Went to the ballpark and, while minor-league baseball is supposed to be about chilling out, it suddenly got intense. Plus I took pictures of the fireworks.
Too Darn Hot · It’s been well north of 30°C for the last three days and Vancouver just isn’t built to take it, nobody has air conditioning, plants and people and the civic fabric are starting to wilt, visibly. Lauren’s away on business which is a drag except it means that I can use her basement office which stays a good 10° cooler than the outside, so I’m holding out pretty well.
Another thing that doesn’t hold up well in a hot environment: Apple PowerBooks; at these temperatures this thing is no longer a laptop, at least for the half of the population that has testicles they’d rather not parboil.
The Canadians · The baseball team, I mean, the park is ten blocks from the house, and the baseball on offer is, how do I put it, extremely sincere. Still fun to watch, but they feel they have to offer some sort of entertainment between each and every half-inning. The high point, as in many ballparks, is the middle of the seventh when our crowd at Nat Bailey Stadium does a rendition of Take Me Out to the Ball-Game that I’ll put up against anywhere this side of Wrigley Field. The low points are many; let’s just say minor-league and leave at that.
Will You? · Except for tonight; one of the between-innings events was a Let’s Make a Deal? quiz show, and a couple had to choose the T-shirt or what was in Box 1 or Box 2. I think there was a little orchestration going on, when they picked one of the big boxes, there was a little box in it, and the guy grabbed it and got down on his knees and took the ring out and asked her to marry him. The girl went to pieces and the crowd went wild. Journalistic integrity requires me to report the beery voices from the cheap seats gleefully hollering “Say NO!” but she didn’t and he carried her off the field.
It was tawdry and cheap and really quite wonderful. Then...
Fireworks ·
My
Dad took a lot of great
fireworks picures with his SLR, his technique was to use the B
setting and brace against the nearest tree.
I got a couple of OK ones that way (yes the
*ist D has a
B setting) but times have changed, a few of them
turned into amorphous blobs of fire, and if I’d had the courage to pick some
F-stops and shutter speeds I might have done better.
Anyhow, here’s what I got.
· · ·
