Cheering the White Sox

“If you love the Red Sox, you've simply got to love the White Sox. In this town (Boston), they're telling us that White is the new Red. “




And as much as an Astros win will increase the value of my son’s Roger Clemens rookie card - we’re cheering the White Sox. My ear will be tuned to the radio (if you can’t be there, this is my favorite way to catch a game!) following pitch by pitch.

If there is a curse greater than the one that followed the Red Sox for 86 years it is the one that haunts the White Sox:

“The 1919 White Sox did something to earn a lifetime of hardball purgatory. They threw the World Series. And they have not won another one since. It is the big, dirty secret that no one wants to talk about as Chicago prepares to play host to the World Series for the first time since the ChiSox were beaten by the Dodgers in '59. Counting the Black Sox scandal, the Second City has lost the last seven (five by the Cubs) World Series played here. The last time Chicago had a baseball champion was in 1917, which was the year before Boston beat the Cubs, which was a year before the White Sox took money to lose.

It's all there in John Sayles's excellent movie, ''Eight Men Out" (John Cusack does a great Buck Weaver), or the book (same title by Eliot Asinof). Angry at cheapskate owner Charles Comiskey, eight of the White Sox, including all-world Shoeless Joe Jackson, took cash to intentionally lose the World Series to the Reds. They were beaten, five games to three, in a best-of-nine event. Two years later, after they were acquitted in a bag-job trial, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them for life. And the White Sox never won again.”

…”Which is why it's important for the White Sox to do what the Red Sox did and put the Black Sox to bed, just as the '04 Red Sox buried the great Bambino. “

(A matter of changing your Sox
By Dan Shaughnessy, Globe Columnist | October 22, 2005)


Go White Sox!

More photos from space...

Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. 2 Nov. 2004. "Astronaut Photography of Earth - Quick View." <http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/QuickView.pl?directory=ESC&ID=ISS007-E-17771> (19 Oct. 2005).

Portland's harbor and the Jetport - very cool!

Blue Marble

The Blue Marble: Next Generation is a series of images that show the color of the Earth’s surface for each month of 2004 (March pictured here) at very high resolution (500 meters/pixel) at a global scale. (NASA image courtesy Reto Stöckli and Robert Simmon)



A full moon is visible in this view above Earth’s atmospheric limb. Astronaut photograph ISS010-E-18583 was acquired February 24, 2005, with a Kodak 760C digital camera with an 800 mm lens.


I love Nasa's Earth Observatory web site. This week they are highlighting new "Blue Marble" imagery:

"In celebration of the deployment of its Earth Observing System, NASA is pleased to share the newest in its series of stunning Earth images, affectionately named the “Blue Marble.” This new Earth imagery enhances the Blue Marble legacy by providing a detailed look at an entire year in the life of our planet. In sharing these Blue Marble images, NASA hopes the public will join with the agency in its continuing exploration of our world from the unique perspective of space."

There is also an article on astronaut photography from the International Space Station - "The Art of Science":

"Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have many tasks, but a consistent favorite is taking photographs of Earth. The ISS astronauts don’t just take digital images randomly. The photos they shoot are part of a well-defined program of data collection coordinated through the Crew Earth Observations team at Johnson Space Center. Current research targets include glaciers, deltas, urban areas, coral reefs, megafans (inland deltas), and long-term ecological monitoring sites."

A freely accessible internet database of their pictures is here.

The sun and the moon...

Finally, the sun is shining. It feels as though we haven't seen it for months rather than weeks. The trees are still changing color and not too many actually lost their leaves during all that wind this past weekend.

It's also a full moon today. I watched it set early this morning. The full moon this month is called:

Full Hunter's Moon - October With the leaves falling and the deer fattened, it is time to hunt. Since the fields have been reaped, hunters can easily see fox and the animals which have come out to glean.

The full moon has a different name as it occurs in each month. You can go to the Farmer's Almanac site for a nice description of the folklore.

Rockwell Kent

Early November: North Greenland
(Hermitage)

Seal Hunter: North Greenland
(Hermitage)

I spent time last night visiting the Rockwell Kent exhibit, at the PMA , one last time before the show closes on Sunday. The last time I walked though the exhibit (three weeks ago) I was shoring up my courage up to face the breakup of a two year relationship. This time I walked through the exhibit with my best friend - and new friends.

Kent's ability to paint snow astounds me. Digital and print pictures do not do justice to the way he captures light; each painting seemingly lit from within.

"Kent went on to Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and finally
Greenland,where he produced spectacular landscapes
in clean modernist forms, bathed in seductive light.
In ''Early November: North Greenland" (1932),
Kent makes a jiving tonal rhythm of the 80-proof sunlight
and long shadowsof late afternoon. The glaciers' pale
faces shinehot against the chill blue of the shadows,
and a skein of goldruns across the water as it hits
the cold shore."
Boston Globe


" Picture a Temperate sea and mountain view; Clear day,
lateafternoon in fall; blue sea, and golden-purple shadowed
land, andpale-blond lower sky; purple to gold, pale
light to deep-toned madder.Now, into that, like a shaft
of sunlight into a lamplit room, likeviolins and flutes
above the bass, high-pitched, ethereally pure, so clean,
sharp, dazzling that it almost hurts, see ice appear. The
pale-gold sky is somber now; sea, sky, and land are of
one low tonality against which sings that poignant whiteness."

Rockwell Kent - Salamina

A really nice description of the exhibit can be found here. More information about Rockwell Kent can be found here.

East Village Opera Company

This is a fantastic CD! I first heard East Village Opera Company yesterday during my commute home on our public radio station. They were being interviewed on the Global Hit segment of The World. Sometimes you hear something and you know - this is it. That is how they hit me - I was bowled over. During errands last night I picked up their CD at my favorite BullMoose store and played it immediately. Even my 14 year old was impressed and had me play the first cut - Overture from Le Nozze di Figaro - over and over again. Incorporated in this redux is an organ part from "Won't get fooled Again" by Peter Townsend. It sends the senses soaring.

From their MySpace music site:

"The East Village Opera Company —a powerhouse five-piece band, a string quartet, and two outstanding vocalists—brings the towering emotion and timeless musicality of opera into the 21st century on its Decca/Universal Classics debut with its inventive, hard-hitting arrangements of the music’s “greatest hits”—including “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto, “Habanera” from Carmen, and “Nessun dorma” from Turandot — performed at full length and in the original languages.

The concept of the East Village Opera Company is totally fresh, but not unprecedented in pop. In 1985, for example, former punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren released Fans, an album of “hip-hopera” that brought funky beats and electronic programming to the works of Puccini and Bizet. But EVOC is a whole new thing: an integrated, eleven-strong working band dedicated to rocking the opera and electrifying the classics, as the ensemble has been doing to spectacular effect ever since its New York stage debut in the spring of 2004."

Check out a short video here.

Literary Awards

And the Nobel Prize for Literature: Harold Pinter

"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms"

And while we're discussing prizes: National Book Awards. Interesting that I tried get the list via the website and it wasn't published there.

The Quills Awards will be broadcast on October 22nd. Some of the winners were my choice and others were not.