perfidy

From Michelle, I discover that Lawrence Simon's brief career as a illegal Mexican narcoterrorist gunrunner is over, thanks to the dilligent and effective police work of the ATF and the Houston PD.

I was just downstairs on a smoke break, and noted that the powerball lottery is up to 180 meeelion dollars. Of course, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning something on the order of 175 consecutive times than to win that money, but its fun to think about what you would do with a windfall of that magnitude. A quick check of the website reveals that the cash payout value is just over a hundred million. Take off a third for taxes, and that would leave you with somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy million dollars. That’s not chump change.

What would I do?

• I’d buy a Hummer, because I’m going camping this weekend. (Personalized plate: NLB4ZOD)
• I’d stop at the sporting goods store, and get one of those nifty tents that set itself up if you just ask it nicely. And while I’m there, I’d get one of those Rambo survival knives, just because the cost would only be .000071% of my net worth.
• Once I’m back from camping, I’d get myself a nice Macintosh computer, because compatibility with the computers at work is not exactly an issue anymore. While I’m at the Apple store, I’d get me a powerbook, an iPod, and whatever other iGadgets catch my eye.
• Since iPods hold 10,000 songs, and the average CD has what, 13 songs? I’d need to buy 769 and a quarter CDs.
• I would go to Japan and buy a samurai sword. The kind that takes a wizened Japanese craftsman ten years to fold umpty-thousand times to create the perfect blade. Then, I’d go to the local mall and buy a cheap stamped aluminum rip-off from the Chesapeake Blade and Tzotchke Company. I’d take the hilt and accouterments of the cheapo replica and put them on the real sword, and hang it on the wall. When some asshole sees it, and says, “You won a 180 million dollars and all you could think to do is buy that piece of crap, you nouveau riche idiot?” I could cut his head off with no effort whatsoever.
• I hate squirrels, so I would purchase a Barrett M82 .50 sniper rifle.
• I’d need more cars. So, I’d buy a black 1950 Mercury convertible coupe (plate: BLUES), a 1969 Camaro in dark green with a white racing stripe (plate: BTCHN), and a 1955 Hudson limo.
• I’d pay off all my family’s bills – mortgage, car payments, credit cards and utilities for a year. Some friends would get this treatment, too.
• I'd go to the art galleries downtown, pick out the ugliest crap modern art, buy it, take it home and build a bonfire out of it.
• I’d set up a trust fund to pay for the education of all the children in my family, and provide scholarships for lazy, underachieving white kids. (There would be substantial overlap between these two categories.)
• Beneath a modest mansion modeled after Stan Hywet and Abbotsford House, I would construct the Ministry bunker and catastratorium.
• For elegant dining and formal occasions, I would get a BMW 760i. Twelve cylinders of ultimate driving pleasure. (plate: BOBSGEO) And an Acura NSX, just because. (Plate: WKNPNUB)
• World Tour!
• I’d buy all the books I want. That’s a lot of books. Maybe I’d even buy that book I never heard of that NDR read.

All of that might come to ten million dollars. I’m sure I could live quite comfortably on the interest off of another ten million. What would I do with the remaining $50 million? That’s a no brainer:

I’d buy my own spaceship company.

Here's an interesting one: former Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff Baxter has become a high powered defense consultant. From Wizbang.

Normblog excerpts an article in the Wall Street Journal (for suscribers only) by Fouad Ajami:

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country...

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.

Check it out.

Worried about getting lost on the beltway? Don't trust new-fangled GPS receivers? Well, just get one of those useless AOL cds, some lego bricks, and a couple mirrors; and you can build your own sextant, and navigate by the stars. This looks like a pretty cool little project, and one I will certainly undertake in a couple years when my boy is old enough to appreciate it.

Hat tip: James Rummel of Hell in a Handbasket.

Thanks to Murdoc, who laughed at our pain during our recent geek deathmatch, we now know that we are not in fact the uber-geeks we hubristicly imagined ourselves to be:

Two Deranged Mongoloid @#!?%wit British Dorks Immolate Themselves in Mock Lightsabre Duel Using Flourescent Light Bulbs and Gasoline

For once, the category used here is almost literally true. If either of these lackwits expires due to injuries sustained in their brief yet glorious attempt to be just like Anakin Skywalker in Episode III, they will certainly be on the short list for a Darwin Award.

[wik] And they got it on tape!

The groovy economist over at the Idea Shop has an interesting post on why tax policy, well, sucks:

There’s a lot of evidence that people aren’t always rational, and suffer from a range of cognitive biases. But thanks to arbitrage, rational people stand to profit when irrational people let prices and wages stray from efficient levels. That’s what justifies the economist’s assumption of rationality—a small number of rational profit-seekers keep markets rational as a whole even when many participants aren’t.

Unfortunately, tax policy has no such mechanism. Tax policymakers suffer the same cognitive biases as everyone else, but the "market" for tax policy—made up of legislators, voters and lobbyists—is much less self-correcting. In traditional markets, bad business practices get pushed out by competition, and bad pricing decisions get corrected through arbitrage. But in tax policy, inefficient tax laws can survive on the books for generations.

Another related aspect of this problem is the asymmetry of the opposing sides. Those in favor of ‘bad’ tax policy (special interests, social engineers, tax accountants and other vermin) are concentrated and focused on their evil work. It is their job to impose these policies on the rest of us, and they have considerable time, skill and resources to devote to that job. Contrariwise, those who favor a simple, transparent, neutral and non-confiscatory tax code (the rest of us) all have day jobs. As attractive as a rational tax code is, and no matter how much we might benefit from such a thing, there are many things that compete for mindshare. For me, the perfectly reasonable and rational tax code is competing with any number of other policy issues, job, time with family, beer and Civ III. The opponents are distracted and diffuse, and so we get the tax code we deserve.

This puts me in mind of something else, too. Different arenas have different time scales. The response time in markets can often be nearly instantaneous. New information immediately affects the price of stocks. In the soi-disant Information Technology Industry (one out of three ain’t bad) the turnover in new software, techniques and indeed people is, shall we say, brisk. In science, things are slower. New paradigms are adopted (so they say) about as quickly as the old generation of distinguished scientists can retire. But the response time of political systems can stretch to centuries.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, bureaucratic inefficiency and glacial response times is bad. The tentative nature and sloth-like vigor of the intelligence reform effort over the nearly five fricken years since 9/11 is a poster child for government incapacity and lack of adaptability. My security questionnaire still had questions about commies on it, for chrissakes.

All of that is unquestionably bad. But, but, what if government weren’t slow? Imagine a government that could reach decisions quickly; create plans and implement them in days; use innovative technologies and management tools to deal with problems in real time. Scared yet? It is well that government’s vast power is balanced by its diffidence and incompetence. In Frank Herbert’s second best novel, he introduces the Bureau of Sabotage. BuSab exists to slow down, interfere with, and screw with the heads of all other government agencies. It is the ultimate citizen advocate, because it stops the government from doing things. In the story, BuSab had its origin in an earlier government that was efficient and fast moving, as well as tyrannical and oppressive. The early BuSab operatives used any means necessary to slow down the operations of this government, and sowed enough chaos that it was able to evolve into a more reasonable and sane government.

Not to be all defeatist, but I think that part of the price of a reasonable government is bad, or at least out-dated policy. Not that we shouldn’t try to reform and improve, but a government that was rapidly responsive to our every need and want would be far, far worse.

Cause Lord knows, they need the help.

From Rocket Jones.

[wik] Note from the Ministry of Future Perfidy ca 2025: Rocket Jones' site is long dead, and for all we know so is Ted since we haven't heard from him in over a decade. So we've replaced the dead image link with this cute kitten.

Wandering through Ace's site, I ran across this little number. Ace links to an interesting theoretical exercise, to wit, how many five year olds could you take in a fight?

This gendanken experiment has some ground rules:

• You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
• You are not allowed to touch a wall.
• When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
• I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
• The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
• There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
• The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

This is a tough one. While we can assume for the sake of argument that most adults could defeat any given five-year-old with little difficulty, facing hordes of the little booger eaters is a different ball of snot. According to this government chart, the average weight of a five-year-old boy is about 40lbs. You get ten of those, and you're talking 400 aggregate pounds of booger eater. If, as the scenario stipulates, these kids get training from a Navy Seal or Green Beret or DC meter maid, they are going to have at least some idea of how to use their numbers against you.

And that's the crux of the matter. If you could somehow trick or fool the kiddies into attacking one on one like the evil minions in a kung fu movie, you could probably win against even an arbitrarily large number of kindergartners. But if they can mob you and get you on the ground, it's all over. Instead of Bruce Lee, you'll be like the grasshopper in one of those old national geographic flicks, being devoured by hungry, hungry ants.

I think even against well trained and thoroughly briefed muchkins, I could take twenty. My reach and strength would allow me (I hope) to keep them from swarming effectively. I could maintain my footing and triumph. Much more than that, and the half-pints would always have a sufficient numbers to saturate my defenses, and take me down.

[wik]Johno, lest you think I am completely inconsistent, I am aware of the implied contradiction between this post and the email I sent you this am. I can only offer this: on Allah's post, Dr. Rusty Shackleford said in a comment, "I guess these things are funny up until the time you have a kid in kindergarten." My boy's only two. Allah also links this Decadent Westpost, which I didn't find as amusing, especially since it personalized the fight. Anonymous opponents somehow are fine, hey, they might be evil or something: Chinese Communists or mutants or Norwegians.

I haven't read Lileks for a while. Months really. Not because of anything he wrote, or didn't write, but simply because I was locked in the solipsistic confines of unemployment and seasonal affective disorder. And going to the park with my son. I tune in for the first time (in months) and what do I find? Exactly what I expected.

I’m still impressed by the movie’s look, the sound, the costumes, the level of ingenuity demonstrated by every frame of the movie in which the insipid words or insubstantial characters do not ruin. If it came from Lucas, it’s krep. It’s like the reverse of Orson Welles – the intellect at the center of the enterprise is bereft of novel ideas, but is kept afloat by indulgent studio support and willing talent. The dialogue in AOTC isn’t completely unlistenable – better Lucas should write exposition dialogue than anything emotional, or you get love scenes in which characters say “I hate sand. It’s dry and gritty. I much prefer your vagina.” Or whatever “Anny” said. But even in the exposition scenes Lucas has an ear made not of tin but some metal alloy created specifically for its inability to channel sound; hence he has his big bad guy announcing not just the creation of an Army, not just an Army of the Republic, but a Grand Army of the Republic. So the Empire is the North, marching to put down the rebellious breakaway South. I’m supposed to root for the slavery side. Noted.

Is there any living screenwriter who’s worse at naming people and places? Naboo, for God’s sake.

Virginia Postrel, writing in the New York Times, makes an interesting argument:

Some people say they want "just the facts," and fault reporters for introducing too much analysis. Others complain that stories do just the opposite, treating all sides in a conflict as equally valid. The news-buying public seems to want contradictory things.

But one person's contradiction is another's market niche. Those differences help answer an economic puzzle: if bias is a product flaw, why does it not behave like auto repair rates, declining under competitive pressure?

In a recent paper, "The Market for News," two Harvard economists look at that question. "There's plenty of competition" among news sources, Sendhil Mullainathan, one of the authors, said in an interview. But "the more competition there has been in the last 20 years, the more discussion there has been of bias."

The reason, he and his colleague, Andrei Shleifer, argue, is that consumers care about more than accuracy. "We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs," they write. Bias is not a bug but a feature.

In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.

That would certainly explain many things, including Fox News' success. By appealing to a previously untapped market segment, they rapidly gained viewers and brand loyalty.

An interesting historical note to the debate over the judicial filibuster comes from Anne Althouse, who notes that the Constitutional Convention considered requiring a supermajority to reject nominees:

Mr. Madison, suggested that the Judges might be appointed by the Executives with the concurrence of 1/3 at least of the 2d. branch. This would unite the advantage of responsibility in the Executive with the security afforded in the 2d. branch agst. any incautious or corrupt nomination by the Executive.

[wik] On the other side of things, here's some interesting information on other means by which nominations could be blocked from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings.

[alsø wik] My earlier discussion of this is here.

By way of our gracious bloghostess, Kathy Kinsley, I learn that the ever-modest and self effacing Donald Trump has a few issues with the proposed Freedom Tower project that he'd like to raise, if it's not too much trouble for everyone:

Denouncing the existing plans for rebuilding Ground Zero as the "worst pile of crap architecture I've ever seen", Mr Trump argued that erecting two new, even taller twin towers was the only valid response to the terrorists. ...Describing the Freedom Tower as an "empty skeleton", Mr Trump said its construction would be a capitulation. "If we rebuild the World Trade Centre in the form of a skeleton ... the terrorists win. It's that bad,"

Myself, I was never too happy with the plans for the Freedom Tower. The fact that it was to be 1776 feet tall was kind of cool, but I never thought the plan was all that attractive. Not bad, but not great:

And at 1776 feet, its only a bit taller than the current tallest building, and smaller than some proposed skyscrapers:

And compared to tallest structures, including free-standing, non-skyscraper thingies, well, it's not terribly impressive:

The CN Tower is already taller than the planned height of the Freedom Tower. But you may argue, "Hey, that's a tower, not a skyscraper." Well, you'd be right, but only trivially right. Further, as you can see from the diagrams, there are at least two planned skyscrapers that will be taller than the Freedom Tower. That, to me, is unacceptable. To build a tower to be the tallest in the world - for a couple years - that's a waste of time. I argued during the first go around that we need to build something stupendously, in-your-face-huge. It doesn't have the visual impact of Kathy's favorite design, but I'd argue that psychological impact would be even greater. If we built something in the 650 meter range, we'd probably be safe for a while. But I'm thinking that we should just go balls to the wall and build a skyscraper an even 1000 meters tall. Don't just break the record, break the record when the building's only a little more than half done. 

One of the most attractive designs I've ever seen for a skyscraper was from Frank Lloyd Wright. Ol' Frank thaought that his mile high "Illinois" from 1956 could have been constructed with the technology of the day. The big problem was insufficient elevator technology, and cost. Reduced in scale to a kilometer, something like this could certainly be built today. It might cost a bit, but imagine this on the New York skyline:

Accept for that whole thirty years' war thing, and Luther's anti-semitism and potty mouth.

I can't sleep, and evyone and their brother have linked this, so why the hell not. Here's a link to Iowahak's wonderful lutefisk post. This post made us ponder why we didn't have him on our blogroll. Since we couldn't come up with a definitive answer, we blogrolled him. This post also serves a useful purpose from Newsweak's point of view: it puts the blame on where it belongs, on the rioting fundamentalist loony tunes rather than on the slipshop reporting which has made them famous.

“It is important that we remember that Lutheranism is a religion of peace,” said Army spokesman Maj. Richard Lehrman. “And we need to remember to avoid insensitive behavior and remarks that will cause these peaceful Lutherans to go on another bloody killing rampage.”

I know how true that is. I was raised Lutheran, and not just milquetoast ELCA Lutheran, but Missouri Synod. That's just one step shy of the wahabi fundamentalist equivalent for Lutherans, the Wisconsin Synod.

The last sentence sums up the situation as well as anything I've seen:

“Oh yahh, I tell ya what, dere’s a lotta bad stuff goin’ on in dat outfit over dere,” said a young Decorah cleric who identified himself only as ‘Pastor Doug.’ “I heard dem infidels are switchin’ da prisoner’s Leinies with Schlitz.”

Ja, you betcha.

Elliot Kalb, author of Who's Better, Who's Best in Baseball?, has a list of the top ten greatest streaks in sports over at Fox Sports. Here's the list:

1. Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak
2. Johnny Unitas' 47 consecutive games with a touchdown pass
3. Edwin Moses' 122 consecutive victories in 400-meter high hurdles
4. Wilt Chamberlain's 45 complete games in a row
5. Brett Favre's 225 consecutive starts at quarterback
6. Greg Maddux's 15 or more wins for 17 consecutive seasons
7. Cal Ripken's 2,632 consecutive baseball games
8. Dale Long, Don Mattingly, Ken Griffey Jr. hitting home runs in eight consecutive games
9. Kareem Abdul Jabbar's 1,000 or more points scored in 19 consecutive seasons
10. (tie) Byron Nelson's 11 consecutive tournament wins in golf in 1945; Tiger Woods' 142 consecutive tournaments making the cut

Read the article for the details, but I have to agree that Johnny Unitas' record is underappreciated, as I hadn't really been aware of it. Interesting that some of the greatest names in sports don't appear on this list. No Babe Ruth, for example. Not that their achievements were unworthy, I guess, but just that they didn't come in streak form.

A few moderate senators from both sides of the isle are scurrying to and fro in an attempt to head off the looming confrontation over President Bush’s judicial nominees and the Senate filibuster rules. It seems at this point rather unlikely that they will succeed. Just so we have some solid ground to walk on, let us summarize the debate:

• The Republicans are pondering changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. The Filibuster would remain in place everywhere else that it hasn’t already been removed.
• The Republicans are thinking about doing this because the Democrats are holding up many appellate court nominees.
• The Democrats say that it is within their rights to do this, and that it is a long standing senate tradition and part of their constitutional duty as Senators to oppose right wing fanatical nominees.
• The Republicans say that the Democrats are obstructionist wackos who are opposing every thing Bush does out of knee jerk political rancor, and that the rule change just puts things back where they were.
• As far as appellate court nominations go, Bush’s success rate so far is about half what the last two presidents whose party also controlled the Senate achieved.
• The Senate rules are not part of the Constitution, and the word filibuster does not appear in that august document. The Constitution says that the Senate must give its advice and consent to nominees, and little more.
• The senate rules for filibusters have been changed in the past – most recently by Democrats lowering the cloture threshold from 67 to 60. Even more recently, some Democrats called for the abolition of the filibuster altogether, back when they were the majority. And of course, minority Republicans screamed bloody murder then.
• All of the judges currently in limbo are ranked “qualified” or higher by the American Bar Association.
• The Republican spin is that all nominees deserve an up or down vote, not endless obstruction through empty parliamentary tactics. In other words, “If you don’t like ‘em, don’t vote fur ‘em.”
• The Democratic Spin is that the Republicans are trying to rewrite the constitution and change the Senate into a rubberstamp body, allowing extremist right wingers onto the bench. In other words, “Don’t let the Right wingers execute a naked grab for power.”

Now, on general principles, changing the Senate rules is not something that should be done lightly. However, It seems fair that a President, having gone to the trouble of winning an election and all, at least ought to be able to get his nominees a vote. On the whole, I think that the Democrats are, in fact, being obstructionists. I would have greater confidence in their claims that they are attempting to keep “extremists” off the bench if not for the fact that they have called all of Bush’s nominees “extremists.” That kind of dilutes the oomph of that word.

The test for me as to whether this rule change is a good idea or not is to flip it. Say, god forbid, the Democrats were to stage an amazing comeback and in 2008 win the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Newly elected President Moonbat sends a group of judicial nominees ranging from fairly liberal to communist to the Senate. Now, do I still think it’s a good idea that the Senate vote on them? Yes, I do. If the Republicans can dig up enough dirt, convince enough moderate Democrats, or make enough deals to keep the more left wing ones from getting 51 votes, hey! That’s great. But that’s how the system should work. The Constitution does not require a supermajority to approve presidential nominees, which is what the Democrat's current filibuster usage amounts to. The Constitution is very clear when it does require one.

So as far as I’m concerned, changing the Senate rules is okay by me, end of story.

But what really confuses the crap out of me is why the Democrats are doing this now.

The Dems are really irritating the Republicans, pushing them hard on the whole issue, pissing them off to the point where they are ready to risk whatever political backlash might come to change the rules. Reid is only offering empty compromises. All for what? To keep a bunch of appellate court nominees off the bench, nominees that the ABA ranks qualified or well qualified, and who aren’t any more right wing than the average Republican? When they know that there are going to be at least two Supreme Court vacancies in the next year or so, including the Chief Justice slot?

The Democrats are going to lose the filibuster, the appellate court nominees will go through anyway and be confirmed, and they’ll have exactly bupkis in their quiver when they get to the real battle. And as a bonus, the Republicans will be in the clear politically because the rule change would have happened well before the Supreme Court fight. That really, really blows my mind. Unless I’m really missing something, that is the most boneheaded political strategy I’ve ever heard of. (Excepting of course the Iraqi insurgents, who are so impatient that they can’t take the time to provoke the US into killing Iraqi citizens, and are skipping the middle man to go right ahead and kill the Iraqis themselves.)

I have to wonder what their thinking on this is. Or do they really think that all of these nominees are rabid, slavering, dues paying members of the KKK? Even the black ones?

Also from Marginal Revolution, an interesting argument from Freakonomics author Steven Levitt: higher abortion rates have lead to lower crime rates.

From Oxford Russian scholar Ronald Hingley:

"For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed."

As quoted in Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

At least some of the time, anyway. Typically here at Perfidy, we like to talk about the brain-eating, stumbly undead sort of zombie, but Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution is talking about consciousness, and its obverse. The basic idea is that parts of your mind operate zombie fashion, without conscious monitoring and indeed sometimes completely bypassing conscious control. Christof Koch, in his The Quest for Consciousness, says,

"Zombie agents control your eyes, hands, feet, and posture, and rapidly transduce sensory input into stereotypical motor output. They might even trigger aggressive or sexual behaviors when getting a whiff of the right stuff. All, however, bypass consciousness. This is the zombie you."

The evolutionary advantage of programmed responses is clear, given that they do not require the processor-intensive cogitation that conscious thought requires. Consciousness then coexists with the zombie you. Consciousness is a more processor-intensive form of cogitation than the sort of rote thinking of the zombie mind. Its advantage is that it, combined with sensory input and short term memory, allows judgment and interpretation of the world rather than mere reaction; provides context and meaning for those actions; and even the possibility of prediction based on internalized models.

I'm not entirely convinced that consciousness is all its cracked up to be. While I am self aware, in the sense that I watch myself thinking, and acting - I find it hard to determine whether I am actually deciding and choosing things or merely providing a running narrative or play-play of actions determined by some other, non-conscious process. Think about it - how many things to you actually decide to do, in the manner of rational, cost-benefit analysis choosing? How hard is it when you make the effort? Or are you just doing what you "want" and providing an explanation for it. Why did you want it in the first place, and where did that come from - did you "decide" to like it? In most cases, are you (the little you, the homonculus that sits an inch behind your eyes) acting or providing a post-facto rationalization for impulses and reflexes coming from somewhere else?

Consciousness may be another layer of thinking - neurons firing and synapses twanging. It is a far richer and more flexible kind of thought than zombie thinking, certainly; but I'm not sure that it is any different, in kind, from the reflexes of the zombie mind.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm not in a position to argue.

For Buckethead, today is clearly “blog about stuff you’ve been meaning to blog about, but haven’t yet” day. Running with this theme, here is the story of last Saturday:

Ted, from Rocket Jones organized an outing to busy, cosmopolitan Woodbridge, Virginia to see the Class A Potomac Nationals of the Carolina League do battle with some other team I can’t be bothered to remember. (It’s single A ball, man. I can’t remember the names of major league expansion teams, fer chrissakes.) Mrs B., little B, and I found the stadium hidden behind some county buildings without too much trouble, and met Ted, his daughters Mookieand Robyn, and Goddess Dawn. Soon thereafter, we were joined by Nic and Victor. The weather was still nice, and things were shaping up into a nifty blog gathering. (Aside from cobloggers, these were the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th bloggers I’ve ever met.)

I went into the gift shop and discovered that the Potomac Nationals had only been in existence for about five minutes. Previously, they were the Potomac Cannons, and everyone in the shop was really pissed about the name change. So, I bought a deeply discounted Cannons logo hat, figuring that its totemic power should protect me from all ills while I was in the stadium. I got one for my mom, too, just to be super safe. Sadly, the hats proved to be of no use whatsoever.

We acquired hotdogs, beer and fires, and adjourned to the stands. One of the things that I love about watching minor league games is the intimacy of the setting. Minor league stadiums are usually about the size of high school playing fields. However, you don’t have to watch thumb-fingered pimply high school kids playing the game – minor league players often exhibit real skill. Of course, those players don’t stay in the minors, let alone single A, very long.

The first inning went great. The mini-Nats scored four runs to take an early lead. But then, the rain came. The skies had been threatening all evening, and mapgirl told me a couple days ago that it would rain, but why should I trust her, the weatherman or the evidence of my own senses? We beat a hasty retreat, along with all the other fans into the sheltered area under the stands, there to wait for at least a half hour. It was really starting to thin out when we decided that the lightning and rain were not likely to stop soon, and that we should come up with a plan B. (As it turned out, they did start playing again within the hour, and we ended up spending $9 a pop for an inning and a half of baseball. That’s a buck an out, people!)

Plan B was a chain Mexican restaurant over by the outlet mall. It should have been a simple matter to drive a couple miles down the parkway and turn left into the parking lot. However, given the rainy conditions and my own befuddledness, I would have missed the joint altogether. At the last minute, Mrs. B gave a hue and cry, and I cut across two lanes of (light) traffic to get into the turn lane. This maneuver left me just a bit in the middle of the intersection. After looking carefully out all three mirrors, and looking over my shoulder, I put Godzira our Xterra into reverse and backed out of the intersection and directly into Dawn’s car.

Not having read her account yet (I will after I finish mine) I don’t know what went through her mind. But as I leaped out of the car, someone seemed a little mad. Then, I realized who it was, and was able to croak out, “Hey, it’s you.” I have rarely felt so stupid and so relieved at the same time. What are the odds that, driving in a rain storm, you’d hit a car with a personalized plate referring to blogging? Happily, a further inspection from the safety of the parking lot revealed only minor scratches. This is a happy side effect of physical laws that prevent you from accelerating to any great speed before hitting an object directly behind you. I swear to god, Dawn, I really did look.

This trauma behind us, we settled in for beers, chips, salsa and guac. Much good conversation was had. We talked about baseball, boobs, high school and many other things before little B’s increasing sleepiness forced us to beat an early retreat.

It was great to meet everyone, and Dawn’s car. We’ll have to do this again, and hopefully we can escape without me running anyone over, or my son hitting Ted in the nuts again.