Ten Years Later: "All-Star Day Daydreaming"

cryptonaut-in-exile: All-Star Day Daydreaming

I'd like nothing more than for Blake and Amelia's first big league game to be at Fenway one summer between 2011 and 2013 ... that first site of a ballpark in the sunshine after coming out of a dark tunnel, while holding their dad's hand -- that's a feeling I can't wait to give them.

Haven't done one of these Ten Years Later posts in a while, so flipped back to July, 2008 and it turns out I only posted once that month and it was about baseball and fatherhood, two things still very much on my mind. The latter all the time, the former reaching a fever pitch here at the All Star break with the Sox looking like they're going to battle the Yankees down to wire, with both built to make deep playoff runs this year.

We didn't make it to Fenway with the kids until this summer, about six years behind schedule, but it was worth the wait. We saw a terrific game -- the Sox won 6-0 behind homers by J.D. Martinez and Bogaerts -- and had the added bonus of being able to go with my brother's family.

This may be the last photo taken where I'm still taller than my son :P

The kids got to go with their aunt, uncle, and cousins to their first game at Fenway.

Baseball-wise, it's been a heck of a summer. The Red Sox are raking and have a 4.5 game lead at the All Star break. Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez have been electric, and I've seen more grand slams this year than I can remember seeing in a while. Mookie and Bogaerts in the week leading up to the break, no less. I always have an excuse why I'm behind on my Doctor Who blogging and my reading; for a while it's been the fact I run pretty much everyday, and that's a big chunk of my free time, but we've also got the MLB season pass so I only miss the Sox games when they play Baltimore and Washington due to the ludicrous blackout situation here in North Carolina, a state without a big league team.

Speaking of the DW blogging, I've got a bunch of skeleton posts for classic and new series stories in my drafts folder that'll get another pass and get published eventually, but it's likely the next to go live will be a reaction post when the new series starts up in the fall.

#TenyYearsLater Still no a #DoctorWho Movie?

cryptonaut-in-exile: Who Movie?

Two ten-year-old posts reblogged in two days. It's Throwback Week here at c-i-e FKA Triptych Cryptic! Kudos to the BBC though for their tenacity. Most of these old links are dead, but the Beeb is keeping lights on. Still, I'm going to put this one in how-I-do-things-now format.

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Doctor Who feature:

Thompson also confirmed that BBC Films is pushing ahead with its plans for a Doctor Who feature, the progress of which is dependent on how the new Doctor Who TV series is received in the US.

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Couldn't ask for it to be better received, I think. Still no dice.

#TenYearsLater If You Could Teach the World Just One Thing ...

cryptonaut-in-exile: If You Could Teach the World Just One Thing ... 

That's a ten-year-old blogpost I can polish off a bit and fix the link for. So, here's that old post in the c-i-e post format I've settled into:

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If You Could Teach the World Just One Thing ...

... And now, here is the most difficult thing that I wish people understood. True design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything, because the designer himself is left unexplained. Designers are statistically improbable things, and trying to explain them as made by prior designers is ultimately futile, because it leads to an infinite regress. 

Natural selection escapes the infinite regress, because it starts simple, and works up gradually - step by step - to statistical improbability, and the illusion of design. 

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The link in the OP was dead, but spiked-online is still going strong.

Cory Doctrow on KSR's Pacific Edge

Locus Online Perspectives | Cory Doctorow: Ten Years On: 

The thing I loved about Pacific Edge is how good the people were, even as they got in each other’s way and fought with one another and made things miserable for each other. Robinson’s book is a tour-de-force character novel that is deeply compassionate about the way that people of good will and good faith can trip each other up. And it is ‘‘utopian,’’ in the sense that it is all set in a time/place where technology doesn’t threaten to get away from its creators and destroy them.

Cory's talking about how PE influenced his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Ten Years Later: Remembering a great day at Fenway ...

cryptonaut-in-exile: Fenway Rocks: 

Jackie Chan (!) threw out the first pitch ... I had no idea he was going to be there ... and I got a Jackie Face On A Stick. Drank tons of beer, ate sausages, and peanuts, and ice cream, then had more beer ... Tif reminds me I should also be bragging about how my girl bought me a new hat, one of the caps with Ted Williams's number 9 on the front. It's sweet.

And I still wear it. As a matter of fact, I'm wearing it now.

The Jackie Chan Face On A Stick, on the other hand, is lost to the mists of time.

#TenYearsLater | We lost Ted Williams ten years ago today.

cryptonaut-in-exile: The Splendid Splinter:

Ted's sweet swing ᔥ Rule 19 Blog

Ted Williams passed away today at 83.   He was the last .400 hitter, probably the greatest hitter ever to play the game ...

#TenYearsLater | I'm pretty sure noodlin' must have been (or be) a reality show by now ...

cryptonaut-in-exile: Bait is for the weak. 

Noodlin' image via HowStuffWorks

Looks like catfish noodlin' is more prevalent these days. I wonder if gar have fallen out of fashion, or were noodled to extinction?

I Don't Feel Safer #TenYearsLater

cryptonaut-in-exile: I Don't Feel Safer:

Bush proposes Dept. of Homeland Security . Yesterday, the bureaucracy was bad. Today it's good and we need more. Which is it?

Did we need it then? Do we need it now?

#TenYears Later ... Ich bin ein cdogzilla

cryptonaut-in-exile: C-Dog Uber Alles:

Holy raving egomania ... I'm the #1 search result for 'c-dog' on Google. (In Germany.)

Not any longer.

Back then I was blogging with the diminutive. Today, as full-on 'cdogzilla' I am virtually the only result (in my many forms) for the term. (In Germany.)

#TenYearsLater Remember the blogiverse as it was ...

cryptonaut-in-exile | Blog Map

Look! There we were. Good ol' TC ...

The applet is retired, but you can still see historical snapshots!

#TenYearsLater We don't yet grok the need for a proper mosh pit.

cryptonaut-in-exile: Hipsters

via PopMatters.com

No less so now, than a decade ago, I encourage folks to read my man Mark's "WRECKTHEPLACEFANTASTIC: A Metaphysics of the Mosh Pit".

Every Yo La Tengo show should have one!

#TenYearsLater Fondly Recalling Opening Day 2002

cryptonaut-in-exile: Opening Day

It is traditional for me to declare, each and every year, that this is going to be our year. After the 2011 epic collapse, the loss of Tito, the retirement of Wakefield, the current situation at shortstop, etc. I'm a little nervous about making my declaration ... but I will. Here I am (not so fearlessly) predicting the Red Sox will win the 2012 World Series.

Quick #TenYearsLater check on Talisman Ethnic Cleansing, Inc.

cryptonaut-in-exile: Compare and Contrast

What the frack, Talsiman?!
Image via propane.pro

Ten years ago I was furious reading about the actions of Talisman. Ten years later, I wish our Supreme Court's fetish for corporate personhood had a correspondent desire for corporate accountability. Talisman, to this day, is doing just fine, thank you very much.

Ten Years Later: I Was Right (That One Time)

cryptonaut-in-exile: Fearless Prediction:

Maybe it's because it was Senior Night. Maybe it's due to my forbidden love of Sue Bird . Maybe it's because I'm slightly loaded. Maybe it's the way Bonedaddy made an inspired pick of the Patriots weeks before their Superbowl win. Whatever it is, I'm predicting now that UCONN will go 39-0 and win the National Championship in San Antonio this year.

They did. I guess you didn't exactly have to be "fearless" to make that prediction though.

Ten Years Later: When Will We See An Openly Gay Male Pro Athlete? (Still waiting ...)

cryptonaut-in-exile: When Will We See An Openly Gay Male Pro Athlete?: 

Billy Bean, via 2003 article in In These Times

A decade ago I might have guessed we were on the verge of having a "gay Jackie Robinson." I probably would've predicted we were, at most, 2 years away from the day gay players would be comfortable coming out of the closet. And yet, here we are ten years later and it hasn't happened yet. Marriage equality is gaining wide acceptance, Savage's 'It Gets Better Campaign' is drawing huge support, Will and Grace has been off the air for years, but there's Glee ... is it really still that bad in world of sports?

Sadly, it probably is.

It's long past time for straight players to start speaking publicly about about how they would support a gay teammate. They shouldn't be waiting for the question, they should be bringing it up, encouraging the discussion and forcing the homophobes in the locker rooms to paint themselves into a corner so the rest of us can know who the bad guys are and not buy their jerseys, not ask for their autographs, etc.

I'll make the prediction now that we are at least two years away from an openly gay athelete playing in one of the big four professional sports (I still count hockey), but not more than five.

Related: While this post was in scheduled status waiting for the ten years to pass since my original post, Rick Welts, an executive with the Phoenix Suns came out. Also, Charles Barkley had something sensible to say. He must not have been on TV. And then Frank Deford weighed in. This topic sure has been heating up ... maybe my two to five year prediction is too conservative now? 

Ten Years Later: The Pine Valley Cosmonauts still in heavy rotation (wherever I play music)

cryptonaut-in-exile: Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills

Only now the CD is packed away somewhere whilst I carry the album around with me just about every day in the iPod.

Ten Years Later: The Movie Of My Life (Has Not Yet Been Produced)

cryptonaut-in-exile: The Movie Of My Life

Ten years ago I took a stab at casting the movie of my life and did a decent enough job of it, I think; it's still a movie that sounds like one I would watch. But, I did mess up the casting of my man Sean. He really needed casting the likes of what you'd do if you were casting for John Lennon. We saw recently on PBS here in the States that Christopher Eccleston did a fab job as Lennon in a biopic, so I'm revising that casting to replace Benny "The Jet" with him.

Oh, also, I've decided that my dad looks more and more like Tom Baker every day, and I'm looking more and more like my dad, so Tom Baker for me in old age. And as long as I'm stuffing the cast with former Doctors, I think David Tennant now instead of Duchovny. Yes, that'll do quite nicely.

The Toilet Online - Leave It To Bush! (In praise of archive.org.)

The Toilet Online - Leave It To Bush!

I do this thing occasionally, maybe you've noticed, where I dip back in the archives to rehash something I posted ten year ago; well, I happened to see from the referral logs that somebody had landed on an old post from 2005 and couldn't remember from the title what the post was about, so I went back to it and the link I'd blogged, of course, was dead -- but, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to find the original page. So, long story long, after all that, and not wanting to wait four more years to mark the ten year anniversary of first linking it, I give you Gary Busey, some ferrets with crosses carved in their foreheads, and George W. Bush saying some crazy stuff.

Ten Years Later: Remember a lot of studying for an exam that wasn't that hard after all.

cryptonaut-in-exile: Series 7

Wow. Time sure does fly. I'm sure my buddy J.R. remembers celebrating after getting that exam out of the way. Thinking back on this makes me miss the friendships forged on those long bus rides from Smithfield to Boston's World Trade Center where we studied. And Bill.

Ten Years Later: The bars of Madison have stopped burning.

cryptonaut-in-exile: All My Old Haunts Are Burning Down!

In January of 2001, a year after I had moved back to New England, I posted at least three separate links about bars in Madison, WI burning down. O'Cayz, The Barber's Closet, and, finally, the one mentioned in this old post, the Regent Street Retreat. It was like PKD story where a crazed, trans-dimensional arsonist was burning down the bars I frequented. Well, not exactly like that, just an awful lot of bars burning down, but still. At least the Essen Haus still stands!