It was a somewhat subdued spring break this year. My mother came to visit to escape Wisconsin's wintery last gasp. We didn't go anywhere except to my brother's for Easter in Sacramento. Last week we started a terribly difficult jigsaw puzzle. This week we finished it--right before school starts up again. We were all relieved, but plan to burn the damn thing so as never to be bothered by it again. R.I.P. crazy cat puzzle!
T’was the night before middle school and all thru the shack
Not a person was stirring ‘cept for mom gone all whack.
The backpacks were weighted, and all primed to go
In hopes they’d be loaded with lunches just so.
The kids were akimbo, all tousled in bed
As visions of terror unleashed in their heads.
As Papa in pj’s spotted my panic
while wobbling there on the threshhold of manic.
While searching the web, an idea she sought
And found one, behold, oh wow, what a thought!
just let her be, and surely somehow
she’ll work it all out, so sleep well for now.
She plays it often enough on the iPhone, but something tells me India Jane, all of 7, is bored with the electronic version. Hence this simpler version exquisitely rendered as only a child envisions.
Happy Palindrome Day, everyone!
You probably woke up knowing it was Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011, but to Aziz Anin (pictured above), a professor of engineering at the University of Portland, today's date looks more like this: 11022011.
That makes it a very rare, eight-digit palindrome day.
Just how rare is an eight-digit palindrome day? In an interview with The Times, Anin, who has taken on the discovery of palindrome dates as a sort of hobby, explained that there will only be 12 eight-digit palindrome days this entire century.
In addition to the automatic awesomeness of a date being a palindrome, Anin points out that Wednesday's date is extra special because it is 1001 x 11 x 1001, or the product of a mathematical expression in which both sides are almost mirror images of one another.
In an email to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote: "I know both 11-1-11 (which can also be interpreted as 1-11-11) and 11-11-11 dates to occur this month are very interesting dates as well since they won't repeat again until the next century, but 11022011 won't happen again in ALL four-digit years!!"
Anin has found all kinds of crazy number patterns in Wednesday's date. If you're so inclined, you can read more about it in an article he wrote for The Beacon, the student newspaper of the University of Portland. One thing he didn't write about was how he intends to celebrate such an important date.
"In one of my classes, I asked my students to make palindrome triangle paper hats and decorate them with Wednesday's date," he said. "And then I'm going to have a photographer come and take a picture of me with all my students, and hopefully we will have a photograph that has some type of symmetry."
"This is so much fun," Anin added. "Engineering can get pretty boring becuase you talk about equations, but when I say, 'Do you know today is a special date?' it gets a lot of attention. It helps me change the subject for a few minutes and bring the students back from their dream or their hibernating."
So, get out the paper hats, and enjoy 11022011!
-- Deborah Netburn
Image: Professor Aziz Anin created this palindrome image (with his face in the center) in honor of 11022011, a very rare eight-digit palindrome date. Credit: Courtesy of Aziz Anin.
School fall carnival today and the weather was perfect. We worked two games while the girls ran wild, collecting stamps for prizes at all the games.
By PAT BORZI
MILWAUKEE — They appeared from behind the left-field fence in the middle of the sixth inning, five tall, costumed wieners with heads like Easter Island statues but wearing hats. The Miller Park crowd of 43,613 cheered and whistled Sunday as the Milwaukee Brewers’ famous racing sausages lined up on the warning track and took off.
This is Brewers baseball, in which a team seeking its first World Series title still has time for complete nuttiness. Eight years after a visiting player accosted one of the sausages with a bat, the races have become such a part of Miller Park that players are often besieged by relatives seeking to participate.
“Everybody in my family has done it,” Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder said. “My wife’s done it. My two boys have done it. My wife’s cousin came and actually tore her A.C.L. doing it. She took it like a champ. She went home, she was walking around and, like, my knee hurts.”
The sausages are so popular that they make public appearances, and the Brewers organized a five-kilometer run/walk for charity with five runners in the costumes. But Fielder, even after seven seasons of watching wieners jog past his dugout, still does not get the appeal.
“I never understood that,” he said. “I think it’s cool, but I don’t know.”
Brewers infielder Craig Counsell, who grew up in Wisconsin — his father, John, worked in the Brewers’ front office for eight years — said it was simply a case of Wisconsinites celebrating their heritage. In a state known for sausages, cheese and beer, it is the ultimate gag.
Best of all, he said, it is nontransferable. Teams in other cities have co-opted the basic racing idea, using United States presidents, scoreboard subway cars and pierogi, but only Milwaukee has sausages (and for that matter, Bernie Brewer, a longstanding team mascot who slides down a chute after each Milwaukee home run).
“It’s unique to Wisconsin,” Counsell said of the sausages. “It wouldn’t work anyplace else.”
The origin of the races is sketchy. Laurel Prieb, a former Brewers vice president who is now Major League Baseball’s vice president for Western operations, said the races existed when he arrived in 1991, but only as a cartoon shown on the scoreboard at County Stadium. Three animated wieners — a bratwurst and Polish and Italian sausages — scampered past Milwaukee landmarks and finished at the stadium.
“At some point, somebody — and I don’t know who came up with the idea — said, ‘Why don’t we rent some costumes and do it live as a kind of surprise?’ ” Prieb said. “It was meant to be a one-and-done thing.”
The live debut is believed to have occurred on May 29, 1994, the day the Brewers retired Robin Yount’s No. 19, although the team’s chief operating officer, Rick Schlesinger, said he could not confirm the date.
Prieb could not, either, but he does remember how it played out. The animation proceeded as usual until the final leg, when three costumed wieners emerged from the left-field corner and ran along the warning track.
The stunt was well received, but Prieb said Brewers officials hesitated doing the live version regularly. “We were fearful people would say it was the hokiest thing they ever saw,” Prieb said. “So we only did it sporadically.”
But by 2000 the live races had become so popular that the Brewers decided to run them at every game. “Lo and behold, it became an iconic thing,” Prieb said.
By then the race featured a fourth wiener, a hot dog. The fifth, a chorizo, for Milwaukee’s Hispanic community and Hispanic contributions to baseball, joined permanently in 2007 after a one-day trial the year before.
The sausages are considered mascots and have names. Brett, the bratwurst, is identified by his lederhosen. Stosh, the Polish sausage, sports dark glasses and a rugby shirt. The one with the mustache and the chef’s outfit is Guido, the Italian sausage. Frankie Furter, the hot dog, wears a baseball uniform. Cinco the chorizo dons a sombrero.
There is even a Sunday wrinkle in which the adult wieners do a midrace handoff to similarly costumed children, although that was put aside for the postseason.
The races received national attention in 2003 when the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Randall Simon conked the Italian sausage on top of the head with a bat, leading to Simon’s arrest and a three-game suspension. “That was supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t turn out to be a joke,” said Bob Uecker, the Brewers’ longtime broadcaster.
The Brewers do not allow just anybody to race. Brewers employees, often members of the grounds crew, usually wear the costumes. The Brewers generally prohibit non-employees from racing because of liability concerns, said Schlesinger, the chief operating officer.
“You need a connection, and then a connection and then another connection,” he said. “If a certain star quarterback with the Green Bay Packers whose name escapes me wanted to race and was willing to sign a waiver, we’d look at it.”
Milwaukee officials would not permit Sunday’s participants to be interviewed, citing a sort of sausage silence.
“The sausages don’t talk,” said Tyler Barnes, the team’s vice president for communications. “It’s one of the basic rules of racing meat.”
But the list of guest participants is so lengthy, including at least three former players — Pat Meares, Geoff Jenkins and Hideo Nomo — that it is not hard to find one willing to speak. A popular question is one Fielder has asked for years. “I’d think it would be hard to run in those things,” he said.
It is not as hard as you might think, Prieb said. He raced once, at Wrigley Field at the invitation of the Chicago Cubs, a rare sausage road trip. “It takes a few steps to get used to it,” he said.
And Prieb insisted the races were not fixed.
T. J. Quinn, an investigative reporter with ESPN, talked his way into the race while covering the Mets for The Daily News in 2002. He wore the hot dog costume and said the race was honest.
“The grounds crew guys who normally run in it grabbed the good ones, the Italian and the brat, so I got the dog,” Quinn said in an e-mail. “They told us not to speak to anyone because sausages don’t talk, and that it was a real race. The suits were surprisingly light, and there’s a screen in front of your face that you can see through fairly well.
“I had no issues with mobility, but I could have employed better course management; when I came to the turn I had to leap over the on-deck circle, and when I landed everybody had turned. I still managed to catch the Italian at the line by leaning. When you’re dressed as an 8-foot sausage, you can really lean.”
Packers playing poorly but the Mounds are good.
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