That Joe Torre Book

You Folded, You Told It, Then You Sold It

The rhubarb and ballyhoo at the moment is the upcoming book allegedly written by Tom Verducci and Joe Torre, covering the non-Championship years of the recent Yankee Dynasty. It's a bit depressing that Joe Torre of all people would want to write such a kiss-and-tell book when he was the manager who suffered under the repurcussions of David Wells' book back in 2003.

He of all people should know what any book to do with the Yankees would do to his successor Joe Girardi; or perhaps that is exactly why he did it. It's hard to say. At best of times the greater audicen and fandom of any sporting franchise canonly try and interpret the semaphore signals the franchise front office sends about what it is trying to do. This is not particularly a Yankees thing, it applies to teams of all sporting codes.

At the end of the day, the only thing that remains are the results and the stats that lie there under the hard stare of sunlight. What happens during the dark of moving players, signing contracts, arguing merits and demerits just doesn't matter. Who knows what people's intentions or opinions are? It's an epistemological nightmare jungle of 'Doxa' trying to untangle that mess. As an audience you can sort of interpret what people say and build some kind of picture, but it's likely to be just as ridiculous as any Action movie plot.

In the end, there's just Win or Lose, that's just it.

The fact that A-Rod might or might not be 'A-Fraud' is just so tangential to the tangential that one strongly doubts the value of recounting the silly days of the 2004 playoffs. The Yankees lost. They got turned around from a 3-0 position and lost 4 games. They screwed the pooch, they went down in flames. It's painful to even reflect on it. A book trying to pin THAT postseason on the persona of one Alex Rodriguez is just plain silly.

What's more bizarre is the gyrating non-logic by the alleged authors, Verducci and  Torre trying to distance themselves from the controversial content. It's a little like a game of "Who Farted?" in an empty lift. Their names are on the cover. It *must* be their book. I know people who have struggled their entire adult lives to get a book published. If somebody publishes a book with your name on it (and you don't sue because they have your consent to use your name), we have to assume the authorship rests with you.

Thus, it brings to us a realisation with a sickly hue of sadness that Joe Torre wants to exploit the Yankee legacy once more for a buck. After all that talk about professionalism and keeping things in the clubhouse and being tightlipped to keep a tight ship, we get this book. We can only assume he invested with Madoff or he banked with the Lehman Brothers.

One More Time For The World

I REALLY wish the Australian press would give it up. Andy Roddick IS NOT 'A-Rod'!!

Blogging Headlines

Jelena Dokic

What do we make of her comeback? She was, after all, a No.4 player in her teens. She used to be a nutty player who had deep shots but awful shot selection and very little patience. The talent was all there to see, but it was hardly the case that her game was something you could call sophisticated or crafty. She was obviously so young and tunnel-visioned.

Since then she's exploded, imploded, gotten depressed, gotten over it and comeback to make a good showing at this year's Australian Open.I'm very impressed with anybody who can overcome what she overcame to getting back. After all, having Damir Dokic as your father would be a very emotionally distorting experience, but she seems to have figured out what the rest of us knew for some time: he's BARKING MAD.

So, while the Australian public has forgiven her and embraced her, the media has continued its love affair with the BARKING MAD Damir by trying to orchestrate an unwanted reunion. For Jelena's sake we hope they throw that idea away. The headlines of Damir picking fights with officials an embarrassing her daughter should be consigned to the rubbish bin of history. It's time to let the gal show us what she's really got. She may still win it all at a grand slam in the next couple of years.

Sourcewatch

One of my favorite sites is Sourcewatch.There's a link to the right. They are full of interesting information about who owns what media, and who is in the payroll of what interests. I originally stumbled across them a couple of years ago and blogged them here. It's interesting to note that the world has moved on considerably since then, and perhaps the day of the Global Warming sceptics is coming to an end. Certainly, there's been a seismic shift in the way Climate Change is covered by the media.

Which brings me to the topic du jour, Mr Al Gore!

Al Gore Has His Say

Al Gore returned to the US Senate to say his piece about Global Warming.

Statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
As Prepared
Hon. Al Gore
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis. We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home – Earth – is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

Moreover, we must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization at a time when our country must simultaneously solve two other worsening crises. Our economy is in its deepest recession since the 1930s. And our national security is endangered by a vicious terrorist network and the complex challenge of ending the war in Iraq honorably while winning the military and political struggle in Afghanistan. As we search for solutions to all three of these challenges, it is becoming clearer that they are linked by a common thread – our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels.

As long as we continue to send hundreds of billions of dollars for foreign oil – year after year – to the most dangerous and unstable regions of the world, our national security will continue to be at risk.

As long as we continue to allow our economy to remain shackled to the OPEC rollercoaster of rising and falling oil prices, our jobs and our way of life will remain at risk. Moreover, as the demand for oil worldwide grows rapidly over the longer term, even as the rate of new discoveries is falling, it is increasingly obvious that the roller coaster is headed for a crash. And we’re in the front car.

And so on...

You'd think he had the easier choice. George Mitchell is off to talk to the Palestinians. :)

The Pettitte Signing

Welcome Back Again

With the signing, the 5th Starter spot now goes to Andy Pettitte. There really wasn't much discussion around Andy Pettitte this winter, but his RSAR is projected to be about 24.5 according to Replacement Level Yankee Weblog's projection system CAIRO.

Scanning down the CAIRO spreadsheet, Carlos Zambrano is projecting to be about 26.3 runs saved above replacement; Chad Billingsly at 27.9(!); Chien-Ming Wang is 24.1; Mark Buehrle 24.5 and so on. Pettitte projects to be about to 41st best Pitcher in MLB. That's a solid No. 2 on most teams, with Wang not far behind at 43rd. AJ Burnett and Joba are at 20 and 34 respectively, so  *if* they're not quite Aces, you get the picture where the Yankees are going to trot out a very good No. 2 starter every outing where they don't send out a dominant Ace in Sabathia.

Just as an aside, Hughes comes in at 11.3 RSAR/ No.141 and Ian Kennedy at No. 158/ 10.1 RSAR. They're solidly No.3 guys on an 'average' team, and they don't make the roster at all.

A quick look at Pettitte projection over at FanGraphs says:

• Bill James: ERA 3.90 192IP


• CHONE: ERA 4.31 167IP


• Marcel: ERA 4.48 183IP

That's not a medicore player. His BABIP has been Yankee-Unlucky, in as much their defense has not been very good, his K/BB is solid. That's a pretty good bargain for $5.5million with incentives. Even with the depressd marlet, it's hard to imagine Mark Buerhle getting that deal in a proper free market, so you have to say the Yankees got an amazing bargain.

Guantanamo Blues - Handling The Truth

Taking The Git Out of 'Gitmo'

Prior to Camp X-Ray, I think the only way most people knew about the base in Guantanamo Bay would have been because of 'A Few Good Men'. In that film of course we find the defiant Colonel Jessup played by Jack Nicholson. Colonel Jessup tells us he does ungodly things in the name of the United States, things that are done by hard discipline and rigorous application to duty, that allows the rest of the United States to sleep safely at night.

Of course Tom Cruise's character Dan Kaffee bests him in court when baited, Jessup tells the court that on Gitmo, he is God. And of course that's been the problem with Guantanamo Bay in real life. He famously thunders at Tom Cruise that he, - and by extension, us, the audience - cannot handle the Truth. The so-called real-life terrorists held in Gitmo were sent there because Gitmo exists in a kind of legal grey area where due process under the law could sneak past. At the time it was argued against in the Supreme Court, the Judges had to admit that things that happened on Gitmo lay just beyond the reach of their jurisdiction.

I recall laughing out loud at the audaciousness of the Neo-Cons to construct a ruse so evil, so legalistic, so sophisticated in its sophistry, but I have to admit I was one of the few. There's nothing funny about a place where they torture people without trial or recourse to a legal defense. The horrors of the place are doubtlessly giving David Hicks nightmares to this day. Guantanamo Bay was the end result of a Machiavelli's The Prince, misapplied. The horror of which is only beginning to be wound down under the new White House.

Thus it is with a bit of irony that I present this article sent in by Pleiades:

As a juvenile, Jawad should have been treated with care, held separately from the adult population and provided educational and other rehabilitation services. Instead, he was placed in isolation and deprived of sleep. More than once he tried to commit suicide, according to detainee records.

Eventually I learned of evidence from field reports suggesting that he was innocent. The reports indicated that he had been recruited by terrorists who drugged him and lied to him, and that others had probably perpetrated the offenses with which he was being charged. It took me a long time to obtain this evidence. I had sought it repeatedly, and military investigators had repeatedly denied me access to it. Only after long delays and many, many requests was it finally given to me, because even after nearly seven years, the military commissions do not have a system in place for discovering exculpatory evidence or providing it to the defense.

I tried to negotiate an agreement to have Jawad rehabilitated and sent back to Afghanistan, where he could be reunited with his family. It was clear to me that he should not have been imprisoned any longer. But the chief prosecutor dismissed that idea out of hand.

I wasn't able to discuss any of the cases I was working on with family or friends because most of the information I was working with was classified. As I sank deeper and deeper into despair, I turned to a Jesuit priest who has written and spoken widely about justice, Father John Dear. I could not give Father John much detail, but he understood my plight immediately. "Quit Gitmo," he said without hesitation. "The whole world knows it is a farce. Refuse to cooperate with evil, and start your life over."

And that was just the prosecutor having a devil of a time out in Gitmo. It's a good thing Camp X-Ray is getting wound down. If you had read Foucault, none of this would have come as a surprise. The War on Terror has managed to tick all the boxes and left America morally bankrupt.

Bank

Global Fried Chicken

Last week I had a problem with my credit card. I rang the bank to sort it out. At the end of the conversation, the guy said they could raise my credit limit.
"Dude," I said "there's a credit crunch going on and you want to extend credit to me?"
"Yes sir, you've been a great customer."
"Don't you guys learn?" I asked and the guy simply laughed.

He knew it was ridiculous. I still have to ask, "Don't these people learn?"

Gran Tornio

Made My Day

It's good to see Clint Eastwood do his thing. He's evolved into a great dean of American Cinema now as his heavily creased face and age-withered gait has reduced him from the fluid gun-slinging actor he was in his youth. You all know I'm a big Clint fan. I suffered through such films as 'The Rookie' just to watch him blow away bad guys - which is in its essence, is a Western just like this film, the life blood of American cinema.

'Gran Torino' is a lot more subdued with the action and the stakes are a lot lower, but no less valuable. The script oozes with character observation that Eastwood seizes upon. The menace and rage has been compressed into a nostalgia for the 1970s, as symbolised by the 1972 Ford Gran Torino. In the early 1970s our man Clint was blowing them away in 'Dirty Harry' and 'Magnum Force', smouldering with rage at the irrational breakdown of the American social fabric. Here he is again, doing the dirty deed to keep society intact.

What's Good About It

The script gets high praise, and it is very deserving. It pays very careful attention to character and space as well as time and occasion. Best of all, the script is very entertaining from moment, and you can watch these characters without needing to kick things along with plot mechanisms. the plot circles back to the point easily enough to explore the textures of this story along the way.

The directing is also good. It's muscular, sinewy and simple, just like the man you see. There are no swooping camera moves, just gentle moves that show draw attention to what is important in the scene. It is a substance-over-style kind of directing that Baz Luhrman ought to study a bit more. Eastwood has never been a flashy kind of director as who makes camera moves that draw attention to themselves, but I think he is every bit as important a film maker as Stanley Kubrick. Let's face it, the man has at least 7 classic directing efforts to his name, and this might even be on that last.

What's Bad About It

I'm hard-pressed to think of anything bad about this film at all. It's a film with an embarrassment of riches. It was a choice o this film, 'Revolutionary Road', or 'Valkyrie', or 'The Wrestler' and it was relatively easy to say, "I want to see the Clint Eastwood movie".

What's Interesting About The Film

Having directed two films about WWII, and Iwo jima in particular, Eastwood play a guy who fought in the Korean War. If there ever was a forgotten war, the Korean War might be it. After all the hoopla about the Vietnam war and all the films dedicated to, the Korean War's biggest screen representation remain MASH and its TV show that ran a colossal 10 seasons.

You come to realise that the 20th Century American fought like the Romans and in the century, it changed the tenor of its culture. The Hmong community that is bourne our of the Vietnam War moves into Clint's character Walt's neighbourhood. In a sense, the other wars America has fought has come to roost in his neighborhood. He tries to make sense of it through his Korean War experience only to find it inadequate.

You can read the film as the Thao character's initiation into the American mainstream, or as the concession by mainstream America that the mainstream itself cannot be defined by the old white neighborhood. Not a difficult topic in the year Barrack Obama takes office in the White House. What's poignant about is that Clint Eastwood the director is seems to be seeing past that point into a future America, based on the weight of his previous films.

People have been making a point about the politically incorrect banter that pours forth in the film, but the profanity and racist epithets seem to be no big deal next to the real issues that are mounting. The issues of respect and self-respect come back like the returning repressed, but what is interesting is that it is the politically correct language that has somehow repressed respect.

I don't know if I can go with that notion. I mean, it sucks to be demeaned, and it sucks to be patronised, but at least the script seem to be saying that being patronised is worse than merely demeaned. There are worse things than being verbally demeaned, and the film is explicit about showing us the miseries of middleclass life, running parallel to the miseries of disenfranchised life.

Here's a spoiler alert if you haven't seen the film:

When in the end, Eastwood's character Walt steps up to being a hero once more, and a Eastwood character must - he chooses to be a self-sacrificing hero. On this occasion the Eastwood character does not choose to do violence unto the other, but rather in a most Christian way, turns the other cheek and die as sacrifice to save his friend Thao.  As Eastwood's Walt lies bleeding to death, he lies there with both arms out, like a crucifix. It echoes the Catholic guilt in 'Million Dollar Baby' but is also echoes the final scene in 'Dirty Harry' where he casts his detective's badge into the water.

You think 'this is hokum' and at the same time, you feel, 'Wow, he got there'. After all these years, I remain an Eastwood fan.

Technorati Claim

Technorati Profile

Who's In Center?

The Melky Cabrera - Brett Gardner Showdown

The position battle to come in the Yankee roster is between Melky and Gardner. Seeing that the Yankees didn't go out and score themselves a Centerfielder this off-season, we have to presume they're serious about this battle. It's kind of weird because a position battle for the Yankees CF should be between 2 stars if anything, and here we are comparing 2 players that might not make some other club's 25man rosters.

Let's look at Melky first. I don't know why I have high hopes for Melky. For the last 3 seasons, I've felt he was on the cusp and each season, he's managed to get less productive, rather than more. During that time, he's shown sparks of a player who can put up a .850 OPS, but last year he turned in a career worst .642 OPS.

Here are his projections according to Bill James, CHONE, and Marcel:

• Bill James:  .276/.337/.393


• CHONE: .280/.345/.402


• Marcel: .271/.333/.383

Marcel is naturally the most pessimistic on Melky because of the dreadful 2008. I think that dreadful BABIP from last year will average back up to around .300 as all the projections predict. His ISO is about .115 so he's not exactly going to slug over .400 easily. The best thing that could happen to Melky is actually to tighten up his K/BB ratio. either draw a lot more walks or strike out less.

Here are Brett gardner's projections accordingt o BillJames, CHONE and Marcel:

• Bill James:.271/.367/.354


• CHONE: .258/.341/.345


• Marcel: .257/.322/.386

Hmmm. The projected ISO of around .090 on Gardner highlights just how sock-less his bat is going to be. Having said that, the .330 or so BABIP predicted for him seems a little low. I'd venture to say he might have a BABIP of about .340-.350 in which case his average is going to be much higher.

Bill James sees Gardner's BABIP to be about .336, so it is conceivable that if Gardner hits into a better BABIP than that, he might be more of a .290/.370/.380 sort of hitter in the best case scenario. Not very impressive at all.

It's interesting to see that CHONE is highest on Melky and lowest on Gardner, while Bill James is highest on Gardner and not impressed with Melky. I think CHONE's projection of 104 Ks for Gardner is a bit over the top.

In any case, the Yankees are essentially running out 2 players who are about the same as Juan Pierre, another speedy guy in the same mold as Gardner; which is not encouraging at all. Melky at least has had 1 season where he's been more productive than Pierre's average.

Surprisingly, for a much maligned player, Pierre has a good K/B ratio. Neither of these guys have Pierre's eyes. Gardner was showing signs that he was getting it to a good level in AAA last year, but we don't know if that will stick at the major level. Unless either one shows a marked improvement in their strike zone control, the Yankees are going to struggle with the 9 spot in the lineup.

The more I look at this, the more depressed I get.

Life's Moments

Peter Abraham Is A Righteous Man

I don't say that lightly. There's this entry here that brought a smile to my face. I want to quote the best bit:

If you ever read Todd’s blog, you know he enjoyed capturing those moments that make New York so unique. I experienced one of those snatches of time on the subway headed uptown to the service.

A subway preacher stood up in the car next to where I was and launched into an impassioned sermon about the coming rapture and our need to repent. I turned up the volume on my iPod and tried to lose myself in The Hold Steady.
But this subway savior was persistent and he looked right at me. “What do you believe?” he asked. “What do you believe?”

That’s not a question you want to answer without some time to prepare. So I said the first thing that came to mind.

“I believe the Yankees should keep Robinson Cano,” I said.

A middle-aged guy with a beard and a Yankees cap was sitting a few seats away. “Amen, brother,” he said with a chuckle.
The train rumbled into the station and we all went on our way.
Had Todd been there, I think he would have gotten a kick out of it.

Amen to that.

The Wrong Perspective

It Ain't The Money, It's How It's Spent

It's one thing for me to write on and on about how fucked the Australian Film Industry is, because it so happens that I've toiled in it, and it's my industry. It's another thing when some random outsider drives by with a shot. While I hate aspects of the industry, I wouldn't be in it if I didn't believe in being in it at a deep level. Yes, it's true, my grand cynicism is concealing a grand romantic when it comes to cinema. There, you can go write that down.

So it really gets my goat when somebody lines up to kick the industry without actually understanding what the problems are, just because it's down. Chances are, if it wasn't down, they'd want to be in it. This article takes the cake in those stakes.

While average Australians are being asked to tighten their belts so much they're in danger of being cut in half, Bana, one of this country's highest paid actors, reckons the Government could do more to help local writers.

"Not enough money is spent on resources for our writers and getting them better access to overseas talent and experience," he said before taking his seat at the $US10,000-a-table knees-up called G'day USA in Los Angeles.

"It would be great if a lot more of them would be exposed to the rigours of the overseas market."
No wonder they call it La La Land.

So just what part of the word "buggered" doesn't Bana understand?

Buggered was the choice term used by Access Economics in its report to describe the state of Australia's finances.

"Batten the hatches," the report went on. "This is not just a recession. This is the sharpest deceleration Australia's economy has ever seen."

Something tells me this is not going to be a writer-led recovery.

Buggered is also the right word to describe the Australian film industry.

Yes, I know it's an opinion piece on a tabloid paper's website - one owned by Rupert Murdoch at that - and the one sentence paragraphs really betray a shallow mind preoccupied with insults rather than proper argument The utter lack of charity in understanding why Eric Bana is arguing for more development money for the writers is flabbergasting.

The only way in which the Australian Film Industry is going to win back its position is through better writing, better writers and more and more of them. There is no other way. It cannot invest in directors or actors or, any other crew area or infrastructure without putting a lot more money into the writing and development of the projects.That's how it's done. Eric Bana is not arguing for anything outlandish.

In fact, the people who are wrestling with this problem know this is true, and are trying to figure out how to get the most effective transmission of money to the writers. At least, that is the theory of the Screen Australia and ts spat with the Australian Writers Guild. It's entirely reasonable for Eric Bana (bless his soul) to ask for more assistance in the writing end of the development.

This Naomi Toy woman is mistaking the results of previous neglect as a case for arguing that further investment is a case of throwing good money after bad. It's simply wrong to argue the case, even if the current crop of Australian films are not something the wider Australian public would care to spend money upon.

Rumourmill Says...

Screen Australia has hired SB who used to be one if its assessors. SB has been known to be obstructive, obstinate, and downright mean and irrational in the way SB has treated projects under the FFC regime. Some have described SB as 'EVIL' without a hesitation in the sentence. It's really hard to see how Screen Australia is going to forge ahead in a new direction when it hires back somebody who has essentially been a BIG PART of the PROBLEM.

The word on the street is that SB's boss from the FFC era felt sorry for SB, because SB would be unlikely to score another job in the industry. It's the worst reason to retain SB as a development officer, but that's the word.

The Alexander Pearce Story

Somebody Was Going To Do It

One of the most compelling passages in Robert Hughes' 'The Fatal Shore' is the account of Alexander Pearce and his cannibal escapade. I liked it so much I started to write a screenplay around it, but I hit a patch. I found the repeated cannibalism totally monotnous and there was simply nothing new to add after the third guy got eaten. Yet the quantity - 7 men killed and eaten according to a pact - has a certain gravitas to it that you have to tell it. I couldn't. The monotony killed my desire to continue.

And here we find somebody perservered.

"What we wanted to do was give this kind of animalistic feel to the murder," Fulton says. "That the line had been crossed and they were no longer human. We had to give a sense that something enormous had happened."

For the most part, however, the cannibalism is underplayed.

"What I wanted was that it would become monotonous," Fulton explains. "You didn't see it but you were aware it was happening; people were chewing on meat. It became absolutely normalised and that's where the real horror comes in.



"Pearce becomes this elemental human being. He's stripped of all humanity and he does what he has to do to survive."

Ultimately the film neither condemns nor absolves Pearce, who remained unrepentant. It simply humanises a man generally considered beyond the pale. Pearce is a reluctant party to the killings and only takes a life when he has no other choice. In many respects his 49-day escape is a remarkable story of survival.

As Fulton says: "In another context, towns and roads might have been named after him."

Complicating matters, however, is Pearce's second escape, which occurred weeks after he was sent back to Sarah Island. Just days after fleeing with a fellow convict, Pearce was found next to his partially eaten corpse even though he still had plenty of provisions.

"From a storytelling point of view, it was a nightmare," Fulton says of the second escape, which is dealt with in the film with almost slapstick abruptness. "It contradicts everything you've told the first time except if you look at it purely as a man who's gone beyond humanity."

I got a heads up from somebody who was enthusiastic about the story and was very disappointed that I didn't continue. Yet sometimes you know half way into writing something that it's not part of you.

I partiuclarly want to note that the producer Nial Fulton actually comes from Ireland. In some ways it is an Irish story much more than an Australian story, and therefore story that I was never going to be privy to.  I struggled with it for 6 months but I don't really regret giving up my own attempt. I'm really looking forward to seeing this picture.

What Were You Thinking, Economist?

The GWB Legacy
Okay, hopefully this is the very last entry about President George Walker Bush. The man was undisputedly a disastrous President and if you asked me back in 2000, I would have (and probably did) told you so. Not for partisan reasons, but basically for humanist reasons. So before he sets off into the sunset I want to set something straight, because I found this article in the Economist this week.

Few people would have predicted this litany of disasters when Mr Bush ran for the presidency in 2000. True, the 2000 election was likely to be divisive because of the peculiar arithmetic of the outcome (Mr Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 500,000 votes, then won a disputed recount in Florida by a few hundred). But for most people Mr Bush was a pretty acceptable choice, and certainly not a crusader-in-waiting.

He came across as an affable chap, particularly when compared with his uptight rival. Frank Bruni, who covered his election campaign for the New York Times, wrote in 2002 that “the Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster.” And the then governor of Texas presented himself as a centrist—a new kind of “compassionate conservative”, a “uniter rather than a divider”, an advocate of a “humble” and restrained foreign policy. The Economist liked this mixture enough to endorse him in 2000.

Ya'know, I like the Economist magazine. As somebody who is not really trained as an economist, what the  magazine provides is a concise, succinct, insight into how the economy is working from week to week, month to month. It's a little more than small-l liberal in its outlook, but I do like it for its rational tone. Reason, after all should lead us to enlightenment. All the same, the guys who write and edit the Economist are conservative types who one imagines went to very nice private schools.

It doesn't surprise me at all that the Economist endorsed Mr. Bush back in 2000. GWB was their guy because ostensibly, they didn't pick up just strident the undercurrent of his rhetoric was sounding. The smart boffins at the Economist allowed themselves to be persuaded that GWB was all right because he was for Free Trade and seemed affable enough. It's a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

GWB was no centrist. A Born Again Christian is not a centrist in any context. A man who gets up and says the Creationists have a right to teach Intelligent Design at schools is not a centrist. Here's some more from the article:

The fruit of all this can be seen in the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory. He was content to be president of half the country—a leader who fused his roles of head of state and leader of his party. He devoted his presidency to feeding the Republican coalition that elected him.

The most important legislation of his first year in office was a $1.35 trillion tax cut that handed an extra $53,000 to the top 1% of earners. At his farewell press conference on January 12th Mr Bush called his tax cuts the “right course of action”, as if they were an unpopular but heroic decision. They weren’t. The budget was in surplus in 2000, and both Mr Bush’s main Republican rival, John McCain, and his Democratic opponent, Mr Gore, also wanted to cut taxes, but by less, so as to pay down more debt and shore up Social Security (public pensions). Mr Bush’s much larger tax cut reflected his, and his party’s, belief that lower taxes restrain the size of government, empower individuals and are good for both growth and Republican prospects.

Mr Bush sold his first tax cut, in 2001, as recession insurance. He did the same in 2003; and though the budget surplus was gone by then, he upped the ante by also lowering taxes on capital gains and dividends. Lower taxes on capital boost investment, but, as one former senior administration official says, that thought was secondary: “It was a political winner that happened to coincide with good economics.” Lower taxes on capital had the potential to bolster a growing “investor class” that tended to vote Republican.

Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.

It's a little late calling those dolts homunculi now. Having lived through the idiotic, reactionary, self-lauding, self-satisfied, ideologically-motivated, morally-stunted, ethically-challenged double-speaking, double-dealing gobbledegook chicanery that was the Conservative decade of George W. Bush and John Howard, I would dearly like to tell these boffins at the Economist that sometimes you can judge a guy by his beliefs, and that is all you need to know in order to make that judgment call. The hyper-partisan, crusading, anti-intellectual President who appointed a pack of idiots to important positions was always on the cards given his beliefs.

It's not that I'm saying his religion is wrong or that religion is wrong. It's just that George W. Bush was one guy you knew who could never get above his religion, because he was a born again Christian. If the Economist is a little uncomfortable about how all this turned out, I hope they realise it's been torture fo those of us who knew exactly the kind of stupidity was likely to come out of having such a lazy mind in the Oval Office, going into it in 2000.

But you know, next week there'll be a new President in the White House, and there will be a new issue of the Economist and I'm bloody well likely to read that one too. The world keeps turning.

Yankee Hotstove

Some Thoughts On The Farm

Steven Goldman has railed for years that the Yankees ought to be more productive with their minor league system so that they are not beholden to big expenditures on Free Agents. Of course he also supported the all-out move of signing both CC Sabathia AND Mark Teixeira, so clearly it's  relative thing in his mind. I've always been a fan of the idea of growing the talent within. After all, the much discussed hallmark of the late '90s Yankee dynasty was that the core talent came up through the Yankee system. Since then, it's been argued they haven't produced much of note.

For one thing it's hard to draft top talent in the later rounds, so that has impacted the Yankees, no doubt. The scarcity of pitching in the Free Agent market hs also skewed the preference of the Front Office to target power pitching righties over position players on the whole. They deny, but it's in the numbers when you track their drafts.

It's also not true that the Yankees haven't come up with Major League position players from their farm system in th last decade. There's Alfonso Soriano, Nick Johnson, Juan Rivera, Marcus Thames, Robinson Cano and if you include just the good moments, even Melky Cabrera. Of course Soriano got traded for A-Rod; Thames for Ruben Sierra; Johnson and Rivera for Javier Vazquez who then got traded for Randy Johnson who then got traded for Ross Ohlendorf, Luis Vizcaino, Steve Jackson and Alberto Gonzales; which leaves us with Cano and Melky.

In any case, the position player development hasn't been as bad as critiqued. It's even likely Jose Tabata, who got traded for Xavier Nady will turn into something useful down the track. All the same, it's been a while since the Yankees have debuted a star-class position player apart from Cano - and that's assuming Cano goes back to being his 2007 version rather than his 2008 version.

The part that really gets me is the case of Eric Duncan. Consider the fact that Duncan, a High School 3B was drafted as the Yankees' top pick in 2003, ironically the very year Teixeira made his debut with the Rangers. back then Teixeira was nowhere near pat of the Yankees' plans. There was  however a strong perceived need for a 3B for the future, as the Yankees cast about and traded for Aaron Boone that year.

Within a year Duncan moved across the diamond partly due to his defense, but mostly because A-Rod arrived through a trade. The move was made with the alleged hope that he would grow into a 1B. They rushed him through the system and he has now stalled at AAA. With his abject failure in 2008, the Yankees simply signed the elite hitter Teixeira to be the 1B instead of wait out Duncan to develop. It's the right call, because who knows if Duncan ever will fulfill his promise?  Now Duncan is slated to be the DH at SWB. At the end of this year, Duncan would have served his 6 seasons so presumably he's going to be a minor league free agent.

One begins to wonder if any of the best-laid plans can come to fruition with the Yankees' farm.

The Alleged Pitching Depth


Going into the Off season, the Yankees shed Mussina, and Pettitte (as well as Carl Bloody Pavano), only to replace them with Sabathia and Burnett. The starting depth goes through to about No. 7 or 8 without bringing Pettitte back, but it doesn't really take into accoun the limited innings that are likely from Joba, Hughes and Kennedy.

A quick guesstimation gives me about 1000 innings across the 6 guys, but it's only a guess. Injuries to any could easily result in digging deeper into the depth and somewhere down there is Kei Igawa, so you shudder a little. Even so, I do wonder if the Yankees really ought to try and bring Andy Pettitte back. The guy is good for 200 innings, of most likely league average pitching, which makes him a kind of very good No. 3. But it also means that they'd be closing the No.5 spot to trying out the trio of Hughes Kennedy and Aceves.

For reasons that similarly irk me about the Eric Duncan saga, I'd be bummed if they did sign Pettitte and Hughes, Kennedy and Aceves all started out in the bullpen and AAA.

What Outfield Logjam?

There is the thinking going on that the Yankees have some kind of logjam in the outfield now that they have Teixeira for 1B, pushing Swisher out of the slot back into the outfield.

The dialogue seems to be whether it is 6 OFs into 3OF slots and the DH so 2 are redundant, but I think there are enough at-bats to be shared around, if all of the OF spots are seen as pairs (and not strict platoons).

• RF can easily be shared between Nady and Swisher.


• CF is unsettled, but Gardner might likely stick out there. If not it's Melky, but Damon could fill in here and there. Even Swisher could fill in in an emergency. In any case, the main CF candidate will likely relegate the other off the team.


• LF belongs to Damon, but he can be given a day off in favor of Swisher. If Wang pitches, you could even put Matsui out there.


• DH Is Matsui, but he can be given days off in favor of any of the other OFs.

In any case, the 2 extra guys become bench depth that the Yankees haven't had much of in some years. I really don't think they should trade Nady or Swisher unless they get a catching uber-propsect who could step into the Big League squad as Posada's backup. Short of that, don't trade them.

Angel Berroa?

Bench depth is excatly where it gets a little hairy. Angel Berroa was signed to a minor league contract and it's making my head spin.

Cody Ransom and Angel Berroa are the candidates to be the inflielders on the bench. The fall-off from A-Rod and Jeter to these guys is a pecipitous drop. Still, you wonder just who might be out there.

Here are Berroa's graphs from Fangraphs.

As a hitter, it's clear that the 2003 season he won the ROY was a BABIP fluke. It's also clear that he had a spike in his ISO that he has never repeated. Year after year, he's been striking out more and more, walking less and less, and miraculously made a league average K/BB ratio in 2008. Even compared to Cody Ransom he's terrible.

Obituary

One of the Bloggers at Bronx Banter, Todd Drew passed away from cancer. Todd was the passionate writer whoused to write the Yankees for Justice blog.

He last reported he was diagnosed with cancer, not that long ago. The immensely sad news of his passing comes as a great surprise. He was 41.

Sunset On The American Century

All Things Come To An End Eventually


One of the more depressing aspects of the GFC that is unfolding is the ramification for the entire English speaking world as the USA finds itself in retreat. The remarkable thing about the retreat is that it follows on from the moment in history when the USA was most exultant about its hegemony. If you look back at the world as it was in 2000, the USA was firmly entrenched as top dog with a very strong presence all over the globe. The military, economic and cultural power of the United States was unparalleled in history.

Then, in the wake of 9/11 we saw America plunge into not one, but two wars, and the two wars have taken their toll on the prestige of America. Not only that, it has cost lives, credibility and much money. On top of all this, the financial powerhouse of Wall Street essentially has sunk itself in amidst its own hubris, and the US government has reached into unthinkably large deficits in order to deliver stimulus packages to stave off that depression.

We should just say it out loud. George W Bush's presidency can be marked as the moment America and its manifest destiny fell right off the tracks. And it's quite remarkable how this has all come to pass in just the 2 terms of having Dubbya at the helm. In less than a decade the USA has gone from a leading world power to an economic basket case.

It is against this context that we find this sobering article inthe Wall Street Journal, sent to us by Pleaides.

As the world stumbles from the truly horrible year of 2008 into the very scary year of 2009, there seems, on the face of it, many reasons for the foes of America to think that the world's number one power will take heavier hits than most other big nations. Those reasons will be outlined below. But let's start by noting that curious trait of human beings who, in pain themselves, seem to enjoy the fact that others are hurting even more badly. (One can almost hear some mournful Chekhovian aristocrat declare: "My estates may be damaged, Vasily, but yours are close to ruin!")

So while today's Russia, China, Latin America, Japan and the Middle East may be suffering setbacks, the biggest loser is understood to be Uncle Sam. For the rest of the world, that is the grand consolation! By what logic, though, should America lose more ground in the years to come than other nations, except on the vague proposition that the taller you stand, the further you fall?

The first reason, surely, is the U.S.'s truly exceptional budgetary and trade deficits. There is nothing else in the world like them in absolute measures and, even when calculated in proportion to national income, the percentages look closer to those you might expect from Iceland or some poorly run Third World economy. To my mind, the projected U.S. fiscal deficits for 2009 and beyond are scary, and I am amazed that so few congressmen recognize the fact as they collectively stampede towards the door entitled "fiscal stimulus."

The planned imbalances are worrying for three reasons. The first is because the total projections have been changing so fast, always in a gloomier direction. I have never, in 40 years of reading into the economics of the Great Powers, seen the figures moved so often, and in such vast proportions. Clearly, some people do believe that Washington is simply a printing machine.

he second reason all this is scary is because no one seems to be certain how usefully (or fecklessly) this money will be applied. I wish Barack Obama's administration all the best, but I am frightened by the prospect that he and his team will feel under such time pressures as to shovel out the money without adequate precautions, and that lots of it will slip into the wrong hands. The news in the press last week that lobbyists were pouring into Washington to make the case for whatever industry, interest group, or service sector they have been hired to represent made my heart sink. Printing lots of unsecured money is bad enough. Frittering it away on courtiers is worse.

The third thing I'm really scared about is that we'll likely have very little money ourselves to pay for the Treasury bonds that are going to be issued, in tens of billions each month, in the years ahead. Sure, some investment firms, bruised by their irrational exuberance for equities and commodities, will take up a certain amount of Treasury issues even at a ridiculously low (or no) rate of return. But that will not cover an estimated budget deficit of $1.2 trillion in 2009.

It's worth a read. The amount of money spent on the recent bailouts is astronomical and Obama is trying to administer the second dose of the 700billion. The NYT is tracking how this money is being spent and it's actually not that encouraging.

In any case, the fate of the USA under Obama will be a period of protracted economic woes. It's unfortunate that he is not coming to his presidency in better times, but had they been better times, he might not have won. America is rightfully frustrated and desperate, so it was willing to try anything - which included an Obama Presidency.

Obituaries

Patrick McGoohan
The actor behind the series 'The Prisoner' passed away.

McGoohan died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said.

McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama Columbo, and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart.

But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in The Prisoner, a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.

McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades.

There's a fantastic interview with McGoohan here.

Troyer:
How would you have described or explained the concept of the series to those writers, the first time you sat down with them, what did you tell them?

McGoohan:
It was very difficult because they were also prisoners of conditioning, and they were used to writing for "The Saint" series of the "Secret Agent" series and it was very difficult to explain, and we lost a few by the wayside. I had sat down and I wrote a 40-page, sort of, history of the Village, the sort of telephones they used, the sewerage system, what they ate, the transport, the boundaries, a description of the Village, every aspect of it; and they were all given copies of this and then, naturally, we talked to them about it, sent them away and hoped they would come up with an idea that was feasible.

Troyer:
What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...

McGoohan:
(very deliberately) It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Troyer:
To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?

McGoohan:
To what end?

Troyer:
For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?

McGoohan:
I think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint! (Troyer: Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.

Troyer:
Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)

McGoohan:
Slightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! And that makes me rebel! And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!

Troyer:
But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?

McGoohan:
You can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.

McGoohan clearly was suspicious of the creeping totalitarian tendency of observation. It's a little like the 'panopticon' concept raised by Foucault, which is probably why the series resonates so much to this day.As it is, 'The Prisoner' was a seminal piece of Television and it's hard to believe that it was conceived so simply and elegantly.

Pleaides gave me the heads up on all that, so thanks go to him.

Riccardo Montalban

Ricardo Montalban of Fantasy island fame passed away too.

The actor died on Wednesday at his home. Garcetti did not give a cause of death.

"What you saw on the screen and on television and on talk shows, this very courtly, modest, dignified individual, that's exactly who he was," said Montalban's longtime friend and publicist David Brokaw.

Montalban had been a star in Mexican movies when MGM brought him to Hollywood in 1946. He was cast in the leading role opposite Esther Williams in Fiesta, and starred again with the swimming beauty in On an Island with You and Neptune's Daughter.

But Montalban was best known as the faintly mysterious, white-suited Mr Roarke, who presided over a tropical island resort where visitors were able to fulfill their lifelong dreams - usually at the unexpected expense of a difficult life lesson. Following a floatplane landing and lei ceremony, he greeted each guest with the line: "I am Mr Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island."

The show ran from 1978 to 1984.

More recently, he appeared as villains in two hits of the 1980s: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and the farcical The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad.

Funny that... Motalban will always be Khan from 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan'. The preening, overconfident, arrogant uebermensch, ready to take his vengeance upon the clearly inferior Captian Kirk and his hapless crew. He'll never be forgotten.

The End Of Sorts For Wall Street

Michael Lewis Tells It Like It Is
This piece was in the AFR recently, but it's also been printed in NYT, so I am able to link to it now, thanks to Pleidaes who pointed me to it.

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

In the rest of the article, Michael Lewis and his co-writer show that the SEC basically failed to function. In fact the ratings agencies that contributed greatly to the subprime loans crisis also get a pasting.It's worth reading how the Madoff 'scheme', the SEC, the Ratings Agency all played their parts in a mechanism that was doomed to fail, doomed to come un-stuck and doomed to drag the world into the maelstrom of problems.

Shark Attack 13/01/09

More Sharks, More People, More Attacks

Since I last wrote about sharks, there was a 48 hour span in which 3 separate attacks were reported in 3 locations.

The first came in from Tasmania.

Mr Mundy was still in a state of disbelief when he spoke at the St Helens District Hospital in Tasmania, describing graphically how a casual surf at Binalong Bay almost ended in tragedy.

"We were just surfing and she was probably five or 10 metres out in front of me," he said.

"The next thing I know she screamed and disappeared under the water.

"She came up and was fighting the shark and hitting it and screaming: 'Help me, help me, help me.' We didn't see it coming.

"It dragged her around a bit and then she went down and under again. I was really worried. There was blood all in the water.

"It brought her up to the top again and I paddled over to her and tried to push it with the board and tried to hit it but I don't think it felt it really. It was a pretty big shark - a monster.

"It would have had two goes at her. She's lucky she didn't lose her leg.

"Hannah kept a really good head on her - kept it together.

"It grabbed her surfboard and dragged that under and she still had her leg rope on and it dragged her under again.

"The shark started circling us and coming up underneath us and when it did that we stopped and turned to face it so we could push it out of the way or poke it in the eye or something.

"She kept it together. There was blood everywhere and I didn't know whether it was going to try and bite her again.

"Then a wave came along and I said 'No matter how weak you are, try and hang on. This wave is going to save our lives.'

"And then we caught that wave to the beach, dragged her up on the beach and saw her leg had been mauled.

"It was pretty deep, in behind her knee was deep. You could almost see the bone. It was pretty horrible really.

"We were lucky the water was cold. It slowed her heart rate so when we pulled her out of the water the leg wasn't spurting blood everywhere.

Pretty grim. That one was most likely a Great White, but it's hard to say for sure.  The next came from up the NSW Coast.

Jonathon Beard, 31, of Brisbane, was surfing with friends at Fingal Beach about 9.30am when he was bitten on his upper left thigh. Surfers said he was sitting on his board near a group of dolphins when the shark attacked.

"He was screaming, 'Shark', then we saw the white water and the turbulence and the pigment in the water [and] quickly realised it was serious," one of Mr Beard's friends told Channel Seven.

Three of them paddled back to shore where they used a surfboard leg rope to stem the bleeding until paramedics arrived. The RACQ CareFlight helicopter and the NSW Ambulance Service were called to the scene. Kang Lim, a doctor who treated Mr Beard, said the bite was about 40 centimetres long, from the surfer's knee to his hip, and five to 10 centimetres deep.

That one was likely a Bull Shark too. Down on the South Coast of NSW came this story.

The man was snorkelling under the Windang Bridge on Lake Illawarra when what is believed to have been a bull shark bit him on the leg, about 10.50am.

He was swimming in a school of fish when he noticed a brown shadow behind him. His leg was then bitten, NSW Ambulance spokeswoman Fiona Kruit said.

"He's punched this brown shadow and it's let go," she said.

The man told paramedics he thought it was a bull shark.

Ms Kruit said a few bull sharks had been spotted in the area recently in search of bait fish.

"He has 40-odd puncture wounds to his calf but they haven't caused any muscle or tissue damage and he's got some abrasions to his right fist where he's punched the shark," she said.

Hmmm. I think The Mythbusters tried busting the 'myth' of the guy who poked the shark in the eye (ep.0608).

Can you poke a shark in the eye when it has you in its grip?: PLAUSIBLE- It will take too long to find the eye. You would be dead. But you could poke the eye if in the right position.

Except this guy Jsaon Cull says he did it.

Mr Cull said he saw a dark shape in the water and thought it was a dolphin.

"It was much bigger than a dolphin when it came up. It banged straight into me - I realised what it was, it was a shark," he told reporters from his hospital bed.

"I sort of punched it, and it grabbed me by the leg and dragged me under the water.

"I just remember being dragged backwards underwater. I felt along it, I found its eye and I poked it in the eye, and that's when it let go."

Not exactly busted, if somebody actually did it. :)

More hilariously, Vic Hislop, famed shark hunter and model for Captain Quint in 'Jaws' chimed in with his theory.

...shark hunter Vic Hislop, who told Macquarie Radio that 200 years of over-fishing in Australian waters had turned the attention of big sharks to "gentler" prey such as dugong, turtles and dolphins.

"That's what's in their stomach now every day," Mr Hislop said.

"As the turtles disappear, which is inevitable, and the dugong herds disappear, humans are next in line on the food chain.

"It will definitely get worse."

NSW Department of Primary Industries shark biologist Vic Peddemor said Mr Hislop's theory was wrong and attacks on humans were almost always a case of mistaken identity.

"It's complete and total rubbish," Dr Peddemor said from the Gold Coast, where he was waiting to examine shark attack victim Jonathon Beard.

"Most species of shark have evolved over millions of years to eat very specific prey items.

"There are only a handful of sharks capable of eating large marine mammals and of the ones that come close it's the tiger shark, the bull shark and of course the great white.

"They are designed to eat marine mammal fat and blubber and we don't have that.

"Even our blood is very different to that of marine mammals so they haven't evolved to have the taste for either our body tissue or blood."

Despite three attacks on humans in the past two days, Dr Peddemor said shark attacks were still very rare considering the "millions of man hours" we spent in the water.

"Occasionally somebody will get bitten and it's inevitably a case of mistaken identity," he said.

The good news is nobody's dead. In my humble opinion, the over-and-under  for Australian Shark fatalities is still 4 deaths.

Helicopter Money

Spending Money Like They Asked Me To

I've been a little lax lately with my own spending, despite the looking Global Financial Crisis hitting our shores shortly. Part of it has to do with the feeling that with interests coming down to levels unseen, it might turn into a Deflationary situation like Japan, even just briefly. Indeed, I keep getting good deals on things.

Apple brought out a new range of iPods so I got a 160GB iPod from the previous range for a tidy little sum. It was impulse, but the deal was too good and it had a time frame.

Ditto the computer I'm using to blog this right now. Back in 2006, I hit the road with a 14" ibook and I'm telling you friends, it was still a little cumbersome to  be writing dispatches and missives and keeping touch with the virtual communities. So when somebody was off-loading a Powerbook G4 12", I leapt at it. It's running OSX Tiger, but it's still handier than most $500 computers. The 1.5GHz processor is even faster than my ibook.

These two purchases alone sort of clued me into the downward spiral of computer and related hardware prices. Even as we speak, I'm typing on my newly acquired G4 laptop. It's pretty cool. I can remember when these babies were worth 8-10 times what I paid. 

My trusty DVD player I bought back in 2002 died. This prompted me to look for a replacement machine, so I also shelled out for a Sony PS3, mostly for the Blu-Ray playing function. It's probably the best option in terms of Blu-Ray playback, short of buying the 17" Aldi laptop that is on offer for $1499 that has a Blu-Ray drive. Heaven only knows how that one came to be so cheap, but anyway I went the PS3 route instead. Besides which, I was eloquently advised by an old baseball friend  who now runs a Games Shop that buying a Blu-Ray player on its own was "fucked".

As if that wasn't enough I blew my budget for X-mas shopping again this year. That was suboptimal, but how am I going to go cheap on my nephew and niece? Perhaps I was going to spend that money anyway.

All this is to say, I've been stimulating the economy as much as I can in my own little way, but it's feeling like there are bargains to be had everywhere if you were so inclined. I imagine the whole retail sector is letting out a massive sigh of relief as it registered one of the best X-mas periods in recent memory (Go Ostraya!). Kevin Rudd ought to be proud of me. 

Having said that, the vibe at X-mas sales at the various shopping centres was subdued this year. It was spooky how there weren't the hordes of people waddling around with shopping trolleys filled with whatever gifts they had. I can't recall a X-mas shopping season that seemed so low-key. There was nary a crowd in some of these places except J&B Hi-Fi. Borders was pretty scant when I rocked up to buy a bunch of books. I don't think I even had a single road-rage moment in the parking lots - which is pretty rare in recent years. Maybe all the big cash was spent after Boxing Day.

Usually when the economy goes through a downturn, it's the bottom feeders that get hit. I remember finding it hard to find work in the wake of the 1989 crash, the Recession We Had To Have, the Asian market crisis, and the wake of the dotcom bubble bursting. In each instance, the frinegy media jobs I had evaporated faster than anybody could say "dole". This time is different. My frinegy job at an Events Lighting company hasn't vanished just yet, but it's bankers and finance sector folks who are taking hits by the hundreds in the last 16 months. Dare I say, this is the first time that I've seen a downturn hit that end of town faster than it hit me. Which is sort of why I'm kind of spending, relatively guilt-free. It's not my problem just yet.

Now this is definitely a strange phenomenon. It's as if after years and years of preaching about the benefits of a trickle-down effect wherein the big end of town gets the bigger benefits first, this time the damage seems to be following the trickle-down model for once. And if all things stay to style, there will be very little that will trickle down to me as trouble, just as there was hardly anything that trickled-down to me with the benefits.

I can't say I'm not enjoying this downturn. :)

I'm sure the pain is going to hit me later this month and next. In the mean time, I'm trying to enjoy what's left of the so-called good times.

Squirm-Worthy

At Least Being Dumb Isn't One Of Her Problems

A couple of weeks ago it was suggested that it was the nasty reviews that hounded Nicole Kidman out of town, but it turns out it was actually seeing her own performance.

Nicole Kidman isn't "proud" of her performance in Australia.

The 41-year-old actress has revealed she "squirmed" in her seat throughout the Sydney premiere because she was so uncomfortable watching herself on screen.

She said: "I can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done. I sat there, and I looked at Keith and went, 'Am I any good in this movie?' But I thought Brandon Walters and Hugh Jackman were wonderful. It's just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all."

Nicole was so nervous about her performance she fled Australia as soon as the premiere was over with husband Keith Urban and their five-month-old daughter Sunday Rose.

She told Australian radio station 2dayFM: "We ran because I didn't want to read anything. I didn't want to know. I saw my sister and my family and we saw Keith's family and then we were straight on a plane."

Nicole added she only attended the premiere to please the film's director Baz Luhrmann.

She said: "I don't usually see my films, but because of Baz I had to see it. I saw 'Moulin Rouge'. I've really only seen that and this in my whole career. It gets worse as I get older."

That's it in full (sorry SMH, I can't resist it when it's this juicy in full). At least she knew it was crap the moment she saw it.

Let us now officially dismiss the claims that it was the tall poppy syndrome. The tall poppy syndrome, while it does exist, had nothing to do with this one. Nicole Kidman watched herself on screen and squirmed and decided to hit the road before the crits came in.

There's an old story about how Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly. 2 weeks into the shoot, the director and producers realised that as fine an actor as Eric Stoltz was, he didn't have good comic timing. It just wasn't his suite. So they canned Stoltz and brought in Michael J. Fox, and the rest of it is history as we know it.

In other words, if a cast member isn't working out for you, especially in a big budget movie, don't hesitate to replace them. Baz Luhrmann should've known from the rushes it wasn't working, but he persisted with Kidman. Heaven only knows what he was hoping for. It sure hasn't done his films any favors and it's surely dented Nicole Kidman's reputation (and bankability) quite heavily for sure.

Voyage Of The Doomed

NASA Releases Details On Deaths Of Columbia Crew

In a newly released research from NASA, it is revealed the astronauts had no chance of surviving the critical mishap that befell Columbia.

The last seconds of the astronauts aboard the doomed Columbia space shuttle have been described in graphic and harrowing detail by Nasa after a four-year investigation into the 2003 disaster.

The 400-page report reveals that they had no more than 40 seconds to react — not long enough to seal their suits and avoid blacking out from hypoxia, a condition said to be similar to extreme alcoholic intoxication.

None of the crew of seven had a helmet visor closed during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere over Texas on February 1. One was not wearing a helmet, and three were not wearing the gloves that came with their orange pressure suits. This was a response to a design flaw with the suits — if the astronauts kept their helmet visors closed it allowed too much oxygen to build up in the cabin, and the gloves were too bulky to allow them to operate the spacecraft’s controls.

The crew members, returning from a 16-day mission, would have lost consciousness almost immediately after superheated gases entered a small ragged hole in the shuttle’s left-wing heat shield — caused by a briefcase-sized chunk of foam from the external fuel bank breaking off 81.7 seconds after lift-off. The gas melted the spacecraft’s frame, sending it into an uncontrollable spin at 203,000ft and 12,500mph. Moments later the nose section — where the crew were seated — broke away from the fuselage.

The nose cone began to break up in the intense heat of re-entry, causing a violent cabin decompression. If the decompression alone did not kill the astronauts, the violent shaking and spinning of the nose section probably did, because they were not property restrained in their seats. According to the report: “The inertial reel mechanisms on the crews’ shoulder harnesses did not lock . . . As a result, the unconscious or deceased crew was exposed to cyclical rotational motion while restrained only at the lower body.” It added that “crew helmets do not conform to the head . . . consequently, lethal trauma occurred to the . . . crew due to the lack of upper body support and restraint”.

The last words from the stricken spacecraft came at 8.59am, when commander Rick Husband said: “Roger, uh, buh . . .” as alarms began to go off in the cabin simultaneously. A minute later the nose section had fallen to 137,000ft. Within the next 24 seconds it was destroyed. The report concludes that even if the harnesses and suits had been working perfectly, the accident would have been unsurvivable, because ultimately the crew members, practically torn in half by their lap belts, were thrown out of the nose section into superheated, near-vacuum conditions. It goes on to make 30 recommendations for improving crew safety. “I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home to read this report and apply these hard lessons, which have been paid for so dearly,” said Wayne Hale, a Nasa associate administrator.

“This report confirms that although the valiant Columbia crew tried every possible way to maintain control of their vehicle, the accident was not ultimately survivable.”

I guess that covers that.

One of the things that prompted me to start blogging was actually the aftermath of the Columbia disaster. I think it kind of hit me that for years NASA had been doing the shuttle program only to have lost 2 of a fleet of 5 shuttles, while accomplishing relatively little, even when compared to the Apollo program. In the years since then, we've all come to understand that perhaps the concept of the shuttle was always a little sketchy, and all the technical problems it contained led to both the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

In a nutshell, they are the most complicated machines ever built by mankind, which means that it has the most parts that can fail. The effect of any of the failed pieces of the shuttle can be absolutely overwhelmingly catastrophic, which in a sense accounts for both accidents. In response to the Columbia disaster, NASA grounded its fleet, and then 4 years ago, gingerly proceeded to continue with the flights. The fleet of shuttles will be retired in 2010, which is now less than 2 years away.

Once Were Dreadful

They Used To REALLY Suck

It's so damn hot I can' sleep. The Green Curry I cooked for dinner isn't helping either. So I've decided to charge up my newish laptop and type some thoughts down about... cricket!

Australia secured a face-saving win in the dead rubber Test at the SCG. Amazingly, it took until the second last over to manage it, and the Aussies had to claim the wicket of Graeme Smith who went to the crease in pain with a broken hand. When it was all said and done, I had a chat to PJ and his gal Mu, only to find they were still pretty down about *how* the win was secured and how much they still intensely disliked Ricky Ponting.

It's weird. I keep finding that Ponting gets scant emotional support from average Aussie cricket fans. You'd think he'd slept with their girlfriends (or boyfriends). They tell me that he might be a great batsman but he's an arrogant captain who does not do them proud. All this got me to thinking about the last time Australia had to win a face-saving Test in Sydney and I think that was back in 1987. The Poms had whipped Australia in the Ashes series as the likes of Gooch, Botham and Gatting were doing a Victory lap. It wasn't long after Kim Hughes had quit as Captain in tears. A reluctant Allan Border had been put into his place, and was heading a ragtag collection of questionable players that included some guy called Peter Taylor who was a spin-bowler they found from relative obscurity.

The couple of years preceding that 1987 Sydney Test were worse. Every Test seemed to bring a loss and every loss brought a barrage of press ridicule. Even a complete novice fan like me couldn't miss the viciousness. Those were awful days for Aussie cricket. They seemed to lose and lose and lose - and the press took so much delight in ridiculing those squads. I imagine they're the same kind of journos busily writing negative pieces about Ponting's persona these days. Peter Roebuck was then, as he is today, full of wonderful insight as to what the Australian cricket selectors, team, and audiences were doing wrong against the proper spirit of cricket. Going to the Test in 1987 was a sure way to disappointment, because you knew that they'd get done.

The Sydney Test of 1987 then, was just as likely to end in defeat. Yet, somehow the ragtag bunch of Aussies pulled off an unlikely victory. It was quite the occasion; and had they had a player like Ponting back then, They sure would have won a whole bunch more.

The point is, Ponting right now might not look like it, but he's actually been handed the same difficult task of rebuilding the Australian team, pretty much from scratch - and I don't think he's the worst guy for the job. If today's desperate, loopy, borderline, dodgy win meant anything, it's that the generational change underway has found purchase. The rookie bowlers did very well, and so perhaps we are beginning to see how winning in the post-Warner-McGrath era might look like. This is a very good thing.

Ponting In The Firing Line

When he wins, he's described as arrogant. When he loses, he's described ass sore loser. Yet, he's cast from the mold of winning cricketers that Allan Border seeked to forge back in the late 1980s. Allan Border decided the chumming around had to stop. In order to win, they had to be rudely confrontational and not give and inch to the poms. It took David Gower by surprise in 1989, but the results showed through the years. Even during the Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh captaincies, Australia played a brand of hard-nosed, sledge-ridden, confrontational cricket. It is the aussie way. It's only in this decade that some people have started to question whether this is necessary. Allan Border of 1989 would probably tell such questioners to stick a sock in their mouths and go leap off the Gap.

Ponting came into the squad as a 19 year old prodigy in 1994-5. It seems like not long ago, but it's also seems like forever. This is a guy who grew up in that environment of Aussie cricket's winning ways and he probably knows no other way. To criticise him for arrogance in winning is a little like complaining that winning isn't good enough, that you have to win wit style as well. It's inherently indulgent to ask that of a win. And to complain that he's s sore loser when he loses is a bit much too. There's nothing to like in a loss, when the stakes are so high.

People of other nations complain bitterly about the Australian approach to the game in the last 20 years, but Ponting has never shown that he is anything less than the best of the system that produced him as a player and captain. If other countries' players can't handle the heat, they should get off the field. I find the demand that Ponting be a better sportsman according to some idealised vision of a gentlemanly cricketing culture to be entirely misguided. The man is who he is, and I think he represents us very well. He's there to win. Unlike the journos who move the metaphorical goal posts for the sake of a good story, he is out there foremost to win or lose, with the expectations of a sports-nut nation on its flagship sport.

We've always had hard-nosed guys captaining. It' not like Bobby Simpson or the Chappells or AB or Steve Waugh were any less confrontational or aggressive for a win than Ricky Ponting. The exception was Mark Taylor who had a cultivated public persona, but he was the exception to the rule in as much as his public persona was so affable. Nonetheless he didn't exactly take it easy on the field either. Why should Ponting be any different?

He's now 32-33. He might not be around for a whole deal longer. He'll probably see out the reconstruction of the Aussie side and that's it. So like it or not, we've only got a little bit more of Ponting. Those two or three summers will go in a flash. It's going to be a shame when he leaves, just as it was when AB, Boonie, Marsh, McDermott, Mark Taylor, the Waugh twins, Warnie and McGrath left, one by one. We might not see the likes of him again. The least we could do right now is to appreciate him for the glory of Australian cricket that he is, instead of complaining about his public persona. He's much, much more valuable than that.

It Might Be Hubris

Or It Might Just Be Plain Awfulness

Pleiades sent in this article here with more feedback about Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia'.

So why hasn't it happened for Australia? What's the problem?

Here are two reasons, neither of which is necessarily Baz Luhrmann's fault.

At one level, Australia was too commercially ambitious, too boastful. The decision to call it Australia instead of its working title, Faraway Downs, was a mistake. It yielded the inevitable result: domestic audiences rolled their eyes at the hubris, while foreigners wondered why the hell anyone would make a movie about that crazy little country in the Alps where Hitler was born.

And Australia's marketing presentation to the public lacked any reference to the one quality deeply connected in our minds with Baz Luhrmann's work: originality.

Luhrmann's previous successes - Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom -\- were all startlingly different. They surprised audiences. We'd never seen the ludicrous spangleworld on screen before Strictly Ballroom - and Moulin Rouge was nothing more than an embarrassing Paris tourist-bus cliche until Baz's movie.

I'm not feeling easy with such easy analysis. For a start, you can't be risk averse, and yet be so pretentious as to call your film 'Australia'. I'm pretty sure it wasn't so much the title as the suggested content as shown in the trailers that turned off a wide cross-section of cinema-goers. Bottom line, people just weren't interested in the world of 1940s Drovers and English Aristocrats going to the antipodes. .

My take on it is that it also had many other negatives attached to it - some of it Luhrmann, a lot of it Kidman - that it overwhelmed any chance it had of being accepted readily by the people who still pay to go see a movie. I don't kno if that is hubris so much as a total lack of judgment.

This Is The Aftermath Of Hubris

In this, the last days of GWB, we can finally see that even America has had enough of this lame duck, shameful fuck of a President.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush's presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him. He is being forgotten already, even if he's not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is, stretching from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.

The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq's improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn't grasp the finality of their defection.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove, he has embarked on a Bush "legacy project", as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as high-falutin' as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short as the President is "not a big reader".

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin is on the White House website: a booklet recounting "highlights" of the administration's "accomplishments and results". With big type, much white space and child-like trivia boxes titled "Did You Know?", its 52 pages are the literary correlative to "Mission Accomplished".

I often thought that the sheer awfulness of Jimmy Carter's term brought about Ronald Reagan and 'Reagan Republicans'. The pay off for that were the 2 Reagan terms, the 1 term of George Bush senior, and the 2 terms o GWB. It's a pretty good continuity of power for the Republicans.

But it may just be possible that the the GWB Presidency was so awful that it might end up ushering in 5-6 terms of Democratic Presidencies starting with the in-coming Barack Obama. Let's not beat about the err... bush (well, why not, here's my bat)...  GWB was that bad.

It's pretty tragic that the USA has had to endure not just 1, but 2 terms of this President. I think he must be the worst President in my lifetime. Yet, his old man, who was in some ways better, but also just as out of touch with Main Street thinks GWB's brother Jeb might one day make a fine candidate as US President.

On "Fox News Sunday," former President George H. W. Bush said he's ready for another Bush in the White House. He hopes his son Jeb runs for Senate in Florida and one day for president.

"I think he'd be an outstanding senator ... I'd like to see him be president some day," Bush said. "Right now is probably a bad time because maybe we've had enough Bushes in there."

Good God, spare me, and spare us all. After the fiasco that saw GWB come to power thanks to the electoral shenanigans in Florida, which happened (and most probably engineered) on Jeb Bush's watch as governor, I think Jeb should be disqualified before he even runs. Or could the God-and-Anti-Abortion Right Wing of the Republicans so stupid that they think Jeb is a viable candidate? You can never tell with that crowd.

The other point to be made about yet another Bush Presidency is that it's really hard to see what exactly the Bush family stand for that is such a powerful symbol of Republicanism - except being rich and spoilt and largely for the big end of town to a fault. Why would the USA need another dose of this kind of Presidency in the wake of 3 totally uninspiring Bush family terms? Who are they trying to kid?

If that's not hubris deserving of calamity, I don't know what is.

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

Nostalgia In Reverse

I would have loved to have done a movie double of this film with either 'The Aviator' to talk about the amazing Cate Blanchett, or 'Burn After Reading' to talk about the versatility of Brad Pitt. Both actors in this film are worthy of study in this film. They sure 'go for it' in this film.

One of the first signs of an actor swinging for the fences is when they put on the aged look with prosthetic makeup and sure enough, both Blanchett and Pitt are covered and smothered in the special effects makeup. But getting past that point, what is remarkable about all of this is how seemlessly they stitch together the aging and aging-in-reverse characters as one performance.

David Fincher is is in fine form when the actors appear as unaffected as you can imagine, given the extraordinary premise of the film. The bits he fails are in the mannered narrative where the occasional flashbacks to story elements that don't belong to Pitt and Blanchett's characters Benjamin and Daisy. The fluttering exposure effect in the Clock back story was more irritating than fun, while the 7 lightning strikes elicit a laugh but are also gimmicky gags in an otherwise elegant film.

What's Good About It

There's quite a bit to like with this film. The directing, the Cinematography, the acting, the design, the attention to detail, the style in most part, all come together as an organic whole. The off-the-cuff absurdity of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original premise for his short story is painstakingly worked out with a kind of mechanical logic, which is probably why the film starts off with a story about a clock that runs backwards.

It's a haunting film that seeps into your subconscious, may strange image-driven ideas. I had very strange dreams following the viewing of this film, all of it inflected with the weird materialism of the film. The film is like a meditation on the Twentieth Century Americana, a sort of reverse of the 'Great Gatsby' as the characters hurtle towards each other, meet, and then pass each other by through time. More than symbolically, Benjamin's love interest is called Daisy, and surely this was a conscious choice made by the writer and director.

What's Bad About It

Not so much bad as ill-fitting are the aforementioned stylistic manner of the clock flashback at the start, but also the reference to the impending Hurricane Katrina disaster. It just isn't necessary because life-or-death issues in the film cannot be made more profound  by Hurricane Katrina constantly moving towards New Orleans. Whatever it might mean, it just cannot match the meaning that is already living and breathing in the picture.

There is also a slight strain in time and place to get the story to work. I didn't buy the need to show the Beatles on the screen to show the 1960s were unfolding. It also made the characters just a little too old to be having their first and only child.

These are minor quibbles. Overall, the picture shows a deft hand by a very good director. It's not quite as good as 'Fight Club' or 'Zodiac', but this is an eminently watchable film that would bear up to repeated viewings.

What's Interesting About It

It's actually a creepy little story when you sit down to think about it in the cold light of day. A guy is born old and grows young through out his life. He meets a girl 5 years younger, who ends up being the love of his life and bears his child. But the earlier moments of their friendship have echoes of pedophilia - only because of the issue of age, where Benjamin is a decrepit looking old due hanging with a young girl, and this reverses to the point where an elderly Daisy has sex with a teenage Benjamin in a hotel room. It opens the door to thinking about age and sexuality without ringing all the alarm bells, though it is hard to see what conclusions one could come to.

The film's perspective on sexuality is very open. Daisy and Benjamin's relationship is founded on carnality; as is Benjamin's other important relationship with Tilda Swinton's character Elizabeth Abbott. Benjamin even says in his voice over that going to the brothel enforced the importance of work, because it is through earning coin that one gets to afford the pleasure of sex. It's not every day that an American film openly says, Love is sex, and it's pretty much tied up with money.

Sexuality is everywhere in this film, you think it's a meditation on sexuality itself; I guess it's not surprising that the cycle of birth, life and death feeds back through sex. Yet the film is decidedly un-sexy. The beautiful people that they are, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett don't set the screen alight with their sexiness. It's not exactly 'Nine and a Half Weeks'. Instead, the film shows a more prosaic boredom with straight Eros and an interest in mild fetishism. It's as if these characters need the trappings of objects - big beds with mosquito nets, yachts, motorcycles, hotel rooms - just to get it going. All of it with this deeply ironic Americana.

I kept wondering what the film would look like had the characters been Australians instead of Americans. I wondered what ironies would be lost and what would be gained. I mention this because Baz Luhrman wants to make his version of 'the Great Gatsby' - yes, it's a bit like wanting to make your own version of 'the Godfather' - and yet David Fincher has gone and made a meta-textual Gatsby through adapting another F. Scott Fitzgerald story. It's all thought-provoking and that's good in a movie.

My God, Was That Julia Ormond?

I couldn't figure out who was playing the grown-up daughter of Benjamin and Daisy. She seemed not particularly good looking or interesting or charming or cute. She looked incredibly plain and if anything, hard-done by age. Sort of like the woman you might see at the flea markets on a Saturday selling pot plants.

When the credits rolled and said Julia Ormond, I thought I'd fall out of my chair. Was this really the woman who played Sabrina and Guinevere? If you wanted an ironic thought about age and aging, that was it right there. It's a pretty brave performance by her too, you come to realise after leaving the cinema.

A Flier On Andruw?

Pitching Park Hell

The LA Dodgers are restructuring Andruw Jones' contract in order to move him in a trade.

I'm hearing the Dodgers are working on a deal that will allow the team to cut ties with Andruw Jones, save $12 million and give last year's free-agent bust the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere.

The Dodgers still hold out hope they can save the money and trade Jones, but the end result will be Jones probably won't be swinging and missing in L.A. this season.

Dodgers GM Ned Colletti said, "We can't confirm that, and right now we don't have a comment," but if a deal is made with Jones' agent, it will give the Dodgers an additional $12 million to pursue Manny Ramirez or cover the cost of a new wardrobe for Mrs. Parking Lot this season.

Jones' agent, by the way, is Scott Boras, and freeing up $12 million helps Ramirez, who is also his client. Jones would accept the reduction in pay to get a fresh start elsewhere in the final year of his contract.

One of the more spectacular drop-offs by an elite player in recent years has been Andruw Jones. Jones, formerly a mighty centerfielder for the Braves moved to LA and had  a truly abysmal season, that followed on from a pretty subpar season. FanGraphs paints a grisly picture of his decline in production.

So I've been trying to make sense of this decline a bit and it is entirely possible that it is due to injury. The first thing I did check was K/BB, and sure enough, he's gone from reasonably good to average to worse than average in the last 3 seasons, but you have to keep in mind that LA is a Pitcher's Park. The Dodgers also play 19 games a piece in San Diego and San Francisco, both of them significant Pitchers' Parks.

The BABIP graph is interesting, because it shows he's been below League Average for 4 seasons after being roughly league average for 8. More interestingly, he's been luckier in LA than on the road. My guess is that he's either significantly lost speed or he's been unlucky for the last 4 years. I don't know which. If you discounted the truly crappy 2008 as anomalous, the 3 running seasons of consistently low BABIP would indicate he had lost speed through injury - and yet if this were so, one would expect his SB to decline and his fielding to worsen. RZR says he was a pretty good fielder in 2006 and 2007. So that theory doesn't quite fit

Amazingly, it is his falling K-Rate that catches the eye.  He's always struck out a goodly amount, but he was a strikeout machine in 2008. That 2008 season looks more and more like a perfect storm of Pitchers' Park, Bad BABIP season, and swinging like crazy at anything in the hopes of getting a hit. It seems to show progressive panic more than anything else.

My guess is that he's declined a little, but not as much as his wOBA graph indicates. There's a lot to like with Andruw Jones still. For instance, even his bad 2007 ISO is significantly above average, and he still draws walks at a good rate even when he's hitting like crud.

If in fact he's healthy, and keep in mind he's still 32 next season, he might hit something like .262/.350/.432  if his BABIP bounces back to about .290, and his ISO stays at his career low end of .170. He could slug even more than that in a park that is more hitter-friendly than Dodger Stadium. Again, if he gets out of the NL West, then he won't be hitting at San Diego and San Francisco 38 games a year on top of the 81 games at home in LA. The steal waiting to happen just might be a trade for Andruw Jones.