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With the World Series between my hometown Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays happening so close to the Presidential election, I can help but confabulate them in my mind. Philadelphia hasn’t won a professional sports championship since 1983. Each of the four major sports teams (Flyers, Sixers, Phillies and Eagles) have made it to the finals, but none has won it all since the ‘83 Sixers with Moses Malone and Dr. J.

Pennsylvania has also not gone to a Republican Presidential candidate for the last four elections. This time around, it will be five in a row for the Democrats. Obama will take Pennsylvania. To win PA, you have to win Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Obama will win both big cities (Philadelphia and Allegheny counties) by a huge margin, so large that it won’t matter much what happens in the rest of the state (OK, add the densely populated bobo suburbs and it won’t matter that McCain wins the 55 rural counties in PA)

Will the Phillies also continue the pattern of losing in the championship? I like their chances of winning for a lot of reasons (the exact opposite reasons I cited in my criticism of the team when they were slumping earlier in the season). I keep hearing commentators and sports writers say “Jimmy Rollins sets the table.” I hate that metaphor.  The truth is Jimmy Rollins sets the agenda; he sets the tone. He is literally the leader of this team. He bats first. When he scores, they usually win. Whether he hits a lead-off home run (as he did in the elimination playoff games against the Brewers and the Dodgers) or walks or gets a hit, when he’s on base the Phillies chances of winning are better than they are with him in the dugout. Rollins may write the plan for success, but it’s Ryan Howard who executes it. Rollins may be the President of this company, but Howard is the Chairman and CEO. How does a player lead the league in strikeouts and errors for his position and also lead the league in home runs and RBI? He’s larger than life. He’ll need to drive in runs for the Phillies to win. Shane Victorino has surprisingly carried the load in RBI with 11 thus far in the postseason. Toward the end of the Dodgers series, Howard was getting a lot of hits–singles and doubles. The Phillies may hit a few long balls, but everyone knows that to win the World Series you have to have great pitching and you have to manufacture runs. If the top of the order gets on base and moves runners into scoring position, singles and doubles by Howard will get runs in and the Phillies will win–that is, if their pitching holds up.

The Phillies pitching has been good throughout the playoffs with the exception of Jamie Moyer, who lost twice. However, Cole Hamels and Brett Myers have had plenty of bad games this year. If they can hold the Rays to three runs or less, I like the Phillies chances. If they have an off day and give up six or seven runs, I’ll be worried. The Phillies have the bats to win games 12-10, but you can’t depend on out-slugging the other team when your pitchers are throwing slow-motion pomegranates right down the middle of the plate. That’s like being one of those basketball teams that wins by hitting 60% of their 3-pointers. The problem is no team can do that four times in a seven-game series.  The Phillies aren’t going to score double-digit runs in four of these games. They’ll need to win a few games 2-1 or 3-2. Their pitching will need to shut down the Rays. They’ll need to play small-ball and use their speed to steal bases and capitalize on sacrifices.

The World Series is going to be close. Obama might as well cheer for the Rays. He’s going to have a harder time winning Florida than Pennsylvania.

UPDATE: 10/22/2008

It’s now been NINE days since Microsoft said that they would  initiate a payment to me in approximately 7 days.  Apparently the margin of error in their approximation is greater than plus or minus two days. So much for Microsoft as a company that’s all about precision. When is the approximate release date of Windows 7? Let’s review: Microsoft’s Live Search cashback program advertises that it will refund a percentage of the price of a purchase made via live.com within 60 days. It has been 70 days since I made my purchase and I haven’t seen dick from Microsoft. I followed all of their instructions carefully. Maybe they’re delivering the cash in a burlap sack (all nickels) via donkey from Redmond to Omaha. Yo, Microsoft: Give me my stinkin’ money!

On August 14th, 2008 I bought a Nintendo Wii system on ebay via Microsoft Live Search cashback. I was offered 25% cash back. I would just have to wait 60 days until the funds were available to me. A few weeks ago I decided to check my cashback account to see how long I would have to wait to collect my savings. The cashback site said that the funds would be available on October 13th, 2008. If you count from August 14th (not counting the 14th–using the 15th as day 1), then October 13th is the 60th day from August 14th. So on October 13th I logged into my cashback account and what did it say? My funds would be available on October 14th. OK. No problem. It’s just one day.Alas, today is October 14th. So I log in and find that my funds are available. I choose to redeem them via Paypal (the only option). How long would you expect it to take Microsoft to make a payment to my Paypal account? My freelance clients who pay me via Paypal send me payments that I see literally minutes after they enter the payment in Paypal. So you can imagine I was a little surprised to receive this message from Microsoft:

Microsoft will initiate a payment to you in approximately 7 days.

I have to wait seven more days? This cashback refund which is supposed to be paid back in 60 days is actually (we’ll see) paid back in 68 days. That gives Microsoft an extra eight days to hang on to my money. Greedy, lying bastards.

Last night at Van Colln memorial fields where the Fairmount Sports Association baseball games are played, there was lots of discussion about a thread on Phillyblog regarding controversy in the championship of the boys 6-9 little league. I was hoping to read the thread on PhillyBlog, but found that PhillyBlog was down this morning when I visited. I did a search and found that there is a pattern of this site being down in the morning.

My son plays on one of the teams that played for the championship and I’m hoping I can contribute some of my observations to the discussion.

PhillyBlog is back online and it feels good to get this off my chest.

Good Morning Silicon Valley has been following the desperate efforts of various music recording industry groups to crack down on illegal music distribution. Groups such as the British Phonographic Industry are calling on Internet Service Providers to monitor their users online activities and punish or report those who share music illegally.

This week, the ISP’s shot back. MISPELL, the Multinational Internet Service Provider Education and Legislation League, issued the following press release:

Industry Groups around the world have been lobbying for legislation that will require ISPs to monitor our users’ activities and ban users who are found to share music files in violation of copyright laws. Our question is, why us? It would make just as much sense to require PC manufacturers to monitor their customers and punish those who steal music. Maybe they could make the violating computer melt into a useless smelly gray blob. That would be pretty good punishment, right?

Why not force hard disk manufacturers to detect suspicious music piracy-related disk activity and then send all the data to the authorities? What is music piracy if not the movement of data from one disk drive to another? Then again, disk drive companies would be correct in their assertion that data cannot be written to a disk without first being held in memory somewhere.

Memory chip vendors should add algorithms that sense illegal music distribution patterns in the silicon, then they should send the user’s biographical information directly to the BPI and the RIAA and display “Don’t copy that floppy” on the user’s screen.

Speaking of the screen, without a screen, it would be nearly impossible to pirate music. The bad guys have to be able to see what they’re doing in order to cripple the poor music recording industry by distributing music on P2P networks. Maybe display and peripheral device manufacturers need to speed up the artificial intelligence components in their devices so they can stop music piracy.

And how did the chip manufacturers come out of this smelling like a rose? Hello! You can’t be an Internet music thief without a computer and there is no computer without a processor. Intel and AMD really need to add some low-level music piracy detection machine code right into the chip. But wait! My Intel Core Duo is about as useful as an 8-track tape if I don’t have any electricity.

Utility companies must massage the power they distribute into a music piracy-detecting pattern in order to save the worldwide music recording industry from the crippling scourge of Internet crooks.

Not so fast there, young fella. Electricity doesn’t just get up and walk across the wires on its own. You’ve got to have some kind of fuel to burn to make heat to boil water to turn turbines to make electricity. What is the most common fuel used to make electricity? Coal. The coal industry has built itself on the theft of other people’s music. They should be ashamed of themselves! How can they sleep at night? We call on coal mining companies to start making “smart coal” that can burn in such a way as to make the electricity that it ultimately generates incapable of supporting intellectual theft. It would be nice, too, if they could alter its molecular structure so it doesn’t release carbon dioxide and speed up global warming, but that is a secondary concern to the music recording industry.

Roger Clemens tried to come out firing brush-back pitches to the House Committee on Oversight, Government Reform, Nannies and Seven Year-Old Hypodermic Syringes Stored in Beer Cans. Unfortunately he didn’t have his good stuff and got shelled for a grand-slam with nobody out in the first inning. My favorite moment was his plea of, “I’m guilty only of being too nice.” That’s chin music all right. Except it’s a coming from a violin under the Rocket’s chin.

Quite a few news outlets are making a big deal of the tense exchange between Clemens and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman at the conclusion of the hearing. I’ll replay it here for those who might have missed it.

You can fool some of the people some of the time and you can give the rest checks for $600. Forget “rebates”, let’s just be honest and call it good-old-fashioned street money for buying votes this coming November. The Chinese government will send some flowers to thank us for stimulating their economy.

Why does the Super Bowl halftime show always feature an old band playing songs that were hits 20 years ago?

(Disclosure: I worked for Yahoo! on the FIFAWorldcup.com project in 2006).

First of all, get rid of all the gossip/tabloid fluff (i.e. the Terry Semel Hollywood slant). The lead on the Yahoo! home page right now is a chicken-wing recipe for the Super Bowl, followed closely by a list of videos from American Idol alumni.  Hey Jerry, this country is at war and in a recession! Leave the crap to the “old media” and Perez Hilton and show us some of the innovation that made Yahoo! what it is. Stop trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Respect your audience and imagine that they secretly strive to be more than donut-eating couch potatoes.