This video made me laugh.

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Oh my goofy-ass Red Sox, you never fail to entertain. Here’s Red Sox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon dancing an energetic Irish dance, possibly in his boxer briefs, before an adoring crowd at Fenway. Watch til the end when others come out to get in on the act.

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All of we-sa be-sa waitin’ to hear how you spek!
image source

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The bar for spousal birthdays has been raised.

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Over at Ask Metafilter, languagehat writes that he is putting together a book on cursing worldwide, and can’t come up with anything good for Canada. He’s looking for “pointers to good use of wicked language by Canadians (doesn’t have to be obscene; cf. Twain’s “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward…”), old or new, online or off.” There are some suggestions posted that he could probably use some input on (is it “nob” or “knob”? was “hoser” an insult before Bob and Doug Mackenzie?).

So, Canadians among us: can you think of anything? Can your friends? Ask around. Post here and I will email them to him, or you can email him directly: languagehat AT GOOD OLD gmail.com.

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Just found this amazing site Take Away Shows, with videos of street performances from a few dozen great bands. I don’t know the full story but I guess this French site Blogtheque invited a bunch of bands, especially Canadian indie bands, to come and perform walking around the streets of Paris at night, last summer. For Chris there’s Arcade Fire. The only ones I’ve looked at so far are the Islands and the Hidden Cameras, both of which are great.

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Ah baseball season. The Red Sox are playing their first series against the Yankees this weekend, and we’re getting the intolerable national/New York announcers (Joe Buck and Tim McCarver) rather than Boston’s own loveable Orsino Orsillo and Remy. Which means that the ritual refrain is upon us – from the other room, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tim McCarver.”

Here are two things I liked:
Remy cracking up when one fan throws a slice of pizza at another fan.

A nice non-baseball bit about the thing you have to understand about Iranians. The same point goes double, I often have reason to observe, for statements about The Difference Between Women and Men, or Why Women are Like That.

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At Cat and Girl today, a nice lesson about classical art. The comic is good, but look below it at the note from 4/10, and be sure to click on the links to see the paintings.

I’m striving, but unable, to come up with a good alternate title for my favorite Caravaggio. Any thoughts?

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So I had this dream, night before last, which made me laugh so hard it woke me up, and then I had to wake Spencer up to tell him – and now, since we’re all together in this big bloggy bed, I’m gonna wake you up and tell you too.

Hey -
Hey – [poke] [poke]
I just – lemme tell you about this great idea I just had –
So, wouldn’t it be funny if there was a sports team named “the Babies”, or “the Kittens”? A super wimpy mascot, who would just lie there on the field, mewling piteously and weakly bicycling its paws in the air? And it would crawl clumsily off the field when it was time for the game? Or, like, “the Fawns”, with baby Bambi knock-knees and leg-slippage? It would be awesome. Especially if there was just one team like this in a league of regular teams like the Sharks and the Deadly Killers and stuff.

But what would be even better — would be if there were a team called “the Joeys”, so they’re not even as strong as regular baby animals, but they have to live in the pouch of a mother animal. A totally helpless mascot, being carried around in the pouch of a big mother mascot. Genius, right?
[rolls over]

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A nice piece from Amanda at Pandagon about pleasure and its role in American political discourse. (Psst Chris – guns, sex, and housework can be the segue from Aristotle on pleasure to contemporary political philosophy!)

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The Yarn Harlot has a long, lovely entry up about taking a day with her family to go skate the Rideau Canal in Ottawa – eating Canadian foods, seeing Canadian sights, etc. Lots of photos. We’re going up to do the same thing next week sometime, and this made me happy to see.

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1. An NBA player came out last week! I totally missed it at the time. John Amaechi — who is a big (6’10″) bald black dude who played in the NBA for five years and looks every bit the part. Hooray for more queer role models who look like mainstream gender-role icons — manly men, womanly women! Hooray for more queer role models who aren’t white!

2. But now another NBA player has gone on record as being agin’ it. This admirable forward-thinker, Hardaway, says:

“I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”… [If there were a gay player on his team, he would ask for the player to be removed from the team.]… “Something has to give… If you have 12 other ballplayers in your locker room that’s upset and can’t concentrate and always worried about him in the locker room or on the court or whatever, it’s going to be hard for your teammates to win and accept him as a teammate.”

So I got to thinking (there’s so much here to comment on, but I’ll stick with the most obvious). I know that there are quotes like this from white baseball players and managers from the 1940s and ’50s. We can’t have black players in the major leagues; all of us guys know it, but I’m brave enough to say it. I won’t play on the same field. That kind of thing. Good company to place yourself in, Hardaway.

3. Interestingly, I went looking for parallel quotes about the racial integration of basketball, and discovered that there aren’t any. Basketball integrated earlier, and with comparatively little hostility among players or from fans.

The National Basketball League, a forerunner to the NBA, became the first major professional [sports] league of the modern era to integrate, in 1942.

The reason you may not know about the NBL’s pioneering efforts is because integration in the NBL and professional basketball as a whole came with much less fanfare and fewer problems than it did in other sports. Unlike baseball, hockey, and football, basketball was largely an urban game played by a diverse population on every level but the pros.

From what the article says, basketball was integrated in the early ’40s because the war made good white players harder to come by. But baseball didn’t integrate then, although the first rumblings came then. It sounds — from the wiki links above — like a large part of the difficulty came because to integrate major-league baseball would require integrating the minor leagues, whose teams largely played in southern and rural areas where racism was most acute. (Purely speculation, but I wonder if basketball was also less dominated by the racism of individual star players, since at that time basketball stars would have been much less known than baseball stars.)

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Mysterious ailment destroys bee colonies across US. This kind of thing terrifies me; it has the feeling of the first visible symptom of a total apocalyptic collapse. And it’s an apolitical reminder of why we need a first-rate science infrastructure (education at all levels, public funding for wide-ranging no-immediate-payoff science, encouragement of high social regard for scientists).

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A nice editorial in the LA Times about how the Democratic Congress should bring science back to Washington. By Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal – includes a nice discussion of the attack on science from postmodernism and “theory” on the left which the Sokal hoax targeted, in addition to the much more serious recent attacks from religious conservatives and corporate interests on the right.

There’s one point about the religious conservatives’ bad effect on science that I found interesting. So, some of them want to stop the teaching of evolution, and some of them want to stop stem cell research. In the article these agenda items are mentioned as being of a piece, but I think they are quite different.

Trying to stop the teaching of evolution, and disputing the genuine scientific consensus about it with dirty tricks (eg fake scientists and fake science foundations) to sow doubt — about the existing strong evidence for evolution, and even about scientific rationality generally — in the minds of people with weak science backgrounds is wrong. It’s lying. It’s an illegitimate intrusion of religious belief into a question where religious belief has no place.

But trying to stop stem cell research is okay. It’s an ethical objection to a scientific program involving humans, and religious convictions have a proper role to play here in a public reflection on what research programs are okay to pursue. I think stem cell research is fine, but if someone has an honest moral objection to it — if their objection is not a disingenuous backdoor way to attack abortion rights — I think it’s appropriate that they try to stop it. (Provided they do this by having public hearings, writing to bioethical advisory boards, etc, rather than backroom dealing.) That is, it’s possible to attack a certain research program on religious grounds without attacking science. But the standard sort of attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself.

Another nice piece and a place to help here; via Metafilter.

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I just realized that I’ve never mentioned one of my favorite things about crossing the border from Canada into the US. This is the sign you pass as you’re about to drive into the US Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint:

HAVE ID IN HAND

Please, wretched teeming masses, huddled, yearning to breathe free: have your id in hand before you come to our country.

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