ECLIPSE 2024 – Part 1

“I can drive to the path of totality!” I said. “And in just one day! I’ll make a vacation out of it!”

I think I wound up in the only place in New York where the skies were completely overcast. Sunday was beautiful; mild temperatures and completely clear skies. Tuesday was unseasonably warm, with a few scattered clouds and a high, thin haze.

But on Eclipse Day, at 3:15 in the afternoon…..

Not pictured: Old man yelling

And because of the cloud cover, almost all of the eclipse phenomena – sudden drop in temperature, weird animal behavior – didn’t happen. All we got was the “twilight all the way around the horizon”.

Looking towards the City of Rochester

We also noted that it seemed to get lighter much faster than it got dark….

Well, at least the Casa Larga Vineyards had a very nice “Toast to Totality” event. I might have stayed there a bit longer (it lasted to 5 pm), but a little after four o’clock, a light drizzle started.

Ya know, I’m not sure I care for all these wineries becoming “event spaces” with sales rooms attached to them. I’d love to chat with the winery staff (NOT the sales staff) about their vines and grapes and how they deal with pests and how they are coping with global warming. Or how it seems that there are so many competitions these days that pretty much any winery can win some medals, or how a person’s particular sense of taste might affect how they enjoy a particular wine – there might be an equivalent to “color blindness” for taste, and we do know that your sense of hearing changes as you get older…. I suppose they’ve got to make extra money somehow…..

But anyway, my trip to Rochester wasn’t a complete waste – I made plans to do other things there, and I’ll tell you about them in the next few posts.

BOOK REVIEW: Crooked

Crooked: The Roaring ‘20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal
Nathan Masters
Hachette Books}
Copyright 2023 by the author

When most people think of Warren Harding’s presidency, one of the first things that will come to mind is the “Teapot Dome” scandal, where federal oil reserves were sold off to oil companies to the benefit of people in the Harding administration. Less well-known to us today, but even more outrageous was the contemporary scandal at the Veterans’ Bureau. The Bureau was purchasing goods for far more than market price, surplus goods were sold off for much less than they should have been, and millions of dollars were flat out unaccounted for.

Senate committees were investigating all this. But the biggest scandal was, quite simply, that the US Attorney General and the Justice Department weren’t doing anything at all to help the investigations.

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Eurovision 2024

It’s been a while since I paid any attention to the European Broadcasting Union’s annual international “Battle of the Bands”. Not knowing much (or caring much) about the contemporary music scene, either here in the US or in Europe, there really isn’t much to attract my interest.

I thought I’d give things a look and see if there was anything in this year’s crop of Official Music Videos that stood out….

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BOOK REVEIW: Time Trials

Time Trials
M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler
Baen Books
Copyright 2023 by the authors

I don’t usually care for novel series. More often than not, you have to commit to reading the complete set of novels in order to get the entire story. Or the follow-up novels are just a case of the publisher telling the author “That book did really well. Write another one, with the same characters and same universe.” It gets annoying when you can tell it’s just a cash grab on the order of the Transformers or Fast and Furious movies.

The worst ones are where they can’t be bothered to indicate anywhere on the cover that the book is part of a series. Do I need to read all the ones that came before it to figure out what’s going on? Will I have to read all the following books? Do I have to read them all in a specific order?

Fortunately, there’s a blurb from Kirkus Reviews right on the cover that lets you know what to expect with this one: “An entertaining first entry in what promises to be a fantastic time-travel series.”

 

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Stamp of Approval

I remember back when we used to honor various worthies by putting them on postage stamps. Sadly, it seems that these days it’s just plants, animals, and inanimate objects that get the honor. I can’t complain about some of the wonderful designs and images we’ve seen lately, but a postage stamp is a quick and easy way to honor someone, and perhaps bring attention to someone we should know more or care more about. A heck of a lot easier to do than putting them on money…..

So here’s a half dozen notables that I think should be honored – and I might even get around to actually nominating them someday.

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Book Review: The Clockwork Dynasty

The Clockwork Dynasty
by Daniel H. Wilson
Doubleday Books
Ccopyright 2017 by the author

June Stefanov is an expert in the repair and restoration of antique “clockwork” devices and automata. She got into the trade thanks to some unintentional inspiration from her Russian grandfather, who survived the Battle of Stalingrad and bequeathed to her both a tale of a mysterious soldier of superhuman ability and an unusual bit of metal he recovered from that hellscape.

Now, she’s been summoned to an old church in Oregon, where they have one of these devices in storage – and is badly in need of repair. Unfortunately for her, there are people who would rather she didn’t fix it – and she finds herself caught up in a centuries-long battle among a hidden cabal of quasi-immortal machines.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Grabbers (2012, Ireland and UK)

It’s so common a trope that there’s got to be a name for it. A monster appears / arrives in a small isolated community. A few strange things happen, and then some people disappear. A few people in the community investigate, and discover the monster. For some reason, authorities outside the community cannot come to the rescue. So it’s up to our heroes to figure out how to defeat it and rally the community for the fight.

Movies from The Blob to Tremors have used it, and even movies outside the “monster movie” genre (like Jaws and Halloween) use at least some of the parts.

Given how common it is, any movie that uses it should be judged not on how well it uses the trope, but on the strength of any other ideas or sub-plots that are used. Continue reading →

The Deadball Project – Post-Series Wrap-Up

Naturally, I have some thoughts. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.

The hardest thing to keep track of is probably the correct Pitcher’s Die to use. There’s the “handedness” factor and fatigue – it can be really confusing figuring out whether you’re supposed to use a d12 or a d8! Like me, many players will probably opt to drop the “handedness” factor altogether. Adding in the effects of player “traits” might get confusing, too. Fortunately, those don’t come into play that often.

Another thing that calls for adjustment is that all the plays to infielders are ground balls. No popups or lineouts. I may have missed something in the rules, but a player should naturally feel free to turn (for example) a 6-3 groundout into a popout to short if nothing else is affected by the play. Other tinkering should be possible to allow for players to play out of position – a shortstop at second, or a starting pitcher coming on in relief. That might already be in the rules (or in the expansions); I just didn’t read them closely enough.

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The Deadball Project – Game 6

Mets 6, Polish All Stars 4

Jerry Koosman had it; Phil Niekro didn’t, and the Mets took the series four games to two.

Koosman scattered four hits over seven shutout innings, while Niekro didn’t make it out of the second. “My knuckler wasn’t knuckling,” he said. “With one exception,” said Stan Musial after the game, “the hits were all weak singles. Bloops or grounders just out of the reach of our infielders.”

A parade of relievers held the Mets to just two runs afterwards, with the help of two double plays.

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The Deadball Project – Game 5

Polish All Stars 8, Mets 2

With the starting pitching being a rematch of the opener, both teams were hoping that this game would not be a repeat of that one, where both starters were knocked out of the box early. Both Seaver and Harry Coveleski lasted well into the game (six and seven innings, respectively), but the results were notably different.

The Poles figured Seaver out early, scoring four runs off him in the first three innings. The Mets got two of them back thanks to a home run by David Wright in the bottom of the fourth, but they’d manage only five baserunners after that.

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