Skip to main content

Baseball has started!

This year, the Major Leage Baseball season started with a pair of regular season games (not just exhibition games) in Japan. The two teams featured are the Oakland Athletics and my favorite Boston Red Sox. Japan is 14 hours ahead of Minneapolis, so the night games in Tokyo started at 5 a.m. yesterday and today local time. Fanatic that I am for the Red Sox, I set the alarm yesterday for 4:30 so I could get in to work in time to listen to the live feed of the game starting at 5. I was running a bit late, but luckily so were the Sox. I sprinted from my parking place to lab and just got the computer booted in time to connect to the live feed at 5:10 and hear the first pitch of the new season.


Yesterday's game was thrilling. I was down in the mouse room for most of it. We fell behind, but tied the game in the ninth inning and then won the game in the tenth. What a great way to start the season!

Sadly, this morning's game ended in a loss. I feel partly responsible because I didn't actually get up at 5 a.m. this time. I listened to a replay recording of the broadcast while working on my computer starting at 9 a.m. I'm sure that if I'd gotten my sorry butt out of bed four hours earlier, my additional fan energy would have worked its way to Japan (fan energy travels at the speed of light, of course) and the Red Sox might have found a way to win. I was just too tired after depriving myself of sleep the night before! I'm sorry, Red Sox Nation!

Comments

  1. Anonymous5:10 PM

    Don't blame (just) yourself: Ekrem got up yesterday but not today, too. I slept in both days, so I'm sure it had nothing to do with me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:47 AM

    I see I can't keep any secrets.

    Indeed, it was likely our fault. By the time I turned on the TV they were already four runs behind and could never recover.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MT1:23 PM

    I think the only time I've gotten up ridiculously early to watch TV broadcast from another country was for Princess Diana's funeral! -liz

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Cross Your Toes?

Katie and I had a heated discussion the night before last. We were sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart when she noticed a large, apparently cancerous growth sticking out of the bottom of my foot. She asked what the big lump in my sock was. "That's my toe," I responded, nonplussed. I had crossed my first and second toes, causing a lump to protrude from the bottom of my sock. Katie was quite alarmed. "You can cross your toes?" "Sure, can't you? Everyone can cross their toes!" "Of course I can't cross my toes. Who can cross their toes?" And I confirmed that Katie could not, in fact, cross her toes. Even manipulating her toes with my fingers, I could not get her toes to stay crossed. She just has very short toes. That led, of course, into a discussion of who was the freak. Were my long, crossable toes abnormal, or were her stubby, uncrossable phalanges the outliers? In case you're confused, here are some pictures. First, of my v...
35 comments
Read more

Leagalize drugs!

The Economist has a wonderful editorial this week about legalizing drugs. I wholeheartedly agree that the world will be better off by far if the United States legalized, taxed, and regulated illicit drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and heroin. The goods that will come from legalization: 1. We will save the $40 billion the US spends trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. 2. We will save the costs involved in incarcerating so many drug offenders (as well as gain their productivity in society). 3. We will gain money through taxation on the legal drug trade. 4. Legalized drugs will be regulated, and thus purer and safer to take. 5. With all these savings, we will have lots of money to spend on treating drug addiction as a public health issue rather than as a law and order issue. We will have lots of money to fund treatment programs for addicts that are ensnared by the easier availability of drugs. 6. We will prevent tens of thousands of killings in countries that produce drugs when proc...
10 comments
Read more

Max the Model

Katie sometimes talks to Max about all the things he can grow up to be. "Will you grow up to be a scientist like Daddy, or a lawyer like Mommy?" she will query. In recent days, though, we think Max might aspire to be a model. He LOVES the camera. Point it in his direction, and he is mesmerized by the big lens, giving it a big smile. He will sit for long series of photographs, changing his expressions constantly so we'll be sure to get a good one. This is Katie's recent favorite series (mostly because she thinks he looks so cute in the outfit): This is my favorite series, based purely on the dynamic range of emotions that Max is capable of. I am especially fond of the last picture. So cute!
9 comments
Read more