More Randomness: Phils, Birds, Softball...Yarn? Chicken?

Submitted for your approval...or not...

• The Phillies finally had a day off after 24 games in 23 days. In that stretch they went 15-9 and have regained the NL East lead for the first time since May. The lead is now a game over Atlanta. Still, with Brad Lidge having elbow issues and Jimmy Rollins leaving their last game with a hamstring problem (that Charlie Manuel says wasn't serious and was due to dehydration; of course, he also said Ryan Howard's ankle injury wouldn't cause him to miss any games just before Howard went on the disabled list for nearly three weeks), and Placido Polanco's saying his elbow is broken (though he continues to play), and the team's general inconsistent hitting all season, it won't be smooth sailing the rest of the season.

• Meanwhile, the NFL is back. The Eagles start on Sunday, and that day they're wearing 1960 throwback uniforms as part of the commemoration of their 1960 championship team. Yes, that was 50 years ago. And yes, that was the last time the Eagles won a championship. So if you wonder why Eagles fans get a little (a lot) crazy, wonder no more.
  
  
  
  

• Also starting Sunday: softball! I'm playing in the CBLSL fall league, which will run for nine weeks (with no games on a couple of those weeks). The idea of fall ball is that it's more casual -- although the plan is to keep standings and have playoffs the final week -- and teams are basically picked at random. Players can try out different positions they normally don't play, or just gain more experience that they may not be able to get in the regular summer league. Vitaminwater was supposed to pay for jerseys for the league, but now they're not. Which is fine, since I don't use their product anyway. Meh.

• And this article amused me so much. KFC is upset because people have forgotten who Colonel Sanders is. More specifically, younger people don't even know him at all. So they're going to do a bunch of PR to reestablish him. Gee, maybe young people don't know about Colonel Sanders because these geniuses took the Colonel out of their advertising and mostly removed his iconic image from their logos and store signs, not to mention shortening their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. What did they think was going to happen? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Remember new Coke?

• Finally, Blogger has added a stat page to my blog that not only tells me how many page views my blog gets overall, but also has numbers for hits on individual posts, websites the hits are coming from, search key words and page views by country, browser and operating system. It only goes back to May, but in that time, according to their stats, the single post that has had the most views was this one...about the "yarn bomb" on South Street and the "yarn bombing" art phenomenon. It must be really popular.
  
  More stat stuff: 59 percent of views came from Internet Explorer, to 15 percent for Firefox and 11 percent for Safari. As for operating systems, it's 83 percent for Windows to 13 percent for Mac.
  
  The "search keywords" stat is odd, because there are 10 different searches listed and the totals run from 8 to 2. They seem like small numbers considering that the top "referring site" is Google with 615, and the next one has 191. Perhaps this instead refers to searches done right on my blog page (there's a search box near the top). Also, the results show that people are using variations on what is bascially the same search. Anyway, here's the top 10:
  
  jennifer utley
  jen utley
  stewart bradley
  kevin seal mtv
  philadelphia classic softball
  philly sexy singles 2010 john christmas
  "jennifer utley"
  chase utley's butt
  comcast
  daily news sexy singles
  
  Seems to be a lot of fascination with Chase Utley and his wife and his butt. Not to mention Stewart Bradley.