Giant-Headed Mascot Needs Accurate Identification

Gee, thanks. I wasn’t sure which one was the Jefferson mascot.

(The Phils are still 1 1/2 back in the division and are the same in the Wild Card. Current playoff odds: 38 percent. By the way, the Phillies totally need a giant-head mascot race. I suggest Ben Franklin, William Penn, Frank Rizzo, Ed Rendell and John Street. Oh, man, that would be incredible.)

Photo - Jefferson & A Friend [Reuters/Yahoo! Sports]

Third Presidential Coin To Make Life Worthwhile

Woo-hoo! Start lining up at the mint, boys and girls, because this is the thing that’s finally going to get you into coin collecting: The Thomas Jefferson dollar coin is being released!

Okay, so you can’t actually line up at the mint. (I guess.) The coin will go into circulation tomorrow, and you can get it at a bank. You can also get it at the Jefferson Memorial today — where the mint director will be quizzing people about Thomas Jefferson and selling the dollar coins for, um, $1 — and buy it on the mint website tomorrow.

Using dollar coins would save money for the government, but since they’d just waste it on the Strategic National Eggplant Surplus or something, nobody uses ‘em. Also, they’re heavy.

The mint knows Americans will only use dollar coins around the same time we switch to the metric system, but the government makes money somehow when people buy the dollar coins and then stash them in a drawer or whatever. The coins are also supposed to educate our stupid asses:

Most folks can correctly name George Washington as the nation’s first president. After that, things get tricky.

Yes, lists are pretty hard. Who’s that second one? Washington… hmm, it’s probably done alphabetically. Professor X, I guess.

US Mint to Release Jefferson Dollar Coin [AP/KYW 1060]

This Time, Your Vote Might Count

There is a tragedy in this year’s This Year In Baseball Awards, and it is that Sal Fasano’s incredible play of throwing the ball directly into the ground is not up for the award.

But we all know that Sal will win the award in spirit, and there’s a chance to turn this baseball award show into something incredible. On a game that started at 11:05 and pretty much knocked the Phillies out of the playoffs, two baseball writers — Dennis Deitch of the Delco Times and Ken Mandel of Phillies.com — got to run in the President’s Race.

The race features four presidents with giant heads who, uh, race around the baseball field. (Like the sausage race in Milwaukee, if you will.) And Ken Mandel, dressed as Thomas Jefferson, managed to fall, becoming the first person in the short history of the race to fall.

This is up for blooper of the year. I don’t usually do much activism here, but this is something you can effect: Your vote might actually count. The other bloopers suck anyway. Vote for Thomas Jefferson’s fall. Not doing so would just be un-American.

Full-size videos after the jump.

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