2 2nd place roto finishes in last 5 years.
1 1st place Division A  finish
Lots of fun and friends ...
Paying it forward by donating prizes for the tourney

Personal best 239 point play - SK(E)TCHED
Personal best 661 game

661 game

Edit: Here is the annotation.  My only really suboptimal play was missing CLOWNISH holding CHOWLI? through an open N.

Anyone use "Visual Thesaurus"?

Is it worth the investment?

It looks very cool.

So I'm at a friend's house for a holiday dinner yesterday, and we're all gabbing and having a punny, wordy time ...

Someone asks me to pass the gravy boat .... and a thought instantly pops in my head ... and the thought then passes directly to my lips ...

"What happens if the gravy boat crashes into the iceberg lettuce?"

(much laughter ensued)

Yes, you too can drink wine from a baby bottle ... at La Cave Des Fondus.

"While drinking alcohol in a container otherwise used for Similac may be a novelty in New York (at least in public), it has already been tried in that world capital of gastronomic sophistication, Paris. Paris, France.

La Cave des Fondus is a faithful homage to the Montmartre restaurant Le Refuge des Fondus, where Parisians enthusiastically suck down the house red and white.

Jacques Ouari, who owns the Manhattan restaurant but not the one in Paris, said, “I wanted to set up my place exactly like the one in Paris. It’s such a fun place. Everybody loves drinking beer and wine from baby bottles - even my father thought it was fun - and I think New Yorkers will like it too. I checked with the health department and as long as we put the bottles in the dishwasher they have no problem with it.”"

As some of you already know, I've been recruited to write for a Yankee-centric blog called "Bronx Banter", hosted on SportsNetNewYork's website.

My job is normally to provide a daily recap of links to various articles on the Yankees.

Yesterday, I got to add my story on my memories of Yankee Stadium (part of an on-going series of remembrances, including submissions by Ken Rosenthal, Allen Barra, Jon Weisman, etc.)

Hope you enjoy this.

Neal Hefti, composer of Batman TV series theme, dies.

"Oddly enough, his most famous tune is among his least musically interesting, even if it was somehow brilliantly apt: the jauntily arch and repetitive theme for the television series “Batman.” Mr. Hefti said that the show was so campy it took him weeks to come up with a suitable melody. It won him his only Grammy."

===================

THAT won a Grammy????

Hi folks ...

Last night I attempted to open a previously created Word file.
The MS Office Word 2000 splash screen came on, then the normal.dot file started to load. At that point, the Word toolbars didn't appear, the program started to hang, and then it closed with no error message.

My Excel program (also part of MS Office 2000) runs fine.

I'm running Windows XP SP3.

I tried opening a different file ... didn't work (same symptom)
I tried opening Word just by itself ... didn't work (same symptom).
I tried "detect and repair" .... didn't work (same symptom).
I tried "uninstall" and "reinstall" .... didn't work (same symptom).
I searched for and deleted all normal.dot files and opened Word again .... didn't work (same symptom).
I went back to a few earlier restore points (maybe something changed since I last used Word a few weeks ago) .... didn't work (same symptom).
I used the RUN command line winword.exe /a .... that DID work.

I ran a VirusScan recently .... its clean.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

TIA (as always),
Diane

Update: I ended up having to regedit the registry, delete the DATA directories for Word, then get into Word via the command line, and click off one of the add-ons that ran at program start-up.  Voila!

Thanks for your help.

Firefighter revives unconscious cat.

"Al Machado rescued the cat from a burning apartment Tuesday, telling The Standard Times of New Bedford that he saw immediately that it needed air. Machado began performing mouth to mouth on the animal as he carried it outside.

Video shot at the scene shows Machado bent over, breathing into the cat's mouth several times. The cat, a tiger angora, was revived and resting comfortably soon after."