Twas the night before Christmas

Sure, it may not be December 24th, but for this young lad, it may as well be. Because I know that no matter what happens tomorrow, no matter how bad work is, no matter how much I hear about kU and their final four appearance, I will at least have sweet, glorious, wonderful baseball to watch all afternoon.

Thank the heavens. It has been too long.

And now, Mark Fenske's thoughts on the matter:

Leaving work to go to a baseball game will make a difference inside you.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game opens something inside your heart that advertising has been doing its best to lock up.
The quest for award-winning work keeps you at work late.
The struggle to do better than those around you makes you work through dinner, get up early, cancel the vacation you planned.
There are times these sacrifices bear fruit.
Mostly they don't.
Because greatness at writing ads comes only partly from how hard you work at reaching inside yourself.
A greater deal of it has to do with being a person worth reaching into.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game is a sign you have taken charge of your life.
It's a sign you accept death is coming and have chosen what to do about it for today.
It will do you no good to learn to write from your heart if you have nothing in your heart.
I was slow to learn this.
Here's hoping you won't be.

Go give your heart away for the afternoon to a team who can break it.
Eat the hot dogs and damn the sodium because we are for lives that are more full than they are long.

What do 4,000 dead American boys look like?

Yikes. Click for the full-size image.

How do you keep this off the field?

Joey Gathright is raw, not doubt. He's only been playing baseball since he was 17, and his bat-handling and glove-handling skills are not yet refined.

But I don't care.

This kid is not only the most athletic player in baseball, but maybe the most athletic in all of sports. Don't believe me? Just watch this video from him in college:



And this one from a spring training game last night. Keep in mind, he did all this on the fly and without any sort of pre-meditation:



And they say football players are the real athletes. Puh-leez.

Nice framing

Mike the Mad Biologist wins a gold star for this quote:

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don't do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

My response was, "In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him."

Trapped

Ever feel like you're trapped in a glass phone booth that's surrounded by cement in every direction? No? Well, here's what it would be like.

The world is coming to an end.

We just haven't figured out why yet. In stories by the Palm Beach Post and New York Times, it seems that bees, pollinator of most of America's crops, and bats, eater of most of the world's creepy-crawlies, are dying. The scary part? We have no idea why.

The government, as per the usual, is attempting to fix the problem by (what else) throwing money ($100 million over 5 years, to be exact) at the problem. As per the usual, though, the bill to acquire the money is stuck in Congress, and won't likely be passed any time soon.

Get on the Bandwagon.

I don't know if you've heard the local, regional or national rumblings about our Boys in Blue, but word is they're going to be a lot of fun to watch this season. We all know they probably aren't going to win the Series, but they're getting closer and in April, we've got just as good a chance as anybody.

If you don't believe me, check out this 2007 highlight reel to see just how good these young ballplayers can be.