Varitek Installment 2

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a long while since I have posted, especially about the most underrated catcher out there, Jason "catching jesus" Varitek. Well, he's done it again! Something that goes mostly unnoticed by the baseball masses, but not to those who know. In last night's game against the Blue Jays, in the 8th inning of a 5-5 game, Varitek was able to prevent the go ahead run with a little bit of baseball fundamentals. Fundamentals that you only see from catching jesus.

Enjoy this article/video.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090828&content_id=6665288&vkey=recap&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

another baseball quirk. thats why we love it.

The recent Nationals vs. Astros game. A make up from a rain delay that happened back in May. Hanrahan, the original starting pitcher for the Nationals, since traded to Pittsburgh, got the win, on his day off. Now, Imagine for a second this totally possible situation...

Had Hanrahan been traded to Houston, and been brought in as relief instead of LeTroy Hawkins, Hanrahan would have been credited with a win and a loss, on the same day, in the same game, for two different teams.

Chew on that.

statistical nugget.

In honor of the final day of all-star voting, I offer this small nugget of baseball statisticality.

Randy Johnson began his career with the Montreal Expos in 1988. His 300th win came against the Washington Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos.

Things have a way of coming around to the beginning in baseball.

all-star picks.

The All-Star game is fast approaching, and the most exciting part is...the Rangers are in first. Yes, it may be a slim lead, but god willing, they will be a game ahead when the Rockies finish of those blasted dual identity Angels from Los Angeles AND Anaheim.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I would like to share my All-Star picks. And out of respect for the great game of baseball, my picks are completely based upon performance. I'm no homer for the All-Star game!

American League

First Base: Justin Morneau, MIN

Second Base: Ian Kinsler, TEX

Third Base: Michael Young, TEX

Shortstop: Jason Bartlett, TB

Catcher: Joe Mauer, MIN

Outfield: Jason Bay, BOS

Outfield: Torii Hunter, LAA

Outfield: Nelson Cruz, TEX

National League

First Base: Albert Pujols, STL

Second Base: Chase Utley, PHI

Third Base: Pablo Sandoval, SF

Shortstop: Hanley Ramirez, FLA

Catcher: Brian McCann, ATL

Outfield: Ryan Braun, MIL

Outfield: Raul Ibañez, PHI

Outfield: Hunter Pence, HOU

May I just say that Albert Pujols is the best player of this era.

"Quarantined in Korea:" Day 4

And now, for the thrilling conclusion to "Quarantined in Korea!"

Day begins bright and early at 9:00 am

9:00 am to 11:00 am: Traveling to....Everland! Korea's answer to Disneyland. Rides, animals, rides with animals. Everyone's dreams can come true here at Everland.

11:00 am to 11:30 am: start the day off with some lunch. I go for the Everland special: Lasagna. Any italian lunch in Korea would not be complete without pickles and radish. fulfilled.

11:30 am to 1:00 pm: Animals!!! Polar bears are kick ass. Spent about 10 minutes staring down a cheetah through a thin glass window. I won when he became disinterested and continued his elliptical path around his enclosure.

1:00 pm to 1:30 pm: Seal show. Never to hot on "animal" shows, but this was thoroughly impressive.

1:30 pm to 2:00 pm: Safari time. Felt more like Jurassic Park. Rode on a nice little bus, painted like a white tiger. Fitting. Rode through Jurassic Park security gates. Such a great job of replicating the natural habitat of lions, tigers, white tigers, a liger (no lie) and bears. Complete with concrete, fences, and paved roads. Perhaps the rocks were fake....

2:30 pm to 6:30 pm: Ride time. Lets start from the top. Pirate ship. Gyro Swing: this amazing piece of craftsmanship is a giant swing...and it gyrates. Hence the clever name Gyro Swing. Double Rock Spin: This little doozy was conveniently located in America Town. To describe this one would be incredibly difficult for my unimaginative writing skill, so lets just say I was upside down at some points, I was high and low. I don't remember the name of the last one, but it did hurt my back, on account of the spinning.

6:30 pm to 7:30 pm: Dinner time. I feel like something different, so I head over to "Holland Town." Just as you imagine, dear reader, holland is afoot, magical dutchness. In order to get the full experience, I opted for the "various sausage plate." With french fries. All in all, tasty.

7:30 pm to 9:30 pm: returning home.

10:00 pm to 12:45 am: I remember a TV being on...I think I was on the couch...

1:00 am: Asleep.

This concludes our 4 part mini-series of "Quarantined in Korea."

"Quarantined in Korea:" Day 3

Day 3 begins at:

11:30 am: arise from my slumber.

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm: Whip up a little bit of curry and rice and eat some lunch while watching........good guess my trusted reader, its Star Trek: The Next Generation.

1:00 pm to 4:00 pm: Star Trek continues on. I feel myself drawn to the handsome yet rugged Commander Riker, or, as he is affectionately known as, "number one."

4:00 to 5:30 pm: Time spent in fantasy land as the GM of the Texas Rangers. Thats right, GM. There are some long overdue changes that will be occurring within this organization. I'm like Nolan.

5:30 pm to 7:30 pm: What day in quarantine would be complete without a substantial nap...on the couch...after a lot of Star Trek and XBOX.

7:30 pm to 9:30 pm: More Star Trek. Making good progress through Season 2.

10:00 pm to 1:00 am: Introduced to a new brand of genius comedy. The British. New TV show titled "Green Wing." Time spent laughing until I fall asleep.

A good day.

Thanks for remembering the time you spent reading.

"Quarantined in Korea:" Day 2

Welcome. Day 2 begins....

9:00 am: Early wake up call to test drive my new bike

9:30 am to 12:00 pm: Ride previously mentioned bike. Was not aware of how painful (and personal) sitting on a bike seat for that long can be.

12:30 pm to 1:00 pm: lunch. Ate ugly kimbab, and believe me, it is ugly. Fortunately, the taste is the opposite of its name.

1:00 pm to 2:15 pm: Sneak a co-worker past the haz-mat guards posted at my door for a second time. Watch 1 STTNG episode. I must lie on the couch as opposed to sit, as I am still in pain from my personal encounter with the bike seat. Episode involves the recurring character of Q, whom I have come to despise. But Commander Riker saves the day.

2:30 pm to 4:30 pm: Once again, I put on the ring and am whisked away to Middle Earth. This time, I find myself at the Gates of the Hornburg, as I turn away the rushing tide of orc filth. Still finding that I am best suited as an archer, with mage as my backup.

5:00 pm to 7:00 pm: I become incredibly tired from physical activity, and enjoy a 2 hour nap.

7:00 pm to 8:00 pm: Due to the "caloric room" I have created within my body (due to this morning's bike ride) I feel the need to eat McDonalds. I feel this is the best way to make a healthy day end well. Friend and I eat McDonalds while watching Casino Royale.

8:00 pm to 10:00 pm: Casino Royale. Blond Bond is growing on me.

10:00 pm to 1:30 am: I decide to continue my journey through space with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Commander Riker and the rest of that wacky bunch of space travelers and knock out 4 more episodes. I am attempting to boldly go where no human has gone before, and that is to watch, chronologically, STTNG from start to finish.

1:30 am: sleep sets in. Its been a long day.

"Quarantined in Korea:" Day 1

Day one begins at 11:00 am...on the couch.

11:00 am: wake up on couch

11:00 am to 1:00 pm: watching season 2 of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Beginning to realize how much of a badass Commander Riker really is.

1:00 pm: ate some rice, curry, seaweed and tabasco (while watching even more STTNG)

2:00 pm to 4:00 pm: Release my inner hobbit and play Lord of the Rings: Conquest on XBOX. I learn very quickly that the hidden talents that lie within my fingertips are best unleased while playing as the archer character, however I do moonlight as a mage.

4:00 pm to 6:00 pm: nap. enough said.

6:00 pm to 7:00 pm: Got lost on the internet. I somehow managed to find myself reading about kimchi...

7:00 pm to 8:00 pm: dinner.

9:00 pm to 12:30 am: Secretly outfoxed the haz-mat guards outside my door and smuggled in friends. Spent the time quietly watching dvds.

1:00 am: Battled the very formidable opponent sometimes known as "sleep" for 30 minutes. Admitted defeat.

Day Over.

Check back tomorrow for another exciting chronicle of "Quarantined in Korea."

QUARANTINE

I have recently returned from a 2 day trip to Texas, for a wedding, and have been put into a "quarantine" of sorts due to the swine flu scare. I will chronicle, hour by hour, this "quarantine," beginning tomorrow.

The Jason Varitek Chronicles. Episode 1: "If Jesus were a Catcher"

Case 1. "If Jesus were a Catcher"

May 28th, 2009
Boston v. Minnesota

After a pitch which Josh Beckett clearly thought was a strike, he shout (audible even on the broadcast) "Goddammit! The balls fucking there!" Now, the umpire had already tossed Minnesota catcher Mike Redmond after he uttered mabye a few words of protest about a close play at the plate, and followed by ejecting manager Ron Gardenhire. Varitek, after hearing Beckett, immediately turned to the home plate umpire to "argue balls and strikes." (which is basically an ejectable offense in and of itself) He was ejected, of course, but what this did was take the umpires mind off Beckett, and a possible ejection, and instead focused it on him. He completely protected the Red Sox from losing Beckett, and instead accepted the ejection himself. The Red Sox went on to win 3-1, so this could possibly be viewed as a game saving act.

Like the title suggests, if Jesus were a catcher........he'd be Jason Varitek.

carpet.

I miss carpet. In my apartment, I have faux (pronounced "fox") wood floors. While they look nice, I have come to learn that they become so dirty so quickly. I wake up in the morning to find that all the stray hair that has detached itself from me magically collect in small congregations for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Now, for someone who has a healthy obsession with cleanliness, this poses a problem. That problem is more intensive and frequent cleaning sessions. Whereas with carpet, all your dreams can be achieved with a vacuum cleaner, that is not the case in this situation. As you may be aware, while a handheld vacuum is operating, it puts out a small amount of air, something I like to call exhaust. This causes the congregations that have been meeting all over my floor to scatter in fear. I then end up chasing a hair all across the floor in an effort to remove it from my apartment. On the carpet, this does. not. happen. The microfibers cling onto the hairs like grim death, both masking their appearance and preventing them from meeting each other, and therefore allowing one to operate the vacuum much less often (perhaps only once every three weeks to a month).

Isn't it fun to travel and learn new things?

dilemma resolved.

Here I sit at 2:14 am on a Tuesday, and have finally discovered the answers to all my previous confusions. My entire life has been building up to this point.

Time.

Travel.

Solved.

(Taken from discovermagazine.com, a very appropriate title for a website, given the situation)

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.

If Isaac Newton’s absolute space and time had been the correct picture of nature, we could simply say that traveling backwards in time was impossible, and that would be the end of it. But in Einstein’s curved-spacetime universe, things are more flexible. From your own personal, subjective point of view, you always more forward in time — more technically, you move on a timelike curve through spacetime. But the large-scale curvature of spacetime caused by gravity could, conceivably, cause timelike curves to loop back on themselves — that is to say, become closed timelike curves — such that anyone traveling on such a path would meet themselves in the past. That’s what respectable, Einstein-approved time travel would really be like. Of course, there’s still the little difficulty of warping spacetime so severely that you actually create closed timelike curves; nobody knows a foolproof way of doing that, or even whether it’s possible, although ideas involving wormholes and cosmic strings and spinning universes have been bandied about.

3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.

I’m only going to say this onece: there would be no flashing lights. At least, there would only be flashing lights if you brought along some strobes, and decided to start them flashing as you traveled along your closed timelike curve. Likewise, there is no disappearance in a puff of smoke and re-appearing at some other time. Traveling through time is just like traveling through space: you move along a certain path, which (we are presuming) the universe has helpfully arranged so that your travels bring you to an earlier moment in time. But a time machine wouldn’t look like a booth with spinning wheels that dematerializes now and rematerializes some other time; it would look like a rocket ship. Or possibly a DeLorean, in the unlikely event that your closed timelike curve started right here on Earth and never left the road.

Think of it this way: imagine there were a race of super-intelligent trees, who could communicate with each other using abstract concepts but didn’t have the ability to walk. They might fantasize about moving through space, and in their fantasies “space travel” would resemble teleportation, with the adventurous tree disappearing in a puff of smoke and reappearing across the forest. But we know better; real travel from one point to another through space is a continuous process. Time travel would be like that.

4. Things that travel together, age together.

If you travel through time, and you bring along with you some clocks or other objects, all those things experience time in exactly the same way that you do. In particular, both you and the clocks march resolutely forward in time, from your own perspective. You don’t see clocks spinning wildly backwards, nor do you yourself “age” backwards, and you certainly don’t end up wearing the clothes you favored back in high school. Your personal experience of time is governed by clocks in your brain and body — the predictable beating of rhythmic pulses of chemical and biological processes. Whatever flow of time is being experienced by those processes — and thus by your conscious perception — is also being experienced by whatever accompanies you on your journey.

5. Black holes are not time machines.

Sadly, if you fell into a black hole, it would not spit you out at some other time. It wouldn’t spit you out at all — it would gobble you up and grow slightly more corpulent in the process. If the black hole were big enough, you might not even notice when you crossed the point of no return defined by the event horizon. But once you got close to the center of the hole, tidal forces would tug at you — gently at first, but eventually tearing you apart. The technical term is spaghettification. Not a recommended strategy for would-be time adventurers.

Wormholes — tunnels through spacetime, which in principle can connect widely-separated events — are a more promising alternative. Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes. The problem is, unlike black holes, we don’t know whether wormholes exist, or even whether they can exist, or how to make them, or how to preserve them once they are made. Wormholes want to collapse and disappear, and keeping them open requires a form of negative energies. Nobody knows how to make negative energies, although they occasionally slap the name “exotic matter” on the concept and pretend it might exist.

6. If something happened, it happened.

What people want to do with time machines is to go into the past and change it. You can’t. The past already happened, and it can’t un-happen. You might wonder what’s to stop you from jumping in your time machine, finding your high-school self, and convincing them that they really shouldn’t go to the senior prom after all, thereby saving yourself all sorts of humiliation. But if you really did go to the prom, then that can’t happen. The simple way out, of course, is to suppose that travel into the past is simply impossible. But even if it’s not, you can’t change what already happened; every event in spacetime is characterized by certain things occurring, and those things are fixed once and for all once they happen. If you did manage to go back in time to your years in high school, something would prevent you from dissuading your younger self from doing anything other than what they actually did. Even if you tried really hard.

7. There is no meta-time.

The least realistic time-travel movie of all time might be Back to the Future. When Marty McFly changes the past (violating Rule 6), the future “instantaneously” changes. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Time measures the temporal interval between different events in spacetime, and can be quantified by clocks. There is no set of clocks outside the universe, with respect to which you can go muck around in the past and have effects propagate into the future “at the same time.” Likewise, your brain is not going to change to remember things differently, nor will any other record-keeping device such as diaries or photographs or embarrassing sex tapes. Sorry about that.

8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.

Right now, at the particular place you are sitting, at the time when you are sitting there, one of two things is true: either there is a closed timelike curve passing through that point in spacetime, or there is not. And that situation will never change — no matter what clever engineers may do in the future, if they create closed timelike curves they cannot pass through events in spacetime through which closed timelike curves did not pass (corollary of Rule 6). Or in plain English: if you build a time machine where there wasn’t one before, it may be possible for future travelers to come back to that time, but nothing can help you go back to times before the machine was built.

9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.

Parallel universes — the kind we contemplate in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) — provide potential loopholes for some of the above rules. According to the MWI, there exist different “branches” of the wave function of the universe, distinguished by different observed outcomes for the measurement of quantum events. In the celebratedSchrödinger’s cat thought experiment, there is a “universe” where the cat is alive, and one where it is dead. Some imaginative (but respectable) physicists, especially David Deutsch, have speculated that we could combine this idea with the possibility of closed timelike curves to contemplate travel into the past of a different universe. If time travel is unlikely, this idea is (unlikely)², but it’s not inherently paradoxical.

If you could travel to the past in a different branch of the wave function, then we are allowed to contemplate changing that past in a self-consistent way, because it’s no longer really “your” past. So almost all cinematic invocations of time travel — where they are constantly mucking about, changing the past in crucial ways — would have to appeal to something along these lines to make any sense. But even if you can change what you thought was the past, all of the rules of continuity and sensibility still apply — no flashing lights, no disappearing, no sudden changes in the future, no re-writing of your memories, etc.

10. And even then, your old universe is still there.

Remember Rule 0: no paradoxes. If you have reliable records of having made some unwise decisions regarding your social life in high school, then those decisions were made, and can’t be un-made. Even if you go into a different branch of the wave function, where you bestow some wisdom-of-experience on your younger self, you would only be changing the history of that universe. There is still the universe you left behind, with all of your bad decisions still intact. That’s life in the multiverse for you. It remains for future scholars to write Ph.D. theses along the lines of Utility Functions and Moral Dilemmas in an Ensemble of Multiple Interacting Universes. But it’s just a matter of time.

in honor of lost.

If you haven't finished LOST season 5, you should stop here.

Time Travel.

I am completely confused by this idea. Why, when the past is changed, doesn't the person from the future, currently in the past, not change. Its like they have broken off the straight of time and started their own circular time line.

Follow the logic, if you can:

They crashed in an island and lived there for 3 months (approx) (so far, I'm with it)

they got off the island (still following)

(this is where I start to lose focus): Those left behind on the island begin to spin through time while those off the island are told to come back

The dust settles and when everyone returns, they are on the island 30 years before the plane crash

They attempt to undo the single event that caused the plane to go down on the island (LOST, which ironically is the name of the show)

Now, if they undo the event bringing them to the island, then they all land in LA, and are strangers, therefore in the future, they do not know each other, thus how can they band together to travel back to time to undo an event that, at this point, never happened in history because it was stopped in the first "history."

I'm LOST, and now I feel like this guy:

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.