With my orange juice carton unexpectedly empty this evening, I find myself turning to the other side of the refridgerator. There, I have a discussion my inner Fat Tony.

Patrick: Uh, say, are you guys crooks?

Tony: Patrick, um, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?

Patrick: No…

Tony: Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?

Patrick: Uh uh.

Tony: And, what if your family don't like bread? They like… orange juice?

Patrick: I guess that's okay.

Tony: Now, what if instead of giving orange juice away to them, you gave it to yourself at a price that was practically giving it away to them. Would that be a crime, Patrick?

Patrick: Hell, no!

Tony: Enjoy your gift.

Mark, your orange juice expires before you get back from your trip. So I'm drinking it.

Walking across the Gannett lawn to a softball game last week, prior to the ejection, I met a duck. It stood on the grass near the sidewalk and looked away until I came within two or three yards. Then the duck turned and quacked at me. I quacked back. I continued to the field, and the duck waddled in place.

Dave Shenin passed the midpoint of the Orioles season in top form: "If the Baltimore Orioles are having nightmares of late as they sleep, visited in their dreams by an army of evil monsters, devils, mothers-in-law or umpires, one can be sure the bogeymen in question have one thing in common: They are all left-handed."

Frank Herzog's rough year continued: "Five months after WJFK radio announced it was pulling the longtime play-by-play voice of the Washington Redskins from the broadcast team, WUSA (Channel 9) has informed him that he's out of a job as the station's main sports anchor when his contract expires at the end of November, according to several sources."

Herzog rented the house next to ours at the beach one year, and my brother and I collected Herzog sightings all week. Our previous experience with the anchor had been at the taping of his weekly Redskins TV show (now long off the WUSA airwaves), where Rob managed to get on camera every few minutes and I only finagled the brim of my hat into the frame. That we were sitting next to each other in the studio at the time said a lot about our respective luck with television cameos. Rob was a wiz. The Redskin guests for that show were Desmond Howard and Kelly Goodburn, and we got their autographs. That we got them out of all the possible Redskin players said a lot about our autograph luck at the time.

On the topic of football, the Post reported this week how Gonzaga is getting artificial grass (last item) on Buchanan Field. Gonzaga's site has published more details on the conversion. The switch was probably inevitable given the progress of artificial grass and the never-ending struggle to keep the field alive during constant practice and game use. The turf between the hash marks browned long before midseasons. But still, at least the dirt was real. Any turf that hosted that many great games, gym classes and pep rallies — like the bomb threat pep rally of '97 — couldn't have been too bad.

Almost by the artificial field's nature now, the strands have given a challenge to the kids at the school. Schedulers have marked the first game there as 1 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 25, against the Stags of DeMatha.

After taking conventional beach photos for years, I ditched tradition this summer and took a more avant garde approach. Editors from National Geographic have seen this work and made generous offers of cash, bling and monkeys. But out of respect for my friends and their influence in the art world, I have decided to present the ground-breaking work here without charge.

Mr. Carnegie Mellon does some research and develops a substantive theory about the mysterious New Yorker Cartoon of the Week.

Matt: lol…it's linguini, and in a tube!

Auto response from Patrick: away

Matt: i'm very amused by that one actually

Matt: i think it suffices to say that our friend peter mueller must've had a bad experience at an italian restaurant recently

Matt: plus, he probably doesn't know squat about italian food since liguini is long and thin, not round, and he also mispelled it…maybe that's on purpose though

Matt: he certainly has the wine and an olive

Matt: if you look at what else he's done, though… for instance, i think it's more of a critique on where technology is taking us in general

Matt: heh, here's another one from our favorite technophobe as he shall now be referred to as…

Thursday evening at Gannett Field, as the USAToday.com Sultans of Dot took on the less creatively named News/Money softball team, I finally hit the ball a long way.

I hit the ball the ballyhooed country mile, still inside the park but long enough for me. I'd been strugging all season at the plate, continuing my Little League tradition of doing so but trying harder than ever to stop. The retraining regimen had been grueling — for office softball. Batting cage trips, relearning right-handed hitting, teaching myself a little restraint in the box (stepping, leaning and waiting back in the box), and remembering to watch that big ball all the way through its drop.

So this hit — this hit was sweet spot sweet. My second drive out of the infield all season, deep into right-center, and I was sprinting around first, off the inside of the bag at second and safely into third with the girl on the bag still waving her arms to get the cutoff man's throw. Our lone Sultan runner scored to retake the lead, and I had myself a stand-up triple.

A stand-up, hot to trot, Sam Crawford-loving triple. The hit and condition of verticality accomplished together only by humans of blazing vision and hustle. The kind of bases I needed to turn my season around.

But when I looked up, the ump had my bat in his hands and he was calling me out. Out! The ump yelled that the bat was illegal. He escorted the bat, owned by coworker, into the dugout, and I ran in from third. Heading back onto the field, he pointed at me and barked, "You're ejected! You're disqualified from the game!"

Ejected! Thrown out of a company softball game! The bat was illegal because there was tape at bottom, the ump said. But we've used the bat all season, we argued back. I had already used the bat earlier in the game! But no dice. The ump walked onto the infield and dramatically rung me out, just to make the ejection official.

I took a seat in the wood bleachers, not arguing, because the only thing sillier than being thrown out of a company softball game would have been going Earl Weaver at a company softball game. My RBI went back to the bases and never got back home; the Sultans eventually took the loss. After the game, the ump would come over to explain the bat rule to me. The tape let big guys get another inch of leverage on the ball, he said, but also made the bat more likely to slip out of their hands. And their slippery hands meant my coworker's bat and I were out of luck.

What was the night's average? It was too bad to lose the triple and worse to lose the game, but the ejection taught us all something about a bad bad man with larceny in his heart and ice water in his veins. That man was me, and I liked it.

Because when they outlaw bats, only the outlaws will have bats.

Then the outlaws will give a bat to me, and we'll all be happy.

Related past entries:

-June 10, 2003: The Narrative of The Bat

-June 3, 2002: Playing softball with Catholics and Kevin Arnold

-April 18, 2002: Hearing the first bat of spring

Maybe Jamie Foxx just has a knack for trailers that he doesn't show in films, but he's now showing in two such promotions surprising with their power. The first, playing before Anchorman at my local theater, is Collateral with Tom Cruise. Foxx is a cabbie; Cruise is a passenger and a killer. IMDB offers the trailer and more details.

The second film is Ray, the upcoming Ray Charles biopic. Trailers can always be deceiving, but Foxx practically brings his young version alive for me in this one. I've been skeptical of Foxx's musical abilities, but if he can pull off this movie, I'll take back my reticence. Yahoo has the trailer, and IMDB has details.

Related past entries:

-June 10, 2004: Ray's Music Exchange

-Jan. 13, 2004: Slow Jamz review

-Nov. 2, 2003: Philly taxi cab hustler

-Mar. 3, 2003: Taxi's Louie or Cheers' Carla?

Movie recommendation:

-Mr. T's finest film work, outside of Rocky III, and the A-Team, is undoubtedly 1983's D.C. Cab. A rag-tag band of hacks takes on rival cabbies and international terrorists on the early home-rule streets of Washington. Also starring Gary Busey, Bill Maher and Whitman Mayo (Grady from Sanford and Son), this inspiration for standardized test slacking is a comedic must-see for District natives and root-setting city immigrants. I'm not saying the film is Gone with the Wind, but sleepy Southernness early in the throes of Barry and deep in a ridiculous script does the job for me.

Linked on Romenesko, Jim Callaghan of the New York Observer offers tips for the new journalism program at the City University of New York. The students, Callaghan writes,"must start their day by annoying the Mayor, the Governor, the City Council Speaker, every elected official and every executive assistant to the deputy mayor — just on general principle."

Elsewhere, Ken Kobre, a photojournalism prof at San Francisco State, talks good sense about photo usage and photos size online. Most importantly, he argues for simpler access: "When pictures are ghettoised, they are no longer part of the experience of seeing pictures and reading the story simultaneously and integrating the two. They have now become disassociated. You don't want to commit the time to opening a slide show. With a magazine, you read the story and look at the pictures and get an integrated and real experience"

Also on the business of getting to information, Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog points to a page that tests the abilities of your pop-up blocker.  Here's how the Google Toolbar 2.0.111 fares:

Normal popup blocking = Passed 

Full-screen popup blocking = Passed 

Channel-opener popup blocking = Passed 

User-launched Delayed-method popup allowing = Failed

You scored 85, a rating of Very Good.

Slate nails another Explainer. As Cassini gets up close and personal with Saturn, Brendan Koerner tackles "Why Does Saturn Have Rings?" But he has me with the deck, "And how come Earth has none?" 

Kinda strange about the up-style headline and down-style decks on Slate. Never noticed that switch'emup before. 

Meanwhile, the WSJ tracks down the "Pet Goat" book that President Bush was reading when he learned of the Sept. 11 attacks. Saving us the WSJ.com subscription price, E&P gives us a brief. Anyone with children's book experience has to enjoy the plot: "It shows what happens after a girl is ordered by her parents to get rid of her pet goat, who has been munching everything in its path. The goat becomes a hero in the home, however, when a burglar invades and the goat butts him into submission." 

And speaking of butting one into submission, the executive editor of commentary at CNET's News.com, Charles Cooper (not the same as my uncle Chuck), writes a piece about software upgrades. His headline is what got me to read: "Homey, don't play that software upgrade."

Roger Ebert responds to a critic, a mother of a 14-year-old. According to a local news story, she pays attention to the son's movie reviews now, not Ebert's. Says the Sun-Times critic: "I am writing you in the hope of saving your friends, your sister Jasmine, and your mother Toni from going to see a truly dismal new movie. It is called 'A Cinderella Story,' and they may think they'll like it because it stars Hilary Duff." 

David Letterman's Late Show offers the Top Ten Ways To Make The All-Star Game More Exciting. (In other All-Star Game news, I failed to watch the game.) 

CNN.com recruits a student reporter at the University of Pennsylvania to write about frat boys' opinions on the upcoming presidential election. Inebriated at least by the weight of tradition, the boys turn to central casting. 

"I think I would rather have Kerry hold my feet during a keg stand because, let's face it, you need… someone responsible to do something like that," Penn junior Patrick Carroll said.  

"You wouldn't want to fall and chip your teeth on the keg or something, and I could just picture 'college-era' Bush seeing a hot girl across the room and dropping everything he was doing to go talk to her," the Kappa Alpha brother said.

"That's not the only reason I'm voting for Kerry, but it sure doesn't hurt," he added.