Infinitive Splitter

From the latest Democracy Corps memo:

As we saw in August, voters have an overwhelmingly negative outlook on the way things are going in the country. In fact, people across eight focus groups had a hard time identifying anything good that is happening in the country. When pushed to say something positive, these undecided voters would only offer comments on the arrival of football season or how much they like surfing the internet.

This sounds about right to me.

A friend back in Pittsburgh shares this surprising bit of news:

Allegheny County Council last night voted overwhelmingly to prohibit smoking in restaurants, bars and other workplaces, moving the legislation into the hands of the chief executive for approval.

“We’re going to go from the smoky city to a smoke-free city,” council President Rich Fitzgerald said when he introduced the legislation.

The ordinance passed on a 14-to-1 vote.

Mr. Fitzgerald said that county Chief Executive Dan Onorato will get the bill by Friday and will have a week to make a decision. Council appears to have enough votes to override a veto.

Mr. Onorato said he plans to approve the no-smoking ordinance as long as it didn’t contain “too many exemptions.”

I always figured Pittsburgh would be among the last of the northern cities to do this. The city boasts some of the nation’s best health-care options, but has the highest rate of maternal smoking in the country — in 2000, nearly a quarter of Pittsburgh’s infants were born to mothers who smoked during pregnancy — and ranks consistently near the top in overall prevalence of smokers.

That’s a lot of smoke. Good for the county for cleaning itself up.

A recent trip to New York — I spent about six hours there on Sunday evening — reminded me of how nice it is to stand in an enclosed space that isn’t filled with toxic fumes when watching a musical performance.

Hypocrisy alert! This only lasted for a couple of months, so now I’m just one of those insufferable people who selfishly welcome smoking bans because we’d like a more immediate reason not to smoke in bars (yes, “more immediate” than certain death).

Today: Pittsburgh; next year: Washington!

(Arlington: probably never, but if you have learned one thing from this website, it might be that I am always wrong.)

So, this week, this happened:

In the span of 18 hours and two appearances that rocked Petco Park, Trevor Hoffman might have earned more than just first place on baseball’s all-time saves list.

With saves No. 478 and 479 secured in front of raucous crowds in the San Diego Padres’ final two regular-season home games, Hoffman caught and then passed Lee Smith. There’s also the chance that Hoffman brought a bit more respect to both the statistic itself and closers in general than they currently enjoy.

There is that chance, but it’s silly. Saves are meaningless.

Hoffman has entered 535 games in which his team was already winning, and he didn’t give up the lead before the game ended in 479 of them. In most cases, this means he pitched one inning — in the last ten seasons, he has averaged 1.06 innings per appearance — and didn’t totally screw up.

It means that in almost 90 percent of the games into which he was called to preserve his teammates’ already-achieved success, he did his job.

Big deal!

Here is something I just learned: Giants Stadium and the Meadowlands, home of the New York Giants and New York Jets, respectively, are different names for the same place.

Many weblogs have weekly traditions. TBogg and others have the Friday Random Ten. Kos has Science Friday. Michael Bérubé has Arbitrary But Fun Friday (and Theory Tuesday and Rhetorical/Liberal Thursday — the man is a machine). All the cool kids do it.

Well, now I’ve got mine.** Several weeks ago, I published a one-off feature called “Thursday Copy-Paste Blogging.” In the interest of blogospheric conformity, I have moved the segment to Friday.

(You may have noticed that I also changed the name. There’s no good reason for this, so leave a comment if you prefer one or the other, or if you have a better idea.)

This week’s stolen content comes from TAP’s Charles P. Pierce:

You worthless passel of cowards. They’re laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They’re laughing at him, too.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the “compromise.” There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can’t ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it — or its congressional authors — seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a “lesser breach” of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives — “Aggressive interrogation techniques” — the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

Go ahead and click the link to read the last couple of paragraphs.

*If you absolutely must get something from me today, here it is: the Pittsburgh Pirates need to win just three of their last nine games to finish the season with a better record than last year’s.

**This probably won’t really be a weekly feature.

This will be my second post in as many days about Serious International Affairs, and it will feature commentary as sophisticated and well-argued as readers of this website have come to expect.

It is remarkable how quickly the Thai state stumbled into chaos after the country’s creepiest (and most famous) tourist was spirited away on suspicion of murder.

Shorter Islamic extremists, to the Pope:

Take back what you said about violence committed in the name of our religion or, by god, we’ll kill you.

(Shorter concept inspired by Sadly, No! and Busy, Busy, Busy)

T-Rex and his friends are talking today about writing clever messages in the memo field on checks. Some examples include “stop following me,” “for your continued silence,” and “nudity tax” (click the link for the best one, at the end).

I clearly have to improve my game. My bank helpfully keeps a scanned image of my past checks online, so here are my last few attempts at financial-transaction comedy:

• bubble machine
• sunglasses and feather boa
• floppy shoes
• penguin costumes
• massage and water balloons
• dog food

Hah! Get it?! We don’t have a dog!

Confidential to roommates, creditors and business associates: October will be a month of unprecedented hilarity.

If you’ve been wondering — like I have — why HBO has been making new episodes of “The Wire” available On Demand a week before they air, here’s why:

The new marketing strategy signals the networks’ acceptance that they no longer can dictate when or where or how viewers watch television. Instead of relying upon splashy TV debuts during a heavily hyped fall premiere week to reach mass audiences and create buzz as the networks have done since 1950s, broadcasters are using new technologies, from iPods to DVDs, to target smaller groups of highly plugged-in consumers.

With regard specifically to “The Wire” (and “Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam”), the article relays the point from a University of Maryland “media economist and historian” that early On Demand allows fans of the Sunday shows to stay “ahead of the curve in online chat” even if they prefer watching football on Sunday nights.

This seems to be the right take on the strategy, but I’m not sure that makes the strategy a sound one. Granted, the independence from advertising means air-time ratings aren’t as important to HBO as they are to other networks. But for a show as desperately in need of mainstream buzz as “The Wire” is, how does catering to the message-board kids help? “The Sopranos” can count on Monday-morning office talk every week; “The Wire” needs it.

The point is moot, of course, if we all just agree that HBO isn’t terribly interested in promoting its best show.

Oh, and if you’ve known about this strategy for months because they did the same thing with “Rome,” “Lucky Louie,” and “Big Love,” good for you. That makes this another in a series of irrelevant posts.

Sometimes 47 radio stations just aren’t enough.

I discovered last season that I could pick up at least one of the stations on the Pittsburgh Steelers radio network in my car, but I never had any luck at home, where I would like to mute the network-TV announcers and listen to Bill and Tunch.

Can anyone tell me which of the cities on the linked list is closest to Arlington, Va.? My best guess is Chambersburg, Pa., which is a little less than 100 miles away.