For Japan

Come what may, the sun still rises on the Land of the Rising Sun.

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Every so often I see an article about bad covers to SF novels, like this one, and I'm always disappointed that I own none of the books graced by those covers. Sigh!

:: So you make something craft-like, such as crocheting a hat. You want to sell it on your Etsy store, but you want someone to model it. Enter your less-than-thrilled boyfriend.

:: Do check out this graphical representation of the history of science fiction. It's a wonderful picture!

More next week!

Answers! More answers!

The Ask Me Anything! 2011 cavalcade marches on...although at the pace I'm setting for getting these replies out, it's probably more of a "mosey" than a "march".

Anyway, a reader who prefers to remain unidentified poses these:

When you are pressed for time, what do you do less of to compensate?

It depends on what I'm doing in terms of being pressed for time. If I'm at work and time is running short, then I have to prioritize my tasks, usually according to what degree of inconvenience it will be to a particular department in The Store if they don't get a certain job done that day. Of course, Management at The Store can weigh in heavily on this...if any of the store's highest ranking management persons directly tell me that Job X must be done by the end of business today, then barring something emergency-like happening, that's what gets shunted to the top of the priority list.

Mostly, though, I'm fairly good about identifying which tasks need to be done today and which can wait until tomorrow. Another factor is which tasks realistically can get done today and which have to wait; if it's after 2:00 pm and I'm in the last hour or two of work, anyone who comes to me with a job that I know is going to take more time than I have left gets put off to another day. So it comes down to considerations like "How badly are they affected if they have to wait for this?" and "How much time do I have to do this in the first place?"

Other times, though, the time crunch is felt at home. In that case, I'll identify what's likely to take the longest chunk of time out of the time I have available to me, and either focus on that specifically, or eliminate it if there are other things that are more important to get done.

What really destroys me, in terms of time management, is -- surprise surprise! -- the Internet. I get sucked into timewasters online with appalling regularity, and it can get downright depressing for me to realize just how long I've been clicking this link and reading that site without doing any writing, or reading the stack of books from the library, or what have you. What I'd really like to do (as I mentioned in another answer) is set up my home network so I can disconnect the laptop from the Internet when I need to buckle down and write. Yeah, I can just flip the Wi-Fi switch on the computer, but it's too easy to flip it back to ON again, reconnect, and launch a browser, "just to check the e-mail".

What do you like to cook the most? Who in your home does the most cooking? (And who does the clean up afterward?) Are you teaching your daughter to cook? (And does she enjoy it, if you are?)

I love to cook! Love it. I tend to focus on one-dish meals: casseroles, baked pasta dishes, soups, stews, and the like. Making multi-item meals tends to flummox me a bit as I often misjudge how long one item is going to take whilst cooking the other(s), so I end up with one dish completely done while another finishes up. This frustrates me. My ideal is to serve when everything's done at the same time, and when this fails, I get a little grumpy.

I suppose I actually cook more than The Wife does, simply because her job has her working nights five days a week, so I'm on "dinner duty" on the days she's not here, plus I'll often end up cooking on one of her two days off as well, if I feel like cooking or if she informs me that she doesn't feel like cooking and therefore I'm either cooking or buying the pizza. Those nights are when I tend to branch out and try new recipes, anyway, because The Daughter is a bit on the finicky side which makes experimentation when it's just her and myself a tad limited.

(Incidentally...I've been really in the mood to make my own fried chicken for a while now. I think I'm gonna have to scratch that particular itch fairly soon, sometime in the next month.)

The Daughter has started learning about cooking, partly out of interest at home and partly out of a Home-Ec style class she's taking at school. The other night she made her own quesadilla for dinner, when she didn't like what we were having. Now, it wasn't the most exciting quesadilla in the world -- sliced sandwich ham and cheddar cheese -- but still, she cooked it. Cool! (Now if I could just get her to realize that onions are awesome, and that salad is wonderful.)

Have you viewed any TED talks? What ones (or types of talks) do you like, if you have?

No, I haven't, and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this. I totally should watch some of these. Going back to the time management thing -- there's a lot of stuff I want to do, but I never "get around" to it mainly because of a complete lack of planning. I need to make strides in this area, big time!

More answers to come!

Saturday Centus

Wow! It's mostly a matter of luck and intuition, but this week's Centus prompt suggested its story to me almost instantly. I'm serious: I knew within seconds of reading it what my tale would be. The actual writing, however, was a bit difficult; I actually generated four different drafts of the same notion, with each of the first three making me think, "Come on, I can make this punchier. It's gotta hit harder." I think that Version 4.0 is the most successful of my lot. So, here it is, with the prompt in bold.

(No science fiction this week for me, by the way. Although it could be; it wouldn't take much to make this into an SF tale. Just a word or two, really, reaffirming my contention that the difference between SF stories and other stories is merely one of window dressing.)

“Guilty.”

The word hung there, like a knife. THE knife.

“But I didn’t do it!” sobbed Tommy Wayne Jones, over and over, as two policemen dragged him out of the courtroom for holding until sentencing. He tried, but really: DNA and fingerprints all over the knife and crime scene? Poor Tommy. He’d never been accused of being intelligent.

Neither had Sandra Allen, the victim’s wife. But she’d never been accused of framing a drug-addicted vagrant for the murder she’d committed, either, which is why she went home to spend her bastard husband’s insurance money while some other poor schlub went away for life.

Sandra wasn’t stupid. Nosiree, Bob.

Sandra seems pretty cold. I may have to look back into her doings at some future point....

Continuing the Answers!!

Yeah, I gotta pick up the pace here...but time to resume clearing out the Ask Me Anything! 2011 queue.

SK Waller asks:

If you could play any instrument in a symphony orchestra, which would you choose, and why?

Easy: I'd play the trumpet, because that was my instrument, and I was pretty damned good at it too, if I do say so myself.

A history, which I've probably told before: I joined band in fifth grade, and played the French horn my first year. I wasn't very good, but then, it was fifth grade and my first attempt at a musical instrument. The next year I switched to the trumpet. I don't know if this was my idea, or my teacher's, but it happened. I was a bit better at the trumpet, but still, I rarely bothered to practice with the effect that I sucked.

On to seventh grade, where I continued to suck at the trumpet. In seventh grade, I was in the Junior High Band, with the eighth graders; up above that, ninth and up, was the Senior Band, the students of which were not tolerant of students who sucked. Neither were the eighth graders, for that matter. So it was that about halfway through seventh grade, I decided that I was really no longer interested in being filed away by all the other kids as "one of the sucky ones". I started practicing, and getting better, and stopped sucking. Sucking, well, sucked.

Over time I became fascinated by the symphony orchestra, and the brass section in particular, to the point where, for a time, my career ambition was to be a symphonic trumpet player. To me, there was nothing quite so thrilling as a big symphonic passage where the trumpets soared above it all. My musical hero, trumpet-wise, was never Maurice Andre or Wynton Marsalis; it was Adolph Herseth of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (Get just about any Chicago Symphony recording from the 1950s on, and you'll hear Herseth playing the principal trumpet part. Track down a Mahler 5th by the CSO -- Solti's live recording is amazing -- and you'll hear some astonishing trumpet playing amidst the greatness of the rest of the orchestra.)

Of course, it's not all fun-and-games for symphonic trumpets. As much as I love Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven, the trumpets of their day were limited instruments and thus were not used for much more than providing some harmonic oomph at strategic points in the score. So the trumpet players spend a great deal of time counting measures, playing a few notes, and then counting more measures.

I did get to be a symphonic trumpet player, in college. Those were some of the finest memories of my college years.

Along the same lines, Kerry asks:

Can you describe that unique smell of the ACS band room (circa 1988-89) WITHOUT using the words "brass," "moldy reed" or "feet"?

Oh, wow. Ummmm...wow. That's hard. Really hard.

At Allegany Central School in the 1980s (and before that, obviously), the band room was located at the extreme end of a long wing that extended off the right hand side of the building, so getting to band involved a fairly long walk, past the Industrial Arts room ("shop"), past the Agricultural Arts area (a subject that was taught by the single most uptight teacher I've ever had), past the Chorus room, finally into the Band room.

The band room had a lot of character, which is to say, it was pretty much of a mess.

The room was oblong, running north and south. One entered the room from the northwest corner; the band itself gathered facing the east wall, with the band director (Mr. Beach or Mr. Roosa) standing on the podium, facing west. At the back of the room, along the west wall, were two practice rooms. (For those who have never been musicians, a "practice room" is a little room, maybe five feet square, where you practice. I always detested practice rooms and avoided them at all costs. You can't judge the sound you're making with your instrument when you are working in a room the size of your bathroom or a large closet.) The south wall had a big shelf loaded with musical instruments, and a bunch of file cabinets which contained sheet music.

Now, the instrument shelves were full of instruments. Some belonged to students in the band; others belonged to the school. Many of them were complete wrecks. Others were on the way there. The school's Sousaphones wouldn't fit on the shelves, so they sat in a pile on the floor. Yup.

Along the eastern wall, at the band director's back, were more cabinets. These contained records, tapes, more sheet music, and basically music-related crap of all kinds. There was a dinosaur stereo system that nevertheless sounded freaking awesome. I loved going to the band room during a study hall and cranking that stereo with whatever I could get my hands on. There was a tuner (a gizmo that, well, tells you whether or not your instrument is "in tune" -- i.e., producing the notes you play at the correct pitch. If musicians aren't "in tune" with one another, the group will sound awful.), and there were a whole lot of goofy posters, some of which were humorous and some of which were music-related. One of these posters I've always remembered: it had an ape of some sort sitting on the ground looking pouty, and the caption was "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." Early LOLCat, I assume.

And there were the other usual suspects: crappy chairs; music stands in various states of disrepair (getting the non-wobbly stands was quite the perk of being higher on the band food chain); percussion instruments taking up most of the north end of the room; more cabinets containing more sheet music; et cetera.

But Kerry's asking about the smell. It was a pretty unique aroma. I wouldn't say it was a horrible smell, but...well, it wasn't entirely pleasant, either. My main recollection of the odor is one of petroleum, in various forms. Valve oil, used by trumpet and horn players to lubricate their valves. Slide oil, used by trombonists to lubricate their slides. Various oils and jells used by instrumentalists of all types to lubricate...well, you'd be surprised how much lubrication is involved in the general day-to-day functioning of a wind instrument.

There was also the smell of musty paper, owing to all that sheet music around. It was kind of like the used bookstore smell, but not as pleasant. And there was the fact that for a lot of band members, the band room served as a "second locker", which meant that there were occasionally things that you would normally find in someone's locker floating around. Some of these things smelled...bad.

I haven't thought about the smell of the bandroom in quite a long time, but I do remember it. It's one smell, or set of smells, that I've never encountered since.

More answers to come, I promise!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Oops! Thought I'd posted this, but I'd only saved it as a Draft. Oh well.

(And I will get to finishing my Ask Me Anything! 2011 queries; the last week has been pretty busy. But I think I'll have some time coming up in the next batch of days.)

Anyway: even before Charlie Sheen's recent descent into the Mouth of Madness, Two and a Half Men has been one of the most highly-rated shows on teevee for a while. Having watched it off and on mainly because, well, it's on in between stuff I like watching more and it's not so bad as to have me reaching for the remote, I'm mystified by its ratings success and odd longevity. Does anybody out there really like this show? How can something this "Meh" be this successful?

My ability to come up with a clever title for this post has been defeated.

Tom Brady dancing. (It's at about the :25 mark.)



There is no adjective in Elvish, Entish, or the Tongues of Men to describe the evil of such a thing.

The ASS Postulate

For some reason, the other day I started thinking about mnemonic devices that my teachers occasionally gave us to help us remember certain things in our classes, back in my hazy school days. Most times, my teachers tended to discourage us from relying heavily on mnemonic tricks, but sometimes they yielded to reality and actually gave us a device outright. I can't remember most of these, but as I've thought back, some have burbled up from the depths of my memory. Here are a few:

:: "Oscar had a heap of apples."

My algebra teacher taught us this one, when it came time for us to study right triangles and the properties thereof. (Which I guess was, basically, entry-level trigonometry. I wish I'd had that teacher for Trig as well...I loathed my trig teacher.) But anyway, this device helps keep straight the formulae for determining the sine, cosine, and tangent values of various angles. Sine is defined as the Opposite side over the Hypotenuse. Cosine is the Adjacent over the Bypotenuse. And Tangent is the Opposite over the Adjacent. I think. It's been a while...but anyway, "Oscar had a heap of apples."

:: "KP can ordinarily form good soldiers."

This one comes from biology. Our teacher was telling us about the various levels of taxonomic classification of life forms. It went:

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

And I still remember it!

:: "Every good boy deserves fudge."

This one was used by every elementary school music teacher I ever had. It indicates which notes each line represents on a standard music staff, using the treble clef. The bottom line is E; the second one up is G; then B, D, and F respectively.

A parallel device was simply the word FACE, as those letters are also the notes in the spaces between the lines. Interestingly, once I joined band, these mnemonics never came up again. I never learned any kind of mnemonic for the notes of the bass clef.

:: The ASS Postulate

This came from my geometry teacher, and it's actually a reverse mnemonic device. When we were learning how to prove that two given triangles were actually congruent, we learned a number of postulates about congruent triangles, all involving side lengths and angles. There was the SAS Postulate, for example, which tells us that in two triangles, if two sides and the angle between them are equal, than the triangles are congruent. Similarly, there was the SSA Postulate (two adjacent sides and the following angle); the ASA postulate (two angles and the inclusive side). Ah, but! our teacher warned us. There's no such thing as the ASS Postulate, and we could remember that by virtue of the fact that if we tried using the ASS Postulate to prove two triangles congruent, she would consider us...an ass.

OK, then. Point taken!

:: When I got to college and took ear training courses in the music program, one of the earliest things we had to learn to do was recognize intervals by hearing them, and not by reading them on the page. Our professor strongly discouraged the practice, but mnemonics for intervals went round the class, anyway. If the two notes played are the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride", that's a perfect fourth. The first two notes of Star Wars? Perfect fifth. The old NBC three-note motif? The first two notes of that are a major sixth. The first two notes of "Maria" from West Side Story? That's a tritone. And so forth. In time we got away from relying on these, anyway.

:: And yes, I remember the one that Marcia Brady taught younger brother Peter on The Brady Bunch when he was having trouble remembering what a primate is: "A vertebrate has a back that's straight."

So, what mnemonic devices do you all remember still?

Sentential Links #240

Two hundred forty! Wow, I've been doing these for a long time.

:: I choose the foods. I choose to wake up at 5 am to get on the treadmill. I choose to make this a priority. I’m not taking a magic pill. I am digging deep, finding the courage and doing this. Two months in and I can see the physical and emotional changes. (via)

:: Let’s start with this… a seat at the bar on a busy night is considered valuable real estate, it’s there for you to spend money not just your time. It’s not a park bench. And few things make your friendly bartender gradually more un-friendly, than having someone sit at the bar and park. For hours! Meaning, not have a drink beyond the first, just sit and sip and sit til the cows come home. For it’s not unlike a book store customer knocking out “War and Peace”, or reading a stack of his favorite “mags” without the slightest intention of making a purchase.

:: The saying “Measure twice and cut once” isn’t just a set of pretty words — it’s something some of us could remember a little more often.

:: Weaknesses: Most people are beginning to catch on to what a vapid, corrupt, petty, spiteful, intellectually incurious, vindictive, greedy, dimwitted, dishonest, crazy asshole she actually is (Yeah, that's a pretty good summation of Sarah Palin.)

:: I am honored that I was given the opportunity to “discover” this amazing book. The manuscript showed up on my doorstep just shortly before a Thanksgiving holiday many years ago. It was over a thousand pages long, and I was anxious to read just enough of it to be able to reject it without having to lug the thing home. But after reading the first page I knew I was doomed to get almost no sleep that night. (Oh, wow! That book is remarkable.)

:: The last ten years have given us a number of colorful and violent looks at the Roman world. When Gladiator won Best Picture in 2000, Hollywood took notice, following it with films about the ancient world (including the Spartan defense against the Persians to Alexander’s conquest of India.) Instead of talking about the films and TV shows of Rome chronologically by release date, let’s allow history to unfold before us. We’ll take a tour of the Roman story as it unfolds… (What a great blog this is!)

:: Most Twitterers will never rise to this kind of brilliance, but it is great that the medium exists for those who can.

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Want to start following baseball, but you have no idea which team to adopt as your very own? What you need is...a flowchart!



(Click through to embiggen it all the way.)

:: This poem, and the animation used to illustrate it, is terrific.

:: Here's a fascinating article about what authors do when they have to abandon works that aren't progressing well. No, this is not relevant to me in any way.

(OK, yes, it is.)

More next week!

Saturday Centus

I know, I know. A day late. Yesterday was a pretty busy one, though, so I didn't get around to mulling over this week's prompt until late, and I didn't start writing until this morning. So here it is. I stuck with science fiction again. The best SF stories, for me, are still about what any good story is about: people. Anyway, here it is, with the prompt in bold.

“Your purpose on Mars?” asked Martian Entry Agent Miguel Martinez.

“Work,” James Nelson replied. “None on Earth. There is on Mars.”

“M-hm.” Agent Martinez finished searching the Nelsons’ baggage. James sighed with relief. “Any illegal contraband requires immediate force-return to Earth,” the sign said. Families had been sent back for the smallest things in their transpo-crates.

Emily, James’s daughter, squirmed in his wife Molly’s arms. “Shhh,” she said.

Now Martinez was scanning the Nelsons’ purple entry-and-work visa. Everything depended on this single card: one problem with their purple card, and it was back to Earth.

“Pass through,” Martinez said.

James exhaled. The Nelsons were immigrants now.

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

For years I've generally been a breakfast cereal person, but over the last month or so I've started indulging heavily in a heartier breakfast, in the form of a breakfast sandwich. I toast an English muffin (I prefer multigrain, but those sell out quickly so usually I end up getting Whole Wheat), onto which I stack an egg (cooked over-hard -- even easier than scrambling), a slice of some kind of cold cut that I've fried ever-so-briefly in the pan alongside the egg (usually ham, but on this one I had some Capicola, which is by far my favorite cold cut but which I don't get often because of the salt and fat), and a slice of cheese (pepperjack in this example).

A banana and a glass of juice complete the meal. More than 90 percent of the time I drink good old orange juice, but every few months I decide to change it up just a bit and get something else. Sometimes it's grapefruit; here I'm drinking a V8 blueberry/pomegranate blend.

Next week I plan to try one with salsa on it instead of cheese. Or a breakfast wrap. Breakfast rules!

The Dance....

George RR Martin announces that A Dance with Dragons has a release date.

I'd love to be one of the fans of A Song of Ice and Fire screaming "HUZZAH!!" over this, but...well, I'll read it, sure. I won't buy the hardcover right off the bat, but I'll read the book. Sometime. But it's been so long since the last one came out that I really don't remember a lot of what was going on, so I feel the need to do a complete re-read before I get to Dance. And I can't forget that I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about A Feast for Crows -- especially since Dance tells the rest of the story from Feast, but with other characters. The last one was, frankly, something of a structural mess.

And...well, the thing is, Martin still isn't done with the book. It's not "It's finished, they're editing and it will be out in July!" Instead, it's "I'm really close, so we're just throwing out a date!" This does not inspire confidence. They've announced release dates for Dance before, and yet, it's been seven years since the last one.

Last I checked, the entire series was supposed to end after seven books. Unless Martin is able to significantly get a jump on the next one, I stand by what's been my opinion for several years now: A Song of Ice and Fire will never be finished. At least, not by Martin.

This photo appeared at Balloon Juice earlier today. How true...and the most staggering thing is the way the Top 1% has funded a bunch of know-nothing Tea Partiers whose only function is to make sure that the everything that the Top 1% wants is handed to them. I'd wistfully await the day when the Tea Partiers realize that they're just useful tools in the further indenturization of America, but self-awareness generally isn't a quality that seems to be in abundance in Tea Party types. Either that, or they genuinely want to be serfs.

(No comments.)

Something for Thursday

After the last post, I've got Blade Runner on the brain, so here's part of Vangelis's music for the film.



And I'm pretty sure I've posted this before, but here's the Love Theme from the film.



(Sequels and prequels, my ass. Ye Gods!)

No. Please oh please, No.

Sequels and prequels to Blade Runner. Come on. What are we gonna do now? See Deckard and Rachel on the run? Or go back in time so we can see what attack ships on fire off Orion's shoulder look like? Now, I've never been as enamored of Blade Runner as many are -- visually it's a staggering achievement, but narratively I've always found it oddly uninvolving -- but really, Hollywood, No.



I really think it's only a matter of time before somebody actually makes Brazzaville, the first installment of the ongoing adventures of former bar owner Rick Blaine and his friend, the ethically-challenged Police Prefect Louis Renault.

Union

Kevin Drum, in a post from last week that I've been meaning to link:

Every single human institution or organization of any size has its bad points. Corporations certainly do. The military does. Organized religion does. Academia does. The media does. The financial industry sure as hell does. But with the exception of a few extremists here and there, nobody uses this as an excuse to suggest that these institutions are hopelessly corrupt and should cease existing. Rather, it's used as fodder for regulatory proposals or as an argument that every right-thinking person should fight these institutions on some particular issue. Corporations should or shouldn't be rewarded for outsourcing jobs. Academics do or don't deserve more state funding. The financial industry should or shouldn't be required to trade credit derivatives on public exchanges.

Unions are the most common big exception to this rule. Sure, conservatives will take whatever chance they can to rein them in, regulate them, make it nearly impossible for them to organize new workplaces. But they also routinely argue that labor unions simply shouldn't exist. This is what's happening in Wisconsin: Gov. Scott Walker isn't satisfied with merely negotiating concessions from public sector unions. He wants to effectively ban collective bargaining and all but do away with public sector unions completely.

Nobody should buy this. Of course unions have pathologies. Every big human institution does. And anyone who thinks they're on the wrong side of an issue should fight it out with them. But unions are also the only large-scale movement left in America that persistently acts as a countervailing power against corporate power. They're the only large-scale movement left that persistently acts in the economic interests of the middle class.

Couldn't agree more.

Answers, the ongoing!

Wow, I gotta start getting the lead out with regard to Ask Me Anything! 2011. So here are a couple of sports-related questions!

Andy has this to ask:

Do you think changing up the Buffalo Bills uniforms will do ANYTHING for the team or do you think they will continue having the top five draft pick selections for the next several years?

I don't think uniforms really have any effect except for in the local sports apparel stores, where lots of fans will undoubtedly spend quite a bit of money to get the new jerseys and whatnot. Sometimes teams change uniforms and then get good pretty quickly thereafter: the Patriots in the 90s did it, and the Broncos changed to their current uniforms and almost immediately won two Super Bowls later the same decade. But usually these types of uniform changes don't result in a good team; rather, a good team results because of a new management team that changes the uniforms at the same time that they are installing a better approach to team-building.

I think that it's more likely that this year's draft will determine whether or not the Bills are drafting in the top five for years to come. If they can get at least four or five solid players out of this draft, including at least two real playmakers, then they should be able to improve fairly quickly. But if they tank on the draft, then the long years of suffering will continue. It seems kind of odd to think about it, since a typical NFL team will draft between six and nine players in any particular year via the Draft, but if you tank an entire Draft class (as the Bills did in 2007, only one player from which Draft is still on the team), it can set you back for multiple seasons.

I look forward to seeing the Bills' new uniforms -- while I didn't hate the uni's of the last ten years, I wasn't wild about 'em, either -- I'm looking forward to them drafting well even more. (I do hope that their new uni's are either their current "throwback" uni's, or just going back to the uni's of the 1990s Bills!)

Roger asks:

When will the Pittsburgh Pirates play .500 ball, and what will it take? Will they ever be truly competitive again? Has the management oversold the "we're a small market team" issue? And any comments on the passing of Chuck Tanner, manager of the we Are Family '79 WS winners?

I have zero idea of when the Pirates will be good again. None whatsoever. It truly astonishes me that a person who was born the last time the Pirates had a winning season is now old enough to drive, vote, serve in the military, see Kill Bill without a parent being along...everything but buy a beer. The Pirates have been losing longer than most people have had Internet access. Last time the Pirates won, George Bush was President. The first one.

Major League Baseball has long needed some form of revenue sharing that's more rigorous than the odd, Rube Goldberg system they have now, but after eighteen years of sucking, the Pirates don't have that as an excuse. They've been simply mismanaged for all that time. Bad scouting, bad personnel decisions, and ownership that refused to spend money...ugh.

The Pirates will need to build their farm system and develop good, young players to construct their major league club around. That's the only way they'll win again, being in a small market as they are. But it's not an impossible task; other teams have done it. (Oakland and Minnesota are prime examples; so is Tampa Bay, which has built a fantastic franchise in a town that heartbreakingly doesn't give a shit.) Small market is part of it, but the major part of it is that the Pirates' management and ownership has been resoundingly, staggeringly horrible.

More answers to come!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Pop Rocks are really gross, right?

Let's go antiquing!

Over the last year, the Orchard Park Antique Mall has become a favorite place for The Wife and I to spend a few hours. The Sunday before last, we had a couple free hours...and we still ended up rushing through the back parts of the store because our time started running out.

I've decided that what I love most about the antique thing is that, while there are familiar things that are always there (several booths of action figures, for example, heavy on the Star Wars), there is always something new, something that's really pretty unique, something that I've never seen before or something that I have seen before but maybe wouldn't mind buying. You really, truly never know what you're going to find in antique joints.

Like...a sombrero!



(Yeah, finger on the lens. No idea how I did that. Sorry. But notice the print of comic art down there, next to the sombrero: "But I had to kill her! We wore the same dress!")

No, I didn't buy the sombrero. Nor did I want to. It's the principle of the thing, folks!

Nor did I buy these Toby mugs, although I gazed wistfully upon them for quite a while:



They're the Three Musketeers, although I'm not sure which is Athos, Porthos or Aramis. Toby mugs are always expensive there...which breaks my heart because I want to own some, really badly. I think that Toby mugs look absolutely awesome. There are always quite a few available at the Antique Mall, but they always go for upwards of $50 or more. Someday!

This bust of Richard Wagner wasn't there last time:



It had no price on it, oddly. This might have tempted, had it been cheap.

Of course, there are books:





I bought both of these...Phantom for The Daughter, who is hugely into The Phantom of the Opera, and the omnibus of Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels for myself. Huzzah!

And for all the "OMG, I really want that!" which you'll find in an antique joint, there are also the items that are remarkable in other ways. Such as...this handbag!



Hand-made, never used. French in origin. All the puzzle pieces fall into place!

The Antique Mall is a brightly-lit store of modern look; no dark and dusky alcoves containing items of unknown origin here. But that doesn't mean that grim things don't reside there:



AIEEE!

And if you want furniture with mirrors, well, the Antique Mall is the place for you. The mirrors seem faulty, though; every one of 'em seems to be showing some dork in overalls. Buy with caution.

Yeah, I am slowly getting bitten by the antiquing bug!