Monthly Archives: October 2012
Oops!
To My Subscribers: you just got an email saying I’d published a new article, but if you followed the link it won’t (shouldn’t!) work. I’m sure we’ve all done it: clicked the big blue [Publish] button rather than the harder-to-notice white [Save Draft] button.
I was working on an article for later, got as far as I wanted to today, and meant to save it as a draft for later. But the Big Blue was just too easy to click!
Fortunately, WordPress allows you to put a published post back into draft status (and I set it to Private just to be sure).
So, oops, my bad! Cat got out of the bag early, but kitty is kenneled again until later!
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Leave a comment | tags: ALCS, Delmon Young, Derek Jeter, Detroit Tigers, Doug Fister, Joe Girardi, Miguel Cabrera, MLB, New York Yankees, Prince Fielder | posted in Baseball, Writing
One of the things that drives this blog and informs its content is that I have a sense of being on the downward part of the hill.
The hill in question being the one they say you’re over when you’re past your prime. Mind you, I’m not far over it, but the path definitely leads downwards these days. As a great poem puts it in another context, “But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.“
[That poem, by the way, is a hoot. It’s about an 17th century guy giving his gal the old line: ‘Time is short, let’s get it on, baby!’ And you gotta love a poem with the couplet, “The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.“]
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2 Comments | tags: age, Andrew Marvell, carpe diem, Gonzo Papers, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack London, Jimmy Buffett, over the hill, Red Lobster, wisdom | posted in Life, Writing
You never know what will bubble up when you poke around the interweb. I was browsing about, a bit blurry after couch snoozing all morning, and stumbled on a writing contest that tickled my fancy.
It’s funny how an idea can spring to life nearly fully formed after being seeded with an idea.
The seed that fertilized my mind was the current contest on the Trifecta Writing Challenge. The challenge went thusly:
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15 Comments | tags: African Swallows, Count, European Swallows, Holy Hand Grenade, Killer Rabbit, rule of three, three, Trifecta Writing Challenge, triple | posted in Brain Bubble, Movies, Writing
Well, it wasn’t unexpected, but the (damn) Yankees beat the Baltimore Orioles today in the fifth game of their ALDS series. And yesterday the Detroit Tigers beat the Oakland Athletics in their fifth game. The Division Series is best of five games, so now the Yankees (can we just assume there’s always a “damn” in front of that name?) and the Tigers move into the next round, the ALCS.
Yesterday the San Francisco Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds in the fifth game of their NLDS series. This has all made for some exciting playoff baseball. It’s painful to see a team lose 1-2-3 (such as, say, a certain Minnesota team did to a certain New York [cough, spit] team in 2010). It’s much more exciting to see the series go to 2-2. That way you get the maximum number of games, and that fifth game breaks the tie and wins the series. And that fifth game is very intense.
But wait! Astute readers may be thinking, aren’t there four Division Series games? I count only three. Indeed you do, but did you notice the title of today’s post?
The Washington Nationals are playing the St. Louis Cardinals as I write this!
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2 Comments | tags: ALDS, Detroit Tigers, MLB, NLDS, Oakland Athletics, San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, Washington Nationals | posted in Baseball
Today’s date, 10/11/12, is one of those dates that’s numerically fun. (For my European friends, I guess it was yesterday.) And, of course, in one month and one day, we’ll have the last “golden date” of this century, 12/12/12.
But for me, October 11th is a sad day, a day of mourning. Eight years ago today, in 2004, my dog — who brought me as close as I have ever come to having my own child — took her last breath. Her name was Samantha; she was only ten.
That she died a couple of years after we moved into a new place I’d bought in part to provide an ideal home for her was tough. That she died a bit over a year after my divorce was final was really tough. That she died only months after the first time my job at The Company was eliminated and I had found a new position two days before my end date was just icing on a shit cake.
Today I choose to commemorate her passing by writing about the perfect day.
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31 Comments | tags: beer, Black Lab, Black Labrador Retriever, dogs, fog, frost, perfect day, Sam, Samantha, snow | posted in Life
I stayed up later than I should checking out NBC’s new comedy, Go On. I meant to just watch the first episode to see what it was like, but I enjoyed it so much I had to stay up and watch all five episodes available on OnDemand.
Actually, there were six episodes available, but the sixth was still in the 30-minute “all the commercials” mode. And since NBC has joined with others that disable the fast forward in OnDemand [spit, a pox on your house], I’ll hold off until they put up the shorter version with only the NBC promos and PSAs. Those versions are 22-minutes (or 23 or 24 tops), which means eight minutes of commercials I don’t have to ignore.
So NBC can kiss my big hairy ass when it comes to commercials, but I think they have a real gem in Go On!
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21 Comments | tags: comedy, Go On, John Cho, Julie White, Laura Benanti, Matthew Perry, NBC, The Whole Nine Yards | posted in TV
It’s been another very disappointing season for the Minnesota Twins and their fans.
They managed to do better than last year, but that’s not saying much. Depending on how you look at it, 2011 was the third (or second or fifth) worst season in franchise history (which began in 1961). The equivocation comes from whether you look at the win percentage, games lost or games won.
This season is the sixth (or fourth or seventh) worst season in the 52-year history of the Minnesota Twins. It’s also only the second time they’ve such a bad win percentage two years running (and many don’t expect next year to be stellar, either).
I’ll explain about this and more, but regardless of how you look at it, it was an awful year!
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62 Comments | tags: ALDS, American League, Central Division, meteor strike, Minnesota Twins, MLB, NLDS, Texas Rangers, World Series | posted in Baseball
I confess, I’m definitely a hedonist.
I deeply believe in the credo that life is short, eat dessert first. However, somewhat paradoxically, I’m also a delayer in that I eat the cake and then the icing. In a given moment, I’m very prone to saving the best for last.
But the main thing is that, when the arc of my life ends, I want as much as possible to be able to say I enjoyed it and had fun every possible minute. There is more in the world to enjoy than anyone can in a lifetime, so you have to apply yourself!
With life’s pleasures in mind, today’s edition of Brain Bubbles is about things that are pleasurable — tasty — to me.
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4 Comments | tags: Anvil of Stars, Evangeline Lilly, furnace, Greg Bear, Hugh Jackman, molasses cookies, NCIS, nouvelle cuisine, Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Real Steel, Rosa Mexicano, The Forge of God, The Who | posted in Brain Bubble, Movies
Last week I went a few comment rounds over on the Moment Matters blog under the Breaking Prejudice on Atheists post. The post’s lead topic — that a study showed that atheists are just as caring as theists — doesn’t surprise me at all. Atheists, after all, believe that all meaning in life comes from within and that the universe is a cold, empty, uncaring vastness dotted with little sparks of life here and there.
Now, I’ve always found fanatical atheists to be just as annoying — just as wrong (in my view, obviously) — as fanatical theists. If you are incapable of acknowledging that your worldview is not factually based and therefore could be incorrect, I basically consider you to be… well, insane. That is to say that the reality inside your head does not correlate accurately with the external reality.
But what I wanted to write about today was the idea that agnostics are indecisive. As an agnostic with spiritual leanings, I think that is bullshit.
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30 Comments | tags: agnosticism, atheism, bisexual, deism, Gandhi, gnosticism, spirituality, squirrels, Stephen Hawking, theism | posted in Religion
This is the first of a series of articles that discuss something I believe is unique to humans. In fact, I think it’s one of the few things we can point to that does differentiate us from the animal kingdom. And it is something that goes deep into our past. It is our ability to use language to create and tell complex stories.
It is also one of my favorite topics. If you’ve read many of my posts, particularly those about movies and TV, you’ve seen me write about my love of stories.
There is an interesting continuum of storytelling modes. Books lie at one end, movies at the other. Plays and TV lie between. The continuum describes — in part — the experience of the audience. Here’s the deal…
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1 Comment | tags: graphic novels, plays, poetry, stories, storytelling, television, theatre | posted in Basics, Movies, Philosophy, TV
Logos con carne 