BERIGAN

I just picked up the DVD a couple of months ago, and that's the one thing that stuck with me. The damned bug is always there first. If the other driver's had noticed, they'd have just given up... Funny, I didn't notice the bug for a long time, it was the firebird that showed up 3-4 times that caught my attention. The Charger also missed the pumps in case you didn't know. They blew up the pumps and the Charger wizzes on by, they edit it so you don't really notice.

Wanted: man to land on killer asteroid and gently nudge it from path to Earth · Nasa evokes Hollywood in effort to avoid catastrophe · Mission would bridge gap between moon and Mars David Adam Friday November 17, 2006 The Guardian It is the stuff of nightmares and, until now, Hollywood thrillers. A huge asteroid is on a catastrophic collision course with Earth and mankind is poised to go the way of the dinosaurs. To save the day, Nasa now plans to go where only Bruce Willis has gone before. The US space agency is drawing up plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid hurtling through space at more than 30,000 mph. It wants to know whether humans could master techniques needed to deflect such a doomsday object when it is eventually identified. The proposals are at an early stage, and a spacecraft needed just to send an astronaut that far into space exists only on the drawing board, but they are deadly serious. A smallish asteroid called Apophis has already been identified as a possible threat to Earth in 2036. Chris McKay of the Nasa Johnson Space Centre in Houston told the website Space.com: "There's a lot of public resonance with the notion that Nasa ought to be doing something about killer asteroids ... to be able to send serious equipment to an asteroid. "The public wants us to have mastered the problem of dealing with asteroids. So being able to have astronauts go out there and sort of poke one with a stick would be scientifically valuable as well as demonstrate human capabilities." A 1bn tonne asteroid just 1km across striking the Earth at a 45 degree angle could generate the equivalent of a 50,000 megatonne thermonuclear explosion. Attempting to break it up with an atomic warhead might only generate thousands of smaller objects on a similar course, which could have time to reform. Scientists agree the best approach, given enough warning, would be to gently nudge the object into a safer orbit. "A human mission to a near Earth asteroid would be scientifically worthwhile," Dr McKay said. "There could be testing of various approaches. We don't know enough about asteroids right now to know the best strategy for mitigation." Matt Genge, a space researcher at Imperial College, London, has calculated that something with the mass, acceleration and thrust of a small car could push an asteroid weighing a billion tonnes out of the path of Earth in just 75 days. Gianmarco Radice, an asteroid expert at Glasgow University, said the best approach would be to land a device to dig into the object. "You could place something on the surface to eject material that would push the asteroid in the other direction." Mirrors, lights and even paint could change the way the object absorbed light and heat enough to shift its direction over 20 years or so. With less notice, mankind could be forced to take more drastic measures, such as setting off a massive explosion on or near the object to change its course. In 2005, Nasa's Deep Impact mission tested a different technique when it placed an object into the path of a comet. Dr Radice said robots could do the job just as well, doing away with the need for a risky and expensive manned mission. Last year Japan showed with its Hayabusa probe that a remote spacecraft can land on an asteroid. But with manned missions to the moon and possibly Mars on its to-do list again, Nasa is keen to extend the reach of its astronauts. Dan Durda, a senior research scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado said an asteroid landing mission would be a good way test the new Constellation programme spacecraft, the Apollo-style planned replacements for the space shuttle with which Nasa hopes to return to the moon. He told Space.com: "A very natural, early extension of the exploration capabilities of this new vehicle's architecture would be a "quick-dash" near-Earth asteroid rendezvous mission." Tom Jones, a former shuttle astronaut, said: "After a lunar visit, we face a long interval in Earth-Moon space while we build up experience and technology for a Mars mission. An asteroid mission could take us immediately into deep space, sustaining programme momentum, adding public excitement and reducing the risk of a later Mars mission." Europe has its own efforts to tackle asteroids. Its planned Don Quijote mission will launch two robot spacecraft, one to tilt at a harmless passing space rock, and a second to film the collision and watch for any deviation in the asteroid's path. 'Not if, but when...' Hits and near misses At Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California, scientists monitor all "potentially hazardous asteroids" that might one day end up on a collision course with Earth. So far they number 831. The next close-ish shave - at a mere 17 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth - will be asteroid 2004QD14 on November 29. The Earth has a long history of asteroid strikes. Thirty five million years ago, a 5km-wide asteroid ploughed into what is now Chesapeake Bay, in the US, leaving an 80km crater. In 1908, an asteroid devastated swaths of Siberia when it exploded mid-air with the force of 1,000 Hiroshimas. The theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid striking Mexico 65m years ago is controversial since scientists uncovered rocks from the crater predating the extinction of the dinosaurs by 300,000 years. A near miss, when asteroid QW7 came within 4m km of Earth in September 2000, led Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik to declare: "It's not a case of if we will be hit, it is a question of when. Each of us is 750 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid than to win this weekend's lottery." In January 2002, the former science minister, David Sainsbury, announced the government's response to the threat from hurtling asteroids: a new information centre based in Leicester. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1950258,00.html

Weird Al, is that you?????

FWIW, Conrad, I'm pretty sure the 50 million is coming right out of John Henry's checkbook, not the team's. You don't plan on a 50 million dollar payment and budget it ahead of time. So really, all you need is to ditch the corporate owner and find a guy with deep pockets. Dan, strangely enough Time Warner wants to sell to some other faceless corp called Liberty. In fact, they stopped listening to all other offers since Feb. yet, no sale and here it is mid November. We do need some deep pockets guy, but it doesn't look likely.........

Updated: Nov. 14, 2006, 8:21 PM ET Red Sox's winning bid for Matsuzaka -- $51.1 million http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2662193 Blah, blah, blah, so happy for you....

Oh by the way, the Braves have the same 80 Mil to spend for 2007, so I really enjoy hearing about teams that have 50 mil to burn just for the rights to a guy...

I agree. Folks see the low wins and forget how good he is. His numbers are down a little bit....but still a #1

All I know, is there wasn't a single baseball professional that predicted at the start of the playoffs the Cards winning it all....not to bring that touchy subject again! It will be interesting....something I didn't see in the article above...are Japanese parks still much smaller than ML parks???

Heard someone on another forum's live chat talk about it....just wondering.... http://www.maxthon.com/

Well, can't say for sure, but a few years ago, I bought tons and tons of VHS tapes that they shipped to the Atlanta store from all over the country. They were supposed to be kind of outlet store as well as new "product"(Hate that word, and bet Ghost or anyone else who has worked at bookstores, etc do too!) store. I was selling New oop MGM musicals for $50 that I was buying for $5! So, after several trips to the store,(And walking out with dozens of big bags each time) a smart manager said I could check out the stuff they had in back. So, I dug thru tons of boxes they had no room for on the floor. I grabbed what I could afford, and after doing this a couple times, the main videos left were mainly classical/opera VHS . I was going to grab those, but the brilliant GM decided to send everything to other stores, even though they were the outlet store. Anywho, long story short, they had many other boxes with oddball stuff laying around. I imagine some stores had cds that they couldn't return for various reasons, plus special orders that were never picked up(It happens all the time) plus stuff selling better at one location over another. I saw this happen in Atlanta when Media Plays shut down, I would see the same DVDs in mass at one store, disappear, then show up at another location when the discount was steeper.

Tons o' stuff at the one in the ATL still. I was there for a very special one day only sale, with an additional 10% off the 30 % off price!(on cds only) I thought they were to be out of biz by about this time??? Not that I want them gone, just thought mid November they would be closed up. They should have waited a few more weeks, and had 30% off during December and made it thru the end of December at least.....and these liquidators know what they're doing, eh???

Keep safe, and hope you had a great one!!!

hope you had a great one!!!!

Hope you had a great one Rolf!!!! Many more as well!

Still Kicking By JAMES KAPLAN Published: November 12, 2006 The deathbed scene, mawkish or moving, is a convention as old as literature. When it comes to the deathbed memoir, however, Art Buchwald would appear to have the field all to himself. TOO SOON TO SAY GOODBYE By Art Buchwald. 189 pp. Random House. $17.95. Readers’ Opinions Forum: Book News and Reviews In February 2006, the 80-year-old columnist’s health came to a crisis. He had been undergoing kidney dialysis; now, blood clots in his right foot necessitated amputation of the foot and lower leg. And there was more bad news: a dye used in the angiogram to diagnose the clots had caused Buchwald’s kidneys to fail entirely. Because of his age, he was a poor candidate for a transplant. His list of options was therefore short and stark: He could either be in dialysis for the rest of his life, or not. If he did nothing, his doctors told him, he would almost certainly die within weeks. At the thought of a life with one leg and hooked up to a dialysis machine, “I decided — too much,” he writes in “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” his brief, moving, occasionally hilarious chronicle of a death postponed. While riding an elevator to his room in a Washington acute-care facility, Buchwald noticed a sign for a hospice in the same building. He took a tour, and decided he’d found the place where he wanted to spend his final days. Except that the days turned into months, and the months turned out not to be final. In short, Art Buchwald’s life took a strange turn: it continued. A few weeks after he moved from acute care to final care, his kidneys, for reasons no one seems to understand, started working again. He wound up spending five months in the Washington Home and Hospice, eating, drinking and making as merry as anyone with a newly amputated leg could. His chief pleasure, besides scarfing down the lavish offerings in the many food baskets he received, was greeting a long, long parade of visitors, a train worthy of a modern Voltaire (Buchwald called the hospice reception room his “salon”). The guests ranged from old schoolmates to the columnist’s many high-octane friends — the likes of Tom Brokaw and Ben Bradlee and Ethel Kennedy and Russell Baker and Jack Valenti and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as John Glenn, the queen of Swaziland and the commandant of the United States Marine Corps. “It is amazing,” Buchwald says, “how many people visit if you are in a convenient location and they’ve been told you’re going to die.” His visitors, he notes, were often nervous at first — shy in the face of death — but soon, because of Buchwald’s irrepressible personality, found themselves lightening up. “Some of them have such a good time,” he notes, “they come back again and again.” Which was just the way the gregarious columnist liked it. In fact, much of his hospice experience — the food, the guests, the radio and TV interviews, the thousands of letters he received — not only met his outsize need for attention but seemed to give him a positively Tom Sawyeresque glee. In the book’s epilogue, Buchwald shamelessly quotes his prospective pallbearers’ prewritten eulogies in their entirety. But the book also has a serious — though not solemn — undertone. Amid an old man’s pardonably digressive reminiscences (some of which will nevertheless feel familiar to readers of Buchwald’s other books), he speaks feelingly about the realities of death: living wills; the grief of other, less fortunate hospice residents and their families; and the strange American habit of trying to ignore life’s end. Art Buchwald has looked straight on at his own “dirt nap,” with liberating results. “People told me,” he writes, “they loved talking to someone who wasn’t afraid to discuss death.” As of this writing, Buchwald was still in the discussion stages. One hopes he’s planning a sequel. James Kaplan is a co-author, with Jerry Lewis, of “Dean and Me (A Love Story).” He is writing a biography of Frank Sinatra. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/books/review/Kaplan.t.html

No, the whole show was a tribute to him. They should have made it 2 hours. They showed very short clips(Like the famous Lena Horne interview) but it was nice that they talked to many of his friends,(His cameraman in Vietnam felt closer to him than his own brothers) and a decent bio. In the clip you have from CBS, they show him waving goodbye to folks on an island. On 60 minutes they showed that while he was on the island, he was handed roughly a 1000 letters for Ed to send to their family members in the States. One even swam out to hand him one as they were taking off, you could tell how moved he was. That's why everyone was waving.....

More reasons to run away from the slacker Drew..... http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlib...s/D/Drew_JD.stm and http://www.unitedstatesofbaseball.com/entry.asp?ENTRY_ID=205 The guy looks kind of stupid criticizing LaRussa, at least on this point, but I have heard LaRussa thought Drew was going to be the next Micky Mantle..... None of these notions quite register with not-quite-genius LaRussa, however. As evidence for his attacks on modern ball players, he mentions the example of J.D. Drew, a former star prospect for his team. It seems that when Drew was with LaRussa’s Cardinals from 1998 to 2003, he never maximized his God-given potential out on the field. LaRussa and Bissinger assert that "Drew may be too talented, that [Major League performance'> comes too easily to him." Oh boy. J.D. Drew probably never has, and never will, made the very most of his natural abilities, and that tells us a lot about J.D. Drew’s character. But it’s quite another thing to imply that this one underachiever represents some kind of damning indictment of the whole modern game.

Sad news. I couldn't find the info in any of the news stories, but I had heard years ago his face was disfigured from a plane crash. Here is some info from Wikipedia(Saw similar info at imdb.com bio as well) With the outbreak of World War II, Palance's boxing career ended and his military career began. Palance's rugged face, which took many beatings in the boxing ring, was disfigured when he bailed out of his burning B-24 Liberator while on a training flight over southern Arizona, where he was a student pilot. Plastic surgeons repaired as much of the damage that they could, but he was left with a distinctive, somewhat gaunt, look. After much reconstructive surgery, he was discharged in 1944.

Excellent point Quince(If I can call you Quince, and since it's not your name... )Let me tell ya, Sheffield tanked in the playoffs with the Braves. Let's see now in the NLDS in 2002 Sheff hit a robust .062(Gee, wonder why we didn't get to the next round?) but he made up for it with a white hot .143 in the 2003 NLDS(Again we didn't make it to the next round) He is the black JD Drew, in other words, worthless come playoff time. He's 38 as well. The Yanks got something for someone they just don't need. and my God, they saved some money even!!! Of course I thought Detroit was nuts for going after Kenny Rogers. I wish the Yanks had just dumped him, and like someone mentioned above he'd have to settle for a one year deal in Pittsburgh.

Anyone ever heard of Dave Apollon? I sure haven't but stumbled across this great clip(And weird instrumentation) of Sweet Sue from the early thirties.

So....are some of the white folks here saying Ed Bradley wasn't black enough???

Well, JD, don't let the door hit you in the ass when you leave! If there is a player whose stats give a false picture of real value, Drew is it. Mr. DL adds nothing to a team, no character, no intensity, nothing clutch. No way this guy is going to better with age, way too fragile. Mr. Invisible just wants to collect his paycheck and be left alone. Looser Dan, he played a year with the Braves, and while he has tools, he really doesn't impress one at all. I think the Dodgers are lucky to be rid of his contract. Now they have more money to go after a Carlos Lee, or Soriano....So if you have any pull Dan, tell them to run away from him, Willy Mo is the way to go!!!

Conrad, have you tried this site? It has a full compendium of commentary and rumors for every team, from just about every American paper. Even tells you if the link takes you to a site that requires registration or not. Its one of my regular morning stops while I'm drinking my coffee. Thanks Dan. I think either you or Johnny mentioned the site awhile back...I forgot the address. I just wanted some weekly baseball info, and the insider is free for 30 days, so if I don't think it's worth $6.95, I'll drop it . It's just that this is the time of year I want to read about baseball the most, and we are still almost 4 months away from spring training.

Well, I finally broke down and signed up for baseball insider...sigh....I am such a whore for baseball info.... I thought they would back down, and give us Gammons, et al for free, but they didn't. And now with little baseball on sportscenter, what was I to do? I'm weak! Surely a snippet here at there ain't bad, and I did find a long gammons post on the STL site that was still up after a week or so.. Al, cheer up, all is not lost!!! add the Rangers to the list of teams the 28-year-old left-hander is considering. Evidently, playing for new Texas manager and former A's coach Ron Washington holds some appeal for Zito, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. "Barry Zito called me," Washington told the newspaper. "He wants to make a visit here. Texas wasn't on his list, but it is now." Washington admitted that money will be a deciding factor in the end. He said he is too new on the job to know if the Rangers will compete in a bidding war for Zito, whose agent is Scott Boras. If the Angels are able to sign Zito, it would allow them to trade one of their other pitchers for a hitter, perhaps Toronto center fielder Vernon Wells, the Riverside Press Enterprise reports. Zito and Bonds! Wouldn't that make you a little conflicted??? Perhaps Bonds could blow his knee out in spring training...and just go away.....