Good Man, Abner Doubleday

As some of my regulars may remember from last week, I'm on vacation this week. Touring around Charleston a bit this morning I learned something I hadn't known, which is that the Abner Doubleday, the self-safe Doubleday who invented baseball, fired the first Union shot at Ft. Sumter. Good man, Doubleday! Gave those yellow-bellied traitors a strong wihff of the grape. (Actually, not really, but he tried.)

Turns out Doubleday was quite a fellow. He was there at Gettysburg, gallantly leading outnumbered Yankee divisions before suffering a neck injury. He then took over the defense of the nation's capital. He rode with Lincoln on the president's train up to the Gettysburg dedication that November. After the war, he moved to San Francisco. All he managed to do there was to patent the cable car!

Anyway. Charleston is beautiful, of this there is no doubt. It still feels a little strange down here. I couldn't believe along I-95 that I still saw a billboard for Pedro's South of the Border that used the word "Sometheeng," spelled just like that. I thought those billboards were racist in 1981, the last time I saw them.

So this is it for this week unless some truly earth-rattling news event takes place. Talk amongst yourselves about Ft. Sumter, baseball, the South, whatevah.