Blinq

Barbarians At The Gates

Who knew Borat was reading the news in Argentina?

Don Groff, the travel columnist, writes by e-mail that he was curious how the news of the Bush twins' excellent adventure was playing in Buenos Aires. He ran the Spanish-language article in La Nacion through Google translator.

The piece begins:

The embassy of the United States in Buenos Aires denied yesterday a journalistic version that indicated that it had recommended the daughters of president George W. Bush to finish his vacations in Argentina by security reasons.

The visit from the Bush sisters to Buenos Aires spent to the public knowledge the last week when a thief stole the purse of Barbarian to the care of American intelligence agents.

The article on the supposed suggestion of the diplomatic delegation to Barbarian and her Jenna sister so that they leave the country was published by the ABC chain in its site of Internet.

“We have taken knowledge from an originating report of journalistic sources according to which civil employees of the embassy would have recommended firmly that the daughters of President Bush shortened their visit to Argentina (...) Is false”, the embassy in the official notice said.

The Bush sisters attended last Sunday a soccer match in the stage of Juniors Mouth, where they were filmed repeatedly by the television while they shone a t-shirt of the most popular club of the country.

Very niiice!

A Cold One

And who knew the National Lampoon was still funny? Michael Richards' stand-up meltdown was horrible to watch. But mash it with a few must-see TV moments, as some clever fellows did, and you have Seinfeld: "The Lost Episode."

Headphones required for work.

Adieu, Tacony Lou

A story about Philadelphia's hardcore punk days is scheduled to be the centerpiece in Thursday's Inquirer Magazine. It's written by Lou Perfidio, a freelancer that some of you may recognize from Blinq's comments section or as the blogger known as Tacony Lou.

When an editor called Lou's house Tuesday to ask a question, his wife, Mary, delivered the news. Tacony Lou Perfidio had died the night before. He'd had pneumonia and suffered from high blood pressure. The coroner pronounced the cause of death to be heart disease. Lou was 43. He left a nine-year-old son, Caesar.

I'm pretty shaken. I've known him since 1988, when I walked into the Inky's Horsham Neighbors section and there he was, in the back, a giant, bearded bear with claws. Lou wanted to know, in so many words, if I was one of us or one of them.

I never really knew how we defined the terms, other than I did my best to be one of us. He was a formidable guy.

I ran him through the Nexis database because I remember a few highlights of his life in print - most of them coming outside of the Inquirer, where he was a somewhat frustrated suburban correspondent for a few years after J school at Temple.

I remembered something about him appearing on an Arizona cable show as The Great Satan, and winding up in some sort of hot water. I remembered something about him showing up in a New York bar and proclaiming himself the Greatest Pool Player in the World - and winding up in a New York Times column.

The facts are even juicer than I remember.

Douglas Martin's "About New York" column went this way on Jan. 13, 1990:

Lou Perfidio arrived at least one beer before the appointed interview time at the same smoky haunt. He wore a tie decorated with pictures of houseflies. ''For luck,'' he inexplicably explained. His cap was on backward. Later in the day, he planned to pick up a blind cat, a gift he professed to greatly prize. He kept saying such as this: ''I'm the greatest pinball player of all time.''

The 26-year-old bachelor told the story of a slightly tilted life. His truck driver father met his mother at a Philadelphia candy store where he was putting some eye-catching moves on a pinball machine. Mr. Perfidio's own youth was squandered developing otherwise marginal motor skills behind a captivatingly cacophonous contraption in a Philly cheese steak shop. ''I was flipper-crazy from the beginning,'' Mr. Perfidio said.

It was a half-year later when Lou wound up in an Associated Press dispatch out of Tucson.

His talk show was suspended from its public access TV slot as Arizona authorities investigated whether it was obscene. The man from the Tucson cable company described it as "sort of a talk show, but it's definitely not the Johnny Carson Show."

Appearing in costume as The Great Satan, Lou offered profanity, nudity, ethnic and racial slurs plus explicit talk and depiction of sex acts. There wasn't a follow-up article, but two years later, Lou turned up in another piece, by an Inquirer feature staffer writing about those who do odd jobs.

Lou Perfidio, 29, is no student, and he's not out on the streets trying to pay for college. He needs money to live. Although he holds a journalism degree from Temple, he has been driving cabs on and off during the last few years to keep his stomach happy. Despite the free-time thrills, he finds that odd jobs pay the bills.

"When I go out in my cab," I expect to make between 80 and 100 bucks a night, realistically," Perfidio says. "That's what I rely on to pay the bills. That's what I do best."

But he has other skills.

Perfidio recently began tutoring fellow writers. His ad in City Paper said, "Can't Write? I can."

That he could.

He wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times when he was living out there in 2003.

Tell me, if I were a white clergyman and told everybody that six black guys raped a teenage white girl, smeared dog feces and spelled out a racial epithet on her body -- and that a black district attorney was in on the act -- and then the girl was found by a grand jury to have fabricated the whole episode and I was found guilty, by a jury, of defaming the district attorney, do you think I'd have a bat's chance in hell to be a Democratic presidential candidate 15 years down the road? Black clergyman Al Sharpton paid his $65,000 fine for defamation as if it were a parking ticket and was free to go stir up more racial hatred in New York and, now, in sheep's clothing, on a national stage. Now he is cute and cuddly. Now he leads all the folk. God bless America.

Lou wrote with more attitude than just about anyone I know. It came naturally, and so when he started putting it all down on a blog, which he called I Love Misery, he drew a crowd. (He chose for his picture that of Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince.) He wondered why I didn't quote him much, or put him on my blog roll. He'd headline his e-mails, "Where is the Love?"

The problem, I explained to him, hemming and hawing and sounding like one of them, was that his language would make a stevedore blush, and make some people who didn't understand the size of his heart, think he was intolerant of others. That he hated them, actually. I don't think I had a good excuse. So I quoted him a little more, particularly about the Phillies, who drove him crazy.

Last week we exchanged e-mails. Agreed we were going to have lunch in Kensington. He was going to show me some deli that had survived on the Avenue.

I just went onto his site to catch up on what I've missed. His last piece is about the Phillies, how ex-Phillies' deaths seem to come in threes, with Johnny Callison's following Cory Lidle's. Who would be the third? It began:

I’m gonna bring up something morose and depressing, so turn your heads and watch a repeat of “The View” if you can’t handle it. On second thought, Rosie O’Donnell defines morose and depressing, so maybe you should watch “Sponge Bob” if you can’t handle today’s subject, which is death and dying. ...

Ex-Phillies, like movie stars and Jesuits, will begin to die in three's. The Great Cosmic Jackoff has foretold this to me. The off-season will become a cornucopia of close calls, assaults, arrests, manic depression, and finally, death – but only for one more EX-PHILLIE.

We are spared the off-season torment of 40-man roster deaths because each game every season is one quiet, inexorable march to the season’s nihilistic end. We all die a little every day with this team. But as for the others…

Ex-Death Number Three is right around the corner.

Let's just say Lou had a sense for things. I wish he could have seen his piece on punk's glory days dominating the feature section on Thursday. He'd find something to complain about. He'd probably be right.

Fun With Dick and Andy

A reader from Limerick, describing himself as "a former Eagles fan," writes by e-mail:

is it just me or do the Eagles post game press conferences resemble those of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? They are all so righteous in their belief that their way is the right way, they ignore the obvious: bad game plans, ignoring the need to change strategy and course, the way they have cowered the press (they respond to legitimate hard ball questions in such a way as to suggest that dissent is impermissible), etc.

We're nothing if not game here. So I went digging through White House transcripts, videos of Andy Reid's press conferences. Found a few things:

Sunday's media conference after the Eagles loss to Jacksonville.

Q: Andy, when you say you'll do what you need to do, what DO you need to do?

A: You don't have to worry about it. I'll take care of it. I'm gonna take care of it.

....

White House press conference with President Bush, March 13, 2003:

Q: Do you believe the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead of alive? 

A:  ... He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore. And if we find a training camp, we'll take care of it.

.....

You get the picture. Now it's quiz time. Find out if you guessed right by clicking "continue reading."

Match the quote with the speaker:

A: "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."

B: "If we choose to ignore their advice and God forbid, have an incident down the road...then everybody in this room would come back and say, 'How could you have ignored that information from all of the experts?' You now have in hand, in quotes, a sampling of highly respected people whose advice we sought before implementing this program."

C: "We will see. I am not going to prophesize to you. I am not that good. I am going to tell you that we are going to work as hard as we can and do the best we can."

D: "I'm not going to comment on hypothetical questions."

E: "They're dancing in the end zone. They just hadn't scored the touchdown. You know, there's a lot of time left."

Was it:

1. Eagles Coach Andy Reid

2. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

3. Eagles President Joe Banner

4. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney

5. U.S. President George W. Bush

A - 4  Dick Cheney on the overall situation in Iraq. source

B - 3 Joe Banner on allowing outside hoagies into the stadium, post 9/11. source.

C - 1  Andy Reid on whether the 2005-6 Eagles were better than the team that went to the Super Bowl.  source.

D - 2 Donald Rumsfeld on reports of death squads killing Sunnis in Iraq.  source.

E - 5  President Bush on the mid-term elections. source.

Google Bombs

Go to Google and type in the Danish words that mean primitive troll. You'll find the home page of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Try looking for "mouton insignifiant" - or unimportant sheep - in French. That will bring you to the official biography of Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

Here, in this country, "miserable failure" will yield President George W. Bush. "Waffles" will get you John Kerry.

Take a second. Try it. It's known as Google Bombing - the dense planting of key search terms to steer Internet traffic - and it gained political traction in the 2004 presidential election.

Those bombs are raining hard again.

Via Blogger's Blog, I read of a National Journal piece that reports liberal activists are lobbing the first volleys during these mid-term elections. The bombing strategy works this way: you identify a post you want to raise in prominence on the page of search results. Then, as many people link to a specific phrase on that post as possible.

The Journal wrote:

Liberal bloggers had the idea first. Chris Bowers of MyDD outlined the strategy Sunday. He said the plan involves purchasing "Google AdWords that will place each negative article on the most common searches for each Republican candidate. Simultaneously, I will produce an article on MyDD that embeds that negative article into a hyperlink."

Bowers asked bloggers to help add links, and they spent the next few days compiling negative news articles on Republican candidates in about 50 targeted races.

This caused the opposition to organize a counter-offensive.

The Journal, again:

Conservative blogger John Hawkins of Right Wing News learned of the strategy and urged his allies to "fight fire with fire." Hawkins expressed concern the Google-bombing campaign just might work for Democrats.

Bowers, a lefty blogger from Philadelphia, recruited bombers here on MyDD and here on DailyKos. The goal, he wrote, was that:

that the most damning, non-partisan article written on every key Republican candidate for house and Senate will appear both high on every Google search for that candidate, and automatically as an advertisement on every search for that candidate. BlogPac will cover the costs. The netroots will supply the research.

Hawkins' call from the other side of the aisle can be found here on Right Wing News:

believe it or not, in this case, a Googlebomb could actually have an impact. Think about it. Who would be doing a Google Search on a particular candidate in the final days of a campaign? Probably an independent voter who is trying to get more information about a candidate. And, if the first article he runs across is a brutal hit piece, well, that could be the information that helps him make up his mind.

Would it play out that way in every case? No, but in big districts, if there's particularly damaging information out there, a Googlebomb could have the potential to sway hundreds of voters.

Sounds like a job for the Google lawyers.

In Google's blog last September, Marissa Mayer, the company's director of consumer Web products, wrote:

We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this (ed note: the 'miserable failure' example) may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Breakfast With Pantera

I have to admit a weakness for WXPN-FM during times like this - their 885 greatest all-time artists marathon - when I've been ripped from sleep by Pantera, tucked in by Kate Wolf (unfortunately I was driving at the time) and generally boggled by sets that define eclectic, flowing from De La Soul into Loretta Lynn into Bobby Darin.

But even more entertaining has been the semi-live blogging at Teenage Kicks, the effort of two music heads who met at the 'XPN bulletin boards, and thought the world needed to read their takes on the listeners' picks. They were right.

Picture Mystery Science Theatre - two wise guys sitting in the front row as the show plays, delivering a rat-a-tat-tat of one-liners, faint praise and foaming raves.

The blog is called Teenage Kicks, after the 1979 song by the Irish punk-popsters called The Undertones. Blogger Trip McClatchy is 49, a circulation manager for TV Guide. Blogger Michael Atchison, 38, is a writer and stay-at-home dad in Kansas City, who listens to the station over the Web. They've never met - haven't even spoken by phone - but have essentially the same record collection, McClatchy says.

"Why are we doing this?" Atchison asked yesterday. "Who wouldn't do this?"

A sample of their commentary:

697. Aaron Copeland

T: Together with brothers Ian and Miles ... the first family of American entertainment.

M: This moves me. He captured what America sounded like.

Or

693. Kelly Clarkson

T: A friend sent me a mix cd with ‘Since U Been Gone” on it but no credits. Score one pop nugget for American Idol. Not to mention that she’s quite the little bunny.

M: OK, so I’m a sucker for “Since U Been Gone,” but her career is predicated on disposability, not immortality. She’s supposed to be on the weekly pop chart, not an all-time list.

Or

681. Eminem

T: Great songs, voice of a generation (for better or worse), cretin.

M: Massive talent, major jackass.

Or

680. Robbie Williams

T: I applaud his inclusion based solely on his Elmer Fudd's "Fire".

M: Robbie Williams? On the XPN countdown? Are the British voting?

McClatchy says he wished 'XPN played more than one song for artists number 885 through 501 "so we could keep up. I was up until 1:30 last night." Some artists are easier to write about than others - he says he prefers ones he really likes or really hates.

"Pantera I can come up with something for. It's more the Duncan Sheiks and Melissa Ferrick's of the world that trouble me. They're just so bland there's nothing to say. Well, they played Duncan Sheik's 'I Am Barely Breathing.' And I was barely listening. Some are easy."

I asked Bruce Warren, program director of XPN, if Teenage Kicks was the official blog of the countdown.

"No," he said.  "I don't know how it happened."

He said as the countdown progresses, the station will play more and more from each artist. Now that they've cracked 500, the artists get two songs each. Between 100 and 51, it's three songs. Then four for 50 to 11. Ten to two get an hour each. And number one, which should get his or her or their time by Oct. 23rd or 24th?

"It's to be determined," he said. "But we're gonna rock it."

Is that a clue?

He laughs. "The rocket won't take me back to the USSR," he answered. "All right?"

I can't resist. One more from Teenage Kicks:

662. Pat Benatar

T: Crossed a Broadway sensibility with hard rock clichés and hit the top of the charts. “Hell Is For Children”… they won’t be alone Pat.

M: She really was quite the stick of dynamite, wasn’t she?

Twinkle

Dear Mary:

Mimi, the boys and I wanted to thank you for Twinkle. Her great run ended yesterday, and it closed with the grace and peace and comfort that she seemed to enjoy embody. That little girl you had to hand-feed in a fur-lined shoe box wound up living large. Twinkle saw nine countries and raised a family of adoring humans.

We counted the places she'd been yesterday at the vet's - The USA, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy and Luxembourg, which barely counts since it took about 15 minutes to drive through. France was a favorite, however. She had just had cancer surgery, three summers ago, and we took her in a van with my parents to Provence, where we spent 10 days among the buzzing cicadas and swirling lavender breezes. She liked France.

Italy provided one of her funniest memories. We were in some Tuscan hill town, and Gordon was leading us with his nose, looking for a place to have lunch. He found a promising trattoria, but I wasn't sure whether Italians were cool with having dogs at tables, so I summoned my best Italian - I had gone there for a week in 8th grade - and asked "Mangia con cani?" The man shrugged. Why not? and we sat down for a good meal. Later I was told a fair translation of what I'd said was, Can we eat our dog?

Some cold thief reached over Twinkle on a train to Prague and picked Mimi's wallet. In Switzerland we stayed a week in Zermatt opposite the Matterhorn, and Twinkle romped in the deep snow, laughing off the frigid temperatures.

Denmark provided her one close encounter with a cow. We stayed on a little island our first summer, and there was a farm across the road. Lots of very big black cows grazed there, and Twinkle was drawn to them. And they to her. It was almost as if they realized they had some sort of genetic role to play together. She walked up to one of them, a little uncertainly, and it started walking to her. She stood in place. Quickly she attracted a crowd, and these cows move very fast. When the first let out this deep bellow, Twinkle almost melted. She turned away, and was done with that. I had this funny feeling our cowherd of Flanders was afraid of cows.

It was in Germany, though, where she was in her element - it must have been the German you used to speak to her. Her special treatment began almost instantly. Yesterday, a couple of scenes stood out: that first morning, when we found a place for breakfast near our apartment, and a waitress brought water for Twinkle before she asked what we were having. How everyone in the neighborhood fed her - the couple who owned the vegetarian restaurant rescued Spanish dogs, and would produce a fresh piece of baguette for Twinkle every time she poked her head in the door, which was every time she walked down the street, of course. The mailwoman, who carried treats in her uniform pocket - a very civilized practice, I must say. The only problem, was that Twinkle started approaching every man or woman on the street and sticking that big bottle-stopper nose in their pockets.

She really was our ambassador in Germany. For the first month I was there, and I went there alone, no one made eye contact with me, let alone began a conversation. As soon as Twinkle arrived, gruff Berliners would drop to their knees, grab her face and whisper to her. Little teddy bear, lots of them called her. Hairy giant Schnauzer? They’d ask me. No, Bouvier des Flandres, a Flemish cow dog. Ah. She bite? Only dinner. My favorite story about her in Berlin has to do with that famous Bouvier aroma. We had the boys' bar mitzvah in our apartment, and invited lots of friends over for the ceremony. Twinkle was a guest of honor, having just had surgery. We dressed her in a peach-colored long-sleeved surfer's t-shirt. She had stayed by the door, barking every time the bell rang, and it rang throughout the ceremony, so Twinkle had a vocal role. The party afterward went long into the night, and Twinkle was at the center of it. Some time after midnight, she let out a fragrance that cleared the room. A doozy. An Australian friend, a diplomat, said dryly: "the French serve orange juice." Apparently, when it's time for your guests to leave, French hosts bring around trays of juice.

That Australian friend and his family visited us here in Philadelphia last month. I'm glad they got to see the girl again. Twinkle was now the grande dame, gray at the ears and beard. Slow to move. Mimi did an amazing job keeping that girl going. For more than a year she'd made her chicken and rice or chicken and sweet potatoes. Twinkle's last meal was Sunday. She went through a pound of hamburger, a half of a loaf of challah and nearly a whole bag of Pupperonis. The boys and I were on an 8-day college tour of New England. Mimi and I feared the dog would be gone before we returned. The last two nights, Mimi slept on the floor next to Twinkle, rubbing her belly. When Mimi would drift off to sleep, Twink would paw Mimi's head, and she'd keep rubbing.

I didn’t want to tell the boys that Twink was in trouble before they had their interviews. We were sitting in an information session for Wesleyan when I looked over at them and couldn't stop thinking about how much I was going to wrench their lives in a few minutes. They were nine when I brought her home.

I was amazed how they handled the news. "I knew there was something," Nick said. The night before, we’d asked them to say good night to her over the phone. Gordon said he’d always thought it would happen when he was in college. "At least she won’t die wondering where her boys are," he said, searching for the silver lining. Maybe, he said, she would perk up when she saw them.

As we drove, more stories rushed back. I told about the day eight years ago when I pulled up to your farmhouse in a rented 4 x 4, having flown to Chicago to meet this girl I’d read about on the Internet. I remember your words were something like, "You can take her home if she likes you." If she likes you. You’d kept her back, the runt of the litter. She was a fraction of the size of her brothers, and so fragile that when the vet gave her anesthesia to cut her ears and tail her heart momentarily stopped. How you named her Twinkle because she was the littlest of your Star Bouviers. She’d also been busy lady, having eight babies after jumping two fences to get with Buddy. It was a perfect match: You were looking to give Twinkle her own a home and we were looking to adopt. You described her over the phone as not beautiful. Humble, but tough. I remember pulling into your place, past a herd of these thundering woolly beasts, all barking wildly as they followed my car. I regretted not wearing my liver-scented coat. Then you came out of the house with Twinkle, her leash dragging behind her. She bounded straight for me, planted two paws on my shoulders and kissed me on the mouth.

A few hours and an Arby's burger later, we were driving back to Philadelphia, listening to a book-on-tape: "Dogs Never Lie About Love." That night, we watched ESPN in a roadside motel in Ohio. When it was time to turn out the lights, I opened her crate and told her to jump off the bed. She just looked at me. No way. Finally, I picked her up - she was about 70 pounds then - and deposited her onto the floor. She flew back onto the bed and peed right where I was about to sleep. Agility, indeed.

She was prey-driven in her younger days, once going two feet up a tree after a squirrel, before realizing she couldn’t climb. Gordon remembered the time he called Nick in for hot dogs, only there weren't any by the time they got to their seats. Twinkle was standing on the table, licking her lips. She did love to eat.

We got home yesterday just when Mimi did, and Twinkle was waiting for us. She couldn’t get up, but she moved her head and offered a paw as we piled on her,  hugging and kissing and crying. There really wasn't any decision to make.

A room was ready for us at the vet's. They'd laid out a fluffy blanket decorated with hearts. There was a candle, some new age music. A statue of dogs and cats playing ring around the Rosie. There was that story about the Rainbow Bridge, that gentle place where beloved pets go and wait until they're united with their families. Francie, the vet, swaddled her in a second blanket, decorated with puffy clouds, and within moments it was done. Twinkle, the littlest Star, sleeps in hearts and clouds.

best,

The Rubins

Old Star Of The New Screen

78-year-old British widower gets addicted to watching YouTube videos. Decides to try one out, himself.

Becomes a star.

The kindly Brit with the handle Geriatric1927, for the year of his birth, has made nine videos now, describing where he's been and what he's seen. He likes motorcycles and the blues. Has no piercings or tattoos.

Bit-Tech Net describes how since appearing in the Metro his video blog has rocketed up the YouTube charts, winning him 347,462 views and 14,045 subscribers.

One fan wrote of the pensioner named Peter:

"It's great that someone from your generation has chosen to share their views on life, and a shame more elderly people don't too."

"I don't have a grandpa, but if I could choose, I'd want you to be mine!"

Ach Der Lieber

An explanation has been found for President Bush's impolitic shoulder rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel at last week's G8 summit. Read the Daily Sally's take: What the hell he was thinking in grabbing the female Chancellor of Germany from behind, without warning and in far too familiar a way. He'd probably tell you he was 'just tryin' to make that little German gal feel welcome among all the big fellas.'

Where Have You Gone, Sal Fasano?

Fans of all ages will lose a real role model with the cutting of Sal Fasano, and not just those working on their first mustaches. Blinq will never be able to write "the heavily follicled, light-hitting Phillies catcher" again. Philadelphia Will Do will never see his moment of cosmic collision, when Sal's Pals, the Fasano-lookalikes, share the same ballpark with the Wolf Pack, the also-furry followers of sidelined hurler Randy Wolf.

Poking around the Web for a tribute to the catcher designated for reassignment by the Phillies this weekend, I found one that takes a different measure of the man.

It's from a MySpace blog, apparently written by a minor-league umpire named TJ, who was surprised during a game of the Class A Clearwater Threshers to encounter our Sal.  (Pardon the ellipsis, the $%^& and the spell-checking - go to the blog for the full, Bull Durham flavor. The boy calls 'em as he sees 'em) TJ:

So I'm trying to stay awake on the bases in Clearwater, when I see this guy on the on deck circle that looks to be in his 30's with a gut and a Ben Stiller mustache straight out of Happy Gilmore!  You know, the "you're in my world now grandma" guy.  I come to find out that he's big leaguer Sal Fasano!

The next day the same two teams follow us to Tampa and as I take the line up cards, I see his name with the number 2 next to it in the position column!  I'm working behind a big league catcher!

He lumbers out to the plate as the Threshers take the field in the bottom of the first, and before I can say anything he offers his hand and says, "Hey there!  Sal Fasano." ... Having a big league catcher basically means that you could've left your cup in the locker room for that half inning.  If these guys let a ball through to hit you the laws of physics have come undone.

I was totally impressed with the way Sal carried himself.  I noticed the night before that on every ball he put into play he would run his #$% off.  He would be damn near second base by the time every fly ball to the outfield was caught.  He was a great example of hustle for the cocky #$%^# rats that I have to deal with everyday :-)

Another situation soon came up that showed me even more class.  The kid on the hill hit three perfect spots to strike out a Yankee hitter, and Sal gets up to groom the dirt behind the plate with his cleats.  He waits til the Yankee hitter is just steps away from the dugout to yell, "That a boy!  Good!"  while pointing at his pitcher.  That's how to act!  What a professional to wait until the victim of a great up-and-in fastball is out of hearing distance before complimenting the guy who sat him down.  That's #$%.  It's just plain how to act, and these guys out here could learn something by watching him.

Say goodbye to a class act.

Time to go around the horn in the Phlogosphere:

Balls, Sticks & Stuff: For the Phillies to cut ties with such a popular player hints that with Pat Gillick in charge of Phillies baseball, we have a man who is willing to admit his mistakes and makes decisions based solely on winning, something rarely seen in an organization that for example, stuck with Paul Abbott for ten starts in 2004.  In all likelihood, Gillick knew he was taking a chance on Fasano when he signed him in the offseason, hoping that maybe Fasano would be another in a long line of mulleted Phillies to catch lightning in a bottle, after all, Fasano had a career year in 2005.

Phillies Flow: I still believe he could have had a nice year if the Phillies had used him against lefties rather than in a platoon with Lieberthal based on who was starting for the Phillies.   Fasano's numbers for the year against lefties were solid, 273/368/394, but he really can't hit righties (234/255/383).  He did have some nice moments on the year -- having pizza delivered to fans leaps to mind, and it will be hard to forget the look on the face of Gavin Floyd when Fasano would charge out to the mound to try to talk Gavin back to a common plane of existence during some of Floyd's rougher outings.

Beerleaguer: Fasano became the first player since Rollie Fingers to gain recognition for ironic facial hair. ... Fasano would do well not to burn his bridges here in Philadelphia. A player of his character--and unlikely popularity--could generate a fruitful living in the Delaware Valley making appearances at state fairs and baseball card shows. And for all their faults, the Phillies open more doors for high-character former players than any team in baseball.

PhillySportsLine: ... do you really think the Phillies would cut ties with Mike Lieberthal now? No way, the Phillies have some unwritten allegiance to the aging catcher and will keep him until his contract is finished. I am not really sure how I feel personally, as I was never a big Sal Fasano fan. His numbers were not great hitting just .243 with four homers and 10 RBIs in 50 games, but the fans still loved him for his strong arm and his blue-collar personality."

The 700 Level: I'd be surprised if he ever has to buy his own beer in Philadelphia.