Sports 'n Books

I Bowled pretty well night last night, about 15 pins higher than my average. Unfortunatley, it seems the better I do, the worse the team does. The remainder of the season will see us fighting NOT to finish in the bottom of the basement.

So it's official, Suzyn Waldman is the new Yankee radio announcer. I wasn't a big fan of Charley Steiner as a Yankee annoucer - he was long-winded and far too dramatic. This was odd, because I loved him on ESPN, particularly the commercials they threw him into, like "Bobby the new Pool Boy for Melrose Place" or "Y2K Preparation" when he tied his tie around his head. But Waldman is out and out awful. Her voice is not pleasant to listen to and she often gets players names wrong, and she's been working with the Yankee organization for a few years now. She must have incriminating pictures of the Boss.

I know Michael Kay has really moved up in his career as the Yankees TV play by play announcer, and he has been putting together solid sports talk on his great ESPN Radio show, a wonderful alternative to Mush Mouth and Fatman, but there was some great chemistry between Kay and John Sterling. At least Tim McCarver is no longer announcing the Yankee games, except for the occasional weekly game on Fox.

My local Barnes and Noble is shit, I swear. The majority of the time I go in there looking for a specific book, I walk out empty handed, despite having a couple of "back ups" to get. They often don't carry what I'm looking for. I wanted to pick up Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire. They had the follow-up, The Killing of Worlds, but not the first. I know shelf life of books is shrinking with the increase of e-commerce, as well as a bunch of other factors, but it is mindblowingly stupid not to have both books in the duology on the shelf. I was going to get E.E. Knight's Tale of the Thunderbolt, after really enjoying his first two books. There were plenty in stock of that, which is good, Knight is a solid writer who will hopefully see his readership grow. And I asked if they had pal Gary's re-release of the first three books in his Gemquest saga, now published by Windstorm Creative. I was hoping to pick up the most recent issue of both Locus and Black Gate, and of course they weren't in stock. So, out of the 5 items I was hoping to find, only one was in the store. You'd think I would have learned by now if I want a good selection I should head down to the B&N in Princeton, where I have purchased both Locus and Black Gate in the past. The B&N in Princeton also stocks almost twice as much Fantasy and Science Fiction, with some of the Gollancz and Orbit imports, a respectable selection from the smaller presses (Meisha Merlin and Wildside) and a greater selection of Graphic Novels.

Enough ranting, I'm playing poker tonight and having a nice steak dinner tomorrow night, and finishing Michael Stackpole's A Secret Atlas, which I'm enjoying a bit more than I expected, so the weekend should be enjoyable.