A great article on ESPN.com about Barry Bonds, baseball, and what it means historically and culturally:

... the past five years have been an especially depressing stretch to be an American ... it's the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually—and then suddenly—hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn't been paying attention to begin with.

This will not be lost on future historians. In 50 or 100 years, they will search for events within the popular culture that supposedly embodied the zeitgeist of the time. Some of these people will use sports, not unlike the way contemporary historians might use Muhammad Ali as a means to define the 1960s. As these future historians try to explain what was wrong with the world in the early 21st century, I suspect they will use Barry Bonds.

[...]

A mound of evidence suggests that Bonds has been less than honest about steroids. But it seems like he's been honest about a lot of other things. "The last time I played baseball was in college," he said in his grand jury testimony during the BALCO case. He said almost the exact same thing to The New York Times Magazine in 2002: "The last game I played was in college. Ever since then, it's been a business. This is a business."

[...]

Early in "Game of Shadows," authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams try to illustrate what motivated Bonds to inject chemicals into his rump, and they suggest that his actions were driven by jealousy and, to a lesser extent, race. "They're just letting him do it because he's a white boy," Bonds supposedly said of McGwire's steroid-fueled run at the single-season home run mark. This statement makes Bonds seem as paranoid as Richard Nixon. How, one wonders, could unseen puppet masters be pulling the strings behind the home run race? It all seems crazy.

But, then again, nobody ever wrote a takedown book on Mark McGwire. I'm not sure anyone even considered it.

Nixon wasn't always wrong.

[...]

For all practical—and statistical—purposes, Ruth wasn't a real person. In 1927 he hit 60 home runs, exactly twice as many as NL co-champs Hack Wilson and Cy Williams hit; when Ruth retired in 1935, he had hit 714 homers, more than twice as many as Lou Gehrig, the man in second place. In 1925, he got a tummy ache, and it was one of the biggest stories of the year. He revolutionized the game, captivated radio audiences, built houses, inspired candy bars and was used as an epithet by Japanese soldiers during the war. Ruth has been dead for 57 years, and he is still substantially more famous than Barry Bonds.

But Bonds is going to pass him, and no one knows how to feel. Ruth was a troubling person, but he's a wonderful idea; Bonds is a troubling person who's an empty idea.

I'm pleased to announce that, after some study, a fair amount of paperwork, more than one outlay of cash, and a four-hour-long multiple-choice test, I am now a certified Project Management Professional. I was motivated in part by my belief in being professional about my job, and that entails continuing education, communication with other people in the same profession, teaching, and all that other good stuff. The Project Management Institute is the 900 pound gorilla of professional organizations in this line of work, incorporated in 1969 "to promote a unifying influence in the advancement of the field of Project Management ...." I'll have more to say about that, and about the certification process, in a later post.

The other part of a professional certification is of course its utility in hustling for jobs. So, if you know anyone—especially a non-profit— in need of the services of a certified project manager, be it a Technology Needs Assessment, Requirements Development, Usability Testing, or general-purpose Managing of Projects, drop me a line.

I saw this a few years ago and downloaded some parts; now the whole thing is available in a stream: "a recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's ninth symphony stretched to 24 hours, without pitch distortion."