In preparation for tonight… an oldie from The Onion (reprinted here). Prepare for humiliation. It shall be upon you at the designated hour.

According to the Dirt Dogs, looks like it was a Pirates hat!

Curt can you explain to the folks your Pittsburgh sports history ties for the panicky Nation? And were you a Willie Stargell or Dave Parker guy?

CS: “My father was born and raised in Somerset, Pa. I was raised a Steeler and Pirate fan. My first and only ML game as a fan was Clemente’s last game in 1971. Definitely a Stargell guy.”

Ditto on Willie Stargell!

One more game to go! Der Soxenhoffers just won 4-1!

From Slate:

Want to know something funny about Taxachusetts? For every dollar it pays Uncle Sam in taxes, it receives only 79 cents back in federal services and subsidies. That ranks it 44th among the 50 states in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes. Indeed, there’s a very strong correlation between liberal, pro-government “blue states” and states that are least dependent on federal spending. There’s also a strong correlation between conservative, anti-government “red states” and states that are most dependent on federal spending. (Click here for details.) If you think of Red America as stubbornly self-reliant and Blue America as a drain on the Treasury, you’ve got it exactly backward.

The author also says “I don’t begrudge the South and the West their many military bases and national parks…” Maybe we don’t have any military installations on a huge scale, but we do have Hanscom Air Force Base, and numerous defense contractors, a club that iRobot of Roomba fame just joined. And MIT’s nickname could be “The House that DARPA Built” (MIT’s financials here; note that big 26.7% of revenue coming from Lincoln Labs, for starters).

NYT covers a Physics World poll on physicists favorite equations. “1+1=2″ makes a respectable showing.

Wow. Here’s a blast from the past. I stumbled into Google Groups from my Gmail account, and decided to see if I had made any Usenet posts in the past that could come back to haunt me if I ever run for office. The two posts for apartments are pretty innocuous. But then there’s this post from someone named Maggie, who ran the Squeezeboxes on the Silver Screen site, and who, if I recall correctly, was in a band called Polkacide.

Such a flashback to the pre-dot-com web, where a stuff like “a list of all the appearances of accordions in movies” was super cool, where people felt compelled to help out and send in additions to the list. And such a flashback to my hardcore accordion days! I forgot how into it I was.

The other funny thing here is that one of the sightings I sent in was about Fargo, which was on UPN today, and which Terri and I watched. I was wondering how they were going to show it on UPN with all the violence. They had no problem showing Steve Buscemi getting shot in the face, bleed profusely, get killed by an axe, and have his body shoved into a woodchipper. But don’t let the kids hear the F-word. (”Drop that f-ruitful bag!”)

Is that a Pirates hat??! The Fox interviewer is talking to him and he has a gold cap with a black P in the center. It also looks sort of like the thing in the center of the P might be the Steeler’s logo. What’s with that?

Speaking of Curt, I missed him delivering the top 10 list on Letterman.

Hooray!

…is now singing “God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch; they announced her as “Boston’s own”. Who knew?!?!

[it’s currently 6-1, Boston]

Should have found this last week, but better late than never. The Smoking Gun has this bit on crimes and misdemeanors from Yankees past and present. [Current score (world series, game 2): 2-1 Boston, 4th inning. Like to see Bill Mueller do something right now…]

From Wired News: “At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding ’suburbs’ and outlying farmlands. It was the region’s capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science.”

The Fox Sports drinking game. I’ve been listening to WEEI while watching Fox. They’ve been pretty good about synchronizing the sound, and it’s obvious that Jerry and Joe have the Fox video feed going somewhere in their booth, because they’ll occasionally comment on some non-game thing that Fox is showing.

Looks like the Globe Sunday Magazine again didn’t do the funky sock feature that Terri was supposed to be in…

From the Des Moines Register: “Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what’s to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals’ lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms.”