JSngry

If only it would be that easy... HA! Funniest part of the whole thing was, about halfway through the Descent Into The Ballpark, I asked an usher, "hey, it there a final stopping point for all this?". Meaning, when do we get to where we're going to stop and wait for further instructions. Well, this guy was pretty frazzled, because he said, "Sir, there's a tornado in the area. We're not worried about a final stopping point right now." He thought I was talking about the rain delay & when/if the game would be called or not! Poor guy...

Well, you gotta realize that "swing" was still very much a to-be-defined quantity when Hawk came up. Louis & Bechet had pretty much defined the quarter note, but the eight note was still open for negotiation, if you know what I mean. Murray's working in significantly more "clarified" times. Which is not to say that he doesn't swing, just that his swing is definitely on the outer edge of defined parameters in a time where those parameters have been in place for more than a little while, But like I said, as funny as it (and his tone and his vibrato) still seem to me sometimes, he's been doing it the same way for so long and so consistently that he must mean it, and he has continued to develop his skills to a pretty damn high level, so hey - he needs not defend himself afaic. But Hawk? Hell, Hawk thought like a cello player, played in territory bands, and just got out there and DID it in a way and place where it pretty much hadn't been done yet. Father Of MY Country (although Prez is my country's Heart & Soul, Hawk remains its Father)! Whole 'nother thing, that is, what Hawk did.

Geez Loueez, these weekday day games are killing me. I work from home hoping for a nice relaxing day. Hasn't happened since the very first one in Detroit. Anyway...pitcher's duel today (or tired players after last night's affair, who knows?) CJ goes strong but works too fast for his own good in this humidity & here comes the bullshitpen. Refreshingly enough, there was a happy ending. The All New Mark Lowe continued to impress, and Dammit Darren Oliver actually got the job done today. Halladabbledewyah! So Neffi comes in, throws one pitch, gets one out, and then, again, loses the strike zone. Walks two. Ian botches an over the shoulder popup but still gets the force at second. Neffi loses the zone again but finally gets the next hitter on a mild fly to center. It shouldn't be this hard. It just should not be this hard. Something ain't right with Neftali Feliz right now. It's gonna be a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong season unless and until... But hey, a 2-1 win after all that? In a game where we get outhit 6-3? I'll take it!

You're really only as safe as your location, unfortunately... Tornadoes are nasty. Us, we were at no real risk, I'm convinced. There were no warning sirens going off, which should have been the case if there had been a tornado in the immediate Arlington area. I understand the Rangers' organizations concerns for public safety, but by every visible indicator "a tornado in the area" did not mean anywhere dangerously close to the ballpark. As it turns, out that was exactly the case. Tell you what, though, before we pulled out of the parking lot, I checked the radio to see what was going on where. I was not going that way! Been going to ballgames since 1965 and this is my first bad-weather experience (granted, for years the Astrodome was where I saw them, so, nothing there!). We hated to leave, but on a work night and with about another 90 or so minutes of rain coming up, we just couldn't. I felt like such a wimp, especially when I went to bed and the game was just resuming. Oh well...

Crazy night at The Ballpark last night... Charlie (my son) & I got some last second free tickets to the game, very last second, we got there in the bottom of the 2nd…ended up being quite the experience, what with gale-force winds, rain, hail, tornadoes being reported in the area, a total lockdown of the ballpark,and the surreptitious escape we made to get away from it all. The rain started at about 8:15-8:30, after the third, and it was relentless. Then came hail. Radar showed more on the way, so about 9:10 we decided to book out. After how quickly they called the Oakland game a few weeks ago, I was thinking this one would get called as well (wished it would have, since we were behind after 3…). We stayed until about 9:10 then decided to head home, and that was about 15 seconds before they locked all the gates b/c of a tornado warning for the area. I mean, we were like 15 feet away from the main gates and CLANG, Lockdown At The Ballpark! That was when the REAL fun started…Staff was mostly ushers (which means old folks who are always happy to see you) and a few more "official types. They started asking people to "go to the lower level", meaning not even on the main concourse. They wanted everybody underground. Well, some went, and some didn't, and nobody really had any guns to make anybody do anything, so..it was what it was. We decided to move with the group that was moving, we figured they'd know where they were going at some point, and we'd eventually get an all clear to get back to business. Didn't happen that way. We walked, and walked, and walked, and then walked some more, even after we got underground, we walked. Saw a bunch of stuff that I never knew was there. Unfortunately, to say that it was hot and stuffy is putting it mildly... But finally we felt a breeze, a nice cool strong one. We followed that, and lo - there was a tunnel with a bus at the end of it. And the bus was parked outdoors. And there was one - one - City of Arlington Fire Marshall hanging around not too strongly asking about 150-200 people scattered all over the place to please go back away from the tunnel and get back inside. Well... There was no rain, no lightening, no gale-force wind, so when this Fire Marshal turned his back, we figured, hey, there's a couple hundred of us, only one of him, so unless and until he calls for backup and/or the weather looks truly nasty, we're just gonna eeeeeease on out of here as inconspicuously as possible and head for the car, which proved to be do-able with zero resistance. Once we got outside, I looked around, and our parking lot was literally across the street. Literally. About 30 feet away. We had walked, underground, out of the ballpark proper, under one street, under one massive service area, and had emerged right where we had parked. EX-cellent! They resumed the game around 11:45 or so, just after I had gotten home and was crawling into bed. I watched it, but it was kind of a joke. Both starting pitchers were out, we used our most ineffective relievers, and...ugh. But the offense is back. Only good things can come from that. Holland was off last night, but right now, he's the only one in the rotation who is, and only good things can come from that, too. The bullpen, though....god help us on that... Before the delay, though, It was wild. The foul poles were, like, DANCING, the wind was so strong. Debris was hovering up in the air like UFOs .Nellie hit a ball that looked and sounded like it was going yard, and all of a sudden it just stopped. Actually blew back in a few inches, and then dropped harmlessly like a little pop up. Chalk dust blowing all up in people's faces and stuff. Wild. Oh well, free tickets, nothing lost except a little gas and a little time, and we both got stories to tell about it. I told Charlie that in 30years, when he’s my age, he’ll be telling his kids and maybe grandkids all about it. Nothing sucks more than getting old and not having any stories totell, ya’ know? However...I do need somebody to reconcile how this game was handled and how the Oakland rainout was handled. That shit just ain't right...

True, but there's regions/subsets/etc. I'm from North East Texas, about 50 miles from the Louisiana border, with a Mom who grew up mostly in Louisiana. Up until maybe 30-35 years ago, all the major network outles were out of Shreveport, La, not Texas. Same with newspapers. If you wanted to read a "serious" newspaper, you read the Shreveport Times. Couple that with a topography and geology that is far more "southern" than it is" Texan", and you have one cultural subset of Texan - the North-East Texan, who has one foot in the South (hunting/fishing, an insistence on good manners, culinary orientation) the other in the West (gun-love, distrust of all things governmental, fashion sense). Texas really is a world of its own, just because there's so many worlds of their own inside it...

I'm a southerner myself, I understand.

Great. We get Halliday, Lee, and Oswalt, Cinci gets this guy. GRRRRRR!!!!!!

How artistic!

Tea, iced, unsweetened, with a touch of peach, ideally. That pisses off UK-ers & Southerners alike, but it's so damn tasty that I really don't care!

You're more than welcome, and my best to your mom & the rest of the Pearson kin. Glad to have been in the service of a happy show of respect for a truly great & dignified talent whose work always quietly projected great warmth and dignity in every measure. Just curious - Y'all ever have a Southern-style family reunion in the summer, with custom printed t-shirts and stuff honoring Duke? That would be really cool, right?

And elsewhere: I used to have the same "problem" w/Hawk when I first started checking him out, but when I wasn't looking, it all fell into place fr me and I started hearing the other things in his playing that I still marvel at, notably the way that his tone fits inside his lines perfectly, and how even though his lines are predominately steady eith note oriented (but not as consistently as you might think, depending on the session), his accents and subtle-but-very-real tonal variations create a tension/release within those eight notes (and within his harmonic dissections) that is quite engaging once one becomes aware of it (and it's not always obvious, that's for sure). I'm just a listener, not a musician. Do Murray and Hawkins's rhythmic approaches have anything in common? Guy If there are any, I don't think there's any meaningful comparisons to be made of them.

And be worth every penny of it, I think! 25 million puts him in Alex Rodriguez' neighborhood. Bench OPS+ over his career was 126. A-Rod is at 145 (Bench OPS+ exceeded 145 in exactly one season). Not even sure if Bench's defensive prowess makes up for that much, as A-Rod was a pretty damn good defender at a premium position, until he deferred to St Jeter. Give me a catcher of Bench's arm and acumen and bat, and I'll give you one A-Rod or any other infielder. Give me all that plus Bench's character, and I'll give you all the A-Rods you want! Give me a world-class catcher and I'm two steps closer to having a solid, stable team that can be built to last.

OGANDO!!! Yeah, the obvious story is Hamilton & Cruz both stepping back in and going yard, good GOD have they been missed, but for this team and what it's going to really need, hey - OGANDO!!! Who knew? He was an emergency fill-in for Tommy Hunter, wasn't really stretched out, and prone to blisters. Now he's a serious All-Star consideration. And tonight, a nifty five-hit, 115 pitch complete game shutout, still throwing strong at the end. Yeah, it's not quite a third of the way through the season, and yeah, there's been more than a few young starters burn brightly and quickly and then flare out, never to really return (Cecil Upshaw, anybody?), and sure, the Yankess schooled him bigtime & hopefully he learned from that, but hey, this guy right now is looking like the real deal, and if he ain't, I'll take him until the real thing comes along. Either way - OGANDO!!! And be worth every penny of it, I think!

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bob-graettinger-p81426/songs http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=11546

Agree with all that, but often wonder why the insistence in these circumstances on stating the function of the diminished to be the replacement of a chord whose root is not really necessary or used in that sequence, other than to point out what is being substituted for. In other words, the B dim doesn't really function as a G7(b9), it functions as a chromatic passing chord in its own right. The notion of a "G" is just there because in Rhythm changes, the while I-VI-ii-V thing is so imprinted as the reality. But is that really necessary, or is it just because those root movements create "comfort level" that is more a case of collective over-familiarity than it is a compelling musical reason to still dominate? Same thing on turnarounds - people always want to look at a iii-biii-ii-bii and see the b-chords as substitues for the VI & the V, and yeah, that's why they work, but...what if, once the theory is understood, we stop looking at them as "substitutions" & instead start looking at them as legit changes in and of themselves, and then extrapolating from there? Maybe the VI & V chords work because of the b-chords, eh? Nobody ever looks at it that way, but if it's a law of physics that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the why does a D-G-C root movement get propped up as more "natural"? B than a D-Db-C? Because of the overtone series? Well, yeah, but is that the only physics derivable? Hell, the tempered scale tells you right there that there are options...never mind the use of microtones as actual functional pitches and not just as "color". Is a "blue note" really blue, or is the blue just a bruise left over from "Western" pitch systems getting smacked a good one? I mean, theoretically, you can play Rhythm changes with the a collection of various time-accepted substitutions and never hit the I. So, really, if it's always going to be reachable no matter where you go, why glamorize that m-f by trying to keep it in mind more than it will already be? Sorry, that's a little "out there" maybe, but...that's just a personal peeve of mine, cats dwelling on glorifying the I under all conditions. Sometimes it's appropriate, but not every damn time, you know what I mean?It's like, if you can the 8 color box and the 64 color box fopr the same price, why settle for the 8? Or if you have to save for a week or two to get the 64, again, why not? And if you really get curious, why not just buy the 64 and then see what happens when you melt them together in different ways? Options, I'm a big fan of options.

OOOOOHHHHHH.....my bad entirely...a pure brain fart. Somehow in my mind I put Jimmy Stewart in North By Northwest. I guess I don't keep watching the old movies enough. Oh well. Bill F was slick enough to post "Grant Stewart" though, which pretty much put everything back on track, so...onward.

Which one, and why?

A good day for all things Giant-ic! But Beri, your Braves...those damn Angels!

Dempsey Wright Jimmy Stewart Jimmy Stewart

Our pressure pleasure, believe me! Now if you guys can get over that 2-1 hump right now, hey, we'll owe you one.

Dude! That picture looks like a giant fruitcake with a Fantasy label in the middle. Perfect for the holidays!

Up, for the family member.

Nice to be able to pull this one back up again! Oswalt was more gettable than we got to him, but Harry hung tight for 8 & Neffy came in and dealt (something about the way he's carrying himself still doesn't look right to me, though, he seems to have some kind of a burden on him or something), so hey, all is well today. The starters have been going real well lately, Hamilton & Cruz are set to return, light at the end of the tunnel, I just hope it ain't the train of a continuingly dysfunctional bullpen.