My New Favorite Ball Cap

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It’s hard to pick a good ball cap. I don’t wanna sound all touchyfreaky, but it’s like they pick you.

Durham Bulls

At any given time, I’ve always got a favorite ball cap, the one I want to grab when I go for a walk on a sunny day, or when my hair’s all bad hair day and I need to go out in public. The classic, which set the standard, was an old green cap from McPheely’s Tavern in Walla Walla. “Relax Freely at McPheely,” it said, and had an inscription in pen from Nietzsche (you know the one) under the bill. It was lost after a particularly memorable game of Ultimate, and all attempts to replace it came up short.

Most recently it’s a cap from the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Paul Cezanne’s signature as a logo. I was in need of a new ball cap, and the Cezanne called out at me from the museum gift shop: “Hey, if you’re gonna shill for someone with a logo cap, shill for someone good!”

The baseball fairy heard that in May, my path will cross that of the Durham Bulls, and bade me be properly prepared. The fairy also sent a program. You can’t tell the players without a program.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Any day you get to quote Charles Darwin is a good day indeed. (OK, I actually had to paraphrase, but still.)

Pity the poor Galapagos tortoise. An icon of evolution, he also apparently makes a nice dinner. When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos in 1835, he noted that tortoises differed from island to island. It was one of the key pieces of evidence that later shaped his ideas about evolution.

He also noted something that in hindsight looks particularly prescient: The islanders found some of the tortoises particularly tasty.

So while the Galapagos tortoise is an icon of scientific history, its numbers are dwindling as the human population in the Galapagos continues to grow.

Blogs as a Phenological Tool

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So I had this idea that I’d be able to look back through old blog posts and find out when the iris bloomed in our front yard each year, and that I’d be able to offer this slightly tongue-in-cheek riff on how bloggers writing about their gardens could create a sort of informal phenological network, as we documented in odd but useful detail the comings and goings of the things in our gardens.

iris
(L. Heineman photo)

Phenology is one of those things you think is already figured out – when things leaf out and flower, how natural systems respond on an annual cycle to the vagaries of climate. But, as I’ve written before, there’s not a whole lot of good data on this subject. So I’s thinkin’ I’d just look through my blog for posts about the first blooms in the big bed of purple iris in our front yard, and then run off a riff along the lines of, “Is there any problem bloggers can’t solve?” Only it turns out I’d been really bad about this, disorganized here just like in every area of my life. So I’ve no idea when the purple iris first bloomed. This year, it was April 19.

As my friend Annette used to say, “Expectations are a funny thing.”

National Precipitation

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David comments on how wet it’s been in Oregon, prompting me to find a national map:

national six-month SPI map

(From the Western Regional Climate Center’s excellent Standardized Precipitation Index page, where you can pick your starting point and the most useful way to display the data.)

Wet up north, dry down south. To first order, a classic La Nina winter, except that this is a pretty piss-poor La Nina – late to the party and no great shakes once she finally got here.

Notes from the Ballyard

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There is almost certainly some special place in purgatory reserved for me, but I was rooting in the 8th inning last night for Jason Bergman, the New Orleans Zephyrs relief pitcher, to hit our Mike Colangelo.

Scorecard segment

You can see from my scorecard that Zephyr starting pitcher Andrew Good was having a bit of trouble with Colangelo, plunking him in the first, second and fourth innings. I didn’t know for sure, but I figured it was reasonable that no one had ever been hit four times in a single Pacific Coast League game, and I love nothing more than to witness an obscure baseball record.

Such is a night at what Miguel lovingly calls “the lab,” home of the Albuquerque Isotopes, the only baseball club ever named after a fictitious team in a Simpsons episode. Such is Triple A ball.

Continue reading ‘Notes from the Ballyard’ »

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Just in from Ethiopia:

A team led by a Los Alamos scientist has emerged from the deserts of Ethiopia with new evidence for the evolution of our first upright-walking ancestor 4 million years ago.

The bones of Australopithecus anamensis capture a moment in pre-history when our ancestors were emerging from the woods on two legs, freeing up their hands for the evolutionary adventure that led to modern humans….

Scientists say that an evolutionary split in eastern Africa about 6 million years ago sent chimpanzees down one branch of our family tree and the hominids— our ancestors— down another.

In a couple of million years more, our ancestors had begun walking upright, freeing their hands and leading to a flurry of evolutionary change that included dexterous hands, large brains, and eventually space flight and the Survivor television franchise.

Last Freeze?

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I’d been meaning to look at this a while ago, because all climate change is ultimately local, but just got around to it today. The last time we had a freeze in Albuquerque was March 23, and it’s reasonable to think that’ll stand as the last freeze of spring. We won’t know for sure for a while – we’ve had freezes as late as May 27, but in recent years the average has been April 1. That’s two weeks earlier than the long term average. A number of things have changed that might explain the warmer overnight temperatures, including the increasing urbanization of Albuquerque and increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

And while we’re on the subject of the climatological spring of 2006 in Albuquerque, we’ve had 0.28 inches of rain since Nov. 1. The record driest Nov. – April (this is based on data back to 1914):

  1. 0.38 – 1939
  2. 0.58 – 1996
  3. 0.72 – 1947
  4. 0.80 – 1967
  5. 0.85 – 1925

I know of no particular explanation, except that we’ve got a weak La Nina and shit happens, but there’s two weeks left, and I’m a-dancin’.

Desert Island Funk

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Back in the day, we used to haunt the cutout bin in the record store at the mall in Walla Walla. One of us, I don’t remember who, picked up an album by Funkadelic because someone said they had some wicked guitar music. (I don’t think they actually said “wicked,” but you get the idea.) It was a pretty great album, but it didn’t really fit into my music life, and it was only lately I realized – hey, wait, I like funk.

Back when I was a kid listening to Top 40, there was Curtis Mayfield. Then there’s the obligatory funk song on each of Bonnie Raitt’s albums, and some vaguely funky Steely Dan backbeats that I always liked. But I’m slow on the uptake, so I didn’t quite get it until I stumbled into a live performance of the Felonious Groove Foundation (go buy Paper Tiger please) and thought – hey, wait, I like funk.

Thing is, I don’t know anything about it, so consider this a lazyweb request. What’s your favorite funk?