The Wizard of Oz and "the book of the year"
Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" has been named the Book of the Year by Amazon.com. The baseball-centered novel also made the New York Times' ten-best list. One of the key characters in the book is a thinly-veiled version of Cardinals great Ozzie Smith. Says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...Henry's fondness for his glove "Zero" and his worn Cardinals hat are mentioned throughout the book. The reason he became a Cardinal fan is the same reason he became a shortstop. It's because of the aforementioned Aparicio - the Cardinals sublime shortstop, Aparicio Rodriguez. Harbach's Rodriguez played 18 years for the Cardinals. He set a college record for consecutive games without an error, a record that Skrimshander is poised to break. Rodriguez's No. 3 is retired by the Cardinals. His first name is all the introduction he needs. Does all of this sound familiar? A Cardinals shortstop who becomes a Hall of Famer, goes mostly by his first name, and has his number retired because of his nimble play in the field...
What a perfect holiday gift this book would be for your friend or family member Chris. But coordinate, people. I don't need 10 copies.
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This is the most thought-provoking piece on Kim Jong Il and North Korea that I've read this week, authored by a former missionary to the Korean peninsula...
The division of Korea was not the fault of the Korean people. Their country was divided by the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. The suffering of the Korean people has continued for 66 years. Ten million family members were permanently separated; people in the north and south live in fear of war; the resources of their country are used for military buildup. On both sides of the division, repression has been used in the name of national security. Only in 1987 was there a revolution that replaced South Korea’s military dictatorship with a democratic government. The same people who worked so hard for democracy and human rights in South Korea are the ones who are the voices for peace in Korea.
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More on why the Republican establishment is attempting to railroad Candidate Paul. It seems that even Rick Santorum has now been deemed worthy of the "serious candidate" treatment if it can help keep the nomination away from Paul..
Paul is running ads that propose to “drain the swamp,” a reference to the insider-driven politics of a Washington where Republicans such as Gingrich maintain the sort of pay-to-play politics that empties the federal treasury into the accounts of campaign donors and sleazy government contractors.
Paul’s ideological clarity scares the wits out of the Republican mandarins who peddle the fantasy that the interventionism, the assaults on civil liberties and the partnerships that they have forged with multinational corporations and foreign dictators represent anything akin to true conservatism.
The problem that Limbaugh, Hannity and other GOP establishment types have with Paul is that the Texan really is a conservative, rather than a neoconservative or a crony capitalist who would use the state to maintain monopolies at home and via corrupt international trade deals.
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Are you guys aware that the football team at Iowa State, my alma mater, is playing in a Bowl Game next week called the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York? The annual game was christened a year ago by Yankees owner Hank Steinbrenner to honor his dad, George, because the old man was evidently quite the college football fan. The game is so closely associated with George Steinbrenner that a number of New York City sportswriters apparently refer to the game informally as "the Boss Bowl." Jesus, what an embarrassment for Iowa State. Wasn't there a bowl game in Detroit willing to take the Cyclones? Or maybe in Myanmar? Of course, the new Yankee Stadium was so heavily-subsidized, they should really call it the Taxpayer Bowl.
posted by CM @ 6:24 PM
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