Vic Sage

While i know that telemarketers are human beings (unless its a robo-caller), and they are just trying to make a living in a dire economy, and some folks don't have many options, and everybody deserves respect for the work they do, yyybbb, i've just got to say this... i hate telemarketers. Or rather, i hate telemarketing and so take it out on those who're inflicting it on me. Now, if they wanted to give me the home numbers of their bosses, i'd happily give THEM crap, but they don't do that (i've asked), so sorry, but they are in my line of fire. i have caller ID and when i get an unfamiliar number, i let it go to voicemail. Invariably, its a telemarketer. And they'll keep calling back and back and back until they get an answer. And often they call while i'm in the middle of doing something (having dinner with my family, watching a game or a show or a movie, reading, doing some work, writing, sleeping, whatever) so the ringing is an irritant and an interference in the quiet enjoyment of my domicile. Knowing they won't stop, i usually just pick up the receiver and hang it up. But sometimes, i'll yell "stop calling this number!" before i hang up. And once in a while, if i'm in the mood, i'll string it out as long as possible and when the try to close the deal i ask them for their phone number. This usually confuses them or stalls them a moment, and i tell them i just want it so i can call them back at my convenience, maybe if i'm up late watching a movie, or up early with the dog, or whenever. But they never do that. Nor do they give me their boss's' number either (though i'm pretty sure they don't know it anyhow). why? BECAUSE WHY ON EARTH WOULD THEY WANT TO BE BOTHERED WITH MY SHIT WHILE THEY'RE IN THEIR HOME? why indeed. Every day i leave the house and i'm bombarded with commercial speech... signs, tv and radio ads, newspapers... i work in times square which looks like the set of BLADERUNNER, with jumbotrons on endless loops of commercials, and homeless folk asking for change. Hell, even my fucking elevator now has a constant news feed with ads. And that's the world today. OK. But if i'm in my house, leave me the fuck alone; I really don't think that is too much to ask in this day and age of electronic overload. But they don't leave me alone; they keep ringing, my dog keeps barking, and i can't even put up a big "beware of dog" sign to scare them off. Or electrify my fence, like Mariano. Or just punch them in their fucking face. because they're not actually there. I know they're trying to pay their bills, but I'd have more respect for telemarketers if they just sold drugs in a school yard.

The Met-lovin' online world puts a lot of stock in Mitchell's 24 games at shortstop, 20 starting, 17 complete, over a quarter century ago. Hojo played 34 games that year, too (with 22 starts), and 38 more games the next year, increasing every year after that, through 1990. Goddamn, i loved me some Davey Johnson.

i assume we'll go 0-162, and then I let every victory come as a pleasant surprise. 75-80 wins for this team is realistic, with a record of .500 or better a good year. I'd be more shocked by 90 wins than by 70 wins, but a shock is good for the system.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I'm with Vic. Let's give Flores a shot at shortstop. Murphy will probably be gone within a year or two, and then Wilmer can slide over to second base if need be. Don't understand me so fast. i'm not saying i want Flores as our SS; i'd just prefer they try him rather than trade a good prospect for a guy like Franklin. I'd still like to see Seratelli get a fair shot, too. And i'd prefer both of them to Tejada, at this point. But we'll see how ST goes.

i used to make such a fuss; big viewing party with my friends, an oscar pool, yyybbb. At some point, it just stopped. i don't miss the party, but i still have a family-wide oscar pool.

The Mets moved Flores off SS after 2011 because they felt he lacked range and quickness, not because he couldn't catch and throw. If they're considering Franklin, they may as well play Flores. He's young, he's coming off a productive AAA season, and he's already here so he won't cost anything extra. If he can play the position even barely adequately -- Howard Johnson, Keven Mitchell, and Melvin Mora come to mind -- then the upside of his bat at that position makes it worth exploring. But what i don't want us to do is give up a decent prospect for someone i view as a similar player.

McReynolds over Harrelson, Mazzilli and Orosco? Fie! I say fie upon thee! Raise your warhammer and meet me on the field of honor!

I plan on hunkering down with D-Dad whoah, too much information. wait, what do you mean by "hunkering"? Oh. never mind, then.

from the Academy Award thread: I've only seen 3 of the best picture nominees so far (GRAVITY, HER, AMERICAN HUSTLE). Of that small group, i was most impressed with GRAVITY. While i appreciated HER (particularly Johannson's vocal performance -- when is that going to be a category?), i did find it meandering after a time, even though ultimately moving and worthwhile. I'm just not a big Joaquin Phoenix fan. But i did like Amy Adams more in this than in AMERICAN HUSTLE, which i think is entirely overrated. The performances are fun, in a cartoony, garish way, and its entertaining enough, more or less, but its mostly about hair... bad hair. I was not moved or particularly interested in any of it. And that the low-level scumbags figure out a way to get over on the high-level scumbags doesn't give me quite the uplift one might think. But Bale is certainly incredible (once again). But GRAVITY was masterful in every aspect; the beautiful cinematography and design, the stellar performances, the taut direction, the powerful themes... its all there. I definitely want to see WOLF OF WALL ST and have some interest in NEBRASKA, too, but no interest at all in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, PHILOMENA, DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, or 12 YEARS A SLAVE, . Well, I might catch up with SLAVE on cable, but the other 3 would require a "desert island"-type situation.

The problem with correlating Ike's injury to his production is that it doesn't... at all. Ike's worst hitting last year happened early in the season, before he was hurt, and he hit best after coming back from AAA still having the strained oblique, until it "popped." The previous season, he had a similar bad 1st half/better 2nd half, and there was no particular injury i can recall that distinguished those periods either. Ike's problem is simple: his swing is too long and has huge holes in it, plus he's not great at hitting lefties or breaking balls (or great high fastballs, but few hitters are). And when things go wrong, he expands his zone and chases even more bad pitches. He hits well during those random periods when he faces some mediocre righties with sinkers, and the timing on that long swing falls into a good groove and, after building some CAHNfidence, he becomes more patient, increasing the success... until he faces some quality arms with good curves (or power fastballs), or a Lefty, and then his timing goes off again and he starts hacking to compensate, and da ship be sinkin. Yes, Ike has good power, and for stretches he can look like a very good hitter, and I think he is a better glove than he showed last year. But he is what he is... a streaky, boom/bust player who can feast on mistakes but has too many holes in his swing to be useful over a full season, or against good pitching. That may be why nobody wants him despite the Mets trying to move him, and why the Mets are trying to move him in the first place. At least Duda's mediocrity comes with a consistent OB%, which rarely slumps. Over the course of a full season, he won't ever be as good as Good Ike, but won't be as bad as Bad Ike, and that may help us more in the long run. At least until Dom Smith gets here.

So right after he gets named as a top 100 prospect, and one of the Mets' top 10, you pronounce him a bust. At age 21. ok. And wasn't Billy Beane the baseball version of Billy Beane?

Since I'm a straight woman the admittedly sexy voice of Scarlett Johannsen didn't help me get through this one. i presumed this was the difference in our responses to the film, i just didn't want to reduce it to that. But yeah, that's probably it. I can listen to ScarJo read a grocery list and get a woody, so Joaquin's response seemed entirely plausible to me.

i agree; I'm just not willing to criticize it for failing to do what it is not trying to do. Even Harryhausen at his height never animated an entire movie, just limited scenes within a movie. The films that are pure stop-motion animation are the simplest kind of claymation or short films. The fully animated feature-length movie you're suggesting would cost at least $100m, probably more, due to the time and labor-intensive nature of stop-motion. That they were not willing to invest that much in a 1st time feature of this type, with a subversive script to boot, doesn't surprise me and i don't fault them for it. Given the probable budget for this project, i think they made the right aesthetic choices with regard to the animation style; they avoided slick Pixar-style realistic CGI or smooth, soft classic Disney-style cell animation. They made it blocky, stiff and lego-like. so good for them. Maybe if this one's a huge hit, we can lobby for a full stop-motion sequel!

A switch-hitter with a good OB%, good SBs, and decent pop over the last 4 AA-AAA seasons. If he can play even barely adequate D, I'd start him at SS today, and likely a better backup option than Quintanilla, Tovar or Flores. That's before you even get to the human interest story aspects.

i like the idea of Sunday 6/29 5pm against the SI Yanks. Otherwise, i'd go for the weekend evening games through July and early August.

Trade for Koehler! Go `Wolves!

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME! i can't get that song out of my head. I forced Sage jr. to go with me. He was reluctant because he's 13 and it looked too much like a kid's movie. But his friends said it was good, and Rotten Tomatoes scored it in the high 80s, so he agreed to go with me. And he liked it alot. I did too. Aside from the jokes, puns, pop cultural references and clever action stuff, the movie was about something. And it was subversive to boot. It's not just dealing with the typical "believe in yourself" and "power of imagination" type themes kid movies usually traffic in, though it does that stuff well. And it doesn't just settle for the "individualism over conformity" theme so common in dystopian SF, though it's about that too. And its got a father-son reconciliation thing, and that's nice too. But the movie actually has an overarching socio-political viewpoint. This is a big corporate studio movie that opposes corporate control of culture, where "president business" lives at the top of a huge office building and tries to control all expressions of culture and fix it permanently in place, and society is coerced into thinking that happiness comes from following instructions. But the heroes are an anarchic group, one is even a "pirate", that wants to give the power to build and rebuild the culture back to the people, to mash it up and recreate it as their imaginations dictate, and to stop following the prescribed instructions. Basically, its playing out the social debate we're having in this country about who controls our culture and makes a plea for "fair use" by the people. In a movie produced by a Time Warner subsidiary. That's pretty cool, i think, and warrants bonus points. Story-wise, yes, its frenetic pace doesn't do it any favors or give the characters room to develop and breathe, so the emotional content is fairly minimal until the end. And the father-son denouement should really have been more strongly foreshadowed and set up earlier so it paid off better. As to its animation style, i appreciated that it didn't go for the slick Pixar CGI look, or classic cell animation look, but gave it the stiff, blocky movement suggestive of a Lego universe. Might it have been better, or at least more thematically pure, if done in stop-action? Yeah, probably, but i don't begrudge it for what it isn't. I appreciated it for what it is. Not flawless, but a fun and smart family movie that is biting that hand that feeds it.

themetfairy wrote: I couldn't suspend enough disbelief to go along with this one. I kept hoping Joaquin would drop the phone in water. Have you looked around lately? The movie is practically a documentary in its portrayal of a society that relates better to its machines than to its people. I know plenty of people having love affairs with their phones.

It meanders, and i'm no fan of Joaquin Phoenix, but i thought it was a moving (almost profound) film, and I would fall in love with Scarlett Johannsen's voice, too.

Which super-expensive free agent did they want us to break the bank for? "They" who? The article goes out of its way to say that payroll doesn't necessarily equal success, and was not advocating any particular signing or lamenting any missed opportunity. It simply points out that the Mets' "spending spree" is an illusion since all they did was replace the production and salary they lost going into this season, which leaves the team pretty much where it was and still reliant on young players to take a leap forward for the team to improve. Which is an entirely accurate assessment. what the article leaves mostly UNSAID, of course, is that successful teams like TB and Oakland operating on small budgets do so because they HAVE to, since they are "small market" teams. But by operating that same way, the Mets are losing their major competitive advantage over such teams (an advantage exercised by teams like LA, Boston and the MFYs), and the Mets are operating that way either because the Wilpons' finances are so screwed up they can no longer operate like a big market franchise and spend accordingly, or they are simply choosing not to spend.

G-Fafif wrote: I answer my own question here. My thanks for all your thoughts on the matter, which helped me work through my own. They are reflected in the above post as well as this one. Your little blog didn't even bother to discuss the impact on the psyche of Metdom of unlosing to the MFYs in `00. Dead. you are dead to me.

Piazza's absence from the HOF isn't due to his lack of credentials. He's the greatest HR-hitting catcher in the history of baseball; a ROY, 12-time All-star, 10-time silver slugger, 7 times in the MVP top-10 voting. That should be sufficient credentials for a 1st-ballot HOFer. His lack of sufficient votes is based purely on the fact that a cabal of old-school voters thinks he may possibly be rumored to have maybe done steroids because they heard from somebody somewhere that he had pimples on his back. A `99 (or `00) championship wouldn't have changed a thing.

As pessimistic as i generally am, i can't see the Mets losing 91+ games this year. They're no worse than they've been the last 4 years (never losing that many over that period), and potentially better. I'll take the over.

You can read the same article at the beginning of every spring training, about some marginal player who has come to ST stronger and more confident and ready to break through. I wish you the best, Lucas, but nobody puts any stock in this kind of piffle, do they?

Yeah, and just about everything he conjures up as a future consequence of a `99 victory could just as well have happened after a `00 victory, except that we'd ALSO have the benefit of wiping the 2000 loss to the MFYs completely out of existence. Tell Mr. Weber he's dead to me.