Dan Gould

Well there was one that looked down and away but I don't know that all of them were bad calls.

Yeah that call on the swipe tag at first was pathetic. The Rays player had every reason to be pissed and the umpire should be suspended for not moving further into the infield to get a view. He saw the glove swipe past him before he touched the base and assumed he'd actually been tagged. Pathetic. The Sox should expect some good calls their way too, between Varitek's home run that wasn't, and Ellsbury's catch that wasn't (what is lame is that managers and umpires have complained that lighted part of the Toronto scoreboard makes it hard to see but it still hasn't been changed. Tito didn't even argue that long because he said that he couldn't really see what happened anyway.)

That's really amazing. But it must suck to know that the season highlight happened on April 8.

None better than when he and Danny DeVito did the sketch in which they are recording the "books for the blind" version of Madonna's Sex book. That was truly classic - iirc, DeVito playing the guy who published Screw magazine and Hartman/Heston lingering over lines like "I like my va-gi-na". Wish I could find it on Youtube.

Aggie, thinking about it some more, I think this is the clearest way to explain: When you make your choice, the odds are 1/3 that you picked the car, 2/3 that you picked a donkey. That means that after the second donkey is eliminated, there is a 2/3 chance that by switching, you will pick the car (the same 2/3 chance you were wrong in the first place). I probably screwed that up, too. Just follow the link, play the game ten or twenty times under each strategy, and read the explanation section. All will become clear.

Aggie, I thought the same way before I followed this link to an online version of the Monty Hall game. Within, there is an explanation for why the odds do change with the new information given. The critical element is that Monty Hall always opens a door with a goat behind it. Let's say you picked the car initially. The odds are 1/3 that you've picked right. Switching away is a bad idea - always. But let's say you picked a goat first. Monty is going to reveal the door with the other goat, and that means that switching will mean that you've won the car. And most importantly, that applies whether you've picked goat 1 or goat 2 - the other goat gets revealed, and switching is the winning play. Basically, 1/3 of the time you'll switch away from the car. The rest of the time you'll switch to the car, and win. You need to have an NY Times account to access the link, but it explains it better than I did. And you can play the game as many times as you want. I went 20 times clicking on door 1 and then staying - I did win a higher percentage than expected - 67%. But then I clicked on door 1 and always chose "switch doors" - and I won 80%! It may be counterintuitive, but its accurate.

Thanks for the link. Pretty pathetic story - it reminds me though of when I worked in a phone sex room. Our way of screening out the kids who had gotten their horny underage hands on the ad in Hustler or Penthouse was to ask their age, and then their year of birth. Of course they'd not know the year, but only a few would hang up at that point, the rest would try to bluff their way through by confidently stating that they were born in such and such year. Of course since the state of math education in this country is pathetic, they were never right, and I always enjoyed quickly doing the math in my head so that I could tell them "If you were born in 1952, you'd be 45 years old, not 25" or "If you were 35 years old, you'd have been born in 1960." I think the worst one was when the kid told me he was 25 but gave a birth year that would have made him 72. Honest.

Can you post a link? I was so astonished that this could happen I went to the Dallas Morning News site and didn't see anything on the front page or the Local News page.

seems to me we had a discussion about this guy before and everyone or nearly everyone agreed that he's a Grade A asshole. I'm not surprised he would opt for a Bench Trial over a Jury Trial but what was the Judge smoking to not see him for the menace that he is?

Wasn't there a Phil Hartman sketch on SNL of a series of Soylent Green sequels ... Soylent Blue is PEOPLE! Soylent Yellow is PEOPLE! etc.?

Dare I say - only better if those three things happen 11 times in October.

Well, it must be said that Dice-K looks very good through his first three starts of his second season, even better if you presume that his 5 walks in Tokyo were a function of being over-amped up for playing in front of the home fans. It was nice today to see similar results as his second start against the A's yet this time he didn't have the really great breaking pitches working. If Dice keeps it up and Beckett gets into his usual groove, I'll feel much better, regardless of what the current record says. Lester and Buchholz have shown glimpses, and Colon shouldn't be too far away since his injury is just a minor oblique strain.

And the big story in the papers was the mystery of who would throw out the first pitch. Such a big secret, described only as someone who would "bring chills to everyone watching" ... and now it can be told: Welcome home, Billy Buckner!

When will we be able to download The Trainwreck in a nano-second or so?

Good thought but the dissolution of the partnership took place later in 2007 and I don't think Jim is too interested in trying to open that can of worms again. Plus these are the work stations of other brokers, not the two dishonest partners, so I doubt there would be anything useful. It was pretty obvious though that the two Latinos were always going to outvote, and screw over as much as possible, the sole Anglo.

thanks a lot. After going through the FAQs a bit I think I've figured out how to burn the image and get the PC to boot from the disc drive. I'll let you know if it works.

She doesn't have any of the discs that came with the computers. Like I said, its a long story, suffice to say that fifteen months ago, her partner was partner with two other guys in this mortgage broker business (at that point she was just a broker). They were screwing him left and right, making him pay a disproportionate share of expenses, and when it became apparent that they were getting ready to really screw him, we went and rented a truck one weekend and grabbed everything that Jim had paid for himself, plus office equipment equivalent to what he was owed on the partnership agreement. But they didn't think about needing the discs for the PCs.

How 'bout this one:

Long story short, my wife is setting up her new office. About a year ago, a dispute with their former partners let to a settlement that included possession of several work stations with XP Pro installed on them. She'd like to set up the work stations so that part-time employees have a spot they can do their work on as needed, the problem is that no one knows the original user accounts or admin account that were set up on each station. So - is there anyway to override this "security" problem? Is there a default account name/password she could use to get into these machines? Thanks in advance.

:party:

Blindman Blues has a nice subforum called "Come and Meet The Gang". Maybe we should start something similar so folks like Denis can have a specific place to introduce themselves ... we would of course have to make sure Chuck doesn't know about it. Not sure how many new members would stick around if he was part of the Welcome Wagon.

Unbelievable that even now, you can only bring yourself to say that your belief that the picture is doctored is "probably wrong". Let's run it down: four out of six initial posts were negative. Conrad posted an image of Heston at a Civil Rights rally to counteract the stated opinions that he was an evil warmonger. You immediately declared the picture a poor photoshop job. Immediately thereafter 7/4 established beyond any doubt that the picture was legitimate. Now, if you knew that Heston was an early supporter of the civil rights movement, why was your immediate reaction to cast doubts on the validity of the photo? Why cast doubts on it at all? If you knew he was a civil rights supporter, you'd know that as one of the biggest movie stars of the age, there would be plenty of photographs of him at civil rights marches and events. No, you chose to declare that the photo was fake. And the problem that you can't get passed is that people like Mark, who are inclined to agree with you when it comes to whether most Republicans are evil, saw your post exactly the same way that I did. But you are blameless Chris. Always blameless.

They want to promote MLB there.

Keep paddling, Chris. But don't forget to read the posts before Conrad stepped in to say something positive about Heston, and what your response was. Moose understood it and agrees with me and Lord knows that doesn't happen very often. Its just as telling when you never came back to even simply post "I stand corrected" let alone, "I stand corrected and certainly wasn't trying to imply that Heston didn't offer his support for Civil Rights, it was one of the few things I respected him for". Its your inability to acknowledge that you are wrong that made me post today. Something that you do considerable frequency, and when you get called on it, the people who are troubled by it are always the wrong parties. Never you. Always them.

The A's have little to complain about. They were back in their own beds within a day of the Tokyo games, with a nice little homestand. Its the Red Sox who got screwed with the 15000+ mile road trip, getting to their own beds in Boston only yesterday, ten days after the A's. Having made that Tokyo flight myself, the transition going over is a breeze. You sleep on the plane, wake up, a few hours later arrive in Tokyo late afternoon, eat a light dinner, sleep again, get up early the next day and you're good to go. The way back, for some reason, is an absolute killer. Took me about a week to recover. I think it depends on when you leave and when you are going to arrive. The Red Sox team physician was advising that all players not sleep on the plane going over at all costs. They left from Fort Myers around 6 pm, arrived Chicago around 10:00pm and were in Tokyo and going through Customs around 11 PM local time. So the idea was to not sleep going over to maximize exhaustion so that the players would theoretically collapse into bed for a long night's sleep, right on time with the local time. Some people had trouble because they slept during the flight; other people had trouble because of a tendency to stay indoors, at the hotel or at the Tokyo Dome - daylight having the biggest impact on setting and re-setting the circadian clock. Not sure about the return but I could understand how it would screw things up because they left around midnight local time and reached L.A. in 12 hours, but local time was like 6 pm. So if you slept on the plane, you're screwed up again.