I Still Believe ...

Well, no I don't. 3-1 is a pretty big hole, and while I won't count them out, the Dodgers will need a lot of luck to get past this Phillies team. There are three games left, if the Dodgers are lucky, and two of them are in Philadelphia, and the Dodgers need all three.

That Game 4 loss is a classic sign of an overmatched team. Win the first two games at home, go on the road and drop Game 3 -- pretty normal. The underdog usually wins Game 3, because the implications (down 3-0) are so disastrous for them if they don't. Then, good teams win Game 4 and things are pretty bleak for the underdog from that point forward ...

This certainly counts as success for the Dodgers, however. Short of a World Series appearance I'm skeptical they keep Manny Ramirez -- he's old, which isn't that big a deal in the American League, where a big hitter can move to the designated hitter and be productive in his declining years, than it is in the National League, where a slow, aging player on the field is a danger to the team.

But after 20 years they've won a series, and even without Ramirez they have a young, talented squad. That's something.

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Matt Stover's new novel, Caine Black Knife, is out. More about that tomorrow, but the very short form is, go buy it now.

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Things have indeed settled down -- and my schedule has lightened up considerably -- I'm up to around 20 hours a week writing time right now, and if things stay the same, my output should rise dramatically. (It's been ~4 hours a week the last couple years.) may not blog much more -- I suspect everyone would rather see Trent text than blog text.

I'm going to issue the first complete half of AI War as an e-book -- my November 30 date's looking unlikely. Sorry, I should have known better than to make that post. That move ate up most of a month, unfortunately, but the first half of AI War is in clean shape and leaves the story at a good stopping point -- not a lengthy stopping point, I hope. I'm talking to Outpost Press right now to produce bound copies of the novel, but I'm not clear on timelines yet.

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Yes, there surely is more coming on the Alan Rodgers front. I'm waiting until after the election, because no one'll be paying attention until then anyway, but post-Nov. 4 we're going to do a fairly large push on that situation. The Alan Rodgers Experience is back online -- no new posts, as I say, I've been busy, but some of the material that's coming there is an update on the last year or so, interviews and blogs with my daughters, profiles of some of the people inhabiting the Los Angeles Family Court system, scanned copies of various documents generated in the last few years, a review of two years of posts by Alan Rodgers and Amy Casil over on SFF.net, including the part where she sought a restraining order against him and he had a bugfuck flipout over it and started threatening her and her surviving child and then demanded she apologize to him publicly ... the list of people Alan's demanded public apologies from is striking, going through all his posts. After killing their little brother, he demanded that Alex and Andrea apologize to him as well. This hasn't happened yet but doubtless he's still waiting ...

The part of my deposition where Alan Rodgers lawyer asks if Amy Casil might have gone down to Alan's office and caused that explosion of filth in a drunken bender after the baby's death is priceless. If they'd just go away and leave be people who want nothing to do with them, watching them fuck with each other would itself be a form of entertainment. At one point in his SFF.net posts, Alan mutters that Amy Casil is accusing him of things that would require legal action if she said them publicly. I can imagine what that could be -- something to do with intentional homicide, maybe? She certainly already knew he'd killed that baby through negligence.

After Alan threatened to kill her daughter, Casil left him. After Alan killed her baby, Casil left him. And then sought a restraining order against him and Alan responded by threatening her and her daughter again, publicly. And then she went back to him, again. Fascinating woman, at least in a clinical sense.

There's material relating to recent court developments I haven't covered yet, but that's coming. Dr. Jane Ellen Shatz, a court ordered reunification therapist, thought it would be valuable to put the drunken, abusive, mentally impaired baby killer into therapy with his surviving children: we've quite thoroughly declined to do that. It's possibly unfair of me to note that she only got paid if the kids went to reunification therapy, but I take note, and will add that some therapists don't threaten their "clients," which Shatz did to my daughters. My daughters may have more to say on their experiences with Dr. Shatz.

I'm surprised by none of this. This is the court system that found O.J. Simpson a competent parent to take his children back, after he cut their mother's head off. It's a good place for monsters like Alan.

(On a mildly unrelated note, nice to see O.J. heading away to lockup. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Gives one hope for karma in other areas of life.)

If you're a blogger who'd like to blog about this, drop me a line in the comments. If you are or know a reporter for a meaningfully sized media outlet, ditto. I've got contacts within NPR and the L.A. Times, and I'll be following up with them as well. The Group News Blog is already on board to cover this after the election.

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Along with the Matt Stover post, some politics coming tomorrow too. Interesting times.