I think firefighters are great. They're super brave, daring, courageous, and do something I can't even dream about doing.

Okay, that should immunize me for a couple of paragraphs.

Basically, this commercial for Sprint, just shows a bunch of firefighters turned legislators making legislation seems oh so very easy, just naming things that need to get done (clean water? why not? better roads? let's do that), and then passing them unanimously (of course with the help of their sprint phones).

This is highly impractical. Perhaps it is not clear to the firefighters, but you can't just pass everything you want - there's a question of funding these things. Once you just say you want clean water, it doesn't just make it happen. First, of all you have to decide what "clean" means, in terms of how few of what chemicals are allowed to be in water. Second, you have to figure out the best way to make the water clean - whether by command and control, or by setting up a type of permit system. Third, you need to figure out how to implement the plan - if it's command and control - what technology to use to clean the water, if it's permit based - how to issue permits, and where this is enforced, at sewage plants or at companies that discharge water. Fourth, you need to figure out how to enforce these standards and make sure people aren't cheating them. I know that was long and boring but it was an incredibly long and boring short version of what needs to be done to make a bill effective. Not simply - "sure, clean water." So, sorry firefighters - maybe here, you need a little more experience. And let's give legislators a small hand. Sure, lots of them are corrupt, and irritating, and publicity hounds, but it's not that easy.

Now, for the other commercial in which it shows the firefighters running the DMV a lot smoother, I can't speak.

Perhaps I'll write more later, but I just saw Pan's Labyrinth today, and here are a few words on it. Some may not make sense unless you've seen the movie, and even if you won't love it, it's worth seeing.

First of all, very good movie, one of several movies that cleverly weaves together two ongoing storylines, here, the story of a girl dealing with living with some evil fascists during the tail end of the Spanish Civil War and the same girl dealing with some magical creatures in some magical underworld. Visually beautiful, and a very solid film. Anyway.

CGI is great, and an essential component to today's movies. However, whenever filmmakers can possibly use humans they ought to. Pan's Labyrinth shows this as well as anything else with the fawn and the "pale man", AKA the evil dude with eyes on his hands, portrayed by a guy with prosthetics being far superior than anything that could have been concocted, at this level of technology, with CGI.

Now, about the movie itself. Okay, so the girl overall was a likable character, and she shouldn't be faulted for every mistake she makes; she's just a small girl. But the fawn specifically told her not to eat or drink anything at all! How hard an order is that! She has to be there for fifteen minutes and she's so fucking greedy she has to taste a couple of grapes - she definitely deserves no pity for this.

Spanish fascists are an underused source of villainry. Sure, Nazis get all the credit for fascism, but they surely weren't the only ones. And maybe Spanish fascism didn't have the same sting of complete and total evil that Nazidom had, but they were certainly evil enough to earn a couple of villian roles in film. It's nice to see them vindicated here a bit.

The villain, the captain, particularly, while being certainly fairly evil enough - shooting some civilians without any evidence, and the, kind of big thing, shooting and killing the main character, also deserves some of our respect. First of all, he leads his troops into battle a couple of times - clearly unlike some pathetic villains, he is not afraid of combat; rather he embraces it - that is to be respected. Second, sewing himself up with stitches in the mouth without painkillers - that takes balls. Also, although obviously there's no way to make not killing a 10 year old (or so) evil, she did kind of kidnap his son, which no matter how evil he is, is not cool. One has to really respect as well how well him and his troops wore the pretty sweet Spanish fascist uniform. Sure, the rebels may have been on the right side of things, but their outfits looked like shit compared to the captain's uniform.

It's kind of sad also to think that lack of believing in magic is what seemed to kill the main character's mother. Who knew not believing in something without absolutely no evidence whatsoever had such consequences? Who knew mandrake root was so potent?

First, in addition to my last post, I wanted to add a slight edit and say the best part of There's Something About Mary was that opening short Jonathan Richman song, which somehow kept getting caught in my head for a couple days after.

Now, to simply respond to a stupid point about the Mets - ESPN's Jayson Stark recently wrote:

“Not having Jose Valentin might be the biggest difference between this team and the 2006 team … He not only played well. He’s a tough guy. He kept other players in line. And he added to the toughness and the winning attitude of that team. You look around that clubhouse now, and there’s not one guy like that.”

Fuck "toughness" and "winning attitude" - it's pretty easy to see the differences between the 2006 team and the 2008 version without having to have been in the clubhouse at all:

Example #1: Carlos Delgado OPS+ed for 131 in '06, while OPS+ing this year for a whopping 82
Example#2: Mets catcher in '06, Paul LoDuca OPS+ed a 102, while this year's catcher, Brian Schneider OPS+ed a 71
Example#3: Carlos Beltran OPS+ed 150 in '06, and has a 113 this year.

Is this simplistic? Sure.
Are there other ways to analyze it? There are
And I'd have to look at the pitching too which has been worse
And, yes Valentin in '06 played a fair amount better than Luis Castillo is now, but not by as much as any of the three examples above. So unless he was the force keeping Delgado's bat speed up, which somehow managed to do all right the last 10 years before he was a Met, I don't think his toughness and winning attitude are the main factors in the difference between this year and 2006.

Movie I Should Have Seen Years Ago But Didn’t: There’s Something About Mary

One of the reasons I avoided watching this movie for years was because I knew there was a very good chance I would hate it, but I ultimately decided it was canonical enough that I ought to see it. Predictably, it was pretty terrible. However, I will add a couple of clarifying notes beyond that.

First, the opening scene where high school Ben Stiller somehow manages to zip over his genitals in the bathroom of prom date Cameron Diaz is simply unwatchable – truly one of the worst movie scenes there is – it’s painful, but not in the British comedy – painful by funny way. Just bad.

Another thing which is hard to watch and I never understand which happens in movies and TV all the time is when characters make clearly unsustainable lies, such as when Matt Dillon lies about being an architect and going to Harvard. Now, I certainly understand why you’d lie if you thought it would help, but at least think through the lie enough that it can’t be found out incredibly easily. I mean, think just a short bit down the road. Even within a few weeks, she's bound to find out some of these things aren't true. If you make, smart, realistic lies, you can at the very least hold out a few months.

The movie also contains one of my least favorite types of comedic scenes – the one where two different people in a room think they’re talking about the same thing, but they’re really not, leading to hilarious consequences, such as when Ben Stiller is arrested for murder, and he thinks he’s being arrested for taking in a hitchhiker. Comic gold.

The fake-architect pizza boy friend of Mary’s is an incredibly irritating character to watch, and the scene where he attempts to pick up his keys with the crutches is brutal.

One institution that should be added to movies is a quota on certain types of jokes. Like, say, jokes about feces. You get one, so you better make it really great, because then you’re done. There’s Something About Mary way exceeds their quote in jokes made about mentally retarded people. Could one or two be funny? Sure. Do about 12-15 get more than tiring? You bet.

Anyway, the second half is not as bad, but the damage is done – most of it is really not as impossible to watch as the first scene, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely pleasant either.

Two small positives of note are first the strange fact that Mary appears to be watching George Michael's Sports Machine early in the movie. Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree with Mary’s view sometime in the second half of the movie when she says there should be more foods on sticks. Too true, too true. Oh, also, it's good to see Jonathan Richman with work.

I know I shouldn’t really be surprised by this, and maybe this speaks to the place this movie has had in popular culture, but I felt like I had really seen all the big scenes in the movie just by watching tv and such over the years – I just kind of thought there would be more to it, like each famous scene I had seen was just one of five things just like it in the movie. I also thought there would be more kind of one-upping between Ben Stiller and Matt Dillon, competing with each other.

Also this was the movie that really made Ben Stiller a star, and was really the birthplace of the Ben Stiller-character, that annoying nervous clumsy guy who can't do anything right. For the creation of this, the movie should also be reprimanded.

Stupid physical humor and sight gags are probably not my favorite type of humor, but there are definitely many times I enjoy it – I love Mr. Bean, dammit, and there’s something like a word per episode. However, Something About Mary not so good.

Lately, I’ve been looking at/doing some all-time rankings of baseball positions, in particular looking at the best pitchers in the NL

Right now, my top 6 looks like, with no order, Christy Matthewson, Three Finger Brown, Pete Alexander, Greg Maddux, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver.

This leaves out a couple of things – first, I have the problem of a couple of old timey guys – John Clarkson and Kid Nichols who both played primarily in the 19^th century – and both of course, have a lot more wins, complete games, inning per year than pretty much anyone else. Nichols is the better candidate of the two, and may have to sneak somewhere onto that list.

Second, any time you do league rankings, you run into the problem of guys who split leagues. The two biggest guys this presents problems for in these rankings are Cy Young, who spent his career almost evenly divided between the AL and the NL, spending the first 11 years in the NL with the Cleveland Spiders and the St. Louis Perfectos, all but the last in the 19^th century, and Randy Johnson who spent far fewer years with the Diamondbacks in the NL than in the AL, but his best years in the NL, which were nothing less than dominating.

Comparing eras is among the hardest things to do in baseball…stats like ERA+ help a lot, in that they reflect players ERA’s, relative to the year, but one thing I’ve been wondering is whether there was a far larger gap between the best players and the worst players earlier on, which helped certainly players dominate more. One reason for this could be because the pool out of which players are chosen was smaller, without black or latino players. The idea might be that instead of the worst batters, which represented easy outs for the very best pitchers, a new set of players should have been there, with skills at the very least closer to average, had these pools of players been in the game. Anyway, it’s just a theory, and I don’t have much proof of any kind of verify it, so for now it’s off to ordering these six – the first two are probably going to be Matthewson and Alexander.

The AL is a lot harder – there are three that really stick out from the pack – Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, and Roger Clemens, but beyond that it’s kind of a crapshoot. More on this later!

Forget the Cardinals or the Orioles or the Marlins or the Rays or Joe Saunders or Chase Utley or Edison Volquez or Chipper Jones. The story of this baseball season so far is Cliff Lee.

Cliff Lee, 29 years old, out of Benton, Arkansas, has pitched in the majors since 2002 (although he only through 10 innings that year), the same year he was acquired by Cleveland in the massive Bartolo Colon trade, alongside Grazy Sizemore and Brandon Phillips. Going into the season, his probably unjustified but still impressive fourth place finish in Cy Young voting just three years ago had largely been forgotten due to lackluster 2006 followed by a downright awful 2007, in which he finished with a 6.29 ERA, a 1.521 WHIP, 66 Ks, 36 BBs, and 17 HRs given up. Lee had to compete with Aaron Laffey and Jeremy Sowers just to win a starting role in the Tribe's '08 rotation.

Honestly, this performance is stunning. Lee just doubled his walk total for the season to four when he issued two free passes to the jays yesterday in 9 scoreless innings of work. Sick stuff.

Anyway, I'll be rooting for him to keep it up for the entire season. It's hard for me to root against lefties.




For an interesting tale about someone running into Cliff Lee on the subway: http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2008/05/to_the_stadium.php

One of the things about being a sports fan, is it provides you moments of great joy which you have done nothing but watch TV to earn (though it sometimes feels like you've done a lot more), and along with that moments of great agony that sometimes come at the worst times of your life, and make you actually depressed over something that really hasn't happened to you at all. A number of defeats have hit me particularly hard over the years.

In particular, I can remember distinct extrememely hard losses, which while both painful, represent a different period than the last few years. Growing up, sports was the only serious hobby I had, not getting into music until later on, and watching TV as much as a normal kid did, but without the type of focused precision I have now. I got into sports on my own volition, with neither of my parents having any interest in it whatsoever, and by fourth grade (which is when, in hindsight I consider my true sports fandom period to start - having been interested earlier, but never knowing names of many players and such) I was reading the sports pages of Newsday before I went to school.

So, let's begin talking about one of the losses that hit me hardest. Even though I've never been in Syracuse for more than a couple of minutes passing through, I am a huge Syracuse Orange(men) fan, particularly of basketball. This particularly team has always had an interesting place in my heart, because unlike with the Mets, or Rangers, I've always been the only person I knew who was a big Syracuse fan, and I've established a certain private bond with the television while watching games, often manifested in fits of yelling at the team, assuming they can hear me.

I consider the start date of my fandom of Syracuse in particular to date back to the 1994-95 season, and I was heartbroken when that season ended at the hands of eventual runner-up Arkansas after Lawrence Moten pulled a Chris Webber, and called a time out after 'Cuse was out, throwing what should have been a win into overtime, when the 'Cuse lost it.

However, the pain after that loss, didn't compare to the next year, when fourth seeded Syracuse made an incredibly improbable run to the Final Four, reaping the benefit of a number of upsets, which their greatest victory being in the Elite Eight, over the #2 seeded Jacque Vaughn-led Kansas team. They beat 5 seeded Mississippi State, an equally unlikely Final Four team, to face Kentucky, one of the best college teams of all time (ranked #2 in a ESPN page two list: http://espn.go.com/page2/s/list/greatestcollegebasketball.html), led Antoine Walker, Ron Mercer, Derek Anderson, Tony Delk and Walter McCarty. Now, all college basketball analysts could talk about was how the semifinal between Kentucky and a Marcus Camby led UMass squad was the "real" final, and 'Cuse was a gigantic underdog, but for some reason, I, with my John Wallace jersey, believed that they could/would win.

They kept it extremely close - after Kentucky had won all four games before UMass by at least 20 points, 'Cuse was felled by just 9, and was closer than that at several points before Kentucky ended it.

Rationally, I should have set myself up as proud we made in that far, and not to expect anything - but it's very hard to set realistic expectations in sports, especially in American sports which is build around a playoffs anyone-can-win mentality. It took days and weeks before I was fully out of the funk that that loss put me in, and far longer than that than I could really realize what an achievement it was to really make it that far at all.