Will's Good Idea for the Week of 9/7/25

Good Sunday morning, Stroock's Books Christian reader(s), and everyone else. We had dinner at one of our favs last night. The food was good, as were the specialty mai tais [Mai tais?-Ed], but the service was excruciatingly slow. It took them, like, half an hour to bring the check. As we tried not to give in to boiling rage, we reminded ourselves that usually, the less we say the better. We escaped the restaurant without incident. 

Mrs. Stroock was pleased as her Nittany Lions obliterated the opposition 27-nil.

Lots of rain last night and this morning. We checked the sump-pump [knobhead-Ed] as we hadn't heard it go off. [You haven't heard the sump pump go off because it's extremely quiet -Ed]. Yes, we confirmed this. [All that mechanical trouble this winter and summer has put the zap on your brain-Ed]. Why yes, yes it has. 

Baseball...as it happens Mrs. Stroock was watching the now infamous Phillies game in which a woman demanded a homerun ball from a bewildered and probably scared father. We don't care who the woman is. We don't need to destroy her. Man, that dad was flabbergasted. It's hard to blame him. Yes, the dad did the right thing. Give that crazy woman the ball and get her the hell away from his son.* 

More baseball...

So former New York Mets manager Davey Johnson died yesterday.  He also skippered Cincinatti, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington. We'll see a lot of tributes to Johnson in baseball media and rightfully so. The man won a lot of baseball games. There's no doubt he was a good manager, maybe even a very good manager. But Johnson wasn't great. He wasn't legendary. The Mets fired Davey Johnson about a third of the way through the 1990 season after a poor start following a disappointing 1989 season.

Because we're sick of blogging about the Middle East, and don't feel like blogging about political machinations, it's 80's Mets week here at Stroock's Books.  The 1980's Mets were a dominate team. They were supposed to be a dynasty. But in the end the Mets of this era disappointed and flamed out gloriously. This era of New York baseball has fascinated us for three decades now. Let's go Mets: F-A-N.

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 9/7/25...we've plenty ideas for articulation of the latest nuke story, and a few seeds for other ideas. We had toyed with making the mom in this story Korean. But we've vested a fair amount of plot and character in the mom being a child of the Dust Bowl. Can it be unvested?  We probably need to do something about people climbing out of radioactive rubble, right? right.  

*A few years ago on LBI we took youngest daughter to the beach to feed the seagulls. The rules sign at the beach entrance said nothing about feeding the seagulls. There is no rule against feeding the birds. In a minute a middle-aged woman came up to us and demanded our daughter stop. We told her to get bent. 'Mind your own business,' we said, and went about ours.