Please excuse my recent absence

My wife and I took the kids on a long weekend trip to Pittsburgh, where we visited Kennywood and the Carnegie Science Center, and did some shopping on Penn Avenue after eating breakfast at an excellent restaurant called DeLuca's, which we saw featured on the Travel Channel's Man v. Food.

Kennywood is quite an underrated amusement park. It's got five or six roller coasters, all of which were pretty good, a couple of which were very good, and the lines were at most half as long as the lines are at Cedar Point. You could ride all of Kennywood's coasters at least three or four times in a day; at Cedar Point, you probably couldn't get through them once. I know Cedar Point has more roller coasters than Kennywood, but you see my point.

The Carnegie Science Center was really good too. There's a World War II-era submarine parked there that you can walk through (I got a bit claustrophobic in there, but still found it fascinating), and there's a side building that houses sports-related activities. You can find out how fast you can throw a baseball, try to figure out which of two bats was corked, see what your vertical leap is, and many more such activities. We'd have had more time to do them if we hadn't gotten to that part of it less than an hour before closing.

Oh, and don't worry, we didn't all turn into Steelers fans—although our 11-year-old decided it would be fun to count how many people she saw wearing Steeler paraphernalia on Penn Avenue. I think she lost count around 40.

Anyway, that's the main reason I haven't posted for a week. I hope both my regular readers will forgive me.

• The Browns have posted their first depth chart of the season, ahead of Saturday's preseason opener against the Packers. There's not much of note here. Top draft pick Joe Haden, who just got into camp last week, is listed behind veterans Eric Wright and Sheldon Brown at cornerback, but Wright just hurt his leg during practice today, so Haden might get the start. We don't yet know how serious the injury is, but this is football, and these things will happen. Anyway, the depth chart isn't the part that interests me. The part that interests me is that the Browns will take the field on Saturday, and this town is set to shift into football mode. I'm pretty excited to see how they look, even if I'm considering an 8-8 season to be a best-case scenario.

• Ohio State is ranked #2 in the opening AP poll, and quarterback Terrelle Pryor is on every list of Heisman hopefuls. Obviously, none of that is important until Sept. 2, when the Buckeyes open the season against a pretty weak Marshall squad; on the other hand, it can't be bad. Maybe this team will give Jim Tressel his second top-level national championship. Their first true test comes Sept. 11 against the #13 Miami Hurricanes at the Horseshoe. That should be very interesting indeed. The only team ranked higher on Ohio State's schedule right now is #12 Wisconsin.

• The Indians are playing decent baseball these days. They lost two of three to the Twins after splitting a four-game series with the Red Sox, but those are both contending teams. They open a three-game set tonight against the suddenly red-hot Orioles, who are 6-1 since Buck Showalter took over as manager. Showalter was the guy I wanted the Indians to hire instead of Manny Acta, but what's done is done. In any case, this Orioles team at its core is a terrible, terrible ballclub, and they will surely come back to earth sometime soon. Maybe starting tonight, when Justin Masterson faces off against Jake Arrieta.

• LeBron James appeared in Akron last weekend and went to Cedar Point on Monday, and nobody beat him up. Is it wrong that I'm disappointed?