Rodger A. Payne's Blog

This post is going to highlight the fantasy baseball team I've built for the first half (A) season of the OBFLB (Original Bitnet Fantasy Baseball League). As I've explained before , this is a 24 ...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2024/04/2024-louisville-sluggers.html

This is my annual post about the Academy Awards. I'm not predicting who will win, but instead ranking the nominations in my preferred order of finish. I'll only rank the films and performance...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2024/03/oscars-2023.html

I used some "Feeling Thermometer" data in a class recently and was struck by an insane result reflected in the recent data. You'll see that below, where I've linked to the original polling agency...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2024/02/american-feelings.html

The graphic below identifies the top 25 films from 2023 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing ...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2024/02/best-films-of-2023.html

I didn't watch that many 2023 movies this year, particularly through October. However, I did sign up for Letterboxd and have been writing brief reviews there. It obviously serves to log all th...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/12/films-of-2023.html

This is my annual post listing books I read in the most recent year. It seems kind of hard to believe, but I have produced such a post since 2005 . This is a link to the 2022 list  if bl...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/12/books-of-2023.html

Over the years, I've collected a number of unusual images that I occasionally hang on my office walls. I am a student of political satire and ridicule  and images sometimes convey complicated sa...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/11/kissinger-finally-dead.html

Last month for fall break, my spouse and I visited our oldest daughter in Rochester, NY. That picture above is actually from our 2022 trip, when we also went during my University's fall break...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/11/rochester-ny.html

I previously blogged about a quote from Louis Masotti that I referenced many times when I was a college debater. My junior year affirmative case concerned police use of deadly force and my colle...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/10/passing-notes.html

On August 25 the huge oak tree in front of our house dropped a large branch during a microburst from a storm. Later that night, it rained and rained and rained.  The tree punctured our roof in...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/09/natural-disaster.html

My family returned to the Delaware beaches this summer for the first time since 2017. My spouse's sister and her family also came over from the UK and so the vacation was also a family reunio...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/08/beach-week-and-dc-stopover.html

This book has been on my radar for a long time. It was published to some acclaim in 2005 and concerns a three game baseball series that occurred August 26th to 28th, 2003, involving the St...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/08/20-years-later-3-nights-in-august-by.html

A friend invited me to attend the major league baseball game between his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday, June 6. As it happened, this was the major league debut of...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/07/elly-de-la-cruz.html

I'm going to use this post to summarize my recent and prior visits to Michigan brewpubs. This is one instance when Google Timeline data is actually helpful, though this information only goes ...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/06/michigan-beer-2023-update.html

Earlier this month, my spouse and I drove north through Detroit, entered Ontario at Port Huron / Sarnia for a long weekend in Canada, and then returned to Detroit to visit the Detroit Institute o...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/06/detroit.html

After my spouse and I departed Pittsburgh , we headed east to visit our youngest daughter in Brooklyn. She's moved to a slightly different neighborhood (Bed-Stuy) south and east of where she used...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/06/brooklyn.html

A few weeks ago we drove to Pittsburgh and took in a Pirates day game against the Colorado Rockies and then visited the Andy Warhol museum the next day. We also visited the Southern Tier brewpub ...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/06/pittsburgh.html

As I have previously written here, I began playing in the Hardy House fantasy baseball league in 1989. It was named for the building on the Northwestern campus where we conducted our first...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/03/2023-bolts-from-blue.html

The past few weeks, my spouse and I have been viewing many of the Oscar nominees. We saw several over the course of 2022, but quite a few remain on the watchlist. We would have watched 2 more f...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/03/oscars-2023.html

Below, I have posted the annual list produced by Metacritic  that reflects an aggregation of about 300 "Top 10" film lists produced by critics this past year. Every year , I note this list to ...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2023/02/best-films-of-2022.html

This is my annual post about the new films I saw over the prior year. Here's a link to last year's list if you want to work backwards through my choices over time.  I made the following point...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2022/12/films-of-2022.html

This is my annual post listing books I read in the most recent year. It seems kind of remarkable now, but I have produced such a list since 2005 . This is a link to the 2021 list  if bl...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2022/12/books-of-2022.html

Anyone who has followed the Twitter meltdown in recent days knows that many academics are turning to substitute social media outlets. It's not a social media comparison, but I keep thinking abou...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2022/11/mastadon.html

> RIP Paddy. Her F '18 in Canada was truly unique & she thrived. Her > brother's cancer had made her our lone companion & she was still in > peak physical condition....

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2022/10/rip-paddy.html

Thanks to the case of COVID that I'm still combatting, I've spent many evenings these past two weeks watching films I missed over the past few years -- with an emphasis on genre films that my spo...

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2022/09/end-of-summer-film-festival.html