Face lift

Okay. Republished the entire site with the new template and a comments section. Looks like everything is holding up well. I may dink around with the text font, but that's down on the list.

Spend Saturday on Bainbridge Island with friends in a desperate attempt to avoid Bumbershoot, the end-of-summer arts and music bash held in Seattle on Labor Day weekend every year. Wifey and I would go to them a few years ago, but we just got tired of the crowds. We were expending more energy trying to get around all the tourists and baby carriages and crying children that we decided to skip it. We're not crowd people, so you could imagine holiday plane travel just thrills us to death.

Speaking of thrilling to death, the whole baseball non-strike is something I can't get my mind around. In any conflict, there's a protocol where you pick someone to root for. With the recent baseball brouhaha (what a fun word), you could choose the millionaire baseball players or the multimillionaire owners, all of whom were fighting over money.

Okay, to be honest, I don't care for pro sports, a money-gobbling, hero-worshipping engine which demands fans pay large gobs of cash for the privilege to see them play on top of the taxes people have to pay for a news stadium (even if the voters reject the stadium, as they did in Seattle when Safeco Field was first proposed a few years ago).

The only way that I ever got to see the Mariners play here in Seattle (or see any sports team play ever) is when I or my family got tickets through work. Otherwise, I'm happy finding out how the game turned out by reading the box score the next morning in the paper.

I don't get sports fanatics, or how a sports team can bring a city together. Why should we care how many games back a team is or what pitcher should be placed where in a pitching rotation. Baseball, football, basketball...all games played by people who are paid a lot of money, a lot more than the fans ever will. Some cities are saddled with loser teams who will never get to the playoffs and baseball fans know that the Yankees will buy their way to another pennant. Sports stars get caught with drugs and can afford lawyers to get out of rehab, only then to sign a contract to endorse shoes made by children in southeast Asia.

The question is raised that what kind of world are we living in when a sports star can get tens of millions for making a shot or hitting a ball 30 percent of the time and teachers get crap salaries when the question should be "Why the hell are these people getting so much cash for a game, a form of entertainment, to begin with?" Why do we worship sports stars? Why do we care how they do on the court? For that matter, why should we care about celebrities? They entertain us. We pay to see them do that. That's their job.

I used to have all sorts of hero worship, but it's mostly an exercise in getting let down these days. You can admire people, you can like their art, but you shouldn't think people in the genre of entertainment are worth being obsessed over. They're people doing a job. They just have a better P.R. venue than the rest of us, and those thousands of trumpets blaring messages of hype in our faces have to be seen for what they are: a way for us to buy something that we either didn't know existed or didn't think about wanting before. It's all a cult of personality...just finely crafted over the years by spin doctors and computer wizardry. Do you really want to drink the Kool-Aid?

French Word of the Day

de trop (duh troh): excessive, superfluous.