Popular Culture

OK, History Doesn’t Repeat

The good news–we won’t have to stay up late this weekend watching any more baseball games. Also, Patricia, being from St. Joseph originally, and still having a lot of family in eastern Missouri, including St. Louis suburbs, is happy.

And there’s not really that much bad news. No one at the beginning of the season expected the Tigers to even necessarily break .500, let alone get into the playoffs, and if you’d told anyone that they’d be in the series, they’d have thought you were nuts. But you don’t win a world series with eight errors, particularly when many of them come from the pitching staff. But, all things considered, there’s always next year for Motown…

Popular Culture

OK, History Doesn’t Repeat

The good news–we won’t have to stay up late this weekend watching any more baseball games. Also, Patricia, being from St. Joseph originally, and still having a lot of family in eastern Missouri, including St. Louis suburbs, is happy.

And there’s not really that much bad news. No one at the beginning of the season expected the Tigers to even necessarily break .500, let alone get into the playoffs, and if you’d told anyone that they’d be in the series, they’d have thought you were nuts. But you don’t win a world series with eight errors, particularly when many of them come from the pitching staff. But, all things considered, there’s always next year for Motown…

Popular Culture

OK, History Doesn’t Repeat

The good news–we won’t have to stay up late this weekend watching any more baseball games. Also, Patricia, being from St. Joseph originally, and still having a lot of family in eastern Missouri, including St. Louis suburbs, is happy.

And there’s not really that much bad news. No one at the beginning of the season expected the Tigers to even necessarily break .500, let alone get into the playoffs, and if you’d told anyone that they’d be in the series, they’d have thought you were nuts. But you don’t win a world series with eight errors, particularly when many of them come from the pitching staff. But, all things considered, there’s always next year for Motown…

General

More Home Improvement Fun

I want to replace a bathtub. The existing one is a five footer, fourteen inches high. It’s wedged into three walls.

I talked to a contractor about it yesterday, and he claims that if he removes the tile, that it can be lifted up at one end, stood up on its side, and then taken through the door. I guess that I can believe this is possible, since the diagonal is only about 61.6 inches, and there’s probably enough slack and play in the drywall to scrape it by with tiles removed. What I have more trouble believing is that I’ll be able to get the new deeper whirlpool in without major wall surgery. If I go with a depth of 21 inches, that makes a diagonal of 63.5 inches, which seems like too tight a squeeze to me. I’m trying to avoid having to (temporarily) remove studs and move it in through the closet on the other side of the wall.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

The other question is, how do I disconnect the drain without making a hole in the wall opposite? Or is that unavoidable?

Political Commentary

The End Of Free Republic?

I’ve been a long-time reader (and a rare poster) over there. It’s often a source for interesting news stories, and often quite amusing threads based on them. But Jim Robinson, the site founder and proprietor seems, to put it simply, to have gone nuts.

There have always been three topics that generate a lot of heat (and usually little light) over there: homosexuality, the War on (Some) Drugs, and evolution. It looks as though heretics who don’t believe in creationism will no longer be tolerated over there. Too bad–it was fun while it lasted.

Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians are all facing deep schisms. The Libertarians have been splintered by the war, as have the Dems, but these social issues are breaking down the long-time useful alliance between small-government conservatives and libertarians, and social conservatives within the Republican Party. It’s not clear whose split is worse, or what the long-term political consequences will be. I do think that it opens up room for a new political party of some type, perhaps by the disenchanted libertarians (e.g., me, Glenn Reynolds) who make up much of the blogosphere.

Space

More On The X-Rocket Tragedy

It looks as though there may have been a mid-air collision, but we’ll have to await the accident investigation to know for sure.

The question in my mind is, why there were five people in a camera chase plane? Yeah, it’s probably a fun ride, and I’d like to have gone along myself, but I suspect that they’ll rethink who are and are not essential personnel on such flights in the future.

Popular Culture

History Repeats?

OK, so due to some sloppy defense, the Tigers are looking down the barrel of an imminent loss of baseball’s championship series. They can’t lose any more games, either tonight in St. Louis, or this weekend back in Detroit, if they want to win their first series in twenty two years.

But this isn’t the first time they’ve been in this position. Thirty eight years ago, they were down three and one to the same team (well, at least a team with the same name, in the same town–at least two generations of ballplayers have come and gone since then). They came back and won it all. Here’s hoping they can do it again.

Technology and Society

The Next Big Thing On The Web?

Virtual worlds?

One of the arguments against space tourism as a long-term market is that as the VW technology advances, the real thing may actually be viewed as boring compared to the possibilities offered by programmable realities. I suspect that this will be true to some limited degree (particularly given the cost differential of doing things in cyberspace as opposed to meat space), but I’m sure that there will always be “Luddites” who refuse to hide in virtual worlds, protected from real consequences, but will prefer to go out and test their bodies and senses against the real thing.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!