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I’ve gotten rid of all of the spam messages that are linked. Now, comments are moderated — they won’t appear immediately until one of us approves them from the Edit menu. What a pain!

Thanks for the regards, FC. Yep – it’s been two years at the same job. As the saying goes, time flies when… (take it or leave it).

Yankees v. Bosox – yep, I’d blame it on the pitching. Not pretty tv watching (well, not if you’re a Yankees fan/non-Bosox fan).

St. Louis has just beaten Houston; World Series will be St. Louis v. Boston. Very interesting to watch.

Oh, and FC – have you noticed this spammer(s) on the blog? He/they have been posting odd comments to my past posts – and it has been clogging my bulk e-mail (well, I don’t care for the clogging part, but the comments were weird). I can delete them when I get a chance… (this weekend, maybe).

TGIF tomorrow.

Ballgame over…Series over…Pennant’s over…. you know the rest. Pretty poor performance on the part of the Yankees. P– is probably not in a good mood…. I only heard it on the radio, but it sounded like it was the pitching that was at fault.

Listening to PBS’s Broadway series. It sounds something like Ken Burns’ Civil War miniseries documentary. While generally good, there are some serious gaps: what happened to the Three-Penny Opera (Mac the Knife)? They tag Show Boat as the first modern Broadway musical, although I think that Gilbert and Sullivan counts. Coincidentally, The Three-Penny Opera was based on another British musical, The Beggar’s Opera, which was performed on Nassau Street around the corner from J&R Music World in 1750. For more info, see Musicals 101.

For everyone trying to get an education at the Electoral College in this election cycle, check out Electoral Vote 2004. I don’t know how this guy can consolidate 41 polls a day.

Shoutout to ssw — two years at the same job! Congrats!.

Yankees v. Bosox – the saga continues. A historic Game 7 of the American League playoffs is on tomorrow.

Oh, and that stepchild National League playoffs, Houston v. St. Louis, is still on by the way – Game 6 tomorrow.

In the middle of all these sports, FOX has been promoting all its crappy yet-to-premiere new reality shows. And, I mean craptacular. I wouldn’t watch this stuff and the commercials are only making me want to avoid them – “My Big Fat Boss…” and then there’s “The Rebel Billionaire” to compete for Virgin’s CEO Richard Branson’s job (kind of watchable, but still silly – like I’m really supposed to believe that doing Branson-type stunts will really land someone his job of running the airlines and music and all that).

FOX’s promotion of the series “House, M.D.” is actually intruiging. Of course, I say that because I’m a big fan of the star, the British actor, Hugh Laurie, who’s playing House, a doctor who solves the causes of weird medical problems as if he were a cop. (a cooler looking version of NBC’s “Medical Investigation” – which hasn’t been nearly as cool as I was hoping it’d be). Laurie, though, is playing an American, so it’s jarring hearing his accent. But, he looks cool and I like that FOX is actually premiering a non-reality series.

Oh, and “The O.C.,” “The Simpsons,” and “Arrested Development,” are also being nicely promoted in the middle of the Major League Baseball playoffs. Hopefully FOX will get the ratings to show for this effort.

NY1 is doing an interesting comparison: “A Tale of Two Subways” – see how Tokyo’s system matches up with NYC’s.

Apparently, the attorney representing the woman suing Bill O’Reilly for sexual harassment is someone who was admitted to the NYS bar without going to law school. Slate.com’s “Explainer” nicely explains how the admissions process worked for this attorney (although, I think most of us lawyers who went through the NYS admissions process probably knew about this explanation already).

Slate.com’s Chris Suellentrop posts that he heard Presidential candidate John Kerry speaking French – but the recording was hard to hear (or else Kerry’s French is a little on the garbled side). An intruiging listen anyway for me (yep, studying French for years is good for something). (oh, and Slate readers ended up translating for Suellentrop; Kerry apparently told Haitian-Americans that he plans to help Haiti).

Bring on the Yankees v. Bosox. I’m so not eager for a Houston v. Bosox World Series (for a number of reasons, but I’ll let the readership figure out the implications)…

What do you do when you lose confidence in the system? What if you don’t know how the system can be changed? Do you reject the system or do you continue to participate in changing the system? What happens in the interim? We’re not up to that point in the election, but I am up to that point in yesterday’s competition.

Some stuff…

The whole flu vaccine shortage is quite a debacle; I like how this NY Times article demonstrates how the debacle crosses into areas of science, politics, human psychology (for instance, it’s amazing how news of the shortage turned into population panic, with the lines of people getting all angsty over not getting their shot; versus reasonable doctors on tv telling people, “You know, if everyone washed their hands, we’d actually have an easier time preventing flu…”), and law. Yep. Just what we need… in the middle of an insane presidential election season (see, complete crossover into everything in life as we know it).

NYC has its first Asian fire chief, as Sophia Kwok – a Brooklynite via Hong Kong – was promoted to deputy chief of EMS operations last week. Cool.

NY Times’ Hilary De Vries interviews Korean-American actress Sandra Oh – very interesting stuff on what it means to be Asian, female, and a character actor in Hollywood.

Yankees v. Bosox. Crazy stuff last night – the game started looking like a football game, with that score (Bosox lost, 17-6); impossible for Bosox to come back from a 3 game deficit – or… well, things remain to be seen, of course. ‘Nuff said there.

I don’t know what it is about having to wake up real early and being totally unable to go to sleep at night. I’m going to have to get to Chinatown by 8:45 am to be picked up to go to Newark to judge a moot court competition. I’m catching up on old tv shows that I haven’t seen this week: Survivor (cool earthquake), Saturday Night Live (funny Town Hall debate parody), Tucker Carlson (spends a lot of time trying to convince you not to vote, idiot) , Enterprise (the other Tucker’s in Brooklyn).

Dallas BBQ opens up one block away, really bad. $6 for a fresh juicy rotisserie chicken is good eats. They are doing gangbuster business, taking far better advantage of the space there.

Ah, short work week means we’re that much closer to the homestretch called the weekend.

Presidential debate #3 – on domestic issues. Umm. Hmm. Talking about the Iraq war (again) is talking about a domestic issue (?) – well, I guess so, in this day and age. Wasn’t too wild about some of Bob Schieffer’s questions, but figured that it was just another draw between the candidates.

Seriously, the debates have been like the ultimate reality show (well, without the physical stunts anyway).

Check out this week’s Doonesbury – (i.e., look for comic strips for the week of October 11) – cartoonist Garry Trudeau, via the Mark Slackmeyer character, is directing readers to websites of editorials or other articles written by disenchanted Republicans/conservatives who disapprove of the current Bush administration (or, are too frightened of Kerry to overcome whatever obvious qualms they may have about the administration).

Not exactly the funniest Doonesbury this week (Wednesday (10/13/04)’s was funny though – Mark advises a college kid to borrow a laptop to read a Salon.com article on the conservative disenchantment of Bush/fear of Kerry; this is because said kid’s laptop is in the shop for repairs; Mark returns to check on said kid – Mark says, “Well?”; said kid says: “Oh…um, I’m still checking my e-mail.”)

But reading the articles Trudeau’s been referring have been very interesting (one citation to a John Eisenhower editorial – son of Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a Republican who says he will go independent this election year). Trudeau’s Moral: Getting different perspectives doesn’t hurt anyone; you might learn something (well, he’s not a favorite of the Bushies anyway).