A glut of perfect games in MLB, a child dies at the hands of morons and Lindsay Lohan finds a perfect role for her

- Is pitching a perfect game in Major League Baseball getting easier? With only 20 perfectos having been thrown in the history of the game, the immediate answer would seem to be no. However, given that two of them have been thrown in the past three weeks and three in the past calendar year, it’s a question worth asking. Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay joined the club Saturday night, blanking the Florida Marlins 1-0 in Miami to add the ultimate masterpiece to his already sparkling resume. Halladay recorded the last out at 9:23 p.m., when he got pinch-hitter Ronny Paulino to hit a grounder to third for the final out. "It's never something that you think is possible," Halladay said. "Really, once I got the two outs, I felt like I had a chance. You're always aware of it. It's not something that you expect." His perfect game came a mere 20 days after Oakland A’s rookie Dallas Braden accomplished his own feat against Tampa Bay. After finishing off the perfect game, Halladay received a call in the clubhouse from Vice President Joe Biden to offer his congratulations. "Early in my bullpen I was hitting spots more than I have been. I felt like I just carried that out there," Halladay said. Unlike many perfect games or no-hitters, Halladay didn’t need many spectacular defensive plays behind him to keep runners off base. Shortstop Wilson Valdez did go deep into the hole for a grounder, backup third baseman Juan Castro went to his knees for another, second baseman Chase Utley ranged well to his left for another out but none were jaw-dropping defensive gems. In respect for his accomplishment, the Marlins said they would give Halladay the pitching rubber as a souvenir. That led to a grounds crew heading onto the field after the game, digging up the rubber as other members of the group prepared for a postgame concert behind second base. The Marlins themselves weren’t too worried about being part of history on the wrong side. "Look who's pitching," Marlins outfielder Cody Ross said. "It's Roy Halladay, the best pitcher in baseball. It's not embarrassing." Not that either side needed to be reminded of who was pitching, but this is exactly why the Phillies made that multiteam trade that brought him from Toronto in the offseason, then gave him a $60 million, three-year contract extension. The Marlins were helpless against his arsenal of pitches Saturday night and their desperation to get a hit showed through in the ninth inning when manager Fredi Gonzalez sent three consecutive pinch hitters to the plate in one final attempt to best Halladay. "He did what he had to do," Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said. "We gave him one run. He made it stand up. That was good. Super for him." It is the second perfect game in Phillies history, along with 10 total no-hitters. The moment was so huge that the local NBC affiliate in Philadelphia switched over from its coverage of the hometown Flyers’ appearance in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals to show the final few outs of Halladay’s perfecto. So whether it’s the quality of the pitchers doing it or simply the perfect game becoming easier to accomplish, baseball is seeing an amazing first half of its season that will hopefully continue………..

- Ironic is thick and at the same time horrifying in this next story. A Korean couple whose baby starved to death because they were too wrapped in an online fantasy game in which they - wait for it - raised a virtual child was sentenced Friday. Kim Yun-jeong and her partner, Kim Jae-beom, allowed three-month-old Kim Sa-rang to die of malnutrition in September while they were locked into 12-hour sessions of the game Prius Online. If you’re not a gamer dork, Prius Online a 3-D fantasy game in which players nurture an online girl who gains magical powers as she grows. Never did it dawn on these two imbeciles that they had an actual, real-life child who needed magical things like food and nutrients to stay alive. Instead, they gamed their way right to a jail cell. Yun-jeong received a suspended sentence because she is expecting the couple's second daughter in August. Hopefully, that child is raised by someone else, someone who remembers to feed her. Jae-beom was sentenced to two years behind bars, but the couple's defense attorney said he was satisfied with the sentence. "This is the first legal case regarding Internet addiction in Korea," said Kim Dong-young, a lawyer with the Korean Legal Aid Corp. "I am pleased that the female defendant's Internet addiction was taken into consideration, and she was bailed." Prosecutors at Suwon District Court had sought a five-year sentence for negligent homicide, but the court handed out a two-year sentence instead. Personally, I would have thrown both in the hole for a decade at least and also ordered both of them sterilized so they can never bring another child into this world for any reason. Just listen to one of the key facts presented during the trial: the child weighed 6.4 pounds when she was born, but was only 5.5 pounds at the time of her death. And no, I don’t accept the defense of addiction to online gaming. Sure, Internet gaming is hugely popular in South Korea, with ultra-high speed Internet connections nationwide. However, this isn’t gambling away one’s life savings or losing touch with family and friends because you spend all of your free time in front of the computer screen. This is neglecting to meet the most basic physical needs of an infant who is unable to fend for herself and allowing that infant to die a painful death because you were focusing your effort on a virtual - VIRTUAL - child that you had no hand in bringing into this world. Ironically, Suwon, the satellite town south of Seoul where the tragedy occurred, was named "Intelligent City of the Year" this month by a New York-based think-tank Intelligent Community Forum. Doesn’t seem so intelligent to me……….

- Rarely has any actor or actress been more perfect for a role than the one Lindsay Lohan is about to occupy on the big screen. One of the biggest lushes and wild women in Hollywood in this or any era, Lohan has been out doing g promotion for “Inferno” - the Matthew Wilder-helmed film that tells the story of ‘70s adult firm star Linda Lovelace. Lovelace, the 1972 “Deep Throat” star, will be brought to life by a woman who has probably had the most hookups with random strangers and yet never (that we know of) appeared in an actual porno - so far. Posters promoting the movie are now making the rounds, with one a close-up on the brunette Lohan, sitting on the edge of a bed with her knees drawn to her chest as what appear to be the torsos of two men linger in the background and the other depicting her laying on her back in retro undergarments. Both images were snapped by Tyler Shields, the same photographer who also captured Lohan wielding a gun back in April. Considering who is involved in the project and who the movie is telling the story of, the posters are actually much tamer than most would have expected. Still, one can’t help but smile at the thought of Lohan finally landing in a role she was born to play, one in which some of her best skills are going to be on display on the big screen. For Lohan herself, it must be nice to have people talking about you for reasons that don’t include alcohol-monitoring bracelets, court appearances or possible jail time. So congrats on finally finding your place in the world, L., keep it up…………

- There are a lot of factors that can hold up road construction and renovation projects: laziness, lack of funds, bad weather, political disputes and dozens of others. However, the state of New York is staring down a new issue as road repair season nears for 2010 - a dearth of road paint. Supplies of the reflective road paint used to mark dividing lines are running low around the country, all due to a shortage of a single chemical used to make the paint. Road paint differs from other types of paint - spray paint, paint used inside and outside of homes, etc. - because it must be specially formulated to give it durability and luminescence under harsh conditions. "It's a very significant problem," said Brian Deery of the Associated General Contractors of America. Right now, the shortage hasn’t hit home quite yet and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials expressed optimism that supplies will be restored before any roadwork gets derailed, but it’s a dicey proposition at this point. "Most states report that they're getting the same monthly allocations [of paint] that they got last year," said Tony Dorsey of the AASHTO. "It's not like the tap's been cut off. They're just not getting more than they got last year." New York isn’t the only state cognizant of the impending problem and in Texas, officials are already taking steps to conserve the use of paint. "We see shortages on the horizon and anticipate slowdowns," said Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for TxDOT. "What we don't want to do is start a project that we can't finish." Well, projects that you can’t finish because of a lack of paint, anyhow. Projects can drag on for years due to other reasons, but not a lack of paint. TxDOT is prioritizing projects to preemptively tackle the potential paint problem, including suspending some repainting work in the hopes of stretching the existing supply until production is back to normal levels, more or less. So if you are out on the road this summer and notice a few less orange barrels and construction projects on your state’s roads, now you’ll know why…………

- Sarcasm makes the world go ‘round - well, it makes my world ‘round, anyhow. The problem with sarcasm is that there are too many morons in the world and sarcasm unfortunately flies right over their heads. Sadly, these tools are the ones who would benefit most from understanding sarcasm because then they might realize what a drain they are on the rest of us and make some effort to step their game up in life in general. The question is how we get these laggards up from the back of the intelligence pack to join the rest of us in dispensing and enjoying sarcasm? Furthermore, how do we accomplish this in the online world, where the normal contextual and nonverbal clues are missing? Enter a group of researchers who have developed a computer program that can identify sarcasm in online communities with an accuracy rate of about 80 percent. That team is led by Oren Tsur, a computer scientist at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Tsur’s sarcasm detector ironically began as a sort of joke after he received an email during his freshman year of college that thanked him for his previous contributions to an annual conference and asked him to be that year's program chair. Being who he was, Tsur knew that the email was intended for someone else. He wrote back with a humorous, yet sarcastic tone and the response to that message startled him. "They allowed me to postpone the deadline for submission and asked me what I was working on," Tsur said. "I wrote back that I was working on detecting irony in email. They didn't get that either." That led him to begin experimenting and working on a program to detect the very sort of sarcasm that had flown right over the heads of those who read those emails he sent and all of that led him to a program that may help the sarcasm-stupid in the world to get a clue. As a test, Tsur and colleagues fed the computer 80 sarcastic sentences and several hundred non-sarcastic sentences that they had pulled from Amazon.com user reviews. The program analyzed the sentences and created hundreds of patterns it then used to evaluate 66,000 reviews for 120 products sold on the site. Results included the finding that sentences that start with "I guess" and end with an ellipsis are often, though not always sarcastic. In order to test their program’s proficiency in detecting sarcasm, Tsur’s team then presented 200 of the same product reviews to three independent reviewers. Those three reviewers found an 80 percent agreement between the computer’s perceptions of sarcasm and their own. The program is still a long way from being ready for widespread use, largely because sarcasm is such a complicated social construct. However, Tsur plans to present a paper about his work at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. If nothing else, he is providing a glimmer of hope for the knobs, tools, idiots and imbeciles out there who just can’t figure out when they are being sarcastically mocked by those intellectually superior to them…………