AB

I've just been reading through Anheurser-Busch's beer fact sheets and find them to be an amazingly frank description of their beers. I think maybe these descriptions are for stock-holders and not beer drinkers?

Introduced in 1955, Busch has a smooth, light taste. The brand is the country's largest-selling subpremium-priced beer in all major demographics.

I mean, who calls their own beer subpremium?

In other news, the Pirates just blew a five run lead in the ninth inning on opening day. All is normal in the universe.

Baseballs

As if to make up for the business in other aspects of my life, I have serendipitously found myself invited three different Pirates games within the span of one week! One w/ CMU peeps, one with work peeps, and the other with family peeps. I really love peeps, and baseballs also. Besides, once I get to India it will be all Cricket all the time.

Dirtgate

Slowly, I have become more and more obsessed with baseball, so I apologize in advance if you care not:

Here is my take on Dirtgate, the incident in which some kind of nasty substance (dirt? rosin? pine tar?) was spotted by Fox's cameras on the hand of Tiger's pitcher Kenny Rogers. From a pragmatic point of view, there is no issue. The Cardinals never requested (as far as we can tell) the umpires to examine Rogers' hands, and since Kenny washed off whatever it was, there is nothing that could be done after that point.

However, what I do not agree with is those (like tonight's pregame commentator on Fox) who claim that using foreign substance like pine tar is just a minor issue; a technical bending of the rules, but something to be expected and dealt with lightly. There is a reason that the spitball was banned from baseball. Any discoloration of the ball can be extremely dangerous for the batter. So much so, that in 1920, a batter for the Cleveland Indians was killed by a discolored ball. Killed. As in dead.

Admittedly, during that time, the balls were used for much longer over the course of the game and therefore got much dirtier as a matter of course. Regardless, for a sport where history seems to be more important than anything, we shouldn't forget the past. If players are caught using foreign substances on the ball, they should be punished.

Okay... after all that...
How amazing was Kenny Rogers Sunday night? I hope I am that awesome when I am 41.

The rest of the weekend roundup...

First things first, thanks to the advice of Albert, my photos will soon all be going on Flickr at the following location: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dixiepistols/
They are not all up at this point, but they will be, so just hold on to your horses.

The rest of the weekend was not quite so awesome, but fun in a relaxed way.
Let's count it down!

• Saturday night: Half-way crashed an EPP party. I did see some neat people there, but I was feeling seriously ill from running and drinking earlier that day, so overall I wasn't quite in the mood to rock. I did see my boss Chris from over the summer which lead to...


• Sunday morning: Massive football in eye at the William Penn Tavern. Watched our New Orleans Saints sneak one out against the truly horrible Cleveland Browns. Fun, but took up basically my whole day.
  


• Sunday night: After some serious ML hacking, Kevin organized some kind of awesome dinner party at the Hunan Kitchen. We somehow managed to get 15 people at the same table, although really it was more like three socially dispersed tables.


• Monday night (BONUS!!): I had already had a not altogether horrible meeting with my advisor, so I was already feeling alright. Got invited to see the Pirates for FREE, and watched them demolish (or, hold on to the lead just long enough) the Brewers. It was windy and I was ill-prepared since I just found out during the day that I would be going. But what evs, free baseball is just that.

Let's hope this week is rock and roll...