News and Updates

1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.

2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.

3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”

4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.

5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.

6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.

7. I have two long term project that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.

8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.

9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.

10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.