Rambling

Let's start with now and move backwards ... and since now seems so after the fact, it will be like climbing up hill and looking down at the same time.

So to start with my network is cranky ... because my Airport apparently got pissed off at the old wireless phone I installed. So I am stealing the next door neighbor's unprotected wireless ... my always available backup for moments like this.

And as we speak, now-not-quite Hurricane Kay is approaching Lake Kejimikujik in interior southern Nova Scotia. This is my homeland, where my grandfather Arod Beales Shirreffs met and married my grandmother Hattie Seldon some time after the turn of the century ... the story I was told is that Meemee, my grandmother, eloped with Papa, my grandfather, because her brothers did not want to lose their only female, my great-grandmother being dead at the time. I visited Lake Kejimikujik once in the summer of 1969, I think. More on that at some point, but passing strange that it is as I write my ancient homeland is under assault by a hurricane.

A little while ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos of windows to my Flickr site. Just a random collection, but I had promised my good friend JG, whose Flickr site continues to draw critical raves, that I would upload some photos. This was an easy set to publish because I had already selected in in iPhoto. Uploading the collection of Fisherman's Wharf/North Beach photos that JG so kindly Photoshopped for me required too many steps, and I dedicated today to cleaning and watching wee Timmie.

Wee Timmie would be Tim Lincecum who pitched a beauty today on the last day of the season for the "young" Giants. 13 strikeouts, 1 run, total domination. And he appears to have "lost the cross" ... thank you, Timmie ... it is such a relief for your legion of middle-aged gay guy atheist fans. It was a bittersweet goodbye to my team. Bochy, the manager, gave the incomparable Omar Vizquel a fabulous send-off ... and he made one last sweet defensive play at short to remind us of the beauty of defense in baseball. But the game was about Lincecum who has Cy Young hopes ... and this dominating start seems to put him in the driver's seat.

Perhaps I will have more to say about the Giants later, but as I watched the domination, I was trying to think of a way to tie this baseball game to the bizarre events in the Presidential election last week. I've read lots of folks who nailed it ... Frank Rich, as usual, or James Fallows, or the indispensable TalkingPointsMemo.

(60 Minutes in the background as I write ... and Henry Paulson is a fraud. Others will dissect this more exactly, but this is a fraud, a naked run on the public's purse to prop up a failed economic philosophy. He's a joke, and we're the punch line.)

So let's see Lincecum as the best of America ... self-invented, upstart, devil-may-care, reliant upon what he does himself. He's on a team, and somebody else pays him, but he still plays it independent. There's no rage there, no fake conflict with evil. He smiles easily, even when he loses. In fact, when he loses, he blames it on himself. He called his second-to-last game a "garbage start" because he lost.

Who looks like Lincecum, McCain or Obama?

Who channeled Lincecum on Friday evening? The angry scowling blaming can't look-'im-in-the-face McCain, or the congenial Obama who conceded something to his opponent and yet threw his pitches hard and in the strike zone. I don't think that McCain was in the strike zone all night. He gripped the ball too hard and when it left his hand, there was no telling where it would end up ... inside, outside, up or down, wild pitch or in the zone, the only thing his pitches had was anger. Hard fastballs, no movement, no sense, no strategy, no thought.

I admit that I didn't get it right away as the debate droned on. I was surprised that McCain was as effective as he was. I wanted Obama to be more vicious, more like McCain. But I was wrong about that. It is funny in the context of the McCain tactic/strategy rant that Obama has demonstrated in his actions that he understands his own strategy and does not allow the moment to dictate tactics that take him away from what he has determined as his over-arching course of action.

That's the same as pitching. Just because some Dodger gets a hit doesn't mean you default to hard, straight fastballs all the time. You stick with your change-up when the time is ripe for a strikeout.

Obama's performance impressed. It's not in the bag yet, but the breakdown on the McCain side is near complete, notwithstanding the continuing phony "balance" that requires that the press not see what everyone sees.

BTW, I was impressed for the first and only time by what that Rollins monster had to say on CNN ... he understands that McCain is not ready, not up to the task. He is ready to throw him to the wolves. And he, too, obviously thinks that Gloria Borger is a grade_A moron ... did you see how he brushed her off? Another crushed fly bites the dust. I like how Begala calls dubya a high-functioning moron ... nobody disagreed.

I can hardly wait for Thursday's Biden/Palin face-off. The loudmouth against the ditz.