Moving...

Well, it's time our little site here, or at least this 'blog part of it, grew up a little.

Tinderbox has been great, but that archives.html file has been killing my bandwidth and download times.

It's hackable, Tinderbox is, and I probably could spend the time and effort making the templates export proper archies split up by month and topic and then adding content to the body of my RSS feed... but I've got other stuff to do, like.

So we're moving on over to http://redsoxnation.blogthing.com/

See you over there.

UPDATE:

So we've moving again! Just nearby this time, in fact. http://supertart.com/qi/wordpress/

Ellis Burks is Back

Oh man I wish I could have seen this game (or, like some lucky people on their birthday, get to attend the damn game).

All right, so the outcome (and the Sox pitching) sucked, but to get to see Ellis come in to pinch hit for Pokey Reese and see him get the ovation he got... oh man, I would have loved to see that. Instead of relying on the Herald (link above) and Beth to report it. L just got to hear me saying, while watching the MLB Gameday window at home while dinner was cooking, "Ellis is gonna bat for Pokey, how much you wanna bet they bat Ellis for Pokey?!" And when he got a single I could just imagine... but man, what it must have been like to be there.

I used to love seeing someone that fast playing centerfield for the Sox back in the latter part of the 80s and through Morgan's Magic.

They let Brady Anderson go because Ellis was filling that spot so well.

I'm glad, in the end, they brought the guy back for one last tour.

What's Going On

So a little update, for those who care.

The project with Adam Pacther is going all right, finally back on now that he's got little things like having a daughter out of the way. Expect more news... well, soon. Soon may be a relative term. Meaning anytime from now to slightly just after never. You know how I can get sometimes.

God Coffee, I Miss You is not, in fact, some fantasy of mine, it actually exists. Well, sort of. Still working on it. Trying to make it exist a little more substantially than it does presently. L has been very good about lighting fires under my butt, I've just proven, as time goes on, a lot better at sitting on flames than you might have thought. Those asbestos underpants really help.

Other than that, still managing a huge staff over at Sane every week and various life events are keeping me from being too active on the writing front. We'll see how that changes in the coming months.

Cat Stevens, Safe in... Maine?

The thing I don't get about this story, which is weird on a few levels, sure, is that the security officials, worried about known 70s singer Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) aboard a flight in progress from London to Washington DC decided that he posed such a threat that they diverted it to Maine.

If I were a Mainiac I'd be pretty pissed off right about now. I mean, you compromise our security up in lovely old Maine so those a**eholes down in Washinton are safe? Jesus, now we've got Cat Stevens running around! Peace Train! Look out! Last time I checked Maine is still part of the Homeland (don't know why, but I hate that term, it sounds like something out of a bad adaptation of a James Fenimore Cooper novel).

I can just picture some emminently bored security agent going through the passenger lists for the flights that day, flicking through the pages, maybe sipping a coffee every once in a while, slumped in his chair, head resting against one hand. Suddenyl, he bolts upright. "Damn!" He looks wildly around the room. "Damn, damn, damn!" He rolls his chair quickly over to the phone, almost upending his coffee when his headphone cord attached to his computer sproings tight and clips the lid off the top of the cup. The cup rattles and totters but finally settles back down, with slightly less coffee in it than before. He picks up the receiver, hits the blue button... "Listen, we've got a code... blue. Jesus, man! We need immediate action! Cat Stevens coming to Washington. From London. Quick, what do I do?" A beat passes. The kid looks around wildly. Unfortunately, his thrashing head does upset the cup of coffee finally. Which is okay, because the spilled coffee from earlier had already screwed up his keyboard as it was, so the extra dousing doesn't do too much extra harm.

"Okay, right, divert, divert, get him out of the country, cool, got it."

Now this kid, being from just around Washington DC, or maybe out West somewhere, has to wrack his brain, where the hell do I send him, somewhere far, far away. But where they speak English, mostly, so he can convince the foreign airport guys to let this plane land there in this emergency. Maine! I've got it! Even though I've heard they speak French up there!

He puts down the phone then picks it up again. Sliding out a drawer with all the airport phone numbers on a sheet of paper stuck to the bottom, he begins dialing... "Yeah? Maine? Listen, we've got an emergency. What? Jesus, is that English?"

"Yes, sir. We have a code blue. We've got to land a plane in your neck of the woods. Yes, we appreciate your compliance. We have always been friendly neighbours, the US and Canada. Err, right, Maine. Sure. Umm, listen, I really can't understand you. It's Flight ---. From London. England. Just let it land, we'll send people up. Right, okay, 'y'eee-ah' and 'they-ah' to you, too. Bye."

And so Cat Stevens lands in Maine. Which, by the way, is still inside the borders of the US of A. Doh. But this kid can at least get back to calmly perusing our flight lists and listening to his iTunes.

Manny Being Manny

You've just gotta love this guy.

Manny gives advice to Rachel Nichols. Rachel's a bit much, but I love Manny's advice for approaching girls and his answer to how busy he is (which is pretty similar to my standard answer when people ask what I do): "I don't really do that much."

Whiskey Tango Ghost

Tanya Donelly's latest album Whiskey Tango Ghost is available for download online. Not from the iTMS, but from 4AD, her label. You can buy and download it from here, it'll cost you around £8.

4ad.com seem to love Hersh and Donelly, Hersh's new project, 50 Foot Wave is on there, as well. Their album you can download from the iTunes Music Store ().

Whiskey Tango Ghost is an incredible album, Tanya's got a beautiful voice. Highly recommended. Oh, and if you're a Mac user you'll want to try and purchase the album with Internet Explorer, as their little buying applet (or whatever it is, to be honest with you I didn't check into it all that closely, or at all, in fact -- it didn't work, I tried IE, standard practise, really) doesn't work with Safari.

Forgeries... or something bigger?

I think there's something bigger at stake than those documents of BushyChimp's(tm)* military records being forgeries...

Obviously, the military has had copies of Microsoft Office for decades now! How else could they have written the documents pertaining to Bush on Microsoft Word 2004!

Found via BoingBoing and SBJ.

* It's not that I hate Bush, it's that I hate traveling abroad and havig people constantly saying, "Oh, you're American? Bush, huh?" With a look of either 1) pity or 2) condescension. Both looks are given in the spirit that the giver of the look either assumes you are 1) burdened by the yolk of being led by an idiot, 2) enjoy being led by an idiot and wholeheartedly agree with him that no other nation 'cept the good ole U S of A counts for anything or 3) you've also had a full frontal lobotomy and they're hoping you don't take this kind of look as a cue to start speaking to them. Seriously, I read an interview with Kerry in Newsweek the other day in the gym, and then proceeded on to the other interview, with Bush, in an attempt to be fair and balanced and everything and try and get both sides of the story. Then I had to go back and re-classify the Kerry responses as wonderfully articulate, smooth, and sensible. Because Bush's grasp of the English language (I suppose you hav to forgive him, his first language being Texan) is disgusting. Any suspicions he wanted that "No Child Left Behind" thing because he was never taught to speak in complete sentences? I mean that's a failure of the system right there. Actually, thinking about it, I do really dislike Bush.

Ps. I saw the latest comment on BoingBoing about these docs potentially not being written in Word. This is an attempt at humour.

Pedro's Wednesday Night Masterpiece

What a beautiful game. All right, so it got a bit boring, when Pedro lost his bid for a no-hitter, but you've got to like an 8-0 lead going into the 7th inning.

But to be sitting down the right field line, spitting distance (I didn't try, this is just a rough guess estimate) from the Red Sox bullpen, surrounded by scores upon scores of Red Sox fans, watching Pedro stymy the A's and watching the Sox bat around against Tim Hudson was pure magic.

Network Associates Coliseum is a big, not particularly nice ballpark, which A's fans never seem to manage to be able to fill. At a rough guess (another one, this post is just full of them, I know) I would have to say 30% of the crowd, at least, were there to cheer on the Red Sox.

The ovation that Trot got, when he took over in right field in the 8th, and caught a sinking line drive was thunderous. In a visiting ballpark. It was really something amazing to behold. I know the folks at home were saying it seemed like the Sox were being given a hard time by the Oakland fans, but, at least in our section, we routinely outshouted the A's fans. So much so that the poor guy in front of me, one of three A's fans in two complete rows of Sox fans, had to content himself with showing his... well, I suppose he thought it was clever, sign to his fellow A's fans, and then he only brought it out in the 7th inning or so, when he was getting desperate and shouting all about 1918...

Everything willing, if I live long enough, I'll come back to Oakland in 60 years and try and start up the "1989" chant. Or maybe, just maybe, I'll have better things to do with my time. I don't know, I'll pencil it in the old calendar, anyway, just in case nothing better comes up.

Garden State

Damn that Zach Braff.

I was very impressed with Garden State.

And Zach had/has a blog for the film here. Which he wrote and directed.

Great soundtrack, brilliantly written screenplay, just an amazing all around film.

Much better than, say, Godsend.

Go out and see Garden State, I highly recommend it. And that goofy kid you'll see in the film, the one from Scrubs? Yeah. That's Zach Braff. Bastard.

Sox-A's Tickets Still Available

If you're a Sox fan stranded out here on the West Coast, don't look now but there are a lot of good tickets still available for pretty cheap for tonight and tomorrow's (Pedro!) games against the A's...

We're hitting Petey's game tomorrow night and managed to get field box tickets for pretty cheap.

I'd love to see the Coliseum turned into Fenway Park West like SBC/PacBell Park was back in June. Of course, I'd not like to see a repeat of Schmidt's performance against the Sox, but we'll see how that goes. Think they'll play Tessie () for us if the Sox win?

And we're back...

We're back from our jaunt across Massachusetts, Clare, and DC, and just about settling back into work.

That was, of course, after I cleared away the cardboard box filler with which the guys had helpfully filled my cube. For some reason, everytime anyone leaves for any period of time we fill their cube with boxes... and man, those Xserve RAID boxes are heavy, even when they're empty.

And look at the Sox, I can't believe my eyes, reading through the papers today... people seem... positively positive... about things. What the hell happened to the Boston media in the last few weeks!

Oh, and the Dropkick Murphy's Tessie is on the iTunes Music Store.

The EP includes a slightly rockier version of Fields of Athenry, which they played at Claire's wedding afters.

Humor, Humor, Humor And, Ehm, Games

Before anyone else flips out on me, especially those statheads that seem to litter baseball fans these days, my comments to Joe Sullivan and on various sites, the ones about Nomar being re-signed as a free agent in the off season by the Red Sox, and all of us having a great big laugh at the press conference where Larry and Nomar kiss and make up?

I was joking. Gallows humour, if you will.

Maybe everyone's a little cranky after the Nomar trade, maybe I've just underestimated people's sense of humour. But I'm the guy who wrote, for Sane Magazine (hell, the guy who writes, and founded, Sane Magazine) the story of Nomar's trade with the headline Breaking News: Boston Devastated By Terrorists. Does that sound serious?

Oh oh oh man, forget this little mini-rant about people without a sense of humour... mid-rant, I found this: Atari2600 reviews... ohh... and Atari 7800 a couple favourites:

Congo Bongo - 2600

Kool-Aid Man! - 2600

Pele's Soccer - 2600

Pitfall (and Pitfall II, which you got sneak peeks of (in the mail) if you took a screenshot, literally a picture of the television screen, if you scored more than 20000 or so on the original) - 2600

Racquetball - 2600

Smurf - 2600, for the soundtrack alone...

Desert Falcon - 2600 The game above this, Demons to Diamonds, we couldn't play so often because we really abused that circular controller you needed to play this game.

Superman - 2600, this one gets panned, but I loved this game. Perhaps shows how simple I am...

And my personal favourite for the 2600:

Raiders of the Lost Ark. To name just a couple...

Food Fight - 7800

Hat Trick - 7800

Winter Games - 7800

But there's no review, just yet, of my favourite on that system: Dr J. versus Larry Bird... ah, correction, they do have it...