The Portland City Council has sealed the fate of Beavers baseball at PGE Park, and what's done is done. They're gone.
There's talk of moving the Beavers to Beaverton. (The Beaverton Beavers?) I don't know whether I'd continue to support the team if they leave the city, but I'd like to have the choice.
So, I've been trying to figure out the odds that the Beaverton deal will happen.

If the Beavers are going to move to Beaverton, I think a deal will have to be in place by next spring, and here's why. If no deal is in place by spring, ticket sales for the Beavers next year, their last in PGE Park, will plummet. That might happen even if a Beaverton deal gets done, but knowing that the Beavers will still be in the region in 2011 is the only way to stop sales next year from plummeting.
Also, they'll want current season ticket holders to also buy seats in the new park, and they could hold out the carrot of getting the best seats in the new park to current season ticket holders. None of that can happen if plans for a new park run past the spring.

So my guess is that it'll be decided by then. We'll see.

The whole Cambridge police vs. Professor Gates dustup is being treated entirely as a race question by some commentators, but I think a bigger reason it has gotten so much attention is that it plays into a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals.

The officer arrested the professor simply for yelling at him. He says so in his report. No crime is alleged in the report. Yet, the officer and other supporters continue to claim that he did nothing wrong. There's no question that this is legally incorrect.
What the officer, along with his supporters, is trying to defend is the concept that police should have unquestioned power to arrest anyone, anywhere, anytime, simply because they are the police. The question of whether the subject committed a crime shouldn't enter into it.

The outlook wasn't brilliant, with Portland baseball's fate at stake.
The score stood four to one, with but one vote more to take.
And then when Adams voted aye, and Leonard did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

But Saltzman then preceded Fritz, as did also Fish,
And the city watched without a voice - they both defied our wish.
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For it turned out not to matter when Amanda Fritz came to bat.

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But it was all to no avail, though the winning case was flawed.
They saw Fritz stand for the people, defying all the strain,
But they knew that Beavers baseball wouldn't come their way again.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Portland - the City Council has struck out.

I didn't bother watching the Tony Awards last night. I thought about it, but I watch very little TV anymore, and when I saw the show wasn't in high definition, I passed it by.
That was a mistake.

My taste in musicals has evolved gradually, to the point where some shows that I didn't particularly like when I was younger are my favorites now. Gypsy is one of those. I think the first time I saw it was the movie with Rosalind Russell, when I was about 10 years old. I didn't think much of it, as you would expect from a child of that age. A few years later, when I was 12 or 13, I saw it on Broadway with Angela Lansbury. Ms. Lansbury may be many things, but Mama Rose she's not. It didn't make much of an impression on me.

Fast forward twenty years. I'd seen the movie a few more times, but I still wasn't in love with it. As I found out eventually, some of the important numbers were excised from the movie, like "Together", and Rosalind Russell isn't really a singer, which hurts the movie. Natalie Wood was priceless, though, as always.
Around that time, a new production was done for television, with Bette Midler as Rose and Peter Riegert as Herbie. This is a role Midler was born to play, and seeing this version rekindled interest in the show for me. I finally realized how powerful the story is, how good the music is, and how meaty the acting roles are for those who can fill them.

By now, it seems that every female Broadway star eventually plays Mama Rose. Bernadette Peters did it a few years ago. I think the world of Ms. Peters, but it's hard for me to see her as Rose, although she got some very good reviews.
And now comes Patti LuPone. She's a legitimate Broadway legend, having made her name in the original production of Evita. Had she never done anything else of note, she would have been long remembered for that. But she's been in the trenches all these years, wowing them every night in shows like Anything Goes and Sweeney Todd.
She's always been excellent at playing strong characters, like Eva Peron, and when I heard that she'd be starring in Gypsy, I was intrigued. I just forgot that there would certainly be a performance from the show in last night's Tony Awards. Which there was.

Luckily, some enterprising soul has uploaded the performance to YouTube, for as long as it lasts there. If you're not familiar with the show, this scene takes place at a train station, where Rose's youngest daughter, the star of their failing vaudeville show, has just left the act. Rose, the pathological stage mother, now has only her older daughter, Louise, and her boyfriend Herbie. Herbie has just suggested that they all leave show business and settle down as the scene begins.

Much has been made of the support Hillary Clinton received in the Appalachian states during the primary season. The votes she received in that region were a major factor in keeping her total near Obama's nationally.
The problem for Obama, I think, lies in the fact that those weren't pro-Clinton votes so much as they were anti-Obama votes. That is a deeply racist part of our country, and it's a problem Obama will have to overcome in the general election. You can't convince me that the 2-1 or 3-1 support Clinton received in those states was because they're a bastion of forward-looking feminism - they're not, although apparently the people there are less afraid of a woman president than they are of a black president. The Democrats are, at least.
Another argument can be made that neither Clinton nor Obama would win those states in the general, so the point is moot. Maybe so, but the question remains, are there enough racists left to derail Obama's candidacy?

I lived in central Pennsylvania for ten years. There's a lot of racism there, and a lot of it is subtle. I'll give you an example.
Where I worked, they piped in one of the local radio stations, run by Clear Channel. This station played "the greatest rock and roll of all time". (My favorite thing about that slogan was that invariably, after they said it, they would play "Piano Man" by Billy Joel, a song that has no relation whatsoever to rock and roll. But I digress.)
This station, which played the greatest rock and roll of all time, never played a song fronted by a black performer. Never once. Okay, there was one exception. They played "Easy Lover" by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey a few times, and then stopped. Normally, they played every song in their playlist ad nauseum, so they must have seen a photo of Philip Bailey somewhere and realized they'd slipped up.
The real giveaway was the songs they would play that had been covered by more than one performer. When they played "All Along the Watchtower", it was the Bob Dylan version, rather than the far more popular Jimi Hendrix version. When they played "Soul Man", it was the Blues Brothers' cover, not the Sam and Dave original. However, when they played the Blues Brothers' other hit, "Gimme Some Lovin'", they played the original Steve Winwood version. This happened with every song you could think of.

That radio station is a small thing, and might seem insignificant, but segregation (de facto, not institutional) and other problems were also rampant there.
One of the best things we can do to fight this, of course, is to get Obama elected. Maybe it'll prove that those people are a dying breed.