Here’s hoping the Cards’ fans give Furcal a rousing reception at home this weekend. The dude should be recognized for his contributions so far in 2012. He is the team MVP at this point in the season among a handful of candidates.

Who would have thunk the Red Birds would be touting a league leading win total, with Carpenter on the shelf, Wainwright struggling to find his form, Salas and Sanchez offering little, Holliday around the .250 mark, and Berkman with zero HRs?

Is Craig healthy enough for second base? Some kinda line-up if he can handle the role.

I look on the bright side. Austin is more the future of Texas than the signs you see on the side of the road. Four of the five major urban areas lean left at this point. The pendulum will swing back toward the center as the population urbanizes. Probably never more than a swing state, but adding a second argument to the marketplace of ideas will be good for us.

Sartre; celebrity or philosopher? Gopnik had a too brief but interesting article in New Yorker.

Oh yes, baseball. Good luck to the feesh in New York. Both teams playing well, but I thought Miami looked better.

Sitting at Bergstrom waiting for my slightly delayed flight – no connection required though, thank Buddha. Stopped at Jasmine’s tacqueria on the north side of Ben White just off the airport exit for my traditional farewell burgeoning breakfast burritos – it’s a little dive with mamacita en la cucina, you know the kind of place. Great coffee too. It’ll hold me all the way home.

Incidentally, some of the idiotic campaign signs along the road reminded me that there was, indeed, a so-called Mayan postclassic, when the Toltecs came down from Teotihuacan and occupied Yucatan and imposed an imperialistic regime of bloviated chest-thumping, the progressive concentration of wealth in the hands of the priestly class and their sycophants, and ruinous warfare on Mayan civilization. It led, inevitably, to another round of famine and collapse. Ultimately, the weeds and iguanas took over. You read about it, and it reminds you a lot of the way Bush succeeded Clinton.

So it goes.

Also, they didn’t enter the season with either the massive payroll or the expectations of the Red Sox, especially after last September’s debacle. This was a team arrogantly projected to be a lock for the World Series last year.

That makes them doubly worse in my mind.