Summertime

I'm going to take a break from attacking everyone's heroes (firefighters, Cal Ripken Jr.) to discuss something far less substantial: the summer TV lineup. I've been watching a few shows after May sweeps ended, and I can actually tell you that unlike every year since television began existing, this year's summer television programming is awesome. Or what I just said was a total lie. That's possible too.

Top Chef: They've aired a few episodes of Season 3, and it really looks like the caliber of chefs is significantly above least season's debacle. A basic problem of any food-oriented show is that you never get to eat any food yourself, so from a television standpoint, the emphasis has to be on appearances, and how aesthetically pleasing the plates are. Last season had a bunch of cooks who maybe made tasty food, but it looked mediocre onscreen. (It probably tasted mediocre too, but I'm trying to be nice.) As in any competitive reality show, it's a little early to tell, but things are promising.


Real World/Road Rules Challenge Inferno 3: Julius and I might be the only people who watch this preposterously named show, which is winding up next week, but know this - Derrick is on the verge of winning his first Challenge ever, as he enters the final mission with a strongly favored team of Steroid Abe, Kenny, Ev (that's a man), in-shape Tonya, and Janelle. After crushing last-minute losses in Inferno 2, Gauntlet 2, The Duel and Fresh Meat, it appears that Derrick's time may have arrived. In a year when Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl, it would be only fitting for Derrick to finally win a Real World/Road Rules Challenge. 2007 - the year of the loser. Has a nice ring to it.

Last Comic Standing: I tried watching this, and a few jokes made me laugh, but I found it very hard to care. I doubt I'll tune in again, I hate watching the personal lives of comedians anyways, they all think they're tortured souls or something.

On the Lot: Rob told me to start watching this. It wasn't a very good idea. The premise of this (film directors compete American Idol style, filming short films which America votes on) is actually not bad, but the execution is horrible. The studio host is bad, the judges make no sense, and I haven't been altogether impressed with the quality of short films many of these directors are making. It isn't a bad show to TiVo though, because you can FF through all the fluff and just watch the shorts. This would be perfect, except a lot of the shorts are very mediocre.

National Bingo Night: Just kidding....or AM I?? But seriously, no, I don't watch this/know what it is exactly.

Age of Love: Surely you've seen NBC promos for this - former tennis pro Mark Philippoussis, age 30, dates a basket of women in their 40s and a group of women in their 20s. Cougars vs. kittens. (NBC's line, not mine). The premiere was pretty funny, just seeing Philippoussis react to 40-year old women, but this show takes itself sort of seriously (people cry quite a bit), so I think I'm going to stop watching. I do like that when he eliminates a woman, his closing line is "Can I give you a hug?" I love it - I'm going to start saying that whenever I break bad news to anyone. "Oh man, sorry I crashed into your car...can I give you a hug?"

Also, Kornheiser was hating on Philippoussis on PTI, but the guy won 11 ATP tournaments and made two Grand Slam finals. I don't think people grasp just how tough that is to do - I'd say his tennis success is analogous to Stephon Marbury in basketball or Marc Bulger in football. He's no all-time great, but when he was healthy, he could be a real tough opponent. Nonetheless, his presence on this show is ridiculous and has to drop him down a few pegs.

Science of Love: I'm never going to watch this show again, but I urge you to check it out once before it gets cancelled, which could be any day now. Alyssa told me to watch - the premise is insane. A guy chooses one woman on his own (instinct) and a "panel of leading experts in the field of love" chooses a woman (science) for him, and he goes on two dates, and decides if he likes "instinct" or "science" better. I won't get into too many details because this show is so stupid, but suffice it to say, almost every moment of the show made me laugh uncontrollably. I'll spoil one highlight - the team of scientists is trying to engineer scenarios to "make" the guy fall in love, prompting the host to say awesome things like "let's see if science can make love" or "are you ready to make some love?" This shit is gonna get canned real fast, so add it to your TiVo lineup ASAP if interested.

Saving Baseball

Gene Wojciechowski casually references a notion in his recent column that bothers me to no end, namely, that Cal Ripken Jr. "saved" baseball. I don't know why this phrase became engraved into our sports lexicon, but the notion that Cal Ripken somehow saved baseball is ludicrous on like six different levels. If I were a better person this wouldn't bother me so much, but alas.

Supposedly, the 1994 baseball strike had everyone so disgusted with the greed of professional baseball players that we were all going to swear off baseball forever, until Cal Ripken got into the "saving" business. Clearly, the '94 strike wasn't fantastic, but baseball wasn't in dire straits as many suggested. Although it appeared that the NBA was the new force to be reckoned with, that league would soon learn that only Michael Jordan drew a 20 rating, even with a '94 final involving the New York Knicks. Hindsight is even clearer: the mid 90s would deliver a steady stream of body shots to the NBA - a decline in scoring led by excessive hand-checking, failure of would-be stars to reach their potentials, and, worst of all, rising perception that the league was full of thugs.

Of course, baseball's trouble wasn't only about the competition - stadium attendance was down. I'm sure there were a lot of fans who cancelled their season tickets for 1995 (and the numbers do bear this out), but they were coming back eventually, Ripken or no Ripken. The inescapable truth is that people love going to baseball games. Although a number of cities showed meaningful attendance declines, seven cities actually posted higher attendance in 1995 versus 1991. The attendance decline was further exaggerated by the 1993 introduction of the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins, as expansion teams draw huge numbers initially, but quickly settle at smaller levels.
Baseball was never going to die.

I can put this even more simply: of the "Big Four" sports during the 1990s (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL) only two continue to have a substantial percentage of white Americans in 2007. I'm confident you can do the math from there, and if not, go talk to a NASCAR fan.

I never understood what was so impressive about the streak. Baseball players have professional trainers, the best doctors, professional nutritionists, fly first class or on chartered jets, don't carry their own luggage, work only 8 months a year and get tons of days off. They make physical contact with another player once every 25 games and spend about 2 hours and 56 minutes out of a 3 hour game either standing in place or sitting down. When you think about it, the wonder isn't that Cal Ripken could play in so many games - the wonder is that all the other guys get hurt so freaking often. If you were to go play a baseball game right now with some friends, you would estimate your personal chance of injury at somewhere between 0% and 1%, with the only meaningful difference being that the tension on your body trying to hit 90 mph pitches is different from trying to hit 70 mph pitches. (As a sidebar, I just saw Derek Jeter have to leave a game after injuring himself trying to change directions quickly on the basepaths, which is pretty much what a basketball or football, or hell, soccer player does every single play every game. And Jeter is TOUGH for a baseball player!)

What separates Ripken from, say, Miguel Tejada is nothing more than pure chance. Well, except that Tejada is a lot better, at least versus Ripken at that point. Ripken had a '95 park adjusted OPS of .746, which is roughly comparable to second-half-of-their-careers Omar Vizquel and Royce Clayton. That was at least an improvement over '92 when he was REALLY mediocre, posting an OPS of .689. The logic in giving a .689 OPS guy 715 plate appearances is somewhere between dicey and really dicey.

In summary, we had in "1995 Cal Ripken" a guy who by chance did not sustain a major injury in a sport where you really shouldn't be having major injuries who continued to get every possible plate appearance at the expense of his team winning games. We were really lucky to have him around, because without this overpaid and overrated shortstop (he had at least 6 undeserved all star selections) we would never have been able to save a game that did not need saving in the first place.

It's A Magical World

Have you ever seen anyone taking roadkill off the street? I never have. Broad estimate here - I've probably seen anywhere from five thousand to ten thousand animals run over on the street in my lifetime, and never once have I ever seen anyone remove any of them. Yet they always vanish. Also, given my schedule and age, I'm often on the road late at night, so the "it happens when you're sleeping" answer doesn't satisfy me. I know that there are roadkill removal companies and services, but I think they are merely sham companies set up for money laundering purposes. (Anytime something stays in business longer than it should, I declare that it must be around for money laundering. I think there is a lot of that going on.)

After much deliberation, I have determined that the answer to this quandary is that there is a roadkill fairy, which is invisible, and removes roadkill whenever people are not looking. I have also decided that the roadkill fairy's name is Terry, which is good in this situation because it's a gender-neutral name.

Along similar lines, one of the things I've learned to block out living in New York are fire truck sirens. As a kid, if I heard a fire siren, I'd feel a palpable tinge of concern, and hope that everything was okay. But in New York, fire sirens are so common that any sense of worry has been completely numbed. I must see 3-4 fire trucks with their sirens on each week, if not more, yet I pretty much never see or even hear of any fires. I understand that small apartment fires might still necessitate the fire department despite no visible flames or smoke to outsiders, but I don't even hear people say "oh, there was a fire in my building this weekend". And I personally speak with at least 1-4 people in New York a day. That's a lot of people. (Granted they're often the same people. And I have an imaginary friend.) By my rough estimation, in New York, I've seen around 300 fire trucks with their sirens on, have heard of two fires, and seen zero. The disparity is ridiculous.

There may be a fire siren fairy, who turns on sirens for no reason, overriding the controls of the New York Fire Department. I'm sure that is the explanation and there are no other possible explanations, so don’t even bother to suggest your own ideas.

Where Are The F*$%ing Updates?

Sorry everyone, I don't know what happened there. The weather got warm, I started running in my spare time, I slept more, I had bouts of writers' block - it all added up to no posts, and that's just plain unacceptable. Well that stops now, and that's a promise you can hold me to. If I break it, there's really nothing you can do about it, but that's what I do best: make empty promises. That and the worm. I do the worm really well. Although I think I do it sort of incorrectly because my chest always hurts a lot afterwards.

So what else have I been doing during the blog layoff? There's been a bit of domestic travel - Vegas, DC, Northern California. I flew to San Francisco a couple weeks ago and had to drive to this tiny town called San Martin for a client event at a golf resort & spa. Even people who live in San Jose, Palo Alto and Cupertino had never heard of San Martin. I went on Wikipedia and learned it's fighting to gain official consideration as a town, which is just about the saddest thing I've ever heard.

I rented a car, and just went with the generic midsize sedan, but when I got to Avis, the guy said he only had two cars available: a Ford Mustang and a Ford F-150. Thinking it might be a bit awkward to drive a pickup truck to this client event at a resort, I went with the Mustang. How the hell do people drive that car? It's ridiculously jerky - I guess that's meant to give you a "sports car" feel or something. Just going from 0 to 10 mph practically made Sara vomit all over the dashboard. Sara kept making fun of me for how douchey I looked driving a Mustang - it really is a car for overcompensating. If you're not rich. Because middle class guys need to overcompensate too. And as we drove around, I realized there were tons of Ford Mustangs on the road. I'm not sure if that says something about society as a whole, or if I was just seeing a lot of rental cars since I wasn't too far from the airport.

Sara and I decided to kill some time and see "Ocean's 13", and Sara did the navigation to her home movie theater in Mountain View, which is on the short list for most boring cities in the universe. We exited the freeway, but there was no movie theater - instead there were a bunch of Google buildings. Thankfully we drove a little more, and saw a sign that said "Movies" with an arrow to the right. I turned right...and more Google buildings. So we circled around the block and eventually found another sign for the movies, telling me to turn left. Went left - still all Google. Google everywhere. I started to get scared, everyone was wearing Google clothes too. We eventually asked someone and found the theater - apparently Google employees are keeping a movie theater all to themselves, because the theater could not have possibly been a real business. The movie cost $7.50 - $7.50!! - what is this, 1991? The ticket they gave me wasn't even perforated, the lady at the door just rips it down the middle. Damn you Google and your underpriced retro movie theater. One day lightning will strike a computer that's showing a Google search and the computer will turn evil even though Google means no harm and we will all die after we are attacked by our computers. It's just like in the movies "I, Robot" and "Stealth". Technology is dangerous, and Google must be stopped. Otherwise we'll all die. Don't say I didn't warn you - it's pretty much a known fact that lightning causes technology to turn evil.

Okay, that's the update on me - more standard blog fodder to come soon. Really.