A Real Fred-Bird

Dave in His Lance Beakman Jersey

Rey Shoots a Redbird Selfie

Doing the Duck Dance

Yesterday, after Rey arrived, we kvetched until six. Then we walked up to Mike Duffy’s, a neighborhood sports bar, claimed a table and waited for the baseball game to begin and also for Dave to arrive. By the time Dave and Bre showed, the Cards were up 2-0. After dinner, all of the kids went off to party with Dave’s high school friends, Anne and I walked home together from the bar. The streets of Saint Louis were eerily quiet. We watched the rest of the game at home, including the last play of the game where Boston self-obstructed themselves. So, after a rather bizarre ending, the Redbirds won Game 3 and go up 2-1 in the World Series with a walk-off obstructionism call. Wanting to research this previously unheard of rule, I turned to wiki. There is a page for this baseball rule and it had already been updated to include a reference to the game that had just concluded. This all occurred, twenty-eight years to the day after the infamous, at least in Saint Louis, Don Denkinger call. Hey, a win is a win, even if it is facilitated by the team in blue, the umps.

Anne and I fixed breakfast in the morning. We kvetched some more around the dining room table. Eventually, Dave and Bre went off to the zoo. Rey went out to lunch to meet a college friend who was passing through town on his way from DC to Montana. This friend has a long and somewhat unusual name. His first name is Chancellor and one of his middle names is Kaiser. I can see that a person sporting such names would hit it off with Rey, the history major. Rey is currently reading a ‘brief’ history of the Norman Conquest. This acted as preamble to what I thought was the best story of the morning. Rey began explaining that because of the Norman Conquest there are numerous word pairs that mean the same, but are derived from either an English or French origin. The best pair was stereotype and cliché. They both harken back to the early days of the printing press. Back then all typefaces were set by hand. In order to facilitate this work, the type for commonly used words or phrases were saved and set aside for easier typesetting.

After all the kids left, Anne suggested that now would be a good time for me to get a bike ride in. She didn’t have to suggest twice. In the park, I caught the tail end of the Rock’n Roll Marathon. This is a marathon that sports a rock’n roll band every mile. I rode by three bandstands that were in the park. I had another traffic altercation in the Hampton underpass tunnel, the second in two days. There are four lanes passing through the tunnel. Yesterday, I was scolded for straying from the right two most lanes. Today, I was scolded for being in the right two most lanes. What’s a biker to do? The problem is that the lanes were laid out by the surveyor who left well spaced dots to mark where the lines should be painted. The lines have never been painted, no signage ever installed and it has been more than a few months. It seems now though that some people have decided to take the law into their own hands.

The Cardinal mask was a gift from Jay and Carl. I took a similar photo of Carl at Archie Mcphee, the novelty store where the mask was purchased. We couldn’t get Bre to pose with the mask, because alas she is a Red Sox fan.