Google Fiber - 'Bring it On'

[ed. Nice to see somebody with muscle and deep pockets bringing some competition to the cable companies.]

Google unveiled the details of its coming TV and Internet services Thursday — even offering “free” access to the web — and the novel rollout strategy that transforms customers into marketers.

The web-search company announced that a bundle of TV and ultra-fast Internet will sell for $120 a month. That includes three devices needed to stream Wi-Fi signals and to store large amounts of computer data and TV programming. It will also come with a Nexus 7 — an iPad-like device that runs on Google’s Android operating system.

“Not just Internet TV, but real TV with your favorite channels,” said Milo Medin, vice president of access services at Google.

The company’s demonstration of the TV service appeared as impressive as any DVR-type service on the market. It allows people to control the TV with the Nexus tablet, with their smartphones or with old-fashioned remote controls. A household will be able to record eight shows at a time, store 500 hours and search through “tens of thousands” of on-demand movies in Google’s catalogue, in addition to Netflix accounts.

The TV package has big holes in programming, however. It lacks ESPN, the most popular and expensive part of most cable packages, and other Disney Corp. offerings.

“We’re launching Google Fiber with content providers who share our vision,” a Google spokeswoman said in an email when asked about the missing channels. “Over time, we will be expanding our TV package well beyond the channels it currently includes.”

Or you can get stand-alone Internet at speeds more than 100 times faster than most broadband for $70. By comparison, Comcast Corp. recently announced it would sell speeds of 305 megabits per second — Google’s offering is three times faster — for $300 a month.

Both the TV and Internet-only deals come with two-year contracts, for which the company said it will waive a $300 installation charge.

There’s a third option. The arrival of Google had set off worries that people with no Internet would be left out of a community transformation fired by faster-than-fast Internet. So Google announced it would provide free Internet service — albeit at far slower speeds — for seven years to customers who pay for installation. That $300 charge can be paid off in monthly $25 installments.

Google-only

Google’s fiber optic network will run slightly different from how Google described it in early 2010. Then, the company said it would “operate an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers.”

On Thursday, Google Fiber project manager Kevin Lo confirmed for the first time in an interview that Google decided not to open the network to other Internet service providers.

“We don’t think anybody else,” he said, “can deliver a gig the way we can.”

Google’s entry into the TV and Internet service is enough to make a cable man’s knees buckle. Comparing the prices on the services is difficult — particularly because no other company comes close on Internet speed and Google’s TV package is so different from standard services. Somewhat surprisingly to analysts, Google is not offering landline phone service.

Still, it’s a bold declaration by Google that speeds of a gigabit-per-second are practical and affordable in the home.

The cable and telephone industries have long said that the cost of stretching fiber optic wires all the way to the home has made such speedy Internet impractical. They also contend that customers rarely express interest in speeds much beyond 10 megabits a second, much less something 100 times faster.

Google looks as though it’s able to cut the cost of deploying such a network in two ways.

First, by targeting neighborhoods with the strongest interest, it can lower its installation costs by going only where there are large numbers of eager customers, stopping by once and moving on.

Second, it brings the same electronic engineering and manufacturing know-how that has increasingly scaled down the cost of building football field-sized data centers around the globe.

“We’re an engineering company,” Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said in an interview Thursday. “Google has a knack at looking at things in a different way.”

The competition spoke boldly in the wake of Google’s announcement Thursday.

“We compete with anyone, anytime, anywhere,” said Time Warner Cable spokesman Michael Pedelty.

The company’s 900 local employees, he said, can stand up to Google’s challenge. “Bring it on,” he said.

by Scott Canon, Kansas City Star |  Read more:

[ed. My favorite laugh...who would've thought there'd be a site dedicated to Muttley?]

dan badea
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Musashi Plain (Musashino) from the series Tales of Ise / Kajita Hanko

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Dealing with Olympic Failure

The London Olympics will feature ten thousand five hundred athletes, give or take a few rhythmic gymnasts, but it’s possible that none are more compelling than American air-rifle shooter Matt Emmons. At the 2004 Games, Emmons competed in the three-position event, in which participants shoot from their stomachs, knees, and feet at a target fifty metres away. Going into his final shot, Emmons was in first place and needed only a mediocre score for gold. Instead, he shot at the wrong target, one lane over, and got no score at all. He finished eighth. Four years later, in Beijing, Emmons again had a large lead on the final shot: he needed a score of 6.7 in a sport where anything below 8.0 is amateurish. Each time Emmons shoots, he aims above the target, lets his sight fall into the bull’s-eye, then pulls the trigger. This time, his finger slipped and he fired early, scoring a 4.4. Emmons called the shot a “freak of nature.” He finished fourth.

Running down the list of twenty-six sports in London, none requires less athleticism, as we typically define it, than the shooting events. (Archery demands at least one muscular arm.) Yet there is no sport that requires more mental precision. Rifle shooters are trained to fire between heartbeats. Medals are won by millimetres. It’s a sport whose top competitors are expected to be so accurate that we have a hard time believing that they could actually miss. In the first Olympiad, in 1896, the American Sumner Paine used a Colt revolver to win one gold and one silver in the pistol competition. Five years later, arriving home to find his wife in a state of undress with his daughter’s music teacher, Paine pulled out his gun and fired four shots at the fleeing teacher. None hit their mark. Paine was arrested for assault but quickly released. Had he wanted to, the police figured, Paine could have nicked off the man’s fingernails one by one then put a bullet through his heart. He had shown restraint.

In the intervening century, competitive gun technology has only gotten more sophisticated. (This year’s modern pentathlon, which combines running, horseback riding, swimming, fencing, and shooting, will feature laser guns rather than air guns.) As such, the expectations for an élite athletes’ precision have only increased.

by Reeves Weideman, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty.

The Gatekeeper

Maitre d' Adnane Kebaier has been with Marcel's since Robert Wiedmaier's acclaimed French-Belgian restaurant threw open its doors in 1999, meaning he's seen a lot happen in the past 13 years. Beyond playing a role in hundreds of marriage proposals, Kebaier has developed a few strategies in keeping the front of the house running smoothly. In this month's edition of The Gatekeepers, he explains why he accepts cash from would-be diners desperate for a table and how race can be a factor in seating guests.

Say it's 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. What's the wait for a table?
Maybe 45 to an hour.

Is there anything I could say or do to make my wait shorter?
If they're really polite and a regular and they're wearing good things, depends on the way they present themselves. Some people they walk in and they lie, they say they have reservations. A lot of times it happens, Fridays and Saturdays when everybody is sold out and they can't get in anywhere, they put on nice clothes and they go out and they say, "We have a reservation. It's your mistake. We called and we made a reservation." And we have to deal with it.

How do you deal with it?
Well, I usually act like they have one. Mistakes can happen. Maybe someone answered the phone and didn't put them or someone canceled the reservation by mistake. So I have to deal with it. What's my strategy Friday and Saturday night when we're sold out? Always a few seats for VIPs left. Always I have Plan A and Plan B.

Has anyone ever tried to slip you money or give you gifts?
Oh yeah. Of course.

Does that ever work?
It works all of the time. I'll make it happen.

Oh yeah? So you accept the money or gifts?
Yeah, of course. You can't turn those away. That's your job. That's how you get paid sometimes, with tips. I learned something a long time ago [from] one bartender who's my friend. He gave me some money as a tip and I turned away the money. I said, "No, don't worry about it. I'll just help you." And he said, "Listen, if your father comes to your bar and orders a beer and tips you, take the money."

So if the restaurant's booked but somebody comes up and gives you money and asks for your help to get in earlier, what do you do? How do you make that happen for them?
As I said, I always have a few seats available for last-minute VIPs, so I take one of those seats and I give it to them. Usually, Friday and Saturday, almost every day when I look at the book, I have my plan. I brief my staff what's going to happen and who's who on which table, whose anniversary, whose birthday, who is gluten-free, stuff like that. So when that happens, I have to brief my guys again and change the plan, changing tables, everything. It's very hard for me to keep the balance in the dining room.

How so?
Just look at the dining room. For example, you cannot have two African-American next to each other. Or two Chinese or Japanese next to each other. It kind of looks like a different section just for this race. I have to split them around and it depends. If someone for example wears a nice suit with a nice watch, nice lady, I'm not going to sit with him a guy wearing just a khaki and a shirt. You have to have the balance in the dining room. (...)

What's the most outrageous request that you have accommodated?
I've been in a situation that I have to present the ring for engagement. All the time. I act like I'm taking the dessert to a table and I put the ring on a plate, cover it and I go to the table and I tell the lady, "Listen, the chef saw you not eat that much so he sent you an extra course. But the real chef is this guy next to you. He made that at home and bring it with him and I just put it in the oven, warm it up and I brought it to you. And I take the cloche off and she see the ring and he finishes the rest."

That's cute. What's your success rate for accepting the proposal?
Well, so far in 13 years, I saw only one reject.

How many proposals have you done?
Maybe 300-400.

by Amy McKeever, Eater DC |  Read more:

Photo: R. Lopez

The Heretic

At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard—donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68.” Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort.

For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they’d been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid—100 micrograms to be exact—enhanced their creativity.

It was the summer of ‘66. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif. However, this particular morning wasn’t going to go like so many others had during the preceding five years, when researchers at IFAS (pronounced “if-as”) had legally dispensed LSD. Though Fadiman can’t recall the exact date, this was the day, for him at least, that the music died. Or, perhaps more accurately for all parties involved in his creativity study, it was the day before.

At approximately 10 a.m., a courier delivered an express letter to the receptionist, who in turn quickly relayed it to Fadiman and the other researchers. They were to stop administering LSD, by order of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Effective immediately. Dozens of other private and university-affiliated institutions had received similar letters that day.

That research centers once were permitted to explore the further frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They seem not unlike the last generation of children’s playgrounds, mostly eradicated during the ‘90s, that were higher and riskier than today’s soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can’t be had close to the ground.)

When the FDA’s edict arrived, Fadiman was 27 years old, IFAS’s youngest researcher. He’d been a true believer in the gospel of psychedelics since 1961, when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) dosed him with psilocybin, the magic in the mushroom, at a Paris café. That day, his narrow, self-absorbed thinking had fallen away like old skin. People would live more harmoniously, he’d thought, if they could access this cosmic consciousness. Then and there he’d decided his calling would be to provide such access to others. He migrated to California (naturally) and teamed up with psychiatrists and seekers to explore how and if psychedelics in general—and LSD in particular—could safely augment psychotherapy, addiction treatment, creative endeavors, and spiritual growth. At Stanford University, he investigated this subject at length through a dissertation—which, of course, the government ban had just dead-ended.

Couldn’t they comprehend what was at stake? Fadiman was devastated and more than a little indignant. However, even if he’d wanted to resist the FDA’s moratorium on ideological grounds, practical matters made compliance impossible: Four people who’d never been on acid before were about to peak.

“I think we opened this tomorrow,” he said to his colleagues.

And so one orchestra after the next wove increasingly visual melodies around the men on the couch. Then shortly before noon, as arranged, they emerged from their cocoons and got to work.

by Tim Doody, The Morning News |  Read more:

Illustration Credit: Jonathan Castro

A Conversation with Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend—“part analyst, part activist, part prophet.”  In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her influence has been extraordinary—not only on architects, community workers, and planners but also on Nobel Prize–winning economists and ecologists.  As one critic recently put it, “Jacobs’s influence confirms that books matter. It isn’t easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time.” A couple of years ago, she won the top American award for urban planning, the Vincent Scully Prize.  This in itself was unusual, not only because she regularly vilifies planners, but also because with the exception of the Order of Canada and a few other prizes, she typically turns down awards—some thirty honorary degrees, including one from Harvard.  Jacobs herself wasn’t interested in finishing university—she went to Columbia for just two years.
     
Her editor, Jason Epstein, puts her among a handful of innovators—Rachel Carson, Julia Child, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock—who gave their fellow citizens “the confidence to challenge the life-denying follies of their times.” On Canada Day 2002, she was named one of Ten Canadians Who Made a Difference by Maclean’s magazine. Finally (one of my favourites), the New York Times Magazine included her in its hallmark list of “Irritating Women”—women who through the centuries have “tugged at history’s sleeve and wouldn’t let go”—from the mediaeval abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen through the eighteenth-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, concluding with Jane Jacobs.

EW: You wrote your 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities when you were living in New York. You said, “Most of the material for these musings was at my front door.” In your case, I think the front door was, and still is, more than a metaphor. It neatly captures your own special qualities as a thinker and a writer because it’s open, it’s curious, it’s down-to-earth. You’re famous for helping us look at familiar things in a new way. I think one critic said your books are principally about what one could see if one opened one’s eyes. How did you come by that attitude, do you think, to be so observant or naturally inquisitive?

JJ: A couple of weeks ago, I finished writing an introduction to one of Mark Twain’s books, The Innocents Abroad, which is being reissued by the Modern Library. One thing I was struck by in reading it, was how much Twain emphasized that what he was trying to do was tell readers what they might see if they looked with their own eyes. He inveighed at great length against guidebooks and people who believed the guidebooks instead of what they were seeing. So this is an old problem. I suppose it comes from people wanting to be correct and not trusting themselves, fearing they’ll seem like uneducated country bumpkins in his day, if they told what they saw and how it struck them. I don’t remember ever being forced to wear those sorts of blinders when I was a child. Children do report what they see. If they’re not pooh-poohed and are listened to respectfully, grown-ups usually hear something interesting. That’s a way of encouraging people to look with their own eyes.   (...)

EW: It was while you were working for Architectural Forum that you began what has become your most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. You’ve described a moment of awakening when you visited a new housing development in Philadelphia designed by a celebrated planner. Can you talk about that moment, that revelation?

JJ: Yes. The chief planner of Philadelphia was showing me around. First we walked down a street that was just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows. I think he was taking me on this street to show me what he regarded as a bad part of the city, to contrast it with what he was going to show me next. I liked this street—people were using it and enjoying it and enjoying each other. Then we went over to the parallel street that had just undergone urban renewal. It was filled with very sterile housing projects. The planner was very proud of it, and he urged me to stand at a certain spot to see what a great vista it had. I thought the whole thing was extremely boring—there was nobody on the street. All the time we were there, which was too long for me, I saw only one little boy. He was kicking a tire in the gutter. The planner told me that they were progressing to the next street over, where we had come from, which he obviously regarded as disgraceful. I said that all the people were over there, that there were no people here, and what did he think of that? What he obviously would have liked was groups of people standing and admiring the vistas that he had created. You could see that nothing else mattered to him. So I realized that not only did he and the people he directed not know how to make an interesting or a humane street, but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care. People sometimes ask me if I wrote this book to educate planners. My reply is always no, because I thought they were hopeless.

by Eleanor Wachtel, Brick |  Read more:

Illustration: drawing of the Acropolis by Zbigniew Herbert

Self portrait of Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station observing the Earth below during Expedition 24.

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#0981009301 by les brumes on Flickr.
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Alfred's day off.

Want to hear a joke about sodium bromide? NaBrO
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[ed. Haven't posted much lately, there doesn't seem to be much new or interesting stuff. Hopefully things will pick up soon.]

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John Brosio. Tornadoes.

Study for “Terrarium”, 2011.

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Avett Brothers

Obama's ‘Choom Gang’

[ed. This clinches it, he has my vote.]

Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale.

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

He would smoke it here and there. He would smoke it anywhere.

Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack Obama: The Story” gives more detail on Obama’s pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama’s high school buddies, a group that went by the name “the Choom Gang.” Choom was slang for smoking marijuana.

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.”  (...)

Hawaii of the early 1970s was something of a pot-smoking Mecca.

“It was sold and smoked right there in front of your nose; Maui Wowie, Kauai Electric, Puna Bud, Kona Gold, and other local variations of pakalolo were readily available,” writes Maraniss.

Obama’s pal Mark Bendix had a Volkswagen microbus known as “the Choomwagon.” They would often drive up Honolulu’s Mount Tantalus where they parked “turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult and Stevie Wonder, lit up some ‘sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds’ and washed it down with ‘green bottled beer’ (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl). No shouting, no violence, no fights; they even cleaned up their beer bottles.”

by Jonathan Karl, ABC News |  Read more:
Photo: YMFY

Craigslist Sues to Prevent Easier Apartment Listings

Following-up on its cease-and-desist letter sent last month, Craigslist has now filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against PadMapper, a website that plots Craigslist apartment listings on a map and makes it much easier to use.

Craigslist also sent similar cease-and-desist letters to Carsabi (which Ars profiled in April 2012) andMapskrieg, which use the site’s data to show used car listings and apartment listings, respectively. The three sites recei ved similar letters from Craigslist’s counsel in June, alleging violations of Craigslist’s Terms of Service.

In the lawsuit (PDF) filed in a San Francisco federal court, Craigslist charges PadMapper with copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, and unfair competition, among others. The lawsuit also names 3Taps, a San Francisco startup which openly scrapes Craigslist data and makes it available to other websites, and Does 1-25 as defendants.

The move seems rather odd for the for-profit company that has been a darling of the Bay Area Internet community for more than a decade. Most of us have used Craigslist to find all kinds of things, ranging from jobs to apartments and cars. (Heck, I found my cat on Craigslist’s free section seven years ago!) But if there’s one thing that has frustrated Internet users for years now, it's Craigslist’s lack of a proper interface, which these sites have attempted to bring to the fore. (...)

In an e-mail to Ars sent just after this article originally posted, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder wrote that he only found out about the suit on Tuesday, and is currently looking for counsel now.

"3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there." (...)

“I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world,” he wrote. “Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.”

by  Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica |  Read more:

My Big Fat Belizean, Singaporean Bank Account

Earlier this month, I decided to see how hard it would be to set up my own offshore bank account. I figured it would be pretty difficult, because I’m not rich and don’t have a team of tax lawyers to oversee my money and because the E.U. and U.S. governments have been cracking down on tax havens by imposing stricter tax-sharing requirements. So I proceeded with some caution.

First, I Googled “company registration tax haven” and randomly picked three firms that set up accounts in offshore jurisdictions. Then I called each and explained that I was hoping to minimize my tax exposure and didn’t want anyone to know anything about my finances. Each company quickly noted that I should consult a lawyer to make sure that I wasn’t breaking the law. Then they calmly explained how to create an account that, it seemed to me, was unlikely to be discovered by the I.R.S. or any other authority.

I ended up working with A&P Intertrust, a Canadian company that I chose largely because I liked its Web site the best. (The other two companies’ sites appeared stuck in a late-’90s style with lots of flashing boxes.) A&P works with the governments of Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Belize. (Other companies that I contacted prefer the Seychelles, Cyprus or the Cayman Islands, where Mitt Romney has been reported to have money.) I decided to start my shell company in Belize because it would be exempt from all Belizean taxes and, as A&P’s site explained, “information about beneficial owners, shareholders, directors and officers is not filed with the Belize government and not available to the public.” And I’ve been to Belize and like the place.

Setting up the company was a lot cheaper than I expected. A&P charged $900 for a basic Belizean incorporation and another $85 for a corporate seal to emboss legal documents. For $650 more, A&P offered to open a bank account to stash my fledgling operation’s money in Singapore — a country, the Web site also noted, that “cannot gather information on foreigners’ bank accounts, bank-deposit interest and investment gains under domestic tax law.” And for another $690, it offered to assign a “nominee” who would be listed as the official manager and owner of my business but would report to me under a secret power-of-attorney contract. Then an A&P associate asked me to fill out the incorporation information online, just so she wouldn’t type in anything incorrectly. The whole thing took about 10 minutes. (...)

Setting up an account may be easy, but managing one is expensive. Following the law requires a team of lawyers and accountants to carefully monitor tax laws in dozens of countries and maintain accounts that stay on the safe side of confusing rules. It’s not really worth the cost for anyone other than wealthy investors looking to put aside money, tax-free, for future generations. Or for large multinationals who prefer to centralize their global cash-flow stream in a place that doesn’t tax corporations or require a lot of financial reporting. Why would a huge company like G.E. want to pay U.S. taxes every time its Spanish subsidiary sells parts to a company in Belarus when it could avoid them by incorporating offshore?

It’s easy to imagine that most other kinds of offshore activity are shady, but there is no definitive way to know, because we don’t even know how much money is in these centers. The estimates, however, are striking. The Bank for International Settlements, which collects voluntary reports from banks in 44 countries, offers the best single source of data. It counts around $31 trillion of foreign-owned assets in the world’s banks and estimates that about $4 trillion is in offshore financial centers. An estimated $1.5 trillion is in the Cayman Islands alone. The country of 52,000, which is about the size of Blaine, Minn., has more foreign-owned deposits than Japan or the Netherlands.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

川瀬敏郎
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Liu Maoshan（Chinese, b.1942）

Songs of Birds Echos in Jiangnan  

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Yankees Acquire Ichiro Suzuki From Mariners

[ed. Good job, Mariners. Ever since 2000-2001 you've excelled in trading your best players away. See also: Careers of Suzuki and Matsui are further intertwined.] 

In their recent search for help in the outfield, theYankees explored several modest options that might have created a small ripple inside the world of baseball. Instead, they made a move that surprised two continents and helped reinvigorate their pursuit of a 28th World Series title.

With a little more than two months remaining in the season the Yankees acquired Ichiro Suzuki, who became the first Japan-born position player in the majors when he joined theMariners in 2001, when he was named the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player.

Before Monday’s game between the two teams at Safeco Field, the Yankees sent minor league pitchers D. J. Mitchell and Danny Farquhar to the Mariners for Suzuki , whose five-year, $90 million contract expires after this season. The Yankees will also receive cash to offset the financial commitment. (...)

The Yankees designated outfielder Dewayne Wise to make room on the roster for Suzuki , a 10-time All-Star whose success in the majors helped pave the way for many other Japanese position players, including the former Yankee Hideki Matsui.

But Ichiro, who signed with the Mariners before the 2001 season and then put together a record 10 straight years of 200 hits, had grown tired of all the losing in Seattle.

About two weeks ago his agent, Tony Attanasio, called the Mariners on behalf of Ichiro and requested a trade to a contending team. The Mariners are once again in re-building process and Suzuki wanted the chance to play for a playoff-bound team before his career ends.

He will have that with the Yankees, who went into Monday’s game against the Mariners with a 57-38 record and a six-game lead in the American League East.

The Mariners were only too happy to accommodate Suzuki’s wishes, considering they were 42-55 going into Monday’s game, and had little interest in re-signing him. Although still considered a gifted player, Ichiro is in the midst of his worst season after a precipitous decline over the past two seasons.

He went into Monday’s game batting .261 with a paltry .288 on-base percentage. He scored 49 runs and had 15 doubles, 5 triples, 4 home runs, 28 runs batted in and 15 stolen bases.

It is a long way from the player he was as recently as 2010 when he hit .315 with 214 hits and had a .359 O.B.P. Suzuki became an instant sensation in his rookie year with Seattle, hitting .359 with 242 hits and 127 runs scored for the juggernaut Mariners. He joined Fred Lynn of the Boston Red Sox in 1975 as the only rookie to win the M.V.P. award.

Suzuki helped take the Mariners to the American League Championship Series in 2001, where they lost to the Yankees in five games. He went 16 for 38 with two doubles and seven runs scored, but he never made it back to the playoffs. It was the only time he ever played left field, he said.

He would go on to carve out a Hall of Fame career, with a historic list of accomplishments. He has led or tied for the major league lead in hits seven times, matching Ty Cobb and Pete Rose as the only other players to do it, and is the only one to do it in five consecutive years.

by David Waldstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press