1980s

The unheralded bargain in O gauge trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , ,

Toy trains are a funny thing. Vintage Lionel trains are almost a status symbol, and their value has almost taken a mythical quality. Marx, on the other hand, was the working class brand in the 1950s, the company that had something for you no matter how much you had available to spend.

For the most part, today’s prices reflect that. Lionels are expensive and Marxes are cheap.

Sort of.

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Congratulations to Wikipedia for two Webby nominations

Dave Farquhar General ,

Wikipedia has been nominated for two Webby awards this year.

It’s up against some heavy hitters (currently losing to Google and LiveJournal in its two categories), but just a nomination is an acomplishment, let alone a second-place finish, which looks like a probability.

Wikipedia, in case you don’t know, is an effort to create a free and complete encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute to it, which is the best and worst thing about it. As time goes on, that becomes more of a good thing than a bad thing. There are topics in Wikipedia that get ample coverage that an encyclopedia written by academics would never touch, either because the subject is too taboo, or because it’s too obscure.

Wikipedia is growing at an explosive rate. Its article count hit 200,000 earlier this year and has already hit 250,000. (I’m surprised this didn’t get mention on Slashdot, but earlier milestones have.) I recommend you check it out. As time goes on, you’ll stumble across it more and more when you search the Web for information.

At least one person who read about Wikipedia initially on this site has gone on to become an editor over there. To which I say, congratulations.

I don’t contribute to Wikipedia at nearly the rate I once did. To be a major contributor, at least at one point, was to invite conflict–and conflict was something I neither had time nor energy for. I had better things to do than battle with someone with a too-big ego. The person I had the most conflicts with has since left the project, and I resigned myself to more obscure topics: First, 1980s computing, and later, model railroading. These days, I guess I appear to be strictly an O gauge specialist. But that’s OK. There’s a lot of information out there that people want and can’t find.

So that’s what I encourage you to do. You don’t have to become an every-day contributor, or even a regular one. Check out what Wikipedia has to say about your hometown and add one detail that might be missing. Do the same for an organization you belong to or admire, or maybe a company that you happen to know a lot about. If your favorite hobby isn’t anywhere to be found, write up an introduction. Frequently when a new article appears, someone else notices it and contributes something. And soon, what once was nothing becomes a pretty good encyclopedia entry.

Wikipedia is definitely something I recommend to anyone who wants to write professionally. Write a couple of entries and watch the changes people make to them. Some will be good, and some will be terrible. Learning to tell the difference is the skill that separates a competent writer from a good or even great one.

Salary cap? Baseball needs something

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , ,

Funny how now that the New York Yankees have added the most expensive sports contract in history, Alex Rodriguez, to their already outrageously priced roster, suddenly the freespending Boston Red Sox, owner of the second-most expensive sports contract in history and the second-highest payroll in baseball, are calling for a salary cap.

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When will we learn to ignore Pete Rose?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , , ,

I’d really rather not acknowledge that Pete Rose is in the news again. I love baseball, and Pete Rose did a lot to hurt it, and talking about him doesn’t do much to help it.
I’d much rather talk about how the Royals just signed Juan Gonzalez and he’s a huge upgrade over anything the Royals have ever had in the lineup to protect Mike Sweeney. With Beltran, Sween and Gonzo in the lineup, this looks like it’s going to be a good year.

For that matter, I’d rather talk about Tug McGraw, one of the great characters of the game and probably the first of the great colorful relief pitchers, who died this week of brain cancer, much too young at 59.

But Rose’s half-hearted confession will appear tomorrow, so nobody’s going to be talking about any of that. It doesn’t change anything. Some people would argue that Rose’s never betting against the Cincinnati Reds somehow excuses his gambling, and his betting on his own team, while the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. It does not.

Contrary to what one might think, a good manager does not set out to win every game. You can’t. You have to pick your battles. You might rest your star players when you’re playing a team like the Detroit Tigers because chances are you could beat that team with your 92-year-old grandparents in the lineup. Or you might play your star players against Detroit, in order to ensure victory, and rest your stars when playing a strong team you’re not likely to beat, such as the New York Yankees or Seattle Mariners.

The reason is pretty simple. The season is 162 games long, and not everybody is Cal Ripken Jr. Play everybody every day, and your team will break down. Witness the Oakland Athletics of the early 1980s. Fiery manager Billy Martin came in, and in 1981, it looked like he’d succeeded in turning that young team into another dynasty. He had young, energetic players, and he played them hard. In fact, he played them too hard. Within a year, all of his talented young pitchers had sore arms and while most of them stayed in the majors for a few more years, none of them ever lived up to their initial promise. For that matter, outside of Rickey Henderson, none of the 1981 Athletics’ everyday players had particularly and distinguished careers either.

It’s in the best interests of a Pete Rose who’s not betting on baseball to manage his team wisely by resting his star players when they look tired, pulling his starting pitcher after he’s thrown about 110 pitches, and using opportune times to give his inexperienced young players some playing time. Betting on your own team changes the equation. Suddenly meaningless games become must-win games. You leave your 20-game winner in the game longer because winning that bet becomes more important to you than the risk of hurting his arm. You take other unnecessary risks.

Rose tries to justify his actions by saying he never bet from inside the clubhouse. Well whoop-dee-do. I’m sure he never beat his wife or cheated on her in church either. That doesn’t make those action OK either. When asked why Rose bet on baseball, he said it was because he thought he wouldn’t get caught. There’s a long list of illegal things that I could do and not get caught, but that doesn’t make any of them right either.

It’s like a little kid, caught in the act of bullying, forced to tell the other kid he’s sorry. So he lets off the words, insincerely, and does the minimum, and spends the rest of his time trying to justify his wrongdoing.

Now Rose says he’s confessed and he wants reinstatement, and induction into the Hall of Fame.

Some people argue that Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame because he hit the ball between the opposing fielders 4,256 times. Fine. Let’s look at what constitutes a Hall of Famer.

Hall of Fame rules state that induction is dependent upon “the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

One at a time: Record. Rose has more hits than anybody else, partially by virtue of having more at-bats. But his statistics, while not as great as his fans remember, are better than some people who are in the Hall of Fame.

Ability. His playing ability is probably adequate. But Rose was a one-dimensional player. He wasn’t a particularly good fielder, he hit for very little power, and he was at best an average baserunner. Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, and Ryne Sandberg, three players on this year’s ballot who are unlikely to make it in, all had far more ability than Rose. Pete Rose was Wade Boggs with a character disorder.

Integrity. Besides betting on baseball, Rose served prison time for cheating on his taxes. He beat his wife and cheated on her. Pete Rose isn’t the kind of guy you want hanging around your daughter, if you catch my drift, nor is he the kind of guy you want your son to model his life after. Pete Rose ain’t no Roberto Clemente.

There are lots of unsavory characters in the Hall of Fame, yes. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and even Joe DiMaggio all have skeletons in their closets. But last I checked, none of them ever stooped as low as Rose, and they also had Rose beat in the other categories.

Sportsmanship. In the 12th inning of the 1970 All Star Game, Pete Rose plowed over American League catcher Ray Fosse, dislocating his shoulder and destroying his career. It was a game that didn’t even count. Fosse, who had drawn comparisons to Johnny Bench, was never the same.

Character. See integrity.

Contributions. To Rose’s credit, he moved around a bit on the field to make room for other players. The Reds had a young power-hiting outfielder named George Foster sitting on the bench. Rose was playing the outfield. The Reds’ weakest position was third base. At the request of his manager, Rose learned how to play third base, which opened the door for Foster to get into the lineup, giving additional protection for Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. In 1980, Rose signed with the Philadelphia Phillies, who had a Hall of Famer named Mike Schmidt playing third, so Rose moved across the diamond to first. Philadelphia was a better team with Rose than without.

Late in his career, this changed. An aging Rose became a part-time player in Montreal. When Cincinnati traded for him and made him player-manager, Rose made himself a regular again, at the expense of playing time for younger players like Nick Esasky and Eddie Milner, and Hall of Famer Tony Perez. Esasky, who usually would have played first base, instead played left field, where he wasn’t as good defensively. Milner was a better defensive player, had good speed, and was at least as good at getting on base at that point as Rose. The Reds had a better lineup with Esasky at first base and Milner in left field, possibly in a platoon situation. People were more likely to buy a ticket to see Rose play than Eddie Milner, but the Reds were a better team with Rose on the bench.

Milner was never much more than a fourth outfielder. Esasky fared better, putting together a couple of really good years after the Reds traded him to Boston, before an injury ended his career.

Playing ability tends to get judged higher than all the rest, so I’ll grudgingly admit that if Rose were eligible, he’d probably get elected.

So what’s one to do?

Here’s my Solomon-like solution. Rose has been banned for life. What’s banned for life mean? He’s banned until he dies. So reinstate him after he dies. Then the Veteran’s Committee can evaluate him on his merits.

But there’s no precedent for reinstating a player banned for life.

Fine. Make one.

Shoeless Joe Jackson by his own admission took money to throw the 1919 World Series. He was one of the eight Black Sox who so accused. There’s also some indication that Jackson, unlike some of his teammates, played to win anyway, because he put up good numbers in the series, although his detractors point out that in the games the White Sox lost, Jackson never drove in any runs. Of course, it’s harder to drive in runs when there aren’t people on base.

Jackson may not have known what it was he was agreeing to do. Jackson was uneducated, and, by some accounts, not terribly bright. Even dumber than Pete Rose.

After the series, Shoeless Joe, like six other players who took money from gamblers and like one player who knew what was going on but didn’t participate, was banned from baseball for life. Thus the owner of the third-highest lifetime batting average in history, and the youngest player ever to hit .400, was denied his otherwise certain entry into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Joe Jackson has been dead for 52 years. Baseball still has never seen fit to put him into the Hall of Fame. Baseball has never seen fit to clear the name of Buck Weaver, the teammate who found out about the conspiracy but didn’t report it.

So reinstate Jackson and Weaver. For that matter, reinstate the other six guys as well. Let the Veterans Committee evaluate them for Hall of Fame entry. Then, when Rose dies, they can do the same for him.

Meanwhile, the best thing to do is just ignore the jerk.

Pete Rose, that is.

Time for a core dump

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , ,

I’ve been keeping a low profile lately. That’s for a lot of reasons. I’ve been doing mostly routine sysadmin work lately, which is mind-numbingly boring to write about, and possibly just a little bit less mind-numbingly boring to read about. While a numb mind might not necessarily be a bad thing, there are other reasons not to write about it.
During my college career, I felt like I had less of a private life than most of my classmates because of my weekly newspaper column. I wrote some pretty intensely personal stuff in there, and frankly, it seemed like a lot of the people I hung out with learned more about me from those columns than they did from hanging out with me. Plus, with my picture being attached, I’d get recognized when I went places. I remember many a Friday night, going to Rally’s for a hamburger and having people roll down their windows at stoplights and talk to me. That was pretty cool. But it also made me self-conscious. College towns have some seedy places, you know, and I worried sometimes about whether I’d be seen in the vicinity of some of those places and what people might think.

Looking back now, I should have wondered what they would be doing in the vicinity of those places and why it was OK for them to be nearby and not me. But that’s the difference between how I think now and how I thought when I was 20.

Plus, I know now a lot fewer people read that newspaper than its circulation and advertising departments wanted anyone to think. So I could have had a lot more fun in college and no one would have known.

I’m kidding, of course. And I’m going off on tangent after tangent here.

In the fall of 1999, I willingly gave up having a private life. The upside to that is that writing about things helps me to understand them a lot better. And sometimes I get stunningly brilliant advice. The downside? Well, not everyone knows how to handle being involved in a relationship with a writer. Things are going to come up in writing that you wish wouldn’t have. I know now that’s something you have to talk about, fairly early. Writing about past girlfriends didn’t in and of itself cost me those relationships but I can think of one case where it certainly didn’t help anything. The advice I got might have been able to save that relationship; now it’s going to improve some as-yet-to-be-determined relationship.

There’s another downside too. When you meet a girl and then she punches your name into a search engine, if you’re a guy like me who has four years’ worth of introspective revelations out on the Web, it kind of puts you at a disadvantage in the relationship. She knows a whole lot more about you than you do about her. It kind of throws off the getting-to-know-you process. I’d really rather not say how many times that’s happened in the past year. Maybe those relationships/prospective relationships were doomed anyway. I don’t have any way of knowing. One of them really hurt a lot and I really don’t want to go through it again.

So I’ve been trying to figure out for the past few weeks what to do about all this. Closing up shop isn’t an option. Writing strictly about the newest Linux trick I’ve discovered and nothing else isn’t an option. Writing blather about the same things everyone else is blathering about is a waste of time and worthless. Yes, I’ve been saying since March that much, if not all, of the SCO Unix code duplicated in Linux is probably BSD code that both of them ripped off at different points in time. And now it’s pretty much been proven that I was right. So what? How many hundreds of other people speculated the same thing? How could some of us be more right than others?

I’m going to write what I want, but I’m having a hard time deciding what I want to write. I know I have to learn how to hold something back. Dave Farquhar needs a private life again.

For a while, this may just turn into a log of Wikipedia entries I made that day. Yes, I’m back over there again, toiling in obscurity this time. For a while I was specializing in entries about 1980s home computing. For some reason when I get to thinking about that stuff I remember a lot, and I still have a pile of old books and magazines so I can check my facts. Plus a lot of those old texts are showing up online now. So now the Wikipedia has entries on things like the Coleco Adam and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Hey, I find it interesting to go back and look at why these products were failures, OK? TI should have owned the market. It didn’t. Coleco should have owned the market, and they didn’t. Atari really should have owned the market and they crashed almost as hard as Worldcom. So how did a Canadian typewriter company end up owning the home computer market? And why is it that probably four people reading this know who on earth I’m talking about now, in 2003? Call me weird, but I think that’s interesting.

And baseball, well, Darrell Porter and Dick Howser didn’t have entries. They were good men who died way too young, long before they’d given everything they had to offer to this world. Roger Maris didn’t have an entry. There was more to Roger Maris than his 61 home runs.

The entries are chronicled here, if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing lately while I’ve been ignoring this place.

Heading back to Way Back When for a day

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Someone I know house-sat this weekend for a couple who are slightly older than my parents. Their youngest daughter, from what I could tell, is about my age, and they have two older daughters. All are out of the house.
It was like walking into a time warp in a lot of ways. There’s an old Zenith console TV in the living room. My aunt and uncle had one very similar to it when I was in grade school, and it spent several years in the basement after it lost its job in the family room. First there was an Atari 2600 connected to it, and later a Nintendo Entertainment System. My cousin and I used to spend hours playing Pole Position and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and various baseball games down there.

The living room housed a modern JVC TV, armed with a modern Sony DVD player and RCA VCR. But in the other corner was a stereo. The Radio Shack Special 8-track player was the stereotypical 1970s/early 1980s brushed metal look, as was the graphic equalizer. The tuner was also a Radio Shack special, styled in that mid-1980s wanna-be futuristic style. If you lived through that time period, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if you’re much younger than me, you’re probably shrugging your shoulders. Beneath it was a Panasonic single-disc CD player in that same style, and a Pioneer dual tape deck. A very nice pair of Fisher speakers finished it off. It was definitely a setup that would have turned heads 17 years ago. (I have to wonder if the Fishers might not have been added later.)

It seems like there are only two genres of music capable of being emitted by an 8-track player. Once genre includes Led Zeppelin and Rush. The other includes John Denver, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow and The Carpenters. Their collection was on the latter side, which sent my curiosity scurrying off elsewhere.

But I had to try out that stereo. I kind of like The Carpenters, but I have to be in the mood for them, and I’ve heard enough John Denver and Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow to last me forever. So I checked out the CDs. Their CD collection was an interesting mix, but with a good selection of contemporary Christian (albeit mostly pretty conservative contemporary Christian). I popped in a CD from Big Tent Revival. I don’t remember the title, but the disc was from 1995 and featured the song “Two Sets of Joneses,” which I still hear occasionally on contemporary Christian radio today.

About three measures into the disc, I understood why they hadn’t replaced that setup with something newer. It blew my mind. I heard a stereo that sounded like that once. In 1983, we moved to Farmington, Mo., which was at the time a small town of probably around 6,000. We lived on one side of the street. Our neighbor across the street owned the other side of the street. Any of you who’ve lived in small midwestern towns know what I mean when I say he owned the town.

Well, in addition to owning the biggest restaurant and catering business and tool rental business in town and a gas station, he also owned a mind-blowing stereo system. Hearing this one took me back.

I almost said they don’t make them like that anymore. Actually they do still make stereo equipment like that, and it costs every bit as much today as it cost in 1985.

And Big Tent Revival sounded good. If I’m ever out and see that disc, it’s mine.

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, I spied a bookshelf. It was stocked with books of Peanuts cartoons, but also tons and tons of books I remember reading in grade school. Books by the likes of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume, and books by other people that I remember reading 15 or even 20 years ago. The only things I didn’t remember seeing were S.E. Hinton and Paul Zindel, but as I recall, those books hit me so hard at such a period in my life that I didn’t leave those books at home. Or maybe Hinton and Zindel were a guy thing. I’m not sure. But seeing some of the names that made me want to be a writer, and being reminded of some of the others, well, it really took me back.

Next to that bookshelf was a lamp. Normally there’s nothing special about a lamp, but this lamp was made from a phone. This reminded me of my dad, because Dad went through a phase in life where there were exactly two kinds of things in this world: Things you could make a lamp from, and things you couldn’t make a lamp from. Well, this was a standard-issue wall-mount rotary phone from the pre-breakup AT&T Monopoly days. One just like it hung in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen well into the 1980s.

The computer was modern; a Gateway Pentium 4 running Windows Me. It desperately needed optimizing, as my Celeron-400 running Win98 runs circles around it. Note to self: The people who think Optimizing Windows was unnecessary have never seriously used a computer. But I behaved.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about this stuff. I just thought it was so cool.

But I remember long ago I wrote a column in my student newspaper (I’d link to it but it’s not in the Wayback Machine), which was titled simply “Retro-Inactive.” Basically it blasted retro night, calling it something that people use to evoke their past because their present is too miserable to be bearable.

Then I considered the present. Then I thought about the 1980s. We had problems in the 1980s, but they were all overshadowed by one big one–the Soviet Union–that kept most of us from even noticing the others. We had one big problem and by George, we solved it.

So I conceded that given the choice between living in the ’90s or living in the ’80s, well, the ’80s sure were a nice place to visit. Just don’t expect me to live there.

I’m sure people older than me have similar feelings about the ’70s, the ’60s, the ’50s, and every other previous decade.

And I guess I was just due for a visit.

DietLinux — a Linux that boots in under 10 seconds

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

The tinkerer in me just couldn’t stay away. I saw a reference on Linux Weekly News to DietLinux and had to look at it.
DietLinux is an example of a Linux distribution that can’t properly be called GNU/Linux, because the majority of its userspace didn’t come from the GNU project. GNU’s libc–the main API for Unixish systems, and I’ll call Linux a Unix just to hack off SCO–is replaced with an alternative, trimmed-down libc called dietlibc. It’s not feature-complete but it’s tiny. Those of you who programmed casually in the 1980s and 1990s probably remember a day when you could write a fairly sophisticated program in a few kilobytes. Under modern operating systems, a simple program that simply emits “Hello, world!” can take up 32K or more. Using dietlibc instead of GNU’s libc shrinks that program back down to a couple of kilobytes.

The majority of DietLinux’s userspace comes from Felix von Leitner, the author of dietlibc. Von Leitner reimplemented init–the program that bootstraps a Unix system once the kernel is loaded–and getty, which is the program that handles text-based logins. These unglamorous programs can eat up a fair chunk of memory, and since Unix systems typically go for long periods of time without being rebooted, it’s a bit of a waste unless you need certain features provided by the more traditional init and getty programs. He also wrote replacements for several standard utilities.

Obviously, not every program in the world designed for glibc will compile and run under dietlibc, so DietLinux won’t ever be a complete general-purpose distribution. But for network infrastructure glue-type servers providing services like firewalling, DNS and DHCP (all of which already function), it would be perfect.

I don’t know what the future plans for DietLinux are. The asmutils provide an impressive number of userspace and server utilities, written in assembly language with very low overhead, and would appear to be a nice complement to DietLinux’s infrastructure. Their use would limit DietLinux to x86, however. And the text editor e3 is tiny, full-featured, and emulates keybindings for vi, emacs, WordStar, and Pico, so it’s friendly to pretty much any command-line jockey regardless of heritage and takes little space.

It’s also not a newbie distribution. Installation requires a fair bit of skill and pretty much requires an existing Linux system to bootstrap it.

But it’s definitely something I want to keep an eye on. I’m highly tempted to put it on one of my 486s. I just wish I had more time to mess around with it.

Life has returned to Royals Stadium

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , ,

The last time I went to a Royals game at Royals Kauffman Stadium (it’ll always be Royals Stadium to lifelong fans like me), it was 1996. Mike Sweeney was riding the bench. Johnny Damon was lifted for a pinch-hitter when the opposing team brought in a left-handed pitcher. And the place was as quiet as a library.
On Saturday night, I finally returned. The Royals were in first place, powered by a young and hungry starting pitching staff, the bats of a bunch of people who never got a chance elsewhere like Desi Relaford and Raul Ibañez (superstars Mike Sweeney and Carlos Beltran have been hurt much of the year). But the weather looked threatening and they’d just lost 4 straight, two to the traitor Johnny Damon’s Boston Red Sox and a doubleheader to the Baltimore Orioles. You can explain away the losses to the Red Sox. You’re happy to take one of three from them. Baltimore’s a different story. Maybe the Royals were fading.

Yet, 25,930 still turned up for the game. A year ago, the attendance would have been half that. There have always been much better things to do in Kansas City on a Saturday night than to go watch the Royals lose.

I knew things were different when earlier that day, I’d gone to the grocery store and I saw people wearing Royals hats and t-shirts. Those had become nearly as common in St. Louis as in Kansas City. Royals hats had become something worn by the fashion-conscious because their royal blue color looked good with the rest of their outfit. Most of them probably didn’t even know that hat had anything to do with a pro sports franchise. Then, on the way to the game, I saw ticket scalpers stationed along the exit ramp off I-70 near the stadium. I haven’t seen people scalp Royals tickets in, well, forever.

The stadium itself is electric. I remember the Royals’ division championship season of 1984. George Brett was still in his prime, and Bud Black was electrifying hitters and the rotation was rounded out with rookies like Bret Saberhagen, Danny Jackson, and Mark Gubicza, none of whom is a hall of famer, but all of whom showed signs of brilliant careers to come. It wasn’t a great team, but it was a fun team to watch.

There was more fire in that stadium on Saturday than I remember seeing in 1984. Well, at the start of the game, that is. The word “Believe” floated across the scoreboard, fading out to highlights of the still-young season like Ken Harvey muscling out home runs and Michael Tucker and Desi Relaford making diving catches in the outfield. A left-handed pitcher wearing number 32 took the mound. Twenty years ago, the Royals had a left-handed pitcher who wore number 32. His name was Larry Gura. He was good for 15-18 wins and made the All-Star team a couple of times.

This guy’s name was Chris George. If he can pitch like Larry Gura, I thought, this is gonna be a good year.

George retired the first batter on two pitches. The crowd was electric.

By the end of the inning, it was like a library again.

Chris George had a no-hitter through four innings. A walk here and there and a balk here and there had gotten him into trouble, but an umpire can call a balk if there’s a guy on first base and he doesn’t like the way you scratched yourself. Just ask my cousin. He was the perennial league leader in balks throughout the 1980s, pitching for Cleveland and Chicago. I think Chris George must have known that, because he pitched out of those situations. George impressed me. He’s definitely a finesse pitcher–he didn’t register higher than 88 MPH once that night–but he mixed up his stuff enough to keep Baltimore guessing and he racked up plenty of strikeouts.

But then Baltimore scraped together a couple of runs. The Royals came back in the bottom of the inning, with a couple of speed demons on first and second and the smooth-hitting Joe Randa at the plate. Randa stroked a double to center field. One run scored. Desi Relaford rounded third and was halfway home when he noticed his third base coach screaming for him to hold. He tripped, tried to make his way back, and was tagged out to end the inning.

That got the crowd’s attention.

The next inning, Baltimore’s slugging young right fielder, Jay Gibbons, hit a two-run bomb to right field. Well, the way the wind was blowing that night, I probably could have hit something that would clear the right field. fence. But it counts. Baltimore was up 4-1. But there’s some life in the Royals’ bleachers. Before Gibbons had rounded the bases, his homerun ball was back on the field.

By then, the temperature had dropped more than 30 degrees since the start of the game. The fans were shivering. Many had left. I stayed, only hoping there was as much life left in the Royals’ lineup as there was in that fan who’d thrown the ball back on the field.

The Royals rallied for three runs in the seventh off a Baltimore left-hander named Ryan and the immortal Kerry “Freak Boy” Ligtenberg, acquired from Atlanta in the offseason. Ligtenberg puts up good numbers, but every time I’ve seen him pitch in person, he’s given up a busload of runs. He didn’t disappoint. By the time Freak Boy managed to put out the fire, the game was tied, 4-4.

D.J. Carrasco, one of the best of the Royals’ young flamethrowing relievers, held Baltimore hitless in the top of the 8th.

With flamethrowing Mike MacDougal warming up in the bullpen, Raul Ibañez led off the bottom of the 8th with a double, which brought up Royals bruiser Ken Harvey. Harvey overswung at a couple of pitches, then cranked an up-and-in fastball 378 feet against the wind over the left field fence, giving the Royals a two-run lead. “It’s Mike MacDougal time,” I muttered. Fans jumped up and started chanting, “Har-vey! Har-vey!”

But this was to become the neverending inning. Between Baltimore meetings on the mound and Kansas City hits, the bottom of the 8th drug on for what seemed like 30 minutes. I swear that by the time the inning ended, MacDougal looked like Tom Hanks in Castaway. And the Royals had a 4-run lead. There’s no reason to bring in your closer to protect a four-run lead.

Except so much time had passed since the last time Mike MacDougal pitched, the rookie probably had two kids in college. And, well, when you’re Kansas City, you have to give the fans something exciting to watch. Royals fans used to pay to see George Brett, no matter how the rest of the team was playing. And Mike MacDougal is the kind of guy fans want to see.

So in the top of the 9th inning, the bullpen door opened, and MacDougal ran onto the field. The scoreboard went black. “Mike” appeared on the screen in white letters as “Rock You Like a Hurricane” blared on the stadium’s speakers. The word faded to show MacDougal striking out a couple of batters. “MacDougal” appeard in white letters on a black screen, followed by still more strikeouts. An animated baseball trailed by flames lit up the scoreboard. A few more highlights from MacDougal’s spectacular 10 prior saves showed up.

By now the crowd was pumped. And so was the team.

MacDougal’s a bit wild, but that’s a big part of his mystique. The guy can throw 103 miles per hour. He generally tones it down into the mid-90s because his pitches have more movement at lower speeds. When someone can throw 100 miles per hour, he tends to be effective. But he’s more effective when nobody–not the batter, not the catcher, not even the pitcher himself–knows where the ball’s going to end up. It’s harder to hit when you’re afraid for your life.

MacDougal gave up two hits, but his control was on. He threw 21 pitches, and 13 of them were actually strikes. Despite the two hits, he managed two outs without giving up any runs. The final Baltimore batter fouled off a pitch that registered 46 miles per hour on the gun.

“Bull,” I muttered. “When MacDougal throws a paper wad in the trash, it clocks higher than 46 miles per hour.”

He struck him out on the last pitch.

And the stadium sounded like anything but a library.

It’s time for a more holistic approach to depression

Dave Farquhar Health , , , , , , ,

Standard disclaimer: I’m not a doctor or a psychologist. I’m a systems administrator by trade and a journalist by training. I write this as a survivor of depression, not as an expert on its treatment. Combined with the experiences of others, I think it’s worth listening to. But it’s no substitute for seeing a specialist.
Earlier this week, after I mentioned my experiences with depression in passing, my mom e-mailed me and asked me a few questions. Thought-provoking questions. Then Dan pointed me to another person’s experience with depression.

It’s been my experience that some people just seem to have a natural tendency towards depression. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Some people are moodier than others, and that moodiness can be exceedingly difficult to be around sometimes, but there’s also a gigantic upside to it. Think of the most creative people you know. I’ll bet most of them are also pretty moody. That’s one factor.

While a student at Mizzou in late 1994 or early 1995, I had a conversation with a girl about depression. I knew she’d struggled with it, and I was curious. We had a long talk one day about it. Initially, in the back of my mind, I thought I’d interview a couple of other people who’d battled it, then interview an expert or three, and write a story about it. It was during that first talk that I learned that depression was sometimes caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. (Interestingly, I don’t remember my lone college psychology class–that’s science of behavior to Dr. Dave McDonald and his students–talking much about depression. Or maybe we did and I just forgot it.)

Over the years I met a lot of people who were put on Prozac or Paxil or any number of other drugs intended to treat a chemical imbalance in the brain. In most cases they didn’t get the dosage right initially. In those cases the adjustment was difficult. In one case, a good friend of mine had been on it in the past and it helped, then he started to feel himself relapse. He called me one day and told me he was going back on treatment. A few months later, I started to hear stories. Stories that were very out of character. My friend, a gentle giant type if there ever was one, was supposedly very detached from reality and sometimes even dangerously violent. His dosage was wrong and it was destroying him. One night he called me, distraught. He was on the brink of losing everything, and it didn’t seem like anyone understood.

I was mad that the stories of his behavior had become public knowledge. I was also a little irritated with him that when his family and friends suggested there was a problem, that he didn’t go back to see his doctor until it reached crisis stage. But I was livid about how the people around him handled the situation. When there’s a problem with your Paxil dosage, it’s a matter between you and your doctor, and you have to be patient about it and so do the people around you. There is no way to measure brain chemistry and figure out exactly the amount of Paxil you need to get the dosage right. (This was news to him and to his family, and when one of his friends, who happens to hold a PhD in psychology, got involved but didn’t mention this, I was more than livid when I found out about it. If I’d known how to call him on the carpet about it, I would have.)

I haven’t been very good about getting to my point here. There’s a lot of guesswork when you get drugs involved. They don’t necessarily kick in right away. Sometimes they kick in too hard. Sometimes they have undesirable side effects. I mentioned the possible psychotic side effects, but they can also increase your sex drive to an uncontrollable level, and they can lead to very excessive weight gain. Those television commercials showing people playing outside on a sunny spring day while extoling the virtues of those drugs don’t mention anything about their dark side. Since brain chemistry isn’t measurable, you’re playing a guesswork game. Hopefully it’s an educated game of guesswork, but unless you manage to get a referral to a psychiatrist, it may not be.

The late, controversial Dr. Atkins took a different approach to treating chemical imbalances. Where do your brain chemicals come from? Your body makes them. What does your body make them from? The nutrients you take in. What happens when your body doesn’t take in the nutrients it needs to make the necessary brain chemicals? Chemical imbalances that lead to depression. What happens when you change your diet and/or start taking supplements that provide those chemicals?

Atkins said, “no more depression,” then moved on to his next topic.

I think there’s something to that. When carpal tunnel syndrome threatened to destroy both of my careers, one of my readers pointed me to Atkins’ vitamin book. I started taking, among other things, Flax Seed Oil or Fish Oil (buy whichever is on sale; chemically, they offer the same benefit) and Vitamin B6 and B complex. I was surprised at the effect they had on my mood. But that combination promotes a generally healthy nervous system. Vitamin B1, Atkins said, is especially effective in treating depression. The B vitamins work best in the presence of each other, so a trip to the local discount store for a bottle of Vitamin B1 and B complex could make a world of difference.

Battling depression via nutrition is imprecise, but the nice thing about that is that you’re not messing directly with brain chemistry. You’re providing your body with the raw materials to make what it needs. Your body knows how to dispose of excess B1. What’s it supposed to do with excess Paxil?

The best thing you can do for your mental health may very well be to visit a nutritionist. Get a copy of
Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution, make yourself a shopping list, get a nutritionist’s opinion, then buy. And avoid processed, commercial food if at all possible. I know my moods are much more consistent when I buy fresh fruits and vegetables and actually cook than when I eat tons of fast food or buy heat-up instant meals from the grocery store. Highly processed foods lose most of their nutritional value. They hurt your mood, they hurt your waistline, they hurt your energy level, they rot your teeth, and who knows what else. And when you’re not happy about how you look and you don’t have a lot of energy, and your teeth are falling apart, none of that helps your mood. Nice vicious cycle, eh?

You hear a lot more now about depression than you did in the 1970s and early 1980s. But there were a fraction of the number of fast-food restaurants and grocery stores were much smaller because they were catering to people who cook, whereas today grocery stores seem to cater to people who heat stuff up because everybody’s too busy to cook. I’m thoroughly convinced that these factors are related.

And cooking isn’t as hard as people make it out to be. I can stir up some mean dishes in about half an hour. Trust me, if I can learn how to cook, anyone can. I’m impatient and clumsy and accident-prone. But I’ve still learned how to cook well enough to impress a girl. Not counting my mother and sister, but I’ve impressed them too.

Remember that most doctors have no special training in nutrition. A lot of people are distressed to hear that and think it’s a conspiracy. It’s not. Medicine and nutrition are related, but they’re too complex for most people to be good at both. Asking your regular doctor to be a nutritionist is like asking him or her to be proficient at surgery. He or she is certainly capable of understanding it, but there are so many things a doctor would like to understand, and there are only 24 hours in a day to learn it all.

I believe that counselling and self-help are overrated, but both helped me to a limited degree. I found
I Ain’t Much Baby, But I’m All I’ve Got by self-help pioneer Jess Lair to be helpful. It’s sadly out of print but widely available used. The biggest gem out of Lair’s book is a question: Do you have five friends? Lair said that if you have more than that, your friendships aren’t very deep. If you have fewer than that, you’re putting too much burden on them. With an inner circle of five or so, the burden seems to be about right.

But when that’s not enough, counselling helps. The problem with counselling is that sometimes people rely too much on it, or solely on it. Often people have issues they need help resolving. Sometimes that means just listening and offering a few suggestions and sometimes it means re-enacting traumatic experiences in order to finish up some unfinished business. It’s work. But it can be helpful, if you’re willing to do the work. But depression is a complex, multifaceted problem, so a one-pronged attack won’t be very effective. Remember the basic difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist: Psychologists can’t prescribe medicine, and psychiatrists don’t do a whole lot of counseling. Both are aware of the work of the other, and an honest practitioner of either profession ought to know the limits and know when you need the other. But you may have to ask when it’s time to see the other. Human beings tend to get overconfident in the abilities of the tools they have.

Finally, there’s a spiritual aspect. Virtually everything I’ve ever read says you should believe in something. If you’ve ever had any exposure to Christianity, read the books of Luke and John (they’re not terribly long–read a chapter a day and you’ll be through both of them in two months) in a modern, readable translation. You can read them for free at bible.crosswalk.com. For readability, I recommend the New Living Translation. It plays really fast and loose with the translation sometimes, but the point isn’t to make you a Bible scholar–it’s to present the words of Jesus in understandable fashion. Or you can read an out-of-print modern blending of the four Gospels by Charles Templeton titled simply Jesus, online, for free.

Last night I told someone it’s healthier to be an atheist than it is to be in a cult, but it’s healthier to believe in something than nothing. I’m a Christian and make no bones about it. If you’re a not a Christian and you believe something else and you’re struggling with depression, then my advice to you if you’re not really practicing is to get serious. And if you find it’s not helping you, try Christianity.

No single thing will conquer depression for you. But the combination of diet and nutrition, counseling, and spirituality can be potent. Pills are a brute-force approach, and after watching my friend’s bad experience, frankly I believe they ought to be the thing you go to when the other things don’t work, not the thing you go to before trying the others. I know they work because I’ve seen them work, but if anything, the other things can make them more effective, and if you can get by without pumping man-made chemicals into your system, that’s a very good thing, and I don’t think anyone will disagree with that.

My what-I-did-tonight piece

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , ,

I hate to do a boring this-is-what-I-did-tonight post, but I figure the occasional one of those is better than silence from my direction.
I’m sick again. I think this is some kind of record. This pattern of five-day breaks between illnesses really better not last much longer.

So I went out to stock up on sick supplies. You know the drill: chicken soup, zinc lozenges, vitamins. I went in to get my vitamins, then found myself blocked in, so I continued down the aisle and found the first vacant aisle to cut through. Of course it was the make-up section. I felt especially manly cutting through the make-up section, especially considering my next stop was… the sewing section. I needed a needle and thread, for two reasons. I’ve got two shirts with buttons popped off, and I learned a cool way to bind books, but you need a drill (which I have) and a needle and thread (which I didn’t) in order to do it.

So I picked up a couple different colors of thread, then wandered aimlessly for a while until I stumbled across the needles. I found a 25-pack for 64 cents. Good deal.

I really, really hope I looked as lost as I felt.

So when I got home I bound a short book. The idea is this: You drill holes a quarter inch from the top and the bottom, then drill two more holes spaced two inches apart. Cut a length of thread about four times as long as the book is high. You can get the sewing technique from this PDF file. Traditionally, you use Japanese stab binding for short books of drawings, poetry, or journals. But I found it works just fine for everyday stuff. I recently printed a few public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and this provides me with an easy and extremely cheap way to bind them.

I was trying unsuccessfully to sew on a button when my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. She asked what I was doing. I told her I was making a fool of myself trying to remember how to sew on a button. She described a technique to me, and when I got off the phone with her, I gave it another try. I think I ended up using a combination of her technique and my mom’s, but it worked. The button’s not going anywhere.

Something she said gave me my masculinity back. She asked how I was at threading needles. I said I had some trouble doing it. She said part of the reason sewing is traditionally a women’s thing is because women have smaller hands, which are more adept to the fine movements that sewing requires. My hands aren’t huge, but they’re bigger than most women’s. She said threading a needle requires good vision, concentration, and a steady hand. I’ve got good vision and concentration. But every time I tried to do something that required a steady hand, my dad just shook his head and said, “You’ll never be a surgeon.” And they’ve only gotten worse with age.

And before all this, I spent some time writing up a piece talking about all the lovely things Microsoft did to DR DOS in the late 1980s. This is in response to some mudslinging that happened over at my recent anti-Microsoft piece. Normally I’d just ignore a troll who doesn’t even have enough guts to put his name on his taunts–all I know about him is his IP address is 12.209.152.69, which tells me he’s using a cable modem attached to AT&T’s network, he lives in or around Salt Lake City, Utah, and at this moment he’s not online–but I think this story needs to be told anyway. Depth is good. Sources are good. And there’s a wealth of information in the legal filings from Caldera. And those filings prove that my memory of these events–I remember reading about the dirty tricks in the early 1990s on local St. Louis BBSs–was pretty accurate.

I’m not surprised. I have a knack for remembering this stuff, and I had occasion to meet an awful lot of really knowledgeable people back then.

If I can still remember that Commodore’s single-sided 170K 5.25″ drive was the 1541, its double-sided 340K drive was the 1571, and its 800K 3.5″ drive was the 1581 and I remember the command to make the 1571 emulate the 1541, and why you would want to emulate a 1541, I can probably just as easily remember what you had to do to get Windows 3.1 running under DR DOS and what the reasons were for jumping through those hoops. That history is more recent, and at this stage in my life, I’m a lot more likely to have occasion to use it.

Not that I’m trying to brag. I can remember the names of the DR DOS system files, and I can remember George Brett’s batting average in 1983, but at the end of a five-minute conversation with someone I just met, I’ll probably struggle to remember a name. Or if you send me to the store, you’d better give me a list, because I’m good at forgetting that kind of stuff.

I suspect the DR DOS piece is half done. I might just get it posted this week.