Another Clear Sheet Portrait

Here's another beardy-bespectacled portrait of yours truly:

Here's a link to the other two for comparison's sake. I'm feeling like polling my wards to see which they like best.

This one at least has my Sicilian volcanic-rock beaded necklace, a nice detail for such a small picture.

Baseball Attendance and Beach Cities

The title for this is ridiculous, as I have other things I want to say about this topic, I guess, and none of it can be easily reduced to simple post title.

I started looking up some information a few months ago when I was reading an article about an innovative baseball team that has poor attendance numbers.

I looked up the city on Google Maps and thought, That's what I'm looking at? I had no ideas the city looked like that, or that's what was meant when folks wrote about the difficulties of attending a game. Here's an overhead shot:

Despite the looks, this is an east coast beach-side city, and I didn't monkey with the cardinal directions.

Looks can be deceiving, especially with zoom factors, like below. This is the classic "west coast" city of Seattle, but zooming out, look to see how much land is west of the city"

Or being zoomed in too far shows a different problem, like below. The ballpark is almost centered in the frame, but it almost looks like an eat coast city, with the water to the right, or east.

That's San Francisco, with the park on the east side of the peninsula.

How about below?

This coastal city isn't even on an ocean. That's Chicago and Lake Michigan...

Anyway, back to my east coast beach city above. The arrow shows the location of the ballpark:

That's the bottom of the St. Petersburg peninsula in the metropolitan area of Tampa and helping to enclose what's called Tampa Bay. Tampa and St. Pete's is on the on the western side of the Floridian wang peninsula, so that accounts for the look of the city. The team tries to appeal to the baseball fans in Tampa all the way to Orlando, the large swath of central Florida, and counts quite a large number of loyal and oddly rabid fans.

Except the attendance of the Tampa Bay Rays tends to be at the bottom of the list each year.

The culprit is the park's location at the bottom of that peninsula. One player who grew up in nearby Lakeland says that if you draw a half-hour-drive's circle around the stadium, 70% of it would be water.

At least their lease is up in 19 years. Yikes.

My team being the Yankees, I suppose I'm supposed to have a hate-on for the Rays, but I don't. They're plucky and well-run, and have success despite the attendance or national recognition issues.

And, to end on a strange note, they're the only American sports team named solely after a body of water.

See:

• Green Bay is the name of the city as well as the body of water;
• Tampa is the name of the city, and St. Pete is the name of the community on the St. Petersburg peninsula;
• Tampa Bay is the name of the bay itself.

Sources in the Strangest Places

When islands break away from mainlands or are created by vomiting volcanic action in the sea, the life that develops there tends to do weird things. Big animals tend to shrink and tiny animals tend to grow. And this I mean in large-swath explanations. But check this out...have you heard about this?

Between five and ten thousand years ago the dwarf-pachyderms of Crete and possibly other Aegean and Mediterranean islands died out, or were hunted to extinction by enterprising humans. These elephants experienced what tends to happen to large animals on islands, as they saw their average size diminish relative to their African and Indian counterparts.

So, while the elephants themselves disappeared, their skeletons and fossils did not, and, it appears, were found by and subsequently inspired later humans. Check out a skull:

That large hole in the center of the skull is where the air intake would be for the animal's trunk. But, if you were a knowledgeable human at the time, you could be forgiven if you thought it resembled an eye-socket.

Hence: the legend of the cyclops looks to have originated with the skulls of newly extinct dwarf elephants.

How cool is that?