nope, not dead

hellllloooooo everybod-eeeee!
(sorta like Christopher Mad Dog Russo on the radio...)

anyways, what the hell have I been doing in neglect of the old blog.

Let's see. Beer Review: Sam Adams 12-pack for Christmas. Let's just say this about the cranberry lambic. I love beer and hate cranberries. My wife loves cranberries and hates beer. We BOTH hated this one. Luckily, their idea of a 12-pack is only two bottles each of 6 different kinds. Unfortunately, what we'll call "plain" Sam Adams shouldn't count as one, but it does. Not that Sam is bad, but if I wanted plain Sam, I coulda bought a 6 or 12 of that by itself. The best in the bunch was "Old Fezziwig Ale", a medium-dark offering.

My family does a Yankee swap every year, and we're required to home-make the gifts. If I'd been smart, I'd have saved a 12-pack of my own award winning beer and just put a bow on it. Instead, I went for a ginger-flavored cheesecake with a crust made from gingerbread cookies. Not too bad, but because I wanted a disposable container for it, I bought a cheap foil pan at the store, and the cheesecake cracked. So I put an "IOU" with the gift of 12 of my NEXT beer. Which I tried to cover up the fact that it doesn't exist yet. Anyway, mom ended up with the cheesecake and served it after dinner Christmas Eve. I have amused my daughter into suggesting we call it a "Red Sox Swap" instead.

Mom gave me a gift card for Dick's Sporting Goods, to get a new backboard and rim for the yard. We were going to have our driveway paved, but didn't have any funds available for the project. So it may wait, unless I want to play on crushed stone. Might not be so bad, especially since when I was 8 I shot at a rim bolted onto an oak tree....no backboard at all. (That was actually rectified only a few weeks later.) Anyway, the lesson here, is that Dick's website address is the FULL www.dickssportinggoods.com, for reasons that may or may not be obvious unless you try to guess, um, something different.

Work is pretty good. My new job has already had 2 Christmas parties (one luncheon, and then drinks after work the next night), and I got a couple of presents from the establishment there. Follow that up with two straight three-day workweeks. Of course, the obvious lack of bonus that comes with switching jobs in December sucks.

My wife's cat pees as I type. At least it sounds like pee. This morning I got to hear the diarrhea squirting out of her ass in the litterbox. Yup, it's pee this time.

The Patriots are 15-0. I fear they shall lose in the playoffs, however. They're definitely not a cold weather offense. Oh, and lest I forget to thank Mr. Brady for the clunker that got me eliminated from my fantasy football playoffs. Never mind finishing 13-3 when nobody else was more than 11-5. I lost the wrong week.

We have an electric pump to drain water that settles on our pool cover through a garden hose. However, it's currently submerged in ice. Oops. We need one of those three-day stretches of temperatures around 50 or something. The cover's starting to get pretty weighed down.

Tomorrow I see the doctor for the results of my MRI. I hope I don't have to become right-handed for a couple of years to let my shoulder heal or whatever....

Beer Review

Here's a good use of the blog....

Roxy Rolles. Made by Magic Hat in Vermont. I normally hate Magic Hat....especially their signature "Number 9" beer. But this one is actually pretty good. Full bodied "foretaste"....oh yeah, a couple of times I've had a 365 beers calendar, and they'd have such flowery descriptions using goofy descriptions like that. So then the hops take over at "midbottle" and I'm left with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

My grade: B

Women and Children First!!!

I could have also called this post, Led Zeppelin III.

Namely, two relatively lousy albums by two really good groups. My point being, a band forms, they've got about 20 songs that they're good at, and they all go on the first two albums. Then it's like, uh oh, we gotta come up with something now from scratch. Obviously both bands recovered just fine -- Zep's 4th and Fair Warning are both awesome.

So that brings me back to this. Most of my snarky comments on the universe in general have been used up. I don't really wanna re-post "cash is like a gift certificate, redeemable ANYWHERE", although it's appropriate at Christmas time, I suppose. And turning this into a diary certainly doesn't appeal to me, either. Like, Oooh, I was invited to play "Talisman" this weekend for the first time. I actually think it's good to use a diary format to launch into decent discussions, but really, the last few weeks -- I got nothin'.

Yeah, my new job starts Monday. Posts will be less frequent -- I'll actually have co-workers to discuss things with -- as the blogosphere tended to be the equivalent of a water cooler at times for me. (Comment on the interesting ones, but get back to work in a couple of minutes.)

Here's a story. One that my daughter was able to re-tell at school in their unit on family traditions/backgrounds, etc. When I was two I was up in Maine, crawling on the kitchen table and noticed a plastic salt shaker. I proceeded to drink the salt straight out of the shaker. Then I threw up all over the place. My mom had to clean it all up. Like she needed another reason to dislike going up to her in-laws' cabin in the middle of nowhere, huh? It's especially enjoyable in that whenever I'm back up there, such as this past summer, the same salt shaker is still in use, I believe.

Anyone ever have almond butter? I bought a jar before realizing it was like $11. Certainly it takes a back seat to peanut butter, but it was still pretty good on Ritz crackers. The company also makes a cashew butter, but I'm not the world's biggest cashew fan.

Good ad campaign?

So, Sunday night I was watching the Patriots blow out the Bills. Around 9:15 or so there was an ad for Subway featuring Peter Griffin from Family Guy rambling on about the food behind him on-screen. So that reminded me, whoa, I was missing Family Guy at the same time....I should switch back and forth during the commericals.

So I hit the remote for my local Fox station, and right on cue, there's Peter Griffin....puking all over the floor on screen.

Nice job, Subway. That's not exactly how you wanna draw it up in the ad office, huh?

Bored on friday

Okay, ten artists with my favorite song by each (not the same as when I posted my 10 favorites all by the Beatles a month or so ago).

Van Halen with Dave -- House of Pain
Van Halen wit Sammy -- Source of Infection
Metallica -- Blackened
Led Zeppelin -- When the Levee Breaks
The Eagles -- Life in the Fast Lane
The Doors -- Peace Frog
Pearl Jam -- Jeremy
Nirvana -- Breed
Soundgarden -- My Wave
Smashing Pumpkins -- geek usa

I usually would have arguments with a friend in college, he liked all the right bands, just not the right songs.

maybe I'll pick 10 more next week or something...in the mean time, i suppose you can argue one way or another about these....

how to deliver this...

okay, had a pretty good idea for a joke, not sure on how to nail the delivery.

The premise is along the idea of "I'm thinking of a number between one and a hundred", only in this case, we're talking fingers.

I want it to come off like, I'm thinking of a finger between pointer and ring...obviously it's a way to verbally give an f-u to someone. I think the delivery's got to be kinda deliberate to set it up right....say it too fast and excited, and it doesn't sound as funny.

Thought...

I don't think the real issue with

Toys Я Us

is the fact that the R is backwards. (And that's what supposed to be there in that line above....I found a Cyrillic letter in the Arial font on my computer to use for it, and that may not work on others' screens.)

Anyway, we have a predicate nominative here. So the pronoun in question should be "We".

Toys Я We

It's like breaking up....

Neil Sedaka, right? I should know, all the car trips as a kid with my dad blasting the oldies station.

Anyways, I found it interesting in that I've had a couple of major break-ups this week.

First, it was time to tell my dentist from the last ten years that his office is too far away to keep going to him. I mean really, 60 miles....it was one thing when I lived in various towns no more than 10 miles away. Besides, this is the guy that's found cavities. I had one dentist for the first 20+ years, and never had any teeth issues. With this guy....had my wisdom teeth pulled, and two fillings (and maybe a third, but he left it as a "watch" on my records for whoever I transfer to). An amusing story, I saved the wisdom teeth after the specialist he sent me to pulled them, and 2 years later (when I'd remembered to bring them), this dentist was able to not only identify which tooth came from where, he could point out where some decay had started that was the cause of the whole "you should have these pulled" conversation.

Okay, breakup number two. My job. I waited and waited six months at a time for my boss to replace my assistant. So now he has to replace two employees. Which were his only employees. So good luck with that, I'm going on to a bigger company. On the bright side, he can't exactly show me the door and be completely unstaffed for 3 weeks....there's some leverage. I even rejected an offer of a pay raise and the possibility of working from home to avoid the God-awful commute on I-95. (I actually don't believe the telecommuting one....he's got lots of "ideas" that never amount to anything. It took me 3 years to get business cards. And I've been waiting since month 1 for him to buy the required server upgrade so that we're not 2-3 versions behind on our software.) I guess that's what happens when you have a bunch of businesses and you consider one of them to be an afterthought....

I'm not big on "let's compare the stress between the break-ups" but some people might make that into a college psych paper....good luck with that.

On a completely unrelated note, my favorite teams are probably better than your favorite teams. Therefore, logically, I must be a better person than any of you, huh?

Slow-roasting a chicken all day in the Crock-Pot "BBQ Pit" thing on the counter. That's dinner, and there's peanut butter cheesecake for dessert.

A tale of two bands

The way the blinds are hanging at the window beyond my desk at work, I can be blinded temporarily for about 5-10 minutes at sunset each night, this time of year. (In the summer, I go home long before sunset, and in the winter, sunset's while I'm still working.) Anyway, the sky is pink with purple stripes of clouds. A bit freaky, but a change from typical blue/gray or even orange.

Last Sunday Duran Duran debuted their entire new album in a concert at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, CT. (Yeah, yeah, it's now the Chevrolet Theatre, whatever.) Let's see....lots of forty-something overweight women in droves. The songs were so-so. Some were good, some were not, but most of all, nobody really wanted to hear them. That's the thing when old bands re-unite. People wanna hear the same 15 songs at every show. In the parking lot, some guy walked past us getting in our car and asked where Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf were. I almost yelled back at him, in your record cabinet, dickhead. But yeah, after the new songs, they did a few old ones. My wife was a full-fledged fan back in the day, and she said she only recognized 5 songs. What was good was that the arena only seats about 3000 or so, and that meant being pretty close -- 20th row, center stage.

Now, Van Halen in Boston was a different story all together. Sold out and LOUD. All old stuff, and after 20 years of Sammy Hagar, I get the feeling they were glad to be able to play this stuff live. I knew every song, and could pick out random bits and pieces from Eddie's solo -- like some of Girl Gone Bad. There was a couple in front of us engaging in doobage, but it's not like they passed it around. Anyway, isn't VH more of a being drunk band, versus a being stoned band? A buddy of mine was kinda drunk, so he starts trying to put his arm around me during songs he liked. (Apparently he tried this with my dad who I gave my Stones ticket to a couple of years ago, and my dad had to keep pulling his arm off and telling him to cut the shit.) Wolfgang, on bass instead of Michael Anthony, pretty much "knew his place" -- you're the chubby 16-year-old kid who's new, just play your lines and don't draw attention to yourself. (One exception, they put a big Red Sock over the end of his bass to appeal to the crowd.) If nothing else, he certainly looks more in place height-wise than Anthony, who always seemed on the short end amidst the other band members. I'll be curious to see if they actually do a new album themselves. (Or if Eddie kills Dave instead.)

The cool thing about being in Boston is that it was also the day of the "rolling rally" parade for the Red Sox. (speaking of doobage...) But what this did is make getting a table at a restaurant an hour-long wait on a Thursday night. All the folks in the city for the Sox, overlapped with concertgoers. (My dinner: Veal parm sandwich from Four's Grille.)

And as I finish this up, the sky is all purple (Prince reference?) with a couple of yellow streaks in the horizon.

Pats-Colts this weekend. Should be good. (I'd be amused there WERE a cheap shot on Brady with all this anti-Pats stuff....because Peyton would invariably go down on the next series, kinda like a football version of a beanball war.)

Good pizza...

Here's a shot of the trees changing in our yard from last weekend. The colors that look best are rusty red, and for some reason, salmon. The worst color is a sorta pale yellowish-orange that is not only too common, but unappealing, and hideous when juxtaposed with trees still green.

Now, on to the pizza.

This was a stuffed-crust monstrosity I put together Saturday. Here's what you have to do. Prepare 2 large pizza crusts. I used a bread machine to knead the dough, as it comes out better than when I try to knead by hand. Then you coat a cast-iron pan with some extra virgin olive oil and put down the first crust.

The filling is made from seven kinds of meat.
Bacon (about half a pound)
Hot Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Sweet Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Diced Ham (about a quarter pound)
Chicken (one breast)
Pepperoni (two layers)
Ground Beef (another half pound or so)

There was about 4 cups of sauce mixed in with the meat (which you cook ahead of time in order to drain off some of the grease -- don't worry, there's plenty of heart attack risk still in there). We had some homemade sauce to use that used some of our garden tomatoes. Also about 3/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese.

Once you spread out the filling, top it with about 3 cups of shredded mozzarella. Then attach the top crust, and poke some holes in it for steam to escape.

About 20-25 minutes in a 425-degree oven. (220 Celsius, for those overseas)

Beer fest

Okay, first of all, Poison's "Nothin' But a Good Time" should not be sung by a choir of children, either in general, or for a commercial.

The beer fest was very good. My amber brew won the best amber, so I got a beer glass with a pewter inscription for Best Amber 2007. Of course, while walking out to my car to put the prize out there, I had it fall out of the box from Things Remembered. Luckily, I gave it a quick kick about six inches from the ground, so the only damage was a little scrape at the top. Rather that, than a full shatter. Sheesh, nice freakin' box.

Dinner was the venison steaks. Nicely done. All day we'd been eating -- shrimp platter, tons of buffalo wings, and my cousin made an impressive vat of chili. We had football games on two TVs. There were several pies for dessert. I had blueberry made by a cousin's wife.

And of course, we're all encouraged to take a care package home from the excess beer. So I get a random assorted 12-pack to put in the fridge.

Movie recommendation

I saw BeerFest last night while drinking Sierra Nevada's Fall Hops something-or-other special beer. The movie is hysterically immature. I recommend it to all who enjoy stuff like that. Now, because my dad's beer party is meant for the appreciation of beers, rather than mass chugging, none of the games in the BeerFest movie ever come into play. Somehow, they made it look okay for 30-somethings to play frat basement games.

One pretty cool thing I saw once in the fall was in college. A building on campus was covered in ivy (it is an Ivy League school, after all), and when the colors changed for the fall, the ivy was still green at the base of one wall, and then yellow, orange, and red at the top, for a kind of rainbow effect.

I need to check out hockey schedules around here. Connecticut's got a couple of minor league teams (and that's AFTER the Whalers left 10 years ago....sigh.) where $15 or so gets you in. Hockey season starts way too early. Even Canada doesn't have snow and ice yet, right?

The chicken fingers at my cousin's wedding last weekend weren't very good at all, nor the fries. But I still made out better than getting one of the adult meals. I didn't like what was served to the grown-ups. The best part is when a Saturday wedding counts as going to church for the weekend. The goof-offs in our pew didn't get out of the way for communion, though....so they took our seats and we ended up between some of them who did go up for communion and those who didn't.

If it stops raining, it'll be pumpkin-buying time tomorrow. I'm not much of a good carver. I make the same old triangle-eye, 3-tooth mouth design.

Maybe the Red Sox will win the pennant this weekend....that would give me something to do Sunday night.

Random hits....

I started to watch a Ren & Stimpy DVD last night. Apparently "adult" episodes. Well, definitely...like cartoon nudity with rather pornographic overtones. So they weren't exactly funny, like the old "Space Madness" classic. And I'm just about sure they won't be back on Nickelodeon any time soon, either. Oh well.

I had a homemade beer last night. It was good. It seems as though different individual bottles got different levels of the priming sugar -- I had a relatively flat bottle the other day, this one had a normal head on it and bubbly.

I got a shoulder injury this summer. It manifests itself in basketball mostly when I try to rebound, the strength to knock the ball loose from others isn't there. Oxford's new high school gym hosts pickup games on Monday nights. The court is pretty nice....the school only has 9th and 10th graders this year, as I suppose it would have been bad to have residents come back to a new high school just for one/two years, if they're already established at out-of-town high schools. I think my high school did that in the 1960s....started with just a freshman class in 1961 and kept adding to it.

In the valley of the forwards, the one-eyed point guard is king. I'm like one of four people in town, apparently, who can run an offense. Watching a fast break from the other end of the gym is an eyesore, and sure enough nobody seems to know what they're doing. I don't claim to be Steve Nash....but if the ball runs through my hands even ONCE on a possession, our odds of getting a hoop increase dramatically.

I get it, when announcers say something like, "that was a big out" in a baseball game. But I want announcers to say, "that wasn't really a big out," some other times. 10-1, ninth inning, a pop-up to start things off. That wasn't a big out, although probably good to get.

I tried making my own buffalo sauce. I screwed it up, though. I'm not sure I needed to heat the ingredients, and the butter separated. Also, I sliced the cayenne peppers that I'd grown, but I would have been better off grinding them to a powder. It still tasted okay, but wasn't really any good.

We've got a few bald trees, and yet plenty that are still all green. Not a lot of in-between so far this autumn.

Scottish vegetable

One of my kids said she went to one of these a few years ago with me. It was actually a "Scottish festival", where they do all sorts of stuff to celebrate Scotland. I went to one last weekend.

For food, they had bridies and Scottish meat pies. A little heavy on the onion flavoring, but I suppose that counts literally as a Scottish vegetable. Also a haggis puff roll or something like that. I guess when you're several generations removed from riding the boat over to America, you lose any real desire to connect THAT far.

I'm Scottish on my dad's side, Irish on my mom's, so it's interesting enough to go to one of these things every few years. They have "highland games", which of course is highlighted by tossing the caber. For kids, they could have a try throwing a cardboard tube -- probably something that carpet was rolled around at a store at some point.

There were some musicians doing folk songs, and a few bagpipe marching bands from around Connecticut. Everyone's dressed in kilts, men and women, with the knee-high socks with tassels. Girls were doing highland dancing in very colorful outfits.

I thought one of the better reasons to go is to check out the clan-specific merchandise. Every clan's got a tartan -- their own specific plaid pattern that identifies the family. So if you want to buy a scarf, a tam, or a kilt, you can buy your family's. I've already got plenty of stuff in my particular plaid. I was actually surprised not to see anyone with what I've got -- tartan ink. There were a few Celtic designs on various men and women there, but nobody else seems to have a plaid tattoo. Guess I'm unique there.

And when you look for "scottish tattoo" on Google or whatnot, usually you get references to a "military tattoo", but I don't think that has anything to do with needles. I'm not really sure why they call it that.

And it was almost 90 degrees out....the previous time I'd gone, it was like 55 and raining. Freakin' October.

Bottling takes a while

52 bottles of beer on the floor,
52 bottles of beer...
take one down, pass it around....

blah blah blah.

Here's the thing, if you ever make your own beer. You have to save bottles from beer you've already drunk at the house. And they've got to be the kind that aren't twist-offs....you need the good kind of beer bottle, because they've got to be able to be re-sealed with a new cap.

So the process involves this....preparing a disinfecting solution. This is easy....a heaping teaspoon of some chlorine-containing chemical to two gallons of water. Then you rinse out all the bottles. Having done this before, I've learned the key is to rinse out the beer bottles once you're done drinking from them. If you leave any beer at the bottom, or worse -- the natural sediment that a non-filtered beer will have in it, then you're going to have to deal with more mold growing at the bottom. It's nothing that the chlorine can't kill, but sometimes it's very hard to scrape the gunk out with a typical bottle brush. And also, you'll want to change the water you use more often in the rinsing out. The chlorine solution dries in about half an hour or so, which is fine since it takes about an hour to wash out 50-55 bottles.

Next step is priming the beer. If you drink what's been fermenting, it's going to taste okay, be room temperature, and flat. So you need to do some priming -- add fresh sugar to the beer to give the yeast something new to feed on. The sugar comes in the form of powdered malt extract, dissolved in water. It's very easy to have the water boil over while you heat it to dissolve it. And it sucks to have hot caramelizing liquid on your stove. My stove is flat-top electric, which is probably better than a gas range would be for such an accident. Add the priming solution to the beer, and start bottling.

This is easy enough, with a siphoning hose started by a small hand pump. It's advisable to leave a good inch of space from the top of the bottle to avoid caps blowing off from the built up carbon dioxide. Even though the tube's got a spigot on it, it's easier just to go quickly from bottle to bottle. At the bottom of the 5-gallon glass carboy, there's usually grain sediment that you won't want to try to siphon into a bottle. But if you want to strain it into a bowl or something, you can try for a buzz from the flat runoff.

Capping is slow. My dad's bottle capper probably comes from the 1970s, so I have no idea if capping technology or whatever has been increased. All I do is put the open cap into a magnetic holding spot in the capper, and place it over the bottle, and slowly pull down the handles of the capper, kinda like working with a corkscrew. If you're out of alignment, you can break the bottle, though. (A reason to wash more bottles than you might need, too....just pour the beer from the broken bottle into an extra.) It seems like the leverage is best when having the bottle on the floor, so working from a chair can save wear and tear on your knees.

In a couple of weeks, the beer's plenty carbonated enough, and then you can stick it in the fridge. Just remember not to drink it from the bottle -- there's always sediment from the grain at the bottom that shouldn't be re-mixed into the beer. Pour it into a glass and rinse out the bottom quarter of an inch or so. (especially if you plan to reuse the bottles another time, to avoid excess mold) And I'm told aging the beer improves the flavor, although I usually just drink them until they're gone in lieu of buying beer at the store.

Anyway, the flat room temperature stuff was promising....should be a worthy entry in my dad's Octoberfest in a couple of weeks.

Frogs are next

I am pretty sure that the Yankees losing last night was due to a literal plague of insects. God's mad.

Spam by phone....

So I just got a call at work. Picked up, and a recording says my auto warranty has just expired. They've sent me warnings by mail all along. Please press one to continue. Uhhhh....yeah. I could tell it was a recording because she didn't react to me reciting "bite me, bite me, bite me" into the phone. How'd she even know I had a car?

I started playing Zelda -- Four Swords Adventures. This thing looks like something for the original 1986 Nintendo, not a Gamecube. Lame, and easy so far. We'll see how it goes. I think they just wanted to show off the fact that you *could* play it by hooking the Gamecube up to a GameBoy.

My beer is fermenting in the kitchen. Another week or two until bottling. There's a pain in the ass task -- rinsing out beer bottles to prep them. They get sanitized with a diluted chlorine rinse....just enough to kill anything in them. But when they've last been filled with unfiltered beer, sometimes there's hard-to-clean scum off the bottom. A bottle brush sorta works, but any bottles that are too hard to clean just get sent back for the deposit money. You have to remember to rinse the bottle out right after you finish the beer or pour it in a glass, generally, to eliminate the buildup.

October 15 is the last major deadline of the year in the world of 401(k) plans. And it's always the biggest clients that use every last day to finish off the 2006 reporting for the government.

Ten Beatles Favorites

I've got iTunes here at work, and I successfully took all my tapes and converted them to MP3 by running wires from my tape recorder to the sound in port on my Mac. So I've got a folder that's all Beatles stuff. I grew up with the American albums, so I once entered "Beatles '65" as my favorite album in an online poll, and was told not to choose American versions! Anyways, so I've got twelve minute "songs" that represent entire album sides. I can't pick out "Michelle" at random, I've got to open up "Rubber Soul Side 1" and then scan for it. The only changes I did were if, the tape didn't have the same song sequence as the record. I grew up with my dad's records, so I subconsciously always have a certain "next song" queued up when one finishes. Well, on the tapes, Capitol was concerned with keeping the side lengths approximately equal. So on Abbey Road, for instance, Come Together is on side 2 instead of Here Comes the Sun. I took the time to splice anything like that I could think of apart, and re-sequenced them "properly". (Of course that's in quotation marks, since all the pre-Sgt. Pepper's stuff was packaged so differently for the US.)

In any event, I think that everybody probably likes at least one song by the band. Even if you don't like them in general, for most people you can find *something* they'll like. I bought a book called The Complete Beatles Scores, which spells out every song, every instrument, as close to the albums as they could come up with. Try playing keyboard parts to Revolution 9 and see who notices.

Anyways, I tend not to like the "obvious" songs by my favorite groups anyways, and the Beatles are no exception. These 10 are probably my favorites:

Tomorrow Never Knows
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
Sgt. Pepper's....(Reprise) -- at the end of the album before A Day in the Life
The End
I'm Looking Through You
Helter Skelter
I Me Mine
Things We Said Today
Wait
I Wanna Be Your Man (gotta pick a Ringo song, huh?)

So the real question is, which will vary with commenters' ages....who know all of these songs?

What would happen if.... (9/26 edition)

...New Orleans or something got its own cable channel entitled "NO". A bit of a quirk, considering there's a cable channel called "YES" that shows New York Yankees games. Are you watching TV? Umm...yes and no.

Ever detect a weird smell and try to put it to something, then realize it makes no sense? Yesterday morning I opened the door to the stairwell at work and was grossed out. I thought to myself it smelled like...."old lady breath". I can't explain what it is, or why that phrase would come to mind upon the smell. Later in the day, I thought I smelled the combination of hair spray and gum....so again, who knows.

I used to think there was a simple chain among the candy bars 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I assumed Milky Way was just 3 Musketeers plus caramel, while Snickers was Milky Way plus peanuts. The nougat's different in Snickers, though. Lighter in color. Also, the outside chocolate shell of a Milky Way is definitely thicker than it is for Snickers.

Let's say you're flying east to west, so that you almost get time to stand still for you -- at 4 pm you're in Los Angeles, and an hour later, you're a full time zone further west, so it's still 4 pm your local time in the sky. In theory you could probably get all the way around the world, if you fly fast enough (and at a narrow enough band around the earth -- maybe not LA, but perhaps Alaska). So, what happens if it's holy day. A Jewish guy in the office was out last week for Yom Kippur....I wondered if he'd gotten on a plane at sundown Friday and kept heading west, from the start of the international date line all the way around, then it would have been roughly Friday at 6 pm for 24 straight hours. Then he'd cross the date line at 5:59 pm Friday, and it would be Saturday at 6 pm. He never would have experienced Friday night at all, and so he wouldn't have to fast or whatever observations are undertaken.

Six of an item is often referred to as a half dozen.
I want 3 of something referred to as a "quarter dozen".
The New England Patriots have started the season with a quarter dozen wins.
Donuts, two dollars for a quarter dozen, $3.50 for a half dozen, $5.00 for a dozen.

Genesis was okay, but they obviously targeted their show last night to the long-time fans, rather than people who know of them from MTV like myself. Oh well....they were good, I just didn't recognize any of the ten-minute "progressive rock anthems".

There was an old saying that the "moral majority" was neither. I always liked to insist that "classic rock" was neither, as well -- just to piss off a friend for whom music stopped when he was in junior high school.

Let's try this again...

No, I'm not alluding to a famous quote from Daffy Duck. (Do you want to shoot him here, or wait till you get home?)

I'm saying this because my wife has gone to an online ticket re-seller and purchased us 2 nosebleed seats to see Genesis at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night. (I like how on Futurama, they have Madison Cube Garden.)

Anyways, Suldog is promising a story from his life as a dishwasher. But while he stalls, I've got my own story as one.

In college I worked for dining services, and was a really good worker in the dishroom. I sometimes would do the 4:30 to 7 shift -- early dinner -- a lot of putting away the last of the dishes run from lunch, and clearing the crap from trays of early eaters. We had a pretty big industrial dishwashing machine in there. It was a twenty-foot conveyer belt on which you could load the plates and stuff....two foot square racks for silverware...wire frames for drinking glasses...or you could also put giant roasting pans on there from the kitchen itself. Sort of like a big automatic car wash that you drive into.

There was a steady crew of 3-4 "townies" who worked full time in the dishroom, along with a crew of 2-3 students. My friend Brunel and I were working one night, along with the only young townie on the crew. A guy named Danny....probably about 20....maybe he finished high school, not even sure. He was an all right guy. Once we discussed the operations of the conveyer belt....could one ride it from beginning to end? Perhaps, if we turned off the spray hoses. Well, we talked Danny into going for a ride, and he certainly seemed up for it. He knew the machine itself better than we did, so he had turned off the spray hoses. He turned on the conveyer belt and crawled on.

So he's going along at the leisurely pace of the belt...it would take a minute or so, I guess from entering the washing tank to the exit. And he was fine, since the sprays weren't on. One problem, right at the end. He didn't turn off the water at the rinse bar. This was not only the last shot of water the dishes would get, but it was the hottest. I think we were told 180 degrees (F). So we hear him scream and start scurrying down the belt to get out of the tank. So he's not only soaking wet, he's burned. Second-degree burns, if I remember correctly. I think the top layer of skin was bright pink and peeling.

So sure enough, Danny was fired after that night. The funny part of the story was that there was a section outside the dishroom, where the line for students would form, where people could put "napkin notes" -- informal suggestions for specific cold cereal, or "fewer pot roast nights" or whatever. We thought it would be cute to put an anonymous note up there asking for Danny to be reinstated. A couple of days later our napkin note was responded to (right on the napkin, actually). Something to the effect of, the risk that our friend Danny posed to both himself, and the machinery, made it so that he would not be appointed back to his position.

And so we never saw him again. But the tale has lived on for years in what we'd call "dishroom lore." In the same way songs by Winger and the Cult were known as "dishroom music" for their popularity around 1989.

What would happen if.... (9/19 edition)

...I ordered the kid's meal for myself at my cousin's wedding next month? Actually, that is what I've done. It was either beef tenderloin (I hate beef when it's baked), Chicken Oscar (I "just say no" to stuff with chives in it), the vegetarian entree (yeah, right!), or the kid's meal (chicken fingers and fries!). This didn't take much thought. My mom said my aunt was going to call me and tell me I couldn't do it at first. I guess that if you order a kid's meal, it's one less person that they charge you for at the open bar. Now that wouldn't be fair...."you can have the kid's meal, Brian, but you'll be chasing it down with chocolate milk all afternoon."

I'm sure the folks who designed the World Wide Web didn't INTEND to choose the one polysyllabic letter in the alphabet for its abbreviation. There's no good way to say WWW really fast. The PBS show "Zoom" (2000s version) referred to it as "triple-W", but that's still a mouthful. Even one W is a mouthful, let alone three.

There ought to be a minimum slicing setting for cheese at the supermarket. I like my ham really thinly sliced. But cheese HAS to have some minimum thickness -- maybe an eighth of an inch? Because what good is it, if the cheese is so thinly sliced that it sticks to itself? I had to try to pry the slices apart with a sharp knife.

My younger daughter followed the older into the bathroom at a restaurant last weekend. Apparently girls learn early to go in pairs or something.

I started to watch Hitchock's movie Rope the other night....I've already seen it, and it's good. It seems impressive that the entire movie plays out as one very long scene -- there are no changes in the angle to "camera two". Of course, it could also be seen as just a fancy videotaping of a live play, in that regard, too. (That at least makes the memorization of such a long stretch of lines only slightly less impressive.)

When playing Scrabble under various influences (coconut rum, for instance), it's perfectly acceptable to play "PQRSTU" as a word. Any five-or-more consecutive letters of the alphabet, actually, are allowed, I believe. In fact, the same board also had "VWXYZ". Yes, it was on the triple word score, but the aforementioned influences preclude the actual tallying of points.

Vanilla ice cream is as popular as it is, in my opinion, only because it's pretty much white and "plain" looking. If vanilla ice cream were blue, or brown, it would sell much less. But because it looks natural, it's a popular flavor. I'm not playing the race card on this.

Was the Legion of Doom modeled after the Superdome amidst the Louisiana swamps?

If you carve your name in a pumpkin, you have to be wary of any letters that have holes in them. For instance, and "o" won't look like an o without some creative carving, as it would just be a hole.

In college on a calculus exam, I had to draw a picture of a duck. And then for more points, compute some line integral around the duck. This required me to erase the eyeball inside the duck I had drawn, because, of course, this prevents the line integral from automatically being equal to zero.

I saw a paperback version of the first Harry Potter book last night, and was stunned by how skinny it seemed. I thought perhaps it'd been divided into smaller books (part 1, part 2, etc....).

Is the Genesis concert next weekend?

That's what I was asked this morning while showering. The answer, of course, is
FUCK!

It was last night.

Oops. That's $150 I'll never get back. Not only did both of us completely forget, but I lost two sets of tennis (6-8, 7-9) to a friend of mine when I should have been driving to Hartford.

And...we were discussing concerts coming up....my friend is one of like 20 million people in the lottery trying to get Led Zeppelin tickets. I mentioned going to see VH next month....and never did it occur to me that I had Genesis tickets for a show starting in about an hour and a half.

I'm "cloning" a brew called Fat Tire Amber Ale. The brewmaking store puts together all the ingredients you need to make famous and not-so-famous beers, so you don't have to work too hard on ingredient-buying. I have no idea if this beer's any good. Each raw ingredient is awful, of course, so hopefully it'll all come together in the end. I had to run out to buy cheesecloth to make a homemade grain bag -- the first step is to steep the grains in water like a giant tea bag. I thought about using an old sock, and actually until I found the cheesecloth at the store, I almost bought a mesh ironing board cover to use.

I could definitely envision someone marketing a beer called "Old Sock"...

Apple season

Apple picking should commence this weekend. The wife makes a f-tastic "Dutch Apple" cheesecake. Our friends coming over the following weekend will be well fed.

Picking fruit at an orchards or farm always takes way less time than it seems like it should. I think hey, a nice trip outside and stuff, but really, you have all the apples/strawberries/blueberries you could ever need in like 15 minutes. So then it's off to the farm stand. I often go to this local place to pick them. They sponsor what is supposed to be a great Sunday breakfast, but I don't know anyone who's gone to it.

My dad is resurrecting his annual Octoberfest beer party this year. It'll be held at my cousin's house, since my parents downsized their house. Usually people hit wherever they find a bunch of microbrews, and we bring them over, try them all, and then judge the best, worst, weirdest-tasting, best label, etc....winner gets like, a beer-a-day calendar, or a mug. Dad cooks up a spread, and we all watch football. (Except for my dad's brother, who's relegated to the basement to watch NASCAR. I don't understand how my dad's brother can be from Alabama when everyone else in the family is from Connecticut.) I always like to be dropped off/picked up. Otherwise, I gotta loiter around the house to sober up, which means my mom comes home from her day of exile before I've left...which of course leads to at least the second degree, if not the third.

I may whip up a home brew to enter this year. I should go buy ingredients this week to have it ready within 5-6 weeks.

I got Seattle right in my suicide pool last week. This week, a certain team from a certain Midwestern town that starts with a C, ends with an O, and in the middle has "HICAG". (Da Bears.) Actually, I never liked the George Wendt episodes of the Superfans as much, compared to the original one with Joe Mantegna. Although there's nothing like Polish sausage substitute to ward off that fourth heart attack, I suppose. (And don't get me started about them trying to use the same bit with the Bulls.)

Wednesday of this week I was promised a new printer either that day or yesterday. I'm going to wait this one out and see how long it takes for the boss to come through. I got an old, used HP LaserJet 4 to use here, and I think it's just about out of toner.

What's better?

Laughing at the phone ringing, because I'm not going to pick it up? Or rather, being pissed and giving the phone the finger while it rings?

Anyway, I've been swamped at work and I hate it.

We took the kids to Old Sturbridge Village just over the Mass. border from Connecticut over the weekend. It's a re-enactment of a New England village in the early 1800s. Farm animals, a blacksmith, a cooper (barrelmaker, apparently), a one-room schoolhouse, a meetinghouse, old school printshop (the guy there was a jerk when Erika pointed out the plasma TV on the wall for educational stuff, how it didn't seem so old-fashioned), so it's like a museum. History of lighting, dresswear, and guns from the era. Actually the corsets and guns were in the same building. Hmmm....

Closing up the pool. Added the chemicals, but the water level didn't drain fast enough before dark last night -- very slowly....so that the pipes and stuff don't freeze and crack from expansion over the winter. If there's any daylight when I get home, I'll tie the cover on. (And work has me thinking about tying one on, of a different sort.)

TiVoed (This is a verb, even if you're using a generic digital video recorder, I suppose...) the Patriots on Sunday, watched it in an hour....every play, none of the crap in between. It saved me from some of the announcers' blah-blah-blah. Wow, Phil Simms sounds stupid in small sound bites. And of course, I overheard the score at my aunt's birthday party that afternoon. I was then told you're supposed to announce upon arriving, that you are taping the game for later, because it's not their fault for not knowing. Knowing the score probably saved me time, less to be worried about while watching the game in progress...

15 people in my suicide pool at work, and after one week, it's already down to 11. Seattle was a good pick, I suppose. Haven't looked at this week yet, though.

Anyone remember Bang Tango? I've got the Psycho Cafe album on MP3 playing now. I thought they were pretty good "back in the day"...you know, for what was essentially a hair band.

The bitter end...

9-7. Stranded on second base in the last inning as the final fly ball out floated to center field behind me. Their lineup did more damage than ours did. I had probably my best defensive game of the year, with 3 really good catches (2 on dives, one on a full sprint) plus a couple of others....tracked down the bombs over others' heads to keep the batter from scoring an inside-the-park homer. But every error in the infield got compounded in such a big game.

Afterwards, ten of us went out to a Tex-Mex restaurant. I had chicken enchiladas in molé sauce. I really like molé sauce....this one wasn't spicy enough for my liking though. And the Bud Light in the pitchers was flat. (Molé sauce is tomato-based with chili peppers and unsweetened chocolate.)

I paid my $20 share of the bill with some of the bet money on our office suicide pool. That's an NFL contest where everyone chooses some team to win one game this week. If the team you pick wins its game, you keep playing. If they lose, you're out. The winners survive to next week, where you pick another game, with the caveat being you can't pick a team you've already chosen. This makes it so that you can't ride the best team in the league all season long. After 5 weeks, the field of 12 or 13 will most likely be down to 2 or 3. We'll see. I have Seattle to beat Tampa Bay on Sunday.

David, is there anything comparable in the Aussie rules leagues?

The best part about running the pool is having spending cash over the length of the contest....I can always later write a check to the winner, or make a single trip to the ATM to make up the cash I've used on stuff like lunch.

Tim Wakefield of the Red Sox pitched last night, and because the game was decided after he was removed for a substitute, he was neither the winning or losing pitcher last night. The first time all season he wasn't credited with either. This is a statistical rarity for a pitcher to go this far into the season without a "no decision".

Anyway, I bring this up because when I was living at home doing some graduate school at UConn, I used to use a 4-track tape recorder to make some homemade music with my guitars and synthesizer (with built-in drum machine). Sometimes I'd take the time to write well-structured songs, and other times I'd just mess around and layer stuff on top of it. One such song I wrote was called "Clemens got a No Decision" which was based on a Red Sox game I had on in my room at the time. Roger Clemens left the game down a run, but the Red Sox tied it up before losing later (I think they lost 4-2 to Detroit, although baseball-almanac.com doesn't support that.) Anyways, lyrics have always been optional, an afterthought at most, to my stuff....so I started rambling on one of the tracks that although Clemens got a No Decision, that you shouldn't get a no decision -- like me the singer suggesting people make up their minds in their life -- make a decision, one way or the other. Anyway, not one of my best songs. I think the song after it featured me saying stuff backwards, like Stairway to Heaven -- just f'ing around with the tape recorder.

practically fall

Okay, the equinox isn't upon is yet...so I'm leaving the sweaters packed away for now. One good thing about wearing sweaters in the fall is that it's less ironing to do. Shirts with nothing worn over them need to be ironed....anything under a sweater can be "as is".

Haven't gotten to see too much of the US Open....back in 1994, I had knee surgery and was laid up for a month, so I watched it every day, and so I usually watch at least one night every year, almost to say thanks to it for giving me something to do as a freakin' invalid that year. (I flew off an ATV and cracked open my patella upon landing....two stainless steel screws are still in there...yes I had a helmet on my head but I guess that wasn't the important spot....lastly, everyone who sees my scar wonders what ligament damage I had -- none, and also why the incision isn't straight -- it is, but the skin break from impact wasn't straight.) A couple of years ago I got tickets to a day session the first week in New York. First, ALWAYS buy the tickets ahead of time online, so you can save an hour in line. Second, if you have a softball playoff game later than night, try to leave early enough to get home. We saw almost a full match, and got to walk around, but we only got to enjoy about 2.5 hours. After the US Open, I convinced friends to drag me out mini-golfing, pretty much hopping around on one foot. And by late October, I was beating them at one-on-one basketball again.

We won the softball game in the 10th inning, and then won the division championship right after. The overall league/town championship is this Thursday.

My mother-in-law's chain saw was brought out to take down some dead trees in our front yard, but it only started up once. We had to call customer service to get a replacement user's manual emailed to us. Probably something stupid, but who knows. Anyways, this meant more work with an ax. The handle to the ax is now split a bit...it seems cedar trees have pretty hard wood. It's interesting enough to smell the cedar as I build up a pile of dead wood in the back of the house....cedar's supposed to be a moth repellent, no? So no moths in the yard then? Anyway, one tree is still suspended from the bittersweet vines above, so it's just kind of leaning in the yard. That's going to be a problem. Once most of the trees are down, I plan to rent a woodchipper or something and mulch them all up.

Flipped on the TV Saturday night to see the new Red Sox guy Clay Buchholz with a no-hitter through five. I would have kept it on, but since the Sox had gotten no-hit through 5 and 6 innings earlier in the week in New York, I just assumed Baltimore would have gotten a hit soon enough, too.

What would happen if.... (8/29 edition)

....private delivery companies (such as DHL, FedEx, or UPS) got sued by the United States Postal Service for their perhaps "unauthorized" use of ZIP codes for routing packages? Doesn't the USPS have some sort of intellectual property claim to the numbers as used to mark regions of cities?

There was a very funny sketch on the old Laugh-In show back in the 60's making fun of ZIP codes when they first came out. They went digit-by-digit showing how it allowed the post office to find exactly where the letter was supposed to go, starting on a countrywide basis and slowly zeroing in until the last digit -- Cincinnati, Ohio. And of course, they pointed out that the city and state were written pretty clearly in large letters on the envelope itself, so why was this fancy number system needed?

[On a side Laugh-In note, they would do "news of the future" bits where Dan Rowan would read the news from 20 years in the future....1988...and he starts "President Ronald Reagan...blah blah blah" The audience is hysterical, but I was watching it on a Nick at Nite rerun IN 1988....so I was totally floored by it.]

One thing we have here at work in the kitchen is an instant-hot water dispenser. Good for tea, I suppose, but I use it also for hot cocoa. You know, for those days where they run the air conditioning even though it's only 61 degrees out. And, not only is it good for making the cocoa, the hot water is the only thing that can dissolve the dried-on sediment from the previous mugful. It can be a couple of weeks in between servings, so the bottom of the mug (which I keep at my desk, a 24-ounce Scooby-Doo "mystery brew" model) gets brown and gunky.

I'm so bugged. I got tickets for Van Halen in Boston for 10/30. I don't mind the drive up, but sure enough, yesterday I get an email that they've added a show here in Connecticut on the fifth of that month. So it would have saved an hour on the ride to the show. The CT show is a Friday, so being out late isn't a big deal...it's a weekend my kids are with their mom....and finally, as my friend has mentioned, who knows if Eddie and Dave will have a big fight and cancel the rest of the tour at some point -- the sooner you can seem them live, the better.

One of my favorite things to do when a spell-checker is turned on is to right-click and view suggestions from the program. For instance, Scooby in the paragraph above is underlined and I'm given four alternatives: Booby, Booby's, Jacoby, or Jacoby's. I can just imagine the porn possibilities of a character named Booby-Doo. Oh, and the alternatives for "Doo" are Dew, Du, Doro, too, or coo. Hey Blogger, wouldn't "Do" be a legitimate word one might *accidentally* type for Doo? Assuming, of course, that I didn't actually mean Scooby-Doo.

Speaking of porn possibilities, one evening a few years ago my ex-boss and I were waiting to start a poker night at the office. Instead of going home, we had a couple of hours to kill....so I suggested a sort of "Internet Mad Libs" -- where you take turns picking a word and going to the site "www.that word.com" and seeing what comes up. Kinda like, first one to end up at a porn site loses. He lost with "gentleman" as apparently www.gentleman.com is a porn site. But you can go on for a while with random words. www.orange.com www.dishwasher.com www.bandana.com....let me know what you can find.

We had our fantasy football draft last night. I actually got first pick. So that means LaDanian Tomlinson is destined to rip up his knees very soon in order to curse me, I suppose. Yahoo's site ranks players, and a very futile exercise while waiting for my turn was to go to the bottom of the rankings and work my way UP the list until I found a name I recognized. Believe me, the fourth- and fifth-best players on really bad teams aren't exactly "household names."

My job requires me to review companies' census data -- names, dates of birth and hire, etc. It's always interesting to see some names....especially when they're obviously ethnic names which, when read in English....well....there was a guy, perhaps Vietnamese, whose last name I'll leave off, but had the first/middle name combo of "Fuk Yue". This perhaps can never be topped.

The parent trap!

First, on the vegetable front. We harvested our lone cucumber. Nine inches long and pretty fat. We're going to see if any others take off, now that the one big one is no longer hording the nutrients absorbed by the plant. We've called off the corn as a bust. The stalks' growth stunted at about 4 feet tall a couple of months ago. We found some two-inch ears with kernels on them...they looked both water-logged AND shriveled....so there was no hope. I've harvested 4 cayenne peppers...one of them is in my snack bag of Cheez-Its, a subtle flavoring perhaps -- or they'll get soggy over the course of the day before lunch. Of course, the most important thing is to wash my hands thoroughly after handling it. And we have three watermelons, but right now none bigger than a baseball. My guess is that the plants will have to be brought inside to mature before the first frost comes. (probably 6 weeks or so for that, so we'll see....)

My older daughter had a sleepover Saturday night -- first time at my house, so that was fun. Three additional eight-year-olds, along with my two kids. Five screaming girls! Keep 'em fed, and you keep 'em quiet :) Really, we made homemade pizza Saturday night, and then there was cake. It was a muddy cake -- chocolate with chocolate-mint frosting, with gummy worms buried in the cake and popping their heads out. Nightcrawlers, anyone? Sunday morning was waffles for breakfast and then hot dogs for lunch. Only one kid tried Erika's favorite topping -- crunchy peanut butter on a hot dog. (It's really good, actually! Especially if the dogs are a little on the burned side from the grill.)

The kids did a lot of swimming, and also some croquet and some soccer. Two of the girls are twins. Freckle-faced cherubic twins -- they both look like Lindsay Lohan, in her pre-skank days. One of those things where you want to say to the father upon dropping them back off, "Your girls are sweet. You may want to steer them clear of cocaine before it's too late!"

One last tale. I am currently navigating Erika through The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She plays, I tell her where to go....a practice I mastered with my brother on Zelda III for Super Nintendo all those years ago. I actually won Zelda 2 on the old Nintendo system, but the more complex the controlling mechanism, the worse I do. The mind, however, remains sharp :)

It ain't over 'til....

...well, I'm not sure.

Softball playoffs started last night. Top seed, 11-1 DataEase versus fourth seed 5-7 Urban Roots. We get there, and again the town of Trumbull has neglected to care for the field. A good 2 inches of rainwater pooled up in the right-handed batter's box, plus another inch or so just in front of second base. So, as was the case a couple of weeks ago when we played this team in the regular season, one of their guys scurried over to his parents' house to get two shovels and a rake so that we could groom the field and make it playable. If nothing else, it would be good and soft for sliding into 2nd base, rather than dried-out hard dirt.

We went down 5-0 in the first inning. We shoulda gotten out of it unscathed, as the LARGE woman on their team who plays 3rd base decided to try to score on a ball that bounced away from the first basewoman on our team. I don't remember who threw it to home, but the ball went over the catcher's head, and so she was safe. A similar play two batters later -- the pitcher getting in the way in front of the catcher, and the shortstop overthrew both of them amidst the confusion. Just awful.

Anyways, we got it back to 5-2 in the bottom of the first after a RBI singles for me and the woman behind me, but then I was stranded at third. We got single runs in the next couple of innings, gave up one more to have it be 6-4, and then tied it in the 6th, I believe. We play 7 innings, so at that point, all we had to do was "win a one-inning game". In the 7th we had a runner at third with one out....kind of a slap hitter up with a fly-ball hitting woman after him. I was coaching third and I sent the runner on contact. It was a grounder to shortstop, they threw home and their pitcher actually grabbed the ball instead of the catcher (like our team, we trust the guy pitcher to catch it cleanly, rather than the woman catcher) and made a swipe tag about 7-10 feet in front of home. I don't care if I got yelled at for sending him, I think it was the right play. Anyways, the woman up next did fly out to left, end of the 7th.

Eighth inning, I lead off after we hold them. There was no way I was putting one over their heads, they were very deep in right field (almost to a one-ton blocking sled that the high school's football team left waaaaaay out there that was too heavy to move, but also too deep to really be a problem getting in the way). I hit a line drive on one hop deep to the second basewoman....and beat the throw by almost a full step. Now I'm excited, because I'm one of our fastest runners. But I start hearing my team say I was out. Honestly, I'm like, "no I'm not" and I return to first base ready for the next hitter. The other team starts yelling at me, and finally the old coot umpire makes an out call. WHAT?! Needless to say, we had the bases loaded with TWO outs later in the inning (and I'd have scored before THAT to win the game if I'd been called correctly safe), and the next guy up hits a screaming liner that their left fielder jumped up to catch just above his head.

Ninth inning, they get the bases loaded with 2 outs, but I catch a liner in the gap to end the threat. Our left fielder starts jumping up and down all excited for the catch, but I'm still pissed about the out call at first. I go back to coach third again -- even though I got the guy thrown out at the plate in the 7th, I'm very good at making sure the runners hear me. With one out, that same guy hits a single to right and runs to second as they bobble it. I yelled at him to come to third, but I think he peeked back and thought not to. (I thought maybe he'd been afraid to trust me, but I found out later he had trouble in the soft dirt in front of second, which slowed him down.) Why is this important? Because we get another short single, so it's first and third with one out. Next guy pops up to the shortstop, 2 outs. Then the woman who I said always hits fly balls (as in the 7th) hits one to left....the left fielder breaks back at first, but then scurries forward and dives. And did NOT catch it. The umpire didn't say anything, which is what he's supposed to do -- you yell "foul" if it's foul, but otherwise just point inside the foul line for a fair ball. The left fielder had trapped the ball and then held it up to make it look like he caught it....and the old coot bought his story.

At this point, the woman who coaches our team is screaming at the umpire, who answered with something like, "what do you want, I can't see out there?" as it was getting quite dark. This was returned with, "if you can't see, then call the game!" and the always mature, "okay, it's called!" followed that.

So now I think we're supposed to play next Thursday, resume the game in the top of the 10th inning. I'm sure the other semifinal is finished, so we have to work out all the logistics of where will we play...
a) Do we finish on the same field? If so, there might not be time to get in the second game against the winner from the other semifinal.
b) Do we play on a field with lights? Do we resume the game on a different field? OR, do we finish our game on the same field, and then the winners drive across town to the field with lights?

In any event, we were supposed to play the championship game on Tuesday, but now there's talk that we'll play next Thursday instead (which will just push the season later into the year, after school starts up, and daylight hours get shorter and shorter)....On the bright side, we may not have to reschedule my fantasy football draft after all (previously scheduled for 8 pm on the internet Tuesday night).

I know this....if we hold them in the 10th, I'm going to chop a slow roller at their large 3rd basewoman and dare her to bend over to pick it up and throw it across the diamond to throw me out. Oh right, I wonder if we'll have the same umpire, too.

Stats for the season:

28 for 39, 20 runs scored, 22 RBI (.718 average, 4 HR)
3 for 4 in the all-star game with a triple
1 for 4 (really 2, except for that damned call!) so far in the playoffs -- I hit a hard liner that was caught, and then had a bad at bat where I grounded out...the dreaded "thinking at the plate instead of just swinging" problem.

Let's compare that to my men's league team: 22 for 44, 7 runs scored, 7 RBI (and considering 2 were HR -- that means I only scored 5 runs on my 20 other hits....and that's while hitting 3rd in the order)....God, that team was so bad.

What would happen if.... (8/22 edition)

....Siskel (RIP), Ebert, or Roeper (the new Siskel, really), were double-jointed like Carol in the UK? This would make their modus operandi of movie reviewing more trifurcated. Thumbs up, thumbs down, or the rare thumbs sideways!!

A popular concept at work is for somebody to unload leftover food in the company lunchroom. These leftovers are usually in the form of extra Halloween candy.....large sheet cakes that were half unfinished from the weekend....or a tin of cookies. I say, let's incorporate a broader range of choices. I want to see somebody bring in the uneaten half of a steak. Perhaps some hot dogs that didn't get finished up. The key, really, is to make sure they don't look picked over. Cut the steak cleanly with a sharp knife, so it looks like it was a properly unserved piece of meat, suitable for being picked over in the lunchroom, after all. How about a bowl of chicken wings? Meat doesn't seem as common, on the list of foods you find in the lunch room.

Anybody who's ever watched cartoons on TV is familiar with the dreaded rolling snowball down a hill. The protagonist runs as fast as he can to avoid it, but the snowball gets bigger and bigger. Nobody EVER steps to the side and lets the snowball pass. Not only would the character avoid becoming incorporated into the snowball in a horrific crash, but it would offer the opportunity to interact with the audience, lauding his own knowledge of three dimensions.

I just heard Merv Griffin died this past week. He created Wheel of Fortune for TV. A couple of times on this show, I got the puzzle with NO letters, just by the shape of the words before anyone had spun. The first time I did this was for a place, District of Columbia. Anyway, the categories are becoming more and more bizarre, as though they're afraid to ever use the same "phrase" or "person" again that they might have used 10 years earlier in an episode. One odd category that I sort of like is "before & after" where you might have to solve for something like "The Battle of Bunker Hill Street Blues". That's not as good as the one I came up with a few years ago -- "Microsoft Word To Your Mother". Now, aside from the fact that the lexicon of Vanilla Ice isn't particularly popular any more....I wonder how one submits puzzle ideas to the show, and if they would pay someone $100 for it. That might be a good idea for the producers, actually.

Alice in Chains blew Velvet Revolver off the stage last night. If nothing else, I hope Scott Weiland realizes how lucky he is not to be dead like Layne Staley. We all lost ten years' worth of AiC tunes thanks to Staley's drug-infused death....and Stone Temple Pilots kinda had some of the same problems for a while there with Weiland. Yes, we might still all be listening to grunge! :) oh wait, no smileys allowed in discussing grunge...that's not happy music.

One website I use for work a lot apparently requires me to change my password every 36 days. I have no idea why that number, but I've kept a record the last year as to when I'm prompted to change it. My favorite workaround? Change it, and then use the voluntary "change password" option to change it right back to the regular one. I know some places track your password history and won't let you re-use an old one. Not these guys, though. (It's actually a "Fortune 100" company, I've overheard.)

That reminds me, I love hearing when things are praised for being "Top N" in a category, where N is a bizarre number like 15 or 30. (As in, one of the top 15 golf courses on the east coast.) Clearly, the actual ranking is probably N or N-1 at best. If you were ranked number 4, you would describe yourself as one of the top 5....not one of the top 20, top 50, or top 100, right? And you might not say "one of the top 4" because with such an un-round number such as 4....you're not fooling anyone that you're anything BUT number four. So I'm guessing that the "Fortune 100" company above would NOT qualify as a "Fortune 50" company.

If the government had any forethought about computers, they would not have allowed ZIP codes and social security numbers to start with 0. Yes, you can format the Excel cells to show the leading zero, but that's more work than would be necessary if they'd started them with 1. Some of the best ones are SSNs from Vermont, which start usually 008- or 009-, so you have to watch for two extra zeros. If left in numeric format, those zeros just go away.

When my original dentist retired, my records were transferred to another guy in the same town. I'd never had a cavity, but the first time I see the new guy, he finds one on my partially-erupted wisdom tooth, and suggests I get them pulled. Sure -- stupid wisdom tooth, ruining my perfect oral history -- get out, and take your friends with you -- the old guilt by association idea. Anyway, after they're pulled by a dental surgeon, I kept them and wanted to bring them back the next year to have him identify the cavity. I forgot them, so it was actually 2 years later before I brought them to him. Gotta give him credit, he knew exactly which tooth was which, and where the cavity was. He said that in dental school, the students would have to walk around a table of random teeth and identify them all -- including the red herrings of animal teeth thrown in there for fun.

The Connecticut "shore"

Okay, so my mom and dad are renting this house at the beach for two weeks, and mom really wanted us to come down a day, so we did Saturday night.

First things first....as you can see from this picture, Connecticut isn't exactly known for its beaches. Sure, there's about 100 miles of land along the Atlantic Ocean, but since Long Island sorta "blocks" the real ocean from abutting the state, we pretty much get a 10-mile wide bathtub. Waves are generally very small....and wow, lots of rocks. Not exactly the white sands of Aruba, let's just say. And the water never gets up much past 70 degrees (21 for you metrickers) so it's not anywhere near as good as say, a swimming pool.

The other reason I don't really like beach-vacations is the crowdedness. The shoreline was jammed tight with little lots each with a house on them....so there's no privacy, and you're lucky if you can drive in 3rd gear for any stretch. I much prefer going to a lake, like Maine or Vermont. The seclusion is better, and swimming in fresh water is better than salt water....except it's easier to float in salt water. I'd rather look out the windows and see mountains and nature, rather than rows of houses. That's too much like being at home!

Anyways, we missed our chance to go to a clam shack because they only took cash, and my dad didn't notice that the 2nd clam shack we passed DID take VISA. So we ended up going a little inland Saturday night for dinner to a regular restaurant. I had angel hair pasta with white clam sauce and shrimp. Totally floored my mom, who'd never seen me eat seafood in 36 years. Of course, three hours later all I could taste in my burps was the garlic. (Of COURSE an all-fried dinner woulda been cheaper, but hey, they were paying anyways!)

The little "beach association" had some sort of gala Saturday night on the water....a cheesy DJ playing gunk like the Macarena, and a bonfire that smelled like whatever had been loaded on the wooden pallets that they used to feed the fire. P-U. The some fireworks a little further inland....but not much further, wow were they loud. Tried to get some pictures, but who needs to see a bunch of blurry colored dots amidst a black sky? Not exactly moment-capturing. Oh well.

What would happen if.... (8/15 edition)

...the prophet Muhammad made a Mini-Me version of himself, and then this Mini Muhammad gave birth to a college football player? (This is a joke, because Darren McFadden, star player for the University of Arkansas, is the son of a woman named Mini Muhammad.)

Many people know that horrible drivers from Massachusetts are, um, affectionately referred to as Massholes. A friend of mine came up with the term FRID to describe "F***ing Rhode Island Drivers", and then another friend topped that with CRUDs -- "Connecticut's Ridiculously Unskilled Drivers". This is very accurate, I've noticed, after doing some out-of-state driving. The biggest problem with CT drivers is that they don't KNOW THEIR LANE. Too often there are slow cars in the fast lane and fast cars in the slow lane. It shouldn't be that hard to get out of the way when someone's on your tail....I know I do. Of course, part of the problem may be that Connecticut's highways have a lot of left-side exit ramps, which requires slowing vehicles to be on the wrong side of the lane layout. Connecticut often adds a third lane on the right for "slow moving vehicles". It's really for trucks on hills. Not only do they not use the lane, but I've found it a great way to get by not only the trucks, but the people that go left to pass the trucks, but don't really build up enough speed to pass the trucks and therefore cause the passing lane to jam up. And my all time favorite is when I'm minding my own business in the middle lane of three....a car gets on the highway and then for no reason at all moves into the middle lane, when there was nobody for them to pass from the right lane...AND they aren't going as fast as the cars currently IN the middle lane. Like there's some STIGMA to being in the far right lane they can't deal with.

I heard the Eagles' song "Take It to the Limit" the other day on the radio. Two of the lines are:
"You can spend all your time making money.
You can spend all your love making time."
I say, complete the cycle....you can spend all your MONEY making LOVE....at least if you go to the red-light district in the city! :)

I think, technically, that when sugar is added to lemonade, that counts as an artificially-sweetened beverage. I know people will make a point of decrying the use of aspartame or acesulfame potassium in food/drinks as "artificial sweeteners". But here's the thing. Unless the drink is marketed as a sugar-flavored drink, then adding the sugar artificially sweetens it. Naturally sweetened lemonade should mean relying on the sugar in the lemons themselves....of which there's not very much, obviously. How about coffee? Coffee isn't sweet -- however you make it sweeter, it's done by artificially introducing a sweetening ingredient. Again, naturally-sweetened coffee should mean the sugar in the coffee bean itself (good luck).

For the last four summers, I have used MLB.tv's subscriptions to watch baseball games on my computer at work during the day. The past couple of years, they have put up an MLB logo over where the local broadcasters' advertisements would be. I'm sure they don't want some furniture store in Kansas City getting free worldwide advertising just because the game's being streamed over the Internet. The big problem with this is that if you start streaming the game during a commercial, you have NO idea what the sound level is until they game resumes and they resume the broadcast feed. The volume of the feeds vary greatly from game to game, so I alternately have to quickly turn the volume down (oops, sorry!)....or crank the thing up just to hear it at all (which of course, affects the level if I switch to a different game).

We harvested the one carrot from our garden that didn't dry out this spring....it didn't do too hot, either, because our thriving cayenne pepper plants kinda took over the spot. The carrot was green in a couple of spots, and also had a 45-degree bend in it. The part furthest down in the soil was orange and very yummy, but only about one bite's worth. And of course, last night I forgot to REALLY wash off my hands after eating some of a cayenne pepper....and then went to remove a contact lens.

New York City has five boroughs....and yet, it seems like only addresses in Manhattan are written out as "New York, NY 10001"....otherwise I mail stuff a lot to "Bronx, NY 10455" or "Staten Island, NY 10314", etc....I never put "Manhattan, NY" on an envelope. Nor do I put "New York, NY" for address in Queens....seems like I should be able to, as long as the ZIP code is right.

Here's a good topic for a book to arouse ire and anger: Someone should examine the world's major religions, and then perform the following analysis: What's the probability this particular religion is "correct"? Each chapter could dissect some different faith....Chapter one, how correct is Judaism? Chapter two....the Hare Krishnas....Chapter three, the ancient Greek gods -- what are the chances that following THEM is the "way"?

There's a brand of long-distance shipping trucks that just have the big word YELLOW spelled out on the truck...but the truck appears to me to be orange. I should take a picture next time I see one, and put it up for debate. I used to get into arguments over whether a rug at the home-decorating store I worked in was more BLUE versus being more GREEN. Could be the same thing here....I used to debate with my ex-wife whether Winnie the Pooh was yellow or orange, at least the particular stuffed one in our house. Perhaps we see the same color and just interpret it differently -- like, where do YOU draw the line between yellow and orange? Like a line of demarcation on a rainbow to distinguish where yellow ends and orange begins.

And with that....back to the grind....

Was that English?

I hate phone calls at work. In part because I'm stuck with MassMutual's phone system that doesn't have caller ID on it. And I've been blindsided too many times by our clients' employees just calling up randomly because their HR person gave them my number....asking stuff I can't answer.

(The worst part is that I'm NOT a MassMutual employee. My boss is, but I manage his side business for him, and the deal is that I have to work in this stupid insurance agency surrounded by a bunch of Willy Loman types pestering people on the phone to be their financial planners....)

Anyway, another reason I hate the phone is when you get somebody that doesn't speak English well, or natively. Through no fault of their own, I am absolutely ABYSMAL at trying to parse together broken English or English with thick accents when it's spoken to me. If you want to write down your message, I'll figure it out, no problem. But I'm awful when someone stands there and tries to say something with a thick accent.

For instance, one of the back-office people from MassMutual's headquarters is a nice little old lady from Russia. And when she calls me, I panic, because I'll understand about 40% of what she says. So almost all the time, she emails me, and it works great.

Today, a woman called, and I think she says she's trying to fill out the paperwork to get her just-died husband's 401(k) money paid out to her. I had her repeat full sentences. The phone line was crystal clear, but I swear, I had no idea what she said. Maybe it's a learning disability on my end or something.....I certainly tip the scales heavy in some other categories on the good side, this could be something to balance me out?! Because I was tempted to say, "Was that English?" I had no reason to think it was bad grammar....she certainly sounded confident in whatever the chirp-like quality to her voice was explaining to me. So it wasn't like she was fumbling for words -- I had no idea what the words were, that's all.

So how does this manifest itself in me? Maybe a slight trepidation towards phone calls -- although that's mostly the blindsided-by-angry-people-without-warning effect. The real effect is that even though I got straight A's in Spanish classes four years in high school (and a couple of courses in college), I will do anything to avoid actually trying to speak it. I would be too ashamed to sound as incomprehensible and wrongly-accented in their language, as others sound in mine.

I always have thought that I'm going to vacation somewhere that speaks Spanish, and I'm going to bring along a pad of paper to write all my requests in perfect grammar, like some sort of mute. Anything that shows a weakness in my own person, must be avoided!

They used to call me Crazy Joe, now they can call me Bat man.

Down Under David has been inquiring what exactly was being delivered to the house, a birthday present from my brother in Florida.

Turns out I got a baseball bat. Sure enough, it's not something I'd want to get hit in the head with. It's kind of a blackish-green color, so that's cool. I have to take the sticker of Todd Helton off it.

Strange present choice....I don't think it's legal for the softball league I'm in -- bats for that have to be approved by some softball governing body, I believe. The handle's thinner than the softball bats I use, too....So this might be one I save for going to the batting cages with the automatic pitching machines.

For my tenth birthday, my mom bought me a wood bat in Little League, an official Rod Carew model. (You may know Rod Carew from either his 7 American League batting titles, or from the Adam Sandler song, since Carew, and not OJ Simpson, is a Jew -- "he converted".) Anyways, I still have that bat, but it's too small to use as an adult. Of course, as a kid it was too heavy for game use, and then we all started using aluminum bats around that time, anyway. So I still have it and actually had to break it out for a softball game last year when nobody else on the team even brought a wooden bat -- which we're required to use to restrict distances on balls in flight.

Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, he took an ultrasound of my shrinked up thyroid -- I take synthroid pills to overcome that. Anyways, since it's the same gel and stuff that pregnant women have for ultrasounds, I asked him if it were a boy or girl thyroid. After having to explain to him the joke about the sex of my thyroid, he said it was a boy, as he could "see a small penis." Let's leave the "and where was he looking, again?" jokes to ourselves, thank you all.

Hopefully the rain will go away for the weekend, I have to spend my Home Depot card on stones and put in the rest of our front walkway.

Nichole's questions...

Normally I don't get caught up in the "pass it on" type blogging fun some others have. I tried tagging people a few months ago....yeah, how'd that turn out...

Anyways, I signed up for what Dr. Nichole referred to as "Krystyn's questions." Simple enough rules:


* Leave a comment saying anything random. Something totally out of the blue. Whatever.
* I'll then post five questions for you. Customized!
* You post the answers to your questions on your blog.
* Include these rules and offer to ask participants questions.

Ok, birthday boy. Here are your questions:

1. What's your favorite food?
A bacon cheeseburger on a fresh poppy-seed roll. Cooked medium....still pink and very juicy without feeling raw and gross in my mouth. The cheese may be either cheddar or American (which one Canadian friend has taught me, isn't a real cheese, but just a processed cheese).

2. What was the best birthday present you got?
Probably a fifty-dollar gift card to Home Depot from Mom and Dad. It's been a couple of months since we worked on our front walkway. This should get us the rest of the stones we need to finish...assuming they've not been discontinued. The style is "bellacobble buff". Erika says there's something good she's buying for me, but it's not arrived yet! My brother says what he has sent from Florida (also not here yet) is something I don't want to get hit in the head with.

3. How much did you spend on your haircut and in what type of establishment did it occur? (that's only one question)
I went to a place called "Colton Joshua Salon", which is a remodeled former "Family Haircut Store" that changed ownership a few months ago here in Fairfield where I work. I paid $15 for the cut and left a $5 tip.

4. What kind of outdoors-y type games did you play with your friends when you were a kid?
Lots of wiffle ball. We had a great fenced-in yard for it. Kept track of all the statistics via tally marks after every at-bat. And real ball....run the bases, ghost runners....not just "you hit this far, it's a double" baloney. Then we'd do write-ups on the games and stick them on the refrigerator....next to the statistics like a real sports section to a newspaper.

5. Did you get any cheap lobster when you were in Maine?
I do not like it in a house. I do not like it with a mouse. Actually, I was a very fussy eater as a kid (or as my dad used to quote George Carlin, a "big pain in the ass at the dinner table"). They offered me baseball cards if I tried some when I was 12. I said okay, and had spasmic reactions every time I tried to swallow. Looking back, I wonder if it was an allergy thing....but I ended up spitting it out after a minute in my mouth. My parents gave in anyways (rare for them) for putting forth the effort. I re-tried lobster a couple of years ago, and didn't like it again.

So there's the deal...Feel free to leave a comment and then I'll get to make up questions for you.

The rain in Maine stays plainly as a pain...

One thing that Maine is known for is its blueberries. Here's one, from a single bush that grows along the lake shore amidst large rocks.



More importantly, though, is where we were. The lake is Upper Sysladobsis Lake in eastern central Maine. My grandfather built it (the cabin, not the lake!) in the 1950s, I believe, after their older cabin burned down. There's no electricity, but most everything runs on gas. There's a fridge and stove/range that haven't changed in fifty years, easily. Gas lamps that you have to be careful lighting, not to blow out the glass mantles. A couple of years ago Erika tried to make me a cake in the oven but it didn't cook very evenly. But it's easy to fry stuff up on the range part. I made bacon and eggs and pancakes Saturday and Sunday, for instance. Something about being at camp lets you say, "screw eating healthy!" although I did bring some fruit and nuts for snacks.

This year's birthday cake was finished off in Connecticut, but by the time she'd frosted it, it was like 9:30 pm, and the kids were in bed because we were getting up around 1:30 am to start driving. We took off around 2:10 from home and stopped in Augusta, Maine, at around 6:30 for breakfast at Friendly's. We got up to Lincoln, Maine around 9:30 or so and hit the grocery store for some last-minute beer. It takes about 45 minutes from Lincoln...the first 15 or so are regular road, but the last half hour is on unpaved dirt roads. It was dry up there, so even though I was in a little Nissan Sentra, I had no real issues with clearance over some of the rocky parts. A couple of loud bumps on the bottom of the car, but at 20 mph, they don't do any real damage.

So the kids changed out of their PJs and into their bathing suits. They have life vests that keep them afloat while swimming. I don't think they NEEDED them, but they don't have to worry about the depth of the lake or the gunky mossy bottom of the lake touching their feet that way, either.

On Friday the kids and Erika swam about a third of a mile and back with vests on to this island at the top.







Anyways, I had to help with yard maintenance. The original septic tank has rusted out, so there was a sinkhole that needed to be filled....a few trips in my uncle's pickup to haul dirt from a nearby quarry-like spot. In addition, I was finally instructed how to operate a chainsaw, as I was in charge of slicing up a cedar tree that was impacting the ability to pull down the driveway, and may also affect where the replacement septic tank goes once the permit is obtained. (I'm not sure how much of the operation is impacted by the Penobscot Indian sovereignty in the local areas. My uncle seems to be in okay with them.)

Anyways, we were all exhausted most of Thursday, so the good part of vacation started Friday. My uncle left, with instructions for cleaning up and locking the place. I took the boat out on the lake....there are a couple of clusters of cabins in spots, but mostly only a few isolated ones, or none at all. Very peaceful. There was a loon in the lake, I only got a half-decent picture of it....its song greeted us each morning. Friday evening, thunderstorms rolled in and rocked the place. The skies kept changing color from bright orange to purple to gray, and then once the really dark clouds came in, they opened up. High winds led me to need to bail out about 6 inches of water (mostly waves crashing in, rather than actual rainfall) the next morning.

Saturday we did a little day trip to Bangor. In part to re-load on things we needed -- paper towels, dishwashing soap -- stuff we didn't know that the camp was out of. Also, to see how much rain had collected on the dirt roads. Several puddles of varying sizes that required me to swerve back and forth on the roads....A guy on my fantasy baseball team who lives in New Brunswick and I had discussed meeting for lunch, but Canada had a three-day weekend, so he'd made other plans. Still, we got to see Stephen King's house in Bangor. It's nice, but very centrally located in the city. My camera batteries died out the first time we swung around the block (the master of horror strikes!!!), so we did swing around again and take a shot from my new cell phone. Erika was surprised someone of his stature chooses to live in a non-secluded area. I say, good for him! Between the two of us, we've read all his books. I read his book "Faithful", a running dialogue with the co-author about the 2004 Red Sox, and Erika's read everything else :) -- in fact, she's just re-read 1408 after seeing the movie.

Sunday was mostly cleaning, and we left around 11. One of my contacts had ripped Thursday, so I spent the rest of the weekend with my glasses on. That meant no sunglasses for the drive back west. Interstate 95 is also a nightmare in southern Maine and New Hampshire on Sunday afternoons, we learned last year. So my bright idea was to cut through northern Maine on back roads -- Route 2 from mid-Maine west through New Hampshire and Vermont, to cut down Route 91 south as the sun was setting. Much less traffic, and since the last 4 hours would be south, the sun wasn't an issue. All that was true, except the lack of a high-speed freeway added 2 hours to the middle of the trip! Ugh. Anyway, home around 9:30 for a well-needed shower and bedtime....and slice of birthday cake!

La policia!

We saw the Police last night. They were great. I didn't realize that Sting's actually pretty good on the bass. Only the trio, no backup musicians...that was also cool, although hearing no piano on "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" was a bit odd.

Parking was 15 bucks....cash only. There was a supervisor taking our $, and he was a prick about it, told us to do a u-turn, and they'd stop traffic to let us out when we told him we only had nine dollars in cash plus our checkbook. Well, they direct us out, and next thing you know, we're in another lane leading to a different parking area, where people have ALREADY paid. Serves the s.o.b. right!! :)

Too bad it took 50 minutes to get out of there after the show. It was at UConn's football stadium....several towns away from the campus, of course, because they only went division 1-A (Bowl subdivision) so that they could make money, so they put the stadium near Hartford instead of near the students. Almost entirely bleachers. Beer was expensive, of course.

So anyway, what a great show. They did pretty much every song you'd expect, and I don't think there was any Sting solo crap. Andy Summers looks a little bit like the hairstylist from "What Not to Wear" (the American version, Carol!) Sting was buff, and Stewart Copeland had a gray mop-top...and odd look for someone that old, but at least it looked like they were having fun.

Next time, though? I park somewhere else in East Hartford (I grew up in the next town over, so I know all the streets) and walk to the stadium.

This game is.....

Bonkers!

This was a game that I loved as a kid in the late 1970s. And unbelievably, my wife had a full copy of it when I met her! So now we force the kids to play it, instead of Monopoly, to the chagrin of my older daugther.

Here's a recap of the rules. You roll the dice, move, and then play a tile on the spot you land, that'll say something like "ahead 4" or "back 2". Then you do that instruction. You try to aim yourself to the scoring pods. There are also "lose" spaces on the board where you'll lose a point. First to 12 wins.

Because you can't go below zero, Erika's favorite thing to do, even more than winning, is to set traps. If she ends up on the Lose space, she'll deliberately play cards that lead people BACK to Lose. Roll a 5? Then she plays a "back 5" card and you lose another point. (Unless you're at zero.) Click on the picture of the board to see how whatever you'd roll from the Lose space would get you stuck BACK at the Lose space, except for only a couple of possibilities on the dice.

It's also fun when the cards instruct you to go to spaces that have OTHER cards.....Back 5 could lead to ahead 10, which then says back 15, which then says back 4, and you finally get a Score point. If the scoring pod is occupied, you also get to roll again, so you can possibly continue to accumulate points.

Here is the song from the commercial way back when, printed on the bottom of the box. (Courtesy of boardgamegeek.com.)




All right, I gotta pack. We leave at like 1 am tonight. What's that, 4 pm your time, David?