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Whew, I've been waiting several hours to get that off my chest.
true ASTROS fans are more than overjoyed that that (swearword) care would change the name and leave us with our memories of our baseball team when we had one. i really REALLY hope they change the name along with the unis
they can't really do Xpress - the AAA roundrock team, is the Express, owned by astros hater nolan ryan
they should rename it - the Suck-its
and not real too surprised they decided to change the no water/no outside food rule. here and drayton always said it was the aramark contract. am also not surprised they are lowering the prices of the seats no one wants to sit in. i wonder if they are going to make the ushers really check the ticket stubs now. the last few years, with the empty ballpark, you could buy a cheap seat ticket and pretty easily move to better ones in the upper deck and even the lower upper deck.
but none of this stuff is gonna get the hardcore fans like me back. of course, they don't care about the hardcore fans. they want the folks who are gonna regard the ballpark the way they do the aquarium. the baseball is just one of those things that happens when you are busy having fun at minute maid - but don't mind that, the fireworks will be on soon
All IMHcurmudgeonO of course.
You're right, that is quite curmudgeonly. I'm betting you'll be doing a facepalm in a few decades.
no idea why the county refuses to USE the darn thing
and yeah, the astronaut thing seems to be rapidly winding down
Sending men to the moon was the single most significant thing that the human race has ever achieved. Setting up a colony on the moon and sending human beings to Mars should be the most important goals of the human race right now. That we are not actively working to do so is a disgrace...
You're an idiot.
Exactly right.
Seriously, what are our choices here ...
Rangers, Mavericks, Spurs, Cowboys ... Mustangs?
Bluebonnets!!! Make it happen!!
Oil Barons? Derricks? Black Gold? Texas Tea?
Creative Accountants?
In honor of Texas's fine jazz tradition, the Tenors.
The Horrors (truth in advertising!)
wait, wait, I think I've got it ...
The Houston Cranes
Oh nonsense.
Seriously, it's not even in the same universe as porn.
BAHAHHAA...
How about we work more on fixing the humanfuckingrace before we make fukkking moon colonies and landing a guy on Mars 'the most important goal of the human race'. Get the #### out of here. Talk about your naive idiots. #### cancer, #### AIDS, #### the enviroment. #### a billion more things more important than some Star Wars nerds childhood fantasy. We should make landing an irradiated cripple on Mars our number one priority.
Are you talking about 'Vaux, A.B.D.'? Disagree, but jettisoning him onto Mars is extreme. /joke
Making a radiation shielded compartment for use during solar eruptions isn't exactly, well, rocket science.
As for the supposedly crippling effects of being in space: Sergei Krikalev has spent 803 days is zero gravity, including 311 days in a stretch. Sergei Avdeyev has done 747 days, being up 379 days in a stretch.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that you're a well-fed , white American. Feel free to correct me.
...and yes, you're all welcome for me taking this completly innocous thread and dropping it right into the shitter. My bad. I didn't think the perfectly defensible prediction of 'We will never land a man on Mars' any different than 'The Sox will not make the playoffs in 2012'. (I guess the Mars thing is a little more likely). But I should have known around these parts it would have been sure to bring out the stupid rhetoric.
You wanna walk on a different world? Drive out to East St. Louis right now, and walk around for an hour. You get back, then getting to Mars will be a cakewalk.
It's not either-or, it's both.
next sentence - he has to know he ain't getting the hardcore fans back. like any businessman, HE DOESN'T CARE because that is not where the money is. the money is from people who have no attachment to the old team and want cheap entertainment.
changing the team name is smart business, not merely throwing a scrap to those of us who used to love the team back when they were a real ML team
I think you are dead wrong on this one. The hardcore fans may be pissed about the move but at the end of the day they are hardcore fans and aren't going to be able to walk away. Oh I'm sure a very small number will walk away for good but I'm betting that the move to the AL costs less than 1% of the fans. In the end winning 56 games last year and probably winning something on that order this year is going to cost a LOT more fans.
And NASA has become the biggest long term impediment to manned space travel ever. It hasn't made a significant dent in launch costs in 40 years, and 99% of space costs are launch costs. Instead it saddled us with a 1960s designed spaceplane for 3 decades by lying to taxpayers that it could bring launch costs down dramatically by performing 50 missions a year . Then it used the few missions the plane could actually perform to politically pander to special interest groups by flying teachers and Senators and influential Saudis into space.
So yea, blowing a few hundred billion flying a man to Mars to learn less about the planet than a few billion in robotic probes could find out a decade sooner would on par for NASA. If you truly believe it's important to find out as much as possible about our solar system, then NASA should be banned from launching any more manned space missions, and restricted solely to unmanned robotic probes,. Those probes have done 10x more to advance our understanding of our neighboring planets than manned missions on a fraction of their cost.
If you believe we should advance the cause of manned space travel, then you should want NASA out of the launch business so competitive forces can work the cost of getting stuff into orbit down substantially. A 10x reduction in launch costs is what is needed to fully transform manned space travel that it becomes relatively commonplace, but it can't be done by a government monopoly burdened by political spending requirements, political safety requirements, and undriven by any competitive urgency.
How bout the Houston Fabulous Prizes?
Houston There Will be Blood*?
*Never saw it, but I assume it's set in Texas somewhere.
Really?
More significant than writing? The printing press? Penicillin? Electric lighting? The internal combustion engine? Refrigeration?
Hell, Thomas Edison invented at least four things by himself that are more significant than the moon landing: 1) inandescent light bulb, 2) phonograph, 3) motion pictures, 4) the fluoroscope X-ray.
No, whatever about the resuscitability of the manned space program, a great feature of old team names is that they preserve older civic identities. Steel production is way down in Pittsburgh. I don't know how much meat gets packed in Green Bay. Los Angeles has a team name devoted to getting out of the way of streetcars that don't exist any more in a city thousands of miles away. I love that stuff. Astros forever!
California actually
He probably meant Houston No Country For Old Men, which came out around the same time and WAS set in Texas, albeit in a part that looks nothing at all like the Gulf Coast.*
*Always amuses me how some Hollywood types think all of Texas looks alike. Saw a movie a while back that had a scene supposedly in Beaumont, but the surroundings were pure west-Texas desert.
But NASA does so few commercial launches, the market has already been set. The Russian and European Space Agency perform a majority of the commercial and small government launches because they have cheaper launch costs. As soon as the Chinese get their boosters sorted, look out - the cost per ton will again decrease dramatically.
The market does not stand still and NASA was caught napping, for sure, by focusing on more politically pragmatic projects. The fact the Delta boosters are more advanced and slightly more reliant than the Soyuz never caught on with users since the safety margins are covered by insurance and the throw weights and price per tons offered by the Russians is unbeatable.
As far as manned travel, if you want the market setting the price for those, then a government monolith will always fail. When some like Richard Branson finally gets a workable usable space plane, we'll see Boeing and Lock-Mart jump on board.
He likely invented none of them individually and should only get credit for the patent. I won't deny his brilliance as a mechanical mind or business man, but as a sole inventor, not one bit.
Heck, let's see an Edison slagfest - that would be a change. I will state now that I am firmly a Tesla man, craziness and all.
Yes.
No, I want a name that combines some local stereotype with "Cats" or "Dawgs". They could just switch from "Astros" to "AstroCats".
Sure, they were weak after landing, but they were up and about in short order. And a Mars mission could involve just a couple of months travel time in each direction by using faster and more energy-demanding trajectories, just because we always send robotics probes on the minimal trajectory doesn't mean it has to take nine months to get there for everything.
I don't think anybody has proposed sending interplanetary astronauts in a tin can without room for amenities.
Well, I'm waiting to hear who it is that's going.
Well there's the desert outside "Paris, Texas"...the mountains of Claremore, "Oklahoma!"...
And more important than actually doing it, was the will to do it and the optimism that lay behind and animated the will.
Those things are in very short shrift in the early 21st c., and they're greatly missed.
And more important than actually doing it, was the will to do it and the optimism that lay behind and animated the will.
Those things are in very short shrift in the early 21st c., and they're greatly missed.
I really find it hard to understand this enthusiasm for grand gestures that, at the end of the day, contribute nothing to the actual well being of anyone.
I mean penicillin has saved literally hundreds of millions of lives. You'd pick a nice photo-op and a feel good story over that?
Hell, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, each one millions of times more important the the stupid Moon landing.
They should've just faked it, and saved the money.
At any rate..good lesson on what NOT to do.
When Bud Adams moved the Houston Oilers to Tennessee, needed to come up with a new name since Tennessee isn't exactly known for oil. Had a name in mind, but just to make sure it was okay, surveyed the community to see if they would be upset if the name referred to a population group.
After getting a bunch of 'em back with stuff scribbled on them like "Heck naw, Shur washt arw wuzst ar Injun",,, went ahead with his plan.
Announced that the new team name would be the Tennesse GAWD AWD BAWDS.
Well, after the populace near burnt the town to the ground and Adams barely escaped a public lynching, Adams scrapped those plans.
Still wanted a name linked to the popular culture though. While driving through the town, noticed the unusual number of junk cars sitting in front lawns, some even on the top of houses.
Announced the new name would be the Tennessee DIPSTICKS.
Well, you guessed it.
Now Adams was fed up. Called in a lackey. Told him to open the dictionary to the T's. Stick his finger in it. "Does that word you have your finger on have ANYTHING to do with referring to the population in this area?"
The lackey was sort of hesitant.."Well, not exactly"
"Then dangit man, speak up. That's the new team name."
The NFL home office inserted the "an".
It wasn't that stupid.
I always understood that the space program led to all kinds of technological advances that we wouldn't otherwise have.
Anyway, saying all that other stuff is more important is like saying that your basement is more important than your roof.
And it's more than a grand gesture. Right now, the human race has all its eggs in one basket. The sooner we set up some kind of offsite disaster recovery facility the better.
But whitey's on the moon.
I get that we should have priorities, but to suggest that people are starving and dying of disease because of our spending on NASA is just silly.
No one has said that. My only problem is with the ridiculous rhetoric of "Making moon colonies and putting a man on Mars should be MANKIND's number one prority", and "Putting a man on the moon was humanity's number one achievment"...cause you know, #### language..and fire..indoor plumbing...the scientific principle..
I get that we should have priorities, but to suggest that people are starving and dying of disease because of our spending on NASA is just silly.
Not to get into the larger fire here, but 1% of the Federal budget is a lot of money. Roughly 35 billion this year with only slightly smaller numbers (in terms of spending power) if we go back a couple of decades. You can feed a lot of people, send a lot kids to college, do X and Y and Z for 35 billion dollars. And you can do a lot of that stuff with only half (or less) than that 1%.
I understand, and agree with, the insistence of an overall budget perspective, but it works both ways.
As far as space exploration, without getting into the political part of the discussion, I generally like the idea, but I'm not sure why we should be sending up manned vehicles at the present time. Aren't humans (on the vehicles themselves) just an unnecessary hassle until we get the basics worked out?
What a silly thing to say. Are any of us blogging from our mother's roof?
I think not.
were you watching it in your beaumont tuxedo?
:)
There are probably at least a couple of dozen of us blogging from your mother's roof.
Really?
When it ends it ends. The human race will come to an end; it's not an if.
And really, why should any of us worry about that far off day?
As if. That gravesite's standard size; you must all be the size of smallish housecats.
It could be tomorrow, who knows when. But I've had a good run and am ready for the rapture at any time, moon colonies or not.
In all seriousness, it is the exploratory impetus that many people feel drives humanity. Exploration leads to conquest leads to exploitation leads to assimilation - a constant loop throughout recorded history. Therefore, with the Earth almsot tapped out, you need to expand the drive outwards - to space.
I do not endorse manned space exploration simply to prove some virility of the human kind, but simply to express what I see to be an impetus to want to explore.
Well the bloke that figured out what that opposable thumb was good for gets my vote...
No, they simply advanced the development and deployment timeline. For example, power tools and velcro were exploited, modified and extended thanks to the space program, but that may have been a natural progression. People see a rapid development timeline and assume that without space travel, those advancements would not have happened at all. I find that impossible believe - battery operated power tools, for example, would have happened regardless of Gemini or Apollo or any manned space travel. It occured sooner because th US Government, specifically, threw a lot of money at the issue. No more, no less.
It has.
Well, some of us would like to ensure that our great-great grandchildren get to have some fun too.
You can’t credit a nebulous future “natural progression” with something NASA actually germinated.
Well, what kind of criteria do you have for "mankind's greatest achievement" that the moon landing doesn't fit? I'm open to the idea that something else was better, if you can make a case for it.
Masturbation?
I guess the Great wall and the Roman aqueducts are that kind of engineering achievement if you era-adjust. The Great Wall was also nearly as useless for practical purposes.
This is kind of a peak vs. career, value vs. fame thing. In terms of simply accomplishing something that had intrigued man for generations, an unconquerable quest being conquered kind of thing, setting foot on the moon is really unrivaled. But from a career value perspective, a number of other things (the printing press, many modern medicinal developments, electricity, etc.) clearly top it in terms of greatest impact on our everyday lives.
So let's just compromise and agree that the greatest accomplishment in history is baseball.
Yet clearly not the most important or most pragmatic.
Sustained success . . . time goes on until the universe ends. The planet and the solar system will come to an end long, long, long before the universe does. We want to survive for as long as we can. Ultimately, continued survival is the project of every organism, and collectively, every species. Hence the drive to reproduce, which goes hand in hand with the drive to explore, since both seek to ensure collective survival.
Observation of human history can lead equally to pessimism and to optimism. Every person has died. Every country has been conquered. Every civilization has fallen. There have been many a dark age. But optimism always wins. That we're here now shows that there has also been many a rebirth, and many a new beginning. There have been many renaissances, many enlightenments, many golden ages, throughout time and all over the world. Every enlightenment is more enlightened than the last, and every golden age more golden, warts and all. Not one living person ought to rather have lived in a previous time. There will be more travail, but there will always be a better, brighter future coming someday.
Unless someday there is no future at all. Unless someday the earth is gone and humankind has nowhere else to go, nowhere else to see the hopeful light of a new day. The earth will someday be gone. But we will live on, breathing the air of other worlds and basking in the warm glow of other suns . . . because we must.
Again, most technical advances were not snatched from thin air but advancements of existing technology. Therefore, I can and do assume those advancements would have taken place without the existence of large amounts of government funding that accelerated their deployment timelines.
Cordless power tools - someone would have made those regardless of man's ability to break through the ozone layer. Powdered drinks have been around for years before Tang burst on to the scene. Most of the items listed in Post 73 are not out of the blue discoveries that only NASA could have accomplished. I find that argument as specious - there were, actually, very few discoveries driven by the space program - it was, rightly, the impetus for the advancement of existing technologies, but as adaptations for what was need to put men in orbit and so on.
I also do no denigrate the actual achievements themselves. Just the thought that they exist only because of space travel.
Abolishing human slavery. You make the case for the moon landing topping that.
Belatedly righting an unconscionable, man-created wrong is not really the same thing as creating something that didn't exist or going somewhere previously considered impossible to reach.
Maybe, but NASA was the one who actually stood on the shoulders of giants.
ETA:
Not that it's been abolished in the first place. It is still practiced in some parts of the world.
Guinan called, she wants her monologue back.
This ties into my screed that what 'we' generally, VERY generally consider fair and moral...is about 50 years old, mostly for the First World, and applies to one species. Talk about a mote in the eye of god.
Agreed, but the methods that Nasa was going to attempt to do something like that was a colossal waste of money and they needed a wake up call to rethink how they would do something like that, instead of brute forcing it with money and a only one option approach.
Aren't we all (Love the show Sanctuary where Tesla is a vampire :), hated that he was a bad guy at first though---the actor that plays him also does live shows where he plays Tesla)
Besides, Edison's Medicine is a good song :)
I'm pretty sure that in the book Physics of the Impossible that he explained it would actually be cheaper to send a man to Mars than it would be to send them to the Moon.
Have to agree.
Things like the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam (etc) might rival the Space Program in being a unified effort towards a goal, but they don't have the cachet that the Moon Landing offers. But ultimately the long term advancement of the human race has been helped more by the things you mentioned than anything the Space Program could have produced.
Dr. Kaku is awesome. Have you seen his TV show? Obviously he can't go into real detail since he's got limited time, but it's still really, really cool.
Yes, because if NASA hadn't spent billions recruiting all those engineers away from private business, they would have been under-employed, their degrees gathering dust while they sat around drinking coffee.
at last, someone talking sense.
Nope haven't seen his show, love all of the books of his I've read, and seen him on TV all the time(he was even talking about the Earthquake in Haiti on one show because he was the scheduled guest when it hit and they instead made him the 'expert'--thought it was cool that he could just shift gears like that.). Yes he is awesome.
Yep, if people think the internet, porn, crack or cigarettes were addictive, the holodeck would end society as we know it. Probably end progress also.
Except for the holodeck cupholder.
It even sort of sounds the same.
As they say....
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