Last days of the Grouse.

Slugger the Seadog
Originally uploaded by cdhu.

I've just returned from an (apparently unannounced) trip to Maine with Lisa, where, among other things, we saw the Portland Seadogs beat the New Hampshire Fisher Cats (sadly, I was wrong in thinking that they were called the River Cats--all that hilarious symmetry ruined!). I've now seen three levels of the Red Sox organization in the past year--I think I'll try to see the Lowell Spinners this summer, when I'm not busy visiting Providence or stalking Jameson in Killingworth, Connecticut.

Also, I've finished the first book on my summer reading list, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. A certain someone, as usual, has something fun to say about it:

So, by a dialectical sleight-of-hand, Chandler formally mobilized an "entertainment" genre to distract us in a very special sense: not from the real life of private and public worries in general, but very precisely from our own defense mechanisms against that reality. The excitement of the mystery-story plot is, then, a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality quite trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished.