gehringer_2

it goes back the disaster the Democrats are that they can't run a better centrist candidate than the sleazeball. They should be building the coalition to swamp the midterms and instead they still close to 100% in circular firing squad formation.

his affect was down for sure - probably he was ailing again. My pet theory was he went to the Worlds, got a taste of what playing with a team full of talented players was like and just couldn't overcome the depression of being back in the Wings locker room.....

It sort of amazes me that anyone still cares to hear what he says, because it's all soon "inoperative", often within minutes. I suppose for the press it's the entertainment value, which is also a sad commentary.

Of course there can be an art to this. If you have a guy who you don't believe is going to make it but other people still be he might - you need to deal that guy before you ever let him get to the league and prove he has no value.....

I almost got sent to the Tar Sands once, Fort McMurray? We had connections with the National Research Council CA and ended up working with some of the stuff in our lab - but in the end it fell through. No tears shed.

Oil. When the balance of power was in Egypt and Turkey, where culture was deeper and something akin to normal economic development was underway, the Arab world had a chance. But when oil wealth empowered the Wahabi Sheiks and the Persian Shia apocalyptics and shifted the regional leverage, everything started moving backward. Oil wealth has been a curse everywhere it has bubbled up out of the ground. You could probably include Texas in that as well.

while you are at it, the split in the final day make-up double header against the Angels that the league hung on the Tigers that put us out of the WS in 1967 gave the pennant to .... Boston.

LOL, the dreaded 'ret con'. My daughter was/is a big aficionado of 'graphic lit' (don't call me comics). She came of age just before all the ret con-ing started and was not a fan of having her carefully constructed youthful literary worlds torn asunder by barbarian Hollywood profiteers.

I guess the debate has finally been settled whether Jeimer was good hitter having some bad stretches or a bad hitter who had had a couple good stretches. Plus he's 31, which is the leading edge of when the unluckiest genomed hitters start to lose it. He always seemed like a good guy, just wasn't the player it sometimes looked like he might have been.

Sayyid Qutb, born in 1906, was boy just old enough to sense the loss when the empire fell, started writing seriously ~1940s, was a sort of the Karl Marx figure for all the subsequent Jihadi's. Nasser hanged him, which just made him more the martyr.

So years ago when we in the West were just beginning to be jolted by the Islamist fundamentalist movement, Bernard Lewis was one of the leading Middle East scholars and he wrote a few books about it. One of his themes was that when a culture that was once ascendant sort of falls from grace and success, the religious in that society will argue that it was because of loss of piety in the society. So for Islam the final fall of the long decaying Ottoman empire at the end of WWI is what set things off, that led by the 70's and 80's to all kinds of crazies both on the Sunni and Shia sides trying to build pious Islamic fundamentalist states (or non-states) in the hope that Allah's resulting favor would allow them to bring back the Caliphate and vault them into a reprise of the cultural supremacy they had in the 12th century. One can only hope that the serial failures of Al Qaida, Isis, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the 'under performance' of the IROI will finally disabuse the Islamic world of the idea that the turbaned heads are going to bring them power and glory if they'd only grow their beards and suppress their women. Now if can break the same paradigm we are getting from the religious right in the US, we might also get somewhere ourselves.

For me one of the things I liked in Burton's Batman is that the way he created a visual style that looked drawn as much as photographed - i.e. a comic book brought to life. Considering his work in animation I guess that fits.

I guess Trump will be sending the B2s against Norway and Sweden next, because conquering Scandinavia is the only way that's happening. 🙄

It's old news but I still despair over the state of the NYT. There is enough content in all the other areas that I still feel I get my money's worth (of course I have a discounted subscription!) but geez, I try not to even look at any of the political coverage anymore excepting Ezra Klein, and his stuff is usually broader than just partisan politics. Just a wasteland of nonsense.

I just get tired of all the complaining over stupid **** - by both sides.

Similar view. I don't really care for 'brooding' Nolan; "Dark Knight", "Interstellar", for the same reason - I'm just not entertained by that kind of darkness. It's art for sure, but he's not telling me anything I need to hear anymore in it (maybe that's a product of age?). Nolan with a twinkle in his eye - "Inception" - is just more fun.

Getting to be the NBA's version of ruptured UCLs.

shadowbox warfare.

Glad to know that the crack NYT journalists can restate the obvious in 12pt TimesRoman.

So I should care now that she is complaining at what looks like about 6 MO after the fact?

and not doing much against AAA pitching either - though maybe they aren't keeping him away from right handers at Toledo.

while this may be true at some level, they probably started moving stuff at the point of the 1st Israeli attack.

something not right in this pic though. This woman looks much further along than an ectopic pregnancy would ever get. Or maybe she's just pretty chunky. Or pic from a completely different pregnancy.

I just wish he ran more fluidly. His odd body conformation worries me wrt his long term bone/joint health. But it's the kind of thing that somebody might do fine with his whole life, it just looks like it's unnecessarily stressful.

If you watched you could see his calf muscle ball up at a point that would be too high for most people to be normal, though not as dramatic as some Achilles ruptures I've see caught on video.