Wednesday, August 8, 2007

The 5 Year Rule. . . (or, No Bitching Until '09!)!



With the Red Sox floundering a bit this summer, and the Yankees closing in a bit (only five games back to start the day), here is a post to remind myself of the five year rule:

"After your team wins a championship, they immediately get a five-year grace period: You can't complain about anything that happens with your team (trades, draft picks, salary-cap cuts, coaching moves) for five years. There are no exceptions. For instance, the Sox could finish 0-825 over the next five years and I wouldn't say a peep. That's just the way it is. You win the World Series, you go on cruise control for five years. Everything else is gravy."
--Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) in November 2004.

I guess I still got two years to go, so it's all good. . . Uh-huh, thats right . . . . . . . . . . No Worries At all!

TomC

La Gloria Cubana Wavell Maduro

5" X 50, Maduro

Appearance
: These are some pretty, dark little cigars. Lightly box pressed and wrapped in a thick looking, rich, oily, toothy chocolate wrappers. Wrapped firmly but not too much so, this cigar looks like it was made to be enjoyed. This stick had a decided sheen to it, just a beautiful cigar.

Pre-Light: Clip was easy with very little resistance. the prelight draw was just perfect, and yielded notes of fresh roasted coffee and earthy undertones. Just wonderful flavors.

Burn/Draw: The burn and draw were just fine. Light and forget. The burn was razor straight and I didn't even have to consider correcting at any point. The ash was firm and rather bright white, which contrasted strikingly with the very dark and oily wrapper. The draw was free and easy and produced clouds of cool, white smoke.

Flavors: If you haven't noticed by now, this isn't going to be one of my particularly unbiased reviews. I loved this cigar, and it was one of the first true "staple cigars" that I kept in my humidor as often as possible. I think they are that good (especially for the price)! They have amazing rich flavor. After an initial not of cinnamon & sagey spice, this cigar settles in to great notes of dark chocolate and freshly ground coffee. About halfway through undertones of earthiness and leather creep in. Over the last third a cedary note starts to waft in and out, with fascinating results. Frankly, my recommendation is this: if you can get your hands on some, you should do just that.

TomC

Charisma Carpenter

Charisma Lee Carpenter (born July 23, 1970) is an American actress. She is best known for playing the character Cordelia Chase in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel.

Carpenter was discovered by a commercial agent while working as a waitress. This led to several roles on TV advertisements. She made guest appearances in Baywatch and Miss Match, and she has had a role in Malibu Shores. Her best known role was that of Cordelia on TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

After 7 years playing Cordelia Chase, 3 years on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 4 years on Angel, Charisma returned only for Angel's 100th episode in the fifth and final season as she thought Cordelia fans deserved closure despite the controversy of her unexplained removal from the show.

Carpenter became good friends with Holly Marie Combs during the filming of See Jane Date and this friendship led to her three episode guest stint on Charmed as a psychic demon called The Seer.

Carpenter appeared on the cover and posed for a nude pictorial in the June 2004 issue of Playboy magazine. She made the decision to pose as a way to motivate herself to lose her pregnancy weight. The photos were taken ten months after she gave birth to her son.

Carpenter has played three characters with the ability to tell the future. In Angel, her character, Cordelia, received visions from The Powers That Be. On Charmed, she played Kira, the Seer, who counted premonitions among her powers. In Voodoo Moon, she could tell the future through her drawings.

Carpenter had a recurring role as Kendall Casablancas in the TV series Veronica Mars for the 2005-2006 season, appearing in 11 episodes.

Charisma recently starred in Voodoo Moon by writer/director Kevin VanHook, as well as an assortment of made-for-television movies. One such recent movie was called Relative Chaos on ABC Family, costarring with Nicholas Brendon, one of her costars from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It was recently announced that Charisma will guest star in the up coming season finale of ABC Family's television show Greek.


TomC

868 - Sadaharu Oh



Sadaharu Oh (born May 20, 1940, in Sumida, Tokyo, Japan), is a former baseball player and manager of the Yomiuri Giants in Nippon Professional Baseball and is the current manager of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. He holds the professional baseball record for home runs, having hit 868 in his prestigious career.

Oh is the son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. Because of nationality laws at the time, Oh has never been a Japanese citizen, but in fact a national of the Republic of China (Taiwan), though he speaks only Japanese. Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian happily appointed him as an "itinerant ambassador" twice, and decorated him with a medal.

In 1959, he signed his first professional contract as a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants. However, Oh was not a strong enough pitcher to succeed professionally and soon switched to first base, working diligently with coach Hiroshi Arakawa to improve his hitting skills. This led the development of Oh's distinctive "flamingo" leg kick. It took the left-handed hitting Oh a few years to blossom, but he would go on to dominate the baseball league in Japan.

Oh led his league in home runs fifteen times (and for thirteen consecutive seasons) and also drove in the most runs for thirteen seasons. More than just a power hitter, Oh was a five-time batting champion, and won the Japanese Central League's batting triple crown twice. With Sadaharu Oh at first base, the Yomiuri Giants won eleven championships, and Oh was named the Central League's Most Valuable Player nine times and to the All-Star team eighteen times.

Sadaharu Oh retired in 1980 at age 40, having amassed 2,786 hits (3rd after Isao Harimoto and Katsuya Nomura), 2,170 RBIs, and a lifetime batting average of .301. Moreover, his record of 868 career home runs, is 112 more than Barry Bonds' Major League Baseball home run record of 756.

His hitting exploits benefited from the fact that, for most of his career, he batted third in the Giants' lineup, with another very dangerous hitter, Shigeo Nagashima, batting fourth; the two players forming the feared "O-N Cannon." In his autobiography, Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way Of Baseball (ISBN 978-0812911091), Oh said he and Nagashima were not close, rarely spending time together off the field. Nagashima, in fact, was and is more popular than Oh, possibly due to Oh's mixed heritage.

Oh was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.



TomC

756


(Mike Bacsik, you are now a Trivia Answer.)
Well there you go. Tonight against the Washington National's Mike Bacsik with one out in the bottom of the fifth inning, Barry Bonds hit homerun number 756 to become the all time leader in homeruns in North American Professional Baseball History, passing the Brave's Hank Aaron. I can honestly say congratulations to him. History will say what it want, but I have to say that I admire what it took to accomplish the feat.

Commissioner Selig's rather ambivalent response was as follows:

"After Barry came out of the game, I congratulated him by telephone and had MLB executive vice president Jimmie Lee Solomon and Hall of Famer Frank Robinson -- both of whom were at the game and witnessed the record-breaking home run -- meet with him on my behalf. While the issues which have swirled around this record will continue to work themselves toward resolution, today is a day for congratulations on a truly remarkable achievement."

While Hank Aaron, always a class act, had a message played on the ballpark's jumbotron after the homerun was hit:

"It is a great accomplishment which required skill, longevity and determination," Aaron said in his message. "Throughout the past century, the home run has held a special place in baseball and I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 of those years. I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historic achievement. My hope today, as it was on that April evening in 1974, is that the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams."

You could tell the remarks visibly touched Bonds, which was cool.

For the first time in 33 years (since 1974) we the MLB has a new homerun king, I wonder how long this record will stand?

(thanks to Baseball-Reference.com)




TomC