Wow, I am really lazy.

Just thought I'd say that, but Kirsten pointed out to me that it's been at least a week since my last update. That's really sad, but I think it's indicative of the kind of person I usually am: I get into something, and go all gung-ho, but then I just sort of taper off and forget about it for a while, until somebody reminds me about it. Then I try to get fired up about the thing, but it just doesn't feel the same.

And then I forget about it.

I'll try to break the cycle here. I'll post again later today, because I'm cool like that.

This is going to be another short entry, as I am short on time. But here goes:
Firstly, I have picked up some spare time working as a supervisor at the WU phonathon again, because they're short on supervisors (the only ones here for the summer are on vacation now). This is nice, as I get 9 bucks an hour that would have been no bucks an hour, and it's easy work, which is slightly more tedious than picking my nose. Oddly enough, it's a blast of nostalgia, as Kristen Haut, another former supervisor, has also agreed to pick up some slack.

Secondly, I saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen over the weekend.

...

It was better than Dude, Where's my Car? was, although not by much. Both had some decent special effects, although it's obvious that the budget was higher for LEG (I refuse to call it LXG, because that's just stupid). Also, the plot was better-formed than for Dude.

But that's about it. Really, it was a pretty bad film. The directing was bad, very bad. One scene that really sticks in my craw as one who has some degree of education in the matter was towards the beginning, when Allan Quartermain first meets Captain Nemo. The camera was focused on Quartermain, then Nemo says something. Does the camera cut to Nemo? Yes, but not while he's speaking. The audience looks at Quartermain while Nemo speaks, THEN we see Nemo. He's not moving, he's just standing. It was like staring at a frilly blue statue with a stoned look on his face. This is not good directing.

The cinematography will also not win any awards, other than Raspberries. God, how I hope it wins a few. The cameras were shaky, sometimes unfocused, and the actors were periodically not really well-framed. Sorry, guys, but no awards for the film.

I will say one thing, though...the CG effects were pretty good, but I'm easily impressed by just about anything along the lines of gigantic, white, silver-trimmed, pseudo-realistic submarines steaming through Venice. It's always a cool idea.

Bottom line: See this movie if, and only if, you do not pay for it.

Bottom line 2: Do not ever watch Dude, Where's my Car?

Buy a fucking fish.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/16/offbeat.meowlingual.ap/index.html

See, THIS is the crap that happens when police interfere:
Hit and run driver nearly killed by wrathful mob.

And now, for today's essay: Barry Zito rocks my world.

Let's face it, the guy is a product of a minor-league system (see my second post ever) that knows what it's doing, and now he's in the majors, selected to be an All-Star for the second straight year in his two-year career.

And then he gets screwed by the Roger Clemens lobby.

Now, don't get me wrong, Roger Clemens is definitely one of the best pitchers that Major League Baseball has seen over the last 50 years, no doubt. I mean, he's no Babe Ruth (who, it should be pointed out, holds the record for best career winning percentage as a pitcher against the damn Yankees). But he's good. You have to be to get 300 wins, and 4,000 strikeouts, all in one lifetime. Hell, Mark Mulder probably won't do that. Neither will Mark Prior. Or Byung-Hyun Kim. Or me.

But that doesn't mean it's time to undermine the All-Star selection process quite yet. Roger Clemens, you see, was not selected to be an All-Star this year. It's his last season, and he hasn't really performed up to usual Roger standards. So the AL manager didn't think that he deserved to be a pitcher in the Midsummer Classic. Neither did the players, when they voted in a few reps from each of the leagues. No, Roger was probably going to spend the next three days tending chickens, or whatever the hell it is he does on his big freaking Texas ranch. Well, tending chickens and watching game film on his next opponent.

Barry Zito, however, was selected to be an All-Star, by the team managers. So he was actually in a news conference last night, meeting with some folks who wanted to talk to him about playing in tomorrow's All-Star game. Then he comes out, and gets pulled aside by Sandy Alderson (who is not human), Ken Macha, Oakland's manager, and Billy Beane, the Athletics' version of God, and gets told what Bud Selig has just done on the Dan Patrick show.

And then Barry Zito isn't an All-Star any more. Some sort of back-room deal was cut, drawing straws representing pitchers who had played in the last, oh, 7 decades, and Zito was cut from the All-Star team to make room for the Rocket.

Normally, I'm a fan of dirty dealings. They are what made America what it is today. We wouldn't actually have a Bill of Rights if it hadn't been for a low-key meeting between a wannabe Congressman and a bunch of Baptists in Virginia. So they're generally OK. But that's one thing if they don't usurp the process. Mike Scioscia thinks he should have been an All-Star, dammit, and Barry Zito ought to be playing in tomorrow's game.

But when Bud Selig gets involved, that's the end of it all. The guy, honestly, has about one quarter of one wit about him, so it may not take him long to gather them, but it also doesn't take him long to do something so phenomenally stupid that it shakes the very foundations on which we stand. Last year, rather than changing the rules for the All-Star Game (sweet Jesus, Bud, you are the fucking COMMISSIONER OF BASEBALL. IT IS NOT THAT HARD TO CHANGE THE RULES IN A GAME THAT DOES NOT COUNT), he says, "Screw it, it's a tie. Now, does this taste great, or is it less filling?"

This year, the commissioner's office releases a statement that says, "Barry Zito is unable to pitch."

What? Says who? Barry?

For his part, Zito says he's "puzzled," and I don't really blame him. If the Dalai Lama came into Chicago tomorrow and said, "I can discover true peace if you let me mow down a couple of National Leaguers," then fine. That's a situation that calls for a statement and an action out of the office of the Commissioner. But Roger Clemens is not His Holiness. More to the point, Roger is not even a particularly nice guy. He's just a pitcher on the tail end of his career who couldn't win in Chicago when it counted. I can't comprehend replacing an up-and-comer with him.

Barry Zito has to live with this for the rest of his life - getting removed from an All-Star team for no good reason. And he's only 25. He says he thought that maybe it was because he pitched yesterday, and Macha and Beane didn't want to wear him out for a game that really doesn't count, no matter how much Fox says it does. He retired one batter last year, and I don't think it will kill his arm to do that again.

So what it boils down to is this: the Commissioner of Baseball is a knob. He decided to cut a deal with the Athletics that allows one of the all-time greats in the twilight of his career to play in the last All-Star Game he'd ever get a chance to play in, and he does it in all the wrong ways. Oh, Bart Giamatti, where are you now?

New random diversion: Matrix Ping-Pong!!!
www.ntv.co.jp/channel/asx/hkzkt10.asx

I don't know if it has sound or not, because I saw it at work. But who cares?

Hoooooo, doggy! I've got work to do!

Some of the directors are starting to come back from their annual vacations between fiscal years, and have started giving me some names of some folks to call. Some. This is nice. No longer do I have to sit and make up work to do (like redesigning spreadsheets that, frankly, worked just fine). I actually get to make phone calls and everything!

I realize how sad that sounds, yes. But come on. I was sick of being bored. When I took this job, and really for the first few months, I thought that I was going to get sick of being nothing more than a glorified whelp for the department, but now I see that even that is vastly superior to doing NOTHING all day. It reminds me a lot of my summer vacations when I was a kid. They were nice, and all, and it was great to be away from school, but still. By the middle of August every year, I was actually looking forward to gettin' edumacated.

That said, I should probably get back to doing some calling. That *is* my job and all.

Sorry about the long delay between posts. I got lazy, I did.

I'm a member of a chat room that revolves around the Cincinnati Bengals and their ineptitude over the last 12 seasons, since mike brown (I won't deign to capitalize his name, he hasn't proven his value as a proper noun) took over the team from his late father, Paul. Paul Brown, for those who don't know, was considered an innovator by truly incorporating the forward pass into his game plan, and is beloved in Cleveland like nobody's business.

Now, you might think that this post is going to be an opportunity to rail on mike brown and the fact that the Bengals haven't had a winning season since 1990, when they went to the playoffs, lost to the Oakland Raiders, and ended Bo Jackson's pro football career. But you'd be wrong.

Most of the members of this Bengals message board, mikebrownsucks.com, are from Cincinnati. This is understandable. Thus, these guys and occasional gal are often huge fans of the Reds as well, and the Reds have shown themselves recently to be a lot like the Bengals: they have a payroll of 60 million dollars, well below the league average, and they don't win nearly enough to keep the fans happy. Also in parallel to the Bengals, they have a pretty new house. Further, they have several angry fan websites: FireBobBoone.com and CarlLindnerSucks.com both come to mind.

The reason that the Reds' payroll is so low is not that their players are all young guns out of their farm systems, who show great promise and poor financial minds. That is part of it, but that's not THE reason. THE reason behind that payroll is that Carl Lindner, who is the owner of the Reds (and Chiquita Banana, which is how he made his fortunes) told his General Manager (Jim Bowden) to spend no more than 60 million dollars on the ballclub. The result is that Bowden managed to obtain some hitters, and some very decent closers. The starting rotation, however, is the worst in the National League, and in all of major league baseball second only to the Detroit Tigers in terms of futility. The Tigers' problems are different from the Reds', by the way.

Now, you might take this time to point out that rather than pick on mike brown, I have instead opted to pick on Carl Lindner. A reasonable assumption, but wrong. Lindner may be a dick for only allowing a 60 million dollar payroll, but whatever. It's his money, and the closers are managing to do well enough to hold the team in games. As I write this, the Reds are only out of first place (behind the Cubs and Cardinals) by 5.5 games, certainly a margin that can be made up. I'm instead going to rant about the fans, who have begun posting things like "The Reds are Finished," and going on diatribes about how the fact that the team is 3.5 games back of the Cardinals (which they were at the time) is a sign that the Reds can't hope to ever win even so much as a wild card slot.

Now wait just a second. That's quite a defeatist view if ever there was one: the team hasn't yet played half of their games, and you're already calling them dead because they remain mired in contention for a playoff berth? Isn't that a little harsh? They certainly won't win the World Series or anything, but I'd hardly call them finished.

The underlying reason behind this attitude, of course, is the Bengals. Once the NFL season is half over, it's usually pretty obvious that the Bengals will not go to the playoffs. As a matter of fact, one of the safest bets (sometimes paying only 2-1) in Las Vegas has been that the Bengals will not be a .500 team. So the fans naturally take a fatalist attitude towards their football team of choice. The problem is when they extend this attitude towards the Reds. It's hardly fair to the players on the Reds franchise, it's not particularly fair to Bob Boone, the manager (who holds the second-worst winning percentage among active managers, it should be noted - the guy's an idiot), and it's not really fair to the GM. Yes, the owner is a tightwad. You can't hope to spend 60 million dollars on an entire major league roster and still expect to win games. But Bowden has managed to assemble at least a better team than he had any right to build...

Sometimes I get the impression that fans from a certain city really do blow. Philadelphia fans, for example, have been known to throw batteries at Santa Claus. But this is a little more insidious...the fans, instead of saying, "the team sucks," are saying instead, "the team cannot hope to pull itself back together," when in reality the team is not broken. It's not right, it's not fair, it's not a well-informed decision, and it makes me glad I'm a Giants fan. Hoo-rah.