The Sox. The Pennant.

Sports history, folks. Next stop: World Series. Hopefully the shambolic Sox will hold it together long enough to make that sports history too. If you want to see what coverage of sports history looks like, check out the Boston Globe’s online report. I swear to God, I’ve never seen a game covered from more angles, more reporters, or with more adjectives. (More coverage: here, here, here, and here.

Oh, and less-confidential to David Ellis: enough, already. Let us have our celebration.

QTN™: Brasserie Duyck, Jenlain Bière de Garde

Yep, the French make beer—highly complex and distinctive beer. I don’t think your average Pabst or Bud drinker would denote this fabulous bière de garde as a beer, but it’s accessible to anyone who’s enjoyed Belgian beers. Michael Jackson notes that Duyck’s Jenlain uses pan-European hops (Alsace, Flanders, Germany, Slovenia) and that it’s 6.5% ABV; he doesn’t note the surprising sweetness that greets you on the first sip. The sweetness is matched by the complexity of the nose, which is equal parts orange peel, bready yeast, and caramel, and by the lengthy finish with lingering citrus and spice notes. Not an everyday beer, but then what is?

Hell Night at the East Coast Grill

I entered the East Coast Grill in Inman Square last night just as the Phantom Gourmet was leaving (you could tell it was him because a van with his logo was parked at the curb). At the door: a dish holding round candies that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be Tums. The occasion: Hell Night, a night where everything on the menu, including drinks, has a higher capsicum per cc count than should be legal.

The instigator: my friend Niall, who reported he had wanted to go to one of these since we got to grad school four years ago but always managed to miss it. From this morning, I wonder if he still feels the same way this morning.

As things go, you could still have a good, though spicy, meal at this thing. I got the obligatory insane hot thing out of the way early with a “Hurler from Hell” (an oyster shooter made with habanero-infused vodka). The oyster was indistinct after its bath in the vodka, which was unspeakable. While recovering from that and basking in the incredulous stares of my tablemates and the waitress, I silently pledged to take the rest of the evening easy. That was accomplished by sticking to appetizers. My choices: a fairly sublime raw tuna with jicama slaw and a hot pepper marinade, and a decent plate of baked quahogs surrounded by chorizo sausage. I couldn’t finish the quahogs, less because of the heat than because of the uneasy interaction of the chorizo with the rest of my meal.

I regret to say that it wasn’t the hottest meal I’ve ever had—I’ve eaten in some Indian and Thai restaurants that produced the full cold-sweat, white-faced, ear-ringing effect and last night I only got the sweat part. But to be fair I chose three- and four-bomb food (the scale tops out at seven with the famous Pasta from Hell). It was certainly the best-tasting hot-food meal I’ve ever had.

Tinmanic

Tin Man was on fire yesterday. Point one: catching the great CNN headline, “Public Split on Whether Bush is a Divider.” Point two: pointing me to Andrew Sullivan’s fisking of William Safire’s editorial taking Kerry to task over calling out Mary Cheney. This is what I wanted to write on Monday and couldn’t pull it together.

But the best is his memory of the 1992 election. Like Tin Man, this was the first election in which I voted for president. I don’t remember as much about that election; if memory serves I was overloaded with classes and not watching a lot of television, but I shared the sense of excitement that things were going to be different. I didn’t know how different at that point.

Today I’m starting, for the first time since the DNC, to feel the stirrings of that hope again. Hope for a day where we govern the “reality based” world and not the world our fundamentalist leader would like to live in. Where we prosecute Ken Lay, not Martha Stewart; go after the radically decentralized and stateless Al Qaeda first and tackle its state sponsors (if any) second; where we don’t cynically underfund vote-getting mandates like “No Child Left Behind,” AIDS money for Africa, and body armor, VA hospitals, and salaries for the troops that fight our wars. Where the Attorney General and the President uphold the Constitution. T minus two weeks and counting.

Game 7!

The Sox are fighting to the finish. A comment on Dave’s “philosophy” of the Sox: yes, the Curse is an important part of the team’s psyche, but so, right now, is trying hard (and thanks for the kind words about games 4 and 6), and once in a blue moon it pays off. Like being the only team to force a Game 7 after being 0–3 in a seven-game series. Nice writing about the game at Eric Wilbur’s “blog” (a column by any other name) at Boston.com. (Oh, and confidential to David Ellis: Nyaah nyaah.)

Blogging the presidency: pros and cons

Some reflections on blogging, journalism, and my last post. A common cry of bloggers is that journalists don’t touch investigations with lots of hard work, uncertain payoff, and that are politically sensitive. A complaint from many liberal bloggers was that the press parroted GOP criticisms of Kerry’s war record while staying silent on George W. Bush’s service—spotty attendance and all—in the Reserves. When CBS went after the story in a big way, I cheered—until one of the memos proved a forgery. Then I fumed. Once Big Media was burned, I figured, they wouldn’t touch the story again and it would die down—even though the rest of the allegations about Bush’s record were provable.

Thankfully, this is where bloggers come in. Paul Lukasiak, aka The AWOL Project, has been collecting information and going after Bush’s Reserve record using regulations, publicly available documents, and hard work to uncover the meaning behind the codes. This is a thankless job that few journalists would touch, especially after CBS’s embarrassment; but bloggers have continued to chase the story and are turning up some valuable findings.

So what’s the problem? I think there’s a danger that a lot of us spend a lot of energy on issues like this one precisely because they’re bloggable and lend themselves to being addressed by individuals with time on their hands, rather than looking at less personal issues about the president like his health care policies and education strategies. The problem, which the Kerry campaign appears fortunately to have identified, is that health care and education are two of the three hot-button issues for voters this election. So where are all the health care bloggers? That’s something I’d like to be reading about.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the AWOL Project is doing great work, and it’s a kind of work I’ve done in the past as well (see “Hunting for the Halliburton Contract” and “How to Spend $2 Billion”). But we need to get the blogosphere past the point where we focus on one or two issues at the expense of others that might be equally valuable to explore.

PTI 961: What really happened to our absentee president

The Mystery of PTI 961 takes an obscure code on George W. Bush’s discharge papers and gives it meaning from DOD regulations: “when an ‘action is reported by the 9xx PTIs’ it represents a ‘loss to the Air Force strength.’  In other words, despite the fact that Bush had almost eight months left on his six year Military Service Obligation at the time, Texas Air National Guard officers were signaling that Bush was essentially worthless to the Air Force, and should not even be retained in the ‘Ready Reserves’ for call up in the event of a national emergency.” The rest of the document is a close reading of the president’s file and the relevant regulations, concluding that Bush was discharged under Rule 8 in Chapter 12 of the Air Reserve Forces Personnel Manual AFM 35-3: that is, he was “unqualified for service.”

This isn’t a surprising finding, since he hadn’t done his flight hours and had refused to take a physical. But it is striking because it is one of the few places where Bush’s records show what is common knowledge among all but his most ardent supporters: that he was mustered out of the Air Reserves because he was unfit for duty.

Thanks to Hooblogger The Rittenhouse Review for the link.

When the going gets tough…

…the crazies come out. Don’t blink, you might miss the dirty tricks machine, as well as some true faces that don’t pop up unless they think they can energize their base without ticking off undecided voters or the opposition.

Exhibit 1: State and national Republican officials are trying to get 63 Philadelphia polling places moved at the last minute. About 53 of the 63 are less than 10% white. I get confused every year about the time and place I have to go to vote, and I have a master’s degree. Can’t imagine why someone would want to wait until the last minute to do this.

Exhibit 2: Instapundit comes out in favor of George Bush. (His position is, I think, obvious, but his explicitly stating it is news.) Good on Tony for calling him out, and for staying on his back.

Exhibit 3: Anti-gay forces in Ohio are gathering reasoned support from all over, including the intellectual spawn of the Inquisition: “The proof for the Christian ethic which condemns homosexual marriage is the impossibility of the contrary. Reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments.“ Quote from Dr. Patrick Johnston, vice chairman of the Ohio branch of an organization bearing the Orwellian name of the Constitution Party. (See page 3 of the Salon article.)

Weekend in purgatory

No, not the trip: our wommitin’ dog didn’t up any chuck on the way back home. I’m talking about sports.

First I should mention that we were in Hazleton, PA, up in the coal mountains, until about 7:30 and were on more or less rural parts of I-80 until about 8:30, so I wasn’t able to check the score of the Virginia–Florida State game until about 5 minutes from the end of the first half. At which point, ESPN’s mobile channel informed me on my phone, the score was 19 to 0. I refreshed the game page until my battery ran out on my phone (I hadn’t charged the phone the previous night), so I saw Marques Hagans’ last minute goal-line stand turn into a field goal when he couldn’t complete a pass from the five-yard line. That field goal would be the Cavaliers’ only score of the game. 36–3 smarts. But at least we weren’t the only top-10 ranked college football team to get pantsed this weekend.

And the Yankees vs. the Sox? Less said about Saturday the better. We caught the game on the radio in the bottom of the second, a few minutes before the Sox got on the scoreboard to tie it up with a homer and go into the lead with another run. Another hour later and at the bottom of the fourth the Yanks had retaken the lead, 11–6, after some of the worst pitching I’ve ever had the privilege to hear. As the one announcer put it, “Okay, folks, bottom of the fourth, we’re entering the third hour of play, and there’s no end to this inning in sight. Like the Snickers folks say, ‘when you know you’re not going anywhere for a long time’…” At least we’re still in contention, by our fingernails, after last night’s win.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys

We’re really starting off the week with a bang. The electricians we needed to come and do about six jobs for us arrived at 7:45 on the dot and got to work. Right now one of them is fishing a snake up from my shop, where he punched a small hole in the finished corner (plaster, naturally; why is nothing in old houses easy?), came up through the firebreak, and is working on getting wire run up to where we’ll be installing some wall sconces for light.

One other project is already finished: a utility outlet under the sink for the garbage disposal we want to install. The previous owner had run wire under there, but we didn’t know from where. As it turns out, mercifully it was run from the breaker box!

The electrician has poked a hole in the living room wall for the first sconce and run back downstairs to snake the wire for the second one. This of course gives me the opportunity to poke around. Surprise: the back wall of the living room is actually plaster over backing board, not plaster over lathe (though the back side is still lathe and plaster). Second surprise: the stud spacing, at least near the outside wall, is about 14 inches. Third: the wall near the arch (which connects the living room to the small hall that accesses the first-floor bedroom, back bathroom, and kitchen) is plaster over board on both sides; no lathe in sight when the electrician opens the wall to install a new switch.

And that’s just the first two projects. Can’t wait to see what happens with the bathroom and garage outlets and the phone wire.

Off

We have a family wedding this weekend in Pennsylvania. Lisa and I just arrived in New Jersey, our base of operations. After a very long drive from Boston through what felt like 40 days and 40 nights of rain, one wommitin’ dog (“aye, she’s wommitin’ bad, sorr”) and various other tribulations, we’re here and I’m going to bed. Blogging might resume on Sunday.

Links that wouldn’t go away

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.