« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
what better way to celebrate 30 years (and relax after a full weekend of celebratin') than by taking the afternoon off with a cigar and some Monday Night Football, live from Norwich. besides, better to get home before the full-blown snow-induced panic sets in.
"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol...There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality...But they used to take morphia and cocaine...Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178...Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug...Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant...All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects...Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology...Stability was practically assured...It only remained to conquer old age...All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course...Along with them all the old man's mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime...Work, play–at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking–thinking!...Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to …"
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
* Steve Keene selling his art (even cheaper than through his website) from a small space in Williamsburg. For those so inclined, it's right around the corner from the Brooklyn Brewery on Wythe Ave. between N. 10th and N. 11th. open only on Saturday nd Sunday from 2pm - 6pm. for those unfamiliar, Keene produces paintings in bulk in a sort of "art for everyone" vein. he's done album covers for Pavement, Apples in Stereo and Silver Jews among others.
* Bingo in Park Slope. there's no website for the place, but this guy includes it in his catalog of businesses on 5th Avenue.
* Richard Linklater has made a movie out of "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick. i'm not thrilled that Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder are prominently involved, but i'm hoping that the great animation techniques in effect help to further distance the actors from the characters. i do wonder, though, if putting Robert Downey, Jr. in such close proximity to Woody Harrelson constitutes some sort of probation violation.
as we left the apartment this morning, some bloke walking by executed a farmer's blow onto the sidewalk. this sent the wife into hysterics about how disgusting that was, how people should know better, etc. i agree that i don't necessarily want to see someone rocketing snot right in front of me, but i contended that it wasn't nearly as offensive to me as someone littering or not picking up after their dog and that compared to some of the other things i've seen in this city, this paled in comparison. she said that it might be fine to do while playing sports but not as a casual thing, and had to end the conversation because she couldn't believe how little it bothered me. i don't know why, but it just didn't.
i am grateful, though, becuase this gave me an excuse to do some research on what this maneuver is called beyond "farmer's blow" which is what i grew up with. here's some of what i found (including a couple that could be categorized as offensive): snot rockets, bush oysters, bushman's blow, one-gun salute, hatching a hippie, South African nose blow, Jewish handkerchief (also Italian, Norwegian and Saskatchewan handkerchief).
as Google's march to world dominance continues (their news maps service blows the competition away), it occured to me that there was one service that they weren't offering: e-mail notification when someone types your name into their search engine. all you would have to do was sign up with a name and e-mail address and they could send you a message to let you know that someone was looking you (or someone with the same name) up. of course it would work better for people with uncommon names, but it might be interesting for Emily Jones to see how often her name gets typed in as well. if perhaps that volume of e-mails is a bit much to be sending out, they could send out a weekly or monthly tally of your relative popularity; even if it's just you typing your own name in over and over again to boost your stats.
the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show rolls over for a second night tonight with the final 3 "Best in Group" winners and the "Best in Show" to be handed out. the wife and i spent an hour or so on Sunday hanging around the Hotel Pennsylvania like a couple of weird dog show groupies, oohing and ahhing around the lobby, making small talk with breeders from Hicksville, USA and just generally waiting to see someone peeing on the floor. a large Husky (or possible a Malamute) jumped on me and scratched my nose and we saw some really sweet Mastiffs, some Great Danes with giant balls (this place was Bob Barker's worst nightmare), a couple of Vizslas that seemed totally ready to get it on and some Spuds McKenzie dogs (Bull Terriers) that made the wife go all goofy.
at any rate, last night's winner were: the Great Pyrenees (Working group); the Norfolk Terrier (Terrier group); the freaking Pekingese (Toy group); and the Tibetan Terrier (Non-Sporting group).
as for tonight, t.s.o.a. is pulling for the Vizsla in the Sporting group, the Coonhound in the Hound group (though you really can't go wrong with much there as far as i'm concerned), and the Australian Shepherd in the Herding group with the hopes that one of them or the Great Pyrenees will win it all.
dog owners and dog lovers looking for other televised entertainment would do well to search out The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan on the National Geographic Channel. the guy is totally amazing: he can turn any unruly dog tame and obedient in a matter of minutes. i've totally been copping some of his techniques to use on our own dog, and the preliminary results have been really good, especially during our walks. for a much geekier pet-related TV experience, watch PetKeeping with Marc Morrone which tends to be on on Saturday or Sunday mornings in the NYC area.
**UPDATE** well, none of my dogs won but i was reasonably happy with the German Short-Haired Pointer that won best in show. also, today's Salon has an article on the Dog Whisperer which will give you an overview of what he's all about (caveat: you'll have to watch an ad to read it).
i don't think i've ever actually posted about the NHL lockout which has now stretched past the 4-month mark and threatens to wipe out the entire season. let's set aside the fact that the owners (like their compatriots in baseball) severly overstated the financial peril that they claim makes owning a hockey team unprofitable; let's set aside the the fact that they have no one to blame but themselves for signing players to the large contracts that threaten to bankrupt them; let's set aside their compete unwillingness to bargain in good faith by making any concessions from their original hard-line positions (while the players have certainly shown a willingness to negotiate, unless you consider offering to take a 24% pay cut to be a bad faith ploy); and let's set aside that the best way to get cost certainty for your business is to control your own costs and not wait for someone else to bail you out. the thing that i'm sick of hearing constantly is that most of the owners are better off with their teams not playing because they lose less money this way. that's 100% wrong and here's why: no owner has ever sold a team for less than s/he bought it for and in most cases the value of teams has escalated at a rate that far ourstrips inflation, or interest rates or the stock market or anything else you want to compare it to (the average value of a team was 2.7 times higher in 1999 than it was in 1991 and my brief perusal of the numbers indicates another 25% jump between 1999 and 2002). by not playing, the owners are damaging the one thing they can ill afford to hurt and that is the value of their investment. a franchise valued at $150 Million has no worth when there are no tickets sold and no games played. players can go overseas and still make money, but an owner can't sell when there's nothing to sell. that the owners would know this and yet continue down the path of destruction only makes them look more foolish.
on to steroids (you didn't think i would let this go did you?). Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, blah, blah, blah. if self-righteousness was water, the entire sporting-journalisitic complex would have drowned by now, and most of the fans too. there couldn't be a bigger rush of people waiting to place blame and trying to outdo each other with "i knew McGwire was on steroids years ago..." stories. i won't re-hash things i've said numerous times before but i will urge everyone to read this free article from the gents at Baseball Prospectus which covers the Astros, Cardinals and Rangers. the piece about Tony LaRussa's managing prowess was interesting, but at the very bottom a great point was made. if you want to believe Canseco's allegations (or believe that steroids enhance performance in measurable ways) take a look at the performances of Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Rafael Palmeiro before and after Canseco joined the Rangers and supposedly introduced them to the juice (reproduced in the article). where is the big jump in performance that would be the smoking gun here? the careers of all of them look pretty normal for a high quality player: good numbers that get better with age, including power numbers that peak around age 26-29 and then plateau for a while before tapering off slowly into the mid-to-late 30s. just like Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth. i'll quote the very end of the article:
First, players are innocent until proven guilty. Secondly, for good or ill, steroids weren't against the rules of Major League Baseball during Canseco's career. And perhaps most importantly, there isn't any study out there that proves that steroids help players produce more offensively. That doesn't mean that steroids don't help; that means that we don't know that they do. We try to trade in data around here and not conjecture, and we're hoping that people who read Canseco's book will do the same.
also, to whichever knuckleheads were using Brady Anderson as an example of how we "know" some baseball players are juicing, would you please explain his statistics on either side of his fluke 1996 season in which he hit 50 homers. this is turning into a witch hunt and it's really pathetic. no one is saying that steroids are good, but the level of discourse here is of the "he's muscular so he must be juiced and i don't wanna hear no arguments" variety. so much so that an obvious attention-hound like Canseco gets credibility simply because people are willing to jump at anything.
if you look at a known 'roid-head like Ken Caminiti you can see the power surge that he experienced later in his career (beginning around age 31) and then use that to hypothesize about other players like Bonds, Steve Finley, McGwire, etc. but using 1 data point is what's known as a small sample size and it would be foolish to draw any conclusions without having many more players to draw from and to know when certain players started (and stopped) taking steroids so you could determine what effect it had on performance. until then, i will remain skeptical.
World Cup 2006 is a little more than a year away, but the qualifying rounds are well underway and i hope to provide some commentary on them from time to time. the US has entered the final round of qualifying for the CONCACAF region (if anyone can tell me why Guyana and Suriname are in this reagion as opposed to South America, i'd be interested to know) which will send 3 teams to Germany next year and possibly a 4th depending on the results of a play-off against the 5th place Asian team.
having already planned a personal day off of work, i was able to watch yesterday's opening game against Trinidad & Tobago in Port au Spain. the game time conditions were hot and humid. the field did not seem to be in particularly good shape, which caused a few errant bumps and bounces throughout the game. and the US team certainly looked like they had not had much time together to prepare, between the near strike of the players and the late releases that some got from their club teams. nothing about the game was very crisp and that included the camera work and the picture. this was perhaps a function of the bar i was watching it in, or maybe it was a function of shoddy equipment and production on the part of ESPN2. i'm sure they didn't have a huge budget for the game.
the US kept up good pressure throughout the first half which finally resulted in a goal from Eddie Johnson, left basically unmarked in the box. this was in stark contrast to the early part of the game where Trinidad seemed to have everyone packed in on defense to avoid getting behind early. but sloppiness crept into the US defense with an alarming consistency and T&T had quite a few chances to make something happen some of which died due to poor execution while numerous others were called back offsides. still, the run of play favored the US and they deserved the lead.
(quick celebrity note: Drew Carey apparently flew to Trinidad just for the occasion of the game and not for Carnival. the announcers also outed him as a Los Angeles Galaxy season ticket holder, which i'm sure goes over big at those parties at the Playboy Mansion.)
the second half continued in much the same fashion as the first and some fast-paced end-to-end action resulted in nice saves from each keeper before ending with a bullet from Eddie Lewis (leaving only Eddie Pope out of the Eddie-goalfest) that gave the US a 2-0 advantage. the rest of the game was largely academic, even after Trinidad pulled back to within a goal in the 89th minute on a cross that Kasey Keller deflected into the net, and so it was 3 important points to the visitors. and those are important points to have heading into their next match with their largest regional rival in Mexico City - where they have never won a World Cup qualifier - on Sunday, March 27 (live on Telemundo at 1pm ET, check local listings). that game will be followed three days later by the first home match against Guatemala in Birmingham, AL at 8pm ET, live again on ESPN2.
elsewhere around the region, Mexico were also victorious yesterday, winning 2-1 at Costa Rica while Panama and Guatemala faced off to a scoreless tie in their opening match. meanwhile in Asia, South Korea defeated Kuwait, Japan defeated North Korea, and Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan tied, as did Bahrain and Iran. the Euorpean region saw a few contests as well, with the only really notable result being Greece's 2-1 defeat of Denmark that gets the Euro 2004 champions back into position to advance to the field of 32.
what to do when you Google someone in an attempt to locate their contact info for something work related only to find out that they write JAG fanfiction? you can't exactly pick up the phone and call without giggling. i've so far resisted the urge to share this information with co-workers but i guess i'll just have to send an e-mail and pray that we never meet face-to-face.
did you know that JAG consistently pulls in ratings/shares of around 6.5/11. that means that over 6 million households are watching this show. now, the t.s.o.a. crowd tends to be a bit provincial, but do you know anyone who watches this show? it's been on for 10 years! perhaps they all keep themselves intentionally anonymous, like the Masons or the Klan or something. i guess it's popular enough for fanfiction but i couldn't even bring myself to read any of it.
west coast correspondent Dave Nelson forwarded along this link to a series of baseball cartoons in Korean. some of them focus on teams and player stats, while others are a bit more narrative based (i assume). perhaps youthlarge can shed some light on what exactly is being said in any of them, but regardless of comprehension they're pretty fun to look at, like the Yankees strip where the team appears to be watching porn in the box labeled "Alex Rodriguez" and the "Jason Giambi" box features a despondent Giambi with a syringe in his shoulder while a teammate (Kevin Brown?) chastises him or perhaps accuses him of stealing his stash. here's another confusing example of Johan Santana as ET:
and featuring Joe Mauer as "Elliot"
for more laffs, check out the most recent cartoon which features the Expos and in which a naked Tony Batista (genitals blurred) does some stretches in the clubhouse, much to the consternation of a teammate. perhaps there's a joke in there about Batista being a better player if he would take more pitches instead of swinging at so many bad balls. the next two frames feature: Batista with his arm around Brad Wilkerson possibly with eyebrows arched; and a geriatric Frank Robinson walking with a cane while a young charge (the number indicates it is Tomo Ohka) appears to razz a visibly shaken Sun-Woo Kim.
watching Fox Sports World the other night, i came across two new entrants in the ugliest uniform contest being sported by Toulouse (lavender) and Caen (striped) of France's Ligue 1. isn't France a country full of designers? can't somebody do something about these? and while the advertising certainly isn't helping the cause, i don't know that it's necessarily making it worse.
the lavender appears to be the result of trying to mix the colors on the French flag into one. perhaps they found the color to be soothing to the point where opponents put up less effort (or simply nauseating). the stripes, meanwhile, can be used to create disorienting optical illusions sure to have the opposing team suffering from vertigo before half time.
if there's anything worse than being subjected to crossing streams of FM-Radio dreck from the desks around you, i'm not sure i want to know about it. if i hear Kelly Clarkson interminable "Since U Been Gone" one more time, i'm going to have to consider going the Van Gogh route (will that prevent me from hearing ever again? if not perhaps just a good dousing with acid will do the trick). freaking Z100 must be playing that song at least once an hour. conveniently, their online playlist only goes back about 45 minutes so you can't use it to call them out for replaying the same goddamn 5 songs over and over again, but i can almost guarantee that you'll see Ms. Clarkson on there no matter when you happen to look at it. also trying my patience: Green Day, the Killers (now playing) and Maroon 5.
so why do i feel like it would be rude of me to start playing my own music? i can't possibly get out of this office fast enough today.
some completely unrelated items:
Bob Nasatanovich's horse racing blog/site is now up and running (heh), but it's pretty hard core so don't go there looking for hijinx or the like. do go if you'd like to know how The Bohemian Girl did in the 9th race at Oaklawn Park on Friday.
remember Sniglets? apparently they're still going strong. Banterist published some with a Starbucks theme today (though he didn't use that particular name) which made me wonder how prevalent they were on the internet. this turned out to be a bad idea as they are everywhere with numerous themes from computers and frisbee golf. perhaps the best was the "Infertility" sniglets i came across which included entries such as "'The Sperminator' - nickname for any friend of your husband's who insists on extended sauna sessions after playing squash" and "Preggozone - the magnetic area around all infertile women that draws expectant mothers into close viewing range; the first day of any cycle has the greatest magnetic field, closely followed by any day on which an infertile womans fails a pregnancy test." does Rich Hall still get royalties from these?
finally, a big Happy Birthday to my wonderful mom, who is celebrating her (3x + y)th birthday where x is your score in bowling if you make a spare in the first frame and then roll a "clothesline" and y is 3 times* the square root of the square root of x. hey, she's a math teacher and a bowler - it seemed appropriate.
* in what can only be called an unfortunate miscalculation, my original equation added in some extra years to the answer. sorry, mom. that's got to be disappointing on a couple of levels.
for a truly surreal experience, try interviewing people for your own position at work. after about the 3rd one, you have to start finding ways to entertain yourself by coming up with different ways to say the same thing and prod people into giving answers with any sort of discernible meaning beyond vague platitudes and generalizations. some people are just complete dead conversational weight. attention interviewees - if you can't even be bothered to make yourself sound interesting what chance do you think you have?
it also becomes very easy to be distracted by staring at someone's face for too long, which i think you're supposed to do in order to convey that you're listening. it's hard to pay attention when your brain keeps interrupting with questions like "wait, which of his eyes is the good one again?" and "does he realize he has that whitehead on his chin?" and "do you really want to hire someone who looks to be one bad chromosome away from the Coney Island freak show?" it seems unfair but those sorts of things certainly enter your thought process when trying to differentiate among numerous qualified candidates.
strangest experience so far: one gentleman of Haitian/Dominican descent was talking about his mother who is a lawyer. i think he was talking about some of her clients when he uttered the phrase "i'm no racist, but..." before describing the fact that he found some of them unsavory, which i guess was part of his reason for shunning the profession. set aside that those are words that should never be used in an interview setting, and instead focus on the fact that i believe he was talking about black people while he himself is black (granted of West Indian origin rather than African-American - still the histories aren't all that different). what was i to make of such a statement? race would have never entered the equation if he hadn't brought it up, but now i was left with a number of unanswered questions - none of which i could ask. i think it took me 20 or so seconds to stop trying to figure out exactly what had happened and move things in a new direction.
another guy responded to my "fun" question regarding his favorite place he's ever visited by doing everything but offering me a time share in the Caribbean. then he sent an e-mail thanking me for my time (which scored points) but added a P.S. that read: "On a side note you were deciding what to do for your vacation, and I threw the idea of the Carribean as a good choice. Well the best way for you to experience what the Carribean has to offer (since you never been there) would be a cruise. Carnival have cruises that go to several different islands in one trip. From the things I heard and pictures that I've seen from family and friends that went on a Carnival cruise trust me you will not be disappointed. Check out there website www.carnival.com". hilarious, and i'm not just talking about the questionable grammar. i guess he didn't count on "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" being among my favorite peices of writing.
two more left for tomorrow. would that they were a bit more dynamic but i'm not getting my hopes up. one guy name dropped Marist College in the first sentence of every paragraph of his cover letter. but the other guy is another Geography major who abandoned his field of study soon after leaving college so perhaps there's a chance for some interesting conversation after all.
