Casey At The Bat Quotes

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question.

All boys are swines. They snog you and dump you. Or lick your face. Or put bats in your mouth.

The conversation, as usual, switched back to sex. “It’s difficult with you sometimes though, babe,” Dominic said to Bronagh. “I’m constantly torn between wanting to fucking destroy you, but I also want to bring you flowers and chocolates and treat you like a princess.” Bro, TMI! Bronagh didn’t bat an eyelid. “Why not do both?” Sis, TMI! “That right there,” Dominic snapped his fingers, “that’s why I love you

Stengel admitted. “I’m not going to make any decision until I have to give the umpire my batting order. Then you’ll know as well as I.” The next afternoon, Casey resisted

But unlike Vegas, what happens in a poet's cave never stays in a poet's cave... We tend to release the bats

De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation.

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke. Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on all right, and as a result got quite a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later, Lieutenant Governor in Willie's last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, "What do you keep that lunk-head for?" Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, "Hell, somebody's got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike." But once he said: "I keep him because he reminds me of something." "What?" "Something I don't ever want to forget," he said. "What's that?" "That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that." So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

The game jostled back and forth, and then came the final inning. Some player named Casey came to bat, like his teammates, looking like a rock. Lightning ripped through the air as rain came down in sheets. The scoreboard said the horses were beating the rocks by two points, but there were two men on base. If Casey hit a homerun, the rocks would beat the horses. If not, too bad for the rocks. This man, Ben, and the two people with him looked horrified as this Casey came to bat. They had red shirts with horses painted on them. They jumped up and down for joy when they saw the final pitch, and Casey sulking back to the dugout. He had struck out. After the game, the four hiked back to a very small car.

In Brave’s case, the risk might be that the billion tokens it issued are treated like long-term investments, hoarded by investors who withhold them from circulation. In that case, the BATs’ value won’t accurately reflect the market for user attention. A critical mass of use, not holding, is needed. Brave’s model included a token-issuance strategy for dealing with that challenge. It set aside a 300 million–strong “user growth pool” to attract new users. There’s a plan, for example, to deliver a small amount of BATs to the integrated Brave wallet whenever there’s a unique new download of the browser. In this way, the token is designed as a tool to bootstrap adoption, to foster network effects. “Early on we saw this as something that would allow us to stake users with initial grants,” says Brave CEO Brendan Eich. The strategy was shaped by Eich’s decades in Silicon Valley, where the veteran engineer created the ubiquitous Web programming language JavaScript in the nineties and later went on to co-found browser developer Mozilla. Over time, he realized that venture capitalists were reluctant to fund the marketing cost of acquiring users and that tapping new equity or debt to do so was dilutive to the founders’ and early investors’ ownership stakes. “But with a token, it can be disbursed to users without credit consequences,” he adds, arguing that by contrast to a dollar’s worth of equity or debt, “the BAT is a social credit currency; it doesn’t have this inflationary property.

Under these models, money is no longer merely a morally neutral enabler of transactions; it can now capture the common values and interests of all parties who’ve agreed to use it. In the case of BATs, the attention metrics captured by the browser dictate who gets tokens and how many, putting a more meaningful market value on attention than can be achieved with traditional money.

these features have the potential to create an ecosystem in which attention is more directly and precisely compensated. It won’t necessarily end the phenomenon of “clickbait” journalism—presumably, if stories on Kim Kardashian continue to draw people’s attention, they will fetch the highest payouts in BATS. But the option to tip publishers could send more nuanced, informative signals to them. We don’t know for sure how people will behave, but perhaps they’ll be more inclined to tip BATs for a work of insight and effort than for a sexy photo they felt compelled to click on.

Brave applies a two-pronged strategy to this problem. It has created a new browser designed to work seamlessly with its tokens. The browser blocks all ads by default and, with sophisticated analytics, collates and anonymizes data from users that indicate how much time they spend looking at certain content. That way it can come up with a useful record of the amount of time we all spend at Internet sites without identifying us. As a user of the Brave browser, you are offered the potential to earn BATs for selectively turning off the ad blocker to view ads; tokens are delivered to an integrated wallet that you uniquely control. You can in turn use those tokens to reward publishers of content that you appreciate—in effect, tipping them with donations. Meanwhile, to place ads with publishers of content on the system, advertisers must first acquire BATs and then pay those tokens to publishers, with the price for those ads dictated by the attention metrics associated with the latter’s content.

She sees tall, sensible Eleanor sitting out on a terrace at twilight, with bats circling above her head. She sees the Pargiter family rising and falling through the decades like swimmers battling the waves.’ Summer Lies Bleeding