It's snowing at College and Alcatraz. There was a bunch of snow up on the hills behind the Claremont Hotel this morning. Snow is an interesting topic, and yet I find it difficult to compose an essay of 75 words on the subject. It is wet and white, and cold, and humanoid figures may be formed by packing it together. Snow was first discovered in 1879 by the noted man of science, Thomas Edison, who would later briefly have a baseball park named in his honor.

Because I like lists

1. California
-Bay Area is the best place in the country
-LA and San Diego are also among the nation's 10 best cities
-Tectonic plates will cast Orange County out to sea in due course
2. Oregon
-Portland is America's most beautiful city, populated by top flight people
-#1 in the nation on a metric I shall not mention
3. Washington
-Seattle is America's second most beautiful city, populated by even more flight people
4. Alaska
-I am fascinated by the far north
-wacky doings...
5. New Hampshire
-I love the forests up there
6. Vermont
-I love the forests up there
7. Nevada
-Beautiful, great weather
-Laudable disdain for gossip
8. Minnesota
-Of the four regions of the country, the midwest has the best people
-lakes
9. Montana
-Glacier is the best national park
-Missoula is excellent
-nickname, "the treasure state" is nation's best nickname
-the sky really does appear exceptionally large there
10. Illinois
-Chicago is a great city
-rest of the state not so good
11. Hawaii
-rebounded nicely from a crime wave in the 80s
12. Idaho
-Beautiful scenery, potatoes, people who look down on Ron Paul supporters as too moderate and pro-government
13. Michigan
-Tiger Stadium was great. The Tigers also feature mlb's #2 cap.
14. Colorado
-mountains are nice
15. Pennsylvania
-I miss Macha
16. Wyoming
-Signs there say "many visitors gored by buffalo"
17. Iowa
-not as nice as Oakland
18. Missouri
-Ex gf of mine went to wustle; "wustle" is my favorite word to say out loud. wustle.
19. Wisconsin
-Lots of box factories, I would imagine
20. Maine
-overrated
21. Utah
-Have you seen that huge arch? It's fucking huge! Amazing!
22. New York
-Calm down, people. Christ.
23. Texas
-Austin is a top 5 city
-Houston is hellish buggy swamp where heroism is synonymous with bug-killing capability
-I heard a good joke about the Alamo once, but have since forgotten it
-I like Stevie Ray Vaughn
24. North Carolina
-Bull Durham is overrated
-Coach K's credit card ads are really obnoxious
25. Rhode Island
-Lincoln Chafee was a pretty comical figure
26. New Mexico
-Not enough clouds
-Will kill us all some day
27. Connecticut
-"Hartford Whalers" was a good name for a team
-Not much else good about this state
28. Indiana
-Hoosiers is the best sports movie
-"Hoosier" is a good thing to call oneself
-Speaking of "Hoosiers", I was pretty surprised to find out that Dennis Hopper is a republican
29. South Dakota
-Better than North Dakota 'cuz it has some hills
30. Virginia
-I watched a good documtary about O. North once
-Lots of history
31. Massachussetts
-ha ha, fuck you
32. Louisiana
-New Orleans is a good city
-nevertheless, a hellish swamp
33. North Dakota
-pretty bleak
-But I know some great people from there
34. Georgia
-Did you know Anderson Cooper's show is 2 hours long now? Dear God.
-Features world's largest electronic map
-"Captital Gang" was a fun show
35. Tennessee
-Robert Altman is overrated
-Plenty of good music from Nashville and Memphis, though
36. Arkansas
-Run tourism ads for some reason
37. Maryland
-Not a good state
38. South Carolina
-Charleston is pretty charming
39. New Jersey
-stfu
40. Ohio
-Drew Carey should be in jail
-WKRP is good, though
41. Delaware
-Ought to be "crossed" off the list of states
42. West Virginia
-Attractive landscape
-Jokes/stereoptypes are all true
43. Kansas
-Edges out Nebraska due to fun history
44. Nebraska
-ugly
-I don't like corn. It's too sweet.
-Should have maintained distinctive option-based offense
-fellow-traveling Fremontists
45. Kentucky
-There is a giant bat statue in Louisville which is pretty awesome
-Joe Saunders not as ugly as Lackey, but still ugly
46. Arizona
-The sun is an enemy that must be defeated
-Way too hot
-There is nothing good about Arizona
47. Florida
-Horrific weather
-Ridiculous culture
-Loveline was a great show
48. Oklahoma
-Seriously? The OKC "Thunder"? Come on.
-State heroes are people who stole shitty land from Native Americans
-Native Americans only there in the first place because they were forced into the shittiest part of the country
-According to an article I read once, there are 0 eligible bachelors in Oklahoma
49. Alabama
-Neil Young got it right
50. Mississippi
-I would feel pretty rebellious if I lived there

I think my first poetic interlude is at least statistically on the mark.

Here goes:

original lyrics.

youtube

One, two, three, out!

Huh!

One, two, three, out!

There's a strike for you, strike two, strike three

can't hit our main man from Phil-yyyyyyyyyyyyy

'cuz I'm the Out Man

yeah I'm the Out Man

Should Halo "bats" appear too small

Be thankful I will throw a ball

'cuz I'm the Out Man

yeah I'm the Out Man

If you swing the bat, I'll bring the heat

If you try to sit, I'll hit your feet

If you get too cold, I'll call you "meat"

If you take a walk, I'll take the heat

Out-man!

'cuz I'm the Out Man

Yeah, I'm the Out Man.

Don't ask me why my curve's so poor

If you don't want the ball at your door.

'cuz I'm the Out Man,

Yeah, I'm the Out Man.

Now my advice for those who whine (Out-Man)

You won't score off Josh and Devine (Out-Man)

'cuz I'm the Out Man

Yeah, I'm the Out Man.

And you're workin', for no one, but bi-LEEEEEEEEE

Out Mannnnnnnnnnn

An essay: Possibly there will be a link or two.

So... this season turned out bad, just like last season, but we had some good moments, possibly justifying our fanhood. All memories apply only to this season, not hope for the future.

1. Japan

I was a critic of this trip, as it represented an injury risk to every player, a reduction in home games, and a requirement that A's fans keep absurd hours to watch their team.

I was wrong. The Japan trip brought a measure of excitement to the opening of the A's season that would not have otherwise existed. Opening day is always exciting. Scoring the first run of the season always causes a fist-pump that doesn't occur later on, and the game outcome seems more important than any other until September, as we all forget over the offseason just how long the MLB season is. The Japan trip created great excitement for me. I felt privileged to have my team starting earlier by a week than the others, and it was exciting to change my sleep schedule around A's ball. I was incredibly pumped upon first pitch in Japan to the extent that it made me forget that the A's didn't have a good team. The A's lost that game, rather spectacularly, and I would say it was the most brutal loss of the season, causing me to scream angrily and hurl my shoes at the pavement/parked cars. But: I still have a fond memory of watching the A's open the season with a few die-hards in the middle of the night. Something magical in fact. As unhappy and pissed off as I was, in retrospect it would be hard to have worked up the requistite passion for any other A's game, and that is worth something: it was damn exciting. And the A's repaid us with a  nice win the following morning. Waking up at 3:00 AM to pre-season-but-it-counted A's baseball with a 4-thread AN showing was awesome. I declare the Japan trip a glowing success.

April 27 vs. Seattle: The A's were surprsingly still in the thick of the race at this point, and so was Seattle. The A's were facing Felix H. who had dominated them over the past several starts, and has the best stuff of any pitcher in the AL. The A's were at risk of fading at this point, and dropping out of the pennant race as soon as had been expected. Felix was utterly dominant for 7 innings. I have rarely seen such dominant pitching with the exception of other Felix starts against the A's. Hope  seemed lost. But the A's managed to rally, with big hits from the RBI machine and Cust, to score 4 runs in the 8th for a hugely satisfying victory.

May 7: Many bad things happened vs. the Orioles, but a kickass slide from Hannahan led to a walkoff HR by Ellis.

May 24: Duke's 1-hitter vs. the Sox. I enjoyed that a lot. A lot. Duke humiliated hitter after hitter, leaving depressed Sox fans to chant in their heads "I'm a doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooche" as they proceeded shamefully to their favored means of transportation, the douchemobile.

June 3: Jack Cust walk-off IF single. I like Cust. And he's kinda fast.

June 26: Harden gem. I don't want to introduce sad notes here, but... Watching Harden pitch was worth all the losing (though not worth all the wondering what could have been if he were able to pitch at various times.) He had a no-hitter through 5 or 6, and absolutely mowed down the Phillies. I fear we will not see a talent as great as Harden dominate hitters for a very long time, if ever, but it was a joy to watch.

No particular date: As long as Mr. BZ (the one who is good at pitching) maintains the scoreless streak, and the equally exciting (to me) no-xbh streak, the season remains exciting and well worth watching.  And it had plenty of excitement before.

Add your own memories! Or links! Yes, links! I mea!nt to write something about fond memories of the Japan thing but I couldn't stop! And now I can't help but end sentences with exclamation marks! The only cure is good links and discussion from the community!

!

Here is my review, which I was forced to write in light of all the love it’s getting. Spoilers, blah, blah, blah.

First the good:
Yeah, Ledger is really good, and the 15-20% of the movie that he’s in is also really good. The pencil scene, which has been noted here, is awesome. The downside of that however, is that it was good because it was a funny joke by the Joker, and I would have appreciated many more such gags, but he was actually rather "serious" much of the time, and the pursuit of mayhem ought to have been more mirthful. Still really good, though.

I enjoyed the first hour quite a bit. The opening scene was great, as was the Hong Kong action scene, and, as mentioned, all the scenes with the Joker. It was well directed and scored, and I thought it struck a nice tone.

I always respect it when major characters get killed off, so good for them on that score. I would have respected it even more if the people on the boats had blown each other up. If you want to make a dark movie, make it really dark… As an aside, another Ledger movie, <em>The Patriot</em>, though a terrible movie, wins my all-time respect award on that score. The movie spent 20 minutes on a rather tedious love story between Ledger and some woman, only to have the evil Brits crowd her and the rest of the town into a church which they then burned down. Awesome.

On to the (lots o’) bad:
The glowing reviews really pissed me off. It has been showered with a "purple rain" of glowing prose such as (all pulled off www.metacritic.com):

An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment

A bit of Hamlet is in this Batman

Mr. Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter, solid family man though he may (or may not) be, should be immediately sacked, as Dalesman would phrase it. I even get his point, but still….

The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread

Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books--pure good vs. pure evil--into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.

Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.

It's proof that popcorn entertainments don't have to talk down to their audiences in order to satisfy them

Gah! This movie is not "brainy" or "smart" or "morally complex" or that of that stuff! It made me dUmbEr and I actually felt a tad manipulated and even insulted by what was supposedly passing for braininess. I thought the plot and "themes" were really pretty silly, and to the extent that it stimulated your brain, you really should read better books. Or something. Here goes my laundry list of whines.

-Generally speaking, this movie had a bunch of the same (tiresome by this point) themes that every damn superhero movie has, but since it was darker, people feel the need to take it more seriously. E.g., Batman questioning whether he should give up being a superhero. Maybe he’s doing more harm than good!  This happens in every superhero franchise. I didn’t find it particularly compelling the first time I encountered it, and it’s not any more interesting in this movie. I kept expecting Morgan Freeman to say "with great power comes great responsibility"….

-The DA guy’s character change: makes. no. fucking. sense. So some of those cops were corrupt… Why does he want to kill Gary Oldman’s family? Gary Oldman didn’t do anything to him. So… the Joker turned him evil by killing his gf and showing him "the folly of planning."… This does not impress me. If this plot element was supposed to be "brainy" or "morally complex" than apparently I lack a brain and also lack moral curiosity.

 -The coin-tossing conceit in No Country for Old Men was awesome and rather chilling, whereas in the film, it was just rather lame and, frankly, confusing. Many films try to invoke fate or chance in the hopes of achieving some gravitas, but these attempts almost always wind up just being dumb.

-People are fundamentally good, even hardened criminals (and we know that big black dudes are the hardenedest criminals of all…)! The Joker was wrong! Wooooooooooo people! Would people really react that way if faced with that boat situation? I don’t know, but I suspect not, since it only takes one. I do know that I can’t muster up the energy to care about that particular absurd situation. The only way I would have liked that scene is if the movie had taken seriously the idea that maybe they should blow up the other boat. I might have liked that.

The ending really was awful. We were supposed to feel somber or sad or heart-swellingly proud or some such thing when Batman has to go into hiding and they destroy the bat signal. But it’s hard to feel that when it doesn’t make any fucking sense! Why should the people of Gotham hate Batman? He seems like a great guy to me. Fights crime. Why celebrate the DA guy? Why were supposed to even like him in the first place? We were I guess supposed to accept the notion that he was the somehow better successor to Batman as the savior of the city who people could believe in or whatever, but there were no reasons given for that. It is just confusing!

-It invoked some contemporary debates about terrorism and surveillance, but didn’t  really do much more than invoke them, and I would personally rather than films not invoke such things at all, as they (especially action movies) are quite poor vehicles for any insight into such matters. I challenge any of you: What did the movie say about such issues that was interesting in the slightest? One can probably draw absurd lessons right (such as in today’s WSJ…) or left, but in either case it is just people projecting their opinions onto the film.

-Batman’s voice: what the fuck was up with that? It was terrible!

I miss Adam West.

Have at me, if you managed to get through all that…..

I am curious as to the predictive powers of AN. The question is: will Mark Ellis be resigned? Not should he be, etc., etc., but will he be? Many think the acquisitions of Weeks and Patterson, not wanting to spend money, and the desire to "go young" indicate that he will not. I think that he will, the reason being that it makes sense, and the FO generally does things that make sense. Also, he appears to want to stay.

So, what do you think?

1. Greg Smith With 6 pickoffs (next best is 3), he may have some chance at the single season record. The most since 1992 was 12, and 9-10 typically leads MLB. I don't know what the record is though.

2. Ziggy I think there's a very good chance we'll see Ziggy up with the A's pretty soon (when Petit goes back down, or Ellis is DL'd). They tried to turn him into Bradford, and his stats have been remarkably and uncannily similar to Bradford's. He's getting a ton of ground balls, dominating right-handed hitters, and has yet to give up a home run since going side-arm. He would be worth using as a roogy or a rtoogy in high leverage situations, and is fairly likely to be better than Andrew Brown generally.

3. Today's link o' horror I'm moving to Seattle.

A's Win!

Two final slaps for the A's on Wednesday after being an afterthought to the Red Sox all week: The ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by Ryo Ishikawa, a teenage Japanese golfer wearing a Red Sox jersey - and because the A's were the home team, Oakland catcher Rob Bowen had to run out and catch the pitch.

A's Win!

Harden!

Giants h8 Bonds. This article is about how they removed all the Bonds stuff from the Booth (now in a truck heading across the bridge?????):

I asked team president Peter Magowan if management considered some kind of visible tribute to Bonds and his record. "No," Magowan said, eloquently.

Will Cargon roam free?

Tournament starts today. Fun stuff. I'm rooting for the Gaels. The other day KenKo picked UCLA while Buan opted for Kansas. If Kansas wins will it presage a changing of the guard? Only time and judgment will tell.

Mike Sweeney is settling into a role of light hijinks purveyor and go-to quote man:

Designated hitter Mike Sweeney started a rumor at some point this spring that the Cactus League champions all would receive big-screen TVs.

So for several weeks, as the A's put up lots of wins, there was much chatter about big screens around the clubhouse, even though everyone (probably) knew that it wasn't actually true. But fake incentive or not, Oakland played extremely well this exhibition season, going 16-7 after splitting Wednesday's games.

"There's a lot of talent here and I don't think the way we've played in spring training is a fluke," Sweeney said. "I think we're for real and I think we're going to surprise a lot of people."

Beane on your 2008 Cactus League Champions:

"My theory is that spring training is the most important part of the season, and if you win it, you should go in as the favorite," Beane said with a grin. "I've completely reversed my (previous) thinking."

Someone "liveblogs" Moneyball. Not sure if this is good.

True basketball fans know that the NIT is the real prize, and Cal notched a titanic victory late last night in front of a screaming 1,906.