I'm a !@#$%*? You're a *&%$#@!

in ,

In a letter, Giles Coren excoriates the Times sub-editors for altering the last sentence of one his columns. The Sunday Times sub-editors respond to Giles with their own letter and wonder why he had to be so rude and profane.


Good points all around. Not quite a literary feud, but similar entertainment value.


On a related note, Chuck Klosterman is overjoyed by the Shaq-Kobe feud and mutual hatred.


, , , ,

Kobe vs. MJ

in

Bill Simmons, in his ESPN chat this week:



Grant (Chicago): Can someone put an end to all the "Kobe is as good as MJ talk." Kobe wins one championship (i'm assuming the Lakers win) without Shaq and he's all of a sudden as good as MJ? I don't get it, Kobe hasn't even had one season that would crack any of MJ's top 10. Not to mention that Kobe isn't mentally tough enough to have gotten through those physical eastern conference playoffs in the 90s.


Bill Simmons: It's such an absurd argument that it's not even worth writing about. Kobe has shown flashes of MJ-dom, and he definitely dipped into those waters in the playoffs, but Jordan played at that level for 10 solid years, and he was doing it during an era when players got pounded and they didn't have the hand-check rules. I have written this before but I honestly believe that, if the MJ from '87 to '93 played with the rules in place from '05 to '08, he would have averaged 45 a game



John Hollinger, in his ESPN chat today:



david I (manhattan): How many total titles with this current roster will it take to truly put Kobe in the same sentence with MJ and not get many arguments?


John Hollinger: At least three. Possibly more. I'm sorry, but I just want to puke anytime somebody compares a contemporary player to Jordan. There's no comparison at all. That's no disrespect to Kobe, who will likely go down as the second-best SG of all time. But MJ was absurdly good.



There are people who think Kobe is MJ's equal or superior. Those people don't know anything about basketball.


, ,

How it all went down

in ,

Everyone who hears about my basketball injury asks how it happened. There were no video cameras there, but imagine me as Chris Paul and this is an eerie video replay of the shot I hit just before my Achilles exploded.






T-minus one day until I go under the knife. I am ready to get it over with and start on the long rehab process. The thought of not being able to run or jump or exercise until sometime in February or March of 2009 is driving me crazy. No NY Marathon in November, no golf trip with the boys this summer, no snowboarding next winter, no running along the beach in Santa Monica, no hitting tennis balls with coworkers.


I need something, and I'm not sure what it is yet, to dissipate my agitation, or I'm going to lose my mind.


, , ,

Margin of victory

in

From a chat with John Hollinger on ESPN today:



Will (NYC): I agree that some close games are 50/50 but those are in the minority. A big part of being a great team is the ability to show heart and win the close games. It's called performing under pressure and that is something that Boston showed they may be lacking greatly. That is why people are less confident in their chances.


SportsNation John Hollinger: (3:37 PM ET ) A lot of people believe that, but it isn't true is just overwhelming. Look at any team that was together for a number of years, even the great ones -- Jordan's Bulls, for instance -- and you'll find that the closer the score, the closer they are to .500. In other words, in games decided by two points or less they'd be almost exactly .500, even a team like the Bulls; in games decided by 15 points or more they'd be nearly 1.000. It's a fallacy that the good teams win the close games; the good teams win by 20. The lucky teams win the close games. There is no team in history that's been able to defy the correlation between scoring margin and wins over an extended period.



Statistical analysis has indicated the same relationship between luck and records in close games in baseball. It's a result that seems contrary to our intuition, which is that certain players, like the Jordans or Bryants, give some teams an edge in crunchtime. I believe in that idea generally, but still think that having Michael Jordan was that rare exception that did give the Bulls an edge in close games.


, ,

Odds and Ends

in , , , ,

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.


Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.


Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?


Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.


The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.


, , , , , , , , ,

The bizarre

in , ,

Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.








Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.







***


The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:


Channing Tatum as Duke


Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander


Sienna Miller as The Baroness


Ray Park as Snake Eyes


Dennis Quaid as General Hawk


Arnold Vosloo as Zartan


Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty


Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President


Marlon Wayans as Ripcord






,

Things I Like

in , , ,

* Modern Love, the weekly column in the Sunday Styles section of the NYTimes. I enjoy the introspective, confessional nature of each installment. This past week's column, "Mom, It’s Me, Your Son, Finally," was a good example of its tone. It's interesting to me how my tastes for various sections of newspapers and magazines has changed over time.


* New Balance 1220 running shoe series, of which the latest incarnation is the 1223. My flat, wide feet are thankful for shoes that, unlike Nikes, aren't made for people with perfect feet, narrow, high-arched. I guess that's to be expected from a shoe company named after a Greek goddess. The 1220's don't change too much from generation to generation, so when I walked into the store looking for a replacement for my 1221's, the saleswoman simply handed me the same size for the 1223s, and I walked out and was running in them fifteen minutes later. There's something to be said for product continuity in the shoe market.


I loved the Air Jordan VIII. It was the first pair I ever owned, and the day my mom bought it for me from a sports store in a mall is still a tactile memory. But subsequent models of the shoe changed so drastically that they just didn't fit my feet anymore.


* Runner's high (proof it exists?). I'd always thought runner's high was the occasional feeling that one could run forever without getting tired, but the definition in the article implies that it's something you always experience during running. Which may be why I have not experienced it in so long.


* Taco trucks. Seemingly an LA institution, the Hulu dev team seems to find a new one every week, each better than the next. I have yet to find one comprehensive listing of all taco trucks, though partial coverage can be found at The Great Taco Hunt and this Google Map.


, , , , ,

Slaughter rule

in

March Madness is a great sporting event, but as I've said many times before, a good percentage of the excitement lies in the format of the event, 65 teams, single elimination, tournament style (its suitability as a large-scale gambling event doesn't hurt, either).


If I were to improve the tourney, I might try to improve the quality of the 16 seeds. No top seed has ever lost in the first round to the 16 seed (Number 1 seeds are now 94-0 versus 16 seeds). A little dose of competitiveness from time to time in that game wouldn't hurt. UCLA won its first round game today 70-29. 70-29!


In an understatement, coach Ben Howland said of his decision to not play Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who sprained his left ankle last week versus USC, "I thought about it and I felt comfortable we would be able to get this one without him."


, , ,

Super Bowl ads

in ,
Wow, what an upset! Tom Brady can take solace in being one of the few people in the world for whom this ad is not aspirational.


We've posted all the ads from the Super Bowl at Hulu. If you have an invite, you can see them here. If you don't have a Hulu invite, you can see them here.
I also have some Hulu invites to give out, so leave a comment with your e-mail address if you're interested in one but haven't gotten in yet.

Highs and Lows

in ,

Ed had tix to the Stanford-USC game and asked if I wanted to go today. I had too much work to catch up on, and besides, Stanford was a 41 point underdog. What would be the fun of driving all that way to see a drubbing? Stanford was starting a QB who had thrown 3 passes in college because their starter had a seizure earlier this week.


Oops.


Meanwhile, I had the Cubs game on MLB Gameday in the corner of my screen, which was like having an IV drip in your arm, except instead of useful fluids, the drip contained liquid depression, spreading through my body drop by drop. If you can't get hits off of Livan Hernandez, who's about 87 years old, it's probably not meant to be.


Abracadabra...uh, open sesame...uh, hocus pocus

in , , ,

Last night, I got home from work around 1 in the morning and pulled up to the electronic gate to my parking garage and pressed my remote key fob button. Nothing happened. I waved it out the window, then got out of the car and walked up to the gate, pressing the key fob near any place I thought the sensor might reside. No luck.


One car pulled up behind me, then another, and soon a few others. We all stood outside our cars, pressing our key fobs. In our neighborhood, there wasn't any street parking, so we were stuck. It was 1 in the morning, I was dead tired, and I was not a happy camper (though if my key fob was out of order then I was on the verge of being literally an unhappy camper).


So I turned my attention to the exit gate, just next to the entrance. That was one of those gates that opened as soon as you pulled up to it. The sensor for that was a bit further inside the garage, but by sticking my tennis racket through the gate I could just reach far enough to trip it and open the gate. I managed to lean my tennis racket against the sensor and then directed traffic through the exit like John McClane waving the planes home at the end of Die Hard 2.


A different discontent plagued me in the nanosecond before I passed out. The security in our parking garage is not good, not good at all.


***


Kanye vs. 50 Cent, as judged by Amazon Sales Rank: Decision to Kanye. Critic's average judgment? The same. From guns to lyrics to now sales...hip-hop conflicts are progressing to more civilized playing fields.


***


Jon Stewart will host the Oscars in February. He seemed a bit nervous to start the last time (even the coolest customer can experience some jitters in the face of so much star power), but he loosened up by the end of the ceremony. I think the second time will be the charm.


***


My favorite Microsoft application was always Excel. I spent a good portion of my early career in that application building massive models, writing macros in VBA, pushing it to its limits. It didn't always keep up--I always had problems getting linked workbooks to update and calculate quickly, and sharing workbooks among my team never worked quite as we wanted to--but of the Office suite, it's always been king.


I hate Powerpoint, and Word's formatting quirks always drove me batty. So when Apple came out with Keynote, and then Pages, I was willing to switch over. I haven't yet, but only because I don't use Word or Powerpoint anymore. All my writing now is done in a plain text editor, e-mail client, script formatting software, or with an actual pen and notebook. As for Powerpoint, I haven't had to make one of those in years, hallelujah.


But I was curious about Numbers, the new spreadsheet app in iWork 08, so I fired it up, imported an Excel spreadsheet, and gave it a whirl. I attempted to update the spreadsheet


Though I like a lot of the interface decisions made in Numbers, I will remain, for the time being, an Excel guy. And it isn't because Number lacks advanced features like pivot tables. My main complaint with Numbers is that it's not keyboard friendly. You have to use the mouse to do so many things that Excel allows you to do without leaving the keyboard. Mousing around a spreadsheet is just counter to my working style.


Numbers might be the "spreadsheet for the rest of us," but I guess that makes me one of Them.


***


George Saunders appears on David Letterman.


***


Looks like I won't be seeing The White Stripes in concert after all. Disappointing.


***


Patriots fined and penalized for videotaping NY Jets defensive signals. Outside of the Bears, the Patriots were once one of the few teams I rooted for because they seemed to win by being smarter than their opponents. Outside of Tom Brady, they didn't have too many marquee names, and they didn't have a crazy financial advantage like teams like the Yankees or Red Sox because of the NFL salary cap. They were the Oakland A's of the NFL.


I suspect that the advantage they gathered from videotaping opponent signals is overstated (as is the case with many forms of cheating in sports), but what's disappointing is the hubris and stupidity/arrogance represented by the videotaping scheme. They were playing a team coached by one of their ex assistant coaches; how did they think they were going to get away with it?And anyone watching the two teams would think it ridiculous that the Patriots had to resort to such scheming to defeat the Jets.


If Mangini was part of such a practice when he was with the Patriots, and if he was indeed the one who snitched his ex-team out, then there's a beautiful tragic resonance to the sequence of events. Every one involved with the scheme is getting what they deserve: Mangini is seen as a rat, Belichick (never a warm fuzzy personality to begin with) is seen as a win at all costs Nixon of the NFL, and the Patriots now will never get the full credit they deserve for their accomplishments.


People are always going to be jealous of and resent perennial winners, but it certainly helps the cause to have ammunition. Brady fathering children out of wedlock and dating supermodels, Harrison using HGH, Belichick and staff using videotape surveillance...it's more than enough.


As a sidenote, a cyclist caught using HGH nowadays is looking at a minimum of a year's suspension and a lifetime of disgrace. A pro football player caught using steroids or HGH gets a four game suspension and then is back on the field, or in the case of Shawn Merriman, on to the Pro Bowl or Nike television commercials.


The NFL has been rocked by all sorts of scandal for a year straight now, from Michael Vick to HGH to PatriotsGate to the revolving convict lineup on the Bengals to who knows what else, and you know what? The league is as popular as ever. The NFL is so popular that it doesn't seem to absorb any economic penalty from scandal. Perhaps because of the violent nature of the game, fans seem far more tolerant of steroid use in the NFL than in other sports.


Astute

in

I find most ex-pro athletes to be poor color commentators on their own sports, but tennis seems to be an exception. Agassi was in the booth providing commentary on the Roddick-Federer quarterfinal match and damn if he wasn't a really fantastic analyst who provided some unique insight into what it was like to play Federer.


Unfortunately, CBS still insists on having Dick Enberg do a lot of big matches, like today's men's final. He stumbled over Djokovic's name in the trophy presentation, one night after having referred to Justine Henin by her married name of Henin-Hardenne just a short while after her divorce. Which would all be fine, but Enberg knows about as much about tennis as your average Joe, so why not put someone like Cliff Dryesdale in the booth with McEnroe and Carillo?


Watching Djokovic and Federer trading nuclear forehands, I tried to think of another sport that had changed as much in my lifetime. The combination of racket technology, grip changes, and the rising popularity of the two-handed backhand have transformed tennis at the pro level into a power baseline game. Players can hit groundstrokes with so much pace and spin that you can hit outright winners from the back court with unprecedented frequency. The foot speed of the average human just hasn't been able to keep pace.


Except perhaps for players like Federer and Nadal, who seem to be able to get to everything. One of the joys of watching Federer is that he seems to have fused the past and the present. He uses the classic Eastern forehand grip unlike so many modern players, and yet his forehand shares the spin and pace of a Western grip forehand. It's a modernized Eastern forehand, hit from an open stance with a loose wrist that lags until just before impact, generating crazy pace and spin. Go to YouTube and you'll find dozens of slow-motion videos of the Federer forehand. Bill Viola should do a high-def exhibition with dozens of plasma TV's displaying various Federer strokes playing on loop.


Federer also hits a classic one-handed backhand, but again, it has the spin of a two-handed backhand, allowing him to hit some shots I thought could only be hit with two hands, like that crazy dipping cross-court pass. I have no idea how he does it.


I downloaded a demo of Virtua Tennis 3 for the PS3 and found Federer in that game to be ridiculously good. You can literally hit a winner on every shot with Federer. But is his videogame doppelganger really so different from the real thing? Maybe not.


As for Djokovic, at least he had both Sharapova and Robert De Niro in his box. And for tennis fans, he looks like someone besides Nadal who can push Federer which is good for the game.