Curse…reversed?

No, I’m not talking about that curse. I’m talking about the Curse of the Car.

Just after I finished detailing my sordid history with said car, things began to turn around. I found out later that day that, since this is my first moving violation ever, I get a free pass on the surchargeable points. Which means in the end, all I really did by fighting the ticket was get $100 off the fine.

But there’s more. One tidbit I forgot to mention was that when I first donated the car to charity, I received a receipt informing me I could only claim $500 as the value of the car on my taxes. I followed this up with a few phone calls, but it seemed I was screwed yet again. Fine, whatever, I said–at least the car was gone. But this weekend, I received a second receipt from the charity, this time telling me I could write it off for almost half what I paid for it used.

Plus the Sox won the World Series. Overall, a pretty good weekend.





Carma

From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Back in September 2005, I was hired to work at a company in Westwood, Mass.–a good half-hour from my apartment in Brighton. To get there, I would need a car. I’d always liked my dad’s Nissan Maxima, so when my mom mentioned that the son of a friend of hers was going to sell his for a relatively low price, I jumped at the chance.

And thus the curse began.

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Soxy new logo

In honor of the World Series–and since I already have the red theme going anyway–I decided to edit the BBn logo a bit. Thoughts?


These are the Good Old Days

Two World Series berths in four years–seriously? With at least one victory?

As my dad told me last night, my generation has no idea what it was like for those eighty-six long years. Never mind the Patriots. It’s already a clich?, but what a time to be a New England sports fan.

As Ed wrote in an understandably dispirited post back in the cold, bitter days before the Second Comeback (i.e., four days ago), the Red Sox seem to be the new Yankees for a lot of baseball fans. I don’t know how much of that is genuinely directed toward the Sox and how much is projected dislike of the big bad Patriots, but even on the Internet boards I frequent–which aren’t sports boards–there are people rooting for the Rockies not because they’re Rockies fans, but because they want the Sox to lose. Ouch. This just three years after the Sox won their first World Series in eighty-six years. I mean, the Yankees have won twenty-five more than that in the same period. I can’t help but feel there’s a slight difference there.

But honestly, I don’t really care. I was born and raised in New England, so I get to be a Red Sox fan and a Patriots fan during these wonderful years. (For the record, I don’t begrudge native New Yorkers their Yankees fandom. That’s their birthright. It’s the fans from other states, particularly those that have their own teams, that I don’t get–I’m looking at you, LeBron.)

Decades from now I’ll be telling my kids all about this, when the Patriots of the early 2000s have become the Dolphins of the early seventies.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to to mention the October 18 column by by Boston Globe writer and Red Sox antagonist Dan Shaughnessy (I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to drive up the hits to the article–that will just encourage him). He wrote:

There’s just so much working against your team. It’s hard to be positive. And even though the Sox aren’t done yet, some of us are already at work carving up the blame pie (speaking of pies, a Cleveland sportscaster did his postgame TV show wearing a cream pie on his head late Tuesday).

At least he predicted his own crow consumption at the beginning of the column. Hey Dan, I can’t wait for the next column, in a day or two, in which you explain why the Sox are going to lose the World Series, and whose fault it will be.




Halo 3 review

Poe Ghostal snipes a n00b

Looking at that screenshot, I’m suddenly reminded of the first videogame I remember playing, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivision. Man, videogames have come a long way in a mere quarter-century. But then, I suppose it only took us twice that time to go from flying the first plane to landing on the moon.

Incidentally, that screenshot was taken in-game by yours truly. It shows my digital avatar, Poe Ghostal, sniping some poor mook.

So, Halo 3. Its release received the kind of marketing hype once reserved solely for summer blockbusters (before they became manufactured a-dime-a-dozen products). It has already made hundreds of millions of dollars.

I was one of those people who was really into the whole “Haloverse” as well as the game itself, and I was greatly anticipating the end of the saga. Here are my impressions.

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