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Topic  #1: Fox Broadcasting Weasels

Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were unbelievably biased in their commentary while the game was proceeding in the middle of an East Coast cold-weather monsoon. McCarver at one point said something like, “The pitcher has a dry ball and the batter has a wet bat” and went on about how the pitcher had a huge advantage. How does McCarver explain how the ball stays dry when the catcher has to throw it 60 feet back to the pitcher. Ruiz is accurate, but I don’t think he can throw balls that dodge raindrops in a dogs-and-cats downpour. After the game, Cole Hamels said he could not grip the ball and had no choice but to throw fastballs. McCarver then suggested that it would be impossible for B.J. Upton to steal second base with all the mud and puddles in the basepaths. One of them asked, “How do you slide into that?” About two seconds later, Upton stole second and executed a perfect slide. A few seconds after that, the “disadvantaged” Carlos Pena hit a single into left center with his wet bat (Impossible! How can a batter possibly get a hit with a wet bat? The batter is at such a huge disadvantage!) that scored Upton to tie the game. If those broadcasters had any objectivity and credibility, they would have been talking about how the game should have been stopped in the 4th inning at the latest (the truth is that the game should have never been started). Of course, the MLB has made them rich and fat and they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them. McCarver of all people, as a former catcher (and a Phillies catcher at that) should know better.

Topic #2: Pitching

I suppose it’s decided. Both managers have already said that they’re going with their bullpens for the continuation of the game. Mitch Williams also said this morning on 610 WIP Sports Radio that the teams should treat this game exactly like a regular game that is in the 6th inning. I beg to differ. It cannot be just like any other game in the middle of the sixth. The players will be in clean uniforms. This is a new 3-inning game. The Phillies have the advantage because they get to bat first and last (this is probably why McCarver said that the entire game should be replayed–that’s a pro-Tampa position). If it were me, I would hand the ball to Brett Myers and ask for three good innings at home, in front of a frenzied, wild Philly crowd. He eats that stuff up. Three innings and you get the glory, Brett. Who is the first player you think of when you think of the 1980 Phillies? Tug McGraw, of course. That final pitch is always memorable. I think Brett would take that over the insult of not being able to start in a possible Game 6. It would be beautiful symmetry. Myers was the opening day pitcher. He had to go back to the minors for a stretch go get his head together. He did it. Why not let it come full circle and have the guy who threw the first pitch of the season prove that he’s all the way back by pitching for the final out in the clinching World Series game.

If it goes back to Tampa, I don’t want to pitch Myers there. He already lost once. He stinks on the road. By then Moyer is rested. Moyer starts game 6 if necessary and Hamels goes in game 7.

But like I said, it’s not happening. We’ll see Chad Durbin, Ryan Madsen and Brad Lidge. As I’ve said before, I don’t care how they do it, as long as the Phillies win, I’ll be happy.

Topic #3: John Bolaris is also a Weasel

During the initial delay of the original game 5, the local Fox affiliate cuts to FOX-29 Meteorology Guru John Bolaris and he hems and haws his way through a phony explanation that the rain came about a half hour later than everyone expected. Well, everyone except a real weather guru like Joe Bastardi of Accu-Weather who demanded at 6:30pm (two hours  before the game), “Cancel the game.” Bolaris says he was not approached by Fox or the MLB.   More proof that Bed Selig is as dumb as a bag of diamond dust. How can you not check with the local weather experts at the affiliate of the network that is broadcasting the game? MLB says it uses WeatherBug. I note that WeatherBug’s copyright statement says “2007.” I think their forecasts are also off by more than a year.

The Microsoft TV commercials featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld trying to connect to “real people” are being pulled. In episode 2 of the ads, Bill Gates asks, “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Seinfeld replies, “you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

The fact is that Gates is not “out of it” at all. He recently retired from Microsoft to devote more time to his foundation. He is passionate about solving a problem that kills three million real people every year: malaria. In a 2005 New Yorker article by Michael Specter, Gates says, “It just blows my mind how little money has been spent on malaria research.” The Gates foundation has spent somewhere in the area of US $10 billion on global health issues. So why does Gates go along with an ad campaign that paints him as a detached hedonist when he so clearly is nothing of the sort?

The other pieces of this confused ad campaign are coming to light. There are the celebrities claiming “I’m a PC.” Getting Deepak Chopra to soberly look into the camera and claim, “I’m a PC” has the momentary effect of making the Mac ads look juvenile. I say momentary because when I clicked through to the site I encountered two glaring problems.

1. The pop-up window where (I presume) a video testimonial is supposed to play was blank–just a black box. This was on Firefox 2.0. I tried the site on Internet Explorer 6 (the only version of IE I’m allowed to use on my work computer) and I got the same result, a black box.
2. My CPU usage shot up to 100% and I couldn’t do anything on my PC until I closed the window with the broken PC ad. I guess that’s the high quality Silverlight software leaking memory like a Xenical clinical trial patient.

Then there’s the “Windows vs. Walls” portion of the campaign with some of the worst copywriting I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was reading The Bridges of Madison County. For instance:

But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other.

What the hell does that even mean? The four corners of our own digital lives?

To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff.

Ridiculously necessary? So things that are necessary are worthy of ridicule?

An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way…of life

Say what? Engineering the absence? I feel a Danny DeVito (auditioning for the role of Louie De Palma) rant coming on–”Who wrote this shit?”

Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows®. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.

Oh, I get it now, Windows® is human. I guess that’s why it is so deeply flawed.

A note to the model who is looking through the “window” he just chopped out of the wall on the ad site: Dude, next time you take your reciprocating saw to a wall filled with fiberglass insulation, you might want to put on some gloves, a dust mask and goggles. I predict OSHA will be the next regulatory agency to knock on Microsoft’s door.

(Disclosure: My everyday computer is an IBM Thinkpad running Microsoft Windows XP. I’m not a Mac snob. However, I do need to replace my laptop soon and I will probably get a Mac. I don’t like the idea of having to shell out a lot of extra cash for new licenses for things like Adobe Creative Suite, which I use daily, but I probably will anyway.)

If you’re going to make a list of heresies, you don’t put 10 items on it. You have to put 13 items on it. 13 is a heretical number. I don’t even want to spend much time on how naive and phony WIRED’s list is. They present a set of false choices, such as picking a hybrid versus buying an old used car (how about not having a car at all or at least cutting your driving by 80% or more–that would reduce carbon output more than anything WIRED recommends). Another bogus point is that air-conditioning emits less carbon than heating. Duh, WIRED, consider that most people in the USA have to both heat AND cool their homes. A better idea is to conserve as much as possible; insulate better, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer. Why quibble over whether “organic” cows produce less beef and fart more than their “conventional” bovine brethren. The better suggestion is to STOP EATING BEEF or at least cut down a whole lot. Those aren’t provocative topics that can divert a person’s attention to a magazine on a newsstand (with content that is so weak that it requires a neon orange background), so WIRED dismisses the more commonsense and ultimately even less convenient truths about climate change. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we’re going to have to give up our gigantic SUV’s, our bacon-double-cheeseburgers and our sprawling McMansions.

My true goal here, however, is to help WIRED fulfill its act of heresy against the green movement(actually, my goal is to poke fun at the numbskulls at WIRED who wrote the article, but play along) Hence, here are my three additional WIRED-style “green heresies” that will bring their number up to the very sinister total of 13.

11) Buy Lots of Cigarettes - Think about it. Tobacco is a plant. Plants absorb CO2. If thousands and thousands of additional acres of tobacco were planted, think of all the carbon that would be kept out of the atmosphere. What’s that you’re thinking? When you smoke the cigarette, it just puts the carbon right back in the atmosphere? Well, you wouldn’t actually smoke them, silly (I suppose you could and still be “carbon neutral”, and, hey, since curbing carbon is our number one goal, we’ll have to make a few sacrifices to our health to get there). Carbon-cutting citizens could put all those packs of cigarettes into crawl spaces and attics for insulation. Americans are accustomed to buying lots of stuff we don’t need (and that we’ll never use) and then letting it all sit around and clutter up our homes, so this won’t require any change in behavior and it would be great for the economy!

12) Be Even More of a Couch Potato - When you boil it all down, it’s human activity that is causing global warming. Want to cut carbon emissions? Then just stop doing so much. Every time you come up with something to do, you’re suddenly spewing out carbon like nobody’s business. You jump in your car and you buy stuff that had to be shipped halfway across the earth and it was made with oil and other natural resources that burned up tons of hydrocarbons to get to the store in your local strip mall. Here’s a better idea: sit on the floor in the dark. If you’re worried about obesity from lack of exercise, try a seaweed diet. Homegrown seaweed. There you have it, WIRED’s recipe for reversing carbon emissions: sit in the dark and eat seaweed that you grow in your swimming pool.

13) Cancel your subscription to WIRED.

Imagine a basketball league. Let’s give this hypothetical league a name. How about the Democratic Un-united Mudslinging Basketball Association, or DUMBASS for short. Now let’s consider two of the teams in this league. We’ll give our first hypothetical team the name “Clinton” and we’ll call our second team “Obama”.

So far so good. Imagine that DUMBASS scheduled these two teams to play each other in Michigan in April. Suppose that the owner of the arena in Michigan demanded that the two teams play in January, not April. When the demand is made, DUMBASS (the league to which both teams belong) makes it very clear that if the game in Michigan is played in January, the game will not count. So the Obama team thinks, “well if our league says that the game is not going to count, then why should we even show up? We could spend our time and energy getting ready for our other games.” Team Clinton, however, shows up at the game, puts five players on the court against zero players for Obama. Clinton wins the game 300-0.

What do you know, here we are in June and Team Clinton is just one victory short of qualifying for the championship. They’re in second place behind Obama. They don’t want to be in second place, so they appeal to DUMBASS to allow the Michigan game to count. So DUMBASS wimps out and decides to give each team half a victory in the Michigan game. The Clinton team realizes that half a victory won’t get them to the championship because they’re a whole game behind Obama in the standings.

What’s a team to do? Team Clinton then asks DUMBASS to come up with a new way to decide which team it will send to the championship. Instead of counting wins and losses, let’s add up all the points that both teams have scored during the season and whichever team scored more total points, regardless of wins and losses, will go to the championship. “Count every point!”, is their motto.

Even with their 300-point fake victory, they still don’t have enough points to win. I guess they’ll have to appeal to the DUMBASS “credentials committee.”

It’s hard to imagine a political party screwing things up worse than the Republicans have done for the last eight years, but I’m beginning to think the Democrats are up the challenge.

I suppose now that the first baby boomer has begun collecting retirement benefits, there are no funds left over to run the Social Security Administration web site.

It’s such a comfort to know that all the money you are paying in interest on your auto loan is going to build a really robust customer service web site. Maybe all the IT folks had to go meet their new bosses in Abu Dhabi.

(Disclosure: I worked for Yahoo! on the FIFAWorldcup.com project in 2006).

First of all, get rid of all the gossip/tabloid fluff (i.e. the Terry Semel Hollywood slant). The lead on the Yahoo! home page right now is a chicken-wing recipe for the Super Bowl, followed closely by a list of videos from American Idol alumni.  Hey Jerry, this country is at war and in a recession! Leave the crap to the “old media” and Perez Hilton and show us some of the innovation that made Yahoo! what it is. Stop trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Respect your audience and imagine that they secretly strive to be more than donut-eating couch potatoes.

Hey Chase, I have a newsflash for you. Lots of people pay their bills during the weekend. Many of your customers have jobs and kids and tight schedules. Sunday is often a good day to take some time, catch up on things. I suppose it’s also a good time for your IT department to sleep in.

I should be more understanding. What do you have ,$60 billion in credit card loans? I guess you can’t afford to have anyone available during the weekend to fix your servers when they go down. Maybe you should let Amazon handle the transactions for your Chase Amazon.com card.

I am unable to continue doing business with you.

Nice going, Adobe. Friday at 11:00am EST is a GREAT time to go down for “scheduled maintenance.”