Let's get my baseball whining out of the way. The Orioles finished 40-41 at Camden Yards this year, the lowest attendance since the park opened. That includes 1994, the strike year. Jay Gibbons hit his wife with a foul ball. He blames the ballpark. In "God, I hate that place" news, Norfolk, VA will be the home of the Orioles AAA team, replacing Ottawa, which wasn't going to work anymore a) because it's in Canada, and b) because the Lynx are moving. About 1,000 people staged a walkout at OPCY to protest the ineptitude of the team over the last 9 seasons.

I've got tickets to a couple of shows in San Francisco, at the Warfield (seeing Gomez) and the Fillmore (seeing Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins), which makes me happy. Both concerts are acts I really want to see, and both venues are high on my to-do list as well.

In a moving show of solidarity with Big Country's laptop (is it Wrigley Field?), the display on my laptop stopped working on Saturday morning. The tech-support guy at Dell walked me through taking it apart, disconnecting and reconnecting the display cable, and then reassembling the computer (though I think I could have figured the last bit out on my own). So far, so good.

The Panthers had Steve Smith back this week, against a shitty team. They won. Go figure.

Carolina Basketball starts in 18 days.