Monday Miscellania

Oops, that was supposed to be 'Rocketing Around the Blogosphere', wasn't it. Oh well, I spent time figuring out how to spell 'miscellania', so it stays (is that even a real word?).

Go visit SportsBlog. Kevin of Wizbang! will appreciate it (he’s one of the founders), and yours truly will be writing incisive and biting commentary on the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Raiders, and San Jose Sharks. Assuming, of course, that the sources I steal from are incisive and biting.

The Dodgers suck.

Speaking of the Dodgers, I’m sure that Annika will be visiting Chavez Ravine at some point. I hope that she wears her black and orange proudly, or at the very least, doesn’t go wearing Dodger blue (there are limits to acclimating to an environment, ya know). Anyways, I found this helpful and humorous guide to behavior at the ballpark. I’m sure it applies to some degree to most every stadium.

Tiger points to an excellent (and entertaining) usage of massive amounts of bandwidth. Mookie will like it, it’s got stick people in it! Also Susie gets a little crazy with slogans and battle cries! Scroll through to see them all, although my personal favorite has her clutching a thorned whip as she shouts:

"I'm going to spank you in such an unsafe manner, you will wake up from the Matrix!!!"

I bet Susie doesn’t have many problems with noisy kids in the theater.

Serenity points to a brilliant yet disturbing series of little movies (another bandwidth-intensive link folks).

Over at The Meatriarchy, ‘A’ gives a mouth-watering review of BBQ ribs he sampled at a weekend rib-fest. Makes me wanna fire up the grill. Oh, and 'A', there's no way I'm going to believe that's your real name, so you might as well give up the charade.

Star Trek. Jerry Springer. Combine them and you get 'Wild Sex Partners From Outer Space'. Courtesy of Mr. Helpful, who promises this next installment of his Shatner Chronicles tomorrow morning.

Kate has the Snark Hunt up this week, and I’m in it. See me at my worst, in a totally roundabout way: go to her site, scroll down to the Snark Hunt, find where she links my entry, then click it to get right back here (well, actually it’s down below a ways, which you would’ve known had you actually read it the first time). See? Pure unadulterated snark.

Finally…

Mookie and I had a moment yesterday. I’m surprised occasionally by something she does, not because it’s smart or dumb or good or bad, but because it’s part of her character that I don’t see very often.

She’s always said she hates earthworms (and squirmy things in general, what a girl), and my attitude has always been ‘pick the stupid thing up and throw it in the garden’. Which she does with great reluctance.

Yesterday we went out back to clean straighten up in between waves of thunderstorms. I was turning my compost pile and mentioned that there were a lot of earthworms in it, which is a very good thing. Rachael did her gag routine.

Since the work went quickly, I decided that we’d go ahead and relevel the shed. I put it in this spring, and despite some care the base settled unevenly, making the doors hard to open and close. It’s one of those plastic types that you snap together, not too big, but you need at least two people to move it.

We emptied the shed (garden tools, lawn mower, shovels and rakes, potting soil and such, etc.), and started to move it. As I shifted it, something ran out from underneath it and out the back gate. My split-second glimpse left the impression of a white shape moving fast. I thought it was a lizard, although the white color confused me. It was too small to be a rat, and too thin to be a mouse I think. So Mookie and I get this shed moved out of the way enough to relevel the brick base and there are... babies... uncovered.

Maybe 2” long, pink and hairless, not more than a day or two old, their eyes were not even open yet. They squirmed and kicked a little, but were too young to do much more. Definitely rodent, but unidentifiable as rat or mouse or vole or anything else. Rachael didn’t want anything to do with them, so I gently scooped them into a shovel and took them back to the creek* behind the house where I left them in the underbrush.

They’re dead by now, I’m sure. Snake or cat or exposure or neglect, because ‘momma’ was not coming back, that was certain. I feel a little weird about it, because I do believe that life is precious, but like they say, ‘nature is a mother’ and they weren’t looking at a long life anyways (especially in my backyard). Everyone reading this should realize that in the grand scheme of things, each of us is a big winner in the cosmic-lotto powerball game.

Two things: first, I’ll have to pour a solid concrete pad under the shed to keep the local fauna from nesting underneath. Maybe next weekend.

Secondly, this is going to bother me for a while.

*Creek is pronounced ‘crick’ as any native northern Californian knows. Don’t argue with me, because you’re wrong.

Update: Here are a couple more places to go and people to see, just because they're cool and/or interesting.

(bandwidth warning) Watch a sketch being done right in front of your eyes. Cool (said that already, didn't I)

50 Things al Qaeda Hates about America.

And some stuff you might not have known about the history of our Social Security system. (He's a real rocket scientist too)

Posted by Ted at September 2, 2003 08:53 AM | TrackBack