Dirac Angestun Gesept

Okay, so we’re up 3-0. Nothing to worry about, right? When was the last time a team came back from a three game deficit in a seven game series?

Last week?

It’s fun to be on (or, well, under) the flight path for the standard Fenway flyover approach. Vooooom!

Enjoy The Draft goes for a Daily Show-esque “truth through humor” take on the possibility of a resumption of the draft. Funny and sobering at the same time.

The Boston location of Marché Mövenpick has closed without notice.

So much for planning to eat there at Boskone.

Wow. Just wow. Apparently nobody’s ever come back from down 0-3 to force a seventh game in the ALCS (or possibly in the postseason, ever).

Until now.

I love baseball.

On to game seven!

Peter Canellos compares Bush’s re-election campaign to Truman’s in today’s Boston Globe.

He leaves out the biggest difference between the two men, though; Truman is famous for “The Buck Stops Here“.

A reservist in Iraq explains why you should vote. Not how, why.

Read this.

This weekend, a group of ships from the NATO STANAVFORLANT (Standing Naval Force Atlantic) are in Boston at the Charlestown Navy Yard (near the USS Constitution), and today they were mostly open for visitors.

The information we’d had from a USENET post turned out to be a bit off reality; the ships didn’t open for the afternoon until 1400, but it wasn’t a huge hardship to hang around and see what else was going on. The bonus was that the post had only listed one ship as being open, which was an underestimate…five of the ships listed as being currently in STANAVFORLANT were there (the German FGS Spessart was not in evidence) and as it turned out all of them were open to some extent, though in one case that was a minimal extent.

We first visited the flagship of the group, the HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck (F 812) of the Royal Netherlands Navy (class ship of its frigate class), and the German Bremen-class frigate FGS Niedersachsen (F208), which was moored outboard of the van Heemskerck and is notable for having saluted the USS Doyle on Sept. 11, 2003. Both ships had their main decks open for visitors, with explanatory signs added in English and helpful crewmembers explaining things as well.

We then moved over to the other mooring, where the USS Simpson (FFG 56, Oliver Hazard Perry class); the Spanish SPS Navarra (F 85, Santa Maria class; the Santa Maria is the Spanish variant of the Perry-class) which intercepted the unflagged freighter So San carrying North Korean weapons to Yemen; and the Canadian Halifax-class HMCS Ville de Québec (FFH 332) were moored.

The Simpson was not offering tours, but did allow access through to the Navarra; there, tours of the main deck, the helo deck and the SH-60 parked there, the upper deck, and the bridge were given by members of the ship’s company. Unfortunately, even two years of high school Spanish, useful as it is for travel (”por favor”, “gracias”, and “¿donde está el baño?”) didn’t give me useful vocabulary words for “anti-submarine warfare”, “close-in weapons system”, or “surface to air missile”. Still, it was an enjoyable experience, as we got to see much more of the ship than we had expected to; it was reminiscent of an airside bus tour of Munich airport we once took, which was conducted entirely in German and was therefore an exercise in putting stories together around the few words we did recognize.

Beyond the Navarra was the Ville de Québec, which like the Jacob van Heemskerck and Niedersachsen was allowing main deck access, plus the ability to climb to the bridge deck for a look through the windows and the chance to visit the helo hangar with its Sikorsky Sea King and talk to the helo crew (one of whom is on an exchange from the United Kingdom). This ship was the first on the scene of the Swissair 111 crash.

We finished our visit there, having enjoyed the afternoon immensely, and headed home.

(The ships previously visited Baltimore and I believe are headed for Halifax next.)

San Francisco is going to a ranked-choice voting system (instant runoff), according to this AP wire story.

Good for them!

Bad for AP, which did a “you forgot Poland”:

• “San Francisco is the first U.S. city where a multiple-choice system is being tried on a grand scale.” Well, except for Cambridge, which has been using the similar Single Transferable Vote system for years for the City Council and School Committee; there are no other city elected offices.
• “If no candidate secures a majority of first-place votes outright, the results will be retabulated to include the second and third picks until a winner can be declared — a process that could take weeks.” It didn’t take weeks even when Cambridge did hand-counts!

I’d be interested to hear from any San Francisco folks about how this works out, how they feel about it, etc.

Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) has sponsored H.R.5296, a bill to allow members of the armed forces who are wounded in combat to continue to receive their combat pay and similar bonuses during their recovery.

Sounds like the sort of thing that the “Support Our Troops” GOP should be all for, right?

Here’s the cosponsor list, with my addition of their party affiliations:

Rep Baca, Joe [CA-43] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Delahunt, William D. [MA-10] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Evans, Lane [IL-17] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Filner, Bob [CA-51] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Gutierrez, Luis V. [IL-4] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Hoeffel, Joseph M. [PA-13] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Kildee, Dale E. [MI-5] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Larsen, Rick [WA-2] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Majette, Denise L. [GA-4] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Maloney, Carolyn B. [NY-14] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep McDermott, Jim [WA-7] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep McGovern, James P. [MA-3] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Tierney, John F. [MA-6] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Van Hollen, Chris [MD-8] - 10/8/2004 [D] Rep Wexler, Robert [FL-19] - 10/8/2004 [D]

Bill status? Referred to not one but two committees.

Compare to the fact that George W. Bush has not had to veto any bills during his entire administration. Note that this means that, as Peter Canellos puts it, “he’s working so closely with leaders of Congress that little has gone through without his preapproval.”

If he really wants to help support our troops, this bill will clear committee in no time, with plenty of GOP co-sponsors. Anyone want to bet that will happen?