'Tis the season for baseball superstition, so let me say that I believe my blog post on Monday about a  singing-songwriting World Series umpire  brought good luck to the Phillies, who won Game Five that night, 8-6.

Ergo, there is a now a cause-and-effect connection between my blogging about World Series music-related things and the Phillies' success at the ballpark.

So allow me to make another musical connection.

Click here to listen to a polka called "The Fightin' Phils,"  written by the now-defunct Delaware County String Band. The strummers composed the ditty in 1950 when the Phillies last battled the Yankees for world domination.

Sadly, it did not bring the Phils any luck back then, as the Yankees clobbered our guys in four games.

But that was then, this is now, and my blog has proven that, in 2009, this blog has the power to determine game outcomes. This blog, and maybe my friend Kate's lucky socks.

Anyway, give the song your ear, but be patient. The band plays the entire thing, all the way through, before the singers jump in. When they're finished, the band plays the song all the way through - again. Then the whole thing repeats ...  and repeats ....and repeats...

So steel yourself.

And if you want to listen to "The Fightin Phils" in a public venue, head on down to the Polish American Center at 308 Walnut St., where "The Fightin' Phils" is playing on almost-continuous loop. The center's Michael Blichasz tells me that visitors go batty with joy when they hear it.  Love of string-band music is apparently very big among my Eastern European brethren. 

Wanna sing along?  Here are lyrics.

The Fight, Fight, Fight-in Phils! It’s a tough, tough, team to beat.
They’re out to win, win ev-’ry day. Every victory is sweet.
Watch ‘em hit that ball a mile; play a game that’s packed with thrills.
Get Pa to bring your Mother, Sister and your Brother
Come out to see the Fight-in’ Phils. The fight, fight, fight-’in Phils.

Feeling bad about the Phillies’ right-to-the-wire beat-down last night by the Yankees?

Main St. in Manayunk was chock full'o'cute kids today, happily trick-or-treating from storefront to storefront in spite of the sloppy weather. This sweet family - Nelson and Natalie Santiago, with their adorably delectable baby, Felix - were having so much fun chatting with beat cops Kim French and Tab Ali, both from the 5th District, that I just had to stop and take everyone's picture. Their big, easy smiles smiles were the perfect counter-point to the gray day.

Happy Halloween, everyone. Stay safe out there tonight!

Rememebr this? Let's hope the Yankees choke again.

The fun part about battling for World Series supremacy is dreaming up ways to rub the opponent's face in their loss, when they, indeed, lose.

Kevin Meeker, owner of Philly's Q BBQ and Tequila Bar, and Shaun Clancy, owner of Foley's N.Y. Pub & Restaurant  ("An Irish Bar ... with a Basbeall Attitude") have entered into a grand plan of humiliation.

Here's how Kevin pitched things to Shaun in an e-mail he shared with me:

"If the Yankees should win, my restaurant workers would have to wear Yankees jerseys, hats, uniforms or anything else you want us to wear  for one week after the World Series ends.  We would have to also wear them on opening day of the 2010 baseball season.

"We would have to listen to the CD of whatever music you pick for us to listen to for that week and opening day. Hopefully, not 'New York, New York' over and over again.

"If the Phillies win, then YOU  have to wear the Phillies gear for the same week after the Series and on opening day of next year.  You will have to listen to a CD of Philadelphia Mummers string-band 'show of shows' music. 

"If the Phillies lose, we would serve food from our great city to the homeless, on the day you choose.  This would include cheesesteaks, hoagies, Philly pretzels, scrapple, TastyKakes, ribs from my restaurant, local beer and maybe Bluecoat gin from Philadelphia. 
 

"If the Yankees lose, you will do the same with whatever food is native to NYC.  Do you have anything other than bagels and cheesecake?"

Kevin tells me that he and Shaun - whom he has never met face to face - are having fun with this smackdown, even trash-talking each other via text messages during the games.

What does he think will be the hardest thing for Shaun's customers, once the Phillies soundly kick the Yankees' stupid behinds?

"Definitiely listening to the Mummers music," Kevin tells me. "The Mummers are great, but everyone knows that an hour CD of string-band music is 59 minutes too long."

Hackenwerth calls this gigantic sculpture, from a previous show, "Attack of the 50-foot Party Balloon."

Somewhere in between trick-or-treating and screaming my lungs out this weekend for the Phillies, I've got to get over to SkyBox Studios in Fishtown, where artist Jason Hackenwerth's show opens tonight, for a four week run.  Curated by Eileen Tognini,  it's called "The Titan and the Fireflies," and you won't believe it unless you see it.

Jason is a balloon artist, which I could describe in detail here. But I'll let  Daily News videographer extraordinaire Sarah Glover show you what Hackenwerth does in this wonderful video she just posted on the philly.com website. She shot Jason in the process of creating his exhibition, so the final frames of her video portray a work still in progress, not completed. You'll have to head over to SkyBox to see the final result:  Gigantic, twisted balloons, suspended from the rafters of the studio's two-story tall atrium, strategically lit and just cool as all get-out.

Have a gander at Sarah's video and Hackenwerth's website, and ponder just how ethereal "captured air" (my term) can appear when in the hands of an energetic artist who was raised by a mom made her living twisting balloon animals for kids' parties.

Here's pertinent info about the show:

Opening Party
Friday October 30, 7-10pm

Exhibition
October 31 - November 28
Tuesday - Saturday
12 - 6 pm

Sky Box
2424 East York Street
Philadelphia, PA 19125

In honor of Game Two tonight of the World Series, allow me to reprint, right here, a column I wrote this time last year explaining how my dad was going to help the Phillies win the 2008 World Series by NOT using his computer, at all, during the Phils' pennant race and post-season games.

As we all know, the Phillies won. That's why I have forbidden Pop from looking at his computer this year, too.

You're welcome, Philadelphia.

From the Daily News, Oct. 23, 2008:

"Dear Dad: To avoid the Phold, please step away from your computer"

By Ronnie Polaneczky

MAYOR NUTTER has decided not to plop a giant Phillies hat on Billy Penn's statue atop City Hall during the World Series. That's good, since everyone knows that when the city did that during the 1993 series, it brought the Phillies bad luck and they lost.

Our jinx-ridden sports teams need all the help they can get. So I'm doing my part.

Yesterday, I phoned my 80-year-old father and told him to stay off the computer. Don't e-mail or anything, I told him. Don't even Google or Twitter.

I'm guessing that you've never heard of the Phillies-killing curse of Al Polaneczky Sr. and his Honeywell 1400 computer.

The year was 1964 and Dad was a statistician at the Franklin Institute. The Honeywell 1400 was the solid-state monster he worked on there. It was big as a garage, but with less than one-millionth the computing power of the cell phone in your pocket.

In those early, heady days of key-punch cards, though, the machine was a marvel, able to quickly tally sums and size up stats that formerly took hours of work with a slide rule, pad and pencil.

The whole town was excited that summer by the Phillies' unexpected run at the pennant. One day in September, with the team cruising toward a first-place finish in the National League, some genius at a local radio station thought it would be a kick to have the Franklin Institute use its fancy-pants Honeywell 1400 to calculate the Phils' odds of winning the pennant.

A pennant seemed all but assured at the time. With a stunning record of 90 wins and just 60 losses, the team was 6 1/2 games in first place with just 12 games left in the season.

Dad's ongoing assignment was to crunch the Phillies' odds of clinching the pennant and then share his findings with the radio deejay on the air.

It all should've been harmless fun. Nothing more than a clever radio stunt to capitalize on the pennant fever of 1964 and the public's growing fascination with space-age computers.

When the Phils lost the first of 10 straight games with 12 to go, Dad dutifully ran the numbers and reported how the team's chances of winning were still excellent, although they had slid just a bit.

The Phils lost the next game, too. Dad reported that the odds had slipped a little more.

Then the Phils lost again. And again. And again. The odds that once so favored the Phils flattened out a little more each day.

Distraught Phils fans started phoning the radio station and the Franklin Institute. The Phillies, they noticed, had been doing just fine until that guy with the computer started slinging around his fancy scientific calculations. Now he was jinxing their beloved team.

One barely literate fan wrote Dad a long, hate-filled letter. It threatened bad things, very bad things, if my dad didn't cease and desist with his smart-guy prognosticating.

My pop thought it was funny.

"I corrected his grammar and spelling and sent it back," he chuckles.

As the losses continued to mount, and the venomous calls grew in number, Dad's boss at the Franklin Institute invented a new scapegoat.

It was all the mayor's fault, he decided. Mayor James Tate, after all, had convened a committee to prepare for the World Series. That was too presumptuous for the baseball gods, who had angrily decided to smite the poor Phils in revenge.

The calls didn't end, but now irate fans were referred to the mayor's office.

All told, the Phillies lost 10 straight games, the most infamous collapse in baseball history: They lost the pennant by one single game, on the last day of the season, in a debacle now known as "The Phold."

"They nose-dived," sighs my dad, whose radio career ended that day. "They just tanked."

He stayed in the computer field until he retired, and today his trail-blazing use of computerized statistical analysis is commonplace on the diamond.

Now, each time Jimmy Rollins or Shane Victorino gets up to bat, we know to the tiniest percentage point how they've fared in the past against the pitcher they're staring down.

That's cold comfort for the fans who wrote my father hate mail in 1964 and still blame him and his computer for The Phold.

Unlike 1964, obviously, the Phillies are in the World Series. But they haven't won a championship in 28 years, and we can't take any chances.

So, Pop, I love you. But, in these jumpy days leading toward a championship title, please unplug your computer.

Play cards. Watch TV. Do it for the city. Or for the grandchildren who carry your name.

And remember, if the Phils lose this thing, I'll know what you've been up to. And I swear I'll rip your Internet connection right out of the wall.

My column today is about my correspondence and phone interview with Richard Wexler, a great guy who's head of the National Coalition to Change Child-Welfare Reform.  He e-mailed me after my last column ran, to say I was full of crap to suggest that we each keep DHS on speed-dial to report child abuse if we suspect it's taking place.

He shared alarming and surprising information about how child-welfare agencies panic when horrific child-abuse cases make headlines. As a result, they place kids more quickly into foster care, without considering whether foster care is the best option for a child. The scary thing is that, studies show, the vast majority of maltreated kids fare better in their own homes than do maltreated kids who go into placement.

Anyway, once I filed my column yesterday, Wexler e-mailed me some additional thoughts about child-welfare agencies and social workers - and a theory about how a beartbreaking case like Charlenni Ferreira's might've managed to persist, through no fault of DHS or any other concered onlookers. He'd just read an Inquirer story about how Charlenni's family had become so good at hiding her abuse. DHS became so convinced the Ferreira familly was being harrased by the school nurse who contacted DHS about them, an agency worker suggested the family get legal advice about how to fight the unfairness of it all.

"The attitude test" - he calls it.

"What [the Inquirer story] suggests to me," he writes, "is that this case was very different from Danieal Kelly or many of the others. When [DHS commissioner ] Anne Marie Ambrose says (without hindsight, of course) that there was nothing DHS could have done differently – she may be right.

"What we may have here is simply parents who were extremely good at conning professionals.  They may have known how to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, how to claim innocence with a tone of sorrow instead of anger, and most important, they promised to cooperate with the various providers.

"In contrast, the parent who gets angry and says, “I’m innocent, dammit!” because she is, in fact, innocent, may lose her child forever.  A lawyer I interviewed for my book called it “flunking the attitude test.”  In this case, it may be the nurse [at Clara Barton Elementary School] who flunked.  She may have vented her entirely understandable frustration at not being listened to in a way that offended caseworkers and the therapist - and therefore been labeled a troublemaker.  (After all, it can take extraordinary wisdom to forgive the tone of someone’s communication and decide it’s worth considering the substance anyway – right?)

"And it wasn’t just DHS that was fooled.  I don’t know that this has ever been studied, but in my 33 years of following this issue I’ve noticed that there seems to be a hierarchy of credibility for child protective-services workers.  At the very top are doctors, followed by therapists.  Nurses are probably third – but in this case the nurse was up against a doctor, a therapist and, eventually, a second doctor.  After nurses, probably, come other “mandated reporters," especially teachers, then other possible witnesses, then foster parents, if any, and – dead last, unless they’ve really mastered the right attitude - birth parents.

"A similar problem is something I have come to call 'fatal neatness.'  I’ve never encountered a profession more prone to equate cleanliness with godliness than child protective services.  Over and over, in news accounts and documents, I’ve read caseworkers and their bosses explain that they never suspected anything because “the home was so neat and clean.”  Conversely, a dirty home may not automatically cost a poor person her or his child (although sometimes it does), but it’s going to count heavily against them.  The New Jersey Office of Child Advocate has warned caseworkes about this.

"If I understand your point correctly [I'd argued, in a phone conservation, that if neighbors of Charlenni's had called DHS, the agency might've realized the school nurse wasn't alone in her concern], you’re saying that if only some of the neighbors also had called in reports, that might have raised the level of suspicion enough to overcome the parents’ apparent skill at deception.

"Maybe.  But as part of any child-abuse investigation, DHS workers are supposed to contact neighbors and other potential witnesses.  So they should have been reached, in any event.  If that never happened, that may be because the DHS workers simply had too many other cases which, on the surface, looked worse – so they may have taken a shortcut and accepted the doctor’s word as definitive.

"That would support my argument that DHS failures, in cases like this, usually are caused by workers too busy to investigate properly – and part of what makes them too busy is people calling in reports based on their 'feeling' that something is wrong."

Just got this announcement from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers about a ceremony tomorrow to honor Mary Katherine Ladany, a young teacher who managed, in one short year, to do what many teachers never accomplish in far longer careers - win the hearts of all who knew her:

"The faculty, staff, students and alumni of Dobbins High School on Wednesday, October 28, will dedicate a plaque and a scholarship fund in memory of Mary Katherine Ladany, a beloved, 23-year-old mathematics teacher who was killed in August when a tree limb fell on her as she jogged along a wooded trail in Fairmount Park.

"Ms. Ladany had started her teaching career at Dobbins during the previous school year and planned to return to teach at the school this fall.

"The Dobbins Memorial Committee will present Ms. Ladany’s parents, John and Patty Ladany of Montclair, New Jersey, with a faculty photo from the 2008-09 school year, the first and only year their daughter taught at Dobbins.

"A permanent memorial plaque will be unveiled, and a memorial scholarship fund will be dedicated in her name for excellence in mathematics. Performances by the school choir and readings by students are included in the program.

"The memorial service and tribute begins at 9 a.m., Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in the school auditorium, located at 2150 W. Lehigh Ave., Philadelphia."

For more information, please contact the Memorial Committee at Dobbins, 215-227-4421.

Artist's rendering of the new Gift of Life Family House, scheduled to open in October 2010.

Congratulations to Gift of Life Donor Program, the organ-and-tissue-transplant organization, which broke ground on Oct. 18th on the Gift of Life Family House. Located at 4th and Callowhill, the 30-room, hotel-like facility will offer temporary lodging and support services to transplant patients and families who travel more than 30 miles to Philadelphia for medical care.

If all goes as planned, the house will open next October.

God knows how badly a place like this is needed. Philly might offer top-notch treatment at a number of high-end medical facilities. But if you're an out-of-towner and need to stay here more than a night or two to receive your treatment, hotel costs can send you to the poor house. 

Especially if you're a transplant patient, where treatment is both intense and long-term - post-op care alone can require up to 50 visits.

The Family House will allow transplant patients and their families to bed down in a place that's actually affordable: a night's stay will cost $40, a fraction of the rates charged at Center City hotels, even if you're a whiz at snatching up cheap rooms on Orbitz.  The fee covers a room that sleeps up to 4 people, meals, van transportation to and from hospitals, parking, on-site fitness center, internet access, services of a staff social worker and who-knows-what other amenities the Gift of Life people will dream up between now and opening day. 

"For those families who cannot afford the $40 fee, we have established a Family Fund where contributions will offset the portion of the nightly fee that cannot be covered by the family," House director Debra Roberts tells me. "Bottom line, no family will ever be turned away because of their inability to pay."
 
Can you imagine how huge this is for people dealing with serious, chronic illness - that kind that keeps you out of work? The average hotel rate in Philadelphia runs anywhere from $125-$150 per night.  Meals, parking, valet parking, tolls, gas - all of it quickly adds up to $200-$300 per day, depending on the number of family members who need to be near the patient.

No wonder bankruptcy is rampant among the chronically ill. The best insurance plan in the world won't cover all the incidental costs of staying alive.

If the idea of a family house sounds familiar, it's because the concept was born here when Ronald McDonald House opened its doors 35 years ago to out-of-town families of pediatric patients who needed a place "to have a cup of tea," as its heroic and marvelous founder, oncologist Audrey Evans, once described the need to me.

There are now 288 Ronald McDonald houses around the world, providing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of complementary lodging, hospitality, social services and TLC to families needing a welcoming port in the difficult storm of childhood illness. 

Here's hoping that Gift of Life Family House, the first of its kind for transplant patients, sparks a similar mission around the globe.

To learn more, or to donate the home's building fund, go to www.GiftOfLifeFamilyHouse.org.