Click to enlarge.

Previously in this space I’ve shown off some of the design work I did for our “Save the Date” mailers, including the nifty ‘Z’-Tree that became an emblem of our wedding, and a symbol I continue to use in the design of this web site (hint: top left).

In the mad rush, however, I neglected to feature the actual invitations for the wedding, which were designed and constructed by Linda Pasca, a flexible and versatile designer based on the east end of Long Island.  You can check out her work at Pen & Paper Calligraphy Design. Linda was eager to ensure our invites had a personal touch, and I feel she was able to seamlessly incorporate my designs into her own artistic vision.  So if you’re reading, Linda, thanks so much!

Below is the invitation’s outer envelope.  My wife and I wax sealed each envelope by hand using a custom wax stamp made by Wax-Works.com.

The Stamp:

Linda provided some beautiful calligraphy, as you can see from the front of the invite.  Yes, we’re invited to our own wedding.

The inside of the invitation is where my own design work features most prominently.  Our ‘Z’-Tree emblazons the slightly opaque vellum sheet that overlays the invite.  On the border of the invitation is a vine design that I created in keeping with the look and feel of our Tree.

Vellum up:
 

Vellum down:

Have I got a joke for you. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Frequently beleaguered New York sports franchise finds itself riding high for the first time in several years thanks to a superlative 2006 season, only to fall flat on its face in spectacular fashion the following year. Franchise suddenly finds itself in damage control mode, faced with an unexpectedly and extraordinarily pissed off fan base that no longer seems to be buying into the sham that ownership is shoveling. What’s worse, the franchise finds itself in enormous debt following the construction of their new billion dollar home, and the only way to recover that capital is by hitting said disgruntled fan base over their collective heads with staggering ticket prices.

But wait for the punch line.

The franchise needs a face. Not the face of a manager under fire, or a boy genius whose rose has lost its bloom. Not the face of a spoiled superstar who doesn’t hustle, or a worn down veteran who can no longer compete. The team needs a new face. A big face. A face that everyone knows. A face that’s already burnt into the nation’s consciousness because ESPN wouldn’t have it any other way. A face that dominates the front page, and a name that’s on everyone’s tongue, on every media outlet’s rumor mill, on every team’s radar, in every fan’s pipe dream.

Ladies and Gentleman, I’d like to introduce you to the newest New Yorker, Johan Santana! Er, I mean, Brett Favre. I mean, Santana. Favre, Santana, Favre, Santana.

Apologies, but my head is spinning. Must be a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Kudos to Jets owner Woody Johnson, who could hardly have orchestrated this grand charade any better. After all, it was a scant four days after the owner announced that the team would be charging its season ticket holders exorbitant Personal Seat License (PSL) fees in their new stadium that Gang Green dropped the F(avre)-Bomb. Now we can put to bed the questions concerning why the team’s partner in their new $1.6 billion stadium, the New York Giants, unveiled details of their PSL program in late June while the Jets remained tight-lipped about their 2010 plans, which will see fans paying one-time fees ranging from $500 to $150,000 for the privilege to buy a season ticket plan. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the PSL was a brain child of the cable company?

Yup, the Jets played this one to perfection, pilfering their subscribers’ pocketbooks while the pickings were good. They learned their lesson from the New York Mets, who in typical Flushing fashion, could not even execute their own greedy scheme properly. Believe me, the Wilpons are not an ownership group that enjoys watching Willie Randolph collecting paychecks for the remainder of his contract’s tenure while taking bows in Yankee Stadium. But the team was left with little option but to fire their skipper when they foolishly failed to coordinate their season ticket brochures with Santana’s arrival. Nice work by the marketing department, which seems to pump out more silly slogans for the team than you can shake a stick at, but failed to have the printing press hot at the franchise’s most critical juncture. Instead, the team had to sit on its 2009 seating chart and pricing tiers for half of the 2008 schedule. Think the Wilpons were happy to see that 10-game winning streak in July? Playoffs? That would just be the gravy.

No, the Jets would not repeat the same comedy of errors. And while the team has indicated that Favre’s likeness will “not be used to sell” PSLs, who’s kidding whom here? Jet fans don’t need to see Favre’s mug on a brochure when half of them are already wearing his number on their backs.

And Woody Johnson saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was training camp and there was preseason, and on the seventh day, he rested. He blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because Woody knew the financing for his stadium had been secured the day Johan Santana walked in the door.

I mean, Brett Favre.

How ironic. In a move to throw a bone to an angry fan base, Mets ownership paints the bull’s eye squarely on their own classless and clueless faces. Fred, Jeff, congratulations: You are well on your way to cementing your legacy as the most beloved baseball executives in New York since Walter O’Malley.

After enduring weeks upon weeks of Willie Watch, which grew to a crescendo over the weekend when SI.com’s Jon Heyman reported on Friday that Willie and/or his coaching staff could be out of work as soon as that evening, Mets management allowed their manager a Father’s Day split and even paid his plane fare to Los Angeles - how generous - before dispatching GM Omar Minaya to finally mercifully (mercilessly) lower the ax…in a hotel room, at 3 a.m., following a 9-6 road victory over the AL West division-leading Angels. You can’t make it up. You can’t even wrap your mind around it. It’s mindless, it’s senseless, and it stinks like shit.

This morning on MetsBlog.com, Matt Cerrone writes that he is “convinced information was intentionally leaked to the media [last week] in an effort to force Omar Minaya’s hand.” If Matt’s suspicions are correct - and I trust his instincts here - then what else can be said? Words fall short. Disingenuous? Gutless? Classless? None of them do this situation justice.

Pig vomit. That’s how I’d describe it. Putrid, stinking pig vomit.

In the last ten months this franchise has engineered a collapse of historic proportions, invested $150 million in a pitcher scouts believe is on the back end of his career, completely bungled and jeopardized the health of their top performer this season, and now, this.

And make no mistake, this is entirely about 2007. Because Jeff Wilpon wanted blood after the way last season ended, and Omar Minaya was able to protect and insulate his manager. But in the end, Jeff got his way, and we shouldn’t have expected anything less from a middle-age brat choking on his father’s money.

So there you have it. The Mets are a disgrace. A Mickey Mouse organization, as Wayne Gretzky once famously called the Jersey Devils. So, have at it, Yankee fans. My brethren and I are at your mercy - and Scott Kazmir is no longer the low point of our fandom.

I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a science major. But I’m a sports fan, and a hockey fan, and over the years I’ve picked up a nugget or two concerning head injuries and the impact of post-concussion syndrome.

The NHL as a league took a long, hard look at head injuries in their sport right around the time that superstar Eric Lindros was clearly losing his battle with the recurring condition - a condition that had already forced his younger brother out of hockey. It’s no coincidence that the league stood up and took notice when Lindros’ career seemed in jeopardy. After all, the NHL had billed Lindros as the next to grasp the baton handed from Gordie Howe to Wayne Gretzky and later Mario Lemieux, much in the same way that the league is currently marketing Sidney Crosby. Nobody cared that Brett Lindros would never play again, but once Eric was felled it was time to take a look at just what exactly we had been doing to these athletes’ brains.

But this isn’t about the NHL. This is about Major League Baseball, and specifically the way the Mets have handled Ryan Church’s latest concussion, his second in three months. Baseball has never had an Eric Lindros. Superstars lost to the stigma of PEDs, yes, but never to head injury. Still, you would think that someone amongst the team’s medical staff would know a sliver of what the NHL has uncovered about concussions since they began to investigate the injury. You would think someone, anyone within the Mets organization would have at least a cursory knowledge of the NHL’s battle with the injury and the measures they’ve taken to erase it from their game.

It is absolutely absurd that only after meeting with a neurologist on Tuesday has the team decided that it’s in Church’s best interest to “stay home, rest and pretty much stay out of the light, daylight,” as GM Omar Minaya told the media yesterday. Church has been suffering from headaches and dizziness since taking a knee to the head from Atlanta’s Yunel Escobar last week, yet despite these tell-tale symptoms of post-concussion syndrome, Church was allowed to travel with the team to Denver and back home, and has even been called upon to pinch-hit on four occasions since the injury. On a recent SNY broadcast, play-by-play man Gary Cohen indicated that Church did not even recall the hit he recorded in the first of those pinch-hit appearances.

Honestly, the negligence is mind-boggling, and it is magnified 10-fold by the fact that Church has now suffered two concussions in three months, and entered Tuesday night’s game tied for the team lead in homers (9), runs (34), and second in RBI (32). It’s nice to see the franchise protecting its assets.

For the record, the NHL would not have allowed Church to travel, practice, or even workout until he was completely symptom-free. Neurologists and concussion specialists have advised the league that any sort of exercise, exertion, or exposure to light and sound can worsen a concussion and/or prolong its effects. They have also learned that each successive head injury tends to be worse than the last, and that with every concussion suffered, the likelihood of a complete recovery decreases. Just ask former Rangers Jeff Beukeboom and Mike Richter, both of whom had their careers ended due to concussions, and both of whom suffered from fatigue and sensitivity to light for years following their injuries.

The NHL had to learn the hard way, and the Mets appear determined to take that route as well. I just hope it doesn’t cost anyone their career.

You can almost see the high-water mark for the New Mets - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. It was a highlight reel catch from Endy Chavez in Game 7 of the the 2006 NLCS, and the orange and blue have receded ever since.

Whether or not you believe this team has been dragged down by the bad karma of 2007, let’s agree that this team stinks.

The lowlight for me? Hearing the loudmouths in the dwindling Shea crowd chant “Fire Willie” during the game’s final innings.

So Knicks fans have abandoned the hardwood and shown up en masse at the ballpark? Is that what we’ve sunk to in Flushing? Is it idiocy, ignorance? It smells a little bit.

And speaking of smells, how has Omar come out smelling like a rose through all of this? His parachuting act into Colorado was clearly brilliantly deployed; and thank goodness for an injury to Marlon Anderson or we might still be fielding infielders in the outfield. With a career-long platoon player in one corner and an oft-injured 41-year-old in the other, what exactly was Plan B in the corner outfield spots? Angel Pagan? Fernando Tatis? Ricky Ledee was unavailable, I presume.

I’m an Omar fan, but fair is fair. How exactly Willie Randolph has earned the status of poster boy for this group’s underachievement is beyond my understanding. Fans think Aaron Heilman is a bum, fans think Carlos Delgado is a bum, fans think Luis Castillo is a bum, fans think Carlos Beltran is a bum. With all these bums, it’s amazing Willie wins any games at all.

As far as I’m concerned, the bloom is off the rose for this entire baseball operations, and that includes the players, coaches, management and ownership. Willie did not conduct himself with much class or composure this past week, but the Wilpons accomplished nothing by dragging their embattled manager in front of them this morning and calling a press conference to announce the man won’t be fired. Didn’t we go through this in the offseason?

Poor Willie, forced to sit though his own very merry unresignation.

Omar spoke of putting past events behind and moving forward, but that’s little consolation for a manager whose job status is no more secure than it was yesterday, and whose team fell 6.5 behind the front-running Marlins tonight.