Chris requested this earlier in the time-travel post, then he found some more embarrassing pictures of Cole Hamels, so I figured I’d take a stab at it.

From the Wikipedia: the Higgs boson

Yeah, I’m sorry. I have no idea what the Higgs boson really is. Supposedly finding it will help explain why matter has mass, and it’s the last missing piece, apparently, of something called the Standard Model of particle physics. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me how or why or what exactly that means.

I really did try to figure this one out. I actually stumble my way onto Wikipedia posts related to theoretical physics with some frequency, and every single time I think, “OK, I’m going to try to see if l I can wrap my mind around this one.”

Doesn’t happen. In fact, it’s pretty rare I ever get past one sentence without encountering something I don’t know or can’t comprehend. Then, to make matters worse, I click on that thing, since it’s the Wikipedia, and then that thing’s article is also incomprehensible.

It’s frustrating on a number of levels. For one, theoretical physics apparently represent a giant hurdle in my quest for omniscience.

Second, it bothers me that there’s so much information about theoretical physics available on the Wikipedia. I mean, I get that the people who edit the Wikipedia are nerds and so are most theoretical physicists. But how many people must there be who understand this stuff for it to have such comprehensive coverage on the Wikipedia? Does every single person who gets what the Higgs boson is also edit the Wikipedia in his or her spare time?

I doubt it, and that makes it even worse. Because then that means there is a whole slew of people who can process this stuff, and only a small cross-section of them bother entering it into the Wikipedia.

There are probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people out there who know all about the search for the Higgs boson and why it’s important. But I am not one of them, and I think that’s depressing.

This space is not about politics, nor do I ever intend it to be.

But could you imagine not being allowed to join the ranks of Dan Snyder, Jerry Jones and Al Davis because the things you’ve said and done have offended too many people?

Yikes.

Does the fact that the Phillies topped the Mets three seasons in a row get you down? It bums me out, for sure.

But every time I feel a little depressed, I look at these photos of Cole Hamels, and suddenly nothing seems so bad anymore.

Here’s Cole Hamels and his wife, in an ad for luxury condos in luxurious Philadelphia:

Here’s Cole Hamels carrying a dog in a bag, telestration courtesy of Phillies blog The Fightins‘:

But how do we know for sure that’s Cole Hamels? Back to the luxury condo:

Note that it’s clearly the same dog.

UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2009

Excellent reader Chris has provided more embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels.

There’s this (Get it? Coal Hamels!):

And, of course, this:

UPDATE, 6/28: Today perhaps the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels yet hit the Internet. It’s a tiny bit NSFW, so I’ll just point you over to the Fightins instead of posting it here.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not nearly the most embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels yet. That’s got to be the one with the kids in the bed.

UPDATE, 8/17:

Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran from Bronx Banter let me fill in for the amazingly mustachioed Jay Jaffe for the Bronx Banter playoff preview. Here’s our take on the NLCS:

Yeah, that’s a Virginia Woolf reference. What of it?

So apparently Charles Wang is refuting earlier reports and insisting that the Lighthouse Project to rebuild Nassau Coliseum and develop the area around it is still on.

I haven’t been following this story that closely, but I grew up about 10 minutes from the Coliseum, and when I think back on it, it still sort of blows my mind that I lived so close to a professional sports team and almost never went to see it play.

Part of that is definitely because the Coliseum is such a drab hellhole, for sure.

I also worked right around the corner from the Coliseum, at Nassau Community College, for a while, and I can attest that outside of the occasional congestion on the Meadowbrook Parkway, traffic never gets that terrible in the area. Nothing like the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, where the Nets are supposedly going, anyway.

But based on everything I heard about the Nassau County and Town of Hempstead governments in my time living and working there, Wang probably shouldn’t hold his breath on those zoning board rulings.

The important thing, as James K. pointed out earlier, is that Wings N’ Things, down Hempstead Turnpike, is preserved. That place is amazing.

According to the Daily News, Rex Ryan held a closed-door meeting with his defense that Kerry Rhodes deemed “PG-13.”

The good news is the rating means Ryan almost certainly didn’t take his shirt off.

But seriously, this type of thing is pretty run-of-the-mill in football, it seems. A coach gets angry and lights into his players in a profanity-laced rant, because that’s what football coaches do.

And so it always makes me think of the Tony Bernazard situation, in which he apparently tore his shirt off and challenged everyone on the Mets’ Double-A team to a fight.

I mean, as I’ve said before, that’s pretty crazy. And it’s almost certainly not the Assistant General Manager’s job. But is it as big a deal as the Daily News made it out to be?

I don’t know. I know that it always seemed like everyone wanted to either expose or target Bernazard as the problem in the Mets’ organization, and I have no reason to believe that wasn’t the case. But I’ll point out again that the Mets didn’t immediately turn their season around on the back of a unified clubhouse after Bernazard got canned.

My suspicion — and this is pure speculation — is that Bernazard is something of a jerk that rubbed the beat reporters the wrong way, and Rubin found the first opportunity he could justify to expose Bernazard for it. And he picked a pretty hilarious one, and did a good job with the details.

Part of the difference between what Ryan did and what Bernazard did, I suppose, is that Ryan was taking on grown men with giant salaries while Bernazard was essentially scolding a group of 21- and 22-year-olds.

Still, I used to do some stuff as a JV football coach that almost certainly should’ve gotten me fired. I would line up at cornerback — without pads, mind you — and play bump-and-run to knock receivers to the ground. And I’d play quarterback on the scout team, then lower my shoulder and steamroll the kids dumb enough to try to tackle me.

In retrospect it seems pretty violent and unnecessary, but I still like to think and hope I was making them better at football. And most of them seemed to still like me.

I guess I’m saying that, in isolation, many things a coach could do to motivate or better his players might seem a little bit over the line. But in context, what Bernazard did might not have been quite as insane as we now assume it to be.

In a post to NY Baseball Digest, Mike Silva asks, “Can Ike Davis change the offseason?”

That’s all well and good, but here’s what I want to know:

Can Ike Davis change… THE FUTURE!?

After reading this New York Times article, it has become abundantly clear to me that the events of the past four seasons preventing the Mets from winning a world championship have not been just an unfortunate series of coincidences.

Clearly, if these Mets were to win a world championship, something extraordinarily bad would follow, and so agents from the future have come back in time to ensure that the Mets do not win.

I mean, think about it: It’s marginally reasonable that one year, in one seven-game series, Jeff Suppan could allow only one earned run over 15 innings and Jeff Weaver could pitch like a competent Major Leaguer.

And I’d believe that a team could blow a seven-game lead with 17 to go, even if the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against that happening.

And maybe once a collection of otherwise reasonable-seeming Major League pitchers could all crumble at once and form the worst bullpen in human history.

And perhaps I could comprehend that a team could, in one season, suffer debilitating injuries to nearly all of its best players.

But c’mon. Four consecutive years? I’m all about the role of luck and randomness in baseball, but at some point — just like those dudes in the Times — even the most understanding and patient of baseball minds have to consider ideas that they might otherwise deem crazy to explain a series of events as unlikely as this one.

And I think it’s pretty clear: someone, or some group of people, from the future has been charged with coming back in time and making sure the Mets don’t win. I don’t pretend to understand how they’ve done this, either to get back to the past or, once they get here, to make sure the Mets don’t win. Don’t expect me to wrap my head around future technologies.

How, you might ask, could they know that the Mets’ success would bring doom if clearly by the time the future comes it hasn’t? It’s a time paradox, stupid. It will always be this way. They are always charged with making sure the Mets don’t win. It’s just how it works.

So the Mets are not only battling the Phillies and the Marlins and a wholesale lack of organizational depth. They’re up against destiny, the entire plotted course of human events, and maybe the universe itself. That’s a whole lot of adversity, even for Carlos Beltran.

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Paul drops more John Olerud facts at Section Five Twenty-Eight.

Lots of good stuff from Adam Rubin today. First and foremost, Manny Acta could return as third-base coach next year.

Second, Manny Ramirez hopes to enjoy a postgame beer with Pedro Martinez. That’s a conversation I’d kill to be a part of.

Slim Pickens at TheNoonerBlog breaks down what went wrong for the Jets on Monday night.

The Lighthouse project to revamp Nassau Coliseum has gone strangely dark. I hope that, whatever they do, they don’t affect the array of amazing fast-food fried chicken places on Hempstead Turnpike.

“Wow, this burrito is delicious, but it is filling.” H/T to grad-school buddy Amanda for the link.