"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do, I stare out the window and wait for spring." - Rogers Hornsby

:: Saturday, February 08, 2003 ::

Big Brother Wants To Watch You Even More

The Bushies are at it again, wanting to expand police powers in surveillance of possible terror threats.

There is no doubt that we are in ever-increasing danger from people who hate this country and everything it stands for; just today a Cuban coast guard vessel casually pulled into a hotel marina in Key West, FL, armed with AK-47's. Luckily for us, all they wanted to do is defect.

We must be more vigilant today, but we also must draw the line between security for law-abiding American citizens and others here legally, and what could easily turn into a Cold War-like Eastern bloc mentality of spying on your neighbor.

:: posted by Al at 4:26 PM [+] ::
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endnote to david gray show

The opening act was a young singer/songwriter named Rachel Yamagata, who seemed either drunk or really nervous, but with her band put out some really nice bluesy funk music, reminiscent of Susan Tedeschi.

:: posted by Al at 4:23 PM [+] ::
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CONCERT REVIEW: David Gray

David Gray is probably best known for his two US radio hits, 'Babylon' and 'Meet Me on the Other Side'.

But his live show at the UIC Pavilion on Friday night was much more than that. Gray almost defies description or categorization, and I couldn't quite place him until he did a terrific cover of Van Morrison's 'It Stoned Me', and then I realized how much Gray had been influenced by Morrison; in fact, he physically resembles Morrison, if you took away Morrison's beard.

Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the Manchester, England-born Gray, who both knows how to rock hard, and play softer ballads on his guitar. He's an accomplished pianist too - 'Meet Me on the Other Side' is almost completely a solo-piano lament. Gray's lyrics contain a lot of pain, but also a lot of hope. It was a terrific, high-energy show, with a crowd of mixed age -- plenty of college-age and twentysomethings, but also many people in their forties. Gray sure has the young women's vote -- during this show, six college-age women stood a couple of rows behind us and danced through the entire two-hour set.

A couple notes about the UIC Pavilion, at which I had not before seen a concert: it's smaller than the United Center, seating about 11,000 for this show, and that "intimacy" makes for far better acoustics than at either the cavernous United Center, or the wood-ceilinged Allstate Arena, formerly the Rosemont Horizon. Sound was crisp and clear last night, without being overwhelmingly too loud, as it is at many arena shows.

Despite conspicuous "No Smoking" signs and a designated smoking area, people in our section and throughout the arena were smoking all through the show. I wish security at these places would enforce the rules more stringently; this isn't just a health issue, it's a fire safety issue.

Gray's show was excellent and if he comes to your town, don't miss him. He's in the middle of a long US tour, so check the dates and go!

AYRating: ****

:: posted by Al at 10:18 AM [+] ::
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Pot, Meet Kettle

Bud Selig asks Marge Schott to drop her lawsuit against the Reds regarding her seating in the new Reds ballpark.

Two more distasteful people associated with baseball, I don't think you could find.

Maybe the judge could throw them both in jail.

:: posted by Al at 1:30 PM [+] ::
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Movie Review: The Recruit

I'm going to take this reviewing opportunity to take a little swipe at movie trailers.

Most of you have probably seen the trailer for this film, which has been running for several months, in which James Clayton, the Colin Farrell character, on being recruited for the CIA by Walter Burke, the Al Pacino character, asks Burke, "Would I have to kill anyone?" And Burke puts this delightful little cockeyed smile on his face and says, "Would you like to?"

Well, that's a great line, and in the later years of his career, Pacino's become surprisingly good at acting like this; his character in "Scent of a Woman" did many of these same things.

But this line gives you the wrong impression about the movie; despite the rest of the action shown in the trailer (SPOILER: much of the trailer action takes place during training sessions, not missions), it's not a comedy, it doesn't have a lot more good lines like this, and I really resent it when a movie production company like Touchstone, though they're all guilty of it, ruins one of the best lines in the film by playing it over and over and over before the film even opens.

OK, end rant.

The movie's pretty slick, Colin Farrell is the perfect actor for this -- he has a perennially confused look on his face as well as a constant three-day growth of beard (how do they do that?); Bridget Moynahan is smart, well-dressed and nice to look at, and Pacino sucks us all in with what seem to be canned speeches, but are really psychological games played to get CIA recruits to think like spies. The movie does pretty well with the first half, the training setups, but then falls flat in the climax; the conclusion is both interesting because of the twists (and there are plenty of them), and unsatisfying; I found myself saying, "This is it?"

Ah well, I guess I shouldn't be too critical. This is normally a slow time in the movie-releasing biz, after the rush of the holidays, before the Oscar nominations, and way before all the silly summer movies. "The Recruit" is a couple hours of pleasant escapism and action, with likeable actors giving decent performances.

Just stop ruining the best lines, will ya?

AYRating: ** 1/2

:: posted by Al at 12:48 PM [+] ::
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Microsoft's At It Again

Today, the world's computer software oligarchy announced, that yet again, there are security breaches in two of its most used products, Internet Explorer and Windows XP.

Why do we let them get away with this? I dunno; probably because we're lazy, and when a product comes along that so saturates the market, has bright colors and overwhelming marketing support, we use it like lemmings. The fact is, that IE long ago became a better web browser than Netscape (and I'm sad to say that, because I was one of Netscape's biggest early supporters, and so I still recommend using it, providing you get the patch available at M$' website.

Can you tell I'm trying to avoid talking about the coming war today? I may have something to say about it later, but for right now, I'm still mulling.

God, I need a baseball game. Soon.

:: posted by Al at 9:36 AM [+] ::
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The Winds Of War

That was the name of a long novel by Herman Wouk, showing how for many years before, the setup for World War II was being put into place.

We are in a similar situation today; according to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a deadline has been set for February 14, ironically, Valentine's Day, a day of love, for Saddam Hussein to comply with the UN mandates.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, it is my considered opinion, made a very good case that Iraq has in fact been in material breach of the UN resolutions requiring it to disarm. This is something people forget. It's not an option; the UN required it. And yet the world sits by, wringing its hands.

This is not to say that I am sitting here in admiration of the way the Bush administration has set this up, in GW Bush's cowboy mode. He's squandered so much of the goodwill that the US had built up after 9/11, and in the words of my buddy Mike, "in a few weeks Bush and his crew will be going to war with the enthusiasm and attitude of a four-year-old stomping an anthill." He's right, and this is no way to get the world on your side.

I also worry that:

1) we will not, if we do go in, be committed to finishing the job;
2) we will not do a proper job of setting up a true democratic regime run by Iraqis (or as democratic as you can possibly get).
3) some people who don't like us will use the opportunity to unleash terrorist attacks on us that could dwarf 9/11

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein and his lackeys are lying through their teeth; they have even given the ridiculous excuse that oh, sorry, some rioters destroyed the very documents you were looking for.

And, again, I commend all of you to read The Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack, a CIA analyst in the Clinton administration, who makes a compelling case that we must go in and do this, no matter how distasteful it seems.

I'm no warmonger, and this is a very tough call. But sometimes you do have to prevent now, what could be worse later, and this very well could be one of those times.

:: posted by Al at 2:28 PM [+] ::
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NAMING RIGHTS FOR THIS BLOG FOR SALE

With the recent sale of the naming rights for Chicago's Comiskey Park to US Cellular (and thus prompting, already, the nickname "The Cell"), I thought, gee, what a great way to raise money! No one's going to call the place that anyway, even though the TV networks probably will be forced to, and so with this post, I hereby offer naming rights to this blog. I'm open to any and all offers -- for the right price, I will plaster your ad all over this page; I will mention your company prominently in my posts; heck, I'll put your logos on my forehead for the right price. I was going to say I'd have it tattooed on my butt, but then again, that wouldn't get as many, ahem, views as your company would probably want.

So -- send mail! Make offers! I'm here and listening!

I'm kidding.

I think.

:: posted by Al at 9:31 AM [+] ::
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Microsoft Under Fire

And you know, that makes me happy. Today, a group of disgruntled computer users in Korea are thinking of suing Microsoft for the damage that the worldwide worm did a couple of weeks ago. I say, more power to them. M$ seems to think they run the world, when all they are doing is running the computer world, and not very well at that.

M$ is also still trying to fight the court ruling forcing them to include Java in Windows XP. They're threatening to take this to an appeals court, which will accomplish nothing except lining some lawyers' pockets with more money. Java's become so universal, that I suspect that some people who otherwise would have upgraded previous versions of Windows to XP, perhaps have not done so just because of this. I know I'm one of those people (there's a bit of Java on this page, if you haven't noticed, at the bottom), although there are other reasons I've been kind of leery, considering that I did the upgrade test that M$ has on its website and it came up with a few things that my current system has that wouldn't run, including my digital camera.

Look, I give credit to Bill Gates for taking what could have been a totally fractured computer operating system market and giving us at least a de facto standard. But that standard has become so bloated and out of touch, that it's almost doing more harm than good. And come this June 30, support for Windows 98, which is probably still the most popular operating system, will be ending.

:: posted by Al at 9:38 AM [+] ::
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The Dead Time

For a sports fan, this is the Dead Time... that short time of year, after the Super Bowl, during the yawners of winter sports All-Star Games, before the NCAA tournament shapes up and just before pitchers and catchers report for baseball spring training... you could call it the Groundhog Days, except I hate Groundhog Day. I mean, read this silliness... can you imagine grown people spending their lives on this stuff? And TV weatherpeople all over the country paying attention to it?

So what's a sports fan to do, especially when it's gloomyfoggydrizzly outside?

Well, you could read this fun site of political satire, or find out which celebrities are dead or alive, or if you are really bored, just watch paint dry.

Gosh, I need a baseball game going on. Somewhere. Anywhere.

:: posted by Al at 1:46 PM [+] ::
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SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Sure, that's a line from Star Trek. But I think sometimes we blase humans of the 21st Century forget just how exciting space exploration was, is and can be in the future.

Those of us in our 40's remember being glued to the TV in the sixties when John Glenn and others launched and orbited the Earth and returned safely. It was exciting and exhilarating and made us think we could do anything, which for a time, it seemed we could.

Well, that got derailed in the inflationary and scandal-ridden times of the seventies. But there were still men and women out there who wanted to push the envelope, to explore, to find out new things, to help make life on our planet better. Seven of them died yesterday trying to do just that.

Scaling back or cancelling the program isn't the answer. What we need are new places to go, new goals, new things to reach for, because only by pushing that "final frontier" ever farther, will we reach our full human potential.

As we, sadly, approach the possibility of a war between our human beings and their human beings, let us not forget that we all inhabit the same planet, a fact brought to mind years ago on the Apollo 8 mission. I'm not a very religious person, but the verses from the Bible read on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, were a reminder that we all have a shared destiny.

In memory to Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, William McCool, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon, and for those who will follow in their footsteps, let us never forget.

:: posted by Al at 11:23 AM [+] ::
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