Tommy Lasorda, a Blind Man, and Hulu

Day 219 on the road.

It's sunny outside and I'm having my morning coffee and reading the New York Times wondering if Hillary has a chance to overtake Obama. I watched Obama's speech on race relations and admired his attempt to save himself from the quagmire created by his former pastor. I'm sure Hillary was licking her significantly large chops over the whole thing.

But as a conservative, and a reluctant supporter of John McCain, I'm just enjoying the theater of it all. I must give Obama the credit for being an outstanding speaker. But I must not let the elegance of his oratory pontification overshadow the ugliness of his liberal and radical beliefs.

Enough politics.
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I’m not sure what I’ll do today. I’m thinking about just working on my web site and doing some reading, writing, and hanging out without having to drive anywhere too far…give my car and gas tank a day off. I’ll be here through next week, so there’s no need to be in any hurry to see other things in the area. I’d like to check out WestWorld in Scottsdale. And the McDowell Sonoran Preserve is another area I’d like to see. I’d also like to drive east to Apache Junction.

Tomorrow’s Rangers game is at 6 p.m., so I’ll have the day to kill. I will probably wash clothes at the Laundromat in Scottsdale I’ve used before, then slowly head to Surprise Stadium. I've only got three games left before Spring Training comes to an end next week.
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Tommy Lasorda and the Dodgers Moving Spring Training Here Next Year

The Los Angeles Dodgers are establishing a new “Dodgerstown” in Phoenix this week, making plans to permanently move their Spring Training camp to Glendale next year. The team has spent the past 60 years in Vero Beach, Florida. Sighting family concerns, the Dodgers are moving to Arizona. They feel the team’s families and friends will have an easier commute to Arizona than Florida. According to Charles Steinberg, the Dodgers chief marketing officer, “It was so difficult for families to make the trip from Los Angeles (to Florida).” A flight from L.A. is much cheaper to Phoenix, and the drive isn’t that bad, either.

So Glendale, a suburb to the northwest of downtown Phoenix, has another reason to celebrate. They are building a new baseball complex to provide a home for the Dodgers, and it will be completed by next year. They hosted the Super Bowl this year and have already begun to submit an application to get the Super Bowl again the next year it’s available. The city has agreed to spend $500,000 to assure the Super Bowl returns. Glendale is becoming a sports venue powerhouse. Just a few years ago, it was a small town with very little to brag about.

With the popular Dodgers coming to the valley, the Phoenix/Tucson area has more professional baseball training camps than any other place in the country.
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I'm attending an arts festival this weekend: the Fountain Hills Fine Art and Wine Affaire, Avenue of the Fountains, in Fountain Hills. Fountain Hills is located northeast of Scottsdale on the eastern slope of the McDowell Mountains.
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Inspiring Story of the Week: Blind Man Climbs Camelback Mountain

Jeremy Schmidt hiked up Echo Canyon leading to the top of Camelback Mountain last week, and the 27-year old area resident is blind. In less than a month, he went from having 20/20 vision to not being able to spot an eye chart in a doctor’s office. A genetic disease damaged his optic nerves, cutting off the signal from his eyes to his brain.

After two months of trying to deal with the loss of his sight, Jeremy decided he couldn’t just sit around and let his life slip away. Having been an outdoorsman his whole life, he went back to doing those things he enjoyed: horseback riding, hiking, mountain climbing. Last week, his 1.2 mile hike up Echo Canyon along with his father was one step in returning to a normal life.

“I didn’t think my whole life was over,” he said. “Not by far. It just meant it was going be one heck of a challenge.”
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Hulu.com is now up, and it looks great. The site arrives courtesy of NBC and Fox, and it will offer free episodes of shows like Arrested Development and movies like The Jerk. It’s a sign of things to come: television and movies will one day be watched primarily online…or will they? What’s going to happen to the cable companies once the Internet becomes the main portal for delivering entertainment? Will your cable modem one day be obsolete like the 8-track tape and cassette?

Current Location: Scottsdale

I'm still on the road, of course. Traveling around the Southwest has been great. I'm seeing places I've never seen, meeting people along the way who are having an impact on my life in ways I would have not considered possible.

Traveling will do this to you. You begin to feel your life taking on new dimensions, new shapes, a new form. One's experiences define life, serve as a way to discover who you are. I suppose that's why I love being on the road. It's an American romantic and mythical pursuit, reflected in our literature and culture. Most recently I saw this fundamental characteristic of our American ethos in the film by Sean Penn, Into the Wild. There is something uniquely American about being on the road and traveling west, seeking one's personal "manifest destiny".

I've been writing a lot, just not here. I hope that will change. My blog at 2Vegas.blgospot.com has been taking up most of time. I'm also writing each day in a personal journal, and working on a rough outline for a novel based in the Southwest.

As I travel and discover more about myself, I'm also discovering my life as a writer, artist, photographer, and poker player. I love playing cards, so I write about my experiences in various poker rooms at www.7seat.com. I'm passionate about art and photography and will be developing a website for those interests in the coming days. My travel blog will continue to grow as I stay on the road, too. Each day I find myself learning to draw with pen and ink, visiting art festivals and museums, writing about various things, playing cards in a local casino, taking photos, traveling about, meeting people and just experiencing life.

I've had to admit to myself that these are the things that define my life.

NYT Online, Writer's Block, Randomness

The New York Times will no longer charge readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, says The New York Post. As a Times reader, I'm glad to know it. I've never paid for the service and always thought the Times would come around and offer free content online.

Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement. Apparently an internal debate has been waging for months over ending the service. The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, sources say.

The Times took the controversial approach in 2005 by charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman. Other online publications were abandoning subscriptions and relying on advertising. I'm not sure I like the intrusive advertising any better, but at least I can shut banner ads off or weed my way through the junk to find my news for the day.

Some of the paper's columnists have been complaining that the service limited their Web readership. Leave it to a bunch of columnists to state the obvious.

In July, The Post reported that insiders were lobbying to shut down the service. After two years, however, the move to do away with TimesSelect may have more to do with growth than grumbling inside the paper. The number of Web-only subscribers who pay $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year fell to just over 221,000 in June, down from more than 224,000 in April.

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Forcing the brain to be creative on demand never seems to work. It's like the brain is free to think of things when left alone. Writer's block is often the result of coercion: we hold a gun to our brain's head until something profound comes forth.

I often find it difficult to generate creative ideas or thoughts when I'm writing. What will I write about today? When you sit down to write for a few hours, your brain often will say, "Not so fast...I'm busy right now...get back to me later."

But a writer must write.

In a recent blog post, Bob Farley admits disappointment that ideas to be written come to him at times when he's not writing. Farley says, "I'm one of those who goes through the day and in places where I have no possibility of writing down or remembering what I'm thinking, I think about things that need written. Wonderful imaginary conversations between characters take place while I'm walking through the aisles at the grocery, waiting for the dogs to poop, or editing business stories for work...if those ideas and thoughts come to me almost regularly at those times, why can I not train them to come when I want them to?"

All writers face the problem. It's nothing new. The ideas, thoughts, imaginations, characters, voices, conversations, wonderful moments of life that need to be reflected upon are often forgotten with our next breath. We get a glimpse of something profound or thought-provoking and say to ourselves, "That's a great idea for a story." But then the thought vanishes into the netherworld.

So the writer has a problem. How do we schedule daily writing sessions when the ideas and thoughts we write about occur randomly, without warning or context, in the imagination of our day? Our brains are not on any schedule; creative thoughts are independent contractors.

How would a chef create a menu for his restaurant guests if the food arrived randomly, or not at all? How would a used car dealer make a living if he had no cars on the lot?

One thing I can do is take notes. I need to be aware when ideas come along that inspire the writer in me, and find some way to write them down before I lose them.