Mike's Minutiae

• The band tonight was about the most hideous thing the Pirate organization has put on the field. And considering Dave Littlebrain put Burnitz, Hernadez, Randa, and others on this team, that speaks volumes.... Honestly, it's so bad, then after the game tomorrow, I am running out of there before it starts. (link)

• The show was suppose to be spectacular. Instead the 32,000+ fans which attended the game booed the band after they totally cut up some famous songs made famous by big time bands and singers. The band which calls its self a punk band sang a song and then a few minutes of fireworks were to be folowed [sic] by the orginal [sic] playing of the song, but that may of been a mistake as the orginal [sic] version of the song made the band look even worst as fans booed.... Overall the bad [sic] sucked and let;s [sic] just hope they don’t perform at Skyblast 2 and 3 which are tonight and Saturday. (link)

• That band was so bad that my wife made me change the channel (yes I was actually going to watch the fireworks). (link)

Gimmes singer Spike Slawson, who grew up in Shadyside, Oakland and Point Breeze before moving 20 years ago, said he knew something was wrong when they started into Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."

"There's a fine line between irreverence and lampooning," said Mr. Slawson, "and [the Gimmes] kind of ride that line. It's not supposed to be a homage -- that's not what we do. 'Stairway to Heaven' is, like sacred, though, and everyone started booing. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. That's the most people that ever booed me in my life."

The Pirates decided Friday to cut ties with the band "Me First and the Gimme Gimmes" after just one show, thus ending the SkyBlast live band experiment.

The band, which plays punk covers of hit songs, did not go over well with the family oriented SkyBlast crowd. They were booed loudly after their performance Thursday night, and the team received several complaints from fans after the band's performance.

"SkyBlast has been very successful for many years. We tried to enhance it and make it more entertaining -- that's why we added the live band," said Pirates vice president of communications Patty Paytas. "I think we just missed the mark with the type of band we picked. That's why we're not going to include them in the Friday and Saturday shows. They'll be more in the tradition of past SkyBlasts."

The Pirates' on-field entertainment staff will make up for the time the band would have been playing during the final two SkyBlast events by adding more scoreboard presentations of player interviews.

"We really do appreciate the feedback we get from the fans because it helps us decide what to do [in future events]," Paytas said.

After everyone had assembled I revealed the mission details. We would sychronize our watches and then walk over to Home Depot and shop. At exactly 4:15 we would all begin moving in slow motion. We'd do that for five minutes, and then shop normally for five minutes as if nothing had happened. At exactly 4:25 we would all freeze in place for five minutes. When that was over we would go back to normal and eventually leave the store.

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

Owen Gingerich, an astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chair of the IAU committee that created the definition, says that they were aware of its usage amongst geologists, but unaware of its importance to the field. "Since the term is not in the MS Word or the WordPerfect spell checkers, we thought it was not that common," Gingerich wrote in an e-mail to news@nature.com.

“I think that today can go down as the ‘day we lost Pluto,’ ” said Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., in an e-mail message from Prague.

Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who captured the enduring image of the American fighting man in World War II with his depiction of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato, Calif. He was 94....

His photograph of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, may be the most widely reproduced photo in American history. It was re-created on at least 3.5 million Treasury Department posters publicizing a massive war-bond campaign. It was engraved on three-cent Marine Corps commemorative stamps that broke Post Office records for first-day cancellations in 1945. It was reproduced as a 100-ton Marine Corps War Memorial bronze sculpture near Arlington National Cemetery. And it brought Mr. Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.

Almost from the day the photograph was emblazoned on the front pages of Sunday newspapers as a symbol of embattled patriotism, Mr. Rosenthal faced suspicions that he staged the shot, posing the Marines. He always insisted that he recorded a genuine event, and others on the scene corroborated his account.

“The picture was not posed,” Louis Burmeister, a former Marine combat photographer who was among four military photographers alongside Mr. Rosenthal as the flag went up, said in a 1993 interview for “Shadow of Suribachi,” by Parker Bishop Albee Jr. and Keller Cushing Freeman.

Wildwood, like many costal resort towns in South Jersey, is home to a tourist-bating boardwalk. But Wildwood's boardwalk is unlike many of its neighboring counterparts. It's a massive, 38-block stretch that sports no fewer than five amusement parks and hundreds of crooked, carnival-type games.... Perhaps the only source of commerce that's more present [than food vendors] is that of the junky, "sundry"-cum-T-shirt shop. As a rough estimate, we'll say that there are an average of three of such places per block. If there are around 100 places to buy T-shirts (or 75, or 50 or whatever), I'd say that at least half of them have prominent displays like this:

[photo of Confederate flag T-shirts]

We'll get to the actual content of the shirts in a bit (but really, "You wear your X...?" How fucking 15 years ago!). The point here is that this shit is everywhere.

Aggressively everywhere.

Incredibly, though I've visited Wildwood many times throughout my life, I'd never really noticed it before.

"There's so much competition for people's consciousness now that a band has to grab anything that gives them exposure," [new Geffen Records chairman Ron] Fair said. "There's no such thing as selling out, now. There's just getting heard."

On Friday, Iowans will get the chance to relive their state's glory days when the movie is shown on a 30-foot screen at Left & Center Field of Dreams in Dyersville. The screening is part of the 2006 Netflix Rolling Roadshow, which is traveling across the country to show modern-day classics at the locations where the movies were filmed.

As an added bonus for "Field of Dreams" fans, Kevin Costner, who starred in the film as farmer and baseball field builder Ray Kinsella, will make an appearance.

His unnamed band will play a concert prior to the screening --- the group's first public appearance.

With 80% of Canadian teenagers using instant messaging and adopting its unique linguistic shorthand, many teachers and parents are concerned about the medium’s potential to corrupt kids’ grammar. But instant messaging doesn’t deserve its bad reputation as a spoiler of syntax, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.

[...]

This research focuses not only on characteristic features of computer language, such as, acronyms like lol, but goes deeper by looking at four features of grammar; intensifiers, as in that's so cool; the future system as in, the show tonight is going to be fun; quotatives, as in "he was like oh hi"; and deontic modality, as in "I have to go to work.

[...]

"Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging, but these teens’ messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers," says Tagliamonte. "They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn’t worry."