I think that the middle of June is the best time of the year, the world so green, the sports of winter finally dead.

• Update: James Bow has confirmed Andrew Anderson has packed in one of Canada's most popular blogs, Bound by Gravity. I know this is so last Tuesday but I checked in only to see he had check out just today. Like all bloggers, I press my face to the screen and say "he escaped - wow."
• Apparently basketball is now over, joining NHL hockey as something I do not care about. Some team from a city I might have thought had a CFL team in the mid-90s swept some team from a city I am pretty sure had an NHL team in the mid-70s. Wow.
• The zoo was good but you are always left with those zoo feelings about the large mammals and even the little monkeys. It is a little odd that there are still peacocks given the run of the Toronto zoo but do you really want the hippos given more freedom. "Ewww! The hippos are swimming in a pool with their own poo!" exclaimed the little girls. The children also were under the illusion that all the large animals had suffered decimation through heart attacks, amazed to see both the elephants and the giraffes still with us.
• If MLB is right, can I write a story about a baseball player and get my meagre ad revenue for doing so?

  If MLB wins its suit against CBC, it would effectively give the league monopoly rights over publicly available statistics and other information that is used as fodder for fantasy leagues across the country, said CBC's attorney Rudy Telscher. "If we lose this case, hundreds of companies go out of business," Telscher said. A key issue in Thursday's arguments was the publicity rights of MLB players. Seitz argued that fantasy leagues are similar to a company that steals a player's image to sell coffee cups or posters. Without using the players' names, fantasy leagues would be an unprofitable game of statistics crunching, she said.

  I thought life was an unprofitable game of statistics crunching.
• My post about the team of destiny seems to have done its work. June has become August, the Red Sox are in full tail spin and the Yankees are marching like there was no April or May on the baseball calendar. Inter-league play has decimated Boston and I have no idea why when the Yankees are cleaning up the same teams. Such is the nature of the game which is really just a large scale misery machine.
• Passport policy continues to befuddle. American officials are in a dizzy about what to do, how to get a practical solution while Canada has announced changes to the passport application rules which apparently mean anyone can vouch for pretty much anyone, defeating the entire security system that was supposed to be at the heart of the tighter rules. Wouldn't one want to ensure that someone of authority and reputation is aware of who someone is before they give away the keys to the joint? But in the new world, authority and experience means nothing as there is no doubt an IT solution to be applied.