Happy Bloomsday, folks. I spent Bloomsday 1995 in Dublin, and I have some pictures that I should scan and put up, but, alas, June 16 has caught me with my digital pants down.

Instead, I was going to put in a link to this blog version of Ulysses that I seem to remember. But I must have imagined that. All I can find is some guy who’s going around blogging his walk around Dublin. So I guess I’ll put it on my things to do list— it just seems like something someone should have done by now.

Perhaps what I am remembering is this: Ulysses for Dummies, sort of a portrait of the artist as an animated gif.

This is terrific. The premise:

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

From the NYTimes: sending prayers to India

Terri and I were on one of the last green line trains to leave Kenmore station at 12:15 am after the heavily-rain-delayed Wednesday night inter-league Red Sox game against the Padres. As is the MBTA’s wont, it being close to the last train of the night, the train stood with the doors open for a while, letting as many people as possible on. The last two people to cram themselves on the train before the doors closed were two guys in Padres polo shirts and some kind of special passes dangling around their necks. As is the Boston fans’ wont, especially after seeing the Sox lose so miserably, these guys were getting some mild crap (”Hey– the San Diego train is the next one!”).

One guy asked them if they were press for the Padres. The younger of the two said “actually, I’m the owner”. That sort of shut everyone in our immediate area up. I was thinking that maybe I heard him wrong. Or that he was just lying. Why would the owner be riding the T?

They got off at Copley. I turned to Terri, and asked “Did that guy say he was the owner?”

“I think so. But why would he be riding the T?”

So the next morning, I Googled for “padres owner” and found a picture in an ESPN story from 2002. Indeed, the guy on the T had been the Padres owner, John Moores. And the ESPN story shed some light on why he might not be riding around in transport you’d expect from a team owner. Seems like there’s a cloud of shadiness around him. He owned Peregrine Systems, a now-bankrupt software company, that had dozens of lawsuits filed against it because of huge accounting irregularities. He sold $600 million of Peregrine stock in 2001, just before the accounting scandals broke. And when plans to build Petco Park—and finance it using taxpayer money— were in the works, he gave some improper gifts to a San Diego city council member (a story which, bizarrely, involves the stuffiest man alive, conservative columnist George Will).

The final interesting aside: Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein from the Red Sox front office used to work for him in San Diego.

From the Houston Chronicle: radio stations playing a whole song as an ad, over and over again in the middle of the night, to put it up in the charts.

I don’t usually get lathered up about nanotech, but this 1/1 millionth scale version of fallingwater— from 1996—is pretty cool

A little taste of the Toscanini’s vibe. Unmentioned is that they also have the best espresso drinks in Greater Boston.

The lone researcher. “lone tinkerers…who cobbled their contraptions together in small, cluttered labs and garages, gave way to drab ‘researchers’ — anonymous drones working in teams for big companies, tweaking products to be marketed by the suits.”

Drainspotting: just what it sounds like. The Wabash tie-in to this is that my sophomore year when Andy Ford became president, someone sent him a photo of a drain cover made by the Ford Meter Box Company of Wabash, IN.

If you’re a little tired of all the Reagan hagiography, the perennially cranky Christopher Hitchens has this in Slate. Dear Old Wabash gets a passing mention.