Archive for January, 2010

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I’m just pissed off and excited.

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Pissed off: I did my Federal and State Income Taxes. Would it be too much to ask that the Federal Government and the State of Iowa actually make these tax forms understandable to the average person? They keep using vague and ambiguous terms that could mean anything and nothing. State Governments have demanded that cell phone companies make less confusing statements. I ask the government to make a less confusing tax form. Or just dump income taxes across the board. Get rid of all of them. If we did that, we’d be able to fund the same government we had in 1999.

Excited: iPad. Technology is way cool. I mean, sure it’s just a giant iPod Touch with just more features and a bigger screen. But it’s very cool that something so powerful could be made so small and thin and light weight. Remember ten years ago when computer screens weighed a ton and would bend desks because they were so heavy and gigantic. Now my screen on my laptop might weigh 1/2 a pound. I dunno. Everything just keeps getting better and easier to use. Especially if you’re not using Windows. But I’m not buying one. I have a laptop and an iPod Touch and that’s plenty good for now.

Pissed off: State of the Union. Ya know, I’m too busy playing WoW to actually watch it. I heard they moved it to accommodate Lost. Hehehe. It reminds me of those ABC guys who thought it was horrible that Monday Night Football would preempt Bewitched back in the early 70′s. So yeah, if you want a reason to be pissed off at that whole thing, read Anthony Gregory’s take on it. He’s awesome.

UPDATE 11:50 PM: Also props to Judge Andrew Napolitano for pointing out why Samuel Alito was justified in mouthing “That’s not true.” during the State of the Union. At least he didn’t yell out “You Lie!” like an idiot.

Excited: Baseball Prospectus annual PECOTA projections came out today and they have the Pirates projected to win 70 games! Now that’s progress. Of course, PECOTA isn’t a guarantee of anything. I mean the same projections have no team getting above 90 wins outside the AL East and the Nationals winning 82 while the Marlins are in last place. Also last season, they gave the Cubs a 62% chance of making the playoffs while the Cards and Rockies had 18% and 14% respectively.

I just wonder if they win 70 or even 75, would people like Smizik and Chass see the Pirates making progress or would they still write their little bitch-fest columns on how the Pirates aren’t spending money.

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Posted in Apple Stuff, Pirates, Political Mind Dump | Comments Off

The best WoW moment ever.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

So tonight I was questing in the Eastern and Western Plaguelands when I decided to call it a night and head back to Orgrimmar and get trained since I got to level 56 right before I decided to quit. I got on my new wolf mount (thanks to me being exalted in Orgrimmar) and rode to the zepplin tower near Under City.

I stop there and waited for the Zepplin when this level 1 Blood Elf Rogue named “Buutmunch” asked if he could ride the wolf with me. I said “No” and he said I was mean. He said that he had two daggers and would munch on my butt with them. The zepplin came and we both got on board. I then challenged him to a duel. I thought for sure he’d decline. He accepted. It was an amazing fight. Over in less than 1 second. He asked what happened and I said “I won”. He then asked “how, you didn’t even touch me”. I said “I know.” I tried to explain why, mostly that he was a level 1 and I was a level 56. He then said he wanted a pet and I said you’d have to be a hunter to get one.

Noobs who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing are funny like that. I bet the game is confusing him. Oh well it was a fun moment.

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Murray Chass is retired in the Brett Favre and Jay Leno way.

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Murray Chass is so stupid in this article, it’s just maddening. Oddly, I only found it because Bob Smizik threw it up on his blog. I tell ya, those two should get a website with a bunch of other old school baseball writers. Put them all in one place so that good baseball writers will know what to avoid. Basically it’s all about Billy Beane’s comment:

“The way the system is right now, there really is no difference between a $75 million and $40 million payroll. I think a lot of small-market clubs look at that and ask, ‘Why pay $75 million when $40 million will buy me as many wins?’”

Of course, Murray responds by taking several teams that were above $40 million and yet below $75 million and were successful.

Of course, looking at those situations, those teams got there because earlier they had move funds from major league payroll to the draft, international signings and player development. Much like the Pirates have been doing the last two years. Then when their young core of players became good and started winning games, the team added to major league payroll by keeping those players on their team.

Right now, the Pirates could be spending $75 million and probably still losing 85 to 90 games a season. When they traded away their “core” during the 2008 season they were on pace to lose 90 games. The fact is that when a team losses 95 games a year, every player is expendable. The Pirates could be spending $75 million or $40 million and losing 90+ games a year. They choose to spend $35 million and lose just as much while taking the money they saved and putting it in to the draft and international talent.  That’s what Billy Beane is talking about.

He’s not talking about the teams that are going to the playoffs every year. He’s talking about the Pirates and A’s who are in down years right now and need to reallocate resources to scouting and player development from the major league payroll. I guess Billy Beane thought the average baseball writer/reader would be able to figure out that part. Evidently, Murray Chass couldn’t.

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Jay vs. Jay

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Poor Jay Leno, he really thinks we’re idiots who don’t know how to use the internet. Actually, I’m fairly certain he doesn’t know how to use the internet. Otherwise, he might have seen this article from 1992. When asked what he would do if NBC cancelled his Tonight Show and replaced it with Letterman:

Mr. Leno said he would “obviously leave NBC immediately” if the network decided to give the “Tonight” show to Mr. Letterman. He said he would absolutely refuse to do a show in the 12:30 A.M. spot now occupied by Mr. Letterman’s show, “Late Night,”

So, yeah I think Leno in 1992 was certainly well within reason to say he wouldn’t accept a bump from 11:30 to 12:30. And knowing that CBS was interested in having an 11:30 talk show, he would have just gone over there and done that show.

Leno ended up keeping his job mostly because Dave refused to take over the Tonight Show and displace Jay Leno. Dave goes to CBS and Dave kills Jay in the ratings from 1993-1995. In 1995, Hugh Grant is caught with a hooker, Leno gets the first interview and takes over Dave in the ratings and stayed there until Leno left the Tonight Show last year.

So the other day, Jay Leno makes a statement during the show in which he basically says that he was fired in 2004 so that NBC could keep Conan, even though Jay didn’t want to leave. Ok, fine that’s NBC’s stupid decision. And clearly Leno had no hard feelings about it, otherwise he wouldn’t have been such a good sport about leaving last year. But maybe this is where he could at least have had a manager to get him out of that contract. But later on he says this:

I said, ‘okay, I’m not crazy about doing a half hour, but okay. What do you want to do with Conan?’ We’ll put him on at midnight, or 12:05, keeps “The Tonight Show” does all that, he gets the whole hour. I said, okay. You think Conan will go for that?

Um…Jay? NO! Why would Conan go for that? You wouldn’t go for it in 1993, why would Conan go for it in 2010? How could Jay even accept such an arrangement without thinking about Conan? Want to know why people are sympathizing with Conan and not with you? This is why!

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Posted in Stuff on TV | 1 Comment »

The Marlins vs. Baseball.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

It’s amazing to think that the Florida Marlins are being attacked by the players union and Major League Baseball for not spending enough money. The Marlins have for the past 7 seasons had 5 winning seasons, a World Series win and only two losing seasons while sporting one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. They are a symbol of success and achievement despite being relatively unpopular in Florida and not having Yankee and Red Sox money.

They are probably the best run team in baseball. Their scouts and player development people are probably more “on the ball” than probably any other team in baseball. They play in a football stadium and they trade away players at the right time for the right return. In so many words, they are probably better at Moneyball than Billy Beane and the A’s are. Last I checked, Beane hasn’t won a World Series yet as General Manager.

So if they’re so successful at such a low cost, why go after them? You can bet most of the pressure was put on by teams like the Yankees and Red Sox who have to write them revenue sharing checks every years. But I think that’s really just a front for the reason the Marlins have been assaulted like they’ve been. It’s because the Marlins are smarter than the Yankees and Red Sox. Look at how much money the Yankees and Red Sox have to spend to win. Look at how much the Marlins have to spend.

The 2008 Yankees spent over $210 million for an 89 win team. The Marlins spent $36 million on an 84 win team. The Marlins spend money, they just spend it on scouting and player development. They know who to trade for, they know who to draft and they know who to sign in the international market. They Yankees just spend their way to winning. The Marlins think their way to winning.

Somehow the smart guys are being criticized and demonized by the press for being successful with what they have, while the Yankees are being praised for buying 5 World Series wins the last decade and a half. To me this whole thing is stupid and backwards. Next on the attack will be the Pirates, Rays and Royals.

The funny thing is that the Red Sox and Yankees are willing partners in this whole thing. The Yankees traded away Daniel McCutchen, Jeff Karstens Ross Ohlendorf and Jose Tabata to the Pirates for Xavier Nady and Damaso Marte. The Red Sox traded away Hanley Ramirez, Jesus Delgado, Harvey Garcia and Anibal Sanchez to the Marlins for Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell and Guillermo Mota. If either team was so worried about the Marlins and Pirates spending, they could have said no, keep those players because we want you to spend more. But that didn’t happen and so to me it seems stupid for the BoSox and Yanks to complain when they helped the Marlins and Pirates cut payroll….

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Posted in Major League Baseball | 1 Comment »

What?

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Dallas Cowboy linebacker Keith Brooking complained that the Vikings ran up the score against the Cowboys Sunday afternooon. He said it was classless. Whatever. If you don’t like them scoring on you, you should stop them. I mean, Brookings was on defense, that’s his fucking job. Seems to me that he’s just bitching because he and the rest of the defense didn’t do their jobs.

Besides that, this isn’t the first time in NFL playoff history that teams have run up the score. The Bears beat the Redskins in the old NFL Championship game of 1940 73-0 and that game remains the most lopsided game in NFL history. The San Francisco 49er’s won Super Bowl XXIV 55-10. The Bears won Super Bowl XX 46-10. The Vikings were beat in the NFC Championship game in 2001 41-0. He’s talking as though this never happened before.

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Bixler is gone!!!

Monday, January 18th, 2010

In honor of MLK Jr. we didn’t do farm work this afternoon. We cut wood instead. So it seemed like a pretty normal Monday in January. It was cold out with a little breeze. I came back inside and saw the insanely happy news hit my RSS feed. Brian Bixler was traded to the Indians for some low level minor leaguer named Jesus, who was born on December 25th. No shit there.

The amazing thing is that both sides think they got the better end of this deal FT(epic)W. The Pirates got a no real position guy who can’t hit a ton, but walks a lot. The Indians got a SS/2B who can’t hit a ton but strikes out a lot. I went over to the Indians blog to check out what they were saying. Sounds like both sides are fairly happy. However, at least one realistic Indians fan said:

If he (Bixler) was a pitcher I think his strike out totals would look pretty cool.

So true. At the end of the day, I doubt we’ll hear much from either Bixler or Jesus again. And that isn’t really a bad thing.

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Conan vs. NBC.

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

I remember watching Jay Leno the night it was announced that Leno would leave the Tonight Show back in 2004. He said he wanted to avoid the mess that NBC had with him and Letterman when Carson retired and just hand it over to Conan. Good job, Jay…

When NBC hired Leno over Letterman back in 1992, it was a big risk. Letterman was the hand picked successor of Carson. The first three years, Letterman killed Leno in the ratings. But because NBC stuck with Leno and backed him up, the show became successful and took over Letterman in the ratings by 1996.

If the environment that exists today was around in 1992, Leno would have been gone by New Year’s Day 1993. It just seems like TV execs have no patience at all for any TV show that doesn’t have immediate success. Having high standards is good. But canceling shows that aren’t immediate successes is a terrible, knee-jerk way to run a business. I think that long term, Conan leaving NBC and maybe taking that rumored job at Fox for the late night gig will hurt NBC a lot more than they think it will. Of course when it comes to TV ratings, you don’t end up last in the big four TV networks by accident…

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Big Baseball News for the day.

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The Pirates own Ryan Church now. I’m going to print out some Pirates 2010 World Champions posters and then get sued. It’ll be fun.

Um, actually it’s Mark McGwire and him finally admitting what everyone knew about him five years ago. I suppose it should bother me more than it does, which isn’t very much, but I just don’t care that much. Yeah, he probably did better than he would have without it. But it still takes talent to hit a baseball. I could start taking roids and start pumping iron every day and I still probably wouldn’t be able to hit a home run.

Also, I think people in this world can be a bit more forgiving about this. I mean, it just seems like people are being dicks about the whole thing. Everyone on this planet is a gigantic screw up, why set the bar that much higher for celebrities and athletes?

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PLAYOFFS? DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT PLAYOFFS!

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

We’ll be lucky to win another game. Since it’s impossible for the Steelers to win another one until September, that’d be some weird luck.

I got a bit of a shock when I forgot about the playoffs starting today. The Bengals and Jets got things started in Cincy with the Bengals being the Bungles to finish their season. I mean, this game wasn’t going to be very good since it was just the Jets and Bengals. Now the Jets will move on and lose next week, instead of the Bengals.

But for the rest, I predict that the Cowboys, Patriots and Cardinals will win this week. I’ll wait and see what happens before I start predicting what will happen next week.

In a completely different topic, Sean’s been twittering about the whole Day Care thing. Basically, they expressed some concern about the Day Care’s dog being aggressive. The Day Care people kicked them out and now they’re trying to find a new one and it sounds like all of them have a 1 year waiting list. There’s 9 months between conception and birth. Then there’s six weeks of maternity leave. So basically you’ll have to sign up a month and a half before you conceive, I guess. Tried explaining the problem to an uncle and he makes it sound like all their fault. If you don’t want to get distracted at work and if day cares are being stupid, don’t have a baby.

Then he complained that he doesn’t get what Sean’s job is. It’s writing programs for iPhones. He wants to know what the big deal is, iPhones don’t do anything. They don’t manufacture anything. And if they’re phones, why do they need programs for them. It’s a phone just have the phone part. Ok, but not everyone wants to get their news and information from a newspaper or radio or TV. I mean, iPhones and iPod Touches come with a program that will show you how stocks performed. They come with a map program. They come with email. They come with a schedule thing that has an alarm to tell you when something is coming up. Then there’s other programs that are sold on the online store. He asked why people need them.

And I think that really starts to strike at the root of the problem here. There’s a lot of things in the world people don’t need. And the fact is that if we’re not growing and we’re not improving, we’re dying. There were probably old guys 100 years ago asking why people need cars. Aren’t horses good enough? Or 50 years ago, asking why people need TV, isn’t radio good enough? So maybe ten years ago, the question was why get a cell phone, aren’t landline phones good enough? Now it’s why have an iPhone, aren’t regular cell phones good enough? And the answer is always no, it’s never good enough. Can anyone imagine our country without cars? Can anyone imagine the United States without radio and TV? Can you imagine what your life would be like without computers and the internet?

It just seems like every advancement in technology is always complained about by some old guys thinking the way things were 20 years ago were just fine and that mankind doesn’t need all this new technology. I hope I never become that guy.

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