Outlander

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkizwJUiVjA

This started almost as a quid pro quo with a co-worker that I got to watch Orphan Black, but now I’m kind of waiting impatiently to see this.

In our conversations of TV shows to watch she mentions that she is excited to see that one of her favorite book series is finally coming to the screen. Starz is producing a TV series of the Outlander books written by Diana Gabaldon. She tells me it is about an English Army nurse from WWII who gets transported back to the mid-1700’s Scotland.

I’m a sucker for time travel, books or movies, so I’m interested. I check out the trailer(s) and now I’m intrigued. I read a bit of the blog that the author writes and I like her style and sense of humor, so now I think, maybe I should read the book. Jamie has a copy of the book on her Kindle, but can’t seem to find her, you know, ink on paper with a glued binding, circa sometime last century version, so I will have to see if I can find a copy of a book that was published in 1991.

Turns out it was pretty easy. My local supermarket has a paperback copy on their book aisle because book No. 8 of the series is just out in hardback and the paperback was re-issued because of the upcoming TV series (even has the two main actors, in character, on the cover.

Now my favorite book series will always be Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, tough guy private-eye with his own moral code that always gets his man, usually in a one on one violent confrontation. The writing is direct with short sentences in short chapters, double spaced on pages with large margins. A couple hundred pages of the literary equivalent of a can of sour cream & onion flavored Pringles.

Outlander is the polar opposite. There are densely packed pages filled with minute, detailed descriptions of the surroundings and stuffed with personal observations, sort of the literary equivalent of a Martha Stewart Poppy Seed Grapefruit Torte. Think Stephen King length, this baby is 850 pages. I’m not a big fan of period pieces, but I’m still with this one at the 500 page mark. I think I recognize the seed in all the flowery, descriptive text as the writing I liked in her blog. Still, I’m not sure I’ll read any more of the books, but if the TV series turns out as good as it looks in the trailers, I’ll be watching.

Second Half

The Red Sox finished up he first half* of the season tied for last in their division 9-1/2 games behind the Baltimore Orioles with a record of 43-52. If the Orioles, who finished up at the All-Star break at 52-42, play at their current pace for the rest of the year they will finish at 90-72. So, for the FRS to get 91 wins and overtake the Birds they only have to go 48-19 the rest of the way. That is a .716 pace, sure we can do that.

Well, so far they have won the first two games of the second half, so only 46 more to go. In today’s game the Red Sox have got John Lester pitching and he has not lost to the Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park, he’s 6-0. That means maybe only 45 more wins to go or more likely, the fact that the announcers mentioned that fact, John will give up about 10 runs and be bounced from the game in a couple innings.

Update: The FRS won the game 6-0. 3 down, 45 to go.

*The baseball season is 162 games long, so game 81, the real halfway point, was actually a couple of weeks ago.

New Look & On Again, Off Again Rain

With what should be self evident, I am pleased to announce that there is a new look here at mr-miata.net. It is the same theme, Atahualpa, just with a new shirt. And because of what the topics have been during this past week’s posts you would have thought I would have gone with a Hawaiian theme, but to tell you the truth, I just thought of that right this minute, or I might have.

Last night I gave the Emperor a sponge bath in the garage and I put the top boot on in preparation for today’s MMC Breakfast run. Got up this morning and it was raining! On Friday when I checked the weather they were calling for 30% chance of afternoon showers. This morning the 30% had changed from afternoon to all day and we were apparently in the middle of that percentage. So, off came the boot and the top went up.

By the time we got to the meeting place the cloud cover was still there, but the light rain had stopped, so we put the top back down. The rest of the cars either arrived with their tops down or put them down once they arrived. We were at a gas station off Exit 1 of I-20 and we were going to a small cafe off Exit 22. Most folks would get on the Interstate, go 21 miles and get off, but we drive Miatas. I mapped out a convoluted 30 mile trip with 12 turns and crossed over or under I-20 five times.

The rain held out for the whole drive and the whole time we were in eating breakfast. It didn’t start raining again here in Aiken again until the late afternoon.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1396

Invitation

Last Friday when I asked my former boss and now a manager for another department how come he never wore a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays. He replied, “I was never invited.”

As the unofficial Valve Store(TM) Arts & Crafts Engineer I took this as a challenge being issued, so I got busy with some Google-fu, photoshopping and Microsoft Word work.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1394

44,000 Teary Eyed Fans

Tonight is the MLB All-Star Game and I considered tuning in just to see all 44,000 teary eyed fans at Target Field watching Derek Jeter’s final tip of the hat. But then I realized that Atlantic Broadband, in their continuing efforts to force a cable box on me, has removed the HD feed for FOX from my available channels, so I didn’t turn it on.

It wasn’t until the 4th inning that I realized I could watch it in HD using my MLB.TV package. This turned out to be a good thing as Jeter was already out of the game so I didn’t have to listen to the FOX announcers lavish praise on him. That reminds me, I have been lax in keeping up with Grantland.com’s fictional Derek Jeter Diary, The Captain’s Log.

I was also very lucky and missed the FRS’s “all-star” pitcher John Lester give up a single and two doubles, allowing two runs in his 2nd inning appearance.

The Purple Whale swam past the 44,000 mile mark on the way to DD this morning.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1391

Disappearing Hawaiian

When I posted that picture of three folks in Hawaiian shirts the other day I could have sworn that I had done it in the past somewhere, but a search of the site using the little search function in the left sidebar didn’t come up with anything, so…

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but a search for “Hawaiian” today still turns up nothing, even though I have posted two entries with the word Hawaiian in the title. Search for just the word “shirt” and the two recent posts show up along with a couple others, including one from 2006 with the picture. Search using Google for Hawaiian site:mr-miata.net and they show up too.

On a whim I tried searching Life of Brian using an uncapitalized hawaiian and I got results. So I used the back button on the browser and noticed that the url for the empty search looked like this:
http://www.mr-miata.net/?s=Hawai%C2%ADian&submit.x=10&submit.y=6
What is with the extra crap in there? No wonder there were no results.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1390