The World Series! Playing on my television box! And I’ve had three beers — my limit, and really, enough to enjoy the game without falling asleep. And…Justin Verlander just threw a big fat pitch up the middle to Pablo Sandoval, who sent it out to the kayaks. Maybe I should turn it off. My interest jinxes teams from Little League to the pros. Don’t want to wreck the boys’ chance.
OK, so.
(And now I’ve been watching the game for a while, and it’s 4-0 in the fourth. Universe? I am making it clear: DON’T CARE ABOUT THIS, NOT ONE LITTLE BIT. THE GIANTS CAN WIN, SURE! COOL CITY, COOL TEAM. WHATEVER.)
I should watch “American Horror Story.” Save your jokes, please.
Well. So, after Donald Trump’s October surprise fizzled from irrelevance into silliness, I’m feeling like November is a foregone conclusion. Every vote counts, guards up, etc., but if I were a betting woman, I’d bet on Nate Silver’s frontrunner. But it’s still a horserace, and so it must be a narrative. Only today we’re calling it a trajectory.
It’s like the D.C. sniper, only not, because this guy hasn’t killed anyone (or even hit one). But unless they catch this guy soon, I think you’ll be reading about him. I drove through this area Monday. Didn’t take evasive maneuvers.
Finally, what Tom & Lorenzo might call your daily pretty: The very best in nature photography. Love the fox shot. Enjoy.
basset said on October 25, 2012 at 12:52 am
The nature photos were pleasant enough, but I really liked the link to “all the small places in North Dakota”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/10/all-the-small-places-in-north-dakota/100390/
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on October 25, 2012 at 6:22 am
To Prospero from yesterday’s thread: I believe, in a semi-pragmatic, mildly theological way, that in my lifetime we’ll see the bottom of Lake Powell again. And that it won’t require dynamite and foolishness to do, since that’s what it took to build the Glen Canyon Dam. I took a picture there this summer in honor of Ed Abbey, and if I could figure out how to link to Facebook album pictures here I’d show it to you, but as the great theologian Spider Robinson says, “God is an iron.”
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on October 25, 2012 at 7:35 am
In honor of Hayduke, for Prospero. Taken this past summer, actual photo!
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beb said on October 25, 2012 at 8:12 am
The interesting speculation I read yesterday suggested that Trump’s pointless “big thing” was cooked up to distract the press from a report that Romney had lied under oath about the value of stock held by the founder of Staples during a divorce hearing. And as a result the wife got very little out of the settlement. Now I think it would be hard to prove that Romney literally lied, or even that he shaved the truth a little since the price of stock on any day depends very much on who’s buying. Still it would be devastating news for Romney because it plays into the meme that hes’ the kind of guy who will say anything, however untruthful, to get his way.
And to JCBurns — I’m sticking my tongue out at you. The Wikipedia entry you sent me to seems ambivalent on the grammatical usage of Democrat. Using nouns as an adjective is apparently a growing, common thing. So, you cares. It’s like people who get upset when someone pronounces nuclear as nuk-u-lar. I don’t get upset because I don’t even hear the difference.
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Deborah said on October 25, 2012 at 8:37 am
Jeff, yesterday we drove out to Chimayo, three ring circus and all, Little Bird had not been there in a few years. It still chokes me up when I get inside the sanctuary, it manages to make me forget about all of the Disneyfication they have surrounded it with. We had lunch at Rance de Chimayo after, great sopapillas.
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Deborah said on October 25, 2012 at 8:38 am
Rancho de Chimayo
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Judybusy said on October 25, 2012 at 8:57 am
I really enjoyed the nature photography. My 16-year-old niece has long dreamt of becoming a nature photographer, so I posted it on FB for her. I just ordered a National Geographic book on how to make great nature pictures; it’s her Christmas present. She recently got her first paying gig, taking pictures of a neighbor’s dog for the family’s Christmas card!
Jeff, to post the album, I think you can still scroll down to the bottom of the page of the album and copy and paste that link–not the one in your browser address box–for anyone to see. I’ve used that a lot with non-FB friends.
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Mark P said on October 25, 2012 at 9:29 am
Deborah, I envy you. I haven’t been out that way in a long, long time. I love the food. Sopapillas …. mmmmmm.
Question of the day: red or green?
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BigHank53 said on October 25, 2012 at 10:00 am
I was living near DC during the sniper panic. I had been to at least four of the locations where people were shot. The Bowie middle school where the kid survived was only a couple miles from my house. He lived because he’d just been let out of the car by his aunt, a nurse. She threw him back in the car and hightailed it to the nearest trauma center instead of waiting for an ambulance.
During those weeks, the usual number of people managed to die in automobile accidents. Snipers are less dangerous than stepladders. Or lightning.
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Deborah said on October 25, 2012 at 10:26 am
Green
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 10:55 am
Jeff (tmmo): Dams on the Colorado are all about stealing water to make LA out of the desert, a sorry tradeoff. I love Lake Powell, parbly because I feel more alive and comfortable swimming than doing almost anything else. Swimming in Lake Powell is like ice skating on the Charles River. You can just keep on going until you’re too exhausted to continue. The only better swimming hole I’ve ever found is Lower Falls in the Swift River on the Kancamagus Highway. The lake is also a great vacation that lasts an extra couple of weeks, since two weeks on a houseboat produces another fortnight in which the floors at the office continue rocking beneath your feet. Still, I don’t think blowing the dam would be foolishness. It could be glorious.
Hank, we are all at least four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terriss, too, though I’d sure like to see God put one about a foot from Willard’s magic utrou when he lies his ass off about preexisting conditions or offshoring jobs. If I had no interest in nor affinity for Barrack Obama, I’d still vote for him because the most apt adjective I can think of for Windsock is “creepy”. I wouldn’t be comfortable letting that guy around little kids.
And Nancy, the current season of American Horror Story is spectacular so far. It even has Sarah Paulson, Merlyn from the late, very great American Gothic, and if the showrunners have any brains, they have already signed up Lucas Buck, aka Gary Cole, aka Jack “Nighthawk” Killian, for a guest spot as Satan. And Jack Nicholson’s old gf Jesse Lange is chewing it up like her old boyfriend as a repressed but randy nun that wears red underwear.
On baseboru: If Matt Kemp hadn’t been injured for so many games, Dodgers would be playing the Tigers. My favorite Tigers memory is Earl Wilson pitching a one-hitter and hitting two monstrous homers. That shit about three homers in a world series game annoyed the crap out of me. Reggie should have been suspended for outright cheating before he ever got to Bob Welch. And why does Japanese just take words from English and mispronounce them? I mean eating al fresco is piku niku.
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Deborah said on October 25, 2012 at 11:11 am
Little Bird showed me this, funny and sad at the same time http://m.youtube.com/index?&desktop_uri=%2F#/watch?v=KtzqvqzBdUQ
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Charlotte said on October 25, 2012 at 11:12 am
Hey Jeff — Hayduke’s not on hospice care – -he lives down valley and his wife is now running the terrific Elk River Books here in town. I love Doug — an odd, odd guy but with the biggest heart in the west. Also, weirdly, an avid tennis player.
The baseball game filled me with much joy last night — especially since we managed to pick it up at Chuck’s house using the digital antenna. Although I admire the Tigers, I’ve fallen in love with the Giants.
Okay — back to another day of sloggy edits. A good project, but one that was written entirely in the passive voice by engineers.
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LAMary said on October 25, 2012 at 11:30 am
In Chimayo? GREEN.
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Little Bird said on October 25, 2012 at 11:52 am
Green on her enchiladas (which is what she had), but red on her huevos rancheros. And she raved so much about the sopapillas that I bought a mix from the gift shop at the restaurant.
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jcburns said on October 25, 2012 at 11:57 am
Beb, it’s a growing thing because people aren’t speaking up about it. I’m speaking up about it. Nuk-u-lar is wrong too. I’m not advocating a static language, but I sure as heck am arguing for a rich, beautiful English that doesn’t sound like we’re all Portsmouth, Ohio meth addicts hanging out in front of the Wal-Mart.
On another note: those ‘small places in North Dakota’ pics were just wonderful. I wandered through some of those places back when my camera had to be loaded with that expensive, fragile scratch-prone..what was it? oh, film. Need to get back up there and grab pixels aplenty.
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Mark P said on October 25, 2012 at 11:59 am
I once took a trip to NM with my parents, where we drove around in their little Suzuki Sidekick. We stopped at a roadside chili roaster and bought a bushel basket of roasted chilis. We ate lots of them right out of the basket. The back of the car smelled like roasted chilis for months. I loved it.
Back East the sopapillas are flat. They just don’t get the puffy form that’s so great for filling with honey.
I’m getting hungry.
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 12:12 pm
So sopapillas are beignets, only they are New Mexican?
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Bitter Scribe said on October 25, 2012 at 12:38 pm
This Mourdock thing has longer legs than I thought it would. Now the WSJ is whining about how it’s a distraction from Obama’s record. (And no, I won’t link to it. I don’t want to give Rupert any more hits.)
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LAMary said on October 25, 2012 at 12:38 pm
Sopapillas are basically deep fried bread. You can eat them sweet with honey or savory with chili or whatever.
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 12:54 pm
If I were the DNC, I’d give serious consideration to running this ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63h_v6uf0Ao
Blind allegiance to Israel is not sound foreign policy. And in the foreign policy debate, Mitt was dim-Mitted as can be. Israel maintains a formidable nuke arsenal at Dimona and bitches when a neighbor state might be interested in protecting itself from typical Israeli war-mongering.
Re: Morloch. Rapists are God’s will. That is what the shitheel said.
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nancy said on October 25, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Stephen Colbert is certainly milking Mourdock for all he’s worth.
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Dexter said on October 25, 2012 at 1:20 pm
I remember that during the D.C. sniper period the newscasts always said the killer (s) were driving a white van like plumbers and painters sometimes drive. Here is Ohio, hundreds of miles from D.C., I’d clock every white van that drove through here, looking for the mystery killer. I think the white van drivers were getting tired of people staring at them, you know, thousands and thousands of white vans and only one sniper van, and then we found out they were using a large car with a rifle hole cut into the trunk, or something like that.
I always thought I’d end up living somewhere around the Bay Area but it didn’t happen. My first wife had to listen to me talking about someday, somehow moving out there, and then fate flipped on me…she married several more times over the years and she ended up with an IT guy and yes, it was she who became a resident of the Bay Area, not me. Yes, life is funny like that. Ha Ha. Ha.
I got to tell ya, yes, I love the Tigers, my son-in-law is a die-hard Tiger fan, my grandpa sat in his garage back in the early 1960s listening to every Tigers game on his huge radio with the glowing center tuning light … so I have a history with the Tigers, but Pablo Sandoval of the Giants is my favorite MLB player, and has been for about three years. So how does a fan feel when his favorite player hits three home runs, two off his favorite pitcher? It is weird. How can you feel bad for one guy for not having a good night, but elated for his enemy for destroying him? It’s easy! It’s baseball. It makes no sense, does it? 🙂
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Dexter said on October 25, 2012 at 1:33 pm
nance, the Colbert bit on Mourdock was good, but this is the one that was hi-lited on The Stephanie Miller Show today…it’s NSFW, btw.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/420539/october-24-2012/donald-trump-s-october-surprise
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Bishop RMoney perjured himself. Or was he just Lying for the Lord, like when he lied, in criminal fashion, to the SEC about Bain?
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Dexter said on October 25, 2012 at 2:02 pm
When one lives in NW Ohio, as I have for thirty-five years, one will hear people mentioning “east siders” and how crazy they are…maybe it’s from breathing vapors most of their lives from the old Sunoco refinery, maybe it’s the water they drink, but people from the east side of Toledo are different, different from the folks across the Maumee River. I am not a Toledo resident, but I go there a lot, having a daughter living right in the middle of it all. Here’s a little primer on the folks who live on the east side.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2012/10/25/Close-knit-East-Toledo-unites-behind-neighborhood-politics.html
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Mark P said on October 25, 2012 at 2:03 pm
New Mexico sopapillas are essentially thickish flour tortillas that puff up when fried, leaving large, airy cavities on the inside that can be filled. As LAMary said, you can use honey or meat or whatever. In NM they are almost always served with meals like rolls or biscuits. I use them to push my food around and sop up the good stuff, but I really, really like to end the meal by sticking the honey dispenser (like a ketchup dispenser) into one end and squeezing honey into the sopa. In the East, sopapillas look like fried, smallish or medium-sized, wheat flour tortillas. They are fried, ending up flat, and often are covered with cinnamon and sugar. I never eat them back here in the East.
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Sherri said on October 25, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Felix Salmon eviscerates the CEOs debt manifesto that appears in the WSJ today: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/25/ceos-self-serving-deficit-manifesto/
The WSJ article is behind a paywall, though you can find it through your favorite search engine. I found the list of CEOs (not included in the article) here: http://www.fixthedebt.org/uploads/files/CEO-Fiscal-Leadership-Council-Membership.10-25-12%281%29.pdf
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LAMary said on October 25, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were both really going after the GOP, Fox and the Donald last night. They were excellent.
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 2:52 pm
From Sherri’s Reuters link:
But when they try to get to the specifics of tax reform, they start falling into blather, asking that it be “pro-growth” (an utterly meaningless phrase), and asking too that it include lower rates and higher revenues.
Could one of the supply sider idiots point out a single case (a year, an era, a single business) where tax cuts produced a single job? Even David Stockman admits that trickle down is hopeless bullshit aimed at making rich people richer. Claiming the deficit affects American security is actually funnier than the Laffer curve. A huge portion of what the Norquist thralls have to say is similar bullshit. Along the lines of what GOPers mean when they talk about small businesses, like Bechtel and Bain Capital. They mean white shoe lawfirms, hedge funds and cosmetic surgery LLCs. What jobs do those aholes create? Take it from Warren Buffet. Zero? A secretary and a personal trainer that pays a higher %age of her income than the billionaire. Surefire recipe for national economic good times, eh?
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coozledad said on October 25, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Republican rape advisory
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Entirely unsurprising source of Willard Windsock’s asinine bullshinola about the US Navy.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on October 25, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Charlotte, glad to hear Hayduke is well. Deborah, thanks for the word on your stop in Chimayo. Now I’m wanting some green chile stew . . . .
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Prospero said on October 25, 2012 at 4:50 pm
Dusty Springfield’s real name was Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien. A great singer, vg songwriter. We have Dusty in Memphis in our music collection, a great album with this great song on it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dp4339EbVn8
Best female Brit singer before Joss Stone came along, who sounds a good deal like Dusty.
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Sherri said on October 25, 2012 at 6:46 pm
Preach it, Tina Fey! http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/25/tina-fey-rips-grey-faced-men-with-2-haircuts-defining-rape/
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Rana said on October 25, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Damn. Now I want some sopapillas.
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Jolene said on October 25, 2012 at 7:31 pm
James Fallows just posted a video of the Southern California flyover by Endeavour that is longer than any I;d seen before. I found it a bit slow, but it is great photography. May be most interesting to Pilot Joe and people interested in picking out the sites below.
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Jolene said on October 25, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Cute Lena Dunham video re voting for Barack Obama.
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brian stouder said on October 25, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Jolene – a marvelous video! I must be as big an idiot as Pam says, because in all honesty, when I read your post and clicked the link, I was wondering how Lena Dunham got to cast multiple votes for the president…
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derwood said on October 25, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Loved the North Dakota pictures. My wife is from Minot and up until a couple of years ago when her grandmother passed we visited several times a year. Minot and west are rapidly changing with the oil boom. It’s not so peaceful and quiet like it used to be.
-daron
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Joe K said on October 25, 2012 at 10:44 pm
Jolene,
Thanks for the video. I can’t imagine the fuel burn on that 747 mother ship.
Pilot Joe
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Jolene said on October 26, 2012 at 12:06 am
Minot and west are rapidly changing with the oil boom.
I grew up in ND, so I’ve been keeping my eye on news reports about what’s happening there. It’s all quite amazing. I’m curious to see how power and population will shift w/in the state over time. Historically, most of the wealth in the state has been in the east–the Red River Valley, where the farmland is very rich. The state’s two universities are also in the cities on the eastern border. Much depends, of course, on how long this boom lasts, but, based on what I’ve been reading, it appears that it will last a long time. There’s lots of construction going on in Williston, for instance, that assumes a permanently larger population.
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