Nat Arem's Blog

I actually think this is true of most religions, not just Christianity.  But people do treat religion like a software license in a ton of cases.

On Saturday night I went to the Rangers v Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park in beautiful south Philadelphia (somewhat kidding). Although the stadium itself is definitely really nice. Saturday night (5/21) was the first time Cliff Lee was pitching against the Rangers since he played for them last year in the World Series in which they lost to the San Francisco Giants (of course, the Phillies also lost to the Giants in the NLCS).

Lee went on to pitch eight shutout innings with five hits and ten strikeouts and the Phillies won 2-0. He’s a beast when he’s on (which is pretty frequent although his record doesn’t look great this year). Most of the game was pretty nondescript although one kind of funny thing did end up happening. We hadn’t eaten dinner so during the second inning we decided to go get some food so we didn’t want to get up during any key later-inning moments. That proved to be a mistake. Ryan Howard hit a home run DIRECTLY into our seats. Like if no one was in the right field bleachers, it would have hit our seat. The people in front of us ended up getting the ball by reaching back into our row. You can see the highlight of it on this ESPN game recap article if you watch the video on the right side. So much for trying to get food at an opportune time during the game. I should’ve thought about the fact that the Phillies’ power-hitting lefty was about to come up to bat and that if he was going to hit a home run, there was a good chance it was coming to our area given that were right in the power spot in right field and we were in the second row. If he hits a home run, I figure there’s a maybe one in a few thousand or so chance that it lands directly in our seat and maybe a one in a few hundred chance that it lands in our general area — but only IF he hits a home run. Multiply those numbers by .065 for our actual chances because he is about 6.5% likely to hit a home run at home (134/2043 – see this) over the course of his career. So it wasn’t like we were massively likely to get a ball hit to us but his at bats were probably the most likely at bats to produce a home run in our area. Anyway, it happened. We weren’t there. Fail. One day I will catch a home run ball, hopefully.

Here are the pictures, this time they’re bigger than my normal size blog pics if you’re on my actual blog domain and you click on them.

EDIT: For some reason the lightbox plugin that I’m using to show the gallery is combining the two galleries that I posted today, kinda. I’m going to look into this. For now it shouldn’t be a big deal.

On Saturday afternoon I went to go visit Eastern State Penitentiary with some friends of mine. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Eastern State Penitentiary is a former prison located out the outskirts of Center City Philadelphia. By that I mean it’s “downtown” but it isn’t exactly among the skyscrapers. For those of you who’ve been to Philadelphia, Eastern State is a short walk from the area museum. Of course, at the time the prison was built in 1829, it was on the outskirts of Philly up on a hill. Today it’s surrounded by a nice residential neighborhood known as the Fairmount/Art Museum area. It was closed as a prison something like 40 years ago so it’s only open for tours and various other events these days.

The prison is of significance for many reasons. For one, it was the first “modern” prison in that it housed inmates separately. Second, at the time it was constructed, it was the largest building in the United States. Third, it was the first prison built with the intent to rehabilitate inmates as opposed to simply locking up inmates.

The cool thing about the tour is that it’s a self-guided audio tour and the prison itself is in a controlled state of “ruin” in that very little of it has been restored. In fact, much of it is falling apart although, from what I’ve been told, that is on purpose.

I’m testing out the image gallery feature in WordPress so I guess we can see if this works:

EDIT: I’ve just learned a few things about the WordPress gallery feature. For one, I can finally make pictures more than like 500 pixels wide so I can put higher res photos on my blog. Two, if you’re on the blog itself and not on an RSS reader, you can hover over the pictures for captions where I’ve put them in. Third, if you’re on the blog itself, you can click on the pictures and it’ll let you use the arrow keys or your mouse to scroll from left to right to see the pictures. You can read the captions, where available, at the bottom. I don’t think you can do any of this from the RSS reader unfortunately…

This one is a link so you have to click on the title. I’m not sure what happens in the RSS feed so this is partially a test.

Testing out the new tumblr-like features.