My First Visit to the Mound

Out of courtesy, I rarely call people before 10:00am. I want to give people time to wake up. In the same spirit, I’ve waited to comment on the Yankees until after at least 40 games. I like to give baseball a chance to get moving before I form any strong opinions.
At the present, the most honorable team in sports is at a respectable 28-20 record.
In the long and short of things, the Yankees are doing just fine. The Tampa Bay (Since when do bays warrant baseball? Do lagoons and inlets get Major League Baseball too?) Rays will fade into a post-all-star-break slump and will never be able to recover. The Yankees have proven that they can almost win most games even without a healthy roster. As an organization, I expect nothing short of a great year. Some individuals, though, deserve my commentary.
Joba Chamberlain: The underpaid setup man is, for the most part, doing his job with the third most holds in the AL. Will he be the next closer? He should be, even though there will never be another Mariano.
Javier Vazquez: Interestingly enough, Javier Vasquez has become the next Javier Vasquez. By that I mean, he has been and always will be a great disappointment in pinstripes. His longest appearance this year has been 7.0 innings, and he holds a record of 3-5 (one of those wins being a four-pitch appearance to end a game). This is the kind of performance that will make any Yankee fan, myself included, say “I told you so”.
Andy Pettitte: Following Sabathia and Burnette, Pettitte’s third spot in the rotation is underpraised. This season, the Yankees are 8-1 when Pettitte starts. My guess is that his usual elbow issues will cause him to have a poor August, a limited role in September, and a great October.
Francisco Cervelli: As much as I would like to see a healthy Posada, Cervelli has a great opportunity to get comfortable with the pitchers in light of Jorge’s likely retirement next year. I was fearful that the Yankees would replace their longtime catcher with an overpaid has-been like the Yankees tend to do, but seeing Cervelli play this year makes me confident that the crucial role of the catcher has now been solidified for the coming decade. It quite pleases me to see a product of the Yankee farm replaced by a product of the Yankee farm.
I have a good bit to say about the players outside the battery, but some things must wait for another day.

7000 Kids With Cans

I stopped in at my friend Lew's house the other day and found him sitting on the sofa watching President Obama's press conference. Like most Americans, Lew thought that the President's statements were disappointing. Lew and I agreed that people don't want to hear the government say that they have been working very hard to do the best they can to get everything done as quickly as possible. They want something more.
I asked Lew how his bunny, Mozart, was doing. Lew said he was sad. 'He's upset about the oil spill. He feels sorry for his bunny brothers in the Gulf.'
In more seriousness, Lew made an interesting point. He said that the President needs to be like Winston Churchill in the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Hundreds of thousands of British troops were stranded on a French beach, and Winston Churchill called for every man with a boat to try to make it to the Dunkirk shores and rescue some soldiers. The result was amazing. Thousands of little fishing boats made dangerous trips across the English Channel, rescuing over 300,000 soldiers and boosting the morale of the nation. Lew suggested that the government pay anyone with a boat to go out into the gulf and clean up the oil. He said that he wants to see footage on television of thousands of children in boats scooping up coffee-cans full of oil. Like Churchill's call for rescue of the Dunkirk soldiers, this would be the wrong thing to do, but it would get people passionate about the oil spill.

You are the 1,000,000th Visitor! Click Here!!

As bothered as I am at Google for looking more and more like (gasp) Bing, there is one thing that irks me more in my day to day internet surfing. That is the banner and pop-up ads. So here's my list of the seven things that I am sick of seeing pop-up and banner ads for (in order of how much they annoy me).
7. Anti-Virus Software. (Macs don't need anti-virus, thank you.)
6. Credit Card Debt Help (I'm not in debt.)
5. Free Ringtones (Even Lady Gaga ringtones?!!)
4. Acai Berry Juice Scandal (Umm, ok.)
3. Teeth Whitening Secret (I've found daily flossing to be rather effective.)
2. Weight Loss Tips (Clearly I don't have that problem.)
1. (I think we all know the last one.)

How to Get People Really Upset

It is occasionally quite fun to excite radioactive personalities. Why? It makes me feel sane. Watching Larry King interview Ann Coulter, for example, makes me feel quite tempered in comparison. Interestingly enough, a large group of people (basically, anybody who watches Fox News) apparently becomes passionately upset and argumentative by particular things that don’t really bother the rest of us. Through careful and costly scientific study, I have actually isolated the specific words that cause conservatives’ and libertarians’ blood to boil. Just try saying any of these words completely out of context to trigger a hot-tempered reaction from a libertarian.
Bailout
Socialism
Fascism
Financial Reform
Gun Control
Nuclear Disarmament
…and my favorite…
Obamacare

I like blogging and blogging likes me.

This is pretty epic in the history of blogging. Tom Firehack, the one and only alternative identity of Rob, is writing a blog. At midnight. In case anybody bothers reading, I'll actually make this posting about something.
On Friday I was able to make my first Whitney Biennial. (I had read quite a bit about 2008, but 2010 was the first I attended.) One piece that quite impressed me was a reference to a performance by my favorite conceptual artist in history, Joseph Beuys. In 1974, the German artist made a landmark visit to America. The trip itself was the art, a performance entitled "I Like America and America Likes Me." See, Beuys was obsessed with felt, which, as the likely untrue story goes, saved his life when he nearly died of hypothermia. In this performance, Beuys flew to New York City, never touched American soil, had an ambulance transport him to a gallery, wrapped himself in felt, and lived in the gallery with a wolf for days. Then, back to the ambulance and off on a flight home. Beuys traveled to America solely to live in a room with a coyote.
And I was thrilled as could be when I walked into one of many video installations at the Whitney to see "We Like America and America Likes Us", a video by the Bruce High Quality Foundation projected on the broken windshield of a hearse. (Yes, there was a hearse in the gallery.) The video had a brilliantly clear and captivating voice-over that described America as a person, a friend, a lover. And by the end of the film, I realized that most people view their country as a god-man-friend (a dangerous relationship to have with one's nation). At any rate, the video is brilliant, is understandable in message even to non-artists, and is more than worthy of the reference to the legend of conceptual art that is Joseph Beuys.