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3:56PM

Etc., etc. edition

1—Obviously if I had unlimited resources and a public relations problem to solve I wouldn't turn to the architect of George W. Bush and Mark McGwire's images, but then I'm not Tiger Woods. Take this as further evidence that being able to hit a ball with a stick doesn't correlate to having the sense God gives to gnats and turnips.

2—Google Maps' new bike routing feature is neat in theory—hard to think of too many things that have the potential to get more people on bicycles—but buggy as hell, as I discovered when I tried out a few destinations. It loves dead ends and highly trafficked roads. I'm sure the kinks will be worked out in time, but for now it may be actively dangerous to rely on its suggestions in unfamilar areas.

3—At risk of repeating myself, while I'm not big on witch hunts, if a client of a doctor accused of dope peddling develops an illness specialists think might be associated with dope use it isn't, contra Craig Calcaterra, out of bounds to juxtapose those two facts in a news article.

4—Count me as another mystified by Ron Gardenhire haters. The man has won five flags in eight years and came within two runs of another the year after trading the best pitcher in baseball for cashews and almonds, and it isn't as if the division has been terrible. There are other managers I might rather have depending on the makeup of the team (Joe Maddon, Ozzie Guillen and Joe Torre come to mind), but I think the only one I'd definitely prefer in all circumstances would be Mike Scioscia. One thing Gardenhire doesn't get enough credit for, by the way, is the way his stars tend to reach their full potential. There's a tendency to not give the manager credit when players like Joe Mauer and Johan Santana become as good as they could possibly be, and it's a bit absurd. There's a big difference between a guy with a five per cent chance of being as good as Johnny Bench and a guy who's actually as good as Johnny Bench.

10:41AM

Their dancing clowns are incredible

A few people have asked just what my contributor's note in the Amazin' Avenue Annual, for which I wrote a foreword, was about, since it mentions that I was a Mets fan from 1986 to 2009. I don't want to go on about it since I'd like to write about it more thoughtfully and at some length, but the basic thing is that while it's been a long time since I moved away, last summer I finally stopped feeling like a New Yorker in exile, and when that happened I just stopped caring about the Mets. I don't know if that would have happened if the team wasn't so lousy, but I think probably so. The odd thing is that before this happened I managed to work my little guy over, so that there are Jose Reyes and David Wright shirts in my house, and a Mr. Met doll who is clutched tightly at night and wards off zombies who might be lurking in closets. As for me I don't really have a team as such, but I live on the South Side and have less than no interest in living anywhere else in America, so I expect sheer proximity will continue to do its work.

9:53AM

Ghetto mentality

Rob Neyer flags this column where Jim Souhan muses about the Twins trading Joe Mauer, and while you can say that it's weird to key in on getting a relief pitcher in exchange for the best player in baseball, that's not what I find odd about it.

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.

9:24AM

What is this man on about?

I don't care about filibuster reform—it's a crock, a distraction from the fact that Democrats are either too impotent to do anything with a 59-seat majority or are (more likely) just hoping no one notices that filibusters conveniently keep them from doing things they don't actually want to do—but I do care about baseball, and I'd like cadaverous senate majority leader Harry Reid to stop lying about the sport's record:

For now, the process seems to be proceeding from the premise that Senate Democrats are fed up with the filibuster. "In baseball," Reid said in a clipped tone, "they used to have the spitball. It originally was used with discretion. But then the ball got wetter and wetter and wetter. So soon, they outlawed the spitball." The same, he said, had happened to the four-corner offense in basketball. "And just the way the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball," Reid said, "Republicans have abused the filibuster."

Of course that's so far from what really happened that I'm not even sure where he's trying to go with this, but you can't expect a former boxer from Nevada to know anything about the sport. Anyway someone ought to clue him in because it would make a much better talking point to say, "In baseball, they used to have the spitball. It originally was used with discretion. But then a dude died! And similarly, the filibuster is murderous."

2:12PM

Trouble with numbers

Over at ESPN's new sabermetrics blawg ($) Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus notes that the White Sox look like an all-or-nothing team again this year, continuing a recent trend:

While Ozzie has made his love for small-ball well known, his teams have been overly reliant on the long ball. So reliant that BP colleague Joe Sheehan christened the Guillen Number, which measures the percentage of a team's runs derived from homers. Last year, the White Sox ranked third in the majors at 41.0 percent, trailing only the Yankees (45.1 percent) and the Phillies (42.1 percent). In fact, they've been among MLB's top four during every year of Guillen's tenure.

Fact is fact but I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Here are rankings for Sox Park in two categories during Guillen's tenure. The first is overall run factor, and the second is home run factor (source here).

2009: 9th, 4th

2008: 4th, 2nd

2007: 9th, 4th

2006: 9th, 2nd

2005: 9th, 2nd

2004: 3rd, 1st

Obviously it's a good hitter's park but a great home run park. Not only is that going to skew the ratio a bit when you calculate the percentage of their runs derived from longballs, but it also suggests that by stacking the lineup with power hitters they're just taking advantage of their yard. I'll take Jay's broader points that this is a lousy team on the bases and that they could stand to diversify their attack a bit, but I don't think the monochromatic offense is quite the problem it may seem.

11:01AM

But... Padres vs. Mariners!

I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe the concept of 'floating realignment' in a way that wouldn't give you a headache, but if this is really an issue here's my plan: Every team in each league plays the exact same schedule, and the four teams (ed: in each league!) with the best records at the end of 162 games go on to the playoffs. Of course this can't happen because of interleague play, but it happens to not be insane.

That interleague play is now so sacrosanct that central baseball is even considering a plan this absurd is one of the great mysteries of American sports.

9:58AM

Day of the rope!

There's little worse than people pretending to care about a dead celebrity, so I won't pretend I cared about Corey Haim. I will, though, urge you to watch the clip above. It's from one of the great terrible movies of all time, Prayer of the Rollerboys, a description of which I'll subcontract to Wikipedia:

Corey Haim plays Griffin, a rollerblader in the not so distant future of Los Angeles which is in a sad state, the city deep in crime and drug activity in the wake of a catastrophic nation-wide economic crash caused by the previous generation. A rollerblade-wearing white supremacist youth gang named the Rollerboys fight for spiritual and economic control of the city, the fascist group founded and led by a childhood neighbour of Griffin's. The Rollerboys carry out their eugenic agenda through both violent gun battles with ethnic gangs, and especially through their distribution of the drug "mist".

It's even more ridiculous than this makes it sound and actually worth going out of your way to see if you have a sweet tooth for movies this outlandishly bad.

UPDATE: Our Los Angeles constituents can actually see this flick in the theater a week from this Saturday and I can't say I wouldn't recommend it.

9:06AM

.372

So Nomar Garciaparra is retiring, and while others will have happier memories I'll always think of him clutching himself after tearing his groin while leaving the batters box in a 2005 game. At his best he was about as good as anyone I've ever seen, a crackling wire with maybe the quickest wrists and the greatest gift for hitting the ball squarely on straight lines you can have, but it was his injuries rather than Mark Prior's that seemed to best sum the sad futility of those Dusty Baker Cubs teams.

Two other things come to mind today. First is Garciaparra's Hall of Fame case, which is interesting just because he offers a rare live example of a theoretical construct, the peak-only player. From 1997 to 2003 he was a strong MVP candidate every single year save 2001, which he missed with an injury. In that time his play was worth forty-one WAR; the whole rest of his career was worth two.

If he'd just strung together seven decent seasons, four of them good but not special and three of them average, he'd be a nearly certain Hall of Famer. This strikes me as really quite silly, because those years wouldn't have been of Hall caliber and really would have added little to the argument for him, which would have had to do with his great peak. But there you go.

The other is the common assumption that Garciaparra fell apart because of steroid use, which I've never understood. Here's the famous SI cover that many, even at the time, took as obvious proof that he was using:

The strange thing is that while he's big here, he's not especially cut up. Here's a picture of Steve Reeve, a famous old school bodybuilder whom no one, as far as I know, thinks was a drug user:

If a clean bodybuilder can get that shredded with 1950s training techniques I don't know why anyone would assume that Garciaparra needed steroids to grow love handles. I'll buy that he was carrying too much muscle for his frame; he's about my size and if I were as big as Garciaparra was in 2001 my tendons would snap like overstretched bungee cords. But the point is that I could get that way by working out a lot and eating a lot. There were a lot of obvious users in his generation even among players who haven't been openly accused; I don't think he was one of them.

3:07PM

What not, WTF edition

1—I haven't seen the likes of the Keith Olbermann-Bill Simmons slap fest since twenty-aught-one! I'll go with the general consensus that his column insisting Tiger Woods has it harder post-wick dipping than Muhammad Ali did after the federal government persecuted him for his religion and political beliefs marked the exact moment when Simmons went from 'useless but harmless' to 'aggressively uninteresting' but Olbermann is still significantly more ridiculous and worthy of mockery.

2—With Mo'Nique having won an Oscar for Precious, which I haven't seen but seems as actively loathsome as a movie could possibly be, now's as good a time as any to link to the great Armond White's review, which is everything you'd hope it would be:

Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy...

Precious raises ghosts of ethnic fear and exoticism just like Birth of a Nation. Precious and her mother (Mo’Nique) share a Harlem hovel so stereotypical it could be a Klansman’s fantasy. It also suggests an outsider’s romantic view of the political wretchedness and despair associated with the blues. Critics willingly infer there’s black life essence in Precious’ anti-life tale. And the same high-dudgeon tsk-tsking of Hurricane Katrina commentators is also apparent in the movie’s praise. Pundits who bemoan the awful conditions that have not improved for America’s unfortunate are reminded that they are still on top.

This misreading of blues sensibility probably has something to do with the disconnect caused by hip-hop, where thuggishness and criminality romanticize black ghetto life. Director Daniels’ rotgut images of aggressive cruelty and low-life illiteracy aren’t far from gangster rap clichés. The spectacle warps how people perceive black American life—perhaps even replacing their instincts for compassion with fear and loathing.

As I recall, the last time Armond broke out the Birth of a Nation trope it was for the noxious Unbreakable, in a review that sadly seems to not be online.

3—Not a ton of new information for anyone who's followed the cult over the years, but this Times piece on Scientology is pretty sweet if just for the respectful treatment given Anonymous and straight-faced bits like this:

The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church’s spokesman, gave the numbers of Sea Org members (8,000), of Scientologists in the Tampa-Clearwater area (12,000) and of L. Ron Hubbard’s books printed in the last two and a half years (67 million). But asked about the church’s membership, Mr. Davis said, “I couldn’t tell you an exact figure, but it’s certainly, it’s most definitely in the millions in the U.S. and millions abroad.”

He said he did not know how to account for the findings in the American Religious Identification Survey that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008.

1:38PM

Beltran, Reyes, Rodriguez and hGH

As someone who doesn't much care if players take drugs you might think that I'd find all the sort of but not really insinuations that have lately been made in the New York papers (typical example here) kind of sleazy. Truth told I don't. A few points in no real order:

1—If you go to a shady-seeming doctor who's been charged with dope peddling, people really aren't out of line in wondering if something's up.

2—Major League Baseball's testing program is very very good at doing what it's supposed to do, which is give players an incentive to not test positive for certain drugs. That players are not testing positive for drugs they know they'll be tested for does not mean they're not on drugs. Lots of players doubtless are on drugs!

3—I'm not aware of any real reason to think that hGH gives any performance advantage in baseball. On the other hand that (some unknown percentage) ballplayers take it suggests that they have reason to think it does.

4—You're crazy if you don't think ballplayers are 'blood doping.' Pool players do it!

5—I haven't done any real research into it and should do so before spouting off, but the 'platelet-rich plasma treatments' Jose Reyes is said to have received sound an awful lot like something that would get you a long ban from cycling, which isn't to say he did anything wrong.

6—If writers get into the speculation and veiled insinuation racket they get whacked as witch hunters, and if they don't they get whacked for ignoring the obvious.

7—There are lots of good doctors in America and going to a Toronto-based doctor to get anti-inflammatory drugs without cluing in the surgeon who's supposed to be supervising your rehab is kind of strange.

8—Sometimes reporters and columnists know more than they can say outright in print. (Of course sometimes they're just talking out their asses about things they don't know about.)

9—I don't understand why 'blood doping' or using hGH to heal an injury while under a doctor's supervision should be considered a big deal, and if these treatments work athletes should be allowed to use them.

10—One problem with drug bans is that there are real grey areas. Not every ballplayer using performance enhancing drugs or undergoing performance enhancing therapies is meeting with a quack beneath an underpass buying vials labeled 'Illegal Drugs.'

11—A true thing: Whole Foods' generic Fig Newtons are super cheap and enhance cycling performance!

7:56AM

RA the Rugged Man vs. Floyd Mayweather

This has been around for a while but if it's new to you, it's new. The interview starts off with 'When are you going to fight someone your own size?' and gets way better from there, with Floyd claiming he runs boxing and that the sport would die without him and sounding genuinely aggrieved in between bouts of schtick. Mildly NSFW but extra relevant given the upcoming Mayweather vs. Undead Shane Mosley fight.

8:32AM

Hey, Mets fan!

The Amazin' Avenue Annual is out and it's free. I'm saying this not to be nice but because it's true: This is work of professional quality and will be an indispensible companion in the seven months to come if you for whatever reason want to follow along with the exploits of Alex Cora and co. Download the .pdf file, print it out, put a big bulldog clip on on it and you're gold, with everything from slick visualizations of player skill sets to a Gary, Ron and Keith drinking game.

I'm not a better blogger because I'm lazy for a few reasons, but a big one is that I'm just skeptical of the form because so much of it comes down to writing about writing about writing. That these guys, rather than falling into that trap, have put a book this fun and useful together and put it out there for everyone to enjoy for free makes me much less so. Here's to a bit more of this and many fewer pictures of drunk ballplayers in future.

2:29PM

Blah blah blah

I have a piece here rating baseball's 30 general managers, about which Rob Neyer makes a fair point:

when I see

Andrew Friedman, Tampa Bay Rays

at the top of the list, and

Dayton Moore, Kansas City Royals

at the bottom, I tend to focus more on Rays and Royals than Friedman and Moore. Andrew Friedman is a key performer in an outstanding organization. Dayton Moore is not.

This is absolutely true and something people should always keep in mind when bitching about idiot GMs. Andrew Friedman is a really smart guy, but the 'Andrew Friedman' I rate as the single best GM in baseball is a metonym for the work done by dozens of different people under certain specific conditions. It's not unfair to do this, both because the GM gets the credit or the blame for what goes on and because he has more power than anyone else to decide who those dozens of people are and change those specific conditions if need be, but it is a contrivance. If Omar Minaya were running the Dodgers he'd almost certainly rate in the top half of a list like this, and if Andrew Friedman were running the Royals he'd probably rate in the bottom half.

10:02AM

What not, local edition

1—I'll probably want to write about this at greater length once I've read the whole issue, but check out the difference between the Reader's new package on my neighborhood and the one Time Out ran a few weeks ago, which kind of sums up the difference between two ways of looking at the world.

Reader tease: 'The Hyde Park & Kenwood Issue. Independent politics. Aggressive urban renewal. Ambitious architecture. More bookstores than bars. And the 800-pound gargoyle: the University of Chicago.'

Time Out tease: 'What's wrong with Hyde Park? Equal parts brain and beauty—so why is it a retail and entertainment wasteland?'

Just want to point out that to take today at random, Kenzaburo Oe is giving a free lecture on former U of C prof Tetsuo Najita's 'approach to intellectual history, including Najita’s Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (1997), a landmark study of the rise of an independent school of economic and moral philosophy in 18th–century Japan' and then Doc Films is playing 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' for $5 later. Not sure 'wasteland' is quite the word I'd use.

2The New Yorker's new many thousand word profile of Richard Daley (not available online) is well turned and gives as much insight into him as a man as anything I can remember reading. Still, it's a shame that so many crushing problems are so lightly brushed off. The South and West Sides are hardly the monoliths of crime they're sometimes thought to be, but it's absolutely true that the civic revival has not touched enormous swathes of the city, in some of which people live a nearly Third World life of grim brutality that is not much relieved by knowing that Chicago is a world center for 'molecular gastronomy.' Sparing a few more words to discuss the morality of saving the city by essentially sealing large parts of it off might have been worth the while. Similarly, readers might have done with a bit less about the Richie-Obama relationship and a bit more about the fact that the Illinois deficit now accounts for half the budget, a sum so large that if you laid off every state employee two-thirds the gap would remain.

3—As I've never cared for the Pixies a bit I was enormously entertained to read what Steve Albini had to say about them in this excerpt from an oral history of the band:

I respect them and I certainly have high regard for Kim as a singer and I think Charles is a good guy. I never really liked their music in the way that I liked my favorite bands' music - like the Jesus Lizard, Television, Public Image, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Suicide, Kraftwerk, unique and brilliant bands that I loved, I never really got that level of interest with the Pixies. It's awkward for me to say because I feel like in some way I'm peeing on their birthday cake here. I do geniuinely like and respect the people in that band. I think David Lovering is a great drummer. I think Joey is an innovative guitar player. I think Kim is probably the best singer ever, and I think Charlie is a talented and unique guy. But the things that I like about that band, it's not really the music.

I've always thought it must be hard to be Albini in that you're serving as an engineer to so many bands vastly worse than your own. How do you stop yourself from just rolling your eyes?

7:03PM

The home nine, pt. 6: Left field

What are you going to say about Juan Pierre? Dude hit .365/.392 last year. Overall, left fielders hit .341/.440. So in a season where he hit as he hadn't in years and never, ever will again, he was okay. And in the four years before that he hit .329/.359. A full list of those who hit worse in at least 600 games over that span goes like this: Jason Kendall, Nick Punto, Omar Vizquel and Willy Taveras. The best hope for Sox fans might just be that he gets off to such a bad start that he hits his way out of the majors.

The sad thing is that Pierre isn't even fun to watch. He's so small, with such a 19th century chop-flail-and-run approach, that you'd think he'd at least offer some kind of aesthetic reward. There's nothing. He hits like he's having an asthma attack while swinging a lamp post underwater, and whatever pleasure there is in watching him scamper in the outfield is more than undone by watching his limp throws bounce at the lip of the infield grass and then careen to a dead stop in front of the cutoff man. If there's one guy who's going to cost the Sox a shot at the division, this will be the one.

At least this explains how he ended up on the team.

7:11PM

Boing Boing delivers the goods

I'm sure there are people who will shake their fists at God on seeing this; I'm just wondering how much I'd have to pay to get this guy to set a routine to 'Kerosene' or 'Sex Bomb.' (Yes, I know it's more than I have.)

2:44PM

Mays, ctd.

In a comment below, reader David rightly wants to know just what I'm on about when I say that in addition to being flat stupid, Pete Hamill's recent comments about Willie Mays evoke 'a whole complex of ideas about Mays as a sort of overgrown 12-year-old that always were and still really are kind of fucking racist.'

As many many people have noted before me, one traditional method of presenting some black men as angry, ungrateful or otherwise delusional and pretentious and thus not worth taking seriously has been to contrast them with milder, more pleasant black men less prone to saying unpleasant things. It's a recurring pattern and I'm sure you can think of any number of examples. The point here is that while today he's a secular saint, Jackie Robinson was an extremely controversial figure in his day and there was much muttering in the press about how he didn't know his place, etc. Mays, as a rather determinedly apolitical figure, was one of those held up as Robinson's opposite—as, essentially, a 'good Negro.' (This isn't an observation made in hindsight, by the way—James L. Hicks, renowned for his reporting on the Emmett Till lynching and a longtime editor of the Amsterdam News, wrote an interesting and quite angry column about this in 1955 that you can read here.)

Go back and read some of the contemporary coverage of Mays and it will just blow your mind. Where Hamill retails the legend of Mays playing stickball with little kids in Harlem as an example of how great things were In His Day, this article about it from 1954 is interesting not least for how ridiculously patronizing it is in parts. (Actual headline: 'That Boy's So Full of Play.') And it's entirely typical. Part of presenting Mays as a wholesome, unthreatening figure who salved racial wounds as easily as Robinson irritated them involved portraying him as a natural who didn't have to put a bit of work in to be as great as he was, a literally childlike figure who relied on such benevolent white fathers as drunken buffoon Horace Stoneham and notorious asshole Leo Durocher to guide him through life. This marks a pretty stark contrast to the way the intensely adult Robinson was depicted in the press.

How much of this was Mays consciously guarding his image is an interesting question, and I'm looking forward to reading the actual book Hamill was reviewing largely to get some insight into it. Take the famous incident where someone refused to sell Mays a house in a fancy part of San Francisco because he was black. This is what he had to say about it at the time:

"I've never been through this kind of stuff and I'm not even mad about it now," the normally exuberant "Say Hey Kid" said last night.

"I'd sure like to live in San Francisco, but I didn't want to make an issue about it."

Meanwhile, this is what Mrs. Mays had to say:

"Down in Alabama, where we come from," she said, "you know your place, and that's something, at least. But up here it's all a lot of camouflage. They grin in your face and then deceive you."

A man married to a woman capable of putting things like that probably felt more strongly about being barred from buying a house he wanted because he was black than he expressed by saying 'it sure looks bad for our country.' And was certainly no kid. But hey—stickball!

Mays shouldn't have tried to be anything other than what he felt comfortable being, and I mean it as anything but a slight to point out that a lot of his image is bound up in the racial anxieties of his day. But if people like Hamill are going to drone on about how great baseball myths were In Their Day (I feel duty bound here to point out that I grew up playing stickball in the streets of New York, too—literally!—and I was born in fucking 1978), they should at least think enough about them to notice some of the implications of those myths. The fact that grown black athletes aren't often presented as large 12-year-olds who owe everything to the guiding hand of their white fathers these days is not, when you consider it at all, entirely a bad thing.

5:14PM

Etc., etc.

1—Of course I generally agree with Joe Posnanski's riff on Pete Hamill's embarrassing claim that Willie Mays represents a time when 'the only performance-enhancing drug was joy,' but two points. First, the really risible thing about this line isn't that it ignores the fact that Mays and many of his peers used performance-enhancing drugs, but that it evokes a whole complex of ideas about Mays as a sort of overgrown 12-year-old that always were and still really are kind of fucking racist. Mays was a man, prone to jealousy, bitterness, resentment and the rest of the full range of complex human emotions, not the grinning eunuch he's so often been made out to be. It beggars belief that in 2010 he's still being implicitly held out as 'the good Negro,' but so it goes.

Second, I don't think Pos is quite right to say that steroids 'were not readily available' when Mays played ball. There are well known stories about the San Diego Chargers forcing players to take steroids before the NFL-AFL merger, and I've never for a second believed that steroids entered the game with Canseco and peers. I will buy that they entered the sport later than they did elsewhere, because baseball always had a culture of belief that training for strength would hurt your game, but there's a lot of circumstantial reason to think they were being used as early as the 1960s.

2—It really is quite bizarre that George Orwell has become something of a conservative icon, and while I like Matthew Yglesias titling his post 'George Orwell Was a Socialist,' he could be even more emphatic about  it. Here, for example, is a famous Orwell essay from 1941 in which he argues for the nationalization of 'lands, mines, railways, banks and major industries' and the limitation of income so that 'the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one' as preliminary steps toward the society he'd like to see.

3—This will be of extremely limited interest to anyone who isn't a Chicagoland cyclist who enjoys long rides through scenic industrial decay, but this is a really nice article on the Calumet-Sag Trail. I can't wait to ride it.

3:10PM

Damn

Guru has had a heart attack and is in a coma, according to DJ Premier, who would know. I'm more than pulling for him—GangStarr's second record was the first CD I ever bought with my own money, and their record signing for Moment of Truth at the Sam Goody on Sixth Avenue was one of two times I've ever stood in line to get an autograph. Talk about an act with a style built to last...

11:35AM

The Atlantic

The Atlantic Monthly has been sort of not such a compelling read since it was given a hideous and unnecessary design makeover, and it looks like they've blown up their website as well. I can't recall the last redesign I've seen that was so clearly done by clueless committee, but this one pretty much destroyed the site's usefulness. I don't know how to make money online, but taking a wrecking ball to your site probably isn't the answer. While I'm complaining, they should really bring in the great Daniel Larison, as reading his mockery of the ridiculous, drippy CW to be found on several of their less interesting 'channels' or 'voices' or whatever they're called would more than make up for the lousy redesign, and he could contribute interesting articles on Byzantine history and how America should have stayed out of World War I to the print magazine, which would certainly liven it up.