This reminds me it's been a lot of years since I used to go out on the dirt track that eventually became Allapattah Avenue over by Homestead AFB and lured baby alligators out of the canals with marshmallows. Or, to be more accurate, to distract mama with marshmallows while I netted a baby and fled. I'd keep the hatchling over the winter, feed it up, and release it into the wild again in September, after it had added about two feet, when the next generation was hatching.
Post game, Richards said his command issues were "nothing that couldn't be fixed." Really? In 4-2/3, he walked 6, hit a batter and tossed a wild pitch.
Hard to remember the last time the Mets prioritized defense. But a game like last night's was just a stinker all around. Time to switch once more to the Knicks game. (Note: as I lack cable, this is metaphorical.)
Gonna disagree about Superman II. I think Wonder Woman and Shazam are better movies, and that once Richard Donner was fired and replaced with Richard Lester, you ended up with a lesser product. Donner likes heroes, Lester likes knocking them down. It has its moments, but it is quite a step down from the first Superman film. And it's totally out of character for Superman to surrender his powers for any reason, even if this is the only version of Superman where anyone takes Larry Niven's essay about how sex with Superman will kill his lover seriously. Superman is far too responsible to give up his powers for love, or sex.
I don't know that JD Davis is viable at third base. Or at any other defensive position for that matter. Which is a shame, because I love his bat, but he was bad to begin with and now he's bad and a head case about it. And it's not as if the Mets don't have viable options, sicne they have Villar and Guillorme, both of whom are hitting, albeit without Davis' power, and have the advantage that they can be expected to catch and throw the ball adequately. (Guillorme's early season errors not withstanding)
What do you do with a guy who can really hit but can't play the field in a non-DH league for a team that already has a DH in waiting for next year?
No, they wouldn't get much back, but they should consider it if someone offers something that is more valuable to the team than keeping him around. Maybe better to wait a year and see if a DH in the NL results in more demand.
Limitations of WAR and small sample size and all that. But Davis currently has an 1.147 OPS which results in a 0.3 oWAR and a -0.2 dWAR (bRef). Which is frustrating as hell.
Yesterday was my first day at the ballpark since 2019 - just in time to watch the Cards and Nats use almost 300 pitches (Nats had 168!) on a frigid, blustery day. It was the slowest moving, least eventful game I’ve attended in a long time - but at least my guys won.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the coldest winter I ever spent was three hours yesterday at Nats Park. Brrrrrrrrr.
As a kid, I adored both Superman: The Movie and Superman II. They mostly hold up well, but that spoken-word "Can you read my mind?" music video in the first one is some weird shit.
I love the scene with Superman and Lois flying. As such, I like the poem, but yeah, it's weird. Something to fill in the silence of them soaring above the world, I guess. (Chris Reeve is still the best Superman, Margot Kidder still the best Lois with the possible exception of Dana Delaney's voice.)
Agreed on the acting. Christopher Reeve's Superman was a perfect portrayal. Confidently charming and wholesome. The whole brooding and morally conflicted Superman is anathema.
I thought the book Nomadland was better than the movie, but the movie is fine. My wife thought it was depressing. The book spent more time with some of the other characters.
I have opening day tickets for the Flying Squirrels (Giants AA team) so I'm about 2 weeks from live baseball. I have opening day tickets for our local 4th division of US Soccer team this weekend and the forecast looks like heavy rain so we'll see. There are limits to my minor league fandom.
I recommend “Why We Sleep” by a sleep researcher. It has all sorts of research about how too little sleep is correlated with dementia, depression, and a host of other things.
RIP Tom Robson, former major leaguer and coach, who was sent to scout a high school player in Virginia for the Mets, and told his bosses about this other kid named David Wright.
In fairness to the Marlins they have actually been doing a very commendable job with social distancing. I tried to get tickets to Tuesday nights game and was told by my rep nothing in the lower bowl was available because of the pod seating, and the crowd looked very similar to this.
Hi, my comment to Craig was not a dig on how the Marlins are handling the pandemic. I agree with you they are doing a wonderful job and keeping fans in the stands at a social distance. My comment, was just a fun comparison on how Marlins games in the past have been attendance wise! By the way...Go Fish! All the best,
I think it's beyond my control. I simply cannot make myself sleep more than I do. And I've tried. On the rare days I do sleep more, I get grumpy because I really like to be up early and starting my day.
As I've mentioned before, a hope -- by no means a plan, but a hope -- is that I can afford to move to California in a couple of years when the kids leave. If I do, I'll have to do my recaps and set the newsletter to publish the night before or else I'll never get the damn thing out early enough. If that happens, maybe I can train myself to stay up until midnight every night and sleep more?
California, where they have an increasing number of forest fires and a parched water table? The places that are good for retiring seem to be shrinking dramatically — global warming* is changing the environment everywhere.
*How did we let "global warming" become "climate change"?
Absolutely. My dad wakes up at 4AM every day and hasn't used an alarm clock in his adult life. Now, he also goes to bed WAY earlier, but when he was my age that was less pronounced.
Even Anna wakes up early, at least for a teenager. She's up by like 7 even on the weekends, which is insane to me. I was sleeping until 11am when I was her age.
An excessive amount, but I really don't think it matters. I have an insanely high caffeine tolerance. I can drink a cup of coffee at 9pm after a dinner out (I do that more often than get dessert, actually) and be happily snoozing at 10pm, no problem. I don't have any issues with the actual sleeping or getting to sleep. I don't suffer from insomnia. I just wake the hell up, basically refreshed, after 6 hours.
The amount of sleeping I do is entirely within my control. I didn't really understand how much I enjoyed it until I retired. An average of two species goes extinct during one of my naps. Now, when I re-watch "Carnal Knowledge" and Ann Margaret is bellyaching to Jack Nicholson about how much time she spends sleeping and how her solution to it is for him to marry her, I have to feel sorry for poor Jack.
Ted Cruz is not dumb. Dumb people don't graduate from Harvard Law School. If he were dumb, it would be an excuse for his actions, in that he'd be too dumb to know better. But he's just evil, which is worse.
Yeah....you can meet some dummies with objectively impressive credentials in adult life. I do think I Cruz is more “playing dumb” than “dumb dumb.” But OTOH he seems to still think he can be President even as a total charisma vacuum so in many of the most important ways, he IS dumb.
I don't think much about his lack of charisma. First thing always comes to mind when I see a picture of him is how much he resembles an eggbound parakeet.
Totally. Ted Cruz (and Tom Cotton for that matter) are not dumb, but are actively playing dumb to court the Trumpsters in a presidential bid. Unfortunately for Cruz and Cotton, there are some truly dumb candidates, so the Trumpsters don't have to settle on poseurs.
I don't know -- anyone who gets dunked on by Trump as frequently as Cruz did can't own the highest SAT score in the room. :D
One huge problem with how we educate people in this country is the assumption that someone who has a memory that enables them to regurgitate things must also be intelligent. Once upon a time, I imagined becoming a medical doctor, and found myself in my college's pre-med program. Some of my peers were some of the biggest fucking dolts I can remember in my four years at school. Many of them are actual doctors today. Ask them to learn the Kreb's cycle, and they could spend ten minutes looking at it and regurgitate it almost immediately. Asking them to *explain* it was an entirely different story and result. Few of them could, nor understood why I though it was important that they could.
Lots of RAM and fast cache access can make it look like your computer is truly amazing, but what really matters is the code. My personal struggles were always around how quickly I could cram data into my pea-brain: there's not a lot of bandwidth there. I needed to truly understand something in order to learn it, as opposed to many of my peers who had a much stronger ability to simply remember and repeat things, giving them the impression they were intelligent.
I once dated a woman with a PhD from Penn who thought she was omniscient. One night I watched her fuck up a frozen pizza because the concept of preheating an oven eluded her.
Being a good student and being smart are two completely different things.
Lucky you that that video brought Chrissie to mind. All I could think was Rush Limbaugh.
you have no idea how much this makes me miss central florida
This reminds me it's been a lot of years since I used to go out on the dirt track that eventually became Allapattah Avenue over by Homestead AFB and lured baby alligators out of the canals with marshmallows. Or, to be more accurate, to distract mama with marshmallows while I netted a baby and fled. I'd keep the hatchling over the winter, feed it up, and release it into the wild again in September, after it had added about two feet, when the next generation was hatching.
Post game, Richards said his command issues were "nothing that couldn't be fixed." Really? In 4-2/3, he walked 6, hit a batter and tossed a wild pitch.
Oof.
Hard to remember the last time the Mets prioritized defense. But a game like last night's was just a stinker all around. Time to switch once more to the Knicks game. (Note: as I lack cable, this is metaphorical.)
Gonna disagree about Superman II. I think Wonder Woman and Shazam are better movies, and that once Richard Donner was fired and replaced with Richard Lester, you ended up with a lesser product. Donner likes heroes, Lester likes knocking them down. It has its moments, but it is quite a step down from the first Superman film. And it's totally out of character for Superman to surrender his powers for any reason, even if this is the only version of Superman where anyone takes Larry Niven's essay about how sex with Superman will kill his lover seriously. Superman is far too responsible to give up his powers for love, or sex.
I don't know that JD Davis is viable at third base. Or at any other defensive position for that matter. Which is a shame, because I love his bat, but he was bad to begin with and now he's bad and a head case about it. And it's not as if the Mets don't have viable options, sicne they have Villar and Guillorme, both of whom are hitting, albeit without Davis' power, and have the advantage that they can be expected to catch and throw the ball adequately. (Guillorme's early season errors not withstanding)
What do you do with a guy who can really hit but can't play the field in a non-DH league for a team that already has a DH in waiting for next year?
Trade him?
Yeah, but the supply of DH types exceeds the demand, so they probably wouldn't get much.
No, they wouldn't get much back, but they should consider it if someone offers something that is more valuable to the team than keeping him around. Maybe better to wait a year and see if a DH in the NL results in more demand.
Limitations of WAR and small sample size and all that. But Davis currently has an 1.147 OPS which results in a 0.3 oWAR and a -0.2 dWAR (bRef). Which is frustrating as hell.
Is this a "Daniel Murphy" situation?
Superman II works if thought of as "The Last Temptation of Superman."
Yesterday was my first day at the ballpark since 2019 - just in time to watch the Cards and Nats use almost 300 pitches (Nats had 168!) on a frigid, blustery day. It was the slowest moving, least eventful game I’ve attended in a long time - but at least my guys won.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the coldest winter I ever spent was three hours yesterday at Nats Park. Brrrrrrrrr.
Frank Mc Court is the rich man's Jeff Smulyan. See Seattle Mariners former dipshit owner.
Of course, the REAL Houston quote is "Mojo has come to Houston" from "Friday Night Lights."
As a kid, I adored both Superman: The Movie and Superman II. They mostly hold up well, but that spoken-word "Can you read my mind?" music video in the first one is some weird shit.
I love the scene with Superman and Lois flying. As such, I like the poem, but yeah, it's weird. Something to fill in the silence of them soaring above the world, I guess. (Chris Reeve is still the best Superman, Margot Kidder still the best Lois with the possible exception of Dana Delaney's voice.)
Agreed on the acting. Christopher Reeve's Superman was a perfect portrayal. Confidently charming and wholesome. The whole brooding and morally conflicted Superman is anathema.
I thought the book Nomadland was better than the movie, but the movie is fine. My wife thought it was depressing. The book spent more time with some of the other characters.
I have opening day tickets for the Flying Squirrels (Giants AA team) so I'm about 2 weeks from live baseball. I have opening day tickets for our local 4th division of US Soccer team this weekend and the forecast looks like heavy rain so we'll see. There are limits to my minor league fandom.
I recommend “Why We Sleep” by a sleep researcher. It has all sorts of research about how too little sleep is correlated with dementia, depression, and a host of other things.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1501144324/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_06K9NM17WP8PHJPVCRJK
Seconding the recommendation.
RIP Tom Robson, former major leaguer and coach, who was sent to scout a high school player in Virginia for the Mets, and told his bosses about this other kid named David Wright.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/31302784/tom-robson-former-mlb-player-coach-dies-age-75
In fairness to the Marlins they have actually been doing a very commendable job with social distancing. I tried to get tickets to Tuesday nights game and was told by my rep nothing in the lower bowl was available because of the pod seating, and the crowd looked very similar to this.
Hi, my comment to Craig was not a dig on how the Marlins are handling the pandemic. I agree with you they are doing a wonderful job and keeping fans in the stands at a social distance. My comment, was just a fun comparison on how Marlins games in the past have been attendance wise! By the way...Go Fish! All the best,
Lou Schiff
“Kinda important to “Nomadland” because it’s called, you know, “NOMANDLAND.””
Actually, pretty sure it’s called “NOMADLAND”....but in all fairness I haven’t seen it yet.
no wonder you guys, craig and whatshisdick watched different movies!
You say the sleep story is news you can use, but don't seem to be saying you have any intent to use it.
I think it's beyond my control. I simply cannot make myself sleep more than I do. And I've tried. On the rare days I do sleep more, I get grumpy because I really like to be up early and starting my day.
Don't give him ideas or he'll have to rename this newsletter "A ham sandwich" because we'll be reading it at lunchtime.
As I've mentioned before, a hope -- by no means a plan, but a hope -- is that I can afford to move to California in a couple of years when the kids leave. If I do, I'll have to do my recaps and set the newsletter to publish the night before or else I'll never get the damn thing out early enough. If that happens, maybe I can train myself to stay up until midnight every night and sleep more?
At least that'd be the theory.
California, where they have an increasing number of forest fires and a parched water table? The places that are good for retiring seem to be shrinking dramatically — global warming* is changing the environment everywhere.
*How did we let "global warming" become "climate change"?
Try that again--
I recommend housing in Bakersfield or thereabouts; by the time you arrive, it'll be prime coastal RE.
So it was more news you wish you could use.
I assume going to bed at 9:30 is off the table?
I do that once in a while. Most of the time I'm not tired enough to sleep then. When I do go to bed that earlier I wake up at like 4.
Really sounds like you might be one of those rare "short sleepers."
Does needing relatively little sleep run in your family? https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-identified-people-who-need-little-sleep#:~:text=Scientists%20identified%20a%20gene%20that,investigate%20for%20new%20sleep%20treatments.
Absolutely. My dad wakes up at 4AM every day and hasn't used an alarm clock in his adult life. Now, he also goes to bed WAY earlier, but when he was my age that was less pronounced.
Even Anna wakes up early, at least for a teenager. She's up by like 7 even on the weekends, which is insane to me. I was sleeping until 11am when I was her age.
Time to sequence the Calcaterras!
Move a couple of time zones east and you'll be fine. Which would mean Atlantic time, so how does Greenland, Brazil, or Argentina sound?
11!??. I was waking up around 3PM when I was 15-17
Beyond your control? This newsletter is "Cup of Coffee." How many do you drink each day?
An excessive amount, but I really don't think it matters. I have an insanely high caffeine tolerance. I can drink a cup of coffee at 9pm after a dinner out (I do that more often than get dessert, actually) and be happily snoozing at 10pm, no problem. I don't have any issues with the actual sleeping or getting to sleep. I don't suffer from insomnia. I just wake the hell up, basically refreshed, after 6 hours.
I'm about at 6 hrs of sleep a day, since, oh, since about the time my son was born, 1992. dropped coffee a few years later.
The amount of sleeping I do is entirely within my control. I didn't really understand how much I enjoyed it until I retired. An average of two species goes extinct during one of my naps. Now, when I re-watch "Carnal Knowledge" and Ann Margaret is bellyaching to Jack Nicholson about how much time she spends sleeping and how her solution to it is for him to marry her, I have to feel sorry for poor Jack.
Ted Cruz is not dumb. Dumb people don't graduate from Harvard Law School. If he were dumb, it would be an excuse for his actions, in that he'd be too dumb to know better. But he's just evil, which is worse.
"Dumb people don't graduate from Harvard Law School."
OBJECTION! Assumes facts not in evidence.
Yeah....you can meet some dummies with objectively impressive credentials in adult life. I do think I Cruz is more “playing dumb” than “dumb dumb.” But OTOH he seems to still think he can be President even as a total charisma vacuum so in many of the most important ways, he IS dumb.
I don't think much about his lack of charisma. First thing always comes to mind when I see a picture of him is how much he resembles an eggbound parakeet.
Reminds me of Marc Andreessen where first thing that always comes to mind when I see a picture of him is an egg.
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fsaritharai%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F02%2FMarc_Andreessen-1200x792.jpg
Totally. Ted Cruz (and Tom Cotton for that matter) are not dumb, but are actively playing dumb to court the Trumpsters in a presidential bid. Unfortunately for Cruz and Cotton, there are some truly dumb candidates, so the Trumpsters don't have to settle on poseurs.
True up to a point, but they do keep getting elected. How wrong can they be?
I don't know -- anyone who gets dunked on by Trump as frequently as Cruz did can't own the highest SAT score in the room. :D
One huge problem with how we educate people in this country is the assumption that someone who has a memory that enables them to regurgitate things must also be intelligent. Once upon a time, I imagined becoming a medical doctor, and found myself in my college's pre-med program. Some of my peers were some of the biggest fucking dolts I can remember in my four years at school. Many of them are actual doctors today. Ask them to learn the Kreb's cycle, and they could spend ten minutes looking at it and regurgitate it almost immediately. Asking them to *explain* it was an entirely different story and result. Few of them could, nor understood why I though it was important that they could.
Lots of RAM and fast cache access can make it look like your computer is truly amazing, but what really matters is the code. My personal struggles were always around how quickly I could cram data into my pea-brain: there's not a lot of bandwidth there. I needed to truly understand something in order to learn it, as opposed to many of my peers who had a much stronger ability to simply remember and repeat things, giving them the impression they were intelligent.
Good analogy with intelligence and computers.
Oh the dunkings he would get!
I once dated a woman with a PhD from Penn who thought she was omniscient. One night I watched her fuck up a frozen pizza because the concept of preheating an oven eluded her.
Being a good student and being smart are two completely different things.
Maybe that's all part of the Republican's strategy in Ohio: Get the damn libs to move out, or not move in, so the state stays reliably Republican.
Sure. They want Mississippi's government. Unfortunately, that also will likely bring along Mississippi's economy.