hello, typepad

I know it is early in the season and it is a marathon not a sprint, blah, blah, blah. BUT...anyone frustrated?

Alyssa Milano, Baseball fan.

Great Do-Overs of the Past:

If anything about this is fishy it's in an arbitrary application of the right to award a do-over. Lots of close games through the years have involved mistakes of various kinds that could have, in theory, affected outcomes. The normal thought through most of my life has been "done is good" and you move on.

Henry Abbot is talking about the NBA, but he could be talking about any sport, or in fact anything.

Will Bonds draw a walk?

If Bonds had immunity from everything except perjury, why would he lie during his testimony?

One possibility is that Bonds is innocent. It is unlikely, but not impossible that Anderson put things in Bonds’ system unbeknownst to the slugger.

If the reports are indeed correct, which will become painfully clear later today when the Mitchell report becomes public, baseball has its white Barry Bonds.

Hi-Ya.

gladwell.com: Kenyan Runners

Fantastic post from Malcolm Gladwell about the dominance of Kenyan runners:

Here's the appropriate thought experiment. Imagine that every year 50 percent of all American 10 year old boys were shipped to Boulder Colorado, where they ran 50 to 70 miles a week at altitude for the next seven years. Would the United States regain control of international middle and long distance running?

Gladwell gets to the point fast, I like that.

Bad news for NYC football fans. How often do NFL teams rebound from 0-2 starts?:

The conclusion: There are 10 winless teams now, the odds are that only one will make the post season... Coaches in sports are fond of saying it's not time to panic. But here at Stat Attack, we say the time to panic is now.

I love stats. Of course, if the Jets and Giants have a 90% chance each of losing on paper, then the Mets have a 90% chance of winning, which we all know is not the case.

Sports posts will dominate hello, typepad well through the World Series, and probably through an indictment of Barry Bonds coming this winter.

The essence of being a Mets Fan

The essence of being a Mets Fan
Originally uploaded by david.

First place all year, but still wearing a rally cap in the second
inning.

photo.jpg

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by david.

There's a nice post today over at Baseball Prospectus about Barry Bonds:

“Why would a baseball player have needed an undetectable steroid when drug testing wasn’t mandated until 2003?” Conte said. “To suggest that Barry’s 2001 record of 73 home runs was assisted by ‘the clear’ is ridiculous and simply makes no sense.”

Sunday Baseball Links

I've been going down the rabbit hole of baseball stats, scorekeeping and sports on-line.

Erik Berg's summary of SportsML, and his ongoing project to record all MLB Box Scores in XML is worth your attention.

Major League Baseball has their own undocumented but pitch-by-pitch complete xml feed of gameday news. I was hoping today's Mets/Brewers game would have projected lineups, but it's not up yet. Take a look at what they have for yesterday's game.

Scorepad offers a free trial of their scoresheet software for the Palm. I want to try this, but it looks like a little bit of a pain.

Chris Nandor's Game::Baseball::Scorecard is a free perl interface to Chris Swingle's PDF Scorecards. Chris's scorecards are the nicest I've found on-line, which may have something to do with the triangulation of his other hobbies: bookbinding, baking bread, and woodoworking.

(Thank you Alan Mitchell)

shrine of hope

shrine of hope
Originally uploaded by david.

I though that once I brought out the "Mr. Eko faces down the smoke monster" card, the Mets would be able to channel the powers of the Island and create a victory. I was wrong.

Will from Deapsin writes:

OK. Sorry. I still can't sleep. Too wired. Site might suck tomorrow. I apologize in advance.

That's honest blogging. Of course, he could use this excuse any time he wanted.

Dave Winer: This Jerk is Wrong

Mets fans are always surprised by a win, never surprised by a loss.

This is the wrongest thing that man has ever said. I expect the Mets to win every night, always have.

On Vox: Darryl Strawberry, NLCS game 1

» Read more on Vox

The Miracle Marlins

As a die-hard Mets fan, I've been getting a lot of text messages and IMs along the lines of "go Mets", "Mets all the way!" and of course, "Yankees suck!" It follows that as a die-hard Mets fan, I'm far from confident - I remember Orel Hershiser in '88 and Mariano Rivera in 2000 much more vividly than Ray Knight or Lenny Dykstra in '86.

The Mets have a nice team, but quite frankly it's hard to see them beating the Yanks or the A's in the World Series. I'm not sure if it's hard because those teams are juggernauts and the Mets don't have a second basemen, a third starting pitcher or a healthy Pedro, or if it's hard because I've seen the Mets lose much more than I've seen them win.

But the real story this year is not the Miracle Mets, but the Miracle Marlins. Despite the public disputes between the manager and the owner, the lack of one true All-Star this side of Miguel Cabrera, and a combined payroll less than Derek Jeter, the Marlins have a fair shot at joining the Mets, Yankees, and others in the playoffs. From The Baseball Prospectus:

This isn’t just a case of the people at BP or ESPN missing on their analysis as the season began. Short of Nostradamus or the diehard delusional Marlin fan I dare say few saw this type of performance by the Marlins coming.

To place this in perspective, consider the following: 53 of the 59 players who showed up for the Marlins Spring Training camp this season had played at least part of last season in the minors. The Marlins dropped their Opening Day payroll $45,410,334, from $60,408,834 in 2005 to $14,998,500 in 2006; that's a 75.17% drop. The Yankees' Opening Day payroll of $194,663,079 was 1298% higher than the player payroll for Marlins on Opening Day. The last time the Marlins had an Open Day payroll close to this low was 1999, when it was $14,650,000. The Devil Rays had the second-lowest Opening Day payroll at the start of this season at $35,417,967, which is still 236% higher than the Fish.

There is a flip side to this tale. The reason the Marlins' payroll is so low is that the owner is notorious for dumping salary, to pad his own profits or to make a power play for a new stadium. It's also sick that the Yankee's payroll, which has grown to over 200 million dollars this season, is as high as it is. And of course, there's a good chance the Marlins won't make the playoffs.

Despite the fantastic story of the Marlins, I'm rooting for the Giants and Dodgers to join the Mets and the Yankees in the playoffs - it would be the first time all four New York teams have ever made it at once.

Curious Sponsors

Fans of the San Francisco Giants have been flummoxed by FusionStorm. The billboards in the Giants' Baseball stadium are populated by Levi's, Budweiser, Cingular and other usual suspects. FusionStorm has taken out two billboards in completely different colors and type treatments on different sides of the field. I thought I would investigate on the Internet (I like to do that). FusionStorm.com, whose mission appears to be to simply "Make Technology Work" greeted me with this:

That image is not working. It looks to me like dude is about to fall off a cliff! I don't want to fall off a cliff.

But one preposterously wasted chunk of baseball sponsorship dollars does not justify a Hello, Typepad post. Two presposterously wasted chunks of baseball sponsorship dollars, on the other hand...

Enter Azek Trimboards! Mets fans High and Inside note: "This year, one of the most prominent sponsors of the New York Mets has been an entity mysteriously known as Azek Trimboards."

Azek Trimboards match FusionStorm tag for tag in sheer web ineptitude. The Azek source code represents web soup at it's worst, so much so that Google takes a seemingly random snippet off of Azeks' info page to describe Azek in Google search results as: "Manufactured in a proprietary process, AZEK Trimboards are consistent and uniform throughout with no voids."

Sadly, there's no trimboard blog (trimboardeo? gizboard? trimway?) that has written about Azek so that I could glean more information (if I wanted to.) And that's the other reason FusionStorm and Azek have stuck with me - I'm used to trivia becoming available within fourty seconds of my first wandering thought, if that. If Apperceptive advertised with the Mets or the Giants, I hope we'd do a slightly better job of communicating who the heck we were. Speaking of which, I have to get back to work.

Apperceptive is consistent and uniform throughout, with no voids!

Bubbles

Yesterday I was walking up fourth avenue in San Francisco when someone offered to trade me a free copy of the Chronicle if I would consider subscribing. I took the paper because I saw baseball players on the cover, even though I live in New York and wouldn't be interested in subscribing to the Chronicle.

I caught the bus, opened the paper, and was immediately disappointed to see that an article about baseball cards was framed by scans of four cards that have dramatically lost value. These weren't cards that were part of overproduced sets, with the exception of 87 donruss. There was an 85 Topps, an 86 Topps, and a 1990 Leaf. These are all relatively valuable sets. So what do Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa have in common? They obviously aren't the cards that have lost the most value in the past twenty years.

This is intellectual dishonesty at best. Of those four players, only Palmeiro has tested positive for steroids. No one will be surprised if Sosa, Bonds and McGwire are ever proven guilty of steroid use, but that hasn't happened yet. The collapse of the cards market was a clear case of supply dwarfing demand. This happened in the mid 90s, when baseball fans barely cared at all about steroids. The 'roid rage of fans and San Francisco columnists is obviously more recent than that. I just wish they could have mocked up a Floyd Landis baseball card.

Doping Scandal Rocks the Tour De France

ESPN: Contenders Ullrich, Basso barred from Tour de France:

"The enemy is not cycling, the enemy is doping," tour director Christian Prudhomme said.

That's a pretty statement. What if cycling is doping? This should put all of Lance Armstrong's doubters to bed for good. Not only is Lance the most decidedly un-doped athlete in history, having repeatedly been assumed guilty and proven innocent, now his top two career rivals have been found guilty of doping.

There's more news over at the Tour De France blog, which is the best blog on the internet for these three weeks every year.

The Pendulum is Swinging Bonds' Way Again

In a society that pops a pill for every conceivable malady, in a society that rewards athletes with hundreds of millions of dollars, in a society that values money over all else, we must recognize that performance-enhancing drugs are rampant and widespread in all professional sports, and we're not going to get rid of them by vilifying the users.

We've tried that in sports and in our other high-profile, punish-the-poor-and-slap-the-wealthy-on-the-wrist war on drugs.

Ben Johnson lost his gold medal. We ridiculed East German sprinters and Chinese swimmers. Nancy Reagan said "just say no" while politicians locked up black folk and won voting support.

Finally, some sanity is creeping into the mainstream coverage of steroids. Also, it appears Albert Pujols' personal trainer distributed Human Growth Hormone, a banned but difficult to detect steroid. In moderation, there are little if no side effects, and it made probably made Pujols an immediately better player. I bet 300 major league players are doing it - it still doesn't make the 298 of them who aren't Pujols and Bonds Ruthian sluggers.

Barry Bonds and Hypocrisy Redux

Barry Bonds, Steroids, and Hypocrisy is far and away the most trafficed post on Hello, Typepad. Since the San Francisco Chronicle and Sports Illustrated published excerpts of an upcoming book that alleges an absurdly high amount of Steroid use on the part of Bonds and other athletes associated with Balco (including Hello, Typepad favorite Marion Jones), interest in this topic has peaked (see my measure map graph for this post, to the left) so I thought I'd just reiterate my opinion, because I'm stubborn like that.

If indeed Bonds is guilty of everything the Chronicle reporters say that he is, and more, he is at least behaving consistently. There's blood in the water around Bonds, but there's money too, and don't think for a second that reporters wouldn't be covering this story if there wasn't. We know this because it's been going on for twenty years and no one started talking about it until Jose Canseco came out with his book. What's more, Baseball didn't even have a real Steroids policy until three years ago.

The fans and press are exactly as hypocritical as Bonds himself in this case. As sad as it makes me that he clearly cheated, his behavior is a symptom, not a disease.

Prospect Park NYC

Imapix at Work
Originally uploaded by lefion.

Inspired by the US team's curling success, surveying work has begun on a curling ice in Prospect Park, hopefully to be finished before next winter.

Humor in Dark Times

It's always sad when fake news outpaces real news when it comes to sharp, direct coverage of current events (e.g. The Daily Show, The Onion, drudge).

But we've fallen to a new low, as ESPN's Page 2 breaks down the US relatioship with Cuba more succintly than I've seen anyone else do it.

First, forget that Cuba was allowed to compete in Atlanta in the 1996 Olympics. Next, forget that it played an exhibition game against the Orioles in Baltimore in 1999. Then forget that even our current administration allowed Cuba's national soccer team to compete in last year's CONCACAF Gold Cup in Seattle.

While you're at it, forget that our government is letting that well-known global leader in human rights -- mainland China -- play in the World Baseball Classic. Forget also that our myopic foreign policy toward Cuba has failed to oust Fidel Castro after more than 40 years while hurting Cuban citizens far more than Castro. And oh yes, forget that our own government has prisoners locked up in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay for an indefinite period.

For those of you not following along at home, the Bush administration is threatening to shut down the World Baseball Classic over Cuba's involvement.

The U.S. Treasury department is enforcing the WBC ban, but this isn't about money. Cuba is not going to benefit financially from this tournament. The tournament is not likely to make much of a profit this year -- perhaps a couple million dollars, perhaps less than that. The winning nation will get only 10 percent of that, the losers even less. Further, Cuba is offering to donate its meager payout to Hurricane Katrina charities. So what's the problem, other than that Cuba does not produce oil or have a billion-citizen economy?

If you want the United States to look like a petty tyrant with a hypocritical foreign policy, then by all means, ban Cuba from playing. That way, we'll drop right into Castro's propaganda hands. We'll look like the big bully afraid to see our millionaire players get beaten by little Cuba, afraid to take charity from an island off the coast of Florida.

Dreamful Attraction

Jackson is well known for applying the principles of Zen to the game of basketball, and O'Neal says that Jackson's methods meshed with his own strategies for victory. "I control my dreams," O'Neal told me. "So-called educated people call it meditation, but I don't. I call it 'dreamful attraction.' The mind controls everything, so you just close your eyes and see yourself dribbling, see yourself shooting." Contrary to some reports, O'Neal says that Jackson has not induced the team to practice yoga. "We tried Tai Chi one year, but the guys didn't like it, because, even though it was stretching, it would make us tight," he said. "Anyway, I don't stretch. I just play."

Henry @ True Hoop just re-posted this Rebecca Mead article about Shaquille O'Neal which is one of my favorite things ever. I think about Dreamful Attraction almost every day, and when we play basketball in the summer, I see good results.

My Wayfaring

Wayfaring is a cool new Ruby/Maps mash-up application. I know these are practically a dime a dozen, but two aspects of Wayfaring stick out. One is that it's the first app that is an in-place replacemnt for the current maps.google.com, if you want it to be. Sure, it doesn't have the local integration, but presumably it will be able to leverage all of the user curated contributions even more efficiently than Google does. Second, they mention on blog that they prescribe to the "release early and often" practice of software deisgn, and they're sticking to it. It looks like they've stomped out some bugs very quickly (and publicly) and there are definitely some rough edges. But it definitely works, and that's enough. (thanks, Finn, for the heads up).

I love the map of the "tough" climbs in the 2006 Tour de France. This continues the precedent of Tour de France maps being the gold standard of mapping hacks. Or at least, I hope they become the standard, because I love them.

Marathon Feet

Feet
Originally uploaded by david.

I watched the first hour or so of the Marathon this morning. Of course seeing runners of all shapes sizes and abilities was inspiring, but I was also filled with a little bit of regret that I didn't get it together to run this year. Next year, we're running for sure.

You can see the rest of my Marathon photos in my 2005 Marathon Set on Flickr.

Brooklyn Nets Update

My opinion (or non-opinion) has hardly changed, but Henry at True Hoop is on the case, and when he points his attention to a topic it quickly becomes bigger news in mainstream outlets. No Land Grab is still the best source for anti-stadium news.

Gatorade Responds

In follow up to my earlier post about nutrition, Susan let me know that protein in a sports drink could be helpful but that carbs were what you needed. What she also told me (correct me if I'm wrong, S!) is that during a race, even a long race, water is more than enough.

Henry at True Hoop finally got response from Gatorade, and it's pretty interesting. The summary paragraph is below, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

I invite your thoughts, and would add one of my own: As much as Dr. Murray seems to be pooh-poohing the existing claims of his competitors with protein drinks, he is at the same time very much leaving the door open to joining that market niche. That last comment makes me think it might be sooner rather than later, and his PR strategy of downplaying the quality of the science leads me to predict Gatorade will first release or promote some new study showing in some new way that protein in sports drinks is, in fact, beneficial to athletes.

Tour de France Google Earth Maps

Tour de France Google Earth Maps
Originally uploaded by plemeljr.

Tour De France Maps for Google Earth allow PC users to track the stages through Google Earth's satellite view.

Get a Tour De France cyclist to wear a GPS and map it on Google Earth real time, and then I'll be really impressed.

The NBA Draft

9:15 – I'm telling you, Vitale is like Confucius tonight. He just had this rant after the Granger pick: "I get so carried away sometimes hearing all these people talking about quickness, jumping ability, wingspan, hey, this isn't track and field, this is basketball!" Listening to Dickie V tonight makes me feel like Katie Holmes hearing Tom Cruise discuss Scientology for the first time – I feel like he's unlocking a key to a higher being or something. Or, it might just be the blood-red background.

Bill Simmons is always funny, but sometimes he's the funniest man alive. I'm this close to creating a Katie Holmes category.

Kranepool, Hello.MLBLOGS

If you're a baseball fan, take a look at Kranepool, my mlblogs blog. It's an Baseball-branded version of Typepad. The templates are nice, albeit simple. I like having a place to dump every single once of my baseball thoughts, since I feel a little guilty doing it here.

A few annoyances:

• For my friends to comment, they have to register an mlb.com account. This is totally unreasonable. (Friends! Feel free to gripe here)


• You can't view your traffic or stats


• Your bandwidth quota is .25 GB a month - which is puny. Hello, Typepad goes through that every week.


• It's relatively cheap ($50/yr), but it's still plastered with MLB ads. Unacceptable for a paid service!

I've left some trouble tickets around these issues, lest you think I'm a total whiner. (I'm only a partial whiner.)

Ichiro 57 redux

I was sadly but predictably overly opimistic in my prediction that Ichiro had a chance to hit safely in 57 straight games this year. Currently, Ichiro is only averaging 4 at bats a game! If he hits .407 over a 57 game span, he still has only a .037% chance of hitting in all of those games. If he hits .500 over 57 games, he only has a 2.526% chance.

I've uploaded my spreadsheet about Ichiro to Hello.Typepad's high capacity servers. If someone can make this better or has some comments (paging Erik Benson), please do.

At bats have their own column (instead of just a single cell) because presumably the more he's walking, the less official at bats overall and the higher his batting average climbs. If someone can model that reliably, the spreadsheet will be much smarter. I also believe there is a minimax point at which Ichiro has a high on-base percentage and a relatively high chance of compiling a long hit streak.

It would also be fun if there was a server where you could pull down live stats, especially average at bats per game, Ichiro's current hit streak, and of course current batting average.

Ichiro 57

While knuckleheads continue to debate an old fake news story (did he or didn't he do something that wasn't against baseball's rules and wasn't against the law and may or may not have helped his game? .. Got off track, sorry. )

I'm wondering whether or not this fake news story will come true. My money's on Yes.

Mocking Me With His Smile

Rockets stop Heat winning streak at 12:

Mutombo was whistled for a technical late in the third quarter after complaining about a foul on O'Neal. After the call, Mutombo held up both arms in disbelief and the Rockets' bench and fans exploded in protest. "He was mocking me with his smile," official Joe Crawford explained to incredulous Houston coach Jeff Van Gundy.

I would love to read a Malcolm Gladwell piece about Blink and sports officiating. I've long believed (and I think it's generally accepted) that 50% of penalties and fouls in sports don't get called, and 50% of the ones that do get called never happened.

Mindshare

kottke says:

Meg, Ev, Paul Bausch, Ben, and Mena are PC Magazine's People of the Year,  Recognized for something called "blogging".

Pat Riley once observed that as Michael Jordan's legend grew his name shrunk - from Michael Jordan, to Michael (temporarily causing a cultural logjam with "The Gloved One"), to Mike (thanks, Gatorade), before finally settling down at "MJ." The Washington Post referred to him briefly as "M" during his ill-fated stint with the Wizards, but it didn't stick. I bring this up because I call "Paul Bausch" "pb," even though I've only met him a few times. He never scored a double nickel in The Garden, but he did invent the permalink.

Thanks to Google Suggest, we have a whole new way to think about the alphabet. A is for Amazon, not Apple. Will this replace the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which was "developed in the 1950s to be intelligible and pronounceable to all NATO allies in the heat of battle"? Fifty years later, the Google Alphabet suggests a different set of priorities: Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Verizon and Zip Codes.

I enjoyed a brief stay as the #1 David Jacobs, but I'm humbled to occupy second place heading into the new year.

Barry Bonds, Steroids, and Hypocrisy

Although the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story (probably the law as well, since Grand Jury testimony is supposed to stay confidential), the New York Times has been leading the charge to take down Bonds and Giambi for their alleged violations.

Steroid Revelations Hardly Considered Surprising.

John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor who has written extensively about performance-enhancing drugs, recommends a renunciation of athletes as role models and an emphasis on intramural and club sports, which are devoted to the joys of participation and the improvement of public health.

I couldn't agree more. I find the pursuit of sport immensely satisfying, whether it's pickup basketball, running, cycling or Sunday softball. I love the gradual improvement, running farther, getting leaner, and the camraderie of my friends. On the topic of role models, my own running partners are as good as anyone's I would wager, and I think I can safely say that aside from the clear air of Alaina's California, none of us are ingesting performance enhancing chemicals.

But the level of hypocrisy surrounding this debate, amidst calls to suspend or ban players, is insane. Bonds, Sheffield and Giambi and all other Major League players were gifted with skill and had to develop nearly unfathomable discipline to perform at the elite level of professional sport. The late great Ralph Wiley once said:

There is nothing, absolutely nothing on this green earth that you can eat drink, sniff, inject or rub on yourself that can make you hit 700 home runs in the Show. That product exists only in our collective imagination, and if he did drink the spiked Kool-Aid, so to speak, this would include Bonds.

Because if that were the case, in spite of all the "outrage," bottles of the stuff would be getting knocked back by just about everybody. People who are currently "outraged" would not only use it, they'd have their kids on it.

Amen. He also said:

Why is it when NFL football players are shot up in their ankles and calves and knees and rib cages and shoulders and necks with pain-killers to numb themselves and then go out and sacrifice their damaged limbs so they can perform for us, we have no outrage over that?

Why indeed. I'm sure that the NFL and NBA will also come under pressure to test their players for steroids. What about runners who train at high distances, thinning their blood and improving it's ability to deliver oxygen to muscles? Should we dynamite the mountain passes in Africa where elite marathoners shave those last seconds off of each mile? Why stop at sports? Should those who have used Viagra stop having sex? What about bored surbanites who dropped acid - can we revoke their right to imagination? High Schoolers get prescriptions to calm them into "attention," and don't get me started on the percentage of our produce that is genetically modified or the pesticides and steroids that find their way into our bellies via meat, dairy and fish.

Of course, I'll be sad if it turns out Serena Williams, Lance Armstrong, Rasheed Wallace, Jason Kottke, Mike Piazza or one of my other favorite athletes are guilty of tilting the playing field, but I don't think it's earth shattering, especially in a culture as chemical dependent as ours.

djacobs globehead

djacobs globehead 
Originally uploaded by &mark.

I love this!

Dead Finn

It could have been worse, it could have been 19-18.
Originally uploaded by david.

Racist Judges Cost Williams Another Match

CENTER COURT: New Yorkers boo cheater Capriati who claims "I deserve to get a call once in a while." Crooked judge Alves (straight out of TV show) responds "Please calm down."

AP: Unfairly, unbelievably, Serena Williams was robbed of a point by an umpire's mistake at the U.S. Open, just like her sister was at Wimbledon

Gothamist yet to comment. Developing...

Gymnastics

Adriana has been googling for an hour straight, mumbling about the long gone Glory Days of gymnastics. I request a post, to which she replies "I can't put it into words."

Tour De Jeopardy

As much as unpredictably and tension fuel humanity's obsession with contests and sport, I believe we're also comforted by those whose performance we expect. Just as we all have food, clothing and music that elicit feelings of instant nostalgia, I'm reassured that the universe is in order when an athlete performs exactly as expected. The consistency of Lance Armstrong dominating Le Tour, Serena Williams (Anna who? Serena represents the pinnacle of human physical potential) winning a grand slam, Michael Jordan hitting the big shot in his heyday, even Takeru Kobayashi shaking down four and a half hot dogs a minute. Even losing is comforting - after a long solitary walk and falafel dinner last night I found myself in a Bay Ridge bar guzzling Bass and watching the Mets. They lost, of course. If they start winning I'm not sure what I'll do with myself.

Anyway, I'm thinking about all of this because I googled Ken Jennings and Jason "Mr. Google" Kottke's entry The cult of Ken Jennings was the first result. Jason, I salute your continued dominance over the world's greatest information resource. It's quite a streak. (Other Ken Jennings pages: wikipedia: Ken Jennings, TV Game Shows: Ken Jennings, JeopardyJennings: Ken Jennings).

And Now for Something Completely Local (with National Implications)

I'm posting a long-winded, hot-headed letter I just wrote and emailed to some elected officials here about a stadium development project proposed for a few blocks away from my Brooklyn apartment (it seems much longer in this blog than it did on paper). Last weekend, the organizers of "develop don't destroy-brooklyn" hosted a community block party and rally in protest of the development. I just got an email saying that the City Council will vote on Monday. See more here. As I say below in the letter, this whole thing -- claiming eminent domain to push people out of their homes, claiming stadium development brings job growth and economic booms -- has been proven wrong time and time again in cities across the country. Plus, on a very personal note, I love my neighborhood and don't want to see it bulldozed over by developers who don't ensure affordable housing or equal opportunity employment who create more breeding grounds for McDonalds.

The Letter:

To Whom it May Concern:

I came home to my Ft. Greene apartment last week to discover the full-color promotional brochure for the “Atlantic Yards” – the name for the new stadium-and-condo complex planned for my neighborhood.

With its full-color spread of smiling faces and laundry list of benefits of the development, it was still just high-priced propaganda. With its tear-out reply card, it was also a bald-faced bribe to get the community “show” its support: Everyone who checked “Yes, I support the Atlantic Yards!” and sent it in was promised free tickets to a basketball game in the proposed new stadium.

What the fancy brochure failed to mention are the dozens of legitimate concerns that citizen groups have voiced about the development through the organizing work of “Develop Don’t Destroy-Brooklyn.”

The fancy brochure failed to mention how these concerns have been silenced by developers. (The one community meeting I tried to attend was canceled without warning, and community members at the recent public forum had to wait five hours to testify, by which point most of the daily media had already left to begin filing their stories).

In cities across the country, we’ve seen the same process unfold: Rich investors and gung-ho developers promise the world in exchange for stadium development – jobs, tax revenue, family entertainment. The stadiums are built. The jobs are fewer than expected, the tax revenue less than predicted, the benefits of entertainment overshadowed by congestion, traffic, noise, and crowds. In Pittsburgh, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, we’ve seen it all before. The verdict on stadium development is in: Stadiums never bring all the benefits developers promise. Why, then, should hundreds of million of public dollars go to this project? Why, then, should hundreds of families lose their homes? Why should our elected officials, those who are supposed to represent the interests of the majority of the community, bow to the demands of high-rolling developers?

One of the defining characteristics of our neighborhood (Ft. Greene and Prospect Heights) is the local, small businesses that make up the commercial real estate here. By bringing in multinational franchises such as Red Lobster, KFC, and McDonalds, the proposed plan would fundamentally change the nature of the neighborhood.

Economists and urban planners have proven the strongest urban economies are localized ones, where dollars circulate within communities. With the influx of these mega-chains we will not only lose local flavor, we will lose our strong, localized economy.

Traffic, already at extraordinarily high levels (haven’t we all been stuck in stop-and-go Flatbush traffic at 3 in the afternoon, 3 in the morning, and every hour in between?), will be worsened by the presence of more than 15,000 visitors on game nights and thousands more in the stadium, condos, and mall slated for development.

Air quality will further be affected by increased congestion and development.

Cultural traditions, on which this borough was built, will be eviscerated with the imposition of high-rises in place of Brownstones and sports bars in the place of corner stores.

It would be a travesty to the cultural legacy and the economic health of this incredible borough – not to mention the democratic process – for Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan to be approved.

As a resident of this community, I strongly oppose the plan, as do hundreds of my other like-minded neighbors.

Sincerely,

Anna Lappé
Ft. Greene, Brooklyn

Work E-Mail

Folks,

Today I ran across all three East River bridges, it was awesome. We cheated a little bit (at my request - Alaina is often slowing down or resting on my behalf) - walking some in Chinatown. It was wet. Of course, I took pictures with my phone. The weirdest one is here (Alaina's pictures are here)

On my way home I had both a Pepsi and a Coke, I think I prefer Pepsi - is that possible?

Yesterday I started some coriander seeds, tonight I'll plant some basil seeds, and then Adriana and I are going to see "Van Helsing," starring Kate Beckinsale and Wolverine.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Kate Lyons and Jenny Baum were involved in a team spirit exercise at the Central Library. The question at hand was "If you were stranded on a desert Island, who would your companion be and why?" They wrote their answers down on scrap paper. Kate's read "Jenny, because she's such a great partner, and together we can solve problems that we couldn't alone." Jenny's read: "Wolverine, because he can cut down coconut trees with his claws and defend us from wild animals."

Thanks,

David

The Other Big Trade This Week

I loved Rasheed, but I could grow into Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Theo Ratliff in the front court. The Pistons are title contenders right now, if you ask me.

On the Brooklyn Nets' New Stadium

With the sale of the Nets complete, one of the three major hurdles to moving the Nets to Brooklyn is behind Ratner. Number 2, getting the MTA to release the land, is a no brainer. The 3rd, getting the state to invoke eminent domain over the three blocks of brownstones in the way of stadium's plans, is obviously the most controversial and questionable step left.

A more ethnically, economically and commercially diverse crew would be hard to assemble, even in New York City. Within the three-block chunk imagined for demolition, there are artists and auto body shops, a world-famous violin builder, a cherished neighborhood bar and a small company that makes hats for church ladies.

Meanwhile, Mary Markowitz calls the opportunity "exciting ... It Brings Brooklyn back to the big leagues." Ah, excuse me, wasn't Brooklyn already the country's 4th largest city? That's fairly big league. My predictably "urbanist" response should be anti-stadium, but I'm torn. Obviously, I'm not in favor of tearing down brownstones, and like William Rhoden, I don't think this has anything to do with nostalgia and the Dodgers. I am the most nostalgic person you know (or don't know), and my Dad grew up a Dodgers fan in the Bronx. They left Brooklyn just as he was getting old enough to go to games by himself, so not even Jay-Z's Brooklyn Nets would begin to heal that wound. (Moving the Mets to Sunset Park, on the other hand....)

But I'm excited at the prospect of living so close to what might be Gehry's crowning achievement as an architect, and the end result would be not only a new stadium, but the eyesore that is the Long Island Railroad yards partially transformed into public park space and 4,500 new apartments. I'd love for a left-leaning think tank to study the effects that 4 new apartment towers right on top of the Times Square of Brooklyn (there, I said it) would have on gentrification of the outlying neighborhoods. If the new living space lets some of the older and further out neighborhoods retain their identity, are't three blocks in Prospect Heights a price we should consider paying? Of course, I don't know anything about this, and there's an equal chance that these new developments could accelerate gentrification, or cause a dramatic depreciation in property values in Prospect Heights, Fort Green and Park Slope which would set Brooklyn's economic resurgence back 15 years. That's why there should be a study.

Serena Williams on Law & Order: SVU

After a hard day in the salt mines of my Macintosh flat panel display and my first ever meetup (the "organizers" didn't show up, don't ask), I find my Adriana sitting on our inflatable bed, her right hand numb from an all-day Zelda marathon, a small plate of olive oil and bread crumbs at her side. "I'm thinking we'll have beans & rice for dinner tonight." This is why I love her.

Only Serena Williams on SVU could reclaim our attention. Also, tonight's victim was a web designer, we get a free Seabiscuit reference and the same actor who was a porn magnate on last Friday's Monk has a minor role.

CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW OF EXCLUSIVE HELLO, TYPEPAD SVU SCREENSHOT

Update: Gothamist is watching too, with a more exhaustive episode summary. Also, what is this "blog without spellcheck" they're talking about? Don't all blogs lack spellcheck?

Episode wrap-up, final update:
axt: "I hate fraternities"
dj: "They were forbidden at Oberlin!"
axt: "But you had cooperatives, and those are scary too. I've heard the stories."

A little bit on Race

Al Sharpton's appearance on Saturday Night Live must be one of the most over-analyzed programs ever, but Jen from The Gothamist still managed to find a fresh perspective:

It was depressing because as many of the skits became black–focused, it showed how we really don't see the black performers consistently (same goes for the Halle Berry hosted episode); many of the white players only appeared in a rather amusing sketch about the other Democratic candidates watching Al on SNL.

I don't watch enough to know, but that sounds right. When I do watch, I'm looking out for the one Black cast member to show up in the credits. Considering how many Black SNL stars go on to success, I'm surprised SNL's talent scouts don't go further out of their way to find more non-white(*) talent.

Ah, also, the fallout from Rasheed Wallace's interview with the Oregonian has offered us a useful opportunity to refute some common race-colored commentary we see in the Sports press and the rest of press. Here's Brian Meehan:

Sheed

But there is no ambivalence, no question about how he feels, in the strong language he uses to criticize the NBA and how it treats black players. In a league where all but one team owner and a vast majority of the decision-makers are white, a league where an estimated 80 percent of the players are black, race is always an issue just below the surface but one rarely discussed.

Rasheed Wallace has been my favorite player since the time I lived in Portland. I'm shocked but pleased to see an even-handed interview with him in the Oregonian. There's a thread over at Sportsfilter, where I talk a little more about my experience with Rasheed in Portland.

JerseyGirl

There's been a lot of talk about Curt Schilling signing with the Red Sox after the fans over at Sons of Sam Horn convinced him they were the best fans in all of baseball. This has caused a flurry of attention towards baseball-focused web sites. With all due respect to the Boston Dirt Dogs, SportsFilter's own JerseyGirl has consistently provided the best Red Sox/A-rod coverage on the In-TAR-net.

I Red Sox NY

Someone put this on a t-shirt!

Red Sox Village

Last night a few of us headed out to Red Sox fan haven Riviera Cafe & Sports Bar to root on the Red Sox against the Athletics. Three summers ago no Yankees fans were around on a Sunday afternoon and so a few Red Sox fans asked if their game could be on the big TV. The vibe was great and so the next night they invited some friends, and among that group was a writer for the Boston Weekly, who wrote that a 'safe space' for Red Sox fans had been created in NYC. The rest is history.

Tyler, a bartender from Atlanta who roots for the Braves and against the Yankees (so usually for the Red Sox) told me it was the busiest night in the bar's history. I can only imagine it was also the loudest and near the latest (although once a Bruins game there went to 3:30AM). The staff generously kept the bar open until the game's amazing conclusion, Ramón Hernandez's game winning suicide squeeze with the bases loaded. The noise in the bar dropped from a defeaning roar to utter silence as everyone quickly filed out.

My photos start in the sixth inning, click previous to move through the evening. Their's a nice radio program about the Riviera over at the ironically named onlyagame.org, featuring the quote: "It's like the Boston Tea Party, but in New York."

MTK vs. Celtic

MTK coach Sandor Egervari admits his side's Champions League hopes are now dead - even though they still have the trip to Glasgow.

He said: 'Our dreams were ruined tonight. We always knew there was a big gap between Celtic and ourselves but we hoped to make that smaller on the pitch tonight but they were too strong.'
(English, Hungarian wrap-up)

Népstadion is a breathtaking feat of Soviet architecture. The ticket booths are set in the ground like battle bunkers, it's so gigantic that there's no way to get a view of the whole structure from the ground, it's a beautiful place to see the sun set and they play Kraftwerk during warms up and at halftime. Inbetween Kraftwerk, it's the home pitch of MTK, the Hungarian League champions who count leftists, pensioners and Hungarian Jews among their staunchest supporters. Tonight we saw them lose to Celtic in a UEFA Champions league qualifier.

Among the highlights were being turned away from the foreigners-only ticket entrance, the Hungarian commentator who gasped at each of "indisputably self confident" Celtic goals, spicy pumpkin seeds, the second half substition of number 16, known to us as "Zoolander" because of his beautiful looks, quickly followed by the substitution of Celtic's number 3 "Mohammed Sylva", who promptly passed the ball to himself through Zoolander's legs not once, but twice, and a sprinkler flooding the Celtic half of the field during the second half. Lowlights include the abysmal MTK play, as well as the Sieg Heil salute given by the 200+ Hungarian skinheads in the audience for every Celtic goal. They claim it's not a hateful salute, rather it's "from the heart," reminiscent of the Tomahawk Chop.

Because the right-leaning Fradi fans root for any team that's playing the MTK and their Jewish constituency, (Gwen: that's leaning so far right that they're horizontal) they have their own fenced off section of the stadium, and were asked over the PA to remain in their seats for ten minutes following the game. Incidentally, they once burned down the very stands they were sitting in, and their website features a flash animation with a Hungarian rendering of 'YMCA.'

All Hello, Budapest pictures (to the right) and their captions are co authored by Gwen and I.

I hope all this sports nonsense keeps Nader busy for the next, oh, 2 years

Go ahead, try to return any Bryant-pitched product — from Lakers wear and Big Macs to Sprite and air-soled Nikes — and watch the sales clerk call for security. If you buy an image, and it breaks, it's yours to keep.

"Companies are marketing emotion; they're marketing hero-worship, and they're not marketing the product," said Ralph Nader, who has set up LeagueOfFans.org, a Web site for the disenfranchised fan.

I buy my sports gear on discount. New bicycle shoes: 50% off. My favorite shirt (Roberto Alomar, 1988, Orioles #12) my Dad bought for me the day after he was traded to the Blue Jays at the Orioles store: 80% off. Public opinion will forever label Bryant a rapist, but I'm sure he'll get off as a result of all this evidence that's been leaked.