The Paperback Cafe

According to Boston Globe, Ray Williams — great Knick basketball player of the late seventies — is now homeless and living in his 1992 Buick. http://tinyurl.com/3ys6lje.

Spotted his car immediately, since I drive the same car — mine a 1995 Buick Roadmaster. Falling apart at the seams; just commented today it is one of the worst designed cars in history; a big floating hulk of metal. The pieces constantly fall off of GM cars — the chrome pieces on the exterior, interior pieces, mirrors, etc. The engine leaks oil; the gas tank had to be replaced and I still always smell gas; the fender’s falling off. God damn engine though — Northstar V8 — is magnificent. Most powerful engine I’ve ever had in a car. Phenomenal power.

I loved watching Ray Williams play in his prime and I hope that he can get a job with the Knicks. Seems like there should be a way, with a franchise that makes so much money, to have Ray Williams work for them in some way..

It has been a week for space.

First, there was the launching of the top secret military space shuttle last week — the X37. Read about it in the newspaper. This being 2010, it was off to youtube to see if someone had posted a video of the top secret mission. Sure enough, there were several videos. The best one was this one — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKgmqxjCM8&playnext_from=TL&videos=MxBGdRr9dM0 .

Best part is when the rocket unloads its payload — the X37 itself — how they cut to illustrations. As all top-secret youtube videos should do.

And I love this coverage of it — how at the very end of the video — last 20 seconds — when this former leader of the Star Wars program, now retired and living in Florida — he mentions god at the end and the news lady immediately cuts him off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuy_rZGrzE 

The X37 is the latest progenitor of the X15, and it is ironic because in this house my 4-year-old has been playing with a toy X15 (part of the Space Voyagers toy series — http://www.thespacestore.com/spacvoyevofs.html – highly recommended), and we’d gone to youtube to find out what it was all about — the best video of it being this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtjg1YN7iso

And this past week was also the week of the NASA space balloon screwup, which looks like something that would happen in my backyard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eab9h-n2yVk

And we’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek original series on Hulu — all of the High Definition rework done on the space scenes has put the old series way, way over the top. It’s vibrant techicolor-like colors have held well to begin with — and they did such a great job with colors and futuristic looks on the series to begin with. Star Trek original series with Bill Shatner and crew, now with reworked graphics — is one of the great accomplishments of mankind. Check out the space shuttle coming into the Enterprise in the first three minutes of this episode:

http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/?pid=UeLbCxOHzQ_EcCN8m_8xubpdk9O2UWYl&vs=Default&play=true

 I’d forgotten Hulu is feeding in CBS video and I was actually watching cbs.com last night!

Was listening to Delphine Blue’s playlist for her radio show on 9-09-09, and it suddenly dawned on me — after listening to the Beatles’ #9 hundreds of times over 35 years — that it is Bob Sheppard the all-time-great Yankee announcer saying “Number 9″, “Number 9″, “Number 9″, over and over again. I think I once knew this, but it didn’t seem important at the time. Now that Sheppard is retired and we only hear his recorded voice announcing Derek Jeter at games, hearing his voice on the Beatles song somehow jumps out.

The number 9 that Sheppard was announcing back in the Beatles’ time was Roger Maris. Later it became Graig Nettles (who should be in the Hall of Fame and have his number retired by the Yankees, but oddly enough isn’t in either case).

Mark this down as one of the great non-realizations in my life time, ranking up there with being a huge Led Zeppelin and Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention fan, and not realizing it was ‘that’ Sandy Denny on Battle of Evermore until 15 years after buying the album and listening to the song hundreds of times.

As reported by Tim Bontemps in today’s NY Post:

The Yankees’ Tampa franchise in the Florida State League — their high-A affiliate – went 30-37 in the first half, but 47-19 in the second half to enter the playoffs in 2009. They featured the following players:

• Austin Romine, the catcher, was named the FSL Player of the Year — he hit 13-72-.276, and stole 11 bases out of 16 tries.
• Brandon Laird, 3B was named to FSL’s post-season all-star team.
• Lance Pendleton, Starting Pitcher was named to FSL’s post-season all-star team.
• Jonathan Hovis, Relief Pitcher, was named to FSL’s post-season all-star team.

Triple A

Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre entered the playoffs looking to win their second straight title; They featured the following players:

• Shelley Duncan led the league in homers (30) and RBI’s (99) and was named Player of the Year.
• Austin Jackson — 4-65-.300 with 22 stolen bases was named Rookie of the Year.
• Kevin Russo — 5-31-.326 — was an all-star second baseman.

Down in Single A — In Staten Island

The single-A Staten Island Yankees, who were also a first-place team, featured

Outside of the NY Post article, following the Staten Island Yankees, the Yanks’ low single A club in the NY-Penn League, on siyanks.com nets you the following info — they won their division in this half-season league finishing 47-29 (1.5 games ahead of the Brooklyn Cyclones), and featured the following young Yankees coming up:

Their entire outfield made the all-star team:

• DeAngelo Mack - 7-41-.306 — finished 6th in batting average in the league.
• Neil Medchill — 14-41-.278 — led league in homers by a lot; next closest had 8.
• Zoilo Almonte — 7-39-.274

Also:

• Jimmy Paredes, their 2nd baseman, also made the All-Star game and was in fact the game’s MVP. His season numbers: 2-17-.302. He finished 8th in the league in batting.

Their best pitchers:

• Sean Black — 6-0 1.62
• Gavin Brooks — 5-1 0.62

Hidecki Matsui has been a boon to the Yankees, not necessarily to their offense, but in making the Yankees the number one favorite team in Japan.

Matsui is 35 years old this year. It will be interesting to see how long the Yankees keep him around.

This is a test of the upcoming Paperbacknovel.com blog site. One of the first orders on our agenda will be to write a blog detailing why ARod sucks and why the Yankees have ruined their team to large extent by signing him to an albatross 10-year contract.