Category: Blog 2006-Present

Quick Links 4/4/08

*This analysis of major league managers’ tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is…well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It’s bizarre. H/T Rays Index.
*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball’s MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank “Wildfire” Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.
*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.
*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That’s a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano’s name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola’s books…as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.
*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I’m more optimistic about Cabrera’s potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I’d generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don’t regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.
*There’s no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can’t buy into Hawkins’ notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins’ logic, I have to admit that that’s more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.
*While I don’t agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there’s no point in fighting over the past. The Administration’s enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers’ ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).
*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.
*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.
*Guns don’t kill people, guns kill movie scripts.
*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

It’s That Time of Year

Over the last several weeks I’ve been dividing my blogging time largely between writing about the presidential election and crunching numbers and getting up to speed behind the scenes to prepare for my annual division previews. Now, with the season starting in earnest March 31 (leaving aside the March 25 Japanese opener between the Red Sox and the A’s) and 6 divisions to cover, ideally before that date, I really need to put my back into getting my preseason division previews in shape. As a result, expect the site to go to a more sporadic publication schedule as I roll out the divisional previews. I may not go completely dark on politics – there’s just so much material out there – but just about anything worth saying today about the elections will be equally worth saying in April.

Where Did That Come From?

I really miss referrers.net and its code that used to run on this site giving me an instant look, not just for the front page but every page on the blog, at how many visitors were entering a particular page from a particular site. Among other things it was a much more reliable guide than anything else I have both to who was linking to me and how many eyeballs they were sending my way.
Today, this post from nearly 8 years ago has drawn, estimating from SiteMeter, hundreds of people to this site. And I have no idea from where. I’d be willing to pay to get a service like that back, as I was paying before; but it just does not seem to exist, or if it does I can’t find it.

Multicultural Ignorance

How can the use of feng shui, a traditional Chinese concept, in a California McDonald’s “help all customers tap their inner Zen,” Zen being a Japanese religious/philosophical concept? You would think an AP reporter named Nguyen (a Vietnamese surname) would know the difference, but apparently all “Asians” are alike to her.
A person knowledgeable about her Vietnamese heritage would be acutely sensitive to such distinctions,the distinction between Chinese and Japanese culture and tradition being of enormous importance to East Asian history. A person raised in America to think of all “Asians” as a homogenous mass to be agglomerated for political purposes might miss that distinction. I infer the latter.

Quick Links 2/17/08

*Pedro: kicking it clean.
*Barack Obama as the Mirror of Erised.
*Debra Burlingame on Bill Clinton’s Puerto Rican terrorist pardons.
*Good roundup of what’s expected from various shows with the writers’ strike over.
*The morality of waterboarding. This probably deserves a longer post but I agree 100% with the point that you have to consider the morally correct thing first and let the law follow.
*The most badass U.S. presidents in history. Hilarious.
*Stephen Green on why Hillary’s South Carolina strategy was actually the opposite of Rudy’s mistake.
*A fitting assessment of Harry Reid.

Quick Links 2/1/08

*Bob Klapisch has a must-read (really!) article about how the Twins got backed into the Santana deal with the Mets instead of taking better packages from the Yankees and Red Sox (one is left with the impression that the Red Sox, possibly rationally, lost interest once the Yankees were out of the bidding – unlike the Yanks they don’t have unlimited financial resources and have a fairly solid pitching staff at present). Via Pinto. On the one hand, the Twins’ new GM Bill Smith clearly screwed up by turning down a deal involving Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and two additional prospects in December; on the other hand, the Yankees will probably regret turning down a last-minute chance to get Santana for just Ian Kennedy, Melky and one other prospect (and I say this as someone who thinks Melky has a good shot to be a real good player).
*Speaking of great reporting, Fred Barnes’ account of how President Bush decided on the surge, based heavily on interviews with the president himself, is also a must-read for intelligent discussion of the subject.
*The five stages of voting in Republican primaries. Via Vodkapundit. Absolutely spot-on.
*The wages of Kelo: the Second Circuit this morning affirms the use of the eminent domain power for the munificent public purpose of bringing the Nets to Brooklyn.
*Stanley Kurtz on Waziristan past, and Waziristan present.
*This is an amazing story, if true.
*You will look long and hard for two savvier observers of presidential politics than Karl Rove and Patrick Ruffini, and their takes on the 08 scene are worth reading, especially Rove’s point about exit polls and Patrick’s point about the advantages of online fundraising (added advantage he doesn’t mention: online donors don’t show up demanding favors).
*The FBI interrogator who questioned Saddam after his capture confirms what we all knew: Saddam intended all along to retain the ability to ramp up WMD production as soon as he could, and he made a deliberate effort to appear to still have WMD capability:

Mr. Piro: “The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there.”
Mr. Pelley: “And that was his intention?”
Mr. Piro: “Yes.”
Mr. Pelley: “What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?”
Mr. Piro: “He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program.”
Mr. Pelley: “Chemical, biological, even nuclear.”
Mr. Piro: “Yes.”

*Great move by the Yankees snagging Morgan Ensberg. Ensberg has had his struggles lately and granted he will be less useful as a first baseman, but his combination of power and patience makes him a potentially very useful bat.
*Color me un-shocked that Clinton crony Strobe Talbott would be duped by Soviet agents.
*The real DB Cooper, unmasked? Nah, he would never have stolen paper currency just months after Nixon took us off the gold standard.
*Mark Steyn rightly takes McCain to task for his hostility to making money in the private sector. I think John Hinderaker has the better of the argument about preferring McCain to a novice politician like Romney on foreign affairs – unlike Steyn’s example of Hillary, McCain is a longstanding, indeed life-long, foreign policy hawk who has no illusions about the likes of Putin (I believe he once said he looked in Putin’s eyes and saw the lettters “KGB”). And Pejman properly takes McCain to task for misrepresenting Romney’s position on timetables and the surge, which is a shame because there really is a fair contrast (see here and here) on the fact that McCain was a longstanding, vocal leader on Iraq strategy while Romney played the role of a cautious follower who always kept his options open to bail on victory in Iraq for the greater good of getting himself elected.
*Andrew Ferguson on Fred: brilliant. Ruffini’s Fred postmortem is also worth reading.
*This video about Hillary’s role on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart will likely hurt her mostly in the primaries, and certainly doesn’t scandalize me. But it’s amusing and interesting on a few levels, not least the accent she was using back then. There’s also a lesson about what drives journalists; biases are one thing, but when Brian Ross mentions that he covered this story 16 years ago, it’s pretty clear that returning to it now is about Ross’ career more than about Hillary.

Continue reading Quick Links 2/1/08

Quick Links 1/12/08

*Tom Maguire on Paul Krugman’s efforts to put lipstick on the pig of the European welfare state. Of course, deceit is to Krugman what the fedora and the bullwhip are to Indiana Jones.
*And here I thought Daniel Webster had driven him out of New Hampshire permanently.
*Megan McArdle has the, er, skinny on people who are waaaaaaaay too sensitive.
*Excellent GOP primary roadmap from David Freddoso.
*Don’t mess with Vladimir Putin, Part XXVIII
*Two war-related decisions yesterday from the DC Circuit; one that rejects First Amendment challenges by Cindy Sheehan to her arrest at a protest but reverses her conviction for failure to prove her state of mind, the other of which rejects a variety of civil claims against Donald Rumsfeld and a variety of other DoD personnel, brought by Guantanamo detainees claiming that they were tortured or otherwise mistreated in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
*The All-Messed Mets Team.
*Heh.
*Slate has a really silly article about the demise of the billable hour, while admitting that the big law firms that handle high-end cases (i.e., lawyers like me) are not likely to abandon hourly billing any time soon. Yes, it’s true that basically every lawyer in private practice hates the billable hour; that’s been true as long as anyone could remember. And it’s true that clients don’t love it either, and that if change comes to billing methods, it will come from client demand. But like Churchill’s dictum about democracy being the worst form of government except every alternative that has been tried, hourly billing endures because lawyers and clients alike are familiar with it, and for potentially major litigation, it’s hard to come up with alternatives that don’t have larger problems. The flaw in the Slate piece is not suggesting any feasible alternative – that works at least minimally for both lawyer and client – for how to bill a case that walks in the door with potentially huge damages liability, yet even the most experienced litigator can’t tell you up front whether it will be quickly dismissed or settled, or end up in years of labor-intensive discovery and trial, or somewhere in between. Without a workable alternative, large organizations will always prefer the tried and tested, and work within that framework to make the process work for both parties.

Quick Links 1/8/08

*Dave Barry’s Year in Review. Priceless. Too much great stuff to excerpt.
*Mark Steyn cautions against

writing New Hampshire off as just another effete decadent coastal latte-swilling gay-marriage weekend home untypical of the conservative heartland, just a Studio 54 in the mountains full of transplanted liberals hitting on coked-up moose as they stagger around in search of a restaurant serving something with arugula. NH delivered Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. It remains the north-east’s still-just-about non-liberal state. If the Republican Party can’t come up with a candidate that has some appeal in New Hampshire, its prospects of winning in November are dramatically reduced.

*From Kevin Drum, grudging acceptance of military progress in Iraq, and a picture-perfect sample of the attitude I described here. And yes, I still think it more likely than not that Hillary pulls this out, although while Iowa didn’t really surprise me that much (the race there had been close for months), I’ve been surprised at how quickly her support in NH seems to have cratered. Speaking of which, Patrick Ruffini and Jay Cost, two of the Right’s savvier campaign observers, lay out how Hillary can win the nomination even after losing New Hampshire, as she is now expected to do. Patrick focuses on the Nevada caucuses, while Jay focuses on the delegate math, particularly the superdelegates.
*Ralph Peters argues that the US Navy should have reacted more aggressively to an obvious provocation by the Iranians in the Gulf on Sunday. He’s clearly right about what the Iranians were trying to do, and I’m generally sympathetic to the power-politics argument that failing to respond to provocations only brings larger ones. On the other hand, you don’t start fights you are not prepared to pursue to the bitter end. As Peters describes it, the encounter came awfully close to the line at which a US Naval commander would need to open fire to protect his vessels, but I don’t buy the idea that we always have to initiate combat over this sort of thing, which is the logical endpoint of Peters’ argument.

Best of Baseball Crank 2007

I’ve been writing on the web since 2000 and blogging since 2002, and in all those years, 2007 has been perhaps the toughest in terms of being satisfied with my ability to produce consistently new and interesting content for my readers – so with things a little quiet here over the past week or so and probably staying that way for the next few days, I hope you will indulge me here if I run a retrospective look back at my best work from this year, or at least the posts I enjoyed the most. For newer readers, it’s a chance to catch up on things you may have missed. Posts are grouped in three subjects and listed chronologically within those. As you can see, the 2008 presidential election is somewhat overrepresented here, while the baseball postseason is underrepresented.
Sports
A look at Hall of Fame and Hall of Fame candidate middle infielders.
Critiquing Baseball-Reference.com’s translated statistics.
Review of Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side.
Taking a victory lap on the BALCO leak.
EWSL review of 2006 and EWSL age analysis.
EWSL previews for the AL East, AL Central, AL West, NL East, NL West and NL Central.
A brief history of the rise of lefthanded pitching.
Assessing Scott Boras.
Is Billy Wagner the best lefthanded reliever ever?
That high-flying Mets defense, before it collapsed down the stretch, and after.
Baseball’s most impressive records. Probably my favorite post of the year, and definitely my favorite baseball post.
Tom Glavine’s 300th win, and the career path of the average 300 game winner.
My BBC Radio debate with David Pinto on Barry Bonds.
Michael Vick and the NFL players union.
Reviewing The Bronx is Burning (the book).
The role of pitching in the history of the Detroit Tigers.
Willie Randolph: the motivational poster.
The home run imbalance between the leagues.
The greatest late-season runs of all time, including the 2007 Rockies.
The horrible almost Yorvit Torrealba signing.
The Milledge deal.
The Cabrera/Willis deal.
The Hall of Fame ballot: Yes on Gossage, No on Dawson.
Isiah Thomas: the most hated figure in NY sports history?
Tim Raines and the Tablesetters.
Politics, War and Law
The wrong way for Rudy to argue about abortion.
Why I’m with Rudy.
Obama’s plan to withdraw from Iraq beginning May 1, 2007.
Mike Huckabee: the right man for the wrong job.
The Iranians in Iraq.
The case against a national minimum wage.
John Edwards’ amnesia on Iran and Israel.
Barack Obama, pandering to cannibals.
Bill Richardson, sucker for tyrants.
A culture war roundup from the courts.
On Imus and the Rutgers press conference.
A look at campaign finance laws through the lens of Torii Hunter’s bat.
Those tax hiking Democratic governors. More here and here.
Eliot Spitzer’s pro-abortion zealotry, and the Seven Stages of Liberal Legal Activism.
Tax amnesty for illegal immigrants.
John Edwards’ fantasy foreign policy.
Obama’s health care plan.
The elements of a third party presidential run.
Harry Reid, the Insult Comic Senate Majority Leader.
The Libby pardon. I’m not even sure if I still agree with this post, but I did put a lot of thought into it.
A satire on the (then-)sinking McCain campaign.
Trying to nail the Hillary jello to the wall on Iraq.
Two cheers for the hypocrites.
John Edwards doesn’t want to know.
A taxonomy of the presidential candidates.
Why Fred Thompson needed to get specific. (He since has).
Uncivil litigators.
The Spitzer/Hillary posts on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, here, here, here, here, and here.
The Trouble With Mitt Romney, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Smearing John Edwards.
Expanding the battlefield.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Michael Gerson.
Yes, Hillary will win the nomination.
Pop Culture and Other Fun Stuff
The Star Wars prequels as they should have been.
Predictions and a wrapup on the end of The Sopranos.
Reviewing the fifth Harry Potter film and the final Harry Potter book.
Pennsylvania Travelogue.

Under Attack

I seem to have suffered some sort of server attack that has wiped out everything (posts & comments) posted to the site since Christmas Eve. My apologies. If anybody happens to have a blog-reader or other cache-type service that still contains the text of any of my posts for 12/25-27, it would be great if you could copy & paste and email them to me at:
baseball_crank at yahoo *dot* com
Thanks.
UPDATE: Got ’em, thanks to reader Dave S.

Quick Links 12/19/07

*Studes says Jose Reyes’ problem down the stretch last season was not hitting too few ground balls.
*TIME Magazine looked into Vladimir Putin’s heart, too, and named him their Man of the Year for discarding the remaining constitutional breaks on dictatorship in Russia. Unlike President Bush, TIME can’t excuse this as diplomacy.
*You’ll shoot your eye out! Mike Huckabee may have a serious problem with granting too many clemencies to violent criminals, but Mitt Romney’s refusal to grant any pardons or clemencies at all took him to the ridiculous length of refusing to expunge the conviction of a decorated Iraq War veteran who was convicted at age 13 of shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun.
*Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one, has announced that she is pregnant. At least she’s keeping the baby.
*Businesses that should exist but don’t.

The Static Channel

Apologies for the general lack of content and specific lack of baseball content – it’s been crazy in a couple of ways, and I admit that the baseball stuff has been crowded out a bit from all the work that has gone into the Romney series, of which two installments remain. Hopefully I can return soon to the hot stove league and postseason awards beat.

More Quick Links

*California wildfires lead to a shoulder injury that could cost Joel Zumaya half of next season.
*Tom Maguire on Paul Krugman willfully ignoring evidence of how the Iranian regime’s assistance to Al Qaeda did, in fact, contribute to the September 11 attacks. Krugman just can’t help himself.
*A note about something missing from the California disaster: looting.
*Matt Yglesias looks at evidence that independent voters are more aggreived about illegal immigration than anything else, a finding that surprises me. Via OTB. It’s pretty clear that the government needs to rebuild confidence in border security before the political environment will again permit serious consideration of a path to legalization.
*Don’t put your suicide note on YouTube unless you really mean it.

Quick Links 9/13/07

*Michael Lewis is a wonderful writer and a guy who understands and loves markets. You have to read (here and here) his take on the subprime lending crisis. (Not everyone is amused). Lewis himself was a bond trader for a few years in the 1980s, leading to his smash hit book “Liar’s Poker,” and he poses here as a Gordon Gekko-type hedge-fund manager who blames poor people for evertything. The great thing about these pieces is that they are double-edged satire, containing enough cold-hearted economic truth to effectively skewer subprime borrowers and Capitol Hill demagogues, but at the same time mocking the misanthropic (at best) attitudes he parrots.
*Speaking of which, Gekko himself is apparently coming back as a hedge-fund manager (improbable given his insider-trading conviction, but that’s Hollywood – it wouldn’t be as much fun if he was running a car insurance company). I wonder how he reacts when he finds out Martin Sheen ended up President.
*Medieval scholastics would have been awed by the effort exerted by the Third Circuit to determine that putting on a hair net is “work”. Of course, I am thankful not to work in a place of employment that has an “evisceration” department.
*The Constitution stops at the frat house door, as the Second Circuit upholds a college’s right to use anti-discrimination policies to deny recognition to a fraternity on grounds of not admitting women. There’s a case to be made for greater autonomy of educational institutions and a case to be made for the fundamental ambiguity of right-to-association law, but the reasoning used in this opinion is almost as flimsy as the public policy at issue is blinkered.
*An ex-parrot who was impressively intelligent.
*Of course, Michael Moore’s new movie is loaded with untruths. (H/T). That’s like going to a Jackie Chan movie and seeing a lot of kicking.
*Seems like a whole lot of nothing to me.

Pennsylvania Travelogue

I have returned from my travels to exotic Pennsylvania. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan for filling in (the other planned guest blogger proved to busy to post).
Citizens Bank Park
We kicked off our trip to Pennsylvania by hitting Citizens Bank Park for a Saturday night game against the Braves (which offered a rare reason to root for the Phillies). We had bought tickets for the Sunday afternoon game, on the theory that a night game would be too late in particular for my 17-month-old daughter, but ESPN decreed that the Sunday game had to be moved to 8pm. Fortunately, the Phillies were very accomodating in exchanging our tickets, and we were able to get a row of six seats even though Saturday ended up being sold out.
It’s a beautiful ballpark in the Camden Yards style, with large open-air walkways behind and under the seats. We took the kids to a Build-a-Bear in the lower level before the game, in which you could build a stuffed Phillie Phanatic (note: this was somewhat more of a summary process than your typical Build-A-Bear). We sat in Section 414 on the first base side of the upper deck (from the map you can see the view), which despite the height were good seats except that the steep angle of the upper deck puts you at the mercy of the good sense of the people in the front row to sit down and avoid blocking the view of home plate. Of course, the Phillies fans were not exactly shrinking violets about letting people know to sit down. We were sitting behind a rather indecently vocal collection of Braves fans (the guy in front of us was nice, the others were unwisely loud) and as for the Philadelphia fans, well, the reputation of Philly as the toughest park in the big leagues for the home team is well-deserved. The next day’s paper didn’t headline the game “Drunk on Boos” for nothing. The phans there hate Pat Burrell almost as much as Mets fans do, and they really hate Adam Eaton, the latter with good reason. I shouldn’t laugh since the Mets have Brian Lawrence in the rotation and he is basically the same pitcher, but at least the Mets aren’t paying Lawrence $8 million a year. Eaton was terrible, put the Phils in a hole they almost but couldn’t quite get out of even against Lance Cormier.
Also on the stadium: the food didn’t impress me. The Liberty Bell that lights up for hometown homers was OK but no Magic Apple. The out of town scoreboard along the fence takes some getting used to but is tremendously informative. There are too few places to get the count; I didn’t love the layout of the big CF scoreboard. There were a preposterous number of moths in the air for the upper deck. The jerseys? Chase Utley jerseys were definitely the dominant theme. I did see one old-school fan wearing a Doug Glanville jersey. That said, the sign of a baseball town is the proportion of fans wearing the hometown colors, especially the female fans, and the Phillies phans don’t disappoint (there were a very large number of young women and teens wearing the identical uniform of colored Phillies T-shirts and very short white shorts).
The racial makeup of the phans is a shock: I know in most towns your baseball crowds are largely white, but to get to Citizens Bank Park you drive through miles of all-black neighborhoods (what looked to my eye like working-class neighborhoods with clean, respectable houses, not slums), but in the park and the parking lot the only black people you see are ticket scalpers.
The Phillie Phanatic comes out at the 7th inning stretch, but unlike Mr. Met he fires hot dogs rather than T-Shirts into the seats. And lemme tell ya, Mr. Met is badly outgunned; while he uses a light shoulder launcher to fire shirts into the crowd, the Phanatic uses a hot dog shaped cannon mounted on a jeep.
Also on the game: I have never seen more dropped third strikes in my life. The Mets bullpen may be a mess but at least we don’t have Jose Mesa. And Jeff Francouer has a freaking gun in right field; he uncorked one throw that had my jaw dropping before it was more than two feet out of his hand.
DUKW Tour
On Sunday, we took the “Duck Tour” of Philadelphia, which is cheesy but entertaining (we had always meant to take those tours in Boston and DC but never got around to it). One thing that made me think when we got off: they mentioned that the amphibious DUKW bus/boat you ride around in was manufactured during WWII and that they had sat dormant for years until the idea came to refit them for tourism…it made me wonder: were we riding on a piece of history? I guess that the DUKWs they use for these tours have been extensively refitted from military to civilian uses, but the idea that any part of the vehicle we were riding may have been used in the war gave some additional meaning to a tour that touched on everything from colonial Philadelphia to Rocky.
King Tut
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia….sorry, couldn’t help myself. On Sunday evening, we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. On the whole, the exhibit was interesting, indeed, riveting, just knowing you are looking at things made – in some cases, of wood – multiple thousands of years ago. We went as well to the IMAX film about the excavation of the bodies of many pharoahs in the 1880s. Unfortunately the staff misinfored us about the starting time so we not only missed the beginning but ended up sitting in the front row. The baby’s eyes nearly rolled out of her head trying to comprehend an IMAX screen from the perspective of the front row. The film, narrated either by Saruman or Count Dooku, talked about how the pharoahs believed that they would be immortal as long as their names were said, in which case I suppose thy succeeded, but then it also talked about how they were using the mummified bodies of Ramses the Great and other pharoahs to study disease, like they were hoboes who gave their bodies to science for a few bucks. Somehow, I can’t imagine they would have approved.
The exhibit starts with relics from tombs other than Tut and works its way up to his immediate family (interesting note: the Egyptian royals may have been primitive but they found time to remember unborn fetuses of the royal family), and then escalated to Tut’s own burial chamber and the things on his body…but I was disappointed when it ended with the diadem that crowned his head – and no sarcophagus, no death mask. I guess it’s perhaps a politically difficult time to get that stuff out of Egypt but the whole iconography of the exhibit – including the repainting of the museum’s steps – is in the image of the sarcophagus. It was a big letdown when nothing of the sort was there.
Instead, after you leave the Tut exhibit, you enter…the gift shop. Which sold, I kid you not, a Tut tissue dispenser modeled on the head of the sarcophagus (you pull Kleenex out of the nose). I guess being donated to science isn’t the worst of it. (My son got a Tut baseball – I was disappointed not to see Cap Anson at the Pyramids).
After the gift shop, the next room has a glass case containing Bobby Abreu’s #53 Phillies uniform. Talk about being put on metaphor alert.
Hershey
By coincidence, I was vacationing the same place Dr. Manhattan was this week – Hershey, PA. And lemme tellya, Milton Hershey could have taught the pharoahs a thing or two. His name is on the town, it’s on the candy company, it’s on the amusement park, it’s on a school he endowed with $60 million in 1918, there’s a statue of him at the amusement park and biographical filmstrips, there are even Kiss-shaped streetlamps on Chocolate Avenue (which intersects with Cocoa).
OK, out of time – short takes on some things I may or may not have time to revisit later: we saw more Amish people at Gettysburg than we did in Amish country; we saw Ratatouille in the theater, and it was no Incredibles but still very entertaining; and Jesus must have a good press agent in Central PA because He has one heck of a lot of billboards in the area.

Programming Note, 2007 Edition

Here’s the deal: I’ll be away from the blog this week, so I am leaving up this announcement so you will know that I have guest bloggers. Unfortunately, for reasons I have explained, I can neither add nor alter the names of co-authors on this blog, so both of my guest-bloggers will be logging in under the name of last year’s guest blogger, Mike Rogers of Mike’s Neighborhood. I promise I will fix this as soon as I can, but for now, that’sthe best option we have.
Confused yet? Hopefully not, and I’m asking them to say up front in each post which is which. One of the guest bloggers was once (so long ago I had deleted his account) a co-blogger here under the nom de blog “Kiner’s Korner.” The other, long absent from the blogosphere, is none other than Dr. Manhattan.
Give them both a big welcome, and apologies for any confusion.

Belated Welcome

Posted by Dr. Manhattan
A belated welcome to all of the Crank’s readers from vacation in Hershey, PA, home of chocolate and misbehaving laptops. (Given my intermittent blogging history, it is only too typical.) I ask your forbearance for a little while longer. By tomorrow, all connecton issues should be cleared up and I should have a few posts up that should provide grist for debate.

Movable Type Bleg

I’m currently running Movable Type 3.33. I am trying to create new authors on my blog – I will be going on vacation in the near future and have guest bloggers lined up – and need to figure out how to add new authors. I can find my way to the “Authors” page, which is supposed to allow you to add authors, and can even edit the permissions of the existing authors, but there seems to be nowhere on the page to add new authors or edit the names of the existing ones. Anybody know enough about MT to help me out here? I’d try tech support but I don’t even know how to contact MT (their site boots me off every time I try to login), plus I suspect that even if they still support 3.33, it will cost an arm and a leg to get an answer to a simple question, if I can even get one in time.

Quick Links 8/8/07

*Did Mike Bascik purposely make it easy for Bonds to go deep? The argument isn’t wholly illogical, but I find it very unpersuasive for such a serious charge. Occam’s Razor suggests that Bacsik is just a bad pitcher, albeit one who was willing to try to make Bonds hit the ball and not just get a free pass.
*Dennis Martinez was 2-19 in his career against the Yankees. In a similar vein, Larry Jackson has to have been the all-time master of beating up the weak teams; from 1957-68, Jackson was 39-8 with a 2.20 ERA against the expansion Mets and Astros, 20-11, 3.08 ERA against the Cubs (when not pitching for them) but no better than .500 against any other team; against the rest of the league he was 124-148, with a 3.57 ERA.
*Spinlessness from Barack Obama on Bonds. Via Instapundit.
*Why on earth is this dispute being decided by a federal court?
*Val Kilmer wants to ban the Koran.
*Maybe we could keep secrets better if there was money in it.

Quick Links 7/30/07

*Pedro Feliciano’s meltdown on Saturday can probably just be chalked up to nobody being perfect (Wagner, whose ERA is down to 1.39, is almost certainly overdue for one of those games), but with Joe Smith down in the minors, it’s also a reminder that guys like Feliciano can go south on you in a hurry if overworked. The Mets don’t have the juice for a Mark Teixeira deal at this point, so the deal they need to make is for another arm in the pen.
*Via Bob Sikes: Bill Robinson has died. Robinson always seemed like a classy guy, and as a ballplayer he was (along with Mike Easler) one of the guys rescured off the scrap heap in mid-career to help build the Pirates into a championship team in the late 70s and early 80s: Robinson was a 31-year-old .235/.386/.281 hitter and busted ex-prospect when he came to Pittsburgh, but batted .276/.477/.313 (114 OPS +) over 8 seasons at Three Rivers. RIP.
*David Pinto makes an excellent point about changing sizes of ballplayers: scrappy little Craig Biggio is the same listed height and weight as Willie Mays and Carl Yastrzemski.
*For all the guff David Wright takes, recall that in 2007, he is batting .295/.516/.423 with runners in scoring position and .333/.611/.400 in the late innings of a close game.
*I banged out a quick column on Spitzergate last week that I never got around to cross-posting here. Mindles Dreck and Prof. Bainbridge both point out that Spitzer would not have cared whether corporate executives claimed, as he does now, not to have known of their subordinates’ misconduct.
*Ryan McConnell aptly sums up my feelings about Glavine:

I’ll be honest: I hated when Steve Phillips and the Mets signed Tom Glavine five years ago. I thought it was a stupid, misguided attempt to steal away a rival’s player and a complete waste of money. But, while Glavine’s never been a personal favorite — I’m Irish, grudges don’t fade as easily for us — he’s far outperformed any reasonable expectations of him while behaving in the most professional, likeable manner possible. He may not be dominant any more, and he seems particularly prone to giving large leads away lately, but I’ll always remember the tremendous performance he turned in during last year’s playoffs. And I’ll be thrilled to see him finally achieve his 300th win.

He also quotes this bizarre statement from Wallace Matthews:

Historically, he may be the best pitcher the Mets have had on their staff since Tom Seaver was run out of town 30 years ago…

How soon they forget. Has Matthews never heard of Pedro Martinez?
*Jaw, meet floor: Byron York notes Obama’s pledge in last week’s debate “to meet, one-on-one, in his first year as president, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashir Assad, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il.”
They never learn. They never, ever, ever learn.
*There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of TNR’s formerly pseudonymous mil-blogger Scott Thomas Beauchamp, but Megan McArdle, as usual, cuts to the root of why the stories set off people’s BS meters even beyond the parts (e.g., the Bradley dog-hunting tales) that seemed to clash with physical reality:

It beggars belief that 100 or more people silently watched some pottymouthed privates taunting a cripple who had acquired her injuries in the line of duty. I’m moderately well-versed in the stories about battle-hardened veterans committing atrocities in World War II. I’ve never come across a single story about making fun of your own side’s wounded.
Atrocities, and just plain barbaric behaviour, do happen, even on the good guys’ side. But the fact that they happen doesn’t mean that anything can happen. AFAIK, the taboo behaviours soldiers engage in tend to fall into fairly well-defined patterns: rape, pillage, looting, revenge exacted on innocent but handy targets, graveyard jokes, taking trophies from the enemy dead. There’s a kind of primitive logic to them that may sicken you, but still ultimate[ly] makes some sort of emotional sense. Beauchamp’s stories defy that logic, which makes me distrust them.

*This study doesn’t sound too promising by itself, but it is true that fantasy baseball is a great microcosm of how humans learn and adapt – getting your butt whipped in a fantasy league, and the desire to avoid doing so again, is a great motivator for not just gathering information but also learning how to sift between the useful and the fool’s gold (similarly, I have crammed years of lessons about, say, the value of on base percentage into the past year by playing Strat-O-Matic with my son).
*John Kerry, Genocide Denier.
*Yes, Bush has been more stymied than Clinton in getting judges through the Senate.
*Who else but James Lileks would describe the young Hugh Hefner as being “built like a bag of yardsticks”?
*Bonobo apes: not so politically correct after all (somebody tell Maureen Dowd!).
*How Roger Clemens ruined Michele Catalano.
*Crazy Pooh.
*Hanson is back. I actually thought those guys had talent, if not much depth to them (unsurprising, at their age back then). I’ll be interested to see if they’ve done anything useful with it now that they have grown up.
*Shockingly, Justice O’Connor’s case-by-case approach to the law has left her jurisprudence with little influence now that she is not there to vote on particular cases.
*NCLB – hated on the Left, distrusted on the Right, but getting results?

Back in Service

If you’re wondering, things have been a bit rocky around here the past few weeks, and probably will be for much of July, at least; work in particular is just crazy right now. One thing I finally got accomplished Friday was to get my home desktop back. Regular readers will recall my misadventures with Hewlett Packard; I finally succeeded in returning the defective replacement for my defective original. H-P was schizophrenic to deal with throughout the process; the online purchase system is a dream, the tech people were unfailingly polite, the machine looked really nice, and their marketing folks are very diligent about bombarding new purchasers with helpful emails. At the same time, the computer didn’t work, the replacement didn’t work, the repair people orginally didn’t show up and then just refused to come, and it was a horrendous ordeal to try and get someone on the phone who would admit to having the authority to give me my money back. At one point I talked to eight different people in two days, each of whom assured me that the next person they sent me to (in some cases volleying me back and forth between the same two phone numbers) would be able to authorize a refund.
Meanwhile, I went to Best Buy and bought a Gateway. Buying from an actual human turned out to be a big plus – the guy got me a Gateway with the same processor as a comparable H-P for hundreds of dollars less. They even offered local on-site installation and data transfer from the Geek Squad, a service company that clearly knows they are in the service business. Granted, it took a few weeks even with these guys to schedule an appointment – but when the Geek Squad guy was running late, he called, and he showed up only an hour late rather than weeks or months. And he set the computer up and it works. Granted, Windows Vista takes some adjusting, and with both computers I was surprised to discover that nobody has 3.5″ floppy drives anymore. But I’m back in business.

Catchy Tunes

There really is nothing that says New York quite like walking through Penn Station early in the morning listening to South American immigrants playing “Hotel California” on the pan flute, is there?
Ever have a song stuck in your head by someone who never sung it (at least, as far as I know)? Had that the other day, had Barry White singing the WKRP theme song. And well, I should add. Once a few years back it was Britney Spears (I must have just heard a song on the radio – I couldn’t hum the tune to two of her songs) singing the Kinks’ “Till the End of the Day,” another time Wilson Pickett doing Bon Jovi’s “Never Say Goodbye,” much better than the original.
“Baby, if you ever wonder…”

The End For Hewlett Packard

My tribulations with Hewlett Packard, previously chronicled here and here, have reached their logical endpoint. To recap briefly, my brand new HP desktop didn’t work at all, so HP was going to send someone out to look at it pursuant to the extended/in-home service contract I paid an extra $300 for; the guy never showed, and only later called to say the motherboard he was supposed to replace wouldn’t be in until late May (later revised to late June). Once I got the second date I had them send me a new PC instead.
So the new PC doesn’t work either; it has the exact same problem. I called tech support tonight, to get them to hopefully send someone out who would actually come. Naturally this led to an hour or more on the phone being tranfserred through five different people (one of whom was in laptop support, the prior person having ignored me when I said desktop), and having to retell the whole tale from the top for each one.
Finally, I get past the guys who wanted to run me through all the same steps that accomplished nothing last time, and onto the guy who could authorize sending someone out…and he tells me that until the old PC has returned the in-home service doesn’t apply to the replacement.
Which, in the interim, still does not work. Even though it, like its predecessor, is brand new.
I have had it; I’m sending everything back to HP, getting my money back and never buying a computer from them again. I’ve now been a month without a working computer (I’m typing this from my wife’s laptop) with no realistic prospect of having one any time soon. I keep reading all this great stuff about HP (the Wall Street Journal had a cover story recently on them surpassing Dell as the #1 maker of computers) but as far as I am concerned, a company that can’t sell a computer that actually functions is not one I want to do business with.

I Hate Hewlett Packard, Movable Type, HostMatters and Kenmore

Sorry, comments are down right now, because HostMatters sent me an email telling me that they were cutting off the comments until I upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 (which I did months ago – I’m running 3.33 now) and do a bunch of other technical goobledegook that is beyond my free time and technical expertise. What drives me nuts is dealing with people who think that running a blog means you understand how to download plugins and rewrite scripts. I have no way of knowing whether the problem here is that HM is a bad host or MT is a bad platform, or both, and given how little time I ordinarily have to blog in the first place, I don’t need to spend a bunch of time trying to find out.
Meanwhile, 13 days after my new PC arrived from Hewlett Packard, I still have no functioning computer other than to keep borrowing my wife’s laptop. The service guy who was supposed to come last Friday to replace the motherboard – to provide the expanded warranty service we paid hundreds of extra dollars for and repair a brand new machine that does not work at all – simply never showed up. When my wife called (I’ve been reminding her to take notes – dealing with computer companies is like litigation, you need to document every conversation), they finally admitted that the part the guy was supposed to bring hadn’t come in and won’t until the end of this month. So, no computer. The fact that I don’t want to go through the hassle is the only reason I have not returned the whole thing yet, but I may.
We also have no functioning washing machine. My wife got the call from Sears asking us to buy the extended warranty/service contract on our Kenmore machine, since the 1-year warranty will soon run out. She said no – and just a day or so later, the machine basically melted down, and won’t run at all because all of its fancy electronic parts are dead. (Dare I ask whether this has anything to do with the fact that this is an energy-saving washing machine). Progress on having that fixed is also slow.
(I won’t even get into the fact that I can no longer connect my iPod to my wife’s Dell laptop without frying the USB ports, which means no more downloading music).

Random Thoughts From Last Night

I was switching back and forth last night between the GOP debate and the Met game before catching up on last night’s “24,” so let me give you my observations on what I did catch, plus a few other bits:
*It may almost be time to add Shawn Green to the list of Omar’s successes – I’m really amazed that he is hitting .324 and slugging .525, when he looked for all the world like he was headed irreversibly downhill last season. It’s a Mike Lowell-style resurgence. Green doesn’t look like a power hitter; he’s built like a finesse pitcher. The Mets have batboys beefier than Green.
*24 has just gone catastrophically off the rails since the end of the plot with the Arabs. They should probably have ended the season right there. In particular, we have seen no explanation of how Chaing new where and when to call Jack to start this whole thing, and no good reason why the White House should have agreed in the first place to negotiate with a state actor holding a U.S. citizen hostage in Los Angeles. It’s gone downhill from there. The Russians seem awfully touchy about nuclear technology that their own consul was basically handing out like Halloween candy, yet blase about threatening war with the U.S. when they know that the U.S. has access to that technology. The simplest explanation is this one.
It looks like Jack is finally leaving Los Angeles after this season. This means we can ask a question that would come up for no other show: will they kill off Los Angeles?
*The account of the White House hospital visit to John Ashcroft, by the way, sounds so much like something from 24… a scene very, very radically different from the caricature of Ashcroft as a jackbooted thug. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for Bush’s talk with Comey to know how his concerns were ultimately dealt with or whether Bush just twisted his arm on the importance of the intelligence being collected.
*That set for the debate looked like a bad game show…I missed the rules, were the candidates actually buzzing in for rebuttal time?
*Rudy had the best response of the night when he slammed Ron Paul for essentially saying the U.S. had invited 9/11. I think Paul misread his invite to the Green Party debate. As I have said before, one Ron Paul in Congress is a good thing, but more of them would be a disaster. Any time he opens his mouth on foreign affairs you see why.
*Runner-up line goes to Mike Huckabee: “Congress has been spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop”.
*Of course, both of them have stiff competition from Fred Thompson’s brilliant and hilarious response to Michael Moore.
*Having seen only transcripts of the first debate, I had not seen Paul or Tom Tancredo live before, and they were much unlike my image of them from reading their statements for years – Paul seemed like a frail old man, and Tancredo seemed meek and nervous; I was expecting a guy who looked and sounded like Bob Dornan.
*Goldberg and Vodkapundit had basically the same reaction to Romney – of course, Romney’s father was a car salesman (well, a CEO of a car company, actually). In positioning himself as a conservative, Romney is basically a smart businessman pursuing an underserved market, not a man seeking higher office out of a firm belief in anything in particular, and it shows.
*There is really, really no purpose to Thommy Thompson and Jim Gilmore being in this race, none.
*Other than his position on trade, I can’t think of a single thing I have seen from Duncan Hunter to dislike. Hunter has no realistic chance of getting the nomination, but he might not be a bad running mate – he’s a serious guy who looks and sounds like a serious guy.
*From what I saw, compared to some of the last debate’s questions, I have to say that the Fox team was just miles better than the MSNBC team in asking questions that GOP primary voters would actually want to see answered (one exception was the justly-booed question to McCain about the Confederate flag) and avoiding speechifying by the moderators. From here on out they should just have Brit Hume & co. do all the GOP debates and Tim Russert do the Democrats.

Computers Bad

I am writing this from my wife’s laptop. Why, you ask? Well, I finally had to get a new computer, since my old one was 7 years old and wheezing badly (still running Microsoft ME).
Having had quite enough of malfunctions and Dell tech support over the years, I decided to buy a Hewlitt Packard, having heard good things generally and seeing as how the company is doing so well, I assumed the products would be good. My HP Pavillion Slimline with its state-of-the-art LCD monitor arrived early this week, looking sleek and a significant upgrade in every way from the old desktop battleship.
Except it will not work. Just keep getting this “Monitor Going to Sleep” message. Tech support seems convinced that the problem is the computer, not the monitor; in either way the thing is entirely useless. Tonight they tried to get me to take a screwdriver and open the thing up…a brand new computer out of the box! They gotta be kidding. Now they want to send me a box and have me send them the computer back to fix, taking who knows how long, and in the meantime I had essentially dismantled my old PC.
Unbelievable. I just can’t seem to buy anything that works on the first try.
UPDATE: So, HP has decided it’s the motherboard, and they are sending someone to my house on Friday to replace it. It took some talking to get them to agree to do that even though we have the warranty/home service contract and even though I’d already been through two prior calls to establish that it didn’t work, but at least now we hopefully will get a functional machine.
Meanwhile, my iPod is no longer on speaking terms with my wife’s laptop, which is supposed to run the iTunes. I can’t win…

4/19/07 Quick Links

*There’s a fair number of debates from the Virginia Tech shooting I don’t have time to weigh in on now (there’s the gun control issue; Glenn Reynolds aptly summarizes the case for less of it here, there’s the university’s reaction time, and there’s the appalling spectacle of NBC News broadcasting the killer’s videotape), though it seems the most important question is why it was so hard to get the killer out of circulation or at the very least on a list of people who should not be permitted to buy firearms, when he was giving off every sign of being a potential danger to himself and others and everyone around him saw those signs and several people tried to do something about it.
In all the horror I did find one moment of a little levity from this quote:

Briettney said her friend, who was shot in the knee, buttocks and shoulder, was expected to be all right.
“The one day he goes to class, he gets shot three times!”

*If you were wondering what was so gosh-darn important about holding that Rutgers press conference: the Rutgers coach now has a book deal.
*All three of my fantasy baseball teams have Felix Hernandez. This is not good news for any of them. Perhaps letting him throw a 111-pitch complete game on a cold April night in Fenway in his last start was not such a good idea.
*I definitely did not see a Mark Buehrle no-hitter coming. The past four years, Buehrle has finished second, second, first and first in the AL in hits allowed.
*You can read my reactions to the partial-birth abortion decision here, here and here. This is also a good summary of the concurrence (H/t).
*Please, wear your seatbelts.

Swimming the Amazon

52-year-old Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel has set a world record by swimming the length of the Amazon River – but somehow, this article just doesn’t make it sound like much fun:

By Thursday evening, he was struggling with dizziness, vertigo, high blood pressure, diarrhea, nausea and delirium, his Web site said. But despite having difficulty standing and being ordered by the doctor not to swim, Strel was obsessed with finishing the course and insisted on night swimming.

+++

He said he was lucky to have escaped encounters with piranhas, the dreaded toothpick fish, which swims into body orifices to suck blood, and even bull sharks that swim in shallow waters and can live for a while in fresh water.

+++

Cramps, high blood pressure, diarrhea, chronic insomnia, larvae infections, dehydration and abrasions caused by the constant rubbing of his wet suit against his skin frequently tormented him.
Strel, who lost some 26 pounds, said there were times he felt such pain in his arms, chest and legs, “that I could not get out of the water on my own.”

Why? Because it was there, I guess.

Hooked on Phoenix

I’m just catching up now after a business trip to Arizona; regular blogging should resume soon. I had not been to Arizona before; definitely a new experience for an East Coaster, from the unnaturally clear skies (the moon being visible pretty much all afternoon) to the everything-takes-30-minutes-by-car sprawl.
Also, got to see my first live spring training game, Teusday’s Giants-Mariners game that ended 9-8 Giants on a late Seattle rally that wasn’t enough to overcome Horacio Ramirez getting pasted. A few thoughts on that. First, as a Mets fan I’m sad to see Ramirez no longer pitching for Atlanta; Seattle is highly unlikely to get equal value after dealing Rafael Soriano for him. Second, up close in person Barry Bonds and Ichiro look even less like big league ballplayers (especially next to a monster like Richie Sexson) – Bonds looks, at most, like a retired athlete, while Ichiro looks like a miler. But Bonds hit the ball with his customary authority (a double that would have been a homer but for a 25-30 foot high center field fence) and seemed to be moving OK, albeit at spring training coasting speed. And third, I never, ever expected to attend a baseball game and see Rey Ordonez play again.

Bleat Bleat

Lileks has a variety of amusing things in today’s Bleat. I liked this:

The second complaint was Outraged that I advocated animal torture in the piece about the Minnesota Youth Symphony. I likened the sound of bad orchestras to a sound a cat might make if sawed in half. Because as you know we have a big problem with ca[t]-sawing, and it’s just not a joking matter.

2/12/07 Quick Links

*I’m not thrilled to see any foreign leader meddle in US domestic politics, but it is nonetheless heartening in John Howard’s war or words with Barack Obama to see a reminder that the “international community” is not as monolithically anti-American as sometimes portrayed. Powerline has some useful thoughts on why Obama’s response was so ham-handed. Of course, the Democrats are never as solicitous of countries that actually support our policies.
*An interesting analysis of the Hamas-Fatah accord. Via Frum. My guess as to the alternative explanations for Abbas’ behavior would be “all of the above.” I tend to think that the accords are a good thing simply for the fact of their existence, i.e., the fact that an Arab government sat down two warring Arab factions and got them to negotiate an agreement without the involvement of the US, the UN, Israel or financial or territorial concessions from any of the above. Hamas is still Hamas, but I still believe that while you can’t negotiate about terrorism, you sometimes need to negotiate with terrorists, and it’s not like there are other good alternatives. The best policy for the US is to avoid the situation as much as possible and play “show me” – i.e., make the Palestinian regime demonstrate its trustworthiness and peaceable nature before we give them anything. At least with Hamas in power, there is less pretense that they are actually peaceable or trustworthy unless they can genuinely demonstrate otherwise through deeds.
*There is little enough worth saying about the Anna Nicole Smith story; she rose to fame due to her natural physical gifts combined with tremendous ambition and a corresponding willingness to use and add to what she had, and she fell due to a lack of sense and even greater lack of discipline. A familiar Hollywood story. But Larry Miller has useful words on the litigation that will long outlive her:

Since yet another of the heart-broken offspring has gallantly appeared to pick up the cudgels and continue contesting it, I’d like to offer two choices of what I think is some pretty good advice: (1) Get a job. You didn’t earn that money and you don’t deserve it. And, by the way, every penny of it should go to Anna Nicole’s daughter. Or, (2) Try your best to get reincarnated as a sexy woman.


*Yes, CENTCOM is indeed engaged in the blogosphere.
*A statute beached by the tides of history: Y2K litigation reform.