There's an old Peanuts comic strip that was one of my favorites, featuring Snoopy lying around and saying, "There's no use doing a lot of barking if you don't have anything to say." So I haven't been doing too much barking lately. But this morning, it's time to get back in the swing of things.
I've spent a lot of my free time recently playing Spore, the new computer game that came out a couple of weeks ago. The blurb on the back of the box says, "Your Personal Universe in a Box." That's really not too much of an exaggeration. You start off as a single-celled organism, and have the choice of being a herbivore or a carnivore to start off. The decisions you make early in the game have consequences as the game advances. The game is a lot of fun and like most good games, will eat up enormous amounts of time if you allow it to.
I watched the beginning of last night's game between the Orioles and the Yankees on ESPN. It was the last game ever at Yankee Stadium, with the team preparing to move across the street to its new ballpark next year. As a baseball fan, I appreciated the history of the team and the Stadium when I went there in June. You don't have to be a Yankees fan to do that. However, I'm not sorry that they won't be making the playoffs this year for the first time since 1993. Go Tampa Bay Rays!
I saw in the newspaper that Sarah Palin drew a crowd estimated at 60,000 to a speech in The Villages, north of Orlando. That's a large crowd for a vice-presidential candidate. She's going to be in Naples for a couple of fund-raising appearances in early October, but they're both for the deep-pockets crowd. If you don't have $1,000 to plunk down for the party, you're out of luck. It's not a surprise, really; Naples is the home of the extremely wealthy, and the Republicans tend to view it is a piggy bank.
I read this article in the New York Times yesterday about how Disney is planning on a reviving The Muppet Show characters in a major way. The most stunning thing for me was that many of the kids today had no idea who Kermit the Frog or Miss Piggy were! I guess that means I'm getting old. But as the article notes, they haven't been on the tube in more than a decade.
