Sports

We had eight days of movies scheduled; we have completed four days. Halfway mark! I am tired but very happy; our hotel continues to be perfectly positioned and the food’s still quite good. There’s this little counter service Chinese place next to the hotel which is unexpectedly tasty. Highlights so far: Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which is some of the best cosmic horror I’ve seen in a while. Not Lovecraftian. It lays out the situation in the first fifteen minutes, so that as Georgina Campbell discovers the scope of the horror, we have the same retroactive realizations she does. Smart movie. ...

No, wrong, no. Yes, the new NFL rule is going to change the game on the field. But that’s OK. The game on the field is too dangerous. It won’t fix the danger completely. Who cares? Concussions are literally ruining minds. Any steps to limit this are good. It’s ridiculously reckless to complain about safety measures on the basis that the game will change in a way you don’t like. ...

I love American ingenuity. Here is Ultimate Tak Ball! (original) People are really playing this.

Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform. ...

The Boston sports world is a weird place. Intense, fanatical, whiny, hopeful – it’s the kind of place that can support two sports radio stations without any problem whatsoever. Very macho world, of course. Sports. So the cool thing of the morning is this: Steve Buckley, who’s one of the reasonably big names in Boston sports journalism, came out (original). He writes for the (conservative) Boston Herald, and he has a frequent guest spot on (fairly conservative) WEEI, so that makes his environment just a little bit more unwelcoming than if he wrote for the Globe. Big kudos to him. ...

I wouldn’t need the League Pass if I was still living in Boston. But down here? It’s awesome; worth it for the Celtics games alone but when I can check out other interesting games at moment’s notice… that’s superb. I wish it was in HD. The lack of high def is mitigated by the presence of home announcers sometimes. Listening to Tommy and Mike makes me feel all at home. ...

Dear Red: (original) Thank you for 1986; and all the others, but thank you for 1986. That was the year I learned to love basketball: packed around a little television in my dorm, watching the fuzzy images of Bird and Parish and McHale storm through the league. My dad scalping tickets for the playoffs. 36-6 in the third quarter. The Celtics. Thank you.

Hey! (original) Manny is a goof A big fat goof, but we love him David Ortiz having a ton of fun Yeah, might as well jump! Once again: old enough to drink? That’s our general manager! (They’re thumbnails. Follow the links. Celebrate!)

Stupid baseball. OK, so you have a man on third, two outs, it’s the top of the 11th inning. The score is tied. Your pitcher runs up three balls on the batter, no strikes. You have two choices; you can either pitch to the batter, who knows you’re in a hole, or you can shrug and walk him and go for the next batter. I dunno, it’s not like I’ve run the numbers, but I can’t see how the second choice isn’t better. You run the risk of additional runs, sure. On the other hand, there is no possible scenario for the third out which does not stay the same or improve if you have the man on first, since you now have the force out at second, removing a possible throwing error from the outcome matrix. ...

David Pinto comments on the Beckett trade here and here. Both times he notes that the Red Sox are going for “win now” rather than rebuilding — but it doesn’t seem to me like that’s a wildly goofy thing to do. The Red Sox are one year off from a World Series victory and they have three postseason appearances in a row; in theory, at least, it makes sense to try and keep the streak going rather than rebuild. ...