Freaks, beards, panda bears. Aubrey, Buster, Timmy. Hell yeah, the SF GIANTS are world series champions!!!! GIANTS!!!
For some reason, the only words that really come to mind are the opening lines to a place just down the road from San Francisco, a place called “Cannery Row”:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.
Truly a team of Everybody, sinners and saints (and a few good pitchers), scratched and clawed their way past teams five time their size this post season to win the first world series in San Francisco history. In typical San Francisco fashion they looked nothing like you’d expect, were assembled from the dregs the rest of the nation threw out, and destroyed the predictions made by certain East coast pundits who shall remain nameless. Tonight in San Francisco they will celebrate!
Hell the high (vote yes on 19?) might even last long enough that their leftist butts won’t even feel the pain of the November 2 election 😉
“sinners & saints”, are you quoting TobyMac?
City on our Knees by TobyMac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFL2NDxF-CA&ob=av3n
If you gotta start somewhere why not here
If you gotta start sometime why not now
If we gotta start somewhere I say here
If we gotta start sometime I say now
Through the fog there is hope in the distance
From cathedrals to third world missions
Love will fall to the earth like a crashing wave
Tonight’s the night
For the sinners and the saints
Two worlds collide in a beautiful display
It’s all up tonight
When we step across the line
We can sail across the sea
To a city with one king
A city on our knees
A city on our knees
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
If you gotta start somewhere why not here
If you gotta start sometime why not now
If we gotta start somewhere I say here
If we gotta start sometime I say now
Through the fog there is hope in the distance
From cathedrals to third world missions
Love will fall to the earth like a crashing wave
Tonight’s the night
For the sinners and the saints
Two worlds collide in a beautiful display
It’s all love tonight
When we step across the line
We can sail across the sea
To a city with one king
A city on our knees
A city on our knees
Oh-oh-oh
Tonight could last forever
We are one choice from together
Tonight could last forever
Ooh
Tonight could last forever
We are one choice from together
As family
We’re family
Oh Tonight could last forever
We are one choice from together
You and me
Ya, you and me
Tonight’s the night
For the sinners and the saints
Two worlds collide
In a glorious display
Cuz its all love tonight
When we step across the line
We can sail across the sea
To a city with one king
A city on our knees
A city on our knees
Oh oh oh
A city on our knees
A city on our knees
Oh oh oh
If we gotta start somewhere why not here
If we gotta start sometime why not now
Dave, here’s a big hoorah for the wonders of Monterey Bay and Cannery Row!
One way to grasp the narrative objectives of quantum systems engineering, is to say that these objectives stand in opposition to Monterey poet Robinson Jeffers’ celebrated inhumanist poem The Purse Seine … whose evil-hearted (IMHO) verses I will not quote here.
But rather, I will quote the life-affirming words of our own academic community’s real-life Ed “Doc” Ricketts … namely, the naturalist Ed Wilson … whose closing passage in his biography Naturalist could have been spoken by Doc himself:
————
If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science.
Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionally the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.
All this, and I need venture no more than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end.
For one more turn around I would keep alive the little boy of Paradise Beach who found wonder in a scyphozoan jellyfish and a barely glimpsed monster of the deep.
————
Ed Wilson’s life-embracing quest is (for me and many) one of the core narrative elements of 21st and 22nd century quantum systems engineering. On campuses around the globe, one can find Ed’s quest being embraced by the younger members of the synthetic biology community … certainly this is true on our UW campus. GOOD!
Good for them.
Not to be a fuddy duddy, but I’ve always thought the title “World Series” rather ostentatious, or at least self-aggrandizing. But I suppose “Champions of the US and a little bit of Canada” wouldn’t sound as good.