Wednesday

Not sure what happened to Monday and Tuesday.  Visits from The Winniferous always disrupt my routines.  I am officially a hermit.

According to my basement calendars, 4 was moving to Lincoln in this time frame four years ago.  You've come a long way, Baby!  You are Daughter of the Day!

I guess I'm going to go through an upgrade on my iPhone.  My device is starting to act a little erratic, and my status with Verizon has me eligible for a change at 1/2 price for the new phone.  I think that the normal wear and tear on the phone tweaks the efficiency over the course of a couple of years.  Dropping it a couple of times a week, spilling coffee on it occasionally, and just handling it constantly on a daily basis has to drive down the effective operation of the unit.  (Besides glasses and your phone, what do you use everyday as part of your "person"?)

I've lost count of how many mobile phones I've owned since my first acquisition of a truck phone in the mid '80's.  (As contrasted to a car phone which was most people's first mobile phone.)  I'm guessing that I'm easily into double digits.  Each "new" one seems to be able to do so much more than the earlier iteration.  Of all the phones that I have owned, only the HTC Touch was a true POS.  That unit was totally worthless.

The Dodgers and Diamondbacks went to the mat last night in a full-blown bench-clearing brawl set off by a hit batter and the subsequent retaliation..and then the re-retaliation.  The stories this AM focus on the coaches who got involved in the melee (McGuire, Mattingly, Trammel, Gibson and Williams) and their influence on the younger players.  My take is that a key Dodger got hit without premeditation, but that the the Diamondbacks needed to stay one ahead after the Dodgers plunked a Diamondback to even the score.  Unwritten rules are hard to understand at times.

Baseball and NASCAR are related on this issue in the sense that teams and drivers have a thick book of unwritten rules that involve retribution.  Baseball has not only the throwing-at-the-batter action, but also the hard slide as a means to deliver messages.  NASCAR's favorite is the bump-n-run, or my personal fav, "puttin 'em into the wall." 

In other sports, this kind of thing is more frowned upon and clear steps are usually taken to keep it out of the game.  Funny how baseball keeps the tradition.  I guess football has payback plays as well, but many of them are handled in "the pile", or at least away from the ball.  Golf?  Tennis?  How can you have rivalries if there's not the opportunity to take a shot at the opponent?

Lots to do today and tomorrow.  I head to the desert (PHX) tomorrow afternoon for a couple of days, coming back Sunday afternoon.

Make it a Good Wednesday.

BCOT