20 May 2004

Well, the Woofs won and are on to the next round. I really don't like basketball. Every exposure to it makes me aware that this simple fact has not changed since the sixth grade. (When I lived in Lawrence, KS: a great town for a basketball-hater.) Still, as a Minnesotan, I'm happy that other Minnesotans will be happy about this. And as a great-niece, I'm thrilled to death that Onie has her Woofs to watch in another round of basketball while she gets to feeling better, because my Onie looooooves her basketball. She played in high school, when girls' teams and basketball were both pretty new to South Dakota. Now she watches compulsively.

More importantly to me, the Flames are going on to the Stanley Cup. Yay hurray! The only team left that I actually wanted to see win! The Sharks fans did not deserve a Stanley Cup team: they booed their own guys off the ice at the end of Game 2 of this series. You don't do that. Don't don't don't. I don't care if they're losing in the playoffs, I don't care if they're playing like amateurs. At the end of the game, if you can't clap and cheer, you go home in silence like a civilized person, with maybe some disgusted mutterings to your hockey-watching buddy. You do not boo your own guys off the ice. Unless, of course, you're a Vancouver fan and that little bastard Bertuzzi is back and up to his usual....

I'm almost done reading The Boy Who Was Thrown Away, and I am not impressed. At all. Ah well; these things happen, and at least I don't have to storm around being upset that Stephanie Smith is not better-known.

My big take-home lesson from this book: if you absolutely must include crudely hand-drawn runes in your book, do not include them as dialog. Because when you say, "Hey!" to somebody, even if they don't have a word that sounds like "Hey!", they don't hear "two straight vertical lines joined in the middle with a horizontal one...then a broken circle with a line through the middle...then a diagonal slash with a smaller diagonal slash at about 45 degrees off it...then a long vertical line with a dot underneath." This is why we have a phonetic alphabet, people: so we can depict the way things sound. I don't know if I want Ed's flat "that's stupid," or my Uncle Bill's hand-waving twangy, "That's stewwwwwwwpid!" But it's stupid. Just plain dumb.

Okay, well, I don't remember if I gave you the errand list on Tuesday, but it's grown since then, despite a few items removed from it. So I'm going to have lunch with Ceej and get some stuff done in that direction. Then we'll see. Not much time this week. Sorry.