Northbound

It is as good a time as any, now, to note that Buck O’Neil is not being inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame this weekend.  The Lords of Baseball should hang their heads; the snowy eminences of Cooperstown should blush with shame.  But Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports has a solution:

[O'Neil] is one of so many whose deeds have gone unrecognized by the Hall because they didn’t fit a category. Which is why the Hall of Fame must consider the idea of a Buck O’Neil Award for Meritorious Contribution.  Currently, there are two standard ways to enter the Hall: through the Baseball Writers’ Association of America vote, which is only for players, or the Veterans Committee, which elects players, managers, umpires and executives/pioneers every two years. Ideally, the O’Neil Award would be held the year the Veterans Committee does not meet, and it would choose one person a year for induction in the main wing of the Hall, not a separate display. They would get the same plaques and the same respect.

Excellent idea, this.  Now, if we only had a commissioner savvy enough to implement it… oh, wait.

Passan comes up with some likely candidates – Curt Flood, Marvin Miller, Roger Angell, Frank Jobe, Bob Sheppard – and a couple of unlikely ones.  (I will never step foot in Cooperstown again if Scott Boras gets in the Hall, and you can write that down in your datebook and sign my name to it.)  But even if the O’Neil Award gets misused, if it gets Buck O’Neil into the Hall, it’s worth it.  Not that Buck O’Neil would worry about it:

God’s been good to me. They didn’t think Buck was good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That’s the way they thought about it and that’s the way it is, so we’re going to live with that. Now, if I’m a Hall of Famer for you, that’s all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don’t weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful.

That I am.

I am in the middle of porting all my movie reviews into the WordPress format.  Everything is going just swimmingly.  I have worked out most of the bugs in the Cascading Style Sheet where the reviews will live, and all that is left is to cut and paste them into the little box where you write your blog posts.  The only problem is that I need to make two little changes to the underlying HTML to get the reviews to show up right in WordPress — a little issue with subtitles, and I’m adding in the little Amazon boxes — and so it’s easier to make the changes in an HTML editor and cut-and-paste that into WordPress.

Unfortunately, the WordPress HTML editor is significantly dumber than the one I use, as it interprets carriage returns as paragraph breaks.  If you’re just typing nonsense into your blog, you don’t care about this.  But if you’re cutting and pasting HTML, and you have a carriage return at the end of every line, and it interprets every carriage return as a paragraph break, you’ll end up with lots and lots of really short paragraphs. 

Here, I’ll show you – here’s a paragraph from my American Beauty review, in blockquotes:

Aside from a hearty helping of Lust, American

Beauty mostly steers clears of the deadly sins. What we see are a laundry

list of tacky little suburban sins. Stalking the Cute Neighbor with a Video

Camera. Trading in the Camry without Asking the Wife. Buying Marijuana

from the Kid Next Door. Saying Mean-Spirited Things about the Gay Neighbors.

And so forth. Even the Lust is tacky, lending itself more to Jerry Springer

than the stuff of high drama.

 

See!  See!  It all looks horrible, and about half the movie reviews I’ve written in my life are in this exact format, and I wish I was dead.  I am sitting here right now, listening to Tricia Yearwood, and cutting out carriage returns, as part of my weekend.  Carriage returns are the enemy.

Sunday morning, day in the life.  Got up a little after nine, checked e-mail, played a round of sudoku, got dressed, and went out to the car.  I tore off the tape and the plastic that covered the drivers’ side window.  The window wasn’t broken, mind you – had that happen before, though, when I unwisely left my car for the weekend on an Atlanta side street and some mook shoved a ten-pound hunk of granite through it.  This wasn’t that.  This time, the window was intact.  It just wouldn’t roll up.

I’d taken my car to the local unnamed oil-change franchise.  They’d rolled down the window.  I tried rolling it up.  It wouldn’t roll.  I hit the button again and again.  Nothing.  They wouldn’t even look at it.  “See a mechanic,” the manager said.  Bastards.

So, I drove over to AutoZone, tried to get a new relay for the window in case it was the relay; they didn’t have one.  I switched out the relay with the same-sized relay for the rear defogger, and the window still didn’t roll up.  I drove home and took the door apart to check for loose wires and didn’t find any.  I tried to bring it up manually and that didn’t work.  So I taped a garbage bag to the window (all of this with my wife’s help, of course) and waited for the morning.

So, this morning, I’m on my way to my mechanic, armed with my iPod, Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and one of the Hornblower novels.  I’m driving down 202, the wind in my face, and some part of my reptile brain tells me to roll up the window.  So I do.

And it rolls up.

What the…

I called my wife.  “Damndest thing,” I tell her.

“It’s working?”

“How did that happen?”

“Don’t know.  You don’t question miracles.”

If you don’t have this site bookmarked, and you do web design, you should:

http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

Take any image you like, and it’ll turn it into an icon file.  (If you bookmark this site in IE, you’ll see — hopefully – a white N with an arrow sticking out of it, which is an icon I created using this site.)  It’s from the creators of HTML-Kit, the best free HTML editor there is, so you know it’s good.  There’s even instructions on what you need to do to make the icon work with your site.  So you’re good like that.

The L.A. Times article is about a pending feud with the FCC over some profanity, but the news is that Ken Burns is making another war movie:

Next fall, the network plans to distribute an unedited version of “The War,” a seven-part documentary about World War II by Ken Burns told through the firsthand experiences of soldiers.

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about this.  I’ve got fourteen hours on my DVR just waiting for this.  Yeah!

The last time I watched a Burns documentary was one of those PBS pledge-drive reshowings of ”The Civil War”; I was in a hotel room in Washington, waiting on Delta to deliver my bags, which they had gotten lost between Atlanta and Dulles.  I stayed up until two in the morning, loving every second of it.  Never mind that “Baseball” was a bit mind-numbing, and that “Jazz” wasn’t jazzy.  Ken Burns is doing another war movie.  Outstanding.

Oh, it’s so, so tempting to jump on the news that new Tour de France hero Floyd Landis has tested positive for a banned substance:

The Swiss-based Phonak team said it was notified by the UCI on Wednesday that Landis’ sample showed “an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone” when he was tested after stage 17 of the race last Thursday.

Landis made a remarkable comeback in that Alpine stage, racing far ahead of the field for a solo win that moved him from 11th to third in the overall standings. He regained the leader’s yellow jersey two days later.

Sounds nice, juicy and controversial, doesn’t it?  But it’s very easy to jump to the conclusion that Landis did something wrong.

First, we’re talking about testosterone, which is a chemical that’s in my body and yours.  So we’re not talking about artificial drugs like steroids.  An “unusual” level doesn’t tell us anything.  It could be that Landis just had a high testosterone level for some reason.  (Although there are, I’m sure, drugs that could artificially boost one’s testosterone level.)  We’d need to know more about whether the reading was within the levels you’d expect of a highly-trained athlete.

Second, there’s going to be an additional test to see if the results were wonky for some reason, so it’s probably wise to reserve judgment.

Third, of course, we are talking about the French.

Just in case anyone is interested at all, the background of the current theme for this blog is derived from a topographical map of Dallas County, Texas, circa 1909, which I found at the excellent map collection at the Perry-Castaneda library at UT-Austin.  (Yes, it’s in the public domain.)  I toned down the colors a little bit to keep it from overwhelming the text, and that was about it.

Still making some tweaks to the CSS of the site, and I’ll probably double-check the accessibility at some point (although WordPress is pretty accessible, and I deliberately chose a theme that was low on images).  After that, then there’s the main TXReviews movie database to create and design, and I’ll add old blog posts once I get around to it.  (The trick is to look up the old posts in the Google cache, resubmit them as posts, and then change the key number in the SQL database.)

The NYT on the latest menace – this time in our ice cream:

New industrial processes, including one that involves a protein cloned from the blood of an Arctic Ocean fish, have allowed manufacturers to produce very creamy, dense, reduced-fat ice creams with fewer additives.

Fish additives?  In ice cream?  Holy mint chocolate chip!  Someone call General Ripper:

Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh?  Fish innards in ice cream!  That’s not America.  That’s not even England:

In Britain, where Unilever’s Cornetto cone is as iconic as the Fudgsicle is in the United States, the news media have leapt in with headlines about “vaneela” ice cream.

What’s next?  Cookies n’ chum?  Caramel Sea Turtle Fudge?  Pistacho anchovy?  Oh, the hu-manatee!

Thank God there’s no fish in Blue Bell.

I would like to, at this time, apologize to the people of the Republic of Brazil for saying all those bad things that I said about them recently.  One of their countrymen, whose name is unknown to me, stole almost a thousand dollars out of my bank account through fraudulent purchases on my bank card.  After this happened, I made several intemperate comments, such as:

•  ”I hate Brazil.”
• “The Brazilian soccer team wears ugly canary-yellow uniforms.”
• “Samba music just isn’t that good.”
• “The Amazon?  Overrated.”
• “If I never hear ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ again, I’ll be happy.”

You know, that kind of thing.  And I stopped eating Brazil nuts.

But all the money is back in my account now, so I suppose that I’ll have to forgive the great, kind-hearted, people of Brazil (all except for the one person who bought a computer and a churascarria dinner with my money, damn you to hell).  I am sorry, so very sorry, for running down your country.  Really, I am.

Saddam Hussein tells CNN that he wants to escape the hangman’s noose:

Saddam Hussein has asked the court in his trial in Baghdad to execute him by firing squad — “not by hanging as a common criminal” — if it convicts him of all charges and sentences him to death.

Maybe just this once, though.