Squirrel attacks Padres’ Bullpen.

Kahn defends ‘jokes’.

Charles Barkley: I had gay teammates.

A Harmon Killebrew Story.

Assorted commentary after the jump.

Alex:
Squirrel!

Who decides that picking up a squirrel with his bare hands is a good idea?

I love the Killebrew story, and Mark Rosen made it a point to say on the radio yesterday that he’d received email by the tens, maybe hundreds, that all related a similar story. What a great man – he will be missed.

Honestly, I think Barkley’s take is right on. There are right now, and probable have been for a long time, gay athletes in professional sports. I’m guessing at least some of their teammates know, and that most don’t care. Yes, there are insensitive idiots who still throw gay slurs around – they’re probably also making bigoted comments in general; some people are simply stupid. The people who would make a huge deal about it are the media, because (like Chuck said) society does still discriminate against gay people (as we know all too well here in MN right now). I would suspect that’s why no prominent athlete has come out yet, moreso than anything in the locker room.

wadE:
“I’ve got a dog that could take care of their SQ-earl problems…”

From the comments on the Killebrew story:
What a classic, touching story. I heard something similar recently about Joe Mauer and Michael Cuddyer, except Mauer promised the kid he’d ground out to second for him and Cuddyer promised to hit into a 6-4-3 double play. And they both did!

As for Khansie:
This is the first time I’ve actually liked Khan. The NBA is rigged, and the T-wolves got jobbed. Not over some smart-alec rich kid with a disease (although that does add to the charm of our reaming), but because LeBron thoroughly eviscerated the city of Cleveland… although with the Indians in first place, I don’t feel so bad for them anymore. Plus, I had missed that Khansie accused Beasley of smoking too much weed. I may be willing to give Khan a little more rope. Let’s see if he can get Rubio over here, and let’s see if we can be competitive in the next year or two. Besides, I’ve gone this long without giving a shit about the T-wolves… what’s another 2 years?

As for Chuck:
He’s right. Just about every player has played with or against someone who is gay. I was listening to KFAN on my drive into work and Morris said that he didn’t know it at the time, but he played with someone who is gay (Esera Tuaolo). However, I’m not sure that all players are ready for gay teammates. I am not saying a person should stay in the closet, but if a player comes out they shouldn’t expect it to be all rainbows and lollipops in the clubhouse. With that being said, the environment is far more friendly now than 20 years ago. I believe with in 5 years we’ll have our first active player (male) to come out the closet while still playing. It’ll be a big deal when it happens, and it will probably negatively affect that players performance on the field/court. But it will open the door and 15 years from now we won’t even remember what the big deal was about.

That’s the pseudonym of the man behind @BPGlobalPR, which if you have not read it yet, is pretty brilliant. Here he’s speaking out against the inanity of BP trying to ‘protect their brand’.

“You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem.”

Preach on, sir. Preach on.

I’m not usually a big fan of these advice type articles. I’m of the opinion that diet advice boils down to the following phrase: Eat less. Work out more. That said, I think this is worth a look, both because of the startling badness of some of these concoctions, and the clever imagery with which they’re presented. So go ahead, have a look:

The 20 Worst Drinks in America.

This would have been a feel-good story. A random group of folks decides to pull together content and publish a magazine, an actual thing, in 48 hours, with the theme of ‘Hustle’. It works, and finds some pretty decent critical review.

And then CBS sues them for infringing on the brand of their 48 Hours news magazine programming.

I realize that we’ve turned into a vulture society, where people can make a lot of money for doing absolutely nothing (c.f. Wall Street geniuses making millions by buying and selling abstract concepts) . . . but this kind of lawyering drives me batty. Since when does CBS get to own the idea of a time span of two days?

I’ve been considering an iPad post ever since it was announced, but one thing kept stopping me – I couldn’t answer the question of why it exists. “What’s it for?” “What does it do?”

I get the feeling that this blog post is going to come as close as anything to summing up the answers to these questions. Note in particular:

I don’t think I’ll be buying any more desktops going forward. I don’t think I’ll even be buying any more laptops going forward.

They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a “computer” in the traditional sense.

Sure, there’s a handful of tasks that I still would prefer a real computer, but — amazingly — that list has now shrunk dramatically. In less than a week.

What does it do? Almost everything you’d want it to, in a package that goes everywhere pretty easily. It’s a consumer device that does most of what a computer does, at a reasonable price, and with a streamlined user interface that won’t confuse your parents or grandparents. It’s not gonna be your primary computer if you can’t get past the notion of what you can’t do with it, and if you’re a computer programmer, or a graphic designer, or for some reason your computer is the only thing you use for DVD playback, it shouldn’t be. For the rest of us, however . . .

Make something that, even to me, looks a heck of a lot like magic:

I won’t say that I’m exactly eager to plop down the amount of money that Photoshop CS5 will cost . . . but wow.

(Found via John Nack’s blog.)

Fantastic post. My favorite:

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

Interesting post here from Fake Steve – who, if you didn’t know, writes as a Steve Jobs impostor, if Steve were more comedian and less businessman. It starts out as a hypothetical ‘why AT&T’s network is sucking the fun out of the iPhone’ conversation, and turns into a ‘what’s wrong with America’. And while I’ll admit I have a bias on this particular segment of the ‘what’s wrong’ topic, he nails it:

“…Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.”

Yep.

A) It’s a grammar challenge.
B) The source material is from David Foster Wallace.

How am I supposed to pass this up?

Here are the questions.
Here are the answers.

Go.

(I got 3/10 on a quick run through, and might have gotten two more had I spent more time on it.)

h/t to HTMLGIANT, obviously, by way of kottke.org

A short post on how to lose a half-hour of your time. Go here:

http://birdbook.org/

Great photography, nice minimal presentation. Very, very cool.