Kirby at 50

Kirby Puckett, it's hard to believe, would have been 50 years old on Sunday. Can't wait to visit his statue at Target Field in a couple of months.

One Week Home

Noah's got a new blog post here, about his first week at home. The little guy turns two months old today.

Best Brooklyn Cop Film of the Month

Yes, better than "Cop Out." I review "Brooklyn's Finest" on Philly.com here.

"Trade Rumor" of the Day

ESPN.com: Phillies internally considered trading Ryan Howard for Albert Pujols

Not believable, for several reasons. One, Ruben Amaro denies the assertion, right there in the story, and calls it a "lie." Two, it would make no sense- the only reason to trade Howard is if you can't afford him, and Pujols is even more expensive. And three, it just doesn't make sense for either team. The Cardinals like having Pujols, and the Phillies like having Howard.

It's not going to happen, period. But I'm sure it'll still be Topic A on sports talk all week.

Film Critic Quote of the Week

Newsweek's Ilana Ozernoy on "Green Zone":

"In the end, though, it is not the details that do this film in; it's the setup. Greengrass shows us very well that it was stupid to allow the looting, that de-Baathification and dismantling the Army were bad ideas, and that all of it led to the insurgency. But then he tells us that we still might have accomplished the mission had one man—one rogue, truth-seeking officer—tracked down a little black notebook whisked away by a Saddam loyalist. In other words, Paul Greengrass compresses the complexity so painstakingly assembled by Chandrasekaran into one notebook that contains one secret that reveals the one important source that only one journalist discovered after speaking to one evil administration official. But in the real Iraq, there were many secrets, many heroes, many villains and accomplices (witting and unwitting), and plenty of good and bad journalism.... In the end, the film felt like a stylized revenge fantasy—a poor man's Inglourious Basterds."

Another big moment in the movie that rang totally false: at the end, Matt Damon's hero runs up to Greg Kinnear's Bushie villain and yells at him, as the Judith Miller stand-in and a few other journalists stand around and stare from far away. Bullshit. I know journalists- they love conflict. If a soldier ran over to, say, Scooter Libby in 2003 and started pointing his finger at his chest and yelling at him, every reporter in the room would have run right over, notebooks in hand.

Quote of the Day

Speaking of retail theft, here's an amusing question-and-answer from Drew Magary's Deadspin Funbag:

I love stealing from Walmart! My swipe of choice has been bite-sized candy! I could easily steal a $3 DVD of Daylight or travel size shampoos, but who really gets a thrill doing that!? I go for the 10-pack of Almond Joys! Carefully, I open the pack, steal about 6 bars and reseal the 10-pack! It is exciting and gives me the feeling that I am "sticking it to "The Man"". Sometimes, I get real ballsy and eat a couple bars while perusing the aisles! Have you ever stolen something? And I am not talking a lame piece of Bubble Yum from the 7-11!

OMG! I don't know! You're not actually sticking it to The Man when you do that! You're actually fucking over the poor asshole who gets paid ten cents a day to stock the shelves! The Man doesn't give a shit if you steal Tic Tacs! He's just happy to now have an excuse to fire Paco and call INS on him! So maybe you should stop!

What's Going On Here

A couple of thoughts about this here blog:

First, it appears the comments aren't working. Not sure what happened; I was getting tons of spam so perhaps my providers blocked all of them, although I wasn't told that directly. I'll look into it and try to get that fixed.

Secondly, you may have noticed a sort of slowing in the frequency of posts here of late. I've been doing this blog, it's hard to believe, for almost eight years, and I've written multiple posts most of those days.

But of late things have started to change- in the world and in my life. Noah is finally home now, at the same time that I'm getting new, additional responsibilities at work. Not to mention, I keep hearing that in the age of Facebook and Twitter, blogging is going away- it's now the stodgy old medium, embraced by the dinosaurs.

This blog is going to continue, no question about it, although expect it to change and evolve in the coming months. There will be times (such as the last two days) when the inspiration will strike me, and I'll throw out 10-15 posts in 24 hours. But that's going to be the exception rather than the rule; I may go post-free for a few days at a time sometimes.

So here's how I expect things to work going forward: I post to Twitter frequently, at Twitter.com/StephenSilver. If you're not on Twitter, click my name on Facebook instead; my statuses there and my tweets are one and the same. If you're interested in seeing my writing more frequently, that's the place to go.

Most posts here will continue to be the usual stuff: post-length expansions of my tweets, funny quotes and YouTube clips, in addition to links to my movie reviews, occasional CTPG/E-Gear/Week in Retail Crime articles, other published writings, and (of course) the Noah blog posts, which people seem to really like. That'll all be there; I just can't promise it'll be there as frequently as before.

I care a lot about this blog, and have greatly enjoyed writing it for the last few years; I was doing this back in 2002 when no one would pay me a penny to actually write. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read it, and just wanted to fill you in on what's going on around here.

Saving Josh's Laptop

In the tradition of my frequent crime updates, here's an interview I did yesterday with my old college pal Josh Bob, who used a special software program to hack into his own stolen laptop and get it back from thieves.

The Trouble With "Green Zone"

I'll have more in my review published next week, but oh lord did I hate this movie. Why must filmmakers tell stories about very recent history, and change, literally, all of the details? Anyone who's read as much as one book about the Iraq war- even the one the movie is allegedly based on- will notice how wrong it is. A whole of lot of horrible things went into the decision to invade Iraq- so why make up whole new, fake ones?

What really happened to lead us to the Iraq War, as last year's great "In the Loop" made clear, was a combination of dishonesty, incompetence, cowardice and wishful thinking, among dozens of people at many levels of government in more than one country.

"Green Zone" reduces all that to one evil guy lying, and the one evil guy isn't even George Bush or Dick Cheney. It's a fictional bureaucrat, played by Greg Kinnear, who's like a one man Rumsfeld/Feith/Bremer/Libby, a midlevel civilian bureaucrat who for some reason has the power to order troops into battle. Matt Damon- his "Stuck on You" costar- is an all-purpose white knight hero, who not only searches in vain for WMDs, and then uncovers the whole conspiracy all by himself.

The howlers are plentiful- the Judith Miller character works not for the Times but the Wall Street Journal- whose Web site is now TWSJ.com. There's a character based on the notorious WMD informant "Curveball," except that every single thing about him is different.

And altogether, what's the point here? To expose the perfidy of the Bush Administration lying about WMD? I think we're about five years too late for that.

Now, I'm the most anti-shakycam critic in the world, but the overuse of shakycam (by one of its inventors, Paul Greengrass) wasn't even close to the biggest problem here. The Tomatometer is 50/50 on this one; that's way too kind if you ask me.

"24" Is Dead

Probably, anyway. Reports are the show will go away after this year, thanks to declining ratings and rising costs.

Yea, it's about time. The show ran out of ideas years ago, especially since there are only so many terrorist attack scenarios/nationalities of villains that can be plausibly used, and the show long ago started repeating itself. And the 24-hour, one-day, real-time structure had a high-enough degree of writing difficulty as it was.

There's allegedly going to be a movie, which I suppose could be good; they just need to take the time and write something good, that isn't just a two-hour episode of the show and is actually something special and memorable.

Not So Small Market

I agree with Tim Marchman, reacting mostly to the trade-Mauer idea:

The Twin Cities are the sixteenth largest metro in the United States, bigger than St. Louis, Baltimore and Denver, among others. They have the fourth largest median household income of any metro, behind only the Bay Area and Washington-Baltimore among baseball markets.

The Twins have a new park opening in a month, have made the playoffs five of the last eight years, and are running a $100 million payroll this year.

Why people still have it in their mind that Minneapolis is a small market I'm not really sure, but it isn't. It's not an especially large one, but this is the sort of team that should be heisting players other teams can't afford, not getting rid of its own stars, and from here it seems writing about the team should reflect that.

Remember when Baltimore and Cleveland were considered "large market"?

Today in Insincere GOP Advice

Jonathan Chait once again flags right-leaning politicians/pundits pretending to give Obama "advice," encouraging him to give up on health care reform. What's the point of this exercise? You think Obama's going to bail on his primary domestic policy priority because Sean Hannity and Dick Morris are telling him to?

Then again, the tenor of the arguments tends to be that if health care passes, it's terrible for Obama, but If health care doesn't pass, it's also terrible for Obama. Had he not even taken up the issue, I'm sure, that also would've been bad for Obama.

"Parks and Recreation and the Hutt"

Great as the NBC show is- and it's gotten amazingly good this year- I think this video is even better:

Leeann Chin, RIP

The restaurateur behind the Minnesota eatery- and subsequent chain of fast food places based on the same cuisine- has died. I always loved it there, especially the cream cheese puffs.

Worse For Baseball Than Steroids and Strikes Combined

"Floating realignment." Worst idea I've ever heard, and not only because absolutely no one will understand it.

So the Yankees and Red Sox are in the same division. Guess what? The day will someday come when they're not good anymore. Someday the Yanks will hire an idiot as manager or GM, make a bunch of bad contract decisions in a row, and suck for a long period of time. It happened for a whole decade with the Knicks and Rangers, both New York teams that far outspend their opponents.

Someone please talk Bud out of this. It's beyond absurd.

Donavon Traded!

But despite this Web hoax the actual Donovan McNabb remains an Eagle. If you're going to spoof an ESPN.com article, try to at least spell the relevant names and cities correctly.

Don't Trade Mauer

"Should the Twins trade Joe Mauer?" That was the big question today in Minnesota papers, radio and blogs, even though it look like the only guy even raising the idea is columnist Jim Souhan.

It'll never happen. The Twins are contenders, they're almost certainly going to extend Mauer, and even if they don't they'd probably rather grab the draft picks instead of a 20-cents-on-the-dollar trade.

But if you thought the Souhan column was bad, he writes "Trade Mauer for Santana" on his blog today: At least that's the headline as the idea of trading Mauer for a pitcher with $100 million left on his contract- who the Twins balked at paying last time they had the chance- isn't actually mentioned in the piece.

I can't wait for WIP tomorrow- Carlos Ruiz and Brad Lidge for Mauer!

LT to MN?

The Vikings are supposedly looking to sign LaDainian Tomlinson to replace Chester Taylor as the third down back/backup to Adrian Peterson. I'm all for it; anytime you can grab the guy who was the #1 pick in every fantasy draft in 2009 (Peterson) with the #1 pick in every draft the year before (Tomlinson), and stick them in the same backfield, you do that.

I'm Not Normally One For Nutpicking, But...

Read the wonderful comments to this Politico story about the car accident that seriously injured Harry Reid's wife and daughter. Karma? Too bad "that hag Pelosi" wasn't in the car? "He probably has sex with his male staffers"? "Is he a demon?"

Wonderful people they've got over there.

(See here if you're wondering what "nutpicking" is.)

It's NOTY Time

It's once again time for the annual Name of the Year tournament! Who will succeed last year's winner, Barkevious Mingo? My money's on Spartacus Bernstein. Had I known that "Spartacus" was an acceptable first name for a Jewish boy, Noah might not be Noah.

Beck vs. Massa

Yes, this really happened:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sour Gropes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Since he's simultaneously in the middle of a political crisis, a health crisis and a sexual identity crisis, it might be wise for Massa to not give any more interviews for awhile.

Age in the Cage

I'd been hearing about it for awhile, but I flipped tonight to TNA, and saw Hulk Hogan on TV. Yikes.

I'm sure the wrestling blogs have covered this plenty, but it's really unbelievable that almost ten years after WCW went out of business, TNA is back with the same head writer, and a bunch of the same people, except that now everyone is ten years older.

So we get things like 56-year-old Hulk Hogan fighting 62-year-old Ric Flair. I remember being really excited the first time they fought. That was in 1991, I believe.

Still, at least Bret Hart and Vince McMahon are going to wrestle at Wrestlemania this year. That was literally the last trick they had remaining up their sleeve.

King Me

Love this Burger King commercial, for two reasons:

It's Howard Eskin being chased through an office- and the woman at the end is... Kimmy Robertson, Lucy the receptionist from "Twin Peaks"! Will this be Jenna Fischer in 20 years?

Welcome Home Noah

My son is home from the NICU, finally. Here's his first blog post from the house.

Volt!

This is about two months late, but here's a video I shot at CES in January, about the OnStar system on the new Chevy Volt.

The Trouble With "Big Love"

I totally agree with Amelie Gillette's take on "Big Love"'s season finale. Yes, it's still entertaining, but the season was SUCH a mess. My biggest complaint, of many- haven't about 100 different people found out over the years that the Henricksons are polygamists? So how was he able to run for office without anyone blowing the whistle? Politicians' skeletons generally have a way of emerging during elections.

Joe Nathan. Damn!

Just when I was getting excited about the Twins season, their all-world closer goes down, probably for the season. Who knows who they'll turn to, although it's worth remembering that the Twins have had strong relief pitching pretty much for the last 25 years, even when they haven't been good. Ron Davis was their last really awful closer.

By the way, Noah's first televised baseball game will be Saturday's Twins-Phillies spring training game.

Oscar Thoughts

I'll always love the Oscars, even if they're as long-winded, bloated, boring and poorly-written as last night's show was. A few notes:

- I like Martin and Baldwin, and they're both good on their own. But there was no reason they needed to both be there- they pretty much just alternated jokes and had no banter with each that I can remember. The writing was just awful throughout- the only thing I laughed at all night was Martin's "Precious"/"Born a poor black child" joke.

- Speaking of "Precious," Mo'Nique has gone in three years from host of "Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School" to Academy Award winner. Not a very common progression.

- Tweet of the night, from Sean Burns after Mo'Nique won: "Awesome! Eddie Murphy just won Best Supporting Actress for NORBIT!"

- The "In the Loop" clip, for adapted screenplay, was literally the only five seconds in the film without profanity. Fuckity-bye. I sort of wish that or "Up in the Air" had won in that category- UITA, in fact, won zero Oscars.

- NOT a good death montage, especially since much of it was shot wide and you couldn't even see the names on screen. Same problem last year. And while they had to cut out various elements, including the song performances and the lifetime achievement awards, WHY the need for ten minutes of interpretive dance?

- Anyway, I'm happy "Hurt Locker" won, it was more deserving than "Avatar," and good that Cameron was kept off the podium. I'm sure his other three ex-wives are thrilled as well.

"Mission: Impossible" at Best Buy, and More

I go into some recent stories of malfeasance at the electronics store on Dealerscope.com.

New From Noah

My son has a new blog post, up now. Complete with fortune cookies!

A Cop Out by Kevin

I review Kevin Smith's "Cop Out" on Philly.com- and no, I still don't find Tracy Morgan funny.

I'm Not Taking Comcast Back, But...

Great, great GREAT idea to have Jon Hamm do the commercial voiceover. He's just as good as it as he was with the Kodak Wheel in Season 1 of "Mad Men":

I'm telling you, Hamm will be the biggest movie star in the world in 3-4 years. There's nothing Clooney has that he doesn't.

Jews and Movies

Heeb ranks the 100 greatest Jewish movie moments. #1 is obvious; I would've also accepted the last scene of "Inglourious Basterds," though I suppose it's disqualified for being somewhat ahistorical.

Pimp Chat

Colbert on ACORN:

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Tip/Wag - James O'Keefe & Sean Hannity
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Porn Chat

Some surprising profundity in an unlikely place: the weekly Fantasy Football and Sex Advice Mailbag on Kissing Suzy Kolber. The part at the beginning about porn is right on the nose, as is the video clip (safe for work, don't worry.)