Shutting Down The Internet, At Least For Occasional Five-Minute Intervals

Bruce Weber. No, I'm not talking about the Anatidae-voiced Illinois basketball coach, nor the fashion photographer particularly skilled at shooting profiles of naked men. (Sending that link to my always-eager-for-Illini-news father is still one of my favorite jokes. It gets him every time.) It turns out there's another Bruce Weber, a sports reporter for The New York Times, and his new book, As They Seem 'Em, is my new obsession. Basically, Weber hung out with umpires for three years and learned everything you could know about him. Umpires are weird creatures: They're on the road all the time, they rarely have anything resembling a normal family life and they exist almost solely to be yelled it. It reminded me of Ron Luciano's famous The Umpire Strikes Back, which I read as a kid and made me think that every umpire was secretly charming, funny and sweet. Luciano killed himself 14 years ago. So there's that.