Round up

I collected various notes of interesting/funny/weird things that I forgot to mention as I went along but didn't merit a new post all of their own.

The name of the Pittsburgh Pirates is a gift for in-stadium scoreboard graphics.  All sorts of pirate-related options are available, including the mascot: the Pirate Parrot.  However, the laugh of the pirates is wrong!  It's far too friendly and not piratey enough!  Now obviously they don't necessarily want to be promoting drinking rum to the younger children, but come on!  Another cool thing about the club area is that they have pool tables for people to play on.  The final note on Pittsburgh is that they do occasionally launch hotdogs into the stands - some are thrown by hand, others are launched by an air-propelled rocket launcher so that they can get them up into the upper deck of the stands.  However, the Parrot managed to overdo the pressure a little in the last game I saw - and managed to shoot the hotdog right over the upper deck and out of the stadium onto the street outside!

 The culture appears so different to the UK when it comes to people with any sort of physical disability.  It appears to be rather polarised.  On the one hand, the ones that could not afford the medical expenses or the insurance have no chance - these are the ones left to begging and cardboard signs although cannot tell whether they are genuine or frauds, except for the one whose cardboard sign read "Why lie?  I need a beer"; on the other, you'll find people in wheelchairs, just vending stuff like the others.  In Denver, there's a guy who vends on Wynkoop Street who sits in his scooter/buggy vehicle, which is holding the three large canisters of oxygen for his assisted breathing, but apart from that, he's selling bottles of water, peanuts and stuff like everbody else.  I saw several wheelchair-using help staff at Yankee Stadium this week - moving around, with their "How may I help you?" paddles like all the walking help staff.  Now obviously, they're not going to be going up and down the seating rows on a stairlift (although having said that, Wrigley Field does have giant stairlifts so that the wheelchair club level can be near to the front - obviously this is more of a problem for Wrigley because they cannot make too many major structural changes to it - the newer stadia just provide direct access to virtually everywhere anyway), but they can around the concourses up and down the lifts.it landed

I still meet British people who believe that Americans don't do irony.  The quality varies from place to place, but in most big cities, it's right there with anybody else.  The huge cheer that went up when the 5th inning of Thursday 22nd's game (TB@NYY - 3) when somebody got somebody got out of an inning giving up only 1 run was raucous.  Another of the biggest cheers was reserved for the simplest of groundouts to second that was executed by recording an out - indicative of a night that saw the Yankees commit 4 errors.  But in general, any pitcher anywhere who manages two 4-pitch walks back-to-back will tend to get a huge ironic cheer for the next strike.

New York is so full of people from all over the world.  The voice in the lifts at Yankee Stadium: a British lady.  I heard announcements on the subway that were from an Englishman and an Australasian.  There's even Americans here!  And on the whole, the people I met are very friendly.  Anybody here will ask anybody else questions about the locality - you just can't tell who lives here and who does not - and they're not at all bothered where you're from if you have an answer.