I came to the USA in 1989, expecting to stay for 3 years and then return to Europe. For the next three years, I lived in Cambridge, and came to like baseball, and especially the Boston Red Sox.

The first game I went to at Fenway was a pitching duel between Clemens, then of the Sox, and Saberhagen, then of the KC Royals. It was on April 18, 1991. I know because I just found the box score. The names (e.g., Boggs, Burks, Greenwell, Reardon) show how long ago that was.

Another indicator of how long ago that was: Tim Wakefield wasn’t with the Sox. I saw the most recent of his many Sox starts on Friday. It was a lot of fun, even though the Sox lost. They did so in extra innings, so it’s just as well the game was briskly played. Wakefield works quickly, even though his pitches don’t move quickly. His fastball is 70-something mph. That’s quite a contrast, though, with his trademark 60-something knuckleball. It’s also a contrast with every other pitcher we saw. The Sox relievers, and the Mariners pitchers, threw hard, with changeups going over 90.

It wasn’t Wake’s best start, and can’t have improved his chances of making the All-Star roster. But make it he did: Tim Wakefield is an American League All-Star. He’s the pitcher in the picture. I think that the hitter is Griffey.

We fled the rainy climes of Boston to spend the weekend in sunny Philadelphia. But there’s no getting away from water. Here’s my foot, being splashed my Maddie. Max is also in the picture/pool, and also obscured.

I just marked a couple of comments as spam. They were from “Mortgage Man” and “Credit Guy.” Each linked to the same web site. Which raised the questions:

• What other spam villains lurk in the same lair? Bankruptcy Boy? Loan Lad? Hedge Fund Hombre? Refinance Girl?
• Why didn’t Akismet mark this nonsense as spam? Because it’s not the most blatant example of spam, and not enough people had previously warned Akismet about that particular nest of spam villains?

I should spend a little more time with Bing, and I’m still trying to find details of the Michael Jackson show I believe I attended. Bing told me about the site Michael Jackson Live! Apparently it allows one to “Be the first to know Michael’s next move.”

Following the link took me to the registration page. The dates page is about future shows (rather than about the long-ago show in which I am interested). Apparently “VIP Packages are still available” even though show dates aren’t. I wonder what you have to give up to get one of those tickets…

This is about the late Michael Jackson, memory, and a few other things. I am old enough to remember the Jackson Five: their early hits, their TV cartoon show. Let’s review:

That means I’m more than old enough to remember when DOS stood for Disk Operating System. Nowadays, I think of those three letters as denoting a denial-of-service attack.

Some sites, including Google, suspected that they were under a DoS attack recently, when what was really going on was the result of a different kind of DoS: the Death of Superstar Michael Jackson. I think that he was a very talented performer, but his work was never personally important to me. (I’ll leave his own personal life alone.)

I remember seeing him live in the south of France, where I lived from 1987-89. It was my then-girlfriend’s idea/insistence that we go. It was more her thing than mine, although I was impressed by the show he put on. I also remember illustrious keyboard player Greg Phillinganes being in the band.

Doing some web research, I see that it must have been part of the Bad tour. But the only list of dates for that tour that I can find shows only two French dates, both in Paris.

Is my memory playing tricks on me? Two things make me believe that it isn’t, and that I really did see MJ. First, I see open dates both immediately before and immediately after the Paris shows, so it’s logistically plausible that there were some other French dates. Second, I do remember Greg Phillinganes was in the band – I recognized his name from his work with other musicians – and that checks out.

Anyway, RIP MJ. We’ll always have Nice, or wherever it was.

There are many books I should have read, but haven’t. Among them is Infinite Jest. I recently found Infinite Summer, a project based on the challenge: “Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd.”

IJ is currently in my Amazon shopping cart, but I’m inclined to remove it. I’m more inclined to do so after reading an NPR blog post about The Shelf Of Constant Reproach: “that shelf filled with books you meant to read or, more likely, fully intend to read some day.” I suspect that many people have IJ on their reproach shelf, and I don’t think I’ll join them just yet.

So, on with The Little Book which is a lot longer than its title, but rather shorter than IJ.

It seems that some Members of (the UK) Parliament have been rather… irregular in their expense claims. In order to investigate the expense claims thoroughly, it is necessary to trawl through hundreds of thousands of documents.

The Guardian decided to crowdsource the trawling, by setting up a web site with copies of expense documents and an interface allowing visitors to classify each document. Michael Andersen at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab presented four crowdsourcing lessons, based on an interview with Simon Willison, who developed the web application.

Two of the lessons are psychological:

• your workers are unpaid, so make it fun
• attention is fickle, so launch immediately.

The other two are technical:

• speed is mandatory, so use a framework
• participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready.

Note that the technical reasons follow on from “attention is fickle.” The framework was Django, and the servers were in the cloud, at Amazon’s EC2. Glyn Moody remarked that open source made this crowdsourcing project feasible. I’ll be more explicit (or perhaps more glib) and remark that this is an example of open source serving the cause of open government.

Is this an example of citizen journalism? It’s certainly an example of investigative journalism, with much of the investigation done by citizens.

Wednesday was Bunker Hill Day, and so Boston Public Schools were closed. A bunch of us went to Castle Island in South Boston.

Some of the kids decided to build a seawater “bath.” Maddie (my 5yo daughter) was one of the kids on the project from start to finish. The photo shows the start. The finish would have come more quickly were it not for the following cycle:

1. Let’s make a river from the sea to the bath.
2. But water flows downhill [i.e. from bath to sea, rather than vice versa].
3. Build a damn [to stop the water flowing out of the bath and into the sea].
4. Once the damn was established, it was back to step 1.

I’m glad that real construction projects in Boston are better-managed…

We the parents each took some reading matter along to Kids Fun Stop on Sunday morning. When we got there, we saw that they have wireless, and wondered if we should have brought computers.

While we were there, I read (some of) the New Yorker, which is the only magazine that arrives in our house by subscription. With a PC, I could have done the same reading online. For example, here is an interesting article on the question: Should creative writing be taught?

But I was better off with the magazine in paper form. It’s very portable (important when one is keeping kids in view), boots quickly, offers excellent print resolution, etc. Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been struck by the advantages of paper, it won’t be the last, and many others make similar remarks.

I wouldn’t consider it worthy of remark were it not for the illustration that adorns the cover of the current issue. A space traveler sits among gadgety debris, happily absorbed in a book. So: praise for paper; and kudos for Daniel Clowes, the artist.

West Roxbury is local to us, although we actually live in Roslindale. Maddie takes classes at the Center for Asian Martial Arts in West Roxbury (it moved from Roslindale at the start of this year). She had her 5th birthday party at the center on Saturday. It went very well, mainly thanks to the instructors who made the party fun for the crowd of kids (mostly girls of 5 or 6).

Another local business that contributed to the success of the party is the Sugar Bakery. They did the usual excellent job with the cake.

Sunday saw my first visit to Seek Books (previously). I liked this recently-opened second-hand science fiction bookstore very much. It packs a lot of inventory into a smallish store, managing to be cozy rather than cramped. I bought an as-new paperback of Sabriel for $4.

Then it was off to Macy’s to pick up some wine. There were a couple of wines out for tasting. I particularly liked the “El Miracle,” a blend of Tempranillo and Shiraz.

We visited a bunch of other local businesses over the weekend, but as far as the specifics go, I’ll leave it at wine, cake, books, and martial arts.