If you could go anywhere in the world right now, absent any resource constraints or responsibilities, where would you go? One place I think would be amazing is Tanzania for a safari on the Serengeti plus a trip to Zanzibar. I realize I don't need to go to Africa to look at animals or go to a beach, but one doesn't need to go to Paris to eat French food and look at art either.

Oh right, Paris. I'd love to go back there for a week or so also. I was there in June, and I couldn't get over how friendly everyone was. A friend at a recent holiday party pointed out that probably people just wanted my money in a down economy. How cynical! He is from Egypt, and he made an analogy about how the Pyramids are like the Golden Gate Bridge, in that the locals see them from afar all the time but rarely go to the actual structures. I thought that was a brilliant analogy.

Brazil for the World Cup would be great too, but what if the sec119 household will have changed permanently by then? DOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!! Hence, the current travel bug.

Steven Spielberg:

Avatar is "the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since 'Star Wars.'

via i967.photobucket.com

Continue reading this post »

Under the assumptions 1) that Bobby Crosby is hurting the team with his bat and needs to be replaced, and 2) that there are no outstanding SS candidates in the farm system, I think it’s time to give Donnie Murphy a shot at SS.  

Continue reading this post »

if almost every line drive we hit looks like it's hit right to a fielder, at least part of it is due to good defense on the part of toronto, and not just bad luck, right?  i'm left wondering if we really are getting unlucky, or if toronto's outfield is that great.  it's hard to see on tv (or even at the stadium, when you're looking at the batter) how much of a jump an outfielder gets on the ball, for example.  given the debate over defensive stats, i'm not sure if there's a good way to answer this even if we had all the information available to us.  any thoughts?  are we getting hosed? did JP pull a moneyball on defense? or is it too early in the season for me to start thinking about these things...

http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20050406&c ontent_id=1001806&vkey=pr_oak&fext=.jsp&c_id=oak

Note also that Saarloos has been added.  Anyway, it's a good thing that we got Ginter after all, since having another infielder around is now necessary.  I guess Scutaro will take SS and Ellis 2nd, with Ginter backing up Ellis and Ellis backing up Scutaro?

CWS is on FSN right now...the only reason I post it on AN is that I just watched Durazo crush a 2-run homerun for Mexico.  So, 1) you can get 1/9th of your A's baseball fix before the season starts, and 2) I wonder why some players do better when they take time off and others do better when they do winter ball.  Maybe it doesn't even matter, player perceptions just depend on how they do during the season, when they attribute their performance to whatever they did or didn't do during the offseason?

I have to admit, I've been reading AN for quite some  time but never bothered to sign up.  The interview with Billy Beane, though, just put me over the top -- it's a thousand times better than anything else in the Bay Area media, with the exception of Susan Schlusser and Mychael Urban.  So now I'm a little curious about the readership here, especially since it seems like a lot more people joined recently as well.