Freestones and Freewheeling

Today I rode Creek Road along Onion Creek with Abby, John and Ellen, a circle cruise beside sheep ranches, longhorn cattle pastures and the persistent mid-summer flow of a Hill Country creek. The creek fluttered across the dams with a trickling personality, calmer than on the ride this spring when we last traveled beside it. We started at 8, to avoid the hottest part of the day, following County Road 190, known as Creek Road to the locals, between the Henley VFD and Dripping Springs.



The route's elevation is pretty tame, at least compared to the hard work of riding up FM 165 from Blanco to Henley. But all the freewheeling, just coasting downhill or on level ground, gave me time to look for the wildlife to the side of the road and penned up behind rancher's fences. Near the end of the ride I looked up the road to see an eight-foot snake — rattler, cottonmouth, something huge — stretched across the pavement, warming itself. The snake was immobile, with about a two-foot stretch of road open in front of the head of the beast. You call out lots of warnings while you ride, but not too often is the call "big snake in the road." You have to get well out into the country to use that one.

After the ride we had brunch at the Sunset Cafe in Blanco, where they serve the Wagon Wheel Pancake. Eat three of them and they are free. You save the $5.75 that way, but probably spend at least as much in gym membership working off the calories. Vast pancakes that fill a dinner place and stand a half-inch thick. Abby and I split just one, smothered with tiny blueberries.

Beyond the pancakes lay the freestone peaches, now in season and at roadside stands along US 290 in Stonewall and Fredericksburg. Near the end of June I try to make a point of shopping for Texas peaches out there, because the freestones — which split open clean and leave the stone free — are among the last kinds of peaches to come in. The four of us split a $17 box of "Ripes," some with a bruised spot, all picked a few days earlier. Abby and I took home our 12 pounds of peaches for $8.50. We've been dividing them up this afternoon between fridge holding box and brown paper sack for ripening.

Pre-dawn posted-up jubliation

I've been up since 4 this morning, prowling the Web for the torrent of stories posted about the Spurs' championship win. The daily newspaper writers have to file within a few hours of the game, so I gave it until sunup Eastern time before I started to check. There were 4,000 stories listed on Google News. I wallowed in the print coverage like the old sportswriter than I am. TV is fun, but the real story is still in the words.

The house was dark and quiet, but it surely was neither last night while our TV unreeled the victory story. The greatest moment was probably the last three minutes of the last quarter, with Timmy earning that MVP trophy by dropping a bucket from way over in Bruce Bowen's territory, baseline corner, followed by kicking a pass out for Manu's three-pointer. Drove the Spurs' lead to seven, I'm screaming and jumping up and down, Detroit calls a timeout, Abby's standing in front of the TV hollering as if she's on the floor of the SBC center, where we know the real fans don't even sit down in a Finals game. I remember standing in front of my seat in 2003, screaming at the crowd around me, "Everybody, up on your feet. We want to win!"

Ah, the delicious madness of sports. This year was different, like it meant so much more, because we'd tasted the last title up close, and then so far away at the final game. We were watching during the last title game in 2003 from a bar in Victoria, Canada, screaming at the TV there, too. Bemused Canadians would stroll by and say, "So, there's a basketball series going on, eh? Who's playing?"

I'm sure they feel the same way when they come to the States and see most people ignoring hockey. But once the Spurs won in 2003, we were completely cut off from the glory of the aftermath. No newspaper coverage, because we headed off to Tofino the next morning, the start of a stunning vacation in a haven of eagles, bears and otters. But no Spurs.

This morning I didn't have the wildlife to entertain me, but I read a few dozen stories, looking for the sharpest columnists. I liked William C. Rhoden's column in the NY Times, recalling the last game 7. Seattle's Steve Kelley filed a nice one, putting Duncan in his rightful place in NBA history. Only one other player has lost all 11 teammates from his title team, and then won again with a completely new crew: Bill Russell. A fellow whose caliber Duncan will match, given a few more seasons.

Meanwhile, Mike Wilbon, who hasn't gotten a single prediction correct in his Pardon the Interruption poodle-dog TV performances — he picked the Pistons less than two hours before last night's tip-off, like he's picked against the Spurs all through the postseason — well, he had the grace to flip-flop and give Duncan his due in today's paper. Not much crow will be eaten for the TV, though. Maybe Wilbon knows something about football. Watching the USA Today basketball writer David Dupree hack down Wilbon's assumptions, that was priceless.

JA Adande wrote about Pop's place in the coaching pantheon, too. A modest guy with three title rings and three superstars locked up until 2010. Adande wrote, "You won't see Popovich writing a book — either a motivational manual or an expose — and you won't hear him hogging the spotlight. When someone asked him to assess his role in his team's success the other day, he snapped, 'Next question.' "

Pop is a fellow who said on TV, as his first comment when he was handed the trophy, "I don't know how we did it."

The newest fun of all was capturing the podcast from the Detroit TV station that clipped all those post-game interviews. It takes more than 100 games to win a title in the NBA these days, especially against a team as good as the Pistons. Listening to the glory of these moments, removed by a few months, will be another sweet plum that two more years of technology brings.

Through the night and into the dawn I pulled on my old editing skills, the ones I first practiced at The Daily Texan newsdesk while editing the best UPI wire stories in college. Finding the best was easier this morning. It didn't take much skill to round up the story of a team from a small sports market that has the best winning record of any in sports since '97. Academy opens at 9, with plenty of Spurs gear on sale.

Alas, no tickets, only TV

At two seconds past 12 Noon, not a single Spurs ticket was available from the Ticketmaster Web site. At any price. In any section. I doubt that the first Game Seven in the NBA Finals since 1994 was really available to non-season-ticket holding fans. It sure wasn't available to us, unlike our 2003 Finals foray.

Okay, not entirely unavailable. For about seven grand, we can attend in the best seats. The link on the right hand side of this page for eTickets promises,

SEC: 24 ROW: 3
Across from Spurs bench - seats are very close to David Robinson & Eva Longoria

$3,425.00 each

At least it didn't cost us that much to attend a couple of Finals games in 2003. There's always the drive to Fatso's, the San Antonio sports garden where the Spurs fans hang out. Or maybe we can watch at something as simple as the Cheatham Street sports bar, just down the street from our rent house in San Marcos. I watched a conference semifinals game there last May, a night when a domestic beer was $2 a pint and the chairs were full of college kids.

I walked in at 11, since the Spurs were playing late on the road in LA against the hated Lakers. Most of the hardback wooden chairs were full of students, though a few teachers were in evidence. A table opened up just minutes after I walked into the Cheatham Street River Pub, right in front of the big-screen TV. The table was a carved-out, shellacked plank bolted in place right in front of the TV. Not moving. Meant to watch TV from. Though it was littered with empties and soggy napkins, I moved in anyway and ordered one of those $2 beers.

It's two-dollar Sierra Nevada night, an evening deep in the University's finals season. When my beer shows up, I leave a dollar under the napkin for the waitress. A young man stands next to me. He wears a Houston Texans hat backwards on his medium-short haircut and asks if I'm waiting for group to join me. After all, I'm sitting at a table big enough for eight, a table empty but for me and him. He takes a chair when I report I'm on my own for the night. He juggles a frosted beer glass, a rocks glass of something brown, and a pitcher of Bud Lite. He is Brazos, he tells me, and then introduces his friend Thomas. Then Brazos waves over a couple of Hispanic girls, slim and a little drunk, but only a little. The shorter one keeps busy playing with her cell phone. He introduces them as Cheryl and Theresa, and we shake hands all around, very polite.

This is my moment to share something about myself. I tell Brazos I'm holding tickets for Game 5, to be played next in the series, after he takes note of my "Champs Again" Spurs t-shirt. I wear my colors over my heart tonight.

The pub is loud and full of laughter. It's already less than an hour before last call, which arrives at midnight by local ordinance. But I don't know how short the drinking time has become. Brazos asks me, "What do you think this town needs that it doesn't have?" A great icebreaker question. "A place to drink beer and watch movies all at once," I reply, because I enjoy the Alamo Drafthouse. Brazos nods, passes along my answer to Thomas. He's with his friends, people close enough that later on, when he lights his cigarette, Cheryl takes it out of his hands and takes a puff. They have shared more than this one Marlboro.

The Lakers surge on the TV. My heart sinks with each of their buckets. They retake the lead from the Spurs, and then it swings back a few more times. Finally LA pulls away on Kobe's deadly accuracy, all the more plain to me from the big screen. I must look depressed, because Brazos tries to buy me a beer. But it's already past last call. I have nursed my pint glass like the Spurs nursed their lead, for nearly an hour. The Spurs' hopes for tonight are as drained as my glass. In the last five minutes of the game, a waiter comes by to count down the time until the table must be cleared of glasses and pitchers. 10 minutes left to drink, then 5, then he announces "one minute," although the Spurs have more than that left on their clock in LA.

Finally the waiter swings past us like Kobe crossing above the arc on the TV, scooping up the glasses and pitcher like so many loose balls under the rim. Time runs down and the Spurs lose in LA. I leave the pub before the last horn sounds on the four pub TVs. People trickle out slowly behind me, only some engaged in the game's outcome. There's other things to do with an evening, after all, besides mope over a ballgame. Like Chris Rock says about nights that single folks spend with each other, "there's fucking to do!" A few more jokes to be told, laughs to be wrung from lipsticked mouths with straight, white teeth.

I think about the outcome and try to force a smile. Game Four evens the Spurs' chances at 2-2, and now I know I hold tickets for me and Abby to see "the Pivotal Game Five" down at the SBC, the night after next. Well, actually tomorrow night, I correct myself, since it's already past midnight here while I head down the street to the little Rio Vista house. I totter home a bit unsteady on my feet after my one beer, slip a little in the mud on the corner from the spring rains. Like the Spurs, I think, slipping in the adulation of winning their first two games in this 2004 series. I comfort myself with the hope they can right themselves back home in the Texas night to come.

That night I didn't know we'd soon be witnesses to the nightmare of the .4 second miracle Lakers shot in Game Five, the crusher that ushered in elimination. So there are times when it stings less to be outside the arena. I will take that as some comfort against the worst possible outcome tomorrow night, when the Spurs try to win their first Game 7 Finals contest, while we watch on a TV somewhere.

Hope for Game Seven

We heard this sentiment several times yesterday on TV and the radio. "I'm just a fan," one NBA analyst said. "I just want to see a Game Seven."

Now we all get what they wanted. In a few hours, I hope Abby and I get what we want: Tickets for that Game Seven.

Two years ago, the first two games of the NBA Finals were ours. We could buy enough to get some for friends. In 2003 fewer people had broadband Internet access, though, so our DSL lines got us a quicker link to the Ticketmaster site than many others used. That was the story we told afterward. It might be a different one today, with SBC spreading its DSL for the last two years. Irony, at that, since the game will be played in the SBC Center.

Ticketmaster is the only way into the arena. Nothing is being sold at the SBC box office. There are those who will want to call, but I have to wonder how many phone orders get filled.

Tuesday's game tickets — those few thousand left to sell — sold out in less than two minutes. We have hope that since we have to weather a Game Seven, Where Anything Can Happen, we can enjoy the ticker tape down the highway, too.

It all flows around Tim Duncan, our superstar. He said last night he's counting on the lift the home fans will give him. We hope to be among those helping out.

That will happen if the Spurs don't do something they seemed to want last night. Like a that torrent of three-point shots, as if everybody wanted to be Big Shot Bob. 8 for 28 won't win a title from outside the arc. Timmy says "we played all year to have home court." We're glad, since his home is not too far from ours.

A Hurricane from Argentina

Manu Ginobili made landfall on the Pistons' hopes of stealing Game 1 at the SBC Center last night, a tropical storm of slashing offense. Manu dropped 15 in the final quarter on a team that prides itself on defense. It says a lot for San Antonio's hope to retake their title when they can run with the defenseless Suns, then steal enough points against the No. 2 defensive NBA team. Here's he's washing over Detroit's Carlos Arroyo, who the Pistons can play as much as they'd like, if you ask me.

We drove back from dinner at The County Line (get yours here) quick to see the start of the game. The BBQ palace on a finger of Lake Austin not only has great sauce, but education for the many out-of-towners enjoying Texas culture. Like this language lesson, which plays nonstop in the restrooms.

The game's start on ABC turned out to be a Will Smith performance with 40 backup dancers and fireworks. The network's gotta sell this one, because its primary element is for advanced basketball fans: defense. Like a 2-1 game in baseball, instead of the juiced-up homerball slugfests the casual fan enjoys.

North of here in Dallas, where the Mavs could not climb past those ill-defending Suns, sportswriters were already taking up the chant: This will be a boring series. Where's the offense? This defensive style of basketball is offensive. And so on. But they had to admit the Spurs can play whatever kind of ball is needed to win. And defenseless contenders need not apply:

Most elite teams impose their will or style of play on the opponent. Not San Antonio. This team is a chameleon willing to adapt to whatever style is needed.

The Spurs needed to average 108.2 points to beat Phoenix. All they needed this night was 84 points for a comfortable victory.

Here's another way to put the difference. The Spurs and Suns combined for 235 points in the first game of the conference finals. The Spurs and Pistons combined for 153 in this one.

Now we have an idea of just how bad the Suns' defense is.

The story at the Dallas Morning News, by way of the Knight Ridder wires, does point out that smothering defense — the Pistons didn't even score 70 — is easier when your opponent is playing bad.

I think there's a reason for the bad play. It wears Silver and Black, and plays enough defense to win. And while those shots clang on the other end, somebody who wasn't born in the USA — Manu, or Tony Parker, or Tim Duncan — is making landfall at the Spurs' end of the court.

They score. You don't. That's a great definition of what Detroit coach Larry Brown calls "the right way." It's only 1-0 now. The Spurs have to prove it all over again on Sunday night. Because when you play against a team that defends, you hope for the hurricane to break over their seawall.

And so my Spurs shirt and my "swingman" NBA shorts — the latter purchased two years ago in the SBC gift shop during the Spurs' last title run — those silver and black clothes go up on a hangar until Sunday, not to be washed. There's the scent of winning in them along with the smell of barbecue, floating in the steamy Texas heat of June, a great month to be able to continue cheering about basketball.

A Bright Light Winks Out

Yesterday I learned that Bruce Toback died. He was a leading light among HP 3000 experts, but far more than that accomplishment can catalogue his genius. I got to know him at first when we worked together on a project in the 1980s; I edited The HP Chronicle and he agreed to contribute a column on languages, if I remember correctly. What stands out much better after all these years was Bruce's sense of humor and scope of intelligence. He and his wife Vicki founded a software company, Office Products Technology, first out of the LA area and then from Phoenix, where they relocated to start their family together.

Bruce was about my age when he died, so the news of his death by heart attack was sudden and sad and of course, a little scary. For the last several years we were both members of a virtual community of HP 3000 veterans — so I got to enjoy his writing, thinking and research even more for the past three years than during those few months when I was lucky enough to call him "one of my writers." He wrote more than 800 messages during the three years since I'd joined this community. He posted on a range of subjects as vast as ice skating, digital photography, real estate transactions, Mac OS X programming, percussion instruments and their science — the list of what he was interested in seemed endless.

The tributes poured in about from the HP community during this week. People told stories about his attention to detail (what kind of light bulb contacts are used in the UK, in preparation for a presentation there) or his devotion to accuracy in education (he and Vicki took their kids down the home schooling path, went one story, because the school was teaching electromagnetism in error, and Bruce couldn't get them to correct their cirriculum.) Many of his colleagues said they wished they knew him better. Through the writing he left behind on the Internet (just type "toback" into the address field on the HP 3000 newsgroup search engine), he won't be gone completely.

His programming lies at the heart of Formation, a ROC Software product which Bruce created as a product for Tymlabs, an extraordinary HP software company here in Austin during 1980s and early 90s. He could also demonstrate a sharp wit as well as trenchant insight. From a couple of his messages:

HP engineer [about a Webcast to encourage migration]: During the program, we will discuss the value and benefits of Transitioning from the HP e3000 platform to Microsoft's .NET.

Bruce: Oh... a very short program, then.

After PFC Jessica Lynch became a media celebrity for being rescued during the Iraq invasion, then celebrated in a song:

I have to wonder if all this attention would have been lavished on, say, a PFC James Lynch. My guess is that if the rescued POW had not been a comely female of prime reproductive age, we might have learned more about the folks who actually did the rescuing.

-- Bruce (who's not saying whether he's pro- or anti-war, but who's definitely anti-coverage-of-war-as-sporting-event)

A fellow of wry humor, Bruce was a realist and optimist all at once. He wrote a fabulous Web-based summary of the 3000 newsgroup traffic for many years during the 90s for the HP user group Interex, entries often full of wit. He kept up; just from reading his more than 800 posts in that community in the years since I joined, I find he was interested in new colorization algorithms, wrote a QCShow player for the Mac, developed a demo server for RETS (an open standard for exchanging real estate transaction) -- and yet he had squirreled away an HP Journal article on HP EGS, a 20-year-old graphics system run on a minicomputer, and his last post noted the revival of assembly language programming.

Through it all, Bruce seemed to be having fun. He once noted a study which reported about 10 percent of all tech gifts would be damaged after the year-end holidays by enraged low-tech users, then added, "Go team!" And I could always feel a kindred spirit in his passion for the Mac's rebirth. He was compiling a list of books "at arm's reach" by HP 3000 technical community members in the weeks before his death, a great idea that was as inclusive as it was incisive. Perhaps his lesson as he left us was to keep your mind open about the relative value of past wisdom and future knowledge. He certainly displayed his gifts for both in the HP community.

He leaves behind a wife and two children, the part of his life that I suspect shone the brightest for him. He told this story on himself in a message about his courtship with Vicki:

Well, as long as we’re confessing, I did take my wife Vicki to HP CSY (or whatever it was called in January, 1978) while on our honeymoon. We had a romantic lunch in the company cafeteria, after which we picked up the full HP3000 manual set I had ordered (all 11 volumes). We then set out on a drive through the redwoods in the mountains south of Santa Clara. I drove while Vicki read selected passages from the Instruction Set and Intrinsics manuals.

N.B., for newlywed techies: I have been paying for this ever since.

For any of us in the HP community who knew him, even a little bit, we'll miss his light, always reflected in his humor.

Tony's Doubts

"Doubt" won the Tony for Best Play Sunday night, and its star Cherry Jones won her second Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Play. Newsday said the play came closest to sweeping, with awards for Play, Director, Leading Actress and Featured Actress:

www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/nyc-tonyso605.story

The leading actor in the play, Brían F. O'Byrne, won a Tony last year. This award goes to actors in consecutive years about as often as Oscar visits a mantle two years running. The TV broadcast had its quirks, like playing nine-time Tony winner Mike Nichols off the stage when his acceptance speech for directing "Spamalot" ran long. You'd think that nine Tonys might earn you an extra 60 seconds. But the American Theatre Wing is just grateful for the TV exposure — those $90 seats don't sell themselves — so the show is a slave to the CBS commercial schedule. Lots of drug ads throughout, another oddity.

Spamalot's TV number was a takeoff on "American Idol," so the joke was lost on me. A friend saw the play this spring and said

I was a bit worried after the first couple of numbers in our musical tonight that I actually COULD have produced the play with a high school drama class. Then things got rolling and it was a full on knee slapper! If you liked "Holy Grail" you'll enjoy the musical adaptation, they've changed it up quite a bit, but the favorite bits are there.

NY Times critic Ben Brantley says "Doubt" will be able to tour easily with its modest cast and set requirements. You have to wonder if it will ever make it onto the community theatre circuit. Maybe only at the braver companies. Pederasty plays probably still aren't homespun fare, even if two of them were nominated for Best Play this year.

Empire Here We Come

After Apple schooled its users that Intel's chips are slower than IBM's, Apple today announced that Intel's processors will drive Macs starting in 2006. But an AP story, which is now legion on Web sites that should be doing a better job, like Silicon Valley.com, relies on a single opinion to damn the decision. Nathan Brookwood concludes, somehow, that the switch in processors will reduce Apple's market share.

Apple, meanwhile, told its developers today how easy it will be to modify their programs for the new architecture. HP has said the same thing about shifting to Itanium. It's always easy, according to the vendor who's mandating the change.

The AP story uses the typical journalist's trick of saying "analysts" when they mean only one. As if there were others who agreed with Brookwood, but couldn't provide a better quote. Brookwood says "each time there's an an architecture shift, many of its customers and partners say enough is enough."

That reflects a little bias, I'd say. Or if true, then HP's in some deep trouble, too, considering the breadth of architecture shift it prompts in moving to another of Intel's products. "Enough is enough" suggests the customer is already in distress.

I guess it's just too wild to imagine that Intel chips in Macs might give some weary Windows users, growing anxious about viruses that bog down their computers, a way to run both OS X and Windows on a single, low-cost box. Apple said today it is resigned to people buying Apple's next-year boxes to run Windows. However, it proposes to keep MacOS from booting on anything other than an Apple-brand computer. (That ought to sound familiar to the HP 3000 customers out there.)

That Apple move begs the question, "Why do people buy hardware from Apple, when it's so different from PC makers like Dell?"

The difference hasn't switched for Apple users: OS X. Until we descend into the crowded and gritty streets of Windows, we can probably still enjoy a measure of security difficult to ensure while using Microsoft's OS. I still believe that any moat that separates me from the PC world's insecurities, be it processor or OS, is welcome. Spyware, the worst of the lot, simply isn't a factor on a Mac. Yet.

It's far too early to determine the impact on Apple's market share from this manufacturing change, one that should not force changes to the thing that keeps Macs more secure. Any Mac downtick, of course, will be immediately attributed to this announcement by analysts who look for people saying "enough is enough." Some can't get enough. For Mac users this might spark a run on the G5 models. Out on macintouch.com today it said "Get PowerPC Macs while you still can!" from Amazon.com.

Nearly every report of the AP-grade seems to confuse the Mac's CPU with its OS while discussing differences. Unless the spyware writers can make time to code for both the Nextstep-based Mac OS as well as Windows, today's switch may be a change on a par with dropping the Motorola 68000 line 10 years ago.

Typical of the misunderstanding from the AP: Apple had a higher market share in the mid-80s, before it left the Moto chips behind. Aside from being ancient history in computing timelines, this wisdom overlooks the fact that during the 80s Macs had a bigger share because Windows was first non-existent, and then too green to be of much serious use. It was the DOS prompt vs. the Mac interface.

From my viewpoint, OS X didn't harm my Mac ownership. It simply delivered a great bounty of software to us Mac users. The old Macs didn't ship with Apache or FTP, for example, or run things like perl.

That AP writer was in a hurry, called one analyst, and wrote a lead with sizzle on a story that was supposed to be a less-sexy recount about the history of Apple's IBM relations. Some attention to the true nature of "Think Different" would have been more enlightening.

To learn more in three minutes, check out the NPR report of this evening. At least that reporter understands the difference between the OS and the CPU:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4682760

Don't Believe It's a Night of No Doubt

Tonight, while the country won't be distracted by basketball playoffs, another contest takes the court in the East: The Tonys. In the past Abby and I have watched the awards show like a sampler for upcoming trips to Broadway and New York's other theatre. There's no such trip on this year's calendar, but if there were, I'd want to see the play that could win tonight's Best Play Tony, "Doubt."

The Best Play award is the place where Broadway's invention has gone to live. So many of the theatres on Broadway fill their seats with shows that are sure bets. Half of this year's Best Musical-nominated shows rode the rocket of movie-based material, stories like the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Strong film background packs them in — just ask the producers of The Producers. The imitation has gotten so profound that Tonys have added "Best Revival Of" awards during the past five years, to re-award the likes of Twelve Angry Men, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, La Cage Aux Folles or Sweet Charity.

But at one point, all of those classics were lifting the curtain for the first time on Broadway, just like Doubt did this spring. The play, like many of the Broadway Best Play entries, had an earlier production debut on another New York stage, The Manhattan Theatre Company. Its author, John Patrick Shanley, has had a busy season in New York's theatre over the past year, with two other shows, Sailor's Song and a revival of his Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. This is the kind of season that creates a playwright's legend, the kind that All About Eve refers to when it describes its character Lloyd Richards, who's had a string of dramatic hits in that movie.

Shanley's play steps into some deep water. The New York Times sums it up this way:

Set in the Bronx in 1964, it is structured as a clash of wills and generations between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the young priest who may or may not be too fond of the schoolboys in his charge. He is played by Brian F. O'Byrne (a Tony winner this year for "Frozen"), whose deceptively easygoing, layered performance is the perfect counterweight to that of Ms. Jones.

This is the sort of play the Tonys love, or ought to. High-octane talent, like the actress who plays Sister Aloysius, 49-year-old Cherry Jones, the first openly lesbian performer to win a Best Actress Tony back in 1995. The play explores a tough subject, handled by an expert author. And maybe, with the play's director and two stars also nominated, Tony voters will take some satisfaction in giving a former Hollywood screenwriter a Tony to go with his Pulitzer Prize for "Doubt." Shanley, after all, won an Oscar for the screenplay of Moonstruck. The Times theatre critic Ben Brantley is predicting multiple awards for Doubt. That's of little doubt. But what a season for any writer: To place a Pulitzer and a Tony in the same year onto a shelf that already holds an Oscar. Shanely's IMDB profile begins, "After he was thrown out of Catholic school in New York..." He's a purist in the sense of that Lloyd Richards character, too. His contract with Hollywood insists not a single line of his screenplays can be changed. A tough point to negotiate, without a doubt.

Blogging for a Living?

The Wall Street Journal has found evidence of it: There's a livelihood in blogging. Stonyfield Farm hired a woman last year to post to four blogs which the dairy company maintains on its Web site, according to the WSJ story. The trick, according to a Stonyfield official in the article, is to be conversational. This encourages people to post comments. That's the goal of a good blog for a company: To invite a community to begin to build and connect.

Stonyfield's Web log sites — what it calls its "Cow"munities — maintained by chief blogger Christine Halvorson, are at www.stonyfield.com/weblog. The topics vary:

Strong Women Daily News: The latest news and insights from Strong Women partners

The Bovine Bugle: Daily moos from the Howmars Organic Dairy Farm

The Daily Scoop: Daily life at the yogurt works, and daily ways we try to nurture and sustain the environment.

There's also blogs for healthy kids and one for parents called Baby Babble.

It's all in a tasty cause. Stonyfield's yogurt products are tasty and as healthy as you'd want, from very low fat to luscious. Nearly all of its yogurt line is organic. While you might imagine it's a modest-szied company, Stonyfield is owned by Group Danone. Yes, the organic alternative is part of the world's largest dairy, water and biscuit company, $13.8 billion Dannon.

But that's a good thing. It makes buying organic easier, because Stonyfield yogurts are available in lots of stores. Blogging at its heart is just communication for a community , something I've been doing for a living since 1982, when I wrote my first articles as the Burnet County editor for my first community paper, The Highlander in Marble Falls, Texas. If you're looking for a job in the blogging field, there's a recruiter site to help: Bloggeropoly.

While that sounds pretty corporate, you can do the work to spread good. My friend Ellen located a great movie that promotes organic buying in the store. Called "Store Wars," it follows the quest of Cuke Skywalker and other vegetable friends. Natch, the Stonyfield blog includes a link to Store Wars, a fun 5-minute film. You need Flash to installed on your computer to watch it.

www.storewars.org/flash

Oh yeah, the living I mentioned. Stonyfield's CEO Gary Hirshberg says he wants to hire a couple more full-time bloggers within a couple of years, according to the WSJ. Blogger pay can be good, too. A listing on the job site Dice.com for a blogger post at Flycell, a game and ringtone provider, included a salary of $50,000 to $70,000 a year.

Consider the Light an audition, Gary.

Finally, the Finals

They overtook a speeding team like radar waves, coming up suddenly in the Suns' rear-view with suffocating defense and a surprise scoring kick. Now the team that had to fight for its dap all season has one week to bask in the light glinting off the Western Conference NBA trophy. San Antonio's Spurs open their third title series next Thursday night, filling the town with pride and the SBC Center's seats with butts.

But the team won't sell a single Finals ticket at the arena. To buy one you have to sign up for a random ticket number at Ticketmaster's Ticket Center locations around San Antone. They call out a number at noon on Saturday, and that number holder becomes first in line, limit four tickets. If it's 37, and you hold 36, you're last in line. Or you can call at noon on Saturday and take your chances in the phone lottery, or push through the spurs.com or ticketmaster.com Web sites. It's worth it to feel the energy of 18,000 people focused on one outcome, blown away by the maniac drive of Manu, snarling for the ball and not stopping until he's on the floor or the ball has sailed through the hoop. I got to see him in that building once this year, against Houston. He scored six points in 2:11 to carry the Spurs out of a 79-76 squeaker lead. Around a couple of Tony Parker steals and baskets, Manu led the Spurs to a 12-point lead in 141 seconds.

Yeah, they can score that fast this year, even against a team that can D-up like the Rockets. So the Finals will be worth our money and time, cuz a fan never knows when a postseason run can dry up and leave you short of the title round. Sometimes it just takes a miracle shot with 0.4 seconds left, like the one Abby and I watched down in SBC last year when the Lakers rubbed out the Spurs' hope of a repeat. I can admit it — I want to be present for an antidote to that kind of moment: late-game magic to deliver a third win to keep us alive, or — dare I dream it — the confetti raining down after the title game.

We managed two games' worth of Finals in 2003, our first championship tickets, when David Robinson was wrapping up his career with a second championship ring drive. It only took DSL-speed Internet service and leaving the Ticketmaster Web page loaded in the browser to get tickets for each game. Yeah, and a little luck, like anybody hopes for in sports.

We're holding back until Game 6 this time around. A sixth game in the Finals is just about a certainty for the Spurs, since they'll face a stronger defense from either Miami or Detroit. (My money is on the Pistons to repeat, since they've got championship experience from last year). That championship savvy led the Spurs past the Suns last night, as well as in the other three wins. The Suns stayed right in every game they lost, even to the last minute. But staying in a game is one level. Remaining focused to hold a lead — three times on the road, no less — is the next level one that comes easier when you've already taken two titles over the past six years.

Tim Duncan, the only Spur on the court who can claim that much championship experience, turned his game around in 48 hours. Monday night he was missing free throws (nine!), baskets in the paint, and his leadership touch. But then on the Suns' last night of their season, Duncan had more points before the half than he scored in all of Monday's game. At one point he scored 10 points in a row in the game's early going. He wanted to erase the TV highlight reels of his struggles. Two days after converting all 15 of his free throws, Duncan missed nine of 12. The Austin paper made fun of his struggles from Monday:

Note to NBA: stop production on the Tim Duncan free-throw instruction video. Hold off, for now, on engraving the Western Conference championship trophy.

In last night's close-out game, Tim made three of four free throws.

Timmy also led the team to the Finals in his classic style: He led the Spurs Wednesday in minutes played, field goals made, rebounds, blocked shots and offensive rebounds. He said afterward he wanted to "rectify" the mistakes of his Monday night in front of the local fans. that's the kind of old-school leader the Spurs count upon, a guy who takes the burden of defeat on himself.

He didn't have to carry his team, though. The top reason the Spurs got beyond the Suns — go-go guys who are going to be back in the late rounds of the playoffs for years to come — that reason was Manu Ginolili, muscling rebounds, driving to the basket for foul shots, dishing dimes out when the defense swarmed him.

Finally, Tony Parker's perimeter shot arrived. Though he had a rough 8-21 night overall, the two 3-pointers he sank halfway through the third quarter let the Spurs pull away during a quarter where San Antonio usually struggles. MVP Steve Nash hit a jumper to pull the Suns within three and the arena in Phoenix exploded. San Antonio didn't take a timeout. They focused to run off 21 seconds of shot clock and then Parker delivered, twice in the next 32 seconds, his second shot set up by a Robert Horry steal:

7:24
Steve Nash makes 15 ft jumper. 59-56

7:07
Tony Parker makes three point jumper. 62-56

7:03
Amare Stoudemire loses ball, stolen by Robert Horry.

6:48
Tony Parker makes 25-ft three point jumper. 65-56

6:46
Phoenix Full Timeout.

That sequence made me turn to Abby and say, "They can win this game tonight." Because Parker showed the hand the Spurs couldn't play Monday, and he tipped the balance of power on a night when Amare Stoudemire took whatever he wanted at the basket for the Suns — except for a clutch 3-pointer that rimmed out with 13 seconds left. That basket that would have pulled Phoenix within one possession. It was the kind of miss that Horry experienced against the Spurs in 2003, a ball that was halfway down and popped out, along with the Suns' hopes for a fairytale season. He's now got a chance to pad his championship resume, with a third team, for his sixth ring.

Meanwhile we've got a week off from the delicious tension, Abby and I, time to let our heart-rates recede and enjoy the grappling in Miami and Detroit throughout this weekend. We'll take either opponent, because the Spurs are past the Suns. The right kind of D-up basketball prevailed, for now. Having beaten the three hottest offensive teams in the NBA to get to the Finals, San Antonio's arena will now thrum with defense, the rippling notes of "Zombie Nation" during the timeouts, and the surge of Spurs experience in the hardest of moments. We needed our own Finals experience to weather gales of emotion while watching on TV, then listening to the WOAI radio call from masterful Bill Schoening. This is a broadcaster so good in just his fourth season of NBA basketball that he doesn't need a color commentator. (Here's a Real Player clip of an interview of him during the Spurs last title season, in 2003.) When the going gets nervy during close games, Bill's call, full of detail and empathetic emotion, makes it tolerable for us rabid fans.

Basketball has at least four more games for a team fast enough to overtake and tough enough to win it all. In San Antonio you can buy D-Rags, black cloth to wave and Spur on the defense.

Down here, we believe it's D-fense that wins titles.

But the Suns series proved the Spurs can run, too. They have Timmy, Manu to slash and steal the ball, Parker to teardrop, and Big Shot Bob Horry to make crucial steals and 3-pointers. It might all be enough to get past those Wallace Boys from Detroit, or Shaq and The Flash from Miami.

Spurs in Six, I hope, just like the last time they won it all.

Getting Engaged with Mobile Upgrades

Cingular wants a relationship with you. Our cell service provider wooed both Abby and I into the a deeper commitment yesterday, when all we wanted was a newer phone for my gal. Nokia's 5165 phones — so popular two years ago you could buy a colored faceplate for them on Amazon — tend to shed their batteries after awhile. The skinny battery slipped off her phone once too often, so she wanted something newer.



I suspected it would not be as simple as buying a newer phone and having Cingular activate it. But I was hopeful as we drove to the closest Cingular retail outlet. We had no luck getting upgraded over the Web; we were ATT Wireless customers who got assimilated by the Cingular/SBC Borg, and Cingular's Web site just doesn't know how to upgrade a phone that didn't start in the Cingular system. (It was our third assimilation, after starting out as GTE customers in 2001, then seeing GTE become Cingular a year later. Billing problems drove us to ATT, but I learned you can run, just not hide.)

Alas, our first stab at Cingular retail service was a bust. The tiny storefront carried the Cingular logo, but no real link to the Cingular corporate database. When we told the clerk (no, he's a sales representative) we were former ATT customers, he rolled his eyes just a bit. "I can't look you up," he said after a minute of tentative tapping on his keyboard. "If I put your number in, it will put my computer into an endless loop, because it's an ATT number."

Who knew wireless communications could wield such power?

We needed a better store. He pointed us "just across the highway" -- an extra 10-minute drive -- to another Cingular retail outlet. Three traffic lights later we walked into a much bigger store that used to be an ATT Wireless outlet. It too had been assimilated, but it retained a computer system that wouldn't fall into the Empire's Death Loop when the sales rep entered our numbers.

We're close to finished, I thought. We just have to wait for our name to be called after we sign in, find a phone Abby likes, get activated and pay up. At least that's the way ATT did it for me 18 months ago.

Oops, too simple. Seems our phone plan would not allow the computer to just sell Abby a more modern phone. No, we were on a plan for older technology — yeah, even me, who used a phone just a year-and-a-half old — so there was no way they'd just add one newer device to our service. My Nokia 3560, which I'd carried on about 5,000 miles of bike riding, would have to go, too.

I made a face that anybody could read as upset. But our rep Sally — just the luck of the draw, with three others working that day — was dilligent, persistent, and patient with my apparent frustration. She could set us up with a new plan. I wanted to resist this option, and so she moved to helping us with our immediate problem: replacing a bad battery. She went to the recycle box in the back and produced a Nokia battery for Abby's old phone, and even gave us an address of a battery replacement shop in Central Austin.

This was service. We were Cingular customers, after all, and she wanted us to leave satisfied. I asked if she could look up the end-date of our contract, to see how long I had to remain a Cingular customer. The service was good, but the options seemed designed to get us into a new contract. There are a lot fewer places to buy cell service from today, but there are options.

"March 2005," she said.

"So I'm not bound to Cingular by a contract now."

"Yes, you can shop around." Sally delivered this line as unfazed as anybody who's been told "I don't have to stick with your company." Sure, you can date around. We were still potential customers.

I had an epiphany. We didn't come to her shop to become nomads, searching for a better provider. We wanted a new phone and as few changes as possible. "Let me guess," I offered. "I bet we could both get new phones and better service for less money."

I had said the magic words. All we had to do was agree to a new contract. "Darling, we're engaged!" Sally was so enthusiastic she sold us a better rate a full day before it became official. She's activating the new phones for us today. Even trying to pick out a new number for Abby that ends in -YOGA.

Because in the cell phone world of 2005, it's all about the relationship. The phone is the least important part of the formula. That's why it's easy to get a free phone, if you sign up for service. Or a cheap phone with fun features, like a camera.

Which was another surprise on the afternoon. I just wanted a similar phone. Abby went way past the simple Nokia and into picture phone territory. "I can send you pictures of Lilias this summer when I'm at Feathered Pipe Ranch," she said. "This will be fun. And I have to get into this stuff more easily." As for me, I can talk on my new phone without an earpiece, hands-free. Good for those hour-long calls to mom, who's retired and still loves to talk. (No, it's not about calling while driving the car. Bad form. Hang up and drive.)

We all learned something yesterday. The new two-year contract we signed gave us 50 more minutes a month, nationwide service for no extra charge, and a bonus of two phones for about $60. We could have had two phones for $36 if we'd wanted to go real lowball. We were prepared to spend twice as much for just one phone.

What they want to sell you is the relationship, not that little device that you bond with because you carry it around with you all the time. But I feel like flashing my tiny Nokia 3120 like an engagement ring. "Cingular must love me — they gave me this for free!"