Category: Internet

Early in the baseball season, I made some predictions:

AL West: A?s (winner: Hollywood Angels)

AL East: Orioles, Red Sox (winner: Evil Empire, Boston is the wild card)

AL Central: Twins (winner: Twins)

NL West: Giants (winner: Hollywood Dodgers)

NL East: Braves (winner: Braves)

NL Central: Cardinals, Cubs, Astros (winner: Cards, Astros are wild card)

That’s 3 out of 6, and one of the two wild cards as a second place finisher, although I didn’t explicitly identify wild card winners.

Matt Welch did better, getting 4 out of 6, but he cheats. I don’t pick the Yankees, Angels, or Dodgers to win anything because it’s not sporting. They have the highest payrolls in baseball, and they should obviously win so there is no honor in picking them. Ruling out the evil-doers, who were half of his correct picks, I beat Welch by a landslide, and I didn’t coddle the terrorists in the process.

UPDATE: See Scott Eiland’s post-season picks.

Here are mine:

DS:
Yankees over Twins
Sox over Angels

Cards over Dodgers
Astros over Braves

CS:
Yankees over Sox
Cards over Astros

WS:
Cards over Yankees

AL MVP
Doesn’t matter

NL MVP
Barry

AL Cy Young
Johan Santana

NL Cy Young
Randy Johnson

Mt. St. Helens just blew up about two minutes ago, sending up a nice plume of smoke. I’ll post a picture shortly.

UPDATE: Never mind. By the time I got my camera, the plume had disappeared. Looking at the mountain now it’s like nothing happened. This was probably just round 1, and we’ll see what follows.

UPDATE AGAIN: Here are some pictures taken by a helicopter flying overhead at the time of the eruption:

See a video here.

Experts explained the reason the volcano shut down so quickly: Native Americans in the area tossed a virgin into the crater as soon as she blew. As this was the last and only virgin in the State of Washingtin, we’re in for it if she blows again. You can thank Justice Scalia for the shortage of virgins, naturally.

When you step outside my office, Mt. St. Helens is directly in front of you. It’s covered with a nice dusting of snow since the rains we had last week. So I’m not real thrilled by this little piece of news:

Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, which warrants release of this Notice of Volcanic Unrest. The swarm of very small, shallow earthquakes (less than Magnitude 1) that began on the morning of 23 September peaked about mid-day on 24 September and slowly declined through yesterday morning. However, since then the character of the swarm has changed to include more than ten larger earthquakes (Magnitude 2-2.8), the most in a 24-hr period since the eruption of October 1986. In addition, some of the earthquakes are of a type that suggests the involvement of pressurized fluids (water and steam) or perhaps magma. The events are still occurring at shallow depths (less than one mile) below the lava dome that formed in the crater between 1980 and 1986.

The cause and outcome of the earthquake swarm are uncertain at this time. Several causes are possible, but most point toward an increased probability of explosions from the lava dome if the level of current unrest continues or escalates. During such explosions the dome and crater floor are at greatest risk from ballistic projectiles, but the rim of the crater and flanks of the volcano could also be at risk. Explosions would also be expected to produce ash clouds that drift downwind at altitudes up to several thousand feet above the crater rim. Landslides and debris flows from the crater that are large enough to reach the Pumice Plain are also possible. Such events occurred at Mount St. Helens between 1989 and 1991.

We continue to monitor the situation closely and will issue additional updates as warranted, whether activity escalates or returns to background levels.

Daily updates of earthquake data and other information can be found on the WORLD WIDE WEB at this URL and here.

UPDATE: 09/25/2004 9:30 AM PDT

Banning Daily Pundit for objectionable content is stupid. I never liked PayPal, so they can take a hike.

Team USA is out of the gold medal competition in basketball after losing to Argentina in the semi-finals. While the game featured more of the dubious officiating that’s marred the games, the main problem for Team USA was its lack of outside shooting and dominant inside play. These things were directly caused by the NBA pussies who refused to play in Athens, fearing terrorist attacks. I hope we don’t get a lot of whining from the morons who so far have distinguished themselves by their stupidity in blaming the heroes who did show up to play, terrorists be damned, but I know better.

The men who played on this team deserve standing ovations when the NBA season starts, and the pussies who were too afraid to show up deserve nothing but boos.

To Shaq, Kobe, Jermaine, Rip, Ben, Kevin, Jason, and the rest of the cowards who didn’t show up: a pox upon you and your houses. May your child support checks grow ever larger and the criminal charges against you more severe.

The Bleat:

The news today noted that the men arrested at the Albany mosque were fingered by some documents found at Al-Ansar sites in Iraq, of all places. Iraq! Imagine that.

But there’s no connection!!!

Check this post at Michael J. Totten about regular people in Fallujah taking down a pack of Al Qaeda terrorists and freeing their hostages.

We’ve turned the corner in Iraq, and we ain’t going back.

I like the sound of this.

Former co-contributor John Kowalski has his own blog now, so check it out. He’s putting out his Hollywood Buddhist spin on the Democrats’ convention, insisting that Carter’s labeling of Bush as a radical extremist insensitive to human rights isn’t “Bush-bashing.” If you say so, John.

But this raises an interesting point, one that’s been perplexing me for a few days now. The Democrats, particularly under Carter, used to be the party of human rights. If one were sincere about this cause, a dictator like Saddam who routinely gassed, tortured, raped, and murdered his people would be completely unacceptable, a point that’s been highlighted by principled men of the left who supported regime change in Iraq on humanitarian grounds. So why has the mainstream of the Democratic Party abandoned this historic commitment to the downtrodden in favor of a “more stuff for me” platform of free health care, higher salaries for union teachers, etc?

Taking cheap shots at the President for the relatively innocuous prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib while ignoring the horror that Saddam inflicted on his people strikes me as craven beyond belief, but that’s Jimmy Carter for you, and that’s why I hate what the Democratic Party has become.

Sharing this blog with my lefty colleague John Kowalski was an experiment that failed. Reading the same old tripe day after day bores me, and I don’t like feeling that I have to respond to personal attacks on my own blog. So I’ve revoked his posting privileges and will delete his messages in a few days, after he’s had the time to save anything that he wants.

I like the idea of debating an honest liberal on a day-to-day basis on-line, and hope that I can do that some day.