New-school westerns

We recently netflixed The Warrior's Way (2010) followed by Rango (2011), without really intending to watch westerns back-to-back.  


In fact, neither of us really remembers how the Warrior's Way got into the queue -- I expect it was my fault, but we're both glad to have seen this "sushi western".  It was very thin on plot, so they smartly kept it to 90 minutes and minimized the dialogue.  It was thick on slick, stylized contrast and commentary on the "years of disciplined training to become a great swordsman" of the east versus the "shoot 'em up" of the west, and, funny enough, no matter which way you go, you mostly end up dead.  I could quibble with the denouement, but had too much fun to bother.  Recommended for a brain's night off.


Rango begins brilliantly and ends well, but the middle is a mess.  They seemed desperate to try to fit a complex "whodunit" plot into the middle of a movie that didn't need one.  We both fell asleep around the halfway mark and had to finish the next night.  Never a good sign.  Simplify, and cut the running time from 100 to 80-90 minutes, and we've got a movie.

The Tiger's Wife; Téa Obreht; 2011

Everybody loves The Tiger's Wife.  


Well, not quite everyone.  The New York Observer reviewer derisively compares it to teen fiction (which I find insulting to good YA fiction), and other detractors point out that Obreht never actually lived through the war in Yugoslavia.  The Salon reviewer is enthralled and exasperated.  Either way, it arouses strong feeling.

Well, not quite.  It didn't excite the same level of response in me.  I like Obreht's writing, and enjoyed the fairytale of Natalia and her grandfather, including the stories of the Deathless Man and the Tiger's Wife.  But I'm not enthralled**.  IMO, the biggest failure in the book is due to poor editorial review -- Luka's***, Darisa's, and the apothecary's stories comprise about 10% of the words in the book, but add nothing to the core story of Natalia and her grandfather.  They are merely a distraction and should have been cut.  The Salon reviewer also noted this problem, but I have to disagree with the suggestion that "Obreht would have been well-advised to parcel out its constituent elements as stand-alone stories" because the other 90% of the book contributes to that core story.  Okay, this did exasperate me, actually, but with more of a sense of resignation than outrage.

** I'm biased because I know the author, but preferred 13, Rue Thérèse.  Both books are debut novels that are germinated from  childhood experiences.  Both feature slightly dull narrators who are researching/imagining someone with a far more interesting personal history.

*** this won't make sense unless you've read the book, but I can't help but wonder if there's any irony in the choice of his name.  Do you think someone of Obreht's generation listens to Suzanne Vega?

Midseason ruminations

Given that the Padres were out of contention once Adrian Gonzalez was traded (and perhaps before even then, since the starting pitchers overachieved last year), I haven't really paid much attention to the season.  When I finally looked up, there were some interesting things going on, and while I meant to post during the all-star lull, I didn't finish these thoughts in time.

The Middling.  Continuing on the start of this post, as woeful as the Padres look right now, there's a little bit of hope for the future, especially if the prospects from the Gonzalez trade (and seemingly imminent Adams and Bell trades) pan out.  Also, Chase Headley might... just *might*, mind you, actually be finally showing some signs that the Padres could get by with him as their "star" for the next few years until the prospects are ready for the bigs.

Also, as good as Adrian Gonzalez has been, I thought he'd be showing more power.  I was expecting 50+ doubles (and he's even temporarily dropped off that rate), but also 40+ HR's.  However, along with the guys in front of and behind him, it appears the strategy is to just get on base, and I can't really argue with the results so far.

The Surprisingly Good.  There are a number of players having really good seasons, but clearly it's the Pirates as a team, not only with a great shot at achieving a winning record for the first time since Barry Bonds wore their uniform, but actually chasing a playoff spot, who are the biggest surprise.  I don't think their pitching is good enough for them to be this year's version of the 2010 Giants, but simply getting swept out of the playoffs by the Phillies would be a huge accomplishment for them.

The Shockingly Bad.  It's one thing to be a middling player having a bad season (Uggla, Stewart, Loney, Tejada, Figgins, Rios, Drew, all of whom are mentioned as mid-season "LVP" candidates by Jayson Stark), but quite another to be a superstar having a middling season, and there are a number of those.  So who is having the most shockingly bad season?  A few weeks ago my short list was Albert Pujols, Hanley Ramirez, Ryan Howard, Adam Dunn, and Ichiro Suzuki.

Even a few weeks ago, Pujols wasn't having a bad season... unless your name was Albert Pujols.  His OPS was 200 points below his career average, and he was on pace to hit fewer than 30 2B, 30 HR and 100 RBI, and less than .300, for the first time in his career.  He's now back on track to hit 30 HR, but his projected numbers for the season are a little shy of 100 RBI, several shy of 30 2B, and he has a lot of work to do to reach .300.  He could easily lose out on all 3 of those streaks, but as a power hitter, the one that matters most is the HR streak.

While Ramirez got off to an awful start, he seems to have responded to McKeon, and is now having a great July.  There's every reason to believe he can salvage the rest of the season.

Similarly to Pujols, Howard's numbers aren't terrible... unless you're being paid $20M/year to be the best hitter on a team with WS aspirations.  The Phillies offense has seriously underperformed, and Howard isn't helping with a seesaw season of great April, terrible May, good June, terrible July.  Then again, is Howard's poor performance this season really "shocking"?  His power numbers (in particular, his AB/HR has increased every year) and OBP have been in a steady decline since his breakout 2006 season.  Perhaps the Phillies would have done better to try to ship Ryan Howard elsewhere in order to get in on the Gonzalez bidding.  (Would I like to have Vance Worley on the Padres right now?  Yes, yes I would.)  Too bad for Philadelphia that, unlike Boston, they couldn't shift their aging, ham-handed 1B to DH to make room.  (All right, Howard isn't that old, but the arc of his last 5 seasons look like those of someone on the wrong side of their prime rather than someone heading into it)

Dunn's numbers from 2008-2010 are very similar to Howard's, they're the same age, and Dunn's numbers have been consistent over the last several years, rather than in decline, so he should have been a relatively great deal for the White Sox at $12M/year.  Stark has already cataloged Dunn's struggles this season, including "stealing" the comparison I was going to make to Rob Deer.  I remember hoping for Deer's strikeout total to exceed his batting average back in '91; numbers-wise, I thought it would have been a season for the ages and very difficult to duplicate because you simultaneously need to be bad enough to bat under .200 and strike out that often, while good enough for your team to put you in the lineup every day.  And yet here we are, only 20 years later, and Dunn is on the doorstep of history.  The good news for Dunn is that he's 31, and could easily bounce back and hit 35+ HR for the next four seasons, bringing him over 500 and within striking distance of 600 in his late 30's, like a poor man's Jim Thome (and Dunn has a 30HR advantage over Thome's total at age 31.  Howard, sorry to say, is almost certainly not reaching 600, and very well might not reach 500 unless his AB/HR rate improves).  The horrible 2011 season becomes an amusing historical footnote in an otherwise excellent career.

Contrariwise, the problem for Ichiro is that much of his greatness is dependent on his amazing streak of 200-hit seasons.  That will end, unless he bats over .360 the rest of the way.  It's possible he could do this, but the reality is that over the last 5 seasons, Ichiro has only hit better in the 2nd half once (in 2008) and that was a modest 15 point increase.  He needs about a 100 point jump in BA, and the only time he did that was in 2004, when he was already batting .321 at the all-star break.  Ichiro could come back in 2012 and collect another 200 hits, but... he'll be 38.  Now, he could pull a Paul Molitor in '96 (who came off a .270, 142-hit season to bat .341 with 225 hits), and I hope he does, if only to break Rose's record of 10 total 200-hit seasons.  But Molitor, Sam Rice, Jake Daubert, and Pete Rose are the only players aged 38+ to reach 200 hits, and Molitor is the only one to do it while coming off one of their worst seasons.

Warning: you are now in Western PA

I love Sarahmac in no small part because of her ability to communicate with the written and spoken word, so it's always difficult to resolve her odd spelling and pronunciation errors with her otherwise amazing facility with the English language.  It's one thing to understand that this is due to growing up in western PA, but another thing to be confronted with visual evidence of *why*.

Here is a sign along the line into Kennywood's Jack Rabbit:

At first I thought the sign was simply wrong, but then I realized that the 'E' was a different color from the other letters.  Let's get a closer look at that:

Holy cow.  That 'E' is a sticker pasted over a whited-out 'A'.  The sign was shipped with it spelled 'separated', until some local "corrected" it.

Hey left hand, it's right hand. Whatcha up to? : VT DMV edition

We purchased a "new" used car, and the new license plates arrived on Saturday.  Thankfully, I have Sarahmac around to point out things like, "those are truck plates."  You know, because of the big TRK on the left side of the plate.


So this morning I call the DMV, using the number printed on the envelope that the plates came in -- the number that the envelope says to call if there are any problems with the plates -- and they can't help me.  Why?  Because these plates aren't in the system yet.  Call back in a week.  Why wouldn't these plates be put in the system as they're being put in the envelope?  I mean, aside from the obvious reason that the VT DMV's system for tracking this kind of information is horribly broken.

Total Cost of Ownership

We finally bought a "new" used car two weeks ago, and yesterday I signed away the title on the Jetta to Good News Garage.  With some work to fix the rust on the underbody, it should be good to go for another family.

Over the years, I've kept all the maintenance receipts, and also kept fairly good weekly mileage data.  By grabbing some publicly available information on gasoline costs (plus some interpolation of the gaps in my personal mileage data), I actually have a reasonably complete dataset of the costs of owning this car for 15 years and 121k miles, and by getting that into SPSS Statistics, you can see:

Very roughly speaking, we're looking at $4000/year or $0.50/mile over the life of the car.

I was a little surprised that Fuel cost more than Insurance, but our insurance rates have been obscenely low the last several years while gas prices have risen.  Breaking it down by year, you can see how the costs shift over time:

I produced the corresponding table and chart by quarter, but the table gets too big to scan and the chart is really jagged.  

Note that this does not include the cost of tolls, parking, registration fees, or the value of the tax break we get from donating the Jetta.  Let's say the latter two are a wash.  We happen to have lived the last 10 years where there are no toll roads, so we only do tolls when visiting.  It's not a hugely significant cost, but I would like to track it in the future because everything now goes on E-Z Pass and it should be easy to track.  For parking, we never had regular parking fees for the Jetta, but we have put change in meters and had some occasional parking garage fees.   Again, it's not a big line item, but this is harder to track because Sarahmac will rebel against recording how much change she put in a meter (and rightly so, to be honest).

I love that huttlet!

For every product, there is a Star Wars version, and this includes the Top Trumps card game.  Connor was given a copy of the Clone Wars Top Trumps.  


The premise is simple: it's War with a twist. Each character is scored on Bravery, Cunning, Leadership, Fighting Skill, Battle Tech, and Jedi Power.  On each turn, the "starting" player draws their topmost card, looks at it, and decides which attribute will be used that round.  The other players draw their topmost cards, and the one with the highest value on that attribute wins.  


The problems are that:

1. each attribute is scored on a wildly different scale; Jedi Power seems to range from 0-10, a Fighting Skill of 41 is very low and 130 is very high, and a Bravery of 24 is very high.  Maybe this is supposed to be a "feature" so that it's harder for players to remember a particular card's relative rank on each attribute, but instead it comes across as arbitrary. 
2. and this is a much greater problem, many of the rankings don't make any sense.  The Jungle Rancor has the highest fighting in the game at 140; General Grievous has greater Bravery than Anakin; the typical Clone Trooper has Fighting Skill equal to Kit Fisto and greater cunning than Jabba the Hutt...

...annnnd, speaking of Jabba, his son, Rotta the Huttlet, has a Jedi Power of 5.  This is less than any Jedi or Sith, but greater than any other character.  Hunh?  Is Rotta supposed to be Force-sensitive?  What gives?  But... thinking a little more along those lines, that would actually have made the plot of the animated Clone Wars movie actually make sense.  If Rotta were Force-sensitive, the premise could be that the Jedi Order asked Jabba if they could take him for training.  Jabba refused, but when Rotta is then kidnapped and Dooku comes with "information" that the Jedi have done this in order to train Rotta in the ways of the Jedi, Jabba actually has a good reason to believe Dooku.  We could even have a discussion between Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan as to whether it's right for Jabba to refuse his son the chance to learn more about his special gifts, and whether it would be just for the Jedi to actually take Rotta and train him.

Sigh.  Can we retcon this ASAP?