General

Deflated balls…

1 Comment

So you’re an American football fan looking forward to the Super Bowl this coming Sunday and, unless you also happen to be one of those rare football fans living in a cave, have heard about Deflategate or Ballghazi or whatever they’re calling it:  The fact that the New England Patriots were found to have 11 of their 12 footballs deflated below the level they should be dictated by the NFL’s rules in the semi-final game against the Indianapolis Colts.  (Worth noting: in the NFL, each team brings and plays with their own set of balls and it was found almost every one of the Patriots’ balls were underinflated while none of the Colt’s balls were)

I’ve heard a lot from commentators since then.  Some outright state that deflating the ball to the levels found in the Patriots’ balls is not worth making much of.  Others feel this is part and parcel of the Patriots’ modus operandi, ie they were already were found and punished for cheated a few years before and this is par for the course.

Frankly, I didn’t know if underinflating a ball would have that much of an impact on a game until I read this:

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/ballghazi-the-new-england-patriots-lose-an-insanely-low-number-of-fumbles.html

To all those who either scoff at the underinflation of balls or were, like me, unsure if such a thing would matter, please consider the statistics presented above.  It shows the Patriots since around 2007 have led the league –strikingly!– in having the least amount of fumbles despite the large amount of plays performed, by an order of magnitude which is statistically incredible.

A few years back there were those who scoffed at the advantages of using performance enhancing drugs for baseball players, noting that having more muscles doesn’t help you hit a fastball.  Yet the reality was that when the baseball league decided to clean up their act, the number of home runs dropped dramatically and are now near the norm statistically.

For me, this relates directly with “Deflategate”: The Patriots were using underinflated balls, who knows for how long now, and they were doing so because they obviously felt it was beneficial for them to do so.  The statistics above may well point out the “why”.

Now that the Patriots’ have been “found out” and I’m sure the league will be far more careful in checking out ball pressure, I’ll be very curious to see how the Patriots’ fumble statistics look like in the future.  Will they fall more within the normal range of other teams?

I will not be shocked if they do.

General

Monday morning…

Nothing like starting the work week in total panic…thanks to your alarm not going off.

Will have to check what exactly happened.  Electricity went out for a while on Saturday and I thought we had the alarm clock squared away.  Turned out not to be the case and I feel like I’m still trying to catch up on things.

General

Kennewick Man mystery soon solved…?

So says the article by Jacqueline Howard on Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/22/kennewick-man-dna-test_n_6516562.html

The mystery of Kennewick Man is a fascinating one as it relates to the skeletal remains of someone who died 9500 years ago and whose remains were found on the shores of the Kennewick River in Washington.  Given the age of the skeleton, a great deal of curiosity surrounds his ancestry.  Native Americans claim him for their own as a distant ancestor and want his remains returned to them so that he may be properly reburied.  Scientists want to keep and study the remains so they may get a clearer idea of who this very ancient American was and what his genetic ties are to other ancient peoples.

It would appear that that later question may soon be answered.

Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Books/Literature

Ancient Scrolls Burned by Mt. Vesuvius…

…deciphered by new X-Ray technique?  Read all about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/science/more-progress-made-toward-learning-contents-of-herculaneum-scrolls.html

Basically we have several scrolls that were found burned in the town of Herculaneum, a town close to Pompeii, which suffered the same fate during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius back in 79 A.D.

Until now there was no way to “pull apart” the scrolls to try to read the material on them as doing so would destroy them.  Now, however, thanks to a new X-Ray technique, there is a way to “see” the indentations of the writing on the scrolls without actually doing anything to them.

The exciting part of this?  David Sider, a professor of classics at New York University put it succinctly within the article:

“For a scholar, it would be wonderful to have a manuscript of Virgil written in his lifetime, because what we have are medieval manuscripts which have suffered many changes at the hands of copyists.”

Fascinating stuff!

Movies

9 Baffling First Drafts of Classic Movie Posters…

Used to be one of the biggest selling points for movies (before the internet gave you all manner of information about the film as it was being made) was the movie poster.  I’ve commented before on how I first learned of Escape From New York thanks to its beautiful, iconic poster…

But like all things in life, the “perfect” image in a movie poster often arrived after considerable work and the discarding of ideas.  Some of those early poster ideas, it turns out, were really terrible given the iconic images we eventually got.

Cracked.com offers a delightful list of 9 “Baffling” first drafts of movie posters, and each and every one of them certainly fits the bill:

http://www.cracked.com/article_22046_9-baffling-first-drafts-classic-movie-posters.html

Alas, there is no “baffling” first draft of Escape From New York presented within this list, but easily my favorite “what the hell were they thinking” first poster draft has to go to:

…Good God…

If you liked that, you need to check out the rest!

 

 

Movies

American Sniper…and liar?

When the first trailers for American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial film starring Bradley Cooper (already a HUGE box office success) came out, I was entranced.  The trailer connected with me like few recent trailers have.  After seeing it, I absolutely, positively wanted to see the film.

Today, shortly after the film’s release, my huge interest in seeing the film has dropped to zero and I no longer have any interest in seeing it.  The reason is simple: The book this film was based on has been found to be, to put it kindly, fast and loose with certain facts.

One of the novel’s “facts”, in particular, is author and “American Sniper” Chris Kyle’s assertion (repeated several times by him to the media) that he got into a fight with -and beat up on- Jesse Ventura.  This assertion landed Mr. Kyle and, after he was killed, his estate, in court.

Mr. Ventura claimed Mr. Kyle’s story was an outright lie and that this lie defamed his character.  Though defamation of character suits are often hard to prove, much less win, Mr. Ventura did both and stands to make a tidy sum from the victory:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news-and-politics/jurisprudence/2015/01/american-sniper-lawsuit-chris-kyle-told-lies-about-jesse-ventura.html

The article linked to above mentions other “dubious” claims made by Mr. Kyle in his book.  While many, if not most, involve things that happened outside his military life and therefore are hard to verify, I nonetheless completely lost my interest in this work.

Understand, I know almost all biographical films stretch/compress/change the truth to suit their needs.  For that matter, I know there have been biographical films that merged several real life people into one character for the sake of streamlining their story.

But at least in these cases the biographical material follows something that actually happened and, one hopes, the makers get the spirit if not the complete and total minute by minute reality of the situations they’re presenting.

I know the whole Jesse Ventura thing is not used in the film and it has been purged from the book but, again, if several untruths are uncovered, does it not make us question how much of what is presented is “real”?

Again, for me, this is a no-brainer.  If the film was presented as a fictional work, I’d be there.  But as a biography, I’m uncomfortable supporting something that can’t be trusted to be real.

Movies, TV

Michael Mann…Hollywood’s Greatest Hack?

So wonders Daniel Engber for Slate Magazine, who went on an epic quest to watch all the movies and TV shows Mr. Mann personally had a hand in making.  He came up with some fascinating insights into his work:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2015/01/michael-mann-movies-i-watched-them-all-plus-the-tv-shows-here-s-what-i-learned.html

I recall a while back someone (maybe even Mr. Engber himself!) watched all of Steven Spielberg’s movies and, like Mr. Engber does with Mr. Mann, comes to a realization that certain themes/story ideas tend to repeat themselves.  In the case of Mr. Mann, Mr. Engber notes that it appears Mr. Mann returns to the same general story, complete sometimes with identical dialogue, as if trying to improve on the work.

This does not surprise me.

There are plenty of authors, artists, musicians, and, yes, filmmakers who to some degree or another repeat previous works.  Some do so in plain sight (director Alfred Hitchcock twice made the film The Man Who Knew Too Much, first in 1935 and again in 1956).  Author Clive Clusser, I’ve noted before, tended -at least until I stopped reading his works- to repeat the same general story that started in the past with the sinking of some famous vessel, then fast forward to the “near future” where his books took place and the hero has to recover the sunken vessel and its usually deadly cargo before the bad guys do.

James Bond films have/had also settled into a standard plot: You started with a slam bang action montage which sometimes, though not always, would have something to do with the film itself.  You had Bond and his usual characters introduced, then Bond would go off to face the situation he was tasked to take care of.  In the process, he would seduce a woman, often a relative innocent but a woman who somehow was involved in the nefarious goings on and she would often become the victim of the bad guys.  Bond would take that woman’s death as incentive to keep after the bad guys, in the process falling for/seducing a second woman (who may working for the bad guys or be a wishy washy mercenary) and with her by his side take on the bad guys and ultimately triumph.

But, as I noted before, sometimes the stories get really similar.  The 1967 Bond film You Only Live Twice was essentially remade as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) which, in turn was essentially remade as Moonraker (1979).

Getting back to Mr. Mann, I find several of his films incredibly good.  Heat, Manhunter, Collateral (though the story gets rather preposterous after a while), and, yes, even the very crazy The Keep.  I also respect what he brought to television.  While Miami Vice might not have aged that well, the show was a watershed moment in TV creation.  I also greatly enjoyed Crime Story.

But I will be the first to say the I could NOT sit though all of Mr. Mann’s works.  Hell, it’s hard enough for me to keep the DVR’s free memory above 40% as it is.

Still, a fascinating article for those interested in reading about Mr. Mann’s film output.

Movies, TV

Interested in Amazon’s latest pilots…?

Here’s a good review of the latest batch of them, from James Poniewozik for Time Magazine:

http://time.com/3670536/amazon-new-pilots-review-man-in-the-high-castle/

Of the ones mentioned, the one that intrigues me the most is The Man In The High Castle.  Based on a story by Phillip K. Dick, the show explores an alternate 1962, where the Nazis and Japanese won WWII and have split the U.S. in two.

The others mentioned, I have to be brutally honest, either mildly (really mildly) appeal to me or don’t at all.  I suspect the odds of me catching any of the others is pretty low.

Speaking of which, anyone else notice we’re living in a hyperentertainment world?  Used to be the amount of entertainment stimulation available to you was very limited.  Nowadays with the internet, cable, DVD/BluRay, Netflix, Red Box, Hulu, Amazon, etc. etc. etc. you have to be picky about exactly what you have time for.  At any given moment you have access to literally thousands of songs, movies, TV shows, books, apps, video games, etc. etc.

For my part I have a very large collection of DVDs/BluRays and it scares me to think how much money I’ve spent over the years buying various features…and how many of them I have yet to see.  Just off the top of my head, I recently picked up X:Men Days of Future Past (have yet to see it), The Long Goodbye (seen it before but wanted to see it again…yet haven’t), Jodorowsky’s Dune (have yet to see it), Breakheart Pass (loved this Charles Bronson film but its been a long time since I’ve seen it and wanted to revisit it), Roshomon (one of the few “classic” Kurasawa films I have yet to see), 8 1/2 (considered one of Fellini’s best films yet one I have yet to see).  And that’s not to mention the various TV series I picked up complete sets of and wanted to see or re-see but haven’t had the time.  Among others, I have the complete series sets of Perry Mason, Mannix, Twilight Zone, Thriller, Farscape, and Battlestar: Galactica.  I’ve seen most of Farscape and Battlestar: Galactica (new series) when they aired, but always wanted to revisit them.  If only I had the time!

Maybe one day when I’m old(er) and retired…

General

Canadian Target’s failure…

Yesterday I read that all the Target stores in Canada were going to shut down.  To me, this was a mighty strange thing.  I like Target well enough.  It’s a decent place to pick up stuff at reasonable prices, from electronics to DVD/BluRays to Food (human as well as pet) to candy to clothing to…well, you get the idea.  Target, like Walmart, is a “one stop shop”, where you can find just about all your needs in one convenient location.

So why would a store that is so successful in the United States be a failure in Canada?  Turns out there was a pretty good reason.  Check it out in this article presented in Slate magazine and by Jordan Weismann and, in particular, the damning photographic evidence that explains better than anything else the reason for Target’s failure north of the border:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/01/15/target-closing-in-canada-these-pictures-show-why-it-failed.html

The Blog of E. R. Torre