The Newsstand Sophisticate

News 8 has the scoop.

The Washington Post discusses a fascinating academic study showing that Southern baseball players are more likely than their Northern colleagues to throw at a batter after giving up a home run or when a teammate has been hit by a pitch in the previous inning. It’s attributed to the South’s “culture of honor,” the clannish ethos thought to have been brought to the South largely by the “Scotch-Irish” (Ulster Scots) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the words of a motivational poster in the locker of Tennesse native and Baltimore Orioles reliever Jamie Walker, “You [mess] with me, you [mess] with the whole trailer park.”

It’s an interesting look at the way cultural patterns, even (or especially) irrational ones, can persist in unexpected ways.

Norm links to a story about the Bishop of Carlisle’s attempt to claim meteorology as a branch of theology. The Rt. Rev. Graham Dow has, the article says, suggested that recent floods in the U.K. are a punishment from God, provoked by the introduction of gay equality.

Norm was kind enough to post a question I had about the right reverend’s theory, living as I do in a state where same-sex marriage is proscribed by the constitution yet which inexplicably continues to be punished by flooding. You can read Norm’s post and my foray into theological meteorology (or is it meteorological theology?) here.