CHANGE JAR STATS
++ As of February 7, 2005,
the change jar was 41.3% full.
++ I last emptied the change jar
on August 11, 2004.
++ The change jar is projected
to be full on October 21, 2005.
[See change jar photo here]
I was surprised to learn today that the U.S. Forest Service is officially a nondiscriminatory agency. This means, I guess, that you're not allowed to make fun of any gay trees or Muslim squirrels you happen to see. Ha ha! No, actually it means that the USFS has to plant explanatory plaques in Braille along the forest trails. I have seen several of these plaques here in Colorado, and I've always wondered what they say: There's a huge, majestic mountain just off to your right. It's covered with beautiful green pine trees and snow at the top, and there are mountain goats leaping gracefully across the rocky crags. Too bad you can't see any of it.
My apologies to any blind people who might be reading this... oh, never mind.
I often see homeless people in Denver panhandling at major intersections, usually displaying cardboard signs with various slogans written in marker: VIETNAM VET NEEDS FOOD, EVEN A QUARTER HELPS GOD BLESS YOU, WHY LIE? IT'S FOR BEER, and so forth.
The cardboard would be easy to get, from dumpsters or whatever. But markers seem too expensive for homeless people to buy. So where do they get the markers? Is there a city program that gives free markers to homeless people? Maybe a marker-exchange program, like with needles? If they do buy the markers themselves, are the markers deductible as a business expense?
WITTENBURG -- Sources report that City Church priest Martin Luther, 34, has been frustrated in his goal to write 100 theses criticizing the the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences for redemption of sin.
As of press time, the Wittenburg University professor of theology was stuck on 95 theses.
"Stick a fork in me, I'm done," said a visibly exhausted Luther. "I'm really disappointed. I used to lay awake at night, picturing it in my mind: 100 THESES, by Martin Luther. Now I'm going to have to go with 95 THESES, which sounds retarded."
"The first 75 theses or so were pretty easy," Luther continued. "But then I ran out of ideas, and for the next 20 I just put down stupid stuff or reworded earlier theses. But now I'm completely dry."
Luther admitted to being "something of a perfectionist."
"Listen to this," Luther said. "Thesis #3: Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh. That, my friend, is good stuff. I just won't follow that up with Thesis #96: The pope's hat is totally lame, which is the best idea I've had in a week."
Opener: The MVP is the player who plays best down the stretch in a playoff race, when it counts. "When it counts" is perhaps the most idiotic phrase tossed about in MVP debates, because it always counts. A win counts the same in April as it does in September, doesn't it? I feel a little silly having to point out that the MVP is an award for players who excel the entire year, not just for 30 games late in the year when ESPN's bobbleheads happen to be paying attention. This criterion could be restated as "the MVP is the player who gets shown the most in SportsCenter highlights during September", which is essentially how Oakland's Miguel Tejada won the award last year.
Nightcap: The MVP is the player whose team would not have made the playoffs without him. By this mode of thinking, the Twins' Shannon Stewart, (31st in the American League in OPS), is a strong MVP candidate because he helped spark Minnesota over the hump to a playoff spot. But a wonderful player like Jason Giambi, (7th in the AL in OPS), is not a strong MVP candidate bacause the Yankees would have made the playoffs without him. It's silly enough to take the MVP away from a player because his team is lousy -- see my September 3 post. Doesn't it approach lunacy to take the MVP away from a player because his team is too good?
Sweaty dance clubs, poolside parties, ultra-hip lounges, raucous punk-pop concerts staged on mountainsides, multicultural rooftop get-togethers reeking of cool. Sexy smiles and easy laughter and confident gestures and witty repartee among friends. And everywhere the beautiful people: young square-jawed men with sinewy arms, yes, but mostly the girls. Tanned girls in bikinis on the beach, sassy girls at the bar displaying a tattoo in the small of the back, gorgeous blond twins behaving unnaturally, slender girls in tank tops screaming whooooo! at a party.
These commercials are supposed to make me want to buy beer. They don't. They make me want to shut off all the lights and huddle in the corner, rocking and weeping.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/25/2003 11:00:00 PM
Prepare to be amazed! Read Thursday's post at Solotarian Views for a twisted, harrowing AARDVARK sighting (see my Tuesday post).
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/25/2003 03:56:00 PM
Sure, I love America for all the usual reasons -- freedom to resemble, purple mountin' majesties, and a constitutionally guaranteed right to sleep sound in the knowledge that Congress may not pass any bills of attainder or ex post facto laws. But I never realized what a great country this was until I went to Safeway to buy lettuce. There, awaiting my consideration, were: iceberg lettuce, red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, endive lettuce, romaine lettuce, and butter lettuce. If I desired a more exotic lettuce experience, I could choose among spinach, cabbage (green, red, or savoy), collard greens, mustard greens, and bok choy. I could purchase lettuce already cut up and attractively packaged in plastic bags, complete with croutons. I could decorate my lettuces with 203 varieties of dressings and 5 different kinds of bacon bits. Truly we are a mighty young Columbus betwixt the earth.
I barely suppressed the urge to burst into patriotic song when I entered the cereal aisle. In what other country can citizens choose from among 255 breakfast cereals? Why, if I ate a box of cereal a week, I could go for five years without having to buy the same cereal twice! Can you do that in France or Madagascar? (I wouldn't know -- I've never been out of the United States.) Even if they can, I bet they don't have 9 varieties of ketchup and 7 distinct kinds of barbecue chips. America rules.
I love America because if I don't feel like eating lettuce or breakfast cereal, I can go to a restaurant and gorge myself on traditional American food, the greatest cuisine in the world: pizza, tacos, sushi, falafel, gyros, and kung pao chicken. I also love America because we have the coolest flag, way better than those European countries with their pansy three-stripe flags. Hey, baby, that's fifty stars on that flag, count 'em: fifty. Second place goes to Uzbekistan, with twelve stars. Nice try, Uzbekistan!
I love America, with our fruity plains stretching from sea to Chinese sea. If the world were a high school, we would be captain of the football team, banging all the cheerleaders, while all the other countries would be riding the short bus. So watch out, other countries -- we're just getting warmed up.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/24/2003 11:36:00 PM
A few years ago, when I had this night job at UPS, I worked with a cool African guy named Cosmos. One day I remarked that he had an unusual name, and he replied, "Yes. Many people tell me this. Did you know the name Cosmos is also the name of a flower?"
"Really?" I said. "I didn't know that." And I didn't. I had never, not in my entire life, heard of the cosmos flower.
The very next day, when I went to my day job, one of the old ladies who worked in the office was wearing a sweatshirt screen-printed with various flowers: the rose, the sunflower, the columbine... and the cosmos. I soon ran across more references to the cosmos flower -- in a magazine, overheard conversation in a coffee shop, on some nature program while flipping channels. It took me twenty-six years to learn of the cosmos flower's existence, and two weeks later I was ready to give university lectures on the thing.
This sort of thing happens from time to time. Recently I caught part of the excellent movie Frailty on cable, and in one scene, Bill Paxton sits down at the dinner table with his son and pops a can of Hamm's beer. I barely noticed this. I had heard of Hamm's before, I suppose, but when was the last time I thought of it? Hell, when was the last time you thought of Hamm's beer?
Two days later I went to my friend D's house to play poker. He offered me a new kind of beer he'd been trying. "Is it good?" I asked.
"It's not good," he said. "It tastes like Hamm's."
I'm not suggesting that there's anything mystical or important going on here. I just find it weird and fascinating. So, because we here at Chaotic Not Random are all about advancing the boundaries of scientific knowledge, I'll be performing an experiment on myself. I picked a book I had never read at random from a friend's bookshelf and flipped through it until I found a word that barely ever impinges on my consciousness.
The word is AARDVARK.
I'll keep track of how many AARDVARK references I run across in the next few weeks, and I'll give a full report in a future post. You are welcome to join me if you have nothing better to do and need something to divert your mind from that attractive member of the opposite sex who said he or she would call, and probably will call, because he or she looked really sincere when he or she said it, and smiled when he or she took the slip of paper with your number on it, and, you know, he or she didn't just smile politely, but in a kind of a flirtatious fashion, and you watched surreptitiously as he or she walked away, and he or she didn't just crumple the slip of paper up and toss it in a trash can, but tucked it carefully into his wallet or her purse, and even if that was several days ago he or she probably just doesn't want to appear desperate and anyway he or she had specifically mentioned that he or she was very busy these days.
After watching football most of the day yesterday, I spent today wishing that working at my job could be like playing on a big-time sports team. Wouldn't that be great? Forget slumping into your chair thirty minutes late on Monday morning, groggy and depressed at the prospect of wasting forty hours that week slogging through that meaningless drudgery you call your career. Now:
Imagine dressing in a spacious locker room, changing out of dull business-casual khakis into a snappy uniform with a slick logo on the front and your name emblazoned on the back.
Imagine the office going dark and quiet, and, out of the hush, cool techno music beginning to play, the kind the Bulls used to play when Michael Jordan came on the floor.
Imagine running through a tunnel onto the office floor and exchanging high-fives with your coworkers as a gravelly-voiced announcer introduces you: Starting... at Accounts Receivable... number 23... Killllllgorrrre Trrrrout!
Imagine a Jumbotron replaying each of your crucial phone calls and faxes in slow-motion close-up from three different angles, as well as displaying your current stats (Average Reports Per Hour, Work Avoided Average, Ass-Kissing Efficiency).
Imagine turning on ESPN's OfficeCenter to see yourself featured among that day's office highlights, plus expert analysts dissecting every move you made, especially including that PowerPoint presentation you screwed up.
The last time a pitcher got serious consideration as a Most Valuable Player candidate was in 1999, when Boston's Pedro Martinez took second in the American League MVP voting. Pedro lost narrowly to Ivan Rodriguez of the Rangers and likely would have won the award had George King of the New York Post and La Velle Neal of the Twin Cities' Star Tribune not left him completely off their ballots.
"MVP is for everyday players," King was reported to have said to a colleague before the voting.
"I feel a pitcher should just not be an MVP," Neal said. "To win that award, it should be someone who's out there every day battling for his team."
This is the most common objection to awarding pitchers the MVP. How can a man who only plays one out of five games, and even then only plays seven innings, contribute as much to his team as the guys who play nine innings every day? This is not an outrageous argument -- it is common in sports for players at certain positions to be considered more valuable than players at other positions. In football, for example, no matter how well a punter or a long snapper plays, he can't help his team as much as a quarterback or a running back, which is why players at those positions have monopolized the NFL's MVP award and college football's Heisman Trophy.
La Velle Neal and George King and their brethren in the no-pitchers-for-MVP camp seem to think that pitchers are role-players. They are important to a team's success, like a good defensive center or three-point shooter in basketball, but ultimately they contribute less to help their teams win than the position players who play every day and swing the bats that put the runs on the scoreboard.
I disagree. A pitcher might not play every day, but on the day that he does play, he is easily the most important player on his team. Each position player can only come to the plate one out of nine times and field the balls that come his way, but the pitcher is involved in every defensive play and bears most of the responsibility for preventing runs from scoring.
Do these extra responsibilities make up for a pitcher's lack of playing time? Let's examine some numbers and find out. In 1999, Pedro Martinez posted a 2.07 ERA over 213-1/3 innings pitched. (His record was 23-4, if you're the sort of person who cares about won-lost record.) The American League average ERA that year was 4.77. Now let's suppose that the Red Sox had replaced Pedro in 1999 with a perfectly average AL pitcher. Such a hypothetical pitcher would have allowed 2.70 more earned runs per nine innings than Pedro. Divide 2.70 by nine, and we see that our average pitcher would have allowed 0.30 more earned runs per inning than Pedro. Multiply 0.30 by the 213-1/3 innings that Pedro pitched, and we find that the average pitcher would have allowed 64.0 extra runs. Another way to state this is that Pedro prevented 64.0 more runs from scoring than an average pitcher in his league.
People who think very hard about such things estimate that a team wins one extra game for every 10 runs it scores or prevents from scoring. The Boston Red Sox, then, won six or seven more games than they would have won had they replaced Pedro with an average AL pitcher. How did this compare to the best position players of 1999? Based on much more complex calculations published in Total Baseball, 7th ed., Roberto Alomar helped the 1999 Indians win 6.2 games more than they would have won had they replaced him with an average AL second baseman, the highest such rating in the American League that year. Ivan Rodriguez, who actually won the MVP, was rated as helping the Rangers win 2.8 more games than an average AL catcher.
None of this means that Pedro was necessarily the American League MVP in 1999. I only intend to illustrate that which should be obvious anyway: pitching is important, a great pitcher can contribute as much to his team's success as a great position player, and no well-informed baseball writer has any business automatically striking pitchers from his MVP ballot.
I feel I should quickly dispense with the specious argument that pitchers should not be considered for MVP because they have their own award, the Cy Young. Yes, pitchers have their own award, but so what? Batters have the Hank Aaron Award, rookies have the Rookie of the Year Award, and relief pitchers have the Rolaids Relief Man Award (don't laugh -- they've been giving it out since 1976). But everyone knows that the MVP is the biggest award, given to the best player in the league, regardless of position. The Baseball Writers Association of America, which administers MVP voting, has stated publicly that all players are eligible for the MVP, including pitchers, both starters and relievers.
I want to know when we're all going to grow up and start referring to colors by wavelengths. Think of the benefits! Let's say you're thinking about buying an Italian wool V-neck sweater ($69.50) from J. Crew, for example. Do you know what color "heather cadet" is? What about "vicuna"? "Wine" would be easy for most people, but knowing you, you would think it was pink, like White Zinfandel. Or maybe you're a young lady looking to get a good deal on a Signature nylon/Lycra hipster side-tie bikini ($28.00). Would you like that in "baltic," "sprig," or "tigerlily," ma'am?
Wouldn't life be better if you could be reading the J. Crew catalog and be able to say, "Look at this hooded donegal sweater ($88.00)! And it comes in 497 nanometers -- my favorite color!"
And your friend could say, "497 nanometers makes you look so slutty. You'd look way better in the 522 nanometers, maybe even the 589."
And then you could point out that even if you look like a slut in 497 nm, at least you're not actually a slut, like a certain other person in the room who drank too much at a party last weekend and smeared her 681 nm lipstick all over some guy's scrotum she'd never even met before. And then maybe your friend would strike you across the face, turning your eye various shades of color from 404 - 511 nm.
I don't like it when different people have the same name. What kind of sense does that make? They're different people, so they should have different names. Take the name "Dave," for example. There are about 1 billion Daves in the world, which is extraordinarily confusing. If I run into someone named Dave, how am I supposed to know if it's Dave, the doctor who will be performing my kidney transplant surgery, or Dave, the guy on the motorcycle who stole my girlfriend and taunts me by sending homemade videos of the two of them having sex?
My policy is to never have more than one acquaintance with the same name. Let's say I meet someone for the first time, and his name is Dave:
SOME GUY: Hi, my name is Dave.
ME: Ummmm... well. I'm sorry, that's just not going to work for me.
SOME GUY: (puzzled) Not going to work?
ME: Well, I already have a Dave, you see, and he's doing a fine job, so I really can't replace him at this juncture. But I can offer you another position... (I pull out a name list.) SOME GUY: Look, my name is Dave, so I don't know...
ME: If you want to stay in the D's, I can put you at... Dirk, Damien, or... well, Dwight just opened up.
SOME GUY: Why did Dwight open up?
ME: Never returned my Van Halen CD. What a dick. Speaking of which, Dick is wide open. You want Dick? You like Dick?
I usually get assaulted at this point, which is why I'm grouchy much of the time.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/17/2003 04:04:00 PM
It's perfectly okay with me if you take naps at work. Your boss probably thinks differently, but I say the hell with her. If she's so smart, why is she stuck supervising peons like you? Ask her that the next time she gives you a bad review!
You should not take naps at your desk. Not only do you risk getting awakened by annoying business-related phone calls, but you might drool on your keyboard and ruin it, and your company would deduct the cost from your next (and final) paycheck. Also, if you have the kind of coworkers who like to play practical jokes, they might put your hand in a glass of warm water or put shaving cream on your face, and then you would look silly giving that important PowerPoint presentation.
The best place to nap at work is in the bathroom stall. You're going to be in there for awhile, so to avoid suspicion, you should make subtle comments to your boss and coworkers like "I haven't urinated in six days," or "I feel like I have a cinder block lodged in my sphincter!" When your eyelids start to get heavy from doing too much of whatever kind of boring work you do, go into the bathroom and lock the stall. Sit down on the commode, put your elbows on your knees and slump forward and you should be asleep in no time.
The trick to successfully napping on the toilet on company time is not to push it. Twenty minutes is plenty. Any longer than that and -- trust me on this -- your legs will fall asleep and you will fall down when you stand up. If this happens, your best option is to fake a seizure. People will feel sorry for you and wedge a stick between your teeth, and if you do it right you might get an ambulance ride to the hospital where you can score some lime-flavored gelatin dessert.
Experts disagree as to whether you should actually raise the toilet lid and drop your pants while napping on the commode. My answer is a definite yes -- what if your stupid boss comes peeking under the door and sees you sitting there with your pants up? Word will get around that you're a pervert, and then you'll never get a date with that hot chick in Human Resources. If you have your pants down, though, with your eyes closed, your boss will assume that you are just concentrating hard on pushing out a monster dump. (You did remember to tell your boss about the cinder block, right?) Also, when your pants are puddled around your ankles, it makes a perfect place to put your glasses, which could otherwise fall off and get scratched.
My father was the funniest man I ever knew. For example, when I was ten years old, I wanted to know what hemorrhoids were. I wanted to know because I kept seeing commercials for Tucks and Preparation H products where they would extinguish matches with medicated pads, or show embarrassed people having oddly non-specific conversations with chipper pharmacists about "itching" and "burning." What were they talking about? I wanted to know.
So I went up to my dad and asked, "Dad, what are hemorrhoids?"
My dad's face got all red and he yelled, "You know goddam well what hemorrhoids are!"
Har! I told you he was funny!
Another hilarious thing my dad said came after we had him committed to a mental hospital. We had found him in the living room after he attempted suicide by overdosing on antidepressants. He denied it was a suicide attempt, though, and explained that "pills are how women do it. If I was going to kill myself, I would use a gun."
Ha ha! You should take that show on the road, Dad!
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/15/2003 05:40:00 PM
When a baseball player hits a home run, he actually has to run the bases. Isn't that great? The whole thing is entirely ceremonial. The ball has disappeared and there's nothing anyone can do about it -- there's no reason the batter couldn't just walk back to the dugout while the runs are placed on the scoreboard. But instead the guy gets to run around the bases, uncontested, while everyone else stands around and waits for him to finish. I can't think of anything else like it in sports. The guy could moonwalk around the bases if he wanted to, or do cartwheels or backflips. Nobody wants a 5-ounce chunk of leather and yarn buried in his ear canal the next time he comes to the plate, of course, so no player ever messes around like that. But he could.
I also love that when a pitcher wants to intentionally walk a batter, he actually has to throw the four balls. If baseball was more like football, the manager would signal his intention to issue an intentional walk to the umpire, probably by throwing a purple flag or something, and the batter would just go to first base. But this is baseball, and so the catcher must stand up and stick his glove out to the side while the batter puts his bat on his shoulder and suppresses the urge to pick his nose. The umpire must watch to make sure that the pitch is, indeed, several feet off the plate, and he must note the balls carefully on his little counter. The ritual must be executed four times, and only then may the batter take his base. It's a perfectly pointless and priceless little ceremony.
According to the fifteenth verse of the fifteenth chapter of the book of Judges, Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. I have often wondered how this went down. How, exactly, do you kill a man with a jawbone? Do you throw it, or maybe just whack guys across the head with it? Wouldn't the jawbone break? It seems as though it would be harder to kill someone with a jawbone than it would be with your bare hands.
I also wonder what all these guys were doing while Samson was on his holy rampage. You'll probably think I'm a pussy, but if I'm in a group of a thousand Philistines, and this one pissed-off Israelite starts killing dudes with a jawbone, I'm going to take off once the body count reaches fifty or so. Maybe forty. What was that 834th guy thinking? "Yeah, he's taken out 833 of my comrades armed with nothing more than a chunk of bone. But I'm pretty sure I can take him."
I also love the part of the Bible that says that Jesus had brothers and sisters. Think about that. How would you like it if Jesus was your brother? Mary would be nagging you constantly: "Why can't you be more like Jesus? Jesus cleans his room. Jesus does his homework. Jesus feeds the five thousand and rises on the third day."
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/12/2003 07:22:00 AM
Today doesn't need a name. Today is September 11 and that's enough. When you mention September 11, conversations trail off. Eyes drop. Throats are cleared. Because we remember.
We remember the first moments when we realized what had happened. We remember our disbelief and horror as the towers collapsed. We remember going home and watching in a numb stupor as the planes crashed into the towers over and over and over. We remember trying and failing to wrap our minds around why.
I'm a patriot. But patriotism doesn't help me understand why 3,000 people died senselessly two years ago.
I love my country. But that won't stop the bloodshed from happening again. And again. And again.
I would die to defend America. But maybe I don't have to. Maybe there's a different way. A better way.
September 11 isn't about patriotism. It's about remembering.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/11/2003 12:00:00 AM
If you would quit playing with yourself long enough to pay attention to the important things in life, you would certainly notice that there are lots of stupid movies with punchy two-word titles: Get Carter, Deadly Friend, Extreme Prejudice, Red Heat, Blood Feast, Hard Target...
I knew you would bring up Gosford Park and Schindler's List. Look, I'm not saying that all movies with two-word titles are bad. I'm just pointing out that a suspiciously large proportion of bad action-adventure and cheesy horror movies end up with easily digestible two-word titles. Convincing evidence can be found in the form of Jean-Claude Van Damme's filmography; this legendary bad actor has appeared in 31 movies, of which 14 -- almost half! -- have titles with more than one but less than three words.
If you want to have some fun with this concept, you can play an exciting, action-packed game I invented. Here are the rules: Make a list of ten imaginary two-word movie titles that seem like actual movie titles, but that you don't know to be movie titles. Make a list of twelve, if you like. Heck, make a list of fifteen or twenty. It's not like you were going to spend the time working on a cure for cancer or anything.
When you're done with your list, go to the Internet Movie Database and type your imaginary titles into the search window. If one of your titles turns out to be an actual movie, you score a point. Or maybe two points. Whatever.
Here's the list I made. The hyperlinks are titles that turned out to be real.
Of the 21 completely made-up two-word movie titles I wrote down, 13 turned out to be real actual movies. Do you realize what this says about the fragile condition of the art of filmmaking today? I don't either. All I know is that I apparently have another amazing talent that will never, ever help me to get laid.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/09/2003 11:47:00 PM
Bala Cynwyd may be just a pleasant neighborhood in the Philadelphia metro area, but I can't be the only person who thinks that "Bala Cynwyd" is a name right out of an H.P. Lovecraft supernatural horror story.
Bala Cynwyd does not have its own high school, which is a pity. Think of the Lovecraftian names that could have been used as mascots for their athletic teams:
-- The Bala Cynwyd Unspeakable Horrors
-- The Bala Cynwyd Necronomicons
-- The Bala Cynwyd Mad Arabs
-- The Bala Cynwyd Shadows Out Of Time
-- The Bala Cynwyd Creatures, Spawned In The Stars, Bringing a Menace Of Unimaginable Evil To Threaten All Mankind
Who would dare to challenge teams with such names? And think of the awesome logos plastered on sweatshirts and football helmets! Such a shame. I know that you are just as disappointed as I am, so as consolation I offer the Neighborhood Club of Bala Cynwyd, which has, I think, the coolest logo I've ever seen for any neighborhood club anywhere.
Speaking of disappointing sports team nicknames and logos, it's time to get mad about the Charlotte Bobcats, the new NBA expansion team. Bobcats? How bland and boring. And check out their lame logo!
"Charlotte Bobcats" was chosen over "Charlotte Flight," and rightfully so; I'll go for anything that stems the evil trend of singular-noun sports team nicknames. But "Charlotte Bobcats" also beat out "Charlotte Dragons," an awful decision. Did you know that out of the 122 teams in the four major American sports leagues, only six -- the NBA's Wizards, the NHL's Devils, MLB's Angels and Giants, and the NFL's Titans and Giants -- are named after fantasy, mythical, or legendary creatures? What about the Cyclops? The Minotaurs? The Vampires or the Goblins or the Yeti or the Beowulfs? Women's teams could be the Medusas or the Sirens... what an untapped mine of excellent team nicknames!
Imagine what could have been: cool new Charlotte Dragons jerseys emblazoned with a coiled, scaly serpent breathing fire through a mouthful of fangs and brandishing razor-sharp talons. Who wouldn't want one? Instead we're stuck with the Bobcats, a nickname already in use by about a thousand U.S. high schools. Yech.
What's that? You say that you're a complicated person? Well, I can't say that I'm surprised to hear that. Actually, the very moment I met you I sensed you had a personality of many conflicting layers leading to a boiling cauldron of pain and rage at the very center of your soul. Even a simpleton like me can see and be awed by that. As we talked, I became progressively more amazed at the depth and emotional complexity that you possess. Not that I would know! Like most people, I have only two emotions -- happy and sad -- and really I'm happy most of the time unless the TV is broken or I drop my new issue of People magazine in the toilet.
What's People magazine? I don't suppose you would know anything about it. Certainly a person as complicated as yourself would sooner brood over Proust while sipping organic espresso in an independent coffee shop than waste time reading some silly celebrity rag. Doubtless you also watch only movies with subtitles and only listen to music by obscure bands that people like me have never heard of and wouldn't understand anyway. How I crave your gift for plumbing the depths of meaning in the works of such artists!
I often wonder what it would be like to be a complex man with a nuanced personality, able to sense more deeply and feel more fully than ordinary human rabble. I suppose it must be like having the ability to see all wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, as opposed to people like myself who can only sense visible light. What a blessing! If I might ask, when did you first notice that you were deeper and more complicated than other people? If I might hazard a guess, was it when you were a freshman in high school, getting shoved and ridiculed by bigger kids, rejected by attractive members of the opposite sex, and misunderstood by your parents and teachers? Did you develop your complex personality through the writing of angst-ridden, non-rhyming poetry and frequent masturbation?
I don't know how I knew that. It was just a guess.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/05/2003 11:40:00 PM
I noticed something interesting today about Microsoft Word. If you type in a cuss word, like fuck, the spell-checker recognizes it as a correctly spelled word. If you misspell a cuss word, like fukk, the spell-checker marks it as a misspelled word. The interesting part is that if you ask for spelling suggestions for, say, fukk, the spell-checker won't suggest fuck, even though that's obviously what you meant. It will, however, suggest funk, folk, fuci, fork, funky, funks, duck, buck, and fake.
I find this delightful. All this time I thought of the spell-checker as an impersonal chunk of code, mechanically comparing letter strings to a standard database of acceptable letter strings. Now I see that the spell-checker is capable of human emotions, moral judgment, and complex social behavior. The spell-checker disapproves of certain language, but it employs tact by keeping its opinion to itself. When asked to participate in the shady business of helping to produce obscene language, however, the clearly embarrassed spell-checker refuses to participate, hinting in diplomatic fashion that more gentlemanly words would suffice.
I've come to envision the spell-checker as a courtly, bookish man, possibly a retired professor of English from a small liberal-arts college somewhere in the rural Midwest. He sits beside me as I write, dressed in a tweed suit with a vest and bow tie, and he blinks nervously at my prose from behind old-fashioned spectacles. He's quiet, my spell-checker, more accustomed to the hushed atmosphere of the library and the lecture hall than the rough trade and profane language of sailors and football hooligans.
"Ahem," he says, his ears turning pink as I type fukk you, assholl!. "That's not quite correct."
"It's wrong?" I say. "Well, how should I spell it?"
"Well." He clears his throat. "I think perhaps duck you, gasahol! would work just fine.
"That's not what I mean at all. Is there just one k, like fuk?"
"Oh my," he says, removing a kerchief from his breast pocket and wiping his forehead. "Have you considered, possibly, fake you, assoils!?"
"What the hell is an assoil? I mean assholl, man. The chocolate starfish? You know, where your wife likes you to put it? Come on, dog." I wink and elbow him in the ribs.
The spell-checker is blushing fully now and staring at the ground. "Goodness. Ah... I say... you may find that fork you, school! works to your satisfaction."
"Fork you, school!" I mull it over. "I like that."
Consider Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez. By several rational measures, (see the August 20 post here), he has been the most productive player in the American League over the past seven years. Can you guess how many Most Valuable Player awards he has won during that time span?
The answer is zero.
Many baseball fans consider A-Rod to be the best player in the American League today, and for good reason. He leads the AL in home runs (40), ranks second in OPS (1010), and among the league's elite offensive forces, he is the only one to play a crucial middle infield position, a position at which he won a Gold Glove last year. Can you guess A-Rod's chances of winning the MVP award this year?
Again, the answer is zero.
How is it possible that the best player in the league has no chance to be named its Most Valuable Player? "Simple," you are saying. "A-Rod's team is 64-75. The Rangers are in last place, 19.5 games out of first, and have no chance to make the playoffs. Great players are supposed to carry their teams. If A-Rod is so valuable, why can't he carry the Rangers to the playoffs, or at least to 81 wins?"
A-Rod can't carry his team to the playoffs because he is not a football player, or a hockey player, or a basketball player. A-Rod plays baseball, a game in which great individual players can do less to help their teams win than in any other major American sport. A-Rod can't march his team 95 yards to score a game-winning touchdown. He can't take extra shifts on the ice. He can't demand the basketball during crunch time. All Alex Rodriguez can do is go to the plate one out of nine times and handle the balls that come his way in the field, and he does these things better than any other player in the American League.
Look at it this way: why are the Rangers a bad team? They don't have a problem hitting -- as measured in runs scored, the Rangers have the fourth most potent offense in the AL. But the Rangers' pitching staff sports a 5.70 ERA, the worst in the majors. What, exactly, is A-Rod supposed to do about this? Take the mound every fifth day? Become the first player to hit 50 home runs and record 50 saves? Sacrifice a virgin in the light of a full moon?
Those of you with long memories will recall that we went over all of this last year, when A-Rod lost the MVP to Oakland's Miguel Tejada, a very good shortstop who nevertheless had inferior offensive stats to A-Rod, including 23 fewer home runs and an OPS 154 points lower. Tejada won the MVP mostly on the strength of a few clutch hits during the A's late-season 20-game winning streak that clinched the AL West division. "He played better when it counted," the analysts noted. Note to everyone in the universe: It always counts. A victory in April counts the same as a victory in September. If A-Rod had played for the A's all year, maybe they wouldn't have needed a miraculous winning streak to make the playoffs.
Look, you guys, this is really simple. The MVP is an individual award, not a team award. Alex Rodriguez does more to help his team win than any other player in the American League and is therefore the most valuable. He shouldn't lose the MVP because the Rangers can't pitch.
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/03/2003 10:51:00 PM
The seventh most pathetic aspect of my life is the strange pride I take in my ability to quickly convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head. (In related news, the eighth most pathetic aspect of my life is the strange pride I take in my ability to spell "Fahrenheit" without looking it up.) I base an enormous portion of my self-esteem on this, which causes problems occasionally. I'll be driving along the highway, maybe with a nice young lady I'm taking to dinner for the first time, and the conversation goes something like this:
SHE: ... so they sent the mammogram to the radiologist, who said Mom needed to have the lump biopsied. (We pass one of those time/temperature signs reading "22 C".) When we found out it was malignant, I just freaked out. I mean --
ME: Seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.
SHE: What?
ME: Twenty-two degrees Centigrade is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Well... seventy-one point six, actually.
SHE: What? ME: You're right -- I shouldn't give an answer with three significant digits when the original datum was only measured to two significant digits. Seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit it is. Say, how about we just skip dinner and head over to my place?
If you're curious about how this technique has been working for me lately, or if you just need a cheap ego boost at my expense, you can consult the "Involuntary Celibacy Watch" in the sidebar of this page.
(You might be wondering what the first through sixth most pathetic aspects of my life are. I'll give you a hint: I've written about all of them in this blog so far. So figure it out yourself, asshole.)
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/03/2003 12:29:00 AM
I am a master of talking on the phone with girls. You can be, too! Here's how:
Be prepared. You should buy a box of condoms and place them on a tabletop where you can see them. You won't need to wear a condom while talking on the phone, of course, but having condoms around creates confidence by giving you the illusion that you are sexually active.
Warm up properly. Calling girls on the telephone is a strenuous activity, and jumping into a call without proper preparation places great stress on the body and mind. To avoid injury, you should always warm up by pacing around your apartment or bedroom at least 450 times. You should then pick up the phone, put it back down, stare at it for two minutes, mutter "fuck" under your breath, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. After drinking as much water as your quivering bladder will allow, pick up the phone and dial the first five digits of the girl's phone number. Then hang up and organize your CD collection in alphabetical order by the artist's astrological sign. If you do not have a CD collection, you may spend twenty minutes reading the warning label on a can of Lysol.
Start with a joke. If you want women to like you, you will need a sense of humor or a degree in medicine. Most men don't have either, so you will probably have to fake it. You can find great jokes published each month in Playboy magazine, on the flip side of the centerfold. As soon as the girl answers the phone, read one of these jokes and pretend that you made it up. If she doesn't laugh, read the joke again, but louder and more slowly -- she probably didn't hear you clearly the first time.
Avoid "danger" topics. When you are talking to girls on the phone, they will probably want to discuss only a few topics, like shoes and shopping and movies starring Julia Roberts. You will have to learn to feign interest in these matters while forgoing more sophisticated subjects such as World Wrestling Smackdown or a woman's rightful place in a marriage. Try this: while the girl blathers about shopping for sandals at the mall, stay silent until she stops to breathe. Then make a noncommittal sound like "ohuh." Repeat as necessary. Advanced practitioners can execute this maneuver while watching the Stanley Cup Finals on television.
Now get off the Internet and start burning up those phone lines, you silver-tongued bastard!
+posted by Lawrence @ 9/02/2003 12:03:00 AM
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