Heartache begins anew

Even though it's still March, today is Opening Day (3.0). We had a couple of games in Japan, and the made-for-TV opening of the Nationals new stadium last night, but today, the season began in earnest.

And the Giants are already getting killed. They're currently down 0-4 in the bottom of the third inning, and have stranded multiple runners on base. At least they're getting on base, I suppose.

Expect more posts like this throughout the year.

#1 Seeds Un-busted

In perhaps the biggest upset of all - and for the first time in history - all four #1 seeds have advanced to the Final Four. Davidson (and the unreal Stephen Curry) were the only underdog to put up much of a fight over the weekend, but, alas, the dream died with their 57-59 defeat at the hands of Kansas. The remaining story lines, as far as I can tell:

Can Bill Self not beat himself for once?
Will the refs ever call a foul on UCLA again?
Do members of the MSM have pictures of Tyler Hansbrough tacked above their beds, or do they just write love letters to him in their secret personal diaries?
Was Memphis merely pretending to not be able to shoot free throws?

Personally, I just hope that having what are supposed to be the four best teams in the country going head to head means we'll get to see plenty of good basketball this weekend. It will help make up for not getting to see the chap-tastic Texas cheerleaders anymore.

The Bell Tolls for Thee, Ben Braun

After a second-round NIT loss to the Ohio State University, Cal finally dropped the axe on Ben Braun. Reactions are varied, from respectful to torn to jubilant, but I'll admit I don't know how I feel about the move. On the one hand, 219-154 seems like a pretty good record over the past 12 years (of course, I'm no mathematician). On the other hand, this is my most enduring memory of Cal basketball:

March 2002 was a pretty glorious time in my life. I was living about twenty minutes outside of Amsterdam, and making the most of it. My friends and I were planning a massive St. Patrick's Day bash, as if we suddenly needed a reason to get intoxicated. As a Cal fan, still stinging from a 1-10 football season (the only victory a 9/11-rescheduled cupcake game against Rutgers), I was elated to my Golden Bears reach the second round of the tournament. It really wasn't a difficult decision: I'd head into Amsterdam ahead of my friends to watch my sixth-seeded Bears take on the third-seeded Pitt Steelers Panthers.

Perhaps I should have been concerned when I couldn't round up any of my friends to go with me (None of them Cal students, hardly any Americans, but still). I definitely should have been worried when I realized the game was in Pittsburgh. Nonetheless, I went happily into the city, with a pair of shamrock-shaped sunglasses, ready to celebrate Ireland and Cal's inevitable advancement to the Sweet Sixteen. The game started off pretty well. I befriended a few other Americans in the bar. The waitress was cute and, I thought, flirting with me with that Dutch-accented English I enjoyed so much. The halftime score: 25-26, bad guys. An upset was brewing, I could feel it. This was going to be the best St. Patrick's Day.

Three minutes into the second half, Cal's up 32-28. I'm sending drunken, random text messages across an ocean and a continent to my friends back in Berkeley, celebrating the Bears and arguing about the best way to pick up a waitress. (Full disclosure: I am a jerk.) My new friends in the bar are planning to come out drinking in the Dutch suburbs with me. Right about then, the wheels fall off:

The next time our waitress comes by, I get the 'are you sure you want another beer?' treatment. I do, and she is not impressed. And then:

Pittsburgh held California without a point for 9½ minutes during a decisive 16-0 run, which began with Cal leading 32-28 with 16:40 remaining and ended with Pitt up 44-32 with 7:08 left. The Golden Bears went more than 11 minutes without scoring a basket, and 15-plus minutes with only one basket.

(Thanks, ESPN.com archives, for ripping my heart out anew.)

Pitt went on to blow the Bears out of the water. Final score 63-50. My new friends offered feeble condolences; the waitress couldn't have ignored me more if I didn't exist. (By then, I was wishing I didn't exist.) I paid my tab in then-cheap Euros, and ventured out into the cold, Dutch night. I got lost on the way to the train station, and a walk that should have taken 15 minutes took 30. When I finally reached Amsterdam Centraal, only two of the 15 or so people were there, the rest having begged off for one reason or another.

After as much sympathy as an English girl and her disinterested American boyfriend could offer, we set off for an Irish bar, hoping to drown my sorrows in Guinness. We had all been to this bar before on several occasions, but tonight, for some reason, none of us could find it. After much wandering around, and not a few stops into other bars and coffee shops in the area, we were ultimately reduced to walking up and down the streets, vainly searching for an Irish pub that seemed to no longer exist. I walked up to an indescribable cast of skeevy hash dealers and generally crazy people, asking directions in the sort of horrendous faux-Irish accent that only a drunken, pissed off American can manage. Oh, and I was still wearing my giant shamrock sunglasses, courtesy of the good folks who make Killian's Irish Red. Needless to say, these people I was talking to were not anxious to help me.

We never did find the bar, and I'm pretty sure that's the night I lost my hat.

All of which begs the question: If this is what comes to mind when I think of Cal Basketball (Well, that and watching Tony Gonzalez push opponents around and saying to myself 'Hm, he should probably play football.'), can I possibly consider the departure of Ben Braun to be a bad thing?

OK, one last link: Goldenblogs has some thoughts of the future of Cal Basketball that are worth keeping in mind as this search goes forward.

Woe...

It's going to keep getting worse, 49er fans. At least Eddie DeBartolo cheated in a way that made the team better...

Words fail me. I'm going to attempt to take solace in my fantasy baseball drafts and hopefully not remember this come April.

What is, what was, what might be

I recently found out that Jesse Ball won the 2008 Plimpton Prize for Fiction (Thanks, Firefly!), which seemed like as good excuse as any to reread Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness. Ball's novel is virtually impossible to categorize. A philistine might call it a mystery, someone with more pretension than me could venture the phrase 'prose-poem' that I hear way too much of lately.

What the book is, in my opinion, is a beautifully written exploration of Truth, and of how we know things that we think we Know. The reader and the protagonist, James Sim, are both kept on extremely shaky ground from the moment Sim encounters a wounded man in a public park. Things get progressively weirder throughout the book, until it is impossible to know who and what to believe.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, I suppose, but all stories have to end somewhere. And I'm pretty certain I know what was going to happen next, so my only disappointment was that I had to put the book down and move on to something else.

C-ro, my friend and erstwhile programming adviser, compared the underlying plot of Samedi to the classic graphic novel The Watchmen. So now I want to reread that and also The Things They Carried, another exploration of the nature of truth by Tim O'Brien. So add those to rereads to all the new books I'm working on

I'm still getting the hang of reviewing books without spoiling them. Feel free to let me have it in the comments.

Bracket Quick Hits

I'm far from an expert as far as college basketball goes, but let's take a quick tour through the brackets anyway, before you finalize your picks. Indulge me...

Congratulations, Mount St. Mary's, on winning the right to be pummelled by UNC and the gritty-white Tyler Hansbrough. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think it would have been a travesty to have a twenty-loss team in the tournament.

Beware repeat sleepers. Just because George Mason had a great run in 2006 doesn't mean they're the same team. Only two starters are left from their stint as cinderella. And Notre Dame is good...

Kansas is good. I know that's obvious, and I know it's lame to pick a number one seed to win it all, but they impressed me in the Big 12 championship game against Texas. I'm just saying.

Siena over Vanderbilt. I don't know why, I just feel it. The favorites can't win every time.

Gonzaga no longer qualifies as a sleeper, folks. Can we please move on?

I don't like Georgetown. Don't think they'll survive the first weekend (I have them beating UMBC and losing to Davidson).

I've already explained why Memphis isn't going anywhere. Out to a phyisical Mississippi State team. Thanks, Texas-Arlington, but no thanks.

Speaking of Miss St, Oregon is soft. So at least one 8-seed should make it to day two. Keep that in mind when you're flipping coins for the 8/9 games.

I'm not impressed with any of the Big-10 schools. You'd better have a really good reason for putting any school other than Wisconsin in the Sweet 16. Some ugly basketball in the Big-10.

Texas is really talented and athletic. When I watched the Kansas game, though, they fell apart as soon as their shooters went cold. It's a skill offesnse, not a system. If they're not hitting their shots, they're done.

UCLA is good. They impressed me by playing strong against Stanford in the Pac-10 final with what seemed like maybe 50% of Kevin Love. I technically have them out in the Elite Eight, but I just can't stand having too much chalk on my board. And I hate the Bruins.

I think San Diego's run ends against UConn. They had a nice run, but still.

It's not Duke's year. Again, just a feeling.

Anyway, that's my completely uninformed, completely arbitrary jaunt through the bracket. No offense if I didn't talk about your team - I probably couldn't think of a random stance to take on them. Good luck in your brackets - even though MidMajority.com says you shouldn't be filling them out.

Bill James Gets Around

Apparently, running the Boston Red Sox isn't enough of a challenge for Bill James (there's some baseless invective straight out of my mother's Albuquerque basement for you). Here in Slate, he's figured out when a basketball game is actually over. Since, you know, I guess it's not over when the clock says 00:00. Or something.

The formula:

Number of points team is ahead
- 3
+ .5 points if leading team has the ball or - .5 if trailing team has the ball (negative numbers become zero)
Square the result

If the resulting number is greater than the number of seconds left in the game, the lead is safe.

Ah, screw it - there's a widget embedded in the Slate article.

Don't mind me - I'm having a hard time caring about basketball after Cal's sorry excuse for a season (funny, I feel like I said something very similar during the bowl games). Besides, this will come in handy when I start placing my foolish, under-informed wagers on the games. And not to mention my brackets. Oh, Lord, my brackets.

Don't call it a guest post: Selection Sunday

Ed. note: In honor of Selection Sunday, I’m handing the reins over to a dear friend of We Have Hair, for what is hopefully the first of many contributions to this site. Not only is she one of the smarter people I know, but she also knows a whole lot more than I do about college sports. Take it away, Firefly:

I recently read Mystic River (I know, I know, an Oscar-winning motion picture from years ago—I'm behind the times). While the book itself was stunning in many ways, there was one specific passage that stuck with me. At the start of chapter four, Lehane uses a baseball game to bring us into the mind of one of his main characters:

"Dave found himself paying more attention to the lights and the fans an Anaheim Stadium itself than to the actual game.

He watched the faces in the bleachers most-the disgust and defeated fatigue, the fans looking like they were taking the loss more personally than the guys in the dugout. And maybe they were. For some of them, Dave figured, this was the only game they'd attend this year. They'd brought the kids, the wife, walked out of their homes into the early California evening with coolers for the tailgate party and five thirty dollar tickets so they could sit in the cheap seats and put twenty-five dollar caps on their kids heads, eat six-dollar rat burgers and $4.50 hot dogs and watered-down Pepsi and sticky ice cream bars that melted into the hair of their wrists. They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That's why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals--buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope.

Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back to out otherwise winless lives.

Win for me. Win. Win. Win.

But when your team lost, that collective hope crumbled into shards and any illusion of unity you'd felt with your fellow parishioners went with it. Your team had failed you and only served to remind you that usually when you tried, you lost. When you hoped, hope died. And you sat there in the debris of the cellophane wrappers and popcorn and soft, soggy drink cups dumped back into the numb wreckage of your life, facing a long dark walk back through a long dark parking lot with hordes of drunk, angry strangers, a silent wife tallying up your latest failure, and three cranky kids. All so you could get into your car and drive back to your home, the very place from which this cathedral had promised to transport you."

I have seen many debates on what it means to be a sports "fan" these days, and they all make me feel guilty for not having a "team" and a closet full of jerseys. As if I'm somehow less of fan because I love sports for the game itself rather than who’s playing in it. I'm just as excited to watch Amherst play Williams as I am to watch Michigan State take on Michigan. (During the fall I've been known to watch nothing but college football from Thursday night until the wee hours of Sunday morning.) When I tell people I don’t have an allegiance to any one team, they always seem surprised. They’ll ask where I grew up (Chicago, and I can remember the 1985 Super Bowl-shuffling Bears, and Michael Jordan’s Bulls teams of the 1990s) or went to school—as if an allegiance should have arisen somewhere in there if I was truly a sports fan.

For me, my passion for sports comes from a deep-seated love of the process of the games. The hope of winning for any given team on any given day, rather than who in particular is playing, is what makes sports so compelling. If there is a chance for a surprising team to pull out a win, I'm all eyes and ears, even if it’s in a sport I don’t normally follow like NASCAR, lacrosse, or curling. And that is what Lehane nailed about sports that makes me a fan: it’s the immeasurable hope found in the playing of the game.

There is no better example of how this hope fills my soul and makes my life more bearable than the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It arrives just as spring is trying with all its might to break through the clouds, rain, and lashing winds. It arrives when teasing, 50-degree afternoons are weighted down by the last dregs of winter, and there isn't a three-day weekend in sight until Memorial Day. March is the long, fallow patch when I struggle hard, treading water corporate office-style, to keep my head above ground while waiting for the sun to stay out past 7pm.

And in these final spasms of chilliness, a field of 65 will battle it out, hope versus hope, first-timers and surprise winners against storied programs and national powerhouses. Over 2-hour periods, buzzer-beaters will abound, as will amazing plays by people whose names I'll forget as quickly as I learned them. Their battles on the court provide enough distraction from the mundane tasks of the day-to-day, so that when I look back outside there will be leaves on the trees and a new season will have begun.

So I say welcome to Cal State Fullerton, Cornell and Portland State, go get ‘em to Drake, Butler, and Davidson and hello again to the Longhorns, Bruins and Tar Heels alike. And a special thank you to the Georgia Bulldogs, for bringing their own hopes to this weekend with the moxie they’ve shown making it to the SEC conference championship game. And now, I’ll wait anxiously to see which one of them will don that glass slipper and let my hope spring eternal once again.

Ed.: That's a wrap of the inaugral edition of Don't Call it a Guest Post. For further discussion on the state of fandom, check out Leitch's book or this post by Dan Shanoff.

Saying Goodbye

There's a nice farewell to Justin Forsett over at Bears Necessity. I agree with his evaluation (although I don't really see what Forsett's faith has to do with anything, apart from explaining his taking a knee after touchdowns), and share his hopes for Forsett's future. Probably not a top tier back, but he'd be great as the speedy half of a Thunder & Lightning backfield. Dallas comes to mind, but I think they just signed someone to pair with Marion Barber III. (Or maybe not. ESPN.com has Barber as the only RB on the team. OK, then, Forsett would be a good fit for the Cowboys.)

Between Marshawn Lynch and Justin Forsett, Cal has benefited from a strong running game over the past few years. (I remember J.J. Arrington and Adimchinobi "Joe" Echemandu both having strong Berkeley careers as well, in spite of their relative lack of professional success.) It will be interesting to see if the Bears are as strong on the ground in 2008. We all know they didn't want Kevin Hart's help. Jahvid Best looked strong last year as a compliment to Lynch, but he's coming off a hip injury. Hopefully he's back up to speed. A strong running game will go a long way in helping Cal reestablish their place near the top of the Pac 10.

It's baaaaaack

According to Jalopnik, the long lost Chevy El Camino is coming back as...a Pontiac? My family had an early 80s L-Cam when I was a kid, and I loved it. Light blue, not quite car, not quite truck. What could be better?

I'm not wild about the Pontiac-ization of the design, but it's nice to see the ghost of a classic rise back up.

Just a Little Off the Top 03/15/08

Fabulous doesn't even do it justice.




Isn't WithLeather great?

A Little Off the Top 03/14/2008

The Play in CA calls for Ben Braun's job. It's embarassing debacles like last night's game against UCLA that makes me glad I don't have cable. Although I'm sure I'll fold by football season.

Thanks, Mom & Dad

Just when I was about ready to take responsibility for my own misery, Edinburgh University researchers have determined that happiness is in our genes. Take it away, Dr Alexander Weiss:

Although happiness is subject to a wide range of external influences, we have found that there is a heritable component of happiness.

So not only can we not determine the legitimacy of other people's brain states, apparently now we're only somewhat responsible for our own general dispositions. Studying 1000 sets of twins, the researchers were able to determine that basic happiness is about fifty percent genetic, with the rest being accounted for by external factors such as health, wealth, and relationships (and, presumably, big-screen HDTVs).

Then again, what do the Scots know? They deep fry pizza:




(Link to the study found on the always interesting Freakonomics blog.)

PS. Just kidding, mom & dad. Y'all are the best.

Pac 10 Tournament

Cal beat Washington yesterday. After such a mediocre season, they'll have to do more damage in the tournament to sneak into one of the conference's six seeds. Tip off against UCLA is in about 3 minutes. Hopefully they found competent officials this time.

Fingers crossed...

UPDATE: Not so much. Almost makes me glad I was in class...

Sacksophilia

I finally finished Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, and *yawn*, thank god for that. It's not a bad book, don't get me wrong, but there is no steak to go with the four hundred pages of sizzle. Sacks has a lot of great anecdotes, and a Bostoner (Bostonite?) would probably say he was 'wicked awesome' to talk to at a party:

(My video embedding skill are failing me again.)

Still, I can't honestly say I'm a better or even more informed person for having read this book. You could easily skip around from chapter to chapter as stories grab your interest. And I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it. I was hoping for more content, though.

For another take on the book, check this previous post.

Sleeper Watch

I was watching Gonzaga v San Diego at the gym tonight (They have bigger TVs. Sue me.), and Gonzaga doesn't look very good at all. Their entire offense, if you can call it that, seems to consist of Jeremy Pargo running around making crazy plays.

I don't know that Gonzaga really counts as a sleeper these days. They are ranked 22 in the nation, after all. But if tonight bears any resemblance to how they play in the tournament, they won't last long. You've been warned, bracketeers.

Mikey B., we hardly knew ye...

This is getting dangerously close to being old news (and perhaps it already is), but Michael Bloomberg officially withdrew from the race he was never officially in. Count me among the nine people who are sorry to see him go. Not that America was ready to elect a short, Jewish billionaire as president of the United States. But still...

I don't pay much attention to NYC politics. As long as the subways are on time and relatively clean, I don't particularly care (although I do sometimes wonder exactly they're doing with all the city taxes I pay). But Bloomberg always struck me as a great mayor for the city, a confident technocrat who wasn't afraid to call in competent help when confronted with an issue he didn't know much about.

He has a great populist touch, giving out free hot chocolate and sleds to kids during our recent snow storm.

And, most importantly for me, Bloomberg isn't bogged down in partisanship like so many of our politicians. Hell, the man only chose the Republican party because he saw a clearer route to the mayoral nomination. He's not afraid to cross the aisle, to transcend petty Democratic/Republican squabbles, to do what is best for the city.

Now that the wheat has separated from the chaff, we're left with three very competent, very qualified candidates, none of whom I'm particularly excited about. Was I excited about a President Bloomberg? That's probably pushing it. But I do think he possesses the combination of experience, independence and transcendence that we need in our next executive-in-chief. It felt like much less of a compromise, whereas now I'll spend the next eight months trying to distinguish between three ok choices.

Makes me wonder what might have been...

Earth shattering, mind blowing news!

Everyone put down your beverages. Find a comfy chair. This is important:

Marshawn Lynch has a blog.

Now, I'm on the record as being a huge fan of the former Golden Bear / current Buffalo Bills running back, but this is cooler than a faux hawk. Consider:



I can't wait to draft the kid on my fantasy football team again. (OK, I only had him on one team out of three. But still) As a bonus, if he ever gets hurt, he can drive himself off the field:



Marshawn isn't posting very often these days, but hopefully things will pick up when we get closer to football season. Oakland in da house, y'all.

Solid. Solid.

(Thanks to the fine folks at 64MillerLites, where I first discovered this bundle of goodness, and to my buddy C-Ro, for an impromptu lesson on embedding video. I might not understand it, but I have some code I can copy and paste...)