Kansas City never hit my radar screen as a place to live.  But when I discovered Joe Posnanski’s baseball-ish blog, I wished I had been reading his Kansas City sports columns for years.   His tales of childhood in Cleveland make me nostalgic for it, though I’ve never even been in Ohio.  He isn’t old school, he respects the modern stats, yet he’s been around enough to anchor them with necessary caveats and a human basis.  His touch is light enough to stay well above the frequent baseball-blog tone of ridicule.

And damn he’s funny.  I get most of his references and his jokes seem just a more advance and adroit form of humor that I feel I’m almost capable of.

I don’t know if he pioneered his use of footnotes, but he’s self-promoted his style with the name Posterisk. when he’s lost on a subject that I don’t have much emotional involvement (such as writing about the KC Chiefs), I’ll scan what he’s dubbed the Posterisks.  It’s sort of like David Foster Wallace footnoting, except that you’re led to the footnote by an asterisk, the footnoted section is typed in italics and resides just below the paragraph that originates the asterisk*.    It’s easy to read in computer scroll text.   And nothing makes me smile like a good tangent.

* And he will even embed Posterisks**

** I need to think of something Posnanski-style funny to put here.  ***

*** Okay, here is the Posterisk that first pulled me into the almost daily musings of Joe — much to the loss of my professional productivity.  Scroll down to the third italic segment for his imagined pitch to the TV producer for Gilligan’s Island.