Nick Punto

Gimbling in the Wabe – Extra Innnings (or, How Do You Play the Game?)

In honor of the Major League Baseball Game, played earlier this week in Cincinnati, I am resurrecting a 2013 Gimbling in the Wabe, which was the final installment of a 3-part rumination on my love sports, but especially baseball. It’s not whether you win or lose It’s how you play […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – Extra Innings: How Do You Play the Game?

It’s not whether you win or lose It’s how you play the game. From 2004 until 2010, Nick Punto played for the Minnesota Twins (he now plays for the Dodgers, after a stop in Boston and another in St. Louis, where he won a World Series ring). A utility infielder, […]

Birthdays

On this day, May 14, in 1965, writer Eoin Colfer was born in Wexford, Leinster, Ireland. This former primary school teacher is best known for his young adult fantasy books (eight so far, with 10 spin-off and companion novels) based on the character Artemis Fowl, a young criminal mastermind. (He himself calls the original Artemis Fowl book, “Die Hard with fairies.”) In 2008 he was picked by Douglas Adams’ widow to write a sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, an honor that he wrote was “a gift from the gods”; And Another Thing… was published in 2009. He served as Laureate na nÓg (Ireland’s Children’s Laureate) between 2014 and 2016. Still living and writing in Wexford, Ireland, today he turns 56.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.