Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader’s upgrades to the Villainschloss continue to eat into computer time. Alas, they also eat into his TV viewing time. If this keeps up your Maximum Leader will be burning candles and reading old dusty tomes in a wingback chair and going to bed shortly after dark… Hey… That doesn’t seem like too bad a plan…
Your Maximum Leader feels that a day without reading Fear and Loathing in Georgetown is a day intellectually wasted. To wit this post that directs us to 3 page piece in the New Republic by Sean Wilentz in which Wilentz smacksdown of some of his critics. You know, every once and a while your Maximum Leader remembers why he wanted to be a history professor once upon a time. Reading this exchange between Wilentz and his critics is one of those times. He enjoyed the historical aspects of discussion itself, but also the cattiness of the exchange. Few things amuse your Maximum Leader as much as a bunch of distinguished professors arguing with each other. On the one hand it is so intellectual; and on the other it is so petty and personal. It brings a grin to your Maximum Leader’s visage.
Of course, FLG isn’t always intellectual on his blog… To wit: he link to portraits of a naked President Obama and his unicorn. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t know what to think of that upon which he just cast his gaze… It is disturbing…
In other news…
The Nationals have not been sucking recently. Indeed they have pulled off a few wins recently. It looks like the gremlin bogey number remains 53. Of course there are only 62 games remaining on the schedule. So it is quite possible that the gremlin bogey number will soon be unattainable. If your Maximum Leader were more statistically inclined he’d tell you what the chances of losing 53 of 62 games would be. So he’s hoping that the Nationals continue to not suck so badly.
Continuing in the baseball theme… Which is more impressive? A perfect game (such as the one pitched recently by Mark Buehrle of the White Sox) or hitting two grand slams in a single game (like the National’s own Josh Willingham). Your Maximum Leader is inclined to say that even though two grand slams seems to be more rare (in terms of instances of occurance) the perfect game is harder. He’d like to see the statistical breakdown of the chances of each. He imagines that building a statistical model to set up the odds of pitching a perfect game would be crazy… Of course the odds of hitting two grand slams in a game would be crazy too.
After Willingham hit his two slams on Monday, your Maximum Leader read somewhere that Frank Robinson (one of the greatest hitters ever) only hit two grand slams in his whole career - and those two were in the same game. Your Maximum Leader found it hard to believe that Frank Robinson could have only hit two grand slams out of the 586 home runs he hit during his career. So he looked up the stats and found that Robinson only hit two grand slams with the Orioles. He hit a total of 8 grand slams in his 21 year career. To be honest that seemed a bit low to your Maximum Leader. So your Maximum Leader looked up some other player stats… After a few looks that total of 8 doesn’t seem too low… Hank Aaron only hit 16 slams out of 755 total home runs. Barry Bonds hit 11 slams out of 762 homers…
Anyhoo…
Massive thunderstorms are upon the Villainschloss and your Maximum Leader thinks he’d better sign off now…
Carry on.
