Debate it: Decorate or not?

This white poinsettia is about as decorative as I get for the holidays. I love what the holidays stand for, but I'm not a fan of putting up seasonal decorations and taking it down a few weeks later. Seems like a waste to me. Anyone care to debate the pros and cons of holiday decorations?

Nasty stuff

My roommate blogged last week about pork roll. Here's what he paid for the foul smelling meat (term used loosely). Has anyone other than him smelled - or worse yet - eaten this stuff?

Pirates?! Seriously?!

The Associated Press is reporting that pirates took a supertanker loaded with crude oil off the coast of Somalia. Seriously?! There are still pirates out there... and evidently they can take over ships much larger than Jack Sparrow. The story said they took it for ransom, which makes me wonder if large cruise ships are next. Imagine the ransom money they could collect from a boatload of tourists' families...

Read the story here.

Paving in Fallston

They're repaving N.C. 18 in Fallston. Its a minor inconvience now, but the road will be much nicer when crews finish.

No time for lunch?

Evidently people are voting instead of eating. Sub Station II was practically deserted at lunchtime.

Gas for $2.19 a gallon!

I drove through Shelby and upper Cleveland County on Saturday morning. The cheapest gas around was $2.37. The price in Catawba County was $2.25. Sunday evening, I bought gas in Hickory at $2.19 a gallon. I can't remember prices being this low in a long time (even though they're higher here than they are two counties over).

I took a photo with my cell phone camera to prove it.

LOL dogs: Capshun this

I can haz mashed potatoes frum da kfc?

For those of you who haven't seen the Lol Cats and Lol Dogs, you're missing out. Star photographer Brittany Randolph set up this one with Gracie and some potatoes.

Try your hand at captioning the photo a la Lol Dogs in the comments section.

Plz to have capshun? Thx.

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Pumpkin head Gracie really is happy to wear her costume. She knows it makes her cuter and, thus more petable.

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Gracie chills out in her pumpkin hat after pet therapy at Cleveland Pines nursing home on Tuesday.

Lulu and Gracie have learned to change channels

Lulu wasn't in the mood to watch Conan. She evidently prefers Craig Ferguson.

Free stuff for readers!

I received an e-mail that cracked me up last week from a marketing company. They were representing a company called Toilet Tattoos that makes toilet seat decals.

Of all the things to send to journalists for possible publication.

I got a good laugh out of it, then cruised through the company's Web site, http://www.toilet-tattoos.com/, which has all of the decals for sale - holidays, potty training stickers, cute designs. In all fairness, the designs were pretty cute, and if I were one to decorate for holidays, I'd consider it. They definitely are a conversation starter...

So for my blog readers' benefit, I also requested samples to give away.

So here's your chance.

Want to win a cute toilet seat decal?

The first three people to comment on this blog post will win one each. Just make sure to include a way for me to contact you and your name. Employees and independent contractors of The Star or Freedom Communications and their immediate families aren't eligible to win. Sorry!

Raining something larger than cats and dogs

This has been a year of seemingly near-death experiences for me.

Over the summer, I shared my almost deadly experience with a jar of beans with readers, but that story pales in comparison to my adventure earlier this month.

We have a regular group of people who get together on Wednesday evenings for a time to relax and watch television, gossip about community goings-on and to share a meal. Every now and then, we'll take it on the road, so in early October, we decided to go to Maggiano's in Charlotte because I had a $10 off coupon.

It happened to be rainy and driving there made me very nervous. We pulled off the side of the road to make sure everything was OK after hearing a strange noise.

Actually, we did it twice. We were all a little spooked.

What are the odds, in the middle of a drought, for it to rain cats and dogs on a Wednesday night?
Well, it was evidently raining significantly larger animals, too, as you'll see.

We arrived at the restaurant, had a wonderful meal, then walked a few steps over to the Cheesecake Factory and ate dessert. We finished around 11 p.m. and began driving back in the rain.

At which point, I should introduce you to our trusty navigator, Kathryn. She has Google Maps on her BlackBerry.

Unfortunately, she reads them upside down, backwards and sideways.

Our other passengers include Justin and a giant bag of dog food on the other side of the back seat.

The navigator missed a turn.

Then we missed another.

And then she told us to take a right instead of a left, maybe even a left instead of a right. We stopped for gas, asked for directions and got going in the right direction. While we were turning around, Justin attempted to become a backseat driver, or so I thought. Cranky after getting lost and stressed out in the rain, I retorted, “I do have a license, you know.”

Immediate regret (and an apology).

We make it to Matthews.

It’s still dark and rainy, but we’re almost to I-485. We round a curve in a mixed residential-business area and bang — we hear a gunshot from close range, the back window busts and glass flies everywhere.

Scared, I begin calling 911.

“Um, ma’am, I think our car has been shot into,” I tell the operator.

Calm at first, I start shaking on the inside as I pull off at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away, far enough that the shooters won’t chase us, I think.

We stay in the car until four police cars with K-9 officers in tow come blaring into the parking lot. We all get out and the police begin investigating.

One walks over to the back “shot-out” window.

“Um, ma’am, was this fur here before?”

Fur???

Deer fur.

Embarrassment pelts the three of us and we start laughing hysterically.

It’s not funny, but after the scare we’ve had, it’s hilarious.

And it’s an experience the three of us won’t soon forget.


And the irony of all this is that I started working on a Web page for shelbystar.com that focuses on deer-car crashes only days before my incident.

As if BlackBerries aren't addictive enough

There are some days when I'm glad to be both a Verizon Wireless and a BlackBerry addict. Today, the Associated Press is reporting that RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry, will have a new version out soon - and that its touch-screen is better than that on the iPhone.

Here's what the AP story said:

NEW YORK (AP) _ Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, is taking on Apple Inc. with a touch-screen phone that puts a new twist on the technology.

RIM is known for its e-mail-oriented phones with large keypads. With the new model announced Wednesday, the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone.

But RIM has listened to users who find the iPhone's glass screen awkward to type on because its virtual buttons provide no tactile feedback. The Storm's whole screen is backed by springs, and when pressed, it gives under the finger.

The long-rumored Storm will be available from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and from Vodafone Group PLC overseas before the holidays, the companies said. No price has been disclosed yet.

In an unusual twist, the phone will work both on Verizon Wireless' network and on Vodafone's, even though they use incompatible technologies. Like a few other Verizon Wireless handsets before it, the Storm will be equipped with radios to handle both networks, making international roaming a possibility. The iPhone, carried by AT&T Inc. in the U.S., can already roam internationally.

The addition of a touch-screen phone to the BlackBerry lineup, the mainstay of e-mail-addicted executives and managers, is a testament to the effect of the iPhone. RIM's share of the U.S. smart-phone market has stayed above 50 percent, but the iPhone has clearly helped expand that market.

Here's how it works, according to AP:

As a Web browser, the Storm more closely emulates the desktop experience than the iPhone does. That's because the screen can distinguish between light touches and firm presses. A light touch can move around a cursor, while a firm press activates a link, much like moving a mouse cursor has a different effect from clicking a mouse button, said Mike Lazaridis, RIM's co-chief executive.

Coverage is harder in the digital age

Photographer Jeff Melton thinks I have a pair of cursed shoes. Every time I wear them to work, there's some sort of big fire, wreck or other event that spells out bad news for people in the county.

The first time I wore them, there was a murder. Since then, I've forgotten all the places those ill-fated shoes have taken me.

But lately, even without the shoes, bad things keep on happening in Cleveland County. The past two weeks have been prime examples of that. I've been to a fire that displaced a family near Boiling Springs, a fatal wreck at a dragstrip, and tonight I went to a bad wreck near Polkville.

For the record, I have a love-hate relationship with these types of events. I hate them because they make me nervous beyond words. I don't know where I'm allowed to stand and who I'm allowed to talk to, much less who I even need to talk to. Like many journalists, if these types of events happen at night, they keep me from sleeping.

On the flip side, I love them because it's always a challenge to get the information I need to make a good news story.

It's also hard to piece together information from so many people - some of whom might not be telling the exact truth. Some of them politely refuse to give information. Others aren't nearly as nice. It's hard to balance not bothering emergency workers as they help victims, clean up messes and investigate what happened.

But in the digital age, it's even harder to know what we should and shouldn't get on video.

Tonight was a prime example.

On the Web, I posted a video of the two cars and of people cleaning up the scene. While I was on the scene, I got footage from a distance of the helicopter that was getting ready to take a patient to the hospital and of the outside of an ambulance holding a patient.

For the record, most journalists try not to get footage of actual patients if they don't have to (which is what I did by just getting the outside of the ambulance).

At any rate, an emergency official asked me to turn off my camera for a while before the helicopter took off. I did so without a second thought. It was the right thing to do.

It was also the right thing for that person to ask me to do so, and I appreciate that person letting me know - because I don't know of a single journalist who a) would not have wanted footage of that, and b) who would have known that you're not supposed to get footage of a helicopter taking off.

With all that said, we all want to do the right thing, and emergency officials should have no qualms about telling journalists the rules, especially in the digital age. And in a lot of cases, we simply don't know what our boundaries are and need direction. Just do it nicely,as the worker did tonight, because we're just doing our jobs, too.

Sigh of relief from the battle-tested Flamingoes

Remember back to the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett is on her knees in the dirt hollering that she will never go hungry again.

Now transpose that to an ill-fated and pink-clad bunch of baseball players and insert the words, "I will never play fantasy baseball again!"

For those of you who follow my blog, you've heard me whine about the inevitable fate of the Flamingoes, my ill-fated fantasy baseball league team. I joined in this year and set a goal of coming in ninth place. There are only 10 teams, so I thought that wasn't too lofty a goal.

Unfortunately, the Flamingoes caught the bird flu around late May and suffered through the loss of three pitchers, two outfielders, an infielder and a utility player or two.

All within three weeks.

And that isn't something you can come back from, as my poor pink friends found out. No matter how hard I tried to doctor them, they kept dropping dead.

Soriano. Peavy (he later came back). Some dude who broke his wrist. Another who practically shredded his ankle. One guy missed games as a penalty for brawling. And the list goes on and on.

But even after all that, I received a glimmer of hope today.

Yes, I'm still the loser out of the bunch, but it turns out that my team had the highest batting average in the league. Small consolation, but it just might be the turnip that keeps my proverbial Scarlett in the league next year.

And I already have a goal: Just beat one person.

Not too lofty, right?

New tech-ey stuff

I recently updated the Firefox browser on my work computer, subsequently wiping out some of the extensions I regularly use and wreaking havoc on settings. For some reason, the download went awry.

So I installed Google Chrome, the new browser from (you guessed it) Google. I also downloaded Flock, which touted itself as being a "social networking" browser. But after trying them both out for a couple weeks, I decided to try my luck again with Firefox, which has been my favorite since the first version came out.

So I reinstalled the newest version of Firefox and transferred my favorites back. I then went about trying to get all the same extensions I had before, with mixed success. But I also came across an extension I didn't have from before. It's called Last FM and works a lot like Pandora.

Don't know what Pandora is?

It's a Web service where you enter in artists you like and it finds music by those artists and similar artists. You can give the music a thumbs up and it'll play more like it. A thumbs down will make it come up less often. You can also see what your friends are listening to on Pandora. For example, my roommate likes to listen to Jazz, while my friend Jennifer has a Pandora station for Timbaland. Personally, I have a "Classics" station that has some of my all-time favorite songs and artists in it - from the Rolling Stones to Sugarland.

At any rate, Pandora is great.

But this new Last FM is better, simply because I don't have to go to a Web site to have access to it. It's at the top of the browser window.

Clever.

And convenient, too, which is why I can go from Miranda Lambert to John Hiatt to Nelly Furtado to Timbaland - all without having to hit a button. (Unless I click on the heart button, which marks the song as track I love.) And, unlike my iPod, I don't have to purchase the music.

And that makes me like it even more.

Want to catch up? Go to the fair.

This week and next, I'm practically living at the fair. And while I don't mind making two, three and sometimes four trips over there a day, I've learned a few things since my first trip over there as an intern for The Star in 2003. 

Everything over there was new to me that year because, despite having gone to Gardner-Webb for three years, I had never been to the yearly classic. I interviewed a man who made fried candy bars. He made me taste one and it was so sweet I nearly went into a sugar-induced coma. And for several years since, he's been there. 

That same year, I met Joe Roberts. He sells peanuts with the exchange club. Five years later, he's my next-door neighbor. 

This year, I've seen several people I've done stories on in the past - the Buff family (their son, who was in elementary school, started drag racing) and Lt. Wayne Thomas from the Sheriff's Office (he's in charge of Project Lifesaver). 

But my familiarity with people in the community pales in comparison to Jeff Melton. I've walked around the fairgrounds with him for two days now and I can't even count the number of people who have hollered, "Hey Jeff!" I swear he knows half the county. 

And the half he doesn't know probably knows him. 

Maybe 20 years from now I'll go to the fair and be greeted like Jeff is. Because being remembered fondly by people year after year is a very sincere form of flattery.

IMG00049.jpg

Here's a really bad cell phone photo of my Saturday night at the Eric Church concert at Crawhads stadium in Hickory. Tickets were free, so we couldn't complain.

Carl Edwards' pink princess loving fan

I worked on a story this week about Emma Mitchum, a 4-year-old who is now a Carl Edwards fan. She's a sweet little girl with a form of spina bifida, a condition that didn't allow her spine to grow properly. It subsequently affects several of her other body systems, but Emma doesn't seem to be bothered much by it.

And now she has a giant racing trophy, which was donated to her by Carl Edwards after the Emerson 250 race just over a week ago.

Two things hit me as I worked on the story.

1) Carl Edwards seems to have given her the trophy without a second thought. I really do think that race car drivers are some of the kindest souls when it comes to doing things to help out kids (Victory Junction Gang, etc.)

2) As if Emma isn't cool enough on her own, she is now a 35-pound dude magnet. She has a trophy signed by Carl Edwards!

Here's a link to the finished story.

Scientific guinea pig

While at the Society of Professional Journalists' annual convention in Atlanta, I opted to take part in a study about journalists and their views. Here's the explanation of the study, as e-mailed by David Cuillier, assistant professor, Department of Journalism, University of Arizona, the person administering the survey:

"As I mentioned at the outset, our goal in this study was to examine how personality measures are related to journalists' views, and factors affecting those views. Specifically, the central question to this study was how thinking about death influences a person's attitudes toward journalism ethics, outgroups and the government."

The first few questions on the survey were pretty mundane... until we were hit with two open-ended questions about death, followed with questions about the government, our feelings toward people of Arabic descent and our ethical beliefs and feelings.

The study basically will look at terror management theory in psychology. Other studies show that people primed to think about death were:

"more likely to express negative attitudes toward outgroups (e.g., other countries, other races, criminals), more favorable attitudes toward government leaders (e.g., supporting the president more), and overall hold their cultural worldviews more dearly (e.g., more religious, charitable, ethical). The idea behind the theory is that over time humans developed these self-esteem-boosting psychological defense mechanisms to deal with the unpleasant thought of inevitable death. Death-thought triggers in these experiments have included a variety of primes, some very subtle, including reading a news story about a murder, being reminded of 9/11, seeing a photo of an elderly person, or seeing a mortuary sign."

The study applies to journalism because of how frequently journalists are exposed to death. Can those thoughts of death trigger unfair coverage?

Possibly.

"In another study, journalism students primed with death injected into their news stories three times more biased or libelous facts toward outgroups (their rival university) than students in the control group. What is interesting about this line of research is we can prevent these effects from occurring through boosts to self-esteem and reminders of tolerance. In the story-bias study I found that when I reminded death-thought participants about ethics and tolerance, they did not
inject any more bias in their stories than those in the control group. Therefore, on deadline while working on stories involving death, journalists might want to remind each other about ethics and tolerance to avoid subconsciously adding bias or libel against perceived outgroups."

A little more about the questionnaire:

"In the questionnaire you filled out, you first answered questions about your values. These served as masking questions to prevent participants from guessing the purpose of the study, which could affect answers. The second part of the questionnaire was the key experimental condition question. In half of the randomly distributed packets, people were asked to describe how it would feel to physically die (the experimental death-thought condition). The other half of the participants were asked to describe how it feels to experience dental pain (the control condition). Both are unpleasant, but one regards death."

"Then, everyone filled out the mood questionnaire to measure how everyone felt. This serves as a check to see whether any differences noted in the death group were caused by feeling angry, sad or fearful. Typically in this research the death group feels no different than the control group, indicating that any detected differences in attitude are not a function of fear or anger.

"You then answered questions about your attitudes toward Arabs, sex offenders, criminals, and immigrants, which is to detect whether people become more hostile toward outgroups when primed to think of death (previous research with non-journalists shows this to be true). Also, questions about the government and President Bush will determine whether those in the death group held the government and its leaders more positively. Previous research has shown people
primed with death will express significantly greater support for leaders, specifically President Bush (it is difficult to say how journalists will come out on this because some may see the government and president as "outgroups," given journalism's watchdog role, so support for the president may actually drop in a death condition). This finding could have interesting implications for during times of war or mortal conflict. For example, some people criticized the press for wearing flag pins and failing to aggressively question the president after 9/11. Could the reminders of death from 9/11 affected journalists' attitudes toward the government, as it did for non-journalists? Questions also were asked to measure your attitudes toward ethics, moral relativism and idealism, to see if the thought of death causes journalists to see the world in more black and white terms, as found among journalism students."

I should get results of the study in the next few weeks. We'll see how the group did.

Ellenboro Fair

Star photographer Brittany Randolph rides the carrousel to get kid pics

Atrium

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) conference was held at the Hyatt in downtown Atlanta. Here's what the atrium looked like. The balconies above are where guests' rooms are located. Meetings were held downstairs.

Braves baseball

Braves catcher Brian McCann walks toward the plate before an at-bat during Thursday's night 2-0 win over the Washington Nationals. Although my seats weren't as good for taking photos this sime around, they were much closer to home plate, as you can see from the protective netting a few rows ahead.

Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind: The hotel I booked was located on Margaret Mitchell square. In case you're not a book nerd like me, she's the woman who wrote the classic novel-turned-movie.

Canine raiders

After a few stressful weeks for our group of people working on the American Legion World Series project at The Star, I decided to thank the group for their hard work with a homemade lasagna dinner on Tuesday.

I put the lasagna in the oven at lunchtime. Before I left, I bagged up the trash and sat it beside the fridge, with the intent to take it out in the afternoon.

But the dogs took care of it before I had the chance... except their version of taking it out was really taking it out of the bag... and scattering it across the floor. Here's the ransackery that welcomed me home.

Legion ball

In case you've been hidden under a rock or been on vacation this week, you've missed out on The Star's coverage of the American Legion Southeast Regional baseball tournament. We've done a lot to keep our readers interested in what's going on, whether they can make it to the games or not.

We created a sub-site in may, www.legionworldseries.com with lots of features we thought fans might like.

• Live streaming video of the game: http://www.legionworldseries.com/cam/
• Stories about the games and people who make them possible: http://www.shelbystar.com/sections/american-legion-world-series/
• A place where people can root for their team: http://www.legionworldseries.com/talk/
• Live streaming audio: http://216.249.100.85:8080/wohs
  
• A place to buy photos from our photographers: http://shelbystar.mycapture.com/mycapture/folder.asp?event=572005
• An interactive, zoomable view of historical photos: http://www.legionworldseries.com/zoom/
  
• A downloadable program: http://www.legionworldseries.com/r_program.pdf
• Legion photos from the past and from this summer: http://www.legionworldseries.com/photos/
• Video from the games: http://www.legionworldseries.com/video/

This has been a huge project for us online, but it's also a huge project in print, with a program for the Southeast Regional tournament, an upcoming program for the World Series and a daily section that wraps around the regular paper. The efforts of more than 10 people go into this each day, and I hope everyone is enjoying the coverage so far, as well as the games themselves.

Any thoughts on what we've done or what we should be doing?

Where's Lulu?

Little Lulu was unfazed by me going through old clips. I've been cleaning out my old clip file and getting rid of junk clips that I know I'll never use. Although the de-pack-rat-ization is going slow, little Lulu is enjoying it.

Watch her disappear!

Thanks to Star copy editor Adam Fenwick for taking and e-mailing the photos to me.

Flower photos

My flower garden has done well this year, while my three tomato plants have floundered.

Domestic failure and a near-death experience

I've been asked by several people to blog about an incident at my house Thursday night.

I blogged earlier in the week about my canning triumph with tomatoes. That same night, I went ahead and broke beans and put them in the fridge so I could can those as well. I waited to do it until Thursday night, when I got home from work. I cooked them partially, then put them in the jars, as instructed by my mother. I packed them in, added the right amount of water and salt and put on the lids and rings. Everything is going well.

I put the jars in the pot with some water and a lid. I cook the four jars for the prescribed amount of time.

When they're done, I take off the pot lid and.......

BOOF!

Boiling hot green beans, steam, liquid from the jars and glass shrapnel assault me.

I blank out for a moment from shock, then work my way through the broken glass and green bean explosion. I'm barefoot, so this is much slower going than I would prefer. Once in the living room, I race to my roommates' bathroom because it's the closest and use someone's towel to get the steaming hot liquid off my face and arms. By now, I'm panicked because I realize I'm burned.
It's shortly after midnight and I'm by myself. My mother is at her house, asleep for hours. I have no one to ask for advice.

So I call Maureen, one of The Star's copy editors. When I call her, I'm in shock and still can't form logical sentences. My face is still burning. On the phone with her, I get a washcloth and run cold water on it, then put it on my face to draw out some of the heat.

A few minutes later, I'm getting more and more hysterical because by now I realize that I could have been killed by one of the jars that exploded in my face or that I could have received third-degree burns.

I pick chunks of bean out of my hair.

Moments later, both of my roommates, Hugh and Adam (both also copy editors at the paper), walk in. I'm crying and hysterical. I am one hot mess. They look stunned, but rush to my aid and begin cleaning up the mess while I go to Wal-Mart and stand in line for 10 minutes just to buy a can of spray aloe.

By the time I made it home, the two of them had everything cleaned up, with the exception of a few bean chunks here and there and a couple hard-to-reach shards of glass. They were both heroes.

Needless to say, it took the three of us a while to settle down last night, but when I woke up this morning, the burns were all better, with the exception of a few places around my eyes and one on my forehead.

With all that said, I escaped the ordeal rather unscathed, despite the trauma, but may never eat green beans again. As for the beans, one jar miraculously survived... and sealed. Amazing.

Beginner's luck?

Atlanta's catcher, Brian McCann, recently suffered a concussion and has to take some time off from playing. He's my fantasy catcher, so I added the best catcher available, according to stats and made the best of an unfortunate situation.

But it turns out that I made the wrong choice. I should have gone with the Braves' Clint Sammons.

Here's what happened:
Atlanta called him up from Triple-A Richmond on Monday.

Thursday night, the rookie not only hit the first homer of his major league career, but he also drove in three runs, had three hits in all and scored twice.

Not bad for his first time out of the stable.

So I added him to my lineup today. I'm willing to take that risk. After all, I'm in 10th place again. What do I have to lose? I'm just hoping that his first outing wasn't "beginner's luck."

Would you buy a paper...

Would you buy a paper from this new mobile marketing tool?

Tomato canning

My family had a few extra tomatoes over the weekend, so in a moment of domestic triumph, I brought them home to can. They turned out well, and should last me through a batch or two of homemade spaghetti sauce.

Wondering about the yellow ones? I mixed them in the jars because they're my favorites.

Leno's loss is Conan's gain

I read in the AP news feeds that Jay Leno's last "Tonight" is May 29 and O'Brien takes over the slot June 1. From what I read, I might not miss out on him for long, though. It appears that he may jump ship to another network.

While I prefer his intros over all the other late-night shows and will miss his wit, I think he'll land on his feet... or possibly on his wheels, considering the number of cars he owns.

But what will he do in a role where he might not be one of late-night's kings? Who knows? Possibly make cameo appearances elsewhere? Maybe help out with scripts somewhere? That seems beneath him, so it's hard to tell where he'll be. Anyone want to venture a guess?

All of it seems a little strange, though, because Conan's numbers are being eroded by Craig Ferguson (whose intros are also better than Conan's in my opinion). Plus, Ferguson's accent and self-deprecation only add to his charm. Meanwhile, Conan's hair is still atrocious.

All this is based on NBC's four-year-old promise that O'Brien would succeed Leno. Sounds to me like NBC put all their eggs in the same Conan basket.

But all the switchings don't end there. Jimmy Fallon may take over O'Brien's former spot. I seriously doubt I'll be checking that one out.

What I'd like to see is a Leno-Jimmy Kimmel combo. I might actually watch past the intro jokes if that were the case.

What are your thoughts on all the late-night comedy drama?

Belated Father's Day present

My sisters and I finally were able to celebrate Father's Day for real with my dad this Sunday. We bought four tickets (one for each of us and one for my father) to a Braves game and gave them to him on Father's Day.

So we trekked to Atlanta Sunday morning, shot through the World of Coke, discovered Barg's red cream soda (now my new favorite) in the tasting room there, then headed to Turner Field for what turned out to be an ugly loss for the Braves (my dad's favorite team). The score ended up being 15-6. Clearly, the Nationals won.

Overall, I think my dad had a good time even though he missed catching a foul ball by only a few inches. He would have had it if he hadn't accidentally hit Olivia's head while trying to snag it away from Erin's head. It turned out that the guy sitting directly behind me (with an infant in his arms) got it... but only after it bounced off dad's hand.

Here are a few photos from our seats. We were sitting fourth row from the bottom, just past the visitor's dugout. Erin is on the left, Olivia is in the middle and my dad is on the right. It was the hottest and possibly sweatiest I've ever been, but a lot of fun for the Killian clan.

All-Star game

I caught the last few minutes of the All-Star game Tuesday night by accident as I waited for a peach cobbler to finish in the oven.

I caught the 13th inning at a 3-3 tie.

Sounds to me like a pretty evenly matched team.

It finally ended in the 15th inning with a sliding play at home plate.

Too bad my fantasy catcher, Brian McCann, couldn't get the guy out.

Actually, that might not have been so bad. My cobbler was done in the 14th.

Movie blogs continued

Thought I'd continue my last post with tidbits on the last few we've seen.

"Sex and the City" (There's enough estrogen on this one to last about a year and a half.)

"Don't Mess with the Zohan" (a lot better than we thought it would be, although some things were played up a little too much. It would have been better when I was in high school.)

"The Hulk" (surprisingly good for a dude-fest, but it's a little too obvious that you're being set up for a sequel)

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (Indiana Jones + aliens = Major bomb)

"The Love Guru" (It's a good thing the movie was free. It's on the list of top 5 worst movies I've seen. It doesn't even stand a chance for getting a cult following.)

Movie binge

I think an apology is in order for my recent lapse in blog posts. I've been extra busy with planning for our coverage of the American Legion World Series that's coming up in August.

I've actually been meaning to blog about our recent movie binge for the past two weeks. Over the past few months, I've been going with a friend to the movies (she gets tickets for free, so we're not out of anything if they're bombs.)

We saw "Baby Mama" (Passable, but I probably wouldn't watch it again), "Made of Honor" (chick flick, but it had Patrick Dempsey in it, so I couldn't complain too much), "What Happens in Vegas" (Pretty good. I like Cameron Diaz, but don't particularly care for Ashton Kitcher, so it was a wash), "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (A fre bits were a little shocking, but it was an OK film).

(Continued in next post.)

Sunday afternoon entertainment

I've been meaning to post these photos all week, but just now got a chance. They're of our "wagon train" Sunday evening. After I got off work, my family called and asked me to ride along in my cousin's new toy. Here it is:






The little girl in the photo is my cousin's girlfriend's daughter. And in an interesting sidenote, her name is Emily Renee like mine. She was surprisingly OK as far as kids go.

Flamingo update

The Flamingoes continue to bite the dust at 10th place in our league, thanks to the aid of yet another sub-par pitcher. Brett Myers, a first-round draft pick in 1999 by the Phillies, was remanded to the minor leagues.

His win-loss record is 3-9.

Boo, hiss.

So we've now picked up Mark Buehrle, who is 6-6.

We'll see what happens.

Fantasy baseball update

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I blogged last week about my fantasy baseball team - the Flamingoes. They've been in the dumps lately, but had an amazing surge on Sunday. They jumped 3.5 points, which was great news for me, but it still secures my spot at glorious No. 10. Jon Jimison blogged about how bad his team is doing a few days ago, and Randy Capps, also in our league, is hovering below the halfway mark in standings. Perhaps it's some kind of Star-affiliation curse. (I'm just glad it doesn't involve a goat.)

But it did give me the idea of putting my roster on here and solicit advice on who to cut, move, etc.

So here ya go. Any advice is appreciated. (And as far as I know, it's not against league rules.)

Catcher = Brian McCann (Atlanta)
1B = James Loney (LA Dodgers)
2B = Orlando Hudson (Arizona)
3B = Garrett Atkins (Colorado)
SS = Derek Jeter (Yankees)
Outfield = Carlos Beltran (Mets), Jermaine Dye (CWS), Jacoby Ellsbury (Boston), Vernon Wells (Toronto)
Utility = Stephen Drew (SS, Arizona), Dustin Pedroia (2B, Boston), Joey Votto (1B, OF, Cin), Adrian Beltre (1B, Seattle)
Pitchers = Bobby Jenks (Chicago), Brett Myers (Philadelphia), Tom Gorzelanny (Pittsburgh), Hideki Okajima (Boston), Aaron Cook (Colorado), Jesse Litsch (Toronto), Jake Peavy (Padres), Dave Bush (Brewers)
Pitcher benched for fighting = Edwin Jackson (TP)
Pitchers on DL = Chien-Ming Wang (Yankees), Rafael Soriano (Atlanta)

Silly when wet

I don't know how many of you have dogs - or how many of you bathe them for that matter, but I like to keep mine pretty clean. They're normally bathed every two to three weeks, depending on how long it takes them to get stinky.

So Sunday I donned shorts and a T-shirt, broke out the doggie shampoo and set to work with Gracie and Lulu in the shower.

Once I finished toweling them off, they each did their post-bath crazy runs.

Don't bathe your dog? You probably have no idea what the crazy runs are. Have one? I'm sure you've seen them take off like a bullet, bouncing and shaking, running into furniture, playing with each other and being silly. The crazy runs usually entail barking, someone inevitably skidding across the floor on wet feet and a lot of general silliness.

Here they are after a pause in the crazy runs (encouraged via cookie bribery). Lulu's the blonde and Gracie is the black and white one.

Baseball hates me

I agreed to join a fantasy baseball league in a moment of weakness earlier this year. Randy Capps, a former sportswriter here, was begging for more people to join. So before knowing the work - and now the angst - it entails, I agreed.

It sounded logical. I like baseball. I played softball for years, so I know the rules. It's a solid sport. I like the uniforms. I'm competitive.

So I joined.

I've regretted it ever since.

My team, which I dubbed the Flamingoes, hovered in fourth place through May in a league of all males - many former or current sportswriters. I was proud of my little pink buddies.

Since then, I have plummeted to a solid 10th place. I'm 10 points behind the guy in 9th place and more points than I can admit behind the league leader.

And it's all because of injuries. I've had a total of 8 guys on the disabled list in the past three
weeks. One guy has even been on it twice. I also had a pitcher suspended for fighting.

The guys call it fantasy baseball, but that's a misnomer. It's really nightmare baseball.

So here's hoping for a healthy few weeks.

I'd really like to say that one random chick (get it, Flamingoes, chick) from lifestyles beat at least one sports writer.

A stellar morning in the Killian household

Unlike most of my posts, this one won't have a photo. You'll see why.

I woke up to the usual morning whining of one dog or another, let the girls out for a little run in the backyard and started getting ready for work. Then I got the hiccups. Not so bad, except they were the hurty kind. I finished getting ready and let the dogs back in, put food in their bowls and made a smoothie for breakfast.

But when I went back into the living room to lock the door, there was a gray, hairy, bloody lifeless thing in my carpet that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a baby rabbit... with its tongue sticking out.

Revulsion set in. So did the heeby-jeebies.

I turned around to go get the shovel out of my foyer closet and saw a scattered brown mass on my rug.

Doggie diarrhea.

Which to clean up first?

I decided the dead thing would have to go first since it was creeping me out.

As for the poo, I just couldn't bring myself to take care of it yet, so I dumped the rug outside and I'll hose it off this afternoon.

Can anyone top that for a morning?

Lasagna

I spent the day Saturday doing some of my favorite things - sleeping and being lazy.

But I also tried to get a few things done around the house. I managed to get part of my spare bedroom painted and watered the plants in my flowerbed (worthless, considering it later rained), and did some laundry and cleaned a bunch of clothes that I don't wear anymore out of my closet.

I also took some time to make lasagna (I make my own sauce for it, too). One pan will be eaten now and the other goes in the freezer until my friend's birthday, when we'll use it to celebrate. (Said friend reads my blog, so for now she will go unnamed.)

Rain... finally!

I've been wondering lately if this summer is going to be like last summer... bone dry and weatheringly hot. It has definitely trended in that direction, but last night's rain (albeit only a little) was refreshing.

Here are pics of it from my house.