Kingston Society For Playing Catch Update

The KSPC met yesterday but I was not able to attend. The big news is that we are now including membership from outside the workplace but that is because someone got a new job.

So far proposed activities of the club have been more refined to include most any game you play without the need to actually maintain score or that only a ninny would think score actually bears any relationship to one’s virility. I say proposed in that we have been on what can be called “winter schedule” which basically includes the drinking of ale and the talking of things.

But it is the time of melting and we have to come to some principled plans about what to do. We certainly have catching to do but we have other things, too. We have any number of the pub games like the branches of the skittles family. Croquet is also there and was solidified with the acquisition of a very sharp set this week by a member of the KSPC who turned seven. It was acquired from this vendor of fabulous things, The Croquet Shop. There is also now talk of 500 Up, its relative Ball and Trap and even bum ball. The kicking of the ball in a group is also to be added to the schedule. The Kingston brew pub has a wellie toss on the 24th of March which may open up the summer gaming season for the KSPC.

I am not sure that this could all end up in a Vintage Base Ball group but one never knows – and getting a game of Annapolis Valley Stick Ball together would be great. And a hat. That would be great, too.

You are reminded that the KSPC is a non-transferable, non-digital organization. You must play with others where you are. If required make your own SPC locally and announce it.

The Rules For 500 Up

I know I am not supposed to post twice on a Friday but I have just had two shocks. I met someone my age who had no idea what 500 Up was and, when I described the game, reported not having ever played anything like it. That was shock one.

I though 500 Up was a great universal. I thought it was primordial. Now I Google “500 Up” and only my post pops up as referencing the game. This is really weird. It is like I mentioned bread – or at least popsicles – and realizing the people I was talking to had never heard of them.

Sloan has a song called “500 Up” off of their first record. Here are the lyrics. Disturbingly, the game is only there as a passing reference, an analogy mixed with another image – a reference only one in the know would know:

Sliding downwards
You’re the batter
That’s what they say
500 up
On the ladder

Do you know the rules to 500 Up? Why is this not on the internet somewhere? That is shock number two. Now I have to know. Are there different points to catching the ball in the air and fewer points for getting it on a bounce? How many points? Did you decide how many before each time you played? I haven’t played it for 21 years. I haven’t played Kingston Nova Scotia stickball for 35. That was a hell of a game.

Friday Bullet Points For March

Did I learn anything this week? Wheels put in motion have been rolling along nicely. Things not to be discussed, however. Winter does not leave with February – I’m learning that, too. For while there in the night it’s been like someone was spraying the house with jello from a fire house. The world out there is glazed at 4:15 am.

  • This is the kind of tax breaks I want to see:

    “There are situations where somebody receiving social benefits will go to work and the net benefit for them will be $1.08 an hour,” Flaherty told the Toronto Star recently. “So, quite rightly, they say, `There’s not much in it for me going to work.’ So, the new tax benefit is a way of increasing participation in the workforce.”

    While you are at it, claw back the 53 bucks a month I get for child tax credit. There is no way I need that – give it to the working poor or add it to the money for schools in Afghanistan or at least the anti-poppy forces. What tax breaks could you give up? And why can’t the Federal government have options on the tax form, credits you can waive and direct into various reserve funds for particular spending in the future?

  • Drink stout today and write about it.
  • Anyone else notice that Lessig is apparently not in demand anymore? Last news September 15, 2006 and last upcoming event came and went on October 5, 2006. Does anyone really care about Open Source as a revolution anymore? I think it was the stupid beer story that killed it off. Now it’s just a good browser and other co-op products that coat tail to one degree or another and/or are bundled for sale. Which is good.
  • This was the worst idea ever. Hardly worth congratulating the yikkie people that canceled it last week as they were the yiks who started it:

    Telus Corp. has withdrawn its “adult content” service to cellphone customers, effective immediately, a Telus spokesman said Wednesday. The company had come under a barrage of criticism after introducing the service that allowed adult cellular phone customers to download nude photographs and videos on a pay-per-view basis.

    That is just fingers-on-chalkboard yik. Apparently the firm is into hiring the yikky-enabled if the PR spin is to be believed. Note to file: Telus is/was an Alberta firm. Yik.

  • Speaking of endtimes, did anyone mention to you this week that THE PLANET’S CRUST IS CRACKING!!!

    Dr Chris MacLeod, from Cardiff University, said the Earth’s crust appeared to be completely missing in an area thousands of kilometres across…”Usually the plates are pulled apart and to fill the gap the mantle underneath has to rise up. As it comes up it starts to melt. That forms the magma,” he said. “That’s the normal process. Here it has gone awry for some reason. The crust does not seem to be repairing itself.”

    Drag. We need Team Zissou.

  • It is always bracing at moments like this weeks slump in the blogosphere to remember that there have been slumps before and there will be slumps again. The long term history of blogs has proven that blogs are the safest investment you can make with your time, your money, your family’s patience. Rumours that this drop was triggered by the realization that most blogs are abandoned within only a few posts have been denied by the Blog Marketing Board. You are asked to start another blog within ten days.

So enjoy your jello hose spraying, crust cracking planet while you can. Yesterday I put on my voicemail “Tra-la – it’s May!” before I realized it wasn’t.

Happy March!

Did I mention ever that I really do not like winter? Well, winter is about to DIE again in the vast fertility rite that we call the planet Earth. Screw you winter.

Many things happen in March. An inordinate number of birthdays, including this year the giving of the bitchin’ hardwood croquet set. Baseball is played. Shilling actually pitched yesterday. But best of all it is the time of the great melt. It has been dripping already but soon there will be puddles, streams of melt. With luck I could plant beets this month.

[Ed.: but…but:]

CHANGEOVER TO ALL RAIN WILL BE THE SLOWEST ACROSS THE NORTH COUNTRY
WHERE A HALF OF FOOT OF SNOW WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A SIX TO NINE HOUR
PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN WITH ACCUMULATIONS OF A HALF TO THREE
QUARTERS INCH POSSIBLE.

OK, sure we have an ice storm coming. Sure there are three weeks of winter left. Sure, sure, sure – blah, blah, blah. Old man winter is about to DIE!

The Endtimes Are Here!!!

Convergence is finally upon us!

  • Chinese overheating meet the West borrowing too much from China;
  • The Web 2.0 bubble is bursting and may well have entirely flopped by 2:37 pm this afternoon;
  • Tenuous consumer certainty in the stock market is evaporating again!

These are the sorts of days vacuous fear mongers like me love. I have been warning you all since the last day of collapse, through all the good times, the wealth generation, the happy years of saving, durable product purchasing and madcap luxury consumption. Now where are those days of plenty – those happy happy days?

Stock markets around the world plummeted yesterday in a wave of selling set off by a plunge in China that was reinforced by worries of weakening economies…

The NYT says it is like someone just snapped their fingers. Who snapped their fingers? Who was it? Was it you? Perhaps YOU!!! We will know better today if this is a blip, correction or the beginning of the endtimes which will see us all drinking tea and putting out but not eating maple leaf cookies at parties as we did back in the 1980s recession.

In other new, Castro’s getting better. Kind of a kick in the goolies day for capitalism all around.

Close…But Finding A Church Is Not Playing Horseshoes

I was after a bit of history the other day on my way back from Hamilton Friday when I thought I would see if I could find Britannia United, my father’s first church after he got his collar when I was six or so, the year before we headed to live in the Maritimes when history itself changed. It was there that I either choked on my letter of the word “C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s” or told Santa that in fact I had been bad – something that I later learned was right out of a movie of the week script. We have a picture of me there on the last Sunday School of the year in the back sticking my tongue out, wee bastard that I was

I got off the highway in Mississauga heading back from Hamilton at the bit where the road names are familiar in that way things that you only knew for the twelve months when you are six are familiar. I drove up Britannia and got lost and jumped back on the 401. Little did I know what Lord Goog now tells me – all too late – that I missed it by a couple hundred yards as the church was not actually on Britannia. Anyway, here are the Google Maps of it all.

Note that it no longer sits in the middle of miles of sugar beet fields as it did in 1969. The owner of the farm shown in the upper left of the top photo learned that the selling highway cloverleafs was much more profitable than the selling sugar beets.


britannia1
britannia2

It’s All Your Fault!

You never called to remind me. You didn’t email or knock on my door. And as a result I missed watching Syracuse and Georgetown, leaving me to referee a massive meltdowny tantrum. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

The Syracuse players sprinted off the court just as the fans rushed on. The players didn’t want to avoid the court-rush from 26,287 fans at the Carrier Dome on Monday. They wanted to embrace the support. Some stood up on the scorer’s table and slapped high-fives. Others went on the floor, showing they’re not claustrophobic. Syracuse’s 72-58 upset over No. 9 Georgetown denied the Hoyas a chance to clinch at least a share of the Big East regular season title. More importantly for the Orange, it secured a victory it would like to point to on its resume for the NCAA Tournament selection committee.

Wow – they smoked them. It must have been great. I wouldn’t know.

The Intensity Principle

How can I adopt the intensity principle into my life so that I, too, can be a better Canadian in the new way:

  • At work, I will not promise to be more productive but when I do work, I promise to really really work, focusing on the really.
  • When losing weight, I will not eat less or exercise more but when I do I will really eat little – perhaps even nothing – and I will exercise in a meaningful way.
  • When retirement planning, I will not fall in to that trap of beginning to save now and making sure I put away a sensible amount every month but when I do get around to savings I am going to borrow a hell of a lot and stick it away…for sure…definitely.

There you have it. It is easy to attain intensity. Intensify yourself. Get intensed. Come to think of it, I am quite intensed about the whole thing right now.

Fernandomania

Here is a rare thing – Fernando Martinez, an 18 year old baseball player already established as one to watch out for:

Martinez grew up in Rio San Juan, a fishing village on the Dominican’s north-central coast, where his father, Odalio Fernando Martinez, was a cattle farmer. He has three stepsisters and a stepbrother, and lives near his mother, Ana Luisa Alvarez. From the time he was 13 or so, Martinez said, he took 400 to 500 swings every day. To increase his bat speed, Martinez swung a weighted bat and tried to hit kernels of corn tossed to him by a trainer.

Now I know what to blame my lack of success in life on – my parents failure to toss hundreds of corn kernels at me every day of my young life.