Poster child for the problems with WAR

These are Adam Dunn's 2004-2010 seasons.  While I think that the 2004 season is his best and 2006 was his worst in this time period**, he was generally a model of consistency.  Unfortunately, while WAR and the human eye agree about his 2004 season, I can't wrap my head around the idea that 2009 was his worst NL season and 2010 was his third best.

GP	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	SO	SB	CS	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	WAR
161	568	151	34	0	46	108	195	6	1	0.266	0.388	0.569	0.957	4.4
160	543	134	35	2	40	114	168	4	2	0.247	0.387	0.54	0.927	2.6
160	561	131	24	0	40	112	194	7	0	0.234	0.365	0.49	0.855	0.1
152	522	138	27	2	40	101	165	9	2	0.264	0.386	0.554	0.94	1.2
158	517	122	23	0	40	122	164	2	1	0.236	0.386	0.513	0.899	0.6
159	546	146	29	0	38	116	177	0	1	0.267	0.398	0.529	0.927	-0.6
158	558	145	36	2	38	77	199	0	1	0.26	0.356	0.536	0.892	2.2

Looking at Dunn's Player Value -- Batters table on baseball-reference.com, the problem is the vagaries of DWAR.  The OWAR rankings of his seasons fairly closely follow OPS (I'm assuming any slight differences are due to the fact that what constitutes a "good" OPS changed slightly from season to season), and thus the wild variation in DWAR, which is due more to the small-sample nature of defensive statistics than any actual change in performance, dominates the year-to-year differences in WAR.

OWAR	DWAR
4.8	-1.2
4	-2.3
1.9	-2.4
3.7	-3.2
3	-3.2
3.7	-5.2
3.4	-2.1

While WAR isn't simply OWAR + DWAR, DWAR clearly plays an important role in devaluing WAR as an estimate of player worth in a given year, and I'd rather look at OWAR.  But if OWAR closely follows OPS over the course of a generation of players, then I'd rather simply look at OPS, which is more intuitive and immediately evident from the seasonal stats.

** I want to be absolutely, positively clear that we're talking about 2004-2010, and not looking at his 2011 season, which was arguably the worst all-time.

Fight, Fight, Fight, Parry, Parry, Parry

Because the kids are less than thrilled with the graphics in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord -- even I'm a little taken aback because the graphics are different from those on the Apple IIe -- they're not interested, and I'm free to do whatever I want with those characters, though I do plan on showing them the battle against Werdna. 

It's also even more brutal than I remember, possibly because we used the identify cheats back in the day.  The "evil" group died on the stairwell between the 4th and 5th levels, and then the "good" group, while getting strong enough to go after the evil group, died on the third level**, so a third group needed to level up to the point where they could recover the good group.  Finally, Gandalf (our original "good" mage) has learned Malor and we can start retrieving the evil group (because Gandalf will always try to save Saruman).

So let me back up a moment.  In some ways, Proving Grounds makes modern CRPGs look like they were designed for sissies, because nowadays you can always revert to a previous save.  OTOH, in modern CRPGs, you also only get one party/storyline, and if you make bad choices in character development early on, you can hose yourself down the road (Wizardry 8 and Dragon Age: Origins are especially guilty here), and starting over means a couple dozen hours of mind-numbing repetition of the quests you just completed with the first character.  By contrast, in Proving Grounds, you build up a stable of characters and can easily mix and match your party as you determine the "optimal" group, and leveling up a new batch of characters to where they're useful is only a few hours of mind-numbing dungeon crawling.

** the Samurai with 18 Luck keeps getting decapitated; after one battle in which he was beheaded, we ran for the stairs to the second level and were surprised by Rotting Corpses and Grave Mists.  Two characters paralyzed in round 1; the other three in round two; TPK.  Good times.

Inspired by the work of Kaja and Phil Foglio

The stairs are painted with chalkboard paint, and then decorated with the kind of text that Lucrezia Mongfish has on the steps leading out of her lab.   

A Separation; 2011

Man living in a society that oppresses women accuses his wife of cowardice, then foists his own difficult ethical decisions off on his 11 year-old daughter.

Lockout; 2012

Guy Pearce is cracking jokes and taking punches during an interrogation over his role in the death of a fellow (former?) agent (CIA? do we care?).  There's some briefcase that has some... what, evidence, or something?  Of... a mole in the CIA?... or... something?  It's all very unclear.  Guy has about as much a clue of what's going on as he did in Memento.  But he got the briefcase to his friend Mace, and he's trusting this information to the guy playing "good cop" in the interrogation.  Hunh?  Why does he trust this guy and not "bad cop"?  (we never find out, btw)  At any rate, there's some espionage going on in this film.

Meanwhile, the president's daughter is checking up on a private company that runs a prison on a space station, keeping the prisoners in stasis for the duration of their term, because she's heard reports about problems with patients kept in stasis too long.  I guess boosting a prisoner into space is less expensive than feeding them in the future?  Whatever, that can all be explained later, for now, this is awesome, and you could write a whole SF book or make the whole movie just about the ramifications of a prison in space.  I'm totally on board with this.  Or, at least, right up until the cliché "crazy inmate" being interviewed by the president's daughter manages to get hold of a gun, shoot a bunch of people, release all the prisoners (because, of course, a vital command center on the station would be readily accessible from the interrogation rooms), and (of course) threaten to rape the president's daughter.  Sigh.  Another, more sane, inmate takes over leadership of the jailbreak.

Back to Guy.  "Good cop" wants Guy to go rescue the president's daughter from the space station prison, because, incredibly conveniently, Guy's friend Mace accidentally shot a cop (fortunately after he put the briefcase in a locker) and was already arrested, processed, sentenced, and sent to the space station prison in stasis.  "Bad cop" is in charge of the situation, but brings along Guy just in case.

While assessing the situation, we discover that the space station prison has an automated defense system that shoots at other spacecraft.  Because, I guess, in 2079, everyone could easily get into space and break their friends out of jail.  At any rate, for a minute this movie suddenly became a Star Wars-style space battle.

On Guy's observation that the inmates don't realize they have the president's daughter captive, "Bad cop" nearly sneaks her out under the guise of "free a hostage as a gesture; any hostage will do, but injured women are best".  This is actually a really good scene, until cliché crazy inmate, who hasn't gotten a chance to rape the president's daughter, insists that they send home the president's daughter's aide, and (fatally) wounds her in an effort to provide an alternate injured female.  The inmates figure out that they're being hoodwinked (an inmate notices Guy wandering around outside in a space suit), and keep the president's daughter captive.  Then comes the turning point of the movie.  

Inmate Leader: [to crazy inmate]  Do something useful.  Go find that man and kill him.  I don't want to see you 'til it's done. 

Other Inmate: [after crazy inmate leaves, and speaking what we've been thinking since the start of the jailbreak]  Why don't we just kill that lunatic?

Inmate Leader:  Because he's my brother.

SERIOUSLY?!  You're going to pull something as tired as "he's my brother" on us?  Well, from here on out, tired clichés are the norm.  Guy manages to get onto the station through some outer hatch thingy and reach the president's daughter just ahead of the bad guys.  As they try to escape, every one of their scenes is a stereotypical "naive spoiled girl in over her head vs. world weary adventurer" conversation.  When they were in separate movies, I liked them, but when put in the same room, I hated them both.  While wandering through the ship, they discover a room in which inmates have been dissected and immediately conclude the company was doing medical experiments on them... because, the company couldn't possibly have simply done autopsies on inmates who died while in stasis.  They find Mace, who (of course) has fallen afoul of bad stasis, and can't tell Guy where the briefcase is.  "Bad cop" finally gets permission to blow up the space prison, but not before Guy and the president's daughter get into space suits, re-enter the atmosphere, and parachute into NYC!!!!!

Guy goes back into custody, but the president's daughter, based on comments Mace made, figures out where the briefcase is, and we discover who the mole is, but we really don't care, because the whole espionage plot felt tacked on to the real plot of the prison in space.  The president's daughter love-punches Guy in the face, and we don't even feel good about this because we hate both of them so much.

There is a great SF movie in here somewhere, but Lockout wasn't it.

Crackers

We had a minor issue to deal with recently, when the kids figured out that since they know how to turn on the home computer and start up their favorite games, they could get up earlier and earlier in the morning and play until mommy and daddy woke up.  They'd be cranky in the afternoon sometimes, which is more-or-less fine during the summer, but would be a problem once school started, so I put a very simple password on the computer.  

The other day we came downstairs to get the kids breakfast and make lunchboxes, and found a piece of paper next to the computer with cowsnocats, cowsascats, as dog no caps written on it.  This was bewildering, until I remembered that the password hint was "a's dog no caps".  I'm sorely tempted now to put a numeric password with a math problem as the hint, at least on the weekends.

We cater to your fears

I believe this ad is truthful in that they are, in fact, catering to Americans' fears... but I can't help but think that the message their advertising is really going for is more of assuaging your fears, or being sensitive to your fears.

John Carter (2012)

Oh, dear.  We watched this a couple of weeks ago, but I've had difficulty writing up thoughts about it.  

In the end, John Carter reminded me of The Black Hole.  A beautiful, visually and technically compelling at times, but ultimately empty, live-action Disney offering**... only John Carter would likely have been too visually and aurally intense for me at the same age I saw The Black Hole.  I don't think that's a good trend in the live-action Disney offerings.

** You could throw the first Tron into this bucket, but for Jeff Bridges' brilliance (that brief clip doesn't do justice to how he injects life into every scene, and is carrying Boxleitner and Morgan, who fall flat when they're by themselves.  I love that scene at Flynn's).  David Warner is also great, but so was Maximilian Schell.  Schell couldn't save The Black Hole; Warner wouldn't have been able to save Tron by himself.

dWAR

I like numbers, and not surprisingly, I like baseball.  More specifically, I like looking at the numbers that the game of baseball produces, and the statistics that researchers have come up with to compare player performance.

But I have difficultly loving defensive wins above replacement, particularly because dWAR is susceptible to wild swings from season to season, but especially if believing in dWAR means I have to believe that Dave Winfield was as bad a fielder as, or worse than, Manny Ramirez.  (scroll to the "Player Value" table and see that Winfield's career dWAR is lower than Manny's).  I'm just having a hard time with that idea.

638 Ways to Kill Castro; 2006

With a runtime of 75 minutes, that gives about 7 seconds on average to discuss each conspiracy, so even if they bundled several together under the same category, you would think that this would be a fast-paced and interesting documentary, perhaps full of slightly morbid British humor.  Not so.  Instead it's a tired and poorly organized mix of interviews, news footage, and reenactment scenes shot in black & white.