-Yay for people who would pay hundreds of dollars for tickets to something that can be rained out. I admire and aspire to both your optimism and your wealth.

-Yay for the people behind the reporter who see they’re on the news and immediately turn into chimpanzees. Now I know that we are #1.

A few months ago, a local man got pushed just a little too far and shot up his workplace. Just when everyone thought his bloody spree was at an end, a woman who knew him returned to her apartment to find that he had begun by killing someone in her place and leaving the victim there. This was unfortunate for a number of reasons, the most minor of which was that the apartment was fairly close to our house, close enough for two news vans to park in front of our house and make a jolly little camp for a couple of hours with their wires and their cables and their Tragi-Milk-o-Matic 9000. In addition to giving me my first ever chance to utter the hallowed words, “Get off of my lawn!” this also gave me the chance to walk up behind the reporters in the middle of their live broadcasts and ruin their afternoon the way they ruined mine.
Mind you, I did not take this chance. My wife spends a lot of time pulling me by the shoulders. So I salute those people who see their shot and get to take it.

-Every March, I go to Walgreens and clean out their entire supply of Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Eggs. They only sell them once a year, and their shape and size are a huge improvement as chocolate/peanut butter delivery system over the flat, impotent “cup.” When I was a kid, I used to stockpile packages of these things in the freezer downstairs and break them out on special occasions like they were champagne. I have three packs right now. They had to last me, after all, until next Easter.

Now, for Halloween, Reese’s makes Peanut Butter Vaguely Pumpkin-Shaped Things, too.

I say thee yay.

-Yay to all those books you heard about on NPR and the Daily Show six months ago that I’m just getting around to reading now. (You’re next, Rejuveniles! In February or March, you are next.) It’s times like these that I wish I was still in a book club, although I’m almost exclusively a nonfiction guy and our club never really went that way. The fact that nobody else I know has read Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You is driving me bug-nutty right now; I want to call people I know and begin reciting it over the phone when they pick up. The graphs mapping out the cognitive skills needed to watch an episode of 24 vs. an episode of Hill Street Blues almost pay for the book all by themselves. The passage wherein the author imagines what educators would say about books if video games had been invented first is also as hilarious as it is true. Sure, we are surrounded by junk, and in some ways the junk is getting junkier (more profane, maybe, more depraved) but in a lot of ways it is vastly, vastly better. Watch an hour of this season’s mediocre TV, then go watch an episode of Charlie’s Angels or The Dukes of Hazzard, and you tell me.

I love contrarians; yay for contrarians. Yay for Everything Bad is Good for You, and yay for Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones and its arguments in favor of “violent” play for children. Sadly, the people who I desperately wish would read these books are people who roll their eyes and make that choke/spit scoffing noise when you try to explain what they’re about.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves was great. Spook by Mary Roach, sheesh, that gets its own entry one day soon. I may catch up on this reading yet.

-Yay for Tivo, rescuer from political ads. Yay for the end of another election cycle.

-Being up 3 games to 1 in the World Series, no matter how oblivious you normally are, does not suck.