Geek of All Trades

Diary of a sore loser

I kept a little bit of a journal during tonight's Game 2 of the World Series. As it turns out, it wasn't much of a game, so it's not such an interesting journal. But here it is anyhow.

Top 1st. Although they didn't score, the Cardinals appear to be executing a game plan against the surgically enhanced Curt Schilling. Edgar Renteria's 12-pitch at bat set the tone for a patient Cardinal attack. Albert Pujols, who was quiet last night, stroked a very pretty line drive double into the gap. I've been salivating at the thought of watching him - a giant right-handed hitter - in Fenway Park, and I hope he delivers tonight.

Bottom 1st. Now let's see what Matt Morris, who has never started on 3 days rest in his Major League career, has tonight. Very nice play by Scott Rolen on Johnny Damon's grounder to Rolen's right - and a nice play by Pujols to pull it down. Morris is pitching ve-e-e-ery carefully - back-to-back walks to Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. He's also making his cather Mike Matheny work for his pay. I wouldn't be surprised to see a wild pitch or two before Morris's night is done. But the answer to the Matt Morris question seems to be that he doesn't have a whole lot, as Jason Varitek reminds me why I so hate the Red Sox - they've scored in the first inning again.

Top 2nd. The Red Sox defense gives Jim Edmonds a second life, but the only cost is a couple extra pitches out of Schilling's Franken-ankle. There really does seem to have been a regime change in the domain of the baseball gods. The Red Sox have appeared nothing short of charmed in the last week. (And I wrote that sentence before Reggie Sanders stalled at second base on Tony Womack's single to center.) And to complete that charmed theme, yet another line drive is smoked off of a Cardinal bat and right into the glove of Bill Mueller, this time for an inning-ending double play.

Bottom 2nd. A double play, a strikeout, and the Red Sox go quietly. Maybe Morris is warming up and finding his groove.

Top 3rd, Bottom 3rd. The Cardinals and the Red Sox trade 1-2-3 frames. Morris is finally looking sharp.

Top 4th. Pujols leads off with another double. With Rolen and Edmonds coming up, I do note expect this to be the frame in which we will see famous LaRussa small-ball. But Rolen's fly to right and Pujols's heads up baserunning puts the Cardinals in a position to score a run with an out. Well, Edmonds, not that kind of out. With the strikeout, it will now take a two-out base hit from Sanders to capitalize on Pujols's big leadoff hit. Fortunately, the Red Sox defense is there to make sure the Cardinals score the run, as Mueller can't handle the sharp ground ball.

Bottom 4th. I was thinking that Matt Morris was actually looking like a Major League pitcher, but the new-era baseball gods have punished me for that thought, as the Red Sox rack up two more runs.

Bottom 5th. That does it for Morris. He's not going to have to face Ortiz again. The result: Ortiz hits the highest, longest, loudest, foul ball you've ever seen, and then demonstrates his class by bitching at the umpires while they discuss it. Of course, at home, with the benefit of replays, it's clearly foul, by five or 10 rows. I guess Ortiz can save his contrition for when he watches the replay on SportsCenter.

Top 6th. With two out, Mueller does his best Bill Buckner imitation. The end result will probably once again just be a few extra pitches out of Schilling, but it never stops being fun to watch the Red Sox's adventures in fielding. Now it's 3-0 on Edmonds - can he finally make the ridiculous parade of errors come home to roost? It looks like no - another ground out - but then Bellhorn joins the error party. What makes me mad is that somehow, these "idiots" in filthy uniforms are still winning. Charmed. Yesterday, they became the first team in over 50 years to commit 4 errors in a World Series game and still win. Now, 24 hours later, they are 9 outs away from doing it again. The new-look baseball gods have a strange sense of humor, and a terrible sense of worthy baseball.

Bottom 6th. I hate the Red Sox. I really, really hate the Red Sox.

Bottom 7th. After failing to run down a bloop in the 6th, allowing two more magical Red Sox runs to score, Jim Edmonds makes a play reminiscent of Willie Mays's "The Catch," an over-the-shoulder basket catch in a full run inches from the wall. Too bad it won't make a difference in the game.

Top 8th. Not a lot of time left for the Cardinals. If they want to mount a dramatic comeback, it had better start right here. Renteria works a leadoff walk. One out later Pujols singles Renteria over to third. Rolen is at the plate and Keith Foulke is up in the bullpen. The Cardinals need a big hit here to make it a ballgame. The Cardinals' dangerous hitters have been deafeningly quiet thus far in the World Series, a large part of the reason the Red Sox have been getting away with their Keystone Kops defense. Rolen had a great at bat, in spite of (as Fox's microphones let us hear) one of Boston's finest demonstrating the class with which Red Sox fans can comport themselves under good circumstances. ("Rolen you chickenshit! We've got your number Rolen! Zero-zero-zero!) Unfortunately a sacrifice fly just isn't going to do the job here. Why has baseball's finest offense fallen asleep on the job? And here's Keith Foulke.

Top 9th. I'm still watching, in the unlikely event the Cardinals can do something to make a baseball game out of this ridiculous farce. But three batters later, this weirdly charmed, incredibly synergistic, poorly washed bunch of players has gotten away with yet another 4-error win.

Hubris strikes back

ESPN's The Sports Guy, a Sox fan, has summed things up perfectly in the best line I've read so far regarding the Yankee's historic display of ineptitude over the last four days: "Now they were headed home for the winter, headed for the No. 1 slot on ESPN50's 'Biggest Chokes' show in 2029." No kidding.

From where I sit, this wasn't a tremendous success by the Red Sox. It was a final, disasterous failure by a team that, bloated payroll notwithstanding, had been playing over its head all season. (Check the Pythagorean standings if you don't believe me - they were 12 games over their Pythagorean record!)

The Yankees have given me very little to complain about in recent years - no owner is more willing than Steinbrenner to do what it takes to field a winning team, and there's been a lot of magic in this great, great run.

But there wasn't a lot of magic in the last few days - just a team that spent itself in one blowout game and suddenly looked listless, old, and bored. I can't give the Red Sox the credit for what looked like a miraculous comeback - they didn't beat the Yankees; the Yankees beat themselves. Sure, Schilling's stoic, bleeding performance in Game 6 was heroic, but that game should never even have happened.

The choke's on us.

One reason I love autumn

This is one of a number of pictures I took in the Berkshires this past weekend. There are more in my new photo album. We're going back this weekend. Just looking at the colors made us feel happy.

(I've also updated the Demetrius photo album.)

Hubris

"I'm not sure I can think of any scenario more enjoyable than making 55,000 people from New York shut up." -Curt Schilling, the day before his Game 1 drubbing at Yankee Stadium.

"Kill the Terrorists"

At the end of the debate last night, John Kerry said "I have a plan that will help us go out and kill and find the terrorists. And I will not stop in our effort to hunt down and kill the terrorists."

I can't describe how sad this made me. Why does John Kerry have to say "kill the terrorists?" Why can't he say "I have a plan to stop the terrorists?" Or even better, why not a plan to stop terrorism? Instead of killing terrorists, why don't we attempt to address the problems that create legions of rage-filled, desperate people ready to kill and die?

The only answer is that Kerry's staff has done the polling and has learned that the "American People" want to kill terrorists. They want a president who will promise to kick ass and take names. They want America to be tough, and the only strength they percieve is the strength of violence and more violence.

I hate that I have to vote for a candidate who makes killing a campaign promise.

Debate this

I don't think I will take on the substance of the debates.  There are plenty of places on the web to read interesting commentary on that. 

I watched the debate with a small group of David's colleagues and their significant others, a group of physicists.  We were pretty much the only Americans in the room - there were a couple of Russians, a Serb, a Slovenian, an Italian, and an Australian.  No one came in supporting President Bush or his pet war, and no one's mind was changed by the debate. 

Indeed, I was not even planning to watch, and wouldn't have had I not been at this gathering.  Listening to the President speaking, and to Kerry ineffectually rebutting him, only makes me angry.  The President's constant lies, his hypocrisy, and his oversimplification and mischaracterization of the subtleties in the issues he addresses are infuriating.  The fact that vast swaths of Americans fall for it just makes me sad.  They find him "forthcoming" and "honest" because he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge nuance.  I didn't want to watch the debate because I didn't want to be reminded of these things. 

Having watched it, though, I can point to a few unsubtle points that I hope are not lost on the American people.  The President claimed that he would (1) increase spending in Iraq, (2) continue to cut taxes, and (3) reduce the deficit.  How can anyone think that adds up?  He also continues to claim that the Duelfer report somehow justified the war on Iraq.  In my most optimistic moments, I have to believe that the American people are no longer fooled by the Administration's Orwellian, black-is-white doublespeak.  Maybe.

On the subjective level, I find the President's voice an manner overwhelmingly grating.  Polls show that a majority of Americans would like to have a beer with him.  I would rather stick a pencil in my eye.  The President's simpering, hunched-over, grimacing laugh when denying he owned an interest in a timber concern (he does, by the way) was enough to make me want to kick a hole in the TV.  Perhaps I'm projecting my violent disagreement with everything he stands for onto a visceral reaction to everything he is.

 

Persepolis

I just finished reading both volumes of Marjane Satrapi's impressive memoir, Persepolis: Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: Story of a Return. These graphic novels comprise a compelling account of the author's youth in war-shaken Tehran and in Austria, where she is sent by her parents to escape the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war.

Satrapi (according to her books) was the only child of affluent socialist intellectuals, a great-granddaughter of the first Shah, born in the twilight of the second Shah's reign. When the Islamic Revolution takes over the government of Iran, her cosmopolitan Lycee Francaise is coverted to a religious school; bilingual education is forbidden, boys and girls are separated, and Satrapi, along with all the other girls, dons the veil. This is just the first miliestone in a life marked by transformation and upheaval.

One of the recurrent themes in Satrapi's story is her continuous search for identity and purpose. The young Satrapi careens wildly from religious fervency to Marxist ideology, from obsession with the west to obsession with Persian history, from love to anger and back again. In Iran, she struggles against the Islamic regime while slowly developing the sophistication required to fully understand the political landscape. In Europe, she must cope with being an outsider among people who seem vapid to her, having never known violence or death or true abrogation of their freedom. Her story takes a horrifying turn in Europe as, in her struggle, Satrapi turns on herself. She must finally return to Tehran, to rebuild herself from the ground up, much as the city begins to rebuild itself after the war with Iraq.

Marjane Satrapi tells her fascinating story in a high contrast graphic style that appears deceptively simple. Despite being simple line drawings surrounded by large black shapes, her characters are intensely expressive. In one of the most moving sequences, the young Marjane comes home from shopping in downtown Tehran to find that the family next door has been killed when their house was leveled by an Iraqi scud. Although the drawings are stark and undetailed, the emotion is powerfully conveyed.

Reviews of the Persepolis series often draw the seemingly inevitable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus books. To some degree, the comparison is superficial, based only on the common format of the books. If Maus and Persepolis had been traditional prose memoirs, I doubt that one would call to mind the other. But the common form does bring the subject matter somewhat closer together. Each takes intense and difficult subject matter and bring them to life visually, using artistic devices that disarm the reader by rendering the material deceptively simplistic. There are differences as well, however. Maus uses Vladek Spiegelman's Holocaust survival story to explore Vladek's relationship to his son and to the outside world; there is an undercurrent of armchair psychoanalysis in Maus, such that the story is as much about the enduring ripple effects of Vladek's experience as it is about the experience itself. By contrast, Satrapi gives the reader of Persepolis fewer glimpses into her present life, so while there is close psychoanalysis of the young Satrapi to be had, there is less of the broad scope of exploration offered by Maus, despite the frequent lessons in Persian cultural history that Satrapi offers.