The Plentiful Vintage

Snagged from jonquil, et al.

A book you own that no one on your friends list does:
The Dodger Way To Play Baseball, by Al Campanis. This is a primer on the way the Dodgers taught their players the fundamentals of the game. TomZ gave me this as a gift some years ago. His dad had bought it for him when he was a kid. There are even some autographs in it, obtained at a Dodger-Giant game in 1956 (at the Polo Grounds). One of them is Jackie Robinson's. Try prying this from my cold, dead fingers.

A CD you own that no one on your friends list does:
Cruel Red, by Jack Smith and the Rockabilly Planet. Friday afternoons and evenings during my last couple of years in grad school (i.e., post-separation from the ex) tended to be fairly predictable. Department seminar at 3, then we'd all head to Iggy's for happy hour at 4, go to whichever bar the GSA happy hour was being held at 6, and then end up over at the Narragansett cafe in Jamestown to finish the night. The 'Gansett had good live bands, cheap beer, and no cover. The only problem was finding a place to sit. The Rockabilly Planet was one of the bands that used to play there. Oddly enough, I didn't find this CD here in Rhody, but stumbled across in the Amoeba in Hollywood earlier this year. Quite a surprise.

A DVD/VHS tape you own that no one on your friends list does:
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons - The Complete Series. This was Gerry Anderson's next series after Thunderbirds. I had a lot of choices here, because I have a lot of old obscure cartoons on VHS I could've mentioned, like Crusader Rabbit or Scott McCloud, Space Angel.

A place you've been that no one on your friends list has been:
The Polo Grounds. I saw my first major league game there on August 18, 1962. (I didn't remember the exact date, but I was able to look it up online. Thank goodness for the interbunny.) The Cardinals beat the Mets, 10-0, and Stan Musial made a sliding catch in right. The Polo Grounds was long and narrow, like a football stadium. The foul poles were only around 260 ft away, while the center field clubhouse was about 460 ft. The bullpens were in the back corners of the outfield, in fair territory. There was a big sign in center advertising Rheingold beer. The "h" and "e" in Rheingold would light up depending upon whether a ball was scored a hit or an error. I thought that was tremendously cool. Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy (the Mets' announcers) had to say "And the 'e' lights up on the Rheingold sign," an awful lot during those first two hapless Met seasons. It became one of our catch phrases when we played ball at home.

The park was demolished when the Mets moved to Shea in 1964. It used to be right across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium.

Sci-Fi has cancelled Farscape, despite initially picking it up for a fifth season. This is just terribly annoying. I suspect they will replace it with another one of their cheesy pseudo-reality shows, which are cheap to produce, and attract a larger and more desirable (from an advertiser's point of view) demographic, that is to say, morons.

I do wonder if the network execs took a look at the recent episodes and couldn't figure out what the frell was going on, and if that had anything to do with it. Many of us have been saying that Kemper appears to have been on the good monkey crack over the past run of episodes. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed this season, the episodes have been difficult follow at times, and almost require second and even third viewings to make sense. This has got to be a problem with casual fans, or even Stargate fans who stay tuned and can't figure out what's going on. To be fair, I always felt that way about Lexx, but I digress. Anyhow, I can see how someone who does not follow the series could be totally lost, which means that it's tough to increase viewership. When you're paying that much for a series, you need to see the numbers go up.

Oh, bother...

Picked up my new truck tonight. Two surprises - things I didn't notice when I took the test drive. First, it has cruise control. Yay! I didn't notice it because GM puts it on the signal stalk instead of on the wheel as most other makers do. Second, it doesn't have power windows. Hmmm... When I got the Subaru, I wasn't looking for power windows. I thought they'd be a waste of electricity. But I came to like them a lot, especially the ability to open other windows from the driver's seat. Now I'll have to crank 'em. Bother. Such a small thing to be annoyed about. OTOH, working radio/cassette/CD.

Another thing I noticed is that the windscreen is sloped more than on the Sub, and extends much farther out in front of me, so I will not easily be able to reach the spot I would normally put the radar detector. Will have to experiment with positioning it.

Tomorrow, I'll go get a tonneau cover, and start looking into getting a lockable cover. I also need to see how hard it's gonna be to attach my bike rack to it. I may need to get a new rack. Or, you know, throw the bike in the bed...

Meanwhile, I'm dubbing tapes of last week's Farscape ep for a couple of Buffistas. It was a great episode, so I don't mind watching it again. And again.

We're back to the hot, hazy, and humid. It was in the nineties, and the humidity is awful. But at least tomorrow I can drive to work in air-conditioned comfort

Today would've been my twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. Damn I'm old...

Managed to finish most of the quotation application today. Still a couple of thing to finish this weekend, but it should be working for some testing on Monday. Access is driving me crazy. Somethings that are conceptually so simple are just so difficult to actually implement. For example, the first part of the application has the operator input the recipe components for the standard in a subform, one component at a time. I wanted the subform to automatically number each component record sequentially, starting at one. The autonumber won't work for this because it just picks up where it left of the last time. There is a published workaround to do this in a report, but not in a form. I tried setting up a field in the subform to count the component records for the standard, and then set the default value for the new record to the count plus one. For God knows what reason, it numbered the first component '1', the second component '1', and incremented after that. If you stopped and clicked on an earlier record, it reset the counter to the correct position, but then did the same behavior from that point. After a good day of banging my head against it, trying various permutations of the code with different triggering events, I finally tried counting the records in the table using DCount(), rather than using Count() in the form. That worked. I have no clue as to why the other ways didn't. It really ought to be simpler than that, ya know?

New Farscape tonight. Aeryn's back. Damn it was good.

No ride today, but I'll hit the bike path in the morning before I head up to Somerville to play games with the Somervillains. Should be a good day. Now to sleep.

Had fun in Somerville last night. Went up to Ellen's to watch Farscape with the Buffistas. We watched Bottle Rocket first, which was quirky and fun. Farscape was the first part of a two-parter, and ended, as Tom W noted, with a cliff-hanger involving an actual cliff. Was fun helping to explain some of the back story to the people who were new to the show.

Driving up only took about ninety minutes. There was minimal traffic, and I'm starting to get a feel for where things are in Somerville. Going home was a nightmare. They were doing some kind of work on the I-93 bridge, so they took four lanes of traffic down to a single lane. Then they did it again right after the tunnel. Yeesh! No doubt these are the same swinging geniuses who are doing the planning on the Quonset project. Took two+ hours to get home in the middle of the frelling night. Plus the muffler blew out just as I was leaving Ellen's. Very, very loud.

Went to Midas first thing this morning, and had a new muffler put in, along with an oil change. $222. They also had to weld the pipe immediately behind the catalytic converters to close a crack. It's a temporary fix, but it's better than paying six hundred bucks to replace the converters on a car with 170,000 miles. Much incentive now to get serious about looking for a new vehicle. I really do need something new before going to Canada in August.

It was kind of a crappy day out. It stopped raining around noon, but it never did clear up. After I got back from Midas, I did some clean-up type stuff in the basement. Cleaned the chain saw, then installed a stationary tool wheel set on the woodworking bench, so I can push the bench to wherever I need it and then set it in place, instead of having to haul it about. Very handy. Tomorrow I need to get the piles of stuff off of the table saw, so I can start working on the bookcases.