Forever Trusting Who We Are

Topic: ""	13 Jan 2010\|10:30pm
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Topic: ""	30 Dec 2009\|02:46am
The Cities post Via Jonah Keri, the idea here is to list every city/town you spent a night in during 2009. Now, without a doubt, 2007 would be the most interesting for me and I think I'll do that anyway, but first, 2009: 1) Bronx, NY 2) Wyckoff, NJ 3) Washington Heights/Manhattan NY, NY 4) Yonkers, NY 5) Hartford, CT (Well, not quite Hartford but close enough) (I was in Boston MA at the very end of 2008, but alas it does not count!) This actually might be it. I did not do much traveling this year--Scranton may be the furthest I went--and almost always was back in the City or in NJ that night. For me, this is highly, highly unusual. For comparison, in 2007: 1) Wyckoff, NJ 2) Syracuse, NY 3) London, England 4) Edinburgh, Scotland 5) Newcastle, England 6) Nottingham, England 7) York, England 8) Lampeter, Wales 9) Utrecht, Netherlands (I can't remember the name of the actual village, but Utrecht's where I spent most of my time). 10) Rome, Italy 11) Florence, Italy 12) Venice, Italy 13) Southhampton, England 14) Dublin, Ireland 15) Lisbon, Portugal 16) Buffalo, NY 17) Orlando, Florida 18) West Palm Beach, Florida 19) Annapolis, Maryland 20) Allentown, PA 21) Lavollette, NJ And in 2008: 1) Syracuse, NY 2) Bronx, NY 3) Wyckoff, NJ 4)Lavollette, NJ 5) Rome, Italy 6) Florence, Italy 7) ____ Maryland (can't remember where, but it wasn't Annapolis or Baltimore) 8) Stowe, Vermont 9) Boston, Massachusetts

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Topic: ""	17 Sep 2009\|08:26pm
I realize not all of you are among his fans, but Pete Abraham is leaving the Journal News for the Boston Globe and the Red Sox. Love him or hate him, no one did what he did with that access.

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Topic: ""	06 Aug 2009\|10:22am
What the hell? Twitter is down completely and Facebook's not much better...did someone launch a cyber attack on social networking sites?

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Topic: ""	19 Jul 2009\|06:02pm
"People forget he had about 150 innings in the minor leagues, which is not a whole lot, I mean I talked to Ron Darling earlier today, he said he had about five or six hundred in the minor leagues, and he's got 30+ starts under his belt in the big leagues. I mean, it's not a ton of pitching." http://www.zshare.net/audio/6289291080f893a9/ My blog posts from earlier this week: ( The Joba Theory ) Have I mentioned that I don't believe in coincidence? I think Joe Girardi reads my blog...

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Topic: ""	17 Jul 2009\|08:37pm
Walter Cronkite has died. There are celebrities, and then there are the men and women worth remembering. "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

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Topic: ""	11 Jul 2009\|06:14pm
I repeat: Fuck orange county. Fucking fucking fuck it. What the fuck good has it ever fucking done for humanity?

Topic: ""	11 Jul 2009\|06:00pm
Fuck the entirety of southern california.

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Topic: ""	23 Jun 2009\|09:44pm
Fuck the Yankees. Fuck my computer. I'm not sure which I hate more right now but I am really, really fucking pissed.

Topic: ""	18 Jun 2009\|09:56pm
So tonight, I am embarrassed to be a Yankee fan

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Topic: ""	15 Jun 2009\|12:53pm
Those concerned about the recent coup in the NYS senate should read this post from liamstliam .

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Topic: ""	02 Jun 2009\|11:51am
I love my life. Got this in my email this morning: Rebecca, We're reaching out to New York baseball fans to find out which of the two new stadiums is the best – the new Yankee Stadium or Citi Field? NBCNEWYORK.com is hosting a citywide debate on our website as part of our most recent Golden Locals debate. Fans can vote on which stadium is the best and more importantly, they can share their opinions about the new ballparks. http://www.nbcnewyork.com/around_town/debates/ The voting ends next Wednesday and right now it’s a dead heat between the two parks. The winning team gets a live trophy and we expect to have a small awards ceremony at an upcoming game. We’re going to be giving this debate online and TV coverage. I’m a biased Yankees fan, so I’m reaching out to all the Yankees blogs with the hopes of tipping the scales. We’d love it if you could highlight our Golden Local debate on your site and encourage your readers to vote and chime in. If you're interested, send me your phone number and I’ll pass it on to our TV producers. They’ll be looking for Yankees and Mets bloggers to interview. Thanks in advance!

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Topic: ""	29 Apr 2009\|02:56pm
Facebook exists in "Pirate". My life is now entirely worth living. I've made it to Page five. So I am 25% doneish. I think. I still have 15 more pages to write and I don't really know what i'm talking about. Good thing I plan to write really, really long footnotes.

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Topic: ""	13 Apr 2009\|02:30am
Got my thoughts on paper. Dear Yankee Fans: It's April. You don't need to freak out. No, seriously. http://tinyurl.com/denbfp

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Topic: ""	02 Apr 2009\|10:50pm
Post I wrote on my blog and the incredible comment a reader left: For Love Of The Game With baseball season just days away, many of us are excited about the possibility of seeing the new Yankee Stadium and perhaps even Citifield. Sometimes, though, it can feel daunting, as though the game itself takes a back seat to the team and to the notion that you are watching titans and not humans. So what's one to do to get close to the game? To remember why it is we're attracted to the game in the first place? Here are some things to do throughout the course of the season: Take in a minor league game. Not just an AAA game, where you probably already know the names of all the prospects, but AA and A games as well, with players not out of their teenage years, getting their first taste of professional ball. Many minor league teams have their bullpens just beside the first or third base line--if you go on a cold or damp night, when no one else is around, walk down to those seats next to the bullpen and watch the relievers warm up. Also--it's a great place to get a foul ball. Go to a college game in your area. Sure, aluminum is a bit different than wood and it's a little harder to find information on the players, but you never know--you may very well be seeing the next Derek Jeter or Joba Chamberlain... Find some friends and find someone's park or backyard, use some old tennis balls and play a sandlot game of baseball. You don't have to play only nine innings; play until the sun goes down or there's a thunderstorm warning. Just make sure to wear a helmet if your pitcher actually, you know, pitches. Take a glove and a ball and go to the park with a friend, brother, sister, parent, cousin, child... and just play catch. There is nothing more basic than having a catch. Turn it into a game with your own rules or just toss lazy fly balls. Doesn't really matter. The beauty of baseball is that as long as you have a ball, you can play catch. The one thing it's so easy to forget over the course of the season is that nothing is bigger than the game. Nothing. No player, no team, no stadium is bigger than the game. The funny thing is, though, the game is at its biggest when its at its smallest. The game is the best, the most pure, when there are no bright lights or giant LCD monitors or $500 lower level tickets. In the end, baseball's a game. That's what's at the heart of it, that's why we watch it, why we're fans. So while you're busy marveling at the new Stadium, make sure you don't forget what this is all about in the first place. Posted by Rebecca at 6:47 PM Mike said... Correction. Baseball was a game. Now it's a business. At least that's how I feel every single year at this time, the cold indifference of a jilted lover almost. Baseball in general, and the Yankees in particular, spend each winter making me lose all interest, filling me with nothing but contempt for the greed that oozes from every pore...nothing, maybe, except a bit of nostalgia, too, for how much better it used to be (and how much better everything used to be, and 20 years from now I'll be saying today was so much better than the future-present). And yet... And yet, when those first spikes step out onto the grass, even though I know it's wrong, even though at the core of my being I know it's the wrong grass (the right grass is gone, the right seats are gone. Right Field, my childhood playground, is gone. Right field, where Al Kaline landed on my father and his father the day before father's day in 1963, a story I heard only a million times, often in right field itself. Right field, where my parents saw Chambliss and Jackson etch their heroic deeds in the record books. Right field, the long shadows, the imposing upper deck, my favorite corner in all the world of baseball, is gone. There is a new right field, but it's the wrong right field) and the wrong spikes (another player I don't want, another ego we don't need, yet another personnel blunder in the post-O'Neill era). Even though I know a year from now I'll go through the same cycle of cynicism and despair all over again, none of that is going to matter. I guess what I'm really trying to say is... Dammit, baseball, I can't stay mad at you! C'mere, you big lug! Is it opening day yet? I'll even learn to love the Interactive Yankeetainment Experience if I have to...just don't leave me again. But you will. Hopefully later in October than the last several years, but you will. But it doesn't matter now. Now it's April, and there is only possibility. Only the columns of zeroes in the standings and in the stat charts. Only the fresh grass. Only six more months with you, baseball, waiting for me when I come home from work each day. And that's fine with me. April 2, 2009 10:45 PM

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Topic: ""	08 Mar 2009\|10:49pm
My friend Brent asked me to share his videos--they are fan videos, but they include every song U2 played, including the two after GMA signed off. Source 1 thinks you need to Get On Your Boots because you're so Magnificent Source two thinks I'll Go Crazy if I don't Go Crazy Tonight Source Three thinks it was a Beautiful Day Source Four thinks you need to Breathe Source four wonders if you've got Vertigo

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Topic: ""	08 Mar 2009\|09:48pm
C/P'ed from the blog: (Today, 8 March, is International Woman's Day. In honor of that, I offer this post, on my thoughts, feelings and experiences as a blogger.) I don't know how it started, my interest in sports. There's really no logical reason for it: neither of my parents were very interested in sports, I was such a bad athlete that I got cut from my middle school basketball team when fifteen tried out for twelve spots, and I can't begin to enumerate the number of times I was picked last for pretty much everything remotely athletic. Everything from my childhood states this girl should not be a sports fan, and yet, here I am. By some odd confluence of events and circumstances, I am here now, a blogger, a writer and a die-hard sports fan. I remember the year it happened. Twelve years old, my math teacher nursed a passion for the Yankees I had never seen anyone have before (his son was taken in the 2008 draft by the Minnesota Twins), and I, ever the teacher's pet, latched on to it. There was nothing quite like the feel of competition, and, unlike the Nets, who never won, and the Devils, to whom I had not yet been acquainted, the Yankees won, and they won a lot. I remember learning about David Wells' perfect game, about one of Darryl Strawberry's giant home runs (which happened to, as my older brother says, "bounce off my friend's chest"). Of course, in the pre-Stub Hub days, it was possible to get $12 bleacher seats on game night, and such things seemed more possible than they might now. In 1998, the year of Sosa and McGwire, it was impossible not to fall in love with the Yankees. We watched Game One of the World Series as a family, and when Tino Martinez came up to bat in the seventh, worked a 3-2 count with two outs, it wasn't hard to figure out what would happen next–these were the Yankees, after all, and the season was 1998. There was, however, one drawback. There were few people with whom I could share it. Most twelve year old girls care about boys and trying to get away with being more grown up than they are. Trust me on this–I was one of them. Most twelve year old girls do not care so much about baseball unless they are on the field, playing the game. I never really bothered to hide it when I became obsessed, and it was probably a very short track from being obsessed to becoming a blogger, though blogs first had to be invented and my ability to be critical of the team, instead of blindly delusional, had to develop. Still, develop it did, and now I've been at this small thing for about a year and a half–just over it, actually. I've been fortunate enough to be able to do this at a time where women baseball bloggers are not an absurdity, even if we still are a little unusual. For instance, in January, when guest bloggers appeared on The Yankees LoHud Blog, I was only one of two women to make an experience. Actually, thinking about it, I can't actually remember if the second woman scheduled to post ever did post... I have to be honest. The most sexism I've ever seen are comments left by trolls, which obviously don't count, and that is, perhaps, an incredibly encouraging thought. Granted, a blogger will never experience what a beat writer or broadcaster will, as we don't exactly get press passes here, and thus will likely never be in an all-male locker room. It's no secret that until recently women weren't even allowed in the press box, so you can imagine how much trouble the locker room may have been for the first to integrate it. Even if we can't stand Suzyn Waldman's nasally voice or Kim Jones's, well, not very questioning questions, you have to remember that as recently as 30 years ago, a time that many of you, dear readers, may remember, the idea of a woman broadcasting or a woman in the locker room would have been preposterous. Women may still be underrepresented in baseball (though that is changing), but the wonderful thing about blogging is that, at least in the fan community, that ratio is getting narrower. I am lucky enough to be a part of it now. It means that in ten or twenty years, as the case may be, I can tell my (future) daughter, that yes, she can be a sportswriter if she so desires, and that her being a sportswriter in itself won't be an objectified spectacle. My grandmother was born only three years after women in the United States won the right to vote; I have grown up in a world where traditional gender norms have been questioned to a point where we can banter around terms like 'transsexual' and 'transgender' without much thought. Still, it's hard to be completely satisfied. I have this opportunity, but many do not. In Iran, for example, women are not even allowed to watch their national football team , never mind being a sportswriter that covers male teams. Even here in the United States, Title IX legislation was needed to ensure girls of an equal opportunity. While such legislation may no longer be needed as attitudes have shifted, that there is still a debate shows that this is not the same thought everywhere. I started my blog because one person told me he'd read what I wrote. I don't actually know if he still reads–if you do, ChiDave, more power to you–but, it got me to do something that has utterly changed my life for the better. I hope there are more women out there, willing to take the opportunity. Cheers, and since I don't say it nearly often enough, thanks for reading.

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Topic: "U2 @ Fordham University/GMA Winter Concert Series"	06 Mar 2009\|09:19pm
[Sorry mods, I'm running on four hours of sleep here...) U2 played a free concert this morning at Fordham University in the Bronx, NYC as part of Good Morning America's Winter Concert Series So my own camera battery died, hence the generic Youtube clip: Source They played six songs, three songs per set, which isn't a lot, but dude, it was free. When I was in the same city as them last time (Dublin '05) tickets were going for ~$350! Anyway, some of my friends were on line as early as 4 AM, I think getting up when it's dark out sucks, so my friend and I wandered over around 6 AM...and we paid dearly for it, getting stuck towards the back. And there was a lot of standing around and just waiting. However, today was much warmer, a balmy 40 F, than it was in the beginning of the week when wind chills were in the single digits. The building they're performing in front of is Keating Hall, which is probably the most famous building on the entire campus. Which would, of course, explain why I've never gone in it. The stained glass windows looked amazing in the sunrise. SOURCE: Dude, I was there!

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Topic: "I'm a narcissist."	04 Mar 2009\|01:37am
This is the TEST shipment you asked for 12:19 Holy crap I did well on an assignment for Maryanne. And the five minutes of exposure was certainly enough to give my fingers mild frostbite # 13:31 @proctorsarm Dude, I'm following 75 on Twitter and your updates are filling my page...I thought liveblogs were supposed to be on the blog?! # 16:34 @Blackrosebugg So if I keep twittering about the Yanks, Nick Swisher and CC Sabathia are gonna call me and ask me to come work for the team? # 18:18 making utterly no progress. RIP Cooper + Smith. # 18:21 making utterly no progress. # 19:58 A-Rod continues to bring trouble: tinyurl.com/bvb8ne It's all Derek's fault? # 20:11 @CC_Sabathia get a picture with @THE_REAL_SHAQ? # 20:37 @russiawithglove hard to fill seats after the economic collapse of doom # 20:43 @proctorsarm iT'S ALL DEREK'S FAULT! # 21:11 @proctorsarm karma is such a bitch # 21:35 I get it: Republicans think the credit Crisis is the fault of stupid homeowners; Democrats think it's the fault of the idiot banks. # 21:56 @FLWbooks Yeah, so my dad's name is Irv Glass. I was kind of confused. # 21:56 @missxanthropy hugs my thoughts are with you hon # 22:48 @NickSwisher They've got some talent, but the Yanks have a helluva lot more. # 00:34 @TheRopolitans Ahahaha. That amuses me. # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter Batteries not included, void where prohibited.

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Topic: ""	07 Feb 2009\|12:11am
I flat-out bawled watching this. I mean, like, I'm still wiping my tears. "Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

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Colour: Red
Food: Anything that comes with a shell and dwells in the ocean
Ethnic Food: Greek, followed by Japanese, Indian, Thai, Chinese and Italian
Teams: Yankees, Jets, Devils, Nets , Syracuse Orange
City: London, England
Subject: British History pre-1688

Books: The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sarum, Les Miserables

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Song: Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica
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Mythological Creature, for originality's sake: Phoenix
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So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters
--Metallica

Genius is non-conforumity
--Vladimir Nabokov

It ain't over till it's over
--Yogi Berra

Not all those who wander are lost
--JRR Tolkien

My journal is mostly friends only, but I'm too lazy for a banner. Nearly all my friends here I met through high school, Syracuse, a Lord of the Rings fan group or my Yankees' blog, though there are a few exceptions. If I seem interesting enough, give me a comment.

I am a writer. I've already been rejected! Yay! I'm working on what I hope will eventually become my first novel. Nothing wrong with dreaming, right?

Stamps

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