A Bloy and his Blog

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to make up my mind about what to think about Major League Baseball shutting down the all-star game at an 11th inning tie. After reading all the editorials, I’ve come to the conclusion that baseball fans are on the lowest point of MLB’s priority list. The multi-millionaire players could have cared less about finishing the game. I can’t help but imagine if this situation would have happened fifty years ago, the players would have said, “sure we’re tired, but we want to finish. Major league baseball games do not end in a tie.”

The managers of the two teams wanted to make sure all their multi-millionaire players got their chance in the spotlight, so in the first nine innings, they used 17 of the total 19 pitchers they had. To his credit, I did read that the last pitcher for the American League said he could have pitched a few more innings. The other players and officials of baseball should have let him.

In a way I almost feel sorry for Bud Selig. I believe he has been unfairly criticized on a lot of issues during his tenure as commissioner. But in this case, he made the wrong decision.

Now the baseball players and owners are arguing over how to split all the money they rake in, and the possibility of a strike or a lock out looms on the horizon. The only question on my mind is, how soon until football season starts?

I definitely have not been paying enough attention to my blog lately. Sorry about that. In order to keep you thinking and out of trouble, here are some links to interesting things I’ve seen on the web recently.

First and foremost, Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian.

I must admit I do own a few albums from One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Music Collection Immediately. Although I do disagree with a few of their removal selections (especially The Joshua Tree and Sgt. Peppers), reading this is worth it for the writer’s wit alone.

Did you know you can search Google using different languages, including Pig Latin, Klingon and my personal favorite Elmer Fudd?

Finally for those of you that aren’t easily offended, The Onion’s Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby is a real hoot.

I signed up with a new ISP the other day. It felt a little weird as I’ve had the same ISP for seven years. Unfortunately, because of corporate buy-outs which led to bad service at inflated prices I was ready to leave. It’s a real shame. Long before the Internet was available to the mass public I was a member of Exec-PC BBS (a computer Bulletin Board Service). Even though the Internet has Flash animations, fancy graphics and a global community, somehow it was more fun reading simple text only messages and exchanging files with a local community of users. I think it was around eight years ago, they began to offer Internet service and it had the same high quality as the BBS. Five years later Exec-PC became the largest ISP in the midwest and the owner decided to sell his company (a good decision, I would have done the same). Service has been on a steady decline since. I am especially pleased about one thing though — all the sleazy, scum-sucking spammers have yet another dead e-mail address in their databases.

I just returned from a camping vacation at the Northern Highland/American Legion State Forest in northern Wisconsin. Below is a picture from the Plum Lake Hemlock Forest State Natural Area. It’s a nice hike from where I was camping at Star Lake.

read the rest of: Star Lake camping

One of the best things about being in this area of Wisconsin are hearing the loons calling at night. There’s nothing like falling asleep while listening to that haunting wail they make. One night I woke up about 3am (my bladder was calling me). After I finished my urgent business I must have stayed awake 20 minutes or so listening to the loons. No, they weren’t keeping me awake, I wanted to just lay in my sleeping bag and listen.

One more entry related to my camping trip. Learning about Native American culture has been a fascination of mine for quite some time. While I was in northern Wisconsin, I visited Waswagoning, a recreated Ojibwe Indian village. They’ve got things set up there as the Ojibwe lived before the Europeans came to this area. The tour guides (from the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe tribe) do an excellent job of showing you how their people lived during that time. The folktales they told also made their culture come alive as the tour progressed. Definitely an excellent place to stop while you’re traveling through the north woods.

What is it about the music of your youth that makes it the best you’ve ever heard? Is it because when you hear the soundtrack of those years it floods your brain with memories (most people look back quite fondly on those times). For me it was my early twenties. I think that’s when I did the most “growing up” and considered myself an adult.

The other day in a used record store, I discovered a CD from my favorite local Milwaukee band from that time (the early 1980’s), Those X-Cleavers. When I got it home and popped it into the CD player, I couldn’t believe how good it sounded. If I close my eyes when it’s playing, I’m at those old hangouts with all of my friends from that time. It almost makes me wish I could time travel. The music of Those X-Cleavers has a new wave / punk feel to it. The compact disc I bought includes two albums: Those X-Cleavers, The Waiting Game and also a few bonus singles from that time. I don’t think it’s available new anymore (no, I won’t sell mine) but if you can find this CD, you too can hear such excellent songs as Silence The Critics, 18 (And Unprotected), Skip A Beat, Nice Legs (Shame About The Face) and Do The Confusion.

Well, it’s come to this. I’ve officially removed all traces of my personal e-mail address from this web site. For a while I had the actual address posted on the e-mail page for everyone to see. I have been getting a few unsolicited e-mail advertisements and paranoia has forced me to take it off so scum-sucking spammers won’t be able to harvest my address. For my e-mail page, I also found a secure, form processing script that lets you hard code your address in the script, so it’s not listed anywhere in the form.

It’s pretty sad when you have to do things like this just to keep the annoying ads from entering your mail box. The worst part of it is, the spammers can send millions of messages at little cost, yet our Internet service providers have to purchase more mail servers to keep up with ever increasing volume of unsolicited e-mail ads that are coming through. Who do you think is paying for that?

Here it is September already. Where does the time go? In a way I’m glad — September is one of my favorite months. The days are usually warm and the nights are usually cool. This month brings the anticipation and excitement of a new football season (Go Badgers!). September is also the time all the fresh produce really starts to be available. Yesterday at my favorite local farmer’s market, I picked up the best bag full of corn, green beans (I love to eat those raw), summer squash, carrots and tomatoes so far this year. There’s just nothing like having fresh, locally grown vegetables on your table. I also saw acorn and butternut squash at the market for the first time this season. Definitely a sign that fall is on it’s way.

Next week we have a primary election in Wisconsin. In today’s mail I got two separate flyers for my congressman, urging me to vote for him. On my answering machine was a message from a campaign worker, telling my why I should vote for my congressman and urging me to go to the polls to vote for him. While watching the evening news tonight, I saw two advertisements explaining why my congressman is so good for our area and that we should go vote for him.

I swear if a politician would come out and say, “I’ve decided to donate all the money I raised for my campaign to a worthy charity and I will not waste it all on ads” I would kiss them on the lips. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t actually do that. Unless they were female, available and a good looker of course. But I digress.

I get a little amused when politicians go on about wasted government spending and then they turn around and spend millions of dollars saturating their constituents with ads, direct mailings and answering machine messages. By the way Mr. Congressman, if you really think I was going to sit there and listen to that message on my answering machine, you aren’t smart enough to be re-elected.