Here I Am

No idea who else would do this, but an analysis of this imperfect Immaculate Grid can be revealing.

The player knows next to nothing about the Colorado Rockies.  Jon Gray is on the Texas Rangers, who are in this year's World Series, and the player vaguely remembers seeing in Baseball Reference that Gray began his career with the Rockies.

The player doesn't know much about the Milwaukee Brewers, or more accurately, he knows more than the average fan about the 1969 Seattle Pilots.  Talbot played for the White Sox before joining the Pilots, Baney pitched for the Reds after the '69 season, and Brabender won 13 games in the Pilots' only season.  It can be safely assumed that the player has read Ball Four more than once.

Like he did with the Pilots and the Brewers, the player has resorted to choosing members of the Montreal Expos, the previous incarnation of the Washington Nationals.  Stoneman was the best pitcher on the Expos in the team's first two seasons, 1969-70.  But Alcala, briefly on the 1977 Expos, was never a star, or even an above-average pitcher.  The player liked to refer to him as Santo Claus, based on the extra-base hits liberally strewn across his 1976 Strat-O-Matic card, a season, it must be added, in which his win-loss record was 11-4.  (And, the player further adds, an ERA of 4.70, facts recalled without any need of reference materials.)  Alcala was frequently matched up against the other team's top pitcher, and while it can't be said that he "outdueled" the other man, he was the beneficiary of the '76 Reds high-powered offense.  And finally, Edwin Jackson is one of those "when in doubt" answers in IG, so the player has been playing this game long enough to have obtained some savvy about it.  See also:  Octavio Dotel, Mike Morgan, Matt Stairs, Darren Oliver, Tommy Davis.

 

Un trou de lapin?

From a story in Le Monde about un nouvel album d’Astérix:  « J’aime les contraintes, elles m’aident, c’est mon côté oulipien », admet Fabcaro...

Oulipien?  Qu'est-ce que c'est?

As a group, Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “workshop of potential literature”) was co-founded about 1960 by the prose polymath Raymond Queneau and included [Georges] Perec, whose most famous, or perhaps notorious, work is perhaps the book-length lipogram La Disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void. The novel entirely dispenses with the letter e, the most frequently used alphabetical letter in French (and English.)

                                                    -- Generally About Books, 15 September 2019 

It was a rabbit hole that kept me hopping for more than an hour.  Here an essay from the New York Times, there a book review from the New Yorker.  

But it all reminds me of this:

Tiny flowers in the back yard

Now, to find out what they are.  Google's answer:  It's thyme.  Good for pollinators, and a worthy subject for an artist.

 

Walking with a camera

While PG was doing her PT at the 1621 building at the top of the map, I took advantage of Indian summer to stroll around the adjoining neighborhood, snapping a few pictures along the way.  This shows how camera-phone shots also include latitude and longitude information that can place them on a map.  The six up top were just off a parking lot and show the asters thriving in stony ground.  (Not sorry-asters.)  I appreciate being able to walk that far and back without pain or difficulty.

Thoughts While Scrolling

If Ralph Edwards were alive in 2023, would he be amused to hear the phrase a "bizarre proto-reality show" used to describe his creation, "This Is Your Life"?  

Then, there's a report this week that the Steely Dan song "Dirty Work" is appearing in TV shows, movies, and thousands and thousands of TikTok posts.  "Are Steely Dan Songs Secretly Cool?" asks the title of the article.  The author attempts to answer the question in this writerly paragraph:

To someone steeped in proto-punk and indie of the same era, Steely Dan represented everything unappealing about the excess of the ‘70s studio sound — a band so into cocaine and cleverness that they engineered all the passion and energy out of their music. Their overtly literate lyricism was clever but self-conscious, a far cry from the visceral howl emerging from the heart of punk rock, while their musical inspirations — show tunes, easy listening, jazz, funk, and lounge music — were always handled with a sense of fundamental irony and distance, subverted with strange chords and quirky lines to distract from the music’s foundations in kitsch. No matter how complex the songs were, they always felt too clean to stand out. Like particularly high-end elevator music. 

I haven't forgotten...

It's the sertraline.  I used it to suppress my appetite and block stress eating, and it worked.  I lost 15 pounds quickly, but then hit a plateau.  I stopped taking it, followed by the return of occasional desserts, and what do you know, I went from 237 to 239 in short order.  

So after a few weeks of that, I went back on, cut out desserts and anything resembling stress eating.  Dinner table conversations dwindled to nearly nothing, which is a negative side effect.  Blog posts disappeared altogether, which isn't all bad, except for the times I'd think of something overnight and forget it by morning.  

But once more, sertraline did the job it was intended to do, and I weighed in at 233 point something this morning.  If/when I reach 228, that'll be 25 pounds, and good enough that I'll give cold turkey a try.  I've been lethargic, and I'd like to feel something again.  I do function, fulfill obligations and all, but not as much beyond that as when I don't take anything.

The typical day consists of a bowl of cereal with whole milk and a 50-50 combination of juice and seltzer.  That is ideally done at 10:00, so I don't miss lunch.  If I do want a bite in the afternoon, I get a banana, maybe some peanut butter with it.  Maybe a cheese stick.  Then for supper, a small serving of something.  Spaghetti with meat sauce, or a small bowl of homemade chili.  PG makes chicken scaloppini with skinless white meat, and I like that a lot.  Tonight, it was a 1/4 pound burger with A1 sauce and a pickle slice.  Generally, either milk, 50-50 lemonade and seltzer, or Evian.  A few mixed nuts or peanuts. So two small meals, almost no sweets, and walking around the block for exercise.  

The doctor P.A. tossed off "Lose 10% of your body weight" as if to say "like you could do that."  Maybe it was reverse psychology, but I'd already begun losing weight before the appointment and nothing she said changed anything I did after it.

 

Thoughts While Scrolling

As soon as I saw the subject line, I thought, "That looks like videotape, but it can't be, because The Edsel Show...".  So I checked the comments, and saw that someone had beaten me to it.  

Come to find it out, the definition of a perennial plant doesn't define "perennial" as a plant that returns every year.  The bar is set lower for plants - "a plant with a life cycle lasting more than two years", according to the dictionary.