Baseball Curses

The Curse of the Bambino got exorcised last year, right? Good. That was getting old. Once the Yankees' fans started chanting "1918, 1918" at the Red Sox, you knew it was only a matter of time. Nonetheless, we heard all about the Curse of the Bambino last year. The year before, we heard all about the Curse of the Billy Goat, which supposedly haunts the Cubs. (Why can't some curse haunt the Marlins? 1993 expansion team with two World Series rings! It ain't right. Why are the Giants cursed? Must be because of Candlestick.) Is it now the Curse of Steve Bartman? Anyway, we've heard all about baseball curses the last two years, but, now, nothing.

This is kind of fascinating to me as the White Sox look like they have a really good shot at winning their first World Series since 1917. No one talks about them being cursed, yet they have the best reason of just about any team for being cursed. The White Sox of 1919 -- the Black Sox -- threw the World Series, after all. That seems like a way better reason to be cursed for all eternity than Harry Frazee selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees to get the money to finance a Broadway production starring his girlfriend, the supposed reason for the Curse of the Bambino. Way better than not letting some bartender's billy goat come to the 1945 World Series, the supposed cause of the Cubs' troubles.

If you think about it, the White Sox actually have been more cursed than the Red Sox or the Cubs. The Red Sox of course came close to winning a World Series several times between 1918 and 2004. They went to the World Series four times in that time (1946, 1967, 1975, 1986). Every time, they lost in seven games. Every time, they lost painfully, e.g., Johnny Pesky holding onto the ball as Enos Slaughter scored from first on a single with the winning run in 1947, Joe Morgan getting the winning RBI with a bloop single in the top of the 9th of Game 7 in 1975 after Carlton Fisk won Game 6 with his wave-it-fair home run, Bill Buckner in 1986. And that doesn't even count blowing a 14-game lead in 1978 and then losing a one-game playoff to the Yankees. At Fenway. After having a lead. On a home run by Bucky Dent. Or the 2003 ALCS. The Cubs have come awfully close to at least getting to the World Series. They were up 2-0, needing one win to go the World Series, in 1984 before they were done in by Steve Garvey and Leon Durham. They were five outs from the World Series in 2003 with a 3-run lead with their best pitcher on the mound before Bartman.

The White Sox, however, have almost totally stunk in an almost totally boring way for years. Yeah, they went to the World Series in 1959, but they lost and there seems to be not much that is memorable about that World Series (except that the Dodgers won!). They were in the playoffs a few times and didn't do anything memorable. Basically, they more or less stunk and were overshadowed by the Cubs for years.

So maybe the White Sox were really the most cursed team. And, this year, it seems like the gods have decided it is time for the curse to stop.

These curses seem to work themselves out in the most curiously appropriate ways. Take the Red Sox. Their curse supposedly derived from the fact that they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. So who did they have to beat to exorcise the curse? The Yankees. Their curse expressed itself in horrible, gut-wrenching disasters like being one strike away from winning in 1986 before the world fell apart and Buckner let the ball between his legs. So how did they exorcise the curse? They inflicted the most gut-wrenching choke in the history of professional sports on the Yankees, who were up 3-0 with a lead in the bottom of the 9th in Game 4 and lost. (Now maybe the Yankees have the Curse of the Metrosexual after A-Rod's wristy attempt to knock the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's glove in Game 6 of that series. A-Rod, man, that guy has a serious case of loser karma, kind of like Chris Webber.)

And how are the White Sox getting their curse -- the curse that came from cheating -- exorcised? By getting a string of ridiculously bad umpire calls. That call at the end of Game 2 of the ALCS, where the umpire said that the Angels' catcher didn't catch the ball? That one stunk about as bad as our dog. That call in Game 2 of the World Series where the umpire said that the ball hit Jermaine Dye and not his ball? That one stunk worse than our dog.

For whatever reason, the White Sox seem to be on karmic parole from the crime of 1919 and the fact that they are getting bends in the rules that their predecessors broke seems to prove it.

Of course, if the Astros come back and win, then they will have broken their curse -- the Curse of the Astroturf -- but I think that they still have some time to serve for being the first team to inflict that stuff on the world.

Separated at Birth?

Enthusio was watching the original Willy Wonka movie tonight and it struck me.

Were Donald Rumsfeld



and Mr. Slugworth



separated at birth?

Roughly the same personality, too.

Creatures

There is a creature sitting on me. It currently is sleeping, judging by the noises coming from it. Based on past experience, it may begin emanating odors soon. So far, this thing has done nothing productive that has benefited The Muse, The Mermaid, Enthusio or me. Ever. It often drives us crazy with the ungodly racket it makes. We have had people leave notes on our front door complaining about it.

There is another creature that lives in the garage. It once lived in the house, but, after we bought this house -- our first house -- it decided that it would use the corner of the living room as its personal outhouse. We could not convince it to stop doing this. It was mutually decided that it might be better off living in the garage. Just about every morning when I go to work, and every evening when I return from work, it complains at me. It often vomits all over the hood of my car, the one that is the culmination of my 20 years of sports car lust. One day, a couple of years ago when I had my old car, it vomitted all down the drivers' side window. There was so much vomit that I had to deal with it at the local gas station where they have squigees and such. This meant driving a couple of miles with disgusting stuff about six inches from my face. Of course, this isn't anywhere near as bad as what happened to The Muse's dad once. He had one of the creatures that lived at his house pee in his car. He had to drive around for several weeks with the windows rolled down because it smelled so bad. In December. In the rain.

Why do we let these things live us? Literally, they live with us. The one that is currently sitting on me would, if given its preference, sleep in the same room as The Muse and me and snore slighly more quietly than an elephant passing through. As it is, it frequently plants itself outside of our bedroom about the time that I am finishing my morning routine and whines, moans and moos until I let it in.

Sometimes they injure us. Once I was playing with the one that lives in the garage and it scratched my nose so badly that it bled profusely and had a nice scab across it. One of my law professors asked me, "You feed something that did that to you?" Exactly.

And yet we do feed them. Frequently. Then they want more or at least give you the very distinct impression that they are put out that you are feeding them food that is not as good as the food that you are eating.

Sometimes we pay big bucks to take them to doctors. Sometimes we break up their fights. Sometimes we do the former immediately after doing the latter (or at least The Muse does).

It is very strange. If there is some biological imperative that drives us to do these things, I'm having a hard time understanding it. Usually, we try to keep little beasts out of our houses.

Oprah

Have you seen the new Newsweek? I am so proud of Oprah. She got her picture on the cover of someone else's magazine! And she isn't even riding a horse or twirling her skirt or playing croquet or anything like that!

USC

Did you see the USC-Notre Dame game yesterday? I only watched the last 5 minutes or so, but, damn, that was a hell of a game. That was the game where Matt Leinart went from being a great college quarterback to being a GREAT college quarterback, like Doug Flutie, like Dan Marino, like Joe Montana, like Bernie Kosar. A guy whose reputation will be secure even if he doesn't do jack in the NFL. Man, being Matt Leinart in LA right now would be something.

I mean, USC had 4-and-9 with like a minute left on about their own 30 with 70,000 screaming Notre Dame fans in their ears and Leinart calls an audible at the line and then throws a pass to the receiver he audibled to find, gets it to the guy even though he's covered like a blanket and they get 61 yards! Then Leinart gets popped trying to vault in for a touchdown with 7 seconds left and then calls his own number without telling the line and gets stuffed and then spins his way in with 3, count 'em, 3 seconds left to win. Great game!

And, once again, the game exposed my personal hypocrisy. I should hate the USC football team. I should want them to lose in painful ways. I'm a public school guy, born and bred. I attended exactly four schools during my scholastic career: (1) Island Union Elementary School K-8; (2) Lemoore Union High School; (3) UC Davis; and (4) Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley. The idea of public schools means a lot to me. Everyone can go, whether they're rich or poor, and they are supposed to get the same education. You get all segments of a community in public schools. They should expose kids to kids of other backgrounds and broaden their minds. If a public school system has special programs or magnet schools or a great band or a great football team or an Academic Decathlon team or a good theater department or whatever, it is open to everyone in the school, at least to try out. I think that all of that is really important. I can understand that, in the real world, where a lot of public schools stink and where people want their kids to go to religious schools and that kind of thing, private schools work better for some people. Overall, though, to me at least, public schools are a big deal. Those old pictures of African-American kids integrating Little Rock High School and other Southern schools are so powerful partly because these were kids just wanting to go to their school, like the other kids.

The Muse's cousin was in town last week and we got started talking about private schools in the context of football. We are from the same area, having graduated from high schools about 10 miles from each other in the same year. She is a UC Berkeley grad and I mentioned that UC Davis, a Division I-AA school, had beaten Stanford, a Division I and Pac-10 school, and she was quite pleased to have Stanford be so embarrassed. She said, "I just love to see those snooty private schools lose to public schools."

Generally, I feel exactly the same way. For example, I always enjoy the day that Duke gets knocked out of the NCAA basketball tournament. I always root for U. of North Carolina when they play Duke in basketball. (An aside: can people please shut up about Coach K? This is a guy who, during the one year he had a bad team, decided that he was too stressed out to continue coaching them, took a leave of absence in the middle of the season and then, during the NCAA tournament, showed up as a guest analyst on TV. Wow, what commitment to his players.) I like to see UC Berkeley (sorry, as a UC Davis guy, I'm not calling Berkeley "Cal" -- all of the UC's are "California") beat Stanford as frequently as possible. (The fact that Stanford didn't let me in has nothing to do with this at all, of course.)

But I can't shake the attachment to USC football that I developed as a kid. When I was about 9 to 12, USC was in one of the stretches when they were really good. Charles White won the Heisman in 1979 and Marcus Allen won it in 1982 (after becoming the first college player to run for over 2,000 yards in a season). My family used to go to the coast for New Years and I used to watch USC in the Rose Bowl on January 1 while gazing on the surf and eating what were basically Malomars. That was sweet. (The Rose Bowl is one of the great setting for sports, up there with Dodger Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, the old Boston Garden, ARCO Arena, Augusta National, Pebble Beach, those kinds of places.) USC, like almost all of the Pac-10 teams in those days, would play a much more interesting kind of football than the smash-mouth teams that the Big-10 would send and the Pac-10 teams would win and all would be right with the world. Plus USC had those cool red shirts and gold pants, colors that were the same as my elementary school's colors. Man, I was going to be a USC tailback. I even had USC pajamas.

But, now, I'm a committed public school guy. The hypocrisy of rooting for USC always gets me when I watch the USC-UCLA game. I really want to root for UCLA. They're a UC, for God's sake! They have those cool powder blue and gold uniforms. (There may be no better of combinations of sports team colors than when USC and UCLA play and USC is in its red-and-gold and UCLA is in its powder-blue-and-gold. It looks like a moving painting.) They generally throw the ball a lot, which I like. But I still feel emotionally tugged to root for USC. I'll probably root for USC this year on the theory that I want them to win so that they can go play and beat Texas for the national championship. ("Texas" in the previous sentence should be said with the inflection with which Jerry used to welcome Newman on Seinfeld.) Next year, I'll make up some other theory.

So, there it is, I'm a public school guy, but I root for USC. As the Muse "loves" to hear, it's the exception that proves the rule.

Kiddo Update

It's funny how kids' natures come out when and how you least expect it. Both Enthusio and The Mermaid have had this happen recently. (The Muse does a better job than I do in updating the kiddos' lives at her blog at tkbezerra.blogspot.com.)

Last weekend, I was mowing the lawn in the back yard. While mowing, I noticed a praying mantis trying to sprint out of the grass. I stopped to let it get away and it made it up on to the concrete, where it resumed praying. I didn't know if the kids had ever seen such a bug, so I had them come see the cool bug. The Mermaid looked and asked a couple of questions and went back out front to resume her playing. Enthusio, on the other hand and in his way, kept asking me questions and prodding at the mantis gently. We then had the following conversation:

"E: Why does it keep trying to get away?"

"WT: It's afraid of you."

"E: Why is it afraid of me?"

"WT: You're a lot bigger than it, it's afraid that you might crush it."

"E: Why would I do that?"

And there's Enthusio's nature in a nutshell. Enthusiatic enough about the mantis that he took five minutes out of his busy schedule of playing with his friends across the street. (It reminded me of the first time we went to Hawaii when he would intensely poke at and examine little shells in a tidepool to see the little tongues/feet in the shells pull back.) But then kind enough to be unable to even fathom the idea of stepping on a bug that he found to be cool. He's almost seven, it wouldn't be a surprise if he stepped on bugs for the hell of it. But that's not him.

The Mermaid recently knocked The Muse and I over with one of her moments of blunt honesty. Out of the blue, at dinner, we have this conversation:

"Mermaid: I don't like wine."

"Muse: How do you know?"

"Mermaid: I tried some."

"WT: Where did you do that?"

"Mermaid: At Grandma and Grandpa's house."

"WT: When?"

"Mermaid: On Mother's Day."

"WT: Did someone give it to you?"

"Mermaid: No, it was on the counter."

"WT: Was it red or yellow?"

"Mermaid: Yellow."

"WT: Did you like it?"

"Mermaid: No, it tasted yucky."

Sometimes, she just decides that she's going to do things. They aren't always the most sensible things, but then no kid is especially sensible. She's pretty confident about doing things she wants to do, though, even if other kids would look a little crosseyed about it. She does her own thing.

The Mermaid also has been learning how to play the saxophone lately. Her school starts kids with music in the fifth grade and The Mermaid has always wanted to play sax, so she started with it. The Muse said that the first session when The Mermaid started wasn't good because The Mermaid expected to start blowing the sax like John Coltrane (well, The Mermaid probably wasn't thinking Coltrane, but you know) immediately and was very frustrated because she couldn't really get it to make noise. But, once The Mermaid got through that, she started to really pick it up, at least to my undertrained ear. Now she sits down several nights a week, assembles her sax, gets the reed ready and starts playing the notes. She can read the notes and, the last time I heard her practice, she was starting to put notes together so it sounded like music. The thing about it is that the kid can really make the sax blow loud. I mean LOUD. Then, when she's done, she dutifully cleans it.

Given The Mermaid's condition, she almost undoubtedly will always follow the beat of a different drummer. It's nice that, sometimes, this is a good thing. Although I'd prefer she stay out of the liquor.

Pittsburgh Pirates

Baseball's regular season ended today. No big surprises, I guess. Red Sox and Yankees both in the playoffs? Whoa, shocking, that the teams with the biggest payrolls got in. The Cardinals and Angels? Everyone knew they would be good (although the A's would have beaten the Angels if the A's had been healthy). It's a little disappointing that the Padres ended up with a winning record. A playoff team with a losing record would have been entertaining.

And the Pittsburgh Pirates ended with what I believe was their 13th consecutive losing record.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Why should the Webbed Toe give a rat's rear about the Pirates? The Dodgers are his team." True, true, the Dodgers are my team. But the Pirates are the canary in baseball's coalmine and they're dying.

The Pirates are a proud franchise. They are one of the old, old teams. I think that they were in the first World Series (losing in 8 games -- yes, 8, they played best of 9 at first) to the Red Sox, I think. Honus Wagner played for them, getting his mug on those little cigarette cards that are now the most valuable sports memorabilia in the world. They sucked for much of the first half of the 20th century, but made the World Series at least a couple of times. Babe Ruth hit his called shot off them in the 1932 World Series. They picked up considerably, I think, with integration. Their pitcher Harvey Haddix is the only pitcher to lose after pitching a perfect game for nine innings. Haddix actually was perfect into the 12th in a 1959 game, then walked Hank Aaron (I think) and Eddie Matthews hit a home run, but passed Aaron on the bases somehow, so the game ended 1-0 with Haddix on the short end. They won the World Series in 1960, upsetting the Yankees with Bill Mazeroski hitting the only Game 7 walk-off home run in the history of the World Series. They got Roberto Clemente in the late 1950's and he played for them until he died in the early '70s. In 1971, they were the second team to win a World Series after being down 3-1 (I think that the Tigers in 1968 were the first), beating the Orioles. In 1979, they did the same thing to the Orioles again, riding Willie Stargell and singing "We Are Family." (I remember that World Series particularly well because my mom went into the hospital to have my brother The Philosopher two months premature just before that Series and we shuttled back and forth to Valley Children's in Fresno pretty much very day for a month until The Philosopher came home.) They had those really good teams in the late '80s and early '90s with Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla, Doug Drabek, John Smiley, Jose Lind, managed by Jim Leyland, that just couldn't get out of the NLCS. They also have what looks like a great park that was built in the last 5 years or so.

But they are screwed now.

Basically, they play in a market that is too small to generate the revenue that they need to be competitive. Among teams of the three major sports, baseball teams depend most heavily on their local revenue streams to generate the cash they need. Pete Rozelle set the NFL up properly back in the '60s when he convinced the owners to split the revenues from their first network contract evenly. That makes it possible for Green Bay to compete with the New York teams. The NBA teams split up the network money evenly, I think, as a result of the league almost going belly up in the late '70s (that's when they put in the salary cap too). The teams have local revenue streams and that might be a serious problem at some point.

But baseball is there right now.

The teams split network revenues from the one game a week that Fox shows and ESPN's couple of games a week and Fox's contract for the playoffs and World Series, but every team has way over a 100 games a year that are broadcast on its local outlet and that money stays with the team. This means that the Yankees make so much money that they have their own network on New York's cable system, while the Pirates and the A's can't make enough money to keep the guys that develop from their farm system.

This in turn means that a lot of baseball teams have to struggle, struggle, struggle just to be marginally competitive. The Brewers are like that, but I view that as karma derived from Bud Selig's incompetent performance as commissioner and his willingness to turn the formerly exalted office of Commissioner of Major League Baseball into the owners' stooge. The Tigers are like that, but they haven't been interesting since, like, 1987 and they missed their big chance by building a lousy new stadium. They Royals are like that and they even replaced the Astroturf in their nice stadium with grass. The A's are like that, but they employ a genius as a general manager, Billy Beane, and have performed miracle after miracle to stay competitive. (We're not counting new teams that haven't managed to be competitive. The Rockies are doomed because they play at 5,000 feet. The Devil Rays are doomed because of that awful place where they play and to which their owners tried to take the Giants to.)

But it is the Pirates that really make me sad. A lot of it is that they're in the National League and I have always much preferred the National League. (Down with the DH!) Part of it is that I remember that 1979 We Are Family team very well. Part of it is that they have cool, old-school uniforms. Quite a bit of it, though, is that they have tried to do things right. They built what looks like a really nice new stadium with cool, kind of blond brick that has a view of downtown Pittsburgh. They've done a decent job developing players from their farm system that they have lost because they didn't have the money to keep them -- Barry Bonds (couldn't pay him as a free agent in '92), Bobby Bonilla (lost to the Marlins as a free agent in "96, I think), Doug Drabek (lost to the Astros as a free agent at some point), Jason Schmidt (traded to the Giants), Jason Kendall (traded to the A's, of all people), Kris Benson (Mets, free agent). And they keep losing. And they never seem to have any hope of getting better.

It seems like there is almost no way the Pirates are going to get significantly better for more than a fluke year or so unless they move. It would be a terrible thing if they moved. It would be akin to when Art Modell dragged the Browns out of Cleveland, a total travesty. Perhaps even worse is that the Pirates aren't going to get any better if they move. There's not really any place for them to go. There really aren't any good-size cities out there to which they could move where they would have much of a hope of being more competitive. The Expos got moved to Washington, D.C. (that was a good move, a mercy killing of the unfortunate Expos, really) and the runner-up for getting them, I believe, was Portland. Portland sounds like a nice city, but it doesn't seem like it's really big enough to generate the bucks to make a baseball team competitive.

So it sure seems to me like the Pirates are doomed unless baseball changes. Baseball must change. It must. We need to see the Yankees and Braves in the playoffs every single year like we need a hole in the head.

October

It's October. It's my favorite month. Glad it's here.

Having spent all but seven years of my life living in the Central Valley, October is fall to me. September usually is still summer here. You can get a nice 105 degree day in September just as easily as you can in June. The difference, though, is that, in September, the water's gone from the ground and any plant that was gonna die is dead. October, though, is the stretch when things cool down, but aren't cold and foggy yet. You can get some pretty serious fog in November if there's been some early rain, but October is pretty safe.

It's still California, though, so, hell, you can often still wear shorts in October. A few years ago, when The Mermaid was in kindergarten, I think, we went to the fall carnival at her then school. I think it was about the first week of the month. They had a booth where you could get a picture taken for $5 (a whopping $20 less than Squidward paid the pirates for the pie that was actually a bomb that he bought for Spongebob in the classic "Dying for Pie"). The Muse decided that it would be a good thing to get a family picture taken. So we did and, man, we got the nicest picture of our little family that I think we have ever taken. The Muse scanned it and sent it to her friends all over the place and she got what was to we native Californians the funniest response from one of them. Her friend in Pennsylvania said that she about fell over when she saw the picture because here was our entire family wearing short clothes (The Mermaid, Enthusio and I in short pants, The Muse in a short dress -- a very nice one, I might add) in a setting with pumpkins. The Muse's friend said that they always have frost on their pumpkins and couldn't believe that it was possible to being wearing shorts in a pumpkin picture. So October is one of those times when it is good to live here.

October is also just about the best sports time of the year. Being a live-long baseball freak, October is THE TIME. When the Dodgers are in the playoffs -- shut up, they used to be in playoffs all the time and their time will come again, you just watch -- October of course is the time when they might win the World Series. (We will celebrating the 17th anniversary of The Miracle of St. Kirk this year.) When the Dodgers aren't in the playoffs, I just appreciate what great games there are. It is inevitable that there are going to be great games, games where someone's ace starting pitcher comes out of the bullpen to try the one out that some team needs because, hey, if they don't get that out, they're going home. (See Orel Hershiser in Game 4 of the 1988 NLCS, Randy Johnson in Game 5 of the 1995 ALDS, Kevin Brown in Game 5 of the 1998 NLCS, Randy Johnson again in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series.) It's the time when, even if your team isn't involved, stuff happens that you never, ever, will forget (e.g., Donnie Moore & Dave Henderson in 1986, Bill Buckner in 1986, Will Clark putting on maybe the best game-after-game display of hitting I have ever seen in the 1989 NLCS, Seattle beating the Yankees in extra innings in 1995, the Pirates getting their hearts broken for the third year in a row in 1992, Curt Schilling and the bloody sock, the Cubs getting sooo close to the World Series, the Yankees committing the biggest choke in the history of professional sports, ha, ha). It is the time when baseball's superiority as a game is demonstrated. In baseball. unlike in the NFL, the kicker does not win the ring for his team. (Adam Vinateri may be the greatest kicker ever -- really -- but he's a kicker.) In baseball, unlike the NBA, there is not a special style of ball called "playoff ball" when the refs let the defense mug the offense and don't call fouls.

In baseball, instead there are games, where there are runners on second and third with two outs in the bottom of the eighth -- or maybe the twelfth -- of an elimination game and the team at bat is down a run, and you sit there and you wait for the next pitch. No one is going to try to kick on third down to make sure that they can kick again on fourth down if something gets screwed up. No one is going to kneel down and run out the clock. No one is committing a million fouls with the prayer that the other tean is going to miss a free throws. The pitcher is going to pitch just like he always does and we're going to see what happens. If the hitter gets a hit, then we're going to see how fast the runner at second is and how good of an arm the outfielder has. (Whatever else Barry Bonds ever does, he couldn't throw out Sid Bream -- the World's Slowest Man -- coming home from second and keep his team in the 1992 NLCS.) Playoff baseball, and thus October, just rocks.

October also is when my birthday is. October 7, to be precise. This added special juice to the month as a kid, of course. It still does, to some degree. This year is a big one, I guess, in that I'll be 35. My parents got married and had me young -- one of my formative experiences apparently was sitting on the side of the pool table in the student union -- so, as I'm getting older, I'm now coming up to ages that they were that I remember. When my dad was 35, we had moved off the dairy -- which was big -- and he was on the board of my school district -- 200 kids total, K-8, and I went to school with the same core 10 kids or so K-12, we had so many birthday parties with cupcakes together that I still remember some of their birthdays -- and had started his own cotton picking business. These were big deals to me. It is more than a little weird that I'm reaching those ages now. These realizations always happen in October.

There's really only one thing about October that stinks. The gunk in the air. When I was a kid, I had asthma and October is the time when everything gets harvested in the San Joaquin Valley, cotton and corn especially. Besides meaning that my dad was working about 27 hours a day every day -- don't how he did that year in and year out -- it also meant that there were lots of fibers in the air for me to suck down. Did a lot of coughing in October, but I eventually grew out of that, so, hey, that makes October better. Once in a while here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway, there will be big fires in the Sierras north of us -- because everything is dead and ready to burn -- and the smoke will blow down and we'll get what The Muse calls a "Brown Thursday," where the sky is literally smoky. That is more than a little weird and unhealthy, but it only happens every few years.

So it's October and it's good. Hey, U2 made a record named October, so it must be good.