Yes, I’m still alive. Activity has been minimal on this end. Everybody’s out of town for the holidays, and I’m pretty much killing time until my family gets here. Fortunately, that’s coming up soon and it looks like Mom has put together a great trip. It’s interesting, traveling alone seems like it doesn’t count. It feels like you need another witness there with you to make it matter. Or perhaps I’m just co-dependent.

On a baseball note, I watched the White Sox-Indians game last night. The umpiring was pretty good up until it actually started to matter, and they blew an important call at home plate. Then Ozzie brought in Dotel for some reason, and left him in despite clearly not having any sort of control. I don’t really understand, but I guess if you sign them to big contracts you’re supposed to play them.

I must seem like the most boring college student ever, given these past few updates. I did go out Friday night, but most of it was trying to find the pub we were looking for and so forth. Wound up just wandering around for a few hours and coming back. I was following around the English kids, and just taking in the sights.

Meanwhile, I still continue to spend an exorbitant amount of time reading about baseball, and watching Spring Training on MLB.TV. Right now I’d go with a starting lineup of Swisher in Left, Brian Anderson in Center, Dye in Right, then an infield of Fields-Cabrera-Ramirez-Konerko. Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen, but I can dream.

I’ve come up with a new way to write history papers that I’m really fond of, and has worked really well recently. I get the books and resources I’m going to use. I then spend several hours collecting all of the quotes and citations that could possibly have any relevance to my topic. Once I start writing the paper I can just refer to my notes, and if I ever need filler, or another supporting argument, I just go back to the quotes. So I’ve been compiling quotes for the past day or so.

The topic is, “To what extent was Ancient Greek religion a matter of doing the proper thing in the proper place.” So I’ll be exploring that. It’s a remarkably flexible and variant religion, but some things they were very strict about. If anybody has any interest in the papers I’ve written I can definitely throw them up here. So far I have written papers on:

- Julius Caesar (the play, not the historical figure, although some history inevitably creeps in)
- How much we can possibly learn about archaic civilizations
- Xenophon

Dry stuff, I suppose, but I’m proud of my work. I’ve been going through the notes I’ve compiled for stand up, and sent out an invite to my London friends. I’m no longer feeling overwhelmed, but capable of meeting these things head-on.

Apologies for the lack of activity on this site. There hasn’t been much to report. The past few days have consisted largely of sleep scheduling difficulties, and abortive attempts at evening plans. We’ve found out a few things about traveling around London, and good places to go (and bad places to go!) through trial and error. Surely it will be useful in the future.

Mike and I did spend a good 3 hours walking around the Leicester Square/Soho area on Saturday evening. It’s remarkable how crowded it is, and how obnoxious the club promoters are. There will be a 20 minute queue in front of it, and they’ll still have people circling trying to give you “special” deals.

There are some beautiful things there as well. Further, in Leicester Square they have Ian McKellan, Billy Crystal, and Sylvester Stallone’s hand prints, amongst others.

I have also spent a good two hours a day reading about baseball for the past few weeks. Not too much of an increase from the norm, but when I’m not up to much else it seems more noticeable. Further, an English friend of mine is very interested in learning about it. Once the season starts up, I’ll start showing him MLB.TV games, and I talked to him for about two hours explaining statistics.

I’m proud to say he already realizes why RBI is a stupid statistic for measuring the quality of an individual player.

Generally my father’s biggest complaint about sports writers, television, and commentators is that it doesn’t teach him anything new about the game. Being a parrot, I have sort of adopted this as a complaint of mine. Well, in an excellent interview with Kansas City Royals pitcher Brian Bannister (Found here) he says the following:

If you think about it, a hitter does not actually see the ball hit his bat, he loses the ball a certain distance out in front of him and has to “guess” where it will end up. This is why repetition and good eyesight are important for a hitter, and why as pitchers we don’t want to pitch in patterns.

This is amazing to me, and something I had never assumed. I always thought they watched the ball into their bat. It could be that Bannister is incorrect here, but I feel like he’d know better than I would. They especially site that he was a position player in college, so he’s had his fair share of hitting.

Baseball is so awesome.

Edit: I must add I found this interview through Vegas Watch . It’s written by a good friend of mine at Emory. Although to be honest, he could have dropped out a year ago and survived on gambling and sports writing, so I’m not sure why he’s still there. Highly recommended.