Shall I compare wine to a summer’s day? Perhaps not, but this especially clean pinot, with a strong cherry note that isn’t bogged down by tannins yet still packs a punch with 14.5 percent alcohol content, drinks well for a long time, lending itself to the extra daylight hours of a long summer’s picnic.

It’s the DH, stupid

By now, I’ve heard just about every possible reason for why the American League is just a better league. This is based on the head-to-head interleague records and the streak of AL wins in the All-Star Game.

Now, personally I like to call the National League “baseball” and the American League “Disney on Ice” because of the DH, which destroys the integrity of the game’s strategy. But more than hampering the in-game strategy, I think what we’ve seen since the last expansion rounds — which added 3 teams to the NL and only 1 to the AL — is the more sinister effect of the DH, the one that occurs in the off-season.The media has been bemoaning the lack of parity in the league since the last expansion, that in baseball your wallet size trumps everything else. What they’re missing, because of the incessant focus on the New York/Boston rivalry, is that this is only true in the American League.

Dan Gillmor, the head of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has been enjoying a feisty and controversial run as guest blogger over at Boing Boing, calling for, among other things, a bloody revolution against the government for its collusion with financial institutions. (Okay, to be fair, he’s merely been wondering and questioning, loudly, why such a thing hasn’t already occurred.) Now, he posits a future for the news industry, in which the nation’s largest papers coalesce their newsrooms into one hegemonic entity that charges a subscription, thereby locking all the in-depth breaking news behind a wall.