Timelies all!

Happy Birthday Steph!

Am back from the con. It was fun, aside from hotel screw-ups. The hotel booked loud parties (with DJs) in the space next to ours both Friday and Saturday night. The main function room had heavy bass coming through the walls.(Apparently the DJs were right against the wall we shared with them, and there was nothing to dampen the sound) We tried to fight back with a bagpiper on Saturday night, but that didn't work.

If this happens again, supplement the bagpipers with reenacters with claymores?

Spicy catfish, for the way. Not $14 worth, but reasonably tasty. My tongue is on a Thai kick, my stomach is not. This will end in angst.

7 million people! 14 million questions! I must away!

I wanted to note my favorite George Carlin about the difference between football and baseball.

In football, the object is for the quarterback—also known as the field general—to be on target with his aerial bombardment, riddling the defence by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defencive line.

In baseball, the object is to go home, and be safe—”I hope I’ll be safe at home!”

David, I saw your story about Emmett's game - was the pitcher trying to hit him? or was it just a case that he's bigger and stronger?

This was true in most dairy states. It was illegal to sell yellow margarine, on the grounds that people might get confused and think it was butter. To protect the dairy industry, the yellow and the margarine had to be in separate packages.

They tried to introduce that in Australia too. One of the arguments in Parliament was that such a law had been introduced in many other countries, including Denmark. Which prompted our Prime Minister to reply "I'd always wondered what was meant by the phrase 'There's something rotten in the state of Denmark.'"

Anybody who says anything like "He's in a better place" or "He's with the angels" or "God rest his soul" never really listened to a word he said and can go fuck themselves.

Um, if I confess to thinking something very close to that (because, well, I do believe in those things, and if anyone has earned a happily baleful eternity of lounging around gleefully snarking with Bill Hicks and Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, it's George Carlin) if I only think about him being with angels like this or maybe this?

David, I saw your story about Emmett's game - was the pitcher trying to hit him? or was it just a case that he's bigger and stronger?

You know, I talked to the pitcher and his parents after the game and I thought he was kind of flippant and assholish about it. (He made an "Oops" face.) His parents said he felt bad about it (as most kids do when they hit a batter), but I think he was used to throwing hard inside without too much worry about whether he hit people or not.

I don't think it was on purpose, but I suspect he was used to intimidation being a part of his pitching game.

Which is part of how you play baseball in the majors, but not how it should be played in Little League.

Anyway, Emmett's been hit about six times this season by a variety of pitchers. Because most of them were solid shots to the body, instead of glancing blows off the arm or leg, it's had sort of a cumulative effect on his psyche.

During warmups for one game, I was standing on the first base side where I coach and an errant throw by the shortstop nailed me really hard in the back. You don't just experience pain in that moment, but a huge jolting shock to your system. It sets off your whole nervous system and your brain is screaming, "Alarm! Alarm!" and it's hard to breathe and you have a wave of nausea and all that. So that was actually useful for me to remembmer that getting hit with a ball is not like getting a bruise. It's more like getting hit in a fight.

I'm trying to get more Zen about it all. Emmett twisted his ankle yesterday and he's hobbling around on it today. So I don't know how much catching he can do in tonight's game. We're just going to let him tell us what he can handle.

Which makes three successive games where I have to worry about Emmett's ability to take the field for three completely different and unrelated issues. So I've decided to stop worrying about it. They can't all be must-play games.

interesting fashion site

I FINALLY have seen the umbrella cubicle farm. I would be obsessed with creating a full coverage system .