Geek of All Trades

Search and ye shall find

How do people find me here at GOAT? 

I don't have many readers.  I might have more if I updated more regularly, but really only my brother and a very few of my friends ever seem to stop in. 

My bloghost, TypePad, keeps a record of site referrers - the places other people clicked that took them to GOAT - that goes back about 48 hours or so.  Every couple of days, I check it to find out how people are getting here.  It's quite interesting.  Most occasional GOAT viewers are finding their way here via search engines.  What are they searching for?

• Searches for "touareg tribe" have led several readers to my post on the music of Mali.
• Here's a great one that I see often:  "Jim Edmonds gay" or, even more oddly, "Jim Edmonds gay pictures" seems to lead people here, probably because I had a post on the 2004 World Series and a post on gay marriage that appeared on the main page at the same time.
• Searches for "Jeter blows A-Rod t-shirt" and variants also tend to send surfers here, because of this post.  I like to think my post gives these readers pause in their quest for sartorial juvenility, but they probably just think I'm a big tool. 

I've also gotten search hits because of my posts on Marjane Satrapi, Robert McNamara, Merck v. Integra, and Houdini.  If you're reading this because a Google search led you here, thanks for stopping by.

Open mouth, insert ankle

The other day Curt Schilling called into a radio show here in Boston and had the following to say about Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella: 

"The problem is when you're playing a team with a manager who somehow forgot how the game is played, there's problems.  This should have been over a little bit ago. Lou's trying to make his team be a bunch of tough guys, and the telling sign is when the players on that team are saying, 'This is why we lose 100 games a year, because this idiot makes us do stuff like this.' They [Rays players] said that on the field."

It amazes me that a perennial Roberto Clemente Award candidate like Schilling can be such an unmitigated jerk every time he opens his mouth.  Shut up and play baseball!  I miss the good old days, when players were gentlemen.  You know, like Mickey Mantle.  And Ty Cobb.

Play Ball!

Baseball season is here again, and I'm getting used to the reshuffled rosters (Sammy Sosa an Oriole?  Tim Hudson a Brave?  Jason Kendall an A?) and the joy of having baseball on all the time, thanks to MLB.com's audio feeds and the "Extra Innings" cable package.  These things provide me everything I need as a person who enjoys out-of-market baseball.  That is this year's euphemism for what I described last year as being "not a Red Sox fan." 

Actually I almost lost the MLB.com audio feed, because the IT folks at my office blocked it when, after the World Series, some Sox fans were using MLB.com to download streaming video of entire Series games.  The strain of all that baseball glee was just more than our little T1 could handle.  When I discovered the block during spring training, I decided to see just how much clout a junior-to-mid level associate like myself can throw around.  I called one of our IT guys and sheepishly asked if the audio feed could be unblocked.  If I'm listening to baseball at my desk, I reasoned, it is usually after 7:00 PM or a weekend.  Well, a few days later, I've got my feed back.  I don't know if I was persuasive, or perhaps some partner who also enjoys out-of-market baseball made the same request.

Finally I'd like to give a little GOAT shout-out to a Sox fan who has my respect:  ESPN.com's Bill Simmons, aka Sports Guy.  Sports Guy is as intense as any other Sox fan, but his passion is accompanied by the kind of respect for the game - and the opponents - that elevates any hometown fan into a baseball fan.  Scroll down this page to the pieces he wrote last October tp see what I mean. 

I often think the Sox/Yankees "rivalry" is a terrible thing that brings out the worst in both teams and their fans.  I'm glad that there are guys like Simmons who are classy enough to rise above it.