Adventures in Miscellany

• One thing that every person should do before he or she dies is ride in a hot-air balloon:

See? This was my birthday present from my wife, and we finally got to enjoy it this past weekend. And, man. It was great. Everyone should get to do this.

• Colin Cowherd is a jackass. He directed his listeners to overload and essentially destroy a website, apparently in response to some perceived slight no one else actually understands, and stole a joke from another website and later refused to give its originators credit for no discernible reason. Moreover, he's terrible at his job, as long as one understands the requirements of his job to include knowing things about sports, communicating them over the radio airwaves in an intelligible manner, and/or being entertaining while doing so.
  
  Here's the thing, though: I can't stop listening. I mean, I can; I would never listen outside of my car, and I can't say I've ever stayed in the car longer than I have to to hear what he has to say. But if I'm in the car and driving and he's on, I listen. It's fascinating. He really is, by any measure, a stupid man, with a severely limited understanding of his native English language. He has a grating and unpleasant speaking voice. He is, I truly believe, a bigot, and is often quite offensive, like earlier today when he improbably turned a light-hearted (but entirely unfunny) dig at Pittsburgh being named the U.S.'s "most romantic city" into a very thinly-veiled attack on San Francisco for being accepting of homosexuality. His sense of humor is disastrous; the other day, he read a "top ten signs your recruit might be on drugs" list, and none of them was any more than a humorless restatement of one or more stereotypes associated with abusing drugs. A representative sample of his humor is this "joke".
  
  In short, I hate every single thing that comes out of his mouth. Which, I think, is why I listen: for the reminder that we live in a country where some large number of people can listen to Colin Cowherd (or Carlos Mencia...but I digress) and actually find themselves entertained. This is what he wants; a guy like Cowherd couldn't care less what I think of him as long as I listen. He's winning. And yet I can't stop. It's kind of depressing.
  
  
• The Onion's AV Club has a nice sampling of wit and wisdom from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. I'm not sure I'd have made all the same selections they did, but it's nice nonetheless.
  
  
• I just don't know what to think of Alex Rodriguez anymore. I've been rooting for him to succeed while the rest of the Yankees fail, because the disparity between his value and fans' perception of him is almost as great as Derek Jeter's (but in the opposite direction), and A-Rod really hasn't deserved anything he's gotten the past couple years (except the MVP award and the $25 million a year). But this start is ridiculous. Nevermind that he's actually winning games for the Evil Empire, with two game-ending homers in the first three weeks. I still kind of love the guy, but he must be stopped.
  
  
• Speaking of baseball (what? me?), I'm taking a trip up to D.C. this weekend to watch some bad baseball in a bad stadium, but from a great seat. Back in October, I bought two front-row-over-the-dugout Nationals tickets at UVA law's PILA auction, so I'll be there to watch David Wright, Jose Reyes and the Mets dismantle the local(-est) nine on Saturday night. Wish me a game worth watching. I really can't justify taking the time out of studying, but that clearly isn't stopping me, either then or now.
  
  
• Kudos to us. By "us" here, I mean we gun-toting, Idol-watching, Colin Cowherd-listening, largely idiotic Americans. We pleasantly surprised me this week by revolting against NBC's (and other networks', after the inevitable trickle down) decision to show the video and other materials sent to them by Cho Seung Hui. We're hopelessly voyeuristic, and we look at things we know we shouldn't (or listen to them, like me with that blowhard Cowherd) for any number of stupid and sometimes vaguely troubling reasons. But there has to be a line somewhere, and that line has to be well in front of the point where we're giving horrifically evil mass murderers exactly the kind and amount of attention they're seeking. I didn't expect us to really recognize that line, but I guess we did. This time.
  
  
• Colin Cowherd is a jackass.
  
  
• Incidentally, Jim Rome is no better at his job; his voice is just as bewilderingly inappropriate for radio, and he's just as unfunny, and really does seem dumb. But he doesn't actually seem like an evil person, so I'll lay off him.
  

The problem with trying not to take anything seriously

Here's a fresh, home-typed transcript of what Jon Stewart, who a bit more than five and a half years ago said the most sincere and moving thing I've ever seen on television, said to open his program this evening (after the usual cheery welcome and guest plug):

Obviously for anybody who's been tuned to the television today, a horrible, horrible day. Uh, I have absolutely nothing to add that is insightful or anything. I will just do what I always do when faced with something, uh, that, uh, is that powerfully damaging to the emotional core; I will begin to repress it, and I will swallow it, uh, and I imagine that thirty years from now, someone will spill juice, and I will freak the f*ck out. So, uh, to that end, let's move on as though the world is okay.

That's pretty much all I can do on days like this. That, and pray, and every now and then start to cry and freak out just a little bit. But mostly that.

Jackie Robinson Day

I'm currently watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. (I should be studying or something, but it's fascinating.) Today is Jackie Robinson Day: sixty years ago today, Robinson, a genuinely great ballplayer who would have been a bona fide Hall of Famer even if his only contributions to history had been with his bat, legs and glove, became the first African American to play Major League ball (or any major American professional sport). In celebration, they're interviewing prominent people who knew and were affected by Jackie (the most interesting of which has been Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson, an engaging and fascinating woman) while the Dodgers-Padres game is carried on in the background.

Earlier, meathead ESPN "analyst" John Kruk said something I think I agree with, which would be an all-time first; the gist was that we're celebrating Jackie because it's the 60th anniversary, and that's great, but it should really be celebrated every year, because it was a momentous occasion not only in baseball, but for all of America. He suggested that it should be a national holiday, and I don't know if I'd go quite that far. But it should be remembered. And at the very least, it probably shouldn't also be tax day. Get on that, feds.

I was going to pick on ESPN's coverage just a little bit, but I'm enjoying it so much that I don't have the energy to do justice to my argument. Here it is in a nutshell: tied in with this celebration, because there always has to be a controversy, is this lurking idea that African American representation in pro baseball is dwindling, going from a high of some 27% in 1975 to just 8.5% today. This seems to me like a bit of a red herring; those percentage points are being taken by Latino and Asian players, and the percentage of white players is decreasing as well (apparently about the same number of percentage points, which admittedly is a much slower relative decline since the starting percentage was much higher). An alternative way to look at it, it seems to me, is that rather than African Americans losing interest in the sport (which may be happening to some extent), a sport that was once heavily dominated by white and black players has become vastly more diverse, with better international relations, more advanced international scouting systems, and just generally better competition for a larger-but-still-very-limited number of roster spots. So I'm not really seeing a problem here (certainly not one foreboding enough that it needs to be juxtaposed with this happy event). Let me know if I'm wrong, and check out some of the recent numbers (and a very favorable diversity report for MLB) here.

So it goes.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

-Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Last night, around the time that I was blathering on about the worst show on television, the news started to break that the world was now populated by one fewer Great American Novelist (and we're down to so few!); Kurt Vonnegut had died at the age of 84.

I make a poor eulogist for Vonnegut. I've read nearly everything he ever published, but honestly, I hadn't looked at any of it since about 1999. I disagreed to varying degrees with most of his views on politics and religion. This was a man who genuinely disliked most of the world and loathed or at least distrusted its precepts; but such are the men and women that so often make great artists. At least three of his books (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions) are, in my inexpert estimation, certifiable works of genius, and have largely stayed with me since I read them back in college. Many of his others would also rank among the better books I've ever read.

I think Vonnegut often gets unfairly labeled as a sort of definitional artifact of "his time," which in turn is often unfairly labeled as "the sixties"; bizarre treatment for an author who produced valuable work for parts of six decades. It's true that Vonnegut resonated particularly well with sixties audiences (or at least with college students in the sixties). But Vonnegut covered difficult topics in ways that hadn't been done before, wrote from perspectives no one else thought of, and adopted a kind of otherworldly-yet-conversational style that was entirely his and has never really been emulated since. It strikes me as lazy and irresponsible to attempt to confine a talent like his to a particular generation. Even worse, to label him a "humorist" or (most laughably of all) a "science-fiction writer"; Vonnegut's novels were often quite funny and often (but certainly not always) took fantastical turns, but these labels couldn't possibly do justice to his body of work. Vonnegut was insightful, often moving, and refreshingly original, qualities that no temptingly easy label (other than, perhaps, "Great American Novelist") can capture.

And so on.

I hate American Idol.

No reason to mess around with a clever title. A little over two years ago, my beautiful wife and I got hooked on American Idol. I'll never really know why. It was always a bit frustrating, what with all the inane pop music, the making fun of people during the audition period who are probably mildly mentally disabled, and the judges who don't really know all that much about singing. But there were a handful of people who were really, really talented and fun to watch, and while neither of the last two winners (Carrie Underwood and Taylor Hicks) fits that description, the good people were always at least in it until something close to the end.

I haven't seen it as much this year, to which I think I can credit my continued relative sanity. In one year, it's gone from a slightly embarrassing but harmless distraction to an unmitigated disaster. I'm not even going to talk about Sanjaya, except to say that he was exactly as awful last week as he was every other time I've seen him, and I hope he wins and ruins this show forever, because the show is an abomination even ignoring the most abominable of them all. But a picture is in order for the uninitiated:









Yeah, they really put that guy on TV. And he can't sing any better than you can.

But that aside, very nearly everything about this show is now unspeakably awful. There are two exceptions--two singers who, while they're not the goddesses the show puts them out as, really are pretty decent singers. Unfortunately, they look like this.











Lakisha Jones above; Melinda Doolittle to the left.

Now, I'm really not making fun of these two. They're very good performers, and thus are totally out of place on this season of this show. The obnoxious truth is that people (especially women) that look this average just don't become stars. There's always plastic surgery, I suppose (though how well that worked for this desperate and far less talented Idol alum is not for me to say). And while their future star potential doesn't necessarily bear upon their watchability on the show, I honestly don't think they're good enough to make it worth putting up with all the other crap, a summary of which follows.

First, there are the six (five, after tonight) other contestants. Haley Scarnato, who was booted tonight, is beautiful but essentially talentless. Phil Stacey, who will almost certainly get the hook next week, is probably the best of an absolutely horrendous group of males. Seems like a nice guy; can't sing as high as he thinks he can, and can't stay in tune. Blake Lewis, who seems to be the favorite among squealing teenage girls, is the kind of guy with whom I could stand carrying on a conversation for precisely seven seconds, looks absolutely ridiculous week after week and can't stay in tune. Chris Richardson is basically the same as Blake, only with even less talent and personality. He really wants to be Justin Timberlake, and can't even live up to that astoundingly low threshold. Jordin Sparks is a 17-year-old girl with good stage presence and energy who sings like a pretty decent 17-year-old.

Second, the judges have gotten worse. Randy Jackson appears to have no qualifications to judge a singing competition, and it shows; the few good performances are "pitchy" and the many truly terrible, torturous, off-key performances are invariably "hot." Paula acts pretty much like this in every episode (watch that video if you haven't seen it--it's hilarious). With Danny Devito getting all that attention for that one interview, how does Paula go out there in a considerably worse condition twice a week without causing any actual controversy? But I digress. Simon remains by far the most realistic of the judges; his comments on the technical aspects of the singers' singing are accurate probably 70% of the time, which is at least twice as accurate as either of the others. He's just not funny anymore; he's completely run out of clever insults.

So this is pretty bad. How to make it worse? Try hiring celebrity "coaches" Diana Ross, Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Lopez. Now, Ross had some chops once, but now she's gone loopy (best moment of that episode was her use of the "word" "pronounciate"); the other two are never-weres. This is like hiring Billy Joel to teach you about driving or Paris Hilton to talk to your kids about abstinence (of either commonly discussed variety). Roseanne may well be next. And the video behind that link may actually hurt my ears less than hearing Blake butcher Marc Anthony's already cringe-worthy "I Need to Know." But I digress again.

I mean, needless to say I won't be watching anymore (I have to be a pig for a moment and admit that Haley, despite being no better than the rest, was the only reason I was still watching at all), which is how I can justify wasting just one more hour to blog about my frustrations with it. If you're not a singer, think of something you're passionate about; now imagine a show that purported to be an attempt to find the next best thing in that hobby, but featured contestants who couldn't do it, fawned over by judges who didn't know the first thing about it, interspersed with appearances by other people who already make a lot of money by sucking at it (is there a Gwen Stefani of, say, cooking?) and hosted by this soulless gnome:
You there with me now? If so, you may be beginning to understand my pain...

Dave Foley really does know funny, Libelous thoughts, other notes

I watched both premiere episodes of Thank God You're Here last night, which you can waste up to two hours watching at the link just provided. It's far too early to tell whether I should be embarrassed at having watched it. But I thought it was mildly entertaining--a really interesting premise that would be more interesting with better celebrities/comics involved (Joel McHale, Kevin Nealon and Jennifer Coolidge were great; Richard Kind and Mo'Nique, not so much).

Here's the thing, though; the show co-stars one of my heroes, or rather a shockingly old-looking, wild-gray-haired-and-goateed imitation of one of my heroes, and it's kind of sad. Dave Foley, probably the most talented and consistently funny member of the excellent--nay, legendary--Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, is the "judge" of the program, which means that David Alan Grier asks Dave what he thinks about each performer, and that at the end Dave gets to pick the "winner" (who wins a little plastic trophy). But, at least for the first two episodes, what Dave "thought" was essentially that the performer was absolutely fantastic--just really great--and he then picked the "winner" seemingly at random.

This is a sad waste of a brilliant comic talent, and a man who, despite appearances, clearly does understand what is funny. Observe (less than a minute, PG, really funny):



My hope is that he's trying to be nice to everybody to encourage bigger and better stars to come on the show in the future, and that he'll start being more realistic if the show gets picked up. But you never know. I just really love this video (especially the end: "requests?"). I wish I could find a version that's not captioned in a language I don't recognize.

Other notes:

• -In leaving a comment on my own blog this morning (does it get any more self-indulgent than that?), I noticed that it said that anonymous comments are not allowed. That seems silly. So they're now allowed. Just not as enthusiastically encouraged as the alternative.


• -The leadership (er, "junta") for the 2008 Libel Show was elected last night. A little sad, since it's the very last time I can even pretend to be involved with the Show. Also, I've decided after experiencing it three times that the election process is about as poor as we could possibly make it. People are nominated or nominate themselves for a position, and speak for a minute or less about their qualifications, and then leave the room while the rest of us discuss their high and low points for something more like ten minutes before the vote takes place. This is supposed to be a secret thing; what is said in the room stays with the people in the room and so forth. Of course, UVA being what it is, with the Honor Code and whatnot, everyone finds out precisely what was said about her while she was out as soon as the meeting ends. So it's like this: there's all sorts of opportunity for people to make unfounded, often ridiculous accusations against a candidate (and that certainly happened last night); the candidate has no opportunity to defend herself, relying on her friends to do it for her, which often makes it a really awkward pissing match; and then afterward, the candidate hears all about it and can do nothing but get angry and/or feel sorry for herself. So 1Ls and 2Ls? Fix that. I'm not sure what the best way to do it is, but you could scarcely do worse.
  
  
• -I took my facebook badge off of the sidebar, because I decided there was a difference between being open and personal on the one hand and actively inviting identity theft on the other. But I also changed my facebook profile picture today, to the headshot that was taken of me for the lobby during the Show, and now you don't get to see it. So here it is:
  
  Terrifying, no? I should probably change the adjective in this blog's title. Nonetheless, I like it. It's probably my favorite bad picture of myself ever. And there have been so many.


• -The Twins did indeed lose last night, and Mr. Ponson didn't quite give up 25 runs, but he was good for 8 over 6 innings (though one who watched it much closer than I said he wasn't actually all that bad). Nonetheless, Ponson remains roughly as worthy of a rotation spot as I am.


• -I left my cell phone in my car. Be right back.
  


• -Back! But it turns out I've nothing left to say.

Talkin' baseball...

Kluszewski, Campanella!

First, a breakdown of my readers thus far, as I understand them:

Me.
My wife, when I remind her.
Mike and Melissa.
Stephanie.
My mother-in-law.
My Advanced Legal Research professor.
My other Advanced Legal Research professor.

Good group. A small group, but a sociologically and geographically diverse one stretching (well, more like jumping) from one coast of this great nation to the other. And growing at a rate of approximately one U.Va. Advanced Legal Research professor per week (warning: due to sample size issues, data may not be a reliable predictor of future performance). If you're reading this for some (or more likely no) reason and don't appear on the above list, I hope you'll let me know somehow (like by using the "comments" link below). It's fun to hear.

Right. So, as one who is hopelessly addicted to the complex, often frustrating, and ultimately pointless world of Major League Baseball, and in particular to the very out-of-market Minnesota Twins, I'm now entering my third year of subscribing to MLB.TV, which allows me (subject to certain restrictions, which are the subject of this portion of the entry) to watch essentially every game through my dying laptop and the miracle of the internet. This year, I even shelled out the extra thirty bucks for their premium package: you get a much higher resolution picture, and access to a software program that allows you to watch and shift seamlessly among the audio streams for up to six games at once (and may even function someday soon).

All in all, I'm happy with it. The picture quality is very good, and streams much more smoothly than a few years ago. I don't have digital cable, so I can't get the Extra Innings TV package, but I don't think the difference is such that I'd be willing to pay the extra $50 per season.

But here's the problem: local and national blackouts. First, each team has a set of zip codes, viewers within which are banned from watching any of that team's games over the internet. The idea, I suppose, is that there's about a 50/50 chance that you'll end up watching the other team's broadcast, and thus miss out on all those critical local commercials. And I'm fine with that. The real problem is that the zip code 22901, wherein I reside, is on the banned list for both the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals, whereas both teams have contracts with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Networks (MASN) to carry their games locally, and Comcast Cable doesn't currently provide access to MASN in said zip code. So I can't get the games on TV or over the internet. What's worse, ESPN has contracts to black out its nationally televised, non-premium (i.e. any night but Sunday night) games when those games are also available locally, presumably covering the same overly expansive lists of zip codes. So while the Twins' opening-night game against the Orioles last Monday was theoretically available on local TV, national TV, and the internet, I had none of these sources available to me. The bottom line is that lawyers ruin everything.

In a similar vein, ESPN and Fox both have exclusivity contracts with MLB that provide that no other games will be made nationally available in competition with their national broadcasts (Saturday afternoon for Fox, Sunday night for ESPN). This makes sense and is completely above the board, etc., etc. The problem is that their definitions of both what qualifies as a national broadcast and the time range of what qualifies as being in competition are ridiculously broad. To take them in order: an internet "broadcast" of what is intended to be a local telecast, made available only to paying subscribers to a website, should not be subject to these blackouts. I'm sure that the language of the contracts explicitly states that they do qualify, but that is true only because, as mentioned, lawyers ruin everything.

Second, Fox has gone and moved the first pitch of its Saturday broadcasts from about 1:00 p.m. EST to about 4:00. This is great in that it allows Left Coast viewers a few more hours to sleep it off and gives pitchers the decided advantage of pitching through really awkward late afternoon shadows, but it's terrible for MLB.TV and Extra Innings subscribers. Games that start at the ordinary start time of 1:00 p.m. Eastern, of which there are several (especially in the colder-weather months), continue to be blacked out, despite very little (if any) overlap with the Fox broadcast. Of course, West Coast afternoon games will also be blacked out, as will games that start in the early evening (say 6:00 EST), which occasionally happen on Saturdays. When one considers that at least half of all local broadcasts are carried on a regional Fox Sports channel, and that Fox is effectively then keeping viewers from choosing not to watch its broadcasts in favor of watching...its broadcasts, these contracts start to seem senselessly restrictive. I'm pretty sure the whole point is to annoy me.

Speaking of annoying things and baseball, the Twins seem to have latched onto the idea that one sticks with what works. Which, in ordinary circumstances, is a fine idea. The problem is that what "worked" for them last year was starting the year with among the least talented lineups that could possibly have been formed of all the talent available to them: Tony Batista and Juan Castro manned third and short, while Jason Bartlett toiled in the minors; Francisco Liriano started in the bullpen. They recovered from this to win 96 games and the division. So, this year, why not give spots in the starting rotation to Ramon (or is it Russ?) Ortiz, Carlos Silva and Sidney Ponson instead of Matt Garza, Glen Perkins, Kevin Slowey and/or Scott Baker? The problem, of course, is what saved the Twins last year is that they recognized these mistakes, come about May, and rectified them. That might need to happen even earlier this year if they're going to have similar success.

The Twins play the Yankees at home tonight, on a nationally televised game that I will get to watch. For some reason, the completely useless Ponson will be starting despite the availability of the completely average Boof Bonser on six days' rest. These are the kinds of decisions that end up costing a team a very tight division, and the kind that lead a team to end up giving up 25 runs to the Yankees on national television. But then I guess Ponson giving up 25 runs, which is honestly well within the realm of possibility, might lead to Garza's recall coming faster, so maybe that's a good thing?

Wow.

I have almost nothing to say right now, except that it's Opening Day, and the Twins won, and I'm happy.

But I had to put this up, despite the fact that it was released today and appears to be pervading the entire InterWeb right now, because I think it's brilliant. It's great when genuinely good artists turn out to have great senses of humor too.



It also shows how a truly talentless performer can release perhaps the foulest pile of elephant dung ever recorded, and then a genuinely good artist can make it almost enjoyable. Just amazing, really.

Enjoy!