Thursday, July 31, 2008

Deadline day doldrums

It's trade deadline day in the major leagues -- the last day of the season on which teams can make trades without having to pass players through waivers first, giving every other team in the majors the chance to block a deal.

For a team as badly in need of total teardown-and-rebuild as my frankly pathetic San Francisco Giants (teams in the major leagues with a worse record = 3; runs scored in the last 23 innings played = 0), the priorities should be obvious: trade whatever role-playing veterans will fetch so much as a bag of batting practice balls in return, and play the kids the rest of the year so that you know what you've got already on your roster before contemplating trades or free agent signings over the winter.

Of course, said priorities assume the collective management of said team has any common sense whatsoever left. Not this group. They're still talking about "competing" next year (for what, "Fastest Exit From The Playoffs Ever"?), still touting can't-hit, can't-field Pirates castoff Jose Castillo as a keeper, and still bad-mouthing their own young players who've never had a genuine chance to prove themselves as major leaguers (see: Dan Ortmeier, Nate Schierholtz, Emmanuel Burriss, etc., etc.).

I've been a fan of this franchise for 40 years and this is the most brain-dead, incompetent front office I have ever witnessed. The 1985 team that lost 100 games was more fun to watch than this one -- at least you had a sense that crew knew they were bad and were trying to get better. This ship just looks completely lost.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The biggest problem in America today

Is it the war in Iraq? High gas prices? The effects of global warming? The continuing plague of the American League's designated hitter rule?

Some would argue -- and on any given day, I might agree -- that it's the steadily growing gap between rich and poor, a.k.a. income inequality. A new story published today by that bastion of left-wing thought the Wall Street Journal only bolsters this perception. As the rest of the nation simmers in a frying pan of rising food and gas prices, a sluggish economy and a wave of foreclosures, how's the other half -- er, 1% -- doing?

Better than ever. According to IRS data obtained by the WSJ, "the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income in two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929." At the same time, "the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years."

In other words, if you get the sense that the rich are in fact getting richer while everyone else struggles to stay afloat, you are not a whiner engaging in class warfare, but rather an objective observer of a measurable phenomenon. The question now is, what are you going to do about it?

Monday, July 21, 2008

Morality play

It sure is nice every once in a while as I'm wading through the gossipy superficial slop that passes for online news to find something of genuine substance and interest. Thank the folks at MSNBC for this one, an article which explains what recent research illustrates about the inner workings of human morality. Given that decision-making based on moral assessment is one of the defining characteristics of human beings that separates us from other life forms, it's more than a little interesting to take an inside look at how our moral compass actually functions and where rationalization comes into play. The study described in the article suggests that "we are intuitively moral beings," but that "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad." The fact that people are able to rationalize actions that most would reflexively identify as wrong is at the root of more modern problems than there is space here to list.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Many of you have probably already seen this video, which recently became such a phenomenon that the New York Times devoted an entire article to it. The most amazing thing about it for this particular viewer (i.e. me) was that I recognized people in it -- and so will anyone reading this who received our 2000 holiday card, complete with photos of our family with a group of tribal dancers in full makeup and feathers in Papua New Guinea. (If you prefer, higher def original version is here, and more about Matt Harding is here.)

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The latest threat: tabloid spam

As if the real tabloids aren't bad enough, now we've got tabloid spam. No, it's not a subscription pitch from Weekly World News... it's a vicious Internet worm designed to hijack your computer, that's simply wrapped up in the tempting bow of a tabloid-headline subject line. I got one yesterday myself, some nonsense about Tom Cruise dying in a plane crash. I was of course briefly tempted to find out if poor Katie was finally free of her megalomaniacal spouse, but the better angels of my nature won out and I deleted with prejudice. Better luck next time, guys. "Giants trade seven veterans for one young slugger" -- that's how you'd get me.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Tim Lincecum: The Freak

The Giants haven't given this fan a whole lot to cheer for this season. Sure, they've done better than some expected and it's been great watching younger players like John Bowker and Fred Lewis and Jonathan Sanchez get the chance to develop. But the team has been so poorly managed that it's become actively painful for me to watch as Bruce Bochy and Brain Sabean have let half a season go to waste playing veterans and pretending they're in a pennant race instead of embracing the need to rebuild and playing the kids.

That's a rant for another day, though; today we're here to celebrate "The Freak," as some call him, or "The Franchise," as others have dubbed the most unlikely pitching hero you've ever seen throw a slashing 98 MPH heater across the outside corner. Tim Lincecum, all of 24 years old, 5' 11" and 172 pounds, is well on his way to being a national story, and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has given The Franchise just the sort of awestruck write-up that he deserves. The kid is for real, and it's going to be incredibly fun watching his legend grow.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Tyson Gay and the dangers of auto-replace

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford's rant of the day for today pointed me to one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks. It seems that the wing-nut Puritan cult that is the American Family Association (Hmm, my family is as American as they come... why don't I see my values represented there?) is so virulently homophobic that they installed an auto-replace filter on their "family-friendly" news feed that changes the word "gay" to "homosexual" wherever it appears in stories that post onto their site. This is merely pathetic until a major athletic figure with the last name of "Gay" starts appearing regularly in news stories, leading to headlines like the one below. Hilarity ensues.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

The David Palmer Factor

I wrote back in January ("Where reality and fiction blur") about the possibility -- which even I regarded with some skepticism -- that Dennis Haysbert's four-year run on the television drama 24 playing a strong, courageous African-American president might have laid some of the cultural groundwork necessary for the success of Barack Obama's run for president. As it turns out, Haysbert agrees.

The part that's a little scary, though, is where Haysbert talks about all the people who still to this day come up to him -- the actor who played the president -- and urge him to run. Maybe on a ticket with Harrison Ford...?