First known as one of the great power hitters of the 80s and 90s, there are some who now call Jose Canseco the « Woodward and Bernstein » of the Steroids Scandal because of his tell all book Juiced. While he did shed some light on an important issue, there is one distinct difference: Woody and the B Dog wrote their book because they wanted to bring a corrupt President to justice because they were great journalists. Canseco wanted to make some money ratting out his old buddies because he’s a douche.
If, for even a moment, you held on to a shred of possibility it wasn’t all about the money, that was blown out of the water when he decided to write a second book which « had stuff » on the likes of A Rod and Junior Griffey, two players who have never shown up in any steroids investigation. This means one of two things: Canseco was making shit up because he’s a dick, or he willingly held out the most surprising allegations from his first book in favor of turning his best friends in first, which makes him an even bigger dick.
Both of his wives have cited him for domestic violence, and both later divorced him. His second marriage was the classic American love story; boy meets girl working at Hooters, boy marries girl, boy hits girl, boy is arrested and put on probation, girl divorces boy, girl poses in Playboy using his last name. If those kids couldn’t make it work, what chance do the rest of us have?
There’s more to the story, like when he tried to blackmail Magglio Ordonez into giving him money to keep his name out of his second book. We emailed Bob Woodward to see if he ever tried blackmailing Gerald Ford, but he didn’t get back to us. The Canseco saga does have a happy ending though. Jose recently lost a « celebrity » boxing match to former NFL player Vai Sikahema in which Canseco was knocked out in the first round. Now if there was only some way we could make that happen seven or eight hundred more times we’d be good. Cellular Field in honor of Ulysses Stanton Cellular.
However, back in the day, he was best known for being a miserably cheap bastard. It stands to reason that if you own a professional sports team, you have a shitload of money, and if you spend that money to buy a sports team, something that is utterly frivolous, it stands to reason that to cheap out on running that team makes you quite the douchebag. It’s just logic.
Charlie Comiskey was one such douchebag, paying his players substandard wages in a time before free agency, when they had no choice but to accept them. He promised one of his pitchers a $10,000 dollar bonus if he won thirty games in a season, but benched him right before he could reach that mark, preferring to save the money at the risk of losing some games. Also he wouldn’t pay for his player’s laundry. To reiterate, he bought a professional sports team, built them a stadium, then decided he’d rather they look like hobos than pay for laundry.
Of course, his stinginess ended up leading to the Black Sox Scandal, in which his team threw the World Series for cash. Cash, that one can presume went toward not smelling like shit.
John McGraw was a decent player, but as a manager he was a well known innovator and is credited with inventing the hit and run. He also is credited with being a mean spirited prick.
Gentlemanly conduct was a foreign concept to McGraw, who as a third baseman was known for his aggressive and undeniably immature ways of stifling opposing runners. Have you ever played with a drunk friend at a softball game who thought it’d be funny to trip people when they were running the bases and tug on people’s shirts to keep them from leaving the base? Well that was McGraw, all the time, and there’s a very real possibility he wasn’t even drunk when he did it.
It’s unfortunate that the only available pictures of McGraw show him shaking hands.
As a manager he was just as big of a douche, constantly picking fights with anybody he could, including the fans, who would in turn throw rocks and bottles at the players. The players had to get pelted with dangerous objects just because they played for this guy.
He seemed to embrace being a manager purely because it gave him a chance to wage psychological warfare on the players under him (one wholesale jerseys coach on the Giants said McGraw )
Remember when Roger Clemens was known for being a great pitcher, perhaps one of the best of all time, and the worst thing anybody had to say against him was that one time he threw a piece of a bat at Mike Piazza? We bet Roger longs for those days.
Some think Clemens’ legacy has been tainted by steroids even moreso than Barry Bonds’. First came the adamant denials about steroid use, including such delicious bon mots along the lines of « If I had been using steroids I’d be pulling tractors with my teeth and have a third ear growing out of my forehead » a statement that, while asinine and condescending, also blew our fucking minds with it’s utter lack of logic.
Yawkey owned the Boston Red Sox from 1933 1976 and the street which Fenway Park resides on is named in his honor, a tribute to a man of fortitude and conviction. Unfortunately, one of those convictions was blind, fervent racism.
Yawkey has the distinction of being the last owner to integrate his ball club, when he reluctantly let Pumpsie Green put on the Red Sox uniform and stroll out onto the field in 1959, which, to be fair to Yawkey, was a mere 12 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. That’s just a smidge over a decade, right?
« Look, Honey, a Negro. Gross, right? »
That’s what earns Yawkey the title of one of the biggest assholes in the Baseball Hall of Fame: determination. Ridiculous, sad, racism fueled determination. For you see, while other teams were integrating and providing themselves with the best collection of athletes possible, Yawkey stuck with the same old white guys that had worked so well at not winning him a single World Series all those years.
They had been at the very least a contender in the salad days of segregation. Once other teams started to incorporate black players in their line up, the Red Sox started a precipitous fall down the standings board. Lesser racists would have seen the writing on the wall, or perhaps mustered up some simple human decency and accepted the fact that these black players were just as good as their white counterparts.
Today, mustache aficionado Keith Hernandez is wholesale nfl jerseys probably best known now as a hair dye spokesperson and for the two part Seinfeld where he almost banged Elaine. However, before that he was a five time all star, 1979 NL co MVP, and perhaps the best fielding first basemen of all time. Also he loved him some nose candy.
Yes, Mr. Hernandez was known for his use of the cocaine which led to his involvement in the famed Pittsburgh drug trials. Of course his own substance abuse doesn’t make him an asshole, but his destructive influence on young Mets teammates Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry sure does. You may remember Gooden and Strawberry as the talented young stars whose bright careers were derailed by drug and alcohol abuse. You know what probably contributed to that? Hernandez telling Strawberry the best way to break out of a slump is to go out and get shitfaced.Apartment rental service AirBnB has is offering free listings for those in the New York and New Jersey who are willing to offer up their homes for free to those displaced by Superstorm Sandy.
Although much of the area affected by the storm is returning to normal, thousands of people remain without power and for some especially unfortunate families, without homes.
AirBnB will waive service charges for anyone who lists their spare rooms, inflatable mattresses, or even couches for free, while still covering the rentals with their host guarantee insurance.
There’s more than just good karma in the mix for AirBnB, whose business model has been questioned by NYC officials in the last year, as rental of entire apartments is illegal and subject to fines. Rental of rooms within apartments is legal, however, and it appears the city government is happy to encourage the sharing of homes, considering the circumstances. Even the Mayor’s office tweeted about the AirBnB offer.
If you are interested in offering your space or in need of temporary respite, AirBnB has a destination page with over 300 spaces available for easy browsing.Any discussion of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is sure to lead to a discussion of where the hydrogen is going to come from. Even though Japanese car companies have been making public strides with hydrogen for years now, the situation is no different there.
It was announced two years ago in Japan that there would be 100 hydrogen fueling stations built, « centered around four major city areas in Tokyo, Aichi, Osaka and Fukuoka » and completed by 2015, when the first FCVs are planned for mass market sale. Last year the Research Association of Hydrogen Supply/Utilization Technology (HySUT) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) together began work on three stations to test planning and viability of commercial hydrogen fueling.
The H2 station at Toyota’s Ecoful Town in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan is one of those three, and we got a closer look at it during a visit to the model village last week. Four stations are being built in Aichi Prefecture, the one in Ecoful Town being the first commercial station that operates at 70 megapascals (MPa, around 10,000 psi) in the area. It was built by Toho Gas Co., Ltd. and Iwatani Corporation (a gas and energy development and supply company), both part of that much larger HySUT/NEDO consortium of companies making the hydrogen push in Japan. You might have guessed by the involvement of two gas companies that hydrogen is produced with the steam reformation process methane is piped in to react with steam, hydrogen and carbon dioxide emerging as the result. The hydrogen is reformed at a rate of 1000 Nm3/h (1,000 cubic meters per hour at ‘Normal’ pressure and temperature normal defined usually as 1 atmosphere of pressure and either 0, 15 or 20 degrees Celsius). It is then sent to a primary compressor which takes it to 40 MPa (about 5,000 psi) and stored in five 300 liter tanks. It is then sent to a « filling package » to be compressed at 82 MPa, after which it is sent to a cryogenic device for cooling down to between 40 and 30 C. Finally, the cooled hydrogen is dispensed at 70 MPa to either fuel cell vehicles or fuel cell buses.
High speed filling means it takes about five minutes to fill a car. But in a ten hour day the station can only produce enough hydrogen to fill 30 cars or six buses.
The ability to fill buses is a big deal because it means they can refill in the city center. Until the station at Ecoful Town went online, the Toyota City fuel cell buses working in the city had to go to the research building at Toyota Motor Company to refuel, which is on private property outside the center. High speed filling at 2,000 cubic meters per hour means it takes about five minutes to fill a car, about ten minutes to fill a bus. They’re trying to get the target for a car down to three minutes. It didn’t look difficult to do, our demonstrator placing the nozzle onto the receiver of a Highlander FCV, pressing a button to initiate refueling, then pressing another button on the bowser when he wanted to stop fueling. The nozzle is a thick piece of kit, though we were told that it’s about twice as thick as a European nozzle because of safety regulations. It might take five minutes to fill a car, but in a ten hour day the station can only produce enough hydrogen to fill 30 cars or six buses. That’s how long the reformation, compression and cryogenics processes take.
Building hydrogen stations remains an expensive proposition: we were told they were trying to get to a unit cost of 200 million yen ($2.03M US) for a single station, but it costs about twice that amount right now, or something like four million dollars. Just as it has done with electric vehicles, the Japanese government is providing large subsidies to the H2 filling station effort; our guide wouldn’t give us a number when we asked if the government was helping, but laughed and said, through the translator, « Oh, yes, big subsidies. »
Customers get in on the subsidies as well, since for the moment it doesn’t cost FCV drivers anything to fill their tanks this early in the study and implementation of fuel cell vehicles, the hydrogen itself is being offered free. An intial temporary pre fab station can be set up to serve a very small market, and can be later replaced by a larger station as demand grows (currently planned for 2015). »Toyota Eco Full Town employs a direct filling type whereby hydrogen is created with city gas as the fuel and the FCV is filled with hydrogen directly using a large volume compressor with a capacity of 2,000 Nm3 an hour. $4million to service 30 cars a day? Do the math. There will NEVER be an infrastructure to support mass production. No automaker would even dream of mass producing FCVs when infrastructure costs were that astronomical. At this point they’re better of just releasing another test fleet and making up more excuses to delay. It just does not sound like a good fuel source for autos. The hybrid device combines a microbial fuel cell (MFC) and a type of solar cell called a photoelectrochemical cell (PEC). In the MFC component, bacteria degrade organic matter in the wastewater, generating electricity in the process. Both, however, require a small additional voltage (an bias to overcome the thermodynamic energy barrier for proton reduction into hydrogen gas. The need to incorporate an additional electric power element adds significantly to the cost and complication of these types of energy conversion devices, especially at large scales. only energy sources are wastewater and sunlight, Li said. successful demonstration of such a self biased, sustainable microbial device for hydrogen generation could provide a new solution that can simultaneously address the need for wastewater treatment and the increasing demand for clean energy. the resource base from sewage, chicken and pig farms etc is substantial, and equally clearly it could not on its own provide all the power for transport, but it gives the lie to the meme that hydrogen means just fossil fuels.