Up and Down

...with my San Francisco Giants...

Whew, what a weekend! Yesterday the Giants played against the LA Dodgers in their stadium, and lost 9-1 while looking like an unsteady Little League time without their ritalin...it was painful to watch.

Tuesday evening, they looked like world beaters. After going down in order in the 1st, the Giants got it together in the 2nd. Buster Posey hit the first pitch for a single. Brett Pill knocked the 1st pitch he saw out of the park! The Giants never looked back, turning four double plays, and commiting zero errors.

Winning Pitcher, Ryan Vogelsong: 7.1 IP, 8H, 1R, 1ER, 3BB, 1K, 0HR, ERA 2.94 Santiago Casilla notched the save, while the Giants handed Dodgers' Ace LHP Clayton Kershaw his first loss of the season.

Once again the world is spinning in greased grooves...

...which brings me to my Giro d'Italia fantasy team...My Young Lion, and Giro d'Italia leader, @taylorphinney tweeted: "Last night I couldn't walk, tonight I can hobble. We have a TTT tmrw and #PINK to defend. Pain? What pain. This is what dreams are made of!"

Thank God today was a rest day! Wednesday's Stage 4 is a TTT, the Team Time Trial, my favorite cycle racing event. Nothing else in sport is like it. Beautiful, dangerous, dramatic...it has everything  you could ask for.

Tonight TeamCorduroyPlanet is on top of the heap in my Giro d'Italia Fantasy Bicycle Racing League. Phinney and my World Champion Sprinter, Mark Cavendish, both hit the ground hard at 75KPH Monday...100M from the finish.

Phinney crossed the finish line in the ambulance, and needed three stitches in his left ankle. Manxman Cav has road rash all the way down his left thigh and calf. Sanctions were made for dangerous riding by the racer that caused the pileup. X-Rays showed no broken bones in Phinney's ankle.

I can sleep in Wednesday because my guys don't start until after 0600 PDT. The TTT isn't on TV in the States, but Internet streams are available.

I'm off to a satisfied sleep...good night, and Happy Belated Birthday to BajaBabe!

Monday Extra

Not much to report about actual meteorite finds since the initial flurry last week...however there is a story about the Foothill's New Gold Rush.

The Pioneer Press has the whole story. "Once again there are lively saloons, fortune hunters jockeying for prime spots and astounding tales of luck" History is a-making in the New El Dorado!


Talk about luck...TeamCorduroyPlanet takes the lead in the Giro d'Italia Fantasy League!

Just a vanity post..gotta go now, the San Francisco Giants are in Los Angeles to play three against the Dodgers. Both teams are 9-9 for their last 18 games. GoGiants!

Willie Mays #24

Happy 81st Birthday to "The Say Hey Kid"

Willie's Hall of Fame plaque

Willie greets the kids on his 80th Birthday

The greatest baseball player I ever saw play...thanks for all the fun, Willie!

"They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays" - Ted Williams

Sunday Funday

Hooray! The 95th Giro d'Italia began Saturday in Herning, Denmark. The Tour of Italy starts in Denmark you say? Yeah, I don't get it either. Maybe it's more EU Love-In stuff? Herning is notable in the bicycle racing world as the hometown of Bjarne Riis, winner of the 1996 Tour de France and directeur sportif of the Saxo Bank team.

Before I drifted off, I checked in with Live Update Guy who was doing the Giro d'Italia Prologue. Live blogged Individual Time Trials are rarely exciting stuff excepting rain, so there was no stimulus to keep me awake. I stirred with the last dozen riders still to start, but didn't finally wake up until the show was over and the results official.

Yes, I do have a dog in this hunt...I put together a Fantasy Team minutes before the deadline. After Stage One, TeamCorduroyPlanet is tied for 2nd of 59 teams. It's all downhill from here! Thanks Taylor Phinney who won today's stage and scored my 20 points!

So far so good...The SF Giants played a fine game Saturday under warm sunny skies and...won! Saturday's game was on FoxTV...I assume they were responsible for the third day of blimp images from the Hanger 1 Vodka Blimp. Thanks FoxTV for another round of SF Bay beauty shots!

After four straight losses, Saturday's game felt good...comfortable even...like that ratty old favorite T-Shirt that the missus wishes you wouldn't wear in polite society...yeah, it felt that good...I drank it in...OK, the Giants do have a ton of offensive problems, and they've been booting it big-time on defense this week, but in Saturday's game they kept a lid on both problems to win 5-2 over Milwaukee's Brewers.

No new news about the NASA zeppelin hunting meteorite debris. Yesterday they said bigger pieces may have made it as far west as Folsom Lake and Roseville. I'm sure there's a latter-day gold rush on across the El Dorado foothills now.

Coda:
 I finished my fine day watching the "2012 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony" with my Sister K. More comfort food for my heart...awesome music, politics-free. Well done rock gods and goddesses!

History Again

History is being made as I write!

It turns out that NASA's meteorite hunting blimp isn't a blimp at all, it's a Zeppelin!  Never before in history has a zeppelin been used to hunt meteorites. The Sacramento Bee today published a "treasure map" of what has been found up to and including Tuesday's finds. I hope they'll do likewise once the zeppelin hunt wraps up.

Sacramento Bee Graphic

On Thursday's 6 O'clock News I watched LIVE as they "landed" the zeppelin at McClellan Park. It looked pretty dicey with the winds kicked up by the passing weather system. At the time I didn't think Hindenberg, because I was still thinking blimp.

Airships are having a renaissance in our modern world. When I was a kid, the Goodyear Blimps were the whole airship flotilla here in America. Now there's a bunch of differently branded blimps floating over sporting events from coast to coast. I remember a newspaper story a few years ago about "stealth blimps" being developed for surveillance work. KirkVallus and I had many belly laughs at the thought of giant airships sneaking up on bad guys. This was before 9/11 I'm sure, today the idea would rate a FacePalm...

I've always had a passing interest in airships, but I don't "follow" them the way I do spaceflight. Thursday the SF Giants played an afternoon game, and waddya know, the telecast had a blimp feeding aerial shots. Needless to say, with the clouds and afternoon sun the views of action on the field paled in comparison to the myriad "beauty shots" of AT&T Park on McCovey Cove, the Bay's Bridges, San Francisco's hills and San Francisco Bay itself.

All the pretty blimp shots didn't help the Giants win however...

The NASA zeppelin Eureka, which NASA actually chartered from Airship Ventures who share space with NASA at Moffett Federal Airfield near Sunnyvale, CA. is the only zeppelin flying in the States today.

Though both are airships, blimps and zeppelins are different solutions to the same puzzle. Blimps are pressurized airships with only the envelope giving them their signature shape. Zeppelins are rigid airships with a metal structure giving the airship it's shape. Post-Hindenberg, all airships use helium instead of the highly explosive hydrogen.

I watched another chartered flight this morning on the web, when a United Launch Alliance Atlas V sent an Air Force Advanced AEHF communications satellite. ULA is a joint venture between Lockeed and Boeing. This was the launch delayed from Thursday for a balky purge valve. ULA rolled the Atlas V back to the assembly building and changed the valve in time to launch 24 hours later...even Florida's weather cooperated.

After the launch I caught up with the zeppelin story. Yesterday I likened the hunt to a glass bottom boat trip, it turns out the glass bottom boat has moved into the 21st Century. The zeppelin Eureka carries a gyro-stabilized, high-resolution video camera that can pick out a golf ball in the dirt from 1,500 feet.

I'm keeping an eye peeled to see if the zeppelinauts find anything.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/04/4464952/meteor-here-jkdkjdffdeck-here.html#storylink=cpy

Meteorite Hunting

@rgj tweets: Scientists to use blimp to look for meteorites after explosion over Sierra Nevada: A group of scientists will bo...Reno Gazette Journal Story

From a blimp! I imagine this mission to be kinda like a mid-century glass-bottom boat trip without the Caribbean waters or sun tan lotion. It's just 1PM here in the Inland Valley, and it's been sprinkling for an hour or more, the winds aren't that bad, but the radar shows showers over the Mother Lode. Fog or mist on the ground would put the kibosh on searching...

It's a gray day all over...it's sprinkling on the Giants and Marlins at AT&T Park in the 1st inning. Interestingly, the CSN Sportsnet broadcast has a blimp today, too! No sign of Bruce Lee the redtail hawk. The AT&T Gulls won't show up 'till the 8th or 9th...

Here ya go, the Sacramento Bee says the blimp is airborne. Happy hunting!

Here's KCRA3 with video of the blimp launch. These scientists are a brave lot!

Geekgasm

What an amazing day I had mining the internet! From the tech minutia of Formula One aero-developement (with great spy photos!) tweeted LIVE from Mugello in Italy's Tuscan countryside, to enough snarky tweets to sprain my funny bone, via some web radio, and some baseball blog fun, it sadly unraveled as the Junior Seau news unwound. Godspeed Junior. I hope his death spurs on the concussion studies of NFL players.

There's been a bunch of tech stuff streaming this week. I think it's so cool that SpaceX streamed the rocket engine test LIVE from Cape Canaveral Monday. The test went perfectly after one quick delay, and SpaceX will send their first Dragon capsule to the International Space Station later this month. Private spaceflight...I've been waiting for this since I was a kid listening to NASA space shots on a cheap transistor radio!

It's been a bad couple of weeks for offshore sailboat racing in California. The Slow Speed Chase ran afoul of shoals at the Farallones on April 13th, leaving one dead and four missing. On the morning of April 28th, the Agean went missing during the 65th Annual Newport to Ensenada Race with four souls aboard. Early speculation had the Agean tangling with a large ocean going ship.

The SoCal yacht racing deaths have been explained. Tech holds the answer. After lunch today, Latitude38 posted to Facebook the rest of the Agean story. It looks like no other vessel was involved. Agean's SPOT Messenger GPS track shows the boat was on a constant course and speed for more than three hours before crashing into North Coronado Island.

This SPOT Messenger GPS is a pretty cool gadget. A hundred bucks for the SPOT and $100/yr for the service looks reasonable to me for people who spend their time out near the edge. I haven't seen any SPOT coms on my Facebook or Twitter feeds...yet...

Jeez, SturgeUrge and I have been planning another Tomales Bay Dungeness Crab Hunt for a week now...the wind, weather and tides just won't cooperate. we're looking at after Mother's Day now...

The winds have turned blustery, and the skies have been darkening since noon today. The Monterey/SFO AFD said there was an 80% chance of rain on Tomales Bay tomorrow, with just a chance of precip here in the Inland Valley. My eye says it could rain here before morning.

Regular readers will remember Bruce Lee, the AT&T Park Red Tail Hawk. Bruce is on Twitter now. Not to be out-maneuvered, the AT&T Park Seagull signed up this week too. I expect an epic, dare I say Iconic, SnarkFest should ensue when @HawkBruce and @ATTSeagull start to tangle!

Finally, the numbers on the 2011/2012 Ski Season are coming out, and they're not good. Truckee's Local Fishwrap has the numbers from Northstar and Heavenly Valley. The two Vail-owned resorts report a 24.2% hit to skier visits from the slow starting season. How'd I know about the Sierra Sun story? They're in my Twitter feed.