Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 4:00 pm posted by Brian Howard
What’s a guy mired in the worst slump of his life to do? Sign on with Red Bull, of course.
Don’t know why Cholly didn’t think of this sooner.
PHILLIES SHORTSTOP JIMMY ROLLINS RECEIVES HIS WIIINGS AT JULY 4th GAME VS RIVAL NEW YORK METS
The First MLB Player to Join the Red Bull Roster, Rollins to Arrive to Game in Tricked-out Vehicle: The Red Bull MXT
WHAT: Rollins will arrive to the Phillies July 4th game raring to go in the hooked-up Red Bull MXT truck as Jimmy gets dropped off at MLB’s biggest rival game. This is Rollins’ first appearance as a Red Bull athlete and is the first MLB player to be supported by the energy drink leader.
**INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY WITH JIMMY**
Rollins attracted Red Bull by his emerging superstar status and dynamic on and off the field. Besides being an All Star and MVP Shortstop, Rollins spends his off-season recruiting new talent for his music label Bay Sluggas Inc., hosting bowling fundraisers for the Arthritis Foundation and collecting custom cars.
WHO: Philadelphia Phillies Short Stop Jimmy Rollins and Red Bull
WHERE: Citizens Bank Park JETRO LOT and PLAYER’s ENTRANCE One Citizens Bank Way Philadelphia, PA
WHEN: Saturday, July 4th , 2009 12PM
Call me old-fashioned, but when you’re trucking into July with a .207 batting average, a .250 on base percentage and a lousy 10 stolen bases (against 5 caught stealings), and on the heels of a very high-profile benching, maybe you should arrive at the ballpark early and quietly to study game tape and not in the “hooked-up Red Bull MXT truck”
Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 12:30 pm posted by Brian Howard
Photo | Michael M. Koehler
Perhaps playing off the massive popularity of our “Riding Dirty” cover story wherein yours truly, photographer Michael M. Koehler, videographer Elan Gepner and Dominic Mercier journeyed down the tidal Schuylkill (read it | watch it), Mayor Nutter yesterday announced a free kayaking program — in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation — that’ll go down at the Penn’s Landing marina this summer. Details will be forthcoming at tidaltrail.org or delawareriverwaterfrontcorp.com
The official word is that the program is “part of City of Philadelphia’s efforts to reconnect
residents to the river, and part of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council’s efforts to increase recreation opportunities on the tidal portion of the Delaware River.”
Which they can say all they want. We know where they got the awesome idea.
Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm posted by Brian Howard
This just in from Photostream All Star Moocatmoocat
Per Mousavi’s calls for worlwide support of the Iranian protestors this weekend, one is scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday June 20 2 pm, N. side of Rittenhouse Square (Walnut between 18th & 19th)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 12:25 pm posted by Brian Howard
Photos | Brian Howard’s Android Phone
Was able to stop briefly at the protest yesterday held by Philadelphia Iranians on the north side of Rittenhouse Square. The peaceful gathering featured what appeared to be between 150 and 200 protesters chanting things like “liar liar” and “the people united will never be defeated,” and holding signs (some homemade, some distributed by organizers) as police, reporters, onlookers and passing traffic observed. Stay tuned for a full report.
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 9:00 am posted by Brian Howard
Some people are addicted to drugs. Because I am a gigantic nerd, I’m addicted to online trivia site Sporcle, whose games are timed and tend toward the “list all of the BLANK in BLANK in BLANK minutes” variety.
They’ve got a new quiz up that asks you to list, in five minutes or less, the 14 most populous cities in the state of Pennsylvania. I got 11 out of 14 on my first try.
A group of Iranian college students will be holding a silent protest this evening from 5 p.m. till 8 p.m. on the north side of Rittenhouse Square to demonstrate against the election process in Iran wherein incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has scored what many feel is a fraudulent victory over Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
Marjan Savoktakin, a 26-year-old electrical engineering Ph.D candidate at Penn, is one of the organizers of the Philly protest. She was born in Tehran and lived there until she came to the U.S. to attend college as an 18-year-old. “We are basically students from Penn, Drexel, Temple and other area schools, and some other Iranians who live in the area,” she explains. “We are going to demonstrate against the flawed election process and we are asking the world media not to jump to conclusions and accept the results.”
Savoktakin is expecting between 50 and 75 protesters — most either born in Iran or second generation Americans. “We wanted to support our countrymen, basically,” she explains on the phone. “The are actually demonstrating peacefully in Iran and they are being prosecuted for it.”
She makes it clear that “we are not protesting against the results; we are protesting against the process. There are a lot of indications that show the results are flawed.”
“Basically the Iranian media is not covering the process that much,” she says, adding that Internet access in the country is low, further hampering the dispersal of information.
On the apparent sea change in Americans’ views of Iranians as a result of the election protests, Savoktakin says excitedly, “I would be very pleased if this is the case. It’s a matter of supporting democracy. We have the right to peacefully demonstrate. No one can take that away from us. Our voices are finally being heard. The world finally realizes that. We want to have peaceful democratic process in Iran. That would be a very pivotal process. We are not a danger to the world. We don’t want to be considered an enemy to other countries. We want to live peacefully with the rest of the world.”
For more information on the protest, e-mail m.savoktakin@gmail.com
Maybe the most chilling documents of the Iranian protests over the disputed recent election are the YouTube videos, presented as naked, unfiltered accounts of the uprisings and subsequent attempts to quell them. I was watching a video last night which, of course, I can’t find now, in which the protesters were allegedly chanting “Death to Dictator,” which appears to be a not uncommon rally cry in Iran. Below are three recent videos from Iran, though YouTube is overflowing with similar footage.
A common trope among travelers is that people everywhere are essentially the same — decent, struggling, striving — and that it’s their leaders who muck everything up. Watching Iranians protest what they believe to be an unfair election makes you wonder how a guy like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in the first place, and to whose benefit having a boogeyman like him it was.
Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 5:30 pm posted by Brian Howard
R. Bradley Maule of photo/city site Phillyskyline writes to let us know about the photo experiment he, Steve Ives (Philly Skyline’s SEPTA guy), Steve Weinik and Chris Dougherty of The Necessity For Ruins recently undertook.
The gambit: Each purchased one of SEPTA’s new $10 day-long Independence Passes, and met at 9 a.m. at the Starbucks in the Marriott, directly across from SEPTA’s 1234 Market Street HQ. “From there, the wind — and Septa — would carry us wherever it would carry us, each one going his own way with a single deadline of meeting back up at 6 at the Field House pub, at the top of the stairway from Market East Station. We’d depart and reunite at the same location, a full and individual shift of riding SEPTA and photography in between.”
These guys are like the Beatles of Philly urban photography. Each has a sharp eye for the details — structural, human, infrastructural — that make living in the metropolis so endlessly fascinating. I’m imagining one of those shirts:
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 4:28 pm posted by Brian Howard
Ha ha. See how I made a steroid joke in the headline? It’s funny what a little thing like a headline can do.
Phillies left fielder Raul Ibanez is understandably pissed about the speculative post on midwestsportsfan.com (MSF) — or at least the public interpretation of it thanks, at least in part, to John Gonzalez’s calling out the blogger — which, despite a ton of good, solid statistical analysis, makes the unfortunate leap to unfounded steroid speculation.
Ibanez has essentially gone on the offensive:
“I’ll come after people who defame or slander me,” he said Tuesday night before the Phillies played the New York Mets, according to the report. “It’s pathetic and disgusting. There should be some accountability for people who put that out there.”
“You can have my urine, my hair, my blood, my stool — anything you can test,” Ibanez said, according to the report. “I’ll give you back every dime I’ve ever made” if the test is positive, he added.
The story — essentially that a hard-working player who’s never been suspected or implicated in any sort of PED thing has been unfairly defamed by a blogger nobody’s ever heard before — has picked up quite a bit of steam in the last day. And it raises several questions
The first question: Should Gonzalez should have let this sleeping dog lie? How many people would have read midwestsportsfan.com had he not? Is Gonzalez at all culpable for stirring up this little tempest?
The second is, would the MSF post have been as problematic with a different headline?
The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez: Steroid Speculation Perhaps Unfair, but Great Start in 2009 Raising Eyebrows
The post’s author JRod attaches a sensationalistic headline to a post that is mostly well-reasoned and -analyzed and in 17 words essentially besmirches a guy who has never, to our knowledge, tested positive for PEDs. (The author also overstates his case for pre-existing speculation a bit, citing little more than a few message boards and comments on other Ibanez stories.) I do think it’s fair to wonder, but to publish those wonderings without the slightest bit of proof — after all, it’s not as if Ibanez is a total stranger to going yard — is a bit irresponsible.
So we’ll politely decline Ibanez’s offer of his bodily fluids and agree that he’s got every right to be flipping mad about this.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 1:05 pm posted by Brian Howard
It’s looking like there’s a chance of thunderstorms tonight. If you find yourself near the radio (or near your web radio) tonight, tune in to Princeton’s WPRB, 103.3 FM (or wprb.com/listen.php), between 7 and 10 and you’ll hear yours truly spinning the musics in the stead of Jon Solomon, who’s off on assignment.
Back in the day I had a regular show on WPRB that I first called “Free Toast” but eventually renamed “No Culture Icons” with the tagline(s) “Nothing but not hits” and “Songs that are not boring and maybe pretty.”
It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve done a sub spot on the air, so I’ll no doubt be a bit rusty. So there’s that. But if you’ve got a hankering for unpretentious indie rock, spooky indie folk and downtemp electronica, well, give a listen.
And let’s make this fun: If you’ve got any requests, you can leave them here, or hit me up on my twitter (twitter.com/beegee73) or WPRB’s AIM (wprbdj) at 7. Let’s see how much of the three hours we can fill with CP reader requests.
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:14 am posted by Brian Howard
Anyone get pics or have stories from that ridiculous thunderstorm this morning? It woke me up from a sound sleep and scared the bejezus out of the cat.
As of 7:45am on Tuesday, the FAA was reporting weather-related arrival and departure delays of over an hour at Philadelphia International Airport.
Travelers were advised to check their airline for schedule updates and the airport website phl.org.
On mass transit, Septa early Tuesday halted services of the Route 102 trolley at Collingdale station because of flooding between Collingdale and Sharon Hill.
And according to The Weather Channel, there are scattered and isolated thunder storms on the menu starting at 4 p.m. and running into the early morning.
Wear your rubbers!
UPDATE: Ray Skwire of Phillybits hast some shots of a building that allegedly had its facade busted up by the lightning.
Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 4:00 pm posted by Brian Howard
Ubiquitous Philly photographer J.J. Tiziou was backstage at Festival Pier with his magic photo booth. How many of the featured Philly notables can you name?
Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 12:15 pm posted by Brian Howard
As we intimated last week, the weekend just past was filthy with killer shows and other excellent stuffs. You had your Roots Picnic. You had your Decemberists. You had your Polly Jean Harvey. You had your NIN/Jane’s Addiction. You had your Talking Heads, NoLibs Festival, Clark Park festival, the bike race and Phish. It was First Friday. Ghostbusters played at the Bourse. It was mass hysteria.
We’ve been busy recapping our weekends over on our A&E blog Critical Mass (believe the hype). But we want to know: what YOU did to fill the gap between 5 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. Monday. What’d you do? Who’d you see? How was it? Did you hook up? If so, is he/she still at your place? Was it all worth it?
The long and short: In the 2006 Tour de France, Landis, after remaining in contention for the overall lead during most of the Tour’s early stages, fell horribly behind during a disastrous Stage 16. The mythology is that Landis and his team drowned their sorrows that night in a bottle of Jack Daniels. The following day, Landis had the ride of his life, making up all the time he’d lost in the previous day’s stage and setting him up for a tour win. He did finish the tour in the lead, but was stripped of his title after his urine test taken at the end of Stage 17 revealed abnormally high levels of testosterone. Numerous appeals were to no avail, and Landis, the good Mennonite boy from Lancaster County, was banned from his sport for two years starting in January of 2007.
Of course, the timing wasn’t all that bad, all things considered. Landis used his time away for already-scheduled hip-replacement surgery (he was suffering from osteonecrosis, or bone death) and the requisite rehabilitation.
And now he’s back. Floyd will be racing in this weekend’s Philadelphia International Championship as a member of the sort of annoyingly named Team OUCH which is billing Floyd and his shiny new Birmingham Hip “The Bionic Man.” Which is fair I guess.
Landis is by far the biggest name on the start list, though this has never been a race about big names (and yes, I know Eric Heiden, Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong once raced in it, but big names tend to get big after they’ve raced here). But he’s also the biggest, most recognizable name to ride the race in some time. All the more reason to get out and support a race that’s been on the verge of not happening two years in a row now.
My question for you, cycling fans, is how do you FEEL about Floyd Landis these days? Have you forgiven him? Or did you never think he was guilty in the first place? Or are he and his mechanical chrome hip still dead to you?
The men’s race, a 156-mile, 10-lap course, starts at 9 a.m., Sunday, June 7. The women’s Liberty Classic, a 56-mile, 4-lap course, starts at 9:10 a.m. Start lists, course maps and spectator information here.
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