We'll Always Have ... Oh Wait, We Never Won Anything

As my D.C. buddies angrily see what will happen next with the Nationals, there's been a baseball death in my family as well. Although without the gloried history of the East-Centric Yankees or Red Sox, the Oakland A's franchise does tout three straight championships (1972-1974), an eccentric manager who wore a suit and tie to the dugout (Connie Mack), and a nod to pop culture when the "bash brothers" were featured on "I Love the 90s". (Although recent allegations have many wondering if they were the "steroid brothers". Though, honestly, Mark McGwire was still thin as a rail back then.) What follows is a eulogy of sorts to a team that epitomizes Homer Simpsons's saying: "Trying is the first step towards failure." To those who don't care about baseball and/or the A's, this would be a good time to load up your favorite porn site or stop by your local 7-11 for a pick-me-up.

When Walter Haas died in 1995 and Stephen Schott took over, all of us thought that we'd never be competitive again. Tony LaRussa left. Mark McGwire was traded and promptly set a new homerun record. Steve Ontiveros was suddenly our best pitcher. In a revised history, by Billy Beane, the Oakland franchise was resurrected by a gritty new way of evaluating players based on on-base-percentage and number of lambs sacrificed to Shitouh the Great. In reality, Beane drafted Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito. Other draft picks included Jason Giambi (pre-steroid Giambi, that is, who was only good for 25-30 homers but was an on-base machine), Miguel Tejada, and Eric Chavez. Instead of keeping these players and surrounding them with more talent to win a world series, the cost cutting A's decided to go the riskier route of signing such has-bins as Jermaine Dye to lucrative contracts. One-by-one they left: Giambi (though, it looks like this was a good move), Jason Isringhausen, Tejada, Keith Foulke, and now, even Jermaine Dye. But Beane replaced them with such greats as Scott Hatterburg, Eric Byrnes, Arthur Rhodes, and (who can forget) Octavio Dotel. But despite what happened, we knew we'd always have a shot of making the playoffs because we had three of the best pitchers in baseball taking the mound 3/5 of the time.

Well, looks like this era is now finally over. Hudson and now Mulder and gone to be replaced with guys such as Kiko Colero. While even the Mariners (gasp!) are going out and spending money, we're cutting payroll once again. Yes, you can argue about the unfairness of baseball's money problems and all that happy horseshit — but can't you pretend that you even care, Scott? Give us something to chew on at least. If you don't think attendance could grow worst, just wait. It's times like these when I look on Red Sox and Yankees fans with envy. Yes, your owners may be evil, but at least they care. I'll take an evil yet caring owner any day over a cheap and stupid one. The only thing that consoles me right now is that we're not the White Sox. Those poor White Sox fans. They 3rd largest market in the country and a payroll the size of Kansas City's. See you in the cellar next year, guys.

Oh, Please

Kobe Bryant lecturing people on fidelity? What's next? Bill Clinton as a marriage counselor? Dude, your team sucks and you'll probably never win another championship. Suck it up.

Kids Can Be Cute

I usually hate kids. Here's an exception.

It's 3:35 in Ann Arbor ...

We begin triple fucked week (thanks, Andy) with a bunch of random thoughts and links to avoid having to do actual work. Yes, I'm still working on that feature. No, I'm not procrastinating on a feature that's being used to procrastinate on real work ... We begin with some wishful thinking for Blazers fans. Maybe for an encore they could resurrect the 1908 Chicago Cubs.

I'm not sure about all the uproar that's occurred with the latest steroid confirmations. Come on. We've all known about it for years. And why should this be considered a bad thing? Let's let 'em pump up, hit a few home runs, and die young. Better than reality TV? You bet! (Ultima VII fans, please refer to Further Drug Experiments in Ultima VII.) As a side note, that guy who paid $450,000 for Bonds's 73rd home run must feel a little sheepish right about now.

Here's yet another study bemoaning how Math-Ed in the U.S. sucks. Here's why these studies piss me off. (And yes, I do realize that we do have deficiencies in our school systems. It's just that it's not as dark as some of these reports would make it out to be.) First of all, large-scale assessments of this nature are always dubious at best. It's impossible for a large-scale assessment of this size and scope to actually measure what students from all of these countries really know. That's a giant reliability factor that's not being factored in. The fact is, most of these tests emphasize declarative knowledge that students in Asia are extremely good at. (They say you can walk into any Chinese classroom at any time and know exactly what page the students are on.) American classrooms have long emphasized cognitive development of skills which, unfortunately, are hard to measure in assessments. What's also not taken into account (definitely on the TIMSS, not sure about the PISA) are the students that are tested. On the TIMSS assessment (in which U.S. kids again fell into the lower quartile of the pact), while a good random sampling was made of U.S. children, some Asian countries chose exactly which kids took the test and which didn't. Even non-stat majors know that this isn't good. (And before we bemoan test scores any further, let's remember that Cuban's study showed that there has been no correlation between test scores and economic development in the U.S. during the past 100 years when data has been available.) Okay, end of assessment rant.

Jacques Pepin, he of the most complex Lobster Americain recipe known to mankind, has gotten old and discovered the pleasures of opening up random cans of food and mixing them together. These new recipes are hilariously simple, and most of them are pretty tasty! You should watch his show to, if you can. Some of his opinions are pretty hilarious. (Jacques on mushrooms: I'll leave the small and expensive mushrooms to you, for me, the best type of mushrooms are old, big, and brown white mushrooms -- they have all the flavor!)

The Download of the Year

YEEEEEEEEEEEEES! Finally! For those of you who think that QuickTime is the most useless piece of crap in the world, rejoice for the light has been shown to us! No more stupid messages that tell us to upgrade to QuickTime Pro. For PC users it is a must for viewing .mov files without the overbearing beast of QuickTime and for those who hate Windows Media Player (in its defense, I'll say it's actually not quite that bad when run in compact mode.). For Mac users, it is a MUST. Tired of having to deal with QuickTime which CAN'T maximize videos until you upgrade to Pro? Tired of trying to find an alternative to the overbearing beast that is iTunes to listen to your .mp3 files? Tired of iTunes automatically downloading and adding .mp3s that you want to play to your local computer/laptop when all you want is just to stream the file off of a local networked computer? Tired of having to deal with Media Player for Mac? Can't get DIVX to work on a Mac?

I bring you our savior: Video Lan Media Player. It's small. It's fast. It decodes just about EVERY video codec in existence (not RealPlayer though, darn) and it's FREE. I'll go away now so you can salivate in private as you download it.

Wow. That Was Awful

During one of the summers when my parents had one of those neat satellite hook-ups, I fell in love with a geeky TV station called TechTV and a show called The Screen Savers. It featured two old geeks who talked endlessly about gadgets, told puns, and who were generally two grumpy old curmudgeons who complained about young'ens and reminisced about the good old days of ARPAnet. If you know me, then you know that that's my type of humor. When I moved to Ann Arbor I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a station called G4TechTV. It wasn't as good as the classic TechTV, but the new generation cast of Screen Savers were still pretty good. Then, a few weeks ago, rumors began permeating the Internet that most of the staff had been fired and a "new" show would air in late November. So I was crossing my fingers that they hadn't ruined The Screen Savers, but still, I didn't watch yesterday's "new" episode until tonight on my little Hauppauge.

I'm sad to report that the show was awful. They had Sarah on the set of Enterprise, of all shows, and Kevin Rose isn't even a host anymore. And, yeah, the rumors are true: Alex and Yoshi are gone. Argh. Well, I guess this buys me back 5 hours of my time every week.

Anyway, Sarah, Alex, Kevin and even Leo weigh in.

Well, Duh!

So news finally broke out about Jason Giambi's grand jury testimony where he admitted that he used steroids. To which we quote the great Craig Warren Farnham: "Well, duh!" The guy went from being a .300+/30 HR guy to a .250/40 HR guy overnight. He also gained muscle mass where no muscle mass should be gained. What could have been the change? Mystical elf powder? A charm of super enhancement +10 that he obtained in the hills of Gondor?

You may also be wondering about the silence from this end. Past readers will know that either means I'm lazy or up to no good. It's the latter in this case. Stay tuned during the next week when the next antiquated software feature goes up. But this time, be afraid. Be very afraid. But wait, you say. What could be worst than Princess Maker 2? Let's just say this makes PM2 look like a normal stroll in the park.