i am looking at a baseball game, having not wtched one all season. the season is over half way through. i know that much. but that’s about it. in seasons past i followed virtually every single game, though by about midseason the ritual was continued begrudgingly. i gave up on the aspirational attitude that professional athletes deserved the riches and the adulation heaped upon them if their greatness on the field inspired even mediocrity among the teeming masses gathered to see the games. now i can only look at these guys and think they’re a bunch of cheating crybabies who deserve but a fraction of the glory lavished upon them in money and in worshipfulness. these are not people. they are gods. they are regarded in the same untouchable class as the gods of centuries past.
i am not really watching the game. just looking at it, for it is on the television in front of me.
my interest in baseball piqued some years ago, when my mother and i shared a mutual pastime of following the lowly tampa bay devil rays, which later became the tampa bay rays. it was a lot of fun to follow that sorry excuse for a major league team, and more fun still since my mother got so excited about it all when they did well, and when they eventually reached the world series. we shared even greater excitement when the buccaneers reached and won the super bowl. my interest was genuine of its own volition, but when my mother became engaged in the games it became that much more like a childhood. nowadays my interest in money-vacuuming professional sports is evaporated, and it is not just because my mother is gone. i simply find pro sports to be ridiculous, and though i am no economist i have a hunch that the financial fundamentals of the major sports leagues are made of mush.
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i bought a new camera today. ordered it. arrival on friday, whence i plan to stay indoors all day to avoid the forecasted 110-degree heat index. that’s going to be ass. it takes a lot for me to complain about the weather but 110 degrees should be worthy of a whine.
i ordered a bunch of other crap, too. shirts and books and a cheap tripod. and other things, when i make these monster orders from amazon i like to try and forget what i ordered, so as to be surprised-like-it’s-christmas when the boxes arrive.
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no wake-up-screaming dreams the last few nights. no breathing problems, either. life is good. i should really be getting more work done, but my lazy life is starting to feel seductively comfortable.
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i walked up to thhe Home Depot today, for to get more honeywell hepa pre-filters, and to attmept to buy an exotic light bulb for a weird reading lamp i got a few years ago.
the depot had not the light bulb i needed, so i go it through amazon, a de facto stream of progress that has contributed to my absence from most retail stores for the last several years. virtually everything is chepaer through amazon, and most attempts to purchase things at highway-robbery places like Staples or any electronics store usually end when i check the price on amazon and find that it is 40% less. i heard an analyst on Bloomberg radio say that he did not consider the in-store price check via the smartphone to be a threat to traditional retail establishments. i heartily disagree with that analyst. the logic and the simplicity of comparing prices from where you are makes its increased usage unavoidable.
the new camera i ordered today will be my 2nd dslr, an upgrade over the sony a550 i got about 18 months a go. not a major upgrade, but i am hoping to keep the sensors clean this time, shoot more RAW format, and grab some video while i’m at it. evidently the a55 i ordered can only shoot a few minutes of video at time before overheating. i like to imagine there will be a firmware update for that bush-league-sounding problem, but i don’t really care too much to use a dslr for video.
this dslr will be a nice place holder until sony comes up with its next Nikon-killer. the a900 is about as excellent a dslr as one could contrive at this stage of the evolution, and i would likely have bought that instead of the a55 except that i think the a900 will be superseded soon by whatever’s next. i also like some of the gadgetry of the a55, such as the fold-out screen, which is actually kind of a deal-maker for me.
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chasing a childhood memory i ordered a copy of a guinness book of world records from the 1980s, in which is purported to be mention of the world’s buisest payphone. according to my foggy childhood memory that payphone was singled out in the guinness book of records, and it was at grand central station in manhattan. i was at grand central earlier this week, looking at payphones, when i remembered that vaguely-held memory. now that i think of it, i think this memory of my memory was mentioned in the new york times story in 2004. i wonder if their fact-checkers verified it. well, i’ll find out soon what the book actually says about the world’s busiest payphone, and if it is specified with fastidious meticularity.
there is a similar early memory i want to verify. in my early days in nyc i swear there was a diner at rockefeller center that had a train theme, and all the tables and booths had some kind of train-related decor. i think it was called something like the “Night Train” diner or the “Train Track” diner, but whatever it was or was not i would just like to find some proof that the place really existed. so, as i chase memories in the pages of old Guinness Records books, i would like to similarly chase memories through old Rockefeller Center Visitors Guides and tourism guides which might mention the fabled diner. i think the diner was near or in the same space as the health food store is now, and where the erstwhile Palm store used to be. either there or where the Hallmark store is…
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free
drum
boilclub
zoomstub
flop
woresole
spotglib
vile
biledial
zone
spit
bone
vole
swat
node
fire
wiredire
view
spin
feds
code
gripgrit
trigclip
swim
ails
crewcrow
cropcreddrew
dole
dots
dote
dose
docs
fort
zoomzoot
suit
stir
vice