mike.whybark.com

RIP Circus Contraption guys. We had a brief, interesting conversation about the new cabaret at Emmett Watson’s about ten years ago.

The damnable Sinks have opened a war of resistance. The tactic? Attrition.

The steady drip, drip, drip aims to wear our morale down.

Our forces are marshalling and soon peace shall be restored to Underkabinettria.

I have emerged victorious from the field of battle. In the matter of the Great Sink Conflict of 2012, let my brow be bedecked with laurels and let the taps run freely, with drainage functionality restored and with hot and cold water lines well-provisioned and without hidden leaks.

I sense Morpheus approaching, holding my cloak of purple into which I shall soon engulf myself, into which I shall sink.

changed our bathroom faucet today, which involved also changing the sink trap and drain assembly.

And sink gook in my eye, and a complete disassembly/reassembly of the drain system.

All in all, it did not go too badly. Only one quick trip to the store for a missing part.

In service of this periodic otaku irruption of mine, I am working my way through Ken Burns’ Baseball. It is a relatively compact way to catch up, but geez is it treacly and, what, precious or something. Begging for satire, of which I know there are many.

One thing I think I have learned is a regret.

A year or two before my cantankerous, independent-minded grandpa passed away, Viv and I spent a couple days visiting. He was hale but had stopped driving and we stayed with him in only house he lived in the entire time I have been around, a beautiful mid-century modern. He and my grandmother must have been the first owners.

He never wanted to talk about his childhood or his family but somehow, having Viv there, he was willing to talk. Among a raft of interesting stories, he told us that he had “played baseball” for “a couple of years” in California, during a peripatetic era of his late adolescence, presumably his very late teens.

Both of us understood this to mean that he was being paid for his time on the field, I think because he was telling us this in the context of how he earned his living after he had run away from home around fourteen.

His father and extended family had a steam-combine rental business in the wheat-growing fields of the Eastern Washington area known as the Palouse. He knew how to run and repair steam engines, and that was his ticket out.
In that house, there was always a box of toys and children’s books which I had assessed since childhood as belonging to my father and my aunt. Among the things in it was a strange old baseball glove, smallish and with weirdly loose fingers.

After he passed away, most of the stuff in that box just passed out of our lives. I think I kept a small book of Donald Duck stories, thick and newsprint with a flipmovie on one margin.

This week, looking at the endless molasses pans of long dead ballplayers from the immediate pre and postwar era, the splay-fingered, smallish glove is apparent in many images. A quick review of glove design as seen in photos from the 1940s, when my dad was in his teens, shows the transition to fixed-finger gloves is well underway.

My grandpa was 15 in 1920 and according to him by the time he was 18 he was safely back in Washington, attending college. So that glove, even though my dad may have used as a kid, may also have been my granddad’s glove. It’s long gone, of course. It would be nice to find I had the insight to grab it back when we were cleaning out the house, but there’s no way I did.

Doc Watson, dead at 89. Thanks for everything.

What else should I be doing?

After a seventy-degree day of sun and blue skies, wind and rain an thunder is rolling in as I sit on the porch. Not sure if it’s a blip or if I need to run for it.

It has been years since I waited for a couple hours by myself in a crowded bar for a friend.

It is interesting to listen to the excited interactions of the young people near me. There’s a great deal of bad judgment, which is awesome. I should start some bar bet tomfoolery; if I time it right I can run into the baseball game with cash and no ass beating.

I haven’t been staying up late to catch NBP games for a month or two, but happened to notice an interleague game between Rakuten and Hanshin was slated for 2, Japanese time, I thought I’d see if I could catch it. I managed to find a feed in the bottom of the first, and the game is in the seventh inning break, Eagles leading, 10-4.

I think. For some reason the feed is now showing commercials over booth chatter, no ad audio, the stadium chants behind the announcers.

Anyway, every time I find one of these NPB streams I am amazed anew that it is so trivial to find a random realtime TV broadcast originating so far from where I watch.

One of the surprises for me tonight was looking at the Eagles’ standings – they are often kind of a bad team, and their most effective pitcher, Masahiro Tanaka, has been on the DL for a while. So noting that the team is third in the Pacific League and in a three-way tie for third in interleague play came as a surprise!