Spartan indeed

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The synopsis on the back sleeve of a bootleg DVD of Spartan, one which an unnamed friend of mine brought back for me from China:
Lsection tghe is a secret work, in the troops mileage undergo military servicing of year robust artistic skill is with the fortitude and resilience's personalityBecome the secret the work empress outstanding prove tghe score, and make him enjoy the colleague with the speak well ofing of superior section th accepted a new mission recently, with the workPreisdent daughter(1)that new hand the (virtuous gram) look for the disappearance together to pull the Newton.(gram is in theshell)Because of the matter passImportant, the president also send outed the own adviser(love virtuous ) helped to solve, like this, an is from tghe F.B.I.(FBI) with centralThe intelligence bureau( CIA) unites to constitute of solved the group to establish.At the same time, this rise the president daughter the disappearance the case, and quickly encountered to growed after launching to investigateGrow the , and become the complicacy to rise. a politician who maniuplate the government, he is apprently disappearance towards pull know aller than owner many ***s of ***
Every episode ever of Friends (a 60 DVD box set!)? Shrek 2? Day After Tomorrow? All available, though it's a roll of the dice whether you'll get a DVD or negative copy, camcorder footage from a movie theater, or some random cantopop karaoke video.

Mauer sans meniscus

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Will Carroll reports that Twins catcher Joe Mauer, still known as the guy drafted ahead of Mark Prior for monetary reasons, had the medial meniscus in his left knee removed. Removed! When I tore my ACL and MCL, I tore my meniscus, but the doctors simply shaved down one tear and inserted a staple in another.
The medial meniscus is a wedge of cartilage that cushions the upper leg bone from the lower. For a catcher to have it removed...well, it's a bad omen for Mauer's career squatting behind the plate. Without much power, he'd be much less valuable at, say, 1B, though he could be a plus at 2B.
And speaking of Prior, I saw his first start back against the Pirates, and he was aces. Same Prior that was lights out in August and September of last year, and he even toseed in a few of his new changeup.

It's okay Smarty, go to a party

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I don't claim to be a die hard horse racing fan. When I was young, a friend of my parents took me to the track one day while I was supposed to be in school. I don't even remember his name, but I like to think of him as the black sheep uncle I never had. He had me place his bets for him. I found it horribly dull, all that sitting around for races that lasted just a few minutes.
Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit changed a lot of that for me, increasing my appreciation for the story behind the races, the context and art of the sport, from the spotting and training of the horses to the sacrifices of the jockeys.
And two other things I've always liked about horse racing. One is the names of the horses. How did everyone in that sport get together and agree that all horses should have catchy names? Two is the pace of the race. At about two minutes long, horse races are both feverish yet deliberate, giving you just enough time to see and appreciate winning moves but not enough time for the action to lag. It's enough time for fortune's to rise and fall and rise again, or vice versa.
One could see Birdstone's move begin with just over a quarter mile to go. Smarty Jones had captured the 1 1/4 mile Kentucky Derby and the 1 3/16 mile Preakness, but the Belmont was a quarter mile too long for the acclaimed miler. Like a lone breakaway cyclist caught by the peloton in the home stretch, Smarty went out too hard, too fast, and Birdstone waited for just the right moment to kick.
One other fabulous thing about the race today: Birdstone owner Marylou Whitney. She couldn't be more amusing if someone had invented her as a caricature of horse racing socialites, with her yellow designer bonnet to match her yellow suit and her snooty voice. I wish I had a clip of it to play here.
Off the top of my head, entities with cool and memorable names:
  • Horses (Alydar, War Admiral, Seabiscuit, Secretariat, Man O'War, Northern Dancer, Seattle Slew, Ruffian, Personal Ensign, Smarty Jones)

  • Nightclubs in Asia (World of Suzie Wong, Solutions, NASA, Velvet Room, Propaganda, Freezer, Sanwei Bookstore, Ned Kelly's Last Stand, Westworld)

  • Famous photographers (William Klein, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Weegee, Edward Weston) and high end cameras (Hasselblad, Leica, Rollei, Mamiya, Linhof, Tachihara)

  • Fragrances or parfums (Coco, No. 5, Cool Water, Opium, White Tea, 212 White, Cashmere Mist,

Well, at least those bastards have to work weekends

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Is spam cheaper to send on weekends? I'm swamped with it Saturdays and Sundays.
I've also started receiving text message spam on my cell phone. They include return e-mail addresses that look real, but I suspect those e-mail addresses have been hijacked.
I've never given out my cell phone number on any websites or order forms. The problem is that cell phone numbers can be easily reverse engineered. They're assigned in blocks of 10,000, and the area code and exchange, or the (###) ### portion of (###) ###-####, are the same for all those numbers. Get one numbers and you can easily guess others, and most cell phone carriers also offer a way to e-mail any phone number in their network. This allows spammers to easily mass-mail lots of actual cell phone numbers with high efficiency.
A telemarketing phone call steals a few seconds of my life. Text message spam can actually take money out of my pocket directly, though fortunately my cell phone plan doesn't charge for incoming text messages. Still, this is pure evil and must stop. Usually I wouldn't offer up legislation as a solution, but that telemarketing act sure seems to have worked. I haven't received a telemarketing phone call in ages.

Caipirinha's and sashimi

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Tank SushiI finally experienced the Japanese and Latin culinary fusion while back in Chicago. It's not a pairing that leaps to mind, but apparently it's quite popular in Chicago.
First, Joannie, Mike, and I hit Tank Sushi, a fairly new and trendy sushi joint near their condo in Lincoln Square. The menu features traditional Japanese and Latin American favorites like sushi and ceviche, but in areas like sushi rolls it brings ingredients from both regions together in unexpected combinations: escolar and jalapeno, yellowtail and mango.
The fish was fresh, but why the pulsing techno music? Or do Japanese and Latin American music not mix?
Later in my visit, my first business manager Ted and I held a lunchtime reunion at Sushi Samba, a restaurant which is more precise about its lineage: Japanese, Brazilian, and Peruvian. South American beef maki rolls? They call the U.S. a melting pot, though I don't think it was meant literally.
This whole movement hasn't made its way to Seattle, yet, though the sheer number of possible combinations of cuisines is mind boggling.

Review: Natural City

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My first movie date of the 2004 Seattle Film Fest was Natural City, and for a punked out girl from the future, she was a real bore. A mess of a sci-fi movie set in 2080 A.D.
Agent R is an MP responsible for hunting down rogue cyborgs, but his heart is occupied with a female cyborg night club dancer who's about to expire. Meanwhile, one particular rogue cyborg is causing all sorts of problems from the police. Will Agent R get his head together in time to prevent a nefarious plot from unfolding?
South Korea's movie industry is booming in output, but recent entries I've seen like this movie and Tube resemble Frankenstinian collages of American movie cliches. The visuals in Natural City are sufficiently impressive, but Blade Runner came out in 1982, and this movie doesn't even match it. The movie needs some serious editing, and the screenplay is crippled by its failure to explain why R cares so much for a cyborg that has the personality of, well, a cyborg. Much of the rest of the plot is murky, leaving me and the rest of the audience tapping our toes until the next appearance of the spinning, jumping cyborg killers. It's not a compliment when the most compelling characters in a human drama are the robots.
I'd love to see South Korean cinema focus on telling stories from its own culture or milieu, stories inspired by its country and environment, such as Joint Security Area by my favorite South Korean director, Chan-Wook Park. His Old Boy won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
The more money Korea spends on its movies, the more unoriginal they turn out. Hey, that sounds like Hollywood.


Aviator et al

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Tiny, fuzzy Quicktime trailer for Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.<
Get that man, er, boy an IV! Wait...he's up! He's up! - 13 year old Akshay Buddiga faints during National Spelling Bee, but then miraculously stands up again and spells a-l-o-p-e-c-o-i-d correctly.
Trailer for Collateral - Looking forward to this one, as I do all Mann films. Just look at the roster of directors Tom Cruise has worked with...amazing.




Amazon's Plogs

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When I logged into Amazon this morning, I was presented with my plog or personal weblog. I'd heard of the project during my last year at Amazon, though I never found out what it was all about.
It looks as if customer reviews for products have been turned into weblog posts so they can be served up as content using the old new release recommendations engine. The introduction also states that plogs will contain updates on the status of my previous orders.
I can't imagine that's all Amazon will do with plogs, knowing the people there. My guess is that soon all our customer reviews will be transformed into weblog posts, for those products without editorial reviews. Then they'll scrape public weblogs and load those posts into the recommendations engine to serve up as content to sell product, especially since so many weblogs are Amazon Associates. And, if they wanted to veer from pure product recommendations, they could simply load all weblog posts into its recommendations engine and create an automated blogroll using their similarities algorithms combined with web traffic analysis from Alexa or web structure data from Google. People who read this weblog also read these weblogs.
UPDATE: Just who owns the definition of plog, anyway? Others use the term plog to refer to project logs.

On-field audio

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I hope that I live to see the day when we can sign consent forms and tap into an on-field or on-court audio feed of sports events. That the trash-talking in NBA games is being lost to posterity is surely one of the great linguistic deprivations of all time. Who wouldn't want to hear the feed from a shotgun mic pointed at always-angry-man Latrell Sprewell as he showers his opponents and unseen demons with a litany of f-bombs, pounding his chest with one fist like a territorial gorilla?

M's

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Is there a more unfortunate name for a band than The M's? Someone here in Chicago told me to check them out, but I couldn't find their CD's on Amazon because a search for "The M's" in Popular Music returns 6,092 results, some inexplicable, none what I wanted, and searching for them on Google was no less difficult. Alas, even at their awkwardly named URL their CDs are not for sale yet. Brilliante Records? I think not.
What's in a name? A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet in the online world where discoverability is critical. A simple name change would do wonders for their sales. I guess I'll have to walk into an actual music store to track these guys down.

Cycling in Chicago

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I brought my bike with me to Chicago, both to try and maintain some semblance of cycling shape and to practice traveling with my bike. I meant to explore the local cycling scene, but I've spent all my time riding up and down the popular Lakefront Path.
The first day I rode it from top to bottom and back again, and it felt as if I was riding into a raging headwind every way I turned. I had to muscle through the whole time just to maintain any speed. Is it always that way? I thought the nickname "Windy City" was coined by Charles Dana in reference to the the hot air from Chicago politicians about the World's Columbia Exposition in 1893! That pain aside (a sour pain, as Lance would say, versus the sweet pain of climbing), the ride was gorgeous. Chicago has, in my opinion, the greatest skyline in the U.S. Seeing it rise up on one side of you while flanked by a stormy, choppy Lake Michigan on the other is spectacular.
The ride takes you past Navy Pier and Buckingham Fountain, through Museum triangle (Shedd Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, and Adler Planetarium), past Soldier Field and the McCormick convention center, by Promontory Point and the Museum of Science and Industry, all the way down to the Cultural Center. Just a few rides familiarized me with the path's personality. North of Navy Pier and even Shedd Aquarium the path is a zoo, the path shared by hundreds or thousands of pedestrians, rollerbladers, joggers, dogs, and cyclists. Weaving between them requires quick bursts of acceleration to shoot through brief gaps in the humanity. My least favorite portion of the trail is heading south over the bridge above the Chicago River. When crowded, I picture myself being knocked off the narrow path by a swerving pedestrian or cyclist coming the other direction and landing in the path of one of the several-thousand pount yellow taxis heading my direction.
My favorite portion of the ride is the stretch that takes one by Buckingham Fountain and the soon-to-open Millenium Park. Buckingham Fountain seems to slide by as if on rails, and in the afternoon sun, it's majestic parabolas of water sparkle like white fire.
Mayor Daley is trying to make Chicago the most bike-friendly big city in the U.S. I haven't ridden enough within the city to assess his progress, but the Lakefront Path is a gem, at least during the week when it isn't overcrowded. I look forward to returning someday to test the outcome of Daley's vision.
Portland is widely hailed as the most bike-friendly city in the world, and I'd love to see more cities follow its lead. For me, bike lockers are essential because I've had way too many bikes stolen off of exposed bike racks. Showers would be a bonus. Portland offers some of both, in addition to over a hundred miles in trails within city limits. I've also heard of bike lockers where you can deposit a coin and your bike is sucked away into a concealed locker, like a safety deposit box for your ride. Sweet.
I have one question that a native Chicagoan might be able to answer. Every time I've ridden the trail I've passed an middle-aged Caucasian male dressed as a samurai, wearing a white kimono and carrying a wooden sword. He was bearded and wore glasses. Usually I encountered him in Lincoln Park, just north of Belmont Harbor. Once he was arguing vehemently with what appeared to be a homeless man, and the other times he was jogging, hand on his sword, ready to draw. What's his story?

K Rod: #$@&!

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I finally caught some highlights of Francisco Rodriguez's pitching this year. The clips were from a game he closed out against the White Sox.
Ridiculous. He may have the filthiest stuff in baseball. K Rod's slider seems to break a foot down and a foot and a half sideways while coming in at 90mph. He simply overpowered Thomas, Valentin, and Konerko. The ball moves so much it appears he's throwing a whiffle ball. His slider reminds me of Kerry Wood's unhittable slurve, the one he threw his rookie season and used to get most of the 20 strikeouts in his 20 K game against the Astros. It's also the pitch that put so much stress on Wood's elbow he had to have Tommy John surgery at season's end.
NOTE: I had F Rod instead of K Rod in here before. Robert corrected me. I really am ignorant when it comes to the American League. This is why I need to manage an American League fantasy team.

Ah, nostalgia

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Fond memories from post-grade school afternoons and Saturday mornings spent watching television: Spider-Man: The 1967 Collection (with its classic theme song, yes, that one) and Wonder Woman - Season One (before Carrie Fisher in her Return of the Jedi slave girl outfit, and long before Buffy in short skirts, we had Lynda Carter in the Wonder Woman outfit, and it was good). We are entering the Golden Age of television on DVD.

Review: Bubba Ho-tepThank ya, thank ya very much

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Bubba Ho-Tep is about a man in a nursing home who believes he's Elvis, battling a reincarnated Egyptian mummy who is sucking the life out of the King's fellow geriatrics. The Elvis impersonator (Or is he really The King? The movie lays out an amusing backstory) is played by Bruce Campbell, and his sidekick is another nursing home resident who believes he's JFK (Ossie Davis), dyed black and missing part of his brain that the government replaced with sand. It sounded like a movie that aspired from the start towards cult status, and that worried me. Cult movies shouldn't start life aspiring towards cult status.
But Don Coscarelli's adaptation of a Joe Lansdale short story is disarmingly amusing, with just enough funny lines of dialogue (delivered by Bruce Campbell with sincere Elvis feeling) and low-budget charm to overcome the occasional comic overreach. Its culinary analogue is the local taco stand: unpretentious but uninspiring, probably not all that good for you, spare in decor, but damn tasty while in the mouth.

Hot NBA prospect: Aloysius Snuffleupagus

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Kind of Blue

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As soon as I had purchased my plane ticket to Chicago, I made plans to jump online the first day Cubs tickets went on sale in March.
That first day of ticket sales, the Cubs set a MLB record for single day ticket sales. I made it out of the Internet waiting room just 3 times all day and managed to buy tickets to the Giants game last Wednesday and the Cardinals games Friday and Sunday.
Wednesday in the bleachers was a blast, even sans Sosa and Bonds. Mike and I went Friday afternoon and also enjoyed the game despite the Cubs loss 7-6. Maybe it was the four beers that just managed to kill off the brain cells containing memories of Sergio Mitre's horrible performance. Not only does he have lousy stuff, but he made several mental errors this game, including a wild pitch on a pitchout. The Cubs made it close on two Barrett homers and an Alou 3-run blast, but because of the 2:20 p.m. start time, when the ninth inning rolled around, Cardinals closer Isringhausen was pitching out of the sun to batters standing in the shade of the upper deck. With such poor visibility, the Cubs were helpless to rally.
Sunday's contest, the rubber game of the Cubs-Cards series, was the ESPN Sunday night game of the week. A few random observations from that game:

  • ESPN suspended a remote-controlled camera on a cable that ran from the left field foul pole to the press box. It provided some unique angles for replays because it could not only pan along the cable but tilt to follow the baseball and action at the same time. NBC once used a similar remote controlled cable-camera for the NBA, though I haven't seen it in recent years. Here's hoping they use more such innovative cameras in the future, in all sports. These days, you can get better camera angles in a sports video game than on live television.

  • I wore the Mark Prior jersey I received for Christmas to all the games, but I wasn't alone. Prior's jersey is the best-selling one in Wrigley, by a large margin.

  • From my terrace reserved seats, I had a new perspective on the electronic ticker under the center field scoreboard, and I stand corrected on one thing. The Cubs do show races on that electronic scoreboard between some innings. The new electronic scoreboards along the first row of the upper deck in left and right fields are useful for something else besides pitch velocity: pitch counts.

  • The Cubs have pretty much sold out their entire season already, and the attendance for the 3 Cardinals games was 39,298, 40,131, and 40,090. The standing-room only section behind our seats Sunday was packed.

Celebrity Cubs fan John Cusack sang the 7th inning stretch. Joannie and I cheered along with the rest of the fans in the terrace reserved seats down the left field line when John walked by on the catwalk behind the luxury boxes. Everyone also cheered for the young woman with him--who was that?
Clement pitched against Matt Morris. For some reason, Matt Morris's strikeout rate is way down this year, and his fastball velocity is also down. When you can't strike people out, and you don't walk them, they tend to put the ball in play. Aramis Ramirez did just that to one of those unimpressive fastballs in the first inning, hitting a line drive missile that might have killed some fan in the left field bleachers, or on Waveland Ave. That 3-run homer and a Barrett RBI double in the 1st were all the offense the Cubs got, and it proved just enough.
Pujols's second at-bat, after the first pitch, some fans started a chant of "Pujols sucks! Pujols sucks!" The very next pitch, Pujols clubbed a home run. As he crossed home plate, he put a finger to his lips to shush the crowd.
The Big Borowski came on in the 9th to shut down Pujols, Edmonds, and Rolen, whose wind-blown flyball stopped hearts all over the stadium until it fell into Patterson's glove just in front of the warning track.
While it's always satisfying to take two of three from the hated Cardinals, the Cubs have serious problems. Injuries have exposed the team's lack of depth. Sosa, Grudzielanek, Gonzalez, Remlinger (now Mercker), Prior, and Wood are all on the DL. The Cubs bench players have dubbed themselves the Lemons, an unfortunate name in its honesty. Ramon Martinez (OBP of .274, SLG of .260!), Jose Macias (OBP of .291), Tom Goodwin (OBP .227, SLG of .280), and Paul Bako (OBP of .313, SLG of .225), and Damian Jackson (OBP .222, SLG .267) couldn't crack a dish in a china shop with bats in each hand. With the exception of Todd Hollandsworth and Todd Walker, it's one of the weakest hitting benches in baseball, and both the Todd's have to start now anyway. Light-hitting shortstop Rey Ordonez waits in the wings. The horror.
The Cubs are a free-swinging team, with only Derek Lee and Sammy Sosa (among the season-opening starters) possessing on-base percentages over .350. That will lead to lots of feast or famine games, and indeed, the Cubs have hit a lot of home runs and been shut out six times this season already.
The Cubs pitching staff has been reduced to starting the aforementioned Mitre (often described as gritty, which is baseball speak for pitcher with lousy stuff), Glendon Rusch (cast off by the Brewers!), and soon, Jimmy Anderson (cast off by the Pirates!). The best pitching prospect with a chance to crack the majors, Angel Guzman, has just started pitching again after coming back from an arm injury that ended his season last year.
Meanwhile, Corey Patterson still swings at everything within ten feet of home plate. I'd like to see the Cubs trade Patterson and someone (Mitre and Francis Beltran?) for Carlos Beltran if they're in the pennant hunt in August. Depth isn't essential in the post season, but you can't make it to the post season over a 162-game schedule without it. I thought the Astros started the season with a slightly stronger 25 man roster, and the gap has widened. We need Prior, Wood, and Sosa back.