New Favorite Movies

I have a new movie to add to my list of favorites: 8 1/2 Now if I could only learn Italian enough to understand it. :-) It's brilliant anyway. In order to understand it, you have to understand Jung, because it's nearly a Jungian drama dealing with a man's relationships to the females in his life as the main character deals with the confusions he creates by following useless and narcissistic tendencies. The climax is as poignant as movies get. A true masterpiece.

So what are my other favorite movies?
American Beauty
Dr. Strangelove
Field of Dreams
Hanna and Her Sisters
Life is Beautiful
Schindler's List
Star Wars, Episode IV and Episode I

Though they certainly span the decades (nothing in this century yet though), there are some common threads - both obvious and more deep. Obviously there are two Italian films, two about concentration camps, five use black and white, and they are generally serious, witty, and often dark. More deeply, they are studies in contrast - always for me the most attractive form of art. The generally share themes of self-actualization in the face of adversity, determination, and penance.

The most common thread is most clearly spelled out in Star Wars - the struggle of good and evil, the battle for the human soul, in short Joseph Campbell's (and Jung's) Hero's Journey, on which Star Wars is based. I'm always surprised by how few people appreciate this most popular movie as a rendering of mythical themes. Distracted by the special effects, I guess.

Speaking of Campbell, I retold again this week my favorite Campbell quote (I'm pretty sure I first heard it in The Power of Myth):

If you follow you bliss, doors will open for you that would not have open otherwise, and that would not have opened for anyone else.

The Yoga I practice I learned from Ananda Marga, which literally means "The Path of Bliss," and this is just the bliss that Campbell is talking about, as he was a Yogi at heart. People can, of course, learn their true nature from many paths. Isn't it funny that when they do, and they act on it, they start knocking down doors that they hadn't even seen before? I can guarantee that if you do honestly practice quietude and meditation you will uncover that steady hum that lies within us all.

No tarnish on '04 and '07 World Series Championships

Now I know I can be naive, maybe exceptionally naive, particularly about the integrity of baseball players, however, I don't believe Manny Ramirez used performance enhancing drugs until 2008.

Why? Here are Manny's numbers in Cleveland, Boston and LA:

(Please excuse the big space here if you see one)

	Cleveland	Boston	Los Angeles
Batting Average	.313	.312	.380
At Bats Per Home Run	14.7	14.4	12.1
Slugging Percentage	.592	.588	.710

Courtesy The Boston Globe

The stats in Cleveland and Boston show what has always been said about Manny - he's a very consistent hitter, and a great one.

Suddenly, in Los Angeles, his numbers are remarkably similar to Barry Bonds' and Mark McGwire's juiced numbers. This should not be surprising, since Manny's was in his contract year, likely his last contract year at age 37.

That's what I hate about autopilot

I never blog or even talk much about fantasy baseball because no matter how passionate as you about it, it's a fantasy, and no one really cares to hear about anyone else's fantasies of any sort unless there's some sort of personal involvement in it that wouldn't seem gross.

If you are not a team owner in "The BLS", the Bushe League Superstars, appropriately, BS.baseball.cbssports.com), I'll try to make this post not really about my fantasy, but about a frustration with algorithmns with some league history. But this post is really for my league mates - it was too long for the chatroom. :-)

The BLS has been a league since 1995 - a few months before the release of Internet Explorer 1.0, and traces further back to when people did fantasy by the U.S. Postal service. You'd wait a week for the report to come in the mail, it would cost about $50 per team per year. You wished it was only 2 days behind and not three, you kept up with boxscores each day in the NEWSPAPER- how quaint! Like many, I did it by hand in a Quattro Pro spreadsheet starting in 1991. I think there were about 500,000 players at the time. Enough to subsidize space on magazine shelves. My first league consisted of some workmates, close friends, two brothers, a wife that ran her own team (As one BLS owner says, "the only wife that knows what WHIP is!"), and some other guys that I found on internet message boards from all over the country and even the world (Australia, Japan, Denmark all hail BLS owners). Susan and I now co-own the The Crackerjacks, and the only other original left just last year.

The league is far more competitive now, but the bridge to the olden days is the way the BLS draft is conducted. It's done very slowly, enjoyed like a fine basket of fruit rather than an ice cream at the beach. The BLS draft is an extended draft of 336 or so picks (14 teams and 24 rounds), which occurs after each team "keepers" from the previous year. I say "or so" because an owner may decide to name anywhere between 3-8 "keepers" from the 30 person roster from the previous year, plus 0-2 form their minor league roster, none of which can qualify for the Rokie of the Year Award.

Most Yahoo or ESPN leagues do a draft 336 in an hour and a half. We do it over 6 weeks (Feb 15th to April 1st or so), 51 picks a week, 7 picks a day -a half a round a day. It can be excrutiating slow at time. There is no time limit at all until about March 1st, and owners will often take a day to think it over. Those are the most important picks, so we give more time for thought.

After March 1st, owers have 12 hours to make a pick, if they go over the time limit, their pick is skipped, but only until they get back to a computer and annouce who they want. Sometimes there are a lot of eyes on the page and picks go in mintues, though usually in hours, and then often hang for for the full 12 hours because we are all busy professionals.

In order to make the draft move faster, you can put the system on "autopilot" so that it pulls the next best player from your queue that is created by hand by dragging and dropping players in order.

(And now the story...)

When I woke up on Saturday, March 21st in round 13 of 22, the person three picks before mine exceeding the 12-hour rule and I skipped his pick (after a long hiatus, I'm commissioner again) .

It was near the "bench" phase of the draft but I still needed:
A relief pitcher
A starting pitcher
A middle infielder
Nice to have - a backup for some of my risky hitters (Travis Hafner)

I enjoy trying to figure out who will be the closer for teams that don't have a proven closer. It usually comes down to talent, temperment and strikeouts. My league requires exactly 3 relief pitchers. If you are going to win, you will need three closers for the season. Since there are 14 fantasy teams, that's 42 slots for "the closer" of each of the 30 MLB teams. Though you can take the risk, it's tough to win without the three closers, because you won't get enough points in the Saves category "rotissierre" baseball. If you finish low in one category (or "punt") you basically have to finish 1 and 2 in every other (and more 1's), to win. The good news is that half the league is playing with 2 closers.

I had two somewhat risky closers already, and almost all of the MLB team's closers were gone. I'm pretty sure in Oakland, that since Joey Devine's arms hurting, Brad Ziegler will get at least enough saves until I can find another one during the season. In Seatle, I love Chad Cordero, and nearly all my picks have been former keepers, as Cordero has been. I like the fit, and I like his talent. Chad has a weird delivery, he's about the only pitcher to nearly square the left side of his foot toward the batter, the toe pointing almost to the first base dugout, not right at the plate as they teach you in Little League. For him, I think it generates some special torque and his ball moves and hitters miss it even though he doesn't throw 95. The problem is that he had labrum surgery in July (injury that may be caused by the foots bad mechanics) and he won't be ready for Opening day, but I figure he'll eventually take the role.

I put Zeigler on top of the queue, then decided who my second pick should be. I was thinking of putting in Cordero, but it was possible that by the time I came back from Newport my other pick could come up. I wanted to make sure not to draft two closers in a row (I can't play a 4th closer), so I quickly put the hitter Troy Glaus second in queue. Determined not to let the draft interfere with my best attempt to be in unison with the cosmic vibration (i.e. - I don't like to do anything that requires such thought before mediation), I figured - "there won't be three picks in the hour it takes me to mediate anyway, I'll come back." I did get involved in a chatting with another where owner and as I went upstairs I thought "did I take it off autopilot?" "Yes. I think so." ,

Susan had to get ready after we finished meditation so I checked the draft web page. Zeigler was drafted (nice pick Peter!) during our meditation. The system picks Glaus for us and we wind up with NO THIRD CLOSER. Though we were able to pick up Cordero later, the way the queue works is sub optimal, unless there's only one in the queue. For most owners there may be 100 to 500 players. I regularly queue 60. An option for a "autodraftable size" queue would be nice.

Italics and Double Spaces

Liam was writing this:
"The story Cinderella [sic] was a great story."
We talked about the right punctuation for Cinderella. Callum and Dylan both quickly said that it deserved double quotation marks.

Callum said that if it's a short story, it's in quotes, but if it's a book or novel, it's italicized or underlined. Dylan concurred.

My first inclination was that it was italicized, probably because of the influence of Strunk & White's Manual of Style, which says:

American printed matter uses italics (the type fonts whose letters slant to the right) for the titles of literary and other artistic works (War and Peace, Verdi’s Requiem); for the names of journals and newspapers (The New York Times, Newsweek); for words, letters, and numbers cited as words, letters, and numbers (as here with the word italics); for foreign words and phrases (ars longa, vita brevis est), although when these loan words and phrases have been fully assimilated into English, we usually cease to italicize them, as with à la mode; for the names of ships (Queen Elizabeth II, or Q.E. II); and for a number of other technical purposes such as are usually specified in a publisher’s stylebook. In handwriting or typescript, underline what you wish to italicize. Italics are also used for emphasis and to indicate a heavier-than-normal stress on a word, particularly in Semiformal and Informal writing, although most editors discourage the practice. To achieve the effect of italics in the midst of a full sentence already in italics, put the word to be stressed in roman: We thought she’d never leave!

Now, in our other recent punctuation discussion, I was proved to be an old fuddy-duddy, as I nearly always put two spaces after each sentence. Yes two. One looks just too cramped for my taste. Extra whitespace is a good thing, especially when you aren't killing trees to show it. I'm pretty sure that this is most common in U.S. business English and the emails and documents I read everyday. The single space was proved to be OK and seemingly preferred nowadays. I still think it's only because HTML will turn two spaces into one and you need to add an '& nbsp ;' - called a Non-Breakable Space, but take out the spaces in this post since I put them in order for it to show up - to get the extra space to show up on a web page.

The Bank, the monster

My last post made me think I should post some sample of the apt prose in The Grapes of Wrath. I started reading The Grapes of Wrath during our California tour, not realizing that it was going to be such parallels to 2008. My other favorite is the whole of Chapter 5, some excepts:

"Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago fond that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank — or the Company — needs — wants — insists — must have — as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time.

"Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

"The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. If the dust only wouldn't fly. If the top would only stay on the soil, it might not be so bad.

"The owner men went on leading to their point: You know the land's getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land: robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.

"The squatters nodded - they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crop they might pump blood back into the land.

"Well, it's not too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.

"Yes, he can do that until his crop fails one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.

"But - you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat [term often used used in the book for pig meat]. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.

"The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. Can't we just hang on ? Maybe the next year will be a good year. God knows how much cotton next year. And with all the wars - God knows what price cotton will bring. Don't they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms?
Get enough wars and cotton'll hit the ceiling. Next year, maybe. They looked up questioningly.

"We can't depend on it. The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size...

"We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

"Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

"No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it...

"No, the bank, the monster owns it. You'll have to go."

The Last Clear Definite Function of Man

"The last clear definite function of man - muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need -- this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam; to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form the conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man -- when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back."

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 14

Acceptence Speech

it was just an awesome speech, perfect.

But what was up with Obama after the speech? He didn't smile until a big one popped out about 5 minutes after he finished. He seemed either one of two things:
1. Really afraid something bad might happen. I think it's healthiest to never talk about this again. Can't believe I said that. Sounds like my mother. I must be maturing.
2. Just damn stoic about it really. I mean like Tao Te Ching "like water" perfect. Humble. Not too up. Non-attached. My goodness, if his ego can't get the best of him at that moment, then we're in the for a new kind of leadership.