Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

This is completely a post to write something for the sake of trying to get a feel for this new keyboard.

I’ve spent most of the last 12 hours just working on getting software that I own transferred over. I haven’t even tried really typing on it for any period of time. I know I need to get used to it, and then I will be back to writing my stories…but for now I just need to type. And it seemed like a waste to type it for nothing.

My biggest challenges with the new computer set up are 1) the keyboard, 2) transferring favorites, and 3) getting music, movies and photos moved. Switch the order any way you want, but those are my three key issues.

But the new compter is really hard to type on. The keyboard is just very different. Weird. This is going to take several days to figure out and get my bookmarks and stuff changed over.

Why is it that every World Boxing Association legal battle is, by their by-laws, only allowed to be settled in Pierce County, Washington federal court? I mean, they are even having to come to Tacoma to sue over a fight for the title in Germany!

But no one seems to know why it has been like that for something like 70 years. It just gets treated as “it is what it is.” Seriously, I called and asked, and they don’t know (supposedly).

Of course Tacoma has a great boxing history, but this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this quirk. For some reason, all WBA disputes have to go through Tacoma. How weird is that? I mean, on the one hand it kind of makes sense to pick a jurisdiction for all your disputes, but who decided Tacoma and why? The answer’s out there…

Ummmm…iPod podcasts are pretty freakin’ cool.

I’m giddy fiddling with it the last few days.

Geeeze…totalo brain fart on this in a way…I thought I was going to be clever and I can’t.

There is a restaurant in New York that I have been to that claims they haven’t cleaned their sauce pots in 100 years. It just all gets passed down and passed on. Well, they clean the pots, they just keep making the sauce in them after they temporarily dump the sauce out. Argh. See, I don’t remember how the guy explained it.

But when I was downloading music from my collection to the iPod, I thought of that. I have a song that was a 45 when my dad was a kid, it got transfered to tape, then it was put on a computer, then it had to go from computer to computer, then it was put onto the iPod. It’s like this tiny slice of nearly-55-yrs-old music. It went from being a 45 to being on my iPod. That’s kind of amazing. He’s got the actual record, I just have it captured. It’s one song that I have kind of just kept transferring to every new medium. So the actual song has gone through hell to get to where I can hear it on the nano. How cool is that? In more than a half-century, that stuff is on an iPod. Now it sounds like shit. I mean, it’s bad. But I protected it. It’s like my way of just holding on to one song from the 1950s.

It’s like that sauce pan. It just keeps getting better, but it keeps going. I’m such a softy for this stuff.

There’s a great Simpson’s episode where Homer says something to the effect, “Elect me because I’m not him.”

But I fiddle wit this idea of running for a public office (like there are private offices for elected officials…duh).

But I do beat the dog of it around. I actually think I’d be pretty good at it. I think P and Big A would be very good at it. I am kind of trained for it. My problem…I hate campaigning. I hate being public with things. I can’t stand it. I am not kidding, every election I’ve won, I hated the process.

But I’d be pretty good in the legislature, or something.

I’ve got a little money and name recognition, plus a community service record. I am going to think about this.

But I have to tell a funny story…well, not funny, just a story…I lost an election once for school student body president, and we were sitting in a room afterwords drinking beer. (I’m not kidding, this happened.) We sat there and figured out how to outhink the entire election process because we knew it was wrong. The problem was that we knew the person I was running against was breaking the rules. Flat out she was breaking the rules. She was non-matriculated and I had to make the call about whether to fight it. I hated it. HATED it. It was a very, very, VERY hard decision to make. But I hated the decision more than the fact she was cheating. But it was a good call. Not because I won, but because it was right. IT WAS RIGHT. My opponent was cheating. Plain, simple and true.

But, holy cow, that left a bad taste in my mouth. It was no fun. Picture Al Gore in 2000 in my body on a little tiny level in 1991. But she was cheating.

If I ever do run for something, though, I want it to be just as pure for the reasons and the purposes. I am still proud of that. We sat there at a table and made a go decision to fight it and it turned into a bit of a school constitutional battle. It’s pretty funny when I look back on it, but it was healthy for the student body, even if they didn’t see it.

The key was that she was cheating and wrong.

I don’t know, we’ll see what happens in a year or two.

The “low-talker episode” is on Seinfeld tonight. Now, there is a TV series that I could absolutely drop a note to buy. The fact you probably know the episode I’m talking about just with that crude description is a testament.

I love my TV shows on DVD. Love them. In fact, just the other day, I ordered “The Wire” because I have only seen two episodes, but that was enough to put me over the top. Sitting around in an airport, you want short and quick…same on the airplane. It’s about 20 minutes for a half-hour comedy and about 40 minutes for an hour drama (or 22-44, but why bother counting). The thing is that we can pluf them into the laptops from about anyplace and just have them there.

I haven’t dropped coin on the complete Seinfeld collection, yet. It’s on way too much from regular TV; it’s what I pay for using the DVR.

But we grab little sales here and there. The latest is, like I said, using Christmas gift cards for the complete “The Wire.” At some point we’ll fiddle with Sunny in Philly beyond the first three seasons…it’s been another favorite. I’d also get “Band of Brothers,” but P is freaked out by it. I might consider “Sopranos,” but I have seen them all and it’s too soon.

Which is what I like about “The Wire.” I’ve seen just enough to know I like it, but it’s all new to me on all those DVDs, it’s relatively cheap, and I used gift cards for it. The other stuff I like is all perfectly capabale of being recorded on some channel, somewhere for home viewing on a whim, but it’s not stuff I just want to take with me and get absorbed into…like a B-novel or something.

I have mentioned it before, but I bought the complete M*A*S*H at a pawnshop for, like 20 bucks. Great purchase…I mean, I can watch those one at a time until the cows come home.

But here’s my big gripe on TV DVDs…some of them don’t have a “play all” button. IT IS NOT AN OPTION! Note to all producers: This is a must!

Hey…the good writing-thing doesn’t kick in until next week…

But I had three obits of people I knew in the Sunday paper today. Wow. I mean, I knew they all had died, but it was weird all on one page.

One of the people was Mike Kahn. See, this is where I should get more detailed and I won’t. But Mike was one of the very first major writers who ever helped me write a boxscore of a basketball game. In the Boston Garden, no less. Sitting on the floor!! With a midget running scores and all. It was a Sonics game in the late 1980s…see…I really should sit and write these out better.

But Kahn went on to become one of the founders of CBS Sportsline, blah blah blah. He died of cancer and it’s a huge loss to the world of sports journalism. A really serious loss of a good guy who helped this very young scribe tell crap of writing from crappola.

I was spending part of the evening cleaning up the computer, and if you do a search on my blog for “clinton” or “caucus,” there is some prescient stuff there. Not earth breaking, but not bad.

I like my angry-campaigner piece, for instance.

I guess, looking back on the last couple of years at this blog, my biggest regret is that I didn’t spend more time on most of the posts in realtime.  I have done nothing, and made no attempt, to actually heavy write out some pretty cogent thoughts, thereby not being much of a journalist/commentator.

The cool thing, for me, is that I know the thought, but I just got too quick with writing them out. I can do better than that.

So that is my blog resolution. I want to write less, and write better when I do write.

Those of you that don’t know, I make notes all the freaking time. There is stuff hidden in these blog entries that trip whole plots of long essays to me. I fudge around with the product later, but not seriously enough. So, for instance, click on that link and come back…

OK…I’ll wait…

Waiting…

Now, what I didn’t do there is tell the whole story of drinking beers with the guy in The Netherlands and hearing Kennedy stories. I mean, there is a giant, rich part of the whole thing and I just skipped it for the sake of writing something fast in a Starbucks or something. I’m richer and smarter than that in my story telling. I’ve gotten blog lazy. I get 25 ideas, then I make notes for a reminder, but then I am nothing more than a pedestrian reporter of those plain facts and opinions.

Shit, I might still suck at it, but the least I can do is spend more than a cup of coffee on the entry.

I resolve to write less entries but to write them better in 2009.

It’s not like I have a very good track record.

FedEx still can’t get their act together to deliver our packages…now I’m just rubbing it in. I mean, it’s been four days of good roads around here, the packages get loaded, but it is still stupid.