Nothing so sexy on the Texas ballot this time, but Early Voting has begun. As I asked before Why are you sitting on your duff?

Yes, Grady Little and Dusty Baker rode their stars too long in each Game Seven. And yep, there’s still evidience that the curses in Boston and Chicago have pull.

But this World Series is completely off the charts. Florida took Game 1 IN NEW YORK! (The All-Star Game: This time it gets home field advantage for the team who would have had it anyway). The Yanks took game 2, so the Series is headed to Miami tied, and the sportswriters who wrote Florida off as soon as it was apparent that Boone’s solo shot in the 11^th^ inning of Game 7 of the Boston series are eating crow.

The coverage of this series is a blatant exercise of the pro-NYY bias in the sports media. The most egregious example is the non-reporting of a terrible call in the bottom of the seventh. With ‘Pudge Rodriguez’ on first and one out, Derek Lee had a foul bounce off his front leg, and roll down the third base line, right to Aaron Boone, the third baseman. Lee wasn’t running. Pudge, seeing Lee not running, wasn’t running. Boon fields the ball, and since the ump didn’t see the ball bounce off Lee’s leg, fires it to the second baseman, who fires it to the first baseman. The plate ump rules it a double play.

Yeah, umps make bad calls all the time, but this was one of the worst I’ve seen. But, since it happened to Florida, who has no fans north of Orlando, the story is completely being ignored. Sure, FLA was down a half-dozen runs at the time, but having seen them rally consistiently in the post season, who’s to say that Rodriguez and Lee couldn’t have started a late inning rally?

The biggest disgrace, however, is the amount of coverage that this would have gotten if it had been, say Derek Jeter off of whose leg said foul ball had bounced. Every sports broadcast in the country would have lead off with the Yankees being robbed, and the picture of the ball clearly bouncing off the shin would have been the lead of every sports page in the country. I’d say ‘East Coast Bias’, but it’s really Yankees bias in baseball reporting.

Medicare Blimp. I (Excrete) you not.

The blimp is scheduled to tour many parts of the country in the coming weeks, serving as a huge, mobile billboard that can specifically reach our audience in a different location every day. It will provide aerial television coverage for selected sporting events and make appearances at major community events and senior activities throughout the fall.

I’ve been searching unsuccessfully for pictures of this bit of pork; hopefully someone else can find them.

There are few things on the internet that I read religiously, but one of them is apparently dead in the water.

That’s right. You heard it here. ESPN has fired Gregg Easterbrook. No more Tuesday Morning Quarterback (at least on that site— although, in years past, the column was on Slate, so maybe it will be picked up elsewhere). It looks like ESPN has erased all reference to Gregg from its website.

I will be the first to admit that Gregg said some stupid and insensitive things about certain Disney executives recently, but I also think that by attributing a higher moral standard to Jews he has not committed the greivous sin of Anti-Semitism. I know that no one wants to be defined solely by their ethnicity, but at least Gregg was trying to exhort the leaders of Disney and Touchstone to reach a higher moral standard, which generally is a good thing.

And he has certainly not done anything worthy of losing his job.

Being the huge fan of Page 2 that I am, I’ve loved Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for the last few years. Easterbrook wrote a column for The New Republic in which he bashes Kill Bill and includes some comments which have been interpreted as anti-Semetic.

ESPN has now made it appear as if TMQ never existed. Try searching for ‘TMQ’ or ‘Easterbrook’ on ESPN, and there’s nada. Nothing. Nyet. Rein.

He may have stepped over the line by trying to link the Holocaust and terrorism with movie executives, and may be rightly being canned by ESPN (Though IMO it’s more Limbaugh backlash), but to scrub the archives of his past work is a little excessive, if you ask me.

Article here listing the salaries of a couple of the NPR talking heads. I’ve got no beef with these folks getting paid what they do; they put out a quality product, but it makes me scratch my head a little bit when I hear the folks on the recent KUHF fund drive talking about operating on a shoestring.

(Since we hit the 20 comment mark on this thread I thought I’d start a new one.)

How odd that just after Kelly menitons the safety of having your iPod backed up to a hard drive thay my iPod started going east? (I’ve decided that the term “going south” is an insult to my heritage, and I’m falling back on the BT/Kelly invention that “go west” is a slogan for good so…) After some finagaling I was able to only recover about 2K of the +3K songs before I wiped the damn thing. Now, it won’t load at all. Since the songs I could not recover were on the first sectors of the drive (and the reload would try to start in the same place) I think I have too many bad sectors there.

So, I now await Apple’s support system to provide me an empty box with which to begin my iPod exchange. More details as they become available.

p.s. Jank- here’s your “we get a cut link” for the 40GB iPod on Amazon .

In a useful way, this time.

If, like me, you’re fighting the battle of the belly (mostly as a holding action), it’d be great to have a tool to carry around to let you know what’s in what you’re eating. Well, the folks over at the USDA have the hook for you. There’s a Palm App that includes the entire USDA database on nutrition in a handy, searchable format. Go to the download page by clicking on the USDA logo.

Only drawback is the size; approximately 2 MB on the handheld. But hey, whadda you want for nothing? Rubber Biscuit?