Beyond Here Be Old Stuff

In 2001 and 2002 I wrote a baseball column entitled "Chin Music" for a webzine called Bull Magazine. Bull was an ambitious project, the brainchild of a bright fellow and excellent writer by the name of Chris Ulbrich. Maybe a bit too ambitious, in that he and I took days upon days to write, edit, and publish each basic movie review, cultural critique, and half-baked baseball wisecrack. The quality of the product was fantastic, but prolific, Chris and I were not. Blogging had already hit, of course, but it wouldn't reach critical mass for another year or so, and it simply didn't occur to us that we could create content on the fly and look like anything other than amateurs. Live and learn, I suppose.

Chris found himself a respectable job in late 2002 or early 2003, and I decided that ignoring all of my clients and responsibilities to write about utility infielders, sabermetrics, and labor strife wasn't the best use of my time. Thus, Bull died, and until very recently drifted like a ghost ship on the high seas of the web. It's gone now, either because Chris decided not to pay for the hosting or because someone somewhere decided that the zombie that was Bull needed a mercy killing. It's now in the limbo of Google cacheland, awaiting its ascension to webzine heaven.

What follows are the old Chin Music columns, reproduced in more or less their original form and marked with original dates of publication. There are some formatting issues that I'm too lazy to fix at the moment, and many of the links are dead, I presume, but I don't think any of the meaning will be lost. Enjoy them, for what they're worth. I certainly enjoyed writing them.