Hokum

I heard it but, as Conan O’Brien pointed out, the real meaning escaped me. Here’s Shatner interpreting Palin’s speech as it was meant to be heard:

Alex Baldwin claims Hulu is an alien plot to destroy the world, but I think cable news is doing a much better job. I have to watch a lot of cable news — it airs on a little TV on my desk all day, every weekday — and participating in mind-numbing activity like that is going to leave a mark after a while.

This poor intern at Vanity Fair is about to find out for himself. I have got to keep an eye on this.

The rainbow that appeared at the stadium last night (look behind the ‘Nationals’ sign) didn’t help: The Nats lost to the Cardinals, 4-1, in a rain-shortened mess of a game. Albert Pujols didn’t even play.

This town is filled with alumni of Congressional Quarterly. I’m one; my boss is one; my boss’ boss is one; my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss is another.

I feel safe in saying that we were all proud of the time we spent there. CQ cared about quality journalism above all else, and found a way to make a profit out of reliable, objective, detailed reporting about Congress and Washington. I spent more than four years there in the 1990s, helping to expand its online operation from a single proprietary database service to a wide variety of Web-based tools.

CQ had been owned since its inception by the Times Publishing Co., which publishes one of the nation’s best newspapers in the St. Petersburg Times — and Times Publishing, in turn, is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute. But the Times, like most newspapers, is having its challenges these days, and CQ always was this odd little stepchild up in D.C. — so it went up for sale.

This week, as expected, CQ was purchased by The Roll Call Group, which in turn is owned by the company that publishes The Economist. That’s about as good of an outcome as could have been expected for CQ, given the high quality of The Economist.

But many of us will be watching developments. It would be a shame to see CQ cheapened and turned into some sort of marketing-flavor-of-the-week outfit, and it would be a disservice to the generations of journalists who did some of their best work there. It also might collapse a business that is in an increasingly competitive market. We’ll see what happens next.

The Sporting News has ranked all of baseball’s parks from best to worst. Best is Fenway Park, which is a great place for a baseball pilgrim to go but frankly lacks the amenities of 25 other major league parks, IMHO (and God help you if your seat is behind a pole). Worst, to no surprise, is the horror that is Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, where the catwalks in the roof come into play.

Pittsburgh’s fabulous PNC park is No. 2; Wrigley Field, a shrine even more overrated than Fenway if you’re a casual fan and/or don’t enjoy two-story hikes to use trough urinals, ranks third; Camden Yards and the park in San Francisco are two well-deserving choices to fill out the Top 5.

Kaufman Stadium in KC is sixth. I’ve been there and it’s a great park…if you’re stuck in a 1978 time warp. Still, I’ve got no real complaints.

Nationals Park is 23rd. That tells you something about the quality of baseball stadiums these days, because it’s a really nice park. In fact, you can go down the list of MLB parks and you won’t run into a real dog until Oakland at 27th (out of 30). I would have ranked Houston’s Minute Maid Park, with its stupid outfield hill and model train set that runs around the top of the stadium, much further down, along with Atlanta and the somewhat sterile White Sox park…but this is why people have debates.