AMERICAN NOTES

GREAT MOMENTS IN MINOR LEAGUE PROMOTIONS

[From the Kansas City Star]

- The Charleston River Dogs tried to play the quietest game ever on
"Silent Night" in 2003. There was no talking for the first five innings,
and fans wore duct tape over their mouths. Fans held posters that said
"YEAH!," "BOO!" and "HEY, BEER MAN!"

- This season, the Southwest Michigan Devil Rays sent three lucky fans
home with their own grounds crew. The Devil Rays sent their grounds crew
to the winners' houses to cut the lawn, weed the garden and take care of
the driveway.

- On "Pre-planned Funeral Night," the Hagerstown Suns gave away a full
prepaid funeral valued at $6,500. Two thousand fans entered the contest.

- The RiverDogs hit the jackpot again with "Nobody Night" in 2002.
Trying to set the record for professional baseball's lowest attendance
(zero), fans were locked out of a River Dogs game until the fifth
inning, when it became official.

- Several teams have tried over the years to give out a free vasectomy
on Father's Day. But the Catholic Church always intervenes, and the
event has never actually come to fruition.

- The Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings took advantage of baseball legend Ted
Williams' body being cryogenically frozen in 2003 by giving out frozen
popsicles to the first 500 fans.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/15047914.htm

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POOR AGE FASTER

REUTERS - People with lower socio-economic status appear to age faster
than their better-off counterparts, British researchers said on
Thursday. They showed that the poor have shorter telomeres, the caps on
chromosomes that prevent them from fraying, which makes them
biologically older than people of the same age in higher social groups.
"Not only does social class affect health and age-related diseases, it
seems to have an impact on the aging process itself," said Dr Tim
Spector of St Thomas's Hospital in London.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=healthNews&storyid=
2006-07-19T230456Z_01_L18380319_RTRUKOC_0_US-AGING.xml&src=rss

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PENNSYLVANIA BARN HEX SIGNS DISAPPEARING

NY TIMES - Hex signs on barns in Pennsylvania Dutch country are waning,
many abandoned long ago to time and weather, and now grown pale. . .
Experts counted more than 800 of the signs on barns in the 1980s; fewer
than 200 remain. The barn stars are disappearing ever more rapidly as
old wooden barns themselves disappear, replaced by cheaper metal ones.
Another factor in their decline was the $300 or so it cost farmers to
keep them repainted. Usually about four feet in circumference, the signs
were painted in bright hues on barns' gable sides. . . They were brought
here by the Germans who came from the Rhineland-Palatinate area to these
fertile valleys in southern Pennsylvania. . . And while the power to
ward off evil and bring good luck or plentiful harvests has been
attributed to the hex signs, most scholars now believe that this notion
too sprang from linguistic error. . . The real origin of the tradition
was purely artistic, said David Fooks, executive director of the nearby
Kutztown Folk Festival.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/us/22hex.html?ex=1311220800&en=
1ba3ca44c46e9f93&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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GREEN PARTY - Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate and death
penalty foe Barbara Becnel ­ the first black woman to run for governor
in California ­ announced this week that she has left the Democratic
Party because the "Democratic leadership is allowing race and class bias
to dishonor the Democratic Party." With Green Party candidate for
Governor Peter Miguel Camejo by her side, Becnel signed a voter
registration form switching to the Green Party Tuesday night. She is
second high-profile person of color to switch to the Green Party of late
­ Nativo Lopez, state and national president of the influential Mexican
American Political Association, has also re-registered Green, the
failure of the Democratic Party to address the concerns of Latinos."