A woman in Georgia has started hand knitting a scarf of Super Mario Brothers’ World 1-1. She’s charting the progress in a blog.
Meanwhile, over at the always reliable cracked.com, they’ve trotted out a list of 11 Baseball Legends Who Were Legendary Assholes.
As for this blog, next week I’ll find some interesting material to write about.
I am not a fan of baseball, truth be told I was hoping that the all star game would end in a tie. It’s strange, I like the history of the game and some of the stadium quirks, like the giant Coke bottle at Pac Bell SBC AT&T Park, but there’s so much about the game I don’t enjoy. For the purpose of brevity, I’ll focus on only one of my issues with the sport.
If you go to any NFL stadium, the football field will be 100 yards long. Hockey goals are uniform in size and the NBA 3-point line is the same at every pro arena. Baseball does not have the same eveness and uniformity in its’ parks. Sure, it’s always 90 feet between the bags, but the stadium can be any depth, well, as long as it’s over 325 feet according to a 1958 rule. This brings us to the strange tale of the Kansas City Pennant Porch.
In 1964, Charles Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics, overheard a conversation about the New York Yankees’ success being partially due to the small depth (295 feet) of Yankee Stadium’s right field. So, Finley brought right field wall of K. C. Municipal Stadium in to the 295 mark. The K. C. Pennant Porch as he called it lasted two exhibition games until baseball officials told him it had to be undone because the 1958 rule said that no fence in new or refurbished parks could be closer than 325 feet. Yankee Stadium was allowed to keep its depth because of a grandfather clause. After moving the porch back to 325, the bare minimum, Finley had a white line painted at the sight of Pennant Porch. He also instructed his PA announcer to say “That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium” whenever a ball was hit passed the line but not over the fence. The PA announcer stopped pointing this out when more would be homers were hit by opponents than the home team.
The year was 1956 and Australia had been diagnosed with Olympic Fever as Melbourne was to host the Games of the Sixteenth Olympiad. Meanwhile, a few students at the University of Sydney, led by Barry Larkin and Peter Gralton, weren’t pleased with the attention and reverence that the torch relay was recieving. Their main reason they disliked the pomp and circumstance was that the torch relay was the brainchild of a chap named Adolf Hitler, who created the relay for the 1936 games in Berlin as a show of Nazi strenght. Conveniently, the torch was going to pass through Sydney and be presented to the Mayor who in turn would give a speech. So, Larkin and eight other students hatched a plan.
One of the hoaxsters was to dress in a white shirt and whiter running shorts carrying a fake torch. This torch was made of a silver painted chair leg, a jam tin and a kerosene soaked pair of underwear. Larkin, Gralton an another conspirator arrived along the route wearing white and lit the flame. The third man went running with the torch, but eventually lost his nerve and dropped it on the street. Soon after, Gralton picked it up, handed it to Larkin and with a swift kick sent him down the road with false torch in hand.
Larkin ran the rest of the route with a police escort to the Sydney Town Hall and gave the torch to Lord Mayor Pat Hills. Hills began his speech, Larkin ducked into the crown and by the time Harry Dillon showed up with the real torch, there was much confusion for the Mayor and the remaining spectators. Upon returning to the University, Larkin was congratulated by the college’s rector and recieved a standing ovation upon entering one of his classes. He would go on to become a veterinary surgeon.
On a semi-related note, anyone else think the 2004 Athens torch looks like a giant Joint of Peace?
