It’s 5 p.m., in other words it’s 75 minutes before first pitch of the Daily Record softball team’s game against the Tav.

It’s our first game, and we basically have our debut against the Yankees of Ellensburg men’s slow-pitch. Oh well, it’s just the first game of many.

My column this week will go deeper into my rationale for coming out of a six-year retirement to play this year, but I thought I’d share with you my pregame thoughts and preparations.

Actually I’m not really preparing and my thoughts kind of stopped and started with checking the time at the start of this blog entry.

I’m not nervous. I’ve played a lot of softball over the years and I’m pretty clear on what I can and cannot do.

Our manager Ryan showed me the lineup earlier today, which was a little was a little discouraging. He has me listed with three or four other guys for one position, which is fine except that the lineup also contains several blank spots. I think he’s hoping for some last minute upgrades.

My mistake was coming out for a couple of practices. He’s seen what I bring to the table, and its not the fine china.

It’s starting to rain now so maybe our debut will be postponed. Although I don’t see how a little weather could impact our play one way or another.

OK, I got to go. Time to see if my old cup still fits. Wish me luck.

I was at the checkout in the grocery store, juggling the multiple cards I need to slide and trying to rapidly click through the requests for donations, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the clerk.

I thought she asked me how the corn was and I told her it’s been pretty good this season.

She giggled and said she wanted to know what color the corn was.

“Um,” I said. “I think there’s a white, a bi-color and a yellow. But don’t worry it’s all the same price.”

At that point I should have kept silent, but I found the question odd.

“Why do you want to know?” I said.

“We’re supposed to keep track of how much of each color is sold,” she said.

“How would you know the color?” I asked.

“There’s signs in the produce section,” she said.

“No, I mean, how would you be expected to know just by looking at the ear,” I said.

“I have to peel back the silk,” she said.

“That seems a little excessive,” I said.

“How else can they track what is sold?” she said.

She got me with that one. I suppose they could track sales the way they’ve always tracked sales by counting how many are stocked and then counting how many remain at the end of the day. I didn’t bring this up because this conversion had already exceeded my recommended daily allowance of random chit-chat.

What the old-school system does not allow for is tracking my personal corn color preference. This is just another piece of information the grocery store is collecting on me in preparation for … I’m not sure, but it scares me none the less.

People like to complain about traveling — whether air travel or trains, but having taken Amtrak to Chicago, then traveled around Chicago on pretty much every form of transit, from trains to boats, and ending with a plane trip back to Seattle, I’d like to testify on the incredible efficiency of the American travel systems.

We were able to get everywhere we wanted to, pretty much on time. Amtrak always takes a bashing, but after 47 hours on a train with two boys, ages 8 and 4, I’d have to say I’d do it again.

One area of improvement would be reconfiguring how people are seated on planes. We flew Southwest so it was first come, first sit, but no airline seats people with an eye toward efficiency.

People should be seated strictly on their ability to quickly get out of their seats and exit the plane. It’s not necessarily an old vs. young people thing. A senior citizen without a carry-on bag can get out faster than a young person who decided to push the limits by jamming a body-sized duffel bag in the overhead bin. Those who can get out fast sit near the front and those who are destined to straggle sit toward the back. Everyone would be happier.

Each week I spend probably a day or two or three, never more than five, trying to think up an idea for a column.

If I’m really stumped some times I find it useful to look at the calendar. Often I’m inspired by discovering something like, “Hey, Christmas is next week.”

Anyway, this week I couldn’t help but notice the multiple graduation ceremonies listed for this week. So I thought to myself, “I should write a graduation column.”

And I should, really, if I could. But I’ve discovered over the years that I need to avoid writing about high school. My experiences weren’t so good, which is not uncommon. The problem is the intensely horrible experiences I find faintly amusing now still come across as intensely horrible to the average reader.

I actually tried writing one this weekend and I couldn’t go two sentences without dredging up dreck. It was light-hearted dreck, but still.

So no, graduation column from this guy. But next Monday is Flag Day. I’ll see what I can work up.

It’s been a tough week for my sports heros.

First came the death of the Thoroughbred Chinook Pass. I spent many a glorious afternoon as a teen watching the ninth and 10th races at Longacres. Entry to the track was free after the eighth race, so I’d either go with one of my uncles or appropriate my mom’s car and park for free next to a cow pasture a few blocks away from the track.

Chinook Pass would have to be the best horse I ever saw race in person. He set the world record for the five furlongs on dirt and was an Ecplipse Award winner. I saw him win the 1983 Longacres Mile and actually won a couple bucks on him.

He died at age 31, a pretty good age for a Thoroughbred. He was euthanized after suffering from a high heart rate and showing signs of distress.

Of course, on Wednesday Ken Griffey, Jr., retired. Griffey is the best player I ever saw play in person, and I did see Barry Bonds play in person. As much as I enjoyed Griffey’s return, I wish he had retired after the end of last season. Seeing his teammates carry him around the field at the conclusion of the final game just felt like a fitting end. But he deserved the right to come back and try to extend his career.

Being older than both Chinook Pass and Griffey, I watched their exits with interest and an eye toward picking up tips. Here are the important things I’ve learned:

1. I need to lose a little more weight if my co-workers are to carry me around the newsroom on my last day. I’m not overweight but newsroom employees aren’t known for their feats of physical exertion.

2. If I show up one morning showing “signs of distress,” I don’t want to be taken into the alley and shot. Give me until lunch to make that call.

These two stories also emphasis that it’s better to be an aging baseball star with a multi-million dollar home in Orlando, Fla., awaiting retirement, then it is to be an elderly race horse.

But I already knew that.

I was listening to an interview with the lead singer of Green Day on NPR last week and it got me to thinking about music groups that do and don’t remain relevant.

Green Day seems like a good band to me, they just came around slightly past the time I was listening to that type of music. I will say the group keeps producing varied and interesting work. An album has even been made into a Broadway-style show.

Some musicians constantly refresh and reinvent themselves. Johnny Cash did interesting work pretty much up until the day he died. Bob Dylan can still surprise. Tom Waits definitely avoids artistic ruts. 

But most acts enjoy a window of opportunity. These are groups that belong in a particular time period. Many of the 1980s arena rock groups don’t time travel all that well. Journey comes to mind. Listening to their music is like being trapped in a 1980s time capsule as it plummets into the sea, the darkness and pressure slowly building until oblivion blessedly ends the torment. I’m not a huge Journey fan.

There are some groups that I wished remained in tact, remained creating. The Clash top my list. From what I’ve read, the group was actually talking about getting back together just before Joe Strummer died. 

But most groups do fine stuck in their time. I have no burning desire to hear what Wham! might have to say about our contemporary times.

And then there are groups that should never have left one place or time. Cheap Trick should have never had left Budokan. The screaming Japanese fans make that album. 

Writers, of course, face the same dilemma. But that’s a discussion for a different day.

There will be a letter from Kurt Sharar in Thursday’s Daily Record, touching on this topic, but I thought I’d chip in a little early.

Sharar’s letter addresses the notion that society is in the toilet because religion has been exorcised from the schools and that in the glory days of the 1940s and 1950s God sat right behind the teacher and everything in the world was jim-dandy. Sharar said he attended school in that era and teachers were not preachers and overt religious instruction would not have been tolerated.

I didn’t attend school in that era, but I did spend time in both the public school and the Catholic school system. The main difference, from my view, was the classroom atmosphere and discipline, not the religious content. One day a student asked my favorite English teacher, a nun, whether we could have a prayer before a test. She said sure, but he’d been much better off studying before the test. That pretty much summed up Catholic school education. It was more demanding than the public school but you were taught rely on strong study habits, not divine intervention.

The only class to regularly include prayer at the start was P.E., and I think most of the boys were praying for something really bad to happen to the P.E. teacher.

We had religion as a required class, but it was not religious indoctrination, it was the study of world religions. They were classes in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and such. And they weren’t titled, “The Evils of Islam.” Learning about other religions is critical to understanding the world in which we live. But it seems like those pounding the Bible for more religion in school want Christian indoctrination. And why they want teachers to perform this service, I’m not sure. Preachers and parents are much better suited to this task.

Look for Sharar’s letter Thursday. It’s a good read.

Those of you who read the Daily Record now know that those helicopters I’ve heard the past couple weeks and assumed to be the dreaded “black helicopters” employed by the U.N. for nefarious but never explained reasons were actually state Department of Natural Resources helicopters taking part in training for the upcoming fire season. Oh well, never mind.

We live a few blocks from Kittitas Valley Community Hospital and can hear when the helicopters arrive and leave for medical transports. I haven’t heard that many lately, which is why I really noticed the heavy helicopter traffic at night these past few days.

Although I haven’t checked the hospital calls that closely, I don’t think they’re medical helicopters. Usually I’m in bed when I hear them so I haven’t gone outside and checked, but they also sound larger than the craft that go in and out of KVCH.

It could be they’re military helicopters on some sort of night training. One of the thrills of driving to Yakima (maybe the only thrill) is to see the copters popping up over the hillside flying in formation for some sort of training.

It kind of reminds me of several years ago when people claimed to see the legendary “black” helicopters around Liberty. These were thought to be UN copters preparing for some sort of takeover. I think this was also about the time when the first grizzly bear recovery area was proposed — the controversy being it crossed the U.S.-Canadian border.

These flights are at night so I’m not sure I could tell whether these were “black” helicopters or not even if I looked. I just hope it doesn’t have anything to do with the grizzly bear recovery area.

Anyone else heard these helicopters?

I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but this past year I’ve become hooked on Pandora.com. Pandora is a website that allows you to build your own radio station. You select an artist and the website plays that group’s music plus music from similar artists. You can also add featured artist to expand the scope. You get 40 hours free a month and I’ve yet to come close to that limit.

It’s a cool idea, but some stations work better than others. I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan so the first thing I did was create a Cohen station. It drew in the expected — Dylan, Van Morrison, etc. — but also deeply plumbed the depths of the sub-genre of depressed male artists. Some of these guys I was not familiar with at all because their careers had been tragically cut short by self-inflicted death. I still listen to the Cohen station but in limited doses.

I created a few other stations, including Irish music and punk, but all stations seemed to eventually lead to the Barenaked Ladies, a group I don’t particularly care for. I can only assume that Pandora treats the Barenaked Ladies as Spankle to cover over gaps in genres.

A few weeks ago, though, I struck Pandora gold with a station based on Galactic, a New Orleans-based jazz and funk group. It’s an evolution of the Meters, a legendary New Orleans band. I added Dessa, a Minneapolis-based hip hop artist and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group that revise pre-World War II black string band music to the featured artist list. As an aside, Central Washington University should bring this group to campus next year. It would fit the school’s mission of featuring culturally diverse groups, plus it’s a bit of a music history lesson. The result is a station that consistently plays, high-energy, fun music.

So, that’s my Pandora tip for the day. If you have a station that works for you let me know and we’ll share it with the class.