Bloggers get grief for being enraptured with their own viewpoint, but I know people who've never even heard of blogs who are just as bad. They feel compelled to deliver an opinion on everything under the vanishing ozone. Maybe bloggers are vanity publishers opining into a dark place that escapes even Google's bright light, on topics about which they have no expertise, with little research and no editing. But I submit that such an assault on the culture is far less abhorent than the (non-blogger) type who consistently accosts you in the flesh with his half-baked, already-evaporating take. Run into one of these guys and you are hopeless. You can feign disinterest, but that won't slow him down. The slashing and pummeling will continue until you finally have to say, "Hmm, yeah, good point."

Whereas, when I get set to launch my opinions, here, you can click away in an instant. No harm, no foul!

1. There will be no baseball strike. But if there is, it will be a good thing because it will free up the great spaces in my evenings and weekends now devoted to watching the Giants. (This is the same way I approach the pennant race when the Giants are teetering on elimination. "Just lose," I say. "You bastards take up too much of my time." And they do lose, eventually.)

2. We shouldn't invade Iraq unless there is real evidence that an attack on the United States is imminent. My suspicion is the Bush administration is hard at work manufacturing such evidence.

3. Warm weather that speeds up ripening and brings the harvest in soon will be lauded by winemakers and growers as a welcome turn of events. The grapes will have shot forward to a stunning state of ripeness. Either that or, continued cool weather that slows ripening and brings the harvest in late will be lauded by winemakers and growers as a welcome turn of events. The grapes will have gathered enormous complexity by virtue of this extended hang time.

4. The new Vintner's Collective in downtown Napa is beautiful and the people behind the project are to be saluted. But I hate it. It's St. Helena plunked down in our crappy little downtown and it makes me think the anti-redevelopment crowd, which I had previously dismissed and which fears for the vanishing working-class soul of Napa, might have a point: Twenty or thirty years from now the whole friggin' valley, from American Canyon to Calistoga, will be a gigantic food/wine/B&B/gallery Disneyland. The Green Lantern alone will survive–as the "scary ride."