It also has Dean Stockwell, age six or so. He ran away from home to join the Navy.

So. Many. Orphans in literature.

From a narrative point of view you have to get the parents out of the way for the kids to have any agency. It's not anti-parent, it's pro-story. Nobody wants to read about your stinkin' happy childhood.

Back from two days in Sunnyvale where Emmett's tournament team went 4-0. Which sounds more impressive than it was since we were in an 11-and-under tournament and played two 10 y.o. teams (and crushed their wee little spirits with slaughter rule wins).

Emmett made some very nice plays at catcher and he made it all the way to the fourth game before a pitcher got him out. He had a lot of walks and when they threw him strikes he got hits.

To put the capper on the baseball weekend the A's swept the Red Sox (ha ha - I'm very bitter about the invasion of the Red Sox fans at the Coliseum every time the Bloody Hose come to town).

I'm going to ignore Teppy going to the land of Lolcats. She's clearly going through a year of radical reassment and testing (non-Blonde! SinLiving!) and is bound to make some egregious errors in judgment from time to time.

I've heard similar arguments for why P.I's are kind of lonerish, traditionally speaking.(That's not why I killed off my character's dad, though. My dad pisses me off a lot sometimes and he never apologizes. So Fictional! Him eats a service revolver and it's all good.)

erika, you'll like this story.

So one of Emmett's good plays at catcher came on a pop up. High foul pop behind the plate. Emmett goes back on the ball thinking it'll go over the backstop fence, but throws off his mask to see. Ball comes almost straight down parallel to the fence and inches away. It's a tough catch even for a major league catcher because you've got to flick your glove out at the last second to catch it - you can't get under it, and the fence is in the way of your glove.

Emmett makes the catch, and it's a last out of the inning and he gets knuckle bumps from all of his teammates, out by the mound. The batter (who had oddly run it out to first even though the ball was entirely foul) ran back across the field from first to his dugout on the third base side and made a point of pushing through our team at the mound and very pissily called Emmett a "lucky fuck."

Our guys were so flummoxed at this breach in sports etiquette that the only rejoinder they could muster was from Emmett's teammate Ben (a very nice boy) who said, "Don't be a hater!"

We didn't mind kicking that team's ass.

(We'd seen their coach before at previous tournaments and he'd indulged some extremely assholish and unsportsmanlike behavior.)

I just had to unlock 21 bathroom stalls with a broom over the top of the door because some imp (or imps) thought it would be funny to lock them all and crawl out underneath.

Cool. Go, Emmett. Kick hater ass. Nope, definitely no Coach Taylor on that other squad.

More like Coach Dickies (that's from an ep this season, erika, I just rewatched it today).

Okay, sitcom ep pitch written - now to write a short film pitch.

what I just typed in my nightly operations notes amuses me, "We had to kick some kids out of Narnia for various inappropriate behaviors."

Back to England with ye!

I love it when you can use sentences like that legitimately.

Wow. It is quiet in here.

Hey, we had a power outage here overnight/this morning.

Weird thing? The storms in the area were 100 miles away and over by several hours when the outage occurred.