“Trying to hit him was like trying to drink coffee with a fork.”
— Willie Stargell, in the Baseball Almanac
1 October 2006, Sunday
Beyond Baseball
Animal Farm
rrgirl reports:
… The newts have been reunited with their devoted mistress.
Little joys in an ugly, scary world.
Did you know this?
Theoretically it is safe to handle newts provided one thoroughly washes one’s hands. However, human skin is toxic to newts. The less oily hands touching them the better. If you must handle them, wash your hands with warm water and soap but make sure there is no soap left on your hands before handling.
But it goes both ways:
Many newts produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defense mechanism against predators. Taricha newts of western North America are particularly toxic; the Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa) of the Pacific Northwest produces more than enough tetrodotoxin to kill an adult human foolish enough to swallow a newt. In order to cause harm, the toxins have to enter the body by being ingested or entering a break in the skin.
Which is why there is no such thing as “newt sushi.”
(Two interesting sites: Caudata Culture and Caudatamedia. I can’t get any of the videos or the SalamanderCam to work on the latter site, but it does have a lot of neat photos.)
Olbermannoceros
Dave Kearsley writes in response to Yankee Stadium Virgin:
Keith is not evil…just misunderstood.
My initial responses to the above:
- Aren’t we all?
- Tell that to the judge.
- He’s just an Excitable Boy.
(Don’t you get the feeling that Warren Zevon wrote the score for Olbermann’s life?)
Kearsley continues:
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
He is the Eugene Ionesco of modern journalists.
(I think Olbermann is getting tired of the comparisons with Murrow.)
Kearsley also talks baseball:
I was at that game on [May 22nd, 1976.] I was back in the New York area after my first year of college out in Minnesota. I attended one of the best games ever pitched with two of my college buddies, one of whom lived on the West Side, the other on Long Island. The latter managed to smuggle half of a roast chicken into the ballpark.
Cool beans. Roast chicken beats Ballpark Franks any day. I once smuggled a salami sandwich and chocolate milkshake into the Metropolitan Opera — had a free ticket to a dress rehearsal for “Die Meistersinger.”
Kearsley also captures the ambience of that night:
It was an electric scene. There were numerous fights in the stands. The game proved to be an early turning point in the Yankees’ season.
It felt like a playoff game.
