Monthly Archives: November 2007

Captain Ward

Eber Brock Ward was Michigan’s most famous and most innovative Rich Man for much of the 19th century; his best comp is certainly Henry Ford, who flourished about 75 years later. I don’t think anyone’s written a full-blown biography of Ward, but there are pieces of him all over my library.

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Posted in History Scrapbook, Mitten State | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Dabbler Migration

That recovery could have been automated, but I chose to review the individual postings. While there’s some pain in this recovery method, it gave me the opportunity to reread everything, rework a few entries, and check the links on the recovered postings. While I don’t regret the effort, I’m pleased to have the little sub-project complete. Now I can make time for more obviously-interesting activities.

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Posted in Dabbler Notebook | Leave a comment

The Wall

My office phone rang. Since it was an external call, and I didn’t recognize the number, odds were it was either a vendor or a wrong number. Nope; Lauren Morgan introduced herself as an editor with Boston Publishing, and she was working with Vietnam Veterans of America on a magazine issue. They’d found a couple of my pictures on Flickr, and wanted to use them to illustrate an article. I asked which photos they were planning to use, which she described, and I said sure. We talked about some details for a few minutes, and the conversation ended.

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Posted in Picture Show, Veteran Testimony | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Hidden Game of Baseball, by Pete Palmer and John Thorn: a short review

All the same, the one sabermetric book everyone should read. Important stuff in here.

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Posted in Baseball CrankSpace, Bookworm Alley | Tagged | Leave a comment

Get Over It

Macalester’s Class of ’82 Reunion theme was "Get Over It." This theme implied an unasked question: Was (is) the Macalester experience worth the price? The question came up by implication in those conversations with imperfectly-remembered classmates, by reference in a presentation exploring our responses to a reunion survey, and quite explicitly twice at the Class Dinner: Our hostess (Mary Morse Marti, I think) wandered around the topic for several minutes before explicitly raising the question as something she still found difficult to answer, and Macalester’s President Brian Rosenberg told us he considers all the early-eighties classes to be problems because their members have largely detached themselves from the community. These concerns have causes.

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Posted in Dear Old Macalester | Leave a comment

Cortesio

Last summer was Ria’s fifth Southern League season, which is a really long single-league stint for a minor league ump. Since she didn’t receive a mid-season promotion, her release from the Umpire Development Program (UDP) was pretty much inevitable. She got the word, from Mike Fitzpatrick, a week or so ago.

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Posted in Baseball CrankSpace | Tagged , | 5 Comments