unemployed

Well the fact that I haven't posted in so long means that I'm succeeding in my goal of not spending my days in front of my computer. In fact, this first week off has already been pretty productive. I haven't been doing anything too exciting, just getting stuff done that always gets put off, and that feels nice.

Last night Krysta and I enjoyed a fine performance by our friend Kathleen at a less than fine venue, The Cat Club on Sunset. The group that performed before Kathleen was turned up painfully loud. Which is a shame because their songs were sort of catchy, but it was just too much. Anyway, Kathleen just finished her first EP and it sounds great.

My fantasy team managed to pull of a convincing 8-2 win over James' team, leaving me tied for first at the moment.

And now I'm off to hear Flight of the Conchords play at Amoeba. I love Hollywood.

winding down

I'm days away from finishing up another job, and already planning a lot more than I'll actually accomplish in my time off. I'm going to try to stay away from the computer a little, except for watching baseball. Hopefully I'll find a good book, watch some good movies, and take care of some overdue spring cleaning.

I discovered Indexed the other day, a cute little blog that most people seem to have discovered a long time ago. She's even published a book! Anyway, its as cute as Venn diagrams will ever be.

fantasy week wrap-up

Well my team, despite taking a commanding lead early in the week, decided to just stop hitting on Thursday and so I took a tough 3-7 loss. That leaves me at 11-9 for the young season, and tied for second place, 2 games out of the lead. Two weeks down, twenty to go.

Here are this week's "awards", starting with the undesirables...

Goat (hitter): I thought Prince Fielder was taking up space on my roster, but what kind of world are we living in when David Ortiz posts a .190OPS? Ouch.

Goat (pitcher): CC Sabathia continues to suck. 3.1IP and a 24.30ERA and 4.20WHIP.

MVP (hitter): Prince Albert woke up, with 3HR, 7RBI, and a 1.392OPS. Carlos Pena was a close second.

MVP (pitcher): Cole Hamels was kind of insane, going 14IP with 9K, 0.64ERA and 0.79WHIP, helping Biscuit Bombers counter my really good pitching week with an awesome pitching week. Damn you!

The Cardinals had a decent road trip, although it was discouraging to see Piniero struggle so much at the end of it. The Brewers are up next, which means hopefully I'll get to do some gloating to the brother-in-law.

welcome back, tv

Last night marked the post-writers' strike returns of two of the more entertaining shows on television, 30 Rock and The Office. Battlestar Galactica returned last Friday, and was good! Battlestar isn't always very good at all, but it was nice that it started the season strong. Now I just have to look forward to watching Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime.

I finished watching Mad Men Season 1 this week, and I was glad the show picked up in the second half of the season. It wasn't really holding my interest for a few episodes in the middle, but it finished strong and I'm looking forward to Season 2.

In other news, is it 1993? There are new albums out by R.E.M., The B-52's, and The Counting Crows!!?? Add to that the fact that there's flooding in Missouri and its a little bit weird. It was an OK year, I suppose, but there's really no need to repeat it.

Have a good weekend everybody!

baseball things

You've been fairly warned: this post is about baseball. Sorry, everyone.

My fantasy team managed to go 8-2 in Week 1, good enough for a 1.5 game lead. I drafted a late round steal in Rick Ankiel, who posted a 1.226 OPS with 3HR and 6 RBI. He was easily my team MVP. My team's biggest letdown? Adam Dunn managed a meager .176 Slugging %. The only reason to have Adam Dunn is so he'll hit home runs. He did not do this. Hopefully he comes around soon.

Speaking of MVP, here are the league "awards" I gave out for Week 1...

MVP (batter): Derek Lee, posting a 1.303OPS with 3HR and 4RBI

MVP (pitcher): Ben Sheets pitched 15.1 innings with 15K, 0.00ERA and a 0.59 WHIP...ridiculous.

Of course, these awards are probably little consolation to The Beer Runs, who went 3-6.

GOAT (batter): Robinson Cano, who committed 2E while only managing a .391OPS. Hard to call a player on a winning team a 'goat', but this was just bad.

GOAT (pitcher): If Pedro Martinez had done any better than a 10.8ERA (or just not pitched at all), San Diego Sliders would have gone at least 5-5 rather than 4-6...oops!

In the real world, the Cardinals are off to a pretty solid start, although last night's loss was disappointing. We just have to accept that our bullpen, which has been so good for a while, is just not that solid this year, and we're going to blow some close games as a result.

cover up

This is required reading: Part 1, Part 2, and today we get Part 3. Will the saga continue? Please?

Its time for this week's music post, but I'll admit that there are lots of things I've got going on at the moment, so I'll try to keep this short.

I appreciate a good cover of a good song. A while back I made a playlist which consisted of several sets of 3 songs each. The first song was an original song by an artist. The next two songs were covers of that artist, but they had to be two different songs covered by two different artists. For example:

1. The Beatles "Let It Be"
2. Fiona Apple "Across the Universe"
3. Brad Mehldau "She's Leaving Home"

The exercise was pretty interesting, and made for an enjoyable playlist even apart from the "novelty" factor. For an artist to have had two different songs covered by two different artists usually means they were a pretty significant songwriting force in pop music. The covered artists on the list include Bob Dylan, Prince, Sting, Leonard Cohen, etc. Here's a PDF of the whole list. Some of my favorites? Aimee Mann's cover of "One", Johnny Cash's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Etta James "You Can Leave Your Hat On." I think Sinead O'Conner covering Nirvana and Sophie B. Hawkins covering Bob Dylan are two of the more amusing combinations on the list.

If you think I've left any out, or have made an egregious oversight in my selection of the cover versions, let me know. I'm always looking to add to/improve on this playlist.

school days

Well the Cardinals got off to a great start last night. Too bad it doesn't count.

Unfortunately, I could have really used the fantasy stats from Ankiel and Wainwright. Alas, its just part of the inherent frustration in fantasy sports.

Jeff sent me this cartoon...its fun times. Read it. Laugh. Love life.

Thanks to the kindness of a friend, I was able to do a lot of video capturing this weekend. The primary reason for this was to capture the footage from our wedding, but I took the time to digitize a lot of old material from film school as well, and some footage from the Polish Music Center's main event last year. Despite how awful some of the material I produced in school is on the whole, there are parts of which I'm kind of proud. I had lost one of my short films to a bad tape, but I was able to re-capture all of the raw footage, so I'm playing around with that again. There are definitely some things about film school that I miss. And some things I don't.