Awesomeness

An American Office

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:31:29 +0000

It took time for me to get into The Office. Years, in fact. I had heard all the hype about how great it was ever since it first began airing in 2005, and I had tried to take in the occasional episode. But the show's approach wasn't something I was accustomed to seeing, and it took a long time for me to understand just what creators Ricky Gervais (creator of the original British version) and Stephen Merchant and developer Greg Daniels were trying to do. But when I finally started to get The Office, I really fell in love with it.

Okay, I passed on season eight, but who didn't?

There aren't many sitcoms in the world about real adults. Usually the adult contingent on TV is represented by the parent, the conservative square, or the douchebros in their 20's who still think they're in high school. It seems like shows about adults are getting to be a once-a-decade thing. In the 80's, there was Cheers. The 90's gave us Frasier, a Cheers spinoff which established itself as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. In the Millennium, The Office decided to come along, but even so, The Office was different. Even the most adult sitcoms on TV tended to portray people leading lives of glamor. The Office took that all out for a portrayal of a workplace not unlike yours or mine.

Hell, The Office doesn't even take place in a glamorous city. This ain't Los Angeles. It ain't New York City of Philadelphia, two places which are referenced an awful lot on the show. It's not Miami or Seattle. The Office happens within the confines of Scranton, a city in Pennsylvania. Not a suburb of a large city, but a city of its own which is so insignificant that most viewers of The Office probably never heard of it until the show debuted. The characters are Rust Belt archetypes. Although one character - Andy (Ed Helms) - loves to pimp his Ivy League degree from Cornell, most of these guys nailed their high school diplomas to their walls and decided they were officially done with education. Then they took the first available open spot in whatever little place they could get into, and flipped their dream switch to the off position. None of them is working in the titular office because they want to be there. Okay, well, there's a possible exception with Dwight (Rainn Wilson), but nearly every character on the show is working at said office because they happened to fall into the position.

The Office is a branch of a struggling, rather unremarkable little paper company called Dunder Mifflin. (And later, Sabre.) The workers do the nine to five thing every day under the watchful eyes of their managers. The Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin has had several managers come in and out over the years: Deangelo Vickers (Will Ferrell), Rob California (James Spader), Creed Bratton (Creed Bratton, yes the character and actor have the same name), and now, Dwight Schrute. But the manager who is unquestionably synonymous with the position was Michael Scott (Steve Carell), the manager for the first seven seasons of The Office and arguably the very face of the show. For the first seven seasons, the operations of Dunder Mifflin in Scranton revolved around Michael Scott's ineptitude, relentless need to always be the center of attention, and a lack of self-awareness which would make a pop music diva look grounded. Michael was a terrible manager, but certain academic theories - especially the Peter Principle - argue that Michael was just given a job above his competence level. Several times over Michael's years, he's shown to be a fantastic salesman and a shrewd, tactful negotiator. He's one of those managers who would rather be a friend to his employees than a boss, and he thinks his relationships with his employees are a lot better than they are - especially with poor Ryan Howard (no, not the baseball player, BJ Novak) and Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker). He has a weird man crush on Ryan which Ryan finds more than a little creepy, and considers the latter his black friend, despite Stanley's contempt for Michael being obvious. Michael makes a lot of backhanded remarks based in racial stereotypes, and they naturally rub Stanley the wrong way. Michael's feelings toward Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein) are quite the opposite - he hates Toby's guts for seemingly no reason, to the point where he once tried to plant drugs on Toby in order to get him arrested. (Michael had second thoughts about the plan, eventually, and the "drugs" turned out to be a salad anyway.)

Michael wasn't especially fond of Dwight, either, although his relationship with him was more like/hate. Dwight loves Michael to death, and is in fact the one employee of Dunder Mifflin who appears to have any real commitment or conviction to his job. While Dwight is just a supporting character, we probably know more about his background than we do any other character on The Office. There are some episodes which take Dwight to a farm he owns, and Dwight is also just a very animated character. He often brings props into work to make some weird point or intimidate his co-workers.

The Office is more driven by a theme than by any kind of story arc. This makes perfect sense because the show is seen through the lens of a group of documentarians who are filming the daily goings-on in the office to reveal a typical American workplace. Although a lot of the things that go on in the office space are hilarious, the real fun begins when the various characters are speaking directly to the camera. They tend to reveal their deepest, most forbidden thoughts about the others in their space. You would think they would be a little bit coy about what they say, being as they're, you know, TALKING TO A FILM CAMERA, but nope! The documentary was apparently being made for a period of ten years, and it's only over this past season - the final season of the show - that these characters are finally starting to snap out of their complacency and realize that holy shit, people are going to be WATCHING me say and do these things! Stanley has suddenly become aware of the fact that his three extramarital affairs may be broadcast ("If I turn up dead, let me save you the trouble: My wife did it.") Andy preempted his inevitable (and very deserved) firing by quitting to pursue his acting and singing careers.

The way The Office presents itself can best be described as this is the office, this is the people who work in the office. Therefore, The Office shows many shades of Seinfeld in the way it grows and develops its revolving array of characters. Their traits aren't forced on them by the writers, but they instead tend to sort of gradually crop up. I haven't seen very many character traits that feel forced, because they're organically weaved into the show by a crew of writers which involved many members of the cast. They clearly knew what they were doing, and so The Office probably has the most realistic character development I've ever seen in a TV show. Every character on the show has insufferable traits which balance out the redeeming traits. Almost every time one character is just about to soar over one line or another, the writing causes them to suddenly pull back so the audience can be reminded of that character's humanity. The most glaring example of this is probably Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey), a stern, no-nonsense worker and a homophobe who is visibly disgusted when one worker, Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez), comes out of the closet. (Read: Forced out of the closet by Michael.) She also carries on affairs with Andy and Dwight at the same time, and the two of them eventually end up dueling over her. According to Angela, it's the second time in her life that two men she was having affairs with fought over her in a duel. The show also did this a lot with Michael Scott. Andy's character development seems to have an arc. The only character this method missed is Dwight, who was supposed to be a little over the top and just got more absurd and paranoid as The Office moved along.

This has caused a unique problem for the show: With a cast that rotated so often, not every character got a chance to develop this kind of humanity. A lot of otherwise great characters ended up getting shafted a little bit because the writers couldn't take years to gradually work on them. The former warehouse manager, Darryl Philbin (Craig Robinson) eventually worked his way into the Assistant Regional Manager position. Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) began as a quiet, reserved, and timid receptionist. She gradually became a more assertive risk-taker, married co-worker Jim Halpert (Jon Krasinski), worked her way through sales, and managed to bluff her way into a nonexistent position as Office Administrator. More recent characters, though, just get quirks taken up to eleven. The weirdness of Rob California is a large part of why I was put off the eighth season. Gabe Lewis (Zach Woods) doesn't seem to have changed THAT much. He was introduced in the Sabre storyline in the sixth season. Receptionist Erin Hannon (Ellie Kemper), the receptionist brought in when Pam leaves the position, just kept getting more and more lovably naive. I can't say I complain very much about the less-developed new characters, though, because they bring a purely comedic bite to the show which is sometimes necessary. Erin has become one of my favorite characters on TV. In one episode, she takes the last picture with a disposable camera, then immediately throws it into the trash, commenting about how wasteful they are and how you never get to see the pictures. Her incidents with a cake and a pen shipment are some of the most priceless scenes on the show.

The problem I have with The Office is its series of ridiculous romantic entanglements, each more ridiculous than the last. Jim and Pam I went along with because the two of them are one of TV's great couples. When the series began, Pam was engaged to a guy named Roy (David Denman), a boorish, inconsiderate, and rude person whom Pam thinks it was a mistake to be engaged to. She eventually married Jim, and their relationship went by mostly drama-free, and included a pair of kids. A turn for the worse happened in the past season when Jim took a job in Philadelphia, which I think happened because the writers got bored. But for the most part, everything went hunky dory for them. Michael also got a happily ever after sendoff with his longtime love, Holly Flax (Amy Ryan). The affair between Ryan and customer service representative Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling), I was also happy to go along with because it brought some wonderful comedic fodder to the show.

A lot of the other love triangles on The Office, though, are better for daily afternoon TV than weekly prime time TV. The serial relationship between Ryan and Kelly was pushing it as it was, but Kelly was also briefly involved with Darryl too. New worker Pete Miller (Jake Lacy), Gabe, and Andy have all been been Erin's worse half. And with an engagement to Angela also under his belt, Andy is apparently the office player. It's enough to make me go to Dunder Mifflin in Scranton and fill out an application just so I could have a shot with Erin myself. (Let's face it, Ellie Kemper is just cute as a button.)

Yeah, to cook all this daytime soap opera bullshit up, the writers must have been exceptionally bored. It wasn't as if office life wasn't being mined for all the gold that could be grabbed from it. Part of the reason the series resonate so much with so many people is that it involves a very sympathetic portrayal of office life, with workers who despise their job and often have to invent silly little time-wasters just to stave off terminal boredom. And the general story arcs were also done well: Over the course of the series, the Scranton office absorbs workers from closing branches of Dunder Mifflin. The company gets bought and merged, causing the workers to fret for their jobs. So the workers create little work parties, an Office Olympics, make silly little bets with each other, and hold absurd contests. If there's some unnecessary obligation that needs to be attended to, the office workers grudgingly take care of it, fighting fatigue and boredom the whole way. The love triangles don't enhance the series much at all. They bog it down, in fact.

The Office was supposed to have a spinoff featuring Dwight's farm, but it was shut down and the show's pilot was worked into The Office's canon for the final season. I'm glad this happened - I love Dwight, but the man is just too nutty to carry a whole show, and in any case, the pilot made it look too manic for its own good. The Office is about to end a fine run of nine years, which is perhaps for the best, so it doesn't become a franchise zombie. Even though I missed the first few seasons, I'll be tuned in for tomorrow night's finale.

Seinfeld Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Thu, 9 May 2013 00:45:04 +0000

For many, many years, I never really understood the gargantuan hype surrounding Seinfeld. I don't think it's a terrible show, but I find most of the show to be lukewarm in its humor.

With that said, there were occasional moments of hilarity, such as this.

On a sidenote, Jason Alexander may be most famous as George Castanza in this show, but I found him much funnier as the title character in the cult cartoon Duckman.

Excellent for a housewarming gift!

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:32:32 +0000

The first thing I noticed about this product was the box it came in. It appears almost like wood and is a decorative item that you would want to keep. The pieces themselves are exquisite giving an appearance of being over a hundred years old. They are very elegant and the cups themselves have very comfortable handles and are exactly the right size and weight that one would look for. One would be hard pressed to find anything wrong with this set. It would be something that would make an excellent housewarming gift.

Take a Bite

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:41:47 +0000

The Nashville Predators have at least one thing no other team can claim: Their head coach, Barry Trotz, is currently the longest-tenured head coach in the NHL. He was hired in 1997, just a couple of weeks after the Buffalo Sabres hired their longtime coach Lindy Ruff, who was fired in February. That means Trotz was hired long before the team began play in 1998 and has been with the Preds since the very beginning. Their general manager, David Poile, is currently the longest-serving general manager in the NHL. His closest competition is Darcy Regier, again from Buffalo, who SHOULD have been fired a few years ago and would have been if the team owner wasn't such a wimp about management.

Other than that, it's difficult to peg the Nashville Predators. They were officially awarded to The Music City in 1997 when Wisconsin businessman Craig Leipold made a nice little presentation to the NHL brass asking "Why not Nashville?" Nashville had an arena built, and when Gary Bettman and league officials visited Nashville, thousands of people gathered on the arena plaza to greet them. In June that year, four new teams were created: The Nashville Predators, Columbus Blue Jackets, Atlanta Thrashers, and Minnesota Wild. Actually, Nashville's team wasn't created AS the Predators. The team actually designed the logo behind everyone's back, then unveiled it to all before asking the population of Nashville "So, what would you like to name the team that wears this logo?" The logo had been inspired by a saber-toothed tiger skeleton found under Nashville in 1971, and from a list of 75 suggestions, four were pulled to be the finalists: The Ice Tigers (honestly, what originality stems from slamming the word "ice" in front of a piece of 90's marketing hubris?), the Fury, and the Attack. As you can see, Predators was really the only choice. The others reek of such terribly dated 90's marketing hubris that I'm surprised the names Extreme (wait, sorry, it's the 90's, so: Xtreme) and/or Express weren't among the names considered.

Before the team even played a single game, rumors began going around that the team would be moving. There was a rumor of a franchise swap with the Edmonton Oilers, in which Liepold would take the Oilers and move them to Nashville while the new Predators owner would take the Preds to Houston. Leipold shot it down quickly, quipping there was no chance, but as you're going to see, it will be the definition of the Nashville Predators' entire existence.

On the ice, it was expansion pain time! In 1999, Nashville finished with a record of 28-47-7. They finished with the same record the following season, though the NHL standings don't say that they way they should because the league had adopted a ridiculous standings format that said wins/losses/ties/overtime losses which ran from the 2000 season to the 2004 season. Not that it really mattered to the Predators, who didn't make the playoffs until they slipped into the eighth spot in 2004. They had only a few highlights during the rocky years: In the 2001 season, they opened with a pair of games in Japan against the Pittsburgh Penguins. That same season, they finished just ten points out of a playoff spot behind goalies Mike Dunham and Thomas Vokoun. In 2002, the Predators became the second-fastest expansion team from the 90's to reach the 100-win plateau. In the 2003 season, Barry Trotz broke the record for the most games coached by the first coach of an expansion team. Considering he's still with the Predators, I'd say this record is going to be safe for some time, if not altogether untouchable.

The first few years didn't yield any real marquee players in Nashville. Their scoring leader through all four years was Cliff Ronning, whose point totals were very good, but not great. Through those first four years, only Ronning, Greg Johnson, and Scott Walker broke the 50-point barrier. Ronning was out in 2004, just in time to miss the team's first playoff trip and subsequent first-round exit at the hands of the all-powerful Detroit Red Wings. Trotz, of course, was still around. Expansion team or not, talentless or not, people with his record over the first few years are usually gone. It's a great testament to the organization's faith in him that they still didn't switch, and he was about to pay them off for it.

After the 2005 lockout, the Preds became one of the great beneficiaries of the new rules. In the 2006 season, the Predators surprised everyone by screaming out of the gate with an 8-0-1 start before a 5-1 loss to Edmonton made them the last team to lose its first game in regulation. With their new toy, Paul Kariya, lighting up the scoreboard with 85 points, three other players cracking 50 points, two more missing the 50-point barrier by one and Scott Hartnell missing it by two, the Predators spent the year going on a 49-win tear. The end result? A glittering record of 49-25-8 for 106 points and the fourth seed in a Western Conference which saw a 92-point team and three 80-point teams miss the playoffs. Their trip to the playoffs was a short-lived five-gamer against the San Jose Sharks, though.

The next year, the Preds outdid themselves once again. They got veteran center Jason Arnott and David Legwand in free agency, and those two tied for the team's top goal scorer with 27 each. During the year, they got arguable the biggest fish of all: Two of their former first round picks, Scottie Upshall and Ryan Parent, plus a couple of future picks were sent to the Philadelphia Flyers. Who did they get in return? Peter Forsberg! Seven players, again led by Kariya, cracked the 50-point mark again. The Predators went 51-23-8 for 110 points, third in the NHL just behind Detroit and Presidents' Trophy-winning Buffalo. Due to the league's fucked-up methods of deciding playoff standing, they were only the fourth seed in the Western Conference, which led to another first round match against the Sharks…. And a second five-game exit.

The Predators receded over the next couple of seasons due to roster decimations. 2008 ended with 91 points and another first round knockout against Detroit. The next year, they missed the playoffs completely, but you can't really call Nashville's season a bad one - if a 40-34-8 record and 88 points are bad, your standards might be a bit too high. 2010 brought in Marcel Goc and Francis Bouillon, and Patric Hornqvist had a breakout year. Going 47-29-6, the Preds finished with 100 points and seventh seed in the playoffs. They FINALLY faced a new playoff opponent: The Chicago Blackhawks. Unfortunately, the Hawks were the Team of Destiny that year, and the Predators got the script right on time. Nashville put up a fight, and managed to tie the series at two. In game five, they were even leading 4-3 with just over a minute left. Then Chicago's Marian Hossa hit defenseman Dan Hamhuis from behind, Chicago got an odd-man rush on the ensuing power play, Patrick Kane scored the equalizer, and Hossa became an overtime hero in Chicago. That deflated the Predators, and they lost the sixth game and the series.

Over the last two years, the Predators have been a regular season powerhouse. They posted a 104-point season last year, and missed the 100 barrier by a single point the year before. They even managed to make it to the second round of the playoffs in both years, too. Unfortunately, they've been awful this year. Their current 38 points is leaving them pretty much out of contention altogether barring a flawless surge and a bunch of other teams holding the mother of all tank jobs simultaneously, and even that wouldn't guarantee anything. Maybe it's just an aberration - a quick drop in standings THAT far is too crazy and rare to be written off as anything but the players being out of shape because of the lockout. If this year is a hiccup, the Predators will return to normal for the next few years and have a real shot at the Stanley Cup. If it's an ongoing thing, massive repairs will be necessary in Nashville.

The Predators haven't had any real transcendent players, which makes their great regular seasons pretty impressive. Their biggest drawing cards have been Chris Mason, Paul Kariya, and Peter Forsberg. Their current Captain is Shea Weber. Poile's GM work has netted him the Lester Patrick Trophy, Dan Ellis won the Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award back when that was a thing, Steve Sullivan won the Bill Masterson, and Mike Fisher - who gives the Predators a little bit of celebrity status by being married to singer Carrie Underwood - was awarded for his humanitarianism. Weber was an NHL First All-Star twice, and Pekka Rinne was a Second All-Star once.

The Nashville Predators share their division with the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks. Both of them are Original Six teams. They also share it with the St. Louis Blues, one of the teams from the NHL's first round of expansions in 1967. Predators fans will probably argue about their rivalries with any one of those three teams, and they can almost certainly make a few cases. Let's be honest about it, though: Those three teams are too busy beating the shit out of each other to give any real thought to the Predators. They're long-established teams with great stability, long histories behind them, and much more firmly entrenched fanbases. The only team that can be considered a true rival to the Predators is their fellow expansion Columbus Blue Jackets, who were created together and can grow and reveal their own stories together. If Columbus/Nashville is given a chance to thrive as a rivalry, it can become a great one.

Of course, that's assuming they're both still around to do it. The Predators, despite their success on the ice, have an ungodly level of instability off the ice even by NHL standards, and THAT is saying something. They're right down there with the Phoenix Coyotes in that respect. Anytime there's speculation of unconquered new potential territory for the NHL, the Predators are one of the names that keeps coming up. In 2007, original owner Craig Leipold was reported to have reached a tentative sale of the Predators to Jim Balsillie, head of Research in Motion. Now, Balsillie is a big-hearted guy with a lot of philanthropic instincts, but he also has an overpowering obsession with getting a hockey team to Hamilton, Ontario. Now, there's no way the NHL will ever let this happen; Hamilton's broadcast territory already overlaps that of two other major hockey markets, Buffalo and Toronto, two cities which are a 90-minute drive apart by car. Hamilton is right smack in the middle of the drive. While Balsillie told the NHL he didn't intend to move the Predators, and he never actually owned the team, he had already began taking the necessary steps to move them. He even went as far as to start advertising for season ticket deposits for the Hamilton Predators on Ticketmaster. Leipold eventually backed out strictly because Balsillie had no intention of keeping the team in Nashville, had directly interfered with the team's relationship with the people of Nashville, and would only buy the team if he could guarantee moving it, despite interrupting two fantasies and having to compensate the Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs. This should have been obvious - Balsillie had tried this same shit with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the past. He went on to try it with the Phoenix Coyotes. When the NHL didn't bite, he decided to try wiping out the middleman. Or, perhaps he didn't, but what I know for sure is that the Sabres were put up for sale in 2011. An anonymous man made a hefty bid for them. All I know about the anonymous bidder is what the Sabres said, and the Sabres said he fit Balsillie's description and wanted to move the team to Hamilton.

In June 2007, Leipold again tried to sell the team, this time to venture capitalist William Del Biaggio III. HE wanted to take the team to Kansas City and made no secret of it. Like Balsillie, Del Biaggio was already selling tickets for a team he didn't own in a place the team didn't play. In july 2007, a third party made a bid for the Preds in part to actually keep them in Nashville. That same month, a rally was held that drew about 7500 fans and sold 726 full-season ticket packages. Ironically, the Tennessee group that wanted to keep the team in Nashville included Del Biaggio, but as a minority holder. In June 2008, Del Biaggio ran into trouble about unpaid loans and had to file for bankruptcy. Those unpaid loans had been acquired through fraud and used to buy the Predators. This seems to happen quite a bit in the corporate world, but it couldn't have come at a worse time for the NHL, which was already fighting a black eye because of other scams revolving around John Spano, who briefly owned the New York Islanders, and majority Buffalo Sabres owner John Rigas, who was convicted of fraud in 2005.

The Nashville Predators' arena has The Cellblock in section 303, a fan organization that has been recognized by the team's front office. The fans as a whole have made a fan tradition of giving the team a standing ovation through the entire final TV timeout. The Predators could be showing some real promise as a team on the ice. Off the ice, though, it's different. I'd like to give the Predators a positive rating, but I'm not gonna do that until I know they're stable enough to not be brought into the NHL's latest discussion about who's heading to Seattle or Houston or wherever else.

The Real Mickey Mouse Team

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:16:10 +0000

With the exceptions of the lockouts, what we have here is the most public of the NHL's many embarrassments. It comes off as nothing but a desperate ploy for attention.

Here's what happened: In 1992 there was this awesome movie called The Mighty Ducks that came out. Everybody loved it. Today, its still highly regarded as, at the very least, a classic of sports movies. It was a big enough hit to spawn a pair of sequels, and get the career of one of its young leads, Joshua Jackson, off the ground. When the NHL was going through its early 90's expansion round, The Walt Disney Company decided it wanted to take a shot at this hockey ownership thing. It's Disney, they got their team, and what was the first name that sprang to mind? Why, since a kids' movie came out that was called The Mighty Ducks, the name Mighty Ducks must be popular now! Time to sponge off that popularity and call the team the Anaheim Mighty Ducks! Except, for even more of an embarrassment, the Mighty Ducks didn't even get the dignity of a proper team name. Officially, they were called the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

The new team didn't use the sweater logo from The Mighty Ducks movie. It quickly mocked up a new design of a traditional goalie mask angled to resemble a duck bill. Their first coach was first-time NHL coach Ron Wilson who, aside from a Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 1998 while coaching the Washington Capitals, has had a resoundingly average career. At least they got one thing right: Their first draft pick was Paul Kariya, who went on to become the first face of the team for a long time afterward.

Despite Kariya's presence, the Mighty Ducks got to be known as a low-scoring team for their first few seasons. They missed the playoffs in their first few years, although their first record of 33-46-5 was substantially better than that of their expansion-mates, the Ottawa Senators, who had managed to lose 70 games that same year, and the second-year San Jose Sharks, who lost 71. In the middle of their third year, the Mighty Ducks made a big trade for Winnipeg Jets star Teemu Selanne. He teamed up with Kariya and Marc Chouinard to form a very potent line, but the Mighty Ducks still kept on missing the playoffs. The Mighty Ducks didn't make the playoffs until 1997, finishing with a record of 36-33-13, their first winning record. Seeded fourth in the first round, the Mighty Ducks fought a hot contest against the Phoenix Coyotes, winning in seven games before being swept in the second round by eventual Stanley Cup Champions Detroit Red Wings. Through all the bumps and expansion pains, coach Ron Wilson was kept aboard, but after the season, he was fired for saying he would like to coach the Red Wings. On came Pierre Page for the 1998 season! And out went Paul Kariya for the year with a concussion. The Mighty Ducks made the playoffs again in 1999, but were swept by Detroit again, this time in the FIRST round.

In 2000, the Mighty Ducks finished again with a winning record, but missed the playoffs by four points as the Sharks slid into the final slot. That was the last we heard about how mighty the Ducks were for the next couple of seasons, heh heh. In the 2001 season, Selanne was traded to the Sharks for Jeff Friesen, Steve Shields, and a draft pick. Their coach - Craig Hartsburg, who had taken over from Page after he was fired after his first season - was fired during the year, and the Mighty Ducks did good enough for last place in the Western Conference.

The Mighty Ducks didn't go back to the playoffs until 2003, with new coach Mike Babcock. They had actually posted a good record to get there too - 40-33-9. Okay, it was actually 40-27-9-6 this year in NHL parlance because the league was going going with that stupid standings method reading wins-losses-ties-overtime losses, but still, the point standings don't lie, and the Mighty Ducks post 95. It was good enough for the seventh seed. They shocked the NHL by finally getting even with the Red Wings for all the times the Red Wings swept them, by sweeping the Red Wings! In the second round, the Dallas Stars loomed. The first game was the fourth-longest in NHL history, and Anaheim's Petr Sykora gave the Mighty Ducks the series lead being the overtime hero. Dallas lost in six, and in the Western Conference Finals, they played against their fellow Cinderella brethren: The Minnesota Wild. Anaheim swept Minnesota, and goalie Jean-Sebastian Giguere emerged as the Mighty Ducks' MVP allowing Minnesota only one goal over the course of the entire series.

This bought the Mighty Ducks their first ticket to the Finals, against the New Jersey Devils. This Finals had a good storyline: The Devils had a star named Scott Niedermayer. He had won the Stanley Cup with New Jersey twice already. He had a ringless brother named Rob who was playing for Anaheim. The series went the distance, with the home team winning all seven games. In game six, Devils Captain Scott Stevens knocked out Paul Kariya, but Kariya returned to the game and managed to score the fourth goal. The Devils eventually emerged victorious after a hard series, but Jean-Sebastian Giguere was vaulted into elite company by winning the Conn Smythe Trophy, which is awarded after the Stanley Cup Finals to the MVP of the playoffs. In the playoffs, Giguere had gone 15-6, 7-0 in overtime, posted a breathtaking 1.62 GAA, and recorded a streak of 168 minutes and 27 seconds without letting in a single goal. It was only the fifth time in NHL history the Conn Smythe was given to a player on the losing team.

Kariya promised a return to the Finals, with a Stanley Cup to go with it, for the following season. I wonder how specific he was about that…. Okay, I don't really, because it doesn't matter. It didn't matter to Anaheim, because Kariya left over the offseason in which he made that promise, and it didn't matter to the Colorado Avalanche, the team he wound up playing for, because they didn't get that far either. Giguere couldn't repeat his playoff heroics, and the Mighty Ducks finished in twelfth place.

In 2005, the great lockout came along, and the Mighty Ducks actually seemed to have benefitted from the time off. The team was sold, first of all. Second, Teemu Selanne returned. Third, once his contract with the New Jersey Devils was up, Scott Niedermayer signed with Anaheim because he wanted to be on the same team as his brother. When hockey finally returned for the 2006 season, the Mighty Ducks, not expected to be much better than they had been in the couple of years immediately following the Stanley Cup run, did surprisingly well under the new rules. They posted a nice record of 43-27-12 for 98 points and didn't stop in the playoffs until the Western Conference Finals, where the Edmonton Oilers beat them in five game.

The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim weren't finished there, though. Oh, no! They were only just beginning! For the 2007 season, the first thing the team did was make a change that was badly needed since their creation - they dropped the embarrassing Disney moniker. The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were, at last, no more. The players and fans could finally hold their heads up with far more pride than they were accustomed to after the official team name was changed to the Anaheim Ducks. Maybe the Disney association was embarrassing to them, but even so, the fans HAD loved their team, and apparently they wanted them to retain at least some kind of connection to their past. So the Ducks dropped the "Mighty" and became just the Ducks. Although the "Mighty" was missing from their name now, though, it certainly wasn't gone from their game. With Chris Pronger added to the lineup, a deadly scoring line featuring Rob Niedermayer, Samuel Pahlsson, and Travis Moen, and a great defense, the Ducks were a chic pick to win the Stanley Cup. In the first 16 games of the season, the Ducks didn't lose a single game in regulation, going 12-0-4, a record since broken by the Chicago Blackhawks. They rushed out to a record of 48-20-14, tied for second place in the conference (with the Nashville Predators) and league (beneath the Detroit Red Wings and regular season champion Buffalo Sabres, who won the Presidents' Trophy with victory numbers as a tiebreaker). After storming through the Minnesota Wild, Vancouver Canucks, and Detroit Red Wings, the Ducks returned to the Finals to face their expansion-mates, the Ottawa Senators. The was not a Finals that was ever in doubt. Although three of the games were of the one-goal differential variety, Anaheim destroyed Ottawa in the attack, neutral, and defensive zones in the five games it took them to win the Stanley Cup. The Anaheim Ducks became the first California team to win the Stanley Cup, beating out their two rivals: The Sharks, and also their fellow southern Californians, the Los Angeles Kings, who were founded in 1967. The Kings responded by finally winning one of their own five years later.

The 2008 season started without Selanne and Scott Niedermayer, but Todd Bertuzzi and Mathieu Schneider made up for them. Selanne and Niedermayer had been thinking of hanging up their sticks, but they did return after all, and the Ducks finished with a 47-27-8 record. The Ducks haven't been back to the Finals since winning the Stanley Cup, but they've been far from bad. Currently, they're occupying the second slot in the Western Conference, just behind Chicago, and they have a legitimate shot at both the Presidents' Trophy and the Stanley Cup.

Despite the team's extremely young existence, they can field a fairly good all-time roster. Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne are probably the best-known faces of the team. Ryan Getzlaf is there. Jari Kurri, one of the great players from the legendary Edmonton Oilers dynasty, played a small window in a Ducks outfit, as did Boston Bruins great Adam Oates. Bobby Ryan made the NHL All-Rookie Team in 2009. Jean-Sebastian Giguere isn't a bad goalie to have around. They even have one of the fiercest enforcers in history in Brad May.

While the Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007, it was their 2003 run that does more to define them. After all, they held their own against one of the modern dynastic teams in the Finals, beat a much better Red Wings team in the first round to get there, and beat the Cinderella Minnesota Wild, a team which had, in both previous rounds, won after coming back from 3-1 series deficits. While the Ducks have a cross-southern California rivalry with the Los Angeles Kings, but that's not the big one. It seems there's a bigger rivalry with the San Jose Sharks up north, which makes sense because Los Angeles and San Francisco have been big cultural and economic rivals for a long time. And there is surprisingly a potent rivalry against the Detroit Red Wings, because the two teams have met in the playoffs so often, and lately they've been fielding comparable talent.

Let's not kid ourselves: We ALL know the Anaheim Ducks are primarily identified through one thing, and it's being The Disney Team. Yes, it's nice they're taking so many steps to distance themselves from that past, but it hasn't been nearly enough time yet. Although the original Mighty Ducks movie used a completely different sweater logo than anything the team came up with, the Disney Company produced a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-like Saturday morning cartoon in order to promote the team. Also, both sequels were unmistakable promos for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. D2 was far more subtle about it - Mike Modano of the then-Minnesota North Stars made a cameo, and the jerseys that gave the movie team its Duck Power were the NHL jerseys, but they didn't appear until the climactic third period. D3 was, without any sense of shame, leaching off the team and trying to tell everyone the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim are a thing. The guy who announces the Big Game in the end spends half of it kissing cameo star Paul Kariya's ass.

And here I thought the New Jersey Devils were supposed to be the Mickey Mouse Team! That's what Wayne Gretzky once called them, anyway. Now, the Ducks actually have a lot going for them: Stability and quality are two very important factors to look for in a team, and the Ducks have both. The Ducks could damn well win another Stanley Cup very soon. But when your original team name looks like a way of telling The Great One to go fuck himself, well, just be prepared to sndure the relentless taunts and catcalls of hockey fans. A few years ago, a Ducks fan could always point to his team's Stanley Cup as a way of getting back at Kings fans poked at the Disney association too much, but the Kings are now the defending Champions, so they don't even have that anymore.

Another childhood favorite that still holds up really well. 84%

Wed, 3 Apr 2013 19:26:35 +0000

For all of my childhood, Who Framed Roger Rabbit has been one of my favorite movies. Thankfully, it's another one of those movies that still holds up really well as an adult.

1988 was quite a year for animation. Out in Japan, Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro, and Akira were released in theaters and were all superbly animated films that in scales from good to masterful, delivered storylines and themes unheard of at the time. Over in America, we were treated to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which gave audiences a hybrid of live-action film and animation that to this day, is unmatched in how sublime it is, which is also helped by its other strong qualities (more on that later).

STORY

It's 1947 in Los Angeles, and cartoons (known as “Toons” in this movie) aren't mere pictures on celluloid, but rather like real actors. Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is an alcoholic private detective in LA, and after being paid by cartoonist R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) to take pictures of Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye) playing patty cake with Jessica Rabbit (voiced by Kathleen Turner), causing Jessica's husband, Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer) to lose his mind. Eddie soon gets tangled in a murder mystery after Marvin Acme was murdered, and must uncover the truth as to who really killed Acme.

CHARACTERS

For the most part, the characters in this movie are done really well. As an adult, I really appreciate the fact that Eddie is a troubled man struggling with booze because given the tragedy he had in the past (I won't spoil it for you), gives him a layer of realism. Also, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) is one of the creepiest villains from movies in my childhood, as he maintains a consistently menacing persona and does really cold-blooded things that can put Doom in the same league as the best horror icons. Roger and Jessica Rabbit are great at providing solid humor, along with Doom's gang of cartoon weasels. However, I wish characters like the bartender Dolores (Joanna Cassidy) had more time to develop.

HUMOR

The humor in this movie is really solid. The humor is a perfect homage to the masterful slapstick and exaggerated bodily distortion of the classic Tex Avery and Looney Tunes cartoons. One of the funniest things in this movie was when Eddie goes to the nightclub the night Acme gets killed, and the opening act is Daffy and Donald Duck in a piano battle. Seeing these two iconic cartoon ducks engage in slapstick antics against each other was hilarious (especially when Donald fired a cannon at Daffy). Another was when Eddie faces his fears about driving into Toontown, he dumps his glass flask of whiskey and using a cartoon gun that Yosemite Sam gave him some years back, fires a cartoon bullet that's a caricature of an American Indian, and the bullet uses a giant tomahawk to smash the flask. Another is when Dolores catches Eddie in his office with Jessica with his pants down (literally), and she says to him “Are you dabbling in water colors, Eddie?” There's plenty of other funny parts in this movie, but I think you get the picture.

APPEARANCE

The cinematography for this movie is marvelous. The set designs perfectly capture that 1940's noir feeling, and the designs of the cartoons perfectly fit the setting it takes place in. The animation of the characters is totally fluid, and is even more impressive considering that the “interactions” with the cartoons and real people was seamless. With this being made before the age of CGI, it's even more impressive to see all this and see the cartoon characters believably carry around real props like guns. I think along with John Carpenter's The Thing, Who Framed Roger Rabbit has some of the most remarkable special effects and visuals ever done in cinema.

On a sidenote, the interior of the Acme gag factory looks a bit like something out of Tim Burton's imagination.

SOUNDTRACK

Alan Silvestri's score for this movie is near perfect. Like the visuals, the music fits the setting of this movie like a glove, and one of my favorite pieces of music is near the end, when Eddie has a showdown with Judge Doom and his weasel minions, since it's so heart-pumping and memorable. The original song “Why Don't You Do Right” is pretty catchy and is a great fit for the style of the movie.

MATURE CONTENT

Even though this is a PG movie, there's some scenes that kids might not get or could scare them. Some of the adult innuendo provided by Jessica Rabbit and even the weasels at times will probably fly over some kids' heads. However, there's a really creepy scene near the beginning where Judge Doom demonstrates his brand of justice by grabbing a squeaking cartoon shoe and slowly kills it in a barrel full of a chemical cocktail made specifically to “kill” cartoons called “the dip.” This scene scared me a lot when I was a little kid and even as an adult, still get creeped out by this scene. Similarly, there's some parts near the end during Eddie's showdown with Doom that were creepy, but I won't mention these because I don't want to spoil anything big in relation to the movie's story.

On another sidenote, it's funny to think that there's plenty of bad anime titles like Elfen Lied and Gantz that abuse bloody gore and dismemberment scenes ad nauseam to seem “creepy” yet the dark scenes in WFRR actually feel intimidating without using bloodshed.

FINAL WORD

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is certainly a classic, and a really good homage to 1940's noir and of the Golden Age of Cartoons. If you love the aforementioned things, you owe it to yourself to reserve a movie night for this live-action/cartoon hybrid gem.

An Agnostic/Atheist Easter Story

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:22:37 +0000

The plaster cast felt like a glove, and it was about as tough. If I had molded it into a more grabby shape, I probably could have played hockey in it. I couldn't help but make fun of the absurdity of a solid, hard plaster cast of my own right arm. It was to be exhibited on an artistic interpretation of the Stations of the Cross, some kind of Jesus-related thing I had never heard of until a couple of weeks previous. Over the preparation for the exhibit, I also helped mold and paint little crosses.

The Stations of the Cross wasn't a concept I had any kind of attachment to, at all. It sounded like another bit of Christian dogma my pastor had not bothered to teach me about in confirmation class. At least, I didn't remember being taught anything about it. Considering that I hated confirmation class and had been seething quietly through what I considered an elaborate initiation ritual which would allow me full membership into my church's wine and wafer club, I was concerned with getting just enough info to pass the final than actually learning anything. Confirmation class was a course I spent two years sitting through, after all, when no one I knew could offer a remotely satisfying answer to the question: WHY am I being denied what is obviously a very important sacrament of Christianity until I listened to my minister's blah blah blah-ing for two hours every freaking Tuesday for two freaking years? Apparently I had missed a commandment somewhere along the line. Thou shalt have no other gods. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt take a two-year course to determine thine communion worthiness. Yeah, sounded about right.

Well, my inquisitiveness took its toll. Seven years after my confirmation, I had ditched Christianity entirely for a whole new religion. Three years after that, I ditched religion entirely. One of the instigators of my religious walkout was that everyone was dying for me to be able to perform rituals and recite passages on command, like some kind of dog/parrot genetic mutation. I was – am – an atheist, in large part because of these unbending dogmas I was being taught, and in even larger part because I had a bad habit of asking just where these rituals were written out in the Bible. The people I was questioning had an even worse habit of telling me the church does it that way because the church has ALWAYS done it that way. Grace Commons, my faith community in Chicago, was a breath of fresh air when I stumbled into it because here, at last, was a community which was challenging the very fundamental core of religion. The questioning of old religious tenants didn't keep them from partaking in some of the rituals, though, so I saw no harm in partaking in the preparation and execution of the Stations..

Grace Commons being Grace Commons, they needed to give the Stations of the Cross an artistic spin. I was game and, truth be told, a little eager to see if I could get away with a little bit of stealth blasphemy. We created 15 stations with our own metaphorical spins on the traditional imagery. In the third station, in which Jesus fell for the first time, we created a drawing of a cross being pushed over by a montage of images of the world's suffering and injustices, and propped back up with another montage of positive images of things which prop people in times of need. The tenth station, in which Jesus is stripped, was a board covered with red paint and black fabric. The fourth station, where Jesus met his mother, was a hand drawing of Jesus and Mary consoling each other.

I had a grand old time creating the exhibits. While creating the little clay crosses, I was given artistic license to create them however I saw fit, long as they were crosses. So I made a bunch of kooky-looking traditional crosses, some Celtic crosses, and one slab of clay on which I carved the word "CROSS" in large, commanding letters. I painted them however I saw fit, and I also created a weird little mold of my hand. Still, while I was doing these things, it was more out of my enthusiasm for being a creator than out of any attachment I had to Christianity. I had no feelings toward the Stations of the Cross one way or the other. As far as I was concerned, they were just another unwritten faith tenant the church had culled from the air in order to control the masses by promising some extra brownie points with God. My mother was more excited for my participation than I was. The Stations of the Cross had been something she knew while growing up as a Catholic. She was more appreciative of rigid religious observances and routines than I was, even though she's a bit of a religious upstream swimmer herself.

The big day came, and I walked in fully prepared to make a few observations and maybe crack a few jokes. Basically, I was expecting to be at least mildly underwhelmed. I had never been particularly moved by the religious displays I had seen everywhere growing up, after all. Maybe it was just a result of the fact that everything about the killed-for-my-sins idea seemed was so distant, or that the questions I had surrounding the entire doctrine had wrecked it for me, or that I had been numbed by the imagery, but the common images always left me with a rather blase attitude. Well, my visit to this display felt a lot different. It WAS different, in a few ways. Instead of the redundant imagery of Jesus going through his crucifixion, the imagery in the Grace Commons Stations felt current, relevant. The focus of the Stations were rarely on Jesus, and few of the Stations featured his likeness at all. I saw the first Station (the condemnation of Jesus) with its portrayal of mob violence, and it clicked. My sense of cynicism had departed by the second Station, a painting of a man grieving the loss of his firstborn child, a metaphorical representation of Jesus being given the cross he had to bear.

Each Station was questioning me, and leaving me challenged; challenged about my ideas of injustice and sin; challenged about my role in fighting them; challenged about how I might have been a contributor. Many ideas which I held to be black and white in the past were being stirred up and tinted in grey. My mind searched for answers and coherent thought with each display as I moved along, and I began to withdraw into myself in a way I had done very few times in the past. By the 14th Station, a display of Jesus being placed into the tomb, I felt drained and somewhat broken down. Station 14′s display was that of a ghostly white face, against a white background, with a translucent white shroud covering it, inside of a pitch-black room lit only by a small flashlight which was there only to illuminate a real prayer, written by a Jew during the Holocaust, asking for the captors to be forgiven of their sins.

Station 14 was the point where I finally tore up. I choked up and fell silent and, in dire need of a breather, I returned to the area where the service had taken place. My thought had now overwhelmed me to the point where everything was now blending together and being replaced by a raw, unnamed emotion. As a handful of others slowly filed into the room after me, all I did was sit and watch the candle flames perform their silky tango. It was a half hour before anyone was able to say anything, and it was only once everyone had processed what we just saw that our usual post-service chirpiness started filling the room.

The traditional pictures of the Crucifixion had never affected me. Having seen them since a very early age at which I wasn't able to understand what they were, I didn't realize they were supposed to be affecting pictures of a suffering deity, and so I never had any feelings toward them one way or another. And now I was sitting here, with a series of images seemingly disconnected from the event, moved in a way I had never been by anything religious. Of course, it wouldn't send me running to dunk my head into the baptismal font, but after many years of religious instruction being hotly questioned and abandoned, I couldn't help but feel like something was finally working.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 06:17:47 +0000

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is thankfully, another one of those favorite movies from my childhood that still holds up really well as an adult. While the story itself is a little conventional, what made this movie such a joy to watch was its masterful fusion of live-action and 2D animation (which despite being 25 years-old as of writing this, still looks amazing today), hilarious gags, and Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom, one of the creepiest movie villains of my youth.

Desert Dogs Who Need Bones

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:19:42 +0000

I'm going to take a brief moment right now to do something I don't ordinarily do in my hockey-related musings: Give NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman some of the props he deserves. No, I don't mean that in an ironic or cynical manner, either. The fact is, for everything that's been going wrong with the NHL since Bettman took over, the man has managed to truly grow the sport in ways none of the fans ever expected, create a lot of new fans, and make hockey a reliable sport in places we never thought it could flourish. California has three teams, none of which are in any danger of leaving. The Dallas Stars are apparently running some sort of development program for kids which created interest, and whereas Raleigh, North Carolina had no skating rinks before the arrival of the Carolina Hurricanes, the city now has six. Whether or not that's because of people taking real interest or because of nostalgic transplants from cold-weather cities, I'm not sure. But the fact that Bettman was able to put a nationalized, widely-publicized hockey game called the Winter Classic up against the college football games of New Year's Day and make it thrive means hockey is no longer seen as a renegade sport for people with non-mainstream interest.

Okay, now that I've noted that, on to the obvious question: Even with the growth of hockey, what ever made him think the NHL could thrive in the desert? A desert in which the people are barely even registering the NFL team which also lives out there? Phoenix, Arizona is not anyone's first definition of a traditional hockey market, and the fans there have proven that repeatedly. Here we have a team that can't seem to get it together either on or off the ice. The Phoenix Coyotes have been one of the NHL's poster boys for the whole-the-hell-are-they? teams, the teams that no one follows, cares about, and seems in constant danger.

It wasn't always like that for the Coyotes. They were formed in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1972. Not as an NHL team, though - apparently hockey-hungry Winnipeg just wasn't good enough for the elitist suits running shit in the NHL. The NHL had recently expanded to 16 teams at the time. The problem was, in those rounds of expansions - 1967 creating the Pittsburgh Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Minnesota North Stars, Oakland Seals, Los Angeles Kings, and St. Louis Blues; 1969 bringing in the Vancouver Canucks and Buffalo Sabres; and 1972 introducing the Atlanta Flames and New York Islanders - only created ONE team in Canada! (Meaning that yes, the NHL was always this fucking stupid.) As you can imagine, Canada wasn't pleased, and a couple of opportunistic American businessmen - Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson, who had previously founded and run the American Basketball Association - teamed up with Bill Hunter, president of the junior Western Canada Hockey League, to see if they could get hazard pay outta some pissed off Canadian cities who felt a little jilted. They went and formed the World Hockey Association, bringing teams to Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, and Ottawa. The WHA was set up to challenge the supremacy of the NHL, giving the senior league its first major competition since the Western Hockey League collapsed in 1926.

The WHA was pretty open about the fact that it was ditching the hated reserve clause, and that allowed the league to roam around raiding the NHL's best and brightest. Meanwhile, a certain team in the NHL which shall remain nameless (hint: It rhymes with "Schmicago Schlackshawks") was being run by a man named Bill Wirtz, a frugal owner who wasn't paying his preeminent stars what they were worth. This royally pissed off a player named Bobby Hull, which wouldn't have meant a whole lot if Hull wasn't, you know, the greatest player in this team's history and one of the greatest players in NHL history. Hull ditched his old team (The Blackhawks, alright? They were the Chicago Blackhawks) to jump aboard the WHA and the Winnipeg Jets. Once the Jets were done raiding the NHL, they then pioneered a whole new way of looking for the cream of the crop of hockey talent: Checking out the best players in Europe. That found them a couple of linemates for Hull with Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson. It also made the Jets the premier team of the WHA. The WHA lasted for seven years before merging with the NHL. The Jets played in the Finals in a whopping FIVE of those years, winning them three times.

In 1979, most of the teams in the WHA folded while the Jets, Hartford Whalers, Edmonton Oilers, and Quebec Nordiques joined the NHL. Of course the senior NHL, being the NHL, was a complete dick about the merger and forced the n00bs to pay a heavy price for entry into the league. The NHL threw a big initiation party for the WHA teams in the form of something called the reclamation draft. It cost them three of their top six scorers, and in the regular draft, they had to draft 18th out of 21 teams. One of the players they protected in the reclamation draft was a defenseman named Scott Campbell, who showed a lot of promise but also suffered from a chronic asthma which was exacerbated by Winnipeg's nasty weather. He was out of the league completely in 1982.

Setting off their place as an NHL team, the Jets immediately paid their dues. Their first couple of years were wretched. In 1981, they won all of nine games. There was a bright spot in the suffering, though, with draft picks. In 1980, they drafted Dave Babych second overall. The next year they drafted Dale Hawerchuk first overall. With them being keystones of a strong nucleus, the Jets were restored to respectability quickly, but they were also hit with a hell of a dire misfortune: They were stuck in the same division as the Oilers and Calgary Flames. Back then, the league and playoffs were set up in a way which pretty much guaranteed the path to the Campbell Conference Finals would take them through one of those cities. Knowing that, I don't think I have to elaborate very much on the Jets' fate in the playoffs. In the 1985 season, they finished with a record better than every other team in the league except three. They accumulated 96 points, the best they would ever do in Winnipeg. And while they were actually able to beat the Flames in the first round of the playoffs, they were swept by Edmonton in the following round. Between 1983 and 1990, the Jets and Oilers faced each other in the playoffs six times, and Edmonton won every matchup. Just to rub it in, the Jets only won four total games in those six series. The Jets were just destined to languish in the playoffs back then. They only won two playoff series through the 80's - the one I previously mentioned in 1985, and a second in 1987, where they beat Calgary again (only to lose to Edmonton in the second round again).

Time to give Gary Bettman a bit more credit: During his commissionership, player salaries started to go up to the point where they were comparable to the salaries of players in other popular sports. What that meant for the teams was that operating costs were also rising. Meanwhile, the value of the Canadian dollar was going down. This started smacking the Canadian teams like a rented mule, because while they collected revenue in Canadian dollars, they had to pay salaries in American dollars. On the ice, the Jets' win totals also started going down. In 1990, they traded Dale Hawerchuk, their star and Captain, to the Buffalo Sabres. They began missing the playoffs with regularity, and even on the occasions they were able to sneak in, they kept losing in the first round. The fans were troopers about it; the Jets had a very loyal following, but there were questions about whether Winnipeg was big enough to support them. Their home building was also one of the worse arenas in the league; it was an aging barn with views so bad, they obstructed the luxury suite views…. Or at least they WOULD have obstructed the luxury suite views, had there been any luxury suites!

Various people stepped in, drawing up every scheme they could think of to save the Jets. All the efforts by local businessmen fell through, so the Jets were sold to American businessmen Steven Gluckstern and Richard Burke, who planned to move the Jets to Minnesota, where they were to fill in the void left by the recently-departed North Stars. That didn't go anywhere, and the two of them made an agreement with Phoenix businessman Jerry Colangelo to move the Jets to Phoenix. Off they were, while Winnipeg was left to accept a new minor league team called the Manitoba Moose for consolation. The NHL finally returned to Winnipeg in 2012, creating a new Winnipeg Jets team by heisting the Atlanta Thrashers.

In Phoenix, meanwhile, everyone apparently thought the name "Phoenix Jets" or "Arizona Jets" would sound stupid. So they threw a contest to come up with a new name, and thus the name "Coyotes" was created. To create a little bit of buzz, the 'Yotes signed one of the NHL's best and brightest: Jeremy Roenick, fresh off a starring stint in Chicago because they had an owner, Bill Wirtz, who was frugal and didn't want to pay him what he was worth. Roenick teamed up with such players as Keith Tkachuk, Shane Doan, Mike Gartner, and Nikolai Khabibulin to lead the 'Yotes to a stretch of six seasons where they finished at .500 or better, making the playoffs every year but one. And the one year they didn't get that far, they managed to post 90 points, which made them the first team to post 90 points and miss the playoffs. Unfortunately, they still couldn't make it through the first round. The best they could do was the 1999 playoffs, where they built a 3-1 series lead which they proceeded to squander to the Blues. They fell in overtime in the seventh game.

There was another problem that cropped up: During the team's first eight years in Phoenix, their arena, America West Arena, was absolutely state of the art!…. For the NBA's Phoenix Suns, whom - it should be properly stressed - the place was built for. Now, if you've seen hockey and basketball arenas, you'll note there's a bit of a size difference, and America West Arena wasn't built with a hockey team in mind. The floor was barely large enough for a standard NHL rink, and so the team had to quickly re-engineer the joint to accommodate a 200-footer. As a result, there were parts of the upper deck that were actually sticking out over the rink! Therefore, capacity had to be cut after the first season, and a new arena was built in suburban Glendale.

In 1998, the team was sold and one of the people who became a part owner was Wayne Gretzky, recently retired and looking for the next big thing. Unfortunately, he got on at the worst possible time. For one thing, the Coyotes were back to stinking up the league again. For most of the millennium, they were barely competitive. Since a good team is important to attract fans who might otherwise not have any interest, attendance also started to drop in a way that was seriously worrying to the league. The team also had a downright shitty lease with Phoenix, which resulted in massive financial losses which they still haven't really recovered from. To try to give the team a shot in the arm, the Coyotes signed Brett Hull (Bobby's boy). Two days later came one of the ultimate embarrassments in hockey: Wayne Gretzky hired himself as coach, despite having never coached before, at any level, unless you count his kid's little league team. Five games after the season began, Hull had recorded all of one assist, and decided he wasn't capable of playing anymore. Just like that, he retired. Gretzky stepped down in 2009.

The on-ice product since then has been sorted out. Dave Tippett took over as coach in 2009 and he's turned them into a real, honest to god force. In his first season, he got them across the 50-win barrier for the first time, ever. In 2012, he brought them to the brink, getting them to the conference finals for their first time, ever. Things are looking up for the Coyotes right now on the ice. Off the ice, though, it's a much different story. The Coyotes declared bankruptcy in 2009, and the NHL has been running the team itself ever since. The NHL was planning to present the former owner, Jerry Moyes, with an offer to sell the Coyotes to Jerry Reinsdorf, who owns MLB's Chicago White Sox and the NBA's Chicago Bulls. But hours before he could, Moyes put the team in bankruptcy with the intent to sell it to Jim Balsillie, who intended to move them to Hamilton, Ontario. Now, Balsillie is obsessed with getting the NHL to Hamilton. Unfortunately for him, the league won't let him do it because the overarching broadcast area runs through that of two teams: The Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs. Buffalo and Toronto are 90 minutes away from each other by car, and if you drive from one to the other, Hamilton is smack at the halfway point. The NHL had blocked his ownership bids twice before, once with the Pittsburgh Penguins, then again with the Nashville Predators, and in 2011 an unnamed bidder who fit his description made a massive bid on the Sabres themselves. But I digress. The NHL is currently pending a sale of the Coyotes to former San Jose Sharks owner Greg Jamison, after other bids fell through. The current deal with Jamison was delayed because he can't reach an agreement with the league.

The Phoenix Coyotes are very deferential to their past as the Winnipeg Jets. It's seen in their list of retired numbers: Keith Tkachuk, Bobby Hull, Dale Hawerchuk, Thomas Sheen, Teppo Numminen, and Jeremy Roenick. Of those players, only Roenick played for them exclusively in a Coyotes jersey. Unfortunately, this team isn't exactly swimming in All-Star talent. Brett Hull and Mike Gartner played for them at the absolute ends of their careers - Gartner was there for a year before retiring, and Hull played all of five games for them. Shane Doan is their face, their Captain, and the only player on the team now who goes all the way back to Winnipeg. He's a career Jet/Coyote, something which can't be claimed by a ton of players.

The Coyotes are a western team, so their games and rivalries tend to not get as much airplay as a lot of others. I guess the Anaheim Ducks and Los Angeles Kings are there as far as rivalries go, but they're not rivalries a lot of NHL followers seem to take seriously. Back in Winnipeg, the Jets had those playoff series with the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers, but those are long gone, and the Coyotes are also disadvantaged by the fact that they're usually pretty bad. The fans the Coyotes do have seem to be more concerned about ownership than getting themselves up for a hard fight against a team from southern California, and it's tough to blame them at this junction.

The Coyotes really don't have a very good identity to hinge on. When they arrived in Phoenix, they were identified primarily by horrid sweater designs which exemplified all the worst aspects of 90's marketing hubris. Cartoons, color complexity, and a design meant to come off as in your face. The sweater logo looked like a hockey-playing Picasso coyote. Their designs now are a lot more simplified and a lot better, with the sweater logo being the head of a howling coyote and the color scheme having a dominant sedona red with sand-colored accents. And those old shirts are actually the best part of their identity. What really sucks about being a 'Yotes fan now is that the team is identified as clearly being one of the most unstable in the NHL. Until last year's conference final run, everything we heard in regards to the Coyotes was: Have they been sold? Who is buying them? They haven't moved yet? Where are they going to move? Why aren't they moving now? You can forgive born and bred Phoenix hockey fans for cheering for some other team, because this chatter isn't the kind that causes confidence in a fanbase. If they DO cheer for the Coyotes, in fact, they have a lot of courage in sticking to them. If they don't, you can't blame them, because they probably don't want to emotionally commit too much to a team which may not be around very much longer.

I think it says everything about the Phoenix Coyotes that most NHL onlookers seem to care about the team's finances than its recent performance surge. If you're a fan of the Coyotes, well, no matter how lowly I grade a team, I have always stressed the importance of not letting my grading discourage adopting fans. What I haven't done is give out the advice I'm going to right now: Abandon ship. If you don't, godspeed to you all.

Faith and (Final) Fantasy

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:27:26 +0000

This is a chapter from my book.

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X was more or less an impulse buy. I was at Media Play one morning, talking to a friend who happened to be working as one of the clerks there. That was something I did pretty regularly to help make her clerk job a bit more bearable, and I would usually show up around the time the store opened so there would be a minimum of traffic for her to fend off while talking to me. I had had an interview at a nearby Sears for a job her own walking away left open, and my school was only about a half hour walk away, so I would sometimes pop in to say hello. The day I bought Final Fantasy X was the very day it started to show up in the bin for the Playstation 2 Greatest Hits collection. It was $20 now, and since I had liked or loved most of the games in the series to that point, I decided to go ahead and take a stab at it.

I never quite learned to develop the fondness for Final Fantasy X that I had for Final Fantasy IX or Final Fantasy IV from the Chronicles package. Maybe those two games had spoiled me, because it had been a long time since I played Final Fantasy VII, which was basically my gateway into the series. Final Fantasy X was a radical departure from the way the games themselves were made. The Playstation games had contained vastly updated graphics, but Final Fantasy X utilized voice acting, traditional turn-based combat, and had a heavier reliance on CGI cutscenes than any of the other games in the series I had played before. It also allowed the players to switch their characters during combat, which had never been done before in the series. I liked the customization system, the grid sphere, because of the convenience of it.

The main story was a little thin, but Final Fantasy X found a particular resonation to me for one reason: It was the first video game I had ever played in which the characters were openly confronted with the idea of questioning long-held sacred traditions. At the time I started playing Final Fantasy X, the whole idea of doing that in my personal life was becoming tantamount to the way I had decided to live. The game's plot revolves around the main character, Tidus, fighting off a giant monster eating his hometown and being thrust 1000 years into the future upon doing so. The game opened with the monster fight and Tidus's little time adventure. Tidus was a star player in a sport called blitzball, and one of the earliest scenes in the game shows a character performing a prayer. Tidus recognized the prayer as a sign that players in his sport gave to each other in his own time. Final Fantasy X certainly didn't take very long to get to the core of what it was really about.

The main villain of the game, as introduced to me, was simply called Sin. He was the giant monster in the beginning, and the the people from the game's world believed him to be the manifestation of their sins against their god. It also confronted evangelism, and the idea of hypocrisy within the church.

I had turned into a religious conservative as a kid, at least in secret, because my church had been teaching repetitious passages to be taken at face value. (My parents are NOT responsible.) Most of the folks there also had a very askew idea of the way the younger culture and real world worked, and a lot of what was preached there was extremely dated. I soaked it up mostly because I was a little kid and all the adults I trusted all seemed to be saying this "God" character existed. He also appeared to have written – or at least inspired – a history book about supermen who could actually talk with this god, and apparently were able to ask him to level cities, create swarms of frogs, flood the world, and cause complete darkness. People who were immune to fire and being eaten by lions and could rip apart temples. This god apparently had a son who was sent to be killed to redeem us from sins we hadn't committed. Who was I to question all this? The church was giving me the impression that the answer to that question was "someone asking for a good smiting, that's who."

It was all well and good back when I was eight years old, but I had noticed a few inconsistencies with my science classes by the time I was about 13. I also noticed a few small discrepancies with the scriptures that weren't sitting very well, either. Even though I was naturally curious, well, I didn't want to get smitten. My questions couldn't stay buried forever, though, and by the time I was 19, I had rejected my originally taught religion for an entirely different religion which was soon causing the same questions and therefore, the very same set of problems I had with my old religion. By the time I was 23, I was done. God, religion, and the idea of needing religion to teach morals and values were dead to me.

Final Fantasy X was projecting a lot of my thoughts onto a disc, and that was important to me because Buffalo is uber-religious and South Buffalo even more so. Although the religion presented in Final Fantasy X wasn't the one I had been taught growing up, it was a relief to me because it made me feel like I wasn't just being crazy. Maybe it was a little weird taking this kind of comfort from a damned video game, but video games are programmed by people, and in this case it felt like the people doing the programming were encouraging me to think. Besides, in a witch-hunt city like Buffalo, I had to take whatever I could get. In a city where a popular way to discipline kids was to tell them they would be sent to live at Father Baker's boys' home (Father Nelson Baker was a Catholic Priest who was renowned for helping the poor and is currently under consideration for sainthood), most people didn't dig the idea of difficult theological questions and would wave them off using the usual answers: Pray more, read the Bible more, or go to hell. My mother was the only person in the neighborhood who was receptive to my questioning, so that made for a very suppressing atmosphere for me within the city. In an atmosphere like that, Final Fantasy X became something of an important release for me, as well as a good place to run and hide.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy X sporadically. My interest started to wane a little bit because I had other games on my plate, and when Final Fantasy X suddenly took a steep curve into far more difficult territory, I decided there wasn't any point to frustrating myself over it when there were plenty of other good games there. In spite of the poorly-done difficulty curve, though, Final Fantasy X is still a game I can count on to be there for a very unusual religious reason.

Star Wars Quick Tip by FreeDom4

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:21:24 +0000

Hi, for those interest in Star Wars and exploring the political and historical influences on the films, I have a new website, the , where I explore those issues. You can check out the as well.

The Lagniappe Con!!!

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:45:36 +0000

Fans of comics, science fiction, and pop culture were given a special treat from November 30-December 2 in New Orleans, LA. With the prospect of college bowl games, a potential playoff run for the New Orleans Saints (which quickly dissolved), and Mardi Gras parties and parades, Wizard World decided to bump the 2013 New Orleans Wizard World Comic Con up a couple of months in order to avoid any competition. The result was two Wizard World conventions in one year in the Big Easy!

The first convention was big, featuring celebrities like William Shatner, Stan Lee, and Adam Baldwin. It also featured some great comic artists, a lot of vendors, and a ton of fan groups.

Initially, New Orleans Wizard World Fall 2012 looked to be just as big, if not bigger. Slated to appear were the entire core cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, Dean Cain of Lois & Clark, and a few other celebrities. Stan Lee was also slated to return. As the event drew nearer, though, many celebs cancelled.

Patrick Stewart was unable to attend due to filming. Gillian Anderson cancelled for unknown reasons. Dean Cain also had to miss the event. Things were looking a bit glum, but Wizard World pulled together some great guests to replace those who had to cancel their appearance. Norman Reedus, Michael Rooker, and Jon Bernthal (all of The Walking Dead), the core cast of Star Trek: TNG, Stan Lee, Adrienne Curry, Michael Madsen, Jason David Frank, Amy Dumas (Lita of WWE), and a number of other wrestling divas showed up for the convention.

Also in attendance were some brilliant artists, including my friend, Vo Nguyen, whom I snagged an exclusive print and a Nightcrawler piece from, as well as some great vendors, the 501st, the Rebel Legion, and regional fan groups and conventions like CyphaCon, CoastCon, Krewe du Who, and the Redstick Rebellion.

As I mentioned in an earlier review, I've freed myself of the baggage of being a part of a convention board, so I was able to roam the con floor freely, take tons of photos, sit in on panels, and generally enjoy myself. Krewe du Who, a Doctor Who fan group, had a TARDIS available for photos and put on an excellent panel that gave brief talks on all of the Doctor's incarnations. There were trivia panels and panels featuring the celebs as well.

There were quite a few cosplayers roaming the con floor, and I took photos of them and with a few. I met up with a few of my old cosplaying friends, took my traditional photo with my friend who cosplays as the Predator, and met a few celebs as well.

As far as meeting the celebrities went, most of them were excellent. I waited nearly an hour in line to meet Michael Rooker. It was well worth it, though, as he joked with everybody in the line. He refused to smile in the photos he took with people. His excuse for doing this was that he was doing Merle's smile from The Walking Dead. I actually got two photos with him, as I closed my eyes in the first one. When the young lady taking photos said she needed to retake the photo, he faked being angry and started yelling at me, "No retakes. One photo, that's all! You're killing my business here!"

After meeting Rooker, I lined up to meet Jon Bernthal (Shane from The Walkind Dead). I was prepared to meet a somewhat cocky and brash man, but Mr. Bernthal was brilliant. He seemed genuinely surprised that people wanted to take photos with him and hang out with him. He was a great guy.

I did not get to meet Norman Reedus, as his line was massive. Instead, I opted to meet a few of the Star Trek: TNG cast. First on my list was my personal favorite, LeVar Burton. Of all of the Star Trek actors out there, Burton is my favorite. He was a big influence in my life thanks to Reading Rainbow. I talked briefly with him, but it was great to meet him. After meeting Burton, I headed over to Brent Spiner's table. He autographed a photo twice for me, since the photo featured Data and his brother, Lore.

The final celebrity I met was Michael Dorn. I was a bit disappointed with Mr. Dorn. There was no one in his line and yet he acted as if he didn't really care if I bought an autograph from him or not. He hardly said anything to me and, to be honest, I felt a bit blown off by the guy. I wish I would have picked Jonathan Frakes or Gates McFaddin for an autograph instead.

Overall, New Orleans Wizard World Fall 2012 was a great experience. The uninterested Michael Dorn aside, everyone I talked to and met was nice. I can't wait for Wizard World to return to New Orleans in 2014!

Gonna Make a Resolution

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:49:29 +0000

Usually I'm not privy to saying very much about my New Year's Resolutions because so many people don't take them seriously, and until a few years ago I was one of those people who was doing the mocking. I made a lot of phony resolutions which, to say the least, were kept easily and didn't require very much work on my own part. If it wasn't that, I would resolve to do something totally outlandish and absurd which I didn't stand a chance in hell of accomplishing. When my resolution to quit drinking so much soda at the start of 2010 became an unexpected success, though, I decided to think through the idea from that point out a bit more.

I thought about resolutions this year and came to these, mostly because I don't see any other good ones. Much of my endeavoring this year is going to the goal of getting me back out of Buffalo, either soon or in due time. I expect it will be the latter, and I'm not sure where I'll wind up. Chicago would be the ideal, but I can't say I'm so dead set on it that I'm going to blind myself to opportunities in other places.

Number one is something I've been trying to do for a few years. I've been wanting to get back into college for some time, but just when I was starting to get off the ground back when I decided I wanted to do it, it would get tangled up in some other thing I wanted to do. Or I wouldn't be able to afford the application fee. Or, back during my messenger days, my debts would get in the way; I was poor enough as it was when the economy went to hell because my income was entirely commission, and there was no work for me to do. Right now there isn't much of an excuse for me to not be able to focus on this goal, and I've also finally narrowed down something I want to specialize in. I knew I was interested in a medical-based field and gave serious thought to therapy, but then an out-of-nowhere candidate came in and took the top spot: Nutrition. My sudden interest in nutrition was sparked by my body's apparent inability to stay at the nutrient levels required by blood donors, and I began being more careful about what I eat. (Well, more so.) It also had to do with my next resolution.

After years of doing just enough to stay in the decent shape I'm in, I've decided to try to build real muscle. Although I normally eat and act in healthy ways, this is going to require a much greater commitment on my own part. Watching food portions and exercising every day are great starts, but actually going out and - well, dare I actually use this term? - bodybuilding will be putting my body through an ultimate challenge it hasn't been through before, and certainly my mutation will add an extra dimension to finding a reasonably workable program which can get me off the ground. The ruling logic behind this radical idea is the same logic which caused me to make my pop-quitting resolution back in 2010: I've tried to do it on a more gradual basis, and kept blowing it. So I decided that, in an instant, that would be that and I was going to go all the way with it or it wasn't going to happen at all.

I'm going to finish my book and start trying to submit more writing samples. My book is actually almost finished as it is. As for general writing, I've been stuck for far too many occasions, and to a point I've been afraid of sending queries because it seems like all the publications I want to send them to use regular staff members to do their writing instead of contributors. Although I've tried to get published in the past, I'm kicking myself for not doing this sooner, because what's the worst that can happen? It isn't as if I haven't been rejected from anything before. The only difficult part is finding a unique and interesting topic to write about.

I've been wanting to try stand-up, since I've been listening to it since I was about six or seven years old. I used to tell stories at slams in Chicago, and a few years ago, with a little encouragement (actually it was more like a challenge) from my friend Dana, I began writing an act. I would like to have the chance to finally try it, and to learn what works and what doesn't work for me. I'm also going to continue writing for it more. Speaking of writing, I will maybe get a bit more serious about journal-keeping, because there are some thoughts that I just shouldn't say out loud or on a computer, or really in public at all.

What's the point of living if you're not expanding your list of interests, after all? Hell, ten years ago I didn't know anything about global politics or alcohol, but I learned a bit about those subjects in short order. Ten years ago, I never had never seen a full baseball game, and now baseball is one of the sports whose teams I have genuine emotional attachments to, plus a little internet fame as a baseball book reviewer. Unless it can be proven otherwise, I'm still convinced that we're here to learn and grow as much as we can. First, though, I have a little stop to make in Chicago!

Buffalo Wings Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:28:12 +0000

One of my absolute favorite "dipping" foods. I don't know what it is, but the combination of crispy chicken wings, hot sauce, and ranch dressing (others prefer blue cheese, but I don't like the stuff at all) just screams "perfect." I prefer my wings "naked," since I think breading can give wings an unsavory, soggy texture that makes it more filling than it should. Wings are a perfect companion with a good pizza and bunch of your friends and/or family (and possibly a good movie, too).

These restaurants offer what I think are stellar buffalo wings.

Pizza Hut/Wing Street
Zuni's House of Pizza
Tilted Kilt
Marti's Place at Ramsay's Landing
Quaker Steak & Lube

Christmas Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:06:10 +0000

Even though Christmas is over as of writing this, I feel like talking about it now.

Despite abandoning my Christian faith in 2001 (I'm an agnostic with really strong leanings toward atheism), I still practice Christmas because I think it's a wonderful time to spend with friends and family, and that I see it more as a cultural tradition in the Western world than an exclusively-Christian holiday. I guess it helps that since 2006, I've been spending my Chirstmases with family that don't bog down everyone's spirits with their dramatic crap or downright malice for others.

My ideal Christmas consists of comics and games for gifts and Mexican-styled food for dinner and dessert.

Rugrats Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:11:16 +0000

Even though the Rugrats would have gone down in quality by alot by the late 90's until its end in 2004, there were a lot of episodes from the first half of the 90's that ranged from good to great. Rugrats was simultaneously funny and relatable, despite having some aspects of the show that felt pretty ludicrous.
When I was a kid, I especially related to Chuckie since like him, I'm a redhead with glasses that was phobic about so many things (though I'm not nearly as phobic as I used to be as of writing this). It should probably go without saying that Angelica is the prime example of a bitch, as she was horrible to Tommy and his pals.

Even with the show's generally light-hearted nature, Rugrats was even capable of moving someone to tears, since even today, the "Mother's Day" episode still makes me squirt tears near the end.

I wish either Netflix would have all the episodes available to watch or if Nickelodeon would release official DVDs of the show.

Crown Them with a Halo

Wed, 9 Jan 2013 16:58:54 +0000

Baseball didn't exactly zoom right out to the west coast once it became a major sport. For decades, westward expansion to Major League Baseball meant maybe putting a new team in Kansas City. The barriers of Major League Baseball were pretty well set in stone until the 50's, and until then, there were no baseball teams either south of Washington or west of Saint Louis. Baseball was slower than residents of New York City to catch on to the fact that there are, in fact, places outside of their regular geographical area. By the time they learned, a fledgling little league known as the National Football League had already planted a pair of teams in California, both of which were becoming mainstays.

For years, though, there had been talk of placing an existing team on the west coast, and Los Angeles - Hollywood, baby! - was always the subject of the talks. They started planning a move back in the 40's, but kept seeing excuses not to go through with it: Pearl Harbor. The sale of the Saint Louis Browns. On again, off again, blah blah blah. In the end, it took until 1957 to finally get a team out there. And what a team! They were in the midst of a string of Pennants and had won the World Series for the first time just two years before. Upon their landing in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Dodgers proceeded to fulfill the potential they first showed in their native Brooklyn, creating a dynasty right off the bat which won three World Series titles and was fronted by one of the greatest pitchers in history, Sandy Koufax. Now in most instances, this would have been game, set, and match. However, in the early 60's an enterprising baseball fan from New York City who missed the Dodgers wanted a team in the worst way. MLB, refusing to expand, laughed in his face. And so that man, William Shea, decided to create a whole new league, the Continental League. It was totally a ploy to get Major League Baseball to comply with him and force them to expand. Of course, they didn't know that, and when a bill allowing MLB to be the exclusive baseball league in the United States was struck down in Congress, it occurred to MLB that a Continental League COULD ACTUALLY BE CREATED! It would give them.... COMPETITION!!! (Gasp!) So now that Shea had everything he needed to get his new team and league, MLB finally sat down and said "Now, let's discuss this like reasonable men, shall we?"

Shea got permission to build his team, which became the New York Mets. One-team expansions are rare, though, and so the 60's saw a round of expansions. With the Mets came the Houston Astros, and before the Mets were the Washington Senators and the Los Angeles Angels. Cowboy legend Gene Autry was a baseball nut who had wanted a team, and this was the one they gave him. The Angels started playing in 1961.

For an expansion team, they actually put up a pretty respectable showing. They went 70-91 in their first year, which is actually still the best record ever put up by an expansion team. It kept them nine games in front of the Senators and Kansas City Royals. It also impressed the hell out of the National League brass, who apparently believed new teams should get to the back of the line and pay their fucking dues before being allowed to, you know, win. When the Astros and Mets were created the next year, the promising showing of the Angels convinced the National League owners to create a new rule allowing them to reshuffle their rosters before the expansion draft, and that resulted in the Astros and Mets both getting royally fucked over; the Astros were atrocious that year, and the Mets put on a display of baseball so unrelentingly ugly that they remain one of MLB's grand poster children for baseball ineptitude. They went 40-120, finished last in a ton of statistical categories, and are not only arguably the worst baseball team ever fielded, but pretty much inarguably the worst team of the Live Ball Era. It wasn't until 2003 that their ineptitude was even challenged.

In 1962, the Angels signed pitcher Bo Belinsky, who brimmed with potential. On May 5 that year, he hurled the first no-hitter in Angels history. Unfortunately, Belinsky was also a real nightlife kinda guy, a street kid from New Jersey who was into pool hustling and womanizing. His career took a turn south, and he never regained that no-hitter form. Even so, the Angels did spend most of that season in serious Pennant contention. The Angels got rid of him in 1964, and he then proceeded to burn through four more teams until 1970 closed his eight-year career. (He eventually landed on his feet, though.) Also in 1962, the Angels became tenants of Dodger Stadium, which pissed Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley off to the point where he, of course, worked a bunch of asinine conditions into their lease contract, like charging them for half the stadium supplies even though the Angels were drawing only half as good as the Dodgers. No one supported giving the Angels a new stadium, so in the end, Autry had to move his team. Long Beach beckoned, under the condition that the team be named the Long Beach Angels. Well, there was no way he was going to accept that stupid name, so he took the offer from Anaheim, who even built him a stadium. It was 1965 when Autry gave the Angels their identifying moniker, the California Angels. When the Angels led the American League in attendance that year, they knew the move was the smart choice.

By 1967, the Angels were contending. They were part of a five-team Pennant race that year which the Boston Red Sox eventually ended up winning. The Angels were very competitive right through the end of the 60's, showcasing guys like Alex Johnson, Clyde Wright, Ken McBride, Jim Fregosi, Albie Pearson, Leon Wagner, and Buck Rodgers. The 70's would see some bad years from the team, although the pitching rotation did have one very notable player: Nolan Ryan. Ryan had been a reliever on the 1969 Miracle Mets team which won the World Series, and all he cost the Angels in bringing him to California was Jim Fregosi. Ryan went on to set a lot of strikeout records, including 383-strikeout mark in the 1973 season which still stands. Now ordinarily, teams sign guys like him for megatons of cold, hard cash. General manager Buzzie Bavasi, however, had something different he wanted to try with Ryan: Letting him go in free agency after Ryan went 16-14 in 1979, remarking that he could easily be replaced by two pitchers who go 8-7. Ryan turned up with the Houston Astros, spending the rest of his prolific career with them and the Texas Rangers. Bavasi later admitted that letting go of Ryan was the worst mistake he ever made. It was particularly rough because 1979 was also the year the Angels finally reached the playoffs. The won their division, but lost the ALCS to the Baltimore Orioles.

That was only the beginning of what would become a very frustrating existence for the Angels from that point forward. In 1982, the Angels made their grand return to the postseason. They also had the burden of being helmed by Gene Mauch, a great manager who was also the heartbreakingest heartbreaker of possibly every baseball manager ever. The man was good, no doubt, but he was also the guy who was managing the Philadelphia Phillies during The Phold of 1964, an oft-repeated part of baseball lore in which the Phillies had twelve games left in the season, were in first, and needed one win to clinch the Pennant when they went on a losing skid that saw them fall into third place. The Angels won the first two games of the ALCS, which was a five-game series back then. Their opponents, the Milwaukee Brewers, proceeded to win the following three, giving them the only Pennant they ever won. 1986 was even worse: The Angels won the AL West again, and were leading in the ALCS three games to one. (The ALCS had been increased to seven games by now.) At the top of the ninth inning in game five, the Angels were leading their opponents, the Boston Red Sox, 5-2. They were one strike away from victory, but the Red Sox came back and managed to pull through the whole rest of the series that year, running an incredible marathon in a classic ALCS. Boston won the Pennant and was, ironically, in the same situation California was in came game six of the World Series - a single strike away from taking it all before the opposing New York Mets came roaring back.

The Angels were briefly subject of curse talk. In the aftermath of the ALCS, fans identified Boston's go-ahead homer as the moment the team had come closest to the World Series. That home run was given up by closing pitcher Donnie Moore, and fans being fans, Moore of course became the scapegoat. He became one of those infamous scapegoats, where the team was so close, except for our one guy who blew it…. He became a scapegoat at the level of Bill Buckner, who was maligned after the 1986 World Series for letting a ground ball roll between his legs which, if fielded, would have clinched the World Series for the Red Sox; or NFL kicker Scott Norwood, just as unfairly vilified by fans of the Buffalo Bills for shanking a kick wide right in the closing seconds of a Super Bowl which decided by a single point. Buckner and Norwood, while both very hard on themselves at first, accepted their errors as part of their sports and moved on with their lives. Moore - who had fought depression in the past - couldn't quite get over giving up that run. It haunted him for the rest of his life to such an extent that in 1989, Moore lost his mind in an argument with his wife. He shot her three times before committing suicide. (His wife was driven to the hospital by his daughter and survived.)

The Angels fell back out of contention for some time. They spent an enormous part of the 90's playing terrible baseball, because by this time there was quite a bit of confusion in the office. Gene Autry still owned the team, but in name only. His health was getting poor, so his wife Jackie seemed to be in charge half the time. At other times, the Disney Company seemed to be guiding the reins, since they had a minority ownership in the team. After disastrous years in 1993 and 1994, the team finally seemed to be on the rise in 1995, when they started winning games in bunches. By August, the Angels had a ten and a half game lead in their division, but they started to slump. At one point, from August 25 to September 3, they lost nine straight games. From September 13 to September 23, they endured another nine straight losses. They finally rebounded to win their final five games, but at the point that was only worth a tiebreaker game against the Seattle Mariners, which the Angels lost. When the worst baseball collapses in history are discussed, this one tends to get overlooked, but it shouldn't. No, it doesn't help that a leading team's momentum slows down, but we frequently don't give enough credit to second place teams who catch fire at the right time. Everyone knows the story of the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers, who held a 13 and a half game lead over the New York Giants only to lose to them and the Shot Heard 'Round the World. The Dodgers, however, didn't collapse badly - they went 26-22 down the stretch, which most times would be enough to hold on. In the same stretch, the Giants ran an incredible 37-7 record. All respectable baseball fans know the story of the 1978 Boston Red Sox and their loss to the New York Yankees through the Boston Massacre and Bucky Fucking Dent. Less discussed is the second half of that season, when Boston went 37-32 while New York ripped the AL to shreds in a 52-20 tear. The 1969 Chicago Cubs had a nine and a half game lead on August 14, which the New York Mets reduced to two over the next 13 days on the way to mowing them down and winning the division and their first World Series title. For the 1995 California Angels, there was no hot team. The Mariners went 16-13 while the Angels were going 13-17 for August, took first on a seven-game winning streak while California was losing nine straight, and lost first when they lost three of their last five while California was winning their final five. You think Seattle was on a hot streak? Nah, I thought not. This was a REAL collapse to a team which was merely lukewarm at best.

In 1996, the Disney Company took control of everything, and the curse rumors started getting serious. The Curse of the Cowboy is what it would be called, and it would have made sense because of the whole Cowboys and Indians image. Gene Autry, who died in 1998, was known as a singing movie cowboy and his team played in a stadium built on an ancient Indian burial ground. (Or so that's the rumor, anyway. Anaheim historians haven't been able to either confirm or deny it.) The team also officially changed its name to the Anaheim Angels in 1996, prompting an outcry from fans that calling them after Anaheim would make them a small time team. Those protests eventually fizzled out. The uniform designs also changed. The spelling of "Angels" on the front was replaced with a Disney-made logo featuring a large angel wing to the left of the A on new vest jerseys with pinstripes. The new design was hated by absolutely everyone. Chris Berman called them softball beer league uniforms. Angels fans themselves called them the periwinkle jerseys. In 2002, due to universal ridicule, the jerseys were scrapped and the old jerseys were brought back.

That was just the beginning of a very eventful year. The baseball gods smiled upon the Anaheim Angels in 2002. First, they got rid of a disgusting jersey design which caused millions of retinas to howl in agony. Then, all the curse talk was scrapped. Sure, the Angels started the year with a pathetic 6-14 record. In the end, though, they came through when it counted, and managed to win 99 games in the regular season. It was four games behind the Oakland Athletics, but still more than enough to qualify for the wild card spot, which would give them the privilege of getting killed in the ALDS by the Yankees, still in their dynasty years and defending their Pennant from the previous year. At least, that's what everyone thought would happen. The Yankees won the first game, but Anaheim won game two. A few days later, they clinched the series in four games after scoring eight runs in the fifth inning during game four. In the ensuing ALCS against the Minnesota Twins, the Angels split the first two games at the Metrodome before clinching at home with three straight victories, winning their first Pennant. They moved on to face the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, a highly underrated, high scoring affair which went the distance and featured an Earth-shattering clutch performance from Giants star Barry Bonds, who by most logic should have won the MVP and probably would have had he not made a deadly fielding error in game six which let Anaheim continue six-run rally that began in the seventh inning and grabbed San Francisco's momentum. In a decidedly anticlimactic game seven, the Giants took a 1-0 lead in the second inning, which the Angels matched with a run of their own at the bottom of the second. The Angels added three more runs at the bottom of the third. The 4-1 score was the final, and the Anaheim Angels won the World Series. After so many decades of bad baseball interspersed with heartbreaking near-misses, Angels fans were at last able to hold their heads high and look Dodgers fans in the eyes.

In 2003, Disney sold the team. In 2005, the team lost a lot of goodwill by making the worst name change on Earth. Hoping to expand on their fanbase and piggyback off Los Angeles, they went back to their original name. Sort of. They were the Los Angeles Angels again, but not exactly. They embarrassed themselves by officially renaming themselves the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. (And just when fans were finally getting over the Brooklyn Dodgers of Los Angeles!) Everyone thought this name was fucking stupid, and argued they shouldn't name themselves after Los Angeles if they didn't play there (even though the NFL's Los Angeles Rams spent a very long time in Anaheim and no one cared) and said the name was a lingual farce because it mixed an English term - "Angels" - with the Spanish word for Angel - "Angeles" - in a heavily Spanish-speaking city. The cities of Anaheim and Los Angeles, The Walt Disney Company, and Orange County all banded together and sued the team for it, claiming a lease violation! The team countered that the lease demanded a name that merely CONTAINED the word "Anaheim." Fan resistance eventually subsided, but legal resistance continued until 2009, when the Anaheim city council dropped the case. The full name, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, is used on official press releases and documents. In other contexts, the name Angels or Angels Baseball is used. MLB simply uses the affiliation of Los Angeles, as do most sportscasters and writers.

The baseball, however, has been stellar ever since. The new owners want the team to win again, and are shelling out the big bucks to make it happen. In 2004, they went all out to get Vladimir Guerrero. In 2006, the team paid up All-Star Gary Matthews Jr. Not a GREAT pickup, but it fueled speculation of getting Carlos Lee, Miguel Tejada, or even Alex Rodriguez. In 2007 the Angels ponied up for outfielder Torii Hunter, stealing him right from under the noses of the Chicago White Sox, who wanted him badly, were willing to pay, and made no secret about any of it. In 2008, they traded for first baseman Mark Teixeira. They got Bobby Abreu in 2009, Hideki Matsui for 2010, Albert Pujols in 2011, and most recently, they signed Josh Hamilton. Yeah, the Angels want to WIN, and they want their fans to believe in their team as well. And they've been winning the division a lot - five times, to be exact. They just haven't been winning the postseason games that count.

There have been twelve Hall of Fame players with the Angels, but none of them are depicted wearing an Angels cap. Still, the list includes Reggie Jackson, Whitey Herzog, Nolan Ryan, and Dave Winfield. Their list of retired numbers includes Jim Fregosi, Gene Autry, Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, and Jimmie Reese.

The Angels have developed rivalries in and out of their division. They have rivalries with the Yankees and Red Sox as well as their great divisional rival Texas Rangers and area NL rival Los Angeles Dodgers. The Red Sox rivalry goes back to a bet between Gene Autry and Tom Yawkey over who would win more games. The two teams have endured a lot of theatrics, from fights to rallies to the 1986 ALCS, and heartbreaker for Angels fans for which the Angels got even in 2009 by sweeping the Red Sox out of the playoffs. The Angels and Rangers have a lot of former players now playing for each other. Vladimir Guerrero going to Texas while Josh Hamilton plays for the Angels is a prominent example. The Dodgers just happen to share the territory, so there's a turf war and a fight for fans. The Angels have had a share of huge, memorable moments in their history. The 1982 ALCS, the One Strike Away game, game six of the 2002 World Series (hell, the World Series itself), Nolan Ryan's no-hitter, and Bo Belinsky's no-hitter are there to whet the appetites of baseball fans.

The reigning image of the Angels is unfortunately their Disney tenure. It's because of Disney that the Angels are still seen as the cute little sibling to the Dodgers, and it's not without reasonable justification. Would those awful wing uniforms in the late 90's and early millennium have existed without Disney? What about a crappy 1994 remake of the movie Angels in the Outfield? Even the non-Disney traditions have come to be resented. If you're not a fan of thunder sticks, the blame can be laid at the feet of the Angels. They created them. They also created the Rally Monkey, a mascot monkey named Katie who jumps up and down on the video board if the Angels fall behind. And in a similar vein of the Chicago Cubs hoisting a flag with a W or an L on it depending on whether they won or lost the game that day, the Angels light up a 230-foot high letter A with a giant halo after every Angels victory.

The downside of the Angels is accepting a tragic history. I'm not talking about heartbreaking baseball; I've covered that. Remember when I mentioned the suicide of pitcher Donnie Moore up there? That was part of the reason the Angels got so much talk about a curse, and it wasn't the only time someone from the team was killed. In 1978, they had a star outfielder named Lyman Bostock who was shot to death paying a visit to a few friends of his in Gary, Indiana. In 1992, the team bus crashed in a very nasty way. No one was killed, but twelve players were injured.

The Angels don't have the great originality of the Dodgers, but they've been very prominent and important in their own right. They've had a dramatic history, perfect for a Hollywood script, and now is a better time than ever to get on board with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Even despite the embarrassing name.

LG's Magic Remote, Finger Gesture and Smart Share Enhance TV Browsing Experience

Wed, 9 Jan 2013 06:10:14 +0000

The Magic Remote comes in two models, one that comes with LG’s premium Cinema 3D Smart TVs and features LED-backlit buttons, and another for standard Cinema 3D Smart TV models. There are of course more functions that the magic remote can assist and there's a video detailing that in full.

On the other hand, Smart Share features one-touch NFC tagging to instantaneously transfer media content from one device to another using WiFi or 3G/4G. Smart Share will also support other protocols like Miracast and Intel WiDi to ensure all possible content sharing functions are supported to enable users to easily share multimedia and other content stored on a smart phone, laptop or other mobile device on the LG Smart TV.

At the end of the day, LG aims to take the complications out of the picture and let technology enable users to enjoy what they wish to do best as seamless as possible. That is LG's design philosophy in developing and improving their products - to make Life Good.

Amazon.com Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 05:19:24 +0000

Since I live in a rural area, Amazon is an extremely convenient addition to my life as I can easily buy stuff without having to drive 12-15 miles away to buy electronics or graphic novels. With Amazon's Prime membership, which costs $80 a year, it includes free, speedy shipping (only two days from purchase, sometimes sooner) and being able to stream some movies for free on your computer.

However, like what the mighty Madpenguin has said in his review, Amazon isn't the ideal place to post reviews. If you're a guy like me, who often thinks a little differently from the status quo (especially with anime), you're gonna be attacked for not liking something that everyone else does. These fascist little twerps will slander you for being "contrarian" and a "troll," even if you articulate and analyze really well in your reviews.

Amazon is a great place to shop, but if you're interested in posting reviews, you're better off posting reviews on Epinions and Lunch instead.

A childhood favorite that holds up pretty well. 66%

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 04:38:33 +0000

Since it's Christmas time, I think it's appropriate to review one of the most well-known staples in Christmas films, Home Alone. I loved this movie when I first saw it back in the very early 90's, and throughout my childhood, I related to Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) really well, being a “little brother” myself (and that at the time, I loved cheese pizza, just like Kevin). However, when my teenage and adult years came around, it was time to get more critical since logical thinking became more dominant in my mind.

STORY

The McCallister family is getting ready to fly from their Chicago home to Paris before Christmas. The night before the family leaves, Kevin gets into a fight over pizza with his older brother, Buzz (Devin Ratray). Kevin gets punished for instigating the fight and causing a big mess, and in a fit of anger, wishes that his family would disappear. After the power gets knocked out that night, the family is running late for their flight and forget about Kevin in the rush. All the while, a pair of burglars, Marv (Daniel Stern) and Harry (Joe Pesci), known as the Wet Bandits, have their eyes set on robbing Kevin's house.

CHARACTERS

While not perfect, I thought the characters were well done in this movie. While I'm not really a fan of Macaulay Culkin, I thought he was good as Kevin in this movie. Kevin is a believable kid, since he generally hits the “right spot” in between overly likeable and being an annoying little brat. He's generally a good but misunderstood kid, but can show signs of selfishness.

John Heard and Catherine O'Hara are good as Kevin's parents, Peter and Kate. They're shown as parents who seem to be a little cold towards Kevin, but deep down, they really do love and care about him.

The supporting cast was decent as Kevin's other family, and it's funny to think that Michael C. Maronna played one of Kevin's family members (Maronna would later become Big Pete in the classic Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete). Roberts Blossom is great as Marley Murphy, a man misunderstood as a bad guy, but turns out to be a good person.

Pesci and Stern are quite good as Harry and Marv. Unlike a lot of family comedies revolving around a kid outsmarting the bad guys, Marv and Harry are actually pretty convincing as burglars. They show to be menacing and believable in how they act before their “showdown” with Kevin. Despite being victims to Kevin's creative traps, they're shown to be a little smart and ruthless at times, and these don't feel forced.

HUMOR

The humor in this movie is quite solid. Of course, the funniest parts of this movie are when Marv and Harry try to break into Kevin's house, unsuspecting of Kevin's traps. Some of the funniest moments in this phase of the movie are when Marv accidentally steps on a bunch of Christmas ornaments with his bare feet, when he accidentally steps on a nail with bare feet, and when Kevin puts a tarantula on Marv's face, causing him to scream like a little girl.

Even before the phase of the movie where Kevin faces off against Marv and Harry, there's still some good humor to be found. Some examples are of the scenes where Kevin puts aftershave on his face, causing him to scream and when he goes to see a local Santa Clause, and you see this Santa smoking and ranting about getting a parking ticket.

LOGICAL FLAWS

I would have given this movie at least a percentage in the 70's, but after analyzing some of the logical fallacies in this movie, I had to bring the rating down a notch in order to give all of you a more fair and balanced review.

Some of the biggest logical flaws in this movie are when Kevin pranks the pizza guy into thinking someone is shooting at him and the other is when he sets up the traps in his house. The former in that it's pretty odd that the pizza guy didn't call the cops after the incident, though he might have been really scared to report it to anyone. The other in that Kevin sets up some pretty messy traps in the house, such as the tar-lined staircase in the basement. Did Kevin even think of how he could clean that up?

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The cinematography in this movie is splendid. Julio Macat captures lots of great imagery of winter suburban Chicago and even of Paris in some scenes. For a family-oriented Christmas film, these clean, pristine images are perfect.

SOUNDTRACK

John Williams's music for Home Alone is very good. Many of the instrumental compositions in this movie are almost Christmas time staples nowadays, and they stir up all the right emotions.

The choice of more “traditional” Christmas tunes wasn't bad, either. They sound good and fit the movie like a glove. I'm glad the Chipmunk Song wasn't used in this movie, as I HATE that song (though that's a different kettle of fish).

FINAL WORD

This is easily the best Home Alone movie in the whole series. While not mandatory viewing, Home Alone is a pleasant Christmas family film, and essentially John Hughes's last good contribution to cinema.

Home Alone (movie) Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:32:41 +0000

Here it is, folks, the only good movie in the Home Alone series.

I initially loved this movie when I first saw it back in the very early 90's, and even after some more critical, analytical thought, it still holds up well. Despite some feelings of contrivance here and there (especially some logic issues, thus why I now rated it a 3 instead of an initial 4), the characters feel more believable and sincere compared to the second movie (and especially the third and fourth ones).

This movie is simultaneously touching and funny. I still get a great laugh when Kevin puts the tarantula on Marv's face and he screams like a girl. John Williams's soundtrack for this movie is also well done.

Vader's Fist

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:45:36 +0000

Anyone who has ever attended a science fiction or comic convention has most likely bumped into at least one member of the 501st, a charitable organization composed of Star Wars fans who dress up as the "bad guys" from the Star Wars universe. These men and women give their time and money to help others. Sometimes they simply show up in order to draw a crowd to an event or put a smile on a child's face. Other times, they help raise money for causes or assist with Toys for Tots drives. In short, these "bad guys" have really big hearts. Their numbers have grown so much over the years and they've helped so many individuals and causes that George Lucas felt it necessary to make the group a canon part of the Star Wars Saga.

In "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith," the clone troopers with blue markings who marched into the Jedi Temple on Coruscant behind a freshly dubbed Darth Vader walked into Star Wars canon as the 501st. This figure (along with a few others in other lines) cements the group's canonicity even more.

The figure's sculpt is excellent. It looks exactly like the troopers from the film. The paint job is excellent as well, featuring the token blue markings and even a bit of battle damage from purging Jedi from the galaxy.

The figure comes with "secret weapons" and a Galactic Battle card and die as well.

The only reason I give this figure three stars is as far articulation is concerned, the toy falls short. The legs are primarily stationary at the hip, with very little articulation at all. The arms are limited in range due to the armor as well.

If you're just purchasing this figure to add to your collection mint in box, I recommend getting the Vintage Collection version of the figure. If you're picking it up for yourself or your chld to play with, go with this Saga Legends version.

It's a nice looking figure, it just doesn't move very much.

In its Saga Legends box, I recommend this figure to folks who enjoy opening and playing with their toys.

The Maverick Jedi Of Episode I

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:05:02 +0000

A lot of people really, really, really dislike Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. I've burned the film myself in a few reviews over the years. However, with the passage of time, my distaste for the film has lightened so much that I actually enjoy watching it on a regular basis. I blame my son for this, as he loves Darth Maul so much that we've watched the film together multiple times solely to see that Sith's brief moments on the screen. We even went to the theater and saw the film together for its 3-D release (a memory that I will never forget, as it was the first time my son saw any of the Star Wars films on the big screen).

One of the few characters that I really enjoyed in the film from the very first time I saw it was Qui-Gon Jinn. He is also one of the few characters that I own an action figure of for the simple fact that I've never really liked any of the molds. Recently a local department store offered eight figures from Hasbro's 2012 Movie Legends line in a multi-pack at a very low price. I picked up a couple of these packs for my son and one for myself. Why? So I could get my hands on a Qui-Gon figure, an Obi-Wan figure, and a Darth Maul figure from The Phantom Menace together at one low price.

The Qui-Gon figure is suitable for display. Although the likeness doesn't quite match up to Liam Neeson, it is fine enough for me. The figure is of Jinn without his Jedi robe and apparently ready for his battle alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi against Darth Maul. The figure comes with a forgettable grappling hook accessory and that brilliant green lightsaber that we see Qui-Gon wield in the film. The figure is also very poseable.

A Galactic Battle Game die and card are also included.

I bought this figure strictly as a collector. I did open it and plan to display it and the Obi-Wan figure in a standoff with Maul. It's also a good figure to keep in-box and, of course, it's fun to play with as well (no matter how old or young you might be).

Highly recommended.

Magnificent Figure!!

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:41:04 +0000

Hasbro's release of realistic figures styled after characters from the "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" series is brilliant. The Obi Wan Kenobi figure is definitely my favorite.

Featuring Kenobi in his "General Kenobi" Clone Wars armor, this figure comes with two lightsabers (one ignited and the other powered down). The figure can hold either the ignited saber or the hilt in his hands, and the deactivated hilt also fits onto Kenobi's belt.

I am particular fond of the armor, which features Republic insignia and the signature battle damage found on so many of Hasbro's other figures in all of their Star Wars lines.

The likeness of Ewan McGregor is very good, and the sculpt even includes the mole on McGregor's forehead.

Overall, this is an excellent figure to both collect and to play with. Definitely a keeper!

Fun This Is, Sometimes

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:36:25 +0000

When Hasbro released its 2012 Star Wars Saga Movie Legends line, I was glad to see that it included characters both popular and obscure. I was also excited because my son has reached an age where he enjoys playing with these figures and engages them in great battles on his bedroom floor.

After Thanksgiving (but not on Black Friday), I visited a local big box store to see what deals I could get my hands on. One of the best deals was a pack that included eight of the Movie Legends figures in one set. Each figure came in its original packaging and these were all encased in one large package. There were a number of sets available, some focusing on the "Clone Wars" animated series, others focusing on the "Movie Legends." I picked up two sets, one of each, and instantly had multiple Christmas presents for my son to open on Christmas day. I did go ahead and give him a couple of the figures ahead of time, though.

One of the figures I gave him early was in the "Movie Legends" set, the 2012 Yoda figure with "whirling lightsaber" action. The figure itself looks pretty decent. The likeness to Yoda from the films is pretty good. It comes with a detachable right hand that has an ignited lightsaber attached to it. There is a second right hand included that is open and suitable to hold the included walking cane. Also included is a detachable cape that, quite honestly, isn't worth the trouble. It doesn't look right on Yoda's back, and I don't particularly like it.

The figure comes with a "whirling lightsaber" action feature which allows you to twist Yoda's waist, push down his head, and watch him spin around muck like he did in "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith" when he took on Count Dooku and Darth Sidious. The only bad thing is that this feature is hit-and-miss (at least with the one I purchased and my son rarely uses that particular feature.

The figure also comes with a die and card for the Galactic Battle Game. This is actually a pretty fun game and myself and my son have collected a number of cards in the set already.

If you are strictly a collector and do not open the boxes, I'd say that this Yoda is passable. If you are the type of fan who enjoys opening and displaying your figures, this Yoda is okay but there are much better molds out there. Finally, if you're just buying this toy for your child or for yourself to play with, it's decent. Like I said before, the "whirling lightsaber" action is hit-and-miss, so you might want to skip this Yoda altogether.

Pizza Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 21:38:33 +0000

I know I'll piss off some people who only like fancy-pants food that's small, dainty, and overpriced, but I think pizza is among the finest contributions in the culinary world. There's noting quite like a thin crust pizza with pepperoni and jalapenos on it, with a close second being a stuffed crust with pepperoni and bacon.

My favorite pizza chains are Pizza Hut and Papa John's, while my favorite local pizza places are the Pizza House in Lowell, Zuni's (various locations, but the one I go to is in Cedar Lake), Goodfellas in Cedar Lake, and the House of Pizza in Hammond (all of these are in Indiana).

The Oriole Way

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:04:17 +0000

Who are the Baltimore Orioles? There are a thousand different ways to answer that question. It has something to do with the fact that constant city-shifting can take a real toll on the history of teams who have moved around a lot, especially from being in multi-team cities or small markets. So, without further ado, who are the Baltimore Orioles?

There was a team in the 1890's featuring Wee Willie Keeler and John McGraw which dominated the National League and won three straight Pennants, known as much for their innovations as their dirty tactics. In spite of their success, they were contracted out of the NL after 1899, and their best guys caught the tail of the Brooklyn Dodgers afterward. There was also an American League team called the Baltimore Orioles which was around at the league's creation in 1901. They stuck around until 1903, when they bolted to New York City and renamed themselves the Highlanders. That team is still around nowadays. They've taken on a different nickname - the Yankees - and despite MLB making a lot of attempts to forget their existence, they've journeyed in on occasion to win a Pennant or a World Series every now and then.

The modern Orioles can be traced back to beginnings in Milwaukee, where the Milwaukee Brewers were created in 1894. When the Western League adopted the name "American League" in 1900 and started operating as a major league, the Brewers happened to be there. Teams were shifted around, and the Brewers were one of the two teams that initially managed to avoid that. (The other was the Detroit Tigers.) The original plan was to move them to Saint Louis, though, and that idea flamed out.

Or did it?! In 1902, the team packed up and moved out to Saint Louis anyway, a larger city whose team was known once and for all by then as the Cardinals. The new kid on the block adopted the name Saint Louis Browns, as a tribute to the Cardinals, who began in the 1880's under the Browns name themselves. The also came to be known throughout their history in Saint Louis as a second division team. During the 1910 season, they etched their name into baseball batting race lore without fielding anyone who was threatening to win the title. The race that year was between Napoleon Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians and Ty Cobb of the Tigers. In the last game of the season, Cobb had the lead, and was pretty much in the clear save Lajoie being perfect at the plate. Cobb was also a bit of an asshole, and nearly everyone hated his guts. So when the Browns played their last game of the year against the Indians, they stationed their third baseman in shallow left field. Lajoie stepped to the plate six times. He bunted down the third base line five times, and made it to first five times. The sixth time, he got his base on an error, thus turning his at-bat into a base without an actual hit. Browns catcher-manager Jack O'Connor and coach Harry Howell tried to bribe the scorekeeper to change that last at-bat to an actual hit, offering to buy her a new wardrobe, but she didn't, and Cobb won the title by one point. The outcry triggered an investigation by AL President Ban Johnson, which resulted in Howell and O'Connor both getting fired and informally banned for life.

From 1901 to 1922, the Browns only had four winning seasons. In the 20's, new owner Phil Ball, who had bought the team in 1916, didn't pull any financial punches, and the Browns were competitive - one could even say they were GOOD - for most of the decade. In 1922, they even finished second. Unfortunately, he also made several bad errors in judgement with running the team. Misstep number one was firing Branch Rickey in 1919 because the two of them couldn't stand each other's egos. He must have forgotten what a genius Rickey was, because Rickey was automatically snapped up by the crosstown Cardinals, where he changed baseball by creating and building today's farm system. In 1920, Sam Breadon, who owned the Cardinals, talked Ball into letting the Cardinals and Browns share the same park. Breadon sold the Cardinals' original park and put the funding into Rickey's farm system, creating a wealth of talent and star power which turned the Cardinals into a much bigger draw. Although the Browns were fielding the likes of George Sisler, .300 batter Jack Tobin, and Ken Williams, the first 30/30 player, Ball's blunders dogged the Browns for pretty much the whole rest of their years in Saint Louis. At the outset of the 1926 season, Ball made one of those legendary doomed guarantees, saying there would be a World Series in his ballpark in 1926! You have to [ay close attention to that wording, because Ball was right. In 1926, the Saint Louis Cardinals played in and won their first-ever World Series. Yes, I said CARDINALS. Ball had failed to specify a team in his prediction.

Starting in 1927, the Browns became acquainted with their familiar basement home again. Until 1943, they only had two winning records, and their losses included a 43-111 debacle in 1939 which is still their worst ever. That all changed in 1944, when the Browns shot to first place and their first-ever Pennant, becoming the last of the original 16 MLB teams to make it to the World Series. It took World War II to enable them to do that, and so they were lucky to strike when the talent was overseas. The Browns still had a lot of their best players, though, because most of them were classified 4-F; unfit for service. That might have been a grand triumph for the Browns; unfortunately for them, their Fall Classic opponents were thir crosstown rivals, the Cardinals, thus bring Saint Louis its only Subway Series ever. Surprise surprise, the Browns were quickly dispatched in six games by a Cardinals team which won three World Series in six years during the 40's.

In 1951, Bill Veeck bought the Browns. Veeck was a showman hated by the baseball orthodoxy for his wild antics and tack promotions. Saint Louis was the home of probably the best-known Veeck promotions that happened outside of Chicago: In one game, he gave the spectators placards with orders on them and instructed manager Zack Taylor to do whatever the spectators' placards said he should do, thus making the whole stadium manager for a day. In another stunt, he signed 3-foot-7 midget Eddie Gaedel to an actual contract and sent him to bat, under the orders to never swing. Since there wasn't a strike zone to speak of, Gaedel was walked on four pitches in his only at-bat, which gave him an on-base percentage of 1.000. There's a popular myth that Veeck had a guy with a high-powered rifle trained on Gaedel, with orders to shoot him if Gaedel took a swing. It blows me away that there are people dumb enough to believe it.

In the 1950's. Saint Louis reached its peak population of almost 860,000 people, but Veeck sensed a decline was near. (He was right, as it turned out; Saint Louis today has only about 320,000.) He didn't believe the city was large enough for two teams, so he was doing everything with the intent to drive the Cardinals out of town. He signed a lot of players who had been popular with the Cardinals, signed legendary Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean as a broadcaster, and grabbed Rogers Hornsby to manage. He destroyed all the Cardinals' material in their shared park and devoted it exclusively to the Browns. The team did start drawing again, because being a fan of the Browns was suddenly a lot more fun than going to watch the stodgy old Cardinals, who were starting to feel Branch Rickey's 1942 departure to the Brooklyn Dodgers. The 50's were the first decade since the 20's which would go by without the Cardinals winning a World Series, and their owner was caught evading taxes and forced to sell the team. Since credible offers to buy the Cardinals weren't coming in from local interests, Veeck was suddenly looking like the big bird in town.

Just as Veeck was uncorking his victory champaign, though, the credible local offer for the Cardinals showed up. The Anheuser-Busch brewery, makers of Budweiser, stepped up and specified the very intent of buying in order to help the Cardinals stay put. They also had far more money and resources than Veeck could ever hope to tap. Today, Anheuser-Busch still owns the Saint Louis Cardinals, and that's why Saint Louis is a Cardinals town and not a Browns town. Veeck decided he was better off not competing with his suddenly gigantic competitors, ceded Saint Louis, and looked to the Browns' original home of Milwaukee for relief. That move was blocked, though it was more for the personal reasons of people who hated Veeck. So he turned to Baltimore, where the city was looking to bring in some baseball after close to a half-century without. He was rebuffed again, and eventually had to sell out his business stake entirely because the people upstairs just hated him that much. Their blocked moves were an effort to push Veeck out of the sport. Don't feel too bad for him, though; in 1959, he returned to baseball in his defining gig, running the Chicago White Sox for over 20 years.

The Saint Louis Browns were moved for the 1954 season. Unlike the other teams who were moving around in that era like the Dodgers, Giants, Athletics, and Braves, the Browns decided not to cling to their past by holding on to their old name and history. They made a try to almost completely sever any connections to the old Saint Louis Browns. First, they renamed the team the Baltimore Orioles, a tribute to the old baseball teams of the city's rich baseball legacy. Aside from the National League dynamo of the 1890's and the early-century team which eventually turned into the Yankees, there was also a Baltimore Orioles team from 1903 to 1953 in the International League, one of the higher-level minor leagues. They had won nine league titles and in their earliest years, featured a young southpaw pitcher named George Ruth. Calling the MLB newcomers the Orioles only made perfect sense. Further distancing themselves from the past, they made a 17-player trade with the Yankees that included most of their more notable players in December 1954. It didn't do much for them on the field, but it did help them establish a new identity.

Paul Richards was both the manager and general manager of those earliest Orioles teams. They were the hip new attraction in the city, so they drew a lot even though they only posted a .500 record just once in their first few years. In the 60's, anyone who felt bad for the shitty team that even lost its home in Saint Louis stopped feeling so bad when the Oriole farm system started producing Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, and Dave McNally. In 1960, they finished second, the first time they were a factor in a Pennant race since 1944, or even further back if you want to discount that war fluke. It was a sign for the AL that, since the Browns weren't there to be anyone's doormats anymore, they were going to be the league steamroller from now on!

In 1965, pitcher Milt Pappas and a few other players were sent to the Cincinnati Reds for Frank Robinson. Frank Robinson was just what the Orioles needed. In 1966, he won the batting title and Triple Crown as he powered the Orioles to the World Series, where they swept the Los Angeles Dodgers. Instituting a policy of conduct which came to be known as The Oriole Way, the team stressed hard work, professionalism, and a strong understanding of baseball's fundamentals. Whatever they called it, it sure as hell worked, and the Orioles were one of the most feared teams in the American League from 1966 to 1983, a stretch which saw them win six Pennants and three World Series. They were the best team in MLB during that run. They produced three MVP's - Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, and Cal Ripken Jr. They found four pitchers who won the Cy Young - Mike Cuellar, Jim Palmer (who won it three times), Mike Flanagan, and Steve Stone. Three of the players were Rookie of the Year - Al Bumbry, Eddie Murray, and Cal Ripken Jr. Manager Earl Weaver, one of the greats, had his managerial savvy questioned by a reporter. A reporter quipped to the Orioles' general manager that Weaver was just a push button manager who benefitted from his talent. The general manager said back Weaver built the machine and installed the buttons.

After the 1983 title, the Orioles began to decline. In 1986, they suffered their first losing season in a long time. In 1988, they fielded one of the worst squads ever, a disaster that lost 107 games. They led sort of an up and down existence until the mid-90's under new owner Peter Angelos, a penny pincher who seems to treat his fans with contempt. In 1996, they returned to the playoffs, playing the ALCS against the Yankees. It was in game one that a young fan named Jeffery Maier interfered with a ball hit by Derek Jeter, thus awarding Jeter a home run which may or may not have impacted the game. The Yankees took that momentum to win the series after that, and eventually won the World Series that year. They went wire to wire in 1997, wiped out the Seattle Mariners in the first round, and lost the ALCS to the underdog Indians. After that year, the team's manager, Davey Johnson, resigned because of a dispute with Angelos. In 2001, longtime team cornerstone Cal Ripken Jr. retired, and the team took a nasty downturn.

The Orioles struggled in the millennium. Occasionally, they could tease; in 2005, they held first place for 62 days, before a rash of injuries to key players let the Yankees and Boston Red Sox take them down. In July, Rafael Palmeiro collected hit number 3000. That was a joyous occasion, and it would continue to be one of Palmeiro's career highlights if he didn't deny using steroids in March. That proved to be a nasty hit to his reputation, though, because 15 days after hitting number 3000, Palmeiro was caught violating the MLB drug policy and suspended. He filed for free agency at the end of the year, but no one took him up. His career is over. Sammy Sosa, also facing trouble for 'roiding up, put on his worst show in ages and enjoyed terrible relationships with other players and his batting coach. Basically, the Orioles were the 2005 equivalent to today's New York Jets in the NFL - a soap opera.

If they weren't already pissed, 2005 was the final straw for even longtime diehards. Angelos had screwed up in a thousand ways, insulted the fans, used new imagery which wasn't exactly embraced, and refused to call the team the Baltimore Orioles. He apparently had the belief that the Orioles were the Maryland and Washington DC team, because he had even taken the name "Baltimore off the road jerseys. Fans started staging protest rallies, with fans - who bought tickets! - walking out of games. The fans who didn't go in for that showed Angelos just how wrong he was to assume the state and capitol were both his. That year, the Montreal Expos moved in and became the Washington Nationals, and fans started defecting. That appears to have finally snapped Angelos back awake, and he gradually started rebuilding the team. They gradually got better, but still continued to play losing seasons until 2012, when they stunned the baseball world by winning 93 games and going a full five against the Yankees in the ALDS, a series the Yankees were quite lucky to win.

As the Saint Louis Browns and Milwaukee Brewers, the very distant past doesn't have a whole lot to include in Orioles lore. The Brewers had one Hall of Famer with Hugh Duffy. The Browns had a bunch, but the only two specifically there for contributions to the Browns are George Sisler and Bobby Wallace. Fortunes took a better turn in Baltimore, whose Hall of Fame players include Eddie Murray, Jim Palmer, Cal Ripken Jr., Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Earl Weaver. Those same six guys are also the list of players whose numbers have been retired by the Orioles. Ripken got the special honor of being the one player in baseball history to ever appear in more consecutive games than the legendary Yankee Lou Gehrig. Gehrig was nicknamed the Iron Horse for starting 2130 games in a row, a record which many believed would never be touched. Ripken broke it in 1995. Naturally not a guy for a day off, he kept going. The absolute WORLD record for consecutive games played was 2216, held by Japanese League player Sachio Kinugasa. Ripken broke that record too, with Kinugasa in attendance. He kept going after that, too, and so both records were not just broken, but thoroughly shattered by a man who would eventually play in an incredible 2632 games in a row. On September 20, 1998, Ripken took a personal day for the first time ever. He said he did it to avoid any offseason controversy about his playing status, and to end it on his own terms. His replacement player that day, Ryan Minor, was a rookie that year and thought his teammate were pranking him when he was told he was slated to start.

The Orioles' biggest rivalries haven't felt like real rivalries lately, what with all their suckage and the non-suckage of the Yankees and Red Sox. They exist, though; Baltimore fans certainly haven't forgotten about them. Now they're competing against the Washington Nationals too. This contest is going to get very interesting in the coming years, since the Nats struggled as much as the Orioles upon first moving into their territory and are now hitting a peak which saw them post the National League's best record last season.

The Oriole Way doesn't seem a bad way to play ball. It's the team's very identity, and it worked for a long time. Although Peter Angelos seems to be a snake as an owner, the Baltimore Orioles have a glorious and dominant past even during the lowlights. In 1969, they were the first baseball team to ever lose the World Series to an expansion team; that was the year of the New York Mets' famed Amazin's squad, which won it all out of nowhere. Unfortunately, bragging about the past only invites mocking from more knowledgeable baseball fans, who know about those pesky days when the team was floundering as the Saint Louis Browns. Browns memorabilia is still available in some places.

It's a shame I can't give this team a better rating. Peter Angelos is still there, after all, and so are the Saint Louis Browns. But the Baltimore Orioles have given their longtime fans good reasons to be very proud of their team. There's a reason why, despite the Nationals defections, many other fans still haven't given up on them yet.

Steve Jobs Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:22:57 +0000

I know I'm late talking about this, but the ugly truth about Steve Jobs is that he wasn't the "genius" that everyone thinks he was.

The people that compare Jobs to folks like Nikola Tesla don't know what they're talking about. Tesla not only had great ideas, but he actually got his hands dirty to actually create machinery and other devices to bring alternating currents to practical use. Similarly, Bjarne Stroustrup not only had the idea to make computer programming easy and logical, he actually worked from 1980-83, buidling off the computer language C to invent C++ (a computer language that's the backbone of so much computer software and video games today). Tesla and Stroustrup were real geniuses. Jobs, on the other hand, was just a guy who had wacky ideas but made his team of computer hardware and software engineers do all the work for him, while Jobs took all the credit.

Jobs, you might have fooled a lot of people into thinking that you were a genius, but you haven't fooled me.

Thanksgiving Quick Tip by woopak_the_thrill

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 05:17:21 +0000

The only day in the year when guys can choose to wear maternity pants and not being made fun of LOL!

Taco Bell Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:11:32 +0000

The quesadillas and side nachos aren't bad, and the Mountain Dew Baja Blast is a neat drink, but the rest of the food at Taco Bell is just mediocre. Personally, I'd much rather go to a reputable Mexican restaurant instead like La Quesadilla and Mi Ranchito (Mexican restaurants in Northwest Indiana).

The White Elephants in the Room

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 18:59:49 +0000

"Loser" is not a word we throw around. In baseball, we certainly wouldn't dream of applying it to a team which has won the World Series nine times, a number surpassed only by the Saint Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees. Nor is it a word that frequently gets applied to baseball managerial legend Connie Mack, a man who won more ballgames than any other manager. As with so many other aspects of baseball - or all of professional sports, for that matter - there are some hidden things that exist between lines, and in the case of the Oakland Athletics, the fine between-line print has a single word written. That word is "money."

These days, the Athletics - who are frequently and affectionately also referred to as just the As - get a lot of attention for their very unconventional methods of operation. Back in the Dead Ball Era, though, they were the Philadelphia Athletics, a dynamo of a team which was created in 1901 when the Western League declared itself a major league, changed its name to the American League, and rightfully decided that it immediately needed a team in Philadelphia to offer fans a counterpoint to the older Philadelphia Phillies. That made perfect sense - Philadelphia back then, as it is still today, was one of the largest cities in the United States. So the Athletics were created and recruited former catcher Connie Mack to manage. This appeared to be an oddity of a move; Mack had lasted ten years in baseball as a player, from 1886 to 1896, acting as player/manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1894 to the end of his playing career. He wasn't a wonderful player, and his managing record in Pittsburgh was a respectable - but not particularly stellar - 149-134.

In spite of his obvious flaws as a player and manager, Mack got to work by giving back whatever the team was paying him many times over. He had a fantastic business acumen, buying a 25 percent stock in the team and successfully persuading Phillies owner Ben Shibe to invest in the As as well. He also talked Phillies star second baseman Napoleon Lajoie to make the jump to the As. An unorthodox guy by his day's standards, Mack had a knack for finding the best talent available, and he employed an easygoing managerial style by which he entrusted his players to be as disciplined as he required. Upon finding good players, Mack would teach them to get their technique really honed, then unleash them onto the diamond and let them play using their schoolyard instincts. He was among the first to prefer young players to older veterans; he didn't pinch hit very often; and he may have been the first manager to see the redeeming qualities of a big-inning offense rather than ordinary small ball. Even John McGraw respected him.

All that being the case, The Athletics became the first dynasty of the American League. Right in the shadow of their 1901 founding, and led by Mack and Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, Jack Barry, Frank "Home Run" Baker, Eddie Plank, Rube Waddell, and Chief Bender, the As won a whopping six Pennants. They won the second AL Pennant in 1902, before there was a World Series to go with it, and they took the flag in 1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914 to go with that. 1910, 1911, and 1913 all went with World Series titles as well. This quickly made them the favorites of Philadelphia, whose National League team briefly crawled out of the basement for the 1915 Pennant in an existence otherwise defined by its destitute shittiness.

In 1914, the Athletics lost the World Series to the "Miracle Braves" fielded by Boston. Also that year, the Federal League was created by players who were pissed off about the Major League Baseball reserve clause, and demonstrated the potential of free agency. Of course, the Feds needed stars to lure people through the turnstiles, so they did what the AL itself had done years before and raided the player stock of MLB. The Feds got to the As, and this predictably resulted in a collapse. A 99-53 record which won the 1914 Pennant dropped to 43-109 and last place the following season, and Philadelphia's 1916 record of 36-117 remains the all-time nadir of baseball's modern era. They had a winning percentage of .235, and a great many baseball fans who argue the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics were actually worse than the 1962 New York Mets or 2003 Detroit Tigers or any of those other bad teams. Hell, there's an outside chance they were worse than the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders, and that's REALLY saying something. Things didn't get much better after that; the Athletics finished in last every year through 1922.

Mack's rebuilding started to show again in 1925, when the As began playing like contenders again. In 1927 and 1928, Philadelphia finished second to the New York Yankees, and in 1929, with the help of Jimmie Foxx, they launched what is now called The Second Dynasty, winning Pennants that year and the next two, as well as the World Series in 1929 and 1930. In each of the dynasty's three years, the team won over 100 games. Unfortunately, Mack was forced to sell off or trade his best players in order to reduce expenses. You know what also happened in 1929? The Great Depression began, so declining attendance destroyed the team's venues. Unbeknownst to everyone, The Second Dynasty was the last of the team's good years in Philadelphia.

After finishing second in 1932 and third in 1933, the consequences of Mack's fire sale became apparent. The As finished fifth in 1934 and were back in last the next year. Fans began to believe Mack was getting washed up, which wasn't as unreasonable a conclusion as one might think because the man was 68 years old when the As won the 1931 Pennant. He also didn't have any source of income outside of his baseball team, so he was really walloped by the Depression. No money, no good players, and the Athletics spun out of control and fell into a decline which ran for over 30 years. Every year from 1935 to 1946, Philadelphia finished last or next to last, with the exception of a fifth-place finish in 1944 which can be safely written off as a result of 1944 being a war year. (The damn Saint Louis Browns won the Pennant that year!) The Athletics didn't compile a winning record again until 1947, and that was a surprise to everyone, especially seeing as how the war was over and the league was reloaded and ready to play some real ball again. They contended for most of 1948 and 1949 too, but finished last in 1950 again. That 1950 season also marked the close of Connie Mack's baseball career. He had managed the team for 50 years by then, won 3731 games, lost 3948, and managed 7679, all records which are well above and beyond even remote threatening distance. He won nine Pennants and five World Series titles.

Much is made about Mack's 3731 victories as manager, because it's such an outrageous number. Looking at his wins and losses, though, one can't help but note that his 3948 losses is a higher number than those 3731 wins. Even acknowledging his team's money problems, you can't help but draw the conclusion that his records are more a result of his longevity. Whether or not Mack would be hired to manage a team today with his overall record - Pennants and World Series titles included - may be the most interesting baseball discussion no one is having.

The Athletics picked the worst time possible to bottom out. There was one great constant about Philadelphia baseball at the time: No matter how bad the Athletics got, they still won those World Series titles and Pennants. Those belong to the Athletics forever. Also, despite their losing records outnumbering their winning records, everyone knew they would still turn out better than Philadelphia's crosstown National League team, the Phillies. The Phillies were the older team in the city. They were founded in 1883 and had been the definition of baseball futility pretty much the entire time. Remember that Pennant I mentioned earlier that they won in 1915? Yeah, for decades that was the only sign of on-field success they ever had. But near the end of the 40's, something odd began to happen: While the As couldn't find pocket change in their couch cushions, the Phillies began spending big money on young prospects. The gambles started paying off almost right off the bat, and the same year the Athletics hit the cellar in 1950, the Phillies had the best year in their history. Their team, lovingly nicknamed the "Whiz Kids" that year due to their collective youth, fought the Dodgers in an exciting neck and neck Pennant race. On the final day of the season, the Phillies played the Dodgers themselves in a thrilling battle in which Dick Sisler whacked a fateful homer which won the Pennant for the Phillies and vaulted them into the World Series. Phillies fans had endured losing for so long at the time that it didn't even matter when the Phillies were swept by the Yankees.

Since there were two godawful baseball teams in Philadelphia most of the time, fans were probably relieved whenever one of them put up any kind of fight, and you can't blame them for gravitating toward the better team on the rare occasion that one was worth watching. While the Phillies started playing baseball in the 50's that was at least respectable, the Athletics were headed in the other direction. There were occasional bright spots on the diamond. Longtime As fans could go to games and at least watch Gus Zernial, a great slugger; pitcher Bobby Shantz, the 1952 MVP; or batting champ Ferris Fain. Still, it was clear by 1954 that the Philadelphia Athletics were taking an irreversible slide to the bottom in both play and finances, and that the Philadelphia Phillies had supplanted them. Connie Mack's sons Earle and Roy, who were running the team now, saw they had no choice but to sell the Athletics. Connie Mack himself, who loved the Athletics and served 50 years as their very soul, saw the writing on the wall too, and sorrowfully gave his approval to sell. There were a few last-minute offers by buyers who intended to keep the team in Philadelphia, including one by a Chicago insurance tycoon named Charles Finley. Remember that name because it's going to become very important later. Anyway, at the time, MLB was trying to turn every baseball city into a single-team city, and so the leaders of the AL decided to solve the Philadelphia "problem" by selling the team to an owner who would move it somewhere else. In October 1954, they found their owner in Arnold Johnson, approved the sale, and sent the Philadelphia Athletics off to become the Kansas City Athletics.

Kansas City is regarded as probably the greatest underrated baseball city in the country today. They have a very rich baseball history between the Yankees' top farm club, the Kansas City Blues, and the legendary Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. Even today, the perpetually pathetic Kansas City Royals have a diehard legion of followers despite riding the bottom step of the AL Central, the worst division in MLB. This history and devotion might have meant something if Arnold Johnson gave a shit about any of it. As it were, though, rumors were going for a long time that Johnson's intent was to sort of use Kansas City as a warm-up spot before taking the Athletics to the real show in Los Angeles. In 1960, the Athletics had one of those release clauses that set off Rachel Phelps from the movie Major League: If the team drew under 850,000 for the season, he could go somewhere else. If this was Johnson's plan, the people of Kansas City had other ideas. They showed up in record numbers. In their first season, 1955, they were third in attendance behind the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves, who had been recently relocated from Boston themselves.

Johnson also had a lot of former business ties to the Yankees. He even owned Yankee Stadium in 1953 before MLB forced him to either sell it or forget about buying the Athletics. His old ties are theorized - not without reason - to be an instigating factor of a rumor that Johnson was running the Athletics strictly as a farm team to the Yankees. Another reason for that rumor was a series of trades he kept making. It was a given for the remainder of Johnson's years that if the Kansas City Athletics dug up a player worth keeping, then you could bet your ass he would soon be a Yankee. Roger Maris, Bobby Shantz, Art Ditmar, and Hector Lopez all became Pinstripers through Johnson's trades. He did land a talented player or two in return - Norm Siebern and Jerry Lumpe were notable - and cash, but his trades were mostly heavily favored to the Yankees. Once or twice, they even sent players to the Athletics themselves only to get them back through other trades later. Arnold Johnson died in 1960, when he was 53. Later that year, Charles Finley returned and bought the Athletics.

Finley was aware of the rumors. Having developed a reputation as one of the sport's great showmen and rebels, one of Finley's first acts was to symbolically take a bus, point it in the direction of New York City, and burn it to the ground! That was the end of the Athletics' "special relationship" with the Yankees, as Finley started refusing to make deals with them and started looking around for unheralded talent. In 1967, the Mets had the first pick in the amateur draft. They selected a catcher named Steve Chilcott. That was a big deal because the projected top guy of the draft was an Arizona State slugger named Reggie Jackson. He was seen as one of those surefire, can't-miss superstars, so when the Mets passed on him, Finley couldn't believe his luck. He nabbed Jackson and that was that. Unfortunately, despite Finley's knack for scouting, he eventually moved the Athletics in 1968 anyway. This time, they went to Oakland, a move Finley later regretted.

By the 70's, the Oakland Athletics were rich in gelling talent. Besides Jackson, they also featured marquee talent like Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Bert Campaneris, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue. The era of the Swingin' As had arrived, and it culminated in what fans call The Third Dynasty. In 1972, 1973, and 1974, they won both the Pennant and the World Series. Although they're considered one of the great baseball dynasties, that greatness is an illusion inspired by, you know, three straight titles. The truth was that the Athletics were playing just good enough to win a division so weak that it was frequently called the American League Least, then rising to the occasion in the playoffs. They also had a lot of flair; Finley radically remade the team's image to fit the times, dressing them in outrageous and loud colors and giving bonuses to those who grew out their facial hair and giving them nicknames. The most prominent nickname was probably Catfish, given to the late, great James Hunter. He wanted Vida Blue to start calling himself "True," which wasn't a bad idea, but even so, Vida Blue is one of the best names a baseball player ever had.

Oh, yes: They all hated Charles Finley. Finley's As, like the others before him, had financial difficulties, and Finley was a serious micromanager. Contract disputes with Jackson and Blue demanded intervention from commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Before the team even moved to Oakland in 1968, 1967 had a near-mutiny so nasty that Finley had to reassert his authority by releasing their best hitter, Ken Harrelson, who was quickly snatched by the Boston Red Sox just in time to help them win the Pennant that year. In the 1973 World Series, Finley forced Mike Andrews to sign a false affidavit claiming he was injured after Andrews committed two errors during game two, which Oakland lost. The team, manager Dick Williams, and the public sided with Andrews, and Kuhn had to step in again to get Finley to back down. However, Finley did keep Andrews benched for the rest of the World Series, and that allowed the weak New York Mets to draw the Fall Classic out to seven games before finally going down. Williams was so pissed that he resigned after the Series. Finley retaliated by refusing to let him manage the Yankees, claiming he still owed another contract year. Alvin Dark led the 1974 As to their third straight World Series title, then it was Catfish Hunter's turn to get pissed when Finley violated his contract by failing an insurance payment on time. Hunter was allowed to go, and the ensuing battle for his services was an important turning point in the creation of free agency. (He went to the Yankees.)

An elaborate scheme to move the Athletics to Chicago failed in 1975, and when free agency began taking hold for good by 1976, most of Oakland's veterans were eligible for it. It shouldn't be surprising to learn they all bolted. The team wasn't drawing, either. A low point hit on April 17, 1979, when the As hosted a crowd of 550. At least, that's the official number claimed by the team. First baseman Dave Revering said it was more like 200. Finley sold the team in 1981. Under new owner Walter Haas, though, they became one of the most successful teams in the league, both on and off the field. The farm system was rebuilt, and produced Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss. In 1986, they grabbed Tony La Russa to manage, fresh off his act with the Chicago White Sox. In 1988, The Fourth Dynasty was launched, and the Athletics won the Pennant in 1988, 1989, and 1990. They won the World Series in 1989, sweeping the cross-bay San Francisco Giants in a somber World Series overshadowed by the Loma Prieta Earthquake.

In the mid-90's, payroll needed to be cut. Again. So stars were dumped. Again. In 1998, the Athletics hired a new general manager, turning the team over to a former ballplayer and former scout named Billy Beane. Upon another salary dump, Beane started getting creative, and enacted a radical new system of evaluating baseball talent. Instead of looking for traditional tools, Beane looked for statistical prowess in on-base percentage and strikeout/walk ratios. With a low payroll, they managed to find dominance during the regular season, although Beane gets criticized a lot because his teams haven't yet won a Pennant or World Series. That's unfair to him because it discounts the fact that the regular season is a ridiculous endurance run itself. It also unkindly forgets the fact that Michael Lewis spilled Beane's trade in a book he wrote in 2003 called Moneyball, which spilled the secret, thus allowing the more monied teams in MLB to pick up on it and start tracking down better players than the ones Beane can afford to sign. The one criticism of Beane's style is that he tends to overlook the human element too much, but many teams in baseball have reformed their scouting based on Beane's ideas. The Red Sox hired stat guru Bill James to do that, and in 2004 they won their first World Series in 86 years. Beane's detractors point to a series of down years Oakland recently had - forgetting that their secret is now also in the hands of higher payrolls - but Oakland still won their division in 2012.

Billy Beane is currently the face of the Oakland Athletics. Connie Mack was the face of their past. Both are innovators who had to oversee a share of losing teams. Home Run Baker, Chief Bender, Mack, Eddie Plank, Al Simmons, Rube Waddell, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Rickey Henderson, and Dick Williams are all in the Hall of Fame based on their contributions to baseball as Athletics. A lot of other big names have played for the team. Notably, people seem to want to ignore the ill-fated Kansas City years. The only notable thing that happened then, apparently, was that weird relationship with the Yankees. The Oakland Athletics appear to want to keep their distance from their past and form their own identity. They've retired five numbers and honored one owner, all from the Oakland years.

This team has produced a lot of colorful players. Reggie Jackson was one of the players who started growing out his facial hair, in defiance of what Charles Finley first ordered, which was to be clean-shaven. That resulted in Finley changing his mind. Jose Canseco, everyone knows as the Godfather of Steroids. Canseco is a player I missed almost entirely, and even though everyone seems to hate him, the law somehow came down on his side and now everyone is being forced to listen to him. He's so hated that people are trying to stain him for something he managed to get right, which was outing the steroid lifestyle in a tell-all book that made him a pariah. Even Connie Mack stood out because he was one of baseball's most gentlemanly people. Mack created a Code of Conduct in 1916 that he expected all of his players to follow, with the expectation that they not only become better ballplayers, but better people.

The Athletics seem to have trouble drawing fans every other year. They are the only baseball team to still share their field, Oakland Coliseum, with a football team, the Oakland Raiders. Whispers about moves pop up a lot, and the Athletics have been in talks since the mid-millennium about a new, baseball-only stadium in somewhere other than Oakland. Fremont, Sacramento, and San Jose are all brought into it. The Athletics are the weirdest of the teams to suffer from Mets Syndrome. They share the Bay Area with the San Francisco Giants, and they actually have more World Series titles than their cross-bay NL rivals; nine as opposed to San Fran's seven. Still, the Giants have one of the great thriving fantasies of Major League Baseball, one that has so much love for their team that they are frequently mentioned along with the Saint Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox as the most fervent. Although it's considered okay in the area to be a fan of both teams, people just appear more lukewarm at best to the Athletics.

The Athletics don't have any true marquee rivals. They have their Battle of the Bay with the Giants, and back in the day they were the natural rivals to the Philadelphia Phillies, but that's it. They had a serious rivalry with the Chicago White Sox for awhile, but that was back when they were both playing in the same division.

The Athletics can be defined in both good and bad ways. On the lower end, they always seem to be poor and struggling. If you have a favorite player, you'll learn to hate him because he'll soon be in Boston, New York City, or San Francisco if you're really unlucky. The team's nine World Series titles and 15 Pennants came within four distinctly identifiable eras of great success. The First Dynasty was the one that began in 1902, before there was a World Series, and ran until about 1914, with particular prominence between 1910 and 1914. They won six Pennants and three titles during the time. The Second Dynasty went from 1929 to 1931, when it won three Pennants and two more World Series titles. The Third Dynasty was the three-Pennant three-titler which ran from 1972 to 1974 during the Swingin' As years. The Fourth Dynasty was from 1988 to 1990, when they won the World Series in 1989. Billy Bean's techniques haven't resulted in a dynasty, but he's not swimming in his funds, either.

A longtime symbol of the Athletics for their entire existence has been the elephant. That happened very early on, when New York Giants manager John McGraw told Philadelphia manufacturer that the city had a white elephant on his hands. Mack defiantly adopted the symbol of a white elephant as a team mascot, presenting McGraw with a stuffed white elephant at the 1905 World Series. McGraw, who had known Mack for years, gracefully accepted it. The elephant is on many of the team's World Series rings, and it serves as a good metaphor for a team that overcame a lot of long odds to win more titles than every team except two. Unfortunately, those titles come far apart. The payoff of being a fan of the Oakland Athletics may be worth it, but you'll have to wait awhile and be ready for some truly hellish baseball in the meantime.

CNN Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 02:44:20 +0000

First of all, I'd like to say that I don't really like any of the American news outlets, since practically all of them slant one way or another and present the news the way they want you to see it or read it instead of just showing it as it is. Regardless if a news outlet slants to the left or right (politically speaking) the fact that they slant in any direction is what annoys me.

CNN is no different from the rest, since they not only cover stories of no importance, they make them front-and-center for the sake of ratings (such as covering Kim Kardashian's short-lived marriage), while truly important stories (such as US military personelle getting killed in Afghanistan or Iraq) are left as mere tickers scrolling at the bottom of the TV screen.

Go to the BBC to get the straight dope.

Taco Bell Quick Tip by BaronSamedi3

Fri, 9 Nov 2012 20:03:27 +0000

The food isn't good for you, but it's painfully addictive. They have a very good dollar menu.

Grizzly Bears They're Not

Thu, 1 Nov 2012 17:42:31 +0000

The eternal story of professional sports has one particular constant: The winners will always be perpetual winners, no matter how bad they get, and the losers will always be perpetual losers, no matter how good they get. Yes, the good teams are going to have off years, sometimes stringing together a few in a row, but you can always count on them to return to the upper parts of the standings, and bad teams will have their occasional moments and sometimes even win championships. Sooner or later, though, we know they'll all return to their usual formal places in the pack, and that's how we know all is well within the sports universe. There are very, very few instances in which a team has been able to change its luck completely, morphing into a league lord after decades of being the doormat, and there are about as many instances of a world class team falling into oblivion forever.

Only a few teams have ever managed to pull that off one way or the other. The NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers are one of the most famous cases. Founded in 1933, the Steelers are one of the NFL's oldest teams. They took the field for the first time only to lose to the New York Giants by a score of 23-2, and it was a perfect sign of just what came to torture Steelers fans for the better part of 40 years. They proceeded to win just 24 games over their first eight years, never made the playoffs until 1947, were repeatedly killed by their archival Cleveland Browns, and posted only eight winning records, one of which came during a war year in which they were forced to merge with the Philadelphia Eagles just to survive. They were markedly improved by the 50's and 60's, but in this case, "markedly improved" means "at least they were competitive." Finally, after bottoming out in 1969, the Steelers won first pick draft rights over the equally dreadful Chicago Bears, and they used them on a Louisiana quarterback named Terry Bradshaw. Bradshaw won four Super Bowls, and the Steelers stayed good long after he left, eventually winning a sixth Super Bowl in 2008, which gave them more Super Bowls than any other NFL team.

On the flipside, we have the Chicago Cubs. Their history as the Lovable Losers of Major League Baseball is very overblown. It's true they haven't won the World Series in 104 years now, but they didn't actually stop being competitive until the late 40's, when the Billy Goat Curse came into being. Before that happened, World Series victors or not, the Cubs were monsters. They were 16-time Pennant winners who did everything right, and were one of the most hated teams in the National League.

The Cubs are one of the oldest teams in baseball. The official record states their original founding in 1876, but that's only because it's the year the National League was founded. They actually came into being in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings (and yes, the current Chicago White Sox did name themselves as a nod to that), and went through several rolls of names. Due to the fact that they just couldn't find a place to play, they were given other nicknames like the Chicago Orphans and Chicago Remnants, as well as other names like the Chicago Colts and Chicago Zephyrs which sportswriters pulled from the air. While they were doing this, they were also winning Pennants. They won the first National League Pennant in 1876, and they followed that up with a dynasty that won it again in 1880, 1881, 1882, 1885, and 1886 led by the day's luminaries: Albert Spalding, Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Cap Anson. In 1885 and 1886, the National League played a primitive World Series against the champions of the American Association. They played against the Saint Louis Brown Stockings both times, ending with a tie in 1885 and Saint Louis being the 1886 victor. They waned by the 1890's, and were deadwood by the 20th century.

The down period didn't last very long. By 1903, their famous infield of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance was locked and loaded, and by 1906 they were complimented by an army of pitchers including Orval Overall, Ed Reulbach, and the immortal Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, whose lost index finger allowed him to get an extra spin on his pitches and allowed him to dominate batters. In 1906, all that firepower took them to 116 victories, a regular season record which is still standing today. It was tied in 2001 by the Seattle Mariners, who needed 162 games to tie it (seasons were 154 games long back then), and the 1998 New York Yankees came within two games of it. They ran away with the Pennant and looked like a lock for the World Series title when they were matched up with their crosstown AL White Sox in the first subway series. (Technically, it would be the Red Line Series, or it would have been if the Red Line existed back then.) Now check the matchup: The Cubs set a record for wins, and also a record for winning percentage which is without equal. The White Sox won 93 games, a miracle when you consider their team batting average was a paltry .230, lowest in the AL. Who would you assume won? That's right, the White Sox managed to gut this sucker out with superior pitching. Their team batting average in the World Series was .198, low but still better than the .196 the Cubs could muster against the South Siders' superior hurlers.

The Cubs didn't let let that little setback slow them down. They returned to the World Series the next two seasons and won it both times, thus creating the second dynasty of baseball and the first dynasty of the modern era. So far, the 1907 and 1908 titles are still the only World Series the Chicago Cubs ever won. The 1908 Pennant races featured baseball's first one-game playoff, against the New York Giants, a classic game in which a very possible Giants victory was ruined when Giants player Fred Merkle didn't touch all the bases. Although Merkle was a rookie that year who put together a respectably solid career which lasted around 20 years, he never managed to live that play down. After 1909 went to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Cubs returned to the World Series once again in 1910 to close out their dynasty.

The Cubs made the World Series again in 1918. They weren't dominant this time, but their 84-45 record did lead the majors, and they had the pitching of Grover Cleveland Alexander. In the World Series that year, they became the final victim of the Boston Red Sox before their own famed curse - the Curse of the Bambino (which Boston natives never believed in, and which was an idea spread in the 1990's by sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, who was bemused at his half-baked idea taking on such a life of its own) - took hold, and they didn't win the World Series again until 2004.

William Wrigley then bought the team. He changed the name of their home field, Weeghman Park, to Wrigley Field. After being criticized by a loudmouthed sportswriter named William Veeck, Wrigley then hired Veeck to run the team, challenging him to do better. When Veeck assembled talent like Hack Wilon, Gabby Hartnett, Billy Herman, and Rogers Hornsby, the Cubs were a dynamo again and Wrigley presumably said "Well, that shut me up." Beginning in 1929, the Cubs won the Pennant every three years until 1938. They kept getting hiccups during the World Series, though, and often got humiliated. In 1929, the Cubs met the Philadelphia Athletics. In game four, the Cubs were leading 8-0 in the seventh inning when the As scored ten runs. The embarrassing part of that incident was that they gave up three of those runs on an inside-the-park homer when Hack Wilson lost an everyday pop fly in the sun. In the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth of the Yankees made a gesture at Cubs pitcher Charlie Root, then hit a home run off him. When Ruth was asked what was up with the gesture, he gave only a vague answer which baseball lore twisted into the idea of him calling his shot, even though only one eyewitness on the field believed that. Everyone else - including Charlie Root, who said he would have drilled the Bambino on the next pitch if he believed Ruth was calling his shot - believes he was giving Root a strike count. 1935 probably gave the Cubs their best chance when Billy Herman hit .321 and led the Cubs to 21 straight wins in September, allowing them to roll into a hard-fought, six-game World Series against the Detroit Tigers which they lost. In 1938, behind the stellar pitching of Dizzy Dean, the Cubs won an important late-season game with Gabby Hartnett's Homer in the Gloamin'. In the Series, they fell to the Yankees again, as so many of the Yankees' World Series opponents are wont to do.

In 1945, at the end of the war years, the Cubs' replacement players won the Pennant. One sportswriter, when asked who would win the World Series against the Tigers, famously quipped that he didn't think either of them were capable of winning it. The 1945 World Series was one of the sloppiest ever played, and the Tigers won it in seven games. The whole series was overshadowed by one particular incident in the stands, though. For one of the games, bar owner, Cubs fan, and goat aficionado Billy Sianis bought two box tickets, one for him and one for his pet goat, Murphy. Goats tend to smell bad, though, and after a few too many complaints, Sianis was booted from Wrigley Field. On the way out, the pissed Sianis uttered under his breath "The Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." Of course, that phrase was laughed off, but 68 years after the incident, the Cubs have yet to return to the Fall Classic.

My opinion on the Cubs would be a lot different today if the team didn't latch on to that image. While at a singles meeting one fine winter night in Chicago, I chatted up some sports fans, and one of them told me the Cubs hired a marketing director who decided the team might be able to play up its loserdom as an image of cute underdogs and run away with profits. After realizing the Cubs weren't going anywhere fast, "Lovable Losers" was apparently invented as a way to market the team, and that led to the inevitable transformation of the Cubs into the "Cubbies," the fandom into "Cubdom," and Wrigley Field into "The Friendly Confines." Harry Carey was hired to broadcast in the late 70's or early 80's (ironically, after having spent years broadcasting for the team's two biggest rivals, the White Sox and the Saint Louis Cardinals), and his exclamatory style and cutesy gimmicks like pronouncing names backwards won an audience of yuppie frat boys. Although the Cubs and White Sox have around the same number of fans in Chicago, the Cubs have an enormous national fanbase, and probably around 90 percent of the casual fans living in Chicago. The imagery is my problem with them. I'm in many ways an ornery Rust Belt factory kid; even if all this didn't happen, I would still have reservations about cheering for a team called the Cubs. But no one has embraced bad baseball the way the Wrigleyville upwardly mobile have. Could you imagine guys like Frank Chance or Charlie Root embracing a title like the Lovable Losers? No, those old players would have stomped fans to the curb for referring to them as the Cubbies.

Anyway, back to my brief narrative, the Cubs were merely average for a couple of years before they started bottoming out. From 1947 to 1966, they were one of the worst teams in the National League, only breaking the 500 mark twice. The Cubs discovered Ernie Banks, their greatest player, in the 50's, but couldn't dig up any real help for him. Players like Hank Sauer and Ralph Kiner were there only temporarily, and Phil Cavarretta was signed late in his career, when his numbers were falling. By the early 60's, the Cubs finally had a semblance of a real talent base again when they had Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Ferguson Jenkins. Wrigley, however, chose that time to try a bold experiment in management which looked like a good idea in paper but proved to be a disaster that led to the Cubs hitting perhaps the lowest point in their history: The College of Coaches, a rotating collection of eight managers who would all take periodic turns ruini - er, running - the Cubs. The would rotate through the entire organization, so every player in the minors would also be introduced to a standard system of play. To Wrigley's credit, this system anticipated the coaching specialization which eventually evolved into the game. Unfortunately, it also meant team leadership was inconsistent, so players had to adjust to a new system every so often. After the 1962 Cubs lost 109 games - the most in their history - Wrigley reinstated the old system, but the college didn't go away completely until Leo Durocher was hired to manage in 1966.

Durocher was excellent as a manager, and the Cubs finally finished the 60's with a string of winning records thanks in large part to him. In 1969, the Cubs were just plain good, good like in the old days good. Until September, that is, when they went 8-17, fell into second place, and lost to the New York Mets, who went 39-11 to finish and clearly weren't going to be stopped no matter how the Cubs did. No, the September record didn't help, but the Mets got hot at the right time and plowed through everything in their path in their miracle year. Fans thought up the stupidest excuses in the world to explain the collapse: In August that season, a black cat ran across the field. Others blamed the number of day games the Cubs played, a result of Wrigley Field not introducing night baseball until 1987.

After middling through a nondescript decade in the 70's, the Cubs were finally back in contention in 1984. Led by a talented cast of players which included Ryne Sandberg, Davey Lopes, and Rick Sutcliffe, the Cubs won their division with a league-best 96 victories. In the NLCS, they met the San Diego Padres, ran them into a 2-0 in the then-five game long series, and became the first team to squander that lead, losing the Pennant. They won the division again in 1989 with Mark Grace and Joe Girardi, this time losing the NLCS to the San Francisco Giants. After hitting more mediocrity in the 90's, the Cubs won the Wild Card in 1998 during what was prognosticated to be a transitional year. Part of that was due to slugger Sammy Sosa playing a game of Top This! with Saint Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire. Although Sosa hit "only" 66 home runs to McGwire's 70 in the great home run chase of 1998, they both topped Yankee Roger Maris, who had held the original mark for most homers in a single season at 61. They won a tiebreaker game against the Giants to get the Wild Card that year, but were promptly flattened by the Atlanta Braves in the playoffs. Same old, same old, and no, that's not a plug for the swill known as Old Style Beer, a Wrigleyville staple.

Five outs. That's literally how far away the Cubs were from their first Pennant since 1945 back in 2003, the first year for manager Dusty Baker, hired fresh off a World Series appearance as manager of the Giants. The Cubs had won their division that year under Baker's positivity slogan, "Why not us?" They had beat up the Braves in the LDS and now, here they were in the NLCS, up three games to two against the Florida Marlins, five outs away from winning the Pennant. Unfortunately, Baker could taste the history he was about to make. He left his starting pitcher, Mark Prior, on the mound a bit too long; while Prior had been confusing and muddling Marlin batters all night with a dazzling array of fastballs and breaking balls, he was also visibly tired by the eighth inning. The Marlins picked up the momentum when his pitches lost their velocity, started hitting, and shortstop Alex Gonzales ended up booting a ground ball which could have ended the inning. Somewhere in the rally, a fan named Steve Bartman caught a pop fly foul because he did what any fan would have done by reaching for it. As outfielder Moises Alou was jumping to make the play at the time it landed in Bartman's lap, many fans ended up blaming Bartman for losing the game. Although the Cubs fanbase appears to have regained its rationality for the most part with this, Alou is being a complete ass about it. At first he said he was sure he would have caught the foul. Years later, he took it back, saying he never stood a chance at catching it. A couple of months later, he denied ever saying he wouldn't have caught it, saying if he did say that, he probably only did it to make Bartman feel better. Now, when I saw a photo of the scene, first of all, at least three or four other fans were also reaching out. Second, there's no way in hell Alou was going to catch that ball. His arm was a solid foot away from it, at the very least. Anyway, the Marlins took the momentum back, then the Pennant, then beat the Yankees in the World Series.

The Cubs actually did better the following season, winning their division and more games, but they were promptly ejected from the playoffs, then were bad again until Dusty Baker was replaced by Lou Piniella in 2007. That year started rocky, but the Cubs found their footing and got involved in an exciting race for the division title with the Milwaukee Brewers. The division crown was important because none of the NL Central teams that year were particularly good, so the second-place finisher was out of the playoffs no matter what - the Wild Card leaders were ahead of the division leaders in the NL Central. Eventually, Chicago pulled through with 85 wins as opposed to Milwaukee's 83, but they lost the first playoff round to the Arizona Diamondbacks. This was seen as a stepping stone to greater things, and the following year, the Cubs posted 98 wins, best in MLB. They were actually pretty lovable while doing it too, so much so that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley - a diehard White Sox fan who is known for in Sox circles for his indifference to the North Siders - was actually seen photographed in a Cubs cap. The Cubs, in this, their 100th anniversary since their last World Series title, really looked like a Team of Destiny. Unfortunately, they choked in the postseason as well, this time against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Since then, Piniella started floundering, and the Cubs have failed back into mediocrity. Chicago is still waiting.

The Cubs have a total of two World Series titles and 16 Pennants. Their Hall of Famers include Cap Anson, Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins, Ron Santo, Mordecai Brown, Ryne Sandberg, Rube Waddell, Robin Roberts, Goose Gossage, and Richie Ashburn. They've retired the numbers of Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins, and Greg Maddux. Also, Jackie Robinson. Unfortunately, Cap Anson was one of the most vile people to ever play Major League Baseball. He played in the 1800's, and when his team was once scheduled to play a game against a team fielding a black player, Anson, sporting the belief that those "chocolate-covered coons" (his term) shouldn't be playing his pure white man's game, refused to take the field. Plessy vs. Ferguson was right around the corner, so naturally, everyone in the league sided with him, and by the late 1890's, black people were out of baseball. He's part of the reason professional sports were segregated, so if you ever happen to spot his grave, defecate on it.

The Cubs have one of the greatest rivalries in the National League with the Saint Louis Cardinals. This came to a head when the Cubs traded Lou Brock for Ernie Brogglio. This pissed off Cardinals fans, because Brogglio was a 20-game winner one year, who had won 19 the following year while Brock could barely tap fouls at the plate. When the trade was made, Brock suddenly morphed into a great hitter who eventually won two World Series titles in Saint Louis and retired as the all-time leader in stolen bases. Brogglio only won seven more games in his major league career. The Cubs also have rivalries with the crosstown Chicago White Sox, who suffered a nasty World Series drought of their own which lasted 88 years, from 1917 to 2005. It was torture for Cubs fans that the South Siders managed to win the Fall Classic before they did, and White Sox fans won't let them forget it.

I hate the Cubs. I can't stand the way they've turned losing into a badge of honor. I can't stand how their fans keep skewering baseball history to make it look like there's some massive conspiracy against the Cubs, one of the most popular teams in MLB. To be a Cubs fan, what you need to be is white, yuppie, and fucking stupid. Cubs fans are convinced their team lost the 1984 NLCS because the lack of lights on Wrigley Field forced them to start more games in San Diego, or something. They're convinced a black cat scattering across Wrigley Field destroyed the 1969 season, and the way they first acted at Steve Bartman is inexcusable. Bartman actually needed a Police escort to escape Wrigley Field, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush offered him a chance to get out of Chicago to hide in Florida. The ones who don't actually follow baseball appear to be the fans the organization frequently caters to. I find it a baseball injustice that Harry Carey got a statue before Ernie Banks, or any other players, did, but it sums up the frat house mentality which affects even people who aren't at the games during summers. I do, however, have to admire the way Cubs fans refuse to see doom around every corner. They're a glass-half-full kind of people, and on the often occasions the team is sucking, they do take in the incredible atmosphere at Wrigley Field.

Wrigleyville is a unique place in baseball. Wrigley Field is notorious for not having any parking, and that's because it sits right in the middle of the neighborhood. Instead of a slightly isolated area, Wrigley Field is located literally right across the street from some apartments, bars, and souvenir shops. It's a breathing part of the neighborhood it resides in. Wrigleyville even has its own beer associated with its identity: Old Style, which is nasty stuff but unique to a Cubs fan mindset. Not a lot of other teams can claim that.

I should rate the Cubs higher, but the way the organization caters to secondary fans, the way those secondary fans react to the team, their cuteness and quiche, and a bunch of other factors prevent that. For my Chicago baseball fix, I'm sticking to the White Sox. Although I must confess that I'm waiting for the Cubs' storybook World Series victory myself, just because it would be followed by one hell of a party.

Ice Ice Baby Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:16:41 +0000

Uuhhgghhgh...

While I do admittedly get nostalgic for the early 90's at times, this is a relic from the era that I'm glad is dead as a doornail. "Ice Ice Baby" manages to both punch the rap genre in the face and rip off David Bowie's "Under Pressure." I'm glad there's really no one left that listens to this and actually thinks it's brilliant.

Jim Carrey mocks Vanilla Ice.

These Giants Stand Tall

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:04:45 +0000

Despite the juice, the cream, and the clear becoming big time factors in the home run's recent surge in baseball, looking at the all-time home run numbers can really boggle one's mind. In the history of Major League Baseball, over 10,000 players have suited up in one uniform or another at some point. Of those players, though, a little over a tenth of them have ever hit a home run. Notice I'm not using any plurals there. That's well under 2000 baseball players who have hit even a single home run, ever, in the entirety of their careers. As the number of home runs grows, the number of players who have done serious damage with them drops very sharply. 300 players have managed to cross the 200 mark in home runs. Once you get to 400, you start to see the names of guys who created their entire reputations and careers on being feared sluggers. Only 50 players ever got there, and there are a bunch of popular baseball names you would be surprised to learn never got out of the 400 range: David Ortiz and Adam Dunn only just got there, and the list includes other names like Dave Kingman, Chipper Jones, Carl Yastrzemski, Dave Winfield, and Jose Canseco. 500 is extremely rarified territory. 25 players got there, including Reggie Jackson, Willie McCovey, Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Frank Thomas, Mickey Mantle, and Mark McGwire. The List of players between 600 and 700 consists of Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Jim Thome, and Sammy Sosa. That's it. The 700 level has room for only Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth.

That makes it all the more remarkable that of the top four guys, two - Mays and Bonds - have played for the San Francisco Giants. That's pretty incredible as it stands, but Mays and Bonds are also both in the conversation for best all-around player in history. They are just two of the players who made the Giants one of the most important, powerful, and respected teams in baseball history.

The Giants seem to be on the backburners a lot in baseball conversation about the greatest overall teams, which isn't fair to them. Look at these staggering numbers: The Giants have won more games than any other team in professional baseball, or any other team in professional sports. As I write this, they won their 22 National League Pennant, placing them into their 19th World Series. Both of those are records in the National League. They have more players in the Hall of Fame than any other team. They've won the World Series six times. Only the New York Yankees, Saint Louis Cardinals, Oakland Athletics, and Boston Red Sox have won it more often, and if they pull through in this year's Fall Classic, they'll be tied with Boston. (And have one more title than their archrivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers.)

The Giants play in the senior National League and are one of the oldest professional sports teams in the United States. They were founded in 1883, at the very beginnings of professional baseball, as the New York Gothams. At the time, the National League was the only professional baseball league in the country, and it was withdrawing from many of the country's big cities as the teams in New York City and Philadelphia were expelled for not playing out their full schedules in their first year, 1876. Teams in Saint Louis and Louisville were kicked out for being caught throwing games. Cincinnati was thrown out in 1880 for having the NERVE! to play baseball on SUNDAY! In 1882, people whom I assume were National League One Percenters fed up with the puritans taking charge got together and formed the American Association, taking up residence in the big cities where they could cater to the blue collar folks by offering cheaper ticket prices, letting patrons act more like they wanted, and (gasp!) playing baseball on Sundays. The National League fought back by dissolving its teams in Troy, New York and Worcester, Massachusetts and returning to New York City and Philadelphia. The NL was hoping to lure the New York Metropolitans - no relation to today's New York Mets - but they decided to enter the AA. The Metropolitans' owners, John Day and Jim Mutrie, did realize a good opportunity when they smelled one, though, so they also made up a whole new team for the NL. Those were the original Gothams.

The Gothams were a reigning powerhouse by the late 1880's, and the proud Mutrie began referring to them as his giants. That's the name which eventually stuck. In 1889, they won their first Pennant. In 1890, though, a group of players got pissed off at the way they were being treated by management, and they formed a new league called the Players' League which all the Giants stars jumped into. A few years later, the Giants were sold to Andrew Freedman, one of the most hated owners in the history of the sport. After a ton of disastrous moves which left the Giants 53 games out of first, Freedman hired as player/manager the equally hated John McGraw in 1902. Although McGraw was hated and is still known today as one of baseball's supreme pricks, no fans can deny the man got results, either. Hiring McGraw was the last and second-best move Freedman made with the Giants. The best thing Freedman did came shortly after - he was forced to sell the team.

Meanwhile, McGraw took the Giants off on a run which, for the first few decades of the modern era, made them the absolute class of New York City baseball. The man managed the Giants for three solid decades, during which they won ten Pennants and three World Series titles. Who the hell was built to compete with that? The Brooklyn Dodgers, with their pedestrian talent? The New York Highlanders, in that new upstart (read: inferior) American League? HA! It might have been four World Series titles had the Giants not boycotted it in 1904. The 1904 World Series was supposed to be the second ever, but McGraw refused to play, citing the inferior talent of the American League, even though the AL representative from the previous year, the Boston Americans, had beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates in the showdown. Part of the problem cited by historians was that the owners of the Giants were somewhat nervous and not at all happy about the prospect of potentially facing the Highlanders, who had made a spectacular run at the Pennant in 1904 before eventually falling second to Boston. The Giants took a lot of shit for that, which led to the World Series being formalized in many ways which are still around today. They did win the Pennant again in 1905, though, as well as the World Series that ensued.

During this era, a lot of big names honed their skills under McGraw. The man had a hell of an eye for talent, and he dug up Christy Mathewson, Joe McGinnity, Bill Terry, Jim Thorpe, Mel Ott, Casey Stengel, and Red Ames. Even with all that talent, though, they still endured a lot of frustration. In 1908, they finished in a tie with the Chicago Cubs, which forced them into a one-game playoff which resulted in the Giants being on the wrong end of one of the most controversial plays in baseball history. The play, called the Merkle Boner, revolved around player Fred Merkle not touching a base after scoring the winning run. In the early 1910's, they won three Pennants in a row but lost all three World Series, first to the Philadelphia Athletics, then to the newly renamed Boston Red Sox, then to the As again. In 1915, they finished last. By 1917, they were Pennant winners again, but they lost the World Series to the Chicago White Sox. It wasn't until 1921 that the Giants finally followed through on their Pennant victory, knocking off their American League counterparts, the Highlanders, who would soon be known exclusively by their other name, the Yankees. They beat the Yankees in the Series the following year, too, before bowing to them in 1923 to give the Yankees their first title, and the Washington Senators their first title in 1924. (Which was also their only title as the Washington Senators.)

In 1932, McGraw finally stepped aside. He let Bill Terry manage the team. Terry held the Giants for ten years, during which he won three more Pennants and defeated the Senators in the 1933 World Series. Mel Ott emerged during this era, and Carl Hubbell became one of only three pitchers in baseball history to master the screwball. (The other two were Mathewson and Fernando Valenzuela.) Mel Ott managed beginning in 1942, but those were the war years, and they were hard on the Giants. After the war, the Giants made major waves by hiring manager Leo Durocher in 1948. Not only was the switch - which came in the middle of the season - unusual because of timing, but Durocher was a rather colorful character in an unwholesome way. He was coming off a gambling suspension in 1947. Also, his former management assignment had been with those fucking Dodgers, their archrivals. In fact, Durocher had been their face. Giants fans did warm to him, though, when he brought them the 1951 Pennant through Bobby Thompson's Shot Heard 'Round the World and won the Series in 1954, which included a spectacular catch by a young Willie Mays, maybe the greatest Giant.

That was their final memorable hurrah in New York City. The Giants stumbled through the next three seasons, and Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, who was moving to Los Angeles at the end of the 1957 season, convinced Stoneham to move out west with him. Part of it was simple practical convenience - it wasn't very reasonable to have baseball teams fly out west for only one series, then immediately go back east, so O'Malley needed another team in California to get the move approved. So he sought Stoneham, thinking it would be awesome if they could continue their ferocious rivalry out in the Golden State. So after the 1957 season, both teams bolted the boroughs, the Dodgers for Los Angeles and the Giants for San Francisco. The Giants, though, were left with a curse: The Curse of Coogan's Bluff, an overlook of their old stadium, the Polo Grounds. It said they would never win the World Series again.

The curse was right, as it turned out, or at least it seemed that way to longtime fans. The Giants hit it off in the Bay Area, and won another Pennant in 1962 only to lose the World Series to the Yankees. It was a tight seven-gamer, too. They contended through the rest of the decade before becoming a disappointing team in the 70's a period when they never finished higher than third. In the 80's, they actually bottomed out. Their Pennant drought was, by this time, their longest, and the 1985 Giants lost 100 games, which is the most in their history. Roger Craig was hired to manage in 1985 after that disaster, and he was able to return them to their former glory, at least somewhat. The Giants never finished with a losing record in his first five years and won the Pennant in 1989. Unfortunately, the Loma Prieta Earthquake interrupted the World Series that year for ten days. After it resumed, the Giants were swept by their Bay Bridge Series rivals, the Oakland Athletics.

1993 brought the man who is, in my personal opinion, the greatest Giant: Barry Bonds. I don't care what anyone has to say about him. He was the best player in baseball for a reason, and pitchers eventually grew to be so afraid of Bonds that they kept pitching around him and intentionally walking him. With Bonds in place and Dusty Baker at the helm, the Giants were eventually able to get back into the World Series in 2002 with the help of other talented players like Jeff Kent and Robb Nen. Despite an exciting, offensively based World Series which saw Bonds put up inhuman numbers, the Giants fell to the Anaheim Angels. During this period, Bonds also broke the single-season home run record in 2001 by belting 73. In 2007, the career homer record was also his. Those should have been more powerful moments than they were. Unfortunately, Bonds was a steroid junkie, so his records are often disputed by those who simply don't want to accept them. This was exasperated by the fact that Bonds is also universally seen as a major ass. Some people have seen Bonds display genuine warmth and affection. Unfortunately, there was too little of that good side of Bonds being seen, and after 2007, he was left in a rather unique position: After breaking the home run record, Bonds was left off the Giants roster the following year. The team refused to re-sign him. And since his bad reputation as a demanding locker room cancer had spread far and wide, no other teams wanted to take a chance with him. The arguable greatest player in baseball history was plump not allowed to play anymore.

Without Bonds, the Giants struggled. He really WAS that important. In 2008, they finished 72-90. They won 94 games the following season, though, but they spent most of 2010 playing keep-up with the San Diego Padres. When the Padres suffered a nasty losing streak in September, though, the Giants closed in, moved into first with an 18-8 September record, and took the division. In a playoff they were supposed to be excluded from, they faced the Atlanta Braves and beat them 3-1. In the NLCS, they faced the two-time defending NL Champions, the team many considered the best in baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies, and beat them 4-2. Then came the World Series against the Texas Rangers, in their first-ever World Series and with the services of AL MVP Josh Hamilton and Cy Young winner Cliff Lee. Staring the 56-year-old Curse of Coogan's Bluff in the face, the Giants overcame the long odds, beat the Rangers in five games, and won their first-ever World Series as the San Francisco Giants.

San Francisco finished second in 2011. In 2012, pitcher Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Melky Cabrera was the MVP of the All-Star Game. Cabrera got suspended for 50 games for using steroids, but his loss was made up when the Giants got Hunter Pence from the Phillies and Marco Scutaro from the Colorado Rockies. Most importantly of all, though, the Giants are now back in the World Series, where they're facing the Detroit Tigers. They just won the first game behind stellar pitching from ace Barry Zito and a tough, smart lineup of batters that shellacked Detroit ace Justin Verlander, who may be the best pitcher in baseball right now.

The Giants share one of the oldest and greatest rivalries in professional sports with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Walter O'Malley talking the Giants into moving west with his was a brilliant move, and it ensured that the incredible rivalry between these teams would always have a sense of importance for the fans, no matter how the teams are doing. San Francisco and Los Angeles are rivals in many other ways, in culture, economy, and politics, so sports is just natural. To me, this is the greatest rivalry in baseball, not the catfight between the Yankees and Red Sox. (And I'm a Yankees fan.) This rivalry is enduring in part because of the great balance in it, and the Dodgers only have one less Pennant (to maybe be followed by one less title.) Unfortunately, this leads to inexcusable behavior on the part of the fans, which hit a low at the start of the 2011 season when a Giants fan at the opener in Los Angeles was beaten almost to death by a pair of punks in Dodgers gear claiming to be fans. It was eventually learned that the guys responsible were members of a street gang that uses the Dodgers as a call sign. Still, the two teams are responsible for many of each others' great moments, including the Shot Heard 'Round the World, and the hiring of Leo Durocher.

The Bay Area is also home to the Oakland Athletics, a team with a great history of its own. It's a lot like the Subway Series rivalry between the Yankees and Mets in New York City, Red Line Series between the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago, and Freeway Series between the Dodgers and Angels in Anaheim and Los Angeles. The difference is that the Bay Bridge Series, as the Athletics/Giants rivalry is called, is a lot friendlier, and to a large extent it's considered acceptable to be a fan of both teams. (These are the luckiest baseball fans on Earth.) Their rivalry goes back a little bit too; the teams met several times in the World Series while in New York City and Philadelphia, and John McGraw managed the Series against As management legend Connie Mack. In 1989, after both were established Bay Area teams, they met in the World Series again.

There are many more players in the Hall of Fame from the New York Giants than the San Francisco Giants, but it isn't like either one is lacking. Carl Hubbell, Rube Marquand, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, Leo Durocher, John McGraw, Gary Carter, Steve Carlton, Monte Irvin, Duke Snyder, and Warren Spahn are just an inkling of Giants greats. 66 representatives of the Giants in all are in the Hall. For comparison, the Dodgers have 54, and the Yankees have 52. Ten numbers have been retired, including Jackie Robinson, a Dodger who was retired by the league. The jury is out on Barry Bonds.

San Francisco, while not getting nearly as much coverage as New York City, is known for having baseball fans who are every bit as rabid and foaming at the mouth as New York City or Chicago, Saint Louis, or Philadelphia. If you're getting into baseball, there's no way to go wrong picking them.

How Dare You Call Her Evil?!?!?!?!

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:52:56 +0000

#685-That's the number of the Batman comic that features this wonderful artwork from Alex Ross. I found it on a t-shirt at Hot Topic and just had to pick it up. Much like the lovely Catwoman on the shirt is mesmerized by the diamond in her hand, I became mesmerized by this artwork!

It takes quite a bit of moxy for a guy to wear a shirt featuring Catwoman anywhere outside of a comic book store or convention, especially if said guy is well into his thirties. I was a bit apprehensive to buy the shirt due to this fact, but I've found that the kitty on my shirt attracts a lot of attention from people of all ages.

People literally stop me in stores and ask if that's Catwoman on my shirt. When I say, "Yes," one of two things usually happens: They compliment the shirt or they ask me if I'm a fan of Catwoman. A few people mumble to their friends something along the lines of, "Hey, that old fat dude is wearing a Catwoman shirt," or at least I think that's what they are saying. A few others point at the shirt and just give me a smile. In any case, I know they are all a bit shocked that I rock Catwoman like it's nobody's business.

The shirt is traditionally cut, black, and very comfortable. If you're a fan of the one villain who makes Batman feel all gooey inside or if you like Alex Ross' work, grab this tee. Hurry, though, as the stock appears to be dwindling down!

And FYI, the F.O.E. stands for Faces of Evil.

KFC Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:29:37 +0000

I think Popeye's is the king of fast-food fried chicken, but KFC isn't bad.

I think the extra crispy legs and thighs are the best they have, and the Double Down sandwich is a delicious snack to sink your teeth into for special occasions (these are way unhealthy). The chicken strips are good as well, though like everything else on the menu, you pay too much for what you get.

redlettermedia.com Quick Tip by RabidChihuahua

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 21:24:09 +0000

If you have the slightest interest in Star Wars, chances are youi know about RedLetterMedia.

Like many, I've seen Plinkett's (RedLetterMedia) brilliant reviews for the lousy Star Wars prequel trilogies. Plinkett's reviews are not only well-detailed and brilliantly analytical in explaining how flawed the Star Wars prequels are, but he also mixes in some great, dark humor about him being a murderer. His Avatar review was brilliant as well for many of the same reasons.

Not quite Hollywood.

Sun, 7 Oct 2012 01:18:50 +0000

**** out of ****

After one has seen David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", the word "Silencio" has become one of the most haunting words in cinema since those spoken by Marlon Brando ("The horror...the horror") in "Apocalypse Now". It might be an irrelevant comparison overall, but both are films that linger in the corners of our minds. Both are less than conventional even if Lynch exists more on his own terms than Francis Ford Coppola ever did (although he is a fine filmmaker; his films can be enjoyed by pretty much all audiences with an attention span). He continues to surprise me as an artist; his films may all contain similar traits, but not one of them is truly "similar" to another. Lynch has enough feelings and images inside of him to inspire a respectable filmography; and so they have.

A black car drives along a winding highway not too far from Los Angeles carrying a mysterious yet beautiful dark-haired woman (Laura Harring). The driver pulls a gun on her and orders her to step out of the car. She seems confused to just what is going on, although it's not until some kids crash into their vehicle with their own and leave everyone but her for dead that we realize how normal things were before. She, still unnamed, walks into the darkness and finds her way to the city. She rests up at a random house. The next day, she is discovered while showering by the occupant of the apartment that she has stumbled to. That person is Betty (Naomi Watts), the daughter of an actress (who owns the apartment but is away on business) who aspires to follow in her mother's footsteps.

The black-haired woman, who identifies herself as Rita after seeing a poster for Hayworth's "Gilda" hanging in the bathroom, is an amnesiac. She can't remember who she really is. She and Betty look for clues in her purse but find only a blue key and a shit-load of money. They hide both of these things in a container that rests in the closet. The two are then engaged in a sort of relationship that keeps getting weirder and weirder; in part because it's so often interrupted by what seem like little vignettes in between, one involving a Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) and his partnership with a pair of mobster brothers (one of whom cannot be pleased by a cup of espresso) who apparently own the next movie he's making, insisting that he cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes.

For the most part, the film balances these two stories; although there are even smaller ones that fit themselves in there somehow as well. For instance, there's an early scene set at the diner called Winkies in which a young man describes to his older colleague a dream that he had involving a frightening man in the back of the diner, which becomes a sort of nightmarish reality by the end of the scene. And then there's a sub-plot involving an amateur hitman who may or may not have ties to the car crash at the beginning of the film. And then there's the Cowboy. It's confusing even for a David Lynch film but better because of it. The labyrinth-like structure of the narrative, which I assure you forms a coherent whole by the end but only if you pay attention and watch it more than once, is appealing to me.

Certain plot details are vital to how you interpret "Mulholland Drive". As usual, Lynch encourages each individual viewer to think for themselves; thus interpretation is key to the enjoyment of the film. Betty and Rita get tangled up in a romantic, sexual relationship somewhere within the last hour; and this is one element that plays a significant role in how I view the film. There's a common theory floating around that Rita is some sort of dream projection of the sort of person Betty would like to be, and that the film itself is all a dream. By the time it was over on my second viewing, I knew that was the theory I'd adopt. I also view it as a satire of this generation's cerebral dreams of fame and fortune; the Betty character is all that materialized into one silly blonde. Watts' performance is uncanny and over-the-top; although in the last act, surprisingly intense as well.

For someone to truly hate the film, I think it would either take too much thought or too little. I didn't allow myself to think too much into "Mulholland Drive" since I'd seen Lynch films before, and so I knew that you simply can't understand everything he puts on screen. You just have to kind of go with it, which is easy for me to do when a director is so passionately emotive and gifted in setting up an atmosphere with unforgettable imagery. "Mulholland Drive" has so much of that. Take, for instance, the employer of the mobster brothers who sits in a wheelchair in a dark room illuminated only by a single light (which shines on him) and talks through a microphone that connects to the inside of a glass cage of sorts, where the employees can speak to him through. And then there's the Rebekah Del Rio scene, which is just sublime. Finally, you've got a superb Angelo Badalamenti score to complete the ambience.

I love David Lynch's technique because he makes films so unconventional, surreal, and beautiful that they cannot be summarized as easily as most films. Is "Mulholland Drive" a mystery? Perhaps, we don't know for sure. Like everything else in the picture, it all depends on how you're seeing it. Either way, Lynch puts YOU in the role of detective and to me, that's more fun than anything else. His images and emotions are so resonant that the viewer - depending on what kind you are - has no problem with what Lynch is asking us to do. This is clearly one of his most multi-dimensional and personal films; a stunning evocation of present day LA and the different vibes that Lynch got, and still gets, from the place that he calls home. If its goal is to be chaotic, destructive, dream-like, disturbing, funny, and ultimately mind-boggling; then it's done the city justice.

Respect jetting upwards

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 07:42:31 +0000

Watching Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, about an approaching planet led me to this movie made around the same time.

As Another Earth begins, we are introduced to a bright, attractive young girl with a brilliant future, with an interest in the Cosmos, and she has just got into MIT.

When another earth with the same continents and oceans appears in the sky, people get excited, some are nervous. As she drives along that night, a radio announcer talks excitedly about the new planet, while a father, pregnant mother, and five year old child sit talking in a parked car. Momentarily, she looks skyward. You can probably imagine what happens.

Now we have a woman whose life is but a walking shadow. After some time she returns to the world. But her star has somewhat diminished. Although she says little me may infer that she has unresolved grief and guilt which cripples her from moving forward in life. She takes a job that requires little human contact, as a cleaner.

Returning to the scene, she discovers the husband, and contrives to meet him and seek forgiveness.

Discoveries about the other earth may make you wonder if there are people like you on this other earth, mirrors to ourselves, mirroring our events or not. Such possibilities offer the hope of redemption, although others find it frightening.

As the husband continues to contend with his waterlogged grief, his withdrawal, and limitations of his previous musical abilities, we see no way for her to broach this subject. Meanwhile, a Branson like entrepeneur offers a select few a free trip to the other earth.

My favorite scene in the movie is when she tells the husband the story of the first cosmonaut, a healing metaphor, and so perhaps if she cannot reveal herself she may be able to heal him in other ways. I watched this scene over and over. We wonder how it will all turn out.

I found this movie to be very beautiful. It has won several awards, including two Sundance Awards, the Special Jury Prize, and an acting award for Brit Marling, a young actress who struggled to obtain acting jobs in Hollywood, and had the novel idea of writing a movie for herself with cowriter and director Michael Hall.

In doing so, they have crafted a wonderful movie. As an actress she delivers a very subtle and nuanced performance. In three scenes in a row near the begininning she says very little, but she conveys a tremendous amount without words, and she has a certain beauty, let's face it, that, if you're like me, grows on you as you watch the movie. Another earth looks like an expensive movie, yet was made on a shoestring, causing director and actress to be very resourceful. To obtain a shot of her walking out of a prison, she walked in pretending to be a yoga instructor, there to give a class to inmates. When she walked out he got the shot.

I was hugely impressed with this movie, the acting, writing, directing, the visual effects of the other planet. William Mapother, who you may remember as Ethan from Lost, or the villain from In the Bedroom plays the husband. Certainly, I liked this movie much better than Melancholia.

Now, I would watch any movie featuring Brit Marling or made by Michael Hall. I think you will love it, and I hope this was helpful.

A Team for Those Who Prefer the Road Less Traveled

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 12:45:58 +0000

Whodda thunk it? Once you get north of California, the basketball-crazed west coast has but one team representing it. That, of course, wasn't always the case. The pacific northwest once had three teams of its own, great local sports rivalries, when it also had the Seattle Supersonics (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...-The_Thunder_Rolls.html) and Vancouver Grizzlies (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...o_Roar_to_Speak_of.html). But those two teams were removed and went, respectively, to Oklahoma City and Memphis. So now there's one team left, the Portland Trail Blazers, to placate three major metropolitan areas and two states.

The Blazers are one of those teams with a small but fervently devoted fan base. There's a tight relationship between the team and its fans which is nicknamed Blazermania, and the team has been one of the NBA's biggest draws for a very long time. Blazers fans tend to rank near the top of a lot of those NBA fan devotion lists, right up there with fans of the Utah Jazz. They had a sellout streak which ran for 18 years, and a strong case can be made that it only ended in part because the team switched venues. The team is in no danger of being moved; it has an ironclad contract with the city of Portland which would keep them in the city even in the event of a sale.

Things weren't always like that for the Blazers, though. The Portland Trail Blazers were created in 1970, to go with the Cleveland Cavaliers (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Cl...All_LeBron_s_Fault.html) and Buffalo Braves (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...lipped_and_Trimmed.html). When the team held their naming contest, they actually had to throw out the most popular entry, which for once was a very good and appropriate name. The sports-loving public wanted to call the team the Portland Pioneers, but that name was already taken by the teams over at Lewis and Clark College. So the name Trail Blazers was selected, with 172 entries.

In the first season, the Blazers won 29 games and drew poorly. From 1970 to 1974, the team never got over that original 29-win barrier, and in fact they won the first draft pick twice during the span. In 1972, they used the pick on LaRue Martin, who played in the NBA for four years, averaging 5.3 points per game and retiring with a grand total of 1430 career points to his name. Every team makes draft mistakes, but this one is notable because Bob McAdoo, one of the great centers in NBA history, was available. Buffalo snatched him up and was off on a series of playoff runs, and McAdoo, late in his career, finally played for an NBA champion when he joined the Lakers in the 80's. It wasn't the only time the Blazers royally fucked up in the draft.

Their second first-round pick came in 1974, and they grabbed Bill Walton from UCLA. That WAS a good draft decision; Walton went on to lead the Blazers to the 1977 NBA title before leaving Portland as a free agent in 1979 as a free agent. His career took him to the San Diego Clippers and he eventually landed with the Boston Celtics (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...-The_Big_Green_Men.html), where he played on the mighty 1986 squad which is often considered the greatest team in NBA history. Walton was the player who helped the Blazers beat the 29-win mark they set in their inaugural season, though they still weren't posting winning records. In 1976, their coach, Lenny Wilkens, was fired and replaced by Dr. Jack Ramsey. The ABA merger also happened to get finalized that year, and the team grabbed Maurice Lucas in the dispersal draft. In the 1977 season, Ramsey, Walton, and Lucas led the Blazers to a great 49-33 record, the first winning record in the team's history. Upon making the playoffs for the first time, they found themselves with the beginner's luck of the Irish. Beating the Chicago Bulls (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Ch...atest_Bullfighters.html) and Denver Nuggets in the early rounds, the Blazers found themselves face to face with the Los Angeles Lakers (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...5-Walking_on_Water.html), playing for the Western Conference Championship. Against all odds or expectations, the Trail Blazers found a way to sweep the Lakers before going to the NBA Finals and defeating the Philadelphia 76ers (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...25-A_True_Original.html) in six games to win their first - and so far, only - NBA Championship. This was the year their sellout streak began.

Now the Blazers had set themselves up as the NBA's force with whom all must reckon, and reckon everyone did. The Blazers raced off to a sterling 50-10 record in the first 60 games, and ended the season at 58-24 mainly because of a quarantine level of injuries. The most notable injury was to Walton, who struggled with injuries for his entire career. When they got to the playoffs, they lost the semis to the Sonics, who went on to win the conference but lose the Finals. Walton left in free agency after sitting out the entire 1979 season, but despite that loss, the Blazers kept playing fantastic basketball, forever being a threat to win the conference. In 1978, the Blazers somehow managed to land their third-ever number one draft pick, which they used on Mychal Thompson. Thompson wasn't a bad pick; he played in the league awhile, retired with 12,810 career points, and played for two champions upon going to the Lakers in 1987. But it's hard to ignore the fact that he was taken over a projected superstar named Larry Bird, even despite the fact that they also drafted Clyde Drexler just a few years later.

In the early 80's, the Blazers were still selling out, playing great basketball. They kept on making the playoffs and frequently getting past the first round, but the Showtime Lakers were unleashed by this time and they kept halting the Blazers in their tracks. As previously noted, 1983 saw the drafting of Clyde Drexler, the greatest Trail Blazer. In the next draft, the Blazers fucked up the draft in THE way which would define every draft fuckup in the entire history of both the team and the league. Hakeem Olajuwon had been taken with the first pick. The Blazers needed help at center, so they drafted a player named Sam Bowie who had missed two full college seasons due to his legs being injured. The next player drafted that year was a projected superstar named Michael Jordan who was so good that none other than Bobby Knight - a friend of Portland's GM - called the team and told them to take that player. When the GM mentioned to Knight that the team needed a center, Knight didn't back away. He merely suggested, "WELL, PLAY HIM AT CENTER THEN!" The pissed off Jordan later returned and made the Blazers pay for that mistake. Not only did the Blazers ignore Jordan, but Charles Barkley and John Stockton were also on the board when the Blazers selected Bowie. I'm sure the team's GM that year would kill for a mulligan.

Bowie went on to suffer more leg injuries and is currently considered one of the biggest draft busts in the league's history. His injuries sidelined him for the entire 1988 season. A lesser-known story is that the team drafted a player named Jerome Kersey in the second round. He wasn't Jordan, but he did have a far better career than Bowie and was an anchor for the Blazers for a decade. Despite the bad draft picks, the Blazers were always playing consistently well, and they began a streak of playoff appearances in 1983 which ran for 20 years and culminated in two conference titles. Still, it's a safe bet that Blazers fans still imagine what was and what could - and by all standards, damn well SHOULD - have been.

Ramsay was fired in the 1986 offseason after too many first-round playoff losses. Mike Schuler was hired. His era was marked by one of the NBA's dominant offenses, but he never managed to figure out defense. That marked a bunch more first round playoff exits, as well as a bunch of controversies regarding the starters. A lot of players weren't fond of his coaching style, either, and Schuler was fired after a 1989 season in which he led the team to a 39-43 record with which they squeaked into the playoffs and were rapidly creamed by the Lakers. Along the way, they made another important draft pick with Clifford Robinson, who became another solid player. Schuler was replaced by Rick Adelman, and the Blazers kicked off the greatest era in their team history.

In the 1990 season, the Blazers went 59-23. Their playoff opponents were a bunch of cream puffs: The Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs, and Phoenix Suns were the only things standing between Portland and the Finals, so they went all the way to the Western Conference title before getting beat in the Finals by the Detroit Pistons. In the 1991 season, the Blazers steamrolled through the entire league to a superb record of 63-19, the league best and their franchise best. They ended the Lakers' reign over the division, but that only pissed off the Lakers, who beat Portland in the Western Conference finals. In the 1992 season, the Blazers won the Western Conference title again, but they made a couple of mistakes: One was not discouraging the media's ridiculous yakking about a possible rivalry between Drexler and Michael Jordan, who played for the opposing Chicago Bulls. The second was spilling their game plan: Funnel Jordan out of the paint and make him beat them by shooting threes. Came the first game, Jordan decided to play along, and he rained threes down on Portland, embarrassing Drexler in the process. Both the media and the Trail Blazers clamped up after that.

After that, the Blazers still played well, but began showing signs of age, and inures started plaguing the team. Bob Whitsitt was also hired as a GM, and his acquisitions created a team that was strong on defense but weak on offense. Mostly, they were again stuck in that weird sports purgatory where they could get to the playoffs but never past the first round again. In 1996, the Jazz actually beat them in one game by a score of 102-64, those 64 being a record for fewest points scored in a playoff game. It wasn't until 1999 that the Blazers got through the first round again, when they beat Phoenix and Utah in the playoffs before losing the Conference Finals to San Antonio.

When the millennium arrived in Portland, there was bad news in the works. The team's personnel moves failed to come up with anything good, and the team slowly began losing. Whitsitt started trying to win with stars instead of team chemistry, and the players started developing a ton of off-court problems: Several were cited for marijuana, one threatened a referee, two got into a fight during practice, one had to register as a sex offender, and guard Bonzi Wells summed up the players' collective attitude when he told Sports Illustrated in 2002 that fans didn't matter to them, because no matter what, they would still ask for autographs and go to games. Fan discontent overtook the region, the the team was nicknamed the Jail Blazers.

The Blazers have been improving since then, and their character is in better standing. They've been up and down, but their great eras are pretty much over, and they've given in to standard unpredictability.

As mentioned, the Blazers don't have a fantastic draft history. McAdoo, Bird, Jordan, and most recently Greg Oden over Kevin Durant. Their greatest player is Clyde Drexler, who finally won his ring with the Houston Rockets in 1995. Him and Bill Walton are probably the most important and identifiable players in Blazers history.

The Blazers don't have any real rivalries anymore, with their rivals in the pacific northwest both having departed. Now their closest rivals live down in California. The Blazers do, however, have a very devoted fanbase which sold out games for 18 straight seasons. Discontent took off once the Jail Blazers era emerged, but even the most devoted of fans would leave during an era like that. You can't really blame them. The team has made it to the playoffs in most of the years of their existence, so adopting the Blazers means getting used to holding on to optimism, yet getting used to disappointment. It doesn't say a lot of good that in all their trips to the playoffs, they were only able to gather one title, even if the Showtime Lakers were standing in the way for a good number of their playoff years.

An adopting fan of the Portland Trail Blazers better know basketball real well. You don't want to get caught in Portland not knowing the team you claim to follow. Trail Blazers fans have the right to be proud of their team. They've been competitive even in years when they weren't.

Love It

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 21:15:06 +0000

This is an awesome show for sitcom lovers.

"Game over, man! Game over!"

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 02:08:21 +0000

**** out of ****

If Ridley Scott's "Alien" will always be remembered as the film to introduce us to the Xenomorph and franchise favorite, the heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); then James Cameron's "Aliens" will be forever known as the truly rare sequel that really, really could. With sequels to great movies, it can be tempting to bank on the previous film's success; but instead Cameron shows a general interest in expanding on the universe while developing a story of his own that shares DNA with that of "Alien" without completely relying on it. With the flick of a finger, a genre switcheroo (from horror to action) gives the film that Cameron wanted to make more gravity and weight; a healthy dosage of each. And what you get is a film that, in the end, manages to weigh itself down. It's borderline exhausting in its highly cinematic exhilaration.

Leaving off from Mr. Scott's film, "Aliens" begins with Ellen Ripley being discovered as the sole survivor aboard the ship Nostromo. She is rescued by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and is informed that she has been asleep for fifty seven years under stasis. When Ripley tries to explain to the corporation what occurred on the planet LV-426, she is met with much skepticism. Her story goes something like this: the Nostromo crew landed on the planet, explored a crashed ship, and discovered an alien lifeform that terrorized and killed everyone but her. To them, it looks like murder; but we've seen "Alien", and we know what happened. Since she entered stasis, terraforming colonies have been set up on the planet; and of course, there haven't been any recent reports, certainly none regarding alien life.

This is because contact has, for the time being, been lost .Weyland-Yutani representative Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), with the help of Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope), hopes to send an assembly of highly trained marines to the planet in order to conduct a thorough investigation into the matters at hand. They also take with them an android named Bishop (Lance Henrikson), who Ripley at first fears because of her previous experience with Nostromo's very own murderous android. Once they're in, there's no going back; and it doesn't take long for the new crew to stumble upon the face-huggers (encased, as they were being studied), the distinctive interiors of the alien ship, a few of the victims, and the Xenomorph itself. Although this time, the title is plural; so it's an entire army of these bastards.

"We're on an express elevator to Hell, going down." This quote probably best explains my experience watching "Aliens". It is action genre filmmaking at its finest; in fact, it juggles enough different genres (science fiction, and even a little bit of horror regardless of the suspense never quite living up to the kind found in "Alien") to leave its mark. As a film, I regarded it as one meant to stir our fondest emotions; fear and excitement among others. It's a classic piece of cinematic badassery written in bullets, futuristic space technology, and acid blood. As far as action movies go; they don't get much better than this right here.

The Ripley character was definitely one of my favorite parts about Ridley Scott's "Alien". She was a strong and intelligent heroine (for once, right?); likable, but able to hold her own in a fight with an extraterrestrial. There was a feminist edge to it all, and "Aliens" pushes that notion about as far as it can go without being overly preachy. Ripley now finds herself in a man's world, even though there are two tough-as-nails women amongst her crew. The crew members of the Nostromo accepted Ripley as one of their own; but she has a harder time with these new fellows, who just want to drop in and kill some shit, although it's never that simple. But maybe Ripley defies gender classification; she has all the charm of a woman and all the raw strength of a man. By the end of the film, she's seen it all.

I feel that most action movies are far too simplistic. Here's one with considerable depth; not only in its visual conception and design, but its conception in general. Cameron says that a lot of the film was based on the Vietnam War; which I find most interesting indeed. Then there's the promise that every sequel to a "monster movie" must fulfill; a new monster. In this case, it's the Alien Queen, basically the Xenomorph but larger and somewhat uglier (although I don't know how much uglier you can be when you're a part of that alien family). It all leads up to a final showdown between heroine and monster; although there are plenty of other showdowns and shootouts to hold you up until then. It's difficult to watch this movie without geeking out completely. I did not find this with the original "Alien", but then again "Aliens" is a different movie. It is more action oriented without sacrificing its rich tension. It is also very well-paced, unless you're watching Cameron's "Director's Cut", which kind of kills it. "Aliens", simply put, kicks all kinds of ass if you're watching the right cut and with the right mind-set.

Blast Off!

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:01:04 +0000

Whenever I first started attending science fiction conventions a few years ago, my favorite part of attending them was sitting in on panels on everything from celebrity Q&A sessions to a look at the cultish following of some science fiction programs to Steampunk 101.

After only attending conventions for a year, I was approached to join a convention board and help produce it for the next year. When I accepted the offer, my world was opened up to a number of conventions that I wouldn't normally be able to go to as I was given free memberships and other perks (including a chance to do my own panels and hanging out with celebrities outside of the convention) to attend the cons as a representative of the con I worked with.

Earlier this year I walked away from my position (vice-president) at the convention I was with due to a number of reasons. This put me back in the position of being just a "fan" and not a convention "board member" or "promoter." I was no longer burdened with having to hawk a convention that I was no longer interested in working with, and this gave me time to visit with other fans as an equal and not as someone trying to push a specific convention on them. I also had the chance to return to my first love of sitting in on panels.

When I saw that Space City Con in Houston, TX was coming up in August, I jumped at the chance to go to my first convention as nothing more than a "fan" in a long time. This was the convention's first year and as a former con board member, I looked at this convention in a slightly different light than I would have before I gained my own board member knowledge.

Right off the bat I saw where there was a bit of chaos about the convention's location. It was held in the Westin Galleria Hotel, a very nice hotel that is a part of the massive Galleria Mall of Houston. For out-of-towners such as myself who weren't completely familiar with the Galleria, it was a bit of a task to both get there and then wind my way to the hotel. Of course, once I pinned down the location, I was free to roam about with little difficulty. However, many people in this age of GPS and iPhones scoff at the use of a map or directory, and I noticed a number of con-goers bumbling about looking for the convention. I was actually stopped by a few people and asked where the convention was, which was somewhat funny since I was myself quite lost only moments before.

The convention hall was on two floors of the hotel and registration was in a separate room from the rest of the convention. The first floor was where all of the fan groups and panels were located as well as some of the gaming. The second floor featured vendors, more gaming, artists, and celebrities as well as a few more fan groups. Signage was minimal in regards to the location of the registration, and I pitied the poor volunteers at the entrance to the con who had to repeatedly tell people to register across the hall.

The hall itself was nice. There was a large room with a bandstand for the bigger panels and a couple of smaller rooms for other panels. I attempted to sit in on panels in these smaller rooms on three occasions, but no one ever showed up, so I gave up on seeing any panels in those rooms for the rest of my visit. In the main panel room, I sat in on four panels. One was for "After Twilight," a comic book series about a theocracy taking over the state of Texas. I was already a bit familiar with this book series before, but gained new insight on a short film and potential motion picture based on the books that was coming in the near future. I met the creator of the story as well as one of the artists from the comic. The other panels I sat in on were Q&A sessions with Bonnie Piesse (Aunt Beru from the Star Wars prequels), Joseph Gatt (portrayed the Frost Giant Grundroth in Thor and is the body of Kratos in the God of War games), and Jason David Frank (Tommy the Green Ranger from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers).

All three celebs were fun and interesting to listen to, especially Jason David Frank. He was bluntly honest with the fans about what went down behind the scenes on Power Rangers and also talked about his family, his MMA career, and his multiple gyms across the United States. He was a very down to earth guy and repeatedly took photos, joked, and generally had fun with the fans. He embraces the fact that he was on a cheesy TV series and that people love him for it. In fact, during his Q&A, he mentioned that people pick on him for being in a cheesy television program. His response is that he asks the hecklers what children love the most. Cheese. Mac n' cheese, cheese fries, Cheetos. He said all he did was offer up a heapin' bowl of Mighty Morphin' and the kids ate it up.

I had the opportunity to talk directly to all three of these celebrities, and they were all very cordial and friendly. Jason David Frank was definitely the highligt of the show. Nichelle Nichols (Uhura of Star Trek) was also in attendance, but she didn't arrive until after I left. I do wish I could have met her.

The vendor area was nice and very organized. Comic artists and craftworkers were on one side of the room and comic sellers/collectors and general merchandise vendors (as well as a few authors) could be found on the other side of the room for the most part. The celebrities were in another room connected to the vendor area, and there was also tabletop gaming and the convention charity located in this area.

As far as freebies go, I grabbed a Texas Renaissance Festival bead, a Houston Harry Potter Fan Club button, and a few fliers (including one for Jason David Frank's gyms located in the Houston area). I met up with a friend of mine at the convention, Vo Nguyen, who is an artist that has worked with both DC and Marvel. I purchased two prints from him (Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn) and visited with him for quite some time. I also got photos and autographed pictures of Joseph Gatt, Jason David Frank, and Bonnie Piesse. I even snapped a photo with the wenches representing Texas Renaissance Festival.

Overall, the convention was a success in my opinion. The no show panels were a let down, but I have personal knowledge about panel presenters skipping out on their duties. Also, there weren't as many cosplayers around as I've seen at other conventions of a similar size. Of course, many of them apparently showed up after I left, since the costume contest was later in the evening.

I hope that there is a second year for Space City Con, and hopefully I'll be able to spend the entire weekend there, as I missed out on a few hotel parties and other festivities as well.

Clipped and Trimmed

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:35:48 +0000

Put two teams who play in the same sport and league in this country, and you'll inevitably see a case of Mets Syndrome. One of those teams will be obviously better than the other, and the media and populace will endlessly fawn over them. The players will be covered simply by walking into the closest nightclubs, and in the meantime, the lower team will walk across the freeway in rush hour traffic will a sign that says Hello! HELLO! and still not receive any coverage. Of course, I named this after case point A, the New York Mets (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...205257-The_Amazins.html), a team created in 1962 that had the misfortune of replacing two legendary baseball teams once the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers headed to California. The Mets aren't actually a bad team to cheer for. They're the most successful of baseball's expansion teams; they've won four Pennants and two World Series titles. But when you're put against the New York Yankees (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/baseball_team/U...to_Wear_the_Iconic.html), baseball's mighty juggernaut - with more World Series titles than any other team even has Pennants - all you can do is shrug, grin, and push forward.

The Mets Syndrome sufferer in Los Angeles is their secondary basketball team, the Clippers. The Yankees of Los Angeles are the mighty Lakers, whose 16 titles are more than any other basketball team except the Boston Celtics (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...-The_Big_Green_Men.html) who have been slipping as of late. The Clippers have far less going for them than the Mets. The Mets, after all, stole attention a few times by supplanting the Yankees. Since their creation, the Clippers don't even have so much as a single division title to call their own. That's an existence going back to 1970, with the Los Angeles years beginning in 1984. That's embarrassing as it is, but the team's owner, Donald Sterling, is also a frugal racist. He made a fortune in real estate and engaged in discriminatory rental practices against blacks and hispanics. On record, he's recorded to have said "Black tenants smell and attract vermin." He pledged $50 million of funding for a site in downtown Los Angeles which was supposed to help the city's homeless population. Although the Los Angeles Times keeps trumpeting this pledge, that's mainly because he generates revenue for the paper's ad department. The shelter itself is either invisible or never actually materialized. He was sued by the damned United States Department of Justice for discrimination. He heckles his own players. He's a grade-A asshole who needs to be punched many, many times.

Fate was unkind to the Clippers even from the very beginning. They were part of the 1970 expansion, when they were created as the Buffalo Braves and joined the NBA with the newly-created Cleveland Cavaliers and Portland Trail Blazers. There were bad omens right from the very beginning with the Braves. One was that the first effort at placing a professional basketball team in Buffalo failed, and very quickly. That was back at the founding of the BAA, when Buffalo was still a big, very respected city. Buffalo's team, the Bisons, wrapped up after all of 13 GAMES, hightailed it to the Tri-cities area, and were basically nomads until they finally found a permanent home and identity as today's Atlanta Hawks. Another bad omen was that the National Hockey League conveniently picked that same year to expand into Buffalo. Both sports breed ruffians, but one is played on ice. If you're having trouble figuring out which team the people of Buffalo really clicked with, well, here are some clues: One is currently a beloved civic institution in Buffalo, a city thoroughly respected throughout its entire league as both a playoff rating monster and a producer of fantastic sport talent - nine players in its league are from Buffalo, more than any other region in the country. The other is the Clippers.

Actually, both teams got off on the right foot with the fans. They both endured their expansion pains, but the hockey team was a Conference Champion by 1975. The Braves didn't get that far, but their time in Buffalo is still the only period of real success they've ever had. They picked up one of the great centers in NBA history, Bob McAdoo, in 1972, and he won the MVP award in the 1975 season. In 1974, 1975, and 1976, the Braves made the playoffs. The team's 49-33 record in 1975 is still the team's best record ever, in any place. In 1976, the Braves beat the Philadelphia 76ers (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...25-A_True_Original.html) in the playoffs. By 1976, the team's founder, Paul Snyder, was actively trying to sell the team. Eventually, he got it to John Brown. Meanwhile, the Boston Celtics owner, Irv Levin, wanted to move back to his home state of California and take a team with him. The people of Boston, not exactly keen on letting their world-class basketball team go, weren't letting him take the Celtics. To this day, there's a little bit of remaining controversy on the exacting details of just how the exchange took place. The most widely accepted story is that Brown and Levin swapped teams, and Levin was freed to bring the Braves out west with him. A few tax and paperwork details, however, are enough to convince people around Buffalo that the Braves were actually absorbed into the Celtics, at least in a legal sense, and so the Boston Celtics are the descendants of Buffalo's basketball heritage, instead of the Clippers.

Any way it goes, however, the Braves did leave their mark on Buffalo. Braves imagery and colors are still worn in the area, and the team has a base of preservationists dedicated to weaving them more into the city's sports heritage. It really is pathetic that the First Niagara Center hasn't seen it fit to hang McAdoo's number. A good preservation site can be found at buffalobraves.net.

The 1979 season saw the first westward move. The team moved to San Diego, officially changing its name to the San Diego Clippers. In San Diego, the team sucked, drew poorly, and was bought by Sterling and moved after just six years.

There were occasional good years, but from there the name of the game has mostly been suckitude. Hard suckitude, and in abundance. The Clippers kicked off their new beginning by going 31-51 for the 1985 season. Two years later, they mounted a serious charge at the worst record in history. They went 12-70, which came dangerously close to the 76ers' 1973 record of 9-73, and is today still the third worst in NBA history behind only the Sixers and last season's Charlotte Bobcats (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...y_Without_Point_or.html). Elgin Baylor joined the team during that 12-win fiasco, though, as GM, and he managed to bring Ron Harper to the team in the 1990 season. Baylor was also a great eye for draft talent. In 1987, he got Ken Norman. A year later, he got Danny Manning and Charles Smith. 1990 brought Loy Vaught. The 1992 season brought a coaching change, where Mike Schuler was replaced by Larry Brown. As basketball fans know, Larry Brown is very, very good at what he does. Schuler had started the season with a 22-25 record, and Brown finished it by going 23-12 for an overall record of 45-37. It was their first winning season since Buffalo, and the first time since moving to Los Angeles they finished with a better record than the Lakers. They lost the first playoff round to the Utah Jazz. The next year, they went an even 41-41, and went back to the playoffs. This time they lost to the Houston Rockets.

After that season, Brown up and walked away. (He tends to do that.) This time, he went to coach the Indiana Pacers while Bob Weiss was left to build on a foundation which, as the previous year's record would indicate, wasn't quite as solid as Brown had probably left Clippers fans to believe. That year was bad, but the silver lining was the fact that the Lakers weren't much better. Combined, the teams went 60-104, one of the worst years in the history of Los Angeles basketball.

The next few years brought tons more major roster and coach changes, with the lone highlight being the 1997 season when coach Bill Fitch led them back to the playoffs, where they were promptly ejected by the Jazz again, who eventually won the Western Conference that year. In 1999, the Clippers moved to the Staples Center to be overshadowed by the Lakers full time. More importantly, they also drafted Lamar Odom. He didn't help much - the Clippers finished with 15 wins - but they also hired a slew of new coaches, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They started winning fans in 2001, improving to a 31-51 record and playing a high-flying style of basketball with talented bench players. The next year, they grabbed Elton Brand from the Chicago Bulls (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Ch...atest_Bullfighters.html), who earned a spot on the All-Star roster, even if that was only as a replacement to Shaquille O'Neal. But the bottom line is the team contended for most f the season. Winning only three of their final twelve games put them out, but they contended and only missed the playoffs by five games.

The next season brought a slew of injury problems, the seasons after brought players lost because Sterling wouldn't pay them, and by now you really know the story: Deals, deals, more deals, bad players. Same old Clippers, but this time, they were actually trying to get better. The 2006 season marked a turning point in their image. The team beat several of the best teams in the league, and the media took notice and began playing up the Clippers a bit more. Despite a few stretches of bad play, they secured their first winning record in 14 years and, with a 47-35 record, their best year since the old Buffalo days. That May was a culmination of their building efforts: For the first time under their asshole owner Sterling, and for the first time since they were the Buffalo Braves, the Clippers won a playoff series. In the following round, they took the Phoenix Suns to seven games, keeping pace with that year's track-meet Suns team every step of the way. They lost, but people remembered. Unfortunately, the next few seasons, they reverted to their losing, Clipper ways.

Blake Griffin arrived in the 2009 draft. They slowly began improving again, and last year they were a power in the Western Conference. With a 40-26 record, they went to the playoffs, won a great series against the Memphis Grizzlies (http://www.lunch.com/reviews/sports_team/Use...o_Roar_to_Speak_of.html) and lost in the second round yet again. But, hell, that loss was to the San Antonio Spurs, and NOBODY was expected to beat them! As they currently stand, things are looking good in Lob City at the moment. The team looks legitimately good, and they're very exciting. Griffin is one of the best players in the league right now. But a veteran Clippers fan would be justified in showing a lot of skepticism, considering his team's history.

As you can clearly see, the story of the Clippers is one of mighty struggle, heartbreak, frustration, and an owner who really needs a groin kick or seven. We're looking at a serious contender for Worst Team Ever in the History of the NBA here. Not single-season, but in the grand overall scheme. This team has had 23 head coaches in the entirety of its existence. They've had all of eleven All-Star selections. One player, ever, was an MVP, although Blake Griffin is looking like he's going to be one too soon enough.

People in Buffalo believe our teams are cursed, and I don't believe anyone who follows sports will ever argue the point. This is a truly pathetic team. The reason I've been bringing Buffalo into this article so often is partially because it's my hometown, but mainly because a lot of the Clippers' most significant history and stories are brought all the way back here. Every Hall of Fame player chosen based on contributions to the Los Angeles Clippers wasn't actually chosen based on contributions to the Clippers, but to the Braves. Its been some 34 years since the team left Buffalo, and 28 since San Diego. Still, the greatest years and most of the really good stories and players were left in Buffalo. Dominique Wilkins is the only player in the Hall of Fame for ever having been a Los Angeles Clipper, and he didn't get there until he was well past his prime.

Mismanagement has to be the primary culprit. Sterling is a cheapskate as well as a racist. Los Angeles is still one of the easier sells in professional sports, but in basketball, it's even easier if you're trying to sell a free agent on the Lakers.

Every year, there's one sports magazine which ranks the best overall sports franchises. That's in every sport, for every category they think makes a team worth cheering for: Pricing, fan friendliness, budget, quality of fielded team, chances of winning a title in the next few years, and a few others that I don't feel like looking up. The Los Angeles Clippers have actually ranked dead last on this list. Why bother rating them when that says everything? I do, however, like their style of basketball, so that and that alone rescues them from the bottom of the heap. Sterling, however, really needs to take a few knees to his stomach.

Birdemic ain't got nothing on this...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:22:41 +0000

***1/2 out of ****

It would be too easy writing off Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" as dated or foul. This is the kind of thriller that makes younger audiences laugh with its now-silly special effects and seemingly imperfect performances. This is really the only reason why the film does not enjoy much success with a younger generation; well that and the people which I speak of are accustomed to thrillers and horror movies that move at a faster pace, ignoring the details that Hitchcock - as a prolific and defining filmmaker with suspense as his area of expertise - was so very fond of. But in moving the plot slowly, Hitchcock is able to make the film more than what the sum of its parts may imply. You've got your killer bird movies, and then you've got THE killer bird movie. This is a cleverly crafted portrait of cinematic tension and fear; and I do not believe any of the suspense has worn off from the film over time.

Wealthy blonde Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) travels to Bodega Bay, California to deliver a pair of lovebirds to the successful lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) for his sister after he visits the bird shop and mistakes Melanie for an employee. While still in the city, Melanie looks up at the sky and sees hundreds and thousands of birds flying in large groups overhead. Migrating, perhaps, is the first thought that crosses her mind. She's forgotten about it once in Bodega Bay and staying at her friend Annie's (Suzanne Pleshette) place. Then, once she delivers the birds to the Brenner estate, a seagull attacks her. And yet again, she fails to acknowledge it as anything more than coincidence.

During her stay, Melanie spends a lot of time with Mitch and the rest of his family, including his uptight mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy). As she gets more involved with their lives, the stranger the behavior of the birds becomes. Soon, they are homicidal and dive-bombing every living human being outside and in sight. And they can break and enter into homes through the windows too. We're talking crows attacking a school, seagulls descending onto a group of young children, and a large swarm of sparrows coming in through the chimney. It's surreal and at the time of its release it was all genuinely frightening; from the moment the birds start attacking to the second the humans start fighting back with firepower and their own general intelligence. Never before had we been lead to fear such seemingly harmless animals; but that's the power of good cinema.

The screenplay is completely uncanny. It's a mixture of genuinely nerve-wracking suspense and somewhat unsubtle feminist politics. In many ways, this is a feminist film in itself. A lot of the important characters are females and the film carefully examines how they all fit into Mitch's life, since he's clearly the only real man in this situation, although he's surrounded by a plethora of less crucial supporting male characters. The film could also be seen as a metaphor for terrorism, a social critique, or an assault on the sensibilities of a B-movie; which "The Birds" certainly is not. The script is handled real well by Hitchcock; who treats his themes with care and allows the story to unfold at a pace that will agree with any viewer who values true suspense in their pictures but will also surely anger the aforementioned younger generation of movie-goers.

But I say fuck that. Most thrillers and horror pictures today tell us that suspense is approximately two-to-ten minutes of silence and then a jump scare. The ugly truth is that most filmmakers just don't have the chops to make this method feel impressive or fresh; although there are a few who take a lot of their cues from Master Hitchcock himself. This film is damn well near perfect; my only real nitpick being that the bird attack sequences have lost a lot of their impact over time. They are well-photographed just like the rest of the film and you'll get more thrills from these "yellow screen" birdies than you will any lame CGI feathered fowls; but you can't deny that it feels a bit silly today. But this wasn't supposed to be a special effects extravaganza. Hitchcock keeps the suspense consistent and therefore thoroughly engages his audiences; keeping us guessing, on the edge of our seats, etc. I cannot give it a perfect score for this problem alone; but it's a perfectly stimulating and spectacular cinematic experience regardless.

There were two methods of building tension that I admired most of all. One was the island setting, which lends the story and the characters a certain layer of vulnerability; I suppose one does not merely "get out of town" like they do in so many other movies, thus these people are sort of trapped. Then there's the decision to skip a more traditional Bernard Hermann score and depend on sound effects such as the birds screeching and the wings flapping (all this was supervised by Hermann, mind you). I thought this was really effective in the context of the film. It gives the film the grand gift of silence and broadens the horizon as far as the overall effect goes. Sure, a musical score might have improved the best of thrills - such as the revelation of a man dead in his house with his bloody eyeballs plucked from their sockets - but overall I think the quiet nature of the more "frightening scenes" separates this one from the rest of Hitchcock's films. The man himself once said that this might be the most frightening motion picture he's ever made. I'm not sure I agree with him entirely; but oh, "The Birds" is still just so damn good anyways.

Gonzo entertainment! So very bloody...so very fun.

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:16:45 +0000

**** out of ****

I love blood. I love guts. I love gore. I love anything (artificial) that flows in large amounts, even if we aren't speaking of bodily fluids. But if we are, then movie blood is what I always crave. The more the merrier is my motto when it comes to such a thing. I'm not easily offended or shocked by movie violence; and in the case of features like "The Evil Dead" and its sequel, the grotesque becomes the darkly comic and absurd. Peter Jackson apparently loves blood, guts, gore, and fake red bodily fluids as much as I do. His early effort "Dead Alive" (known as "Braindead" some places) is an ode or homage to the mere existence of over-the-top movie violence and gore. The whole thing has this real low budget aesthetic to it throughout the first half and that's charming, but what's even more-so is the transition from that to all-out gruesome carnage in the third act.

This is probably one of the most bat-shit insane and violent movies I have ever seen, period. It's such a lively, spontaneous, comic horror farce; it embraces special effects for blood and gore like few films before or after it truly have. And by blood and gore, we're talking organs coming back to life, faces being ripped open and necks suffering from a similar fate, flesh exploding into a frenzy of green goo, and a in a famous scene, a lawnmower meeting with mortal flesh and causing certain disfigurement and mutilation. Was there a line that Jackson ever considered? Because if there was; he not only crosses but disregards it all-together. With "Dead Alive", there simply is no line. And Jackson couldn't give less of a fuck about it.

It starts out with a sequence involving a couple of misguided explorers on the fictional Skull Island who intend to escape with a caged "Rat Monkey", which has a rather nasty bite. Not everyone makes it back alive. Cut to the town of Wellington, New Zealand; where the rat monkey now lives, confined in its cage with the other monkeys at a zoo. It's 1957; and the likably docile Lionel (Timonthy Balme) is living with his elderly mother (Elizabeth Moody) and is being pursued by a helpless romantic foreigner named Paquita (Diana Penalver). The two go to the zoo one day on a date and Lionel's over-protective mother tags along, only to be bitten by the crazed rat monkey. Lionel must take care of her while she is still sane, which won't be for long. She starts losing her skin (an ear, parts of her face, soon her whole body) and eventually goes completely mad, or so it seems. Perhaps she's just a zombie.

Her behavior gets increasingly violent and Lionel must purchase a syringe in order to fight back against his mother and the ill-fated house guests that she has killed and turned into zombies just like her. When mother leaves the house, she starts attacking townsfolk and turning them into zombies as well. Soon she'll have an entire army behind her. Lionel must contain what she's started in his house. But it's not easy. Two of the zombies have sex and produce a disgusting little zombie baby who Lionel attempts to father by taking it to the park and then subsequently beating the shit out of it. Then Lionel's obnoxious cousin arrives, discovers the zombies in the guest room, and invites all his friends and family to the house for a party. You know what happens next.

I'm a sucker for movies like this. Movies that are made according to a director's original and daring vision regardless of what the general public might think. Even the most mainstream of film critics have warmed up to this one by now; and it's considered a masterpiece in the field of marrying the humorous with the macabre by horror fans and movie critics specializing in or who enjoy the genre in particular. I can understand why. Here, you've got a director (Jackson) who is known for bigger and supposedly better things such as the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the spectacular re-imagining of "King Kong" (which also features Skull Island). But the truth is that the earlier end of the director's career was populated by absurdist comedies of an extremely over-the-top nature; and this is one of them as well as one of the best. If you're half as crazy as me when it comes to your taste in cinema; you're going to have the movie-going experience of your life with this one.

Kung Fu priests that "kick ass for the Lord", diabolical yet playful zombie newborns, silly dialogue, silly accents, yet effective satire on 50's New Zealand society; "Dead Alive" has just about everything I've been looking for in a movie but never expected I would get. As far as sheer entertainment goes, it's a marvel and I haven't had this much pure fun watching a movie in a long time, but I love it when the occasion pops up at random. Every self-respecting sicko should see this. Any self-respecting human being should see this. It's such a good, hilarious, ridiculous bloodbath that I can't stand seeing it being overlooked by ANYONE. It is good cinema. Because as a special effects extravaganza, it really does understand itself. It's completely self-aware of its absurdity. But it was also influential for the new wave of American horror film; particularly films like "Shaun of the Dead". It's a classic on its own right. A flesh-crawling, head-ripping, toilet-absorbing, blade-cutting good time.

What's Wrong with a Little Hope?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:25:13 +0000

"If you truly expect to realize your dreams, abandon the need for blanket approval. If conforming to everyone's expectations is the number one goal, you have sacrificed your uniqueness, and therefore your excellence."
-Hope Solo

Doesn't it make perfect sense that it would be Seattle Sounders FC keeper Hope Solo who would welcome Terrell Owens to the Seattle Seahawks on her Twitter feed? And later ask how long Metta World Peace would be on for his latest TV appearance? All three of them have been lightning rods for "controversy." Which in their cases is a euphemism for "loud and brash with people hating them for no conceivably good reason."

I'm a soccer fan. I started actively getting into The Beautiful Game about ten years ago during the 2002 World Cup. That was the World Cup set in Asia, when westerners had to get up so early to watch the games that there was no real point in going to bed in Buffalo if you closed the bar at the city's traditional 4 AM time. When the local news did a report about people getting up that early and going to bars just to catch the matches, I started to wonder what the rest of the world knew that the United States didn't and made it a point to catch at least one game. I caught that game a few days later and I can't even remember which teams were playing against each other, but it was love at first sight. I caught matches regularly for the next couple of years, began following MLS when it began making headway onto the American sports radar in 2005, began keeping track of the European leagues in 2007, and in 2010 I took the completion step, adopting a team from Europe to follow in Arsenal FC, the legendary Premier League club from North London.

Of course, dedicating oneself to the world's most popular sport means cheering on the national team, no matter how badly they suck. The United States National Team – alternately called the Red, White, and Blue, or the Stars and Stripes, but most often simply the Yanks – has led a famously up and down existence. The men's team has qualified for the World Cup only nine times. Their best finish was in their first appearance all the way back in 1930, when they finished in third place. After qualifying for the following World Cup in 1934, they underwent a 16-year dry spell before their legendary upset of the English national side, then the best in the world. After that, they missed the next four decades before coming to consistency starting in 1990. But one of the pleasures of supporting the Yanks is the fact that we get to cheer for the women's national side as well, and… Well, Yank ladies can fucking PLAY. In the Women's World Cup – established in 1991 – the women's side has been absolutely dominant, winning the entire tournament twice (1991, 1999), the runners-up once (2011), and never finishing below third. They've qualified for every tournament. Their lowest-ever FIFA ranking was second. Despite my moral objections to the International Olympic Committee, you won't often see me turn down a chance to watch Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, Heather Mitts, Hope Solo, and the rest of the women's national side. Like my beloved baseball Yankees, these Yanks can virtually guarantee wins, so there's no worry about IF they're going to win. I love to watch the women's Yanks because they have the greatest collection of talent anywhere, playing cohesively, in perfect unison, which doesn't happen very often in American sports. I love to watch them because I want to see HOW they win.

Hope Solo has been a constant with the Yanks since 2000, with 124 caps (a fancy soccer term for appearances), and a magnet for sports commentators' ire for some time now as well. See, she's one of those people who doesn't come with a mouth filter, so she tends to ruffle feathers. In 2007, she was famously benched during the Women's World Cup. Solo hadn't done anything to warrant a benching. She had led the Yanks to victories over Sweden, Nigeria, and England – all shutouts – before coach Greg Ryan decided to go on a hunch. In fairness to him, replacement Briana Scurry had an outstanding performance history against their impending opponents, Brazil. But she hadn't played a full game in three months, and so her 36-year-old body wasn't quite properly prepared to withstand a full onslaught against Marta and the rest of the Samba Queens. Brazil being, you know, Brazil, they humiliated and embarrassed Scurry and the rest of the Yanks in a one-sided 4-0 rout, and Solo flipped out. Going to the media, Solo claimed her replacement was the wrong decision, that she could have made those saves, and Ryan shouldn't have made a decision based on a performance from 2004. After her outburst, the team decided she needed to be made an example of and benched her for the rest of the year. In 2010, she claimed to have heard racist insults coming from the stands during one match in which her Atlanta Beat played against the Boston Breakers, left the media session without speaking or signing autographs, and used Twitter to address the issue.

What's been forgotten is that when Solo was benched, everyone was initially on her side in 2007. Solo wears her competitiveness on the outside, and her comments shouldn't have surprised anyone. Being benched when you've proven yourself has to be frustrating, and it's clear Solo was venting over the fact that Greg Ryan tried a radical strategy which backfired. I don't know what everyone was so upset about in Boston. If Solo did hear people shouting racial slurs at her teammates from the stands, she was totally in the right to react the way she did. What's the chance that she heard people shout slurs, though? They have to be next to nil. After all, Boston has a rich history of racial diversity and tolerance, right? It's a well-known fact that no minorities have ever been wronged there, and that Boston has always been, is now, and shall always be a real bastion of equal opportunity where minorities are treated with nothing but the utmost dignity and respect, I'm sure.

Solo has owned the last couple of years. After the 2011 Women's World Cup, she made waves by doing something a lot of famous women do: Get nekkid and let people take pictures of her for magazines. In a blatant example of how women can't catch breaks and are held to double standards, people got on her back for this decision. Solo's nudies are unique, though, because she wasn't doing it as a celebration of her emergent status as a sex symbol for a magazine that catered to overly hormonal men. She did it for ESPN Magazine, which was photographing several athletes in the buff as a celebration of fitness and athleticism. The pictures are tastefully done and don't reveal anything which would cause parents to scream about the children. Although the designated heartbreaker role for the Yanks was given to Alex Morgan in a landslide with Heather Mitts being the backup, Solo is a gorgeous woman who definitely turns her share of heads too.

Although the spread was only barely sexual and brought tons of positive attention to the women's side, commentators still accused her of being there to promote the Hope Solo Brand Inc. The universal reasoning appears to have been that it SEEMED like she was in it for her own selfish reasons. I haven't read even one convincing argument against her nude photos. Every last piece about her that mentions them dismisses them in a quick huff.

During the 2012 Olympics, she stood out in every way. The past couple of weeks have been a banner to both the otherworldliness and humanity of Hope Solo. After a June 15 drug test, she tested positive for a banned substance. I don't need to repeat my belief here that drugs of every stripe should be legalized in order to excuse Solo; Solo didn't need to be excused. The banned substance happened to come as an ingredient in her pre-menstrual meds, and after Solo gave the USADA her full cooperation, her story checked out and she was cleared. The positive drug test was reported. The checkout, not so much.

As Solo deftly defended the American goal during the Olympics, she was beset by controversy with nearly everything she said or did. With her autobiography coming out soon, Solo released an excerpt about being conceived in a prison. Then she talked about how she and her 2008 Gold Medal teammates from the Beijing Olympics partied all night and appeared on The Today Show drunk and on zero sleep, and also invited an unnamed celebrity up to her room. She got into a Twitter war with former teammate – and 1999 World Cup champion – Brandi Chastain. She went on Dancing with the Stars, which also pissed everyone off for some reason. The popular complaint was that she was seeking attention for her autobio, which is being released tomorrow. I'm not sure how right it is to jump to the conclusion that Solo was looking for the attention; after all, don't books usually spend months in publication at the very least? She's a marquee athlete, so the book was bound to be brought up whether or not she had kept her mouth shut.

The Olympics were rocked by scandal weeks before the opening ceremonies because someone revealed that the Olympic Village where the athletes are put up are also giant orgies. This makes perfect sense when you think about it. When you're a teenager or young adult who has no real life because you've spent nearly every minute of every day training to build your Olympic-worthy physique, it's probably tough to avoid being overwhelmed by hormones while sharing unsupervised housing with some of the most physically perfect specimens the opposite gender – or the same gender, for that matter – has to offer. All Solo did by mentioning her partying and celebrity fling was confirm the new perception of the Olympic Village being a giant frat house, and for my life I don't see what was so wrong about that. Why is it that sports columnists are so offended by the idea that these athletes are human beings, who in many cases have been deprived of a real life, acting like regular young people? If anything, the Olympic Village is a fine opportunity to cut loose the old regimen, socialize, and possibly make a few friends among a big crowd of uniquely reared people who are able to understand the kind of strain and pressure you were raised under yourownself. I won't even get into the fact that a "scandal" like this is actually good for the International Olympic Committee, because a nonsensical little scandal like that would be a useful cover for the fact that the poor and underprivileged people of Rio de Janeiro are being forcibly removed from their homes because of them.

Solo's spat with Chastain was a bit of an overreaction, because Solo's comments are a lot harsher than the comment Chastain made about her teammate which tipped it off. Chastain's comment also had some validity. But what I got out of Solo's reaction was that Solo was leaping to the defense of a teammate as if she had been a target herself. I like that because it shows how far she would go to protect and defend her team. Julie Foudy wrote that Solo's outburst doesn't show any signs of leadership, but don't great leaders stand up for their troops? What's more, her benching in 2007 was the result of her team getting pissed at her and voting in favor of it. Solo stood up for at least a few players who put her on the bench five years ago.

Stereotypically bullshit was the way the media rushed to attack Solo for trying to become her own brand name while defending Chastain, a woman who, after scoring the game-winning goal in the 1999 World Cup, ripped her shirt off, revealing her sports bra and the brand name plastered all over it. The reactions of sports columnists like Foudy, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, and Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Sun-Times has been to try to deflect the fact that Chastain did that by pointing out everything Chastain accomplished with her teams, and saying the women's team wouldn't be where it is now if not for Chastain, claiming that Solo hasn't done anything in comparison to her senior ex-teammate. The Olympic Gold Medal she won in 2008 is a pretty high honor, though, and her taking the Yanks to the brink of the World Cup in 2011 wasn't too shabby either. She's won a score of individual awards as well, and is considered the best in the world at her position. Think about that; soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Billions of people have booted the ball around the pitch at one point or another, including a countless number of women. Hope Solo is better than all of them. Trumpeting Chastain's accomplishments just to degrade Solo is blatantly ignoring and rejecting everything Solo has done.

As far as her playing on Dancing with the Stars, I guess it was optimistic of me to think the media wouldn't be piling on. That's the sole basis of hating her for her Dancing appearance. They hate her for a lot of other things, so let's hate her for going on a kitch show that lots of athletes have gone on before (with one of them, Emmitt Smith, actually winning the whole competition). Olympic athletes who haven't retired are among the show's alumni, but I don't recall such outrage over Misty May showing up to play twinkletoes.

Let's see: So far Hope Solo has been scrutinized this year for a smear coming from a media that didn't do its research and won't report the fact that she's clean; adding her two cents to a fake scandal which upset people because it wrecked their images of Olympic athletes being pure, chaste, clean-cut people who wouldn't dream of doing anything but perfecting their physical molds; defending her teammates from criticism (even though it was light criticism that was warranted); told a story to promote a book whose publication coincided with the Olympics; appearing in a magazine spread which glorified human physicality and brought attention to the Yanks for a good reason; and dancing on TV. Next thing you know, she'll begin complaining that her team doesn't have a league to play in for the upcoming soccer season, the bitch! It's worth noting that one of the primary complaints coming from every sportswriter who attacked her was that she was going to end up being a distraction for her team. It's also worth noting that her team hasn't said anything bad about her. With that, I'm glad the women won the Gold, so everyone who used that excuse would have to eat crow. So far, Solo has shown a ton of class by not rubbing it in sportswriters' faces. If she suddenly begins doing that, she has every right.

It would be refreshing if some columnist finally came forward and just told the truth: They don't like Hope Solo because she falls outside the mold we've cast for our Olympian heroes. For that, she has permanently placed herself on my personal list of all-time favorite Olympic athletes. There's nothing wrong with the quiet humility shown by other members of the team, but when all is said and done, in a park pickup contest, I want the player who defends the team that voted to bench her. I want a fiery, emotionally raging leader who leaves everything on the pitch. I want a person who is dedicated to her game but still can cut loose. I want the player who is vocal about frustration, has complete confidence in her own abilities, and believes her teammates are the greatest group of people in the world.

In layman's terms so simple that even the amputee bigot Morrissey could recognize them, I want Hope Solo. She is the greatest thing to ever happen to the Yanks, and it's a shame holier-than-thou-art sportswriters are too stupid to realize that.

My favorite of all the Mario games. 94%

Thu, 2 Aug 2012 16:58:22 +0000

Many gamers consider this the best game in the NES library, and while I won't say that since I don't think I've played a wide enough array of games for that console to come up with such a conclusion, I'll say that this is my favorite game with the Mario title on it. This is my favorite of all the Mario games since I think among Mario's "classic" games, this one is the toughest while still being fun and unlike the two previous Mario games, starts to include features that would be essential to future Mario games.

STORY

Bowser is back to unleash terror, but this time, he's brought his seven children, known as the Koopalings, to wreak havoc in seven kingdoms, and to steal the magic wands from those kingdoms for Bowser's nefarious plans. Mario and Luigi have to go stop the Koopalings' invasion through their airships, retrieve the stolen magic wands and turn the transformed kings back to normal, and eventually, fight Bowser himself...again.

What I find most interesting with this storyline is that unlike most other Mario games, Princess Peach isn't immediately the "damsel in distress," but rather in the beginning of most worlds you enter in the game, she supplies you with a power-up. It's not until near the end of the game that she gets kidnapped by Bowser.

GAMEPLAY

SMB3's gameplay is a vast improvement over the previous two games. If you're familiar with the gameplay mechanics of the first Super Mario Bros. (the American Super Mario Bros. 2 is pretty different, considering that it's merely Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters, and therefore has some pretty different gameplay mechanics, and I don't consider it a true sequel to SMB), then you know around 90% of Super Mario Bros. 3's mechanics. The right and left buttons on the d-pad make you walk right and left (respectively), Start pauses the game, B launches an attack (if you have a power-up that dishes out attacks), A makes you jump, and the Select button is restricted to the title screen to toggle between 1 and 2-player modes.

Throughout the game, you navigate through eight different worlds and have to complete a number of levels until you reach the end of the overworld map (usually you have to beat each level in order to get to the end of the map, but you can sometimes skip a level if there's an alternate, unblocked route), which features a castle with a transformed king and a Toad in distress, asking you to retrieve the magic wand from the Koopaling you have to fight.

The eight lands in the order of progression in the game are Grass Land, Desert Land, Water Land, Giant Land, Sky Land, Ice Land, Pipe Land, and Dark Land. The respective Koopalings you have to fight in these kingdoms are Larry Koopa, Morton Koopa Jr. Wendy O. Koopa, Iggy Koopa, Roy Koopa, Lemmy Koopa, and Ludwig von Koopa (you fight Bowser in Dark Land). With the exception of Bowser, you fight each of them on giant airships, that are often bristling with cannons and flamethrowers.

In the individual levels within the eight worlds you travel, they're quite varied. There's "regular" levels where you travel through a level on the world's surface while jumping over obstacles and defeating enemies. There's "sky" levels where you have to traverse through platforms above a giant bottomless pit, and these are often "auto-scrolling," so make sure you're staying ahead of the screen's movement towards the right. There's levels where you have to go down a pipe and swim through water, and there's levels where you have to go down a pipe and traverse through an underground level. Aside from that, there' also smaller castles within each world that you have to beat. These castles often have lava pools and jumping fireballs much like the castles in the first Mario game, and in the end of each, you have to fight a reptilian creature known as a Boom Boom, though these guys are often easy to defeat.

There's also optional places in each world you can visit. These include "mushroom houses" that when you visit them, you choose from one of three chests to pick up a power-up and a location where you try to align three images to win a power-up (the power-ups you can win are a mushroom, leaf, or fireflower). Sometimes, a moving card will appear on the map and you can play cards to win things like coins, extra lives, and power-ups by flipping cards and matching two of a kind to win something. Once in a blue moon, a ship will appear on the map and when you get on it, you just collect a ton of coins and you go down a pipe in the end to fight two Hammer Bros..

In each map, you'll bump into the Hammer Bros., and when you beat the two of them, you'll get a power-up.

There's a smorgasbord of enemies you fight in this game. As usual, you got the Goombas, Koopa Troopas, Piranha Plants, and Buzzy Beetles, but there's some more this time around. Some of the new enemies are the Chain Chomp (when I was a little kid, I thought these were spastic football helmets that hurt you), Boo, Dry Bones (the Koopa Troopa skeletons in the fortresses), baby Piranha Plants (these are capable of jumping), Thwomps (the blocks in the fortresses that try to crush you), and Buster Beetles (the beetles that can throw Ice Blocks at you).

There's a bunch of new power-ups as well. Along with the fireflower, there's the leaf, which allows you to fly after attaining a high-enough speed. There's also the Tanooki suit, which like the leaf, allows you to fly, but also allows you to turn into a statue for protection against enemies (and can defeat otherwise invincible adversaries like the rotating lights and fireballs in the fortresses). There's a frog suit that allows you to swim better in underwater levels. Among the "best" power-ups are the P-wing, which is similar to the leaf, but allows you to constantly fly without having to run and fill up the P-meter (and flight ability doesn't run out unless if you get hit by an enemy). My favorite power-up is the Hammer suit, since this makes you throw hammers that can defeat nearly all enemies (such as the Boos and smashing blocks, which are invincible to tailspin attacks and fireballs), and when you crouch, the shell on the back of your suit protects you from fireball attacks. Because of how potent the Hammer suit it, it's only natural for it to be the rarest power-up in the game.

GRAPHICS

SMB3 is a step up in graphics compared to its two predecessors. Because of the more diverse environments, each world has a distinct visual style. With the graphical improvements, Mario and Luigi look better than in the previous two games, and the same can be said for all of the creatures in the game. Also, there's a much wider array of colors used in this game, and this game helped set the stage for what is now Mario's signature polychromatic worlds and creatures (while the first two SMB games had color, the color range wasn't very large). I think some of the best-looking environments in this game are for Ice Land and Dark Land. The former for the fact that it really does look and invoke the feeling of a chilly world (and to be humorous, I bet this is what Mario and Luigi would imagine what countries like Russia and Finland are like) and the latter for its really ominous, bleak atmosphere. Thanks to the wider array of colors, it helps flesh out each world as very distinctive from the other, which is a great thing considering how varied each of the eight worlds are.

SOUND/SOUNDTRACK

A lot of the sound effects from the first two Mario games have been carried over into SMB3, such as the coin sounds, enemy-smashing sounds, and the fireball sounds. These sounds are quite effective, given the NES's hardware limitations.

The soundtrack for SMB3 is some of Koji Kondo's best work yet. There's more Overworld themes instead of just one, and the well-known Underworld theme has been "spiced up" in this game (and it sounds better). Two of my favorite themes in this game are the Fortress and Air Ship themes. The former makes you feel like you're in a hideous dungeon where hundreds of innocents are met with horrible fates and the latter has a percussive, militaristic aesthetic. In one of the levels in Dark Land, you have to traverse through a squad of tanks, and with the ominous black background and Air Ship theme in the background, it feels like a squad of German heavy tanks is pouring into the Soviet Union circa 1941.

COMPLAINTS

I only have a few complaints with Super Mario Bros. 3. My chief complaint with this game is that for how challenging and lengthy it is, there's no saving feature in the game. So this means you gotta devote a huge chunk of your day to beat this thing since you gotta do it all in one sitting.

The difficulty curve among the last three Koopalings is a little off. Fighting Roy Koopa is pretty difficult since he can shake up the ground, temporarily immobilizing you if you're on the ground. However, Lemmy is after him, and fighting him is almost as easy as fighting Larry and Morton, but with Ludwig coming after Lemmy, the difficulty spikes up drastically.

The other is more minor, but it does irk me a little. Why are the Boos invincible to fireballs but not so to hammers? Theoretically, ghosts are supposed to be gaseous entities, so wouldn't fire be a more logical element in defeating them rather than metal projectiles?

FINAL WORD

This is surely a classic in the NES library, and easily among the best of all Mario games. This game is available on the Wii's virtual console (and has been re-issued on various handhelds over the last decade or so), so you can play it on there. However, if you're more of an old-school gamer, you may find yourself dusting off your NES and SMB3 cartridge to play this one again. Regardless of what method you like to play this game on, give it another whirl.