Upcoming appearances:

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

I'm on the road, but that's no excuse not to fill my journal with

LBJs:

*Summer's leaving us, but I got to experience one more ritual of the season tonight: minor league baseball. My parents took Kelly, the boys and me to a Savannah Sand Gnats game in historic-but-muggy Grayson Stadium, where we watched the Gnats fall to the South Georgia Waves by a score of 11-8. It was a lively game, and the Gnats had a shot, but in the bottom of the eighth they wasted a grand scoring opportunity due to a base-running error: with men on first and second and one out, the tying run came to the plate. With the count 3-2, both runners took off as soon as the pitcher wound up. The batter took a swing at a third strike, and the catcher threw to second. He was too late to catch the runner. Unfortunately, the runner who had been on second had gone toward third, seen the catcher jump up, and tried to slide headfirst back into second. It was quite easy to tag him, and the inning was over. Hey, that's why it's Class A ball.

*I just finished reading David Quammen's The Boilerplate Rhino, my first exposure to his work, and I'm cursing myself for having missed him all these years. He started writing his "Natural Acts" column for Outside Magazine back in 1981, so I could have been enjoying him for over two decades now, but no, I had to be late to the party. He's alternately hilarious, informative, poignant, snarky, and literary--sometimes all five at once. I find myself wishing I'd known about him so he could have been an influence on me. As it is, I'm just going to have to throw myself in the briar patch of his past work. Darn.

*Dangerous. I may actually be running three fantasy football teams this fall. I'm still running The Fighting Coelocanths [sic] for FLOGG, my original league, but I'm also jumping into a statistically complex league called the Number Crushers, which is run by one of my fellow FLOGGers, and I may end up in a league with some other Woodberry folk. The hard part is naming the teams. I like names that have some sort of absurdity, but aren't completely out of the question for a team; hey, in a world where the Fighting Blue Hens of Delaware play every week, that's a big category, and coelacanths fit right in. For the Number Crushers, I decided on an avian theme, but a bird that hadn't been tapped for use by anyone just yet: the Scrub Jays. They're smart birds, attractive in a non-showy way, and they're smart to boot; I also like using the word "scrub" as the name of a football team. For the WFS league, however, I had to swipe from the geniuses at my favorite online cartoon, Homestar Runner, and call my team the Burninators. (Click on the link above, go to "Strong Bad E-mails," and check out the one called "Dragon." Trust me, you'll be glad you did.)

*I must be on vacation; I've finished nearly a book a day since we left home: Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones of Marrakech, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets, the aforementioned Quammen book, and two "graphic novels" that in my day would have been called "bound copies of a half-dozen or so comic books printed on reeeeally nice paper": Ultimate X-Men 4: Hellfire & Brimstone by Mark Millar & Adam Kubert, and JLA: World War III by Grant Morrison & Howard Porter. Now I've got to figure out what I'm going to read for the next four days of travel. Luckily, my parents own books.

*Last night Mom served us a fish and shrimp dish I once had at my cousin Tommy's. It's basically grouper (or tilapia), shrimp, sour cream, paprika, and lemon juice, baked until succulent. Tommy, I'm telling you, you're a genius...

*After I get back, remind me to tell you about the tree frog in the car. It's worth writing about, but not just yet.
10:19 PM

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