Hilarity in New York City
Tha Yankees are having another good year, sitting 9.5 games ahead of the Red Sox and top of the American League in wins. Still, owner george Steinbrenner can find fault with a team loaded with Superstars everywhere except second base and blast his manager Joe Torre. Putting all of this in perspective is this article by Joel Sherman.
Seeing it's so funny, I decided to quote it here Wholus Bolus.

August 11, 2004 -- WE are George Steinbrenner City. We are addicted to a man who by all logical reviews is at least borderline certifiable. We have absorbed all of his worst characteristics, all while making fun of those very traits. Those of us in the media track him down on the off chance he again has diarrhea of the mouth and says something really dumb, like Kenny Lofton should not be in right field for a Monday matinee against the last-place Blue Jays with his club in first place by 101/2 games. The scary thing is just how many Yankee fans had beaten him to the emotion, had betrayed all the same unreasonable complaints over a singular loss in a thriving season.

We have all been Steinbrenner-ized. Every defeat is treated as if it will knock the Yanks from the No. 1 spot in the AP poll. It is bad enough Steinbrenner thinks the Yanks should have a Cooperstown-bound player at every position and win every game from Legends Field to The Canyon of Heroes. The disturbing thing now is we all believe it, as well. Steinbrenner has gotten into our blood.

The Yanks don't get Randy Johnson and that is regarded as something the Homeland Security Department should investigate. Fans beseech me on the street and in e-mails, cringing that the Yanks do not have a situational lefty, equating that someplace between nuclear proliferation and world hunger as global problems. Steinbrenner is cruel, impetuous and irrational, and we are all in lock step with him. Nearly 4 million folks are going to see the Yankees at the Stadium this season, and
since a few actual losses will be mixed on occasion, there will be boos of dissatisfaction.

Again, I criticize the media, as well. Probably more. We should just be ignoring the babbles of a madman. Instead we wait upon them like wisdom from a burning bush. This is a guy who has dubbed more of his players "warriors" than existed in the whole 14th century. Thus, he has passed the test to be ignored. But we are addicted.
On Monday, Joe Torre played one player he and the baseball executives in New York did not want (Lofton) for another (Sheffield), and Steinbrenner, who ordered the signing of both, had problems with it. Of course, he only had problems when Lofton actually kicked a ball.

Believe me, if Lofton had hit a game-winning homer, then Steinbrenner would have, of course, made him a "warrior." Steinbrenner actually said he thought Sheffield might have caught Gabe Gross' laser-beam homer pulled to the right-field corner. One of his clearer-thinking executives said Manute Bol would not have caught the ball. But why don't we say that, even if Sheffield could run like Carl Crawford and jump like Michael Jordan in his prime he would not have caught the ball? Because he can hardly lift his arms, or have you not noticed he is catching balls sidesaddle to compensate for a pained shoulder?

Which is why he was not in the outfield in the first place. If you cannot give a hurting player a break with a double-digit division lead, when exactly can you in Steinbrenner City? You know what would have been negligent on Torre's part? Not seeing what Lofton can do in right. Sheffield just might blow out before October. If he does, Steinbrenner is sure to lambaste his manager for overplaying him and not experimenting to discern options should there be a Sheffield-less postseason.

Steinbrenner should have said "thanks" to Torre for keeping the big picture in mind. Instead, he verbally slapped at him. Perhaps there is a more ungrateful person on the planet, just no names come readily to mind.

The last time Steinbrenner got this annoyed about poor right-field play, Enrique Wilson was stumbling around in a nationally televised Saturday afternoon game at Shea in 2002. Steinbrenner reacted ・against his baseball people's wishes ・by obtaining Raul Mondesi. That ended up costing him roughly $20 million. Most people would take that as a sign to shut up. But Steinbrenner is never going to shut up. He has the forum and the inability to control himself.

Here is the big question ・why are we still listening?

I guess it's because I've been brought up with it. It hardly seems out of place to think like George, even though everybody with half a mind can see 'the Madness of King George'. The man wants to win and so do we - Damn it, why can't all Yankee players be Super-Clutch like Derek Jeter?

Some time ago, I had a conversation with art critic Yumi Yamaguchi who pointed out that business men are always far more ready to talk to elite athletes than successful artists. However, when they do meet them and do talk to them about the moment that defined the elite athlete's playing careers, they never get the sartorial, insightful comment; they only get a flash or reflection. She opined sagely, "they only ever seem to say the same things about the great moments, because they were busy playing through that amazing moment. What new insights in life can be recovered from such a process?"
All to which I agree. I mean, Derek Jeter is a Clutch God, but what could he possibly articulate about the great moments in his career that I couldn't imagine? - So clearly Yumi Yamaguchi is spot on in her observation; but it can't change the fact thatI still like baseball and I'm a Yankee fan.

- Art Neuro

Hubble Trouble
One of four instruments has gone down aboard the Hubble telescope. So now NASA are looking to launch a rtobotic mission to Hubble; except they don't know where the money's coming from.

"Let's go save the Hubble," O'Keefe said. He did not say whether the failed instrument would be repaired. O'Keefe told about 200 employees at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to develop a firm proposal within a year, at which
time a decision would be made whether to proceed.

NASA officials have stated previously that a full-fledged robotic servicing mission would likely cost in excess of $1 billion. A recent internal NASA study, according to government and industry sources, estimated the cost at $1.6 billion to $2.3 billion -- several times more than what NASA has spent in the past mounting space shuttle missions to the telescope.

It is not clear where the money would come from.

That may be money well spent. Hubble may be past its prime, but the value of Hubble as an on-going resource is too great to waste. It's not as if another telescope is ready to replace it

- Art Neuro

How The Australian Film Industry Got 'Stuffed' - Part 1
At the core of the concern for that state of the Australian Film Industry lies the notion of the value of actually having a cultural industry. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when American Studios through their distribution channels ruled the entire world's cinemas through her marketing power, the most likely product you would have seen at the cinema was American product, and nothing else. While being an English speaking country spawned off from the United Kingdom, the United States of America has always had a distinct culture unlike that of the other English speaking Nations.

Naturally, those in Australia felt that to have cinema monopolised by American culture was a problem, and so the concept of a National Cinema emerged from the murky business of the Studio monopolies. At the same time, the Studio monopoly on distribution was broken by anti-trust laws in the 1950s, which prompted the loosening of control over world-wide distribution the Hollywood studios once possessed.

So in the time of Prime Minister John Gorton, Australia embarked on a project to resuscitate its National Cinema (which dates back to 1906). This led to the formation of the Australian Film Television School, and launched the feature film careers of the likes of Peter Weir, Philip Noyce, and Gillian Armstrong. At the same time, the government devised a tax break known as 10BA, which gave a whopping 150% tax break to monies invested in certifiably 'Australian' films.
At the same time, the Australian Film Commission was given a boost to its coffers to invest in worthy projects.

These policy shifts carried out by both Labor and the Coalition Governments brought about what we now call, the New Wave of Australian Cinema. Some of the most famous films were made under this regime; Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Mad Max 1 &2, Newsfront, Heatwave, My Brilliant Career, all of them representative of the best of Australian Cinema were produced with the help of the 10BA and the Australian Film Commission.

Then, in the 1980s, it was discovered that many films made with the help of 10BA were actually being used as Tax Shelters, helping people write off money in losses, rather than being invested in films with the view of creating quality works. At the same time, strapped for tax income, the Federal Government reduced the 10BA tax incentive from 150% to 133%, then 125% and finally 100%. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the Federal Government had a new plan. It would create the Film Finance Corporation which would directly invest in projects, functioning as a defacto Australian studio. The AFC would remain, and concentrate on 'culturally important' films (i.e. films made by Indigenous People that nobody would want to pay to see, but need to be made for the good of our culture anyway).

Except the FFC did not quite function like a studio. Instead, it hired on arts bureaucrats that ate up most of its budget on salaries and junkets while investing in a raft of fairly unsuccessful films. Now, the rule of thumb when it came to film investing used to be, you'd make 10, and only one would be a hit, but that 1 would pay for the slate of 10. Instead, the FFC put together year after year where it failed to make its budget back at the market place, and now everybody is asking, why can't we get money from these people?

The truth is, if you invest only in worthy projects, chances are you won't see any of your money back; and that's what has happened to the FFC. Then how does Hollywood do it? After all, the annual budget of the FFC rivals that of MGM. Why can't the FFC turn a profit commensurate with its budget? The short answer is that they don't make films for the market; they make films for cultural reasons, which brings us back to the issue: What is having a cultural industry worth to a country?

The way I see it, an industry is only going to be an industry when it actually can turn a profit as whole; not one or two success stories a year, but as a whole. Otherwise, it's a sheltered work shop. In fact, the model whereby producers put together reams of paperwork to satisfy bureaucratic criteria in order to get money, can only lead to the creation of films that have very little market appeal. In other words, it's a glorified kind of the dole. And while it is stuck in that model (which it has been for many, many, many, years), then there really is no 'industry' to speak of. The folks who gather at SPAA to talk about the state of the *industry* are kidding themselves.

And yet the federal government would insist this sad so-called *industry* stand on its two legs and go out there and be a market place player. Well, that's not going to work when the opponent is the Goliath known as Hollywood; and in this instance, Goliath has better equipment, more talent and more expereince than our david-Industry. Frankly, I just don't see that as being feasible; and if they do, they're kidding themselves as much as the folks gathered at SPAA.

If the government values a cultural industry, then it's just going to have to prop it up no matter what because that's the nature of the cultural industry: it's just not rationally economic. If the government chooses to say the industry must function as a free market player, then it is best off dismantling the FFC and re-instate tax incentives. The reason the Australian film industry is 'stuffed', is because the FederalGgovernments of the last 12 years, both Labor and Coalition have kept insisting on being both a cultural industry, but also a free market player.
Well, sorry Politicians, but that simply wasn't going to work.

- Art Neuro

A Rant Is A Rant Is A Rant
A few day ago i did my block against the Conservative Weasel and mentioned in passing, Australia's own left wing wiener, Bob Ellis; in stark contrast to the right wing nut-job, Piers Ackerman. Since then a reader has pointed out one of Mr. Ellis' little rants at his book launch. The bit that really amused the reader was this little piece of hyperbole:

Bob Ellis hasn't been sleeping well lately.
For this he blames the state of the world, and more pointedly, a "pack of greedy Texas Christo-fascists" led by US President George Bush, media magnate Rupert Murdoch - owner of "the multi-national police state that is News Limited" - and John Howard, whose prime ministership has been "a long, long tale of lies upon lies upon lies".

"I am thinking of offering a $400 prize to anybody who can supply me (with) one
statement of John Howard's that over time proved wholly true," Ellis said yesterday in Parliament House.

If that isn't playing to the gallery, I don't know what is.
What the hell is a Christo-Fascist? I've heard of crypto-fascists, but Christo-fascists? As in the Count of Montecristo-Fascistos? Multi-National Police State? Come on, Bob, get a grip! But I guess he wants to have a shot at being Australia's Michael Moore.*Ugh*.
What exactly is Mr Ellis' claim to being Australia's-commentator-of-the-Left? Why does he get a lousy page in every issue of Encore magazine? Why do they keep letting him write that stuff? Who made him the spokesman of the Film Industry, and don't they think he actually hurts the cause? These things, we will never know or understand. Groan, groan, groan.

- Art Neuro

The Australian Film Industry Is 'Stuffed'
In recent days, there have been reports that the Australian Film Industry is 'stuffed'. I'll quote the lot here because I do want this to go down in posterity rather than disappear off the internet as news articles do:

Alarm at state of film industry

Des Partridge and Greg StolzAugust 9, 2004

AUSTRALIAN movie makers have dramatically declared the nation's once celebrated film industry to be "stuffed".Screen Producers Association of Australia president Stephen Smith made that blunt assessment yesterday. Queensland filmmaker Trish Lake agreed as filmmakers met at the first SPAA conference to be held on the Gold Coast.

"There is no question that the industry is stuffed," Lake, the producer of local success story Gettin' Square, said. "It's difficult to be a producer in Australia at this moment." Mr Smith slammed the industry's "strike rate" in the past five to six years, saying it had been overshadowed by a resurgent England and Canada.

He said the problem was a poor financing structure which virtually ensured films did not go into profit. Limited releases for local productions meant the public had little opportunity to watch home-grown films, giving producers even less chance of turning a profit.

"This leaves little money to live on between projects, let alone anything left for reinvestment or development," he said. The harsh assessment came after figures released last week showed the number of Australian films to hit the big screen was at its lowest level in years. Australian Film Commission data revealed almost two-thirds of local releases took less than $1 million at the cinemas. The only films to break the $10 million barrier is the past five years were Moulin Rouge, The Dish,
Lantana and The Wog Boy .

Spending on Australian film and television drama production also had slumped to a 10-year low. While expenditure on feature films and television dramas rose 15 per cent to $588 million in 2003-04, the increase was due entirely to foreign productions.

The malaise meant the champagne had a bittersweet taste at the SPAA awards for Lake and fellow Queensland movie maker Chris Brown. Lake was recognised for
Gettin' Square while Brown scored with Blurred.

"Gettin' Square has done very well in a very bad climate for Australian feature films," Lake said. Brown, who was named SPAA Independent Producer of the Year for films including the Schoolies Week-inspired Blurred and the new release Under the Radar, said Australian films were being overshadowed by Hollywood productions and distributors and exhibitors needed incentives to promote the local product.

He warned that the downturn in Australian film production was putting pressure on every new film to be the "saviour" of the industry. But critics were bagging films "just because they're Australian".

Well, uh, no. They were bagging them because they were shit in conception and execution. The foreign product was better. Why? I don't know; ask the market. I'm going to come back to this topic, but for now, just read the symptomatic mess - heck, it's an entire syndrome by now.

- Art Neuro

And The Rockets Red Glare...
Sometimes there are ring-ins that are there for the heck of it, making the competition a more full, robust experience for all. A bunch of ultra-low budget guys sent up their rocket in a bid for the Ansari X and it blew up.
This is amusing:

No one was hurt in the test of the Rubicon 1 just south of Olympic National Park. The 23-foot-long, 38-inch-diameter spacecraft held three dummies simulating the weight of astronauts.

The rocket, which crashed about 200 feet from takeoff after its parachute failed to deploy, will have to be completely rebuilt, said Eric Meier, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of Space Transport Corp., of Forks.

Meier and partner Phillip Storm had hoped to reach supersonic speeds and an altitude of 20,000 feet in Sunday's flight, but Meier seemed undeterred by Sunday's failure.

"We need to raise some more money ... fix our problems and launch another low-altitude flight as soon as possible," Meier told The Associated Press. "It's a learning experience to be expected when you're developing a vehicle with this kind of capabilities."

Yeah. Immediately. Somebody throw them some good money after the bad. The show must go on. I probably shouldn't laugh, but it's funny - a bit like the season of the 2004 Red Sox. What is a natural born cynic to do? :)

- Art Neuro

Da Vinci Project
The second private group working towards th Ansari X Prize announced that they will be going ahead with their launch, setting the date at 2 October.

"We want to win the X Prize, weve got a very good shot of winning the X Prize, we are determined to win the X Prize," Feeney said during todays announcement at Wild Fires Downsview Airport hangar. "The most important thing is that we ompete."

Feeneys announcement comes on the heels of a July 27 launch-timetable announcement by the backers of SpaceShipOne, a rocket ship built by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his Mojave, California firm Scaled Composites. SpaceShipOne is slated to make its X Prize flights beginning Sept. 29.

"Today is a historic day," said Gregg Maryniak, executive director of the St. Louis, Missouri-based Ansari X Prize Foundation, during today's press event. "When you have one space ship, you have a test flight, when you have two, you have a horse race."

And so the race continues.

Once More With feeling...
I know it's only smoke, but it has to be said, that it's quite spectacular smoke. Orlando 'El Duque' Hernandez notched his fourth Victory in a row since his return from injury, pitching 8 innings, striking out 7 and scattering 5 hits without conceding a run. Once again the vicitms were the Toronto Blue Jays:

In three starts against Toronto, Hernandez has not allowed a run in 17 innings. Blue Jays manager Carlos Tosca has seen enough of the right-hander.

``Hernandez was filthy,'' Tosca said. ``He throws strikes on the black. He gets his slider in and under left-handed batters' hands. I didn't see him at his best, but he's certainly been pretty good against us. He looks like he's on a mission. His slider was good. His changeup was good. He did whatever he wanted.

``He's a guy who pitches strictly on feel. He does what he wants to each hitter. You seldom see the same pitch twice. That's his style of pitching.''

And that's the other guy talking. The miracle comeback is in stark contrast to the 'enigmatic' and now long-gone Titan of Bronze, Jose Contreras. 'El Duque' is a one of a kind. No other Cuban pitcher in recent times has impacted on the Major Leagues like Orlando Hernandez has. Maybe to even consider that any other pitcher from Cuba could do what he has accomplished was too much pressure on 'El Titan Bronze'.

- Art Neuro

Nomar Swings for the Chicago Cubs
This just looks plain wrong...
- Art Neuro

I'd be pissed off too; except it's the Red Sox so how much compassion can even the Buddha muster, let alone a mere mortal such as I? .
- Art Neuro

Storms on Saturn
This is the article. Check it out.

"Cassini now has evidence for changes in the thunderstorms that occur on Saturn over more than 20 years since we first started making measurements of these," Kurth said. One difference is that lightning is occurring much more sporadically.

@Some days we see no lightning at all; other days we see evidence perhaps of more than one storm," Kurth said. "Back in the early 1980s on Voyager such storms were detected extremely regularly."

Another major difference is that the thunderstorms observed by Cassini are taking more time to rotate around the giant gas planet — about 10 hours and 45 minutes, compared to the 10 hours and five minutes in the 1980s.

The pictures presented don't really tell you much.

Wanted, Court Jester
I know I'm out of a job and all, but this seems a little difficult even for my myriad set of skills:

A court jester to fill a post vacant for 350 years since England executed its king.

English Heritage said in an advertisement in the Times on Thursday applicants for the competition at the weekend should bring their own costumes with bells, but said it would provide a bladder on a stick -- a traditional jester's prop. Contrary to the image of a buffoon, court jesters had to be highly astute, able to lift the spirits of their monarchs and risked death if they failed -- as many did.

The duties of the last court jester, whose job ended in 1649 when Charles I lost his head, included making him laugh and providing a distraction from politics. This time, however, English Heritage said the winner would not risk decapitation but would still have to provide trenchant wit. Would-be fools should attend a public audition Saturday at Stoneleigh Park in central England, wearing their costumes.

My goodness, supply your own wardrobe; keep the monarch cheerful; probably quote vast sections of King Lear, and when Her Majesty should abdicate, splitting up the UK into three separate kingdoms, the fool should follow her through the wild heath as she rages against the storm... I'm sure. I put this one in the too hard basket. Gimme something I can work with, guys. :)

- Art Neuro

More News from The Rovers
As you can tell I've run out of jokes to do with the word 'rover'. My favourite was in reference to Jimi Hendrix, which dates me more than anything else.
In the mean time, it seems Spirit has landed on top of an ancient lava flow that has obliterated possible signs of previous land formations. Short of an archaeological trip up there ourselves, we won't find much to do with water, according to this report.

Spirit landed in the 95-mile- wide Gusev crater on Jan. 3 and rolled though pockmarks and around boulders, collecting dust, drilling into rock and taking spectrometer measurements. "Gusev crater is a place that we believe surely must have had liquid water on it at some point," said principal science investigator Steven Squyres.

"When you see a hole in the ground with a major riverbed flowing into it, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out there was water in it at some time."

To their great disappointment, Spirit has found little evidence of that water, instead finding that a thick layer of basalt and other volcanic rock flowed over much of the crater, burying the most juicy evidence. It is not clear where the lava would have flowed from.

"We landed with hopes that we might be able to identify water-laying sediments. Instead the rocks we found were all layers of basalt," said Squyres. "There are little craters all over the place. Lavas have covered this region of Gusev crater and then they have been all busted up by impacts."

For those of you who want a more interesting overview on Mars Exploration as it stands, there is this very nice article over at Wired Magazine. What's interesting about this article is that it seems unless we gte up close and personal with the images we're seeing we'll never really know what we're looking at through the scanners.

Van Flandern's main beef is with overzealous photo interpreters. "Amateur astronomers are amateurs at image processing as well," he says. Many of these photos suffer from over-magnification, which gives pixels a rectilinear - and hence artificial - appearance. Other folks go so far as to digitally fold and mirror the NASA images, creating Rorschach blots that inevitably invite pareidolia. "That really drives us professionals up the wall," complains Van Flandern. "Most of our submissions are just 'faces' in clouds." Any time you interpret curious shapes, whether of sedimentary rock or ancient hominid bones, you confront the same faces-in-clouds problem: Is it there or am I imagining it?

The difference with Martian anomalies is that hundreds of millions of people can directly point their Web browsers at the same cloud. "Because hard visual evidence is available and readily verifiable in NASA and JPL's own official science data, everyone can then make up their own mind as to its merit," writes Joseph Skipper on MarsAnomalyResearch.com, perhaps the best one-stop shop for Martian enigmas. "No one's interpretation of the visual evidence should be considered established fact."

- Art Neuro

Now They're Venerable
The two mars Rovers are now being described as aged. I don't know how I feel about that.

Spirit, which has begun to climb into the Columbia Hills in a region called
Gusev Crater, was previously diagnosed with a balky right front wheel. Controllers have mostly been driving it in reverse with five wheels operating, saving the remaining life of the problem wheel for situations when it is most needed.

Spirit's twin, Opportunity, also has sent error messages back to Earth four times in the past two weeks while successfully taking pictures with the microscopic imager on its robotic arm, JPL said. The likely cause is that instrument cabling running along the arm is degrading.

Opportunity has descended 66 feet into Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region to study increasingly older layers of bedrock. JPL said it will continue to go farther into the crater if assessments show that the rover can traverse the inner slope.

Both rovers landed on Mars in January and have long outlasted the planned
length of their primary missions — 90 martian days, the equivalent of 92 Earth
days.

A Hard-On Should Be Got Legitimately
So says Robert DeNiro's character Paul Vitti in 'Analyze This'. Well, here's an interesting report about the little blue pill with a 'v' onit that helps with getting illegitimate hard-ons.

The study of more than 5 million insured adults from 1998 to 2002 found the
fastest-growing segments of users was men aged 18 to 55 years.

The number of men under 45 using the drug tripled during this time, the company reported in the International Journal of Impotence Research. And fewer of these men are using Viagra because they need to for some medical reason.

"These findings suggest increased use of Viagra as an enhancement or recreational agent," the company said in a statement.

Aah. Yes. Well... This could help blow out the Medicare system in America, they say. All I can say is that at least somebody's getting blown.

- Art Neuro

See You At The Party Gustav! (a.k.a Triumph of The Will Redux)
I meant to post this up last night, but I clean forgot. :)
The Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that his father Gustav Schwarzenegger used to beat him up regularly. His old-time for-real Nazi party member father would demand that young Arnie 'conform'. Arnie said it wasn't just him, the kid next door and the kid next door were all treated this way; the German Austrian mentality. Sometimes old Gustav would use a belt for his whupp-ass:

Describing his upbringing to Fortune magazine, Schwarzenegger said: "My hair was pulled. I was hit with belts. So was the kid next door. And so was the kid next door.

"It was just the way it was. Many of the children I've seen were broken by their parents, which was the German-Austrian mentality.

"Break the will. They didn't want to create an individual. It was all about conforming." But he went on: "I was one who did not conform and whose will could not be broken.

"Therefore I became a rebel. Every time I got hit, and every time someone said, 'you can't do this,' I said, 'this is not going to be for much longer, because I'm going to move out of here. I want to be rich. I want to be somebody'."

Isn't that just like a scene out of one of his movies? A vicious NAZI-like villain whips the hero played by Arnie, senseless, but we see Arnie grit his teeth because we know he's going to come back and beat that old NAZI and every other evil bastard out there. To think he was fighting conformity all this time! Long live Arnold Schwarzenegger! Long Live the Governor of California.
If people think that wars in distant lands don't come back to haunt you one day, one ought to think about that young Austrian boy who was regularly beaten by his Nazi party father, who now rules over the state with the 10th highest GDP in the world in its own right. The kids of the old Axis powers have a lot of axes to grind. They ain't Nazis and Emperor-worshippers; they're just emotionally lean, mean and reified.

- Art Neuro

He Said, She Said
The Ugly Business of having traded Nomar Garciaparra has turned even uglier. Essentially, principal owner John W. Henry is claiming that they had no choice but to trade Nomar Garciaparra after it was disclosed that he might miss significant time between now and the end of September.

"I wanted to sit down with him and remind him of the chronology of events that had occurred, just to make sure he understood why we went the A-Rod route."

That one-on-one meeting never took place. Instead, Henry said, there was the July 24 meeting at Fenway Park while the Sox and Yankees were waiting for rain to let up so they could start their game. The purpose of that meeting was twofold, Henry said. One was to ask Garciaparra what he thought could be done to help the Sox and to help him. The other, Henry said, was to ask Garciaparra why he seemed so unhappy.

Said Henry, "The next day, after that meeting -- I don't know if I'm breaking a confidence, my general manager will probably be mad at me -- I got a phone call from Theo, who said that he had talked to Arn, who said that prior to that meeting he had to talk Nomar out of demanding a trade. We knew from that that he didn't want to be here."

So was there a fissure? "Obviously there was," Henry said. "That was why I wanted to remind him of the Dec. 5 call between Arn and Theo when negotiations broke down between Theo and Arn. That's the point at which the A-Rod stuff took off."

Arn Tellem, the agent of Nomar Garciaparra has countered saying that The Red Sox simply never put on a serious negotiation and traded the problem away rather than deal with it; and also that the Red Sox should just 'let it go'.

But Tellem disputed Henry's version of what took place when the club resumed contract negotiations with Garciaparra last March, a year after the Sox had offered Garciaparra a four-year, $60 million deal for an average value of $15 million a year. Garciaparra had counteroffered with a four-year proposal that averaged $17 million a year in March of 2003, and the sides agreed to table discussions until after the season. That's when the Sox began discussions with the Texas Rangers about A-Rod, and the Sox made a lesser offer to Garciaparra, a four-year, $48 million deal, both developments leading to an acrimonious exchange in which Tellem called the Sox "disingenuous" and Henry branded Tellem a "hypocrite."

Just before Epstein flew to New York to meet with Rodriguez, he called Garciaparra and told him he would call off the A-Rod talks if Garciaparra took the lesser offer. Garciaparra refused, the A-Rod deal fell apart, and the sides met again in spring training, a meeting, Tellem claims, which began with Henry apologizing for his remarks about Tellem. Henry said last night that the Sox wound up offering Garciaparra $60 million -- the same figure they'd offered the year before -- but admitted much of the money was deferred. He also said Tellem never made a counterproposal to any of the Sox offers since the 2003 season ended.

Not true, Tellem said. "I was the one who suggested that we use deferred money to break the logjam," he said. "Larry Lucchino said that was a good idea. They came back with a proposal that, based on the way the players' association calculates contracts, was close to $12 million (in average annual value), and by the owners' calculation closer to, but less than, $12.5 million. It contained a significant amount of deferred money that wouldn't be paid to Nomar until he was 60 or 70. I told them respectfully that I would be in my 80s by then and given my health history, I wasn't sure I'd be around to make sure the contract was enforced."

And contradicting Henry, Tellem said he offered a counterproposal, one in which the deferred monies would be paid at the end of the contract, or when Garciaparra retired, which would have made the average annual value around $14.5 million, less than the $15 million a year the Sox had offered the year before. The Sox rejected that proposal, Tellem said, but he came away from the talks feeling positive, he said, that something might be done.

Instead, the Sox, claiming they had no chance of re-signing Garciaparra after the season, and fearing that his injury would leave him unavailable for much of the last two months, made last Saturday's trade.

How did it get so bad? The Red Sox offered Nomar a deal he turned down. So the Red Sox decided to trade for Alex Rodriguez on the assumption that Nomar wouldn't stay, and that A-Rod was a better shortstop. The negotiations for A-Rod of course went for weeks and ultimately failed, which hurt Nomar's pride, but also meant that the Red Sox had to go back to dealing with their golden child who they had essentially insulted. To add insult to injury, The Yankees acquired A-Rod (even though they already had Derek Jeter at shortstop) to play third base. In other words, if the Red Sox were truly creative, they might have conceived of moving A-Rod to play third next to Nomar and signed Nomar, come hell or high water. Heaven only knows that A-Rod was so desperate to get out of Texas.

So in essence, the Red Sox went from having a super-shortstop to not having one, while the Yankees had one and got another, the best super-shortstop of them all, to play third base. The joke doing the rounds is that when Nomar becomes a Free Agent at the end of the year, the Yankees will sign him to play second base where they have a hole. And Nomar would sign just to spite Red Sox management. Well, that's about as likely as say, Ricky Ponting signing with the Yankees, but you never say never.

- Art Neuro

This rather phallic craft is the Messenger space craft that was sent out to Mercury today.
- Art Neuro