Meanwhile, in the world of baseball...

Since I only ever check in on baseball news every couple days, I didn't even know that Tuesday was a thrilling day to be a Mets fan. But I am excited now, anyway.

When I was first reading about who all the fans wanted to pick up for 2008, Santana really seemed like pie in the sky. Like, yes, I agreed that he would be just what the Mets needed for a contending pitching staff, but giving the Mets a contending pitching staff was not on the Twins', or any of the competing bidders', list of priorities. I dismissed it as wishful thinking and that the shot we got in 2007 was not to be repeated in the near future.

But what I don't know about the baseball business could fill a book (or at least an infrequently-updated blog), and I'm happy to be proven wrong. 2008 should be a fun year.

Civics Noob

If Joe Lieberman attends the GOP convention, then will he still be available to keynote at the Connecticut For Lieberman convention? They are running a candidate this year, right?

Warshington Noob

I came across a blog post that mentions Aplets & Cotlets. Horrible name, I know. "Cotlets." Jesus. But the blogger claims that, "growing up in Washington State, [she] always got [Aplets & Cotlets] as Christmas presents" and she hated them.

I have never heard of such a thing. The only holiday candies I associate with the Evergreen State (that's us, right?) are Almond Roca and the chocolates you get at Nordstroms's. Or possibly the Bon Marche. But they are basically less flavorful versions of fudge. I think she's from Eastern Washington, though, so maybe they do things DIFFERENT out there.

"Aplets." Christ almighty.

It looks like Turkish delight, which I don't find terrible. I do remember that it was immensely disappointing after only knowing about it from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Definitely not worth selling one's soul for or whatever.

Home Economics Noob

I brew my tea by the cup, boiling the water in a small electric kettle. I have always overfilled it slightly, so as to avoid any risk of not being able to fill my cup adequately. Last week I switched it up, so that now I may come up short once in a while, but I'll only rarely end up with too much.

I'm not really concerned with wasted water so much, but I'm worried the energy used to heat up the water might add up over time.

I figure I probably have an average of two cups a day when weekends and days I'm not working at home are factored in. So call it 700 cups a year. If I was overshooting by 20%, or two ounces, then that's 1400oz of water each year that I've been heating to boiling from room temperature.

A BTU is the energy it takes to heat a pound of water a single degree Fahrenheit. Each year I've been heating 87.5 pounds of water a whole 140 or so degrees, for a total of 12,250 unnecessary BTU each year, or about 13 million Joules.

My kettle is rated at 1000 watts, and since it is probably close to perfectly efficient (it's small and plastic, and the heating element is fully immersed), that means I'm wasting, uh...13,000...seconds. Each year.

That's three and a half hours! At minimum wage it would buy a nice lunch for two! I'm glad I've change my ways.

Comics Nooby

I took a sketch pad and my new brush pen home with me over the holidays, hoping to get in some good practice time. I wanted to both practice laying out full comic pages as in my baseball drawing, and to get a little more comfortable with the brush pen.

The second day I was home, I drew a couple panels portraying part of the previous day, when my mom took Nate and I on a walk down to the creek to see where the salmon were all dying after spawning:

It was a nice little vignette, I thought, so I decided that each day I would do a full page depicting something I'd done the previous day. I was laying out the panels, drawing in blue pencil, and then inking only with the brush pen.

Unfortunately, because of how vacations tend to go, most of the rest of my days were not nearly so exciting, and rather than drawing little episodes, I tended to just summarize each day with a bunch of confusingly juxtaposed panels. So the result is neither coherent nor really very interesting.

Also, the first page gave me practice drawing from different sources: the establishing landscape panel I drew from real life, then the second panel was from memory, and I used a reference photo for the third. Later pages tended to be almost all from memory. Here they are:











I also noticed that while I didn't have any trouble coming up with different facial features for made up characters in Night-Wight, I have no clue how to look at an actual person's face and distill their features into a drawing. So everyone looks exactly the same in these drawings, and going back I probably couldn't even tell you who is supposed to be who.

Was this exercise a success? I don't know. I didn't even really do any shading after the first three, so I don't know that I actually got any better with the brush pen. But I did come up with a good variety of panel layouts that I think mostly worked pretty well, and I know that I need to work on looking at faces and figuring out how to portray them (or rather, how to model them in my mind so that I render them as accurate portrayals). It was fun, too, so I'm glad I decided to do it.

Noob of All Trades

I have non-baseball stuff I want to post. While there's no technical barrier to creating a "*n00b" blog for each of my new enthusiasms as they come up, I don't want to mess with my technorate scores and affect my ad rates.

So I've decided instead to embroaden the scope of this here blog to include any topic on which I am a clueless nooby. Which for the time being is probably going to be stuff related to Scrabble or comics or bikes or whatnot, and who knows what all else in the future!

For example, here's some crap I made for playing Scrabble, both PDF files: a score sheet, and a 2- and 3-letter word cheat sheet (from the SOWPODS word list). There are two per page, and they line up if you want to do a score sheet on one side and the cheat sheet on the other.

The score sheet is designed for two player games where each player records their rack for each move, folding the edge of the paper over to obscure the rack columns. That way you have a full record of a game played in real life, and can record it later in something like Quackle and have it tell you all the 100+ point bingos your stupid ass missed. It's great!

Capitalism 101: Fuck the Yankees

Putting together dominant teams by luring in the best performing players with enormous salaries creates an incentive for players to enhance their performance through any means necessary? No shit?

I'm mystified by all the Sturm und Drang surrounding the impact, e.g., Roger Clemens' steroid use will have on "the kids," who are getting the message that it's okay to abase oneself
and risk one's physical health in pursuit of material reward. Yes, using steroids to improve your athletic performance is risky to your health and career prospects. You know what else is? Trying to make a living playing professional baseball.

In terms of eventual outcome, the aspiring pro ballplayer is probably better off washing out sometime early in college, hopefully not by an injury with a severe impact on quality of life. That way you've got your fond memories of high school stardom to look back on, you've got a couple years left to decide on something to study for real, you probably know a couple people who have a shot at the Show (valuable contacts regardless of your own personal future), and you're not staring at the prospect of toiling for years in the minors and never breaking out. True, you'll always wonder what coulda been; but realistically, it probably wouldna.

It's just another example of the US schizophrenia regarding economics and consumerism. Up to a certain point, the quest for material comforts at any cost is the very lifeblood of our nation. Past that, it's a dehumanizing corruption of all that is decent. It comes up in the eternal debates over whether rap music is a positive or negative force in our society (answer: rap music is our society).

"The kids" get the message: everyone's for sale, and your primary goal in life should be to make sure you get a good price when the time comes to sell out. Revelations like the Mitchell Report simply make explicit the tacit implications of our social order. It's no wonder they're so unsettling.

I had no idea.

I was out on my lunch break and stopped by the little tea shop by my house to pick up some key staples (while passing on some others that they also carry). The radio was on in the shop, but since it is my habit to tune out radio broadcasts of anything other than rap music, I wasn't listening to it. Then as the owner was ringing me up he commented that he was hoping listening to talk about baseball would warm him up.

Baseball! They were talking about baseball on the radio! It's the middle of winter! But of course, this is what's known as the "off season," when all sorts of trades happen. So I came right home and checked to see if my beloved Mets were up to anything. And they traded Lastings Milledge!

Reading some of the discussion, a lot of people seem to be concerned with the race angle. I think the notion that the owners or management want a completely non-black team is pretty far-fetched, but I do think it would be worth enduring insults from the slavering racists at the Post (seriously, when did it become common knowledge that Don Imus recorded the first rap record?) to have a shot at bringing up a homegrown African-American superstar.

The small number of blacks in baseball means that the ones who become great have that much more star power. The Mets would have done well to stick with Milledge and try to benefit from that potential, better representing the city and broadening the fan base as they have done with Latino players.

Anyway. Did not expect to be thinking about baseball other than in video games or drawings for several more months. But there you go.

Katie Casey was baseball mad

I finally got around to going by Peter's place to watch the third disc of Ken Burns' Baseball. This was a good one...I think we each only started nodding off once or twice. It started with Ty Cobb, continued on through World War I, and then wrapped up with the Black Sox. Pretty fascinating stuff.

After it was over, we looked up the full lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," sang a few rounds, and then played the trivia game that's part of the special features of each DVD. For the first time so far, we batted a perfect 1.000! I think we only had to guess on like one question.

Drawing

I got some new pens and paper the other day. The paper is just a cheap sketch pad, but at 11" x 14" it's big enough to draw a comic-sized page with bleed at 125% real size. I almost went for the 14" x 17", which would let me draw at 150% real size, but I don't really have the desk space to even use that, so I decided not to bother.

The pens include the Japanese Pentel brush pen that everyone loves. It's fun, but it does put down a ton of ink and I'm still pretty shaky with it. The bristles are really infinitely better than the crappy felt-tipped "brush" pen I was using before. I also got some smaller sizes of the regular Pigma pens, and then I stole a Sharpie from work.



I just wanted to block out and draw a full page on one sheet, and I think Peter inspired me to do a little baseball scene. I'm not working on a longer baseball story or anything: I just wanted to try out the format, and a squeeze play seemed like something I could portray on a single page that would cohere in the absence of a larger narrative context while also giving me a couple interesting backgrounds and figures to draw from a few different angles and positions (nh).

I'm not sure the three bottom panels really make sense the way they're drawn. It might work with color (panels brighter than the background?), or it might be something I'd have to do over.

Update: Those last three panels kept bugging me, so I went back and fixed them. I cut a piece of the same sketch book paper down to fit in my printer, blew the image back up to 125%, and just printed out the bottom part, landscape mode, in very light cyan. I only reinked the panel borders and the parts inside the old panels, then scanned it back in, lined up the new layer, and erased the unneeded lines.



I should have done this as a new post, rather than an update, just so I could title it "Back to the Old Drawing Board...Literally!" Oh well. I just noticed that I left the catcher as bare line art, and it looks kind of out of place. I'm not planning on fixing that, but if I do then I guess I have a title for the blog post.

Whee, baseball!

After brunch yesterday, a couple of my usual cronies went by to play with Gabe's Wii (nullus). Peter immediately noticed that the sports game had a baseball mode or level or whatever.

Andrew: Oh, Baseball's really boring.
Me: I know baseball's boring. That's why I like it.

Needless to say, Peter and I played at the first opportunity. He took an early lead with a single-run homer in the bottom of the first. I tied it up in the next inning and left a man stranded, but then fanned three batters to end the inning. I went scoreless in the third, and then Peter stepped up and won the game with a two-run walk-off home run. Pretty dramatic! I believe I hit for .222 and struck out five or six batters.

One funny thing was that Peter was striking me out throwing the same outside breaking balls that earned him so many K's in the wiffleball park.

I was also no good at Boxing. Video games!

More Baseball, and other stuff

Peter came over on Tuesday night with the second disc of Ken Burns' Baseball and we enjoyed it alongside some beers and Middle Eastern food. The further hijinx of tremendous asshole John McGraw—on the one hand carrying a piece from a noose used in a lynching for good luck, on the other (?) hand trying to sneak a black player onto his team by calling him "Chief John Tokohama," supposedly an Indian—were of course entertaining, but the highlight for me were the clips from a DeWolf Hopper recitation of "Casey at the Bat," a poem whose charms have always eluded me.

The pictures in the Wikipedia entry show him as a young man, and it says he was only thirty when he first performed the poem. But given that that was well before the turn of the century, I suppose it isn't surprising that by the time the film used in the documentary was recorded, he was pretty creepily ancient. I wish I could find a YouTube of it, but his lipstick alone is spine-tingling, and that's before he even begins his Cryptkeeperly melodramatic delivery. Ugh. I can't tell if the repulsiveness of the performance indicates the wide gulf between what was then and what is now considered entertaining, or if rather it suggests an element of the freak show in vaudeville that modern audiences only look for in reality television.

Hm, Wikipedia also says Hopper had (at least, I suppose) six wives. Interesting that as I watched the clip, some of my thoughts were along the lines as "so sad that this is what gays once had to resort to to make a living."

On the topic of oldish film clips (and gays, and tremendous assholes), a blog discussion of a debate on 9/11 conspiracy theories led me to discover clips from one of a series of debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential election. So many awesome things about these.

First, I love the rhetoric. Buckley's intimations of treason are of course not so different from what we hear from the bloodthirsty right today, with standard issue red-baiting standing in for contemporary accusations of Saddam-loving and terrorist-loving. But Vidal's side, damn. I realize that this one debate, taking place as it did during the unrest of the Chicago Democratic Convention, is unique even for the time, but the idea that the whole issue of the debate is framed from the beginning as essentially "yes or no: we are now living in an authoritarian police state" speaks volumes. Coming from a world in which Russ Feingold's is a champion of the left for quietly opining that perhaps millionaires should not be able to buy their way into political office, it's refreshing (and depressing) to see that national television once made room for a genuinely left-wing point of view. Vidal is still around, but he's so old

Second, there is the part where the two "nearly come to blows," as it seems to always be described. It is basically just Gore Vidal calling William Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and then Buckley calling Vidal a "queah" and threatening to punch him, but it is awesome. Again, you have to love the willingness to casually accuse someone of harboring fascist tendencies. Try to get a public intellectual (do such beasts still roam the world?) to apply the f-word today to even such a worthy target as, say, Rudy Giuliani. Here's the episode from YouTube:



Finally, it's fascinating to hear conservative cant from a source other than a faux cowboy jes' talkin' common sense. This predates the conservative movement's rebranding as an ideology of the working man. It's the same apologetics for the rich and powerful, but actually voiced by someone who is unabashedly rich and powerful. Which should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but because of how successful the right wing has been in burying the realities of the movement, it comes across almost as a put-on. Clearly this upper-class twit cannot really be a Nixon supporter.

Also while looking for those videos, I found a two-part debate from 1969, between Buckley and Noam Chomsky. The subject was US imperialism and interventionism, and how the two might be distinguished, if indeed they can be. Again, you have to love Buckley's shameless effete upper-classness. Chomsky comes across, appropriately enough, as a real professor type just trying to get down to the hard facts of the matter, in stark contrast with Buckley's high-flown rhetoric. It's in two parts:





The old-fashioned days, guys. So awesome.

All the rest of baseball

I forgot to post about watching game deuce, which we also did at Floyd. It was much more exciting than the first, of course. I didn't see any of the last two games, just overhearing some TV viewers' cheers during a party on Saturday and then catching only the final pitch as I came home last night from another. Would have been nice to have had more of a contest, I think, but at least the sad, misguided Yankees fans of the world will be upset. The Red Sox are now beating them 2-0 in World Series this century.

Red Sox vs. Rockies

Peter and I enjoyed a viewing of the baseball starting in the fourth or so...I remember Varitek had just driven in two runs on a ground-rule double as Peter arrived.

I had the idea that Jason Varitek might be a bit on the tall side for a catcher, but none of the baseball stats sites had a search by height. Then google provided me with only a handful of players thus described, all measuring in at 6'4" or 6'5", so I guess Varitek's 6'2" is considered within normal parameters. Ah well.

Not really too exciting of a game. Seeing all those Boston runs scored with two already out brought back some painful wiffleball memories, as Peter helped me remember. I did enjoy Matt Herges's relief pitching (nullus). He seemed to be throwing a lot of dramatical curves.

Do I have to support my League?

So this is hilarious that Rudy[eez-nutz] Giuliani[eez-nutz] is now claiming to be a Red Sox fan. I like also that the Republican fascists at his hate rally applauded him for it. Or, more likely, they applauded the (again, hilarious) spectacle of a Yankee[z-nutz] fan shaming himself. Beautiful.

But in the TalkLeft thread there is this idea I have never heard about before, that when your team fails to make or gets eliminated from the playoffs, you're then supposed to support whoever wins your league, the exception being crossing the lines of the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry.

But I don't want to root for the National League, because a) I don't really care about the Rockies, b) I have lots of friends from Boston, c) I also like the Mariners, so I can choose which league I root for in the Series, and d) a Red Sox win would piss off Yankees fans and force them to throw away their "1918 - 2004 - 2090" t-shirts, which event must be considered a universal Good.

So, go Red Socks.

Red Sox vs. Indians

Some friends and I managed to watch most of Boston's ALCS win on the big screen at Floyd's. The Cleveland fans sitting in front of us made themselves scarce around the seventh inning, I believe.

We had a good discussion about the Indians' horribly racist "Chief Wahoo" emblem, and this morning Peter came across a good blog post on that topic.

I was also going to post an update to my last entry, but I think the embedded map has confounded Blogger and I can't seem to edit the post. I wanted to note that my defeat in wiffleball yesterday was not as bad as the 22-0 drubbing the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club experienced at the hands of a bunch of cricket players in the first officially recorded baseball game in history. Thank you, Ken Burns, for providing me with some historical perspective.

More Wiffleball, Baseball

Peter and I played a seven-inning wiffleball rematch yesterday. Cadman Plaza was full of people, so we headed down to DUMBO and found a great spot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.


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Somewhere around the fourth inning, Peter figured out how to hit my high faster pitches, and I just fell apart. With the wind at the batter's back, fly balls were more often doubles and triples than anything catchable, and I was only able to get swinging strikes off my changeup. Meanwhile, no sooner had I learned to stop chasing the high and away sliders Peter had relied on for K's last week, than he started fanning me on the inside breaking balls, plus a wicked off-speed pitch of his own. It was brutal. If I don't start getting some more movement on my full-speed pitches, I don't think I'll be able to compete. When the carnage was complete, I believe it stood at 23 runs to only 3. Though, understandably, I may have missed one or two in there. Ouch.

Afterwards we took up some food from Rice and went over to Peter's to watch the first disc of Ken Burns' Baseball, which was so awesome. I thought it would be dull, but of course it was just hilarious and actually really informative. The labor stuff is fascinating. I love the implicit critique of state capitalism in the history of America's pasttime. I was disappointed to hear about the National League's puritan bourgeois history: the American "beer and whiskey" League sounded like much more my speed. The first disc only got us through the turn of the century, so I don't know what would eventually lead the AL to stray to evils such as the DH rule, not to mention the hated Yankees.

Meanwhile, there was apparently some actual baseball being played yesterday. Sounds like it was dramatical!

Oh, and I did a little illustration of a character I came up with called The Umpire. He's a villain or antihero type who casts judgment on people and vigilantifies their asses with a chest protector. SO AWESOME RIGHT. I wasn't sure how to show someone wielding a shield-type implement, so I did an image search and did the pose after this still from Captain America. Lines need some cleaning up, but I think you get the idea:

Wiffleball!

On Saturday Peter and I hit up the new artificial turf at Cadman Plaza for a little wiffleball:


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Or that was the plan, anyway. We traded one- and two-run innings for a bit until I broke out and took a 9-4 lead in the top of the fourth. A scoreless fifth, and then Peter came back with nine runs in the bottom of the sixth inning, a 13-9 lead. We hadn't decided on an official game length beforehand, so I kept asking for just one more chance to come back, and before we knew it we had played through the top of the ninth, with Peter taking it 16-9.

We were playing with no strike zone and no balls, and no strikeouts on fouls. So aside from a few short at-bats where the ball was put into play early, most of them were easily going to ten or fifteen pitches. I think we probably each must have thrown around 250 pitches.

You don't really think "physically exhausting" when you think of wiffleball (or I didn't), but after more than three hours of playing I was spent. I crashed pretty early, and was really sore yesterday. Not just my entire arm and shoulder (which still hurt today), but even my legs and "core." I had no idea.

It was super fun, though. We were both getting a bit of movement on our pitches, and Peter got me to chase his riser many times (nullus). I did benefit from his tendency to look way too sneaky and then crack up whenever he tried a knuckleball.

Ouch

That was ugly. RIP 2007 Mets.

I will never believe in anything again.

Mets vs. Marlins

So painful. A rare treat really, as recently we've only been able to watch a single Mets starting pitcher blow it in each game. Perez was unbelievable. Really, though, that 7-4 score was up there a long time, and our bullpen held it down while the offense failed to deliver. It's always one or the other.

Hats off to the Phillies. I mean, screw them one level, but it also sucks to have it come to a point where a team that's worked so hard needs to fuck up for my poor, hapless Mets to succeed. That's just the way of things, I suppose.

Dallas Penn had some good video clips from his birthday at Shea, where he sold his "Vote For Pedro" t-shirts to get money for a ticket. Bummer about the game.