That, sadly, is pretty much the first thing I heard at Yankee Stadium.  Although the D line subway got me to the ballpark two hours before gametime, the security line (TSA-like in its thoroughness) was so slow that I wasn’t able to get inside the park in time to visit the shrines.  Maybe a good thing, though, as I might have been tempted toward vandalism on some of those self-righteous plaques.  The game was interrupted by a rain delay of nearly an hour.  We tried to get to the Stadium Club to escape the weather, but for some reason the security forces barred the way for most of the delay.  We did eventually get in long enough to order a brew before the game restarted.

Adding Yankee Stadium to my MLB ballpark lifelist rounds out the count to a nice even 40.  That number won’t be augmented here at the convention, as I’ve previously seen about three or four games at Progressive (nee Jacobs) Field.

Oh, I should also mention that when I walked into the Columbus Circle subway station to go to Yankee Stadium, I ran into two of my SABR pals!  I already knew they were planning to go to that same game—one of the two was doing the same sort of first-and-last visit that I was—but it seems rather odd and amazing that we’d independently end up buying Metrocards in the very same line in the very same subway station at the very same time.  Chaos theory, indeed!

Leaving Newark Airport yesterday afternoon, my plane sat at the gate for nearly an hour beyond its scheduled departure time.  No particular explanation, of course.  Then there was more delay in the takeoff line ... in this case, the captain informed us that a small plane that was supposed to be landing at another nearby airport was “wandering around lost” somewhere in Newark’s airspace.  Hmmm, was anyone thinking about shooting it down?

This morning, I made my first trip to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  Though I’ve visited Cleveland on several occasions in the past, I’d never before had an extra day available.  Now that I’ve seen both the R&RHOF and Seattle’s Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, I have to say that there’s no comparison between the two.  EMP sucks, and not only because of its hideous building.  The Hall of Fame was tasteful, thematically sound, and had very little of the silliness of EMP.

One exhibit took me aback just a little bit.  Amidst the displays of soul music greats was a small section on Jackie Wilson.  You may not know the name, but I suspect this will sound familiar:

On September 29, 1975, Wilson suffered a heart attack while performing at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill NJ.  Although he was resuscitated, Jackie Wilson had suffered severe brain damage due to the extended time it took to do so.  He remained in a vegetative state until his death nearly a decade later. 

Among the items on Wilson were two “get well” telegrams (one from Redd Foxx, the other from Elvis) addressed to him at Cherry Hill Medical Center.  What struck me about all this is that my father was a physician at that institution.  He was on call that night, and participated in Jackie Wilson’s initial care.  Seeing the phrase “Cherry Hill Medical Center”, then, brought out that memory from somewhere in the crevices of my mind.

I’ll be here in Cleveland through Sunday, so maybe it’ll seem like home soon.

Next, I am extremely humbled by the support everyone in the 9th Congressional District showed me today.  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You! - to all those who voted for me, and for sending me to Denver.  It is an honor to be reprenting [sic] our 9th Congressional District and all of you at the national convention.  You all have inspired me beyond words.

I wish I could give a full report on the results of Saturday’s Congressional District caucuses.  It has been frustratingly difficult to find out the distribution of delegates between Obama and Clinton, much less the identities of those who were elected.  While I still expect that the overall numbers came to 34-17 for Obama, which will eventually result in 52-26 when the at-large and pledged PLEOs are added next month, that distribution hasn’t yet been confirmed.

I do know who was elected from WA-07 (Obama 7, Clinton 2) and WA-01 (Obama 4, Clinton 2).  Dan Kirkdorffer gave us the names of the Obama delegates in WA-08 (Obama 4, Clinton 2); unfortunately, Casey Knowles, the now-18-year-old who was the child in the stock footage used in Clinton’s “3am phone call” ad, didn’t make the cut.  Reading between the lines of Yee’s statement, it appears that WA-09 went 3-2 in Obama’s favor.

I expect that the distributions in the other five CDs went as follows:

• WA-02 (6 delegates)—Obama 4, Clinton 2
• WA-03 (5 delegates)—Obama 3, Clinton 2
• WA-04 (3 delegates)—Obama 2, Clinton 1
• WA-05 (5 delegates)—Obama 3, Clinton 2
• WA-06 (6 delegates)—Obama 4, Clinton 2

One final note, about one of the WA-07 Obama delegates.  Iraqi-American Majid al-Bahadli is a resident of my own Legislative District.  The story of his journey from Iraq through refugee camps and somehow to Seattle and American citizenship is remarkable. 

Apparently, we took no pictures of another signature feature of this ballpark, the one that’s way out in deep center field.  Silly of us, I suppose.

Anyway, if no one has the right answer after another couple of days, I’ll post it for you here.

The “Contract On For America” was an authoritarian, top-down coup perpetrated by the Republican House leadership cabal.  Gingrich, Armey, DeLay, et al. strong-armed colleagues to sign on, demanded fealty to their radical plan, even chased off reasonable Republicans (yes, there used to be a few) who wouldn’t knuckle under.  In sharp contrast, the Responsible Plan was conceived by a lone Congressional candidate out here in far-off Washington state, gaining support from other candidates—no confirmed sitting legislators yet (but see below)—through word-of-mouth and face-to-face discussions.  Darcy’s workproduct exemplifies the burgeoning power of the netroots and grassroots in the Democratic Party.

At yesterday’s unveiling, the Responsible Plan had already been endorsed by nine additional progressive Democratic House candidates from across the country:

• Donna Edwards (MD-04), who defeated incumbent Al Wynn in the Democratic primary
• Eric Massa (NY-29), a “Fighting Dem” Navy veteran
• Chellie Pingree (ME-01), vying for Tom Allen’s seat
• Tom Perriello (VA-05)
• Jared Polis (CO-02)
• George Fearing (WA-04), trying to upset Doc Hastings
• Larry Byrnes (FL-14)
• Steve Harrison (NY-13), who hopes to remove Vito Fossella, New York City’s only remaining GOP Congressman
• Sam Bennett (PA-15)

In just a bit more than 24 hours, additional Democratic contenders have endorsed the Plan.  Off the top of my head, I can come up with such worthies as Larry Grant (ID-01) and both of the leading Democratic candidates for Gordon Smith’s Senate seat in Oregon—Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick.  I’ve also seen a report that a sitting House member, newly-elected IL-14 Congressman Bill Foster (in the House seat recently occupied by the ample butt of Dennis Hastert), is endorsing the Responsible Plan too, but I can’t find confirmation of that at the moment.

Many other bloggers, here in Washington and across the land, have written about this exciting development in the 2008 campaign season.  And, since this is a netroots-based project, put forth by perhaps the (neologism alert!!) netrootsiest candidate on the scene today, we regular Joes and Joans are invited to add our own names to the list of endorsers.  In fact, Darcy’s supplied a nice banner link to make it easy to add yourself to the list.  Just click on the red button in the image immediately below this paragraph!

Right after the 2004 precinct caucuses, I wrote a rather lengthy blog post about the experience.  Tomorrow’s events will be generally quite similar.  This time, however, I’m running the show instead of working for a candidate.  I’ll be one of the site coordinators, as well as the PCO of my precinct.

Though I’m extremely involved in the presidential election season, I’m not particularly wedded to any of the candidates.  Whatever it was that Howard Dean stirred in me four years ago hasn’t been touched by any of the 2008 candidates.  I gave a few bucks to Chris Dodd awhile back, more for his stands on habeas corpus and FISA than due to any belief that he’d run successfully.  Had he stayed in the race, I would have caucused for John Edwards; his message of economic populism reasonated with me. 

Now, with just two candidates to choose from, I’m still undecided.  Not between Clinton and Obama ... between Uncommitted and Obama.  Anyone But Hillary is still my watchword, as it was from the start.  She is simply too much a creature of the “inside the Beltway” mentality for my taste.  Which is not to say that I’d vote for someone else if she ends up as the Democratic nominee, just that I’ll look elsewhere unless and until her name is the only one in the running.

Why not simply move to Obama?  Mainly because he doesn’t stir me.  His oratorical skills are extraordinary, but I’m not convinced that the substance is really there.  Since he’s the only remaining not-Clinton candidate, I’ll certainly switch to him if there are too few others in my precinct choosing Uncommitted to earn a delegate, but I’m sort of thinking I want to keep my options open as long as I can.  Or maybe I’ll just stop playing these games with myself and sign in for Obama.  I still haven’t figured it out.

Now I’m off to copy off more sign-up sheets, more maps of the precincts, and so forth.  We’re expecting a huge crowd tomorrow afternoon.  See you at the caucus!

Hi [N in Seattle],

I also left you a voicemail, but about 3 years ago you sent an application to the Selective Service System to become a Seattle Local Board Member.  Since we had no vacancy at that time, your application was held in my files, until now when a retirement of an active member has created an opportunity.  If you are still interested in this position, I would be glad to provide more details. ...

I can certainly fulfill the qualifications for becoming a Draft Board member—I’m an American citizen, (well) over 18 years old, neither active in nor retired from the military, live in Seattle, not employed in law enforcement, no criminal offenses.  Though I don’t yet know what the time commitment would be, I’m sure I could arrange it so that I could participate if I wanted to.

But do I really want to?  The draft was a fearsome institution to those of us who grew up during the Vietnam era.  I was in high school and college as the war heated up, so when I registered my classification was 2-S (student deferment).  In the December 1969 draft lottery, my birthday came up as #149.  Thus, I retained my deferment in 1970, when the draft took those with numbers up to 195.  When the 1971 draft reached only to #125, I dropped the deferment, was briefly a non-draftable 1-A, and then became a 1-H ... no longer subject to the draft.  I was fortunate, but even that not-so-close brush with Selective Service left a bad taste.

On the other hand, I doubt that there were any people with a story even remotely similar to mine on the Local Board in my New Jersey hometown.  I assume, without evidence, that that Board consisted entirely of people who were gung-ho to get as many kids into the Army as was humanly possible.  I assume, without evidence, that they would have made it extremely difficult for anyone who appealed for a hardship deferment or Conscientious Objector status.  I strongly believe that if the draft is ever reinstituted, a Draft Board that is truly representative of Seattle must include members whose view of military adventurism is, shall we say, skeptical.

I should also mention that there’s something of a personal interest involved here—my nephew, who turned 14 earlier this week, lives here in Seattle.  He’ll register with Selective Service four years from now.

I haven’t yet replied to the message I received from the local Selective Service representative.  I’m leaning toward doing so, if only to obtain further information about the time and effort that would be required of a Board member.  And, perhaps, to see whether Selective Service would seriously consider putting someone like me on the Board.

Finally, for your listening and viewing pleasure, here are a YouTube link to Arlo performing Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (embedding is disabled, since it runs nearly 20 minutes) and the trailer for the 1969 movie Alice’s Restaurant:

[Also posted as a diary on DailyKos.]

Another year, another blog…

I can’t say what shape this enterprise will eventually take.  There are daily events worthy of comment and discussion, in a myriad of arenas, but the one or ones that inspire me to bat out a few words can’t be predicted.  It might be a political decision or it might be a baseball game; a piece of music or a magazine article; scientific research or a well-cooked meal. 

Whatever I happen to discuss, my viewpoint will be one of seeking rationality, of following the subject to its logical conclusion ... even if that logic sometimes takes us to a reductio ad absurdum.  It’s a viewpoint tempered by 50-some years of living, by two years residence in the Pacific Northwest after spending most of my days in the Northeast, by a career of research into healthcare and the quality thereof, by Woodstock and the assassinations, by close observation of governments in action, by Herman Melville and Bill James, by Bob Dylan and Dan Bern, and by much, much more.

As the title says, today is opening day.  Who’s pitching tomorrow???

You’ll have to be the judge of whether the 326 entries written since then have lived up to that original intent.  In that time span, my subject matter has been vastly more on politics than on baseball, music, or magazines.  A sign of the times, no doubt.  I’ve mentioned Woodstock three times; the death of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr. six times; Herman Melville not at all; Bill James once; Dylan ten times (he’s been the topic of five posts); and Dan Bern once.

My blogging history has been one of diminishing returns.  I wrote 142 posts in PTF’s first year, over 43% of my entire output.  Year Two totaled 69 blog posts, followed by 47 in Year Three, 46 in Year Four, and just 23 (including this one) in Year Five.  It isn’t entirely that I have become less productive in that time period, though I must admit that sloth and outrage fatigue have played a not-insignificant role.  I’d prefer to believe that the largest portion of my decrease in blogging is a reflection of the numerous progressive blogs—both here in the PacNW and throughout the land—that have created such a vibrant netroots community.  I was here in blogtopia (y!sctp) ahead of the great majority of them, but it bothers me not in the slightest that I have been eclipsed by so many others.  With insightful, acute, talented, and prolific writers like Goldy and his HorsesAss colleagues, Dan Kirkdorffer at On The Road To 2008, Dave and Sara at Orcinus, and many others wielding influence in the Washington political scene, whatever I might come up with would be (at best) a “me too” afterthought.  And then there are the remarkable national progressive blogs like digby’s Hullabaloo and the immense orange community created by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

I still spend a lot of, probably too much, time reading the thoughts and ideas of those other lefty-bloggers.  And I’m a fairly regular, and very longtime, diarist and commenter on dKos.  So it’s not like I’ve completely stifled myself on the web.

Will the next year see more frequent posts here?  I won’t promise that, but I do hope I can find the inspiration within myself to create material worth your reading-time, and hopefully more such content than I’ve produced recently.  Even if I’m long-silent, though, I expect to be here in 366 days to mark my candy/iron blogiversary.

So I made another appointment with the doctor just after Thanksgiving, this time laying out my entire collection of signs and symptoms.  Not just the still-lingering cold, but everything from brittle fingernails to depression to the occasional short bout of what I called heaviness or tightness in my chest.  This last item piqued the doc’s interest.  Hey, I’m an obese 57-year-old male being medicated for hypertension and hyperlipidemia, definitely at risk for coronary disease even though I’m a lifelong nonsmoker.  He did a brief EKG rhythm strip right then and there, and scheduled me for a stress test to be taken on Monday, December 10.

In the interim, I continued to feel just as lousy.  Then came the early morning of Thursday, December 6.

I awoke that day at about 4am.  In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual for me in recent months.  Sadly, I seem to wake up briefly once or twice just about every night, usually because of the noise and discomfort of a misadjusted CPAP facepiece.  This time, though, what woke me was chest tightness, appreciably greater than ever before.  It was as if there was a very large elastic band around my chest.  I lay there for a few minutes, asking myself whether this was bad enough to call 9-1-1.  Eventually, I chose not to make the call.  My principal reason rationalization was that my workplace is just a couple of blocks from a major hospital—in fact, I work in a research office associated with that very hospital.  So, feeling anxious and a bit short of breath in addition to the discomfort in my chest, I showered, dressed, and took the bus to work.  My chest didn’t seem to be getting worse, but neither was I feeling any better.

After about 90 minutes at my desk with no improvement whatsoever, I decided I needed to do something.  When I informed my supervisor that I thought I needed to go over to the hospital to have someone evaluate me, she immediately volunteered to walk over there with me.  She said she needed to go there anyway, but I suspect she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to keel over in the middle of the street.  We got to the ER, and she left me there at the triage desk.

It’s quite enlightening to see what happens when you tell an ER nurse that your chest is bothering you.  Within a minute I was escorted to an examining table, where three or four professionals quickly hooked me up to a 12-lead EKG monitor and blood pressure cuff, fitted me with a nasal cannula delivering O₂, taped a pulse oximeter to a finger on one hand, and placed an IV in a vein on my other wrist.  I assume the IV was used to draw blood for my labwork, but I never saw the tube drawn.  They did a chest X-ray right at the examining table, and I swallowed an aspirin tablet.  The emergency physician was accompanied by about half a dozen students for the first few minutes, and a cardiac fellow also participated in the evaluation.  I was asked the expected questions—how long have you had this pain?  where is it?  does it extend into your arm?  how bad, on a scale of 0 to 10?  do you have any prior history?  is there a family history?  what medications do you take?

While waiting for the lab results to come back, the ER staff checked back with me regularly, asking about the nature of my pain.  In the hour or so between the blood draw and the report from the lab, my discomfort initially increased a bit but eventually began to fade away.  The thick band around my chest seemed to become narrower and narrower, and eventually disappeared completely.  At about that time, my lab values came back essentially negative.  Normal values for cardiac enzymes and for D-dimer.  No sign of myocardial ischemia (recent or remote).  Whatever was going on with this episode, it wasn’t cardiac in nature.  Whew!  After resting comfortably for another hour or so, I left the ER with nothing more than a prescription for something called Neutra-Phos-K ... apparently, my phosphate and potassium levels were a bit low.

Since that day, I haven’t had a smidgen of chest discomfort.  Four days after my visit to the ER, my treadmill test was completely unremarkable and uneventful.  I was more than a little bit unhappy, however, that the cardiologist ended the test before I’d gotten past a brisk walk.  At that point I’d already reached and exceeded my “target” maximum heart rate, which shows how far out of shape I am.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t quite end there.  Since my heart scare, I contracted another head cold.  While it wasn’t nearly as severe as the one I had in October, and was much more typical of my usual cold symptoms than the earlier one had been, it too has lingered far beyond the time it normally requires for me to recover from a cold.  As I write this, about two weeks after coming down with the more recent cold, I remain stuffed up and nearly without a sense of smell.  What I wouldn’t give to make this thing clear up completely…

Whenever someone writes about a healthcare encounter, it’s expected that they’ll say something about the vicissitudes of dealing with health insurance and payments.  So far, knock wood, I really can’t complain.  During my visit to the ER, the only mention of insurance was a clerk’s request for my SSN during the initial setup on the exam table.  I never showed my insurance card to anyone.  Then again, I did inform the triage nurse that I was employed at that very hospital (the ID badge around my neck was another indicator).  As it turns out, as an employee of an institution owned by King County and managed by the University of Washington, I have extremely good health insurance.  I don’t know what I’ll have to pay for either the ER visit or my stress test, because I haven’t yet received either EOBs or bills associated with either of them.  Not that I’ll begrudge my portion of the costs, whatever they are.

Here is the original Harvard/XVIVO video The inner life of a cell, with its scientifically accurate narration intact:

And here is a clip from a Discovery Institute presentation that features an excerpt of the video, now redubbed and retitled The Cell as an Automated City.  Notice how the presenter describes the video as “state of the art computer animation”, implying that it is somehow the work of the institute:

As ERV points out in his her post, this isn’t just a naive case of copyright infringement.  The Discovery Institute has plenty of lawyers on staff and on retainer, so they sure as hell know that scrubbing the Harvard/XVIVO copyright and credits off the video is not only dishonest, but illegal.

Maybe they think it is “okay” because they gave the animation a new title (Inner life of a cell became The cell as an automated city) and an extraordinarily unprofessional new narration (alternate alternate title—Big Gay Al takes a tour of a cell!).  Harvard/XVIVOs narration, all of the science, is whisked away and replaced with a “surrealistic lilliputian realm”, “robots”, “manufacturing”, “circuitry”, “nano moters”, “UPS labels”.  Maybe they think it is “okay” because they turned all of Harvard’s science into “MAGIC!”.

Hmm.  From my point of view, as a virologist and former teaching assistant, this isn’t just copyright infringement.  This is theft and plagiarism.  Taking someone else’s work without their consent, manipulating it without their consent, pretending it supports ID Creationists’ distorted views of reality, and presenting it as DI’s work.

ERV further points out that if the DI fellows responsible for this were at his her university, they would be expelled for their plagiarism.

But this is just business as usual at the Discovery Institute, and it raises a question:  if the Discovery Institute can’t be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on its signature issue, Intelligent Design, how can its Cascadia Center be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on regional transportation planning?  Of course, it can’t, and the media, business and political elites who ignore the institute’s established track record of distorting scholarship and science in the single-minded pursuit of its own private agenda, are little more than willful dupes.

Our region’s transportation planning is too important to be trusted to a faux “think tank” with such a shameful and embarrassing record, and every time one of our local media outlets unskeptically cites one of its reports or recommendations, it grants the Discovery Institute credibility it simply does not deserve.  Unlike a real think tank, the Discovery Institute produces “scholarship” to support its existing agenda, not the other way around, and thus it cannot and should not be considered a trusted partner in planning our region’s transportation future.