nboucher

Can't make it this weekend, but I was there on Washington's Birthday. It was kind of a zoo, but they had clearly stocked up since the last time I visited, before Christmas. The lure selection seemed kind of spotty to me. I was particularly disappointed in the narrow range of jigs compared to what's available on their Web site, but I did manage to use a gift card I got for Christmas to pick up a few odds and ends. Have fun, guys.

I'll take her canoeing, but not fishing. She'd be too much a distraction.

Don't let it, man. The game is better than any of this garbage. It will survive if we keep eye on what matters: the action in between the baselines. Baseball survived the black sox scandal and it will survive this. If anything finally kills it, it will be greed of owners & players.

Although I can't remember the last time I turned down any cup of coffee that was offered to me, I've come closest when offered any kind of "flavored" coffee. Strong, dark coffee already has plenty of flavor, thank you. My current favorite to brew at home is Love Buzz, produced by Equal Exchange. I used to be friendly with one of the founders of this company. Their mission is to work direcly with small producers of coffee beans to give the small farmer a market. Here's their description of Love Buzz: Organic Love Buzz Post-Roast Blend: Full City and French Roast Created by a genius in Philadelphia, this secret recipe delivers a sweet, sultry and smooth coffee with an unexpected bite and lasting finish. A smorgasbord of roasts in a combination of Latin American beans so fine it will make your heart pound. Feel the love! (Available in 12oz & 5lb) That's from their Web site: http://www.equalexchange.com/coffee-blends#OLB I'm not connected to the company, but I think they're doing a good thing.

6 lb, 11 oz on March 31 last year--my first day out that year! Talk about peaking too early. . . Caught her on a 3/8 oz black/blue Mann's Stone jig with a matching Zoom super chunk trailer. I was so surprised, I forgot to take a photo. . .

Ronnie, I'm old enough to know that six years is just the blink of an eye. I'm sure your loss is still felt. Often my wife is only too happy to get me out of the house to go fishing. Inside, I'm often restless and unfocused, and it drives her crazy. In fact, she will often say, "Why don't you go fishing? It'll make you feel better." This is my second marriage, and I'm trying to do it right this time. I want my wife to be happy and she wants me to be happy, even if the things that make us happy can sometimes be different things. Sometimes those things are simple: fishing for a few hours, in my case, coming downstairs and seeing the kitchen has been cleaned up (with asking), in her case.

Looks like you're on your own this year, Mike. Cigarlover and I went down last year from Mass., though, and it was a blast. I highly recommend you make it if you can. First-rate people to fish and hang with.

Pass & Kessler: you're a lucky man, Dom. When I saw Pass play in 1972 or 1973, I thought I knew how to play the guitar a bit. Seeing him disabused me of that notion real fast. His solo albums are a wonder: Virtuoso, recorded in 1973, has got to be one of the two or three best jazz guitar recordings ever. Among the amazing things about Joe Pass was that he was a heroin addict for so many years; how he produced that kind of work while struggling as a junkie is beyond me--maybe you can understand it better than I can. The other amazing thing about him was that he used zero tricks. No fuzz box, no distorting sound, maybe and rarely a little reverb, maybe. Just pure sound. Back to Oscar: my nephew, who's a jazz pianist in New York, went to a tribute concert for him a couple of months ago. He said Oscar's wife was there, but he never showed. She said his back was bothering him, but was probably just covering up for how bad he was. By the way, I'm planning on being in New York on March 6 for my nephew's gig at the Kitano hotel. It's a quartet, and includes Billy Pierce, who played tenor sax with Blakey's Jazz Messengers and also played with Max Roach and Tony Williams. On drums will be Billy Drummond, who was part of Horace Silver's sextet for years and also played with Sonny Rollins. If you're in New York then, maybe we can hook up there. My treat.

Muddy, driving up to my sister's house today, I spent the hour listening to his classic album with Joe Pass and Nils Pedersen, The Trio. It was one of the first jazz albums I bought 30 years ago, and Peterson's technique blew me away. I had a chance to see Joe Pass at around that same time in a small room. He walked in with his guitar in one hand and a small amp in the other, then sat down on a chair and played alone for the next 90 minutes or so without saying more than a few words. I never saw anyone get so much out of a hollow-bodied electric guitar before. He would take a sappy song by Bread and improvise it into a masterpiece. Now that Oscar's gone, the entire trio from that classic The Trio album is gone. Sonny Rollins is one of the last of the old greats left. I *** your having seen Oscar.

The best result the Mitchell report can have is to move the discussion of illegal drugs in baseball further along. For example, as Jason Stark hints at on ESPN.com, it would be useful start figuring out whether all offenses are alike, or whether someone using HGH to recover from an injury is the same as a healthy player taking steroids to get stronger. And what about greenies, which are still used widely today? Should they get the same slam as steroids? Given what players can legally take to recover from injury, I, for one, am willing to cut a player some slack on the HGH issue if the use can be shown to have been short-term and during the recovery phase. (That's a difference between Pettite and Giambi or Bonds, for example.) And, yes, people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and the Mitchell report is largely based on one individual, as many of you have pointed out. It wouldn't fly in court, I think.

Give Camino, another mozilla offering, a spin. I like it even better than Firefox.

I haven't read the report, and I'm not making excuses for the players, but this is much bigger than the players. GMs, owners, and MLB officials all knew to varying degrees that this was going on, and at best they were in denial about it all and at worst they were complicit or looked the other way. What to do if you were a player during the steroid era? There was simply no downside to taking steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs then. Heck, even the fans deserve some blame: the fascination with lots of long home runs kept putting butts in seats, even if (okay, now I'm sounding like a baseball snob) that's just one dimension of the game and in some ways the least interesting one. So we call out Bonds and Clemens. Big deal. It's not like everyone else was against the stuff and these guys defied everyone by ingesting or injecting this junk. Selig may not be a hypocrite, but he's still in denial if he thinks this is primarily about the players.

The Steelers had half of a good defense. Their tricky blitzes were a good approach to force short, quick passes, but the second half of this defense should have been doing what the Ravens did to shut down Moss: hit him hard at the line. The Steelers were so focused on bringing pressure on Brady that they let the receivers get going deep. When it wasn't Moss, it was Gaffney. It's true: the Patriots chances to run the table never looked better. I'm sure we won't hear anything about guaranteed wins from the remaining three teams . . .

Russ and Glenn certainly deserve high praise for their CAST involvement. I was lucky enough to attend Russ's first CAST event on a raw drizzly day, and, yes, it's great when the kids take to fishing and keep it up. But although fishing's the centerpiece of the event, I'll bet even the kids who never pick up a rod again have memories that can help comfort them in some small way during hard timeswhich many of them will continue to face. And I'll always remember talking to the kids' parents and family. As a dad myself, I really felt for them. Raising kids is exhausting for any parent, but you can only imagine how draining and challenging life is for these men and women. There are no breaks when your child is in a wheel chair and can't do much for himself or herself. Not that I heard a single complaint from any of the relatives I talked to at the CAST event. It was gratifying to watch the parents stand by and actually take a break while anglers took their kids out and showed them a great time. They were often as gleeful as the kids and as appreciative as they could be. Anyway, thanks Russ and Glenn, and if you've never been to a CAST event, please do what you can to get to one, or even better, to make one happen. These guys have already paved the way.

Anybody can make a mistake once, but these I do over and over again: (1) thread the line through the guides, reach for the terminal tackle/lure and have the line slither right back down through guides (2) spend what seems like forever getting a simple Palomar knot tied, only to have it easily slip apart when I tighten it (3) drive to the pond or lake, lift the kayak off the top of the vehicle, unload rods, tackle, pfd, and drift sock, only to discover I never packed the paddle Who says we learn from our mistakes?

By the way, I did make it over to BPS on Sunday. Some of the more popular colors of plastics and some of the jigs were already out of stock, so either they're having trouble keeping the racks stocked or they ran out of some things. I plan to go over again after the holidays, when things settle down. I'm sure they're still getting the bugs worked out; the sales people, though courteous enough, weren't very knowledgeable. I had my 15-yr-old daughter with me, and she was mostly interested in checking out the party boats. : Russ, we'll connect one of these days. Too bad we didn't get on the water together this year, but there's always next. . .

Sat, the 24th? I can do that. I suggest meeting earlier, though. Big shopping weekend, so it might be less busy earlier. I also got a circular in the mail on Sat., and it looks like there's going to be a lot of sales every day that weekend. The circular may be online, but I haven't checked.

I've bought stuff off their website. VERY fast delivery.

Don't rush it. Now's the time of year I get to those piles of books that have been getting taller all summer and fallPete Hamill's at the top, Dom!

Thanks, RW. You're being gracious, being a Rockies fan and all.

You know it, brother. I could go on at length, but will spare you. By 2004, I'd been going to games at Fenway for 40 years, through the lean early 1960s, then the post-1967 Fenway, when the place started to fill up. I was there for Yaz's last game and Clemens's first 20-strikeout game. I was there in 2004 when the Yankees beat the Sox, 198, to put them ahead 3 games to zip in the ALCS. We know what happened then. 2004 was the big kahuna, and my daughter and I stood along the victory parade route in the rain cheering and cheering. Hard to describe the emotion then, the intense relief and joy. I'll always love that 2004 teamyes, even Pedro, Muddy. This time the feeling is completely different. The same joy, but the lurking suspicion that the Sox would somehow choke just never came up in my mind. I didn't realize that until it was all over, that that inevitability just wasn't there, weighing me down. I like this new feeling much better.

Pats. The key to the game will be Welker. Watch him.

Don't get me wrong. Money makes a huge difference. Matsuzaka, J.D. Drew, Ramirez, Schilling, Beckett, and the rest of the veterans on the Red Sox are raking in big bucks. However, here's what the difference-makers in the World Series are making this year: Dustin Pedroia $380,000 Kevin Youkilis $424,500 Jon Lester $384,000 Jonathan Papelbon $425,500 Then there's Jacoby Ellsbury, who did not appear in enough games during the regular season to officially be classified even as a rookie. He's making less than all of them. Ironic, isn't it??

Me, too! 8-) Kent, I was going to offer you a wager of a couple of bags of senkos on the series last week, but never did, and it would seem cruel to make the offer now. :

There's no doubt that the Sox are up there with the Yankees as big spenders. With Drew making $14.4 million/season, Ramirez making $17 million, and Schilling making $13 million, those salaries pile up, and in the case of Ramirez and Schilling, at least, the money's been worth it. Drew and Matsuzaka show that big salaries are no guarantee of first-rate production, though, and the last couple of postseasons have proven once again that money can't buy you a championship, though it may propel you a long way into getting into the postseason. The really interesting thing about Red Sox salaries, I think, is that Pedroia is making $380,000 this season, while Youkilis is making $424,500, which means two players who are having a major postseason impact are costing the team less than $1 million combined. (Also, at $6.6 million, Beckett is making about half of Schilling's salary.) I've been a Red Sox fan since I could talk and have been a Fenway season ticket holder for the past 21 years, but I doubt this team will be a dynasty. The playoff system in baseball pretty much insures against dynasties. I think the best measure of quality is which teams consistently get into the playoffs, but once they begin it is often a crap shoot. Sorry, Cardinals fans, but the best team did not win the World Series last year, and wild card teams have won what, 3 out of the last 4 WS? (Or is 2 of the last 3.) The first round in particular is risky; if a great team is off for three gamesand who isn't at some time during the seasonit's over. John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox who made his fortune using statistics in to detect small differences in currencies, said the other day that each team in the playoffs at the outset has a 12.5 percent chance of winning the World Series. He was being cute, but the point is that the hot team wins. I'm sure the Rockies are a much better team than we've seen over the last two nights, but we may never know it this postseason. I have tickets to games 6 & 7 at Fenway, so I'm secretly hoping the Rockies take 2 of the next three games.