Remains of the Day

The good, the bad, the ugly, the surreal

The good...

...Ben Gordon scored 22 points in the fourth quarter to lead the Bulls to a win over Charlotte. I love Ben Gordon. So few players have as broad an arsenal of moves on offense, and that jump shot of his carves beautiful, high arcs through the air. In the fourth quarter, the Bulls offense is to give it to Ben and get out of the way. I'm thankful the Bulls are decent again. I know we had Jordan and the six championships, but the team has been truly awful for a long time until this year.

...With alleyoop.com out of commission and John Hollinger moved on to ESPN Insider, 82games.com is the new website mecca for analytically-inclined basketball fans.

The bad...

...Bucknell, which upset Kansas in the NCAA Tournament, had to borrow Northern Iowa's prep band for that game because its own band was on spring break

It borrowed Oklahoma State's band, and many of its fans, for its second game, training them in Bucknell cheers. That's rough when even your band doesn't think you'll win and decides to stay home.

The ugly...

...Phat Phree selects its NBA All-Ugly team

Some of the dubious winners:

• Sam Cassell: "Everything that can go wrong with a human face, aside from gigantic warts, goes wrong with Cassell's."
• Popeye Jones: "But I see this picture, and quite frankly, it's hard to believe he isn't somehow mentally impaired in some way."
• Gheorge Muresan: "Inch-for-inch the ugliest man on this team, that team, any team."
• Larry Bird: "Larry Joe Bird, in addition to being an All-Ugly performer, also owns the distinction of being the ugliest man on the ugliest team in NBA history, the 1985-86 Boston Celtics."
• Patrick Ewing: "Ewing's jaw... there hasn't been one of its like in the human race in 60- shoot, 70,000 years. If Ewing was to pass on, and you got a hold of his skeletal jaw and buried it in the Olduvai Gorge, the archeologist who dug it up might announce that he had found a speciman that was almost certainly Homo Erectus, though remarkably well-preserved."

The surreal...

...Jose Canseco will be on the next season of the Surreal Life

Fellow cast members will include Bronson Pinchot, former Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, and Caprice. Remember, last season spawned its own spinoff called Strange Love in which Flavor Flav wooed Brigitte Nielsen, prompting a public denunciation of Flav's behavior by his Public Enemy brother Chuck D.

...Okay, I'm really late on this one, but SpongeBob SquarePants might be gay?
Conservatives note that SpongeBob is an icon in the gay community, "perhaps because he holds hands with his pink sidekick, Patrick Starfish." So that's what Robin Williams was joking about at the Oscars. I've really missed out on this whole SpongeBob thing. I've never seen it and have no idea what it's all about. I'm old.

Star Wars Clone Wars Vol. II

Caught up on Chapters 21-25 of Star Wars - Clone Wars on Cartoon Network off of my DVR. Chapters 1-20 are on DVD now, and together the 25 chapters fill in the story between Episode II and the upcoming Episode III. If, instead of just reading the famous text crawl this summer before Episode III, you want to see what actually happens, check out The Clone Wars. The animation and music and voices are top notch, and some major plot points occur between the two episodes.

If you missed episodes 21-25, they're online as matchbox sized streamable Quicktime movies, for how long I don't know (ch. 21, 22, 23, 24, 25).

By this point, the entire story of Episode III is available in all sorts of formats (for example, here), the major spoilers out there if you want them. I've tied to avoid them, but The Clone Wars won't spoil Episode III, they just provide background. In particular, I liked General Grievous, a predecessor to Darth Vader, though Grievous looks more machine than machine, a multi-armed warrior trained by Dooku to eradicate the Jedi. Grievous looks a bit goofy below (are robots bashful? why do they need to wear capes?), but animated in The Clone Wars he's one bad mofo.

The Clone Wars timeline provides key plot developments leading up to Episode III.

Geek out.

I Palindrome I

Eros
Saw the poster for this at a movie tonight. I'd almost forgotten about it. Three short films about love, one each by Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni, the former two paying tribute to the latter for his influence on their work. With that lineup of directors, it sounds like a dream, but these massive collections of talent often produce disappointing work, perhaps because thematic constraints limit their imagination. Opens the following Friday, so we'll see

Chinese man kills a friend for selling his virtual sword from a video game
You could write an entire weblog entirely about the crazy behavior driven by virtual (video game) assets

Le Samourai on DVD
In PAL format, unfortunately, but one of my favorite movies of all time, so perhaps worth it. Strange to see it on Amazon's US DVD site. Are they starting to import foreign (i.e., not Region 1 or All) DVDs to sell off of their U.S. site? Now they just need to add some Region-Code-Free DVD players

B2Up's Bust-Up chewing gum is all the rage in Japan
The company claims that chewing the gum three of four times a day can help enhance the size, shape, and tone of the breasts

Trailer for Todd Solondz's Palindromes
I wanted to see this at the New York Film Festival, but failed completely in the rugby scrum for tix. The movie casts multiple actors in the role of Aviva. It's a form of actor montage, with the hope of synthesizing qualities of multiple actors in one character. Interesting idea

Loose change

Watchmen, the movie
Coming in 2006. No pictures, though, so all I can see in my mind's eye is David Gibbons' art

Stream the new Hot, Hot, Heat album
I couldn't get the stream to play on my Mac, though

7:35 in the Morning
"So, what the hell is making me smile at...seven thirty-five in the morning?" More than one twist in this Oscar-nominated short

New Atul Gawande article about how doctors make money in this week's New Yorker
Gawande finds no answers to the tangle that is health care economics in the U.S.: doctors feel overworked and underpaid, patients feel robbed, and both patient and doctors despise their health insurance companies. Interesting survey of the topic, especially an anecdote about a surgeon who decided to stop accepting health insurance and to charge what the market would bear

Fantastic Four trailer from ShoWest
The more footage that releases, the worse it looks

A new New Order album, Waiting for the Sirens' Call, arrives April 26
Stream the album here. I had no idea they were still together. The last time I saw them was at Moby's Area One concert at The Gorge. Bill and I ran up to the stage when they came on, but most of the young kids hung out way back on the lawn and smoked pot, wondering who the overweight middle-aged dudes were on stage. I felt old.

The 2005 Tavistock Cup ended in a tie
Tiger Woods played for the first time in this golf tournament between two crazy wealthy golf clubs in Orlando, FL: Lake Nona and Isleworth. It's a private tournament but features ridiculous golf talent

If the heart does quit, from this mortal coil you must flit...the Johnny Cochran obit
What a crazy career, from defending P. Diddy to OJ to the Seinfeld gang as Jackie Chiles

A different type of child photography
Photos layered over paintings

Toyota Prius

I visited Mike and Joannie for a week and a half in early March. During my visit, I experienced their new Toyota Prius hybrid firsthand.

There are a number of hybrids on the market, but Toyota has sold more than all other automakers combined. The Prius engine consists of two systems, one a gas engine and the other an electric motor. The electric motor operates when engine demand is low, usually at low speeds. Coming out of the garage, the car was dead silent, as if Yoda were pulling it out with a wave of his hand.

At higher speeds, the gas engine powers the car and also recharges the batteries. When you pump the gas hard for greater acceleration, the gas engine and electric motor work together for added kick.

I know much of this because the display screen on the center of the Prius dashboard displays a schematic indicating which system is in play while you're driving (everytime you turn the car on, you have to click to agree to a waiver form that frees Toyota of liability if you crash while driving because you were engrossed by the graphics on the display). This schematic also indicates your current fuel consumption/gas mileage.

The geek in me couldn't stop trying to boost my gas mileage. The first time I drove the Prius to pick up Mike and Joannie from work, I played around with the car to see how I could achieve optimum gas mileage. The goal was to achieve something over 50mpg.

I never reached that figure. Their Prius is new, and the cold weather in Chicago didn't help. However, I did become skilled at emphasizing use of the electric motor over the gas engine in order to maximize gas mileage. The optimal driving method for minimizing gas consumption in a hybrid is not unlike that with a traditional internal combustion engine. Accelerate, coast to a stop, repeat. Obviously, you can't drive like that on city streets, so what I did was accelerate to a crusing speed, then coast until the gas engine turned off, then used the electric motor to maintain velocity. It takes a gentle foot, and with a longer drive and less stop and go, I think I could have achieved 50mpg. Regardless, driving was fun again, and next time I'm in Chicago I'm shooting for 60mpg.

Other fun things about the car--instead of inserting a key to turn on the engine, you simply need to have the car key on you when you depress a starter button. Like powering on a stereo.

Mike and Joannie's Prius came with select voice-activated commands. Hit a button on the steering wheel, and the car will mute the radio and listen for a voice command. I did not have the glossary of all the commands, and like any typical male, I skipped the instruction book and instead barked random instructions as I drove.

"Defrost!" I commanded.

"Track...up," the serene female computer voice responded.

"Hazards on!" I tried.

"Changing...temperature...to 69 degrees."

"Next disc?" I ventured.

"Disc 5," the Prius computer cooed. Bingo. Like any newlywed couples, we merely needed some time to work out our communications issues.

I hope the Toyota engineers insert some Easter egg voice commands in the next gen Prius, or offer different computer voices to choose from. On a long nighttime road trip, who wouldn't appreciate some Michael Knight/K.I.T.T.-like conversation with their automobile? And, upon failing to successfully merge into traffic from an on-ramp, what driver couldn't use a tongue-lashing/motivation speech from Alec Baldwin?

"But the engine is too weak?" you'd protest.

"The engine is weak? The effin' engine is weak?! YOU'RE WEAK," Alec Baldwin would respond. "I've been driving since I was twelve..."

Lousy Monday, Good Friday, new Monday

Last Monday I received an unpleasant surprise, a one-page form letter from NYU film school, the type a grad school applicant doesn't want to see (school applicants know that size matters when it comes to such things). It was late in the evening, and I had nearly forgotten to pick up my mail that day. I eyed the letter, sitting on the top of my mail pile in my mailbox, but left it alone, as if it were booby trapped. No way to defuse this situation, though--I knew what the letter said. It slugged me in the gut.

For a few days, I moped.

I withdrew into a dark place and did not feel like writing, least of all here.

I had no appetite, subsisting on a diet of mostly liquids.

All that work, and nothing but a lousy form letter in reply. A call for feedback went unreturned. After a few days, I emerged from mourning into a bitter rage (throwing beach balls around my apartment).

Men don't handle success or loss as well as women. I'm not sure why that is. The weekend brought visitors and roused me from my trivial personal drama. Christina, on her way to China, stopped in for a few days, and then Jason. Christina was living according to an Asian bodyclock and shifted me into another time zone. Then I woke bright and early Sunday to accompany Jason on a whirlwind sightseeing tour of parts of NYC I hadn't visited before. Sunday night, after Jason left, I came home and fell asleep on my sofa almost immediately.

I awoke Monday morning (in the previous day's outfit) to the sounds of cabs honking their impatience. Easter is about resurrection, and after my deep sleep, I felt like I'd been reborn. Nothing has changed, really. I'm still chasing after the same thing, and someday we all end up six feet under. Everything in between is just a way to pass time.

Kibbles and bits

On her site, Aimee Mann is posting new tracks from her upcoming album The Forgotten Arm

Flickr confirms that Yahoo! has acquired them

An online stream of Beck's upcoming album Guero

Sarah Silverman: is there a comedian more magnanimous with her offensiveness?

A chamber music cover of Radiohead's "Creep" (MP3)

13 things that do not make sense (from New Scientist)

SXSW music, new Coldplay

The SXSW website features MP3s from participating bands. Look for the cassette tape icon next the band's name; if it's present, click on the band's name to see what's available.

Six tracks from the new Coldplay album are here, from their recent appearance on KCRW

"I've got your free bird right here"

The new War of the Worlds teaser trailer (#2)
Yep, it's a tease. We still don't get to see the aliens. Cool highway destruction, though.

Why do people in the audience yell "Freebird!" at rock concerts? No one knows

"Bands mostly just ignore the taunt. But one common retort is: "I've got your 'free bird' right here." That's accompanied by a middle finger."

Some label should issue a compilation of Freebird covers.

Got home and reviewed the Episode III trailer in high def from last week's O.C.
Hot jedi action! The previous two episodes are sunk costs--let's see some light saber-fu.

Freakonomics website live

The Freakonomics website now has content, including a weblog, a forum to ask the authors questions, links to articles by Dubner and Levitt, and excerpts from the upcoming book.

Spamalot--no kidding

I received this following e-mail from the Broadway musical Spamalot. I don't think it's a joke, though it's such a pathetic coincidence it's almost funny.

Dear Spamalot Newsletter Subscriber,

It has come to our attention, that the database containing your subscription information may have been compromised during an attack on our servers by internet hackers. As a result of this theft, you may receive unsolicited emails to the account you submitted including fraudulent emails that appear to come from financial institutions. Since being informed of the potential problem, we have taken additional security precautions which will prevent this type of attack from succeeding in the future.

We apologize if this has caused you alarm or inconvenience. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at newsletter@montypythonsspamalot.com.

Sincerely,

Website Manager

I had considered going to see it, but this clinched it for me. Somewhere, the Website Manager is hopping around, just a bloody torso, after having each of his limbs severed one by one. Just a flesh wound, of course.

A to Z

Spike Jonze's new ad "Hello Tomorrow" for Adidas
The featured product is the Adidas_1 running shoe, the world's first running shoe with a microchip inside to adjust the cushioning based on how much the shoe compresses at each step. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Adidas running shoes since they sat on my feet during my marathon run last year. The Adidas_1 sold out almost instantly when a limited number of pairs was offered online. I wonder if airport security will flip out when they run a pair of these through the X-ray machine, what with a microchip and motor in its sole.

In case you were wondering what happened to Darius Rucker, he's doing commercials for Burger King

Fantasy baseball contest winner to earn job with San Francisco Giants

FlickrFox, a Firefox sidebar that allows you to browse your Flickr photostream

Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who recently retired, is sick of Vladimir Putin and can't take it anymore so he's running for president against Putin in 2008

We should have invited Korea to do the Superbowl halftime show this year

I'm too old to collect toys anymore, but these figurines are cool

Lord of the Rings the musical?!

If a VJ could scratch like a DJ, the result might look something like this

The West Wing gets will return for a seventh season
I'd be surprised if Jimmy Smits isn't elected president over Alan Alda

Yahoo previews a beta of its blogging service, Yahoo! 360°

HD trailer for Legend of Zelda videogame
Videogames become more and more like movies, and as with movies, the trailers are usually superior to the games

Around my brain in 80 seconds

Congrats Dave and Karen!

Whole Foods opens in Union Square this Wednesday, Mar. 16
Whoo-hoo! I've been waiting for the store to open ever since I moved to NYC. In another city, Whole Foods would count as a premium grocery store, but relative to other NYC stores, I think its prices will be reasonably unreasonable. Trader Joe's may invade Union Square this year as well, providing some downward pricing pressure. [news via Gothamist]

Bill Gurley blogifies his "Above the Crowd" newsletter/column
RSS feed for the column here. Always an interesting read, though Gurley's last post up until this week was from Fall 2004. The blog format should encourage more activity

The fantasy baseball league I play in, Mendoza Baseball, implemented an arbitration simulator this spring. Really cool. I don't think I've seen that in any other fantasy baseball simulation anywhere. I went to arbitration with some of my players today, and it was nervewracking waiting for the browser to refresh and display the arbitrator's decision when the player and I differed on salary judgments. Yes, I'm a total geek for caring about this, but some of you out there must play fantasy baseball, and if you're interested in trying to be a fantasy Billy Beane, check it out. The league has all sorts of interesting participants, from professors to students doing their PhDs on fantasy baseball

Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools hit bookstores this week. The book details the Enron scandal. I have a soft spot for white collar criminal non-fiction. Eichenwald's The Informant, about price-fixing at Archer Daniels-Midland, was excellent.

From The Onion: "According to a study released Monday by the Center for Media and Social Research, the reality-TV genre is unfairly biased against black people. The study revealed that reality is unfair to blacks, as well."

And from The Onion frontpage: "Could Hillary Clinton Have What It Takes To Defeat The Democrats In 2008?" and "Thick Sweater No Match For Determined Nipples"

Last Friday, Mike, Joannie, and I caught DJs A-Trak and Diplo at Sonotheque
Amazing stuff by DJ A-Trak, an honorary member of Invisibl Skratch Piklz and the first DJ ever to win all three major titles (DMC, ITF and Vestax) and the first DJ to win five world championships. He was Kanye West's personal DJ on tour last summer. A-Trak's first DVD and soundtrack Sunglasses is a Must comes out this summer on Audio Research Records

Freakonomics

I've been in Chicago visiting Joannie and Mike, and so I haven't been online much the past several days. Since I work on my computer so many hours out of each day (writing, editing, surfing, blogging, and lately, trying to learn linear editing software), vacations often feel like extended departures from the computer as much as they are departures from home. Laptops, an ever-widening net of wi-fi, and the seemingly ubiquitous Internet access in homes around the U.S. mean that I don't have to make such a tradeoff, but I do out of choice. Occasionally broadening the frame of the world beyond the confines of your LCD computer screen is relaxing, a break from information consumption/production compulsion.

I did want to mention and tout one book, though, a book I've mentioned before: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by famed economist Steven Levitt and reporter Stephen Dubner. A representative from Harper Collins was kind enough to send me a galley, and I've been up since three in the morning and have just finished devouring it. It is the logical successor to the Guns, Germs, and Steel --> The Tipping Point --> The Wisdom of Crowds --> Blink daisy chain of thought-provoking page-turners. For fans of Levitt who've always had to read about his work secondhand through articles, the arrival of the book is like finally sitting down in a theater to watch a blockbuster movie for which they've watched tantalizing movie trailers for months on end. The book doesn't disappoint; I found myself pulling out my moleskine notebook to jot down notes and thoughts as I read through it, something I rarely do with a book. His studies of cheating in sports like sumo wrestling are particularly relevant right now in the wake of all the steroids investigations in baseball. I'll post a review once I'm back in NYC from my vacation.

The official Freakonomics website is a work in progress consisting only of a front page for now. By the time the book arrives in April, I'm sure it will be populated with content.

Speaking of reading about interesting ideas secondhand, Salon's sports columnist wrote Thursday about a Bill James article in the Baseball Research Journal No. 33 that concludes: The absence of stats that prove clutch hitting ability exists doesn't mean clutch hitting ability doesn't exist.

On the face of it, not a particularly earth-shattering conclusion. It should raise the eyebrows of devotees of Baseball Prospectus and the sabermetric schools of thought, however, because they've conducted many studies attempting to detect clutch hitting and found no evidence that clutch hitting is a repeatable skill. The usual study tracks a hitter's hitting statistics with runners in scoring position and/or in late-inning high leverage situations (e.g. postseason games) over several years. High variability in such statistics from year to year (or the statistician's inability to accurately forecast those stats from year to year) has often been taken as proof that clutch hitting is a myth, an urban legend.

I don't have a copy of James's article, but the Salon article excerpts the following:

"We ran astray because we have been assuming that random data is proof of nothingness, when in reality random data proves nothing," James writes of his own and others' studies. He cites a famous article about clutch hitting by Dick Cramer. "Cramer argued, 'I did an analysis which should have identified clutch hitters, if clutch hitting exists. I got random data; therefore, clutch hitters don't exist.'"

James pronounces himself guilty of the same thing, many times. But: "Random data proves nothing -- and it cannot be used as proof of nothingness. Why? Because whenever you do a study, if your study completely fails, you will get random data. Therefore, when you get random data, all you may conclude is that your study has failed."

James doesn't go so far as to say clutch hitting exists, only that he's no longer certain it doesn't exist. Drop clutch hitting in that category of phenomena you believe in but can't measure; thus the common comparisons to religion.

One example of this that I subscribe to is the phenomenon of hitters getting hot and cold. Analysts have often described a series of at-bats by a hitter as a series of coin flips. Hot streaks are merely stretches where many hits occur, but each new at-bat is a new coin flip. When I played Little League Baseball, however, I experienced what hitters commonly describe as periods when the baseball appeared to travel slower and to grow in size, when I could center the ball on my bat with unusual frequency. Conversely, I went through phases where I couldn't make good contact or feel comfortable at the plate at all. This was something I could actually physically feel.

Was my feeling of invincibility at the plate a product of a few chance hits strung together or did some physical change occur that allowed me to hit well for a period of time? The former seems more likely, especially since I don't have even the slightest hypothesis as to what physical changes might have caused me to hit better. It's also entirely possible that some other unidentified factor(s) may have been in play. However, ask any athlete who can't miss a jump shot or golfer who shoots a fabled round of 59 because their putter is on fire, and I suspect they'd profess a belief in hot streaks.

If someone discovers a copy of James's article online, do pass along a link!

One last link to some non-conventional thinking: in today's NYTimes Sunday magazine, Roger Lowenstein writes about David Cutler's proposal for health care reform. One line in the article caught my eye:

Cutler wrote a still cited dissertation on how changes in Medicare's compensation scheme caused hospitals to release patients after shorter stays. It proved, Cutler says, that doctors were incredibly and, in some cases, ''horribly,'' responsive to incentives.

It caught my eye because Steven Levitt bases much of his thinking on incentives, and since reading Freakonomics I've been thinking about everything in those terms. Two myths I've been guilty of believing are that doctors are sacrosanct, immune to human foibles, and that all doctors are equal. Something in my childhood education or my cultural environment fostered that belief in me, and it wasn't until I became an adult and experienced some distressingly horrible health care that the mystique around doctors evaporated (that's not a knock on doctors, of which there are many in my family; no one needs the unhealthy expectations that come from mythologizing, and good doctors probably deserve more credit than they receive).

Doctors are humans, health care is not uniform in quality. Not surprising at all. Replace doctors and health care in that sentence with any other profession, and I would have agreed with you all my life, yet doctors got a free pass in my book for years. Very odd. Perhaps movies and books present doctors in an overwhelmingly positive light, and perhaps there's a lack of data (or publicized data) on the variability of the quality of health care.

David Cutler's CV links to many of his papers and articles. Another related article: "The Bell Curve" by Atul Gawande, about measuring the quality of doctors.

Hoop Dreams on DVD!!

Joy of joys--Hoop Dreams is coming out on a Criterion Collection DVD May 10.

In case anyone had any doubts, China intends to use non-peaceful means to crush any formal Taiwan independence efforts

In apparent response to Washington's intervention, [deputy chairman of the assembly's Standing Committee Wang Zhaoguo] quoted the legislation as saying the struggle over Taiwan is "China's internal affair" and "we will not submit to any interference by outside forces."

New Sin City trailer (Quicktime)
Rodriguez ain't kidding--he really does want the movie to look just like the comic book

...

Darn, Lance is going to skip Paris-Roubaix after all

I like this week's New Yorker cartoon of the week. My nephew Ryan is a Babar fan; I'll have to save this for him.

New York Magazine's Best of New York 2005

John Updike reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Updike would have preferred the novel slightly further away, and a bit quieter

Food porn
Agh, I'm so hungry

Waiter Rant
Meant to post this a while ago--I think I saw it it in a NYTimes article a while back--but it's still a fresh read

The movie rental version of "Who's on First?"

NASA's World Wind is a sweet app that allows you to browse photos on any place on earth via satellite photography
Sadly, it's only available for Windows users, but I demoed it on a friend's computer and it's cool, if a bit slow

Living in Oblivion

The rumor about Living in Oblivion has always been that the character Chad Palomino is based on Brad Pitt, who director Tom DiCillo had worked with on his first feature film Johnny Suede. In the director's commentary, though, DiCillo says that's just a myth and that in fact Brad Pitt was originally slated to play Palomino until a last minute scheduling conflict with Legends of the Fall. It doesn't help that James Legros looks a bit like Pitt, or that some of his mannerisms remind people of Pitt.

I wonder if DiCillo is being honest or just trying to avoid a lawsuit. DiCillo said LeGros based Palomino's mannerisms on those of a big Hollywood star he'd just worked with. Who that actually is remains one of the great Hollywood mysteries, like what Bill Murray whispered in Scarlett Johansson's ear.

Living in Oblivion: hilarious flick, and it will remind anyone who's ever been on a student film shoot of the madness on set.

Clash of the Titans

Phil and Tiger dueling mano y mano all afternoon. Awesome. Ken and I were on the phone much of the afternoon discussing it as if recording a podcast commentary.

Tiger was using his new Nike Ignite 460cc(!?!) driver with a Graffaloy Blue graphite shaft. Meanwhile, Phil Mickelson was sporting his new Callaway clubs: Fusion FT3 driver, Big Bertha fairway woods, X-Tour irons, and HX Tour ball (all prototypes). So this is what happens when the best golfers in the world use equipment designed to help the average weekend hack. It was strange to see Tiger swinging a driver with a larger head than the one on my Titleist driver, and to see Lefty swinging cavity back irons. I'm never going to be embarrassed to pull an oversized or game improvement club out of my bag again.

Having two of the world's top players in the final pairing is a rare event, despite the number of events golfers play each week, so to have Phil and Tiger 1 and 2 and Vijay Singh in 3rd at the Doral was epic. Watching Phil and Tiger slugging it out reminded me that they play golf, but it doesn't resemble the golf anyone else plays. On the 603 yard 12th, Tiger reached the green in two for the second day in a row, hitting a 290+ yard 3-wood second shot that rolled past the hole to the far end of the green. 290+ yard 3-wood off the fairway!

Tiger went for it all day. His round by round driving average:
Round 1: 310.5
Round 2: 285.5
Round 3: 319.0
Round 4: 334.5

Neither Tiger nor Phil was particularly accurate hitting fairways off the tee (Phil tied for 74th, Tiger for 68th in driving accuracy), but when you're crushing drives over 300 yards a slight tradeoff for accuracy is worthwhile. On the 370+ yard par 4 16th, Tiger went for the green with his drive. He swung so hard he actually left the ground with both feet. It was like a cartoon swing, like Bugs Bunny winding himself into the ground. On Saturday, Woods, hit some 3 woods that landed on the green and checked up like my pitching wedge. This was like videogame golf.

If Woods has found his swing again, it will be a lot of fun seeing Tiger, Phil, Vijay, Retief, and Ernie slug it out (Els won the Dubai Open with an eagle on the last hole of the tournament today).

Ken told me that a lot of pro golfers live in two golf resorts near Orlando, Florida: Isleworth and Lake Nona. So many stars live in those two developments that they actually hold their own golf tournament, the Tavistock Cup. This years tourney will be held March 28-29 and be televised by The Golf Channel. The rosters for the two teams this year are silly good. It's for fun, but players on the winning side earn $100,000 each, losers $50,000 each. That's like a friendly weekend game of poker where the winner takes home $25K.

Different game.

The Innocence Mission

Came across one of The Innocence Mission's tracks on an MP3 blog somewhere, and sampled a few more of their free MP3 tracks off of Amazon. On "Today," Karen Peris' reminded me of Harriet Wheeler from The Sundays; that's a plus in my book. They're a great example of why it's good to release some MP3 tracks of your best songs for free on the web. After hearing a few tracks, I went on Amazon, read a few customer reviews, and snapped up a CD. Had I never heard one of their MP3s, I would never have dropped $10 on one of their CDs sight unseen. A few full-length tracks are much more convincing than just a song sample, as anyone who's been disappointed by a movie after seeing a thrilling and meticulously edited movie trailer knows.

I do think that the economics of the movie business may be different enough that releasing a movie for free on the Internet isn't as economically beneficial to the creators. There are fewer revenue streams to justify loss leaders in the movie business, but it's also the fault of studios who have inflated movie production costs to the point where often it's only the healthy sales of $20 DVDs and syndication fees for pay-per-view and network/cable TV broadcasts that help them turn a profit.

Paris-Nice

The Race to the Sun is Lance's first race of the season. Starts tomorrow, and I believe OLN will televise it.

Perhaps it will inspire me to get back on the bike. I still haven't unpacked it since arriving in NYC!

Oh, and Tiger and Phil are the final pairing at the Doral tomorrow. I mean today. Nice.

Kelly Leak!

Richard Linklater is directing a remake of The Bad News Bears
Billy Bob Thornton will play the coach originated by Walter Matthau. I'm guessing BB will channel and fuse his work from Bad Santa and Friday Night Lights

MT-Keystrokes: an ingenious new method for battling Comment Spam in Movable Type 3
It counts the number of keystrokes in a comment (using javascript) to guess if a person or robot entered the comment

A peek, just a peek, of the new Star Wars trailer debuting with The O.C. next week (Quicktime)
Other required viewing prior to Episode III is The Clone Wars, which aired as twenty five-minute episodes on The Cartoon Network last year. It was excellent

Buffy Season 1 in One Minute (MP3)

The Neorest 600, the Ferrari of toilets
From a Wired magazine article. According to its manufacturer Toto, this is the toilet for Brad Pitt, J. Lo, Cameron Diaz, Charlie Sheen, and Will Smith. The $5,000 toilet has a 16-bit processor and 512 Kbytes of RAM. The seat can be raised by wireless remote (Howard Hughes would've dug that), assumes it can save water when the seat is up, is tankless, and transforms into a bidet when you're seated. Gentle aerated warm water spray, catalytic deodorizer, and hot air dryer. Not surprising that this product comes from Japan. When I visited Japan in 1990 with a youth orchestra, I encountered for the first time a toilet that had two levels of flushing, a lower one for, well, number one, and a higher one for more serious business. Americans have a cultural bias against bidets, and I've been guilty of that in the past when abroad, but at some point in life you realize it makes a lot of sense. Ok, that's enough on toilets

Maybe it's worth waiting for the next generation of iPods, rumoured by Engadget to have 3X the battery life

Harris Poll detects confusion over the meaning of left-wing and right-wing
I'm not sure this reflects ignorance of the people as much as it does the meaninglessness of these reductive labels (and the simplistic polls that attempt to define them)

The demographics of insurgency, ethnic conflict, terrorism, and state-sponsored violence are the same everywhere: young men, out of school and out of work
The article suggests that policymakers consider increasing funding for programs that help nations around the world to make the demographic transition from a population of short lives and large families to one with long lives and small families. A major comonent of that strategy is to promote girls' education and improve women's rights in the workplace. I'm curious to see a chart of all the world's nations and where they fall on this demographic continuum

"Warm Up" by The Firebirds (MP3)
Cool 60s funky bluesy cover of "Light My Fire"

Why Your Brain is Not a Camcorder
Just a summary of a study, but one conclusion interested me: the same processes that create false memories create true memories

The Circular Life
Cool Flash site that allows you to explore locales in Italy over a 24 hour period through pictures and sound. Stopping at different points along the circular wheel reminded me of how much the web under-utilizes sound to create environment (or misuses, in the case of those old MIDI ditties that would embarrass a surfer at work)

"Sussudio" by Ol' Dirty Bastard (cameos by Kelis and Li'l Kim) (MP3)
From a hip-hop tribute to Phil Collins from European label Urban Renewal. Shoot, I'm way too late to pay my respects to ODB, huh?

Movie posters, remixed

East of Eden

I recently finished East of Eden by Steinbeck. The book had been passing through our family here in NYC, and I was one of the last to complete our unofficial family book club assignment. The book retells the Biblical story of Cain and Abel through two generations of brothers with the names that reference their biblical counterparts: Adam and Charles Trask, and Cal and Aron Trask. The book suffers from some of the same character flatness that plagues The Fountainhead; at times the characters feel more like vessels to convey the author's message than real human beings, but at other times Steinbeck writes with a mythic insight into society and people.

A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development--to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

The very short story of Cain and Abel remains a mystery to me. I don't understand it, and its cryptic nature has always piqued my curiosity. Any insight from the ether is welcome.

Star Wars trailer to premiere on The O.C.

The trailer for Star Wars III: The Revenge of the Sith will premiere on March 10 during The O.C.

Superstar

35th anniversary of the Adidas Superstar

Video clip of Halle Berry accepting her Razzie (click link under her photo)
Unfortunately, this didn't work for me on any browser in Mac OS X. I had to make do with the slideshow. Windows users come out ahead this time

Joe Sacco's comic "Complacency Kills," about his visit to Iraq on behalf of the Guardian (PDF)
Like a suggested reading companion for Gunners Palace

I'm not sure I love any movie score more than Bernard Herrman's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo

Download some tracks from Fiona Apple's unreleased album

National Book Critics Circle Awards nominees for 2004

Fiction
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

General Nonfiction
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
Edward Conlon, Blue Blood
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History
David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Biography/Autobiography
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master

LSU professor tries to order customized NFL jersey with former student (and current Patriot DB) Randall Gay's last name on it and is rejected

The Whitney

Mark and Ken visited at various points this weekend. Ken led me to the Whitney Museum of American Art on Saturday afternoon. It was my first visit there. He wanted to see the Bill Viola exhibit, specifically. I wasn't familiar with Viola's work before, but after seeing Eve Sussman's hypnotic high definition video installation "89 Seconds at Alcazar" at MOMA, I had a newfound interest in video installations as an art form.

Viola's exhibit at the Whitney (purchased in 2002 with the Tate, London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in a three-way partnership) was titled "Five Angels for the Millenium." On each of five screens in a darkened room, slow-motion video depicted images of angels flying up out of or down into pools of water. Slow-motion and reverse footage was employed in some shots to entrancing effect. It takes some patience to wait out each of the five angels; much of the time, the screens simply depict a dark pool of water, a few ripples reflecting colored light, or a few bubbles rising or falling. It also takes a while for your eyes to acclimate to the near total darkness in the room, so it's best to slow down once inside lest you nearly tackle some complete stranger as I did. I'm not sure what each of the angels represents, but the videos are mysterious and powerful, like a vision.

I also enjoyed the Tim Hawkinson exhibition. Many of his works examine his own body in unique ways, inspiring some new meditations on self, consciousness, and identity. "The Wall Chart of World History from Earliest Times to the Present" resembles a tub of intestines rendered in red ink as a tightly packed coil of spirals. "Signature" is an ingenious machine mounted on a school desk that continually signs the artist's name on a piece of paper before chopping it off and dropping it in a pile surrounding the desk. "The Emoter" is a mechanical face animated based on electrical readings from programming on television. Really fascinating body of work.

The Whitney admission prices are $12 for adults, $9.50 for students and seniors. Fridays from 6-9pm is pay-what-you-want admission.

Eve Sussman is now working on a video installation titled "Raptus," a modern recreation (set in Brooklyn) of the Jacques-Louis David painting "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (some images from the filming can be seen here).