From the Herald Sun:

Offering a new and much more literal measuring stick for the corporate glass ceiling, a University of Florida study says tall people earn better pay than short people. Each inch, the report said, adds $783 a year to someone’s income.

The study, released this week, concluded height matters more in determining income than gender. Tall people beat short people on job evaluations and even fare better on seemingly objective measures, like sales performance.

Researchers say the advantages probably come from an inclination to respect tall people and to view them as successful.

Apparently, people look up to people they have to look up to.

What was it Randy Newman said? “Short people got no reason to live.”

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.”

– Bart Giamatti, from The Green Fields of the Mind (thanks to Michael J. Madison and many others who saw fit to quote this)

Or my buddy Jim Belshaw:

Baseball is finished for the year, but the World Series is just starting. It is the Bambino’s Paradox, the Goat’s Conundrum. Very strange.

No Cubs. No Red Sox. No curses. No gauzy sentimental TV moments. No identification with futility, because like the Cubs and Red Sox, most of us know futility too well. Tragedy sticks to our ribs long after comedy has come and gone.

Jim is a fan of the Chicago White Sox, and loves to repeat this quote, from Jean Shepherd:

If I was ever ordered to storm a pillbox, going to shear, sudden, and utterly certain death, and told to pick my platoon, I would pick White Sox fans. I would pick Sox Fans because they have known death every day of their lives–and it holds no terror for them anymore.

The Sox haven’t won since 1917. Jim is a Sox fan.

The folks at eBay pulled the auction of an “modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts”. Methinks Saskboy’s new technology is hitting a little too close to home, eh? The auction seems to be back up, but I’m suspicious.

“Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”

– Rush LImbaugh

Pepys’ description of church today was a picture:

To White Hall chappell, where one Dr. Crofts made an indifferent sermon, and after it an anthem, ill sung, which made the King laugh.

Gotta love the New York Post: Fenway Punk was their cover headline, above a picture of a young and trim Pedro Martinez standing over – well, let’s let the Post describe the scene for you as Zimmer lumbered out of the Yankee dugout headed in poor helpless Pedro’s direction:

The lovable, roly-poly Zimmer headed directly for Martinez, awkwardly lunging for the hurler. Martinez sidestepped Zimmer,
grabbed him by the head with both hands and tossed him to the ground like a rag doll.

“I was just trying to dodge him and push him away, and too bad his body fell,” Martinez insisted afterwards.

Too bad indeed, Pedro.