Look, I hate the Yankees as much as anyone else. Except, that is, Red Sox fans. Now, I agree that they have every right to hate the Yankees more than I do. What I have a problem with, however, is when their blind hatred makes them irrational. Which, sadly, is all too often. For instance, last week, a couple of Red Sox fans were completely enamored with the fact that they beat the Yankees in a close game. This left them 2.5 games behind the Yankees. Which might indeed be a big deal, except that they already had the wild card basically sewn up at that point, so who really cares whether they win the division or not? The reality is that they never really had that much of a chance to win their division anyway. But listen to a Red Sox fan for a fraction of a second and all you hear about is how the Red Sox are this close to catching the Yankees. Instead, they should acknowledge that their hopes lie in Pedro and Schilling, and turn their attention to the other exciting races happening in the rest of baseball, namely in the American League west and the National League wild card. But if you ask them, the rest of baseball doesn't seem to exist.
Now, as for Yankee fans. I guess I don't have so much of a problem with them. I mean hey, you grow up in or near New York, I can understand that. By the way, another irriitating thing about Red Sox fans is when they cry about the Yankees huge salary. Well guess who's at number two, and not really that far behind the Yankees? Yep, bloody hypocrits.
Major League Baseball is supposedly about to announce the move of the Expos franchise in Montreal to Washington D.C., where they will become the third incarnation of the Washington Senators. In principle, I think it's a sound idea, since baseball is doing horribly in Montreal, and a team in D.C. could draw on the market in Maryland and Virginia to support itself.
However, there are still major questions that need to be resolved regarding the ballpark where the Senators would play. I read an article at Baseball Prospectus discussing this very issue. It's a fairly long article, so I'll try to summarize it. Basically, the current plan is to pay off the $440 million bond over a span of 30 years at about $40 million per year. Supposedly, the plan is to break down the payments into about 15% owner, 30% in-stadium taxes on tickets, concessions, etc., and 55% tax surcharge on large D.C businesses.
BUT, the owners can pay off a significant amount of their portion by selling naming-rights. For instance, Houston managed to get Enron to pay $6 million a year! So, there's a big deception there.
Second, (and I'm not totally clear on this point) in-stadium taxes are problematic because the assumption is that without a stadium, baseball fans would save their disposable income instead of use it. Which doesn't make sense, because people will spend their money on something, it's a matter of what.
The most important issue is probably the large business tax. The problem is that after one tax raise gets passed, it takes a few years before it's ok to pass another one. And if you decide to blow a bunch of money on a ballpark, you won't be getting money to spend on other things like schools in the next few years. Also, in the past people have used revenue from state-sponsored gambling, which tends to have significant negative effects on low income citizens (who I guess are most prone to gamble?). Here though, you run into the same problem: if you use potential funding through gambling, you run the risk of drying up the gambling market for future projects requiring money (like, say, schools). They really describe this point better in the article.
The thing I'm wondering about this, is the article doesn't seem to differentiate between "large-business tax" and simply "tax". Maybe the big business guys will go for a stadium (increase local revenue or something?) but they won't go for new schools?
Finally, it seems like there is some risk in budgeting, i.e. they haven't budgeted enough money for cost overruns. However, I think those details could be worked out along the way. Also, I think the Expos franchise would benefit from a move. So I'm hoping it happens.
A busy weekend...
On Friday, I turned 23. Special thanks to all those who remembered it and wished me well.
Also on Friday, I flew back to San Jose to visit Tiffany and my family. It was very good to be with Tiffany again and to see my family once again.
Saturday, I went to OSH with Tiffany and my Mom and bought a couple of houseplants that are now making my room a much nicer place to be. Carrying them on the plane trips was a bit tricky, but I managed.
Saturday night, after going out to dinner with my parents and sister at a nice restaurant called Eulipia's, Tiffany and I drove up to San Francisco to hang out at a party hosted by a friend of ours from our Stebbins days. I had a good time and was glad to see her again.
On Sunday, Tiff and I drove back down to San Jose, where we met up with Tiffany's sister Jayme. The two Bartz's then went off roller-blading around town. A lazy Sunday night was completed with apple pie and ice cream.
And today, I flew back to Tucson. So, about one full day of travel and three days in the bay area. It was a good trip and things are going well. Hopefully I'll be able to play racquetball tomorrow.
Thursday morning class got rescheduled to Friday afternoon, so I was able to hang out at the house of one of the other grad students at Steward as part of the weekly "Cigar and Bloody Mary Night", an event which includes neither cigars nor bloody marys. Instead, it involves a bunch of grad students sitting around and drinking beer.
Tonight, we had the pleasure of having a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to drink, but in the unique container of a bottle (normally, Pabst Blue is found only in cans because it is such a shitty beer). People were commenting on how uncommonly good it tasted in a bottle, so I suggested that we tear off the label of one bottle and give it to an unsuspecting victim to see what they thought of it.
One of my cohorts agreed, taking the label off one of the bottles and handing it off to someone else, describing it only as a special "micro brew" beer. He called it by the name of "Pon Blue Road" and remarked that it was given the "Best Beer Award" in 1993 by the American Beer Drinkers Association.
And the poor unsuspecting guy bought the whole thing, somehow. He actually said it was a good tasting beer. I guess you could call that a form of brainwashing.
Evidently, four square is a popular game among grad students in Astronomy. A number of students here at Steward like to play (although we're currently playing with a tennis ball instead of a four square ball), students at Berkeley played (pretty intensely I might add), and I've heard that students at Hawaii play too. And who knows about other institutions. Now, four square is a game that's fairly popular among the elementary school crowd, and since great minds think alike, I'd say it's reasonable to conclude that we grad students have mental capacities on the level of your average elementary school student. Yeah!
Furniture I would like added to my room: a desk and chair for reading and writing; tall bookshelf; dresser; perhaps, a "comfy" chair (comfy chair! comfy chair!?! comfy chair? comfy chair!!); sturdy wood bedframe; firm foam mattress. Of these, a dresser is the item of most immediate need. I've gone shopping at thrift stores a couple of times without any luck. I might decide to hang on until the next "moving out of Tucson" sale by a departing former grad student. Or I might not. We'll see.
Temperatures in Tucson dropped like a rock today! I'd say midday temperatures approached the 70s. However, things haven't really cooled off since sunset, so it'll probably be a short-lived respite from the heat.
In other news, I've spent most of tonight banging my head against my desk in a fruitless search for solutions to my plasma physics problem set.
Last night, giant thunderstorms rocked the greater Tucson area. In particular, at about 4:30am, lightning bolts struck precariously close to a certain home in Tucson rented by two certain astronomers-to-be. In fact, they fell so close that one of them was rudely and abruptly awakened from a deep slumber. Except that it couldn't have been that abrupt, because when I first woke up, I thought my bedroom was a big tent that had a gigantic metal pole rising from the center of the room towards the sky. Which scared the shit out of me, since a thunderous storm was taking place just outside. Eventually, I became fully awake and realized what was going on. I still felt unnerved though. And the storm got worse before it got better too, so it took me awhile to fall back asleep. Good old Arizona monsoon season.
Books on my to-get list: Harry Potter and Racquetball.
I'm travelling to the SMT (Sub-Millimeter Telescope) up on Mt. Graham--about a three hour drive from Tucson--today. The occasion is the training of the two "winterovers", the people who stay at the South Pole during the Austral winter to run the telescope and ensure that everything runs properly. Apparently, the instruments at the SMT are very similar to what they'll be operating at the South Pole, so by learning this stuff they will hopefully be prepared when it's time to go down south. My purpose in going is to tag along and be useless, which I'm very good at, thankfully. We'll only be there for one night, so I'll be back by Friday evening, but it should be a very cool trip nonetheless. Naturally, I'll have my camera long.
Just a little bit more about winterovers: It seems to me to be a crazy thing. I mean, six months without any sunlight whatsoever? In extremely harsh conditions that force you to remain indoors at all times? One positive is that you make somewhere between 75k-100k doing it (with virtually no expenses, I believe), but you have to stay for the Austral summer as well, so you end up spending 13 consecutive months on the Antarctic continent. That's over a year of your life, gone. Down the tubes. Yikes.
As far as qualifications go, I think it's more engineering types that they look for, since you have to be able to repair things if they break, make adjustments to the system as needed, etc. But you also have to be able to pass a physical and psychological exam. Supposedly, in the past, people have failed the physical (which actually causes a lot of problems for the people in charge of the instrument, as they desperately need to find a replacement in a short amount of time), but I've heard that the only challenge to passing the psychological exam is answering the seven hundred plus questions without going insane.
I went to my first ever political rally today. Although it was an exciting event, I was a little disappointed because I had been expecting a speech from Edwards outlining a concrete plan of how to direct America. Instead, it was more of a "pump up people that really don't need to be pumped up" type of affair. I mean, let's face it, anyone attending the rally is probably already going to vote democrat anyway. I guess the idea is to mobilize those who attended into convincing their friends and families to vote democrat too. Well, for me, that's pretty much already going to happen. Maybe I need more conservative friends?
I spent the weekend sailing at Lake Roosevelt near Phoenix. I went with Eric (my roommate) and a couple of older grad students (Jane and Andrea) from the astro department. Eric and I drove up there Saturday morning and met Jane and Andrea around 11:30am. We helped them set up the sailboat and set off just after noon. It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately the wind was not very strong until just around sunset, so we didn't do much high speed sailing.
The most interesting thing that happened was right around sunset, when the wind finally picked up, ableit briefly. Another, faster sailboat, decided to get a little too aggressive and ended up capsizing. The two people on board were fine, but didn't have enough weight to tip the boat back upright. So I was ordered to jump overboard and swim over to help them (with my vast girth). It was exciting to help them tip it, although it was also a bit scary when the boat was actually tipping, because it would have been easy to be in the wrong place and get hit by the hull as it tipped back over. But I managed to dodge it and stay in once piece.
Camping ensued on Saturday night, which would have been fine if my roommate didn't snore in the form of a quiet chainsaw mixed with Vader-esque breath patterns (Darn you Eric!). Then we went for a short sailing venture Sunday morning but were ultimately stopped again by the non-existent wind.
So in sum, it was fun but I hope next time there will be more wind (maybe we'll be the ones capsizing!).
I just checked Arizona's State gun laws, and it looks like there is "No state restriction on the sale or possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons like the AK47 and Uzi." Moreover, "Assault weapons are as easy to buy as hunting rifles." Without federal protection, I am definitely scared...
Apparently, a 10 year old federal ban on assault weapons is about to be lifted. This means that, barring state or local restrictions, the sale of these weapons (that are designed specifically for killing large quantities of humans) will no longer be prohibited. This is particularly frightening to me. What if that crazy idiot at the bar a couple of weeks ago had an AK-47?
The way that Bush is involved that pisses me off is that he knows most Americans are opposed to lifting this ban. In fact, part of his campaign for election four years ago was that he would push for renewal of this ban. And now, his stance is only that he'll sign the bill if it's put on his desk. And of course, the Republicans in congress will only create the bill if they're pushed to do so by the President. So, the result is a wonderful little web of idiocy whereby the NRA gets what it wants, Bush and the Republican congressmen shirk their responsibility of representing the citizens, and we suffer from who knows how many more mass murders as a result of people owning guns they shouldn't own.
My source for most of this information.
Andy Roddick just lost to Johan Johansson (or something like that). I couldn't believe it. I started watching at the end of the second set. Roddick lost that set to be down 2-0. Then he went on a tear and easily won the next two sets. I figured he would easily roll through the fifth set. But tennis is weird, because all of a sudden he just wasn't as good. And then he was serving at 4-5 to stay in the match, and he couldn't do anything. He quickly got down 0-40 and it looked all over. Then he won the next two points and he had my hopes up again. And then he lost. AARGH!!
I have recently noticed that my glasses are not very clear. The problem is that the lenses are scratched and dirty, and they obscure part of what I should be seeing. It's irritating when I'm looking at things up close. In fact, most of the time I don't wear my glasses when I'm looking at stuff less than two feet away. It's particularly bad for soldering, where fitting the pins in the connectors requires as clear vision as possible.
Maybe I should get new glasses? Hah! That would require spending money. No way jose.
I hate TV. Most of the time, that is. This past Saturday morning was an exception, as I simultaneously watched Cal beat up on Air Force, the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and professional poker players on the World Poker Tour. By constant use of the remote, my extremely short attention span (for TV) was satiatied and I wasn't forced to watch too many commercials or any other form of "downtime".
Unfortunately, what is far more common is the situation where there is one show on that is vaguely interesting to me and I get sucked in to watch it, even if I went in swearing to myself I wouldn't spend more than such and such time doing so. This is particularly bad around the time I'm going to bed, as it basically just means less sleep.
Frankly, watching TV amounts to wasting time. Unless you manage to find several interesting programs to watch at once, you're going to have to put up with ads and other forms of irritation that you are spoonfed. But even you do find a bunch of programs to watch, it's hard to keep up with all of them, so you tend to miss out a little on each one.
So, am I glad I have a TV with cable in my home? Yes, because the stuff I got to watch on Saturday was quite nice. And it's a decent way to pass the time while eating dinner. I just have to do a better job of controlling my destiny.
Today, the Deutsche Bank Championship ended with Vijay Singh fighting off a late charge by Tiger Woods. What is interesting about this is that it means Tiger is no longer the king of the golfing world, having relinquished that title to Mr. Singh. It must have been incredibly exciting to watch the end of that tournament, at least when Tiger was within a stroke of Vijay. Too bad I was soldering cables together in the lab at the time.
Also today, the reigning champion of the US Open tennis tournament, Justine Henin-Hardenne, lost before reaching the quarterfinals. While she has been injured this year and hasn't played too much, it was still a big upset. It means that she's going to lose her number one ranking, either to Lindsay Davenport or Amelie Mauresmo. I'm hoping the American Davenport gets it, but who knows.
And, since I know you were wondering, all my fantasy baseball teams suck. Next year!
I have uploaded a number of new (and old) picture galleries for your viewing pleasure.
The three main new galleries are of the place I'm renting from in Tucson, a hike on Mt. Lemmon, and pictures from the lab I'm working in now.
However, I've also uploaded some older galleries, including Where's Waldo and Bay shots, Space Sciences Lab and Bay shots, more SSL panoramic bay shots, my new car, and a random picture from San Jose as well as my new bike in Tucson.
I learned how to solder yesterday. Today I'm soldering a wire to two connectors to form a cable that will transmit information from the detectors of the instrument that I'm working on to another part of the instrument. There are nine pins on each connector, and each one needs a wire soldered onto it. Since we need four total cables, that means I have to solder 72 pins. And, since I currently suck at soldering, it takes awhile. Although it's not what I would call the most thrilling work I've ever done, learning to solder is a good thing to do so I'm reasonably happy with it. I took some pictures of what I'm working on, but who knows when I'll have time to post them.