I meant not to do this. I meant to ensure there was something between Friday posts. But the week did not let me. Too sad to mention baseball. Too occupied with the beer blog. It's not every week a 920 page Oxford Companion to your favorite hobby shows up. These are not excuses. These are reasons. What would I write about? I could post about each episode of Doctor Who but this season, thankfully soon to be over, has been so badly managed that it's hard to get the energy up. There's a provincial election but I know people involved. So we have the bullets.

⇒ Morton is in first place With the Sox sucking and the Leafs about to suck, it's a good time to be a fan of the Morton.
⇒ This is the under-reported story of the week. Had to run her off the land.
⇒ Excuse me but are those pants on fire?
⇒ This beer fest looks warm and inside. The one I am heading to is outside on a weekend that the weather lady just said would be "raw" - yikes.

Maybe more later. There's a day ahead, a day to take on like the best last day of September as the season slips into a freezing damp cold patch ever. W.o.o.t.

Glad that's over. Summer? What was that all about? Reality is back baby and the stock market is falling along as the space hardware. [Remember. It's wrong to wish on space hardware... even when it's aimed at you.] Speaking of collapses, what about the Red Sox? For a fan like me, it's a taste of the old days. To be fair, they sucked in April and in interleague play, too. so it is really a bit weird that they are still in the running. The Yankees have an opportunity to drive a wooden stake through the heart of their arch enemies this weekend - and at Yankee stadium, too. I say the Angels take the wild card. Ah, autumn. The time of tears.

⇒ One of the better kottke hat tips ever - but what now can I ever believe you are actually saying?
⇒ More old TV schedules from my life. On this Saturday when I was ten and a half I know I watched Joe 90 as well as Davey and Goliath. I can confirm that I do not own the complete DVD set of Davey and Goliath.
⇒ Once in a while the overrated Christie Blatchford writes a column actually worth attention.
⇒ Where will you be for the Ontario election leadership debate?
⇒ There's no racist like a hockey fan racist from the boonies!

Well, really. You can't want more than that. How much more could you need? There's still a workday to get through, you know.

God love the nerds who load information into the internet:

Saturday, Sept. 11, 1976 TV listings
CHSJ (CBAT) Channel 4 Saint John / Channel 7 Moncton (CBC)
12:30 Circle Square
1:00 Onedin Line
2:00 Space: 1999
3:00 Saturday Sports
5:00 Water Skiing
6:00 Klahanie
6:30 Pop! Goes the Country
7:00 Hawaii Five-O
8:00 Baseball - Montreal @ Pittsburgh
10:30 Horse Race - B.C. Derby
11:00 CBC News
11:15 News
11:25 Movie - Viva Maria (1965; Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot)

Space: 1999 and an Expos game!

We have had a good crop of tomatoes and basil this year but there is a fair nip in the air so that may be drawing to a close. I don't mind. I picked up a copy of FutureSex/LoveSounds to keep me warm. I may start doing reviews of my new funky collection but suffice it to say that I never imagined thinking an album could remind me of punk, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury. I thought the internet was affected by the cold this morning as it was 1995 sorta sluggish. I thought someone forgot to turn a switch somewhere. Maybe a key router froze up north.

⇒ Did I mention this one before? Such a weenie. Likes his own chair by the TV, too. Don't you think of sitting in his chair. Contrast: our top soldier loves to travel. On us.
⇒ Admit it. This is useful.
⇒ Great article: : "Dubya and Me." Another sort of great writing.
⇒ I am pretty sure I worked with Vic Gupta back in 1992 in a pub / restaruant in London, Ontario. Great guy. I would be hard pressed not to vote for the guy if he was in my riding... and he a Tory. One to watch. The vintage base ball team's second base woman and (let's be honest) best player, however, is a local NDP leader so the universe is balanced.
⇒ This building faced the old Gingers on lower Hollis Street, home of the original Granite Brewery where the makers of beer experimented on us college kids as we learned how to play snooker watched and jeered by a crowd of hard luck cases whose shakes kept them from the table. I had no idea that we were looking at a 1760s building as we left the place.
⇒ Good that the RCMP has been called into PEI. A cool and untraceable $400 million enters an economy of 135,000 people, citizenships are given away and no body know nuttin. Classic. I was disgusted back in 2009. Related: best headline ever. If you have to say that, you know they are screwed.
⇒ Unbelievable that the parliamentary secretary to the foreign affairs minister doesn't know that you do not make kissy face with journalists from dictatorships.

There. That should hold you.

While the world continues to wobble, drowning in debt to itself caused by buying into the shell game, some in Germany have a plan:

The shift was signalled on Friday, when Gunther Oettinger, the top German representative in the European Union, proposed that a bureaucratic invasion force be sent from Brussels to Greece to seize the struggling country’s assets “without regard to resistance.” (Mr. Oettinger also suggested that Greece and other debtors be forced to fly their flags at half-mast in Brussels.) Berlin papers characterized the proposal as a UN-style “blue helmet” operation; Greeks likened it to Germany’s Second World War invasion.

Ah, the eternal and inevitable WWII references. But it sorta makes sense. Why have an economic union without joint rules about handling the money? When the answer to the joke "what's a Grecian urn" a shrug of the shoulders backed by a very odd tax return, well, you really have ask.

I have never understood why setting up systems is treated as a local matter. Sure, administer them locally but money really has no local character. Like the Canadian criminal code - rules set Federally and administered locally. Some wiggle room granted here and there to make sure things are fair but, really, when things are subject to audits who needs to get creative or prop up an obviously dead horse? Send in the suits from Bonn!

I was on a platform in a curling rink in Summerside, PEI after giving a presentation when I heard. I got home as soon as I could and six days later I started writing comments on a blog. For some reason, we had guests from Sweden, in-laws of in-laws who didn't speak English and for a time had a very hard time understanding. We were worried about our cousin Susan who was very near events. The parents passed along news. It was a beautiful late summer day. Soon, there were no planes heading to Europe in the sky above the house. Usually there were three or four at any time somewhere up there above the Maritimes. I hadn't realized how they could be heard until they stopped. The first ones to come back were the jet fighters.

⇒ Ruk wrote this.
⇒ Steve remembered looking down from one of the towers as a kid.
⇒ Mike, on a blog post now gone, remembered a passage from Churchill from September 11, 1940: "These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler's invasion plans. He hopes by killing a large number of civilians, women and children, that he will terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city and make them a burden and an anxiety to the government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing..." Hitler did not terrorize or cow as it turned out - and neither did Ben Laden. We just learned to go about.
⇒ Ian wrote this on the second anniversary.
⇒ The Flea was brilliant in his scorn on the fifth anniversary.

Calamity has spawned or eclipsed calamity since then. The good spaces between go on, too.

...because, it's really the same thing as "the Harper Government" yet it is clearer about his intentions:

Erin Junker, a senior communications adviser at Health Canada, responded by email: “This was a directive I received from PCO.” The Privy Council Office is the bureaucratic nerve centre that serves the prime minister, working in concert with the Prime Minister's Office. A PCO spokesman responded to a series of questions Wednesday about the Health Canada email exchange by reiterating that “there has been no change in policy or direction.” Raymond Rivet said in an email that he “cannot speculate” on what directive Ms. Junker was referring to: “There may have been instances where the term was introduced but, as I have said, there was no formal directive to use the term Harper Government.”

On one hand, I say run with it. Who cares? Steve wants to be the anti-Trudeau? That's fine. Chretien beat him to it 15 years ago and Steve has about 35 million in deficit and a hell of a lot of Federal-Provincial agreements to go to catch up. Steve wants to change the symbols, the tone, the constitutional traditions? Go for it. We'll have his grey and white flag one day, too.

But if I was a Tory I would be livid. Except Mr. Harper is not a Tory. He is not a Progressive Conservative either. He has gotten rid of both those things. And now he is getting rid of conservatives, too. It's all Steve - Steve - Steve. For now. Because when he is gone? Liberals forever. Or the NDP or whoever. Name the heir apparent if you disagree.

At least the conservatives won't lose when the house of cards fall. And one day it will.

You better be meditating on the benefits we all share from the labour union movement this weekend. "Sure, I'll take the day off but don't you dare think for a minute that I like unions." I can hear you. You hypocritical holidaying ingrates. Me, I will be singing "The International" and all my Billy Bragg 45s and calling everyone I meet comrade or maybe even Leonid.

⇒ WATCH OUT! SPACE JUNK!!!

⇒ Glad that's cleared up. Italians are now "ethnics" under the rural overlords world view. Next, Scots and Irish and soon New Brunswickers.

⇒ Ernie Eves busts out against those Ontario Tea Party Tory bastards: "I don't think it was fair and I don't think it was loyal and I don't think it was compassionate and I don't think it's honest." Crime: voting for someone. Now, that's a Tory: anti-democratic and proud of it.

⇒ I have no idea how sad it must be to be a Blue Jays fan. I mean, it's like they think the team doesn't suck. See, being a Leafs fan, I know they suck.

⇒ Do we now feel a twinge of guilt for reveling in Conrad's fall? I will give him this - there is no one else reporting honestly on the state of the back end of the justice system like he is.

Ahh... long weekend. I needed it. I earned it. Really did. Didn't I. I didn't? Who says?

Saw Steve Earle last... alive as you and me. It was great. Three hours of a wide range of styles. He was far hairier than in this video, my favorite of his songs. Here's the studio version.

There aren't enough good songs about Mainers. Chamberlain. Finest kind.