity secret society which goes on to gets its expertise from the British. They cut their teeth in WWII after which, they move on to secure American/WASP interests against the communists around the globe. The fear of communism is all-pervasive, and so all means become acceptable. Cuba then falls to Communism, which creates a major policy crisis for the USA.

The CIA keep working the issue with Cuba and they team up with the Mafia, as well as the anti-communist Cubans - who they equip with lots of guns and weapons. Meanwhile, the Kennedy family who are Irish Catholic glom onto power through crooked elections and their own mob connections only to find themselves in the hot seat for the Bay of Pigs operation. The CIA wants it done, but the Kennedys are appalled. They pull the plug, sack some generals and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA.

When the Cuban Missile comes up (mostly as a reactionary result of the Bay of Pigs Incident), the Kennedys do their best to put out the deliberate attempts to go to war by the CIA and the Pentagon. The CIA and Military Industry Complex carry 2 major grudges from the Bay of Pigs AND the Cuban Missile Crisis, as they hurtle into Vietnam. they don't want the White House to know just exactly what is going on there, so they deliberately misinform McNamara, and by extension, JFK.

In 1963, JFK commits to pulling troops out of Vietnam on the advise of McNamara which prompts the CIA to assassinate JFK. McNamara stays on in the hope that there is a rational exit to Vietnam, but then he is overwhelmed by those who really want it to be an excuse to spend money. Deals are made, people are brought in, 'Lee Harvey Oswald' is set up as an elaborate cover story. Then the fateful day in Dallas happens.

LBJ, then becomes the President and greatly facilitates the War in Vietnam because his constituency is Texas - but also he believes the Domino Theory. By 1968, the USA is spending up to 100billion dollars on the Vietnam War for marginal gains and massive destruction of equipment. The war industries such as Bell helicopters are making a fortune. RFK runs for the White House saying he'll end the war and surprise surprise, he gets killed too. So Nixon slides into th Oval Office, mostly as a puppet of the Military Industry Complex and he too tries to face down the CIA and the Pentagon, but he ends up so paranoid and thus gives rise to the Watergate thing.

That's the grand narrative in a nutshell if you believe Hollywood's version. Of course it could all be codswollop as much as say 'Pearl Harbor' was; and we should all take it with a truckload of salt. After all, if it weren't fanciful it wouldn't be Hollywood. What kind of episteme could we have out of movies anyway?

If you think that's bad enough a bet, consider this: The CIA and the Pentagon all have 'plausible deniability' over all of this stuff from start to finish. There's a mass of stuff to deny, but it can't all be plausible to be denied away. Now that would be downright creepy, kind of like being caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

I don't know where all of this leaves us. I don't believe in decoding ciphers as a way of reading history (even though I do like 'The Name of the Rose'). History is not a palimpsest. Nonetheless, the grand narrative is out there if you could bother watching a bunch of dour movies.

Fantasy Teams Report

Got The Phil Hughes Blues

I drank the Brian Cashman koolaid. I have Phil Hughes in both my Yahoo leagues, and he's pitching up a stink. After 1 great start which catapulted my teams to the top in the first few days, he's had 3 bad starts and his ERA is now 8.82 and a 0-3 record. Worse still, I have Ian Kennedy on all three teams and he's posted a 9.64 ERA as well. I also have Chamberlain in 2 of these leagues and he's been away for better part of the last week, so I've hardly had him come in and blow hitters away.

I planned my season around the troika, just as the Yankees did and right now, I'm being 'rewarded' with copious earned runs and absolute lack of stuff with a bloated WHIP every outing from Hughes and Kennedy. Chamberlain on the other hand has been electric, but he's simply not been around much. Judging from the results, it seems theyoung starters get into a lot of bad counts and are forced to throw down the middle and get hit. Yesterday's outing from Hughes was more encouraging until he let things slip in the 6th, but essentially they need to challenge the hitters more. easy to say, hard to do, I'm sure - but my entire season as well as the Yankees is resting on these guys doing a lot better (or in Chamberlain's case, just more) than they have to date. Who knows? By the end of May they may have picked it up and we may look upon this shaky start to the season as nothing but just that.

I guess it's not like I had the choice of trading for Santana, though. I wonder how Cashman is feeling right now.

My Life In The AFL Bush Of Ghosts
The hardest thing each year with the AFL league each year is to stock a side that actually hits the field and plays. because you only get 2 substitutions a week, and most weeks go by with at least some star sitting it out. It's weird. In the head to head rounds I've already taken a drubbing because 4 of my forwards sat last week. It's just hell when that happens.

What Sunk The Titanic

Riveting Stuff

Never pass up a cheesey pun I say! I always thought the hull smashed like a crystal glass when Celine Dion hit that High Note.

The good ship Titanic, the ocean liner of our dreams and nightmares has been studied from a new angle and it seems she set sail with substandard rivets.

Adding to the threat, the company relied on cheap materials, scientists say. They found many rivets riddled with high concentrations of slag, a glassy residue of smelting, that can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture. The company also faced shortages of skilled riveters, according to archive papers.

Shipbuilders of the day were moving from iron to steel rivets, which were stronger. And machines could install them, improving workmanship and avoiding labor problems.

The scientists discovered that Harland & Wolff only used steel rivets on Titanic's central hull, where stresses were expected to be greatest. Iron rivets were chosen for the ship's stern and bow. And the bow, as fate would have it, is where the iceberg struck. Studies of the wreck show that six seams opened up in the ship's bow plates. And the damage, one of the scientists noted, "ended close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel".

The scientists argue that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to have arrived before the icy plunge, saving hundreds of lives.

The last bit there's pretty depressing. The ship went down in 3hours - which is about the length of Jim Cameron's bloated hyper-bombastic epic.

Bad News All Around

IMF Alert On Food Price Crisis

Fuel prices are surging. This has led to people wanting to try Bio-Diesel. The problem is that the Bio-Diesel firms are making their diesel fuel from staple food crops such as corn and wheat which in turn is driving up these staple crop prices. Naturally, this is creating a food price crisis.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation says 37 countries face food crises. The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, urged members on Sunday to provide $US500 million ($540 million) by May 1 to help alleviate the problem.

There have been serious disturbances in more than a dozen developing countries, including Haiti, where a Nigerian peacekeeper serving with the United Nations police force was dragged from his car and shot dead as he was taking food to his colleagues on Saturday.

Violence had flared in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, following the dismissal of the prime minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, earlier in the day and the announcement of a plan to slash the price of rice. A week of hunger-provoked protests and looting has left six people dead, and aid workers say volatile protests are likely to continue because of sustained high food prices. Haiti imports almost all its food, and global food prices have risen 40 per cent since the middle of last year.

Mamadou Mbaye, who heads the UN World Food Program's office in Haiti, said fixing Haiti's systemic problems, such as unemployment and dependence on imported food, could not be accomplished immediately, meaning unrest could continue.

"Some measures will generate results in the long term … but whether people will be willing to wait for that is another issue."

In the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday. There have also been protests in neighbouring India.

Some experts, including Mr Zoellick and the British Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, have identified the growth of biofuels as one of the main causes of higher food prices.

The UN says 232 kilograms of corn is needed to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol - enough to feed a child for a year. Last week the UN predicted massacres unless the biofuel policy was halted.

Jacques Diouf, of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, said: "The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso. There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50 per cent to 60 per cent of income goes to food. The reality is that people are dying already. Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react."

And we still can't stop using carbon based fuels. Our civilisation is totally hooked on oil.
There are trials in Scandinavia to try and use a Hydrogen based model, but there is one fatal flaw in that system - energy is required to separate the H2 from the H2O in the first place. So a Hydrogen-based automobile fleet will only be feasible if there is an energy system to do the H2 de-coupling. i.e. there is no Hydrogen energy economy as such.
In Iceland, they use geothermal energy to accomplish this feat. However, if we use oil, it would be meaningless.

The bottom line is that if oil prices keep going up, food prices will go up with it, regardless. If people are serious about Bio-Diesel, they had better figure out a way of supplying the demand without resorting to food crops.

The other bad news in all of this is that the re-shuffling of the deck chairs in a world after the era of cheap crude oil is underway. A lot of lives are going to fall astray, and we can expect a lot more refugees and collapsed states in the years to come. If people have a bright idea about how to change our energy source for our civilisation, now would be a good time to step forwards with it.

Not Newsworthy But... Pt 3

These Things Come In Threes

As idiotic as it is, there's this story here about a man who is a dead-ringer for the late Mickey Mantle. Yep, that's the guy in the picture above - apart from his mild resemblance, it's not like he can demonstrate hitting prowess - there is nothing remarkable about the man. Nope, it's definitely not newsworthy, however it seems to be the theme of the week so I'm blogging it.

Don Brown, a 63-year-old Mantle impersonator from upstate New York, tells people to relax.

“People take pictures of me on the interstate with their cell phones, and there was a lady who rear-ended someone else with her car because she was looking at me,” Brown said. “I had a lady come up to me just shaking. She said she thought she had seen a ghost.”

Brown said he uses his uncanny likeness to the Hall of Famer to raise awareness for his true passion: organ donation. He was at Integris Baptist Regional Health Center in Miami, Okla., on Tuesday to promote April as Organ Donation Awareness Month. He will make a brief stop in Joplin today at the Elks Lodge, 1802 W. 26th St.

Brown got involved in organ donation about the same time he realized his likeness to Mantle.

“For years I was a salesman for Reader’s Digest, and one time in the mid-1980s I stopped into this bar outside of Cooperstown, N.Y.,” Brown said. “I was dressed like a salesman, in a suit, and had a ring on my hand that looked very much like Mantle’s 1956 World Series ring. These two guys at the end of the bar kept looking at me, and finally one them said, ‘I know who you are. You’re Mickey Mantle. Welcome.’”

Around that same time, Brown’s brother, Ed, needed a kidney transplant. Brown insisted on donating one his own kidneys, but his brother died before the surgery. After that, Brown got involved in Mantle’s organ donation foundation.

Now, Brown travels around the United States in a 2004 Thunderbird with a custom pinstripe paint job and a Yankee logo on the hood, and Mantle’s No. 7 painted on the back. He attends National Baseball Hall of Fame and Mantle events, and visits organ donors and recipients in hospitals.

“I’m not licensed by the MLB (Major League Baseball), and I don’t sign any autographs as Mickey,” he said. “I’m not Mickey Mantle. I just raise awareness, and that’s what looking like Mickey does. It just brings a greater awareness.”

Like I need to know what it might be like to look like Mickey Mantle. Wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to a guy. No story yet on if Don made it with Doris Day as well.

There was that dude in the documentary 'Sherman's March' who is a dead ringer for Burt Reynolds in his peak years. When he's asked by the director if he scores a lot, he responds "Oh yeah, sure I do." It's one of the highlights of that film.

Not Newsworthy But... Pt 2

Marylin Monroe's Private Blue Movie

I missed this one yesterday.

A 15-minute film of Marilyn Monroe engaging in an oral sex act with an unidentified man will be kept from public view by a New York businessman who has bought it for $US1.5 million ($A1.6 million), the broker of the deal said.

Memorabilia collector Keya Morgan said he recently arranged the sale of the silent, black-and-white film from the son of a dead FBI informant who possessed it to a wealthy Manhattan businessman who wants to protect Monroe's privacy.

"The gentleman who bought it said out of respect for Marilyn he's not going to make a joke of it and put it on the internet and try to exploit her," said memorabilia collector Keya Morgan. "That's not his intention and I would never get my name involved if that were to happen."

Monroe is clothed and the man's head remains out of the frame for the entire 15 minutes of the film, said Morgan, who viewed the film.

Monroe was rumoured to have had an affair with former US president John F Kennedy, and Morgan said former FBI director J Edgar Hoover, a Kennedy rival, went to great lengths to try to prove it was Kennedy in the film.

One of Monroe's ex-husbands, the late baseball great Joe DiMaggio, once tried to buy it from the collector for $S25,000 but "he would not part with it", according to declassified FBI files provided by Morgan.

Morgan is a well-known collector who owns memorabilia from the estates of Monroe and DiMaggio and said he was friends with Monroe's other two husbands, Jim Dougherty and Arthur Miller.

It was probably Joe D's penis.
There's nothing like porn of yesteryear, especially if it involves stars. I think Hedy Lamarr was found to have done a skin flick back in Austria. She was asked for an explanation by Louis B. Meyer who feared scandals for his stars, and she answered "yes."
Louis B. Meyer then asked her, "did you look good?"
"Why, of course," she replied.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting this article surfaced in the wake of the previous story about Doris and Mick.

Sick In Bed

I Ought To Be
But I keep turning up to work, because I just have to. No 2 ways about it. Doesn't leave me with much energy at the end of the day to sit and think about something interesting to say about the world.

I'm slowly working on a cover of 'Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy'. It takes time to untangle the complex arrangements that Frank Zappa rendered on his songs. I don't know why I like this song so much, in as much as it's simply an ode to obscure sexual practices, yet somehow the song manages to spell out the miracle of lust. I guess I got really inspired to do it when I saw Dweezil Zappa's band work their ay through it and suddenly it didn't look as complicated as the other songs in the Zappa repertoire.

The other thing I'm working on is a version of 'How Many More Times' with Dave Millard in England. He'll do the vocals and I'll do the rest. Should be fun. Anyway, you can all expect that in iComp in the next few weeks. Until then, I'll try and get better.

Not Newsworthy But...

The Mick And The Girl Next Door
This was in some press today.

Singer/actress DORIS DAY once embarked on a whirlwind affair with late American baseball player MICKEY MANTLE, according to an upcoming book.
American author David Kaufman clams in his tell-all tome Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door that Day met Mantle on the set of 1962 movie That Touch of Mink.
He writes, "A notorious womaniser, Mantle boasted to friends that not only had he slept with Day at his regular suite in New York's St. Moritz Hotel, but that she was 'one of the best f**ks of his life.'"
However, a spokeswoman for Day has refused to comment on the reports.

Ms. Day is still alive, too. Anyway, it inspired a thread over at BTF. It makes for pretty funny reading.

This picture of course is the alleged 'moment of seduction', caught on film. There she is, perched right next to a bored looking Mick.
Hilarious. I think the story holds fascination in the same way that Joe Dimaggio married Marylin Monroe, except there's something incredibly cheesey about the combo of Doris and Mick.
Yet deep inside of us all, we'd all like to be Mickey Mantle giving it to Doris Day.

Gotta go off to work now.

Shark Attack

The Last Bite Of Summer

One of the things we do track on this blog is shark attacks. Why? I don't know, but I started tracking them as they emerged in the media a few years ago and now I can't quite let it go. Call it the Jaws-homage-Factor. Usually these attacks seem to happen more in spring than in Autumn, but here we have a late one

The latest attack took a 16 year old boy near Ballina.

A 16-year-old boy killed off the NSW North Coast was probably the victim of a bull shark, an expert says.

The boy, from Wollongbar, west of Ballina, died after being bitten on the legs while bodyboarding with his friend at Ballina's popular Lighthouse Beach about 8am today.

Manager of life sciences at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, John West, said today recent rain on the NSW North Coast would have resulted in an increase in shark numbers in the area.

"The nutrients that come down with the water and out from the rivers stimulate an increase in the available food for fishes, and then you get schools of fish forming, and then you get predators that prey on those," Mr West said.

Today's attack occurred near the North Wall - a breakwater at the entrance to the Richmond River.

Mr West, who is also the curator of the Australian Shark Attack File, said large schools of fish were likely to congregate at the river mouth.

"That's a typical spot where you'll get congregations of fish, and therefore other sharks," he said.

The attack was likely to have been by a bull shark, Mr West said.

"If there's a lot of fresh water around, and it probably sounds as if there was, the animal's more likely to be a bull shark, because bull sharks are able to move up into fresh water, whereas the white pointers and tigers and other whalers don't."

Bull shark it is, then.
I got to see the oldest Bull Shark n captivity in Okinawa's Churaumi Aquarium a couple of years ago. It's plenty scary enough an you certainly wouldn't want to fall into that fish tank, even if the bull shark was fed recently.

Fantasy Season

3 Teams, No Idea

The Jack Kerouac Memorial League is a schmozzle this year, partly because nobody was around and also because I've been busy as hell so it became one job too many to organise. As a result, the league is in an experiment this year. people have carried over their entire teams from 2007. So it's a Keeper League with 25 keepers and no draft. Pretty much like a real MLB team.
So we'll see.

I've also been roped into another 5x5 Roto league where they keep 6 players. Amazingly, apart from Jose Reyes, Takashi Saito and Alex Gordon, I only had junk to keep so this team is going to be a work in progress. OTOH, the draft went very well and I now have Hughes, IPK and Joba as well as Posada and Abreu. I also have Andre Ethier and Broxton from the Dodgers to go with the Yankees squad, so the team should be called The Donkees.
I like my chances of a top 3 finish with that one - I won't win homers or SB, but I'm in line to contest for a lead in W and Ks.
I've called my team the Ligers in honor of nothing so much as indecision. I wanted a bland kind of name, mayb with a big cat but didn't want to be 'Lions' or 'Tigers' so 'Ligers' it was.

The third team is a mystery league on the CBS site with a weekly roster change. My team was auto-drafted so I actually have excess shortstop and hardly any pitching. Yes, I have Reyes AND Derek Jeter as well as Yunesky Betancourt. So far, nobody has offered a trade, even though I've placed Betancourt on the block. I think I'll stink up this league. In fact, early signs are already there. I'm trwling the bottom badly this week. It's had to get anything going from the FA pool so far.

Fuk-U-Dome!
Kosuke Fukudome has an unfortunate spelling, but he can sure bat. His start with the Cubs this year has been with a bang, so I've picked him up in the JKM league. I even drafted him as a whim without knowing
where I'd play him in the 2nd Yahoo League. It's been sweet in 3 games. 159 to go!

AFL Fantasy
The Combat Wombats are back in the PJ League. This year I drafted guys I sort of recognised from my team last year - so it's really a continuation of the Combat Wombats who won the bottom half premiership. Wouldn't you know it, they've already sunk out of the Top 8 in the first 2 rounds. 1 more round to go before the Head to Head starts.
While I don't watch much AFL, I've actually been looking forward to coming back to this league. Its simplicity complements the complexities of trying to figure out the Jack Kerouac Memorial League.

Just A Thought I Had

Apropos of Nothing... As They Say

If I don't write this stuff down somewhere, I tend to just forget I thought of it.
I imagine you're a fish in a tank. You swim around in circles a lot.
The water you drink has the oxygen you need in it, so you're essentially breathing in the medium you exist in. The food comes down in flakes into this medium and you gobble that up too. However you also defecate into this medium. So it's like swimming around in a toilet bowl all your life, while eating and drinking the stuff floating in the toilet bowl water and peeing and shitting into it at the same time, swimming around in it some more.
Yeah. Life of a fish in a tank.

It's That Time Again

MLB Season Starts
Look, it's not my fault. I'm just drawn that way.
Just bring it on. I'll keep following this stuff until I die. It's just what it is.

Last Season In Yankee Stadium

I don't know what to say. Everything has started with a whimper this year. For a start, the Yankees-Blue Jays was rained out. The damn Red Sox got a head start into the season against the A's in Tokyo - which the split - and the Yankees are yet to play a game.

Here's an interesting page about Yankee opening days through history. This bit caught my eye:

1923 Yankees Starting Lineup: First Lineup in Yankee Stadium History
CF Whitey Witt
3B Joe Dugan
RF Babe Ruth
1B Wally Pipp
LF Bob Meusel
C Wally Schang
2B Aaron Ward
SS Everett Scott
P Bob Shawkey

2008 Yankees Starting Lineup: Last Lineup in Yankee Stadium History
LF Johnny Damon
SS Derek Jeter
RF Bobby Abreu
3B Alex Rodriguez
1B Jason Giambi
2B Robinson Cano
C Jorge Posada
DH Hideki Matsui
CF Melky Cabrera

Kind of amazing what has changed, and it's not just the DH thing. The guys in the original 1923 lineup are all white guys. The 2008 edtion is anything but:
There is a black guy (Jeter), a Venezuelan (Abreu), a Puerto Rican (Posada), some Dominicans (Cano, Cabrera, and a bit of A-Rod), a guy from Japan (Matsui), and a half-Thai dude (Damon); plus there's the Panamanian Mariano Rivera and the Winabago tribe's own Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen.
They're pretty United Nations today, giving lie to their moniker the Yankees.
The other thing that caught my eye was this list:

Most Opening Day Starts by Position
P Ron Guidry (7),Whitey Ford (7), Mel Stottlemyre (7)
C Bill Dickey (15)
1B Lou Gehrig (14)
2B Willie Randolph (13)
SS Derek Jeter (11), Phil Rizzuto (11)
3B Graig Nettles (11)
LF Roy White (9)
CF Mickey Mantle (13)
RF Hank Bauer (8)
DH Don Baylor (3), Ruben Sierra (3)

That Hank Bauer played more opening games in RF than Babe Ruth surprised me. Weirder still I've seen a whole bunch of these guys play. It's easier to count those I didn't: Ford, Sottlemyre, Dickey, Gehrig, Rizzuto, Mantle, Bauer. Boy, I'm gettin' old.