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Monday, September 05, 2005 |
Pickoff Moves, Labor Day Edition
Baseball All Day Long
What a great thing, and probably one of the last times this year we'll see this outside of the postseason: baseball all day long on ESPN, starting with the White Sox vs. the Red Sox, the Mets at Atlanta, and the Giants vs. the Dodgers. Today's Chicago vs. Boston game (in progress!) is the makeup game that prompted the Red Sox to ask the Angels to play a double header. Woo and hoo!Update 10:34: I'm no proponent of smallball, but damn, Tadahito Iguchi's bunt in that suicide squeeze in the fifth was a beautiful thing.
Whew
The Angels are not interested in a trade for Barry Bonds. Sometimes, there are advantages to having a GM who can't spell the word "trade".Dessens Wants To Stay, Wants To Start
Elmer Dessens has a $1.3M mutual option at the end of the year, and would like to start again:As the Dodgers slowly come to grips with the fact it is time to start looking toward 2006, there is a question as to whether they can count on Dessens in that same role next year. He has a $1.3 million mutual option, one the Dodgers appear willing to exercise. Although Dessens has found the Dodgers to be a nice fit, at least in part because of Los Angeles' proximity to his home outside Phoenix, he also would like to return to starting on a regular basis.Dessens stopped short of saying that is a prerequisite to him agreeing to exercise his option.
"We'll just have to see," he said. "I'm not really thinking about it right now. I just want to finish the season strong. But I do like it here."
OT: "No, There Are No F***ing Postcards"
The Austrians are supposed to be the antithesis of what most Americans envision German-speakers to be. This was the country, after all, that gave us Robert Schumann and Johann Strauss II, the former noted for his beautiful melodies and often "whimsical" pieces, the latter producing the great dance music of the latter part of the 19th century. That is to say, they were both charming and knew how to party. So -- imagine being Austrian and discovering, through no fault of your own, that your town spelled a naughty word in another language. And not just any naughty word -- the queen mother of all naughty words in English:"Let's just say there are plans in place to deal with this," the Kommandant warned darkly. "What they are, I am not at liberty to disclose, but we will not stand for the F***ing signs being removed. It may be very amusing for you British, but F***ing is simply F***ing to us. What is this big F***ing joke? It is puerile."You'd think they could handle it a little better......
"Here we have tranquillity, clean air, lakes, acres of forests and some of the most breathtaking vistas one could imagine," said Augustina Lindlbauer, who runs a guesthouse in a medieval pile just outside the village. "Yet still there is this obsession with F***ing. Just this morning I had to tell an English lady who stopped by that there were no F***ing postcards."
Comments:
That's pretty funny, however, Austrians are reason most Americans perceive German-speakers as having a "harsh" language (lots of hard stops). This stereotype was almost certainly largely popularized by Hitler, an Austrian. Southern Germany and Austria share this "harsh" dialect of German, while northern Germany tends to have a much softer dialect (it comes down to something like the word "ich" being spoken with a hard or soft "-ch" depending on where you are). Of course, that is not to say that Austria did not have great musical talents (they did)...but the part of the modern view of Germans can be attributed to an Austrian.
Hitler may have been an Austrian, but he was a Prussian in his outlook, though he lacked the aristocratic touch that, say, a Junkers would have had; unlike the Junkers, he was petty and venomous. Contrast that with, say, the Habsburgs, who not only made modern Europe possible by slamming the gates closed to the Turks, but sponsored some of the greatest musical and artistic works Europe ever produced.
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