Obtuse Observations...
Nothing special to post about, so here's a bunch of stuff:

FROZEN OUT OF BASEBALL: I spent all season watching one of the worst-ever teams in the Annals of Baseball History, The '08 Seattle Mariners. And they may not be much better next year, either. No prospects in the farm system, same old management, and the ever-present hex on any team that bases itself in the Emerald City. The M's tanked this year, the Seahawks are in the process of undergoing another losing season, and the Pro Basketball team moved to Oklahoma, where the corn is as high as an elephant's eye...anyway, now that the Baseball Playoffs are underway, I'm being FROZEN OUT. The playoffs are on TBS, a channel which my expanded basic-cable DOES NOT feature. And if my cable company thinks I'm gonna upgrade so I can watch two weeks of baseball playoffs, they're CRAZY.


One could say that the Seattle Mariners pretty-much "unraveled" this season...

I've been told I can listen to the Baseball Playoffs on ESPN radio. Great. The local small-town station that carries ESPN down here has all the transmitting capacity of a couple of 9-volt batteries; you can't hear it if you're on the wrong side of a rocky ridge after the station lowers its power...which is happening earlier and earlier as the days get shorter. (Radio Waves travel further at night, so some "AM" stations have to 'power down' at night, lest they interfere with another station on the same frequency).
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I GOT SCOOPED BY MY OWN PHOTO: I stay in touch with what's going on where I used to live by reading Huckleberries Online (www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/hbo; better click it while you can 'cos I understand the web address is soon gonna change). For a long time, I read the Spokesman-Review Newspaper, and it, like many other dailies, is Experiencing Hard Times. Sad. I'm familiar with some of its people. Layoffs have happened. Christmas is only 60 days and change away. So I sent the editor of Huckleberries Online a little fotoshop-thing I did, to cheer him up, and he went and POSTED IT. I got scooped by my own photo, 'cos I haven't posted it here yet. Although I am largely 'apolitical', I couldn't resist doing this...


Basically, the SaraCuda is being hunted so someone can put a MUZZLE on it...

Okay, that's fine. I'm glad they used it, although I didn't do a very good job...you can see 'smears' in the above photo where I couldn't match Shades Of Blue uniformly in the picture. Now, here's where the irony lies...I sent That Same Person another cheer-up photo quite some time ago and he never posted THAT photo. All I did was take a quaint summertime picture of two little girls jumping into the water, and modify it just a wee bit...


You gotta watch out for them Rocky Mountain Lake Sharks. They're constantly in a feeding frenzy...
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TURNING THE TABLES: Lately, I've been listening to the soundtrack of the movie "Woodstock", where, in 1969, people got to wallow in the mud for 3 days listening to their favorite bands with 300,000 other people. I love the music, but You Can Keep The Mud. There's enough of THAT in Politics. Anyway, I came into possession of the 4-CD set of Woodstock Performances, which features previously-unreleased material by Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, Johnny Winter and Tim Hardin, as well as More songs by the artists which were featured on the original 1970 Soundtrack album. My favorite Woodstock Moment? Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, thanking the crowd for the applause: "Thanks, we needed that. This is the second time we've ever played in front of people, and we're scared SHITLESS." This, after the group BEGAN its performance with "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", one of the most complicated songs I've ever heard. Believe me, CSN (and Y) EARNED that applause.


The Woodstock soundtrack (one record in a 3-album set) spins away on my turntable...

My favorite Woodstock Musical Rarity is "Sea Of Madness", a song written and sung by Neil Young (The "Y" in "CSN&Y"), and to the best of my knowledge, the Woodstock Soundtrack is the ONLY place one can find that song. He recorded it nowhere else, on the legions of albums he (or the group and he) have made over the years. Brain teaser: What groups were Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in, before CSN&Y? Answer at the bottom of this post...
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WANT TO GET AWAY FROM IT ALL?: You remember those fairly-recent American Airlines commercials which depicted yer Average American having a Really Bad Day, and it wasn't about to get better anytime soon...I think that pretty-much sums up the photo below:


The "Juice"... got SQUEEZED...where's Johnny Cochran when ya need him?
(Photo stolen from the files of Huckleberries Online, where they're all pickin' and grinnin'. Well, not grinnin'...)
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THIS IS KINDA HARD TO SWALLOW: What ISN'T wrong these days? We've just had some sort of big stock-market bail-out instituted by the Bush Administration; the net result being that the day after the bail-out, the market plunged another 300 points. Originally it sank by over 800 points, but it rebounded, if you can call reaching a lesser Negative mark a rebound. That's what it is. A Negative Rebound. Sheesh. I think I've just invented a new political term, one that ranks up there with "Slippery Slope" or whatever else the Pundits like to decorate their pseudo-newscasts with these days. But the Economy, WILL be the major issue in the forthcoming Prezzidential Election(well, along with McBlame's unconscious aloofness and SaraCuda Palin's relative ignorance, plus zillions of things that Joe Biden's Smile Alone Cannot fix...). So you're irritated, all up in arms, you can't relax, you're losing sleep, inflation's eating your paycheck...all right, take a deep breath; I've got just the cure for you. The world-famous CHILL-PILL...


As promised, here's the answer to the question I posed above: David Crosby was a member of The Byrds. Stephen Stills and Neil Young were members of Buffalo Springfield. And, Graham Nash was a member of The Hollies. That's his voice you hear on "On A Carousel" (Not one of The Hollies' best tunes; in fact, it's kinda cloying and annoying...) Ah. Blog over. Time to Chill. Where's that doggoned pill...