Yankee Hotstove

The Hot Stove Begins Early
That's what happens when they don't make the play-offs. Just checking around the blog-verse, there's a certain resigned air to most of the Yankee Empire of fans. 1) it was bound to happen some day; 2) there were a lot of injuries this year; and 3) that Hughes-Kennedy-Chamberlain troika didn't quite transpire the way it was hoped.

The past few years' post-season appearances have been pretty bad, so it's only a matter of degree of disappointment that's different. 2005, 2006, 2007 were all crappy entries in the annals of Yankee Play-off appearances. They had no pitching and no mongrel in them.

The Brian Cashman Watch Begins... Again
It doesn't seem like it, but it's already been 3 years since we did this merry-go-around when Brian Cashman seemingly won a battle of wills with George Steinbrenner to run the team his way, with his vision. Since then, the 'Steinbratz' Hank and Hal have taken over where George left off and it's been anybody's guess. So here we are again, waiting to see if Cashmoney is going to stay with the organisation in which he came to prominence.

As the Yankees enter another off-season, their first priority is to re-sign Cashman, who is well liked by the Steinbrenner brothers. Hal Steinbrenner has worked closely with Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi, and Cashman said, “I have a tremendous relationship with the Steinbrenner family.”

Hank Steinbrenner has publicly promised to be aggressive in pursuing free agents this winter, and the crop will be thick. The Yankees will explore Sabathia, although they are pessimistic about his desire to play for them.

Well that's nice. He might stay then. That would be very nice. In an organisational sense, he's an in-house product, much like Mo and Jeter and Jorgie, so you'd think he'd stay to see it out.

Things I'd Rather They Didn't Do...
More from the link above:

The Yankees could let Cabrera and Brett Gardner, two strong defenders, compete for the center-field job. But they must prove they can hit. The team could also see if the Dodgers would trade center fielder Matt Kemp for Canó, who has bothered many in the organization for producing so little after being rewarded with a long-term contract. Canó could be replaced at second base by a free agent like Orlando Hudson.

The O-dog is a funny guy - he once called JP Riccardi a guy who dresses like a pimp - but I'm not sure another older player is what the Yankees want. Cano after all, did have a sucky BABIP most of the way of the season. He was down 40 points from his career norm.

Had he hit to his career norm, his line of .286/.305/.410 would have translated to
.326/.345/.501, which is roughly his 2007 line with a touch more SLG. The guy's still an excellent 2B. Matt Kemp is a very nice player, but the upside of Cano is too good to trade away at the lowest point of his value.

Things To Watch Out For...
...apart from signing Cashman.

1) Will they sign Mark Teixiera?
2) Will they sign C.C.Sabathia?
3) Whither Moose and Andy?
4) Who will they sign as the other catcher?
5) What's the bench going to look like in 2009?

Thus the hotstove begins.

UPDATE: Overnight, Cashman confirmed he would return, so that part is done.

“I consider coming off a season where we didn’t reach the playoffs for the first time since 1993 as a personal challenge,” Cashman said in a statement. “I’ve never been one to run from a challenge, and I look forward to having the chance to go after this thing again.”

New York’s shortcomings this season led many to believe that Cashman would not be back with the Yankees in 2009.

However, Cashman received a vote of confidence from Yankees co-chairmen Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, who made the decision Tuesday in an effort to jump-start what likely will be a turbulent offseason in the Bronx.

Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, the sons of Yankees principle owner George Steinbrenner, praised Cashman in a joint statement released by the team.

“Holding the position of general manager for any major league team is a challenge,” the statement said. “But to do so in the great city of New York, where baseball is passionately followed 12 months a year, you must possess a number of unique attributes.

“Brian has shown throughout his Yankees career that he has the dedication, integrity and know-how needed to perform - and succeed - in this environment. Having him in place allows us to begin an offseason of hard work, and we are pleased he will be working hand-in-hand with us to bring the New York Yankees back to the postseason.”

So that's a good sign. If I were him I'd keep going until they took the desk away from me. :)

House Rejects Bailout Package

Principled Stupidity

You have to admire people who live by the sword and then die by it. You just wish that they'd acknowledge the dying part. The House voted down the bailout package.

WASHINGTON — In a moment of historic import in the Capitol and on Wall Street, the House of Representatives voted on Monday to reject a $700 billion rescue of the financial industry. The vote came in stunning defiance of President Bush and Congressional leaders of both parties, who said the bailout was needed to prevent a widespread financial collapse.

The vote against the measure was 228 to 205, with 133 Republicans turning against President Bush to join 95 Democrats in opposition. The bill was backed by 140 Democrats and 65 Republicans.

Supporters vowed to try to bring the rescue package up again as soon as possible, perhaps late Wednesday or Thursday, but there were no definite plans to do so. A former Treasury Department official predicted that the administration would try to get another House vote before the end of the week, and with only “tiny tweaks” to the package, given the relative closeness of the vote.

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety.

The vote was a catastrophic political defeat for President Bush, who tried to muster national support for a recovery plan in a televised address last Wednesday, then lobbied wavering Republican legislators in intensely personal telephone calls on Monday morning.

“We put forth a plan that was big because we got a big problem,” the president said afterward. “And we’ll be working with members of Congress, leaders of Congress on the way forward. Our strategy is to continue to address this economic situation head on.”

I've hardly ever sided with George W. Bush on any issue, but this was a rare instance I could see the point. Even many of the Democrats saw the point. The Republicans who saw the point, knew it flew against their credo of small government and not spending up big deficits, but voted for it. That leaves the Republicans who simply said "no, it's socialism, and that's un-American".

I'd like to say, "For fuck's sake, you're playing with the worlds economy and most of the world is 'un-American' - as in not of the USA - so why let that get in the way f a good deed?"

I've been keeping a close eye on this because it augurs for the marketplace for films that I work in and this is a disaster. The last thing I need in my life now is a 'Great Depression II - The Return of the Hunger'. This is giving me the shits today, along side other aggravations in life.

Of course then these back-biting idiots start playing partisan politics with it, mostly because they ca, at other people's expense.

Immediately after the vote, many House members appeared stunned. Some Republicans blamed Ms. Pelosi for a speech before the vote that disdained President Bush’s economic policies, and did so, in the opinion of the speaker’s critics, in too partisan a way.

“Clearly, there was something lacking in the leadership here,” said Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia.

Democrats, meanwhile, blamed the Republicans for not coming up with enough support for the measure on their side of the aisle.

Members of both parties, doing a quick political post-mortem, said those who voted no had encountered too much hostility for the bill among their constituents, and were worried that a vote in favor would be political suicide.

Get that? Instead of doing what's right for the country, and by extension the world economy, they chose to sit on their meal tickets - and blamed the other side for the failure.
This is actually worse than the Yankees not making the post-season.

Lightning Strikes Dead A Teacher

Benchmark for Infrequency

There's a statistical remark, "you're more likely to be struck by lightning." It usually means the odds are so small, it may as well be insignificantly small. Then, you see a headline where somebody actually gets hit by one and you think... "Oh boy."

Winthrop Baptist College social studies teacher Gregory Crombie, 41, and 19-year-old Thomas McGuinness, died after the group was caught in an electrical storm in Khon Kaen province late yesterday.

Three Thai nationals also died after being struck by lightning, but the college says they were not with the Winthrop college student group sightseeing at the waterfall.

Mr Crombie's sister-in-law Thongsom Paggangwaesang told local media the group had been swimming at the waterfall when the storm hit at Mukdahan, 642km from Bangkok.

She said two bolts of lightning struck and several people collapsed.

So there you go. You're a perfectly healthy 41y.o. dude on a trip, and bang, a lightning strikes and you're a goner. No time for midlife crises. What is that but an 'Act of God'?

NSW is A Racist State

...According To A Study

Sometimes I sort of wonder what constitutes the baseline for racism. It's actually a hard thing to bench mark when you think about it, so you sort of wonder how much veracity there could be in any study. How do they account for cultural prejudices that precede people's lives, such as ancient enmities between peoples? How do they adjust for that context? I mean, can there be such a thing as a replacement-level racist, and if so can they be persuaded to desist?

Anyway, here's what AAP has to say:

A study into racism has found Muslims, or people from the Middle East, are most likely to encounter prejudice in Australia.

Human geography and urban studies Professor Kevin Dunn also says older Australians are more worried about this group than younger or middle aged people.

"It's an indicator of a narrow view of what constitutes Australianism," Professor Dunn said.

And .. he's found while 40 per cent of Australians believe some ethnic groups do not belong in the country .. one in 10 has outwardly racist views.

The overall figures surge to 65 per cent for people over 65 but drop to 31 per cent for those aged 18 to 34.

I think in the wake of 9/11 attacks, any Rorschach Test will reveal that we as a population has been duped into suspecting every Muslim as a potential Terrorist. What was that catchphrase? "Alert, not Alarmed"? Well, 7 years later the war on terror has eroded the tolerant, egalitarian Australia that used to exist.
Pretty damning, really - And I say that as a non-Muslim. What ever happened to the Australia of a 'fair go'?

Mussina Wins No.20

He'll Make The HOF Now

Moose won no.20. It makes me very happy.

In a season with little to celebrate, his teammates gave him a rousing welcome—one he had waited his entire 18-year career to receive. Mussina had just become the oldest pitcher to win 20 games in a season for the first time as the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 6-2 Sunday in the opener of a rain-delayed day-night doubleheader.

“This is one of those things that I think will take a while to sink in,” said Mussina, who has won at least 18 games five other times.

The playoff-bound Red Sox won the second game 4-3 on Jonathan Van Every’s bases-loaded single with two outs in the 10th.

Less than three months before his 40th birthday, Mussina (20-9) gave up three hits in six shutout innings in his final start of the season. He returned to the field to bring out the lineup card for the second game.

Last year he had the highest ERA of his career (5.15). This season, it was 3.37 after he allowed one earned run in 16 innings over his last three starts.

“I’m proud of myself to be able to do this after last year,” he said.

Previously, the oldest first-time 20-game winner was Jamie Moyer, who was 38 when he went 20-6 for Seattle in 2001. Mussina, who hasn’t committed to playing next season, could be the first pitcher to retire following a 20-win season since Sandy Koufax.

“I just had a lot of fun playing this year,” Mussina said. “I don’t know what the future holds. When you’ve got 18 seasons in, it could always be your last year.”

Mussina is 269-153 with a 3.69 ERA in his career. and his previous high for wins came in 1995 and 1996, when he won 19 games each year for Baltimore. Mussina went 0-2 in his last four starts in 1996, leaving his final one with a 2-1 lead after eight innings only to watch Armando Benitez allow a tying homer to Toronto’s Ed Sprague in the ninth.

I know, the highlights for the end of season coming to this is a bit sad, but you have to be happy for a guy who has won 18games in a season 5 times and yet has never won 20 until now. Why 20? I dunno - because we are into the decimal system I guess. 270 wins is a lot of games to win in this day and age of setup-men and closers taking the ball out of the starting pitchers' hands sooner. Not only did he have to pitch well, he had to pitch for a lot of good teams. When he came into this season, even No. 251 looked dicey given how poorly he pitched last year. More significantly, he finished with an ERA of 3.37, with a 5:1 K:BB ratio. More amazingly, he did it in front of an unforgiving defense:

Check out the poor BABIP numbers last year and this year. It's almost unfair. So it's no fluke of the bounce of the ball that netted him his scintillating 3.37 ERA. Looking at those numbers, there's an argument to be made that he pitched astoundingly well this year and more than deserved his 20 wins.

Anyway, it's all on his resume now. Those pesky writers won't be able to deny him the Hall of Fame on account of never having been a 20-game winner now. Best of all, he did it against Boston.

Paul Newman Passes Away (1925-2008)

Goodbye Cool Hand Luke

Paul Newman passed away at age 83.

The 10-time Academy Award nominee died Friday at age 83, surrounded by family and close friends at his Westport farmhouse following a long battle with cancer, publicist Jeff Sanderson said Saturday.

In May, Newman dropped plans to direct a fall production of "Of Mice and Men" at Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse, citing unspecified health issues. The following month, a friend disclosed that he was being treated for cancer and Martha Stewart, also a friend, posted photos on her Web site of Newman looking gaunt at a charity luncheon.

At 83, you can't say he was too young to die, yet my mind is filled with the way he as in all his movies so I'm a little surprised. Even in Road to Perdition, he seemed spry and full of beans. He seems to have been around forever.

My earliest memory of Newman is as Butch Cassidy; in particular the scene where he is challenged by one of the underlings. He then says he's going to explain the rules and kicks the guy in the nuts saying there are no rules. As a kid I found that incredibly funny. Then there was his turn as the con man in 'The Sting' that I marveled at. He was so smooth end eloquent when putting one over Robert Shaw.

He was a wonderful actor.

Schwarzenegger's Global Warming Conference

Go Arnie!

Here's some news from California...

The governor said he will invite officials from Europe, as well as from Australia, China, India and other countries, in the hope of forming an international alliance of community and regional leaders.

He is planning the conference for November, a month before the United Nations holds its next round of international climate talks in Poland. Governors from all 50 states also will be invited.

"The real action for any new ideas is always on the local level," Schwarzenegger told a gathering of the Commonwealth Club of California, a nonpartisan educational organization. "This is how we can push the agenda."

Schwarzenegger has been at odds with the Bush administration over environmental policy, criticizing what he calls a failure of leadership on global warming and other matters.

People quibble too much about this guy's merits. Okay, so he's not Einstein or Jesus Christ or a Democrat, but he is doing the right thing, taking on the battle to save the planet. That plus sticking it to President GW Bush. So, yes, go Arnie!

Afghanistan Redux

'The Man Who Would Be King' - Revisited

One of the more haunting films I saw on TV growing up was 'The Man Who Would Be King' starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. What I didn't know was that Christopher Plummer from 'Sound of Music' fame plays Rudyard Kipling, and completely over my head went all the references to the Freemasons. Also, it was directed by John Huston which is interesting because it does smack of 'Black Heart White Hunter'.

Why watch this now? Good question. Well, apart from the nice price tag I saw for it, I think it was the British Army uniforms from the 19th Century worn by Michael Caine that got me in. He did look rather dashing in 'Zulu', and Sean Connery is well, Sean Connery. Indeed a movie that features two Brit stars of the 60s can't be that bad to watch again. Perhaps a more adult insight might be found.

There are indeed fascinating ideas lurking in this story, not to mention the fateful geography of Kafiristan. You'd think it was a fake place name, but it is not!

Kafiristan takes its name from the inhabitants, the Kafirs, a fiercely independent people with distinctive culture, language and religion. They were called Kafir ("infidel") because they were not Muslim. In 1896 Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, who conquered the region for Islam by sword^[1], renamed the people as Nuristani ("Enlightened Ones" in Persian) and the land as Nuristan ("Land of the Enlightened"). Only three valleys, Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur, escaped because they were located east of the Durand line, under the administrative control of the British Raj and later Pakistan.

So yeah. It's a film set in Afghanistan, with Englishmen trying to get a kingdom going.

What's Good About It

Considering how simple the story is, the script manages to convey a number of complex ideas that are germane to the 'why' part of the story, and it boils down to this: two army officers decide to go into deep central Eurasia, equipped with the modern military know-how and try to carve a kingdom for themselves, because... they can. The essence of the story is in the 'can'; the willingness to undertake an audacious move with just a bunch of guns and military know how is beautifully and indelibly expressed.

The boundless, jaunty energy of both characters played by Connery and Caine is infectious and totally skips over any post-colonial trauma for India and Pakistan. Perhaps the overt Imperialism in Kipling and hence the film is a bit too much for us to take these days, there's something profoundly charming about both Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. they do make a dashing duo, sort of 'Bond and Palmer'.

What's Bad About It

Time has not been kind to this film. The acting seems very old-style and a little stilted. Connery over-acts for the shot-size in parts and Caine is a little cheesy as he reprises his Zulu schtick in other parts. It's not bad as such, just a little on the nose by our contemporary standards. The lighting in the studio scenes are nice, but most of the location exteriors just look flat and unimaginative. I'm not exactly sure where they shot it (wikipedia says Morocco), but it all looks like America to me.

Other Thoughts

I kept thinking "damn, we're still there fighting in Afghanistan." What's worse is that we're in Afghanistan for as equally intangible reasons as Danny and Peachy. After all, there's actually something of the current military campaign that echoes what amounts to 'Danny and Peachy's excellent Afghan adventure'.

Danny and Peachy set about going in to Afghanistan with the hope of using 20 rifles to secure one of the tribes to be their army. From there, they are going to use their military acumen to conquer the rest of Afghanistan. It's a wildly fanciful story except that is exactly how the CIA fought the Taliban in 2002. They went in there and gave superior weapons to the North Eastern tribesmen - some even presumably from Kafiristan/Nuristan - and sent them in to take down the Taliban Government with US Air Cover. In fact, the entire Afghan campaign since 9/11 could be characterised as 'Danny and Peachy's Extraordinary Afghan Adventure Part 2' - although serious minded people would be in denial.

They'd be kind of wrong to be in denial.
Let's face it: how different is the goal to become a King and to establish a stable government in Afghanistan? If Rambo III was a little silly, then surely the real life wars in Afghanistan are worthy of comedy. Kipling would've seen the tropes and laughed. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we're there because Kipling wrote this magnificent short story that got made into this wonderful film and people are still programmed by it to go to Afghanistan? Who knows?

When Peachy implores Danny to come home with him, he looks out at the Afghans and says, "they're savages!" It's a bit cruel and unkind, indeed it's downright imperialist and priggish. It's more like they are barbaric than savage, I thought. How little things change. Yet the fact of the matter is, we're all Danny and Peachy in Afghanistan. What was a bittersweet parable by Kipling is still the defining text of how the West with all its technological edge fails in the Central Steppes of Eurasia.

Alexander, The West and Parthia
Parthia, the Empire to the East has been the counter part to the Western Civilization for along time. Alexander marches deep into terrain on his way to making his great Empire, but this is more of a punctuation in a long line of history written by people of the Persian area. Xerxes hailed from there, as did Darius. The Roman Empire stopped on the doorstep of the Parthians and today, Iran has inherited the political legacy of the Parthians and the Sassanid Persians.

It's no coincidence then that the story turns on the recognition of supposedly Alexander's symbol which has been co-opted by the Freemasons. I'm sure there is a mountain of literature on the significance of these things, which I'll politely sidestep because I want to get to one point: We in the west are largely ignorant of what the world might look like from the Parthian/Persian perspectivie. As such, we are driven by our own needs and seem to stumble into Afghanistan over and over again when in reality it might be somebody else's problem.

Like Alexander himself, Danny and Peachy fail because they have no conception of the depth of the Kafiristani culture. They all ride in proudly as conquerors but do not realise that they have been co-opted into the local war. This too has a historic echo in what is happening today as our troops fight in Afghanistan siding with Karzai's government, shooting at the Taliban.

It's also a little like the observation that the Connecticut Yankee ultimately fails in King Arthur' court because of his own cultural prejudices and his failure to take in to account the local culture. It's a story that seems to keep repeating in history, which is probably why this yarn by Kipling keeps its relevance.

The Last Game At Yankee Stadium

The Last Game

Yankee Stadium closed today. The Yankees are moving to the new stadium across the road. I guess it means one of these days I'm going to have to trek out to NYC to have look at their new digs. Fortunately, they had enough in their tank to stave off elimination for 1 more game. It's doubtful the Bosox won't win 1 game in the next four, and it's not exactly likely the Yankees will sweep the Jays so that is all she wrote for 2008 when it comes to the Yankees.

My Memories of The Stadium
I was 11 when I finally got to see a game at the Stadium. It wasn't long after the renovations back in 1977 and everything was still freshly painted. Thurman Munson was the Catcher, Ron Guidry was on the mound, around the horn were Chris Chambliss, Willy Randolph, Fred Stanley, Graig Nettles. The outfiled left to right was Lou Piniella, Mickey Rivers and Reggie Jackson. It seemed like a colossally big place. I got an aurograph from Mickey Rivers. He was very polite; he sort of shuffled around and occasioanlly cocked his head to th side.

I know from objective facts that its capacity of 56,000-odd makes Yankee stadium smaller than Sydney's own Telstra Olympic stadium or the Beijing Birds' Nest, but it always looms large in my memory. The only other time I walked into a stadium and was blown away by its dimensions was when I walked into the Colosseo in Rome. It was a strange sensation as if I had been there before, and then it hit me - I was re-experiencing the moment I stepped into Yankee Stadium as kid. Which is kind of weird because it suggests:
- Babe Ruth is more real to me than say, the Emperor Diocletian.
- Some parts of my brain are indelibly centred around my Yankee-fan experience.
Anyway, I don't have much else to offer. So much has faded over time.

My Yankee Fan Day In Sydney

Take Off That Hat If You Don't Know Anything About It, You Shit!

I pulled up at the lights next to a guy in a swish looking car. He had a Yankee cap on.
So I asked him, "Did they win today?"
"I don' know," he said.
"Did Moose win no. 18?"
"What?" he responded
"They were up 7-1 when I left home.," I yelled.
"I don't know. I don't watch it."
"So you don't know if Jeter got a hit?"
"Who?"
"Derek Jeter..."
The the lights changed. So we drove off on our merry ways.

One of these days I want to make a doco where I ask people in Sydney a bunch of Yankee related questions and get their responses. They shouldn't be wearing those Yankee caps if they don't know who Derek Jeter is.

Moose won No.18 for the season.

NSWFTO

Dealing With Rejection

Just a quick note to tell you all the NSWFTO declined to back our little project 'Crashing by Design'. The prospects for which were essentially sunk by an unfavorable Reader's Report written by one NG. MW informed me by phone that the meeting essentially goes on what the Reader's Report says so they decided not to go ahead.

Which is fine until you sit there and ponder if the Reader's Report was actually fair. I've been canvassing a few fellow screenwriters who have come back and said, "what she says is right, but how she says it is hostile". I actually disagreed. The Reader completely missed the Hamlet plot points we worked into the story and she kept complaining that it didn't ring true to her when in fact, the part she was complaining about was based on a true story.

If you get sunk by somebody who is making a good point, then yeah. It's a fair cop. When you get sunk by somebody who didn't get the story, then it's not a fair cop. Thank you NG, I'll never forget you and your idiotic input that sunk our application. One of these days I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to repay that favor when I get to sink one of your projects.

I also imagine that a script that tacitly points to the various corruptions in NSW is not going to win over a NSW Government organ, but you get that.

Photoshop Palin

They Fooled Me Jerry!

Last week or so, Yahoo news posted up a news story with this picture above. This is it here. Of course it turned out to be a Photoshop-manipulated image based on the one below.

There's a critique of the phenomenon here.
Sarah Palin reminds me of Pauline Hanson with a few tweaks and kinks. Her appeal is essentially the same as Hanson: ill-educated rednecks plus disenfranchised right wing nuts with an axe to grind. She seems to be better educated (which is a plus) but comes burdened with a psycho-Christian religion that is waiting for the 'rapture' (which is a major minus). So should McCain win and then die in office, as roughly a third of Presidents have done, then she'll have her trigger-finger on the doomsday switch. Are we comfortable with that?
I'm not.

Metallica Mix & Mastering Is Allegedly A Mess

Interesting Thread

I'm not a Metallica fan at all. Heavy Metal generally isn't my thing, though there are some metal acts that I do like. I understand Metallica's position as some kind of pinnacle act of its genre, but they've never really come close to selling me a record. It's a little tricky for me to like HM because I just can't get at the kinds of themes that interest HM acts. There used to be a guy who I'll just refer to as SV that I used to know back in High School who was totally into his stuff, and it was he who introduced me to Van Halen and the tapping thing - but I just couldn't get at the rest of the silly posturing. And there used to be a tonne of silly posturing in Heavy Metal.

Anyway, it seems the latest album sounds like an over-compressed sonic pancake and the punters are actually a little more than upset with the production value. If you want to know what musician types are saying about it, here's an interesting thread at iComp.

If you feel brave enough to listen to the whole album, you can do so track by track, over here.

If you want to know what engineering boffin types are saying there's an interesting thread here.

Here's a link to a diagram that shows just how crunched the sound is on the current Metallica album.

Now, the funny thing is, yes I can telll all the distortions and clipping, and they are unpleasant indeed, but I kept thinking "isn't this what it has always sounded like?"

Any way, I just thought I would just put that out there... and wait for the hate-mail

Obituaries - Richard Wright (1943 - 2008)

Pink Floyd's Keyboard Player Passes Away

It's a real drag when a rock star dies. Even if it's a a guy who is much older than 27 - in this case a still-spritely 65. Intimations of mortality abound. Can't say I was much of Pink Floyd fan back in High School, but Walk-off HBP was big on them; pharmakeus and his guitar identity was practically born out of them; and when I got to University, I was surrounded by quite a number of people who just loved 'The Wall'. It was all part of the canon of rock you had to know when you were a teen in the late 1970s through to the 1980s.

To this day, my favorite Pink Floyd album is 'Animals', partly because it is a total Gilmour-Guitar-fest, partly because it has the word 'animal' in the title, partly because it's a cynical nasty album, but also because the keyboard work makes for such a beautiful backdrop for all the guitar heroics. I also love Wright's understated playing on 'Dark Side of the Moon', which forms the vast majority of the harmonic information on that album. 'Great Gig in the Sky' is Richard Wright.

I'll never forget the time a fellow student in Med School gave me a cassette with 'The Wall' on it as a gift because he felt it expressed how he felt about the world. I listened earnestly for about a fortnight on my walkman because he kept asking me if I felt that way about life; and I had to say no, I felt more like Jimmy Cooper, the four-personality mod in 'Quadrophenia', than the protagonist in 'The Wall'. I think I let him down really badly.
It kind of scares me to think that person is out there now practising medicine, along with all the other emotionally stunted people from Med School.

Yet there was a lot of it going around, and I think that people *got* the mood of that album because of Richard Wright's tremendous moody playing. After all, it's not like it's (pardon the pun once again) wall-to-wall guitar heroics on that album.

'Wish You Were Here' is another album that defines keyboard atmospherics at their best. It's hard to imagine it now but there was a time when the album defined lush keyboard production value. Still, being a guitar more of a guitar kind of dude, I tended to hang for the lead breaks, but what makes Pink Floyd so compelling is in Wright's work.

All the while we kept hearing stories about how unwanted and unloved he was by Roger Waters through the years and it seems hardly possible. how could he level so much venom against the musician that gave so much style and substance to his largely bellicose lyrics? It's all very odd.
One thing is for sure - Richard Wright will be sorely missed.

Tropic Thunder

Diminishing Signification Through Parody

The world is a cruel place for actors. There's just no hiding the fact that actors are totally the playthings of circumstance who get passed around as names and a brand and a look as their names become a commodity, and their identity becomes laden with roles they take on, but this experience is actually hollow because they didn't really do the things the characters did in the films or plays they appeared in, they simply acted it. Their very existence is Martin Heidegger's future, where in he said the future was a shining darkness, stretched across like a screen (I always thought he must have meant movies). This confusion of identity and meaning of course only visits itself upon the successful ones. The less successful simply travel through roles without acquiring any meaning at all. They simply pass through the business like so much scenery and fodder.

So when you consider a film directed by a star about stardom, you are forced to reckon with the dual reality where actors are playing a certain kind of fictionalisation of their largely fiction-enhanced lives, where their identities simply become crutches for their every day existence.
Tropic Thunder then is that rare film where the filmmaker tries to open up the backstage, only to turn that backstage into a cornucopia of laughs.

What's Good About It

For a start, it's just flat out funny in at least 50% of the scenes. The much discussed 'retard' exchange is more insightful than advertised. As Robert Downey Jr., who is playing an Australian who is method-acting his way as a black American explains, playing the full retard will not net you an Oscar. It's a great thesis, explained in wonderfully succinct detail. Playing the full retard, is not good.

The comedy is decidedly black. This is no pun, even with Robert Downey Jr's Sgt. Osiris character. The humour is in many ways a kind of gallows humour best reserved for sardonic laughs. You get the feeling that the people who would enjoy this film the most are in fact, actors. Sure enough, the director steps on a mine and is dead by the end of the second reel. However, his blasted head does get played around by Ben Stiller in classic black comedy style where handling of a corpse is de rigeur. There is also the continuing sideshow of the Agent and the Studio boss which highlights much of the gallows humour.

What's Bad About It
The film takes giant swings at the ego of star actors, but at the same time, none of it is anything that is profoundly wounding. The nudge-wink factor makes the film pull short of condemning anybody. Even Robert Downey Jr.'s excellent pay-out of Russell Crow has the air of a gentle homage. I guess I wanted more poison in it, but because it's made by the people who inhabit the centre of the same star-actor universe, it stops short of being truly cutting.

The film also never finds the right mode of comedy. In parts it is happy doing parody, but in other parts it is reaching out for a more interesting character comedy. The film vacillates between these modes of comedy and this contributes to an alienating effect. You're never sure if you're meant to invest anything into these characters. If you do, you could be betrayed by the film-makers; if you don't the story renders itself largely meaningless. It's a little confusing.

The film is at its funniest when the parody is right, or the commentary on the film business is sharp. The film is at its worst when the jokes are gratuitous fat jokes, fart jokes and animal jokes.

What's Interesting About It

The film kicks off with a bunch of trailers for fictional films. Then we are thrown into a Vietnam movie action sequence which climaxes with a parody of the the death of Sgt. Elias in 'Platoon'. Then it is revealed to be a movie in the making and we enter the world of fiction within fiction. This gets a little trickier as we navigate the book the fictional movie is based upon turns out to be a complete fabrication within the film Universe as well, when Nick Nolte confesses he was never in Vietnam, and we find he never lost his hands. So the film is about a fake film being made about a phony experience written by a phony man made by actors trying to impersonate these phony characters with as much 'realism' as they can muster.

The film actually comes close to confronting something about fiction all the while showing the ineptness of shallow star actors to convey any real emotional truths. We almost glimpse something about why we watch this stuff. The closest film in terms of this polemic was 'Galaxy Quest' where the good aliens believed the events portrayed in a TV show much like 'Star Trek' to be true and when they find out it was fiction, fail to understand why humans would do such a thing.

Why do we do fiction? At all? It's an interesting thing to ponder.

Other Thoughts

Robert Downey Jr. is simply amazing. After his turn as Iron Man/Tony Stark, his performance in this film is like a magic trick. His Australian accent is a little suspect, but as impersonations of Russell Crowe go, it's hilarious. If you ever meet Russell Crowe, I suggest you don't bring it up because he most likely will punch you in the face. Then again, I suspect he punches everybody in the face at least once.

Jack Black as the addict was not as interesting as his other roles in the last few years. Maybe it's good that he got away from the rock dude schtick he has been building up over 3 or 4 pictures. And yet, I kind of miss that guy. This guy he played was nowhere near as intense.

Tom Cruise... *Ugh* :(
Going into watch the film, I heard his performance as Lee Grossman was great. Perhaps because I had been told so much about it, I expected too much. I was mostly underwhelmed. All I saw was Tom Cruise paying out on studio execs. Which is fine, but it wasn't really anywhere near as brilliant as what Robert Downey Jr. was doing, nor was it as interesting as I was led to believe. As for the dance, it reminded me of his little dance routine in 'Risky Business'.

The Great Depression Part II?

'Small Government' You Say?

Here's something I don't get. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae essentially gave out huge amounts of bad loans to people it shouldn't have handed such loans. That's why they're called bad loans. It's not like there's a special, different definition for 'bad' in this case. It's just awful decision making on the part of management. Then, when the credit crunch comes, they go running to the government and the government bails them out.

So much for all that laissez-faire small government talk - they just simply throw tax payer's money at those people. In turn, the bosses of these firms leave these companies with their golden parachutes worth $13m and $8m respectively. Hang a minute, I think to myself, isn't that money from the public purse that they're taking as their golden parachute? Why doesn't the American public get more angry about this stuff?
It's ethically and morally fucked up, but nobody seems to give a shit. It's astounding. It's also pathetic to see that all that grand talk about the power of capitalism comes down to the Federal Reserve bailing out these crippled mortgage giants.

Don't Look Now, But There Goes The Banking Neighborhood

Lehamn Bros. has decalred bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve got together with a bunch of banks to create a $700b fund to shore up the hole being left by the imploding Lehman Bros. What's worse, the Fed is swapping out Treasury Bonds for the next-to-worthless mortgages. Isn't this a little bit like swapping dollar notes out in exchange for bits of used toilet paper?

Anyway, the estimated global exposure of the financial sector to the Lehman Bros collapse is estimated to be in the order of $850billion. Got that? That's US$85,000,000,000.00. Naturally, the ASX told people to stop trading with Lehman Bros. in Australia sometime this morning and the rest of it is a major meltdown of the financial sector.

Meanwhile the Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch amid the deepening crisis. The Federal Reserve is stepping in actively to shore up the financial sector because the price of not doing so would be a rerun of the Great Depression - and nobody in their right mind wants that. The question that naturally follows is, are they too late? You certainly hope not, but you get the feeling the horse of the credit crunch bolted a good 14months ago.
So just where are we on this alleged economic cycle?

All Hail Derek Jeter

9 hits in 3 Games

This is what the season has come to... watching milestones for the players. Derek Jeter came into the last home stand at the current Yankee stadium ever, needing 9 hits to tie Lou Gehrig for most hits at Yankees stadium. Yes, it's an obscure stat, like how he recently passed Babe Ruth on the all-time hit list for the Yankees. As Steven Goldman rightly pointed out, Jeter made so many more outs doing it.

In fact Jeter has been a sub .300 hitter for most of this season through the vagaries of BABIP, so it seemed rather unlikely that he would even get his average up over .300 this late in the season. The graph above shows his BABIP movement through the seasons and you can see that he was way below his career rate until the second half of the season.

Steven Goldman suggested he needed to go 22 for 65 over the last bit of the season to get there.

JETER .300 WATCH
The Yankees have 16 games to play. Jeter averages 4.04 at bats per game, giving him another 65 at bats on the season. He's presently 165 for 557, so...

If he goes 20-for-65, or .308, he will finish the season with a batting average of .297.
If he goes 21-for-65, or .323, he will finish the season with a batting average of .299.
If he goes 22-for-65, or .338, he will finish the season with a batting average of .301.
Get your hitting shoes on, Captain.

In the three games with Tampa Bay, Jeter went 9 for 11, raising his average to .306. He still has 13 games to go in the rest of the season, and if he hits the rest of the way at career norm, he'll stay above .300 for sure. I doubt he's going go all Mark Taylor and stop just because he tied Don Bradman - one of the all time wet decisions. In any case, it's a nice piece of drama, but I would have preferred it if the Yankees were playing the Post-Season.

UPDATE:
I caught up with my old man today. When I pointed out to him the 9-for-11 spot by Jeter in the last 48hours he simply snorted "Too late." He's actually a lot angrier than I am about the Yankees not getting to the post-season.

Dungeon Dad - The Sequel

So Far, No Hate Mail
That's right. Since posting my song about Josef Fritzl the Dungeon Dad, I haven't exactly received any hate mail for it, which is pretty good going for me. Anyway, seems there's now another Dungeon Dad, this time in Poland.

The case in Poland involves a 45-year-old man identified only as Krzysztof B, in keeping with Polish privacy laws. Police detained him on Friday in the eastern city of Siedlce after his wife and daughter came forward. Police said they believe the man was trying to flee Poland.

His wife, identified as Teresa B, said on private TVN24 television that the man used to order her to watch television whenever he went into the girl's room, closed it and took out the door handle.

"My daughter was frightened and did not want to talk about it," the mother said. She learned the facts when she found her daughter's diary, the mother said.

She said the man beat her and her daughter when they asked that he stop the abuse.

"He intimidated us; he threatened that my daughter will be dead, that he will destroy us all, if anyone learned about it," Teresa B said.

Investigators collected the hospital records of the children and were trying to find them and carry out DNA tests to determine their paternity, national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.

Prosecutor Miroslaw Zoch in Siemiatycze cautioned that it was too early to say whether the man fathered the two boys.

This is the picture of the guy getting carted away:

Not surprisingly, his fly is undone.

More On Pavano

4 Year Miscreant?

I know the easy thing is to kick Pavano for his non-contribution. After all, its a 4 year $39.95million contract he signed to pitch for the Yankees. Anyway, here's an article in the NYT that explores his side of the story.

In hindsight, Pavano said, he could have had Tommy John surgery that summer, but the Yankees did not recommend it to Andrews.

“I think I could have, but we’ll never know,” Pavano said. “He was told not to. He was told to take the bone chips out and rehab it.”

Two starts into the 2007 season, the elbow pain returned, and Pavano insisted on major surgery as the only way to heal everything. It took four doctors — Hershon, Andrews, Lewis Yocum and David Altchek — to find one who agreed definitively. That was Altchek, the Mets’ team doctor.

“They had to go through all that red tape; that’s why I had to go get all these opinions,” Pavano said. “It was crazy. And I had to walk around with my heart in my throat: ‘Are you serious? You’re messing with my career here.’ You think I wanted to have Tommy John surgery? But I knew I needed it and I knew I could come back from it. That’s why I was all for it.”

Altchek told Pavano he had done everything he could to come back from the 2006 operation. His only choice was Tommy John surgery, in which a tendon from Pavano’s knee was used to replace an elbow ligament.
It took place June 5, 2007, nearly two months after he had last pitched in a game. Pavano said he wished he had the operation sooner.

“I would have been back seven weeks earlier this year,” Pavano said. “That would have been a considerable amount of time to help the team.”

General Manager Brian Cashman said the fact that Pavano had bone chips in 2006 did not necessarily mean he should have had reconstructive surgery.

“That doesn’t mean the ligament was gone yet,” Cashman said. “Bone chips usually mean there’s an unstable ligament, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pitch another 10 years without having Tommy John.”

In any case, Cashman said, he does not blame Pavano for wondering what different steps he might have taken. If anybody can relate to Pavano’s frustration, it is Cashman, who championed his signing.

“At the end of the day, he was hurt,” Cashman said. “People always say, ‘Why do you stick up for him? Is it because you signed him?’ I’m just being objective. The guy, I know, can pitch when he’s healthy. He just hasn’t been healthy. It’s not because he mentally wanted it that way. It just happened.”

I'm sure it was really frustrating for Pavano to live through all that... and get paid $39.95m. I guess that's the point. The sympathy runs out when the money runs out, and the money has been running out the door with Carl 'American Idle' Pavano. Maybe it could have been handled better, but there seems to be a point at which Pavano should have spoken up sooner about his back pain and then subsequent elbow pain.

Teammates recognize that his pitches are not as sharp as they will be, and they respect his approach. Pavano is challenging the hitters, and himself, with a fastball that has command but little pop.

“Obviously, his stuff now is not that good, but he’s going out there and competing, he’s going after guys,” reliever Brian Bruney said.

“There are guys with way better stuff than he has that don’t go after people like that. The guy’s got heart and he wants to win. I’ll take that any day.”

Pavano will be a free agent after the season, and he could turn a decent September into a new contract with another team. He may succeed the way the Yankees hoped, just not for them. His time on the mound with the Yankees has been brief: he has made 22 starts, pitched 126 1/3 innings and compiled a 7-6 record.

If all this were true, then Pavano sort of owes it to come back for a cut-price rate for 1 year and show what he's really got. I hate it when the Yanks rehab a pitcher like Lieber and Dotel and they end up pitching for other teams. Pavano owes a year of his best effort under normal conitions. It would be a serious drag to see him pitch somewhere else and do alright.

My Song Of The Week

It's More Like Song Of The Quarter

I've been preoccupied with lots of other things so I have not managed to record at a pace of a song a week, let alone, a song per month. That's how life goes, sometimes.

I've posted up a song about Josef Fritzl, a.k.a The Austrian Dungeon Dad.
The song is imaginatively called 'Dungeon Dad'.

Hadron Collider Rap

Yankees Update

Where've You Been All My Life, Carl Pavano?

There's this to contemplate, late in a disastrous season.

The Yankees have won the last six games that Carl Pavano has started.
OK, so three were in 2008, two were in 2007 and one was in 2005. But six in a row is six in a row. When the Idle pitches, the Yankees win. Mark it down.
Pavano wasn’t happy with his outing tonight. Given six runs of support, he couldn’t through the fifth inning.
“I feel like I cheated my team tonight,” he said.
Tonight? Tonight?

Aiyah. Good, in a season that's gone bust but, aiyah!
Where's Kei Igawa? Send him in to pitch!