This Week’s Haul

  • Booster Gold #8, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
  • Countdown to Final Crisis #3 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen & Freddie Williams II (DC)
  • Justice Society of America #14, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham & Prentis Rollins (DC)
  • Nova #12, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
  • Echo #2, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
  • B.P.R.D.: 1946 #4 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
  • The Complete Peanuts 1967-1968, by Charles M. Schultz (Fantagraphics)
  • Locke & Key #3 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Justice Society of America #14 I don’t get the cover to this month’s Justice Society: It shows all our heroes either walking away (from what?) or standing around (why?) while the face of (presumably) the villain appears in the clouds in the background. But this has nothing at all to do with the issue, although its composition seems to indicate that it does! Basically it’s a typical “The heroes have been so defeated that they’re giving up” cover, the sort exemplified by the famous cover to Amazing Spider-Man #50.

Yet it has nothing at all to do with the issue, whose story goes like this:

  1. The JSA having a meeting about who’s going to go after the very powerful Gog.
  2. Gog shows up in their meeting room
  3. Fight!

Anyway. It’s not so much a bad issue as a “well, let’s get this out of the way” issue. Basically, John and Ross have let us down as far as building dramatic tension and bringing it to a climax goes. In other words, regardless of where the story “They Kingdom Come” is going, it’s going there very slowly and is being boring while it’s going there.

Nova #12 It seems like when I have little to say about the rest of the haul, Nova always stands out and makes me smile. Nova’s quest to rid himself of the Phalanx technovirus comes to an end, and he and his allies have to face a powerful adversary. Abnett and Lanning also cleverly manage their characters, setting up expectations for how things will turn out for all of them, and then arranging things so they works out differently. This story has gone on a little too long, but Abnett & Lanning managed to pack some more stuff into it to keep it from dragging, and they managed to deliver a satisfying payoff – really exactly the opposite of how JSA is going.

And it turns out that it’s been dragged out this long because now Nova’s going to loop back to where this story started in the conclusion to Annihilation Conquest. Which might seems self-indulgent, but since both series have been plenty of fun, I don’t really mind. (This also explains why Nova’s 4-issue involvement in Annihilation Conquest last year ended so anticlimactically – it was just the set-up for this longer arc which would then tie back in to the mini-series. I guess I shoulda had more faith!)

Oh, and there’s also a hint at the end of the issue that Drax is starting to revert a little to his “big dumb destroyer” form. I wonder if he cycles from weak-but-clever to strong-and-stupid and back again every few years?

Ampex Appreciation Day

Mike Cassidy in the San Jose Mercury News:

OK, so it was stunning 60 years ago. But Ampex, which pioneered audio and video tape recording, is still with us. And so is the towering Ampex sign honoring the company’s history. You’ve seen it just off Highway 101 in Redwood City.

Last week, Ampex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its head count is down to 101 from a long-ago peak of 12,000. Its shares are trading at about 40 cents. Watching Ampex is like watching some beloved relative stagger and wheeze and shuffle around the house.

And so I’m declaring today Ampex Appreciation Day.

I actually knew nothing about Ampex before reading this article. I’ve seen their sign from the freeway plenty of times, and often wondered what they did. I never remembered to check when I got home.

More about Ampex at Wikipedia.

2008 Baseball Picks

I finished my picks for the 2008 baseball season, so I thought I’d share. 🙂 First up are my Predictatron picks at Baseball Prospectus, picking how the whole season will turn out:

AL East
Boston 95 – 67
New York 90 – 72
Toronto 81 – 81
Tampa Bay 80 – 82
Baltimore 65 – 97 (mortal lock)
AL Central
Cleveland 93 – 69
Detroit 90 – 72
Chicago 76 – 86
Kansas City 72 – 90
Minnesota 69 – 93
AL West
Anaheim 88 – 74
Texas 81 – 81
Seattle 80 – 82
Oakland 75 – 87
NL East
New York 90 – 72
Atlanta 88 – 74
Philadelphia 88 – 74
Washington 75 – 87
Florida 67 – 95
NL Central
Milwaukee 88 – 74
Chicago 87 – 75
Cincinnati 85 – 77
St. Louis 73 – 89
Houston 70 – 92
Pittsburgh 70 – 92 (mortal lock)
NL West
Arizona 90 – 72
Los Angeles 88 – 74
San Diego 86 – 76
Colorado 82 – 80
San Francisco 68 – 94

I approached this by trying to figure out who I thought would be the “surprises” in baseball this year (either doing better than expected, or worse than expected), and I had an awfully hard time coming up with some. It seems like there’s a lot of parity in the Majors these days, with few truly great or truly abysmal teams. A few observations:

  • The two really bad teams in the Majors are Baltimore and San Francisco, both of which lost their best player in the off-season after a bad year last year. Both will struggle to win 70 games.
  • The young teams on their way up are already here: Arizona won their division last year – partly through luck – but should be better this year. Cleveland and Milwaukee are already contenders. Detroit is not exactly young anymore but is a contender.
  • I think the Tigers will overcome their slow start, but lose by a nose to Cleveland.
  • I expect both Texas and Cincinnati to be modest surprises this year. Texas I think had off years from a bunch of guys in 2007 and will be better this year. Cincinnati is a young club, but not yet a good club.
  • Like some sabermetric analysts, and in opposition to some mainstream analysts, I expect Seattle to be a mediocre team this year. Their offense is bordering on the moribund, with three infield hitters who could all be abjectly bad. Their pitching is Erik Bedard, Felix Hernandez, and a bunch of uninspiring guys in both the rotation and the bullpen.
  • The NL East is especially hard to pick since it’s full of teams who have some good points and some bad points and a lot of risk. I could see the top three teams finishing in any order.

Here’s how I picked the playoffs:

American League Division Series:

  • Cleveland over New York in 4 games
  • Boston over Anaheim in 3 games

National League Division Series:

  • New York over Milwaukee in 4 games
  • Arizona over Atlanta in 4 games

American League Championship Series:

  • Boston over Cleveland in 6 games

National League Championship Series:

  • Arizona over New York in 6 games

World Series:

  • Red Sox over Arizona in 6 games

I decided to give in to my Red Sox bias this year, in part because last year I did my picks and came down to picking the Sox and thought, “I pick the Sox every year! I’d better pick someone else.” And we saw how that turned out.

I do think the Sox have the best team in the Majors; it’s not a perfect team, but I think it’s better than any other team. But of course that only gives them a slight edge and they could certainly get knocked off in a short postseason series. But this is the way I decided to bet.

I also picked my HACKING MASS team, which is basically a set of players who I expect will provide the biggest aggregate drags on their teams during the season:

C Ramon Hernandez BAL
1B Rich Aurilia SF
2B Jose Lopez SEA
3B Pedro Feliz PHI
SS Yuniesky Betancourt SEA
LF Juan Pierre LA
CF Willy Taveras COL
RF Brian Giles SD
P Matt Morris PIT
P Barry Zito SF

You can see how I thought Seattle’s infield would suck. (1B Richie Sexson is the third infielder they have who I think won’t hit this year.)

I also wonder whether Barry Zito’s giant (or Giant) contract might be the worst contract any team has ever signed a pitcher to. On top of his 8 year/$126M pay schedule, he has a 2014 option which vests if he pitches enough in 2011-2013, and a full no-trade clause. Which means the Giants are likely stuck with him for the next 6 years, unless the team is so abjectly terrible that he waives his no-trade clause to get out, and they’re willing to take on enough of his salary that they can unload him. (I’m skeptical he’d ever waive his no-trade clause, though, since I have the impression that he loves living in San Francisco.)

It’s going to be a grim year for the local baseball teams here in the Bay Area (the A’s are rebuilding, the Giants don’t seem to have an idea how to start rebuilding), but it should be a good year for us Red Sox fans! 🙂

De Gustibus non Disputandum Est

Yesterday I received my DVD set of Torchwood from Amazon. Just for yuks I put it on display so people could see it through my office window when they walked down the hall.

A few hours later, C. walks past my door and stops to say that his wife loves the series (and he thinks it’s pretty good, too). I say I haven’t watched it, but that I do like the new Doctor Who (although it’s slowly going downhill). And also that I’m just starting to watch Battlestar Galactica. Then I shock him with the fact that I didn’t like either Firefly or Heroes. And we natter on for a while about all of that and he departs.

Some time later, T. comes by my office and notices the DVDs.

“Why’d you get that?” he asks. “It sucks.”

Okay then.

My main problem right now is that I’m not watching as much BSG as I want to.

Well, and I haven’t mailed my taxes yet.

Okay, maybe I don’t have a “main” problem.

Times Past

During my ongoing project to clean out the front room and closet, I came across this wipe-off calendar from 1999:

Calendar from 1999
(click for larger image)

Back when I was working at Epic in Madison I had an Apple Newton as my PDA, mainly to keep my want list (books, comics, etc.). But it was large and unwieldy for use as a calendar, so eventually I bought this 3-month dry-erase calendar and pinned it to my wall at work to keep track of my appointments.

Once I got offered my job at Apple, I used it to keep track of all the things I needed to do before I moved out: I had to finish up my projects at Epic, meet with people to transfer my responsibilities, pack up my stuff, get the cats prepped for their trip, and then fly out. And as you can see the month of February is planned out on the calendar (and then I wrote about it in more detail over here and here). What a crazy month. It’s still hard to believe it went so smoothly.

Well, at least I remember it went pretty smoothly.

Welcome to WordPress 2.5

I upgraded FP to WordPress 2.5 tonight. I’d been thinking about doing it for a few days, but I was moved to act when I read that Technorati has decided to stop indexing blogs using WP 2.3.2 and earlier. Now, I don’t really care about whether Technorati is indexing my journal, but I figure Technorati at least has their act together enough to know whether the security hole in 2.3.2 is serious. Not conclusive evidence, but enough to make me make the jump.

It’s going to take me a little while to get used to the new admin interface. It’s shiny and flashy, but of course all the pieces have been moved around a bit.

At least the plugins I’m using all seem to work. Indeed, Fold Category List has a new version which works with the WP 2.3 and later database format.

Anyway, it seems to have gone smoothly. Let me know if anything seems screwy. Hopefully this won’t make any difference to you at all!

Speed Reading

Last night I did something that’s very rare for me: I read a whole book in one evening. Specifically, I read Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed for my upcoming book discussion group. As I’ve said before, I’m quite a slow reader, usually plodding along at about 60 pages per hour, which means I can expect to spend about 7 hours going through a 400-page novel, the likes of which are common these days. Wild Seed is only about 280 pages, which means it would usually take me over 4 hours to get through it, but I finished it in about 3.

Okay, I did cheat a little bit, because I’ve read it before. I read the 4 in-print volumes in Butler’s Patternist series some years ago (I own a copy of the long-out-of-print volume, Survivor, but haven’t read it). For some reason I didn’t write reviews of the 4 books back when I read them. My recollection is that I thought they were okay but not terrific.

Which is pretty much what I thought of Wild Seed this time around: Okay but not terrific. The book concerns a pair of long-lived people, and their kin, who are all mutants with superhuman – mostly telepathic – powers. They actually seem very much similar to the comic book X-Men, only in this setting one of the long-lived characters, Doro, can jump between bodies (effectively killing any person whose body he inhabits), and is engaged in a long-term breeding program to create more people like himself. The title character, Anwanyu, is much younger, and is a shapeshifter and healer. The book is primarily about their relationship and the tension between them, as Doro expects everyone to bow to his will, while Anwanyu considers much of what Doro is doing to be abomination. The book has some powerful moments, but peters out at the end as the dramatic conclusion of their struggle is quite anticlimactic. (This is somewhat necessary as the book is a prequel to an already-existing series. But still.)

Anyway, although I did skim some of the more tedious bits (Butler often goes into a little discourse about the beckground of whatever new setting the characters are moving to, and then pretty much shoves all the background into, well, the background; there are also some less-than-illuminations digressions into the backstories of the two main characters), the book really was quite a quick read. I’m not really moved to re-read the rest of the series, although maybe I’ll tackle Survivor sometime soon to finish the arc.

Next up is Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. I’ve read a couple of stories recently in Asimov’s by Swanwick which I’ve enjoyed – especially “A Small Room in Koboldtown” – and I learned that they’re excerpts of his latest novel, The Dragons of Babel, which is a sequel to Daughter. So it seems like a good choice. What appealed to me about the stories is the setting: Traditional fantasy creatures (elves, goblins, trolls) whose world apparently continued developing beyond the medieval era and is now in an industrial age much like ours. A nifty idea.

I find Swanwick’s books to vary widely in quality. I liked The The Drift and Vacuum Flowers (both of which I reviewed here), but didn’t care much for either Stations of the Tide or Jack Faust. I’m hoping that these next books will be more like the former than the latter, even if I’m not generally a big fantasy fan.

Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series

Talk about late to the party: Last night we finally watched the DVD of the Battlestar Galactica mini-series that’s been sitting on my shelf since my Dad gave it to me a couple of Christmases ago. It’s one of the few TV series that I’m sorry I missed out on; the reason I did is that Comcast in my city doesn’t include Sci Fi among its stations unless you pay extra for digital cable, which I’ve refused to do just to get one station. So, no BSG on television for me.

I have heard the many good things people have said about the series, but it was hard to get up the motivation to start watching several seasons of television on DVD. And the last two well-regarded SF shows I watched – Heroes and Firefly – were both pretty bad. (Heroes was a decent idea weighed down by boring writing. Firefly was just drek.) So my enthusiasm for BSG was muted. Plus one of the creators of BSG is Ronald D. Moore, who was a writer and producer on the 90s Star Trek series, which were also drek.

Despite all of this, we thoroughly enjoyed the mini-series, finding it well-written, well-acted and well-produced. Which makes me even sorrier that I’ve been missing out on it after all this time!

I was impressed that the creators were able to take the original series’ premise and trappings (character names, planet names, visual appearance of the Cylons) and craft a completely series – even grim – story out of it so that some of the silliness of the names actually seem like artifacts of humanity’s golden age which we’re watching come to an end over just a couple of days.

The construction of the characters is downright scientific: I think all of the major characters either tells a big lie during the story, or is hiding one from before the beginning. All of them are deeply flawed in some critical ways. I think the perfect example of character construction is Gaius Boltar: The “traitor” in the original series, in this series he’s used by a Cylon agent to help bring down humanity. We also know he’s going to be the Cylon’s link to humanity if he manages to escape, yet he does the honest thing when he has a chance to get away by letting someone else go in his place – and then is able to go anyway through the selflessness of another character. The series unflinchingly forces characters to confront their flaws, and different characters have different degrees of success in doing so.

It took me a while to decide whether I liked the acting on the show, and eventually I decided it was actually very good acting. I think I found it difficult to judge because the writing is very subtle and there are few emotional outbursts, and thus few opportunities for actors to really chew the scenery. I think Education Secretary Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) was the litmus test for me: I kept wondering, “Is she doing a good job, or is she just sort of sleepwalking through the role?” Roslin is a very even-tempered character placed in a very difficult position, but I think McDonnell does a fine job of holding the character steady but having her inner turmoil show itself in small ways at key moments. The rest of the cast is equally good, and Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama is excellent in anchoring the series as the man at the center of the firestorm.

The production work was interesting, too. The space battles have a visual look similar to those in Babylon 5 (not really a surprise since B5 blazed the trail for special effects in space opera used today), but the low-key music (often no more than a simple rhythm) and frenetic editing make the battles seem less like a ballet (a style pioneered by Star Wars and rarely deviated from in SF film since) and more like a period of complete chaos in which everyone feels happy to get out alive. The sets and lighting are dark and foreboding. The music is portentious – what there is of it. I would have appreciated some slightly more melodic music, but I can see what they’re going for here; it’s so sparse that many scenes occur without any musical support, which is unusual in adventure television.

So overall, good stuff. Naturally I promptly went out and bought the first season on DVD. This series seems to be further support for the notion that there are no bad ideas, only bad writers. What the world (or at least television) really needs are more good writers.

Kicked My Ass

Frisbee kicked my ass last night.

We always end up with fewer people at the end of the season for various reasons: People move away, or get busy, or whatever, and pretty soon we have only 7-9 people showing up (or less!) to field a team of 7. Which means lots of playing and not a lot of time subbing out to catch my aged breath.

Last night I realized pretty quickly that I was having a Bad Endurance Night, and I was dogging it on the field quite a bit. Moreover, I was also Mr. Butterfingers and dropped a bunch of astoundingly easy throws. (I also just missed catching a score which was just an inch out of my reach, which was no less frustrating.) Moreover, our opponents were executing some perfect throws to elude my defense; since my endurance is Teh Suck, I play a very positional game, and to some extent that relies on blocking the guy I’m covering out or standing in the line of the throw. But if they manage to throw it just over me – or more likely, curve it around me – then there’s not a lot I can do. And that was happening a lot last night. (On the other hand, the skill level of SBUL is such that my strategy is usually pretty effective.)

I took it all with fairly good grace, though; I just tried to play the best I could, even if it wasn’t very well.

It was kind of sad, since we’ve been short-handed the last two weeks and I’ve actually been playing really well. But sometimes you just have an off week, I guess.

Anyway, the net result of all of this is stiff legs and tight thigh muscles today. Sheesh.