It's only April, but for those raised under the curse of the Bambino, it's never too early for Red Sox fans to start eyeing the panic button.
Audio: WBUR & NPR's Only A Game Commentator: Bill Littlefield.
The Red Sox should have swept the Baltimore Orioles (with the worst record in MLB) over the weekend... But lost the series finale yesterday in extra innings.
Codebreaker
Baseball may have a set of rules, but there's also an unwritten code deeply respected by players. Jason Turbow, author of the new book, The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime, discusses parts of the unwritten code: like why spitball pitches might be tolerated and why a pitcher will intentionally aim the ball right at the batter.
America is browning. As politicians, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues America has been brown from its inception, as he himself is.
For Rodriguez, brown is not a singular color. Brown is evidence of mixture. At the core of the book is an assessment of the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America. Reflecting upon the new demographic profile of our country, Rodriguez observes that Hispanics are becoming Americanized at the same rate that the United States is becoming Latinized. Hispanics are coloring an American identity that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black and white.
Audio: Berger & Prescott publish podcasts on Facebook. They now face West, so when they fart, it wafts in the general direction of the Middle East, via Arizona.
The controversial story line was a two-parter... The second half aired Wednesday with audio bleeps added by the network after the program's depiction of Muhammad in a bear suit in the previous episode triggered a warning from an extremist group.
The episode guide for # 201, (Original Air Date: Apr 21, 2010) said: Angry celebrities, violent ginger kids and Mecha Streisand are about to destroy South Park and all anyone wants to know is, “Who is Eric Cartman’s father?”
Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker reacted immediately.
In the 14 years we've been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn't stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn't some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle's customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn't mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We'll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we'll see what happens to it.
Comedy Central has declined to comment, but a spokesman said neither episode is available online. That's normal, a contractual delay in posting to the South Park website. But it remains unclear whether they eventually will be, and whether they'll be the original or censored versions if they are.
On Showtime's 2006 mini-series, "Sleeper Cell," radical Muslims, who are planning a terrorist attack within America, first feel compelled to kill a charismatic young Muslim cleric they consider too radical.
The imam's message: The struggle Islam commands in the name of Allah is against your own nature and darker impulses, not any other person, nation or ideology... True jihad is personal, not political.
It's about a best selling author and college professor considered an “atheist with a soul,” who doesn’t believe God exists, but takes faith seriously. The novel includes an unusual appendix, where Goldstein shows her own academic philosophical chops.
Audio: BBC, PRI & WBUR's Here & Now 4/22/10, Host: Robin Young.
New $100 Bill: Bells! Ribbons!
By Jacob Goldstein, NPR Planet Money, 4/21/10
The government just posted pictures of the new $100 bill. Here's what it looks like.
The $100 is a favorite of counterfeiters, for obvious reasons, and the government's rolling out new bills to try and make life harder for them. It seems like the old antibiotics-versus-bacteria thing, where the pathogens/counterfeiters are always catching up to the drugs/government.
The new hundreds will enter circulation in February of next year.
Every year, it's a weekend of emotional ambiguity marking two medical anniversaries with totally different outcomes.
More recently, a life saving surgery. In the distance, a reminder that one of the few potentially life saving amateur tools in which the public is trained fails 9 of 10 times.
The painful truth is that your best may not be enough to save a loved one. But because they are a loved one, you try... And live with the memory through your Sadderdays.
Earthquake, tsunami,
