Smoke from a distant fire

The wildfires, which are many miles away, are making the sky look like this, as seen from my apartment complex here in North Hollywood at about 3:30 P.M....



The camera couldn't handle it, so the picture doesn't do justice to the sun, which is a brilliant sunset red about an hour and a half before actual sunset.

I love L.A.

Everything here is either on strike or on fire.

Rounded off

I just had an Amazon.com order (accidentally) come out to exactly $100.00...but then my "trivia nickels" got applied to the total, thus ruining the whole thing.

Well, it didn't ruin the whole thing...I mean, I still went ahead and placed the order.

Well, there's always the WNBA

I just saw an AP sports headline that I thought said "Bryant Awaits Decision on Sex Change." I thought, "Wow, that's a drastic step to take to gain sympathy!"

(Turns out that last word was actually "charge.")

It's designed to break your heart

There are three major league baseball teams I don't like. Two of them are playing each other in the World Series, following defeats of one team I do like, and another team I really do like. I blame Bud Selig.

In my lifetime, at this rate...

• There will not be cities on the moon


• The gasoline internal combustion engine will not become extinct


• The Chicago Cubs will never win the pennant!

Ungrateful

The person who e-mailed me asking where the Yankees-Red Sox game was (see below) didn't e-mail me back to say thanks or anything like that. See if I ever answer those kinds of queries again.

What's the weather like in Boston?

If you try to e-mail me something through the form on my web site, there's a very long, snarky message pointing out that I'm not affiliated with any TV station, cable network, or anything like that. (The main problem is that my pages of TV Guide lineups rank pretty high on various search engines on searches for TV station call letters.)

Despite that message, I occasionally get e-mails through the form like the one I got tonight, which reads as follows:

"Where the heck is the Yankees Red sox game on 10/12/03 ????????????????????????????
Hey you have it listed that the game is on tonite... where is it??????????????????????????"

I actually wrote back saying the game was rained out, which is a lot more generous than I usually am in such situations. (I usually just ignore the e-mails.)

Are they sure they counted my ballot?

Oh, boy! Three straight years of late-night talk show jokes about California!

Go Cubs!

Automated vacation e-mail response from a friend: "I will read your message regarding 'Kerry Wood is quite a good pitcher' when I return."

Ha ha Hamlet

Since one of the definitions of comedy is "tragedy plus time," shouldn't Shakespeare's tragedies be reclassified as comedies?

The new math

The author of this blog is in a just-released TiVo promotional DVD with Michael McKean, who was in "The Big Picture" with Kevin Bacon.