Unusual Trades In Baseball History

For only the fifth time in Major League Baseball history, a player was traded as compensation for a manager.

The Boston Red Sox sent Mike Aviles to the Toronto Blue Jays and in return received a pitcher and the Blue Jays manager John Farrell.

See NYT: Red Sox Make a Trade to Get a New Manager

However, the most unique baseball trade involved the legendary Ernie Harwell. In 1948 he became the only broadcaster to ever be traded for a player when Branch Rickey acquired him from Atlanta (source: USAToday).

Who Is The Greatest MC Of All Time?

The safe answer is Rakim.

The correct answer is Big Daddy Kane.

He was the complete package. He could do many styles, had the dance moves and the cameo cut, was the lyricist for the Juice Crew, and was behind Roxanne Shante's battle raps.

I love Rakim but he was not as versatile as BDK.

In high school the margins of my class notes were filled with Big Daddy Kane lyrics. I made diagrams showing the links between BDK - EPMD - Biz Markie. They were the holy trinity of rap.

Doug E Fresh, Dana Dane, the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul and others were there too; but as planets around the rap stars.

I am still not sure how I found this music as a suburban kid. It all came as tapes from my friend Tom. They were the primer that led us listening to Marly Marl's The Symphony over and over in Matt's basement while we played ping-pong.

But Big Daddy Kane was always the one I listened to the most. Even in graduate school I was writing his lyrics on chalkboards when I was board.

When my wife was just my girlfriend I gave her a few quizzes, one test was on a drive from southwest Ohio to northern Michigan. Much of that drive was spent listening to Big Daddy Kane tapes. Had she complained our history would have been history. Rather she complimented his ability to work the phrase "party people" into just about every song.

His line that gets stuck in my head most often is "So pick a B.C. date because you're history".

And the song I listened to most often? Many nights were spent in the '87 Accord with 'On The Move' turned up all the way as I drove from Matt's and past Jill's on the way home.

Without Big Daddy Kane there would be no Jay-Z. Maybe not even a Paul Barman (which would probably make many people happy). But to my ears there is direct link from Big Daddy Kane's compound syllable rhyming (e.g., "the best oh yes I guess suggest the rest should fess/ Don’t mess or test your highness/ Unless you just address with best finesse/ And bless the paragraph I manifest") to today's MC Paul Barman incredibly clever quattro-syllabic to mono-syllabic rhyming. (e,g., "That sure made it sat-ur-at-ed")

What sent me on this sentimental journey was a post at Herohill that linked to a documentary about Big Daddy Kane.

Watch it then see the 2005 VH1 Hip Honors celebrating Big Daddy Kane.

PEACE

What Jesus And Ayn Rand Have In Common

If they showed up today and saw what was going on in their name they'd never stop throwing up.

Hannah And Her Sisters Scene

Chris Leonardi | MySpace Music Videos

I often wonder if the Tea Baggers realize that when they talk about "going Galt" do they also know that Ayn Rand was a pro-choice, fiercely anti-religion amphetamine addict who had no problem with government provided health care?

Likewise, Adam Smith recognized that capitalism needed a way to account for social costs and justice. See Esq: Adam Smith, Socialist

"When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."

The Fierceness Of The New Madrid Earthquake May Have Been Exaggerated

Via SciAm: New Madrid quake analysis rewrites history books

Pat Buchanan Is All Kinds Of Crazy And Un-American

I don't subscribe to my town's newspaper, but my mom still likes to have it around and since she is babysitting for awhile there is always a copy in our house. Earlier this week I was flipping through the pages and saw an opinion column by Uncle Pat: New Tribe Rising?

In this piece he basically says the Tea Party is made up of white ethnonationalists and it is a good thing and everybody else better watch out because this kind of uprising has a long history (though Tecumseh, Hitler, and Milošević were unsuccessful, maybe it was because the right person has not tried it yet).

The conservative blog Little Green Footballs even thinks he's crazy: Pat Buchanan: Tea Parties Are a 'New Tribe Rising'

This kind of tribal thinking is essentially un-American. The promise of America, and what continues to be a goal for Americans, is the concept of the "melting pot" as cliched as that may be - but it is a cliche because it is true. Buchanan is arguing for fascism.

Not only is racial based tribal thinking antithetical to the ideals America represents, but it also makes for bad economics. See TheAtlantic: Why Nations Struggle or Thrive

It's also clear that the most troubled societies -- those with the highest reported levels of suffering -- also, generally speaking, face the highest levels of intolerance.

Crash Course On Palestine

The Israel-Palestine conflict is not something I follow closely, but I think I understand it much better after reading Juan Cole's The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It

Kim Stanley Robinson Developed A New Time Travel Hypothesis For His Latest Book

Interview with KSR at The Guardian: Kim Stanley Robinson: science fiction's realist

Geologist At Work

When I was in high school my favorite books were in the 'Winning Of America' historical fiction series by Allen Eckert. The NYT has a profile of Asbury Sallenger Jr. and his book 'Island In The Storm' which sounds like a work of geological fiction: The Geologist’s Tale: A Storm, a Survivor and a Vanishing Island

The book is “Island in a Storm.” The island is Isle Derniere (in French, “last island”), one of the barrier islands that run along the Louisiana coast. And the storm was a ferocious hurricane that roared out of the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 10, 1856.

Christopher Columbus Knew Exactly What He Was Doing

As I discovered when I read Stephen J Gould's 'Dinosaur In A Haystack'. Everyone knew the Earth was round and that there was a continent to the west. Now there is some more supporting evidence.

See Reuters: Vinland Map of America no forgery, expert says

Reminds Me Of "Those Who Write The History Books..."

Funny but true at BalloonJuice.com: The Thin Line Between Socialism and Capitalist Nirvana

The 2010 proposed rate of 39.60% = socialism.
The 2002-2008 rates of 35.00% = capitalist nirvana.
The 39.6% rate of the 1990’s = socialism.

Chestnuts On The Verge

Perhaps just 150 years away to full reforestation!

See: Blight-resistant American chestnut trees nearing reality

Teddy

McCain's Hero: More Socialist Than Obama!

McCain can call Obama a socialist or he can call Teddy Roosevelt his hero. He can't do both.

A Profile Of Ben Franklin - The First American

Benjamin Franklin: City Slicker

Franklin also exhibited psychological skills far beyond any mere country bumpkin’s. Seeking a second term as clerk, for instance, he was opposed by a rich and talented new assembly member who proposed a different candidate for the post. Franklin won the job, but he didn’t like the threat that the member would pose to his pocketbook in the future. Rather than gaining the man’s favor by paying servile respect, however, Franklin wrote a note asking to borrow “a certain very scarce and curious book” that he knew the rich man owned. The man sent the book immediately. Franklin read it and returned it a week later with another note, this one “expressing strongly” his “sense of the favor.” The assemblyman “ever afterwards manifested a readiness” to serve Franklin and remained a lifelong friend. It was another instance, Franklin believed, of the truth that “he that hath once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.” Now that’s city slick.

Eating For Conservation

IHT - To save a species, serve it for dinner

Fascinating article about Gary Paul Nabhan who has written a book about North America's most endangered food traditions.

Professor Cole Schools Willie

I liked Bill Cunningham much better in the late 1980's when we was just "Willie" and realized he was playing a character.

JuanCole.com - Barack Hussein Obama, Omar Bradley, Benjamin Franklin and other Semitically Named American Heroes

Songs About Trains

I've been working on a "songs about trains" playlist in iTunes for awhile. Here's someone who has done a history of the railroads and songs about post - 7 Means of Movement: Railroading.

Maybe The Mayans Were Geologists?

Seems like enjoyed beer like a geologist would. NY Times - Love of Chocolate May Have Begun With Cacao Beer

Dr. Henderson suggested that the Mesoamericans fermented cacao first to make beer, eventually discovering, likely by accident, that the fermented seeds made an even better beverage.

Cacao and Chocolate timeline from chocolate.org

The Jedi Templars?

Jedi in Star Wars are Templars in medieval Crusades

Delusions Of Grandeur

(The entire article at HNN.us is Must Reading)
Via History News Network from Juan Cole - Bonaparte and Bush on Deck

rench Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration's already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.