Thanks to my little brother for forwarding a newspaper article on adult kickball teams. Learn more at the World Adult Kickball Association's site. Alas, no teams in Capital City. I recall noting at camp a couple of summers ago that kickball is a game accessible to all kids, no matter how athletically timid.

This Saturday, Dan, Whitney, and I went to Caravatti's. Amongst the old house treasures we coveted: pink bathroom fixtures for me, a Deco Hotpoint stove for Whitney, and kitchen sinks for Dan. The kind of sink he eyed is in the background of this Lileks flotsam.

I am sad to hear we have lost Katherine Hepburn. I feel the urge to go rent "Bringing Up Baby" -- but perhaps I should broaden my horizons? Do suggest some of your favorites.

Capital City Weather: 80 degrees and clear at 8:21 a.m.

You Goin' Straight Home?
Speaking of diners, as Bill is over at Prometheus, I was charmed to see NYC's Empire Diner appear on the TV screen (in the movie "Igby Goes Down") right under a friend's poster of the painting of said eatery. John Baeder's painting, of course, hangs around the corner at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Barry Levinson's Diner is one of my favorite movies of all time.

My favorite diners: Miss Florence Diner, Florence, Mass.; the Triangle Diner, Winchester, Va. (Pictures from a diner website I keep bookmarked: Diner City.)

Reality TV Confession
I have been loyal to only two reality TV programs. The first, Making the Band, tossed together a bunch of 20ish young men, who were weeded down to form a boy band. My current crush is called Last Comic Standing, and it's the same idea, only with a great cross-section of wacky people. I'm rooting for mild-mannered, off-beat Dave, from a farm in Minnesota. For his comedy, not from this house crap.

I deny even glancing at other reality TV. . . .

Capital City Weather: 90 degrees, clear, and not too humid

Dan has an anti-summer camp tirade at The Marble Bar: please go over there and set him straight.

I tried to watch the rained out Mets – Yankees game yesterday. I had been muting the commercials and reading, but the tone of one, rhapsodizing hot dogs caught my attention and I looked back up. Lo! Said hot dogs were piled on a North Star plate! The platter, in fact. (North Star, by Salem, is one of the 2 or 3 dish patterns I admit to collecting.) It was a beer commercial, it turns out – do keep an eye out for it.

During the game, two men -- a fan of each team -- who seemed to have won a contest were in the booth with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. "The easiest sports job in the world," asserted Mets fan Chuck, "is to be a Yankees fan."

"Time is Relative. Lunch Time Doubly So.”
At Target, there are no clocks on the wall. If you’re standing in a check out line wondering how much time you have before you said you’d meet your friend, Target does not want to help you out. “You wanna know the time? You can buy a watch right over there, behind the handbags.”

Ukrop's Carytown has a nice big clock over by customer service. I could confirm that I was okay on time.

Does Target want us to lose our sense of time and space and shop forever? Maybe. More likely, Ukrop’s is deservedly self-assured. Our hometown grocery knows you found everything you needed and that the checkers are without peer. Ukrop’s has nothing to fear in displaying the time by the registers. They know they are that good.


“Take thy beak from out my heart”
If I had chosen the teaching path, I would use the Halloween episode of The Simpsons with “The Raven” to teach Poe – no matter what subject I was meant to be instructing. Channel 35 ran the 1990 Tree House of Horror episode tonight. Homer and the Bart-Raven make mood, tone, and even tough vocabulary (“censer”) crystal clear. We feel the tension build, we see Raven-Bart drive Homer mad. It’s brilliant.

The Simpsons Archive suggests that another good story from that show, “Hungry are the Damned,” reflects an episode of The Twilight Zone. I first encountered a story in which our heroes believe they will be served up for the feast in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (Chapter IX). Hmm, Lewis’s copyright is 1953, and the link on The Simpson Archive to a Twilight Zone site is cold. I’m not going to crack which egg came first, tonight.

Last week’s Style had an interesting cover story on the possible privatization of liquor selling. I think I lean conservative on this one. Sure, let the state take sole charge of where it locates ABC stores, how clean they are, and how well they check ages. They never fail to card me.

In regional news, the noted, much-contested Wal-Mart opened in Ashland this morning.

Thanks to Bill, over at Prometheus Unleashed, for setting up the Comments so they work.

Capital City weather: muggy, coolish, damp.

Y'all will warn me if I'm turning into this [Onion] guy, right?

CB gets bonus points, today! He let me know I needed to fix yesterday's links; and he didn't make fun of me for not knowing about this team. I may have to throw over the Capital City Braves!

Two T.V. Items
How cool is this? Thanks, Mitch!
And from Doyle: Atari and other toys.

At the Byrd: Gangs of New York. Gee, the 19th century was unpleasant.