Just In Time For …

A) Baseball Season

B) My Birthday

I followed a trail of links (I believe it started at Rob Neyer’s new SBNation blog) and discovered these lovely baseball scorebooks being designed and produced by a graphic designer named Bethany Heck.  I have long intended to purchase a scorebook at Modell’s or some place since the Mets and Yankees, unlike my beloved Cardinals, do not sell separate $3 scorecards and expect me to shell out upwards of $12 for a program just to get at the one sheet of paper I’m actually interested in.  Plus, how cool would it be to have all the baseball games you went to catalogued in a certain period of time in one place, like a little game diary?  I even like that they’re a bit smaller than average, since I’m usually taking mass transit to games these days. (Apparently a larger version is in the works.)

I want one of these so bad I’m not sure I can wait a week to see if I get one for my birthday. Of course, if I wound up with two, I guess I’d just have to go to more baseball games.

Orders are being taken through the project’s Kickstarter page, which is here.

Saturday Self-Promotion

I wrote up my trip to the Knicks-Hornets game (which almost didn’t happen) for Ladies… this week.  Apologies to those of you who are already Facebook fans/readers of Ladies… and thus are seeing this link for the second time.  I’m not planning on cross-posting every week, just if it seems particularly relevant.

Review of a Preview: The Book of Mormon

Sainted Boyfriend had a moment of pop culture prescience in January, and as a result we’ve wound up with tickets to two of what are shaping up to be the hottest tickets in town. Next Thursday we have Knicks-Hornets tickets (which means I’ll be interrupting my Knicks cheering to scream “CHRIS PAUL!!!!!” every so often); this past Thursday, we were sitting in the second row for the first official preview performance of  The Book of Mormon, otherwise known as “the musical written by the South Park guys.”

I should note, I’m at best indifferent on the subject of South Park. I’ve seen only a handful of episodes in their entirety — most of what I know about the series actually comes from the Behind the Music (I think? It was about ten years ago) episode focused on Parker and Stone. So I am pretty well qualified to say that you can enjoy this show without being a South Park fan, because I definitely did.

They’re So Cute At That Age

I went over to the old blog to post the official moving notice, and flipped through some of my very first posts. This one really brought home how long ago I started blogging (please bear in mind that I was 20 and suffering from new-toy-overeagerness and about a week from graduating from OU before you laugh at my enthusiasm and clumsy writing)

This is Albert Pujols, my new favorite Cardinal (although I love them all, of course). He is only 20 years old, but you woudn’t know it from the way he’s played so far this season. It’s been great to have his offense since Mac’s knee is still so shaky. Pujols and Rick Ankiel are the first Cardinals that seem more like my peers than my father’s

Ooooh, shiny.

I got a new computer on Friday. It’s a laptop — I keep thinking of it as my very first laptop, but my first ever computer was also a laptop: it just weighed about 10 pounds more, had a 9 inch screen, and a 386 processor.  So I guess this is my “first laptop powerful enough to not require supplementary support from the desktops in the campus computer lab,” but that’s a bit awkward to say every time.

Stupidly Addictive Blog Idea: The Files of Jessica Fletcher

The first two seasons of Murder, She Wrote are streaming on Netflix Instant right now and it’s become my go-to mindless after work viewing over the last month.  (Heh: in a strange coincidence, the podcast I’m listening to at the moment just played a snippet of the MSW theme song.)  Retro recaps of this show really could make one of those pop culture blogs that you can’t help reading, a la The Dairi Burger.  If I were to write such a blog, it would include such regular features as:

• The Angela Lansbury Acting Challenge.  Jessica Fletcher is something of a Mary Sue, character-wise, so about halfway through the first season, either Lansbury or the writers must have gotten bored and decided to start throwing in plot points that would allow Angela to demonstrate her considerable talent for comedy, whether it’s having Jessica pretend to be drunk to lure a murderer into revealing himself or writing her a double role as her own identical cousin, a saucy old-time music hall performer in England.

Dental Damned

As a type-A eldest child, I follow directions to the letter, sometimes to my detriment. After spending much of my early childhood being told by the dentist to brush my gums more, I have now apparently spent my adult life brushing my gums too hard. Thus in the last 24 hours, I’ve acquired a periodontist and a prescribed electric toothbrush. I always assumed electric toothbrushes were one of those superfluous gadgets adding to everyone’s electricity bills (a belief only reinforced by the fact that Sainted Boyfriend has one, as he both loves gadgets and has electricity included in his rent) but apparently they are actually recommended if you are like me and can not be trusted to brush your own teeth properly.

And so another longstanding grudge dies a quiet death ….

Perhaps a later history will view all these as the final gutterings of a spent flame. This is no golden age, and several of its ballets are indeed dead. My own main alarm about ballet — not one that troubles Ms. Homans — is that its dependence on pointwork for women and partnering by men proposes a dichotomizing view of the sexes that is at best outmoded and at worst repellently sexist. Nevertheless, this balletgoer testifies that the scene feels brighter than it did 10, 15 or 20 years ago.

That’s an entire paragraph of Alistair Macauley that not only didn’t make me roll my eyes, it made me cheer at my computer screen.  I have to stop totally hating him now.  Not that he didn’t pull his share of name-dropping condecension in the rest of the review, but he’s no longer completely dismissable as a high art snob.