kopia lustrzana https://github.com/thinkst/zippy
96 wiersze
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
96 wiersze
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
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Wednesday, 19 May 2010
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The Internet occasionally reminds me of how different life is because of
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it.
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I noted on Facebook that, from a statistical perspective, what makes baseball such an
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amazing sport is that you can watch it your entire life and still see, on a daily basis,
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something you’ve never seen before. (It’s a truism, I know, but it has the benefit of actually
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being true.) In this case, the something in question was watching the wonderfully named Angel
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Pagan hit an inside-the-park home run and initiate a triple play in the same game. John Emerson responded with some humbug about it
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not being an inside-the-park grand slam, which made me remember that I had seen an inside-the-park grand slam at some time in the remote past.
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I remember being six or seven years old and watching the Mets play the Cardinals in an
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afternoon game at Shea Stadium, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can definitively say that at approximately 4:30
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p.m. on 9 June 1985 , I watched Terry Pendleton hit an inside-the-park grand slam off Joe
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Sambito in a game the Cardinals would go on to win handily. The fact that I can verify vague
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memories of events that occurred twenty-five years ago astounds me in a way I sometimes forget
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the Internet is capable of doing.
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This realization is obviously not of world-historical importance, merely a reminder that this
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thing whose existence we take for granted daily represents a fundamentally weird complement to
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human memory. The fact that at some point in the future I can know who I rode in an elevator
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with on 28 December 2005 is less weird because I chose to write
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about riding in an elevator with Grimace . That I can access detailed information about
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events I have no right remembering in detail is another matter entirely.
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Joe Sambito. Wow. I'd completely forgotten about him. I sometimes wish I could forget that
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Pendelton is the Braves hitting coach. Closest I came to that was watching Dale Murphy get
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tagged out at the plate on what would have been an inside-the-park slam.
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Posted by: Chuck | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 06:16 PM
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He pitched for the Astros before he came to the Mets, stayed for '85, then he pitched for
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the Red Sox against the Mets in '86 World Series. I remember him being ineffective, and as it
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turns out, he was . Now that I remember him, which I didn't before, I remember him as
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being the pitcher who'd pitched for 1) the team the Mets faced to get to the '86 Series and 2)
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the one they faced in it. I didn't remember that I remember that, but now that I do, I do.
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Memory, as Gertrude Stein would say, is funny.
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Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 06:27 PM
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Apparently the drug use, sexual excess, and weird UCI experiences haven't softened your
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brain yet.
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What's really bothersome, though, is when you only remember things from your distant
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past.
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My grandpa was alert till the end, but when I last saw him at age 92 everything he wanted to
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talk about was 70 years in the past.
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Posted by: John Emerson | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 07:02 PM
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A guess, but perhaps your grandfather's life at 22 was more interesting than the ensuing 70
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yrs.
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Posted by: M. Bouffant | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 08:54 PM
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You know what makes this post great? No stinking cricket.
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Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 09:04 PM
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Yeah, I remember Sambito from the Astros (when the Braves were in the old NL West because it
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made sense to have a team 3,000 miles from most of their division rivals). Solid pitcher for a
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while. But burned out toward the end. Apparently, he is a player's representative now.
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Posted by: Chuck | Thursday, 20 May 2010 at 12:14 PM
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>Prosthetic memory. Posted by: Endy | Thursday, 20 May 2010 at
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02:35 PM
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I like to read about others watching baseball more than I like to watch baseball by a factor
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of nine. Having given up on watching the actual sport, mention of baseball now only sparks
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memories of The Old Man and the Sea and the old time baseball writers. It is true that at the
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end of time, the old time baseball writers will be hailed as the very best writers, as they
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had access to an event that was susceptible to beautiful writing, but horrendous to watch in
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person. Plus, they smoked a prodigious quantity of cigarettes.
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nota bene: An overdue library book is a crime against Humanities.
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Posted by: THE LIBRARY | Friday, 21 May 2010 at 11:17 PM
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