Super Mega Baseball

I have been playing a fun game for the last couple of weeks on the Xbox One. It's called Super Mega Baseball. Most reviews you see of the game will call it an arcade style game with surprising depth. That is an apt description. A couple of days ago I hit a single off the opposing pitchers head. I thought I would share it.

2015 Darlington Southern 500

It was that time of the year again this last weekend, the annual trip Jeff and I take to Darlington for the Southern 500. This year we weren't as excited as we have been in the past. Part of it was due to the change of the date of the race. Since 2005 the Southern has been run in the spring. Spring in Darlington, SC is much, much more pleasant than late summer. The humidity and temperature are each lower. I'm not sure of the scheduling negotiations that went on behind the scenes for racing to return to South Carolina in the summer but NASCAR definitely marketed the shit out of it. Marketing centered around returning to tradition with cars featuring "throw back" paint schemes. I thought running the Southern 500 in cool weather was a hell of a tradition to establish and continue.

One tradition NASCAR did bring back this year was green flag passing. There were 24 passes for the lead during green flag racing. I am a big fan of this low down force package NASCAR has used at Kentucky and at Darlington. Less grip means less reliance on down force and that leads to more passing. With this package they are definitely going in the right direction. As far as I am concerned if they ran body styles from 1975 the sport would be better off. Get them cars going sideways and let the best driver win.

Every trip to Darlington I budget for a single souvenir. Usually, I purchase a hat because I like hats and shirts for sale are usually ugly as sin. A week before the race I received an email from the Tervis Tumbler people informing me that they would have a presence at the race. The email said they would be selling tumblers with a design you could only purchase at the race! I had found my souvenir purchase for this year's race. I found their booth and purchased a tumblr. Very class, no?

After the race we ran into a frightening situation. We have sat in the Pearson Grandstand in turn 4 for several years and have never had any trouble exiting the track after race. There is the usual mob but the track has generally had a good system for funneling the crowd out. This year something changed. I don't know what. We seemed to be funneling into a narrower area than before and the crowd got bottlenecked. People started getting frustrated because they didn't know where to go and those behind started putting pressure on those in the front. It didn't take long before people started pushing chain link fences over or climbing over those fences. People were getting angry and panicky and for about ten minutes it got scary. It doesn't take much for a situation like that to get out of control and it nearly did. I hope whoever is in charge of crowd control looks at the area near the Pearson Grandstand where fans are attempting to walk toward Harry Byrd Highway. Whatever was changed needs to be examined.

Kyle Larson in a throwback paint scheme going through turn 3

Forza 6 Demo

Yesterday I downloaded the demo for Forza 6. For those of you unfamiliar the Forza series is a racing simulator for consoles. I have mixed feelings about it. The game has historically simulated driving physics very well. Unlike most other racing games the cars in this game feel like they have mass. You cannot just throw cars into turns and expect to come out on the other side. You have to pick a proper line and drive it. If you go into a turn wrong at racing speed you are either going to wreck or have to slow way down. It is challenging. As a racing game it has yet to really hook me. The other cars on the track tend to drive lines and not really race you. The game tends to default to expecting you go finish first in each race in order to advance. I'd like to see that tweaked.

So, last night I tried the four-race demo for Forza 6. Unsurprisingly, it looks amazing with great physics. I found the game giving me a lot of options in order to tweak the game play. I found a good setting for the physics with a matching setting for opponent aggressiveness that forced me to really scramble just to finish third in a race. I also noticed the game borrowing from games like Titanfall by offering packs of cards you can purchase with points earned during gameplay that give you advantages or challenges that last for one race. Could be a nice touch.

The one special race offered in the demo allows you to turn seven laps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I really felt a sense of speed and driving laps around Indy at racing speed was not easy. I am really leaning toward giving this game a chance. Below is a video of my last few laps at Indianapolis.

Fenway Park

One of the best ideas I have seen realized at a baseball park is putting seats on top of the Green Monster at Fenway Park. I doubt if there is a better view at an American sports venue except for the seats in turn four Jeff and I get at Darlington.

Look at that view!

Photo credit DGA Productions

I have wondered how exactly those seats were installed because there is no room to make the park any bigger seeing as how the reason the wall is so close to the infield due to the lack of space out there. Today I did a Google Street View of Landsdowne St and saw how the seats were installed. The seats were installed over the street. Of course, what else could they do?

Fire Whip

Last weekend at the Comet Grill there was an event called Sunshine Festival. There was a group called Firestorm and they played with fire. This guy in the picture below set a whip on fire and twirled it around. He even snapped it a couple of times. The first time he cracked the whip it was still full of flammable fluid at when he swung the whip it whooooshed and cracked. The initial crack of a whip is a little shocking, especially when it's on fire. Several people audibly gasped. I caught him right after he swung it for the crack. Too bad it wasn't darker out.

A Tree in Alden, MI

Back in the 80s my dad showed a tree on Spencer Creek in Alden, MI that he had carved his initials in back in the 50s. I crawled up the tree and did the same that day. We went back last month to see if we could find that tree. We think we did. The carvings in the tree were almost unreadable but we think the initials we found on the branch were ours. I couldn't climb up the branch because it was dead and starting to rot.



Dad in front of the tree. I noticed there were several other carvings in the tree.


The carving we think my dad created back in the 50s.


A view further down the creek

Big Ass Maple Tree

In the back corner of my Dad's land there is a giant maple tree. It is at least three feet in diameter. The reason it survives is that it is on the property line of the farmland my parents purchased in the mid 60s. Farmers would use the trees to as living fence posts so some pretty old trees can survive on land that was 99% cleared for farm use. The first picture is a stitched panorama of three photos. The second picture is a shot of Dad next to the tree for scale. In the background of the second photo you can see the trees are lined up in a row, those were also part of the old fence line. The area to the left of that picture was a field fifty years ago.

Civil War Memorial

Driving by the old courthouse last week I noticed a statue that looked like it could be a Civil War Memorial. I took an opportunity while in town running errands on Monday to check it out. The statue I saw is a Civil War Memorial. The monument next to the statue has a history of it. It reads:

"...statute was purchased by public donations from the Chicago Bronze Company and dedicated at a public ceremony on Decoration Day, May 30, 1890. Over 300 Civil War Veterans were joined by 4,000 citizens at the unveiling at the original courhouse located on Cass Street. Traverse City May Perry Hannah delivered the keynote address.

The statue represent the 171 volunteers from the Grand Traverse Region who marched off to War and the 32 who lost their lives in that conflict..." The statue was refurbished in 2005 and rededicated on May 30th, "exactly 115 years to the hour."

Lily

I stopped by my sister's dog kennel the other day and met, among a dozen other dogs, Lily. Lily is a sixteen year old greyhound and she is the sweetest dog in the world. Very affectionate. She even ran for about ten yards twice. She had to recover each time but she had to run at least a couple times while outside. A little shaky on her feet but you can feel how happy she was to be outside.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Today while running errands for my Mom as she recovers from knee surgery I stopped at the former location of the Traverse Area District Library on Sixth Street. This library is an old Carnegie library with an addition. The addition used to house the circulation desk, the childrens collection and the audio/video collection. When I was a kid in the 70s and raiding their juvenile science fiction collection I would search for the books with the atom symbol on the binding. This is the first library I went to. I visited it as a second grader during a class trip while attending Saint Francis Elementary School. That school looks like it is now called Holy Angels Elementary and Preschool. This building no longer houses a library. The single-story addition now is home to an art organization and I am not sure what is in the Carnegie Building.

This is the current state of the old Carnegie Library. While I was going to the library this housed the adult fiction and nonfiction and had a reading room. I was not allowed to venture into this building until I had outgrown the juvenile science fiction collection and needed access to the adult science fiction stored on the west side of this building. I remember the silence. It felt like a library. My Mom really drove it into me that I had to be quiet when I was in there browsing and I was. I could feel adults looking at me and I knew they were thinking that this little bastard better keep his trap shut while I read my newspaper. That probably wasn't the case but back then I was sure of it.


Here you can see the single-story addition attached to the right side of the Carnegie building. That is where I found all my science fiction, sports biographies and World War II books.


Here is a view nearer to the addition. Yes, that is a cobblestone street.


The Traverse City Area District Library has a local history collection and the following photos are from their website.

This photo shows the reference desk and reading area of the Carnegie building in 1988, two years after I had left the area for the Marine Corps. The door at the back leads to the childrens/circulation area. That is the door I passed through to find the adult science fiction. I'd love to walk through the stacks of that building one more time.


This is picture of the Carnegie building from 1960. The picture is labeled as "before the addition" and the new remodeled building opened in 1963. I wonder how long it took to remodel and build the addition and what happened to the library during the project.


This picture shows the nonfiction stacks. I loved wandering through here.


Here is a shot of the construction of the addition during 1965. You can see the addition had a basement. The basement is where the audio/video room was located. I used to check out LPs and take them home and record them.


If you got this far here is your reward. While walking through the park next the library I came across a black squirrel. Living in Charlotte I forget that not every squirrel is gray.