1) Last Saturday I verified that I had never gotten drunk in my life before last Saturday. I had been buzzed before and drunk into sleepiness, but not to the point of having large gaps in my memory, etc. On this occasion there were a large number of shots of Thor's Hammer vodka with Harps chasers in rapid succession. It turns out I'm a rather paranoid drunk. Most of the night, objectively reported, would probably be pretty boring, as they tell me I spent most of the time apologizing to everyone for being drunk. Julie has recommended that I report the stuff I can remember doing.

a) Everyone enjoyed it when I started ranting about John 1:1-18 or however long it goes. I was like "the Word was with God, and through the Word God made all things. God didn't make the world! Jesus did!"

b) Everyone did not enjoy it when I stole a cell phone and called my parents. There was an ostensible good reason for this (my Dad always wants to come down and go to church with me, because that's what he's into, and I wanted to specify that I would not be able to make it), but the content of the phone call wound up being, "I'm okay? Alright? Do you hear me? Don't call the police." Then I hung up. Like one minute later I called back. "Don't call the police!"

c) I don't know where my belt and Guiness t-shirt are. I am positive I threw the t-shirt out the window, and think I think the belt went there, too. Eventually I wound up cradling my laptop in my arms, trying to give it to a guy named Eric, urging him to hide it from me so I wouldn't throw it out the window. "It costs a thousand dollars!" I said about seven billion times, until once right before he took it I remembered that in fact it had cost me more and yelled "It costs one thousand *five hundred* dollars!"

d) There was a fourth-story balcony, and perhaps due to the throwing-stuff-out-the-window thing I was really worried that someone would be drunk enough to throw themselves off the balcony. At one point I was crawling on the balcony (to keep myself from throwing myself off the balcony) trying to push everyone else back inside, begging them to get off the balcony.

e)
BEN: What the hell is that? (Indicates computer monitor showing Alyx Vance, Gordon Freeman's female sidekick in _Half-Life 2: Episode One_, in a fixed position, which it has seemed to be doing for anywhere from 15 minutes to five hours)
DAN: Oh. Episode One loaded, but it froze.
BEN: So *that*'s why it's been showing nothing but Alyx Vance forever!
DAN: Yeah.
BEN: *I'd* fuck Alyx Vance.
DAN: Okay, Ben.
BEN: She's hot.
DAN: Okay, Ben; that's great.
BEN: You *know* it.
DAN: [snickering uncontrollably]

f) Something about how "This country deserves everything that is going to happen to it" and how Thomas Jefferson would vomit if he saw modern juries.

2) I'm finally going to by my damn self a cell phone. Any advice about what company to use?

Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8279259653476560763&q=look+around+you+sulphur&pl=true

These BBC "Look Around You" parodies have recently been brought to my attention. I thought that the Actual Scientist Audience of the blog might like these more than other people, because the experimental procedure is invariably the best part.

These two, the best in my opinion, may be of special interest to our materials scientist. The link in the title deals with sulphur, and the link following this sentence deals with iron. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5867126092237181778&q=look+around+you+iron&pl=true)

Hey, if Beni can do law school related inquiries here, I can do them too! Dan, Victor, Paul: based on the fact that I know you at least kind of okay and lived with you for a year, I was wondering if you would mind me listing any of you as character references on my bar exam application. If it's alright please drop me a line with your current address and phone number at *jwimmer@uchicago.edu. (You know what the letter is. Hopefully that will fool like some internet email address-finding thing.) You may get a call from some creepy dude.

So I wasn't really aware in a moral sense of Google Video Beta until like twenty hours ago, when I first started intermittently poring through the Portal of Evil TV Archives (poetv.com). This location offers the usual sort of internet fare: man in a banana suit sets self on fire, "Garbage Day." (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=744 and http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=600, respectively.)

But there are also a couple of images on the search engine that are, instead of being just straight awesome, kind of intriguing. Mostly for me so far it's been this kind of uncontextualized footage from Iraq. I have no idea how Google looks for this stuff or how it winds up on there.

I remember once during the initial invasion being up at around 2 am on a Sunday in the grad dorm, watching what I think was CNN, but with no anchor. "This is video captured by troops as they entered a power station," a title card said, and then there were two minutes or so of perfectly silent, green-tinted (starlight scope) footage of U.S. (I assumed?) soldiers as they entered several spartan rooms, rifles ready. There was a very vertiginous sense that I seriously had no idea what was going on in Iraq in a bare, factual sense, let alone that I might ever understand it.

I know it's wrong to think that I'm somehow getting a raw, neutral, un-ideological access to the war when I get images like these, and that weird anonymous delivery and lack of context conditions my response as much as anything else. But sometimes I can't help but feel like there's some sort of revelation waiting to be had. Take this son of a bitch: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=718810364944597762&q=car+bomb
I don't even know if it's in Iraq; I guess it might be. But listen to the utter fatigue in those voices! The troop rotation issue seems a bit more real, even if these guys are just civilians. "Let's go. Could be another one."

So like, does anyone else here play around on Google Video?

Link: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=251012104

Okay, normally I wouldn't think to discuss here some baseball game I went to, but this one was a tad unusual, so I thought you might appreciate some kind of insider perspective on what the situation was at the ballpark. The short version is that both teams played a really rotten game behind excellent starting pitching, and finally the White Sox won by scoring a run in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. The trick is, here's how it happened. With two outs, Sox catcher AJ Pierzynski struck out on a ball real, real low. Angels catcher Josh Paul caught the ball, and then rolled it toward the pitcher's mound. Meanwhile, Pierzynski takes off for first base, hoping that Paul dropped the third strike. When he was on first, the plate umpire called him safe. Right after that, the White Sox put in a pinch runner, pinch runner steals second, and the next batter knocks him in on an 0-2 pitch. The ESPN story is linked to above.

Now, no one disputes anymore that this was a rotten call from the ump. As a matter of fact, everyone at the Cell hated him. I was in the center field bleachers, and by the sixth the entire section was enraged with pretty much the entire crew. I tried to label the plate Heisenberg because he had a strike zone that could only be described probabalistically. Physicists posting here please forgive me for butchering stuff there. At any rate the fans seemed to perfer "shit," as in, "YOU'RE WORTHLESS, BLUE! YOU'RE DOGSHIT!"

Unfortunately, it was rotten in more than one respect, because this ump came off as totally indecisive and unsure of himself. He made a balled fist motion at the plate which is totally supposed to indicate that someone is out, and then instead of just standing on his call of safe at first he had to consult with everyone on earth and have a four minute delay on the field, and THEN, worst of all, he had to agree to go on TV after the fact and try to explain himself, including discussing video replays he had since seen which were he was forbidden to view on the field and which could not have influenced his decision in the first place. I half expected him to somehow give permission for the Angels to take it downtown with an emergency appeal to the Seventh Circuit.

They call this thing "selling the call." When the ump makes a call that is close or questionable, he's supposed to make it forcefully and brook no controversy. (E.g., you know how when someone makes an important strike out a good umpire always goes all crazy behind the plate, pumping his fist and whatnot like he is the next karate kid? That.) This makes it easier for fans to accept the fact that a lot of close calls are just too much for unaided human perception and as likely to be wrong as right. One of my profs has compared this to the jury in American civil law. Obvious civil cases can be decided on summary judgment by the judge, who gets pretty deferential appellate review on her factual determinations, but when a case is close enough it goes to the jury, which gets overturned on its factual determinations only if there's no way in hell that anyone could reasonably have come up with that result. The jury is the judicial system pumping its fist like a maniac.

Meanwhile, this bozo goes out there and he's looking like he's calling people out, he's calling people safe, he's going on Oprah about how hard it be an umpire, blah blah, he's worthless, he's dogshit.

The worst of this now, for a White Sox fan, is that this rotten umpiring job, this basic inability to get the job done, has seemed to play off against the Sox in some areas of the press. Some have come off as basically accusing the White Sox of cheating. I can forgive this coming from the Angels fans, whose official website board is filled with bizarro conspiracy theories, including the fact that Josh Paul used to play for the White Sox, who had somehow influenced him to botch the play by not tagging Pierzynski, which is a standard move for a, you know, professional catcher when there's a third strike near the dirt. They're upset. Fine.

But professional columnists, not in Los Angeles? I can't see a certain entire column in the Boston Herald, but I would like to, because I like to be thrown into a rage. Mr. Howard Bryant has entitled his article "Something stinks: Chicago's win polluted," and begins it with the available-to-the-entire-net paragraph, "In the city that invented corruption, or at the very least perfected it, the Chicago White Sox live and breathe again. So what if the South Side air was polluted last night." This infuriates me. Baseball teams are the beneficiaries of questionable calls all the time. At minimum, he seems to be suggesting that the White Sox had a duty to insist that Pierzynski was out and that the Angels had just ended their inning, and that if they don't they somehow don't care about the integrity of the game. What crap! And "the city that invented corruption"? What, did the Sox pay the umpire now? Is the umpire getting kickbacks from the World Series revenue? What the hell is he trying to say? Not even the L.A. Times coverage was that nuts--hell, it was pretty balanced, with most of the ire going towards the plate ump's wierd "I Can't Believe It's Not The Third Out! (TM)" fist motion behind the plate and towards Paul's failure to put the tag on Pierzynski.

I don't even like this talk that the call has cast a shadow over the series. Bad calls happen. With this particular crew, they happen a lot, and they had been happening all night. That's it, end of story.

I do appreciate what I think may be a very straight-faced bit of satire from the Red Sox Nation's humorous headline site, bostondirtdogs.com. After starting out with "It's Another Black Sox Scandal" and "Angels Robbed in South Side Hustle," they then proceed to add "Chump Umps in Chicago Throw Away the 2005 American League Championship Series," and then, with delightful excess, "Umps Don't Call an Out an Out in 2-1 Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham."

I don't travel much; I'm a stay-at-home kind of guy. So when I went to see a friend I've known since grade school at his current residence in Edinburgh last week, it was my first time flying on an airplane unaccompanied. Perhaps more frequent flyers than I know how to make the airline get my luggage there on time? British Airways screwed it up going both ways. On the return flight I understood, because the guy who bought me the tickets only left one hour on the ground at Heathrow for me to get to a connecting flight and the flight from Edinburgh was 45 minutes late. The throwers (citing _Fight Club_) aren't paid to run like I did. But on the way over the flight *out of Chicago* was four hours late, the new connection they set up for me was leisurely, and they still lost the bag. No airline has ever lost my luggage before this. What's the deal here?