Friday, June 29, 2007

Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip

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Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip had it's farewell show last night on NBC. The show only lasted one season as NBC did not renew it for next year. Too bad. It is truly a great drama and is so well written by Aaron Sorkin. The cast is unbeleivable for a TV show with four legitimate stars in Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet and Sarah Paulson.

Last night's last show was the best episode of the season. It had everything you could want in a drama. Happy endings all around with Matt and Harriet back together. I am going to miss this show. NBC was wrong in taking this show off the air. It was a show that epitomizes what a good drama should be that is enjoyable but also full of intelectrual content. Sorkin has never shied away from controversy, as demonstrated by his previous show "The West Wing". Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Washington Nationals Better Than Expected

With that victory the Nats completed an 8-7 record in a 15-game stretch against the American League in which they were supposed to be utterly overmatched and now boast the same 32-43 mark as last year's team at the same point. Yet they've done the job without Alfonso Soriano, Nick Johnson, Jose Vidro, Jose Guillen, Livan Hernandez, Ramon Ortiz and a half-dozen other veterans while surmounting a ludicrous number of injuries.

"Everybody laughed at our rotation on Opening Day, then we lost four of them," Manager Manny Acta said. "When I hear about other teams having injuries, I don't have a lot of sympathy for them."

In a season that began with countless questions, the resilient Nationals have continued to find unlikely and pleasant answers. With 23 wins in their last 41 games, the Nats have played miles above expectations for a quarter of a season. Yet their current altitude is as scary as it is inspiring. They're baseball's plucky but endangered high-wire act. And it never gets easier.

On Tuesday, the Nats were clubbed, 15-1, as part of a three-game sweep in which the Tigers scored 32 runs on 41 hits, including nine doubles and five homers. "They just kept hittin', hittin' and hittin'," said Jason Simontacchi, a 10-run avalanche victim in three innings on Tuesday. Then, on Saturday night, in the sport's other type of Most Demoralizing Loss, closer Chad Cordero gave up a three-run, game-losing home run in the ninth inning in a 4-3 Indians win.

As if anything could be worse, that Saturday loss ended with a bonehead play as wandering Nook Logan was trapped off third with Ryan Zimmermandue to bat with the bases loaded. As the crowd gasped, Logan was not only tagged out to end the game but also pinned to the ground by Casey Blake, still a yard from the base, like a gruesome entomology display.

Yet the Nationals' response yesterday was, as usual, ridiculously resilient. Did a building just fall on us? Can't remember. Same score, same situation: Cordero got a save against the same heart of the Cleveland order that crushed him just hours earlier. Simontacchi, following the worst game of his career, allowed only one run in six innings to get the win. And the Nats held the Indians -- the second-best hitting team in baseball -- to a .202 average as they won two of three.

How can a end Saturday night's loss with a blown save and a brain cramp, then just ignore it all?

"People don't get it," Zimmerman said. "We just don't care."

The Nats show up, count the warm bodies, check the lineup card and play as though they just don't care that perfectly sensible major league scouts predicted that -- at full health -- they might be the worst team in history this season. All things considered, their 31-37 record since April 10 is one of the most remarkable 11 weeks I've seen from any team.

In a season in flux, a year that could still fall apart, it's hard to know what really matters, what answers have lasting weight. But team president Stan Kasten thinks he already has a "yes" to two large questions.

"I know we've got a general manger who can really find 'pieces,' " Kasten said. In yesterday's game, castoff Dmitri Young, continued his all-star campaign with two hits, raising his average to .339. Utility man Ronnie Belliard had three hits and is hitting .297. Jesus Flores, a Rule 5 pickup, had two RBI. General Manager Jim Bowden found them all when few, if any, wanted them. That's one day's list.

"After all the players we subtracted, to get where we are now, especially with all the injuries, is a testament to Jim and his staff," Kasten said. "And we've found a manager that can manage. Watch how this team is playing. That's the manager.

"So we're okay at those two spots. That's a lot to know."

With a team that was supposed to be awful, in an ancient park before the fifth-worst crowds in baseball, in a season when they have had the worst injuries in baseball, the Nats have played the league to a standstill since the 10th day of the season. Yesterday, Cleveland's Paul Byrd told Austin Kearns, "You guys have a scrappy little team." How nice, in a condescending way.

What happens, someday, if they become a scrappy big team? ...Read more here...

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Top 10 US Beaches

1. Ocracoke Lifeguarded Beach, Outer Banks, North Carolina - National Winner

2. Caladesi Island State Park, Dunedin/Clearwater, Florida

3. Coopers Beach, Southampton, New York

4. Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii

5. Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

6. Hamoa Beach, Maui, Hawaii

7. Main Beach, East Hampton, New York

8. Coronado Beach, San Diego, California

9. Lighthouse Point Park, Daytona Beach, Florida

10. Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Florida ...Read more here...

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Jefferson Virginia Soccer Champs

NEWPORT NEWS, Va., June 9-- There was plenty of time for reality to set in, but still no one on the Jefferson boys' soccer team could believe it.

The 10th-ranked Colonials had been awarded the AAA state championship trophy. Hundreds of their red-clad fans had rushed the field to celebrate the victory. They posed for pictures, hugged and high-fived. And still, they could hardly comprehend that their magical late-season run culminated Saturday with a 1-0 victory over No. 1 Osbourn Park in the state championship at Christopher Newport University.

Harry Beddo's goal in the 51st minute lifted Jefferson (17-1-5) to a championship that few thought was possible early this season. The Colonials finished below .500 and missed the Northern Region tournament last season, and they started this year 4-1-5 before winning 13 straight to claim the Liberty District, region and state titles.

"It's like we just robbed a bank and no one knows where the money went," Coach Sean Burke joked. "We're rich!"

The victory capped one of Jefferson's finest athletic seasons since it became a magnet school for science and technology 22 years ago. The Colonials have won state team titles in boys' and girls' swimming and diving, boys' cross-country and girls' indoor track, but this was their first title in a sport with no individual competition. ...Read more here...

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Nude Bikers

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Dozens of women posed naked on their bicycles on a bridge over one of Amsterdam's historic canals last Sunday - a unique sight even in a city famed for its relaxed attitude toward nudity and sex.

They were among 2000 men and women who participated in a series of four nude group photos in the city in the early hours of the morning as part of the latest project of US photographer Spencer Tunick.

The first and largest composition was in a decidedly prosaic location: a parking garage on the outer ring of the city.

But what the location lacked in romance, it made up for in style.

Participants lined the railings of the garage's twin circular towers, creating a pattern of multicoloured stripes against the white building and an overcast sky.

The women on bikes were selected from the larger group and posed with their chins pointed triumphantly upward toward the sky.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Honey, I'm Gone

Abandoned Beehives Are a Scientific Mystery and a Metaphor for Our Tenuous Times

In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," just before Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route, all the dolphins in the world disappear, leaving behind just the message: "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Now, around the world, honeybees are vanishingen masse, leaving their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning of their exodus. Entire colonies are following the Shakespearean stage direction, "Exeunt omnes." They're flying off and not returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even dead bodies.

A third of our food supply -- including much of the boredom-relieving stuff, from cranberries to cucumbers -- is dependent on animal pollinators like the honeybee. As a result, this mystery is rapidly joining the all-star ranks of millennial end-time run-for-your-lives threats, right up there with Y2K, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS and avian flu.

Of equal note is the way the bees are setting a new standard in human emotional resonance. Absolutely no one yet knows why the bees are checking out, though not for lack of abundant effort on the part of the world's scientists. This dearth of data allows us to project our greatest anxieties onto the bees.

If what you're searching for is an entire spectrum of moral lessons regarding the evils of human behavior, this crisis is even better than global warming. If you hate globalization, then you will doubtless see its evils as patent in the disappearance of the bees. Pesticides? Genetically modified foods? Those, too, are convenient hypotheses in the absence of contradictory information. Even cellphones have been offered as an explanation. If you're driven crazy by them, then so must be the bees. Isn't it obvious?

Our fuzzy, hard-working, sweetness-producing icons have become our most powerful Rorschach test.

As go the bees, so go our hopes and fears for the future.

An estimated quarter of the country's 2.4 million colonies of Apis mellifera have been lost since winter. ..Read more here...