Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: If Bull Durham is the Casablanca of baseball movies – filled with a love triangle, passion, battle (on the baseball field) and countless quotable lines – Annie is this movie’s Rick, the local legend who everyone knows and who has seen everything and who walks to the beat of her own drum. (Wonderful post on Bull Durham. Here’s an old post of mine on the movie, which I love dearly!)

:: I had to stop, turn off the music, and take a second to appreciate everything and everyone that has been thrown my way. After a minute, I kept going, and nearly stumbled over a baseball, lost in the grass. Picked it up, and it was heavy with rain. So I threw it into the trees surrounding the field. (My friend Kerry is going to write a heckuva book someday. And when she does, she’ll write it so well that it won’t bother me one bit that it won’t have a single space princess in it.)

:: Today’s comics remind me of Chuck Klosterman’s comment about how my generation is “The Cool Generation,” because that’s all this generation aspires to or is capable of. This is the Cool Era of comics, and I pretty much hate it. (I read Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night Green Lantern epic a while back, and it’s supposed to be a neoclassic of some sort…and yet, I didn’t like it. It was endless violence, art that crammed so much into the panel that it was impossible to make sense of what was going on, and no sense of any characters at all. Not a fan.)

:: For her, the only shuttle that never flew in space, it was a sort of homecoming, one last day in the sun, one last chance to stretch her wings. I almost expected her to cast free of the jet and glide into JFK on her own, just as she did during the approach and landing tests she performed over Edwards Air Force Base back in the late ’70s. How cool would that have been? Impractical fancy, of course. Her systems were long ago frozen in place, I’m sure. But I enjoyed imagining it.

:: I know there’s a marketing blitz behind this, but I can’t help but enjoy the idea of a tool that survives without major functional changes for most of a century. Think about it: Since 1937, mankind went from early aviation to jet flight to the moon. Certainly the Model 77 has seen a bit of innovation over the years in terms of motor and material technology, but it remains essentially the same in shape and function — and it’s still a pretty popular model, despite lots of heavy competition. (My circular saw is a Ryobi one, just a cheap model, that I bought at Home Depot (for work, so they footed the bill). It’s a nice enough saw, not awesome, but it gets my cuts done when I need them. I ditched the original blade, though. I have a 24-tooth blade for rough work and a 60-tooth blade for finish cuts.)

:: I only started with three little goats when we moved here…to the farm. It was supposed to be two, but then I got to thinking…what if something happened to one?

:: One of the things I learned in my first year in library school was that information disappears over time for a number of reasons, but that three are foremost: war, when the other side wins; commerce, when there is not enough of a perceived market for the cost; and technology, when the newer methodology renders a previous iteration obsolete. (I have a couple of books around here that deal with precisely these kinds of issues. I should re-read them….)

More next week! (Unless there aren’t. Duh!)

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