Right about now, many of my friends and colleagues are gathering in a place far from here. They’re in Pomona, where unlike Minnesota it most likely did not snow yesterday and they didn’t have a hard freeze last night. I’m not there, and that’s more melancholy than I expected it to be. I could’ve gone, and in Vegas I heard that “Will you be in Pomona?” question a lot, but it’s an expensive race to get to and at some point you just have to say no to spending that much money when you’re not going there to work. Especially after having done just that when I went to Las Vegas.
It seems like I haven’t been very busy lately, because I’ve had to dip into the “Blog About Nothing” well a few too many times. This installment will be different. I’ve actually been on the go pretty much nonstop since last Thursday, and there’s a lot of good material to cover. “But what’s the challenge in that?” Right? It’s fun to write about great stuff that just happened, but sometimes it’s as much fun to come up with 2,200 words about absolutely nothing. Very Seinfeldian, you might say.
Yes, I’ve watched the first two games of the World Series. No, I really don’t have a rooting interest, but that’s never mattered to me. Many times I have had one of “my teams” in the Series, but just as many times I haven’t and I’ve never willingly skipped a game. I’ve had to miss a few, but I’ve never once said “I’m not watching tonight” because I didn’t care to. I have many friends who are Dodger fans, and many (including my nephew Del III) who are diehard Red Sox fans. I’m a baseball fan. It’s in my blood.
Welcome back, blog faithful, for yet another week of wit and whimsy, or something like that. To get right to the point, this one is going to be about some very vivid memories, all brought back to the frontal lobe this week after Bats, Balls, & Burnouts experienced a totally unexpected spike in sales on Amazon. As in, right back up into the top 100 in the category. We hadn’t seen that lofty status in probably a year. That’s not to say that the book is back to top-seller status, although it does continue to sell through various platforms, but it does mean that on a couple of consecutive days during the last week, a lot of people decided to buy a copy all within the same 24 or 36 hours and those simultaneous sales sent the ranking soaring. And that’s not a bad thing!