Author Archives: Richard

Thanksgiving

People don’t usually give a lot of thought to the origins of the holiday. It’s usually seen as just a day when you stuff yourself silly with family that you mostly like, and then go back to getting ready for Christmas.

If it gets any attention, it’s often depicted as marking the beginning of the conquest of North America by the English. I have to wonder what the natives actually thought of it at the time – if there actually was some sort of celebratory feast.

If there was, I suspect it was about the formation of an alliance between the English and the Wampanoag, the local tribe. As I understand it, the situation in south east “New England” was that there were a lot of small tribes in an ever-shifting network of alliances. The English could have been seen as just another tribe, so any celebration could have marked the acceptance of the English settlers into that network. That it took place at the end of harvest season (so we are told) is a mere coincidence.

Actually, there’s a long tradition of harvest festivals in places where winter is a time of darkness and privation. You’ve brought in and stored all the crops, killed all the livestock you can’t afford to keep alive through the winter – and preserved as much of the meat as you can, and gotten everything else ready for the cold and dark. A perfect time to have a big party and gorge yourself on all the late-ripening crops (nuts, root vegetables….) and what birds haven’t yet migrated away (pheasant). And if you’re lucky, any meat that you don’t have room to store.

So, if you want to get rid of all the political baggage that comes with Thanksgiving these days (and I’m not talking about that uncle who insists on talking about his conspiracy theories and how one political party is going to bring us to ruin), just skip all of it and celebrate the end of the harvest season as you get ready for winter.

And stuff yourself silly.

The Deadball Project

When you’ve been a baseball fan for a long enough time – and not particularly obsessed with a single team – you might start putting together “All-Time” teams. Not just players from one specific franchise, but perhaps an “all switch-hitters” team or a team where everyone is named “Joe” (or Jose, of course).

I consider myself to be of Polish ancestry, so naturally I thought of a “Polish All-Stars” team. If I am a fan of any one team, I would have to say it’s the Mets. So I’ve often tried to come up with an All-Time Mets team.

Then, with the two teams, might it not be fun to have them face each other in a best-of-seven series?

That’s where “Deadball” comes in.

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Pond in a Jar – Update 3

Almost three months since the original collection, and it’s still thriving! OK, I’m down to just one beetle (that I can see), But there are still plenty of snails of various sizes, and that little sprouting plant has taken over. It’s over six inches tall, and has several side roots and offshoots. I really have to wonder where all the nutrients are coming from. The other plants don’t seem to be growing or dying off, and there’s no sign of any change in the soil level. And I’m keeping it sealed – it’s been a couple of weeks since I last popped the top. The water still has a greenish cast. I wonder if that’s algae floating or sticking to the glass. I don’t intend to shake things up to find out.

I wonder if it will make it through the winter – the heat in the room gets really weird; I sometimes have to open the window to keep from baking.

I tweaked the image a bit to better show details.

On the 2023 World Series

Well, that was set of games.

Look, they can’t all be stone-cold classics like 2016 or 2017. Sometimes you wind up with a pair of “meh” teams (2006), or one team that got hot / lucky at the right time, and then was totally overmatched in the Series (2007). This was a case of the latter – the Diamondbacks were a streaky team that barely made it in to the playoffs, and then got just hot enough to take advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses in the first three rounds. Then they ran into the best offense in the American League: the Rangers were first in batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage, and tied for first in home runs. They didn’t really stand a chance. The Rangers also had six players selected for the summer’s All Star Game, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at how far they made it. Continue reading →

On the Fourteenth Amendment

It’s been popping up in the news every so often these days. People, worried that Donald Trump might actually get elected after having tried to overturn the results of a legitimate election, are using Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment as justification to keep him off the ballot in a number of states next year.

That was one of the post-Civil War amendments that ended slavery and gave rights to the former slaves. The particular section under consideration was added to prevent leaders of the Confederacy from taking office at any level where they could presumably work to destabilize the country (again).

The text is:

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BOOK REVIEW: Empire of Ice and Stone

Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk
Buddy Levy
St. Martin’s Press
Copyright 2022 by the author

It’s the explorers going for “firsts” that get all the press. First to the South Pole, first to summit Everest, etc. The ones doing the actual science and cartography, filling in the blank spaces on the map, are the ones who get forgotten – even if their travels and travails are far more interesting and exciting.

In 1913, Vilhjalmur Stefansson decided to lead an expedition to the “High Arctic”, setting out from Alaska and moving up into the Canadian north. The “Canadian Arctic Expedition” would map the territory and do assorted scientific explorations, looking for sea life and recording the weather – and staking claim to any new lands. Stefansson, meanwhile, knew where the real profit was; he arranged for exclusive publication rights to pretty much everything produced by the expedition. There would be two ships to take all the scientists; Stefansson would captain the Alaska; Robert Bartlett would head the Karluk. Continue reading →

Pond in a Jar – Update 2

The jar was nice – but it wasn’t particularly aesthetically pleasing. It was a jar fer cryin’ out loud, with bands of gunk on the outside where the label was glued to it. Not really the kind of thing you wanted to see on your desk or windowsill. As it happened, while poking around in the kitchen cabinets, I found an old wine carafe (from way back when Almaden Vineyards was selling wine in lidded carafes, for some reason) that had managed to survive in there for decades.

“This would make a much better ‘Pond in a Jar’”, I thought. “It’s larger, the outside is cleaner, and is much nicer to look at.” All I had to do was go back to the pond, get another eight ounces or so of water and bottom sediment, and carefully transfer everything into the carafe.

That was done two weeks ago.

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Book Review: Why We Love Baseball

Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments
Joe Posnanski
Dutton Books
Copyright 2023 by the author

The title is something of a misnomer. The book is not a collection of essays on how great baseball is, nor is it a historical chronicle of key events in the history of the game.

Over and over again, with his many books and articles and essays and blog posts, Joe Posnanski has shown himself to be a master at telling stories. Here, he puts that skill to work, with what turns out to be over 100 stories of baseball at every level.

Sure, there are plenty of things from the Major Leagues and World Series. But that’s not all there is to baseball. A Little Leaguer learns the knuckleball from and old star, and uses it to toss a perfect game…. A real potato makes an appearance on the field in a minor league game…. A team pulls of the perfect “hidden ball” trick in the College World Series.

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Little Shorts of Horror

It’s that time of year again. TV networks and streaming services roll out their libraries of horror movies to throw a “Friday Night Frights” or “Nights of Horror” thing at you.

Should you want to try something different – or perhaps you don’t have enough time for a full-length movie – there are plenty of short (typically less than 30 minutes) horror films out there online.

ALTER and CryptTV are YouTube channels devoted exclusively to horror. Short of the Week and Omeleto are for general short films, but they both have a category for horror.

DUST is a channel for science fiction shorts, but since the two genres frequently overlap, they’ll occasionally drift into horror. For example, here’s “Laboratory Conditions” by Jocelyn Stamat (and starring Marisa Tomei and Minnie Driver):

Since one can easily get tired of blood, gore, and ghosts, it’s nice to find a horror-comedy every now and then. Like Dylan Chase’s “A Night in Camp Heebie-Jeebie”:

And sometimes you’ll come across something that on the face of it looks like a typical horror tale because the elements are all there, but it quickly goes somewhere completely different. To wit, “Summon a Fiend” by Eleanor Cho…..

 

Pleasant dreams!!!

MOVE REVIEW: Princess of Mars (2009)

It boggles the mind (well, mine at least) that it took nearly a century for one of the most important works in all of science fiction to be adapted for the big screen. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” novels, starting with 1912’s A Princess of Mars, have influenced everything from Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” to James Cameron’s Avatar. The novels have pretty much everything you’d want in a grand epic. Action, adventure, romance, and spectacle, all in an exotic (but still understandable) setting. Admittedly, depicting giant, four-armed, reptilian warriors on any screen would be a problem – but nothing that you can’t use an Artistic License to work around. Ordinary two-armed people in latex head masks will do fine.

That’s the method chosen by Asylum Pictures, the rulers of the “direct to DVD” domain, in their 2009 adaptation of the first of the novels. They must have gotten wind that Disney was going to throw megabucks at their own version, and figured “Anything you can do, we can do cheaper and faster.” With some $300,000 at their disposal, they set to work.

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