How could I not? Kerry Freaking Woods, pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, is one of the reasons NL baseball will always be better than AL ball. He’s hanging in trying to eke out another two outs at the bottom of the 8^th^, after he hit the two-out double in the top of the sixth to put the Cubbies up 4-1 over the Braves.

Granted, I’ve just jinxed the Cubs, but darn it I’m pumped …

OK, waited until the game was over – beautiful. Cubs Win.

I’m cashing in my bandwagon ticket for the Cubbies. But in general, this post-season is looking great. The Giants won, the Cubs won, and the Braves and the Yankees both lost. To hell with the rest of the world – it’s fall, it’s cool weather again, and America’s Pastime is back with a fury.

Cubs and the Sox in the series, Cubs in six.

Went to catch Once Upon A Time in Mexico this evening. I loved it, but I’m not completely sure if I can recommend it to ‘normal’ folks. If you strongly preferred Desparado to El Mariachi then OUATIM is going to disappoint you. Likewise, if you loved the intimacy of “El Mariachi”, then OUATIM will probably leave you cold.

But I liked it. A lot.

This quiz pegged me pretty well.

with politics. Why not take up another political topic? To pay or not to pay? Thoughts?

In honor of Universal doing the smart thing and enticing more new CD purchases by announcing a price drop for retail purchases, I propose that we all buy a CD on October 1st from UMG to show our support.

G@#d*%^ Regional Coverage.
I have to watch the Horns in a bar this weekend. Who the hell wants to see Clemson v Maryland? I can tell you right now how that game will come out – it’ll suck, compared to UT v KState.

Fried Oreos. Fried Snickers. Fried Cheesecake. Welcome to the State Fair of Texas! …and a large Diet Coke.

I was really nice yesterday — avoiding politics and such — but Tom Toles was just too funny today.

This is a transcript of a Q&A with Walter Pincus of the Washington Post about the leak naming Joseph Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, the resulting stories and now possible Justice Department investigation into the matter.

I love Pincus because a)I’ve met him and he’s a wonderful, kind, intelligent man, and b)he’s been doing the most consistent reporting about the intelligence behind the administration’s arguments for attacking Iraq. He’s been on the “inflating the evidence” story all along, but for most of the summer the Post had him buried. Only lately have his stories been on the front page where they belong.

Isn’t it exciting how presidential scandals happen? You just never know where they’re going to come from and every administration tries to do something a little different than those before.

And every once in a while you get a real whopper. I guess we’re pretty lucky to have had a resignation and an impeachment in our lifetimes. But who knows, we might get a 10 year prison sentence for somebody before this one is out.

I hope I don’t jinx it!

Salon (no, I haven’t renewed yet) is running a review of Bill Greider’s new book, The Soul of Capitalism. Haven’t read the book, but the review has me pretty pumped.

I’m sure you all can remember back to the early ’90s when Rolling Stone ran a series of back and forth on politics, economics, etc, between Greider and PJ O’Rourke. Yep, at one time, Rolling Stone was not irrelevent. This is all about the same time that MTV was pushing ‘Rock the Vote’, etc. Even though PJO swayed me towards conservatism, Greider was always worth a read. Apparently he still is.

The relatively high standard of living enjoyed by citizens of the United States is in part due to the vigor of capitalism, but it is also due to people believing that higher standards were possible, Greider stresses. Somewhere, he suggests, the average American has lost that sense of possibility. Whether he or she has been beaten down by rhetoric that suggests that any restriction on the capitalist engine will undermine the economy and mire us all in command economy poverty, or whether the obvious corruption and failure of government to serve the interests of the people first have disillusioned us about the ability of our institutions to work in the future, isn’t necessary to determine. The point is that our national character, eventually, will demand that we ask for more.

I think Bill just made my list of to-reads. Maybe I’ll drink the progressive kool-aid yet.

US Uses Patriot Act to Pursue All Crimes

“The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.”

Why do programmers and mathematicians mix up Christmas with Halloween?

We got to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Frighteners Satuday night in a double-feature hosted outdoors on the grounds of a former state-run sanitarium. Then we made our own double-feature on Sunday with The Rundown and Underworld . All-in-all a good movie weekend.

I think every article I have seen about electronic voting at Salon.com has been by Farhad Manjoo. The man really seems to have it out for electronic voting. With Another case of electronic vote-tampering? (9/29/2003), Voting into the void (11/5/2002), An open invitation to election fraud (9/23/2003), and Hacking democracy (2/20/2003) Farhad has made his stance clear. What is dissapointing about this is that Salon.com, following in the steps of nearly every news outlet, is only presenting this viewpoint clearly leaving the opposition relegated to the letters column.