More tools for the job

On the way home from work today I was listening to the local Sports Talk radio station, and they were doing a brief bit with former Buffalo Sabre Rob Ray, who talks on the station on days when the Buffalo Sabres play. At one point, the conversation turns to athletes and their use of Twitter, and one of the hosts asked Ray if he had any plans to start a Twitter account.

Ray's response was along the line of this: "No way, man! My phone is ancient and you can barely text with it! How am I gonna do Twitter?"

And I'm thinking, Geez, the cell phone has become so dominant in our culture that we forget that there are things called computers?

Every so often I read articles either online or in magazines like WIRED which predict the demise of the PC, the laptop, and pretty much anything bigger than an iPad. I'm clearly no Luddite, but I like my laptop and I have no desire for something like an iPad, which I'm pretty sure would be a pain-in-the-ass to write with. I want a full keyboard, a screen that's at least 15 inches, and I'm not impressed with something that's super-super thin.

Come to that, I'm not sure I like anything in which thin-ness is touted as a highly desirable quality. Super-thin pizza? Meh. Thin models are ugly models. Thin computers? Do not want.

Yeah. Give the fat tools, please. Give me your big, your bulky, your heavy masses yearning to generate lots of lap heat!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

I've set this post to publish at about the same time I'm getting up today: 3:00 am. This is because of a bunch of jobs at The Store that need doing, which have to be done very early before the associated departments start doing their thing (i.e., before they start handling food). The extra money associated with the overtime will be nice, but 3:00 am is just an awful time to get up.

So: what's the earliest you can get up where you're not thinking along the lines of, "Oh crap, I'm up now. Ugh ugh ugh."?

X-Files Case Report: "Pilot"

So I've decided to embark on something of a long-term project here: rewatching The X-Files. I'd like to rewatch the entire series, start to finish, series pilot to final episode of Season Nine, with the first movie (Fight the Future) thrown in between Seasons Five and Six, and culminating in the movie from a couple of years ago (which I still haven't seen). Obviously this will take a while, and while I'm not going to try to do this on a weekly basis, I'm hoping for at least two or three of these a month. Maybe more, when I watch them in clusters, as may well happen.

Why? Well, why not? Among the blogs I follow which focus on F/SF/H stuff, rewatches of movies and teevee series and re-reads of books and book series are always in vogue, and right now, nobody that I follow is doing an X-Files rewatch, which gives me a niche. This also gives me a longterm source of content (always nice), and it gives me an excuse to revisit a show that was once beloved to me.

Don't get me wrong, there: as far as I know, I still love The X-Files. The show was an iron-clad, "can't miss it" event at Casa Jaquandor for most of its run. But with relatively few exceptions, I only saw the episodes a single time each, upon their initial airings; and there are quite a few episodes from the first three seasons that I've never seen. I'm interested now, seventeen years after Season One, partly in how well the show has aged. We'll see!

My fandom of The X-Files was slow to blossom. I was only dimly aware of the show's existence for most of the first season. In fact, this was back when FOX was still a fairly fledgling network with only a couple of notable shows to its name (The Simpsons, Married With Children), and if I remember correctly, back then, FOX didn't even have enough shows to put together and entire weekly lineup. (In some ways, FOX still doesn't. There are no 10:00 shows on FOX.) I heard of this show that had FBI agents investigating paranormal stuff, but I didn't watch until my mother, who did watch, recommended the show to me. So I saw a couple of episodes during the first season and came away somewhat favorably impressed, but my attention wasn't grabbed enough to make me a regular viewer until somewhere in the middle of Season Three.

I'm lucky that I came along then, and not later; the show's "mytharc" was still pretty manageable at that point, and a new viewer could pick up the basics pretty quickly. I do remember, though, a special episode that aired sometime toward the end of Season Three that was basically a summation of the show to that point. I found that very helpful, and a short while later, the show's popularity led to video releases of early episodes. Of course, this was before DVD, so these video releases consisted of sets of VHS tapes with two episodes each, and only selected episodes at that – no complete seasons here, just the most important "mytharc" shows with a few of the better "monster of the week" shows thrown in. Anyway, I was hooked, and I didn't fall by the wayside until Season Nine, which struck me as rudderless, pallid, and just too-much-of-a-good-thing. We'll see what we find as we go, though.

Which brings me to the Pilot Episode. It opens with a teaser sequence, set in the Pacific Northwest, that shows a girl in her nightrobe running through a forest, until she stumbles in a clearing. Here she is met by a human-shaped figure (whose features we cannot see) who is accompanied by a brilliant light; the wind whips up, there is lots of noise, the leaves are blown in circles around them as the light brightens. Cut to twelve hours later, and the girl's body is found in the clearing by the cops, sporting two circular wounds near her backside. The chief ID's the body, noting that she went to school with his son; another cop says, "Class of 1989? It's happening again, isn't it?"

Cut to Washington, DC and the FBI Headquarters, where a beautiful young agent named Dana Scully reports to her superiors for assignment. She is to work alongside another agent, named Fox Mulder, who has been using his time to investigate cases that are outside the official FBI mainstream. These cases, called "the X-files", are the kinds of thing nobody wants anything to do with – except for Agent Mulder, who later suggests that it's only by way of his friends in Congress that he is able to do this work at all. Scully is being assigned for her scientific, skeptical approach; when she asks if she is being expected to debunk Mulder's work, her superiors manage to say Yes and No in that wonderful bureaucratic way of not saying much at all. Off Scully goes to meet Agent Mulder, who has just caught wind of this strange case brewing out in the Pacific Northwest. After some introductions, Mulder briefs Scully on the odd case and the wounds on the bodies (of which there are four), and then they're off to Oregon to do some investigating.

This really is one of the better pilot episodes to a show I've seen. In the space of about five to ten minutes, we get: an intriguing mystery for the first episode; an establishment of a supernatural/paranormal mood; the introduction of our two main characters, both to us and to each other; the establishment of certain tropes within their relationship; the tense conflict between the official FBI and Agent Mulder; and some initial conflict between Mulder and Scully. They would later come to trust each other in the implicit way of two people who are absolute soul-mates, but there is still constant tension between her skepticism and his willingness to take wild leaps in logic in order to press his case. (Oh, and in the first scene in the FBI Headquarters, there's an ominous looking fellow lurking in the background who is always fingering a lit cigarette.)

This first case of theirs also sets up so many of the tropes that would dominate the show for the entirety of its run. Alien abduction. Lost time. Mystery elements that are never able to be conclusively explained because the evidence is somehow destroyed or compromised. Implants of unknown origin. Secret government storehouses where old evidence is squirreled away, never to be seriously investigated again. Autopsies of mysteriously deceased persons, and autopsies of mysteriously deceased things that may or may not be persons. Locals who are unwilling to talk to the two FBI agents, and the one local who is. The fact that Agent Mulder is haunted by the disappearance/abduction of his sister. And the solving of the mystery in an unfulfilling way that leaves Scully nothing to report on.

I also noticed that the show's look that would dominate the first five seasons – dark, cloudy, foreboding, often raining – is in full effect here, as is the moody synth-driven music by Mark Snow (minus the famous main theme, which wouldn't arrive until the second episode). I was surprised, watching the Pilot episode again, to see just how much of the show's eventual theme and feel was present right there from the beginning. Everything except The Truth being Out There. But don't worry – it is. Oh yes.

(Oh, and I promise not to make this series into one long love-letter to Gillian Anderson. But I had no recollection of the pilot featuring a scene with her in her underwear...her skin lit only by the light of a single burning candle....)

"These deadly rays will be YOUR death!"

A while back I posted about an old SF B-movie I saw when I was a kid, Battle Beyond the Stars. I saw Battle in this old, somewhat beat-up theater in Hillsboro, OR that often showed double features – which I remember my parents sending me off to with their blessing, only now realizing that it was probably a great way to get an annoying kid out of the house for a few hours. Battle was the main feature that day; the lead-in was another SF flick called Starcrash. Yup, I saw Starcrash in its theatrical run.

If you're a fan of SF movies, you've probably heard of Starcrash -- and not in a particularly good way, either. It's one of the legendarily bad movies of SF history, made on a shoestring budget to capitalize on the SF craze initiated by Star Wars in 1977. I remember kind of digging the movie, when I was 8 years old, but I never saw it again...until a month or so ago. I tracked the film down, wondering just how bad it really was. Is it really one of the worst movies in SF history? Or is it a bit better than I remember?

Well, it's bad. Really bad. Its badness exists on some kind of epic level. Starcrash is almost a primal force of nature in its badness. Seriously, this is a bad bad BAD movie. But it does have that nice virtue of being bad on a level that's entertaining in a "watch it just to laugh at it" kind of way.

The main characters is a female star pilot and criminal named Stella Star, who is gamely played by Caroline Munro, a buxom, gorgeous woman whose best-known role was a femme fatale who tries to kill James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me, but upon whom Bond turns the tables and kills instead. (Interesting Bond trivia: Munro's Spy Who Loved Me character, Naomi, is the first woman directly killed by James Bond in the movie series. Sure, he's responsible for a lot of women dying, but she's the first we ever see expire by his hand.) Stella is flying around with a curly-headed guy named Akton, when they incur the wrath of a couple of space cops, one of whom is a robot named Elle. They are basically blackmailed into searching for a lost ship that carried on it the son of the Emperor of space, or something like that. This is important because there are bad guys about, led by an evil Count, planning the conquering of the Empire. Or something like that.

Starcrash is one of those movies where when you try to summarize it, you find yourself saying vague things and using the phrase "or something like that" a lot.

Much of the middle section of the film settles into routine: Stella and friends go to a planet, find the Prince isn't there, evade some dangers, and go to the next planet. Eventually there is betrayal, a bunch of mystical stuff involving Akton that makes no sense at all, the Prince turns up (played by David Hasselhoff!), we meet the Emperor (played with benevolent and soporific droning by Christopher Plummer), and we finally find out what the title "Starcrash" means. It involves crashing. Among the stars.

Below the fold are some screencaps of the glory that is Starcrash.

Let there be dancing in the streets!!!

My book came!



And a beautiful book it is, too. I can't wait to read it!

Sentential Links #227

Lnikage. Likange. And linkage!

:: Of course, it's worth appreciating the fact that we know the Bush/Cheney tax policy Republicans are desperate to continue didn't produce the intended results. Indeed, it was abject failure -- it didn't create jobs, it didn't generate tremendous growth, and it didn't keep a balanced budget.

In other words, the one economic policy Republicans will fight for, no matter what, is the one economic policy we know didn't work.

:: It’s almost as if the tea party isn’t really a libertarian minded grass roots uprising calling for more personal freedom, fiscal conservatism, and limited government, but actually might just be a slick re-branding of the lunatic wing of the GOP by wealthy billionaire businessmen to be used to propel the GOP back into power.

:: Thing is that most of these people had a certainty that God supports their particular take on the word because they believe – at least the non-slaves – in the notion that the United States is uniquely blessed by God. Interesting, one person in this period was less certain about God’s will, and that was President Abraham Lincoln, a man with a good Old Testament name.

:: I deserve some kind of compensation though so I have decided to make this a Mozart day. I’m listening to nothing but Mozart for the rest of the afternoon - light, fluffy early Mozart, nothing later than K200 or so. (Awww, that seems a bit limiting! I can think of few pieces of music more sunny in nature, more optimistically life-affirming, than the ever-wonderful K364.)

:: What happens when the language you use is not comprehensible to all readers? Do you adjust? But if you adjust your language to make it easier for those who don’t understand, then are you not cutting yourself off from your own history? This has giant implications.

:: I understand why people don't participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don't matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they're always going to go that way, well, what's the point?

:: But there's a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next). (Sorry for linking an entire paragraph like that, but I couldn't figure out how to distill it down without destroying it. So there it is.)

:: “You can’t do that!” Wesley says, “Lando doesn’t know how to fly spaceships!” (Interesting post about the current generation of Star Wars fans...albeit with some of the usual "George Lucas sucks!" stuff in the comments, as per usual.)

:: Tomorrow I will bury the bunny in my backyard and say a little blessing for it. And if after that I feel up for another bike ride I will, regardless of the wind, most definitely go the other direction. (I'm so glad I found this blog.)

More next week!!!

Bears 22, Bills...less than 22.

This was a fun game to watch. The Bears ran it well, but the Bills stayed right there, even taking a 19-14 lead in the 2nd half. But as the fourth quarter ran on, you just felt it coming. You knew it was there, waiting....



And sure enough, with the Bills trying to set up a tying field goal to send the game to overtime (after a freakishly good bounce on a Chicago punt to leave the Bills at the 1-yard line), QB Ryan Fitzpatrick rallied the troops...and then promptly unrallied them by throwing an interception, allowing the Bears to run out the clock.

Splat.



BTW, I know it's hard to judge sitting at home watching on the teevee, but it sure sounded like the crowd at this Bills "home" game -- played in Toronto -- consisted of mostly Chicago fans. Yuck!

Back to the kitchen with you

I was looking around some blogs this afternoon, and in the comments on one blog that I keep coming back to for some reason (even though I can't stand the blogger, her viewpoint, or her writing) offered this in reference to last week's elections:

It was nice to see Nancy Pelosi put in her place!

Wow. "Put in her place". I'd take the charitable view here and assume that this writer meant, as a conservative, that it was nice to see the top Democrat in the House relegated to probable Minority Leader status. But I'm not going to take this view, as this person's writings over the years have made clear that she deeply fetishizes a time when a woman's place was a lot more clearly defined than it is now. I'm always surprised to see such rhetoric employed out there.

Nancy Pelosi has achieved the highest elected position ever ascended by an American woman...but now, she's been put in her place. One wonders if the blogger in question hopes John Boehner gives Nancy Pelosi a fifty and tells her to "go buy herself somethin' pretty".

Tinkering under the hood....

In general I've liked the changes I made to this blog's appearance a while back, but there were two things that bugged me: my ragged right-margins, and the fact that text offset using the blockquote tag didn't stand out as much as a block-quote as it did in my previous template. I have now fixed both problems.

See? Here's my new style of blockquote! Huzzah!!!

OK, back to my normal blathering. Carry on!

Sunday Stealing

I haven't done a Sunday Stealing quiz in a while, so here's this week's edition.

1. What do you consider your hometown to be?

If I'm talking to people around here, I'll say Orchard Park. In a more general sense, I just say "Buffalo", because I consider the whole region to be the "Buffalo" region. I'm a big fan of regionalism, actually; I think a lot of Buffalo's problems could be helped along, if not solved, by allowing the city to annex suburbs. Unfortunately, that apparently can't happen in New York the way the laws are right now.

If by "hometown" we mean the place I was born, then it's Pittsburgh, PA. But we moved from there when I was only two or three, and while I have always had strong emotional ties and a deep love for that city, it's not my home anymore.

2. What’s the hardest part of your average day?

Mid-afternoon, usually. That's when my attention and motivation levels sag a bit as I start to make the mental transition to evening.

3. The easiest? Why?

Morning and evening. Those are when I'm the most fired up.

4. What beverage do you reach for to quench your thirst?

If I'm thirsty, then it's water. I've cut quite a bit down on drinking pop and alcohol over the last few years, and I indulge in those when I'm specifically in the mood for one of those, not for when I generically need to wet the proverbial whistle.

5. What is one not-so-secret goal you have for your life? I’ll let you keep your secret ones to yourself.

To write something that makes someone else say, "Hey, I'll pay you a nice sum of money to let me publish that." (I'm somewhat flexible on what qualifies as a 'nice' sum of money.)

6. What physical pain do you fear most? For example, I’m trying to decide how bad my jaw pain needs to get before I risk a potential needle from my dentist. So, for me, throbbing is preferable to jabbing.

Probably sharp chest pains, I suppose. Never had any, but I'm not wild about the notion.

7. Where do you find solace?

Home. That's what home is for.

8. What makes you the saddest when you read/see the news?

Children dying. Of anything.

9. What do you eat for a favorite snack?

Heavens, I like to snack. I need to cut it down, really -- but there are tons of things I like to snack upon. Cheese and crackers. Apples and peanut butter. Apples and cheddar cheese. And, of course, too many kinds of crunchy-and-salty things that come in bags at the store.

10. What movie could you/would you watch more than two or three times and still enjoy just as much as the first time?

Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Casablanca, My Fair Lady...pretty much any movie on my Top 100 list.

11. What boy/girl first made you cry?

Not really sure. It was probably this girl I had a wicked bad crush on when I was a sophomore in high school. Her name was Deanna. She was nice and friendly to me, and then...she wasn't. Ouch! I wonder what ever happened to her....

12. What brand of coffee/tea do you drink most often?

8 O'Clock coffee, mostly, although I also buy some nice flavors in The Store's brand. For tea, I'm all over the place. I love Rishi Tea's Green Mint -- absolutely adore the stuff. It's wonderful.

13. Dig in the dirt with or without garden gloves?

Depends. If I'm just repotting a single plant or two, then no gloves. If I'm doing quite a bit of work in the dirt, then I put gloves on. Since we live in an apartment, this isn't much of an issue -- more often I have to do this kind of thing at work.

14. James Taylor or Carly Simon?

What an odd dichotomy! I think I like more Carly Simon songs than I do James Taylor songs, so I give the nod to her. I guess. Hmmmmm. (Plus I just like the name "Carly".)

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

Only one item this week. No, I do not want to eat this sandwich. But you'd better believe I want a bite!



More next week!

Bite me, Millard Fillmore!

I love Sporcle, and I'm always drawn like a moth to flame to the quizzes about the US Presidents. Even though my brain is apparently wired in such a way as to be utterly unable to retain the piece of information that we had a President named Millard Fillmore, who is somehow always an answer on these quizzes, and who is always one of the couple of Presidential names I'm desperately trying to coax from my gray matter as the quiz expires. Case in point. Stupid Millard Fillmore!

A moment of arse-kicking awesomeness

Sorry for the blog silence the last couple of days, folks. For those still out there, here's Mr. Russell to brighten your day.

Meh....

Yeah, last night's election results are disastrous and idiotic, but I'm not dwelling on it. Political power comes and goes. It'll come again...and it'll go again. Like the tides.

I will say this, though (which I said on Twitter and Facebook last night, but not here): Watching these Tea Partiers trying to govern is going to be like watching Edward Scissorhands eat with chopsticks.

For want of an idea to post....

Here's something I stole from Cal:

100 Tweets about overalls

OK, I recently got a search engine hit for "100 Reasons Why Overalls Are Awesome". Well, I suppose I could come up with such a list, but...well, I don't feel like doing that much work, even though I've certainly done my own yeoman duty on singing the praises of bib overalls throughout the years! So I'll just do something lazy, and do a search on Twitter for "overalls", and post the tweets the amuse me the most. Here we go!

(Oh, I'm not actually grabbing a hundred of these. I haven't got that kind of time.)

NEW RULE: Overalls are not conducive to dancing to (80’s) Music. It makes the nipples raw. That is all. (Here's why shirts are handy.)

Case in point: this guy asked me out the day I wore a skirt. The next day, I wore overalls, and he broke up with me. *sigh* (Some guys are idiots. What can I say?)

So in my college years guys always thought it was hot when girls wore overalls but I just found out why they really wore them...yuck. (No idea.)

If I do not maintain my appearance with clippers, it looks like I'm wearing fuzzy overalls (I'm trying not to picture this.)

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." ~Thomas Edison (Judging by how often this shows up in the search results, this must be the most popular quote about overalls in history.)

Wearing only overalls in public should never replace pants and a shirt. Put on a shirt, old man. (For God's sake, yes. They don't cover everything, guys.)

Some redneck in overalls just picked his kid up at the bus stop while holding his hunting rifle! WTF?!

I miss wearing overalls. (So wear them! Do you need a permission slip from The Queen of Fashion or something?)

Only babies and toddlers should wear bib overalls. (Duly noted. Next.)

Th-this guy just walked in wearing overalls. I don't know how to feel. (Such angst over some stranger's clothes! How will we go on! Style points for stammering on Twitter, though.)

I wish overalls were instyle. I would wear 'em all the time. (Again with the notion that the arbitrary decisions of other people should determine what we do. Weird.)

I haven't researched outside of this rural Georgia McDonald's yet, but so far my study shows that 87% of Americans wear overalls. (This cracked me up. For the win!)

Didn't wash my painting trousers till yesterday afternoon and they are still damp. Wearing damp overalls is not the best start to a Monday.

It was not a good idea for my roommate to wear overalls while I'm high. (I don't wanna know.)

I'M NEVER TAKING THESE OVERALLS OFF. Soo comfy! :) (Now there's the spirit!)

OK, I'm done now. Sifting through a bunch of tweets can be a horrible, horrible experience. If tweets are representative of how some people actually talk, civilization is doomed. But overalls are awesome!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

How weird is this Star Trek moment, anyway?

Holy SHIT.

Sorry I couldn't come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but...well, sometimes you gotta go with the words that hit you. Therefore: Let there be dancing in the streets!

Yup, I won a copy of Doug Adams's The Music of The Lord of the Rings, which makes me so utterly happy that...well, later there may be opening of beer and dancing once I am alone and no one can see.

The entry rules were simple: in addition to providing contact info, entrants had to identify their favorite bit of music from the films and describe why. Here's what I wrote:

My favorite bit of music from the LOTR scores? That's a nearly impossible requirement for me to fill, as I adore just about every single note in the trilogy, from start to end. But for the purposes of this contest, I'll name the music that plays as Gandalf leads the Fellowship into the ruin of the subterranean Dwarvish city of Dwarrowdelf, in Moria. There's just something so majestic and regal about the music in this scene: most of the Moria music is dark and forbidding, but in this one passage, Howard Shore conveys some of the optimism that the Dwarves must have felt as they started digging into Moria. The music builds and builds, and it feels like it's about to open up into a huge melody -- but that melody never comes, which is fitting since Moria never reached the heights that the Dwarves had hoped. Instead, the music turns dark again as Gimli finds Balin's tomb. This moment in the score always makes
my spine chill a bit. (The film actually blunts the impact a bit by having Sam say "Now that's an eye-opener and no mistake". It's a scene that needed no dialogue.)

Here's the music I'm referring to. It's the first 1:15 of this clip, and I shiver in awe every time I hear this passage. It's so regal and sad and evocative of Tolkien's world that is full to overflow with old things that are lost and nearly forgotten:



That music is Middle Earth.

Yes, I did.

I got home from voting a short while ago. My polling place changed this year, from the community room in the main building of our own apartment complex to the gymnasium of the Catholic school down the street. I suppose this is because they needed more room to put tables, since we're now no longer using the "flip the lever" gizmo and are instead filling in the ovals on paper ballots that we then stick into the scanner ourselves. I always enjoy voting as an exercise, even if they seemed a bit disorganized today -- the only signage directing people where to go assumed you knew what Assembly district you live in, and to be honest, I have no idea. So I had to ask if I was in the right line. (I was.)

And since the polling place workers are all elderly volunteers, everybody had to shout their names to be heard. But still, it took me all of ten minutes to vote, and nine of that was standing in line. That's the nice thing about being unwilling to vote Republican unless the Democrat is literally an axe murderer; takes a lot less time to just go across the top and fill in the circle next to every Democrat on the ballot.

Anyway, now to see what happens.

Bring on the Bucs!!!

Yeah, right...but as I write this, it's about ten minutes since the San Francisco Giants won the World Series. I didn't pay a great deal of attention, but I always try to be watching when the final out of a World Series takes place, and tonight was no exception. A few thoughts:

:: The game ended around 10:35 pm, Eastern Time. Wow. For baseball, that's ridiculously early, innit? I've seen World Series games decided after midnight in recent years.

:: And since it ended early, Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum won't be out quite as late on a school night! (Seriously, the guy looks like he's 14.)

:: FOX Sports does a great job with its World Series and baseball coverage. They really do. One thing I always love about them is the way they have a camera on just about everybody on the team that's going for the win in the 9th, so when the final out happens, they've got footage of every single player's reaction as they see the last out and start jumping for joy, screaming, and charging for the pile-up on the pitcher's mound. That's always very cool.

:: They also had the obligatory footage of a crowd's reaction in San Francisco as the final out happened. It was the usual stuff -- a crowd of mostly young-ish people suddenly jumping up and down and screaming and hugging as their hometown boys won the title. The camera then panned across the crowd, and suddenly there's a little old lady, maybe all of five feet tall and around 80 years old, jumping and screaming and looking for someone to High-Five with the best of 'em. What a great moment!

Congrats to the Giants!