The cursing count is now at 9. Like I said, harder than I thought.

Evgeny Plushenko, Danger Kitty called, and they want their hair back!

Seriously, what is the deal? How can you get to the world championship level of anything, never mind a sport where style and grace are so highly prized, and still have hair that Judas Priest recanted 20 years ago? Not to mention you're competing against a passel of males who are single, thin, and neat. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Moving to something completely different, I almost never quit on a book that I've started. Once I make the commitment to start, I very rarely decide to give up, a reflex probably akin to how you don't leave after waiting a long time for an elevator, as once you leave it'll show up.

That being said, I had to bail out on Storied Stadiums by Curt Smith, a former Bush Sr. speechwriter and baseball fan. It's written in this Ring Lardner meets crystal meth freak prose, very choppy and full of this slang/jargon which slows things down even more. One review says it gets better after the first 150 pages, but the way I look at it it shouldn't take that long for a book on what should be a highly interesting topic to become readable.

There's also blessed little information on the stadiums themselves, so it's not even like the book keeps to the framework it sets out in the title. And there are all the random quotes, many not even baseball related, that I think the author put in just to show how smart he is.

Thinking back, there are only two other books I can think of that I've bailed on (I'm sure there are more, just can't think of them now). One was E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair, the other A Passage to India by E. M. Forester. I've been told the latter is very good once you get through the first 50 pages, but I never made it past the first 25. All the reviews of World's Fair that I read make it out to be a classic of American 20th century literature, so perhaps I should go back and give it another try.

Thinking of the baseball book, I should try to locate the list of books I read during my baseball book a week phase from 1996. For those of you who didn't see me go through it, I was trying to get back into baseball after the strike year in 1994, when I was incredibly bitter about the sport (not that I was the only one). I read some really great books during that time, and read some crap. Perhaps for the coming season I can go back to that list and make suggestions and the like. But perhaps I'll bump it back to a book every other week; once a week was fine when I was commuting and had a couple hours on the train each day to read, but there's no way I could hold that pace now.