NCAA Football Picks

I see now that I went 7-5 last week. For some reason I thought I was going to come in around 9-3. It felt like a much better week while it was going down on Saturday. But hey, 7-5 for me is like 9-3 for anybody else. And at least I got to think I did 9-3 good all week. Work sent me to Orlando through Wednesday night and pretty much dominated my time, so I only now got the chance to verify my record. It was good while it lasted.

Overall record goes 14-12-1.

Wisconsin at Northwestern (+7)

North Carolina (+3) at BC

Kentucky at Georgia Over 51

Penn State at Michigan State Over 48

Oklahoma at Texas Tech (+6.5)

Oregon at Arizona (+6)

Review: Dissolution

When I reviewed The Billionaire’s Vinegar not too long ago I described my recent dissatisfaction with a couple of books and how it made me nervous that maybe I was just losing my interest since I had started two books consecutively that I didn’t have any desire to finish. That situation caused me to branch out from my stickiness to historical non-fiction, just in case, and I ordered a couple of novels from Amazon. The first is Dissolution, a piece of historical fiction and the subject of this review.

Set in Tudor England, not long after the beheading of Anne Boleyn, this first novel from C.J. Sansom introduces Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked commissioner for Thomas Cromwell. Shardlake is dispatched to a monastery in Scarnsea to investigate the beheading of another of Cromwell’s commissioners that also involved some desecration of the place including a bled out cock and the theft of a holy relic.

Shardlake is accompanied by a young man to whose father he made a promise that he would see to it the kid stayed on the right path and led a successful life, but who had already fallen out of favor due to indiscretions of an amorous sort. Anyway, the monastery is full of suspects, since nearly everyone could be pissed enough at Cromwell’s commissioner if they felt he was there looking for cause to shut the monastery down. It’s a pretty formulaic whodunnit from there, as whodunnit is none of the above. And the “twist”, as it were, is standard or maybe even sub.

Am I supposed to rip a plot that is so devoid of thrills? Which didn’t give me any reason to care about any of the characters? Am I soft if I say that I still enjoyed the book? Because I did. It was a nice read. Not everything has to blow you away.

Dissolution falls squarely into the “Ehh, why the hell not?” class of books. Whether I will feel compelled at any point to read the second book featuring Matthew Shardlake (I think there are four now) is another story. It’s possible, but I wouldn’t put the chances much higher than 50%. There’s a lot of stuff out there I want to read that I think could be excellent. Like the book I just started.

NCAA Picks of the Day

Let’s see … took last week off … I think I was 4-4-1 the week before, which would make me 7-6-1 on the season with the extremely belated start to the year.

BC at Virginia (+4.5)

Clemson at NC State (+7.5)

Nebraska at Kansas Over 43

Stanford (+10.5) at USC

Arizona (+3) at Cal

Missouri at Kansas State (+1.5)

San Jose State at Utah State (-12.5)

Florida at South Carolina (+17.5)

Alabama at Mississippi State Under 43.5

Miami at North Carolina Under 43

Utah (+20) at TCU

Troy State at Arkansas Over 65.5

 

I Wish That I Knew What I Know Now

I was twelve years old for the great majority of the 1993 baseball season. At the time, I resided in Cotati, a little town in Sonoma County, about a 45 minute drive to San Francisco. For the great majority of the 1993 baseball season, San Francisco and the surrounding communities were a good place to be if you wanted to see some good baseball. The Giants, buoyed by Barry Bonds, won 103 games that season. Of course, that did not get them into the playoffs because in 1993 Atlanta was considered a western city and the Braves won 104 games.

I’m writing about this in November of 2009 because, for no particular reason, I started to think about that team yesterday. One of the things that was said quite often in the Bay Area as the 1994 season approached was that it would be hard for the Giants to be that good again (duh!) because 1993 was a year where everyone on the team had a career year. In today’s stathead parlance, we would say that the team should expect a little regression to the mean.

Did everyone really have a career year? Not literally, but there’s quite a bit of truth there. Kirt Manwaring and Royce Clayton were as close to good as they could get, and Robby Thompson was better than he was in his previous good seasons and better than he’d ever be again. Bill Swift and John Burkett anchored the rotation, and the guys who were cobbled together to take the rest of the starts pitched well. Mike Jackson and Rod Beck were the first Rivera and Wetteland.

And so on.

We were even led to believe that Darren Lewis was awesome. Hey, he was the leadoff hitter and made zero errors in centerfield! But D-Lew OPS+ed 70 in 1993, and was the leadoff hitter from mid-May on after Willie McGee scuffled early on. Scuffling Willie McGee was as good as productive Darren Lewis. So everybody on the Giants had a career year in 1993 except the leadoff hitter, who could have scored bushels more runs with Thompson, Will Clark, Bonds, and Matt Williams behind him. An extra bushel of runs would have won the division for the Giants, in all likelihood. And until now, I was under the impression that Darren Lewis was perfectly adequate at worst that season.

But Lewis did prove that you don’t necessarily need a leadoff hitter to get on base in order to win games. Neifi Perez, Corey Patterson, and Willy Taveras thank him.

Review: Mirage

Let me first say that this review is coming from someone woefully ignorant of Napoleon’s career – particularly woeful for someone who claims to enjoy history. Study of the French Revolution and Napoleon is high on my list of desires, but I haven’t made much progress. I think one of the stumbling blocks that keeps me from digging in is my unfamiliarity with the French way of speaking. Even in Nina Burleigh’s Mirage, I was constantly changing the way I pronounced the names of different players in the book, trying to figure out what sounded the most French. It would probably be better to just Anglicize them all and forget about it, but I can’t do it.

Getting away from myself and on to the book, I will say that Burleigh writes nicely and that the book was a fun read. She does a very good job of capturing the allure of Egypt for the French in that time, not just as a colony that would have large strategic benefit to France but as a land which Europeans imagined as totally idyllic and contemplated with wonder.

The book’s focus, or what one would gather would be the focus from the subtitle, is on the crew of scientists and students of the same persuasion which Napoleon brought along on the trip to document all which was discovered on the expedition. It should be noted that these scholars were only invited on an important and wonderful journey and, like most everyone else, not informed of the final destination almost until arrival (although it seems most people would have supposed the destination was Egypt if forced to guess). I think the book suffered from a lack of organization and/or consistent focus on that area.

Particularly in the first half of the book, it sometimes seems more like a very skim review of the whole Egyptian occupation rather than a separate study of the work completed by the savants. It didn’t bother me too much due to my unfamiliarity with all of it, but if I had bought the book with the hope of reading 250 pages about the scientists, I may have been more distressed about the shifting subject matter. Although I obtained value from all of the book, I did enjoy it much more when the scholars and their work were being discussed.

The scientific research, the examinations of ancient landmarks, and the lasting impression on the scientific world left by many of the scholars, regardless of whether those impressions arose from their work in Egypt, were fascinating to learn of. There were men who came up with ideas which began to build toward the theory of evolution; others contributed extremely intricate drawings of creatures in Egypt; each of those who plays a significant role in the book contributed something which was relevant for generations, if not to the present. The opportunity to learn about these men makes Mirage a worthwhile read.

Who’s Up For a Class Action Against Wal-Mart?

Running low on supplies and my weekly shopping trip not scheduled until Sunday, I picked up a package of Wal-Mart’s chicken enchiladas this morning while I was there for a couple necessities. These were their brand, part of a “Marketside” line, kept in the same place as their pizzas. I thought I was in for an easy enough and tasty enough dinner solution appropriate for a day centered around college football viewing. I could not have been more wrong.

The description on the package says

We’ve stuffed corn tortillas with tender chicken, sweet peppers, and cheddar cheese for traditional south-of-the-border flavor.

Bullllllllsheeeeeeitttttttt.

Note the lack of any mention of rice in the above description. But the filling is at least 75% rice. Who the hell puts any rice in their enchiladas, much yet assumes that a consumer will be just fine with it comprising the entire dish when he realizes what is going on upon attempting to consume them?

So, if we get enough people together who have been victimized by the same thing, we can each get our $6.98 back, I reckon. Maybe even some punitive damages. Like another 3 or 4 bucks.

More Pretend Football Picks

I can’t just pretend my historic 3-2 last Saturday evening didn’t happen, can I?

Purdue at Wisconsin (-7)

Central Michigan at Boston College – Under 50

Ole Miss at Auburn (+5)

Georgia at Florida – Over 49

Cal (-6.5) at Arizona State

Michigan (-7) at Illinois

Texas at Oklahoma St. (+9.5)

Hawaii at Nevada – Over 70.5

Penn St. at Northwestern – Over 47

South Carolina (+6) at Tennessee

 

Sharks @ Flyers Thoughts

Reviewing the Sharks schedule to date, and this game in Philly was definitely the first of the season I’ve been into from start to finish. I arranged an opening night viewing with my sister and brother-in-law, but they just flat out didn’t show up for that game and we gave up on it about halfway through. They were also on Versus against the Rangers six days ago, and kicked their ass, but I was only checking sporadically due to baseball. I know the team hasn’t been this good all season, but tonight’s game against the Flyers was exquisite.

This was the second game in two nights, and the last game of a six game road trip, and the first game all season started by Thomas Greiss. And they won last night. Really, this is the kind of game that many teams, and especially the mentally weak Sharks of recent years, would just mail in. They’d take their 5-1 loss, be happy to go 3-3 out east, and fly back home. And they scrambled around a little bit in the first period and were probably pretty lucky to not be down a goal or two, but from then on they played really well.

The third period was particularly heartening. Up 3-1, they didn’t just chip the puck off the boards into the neutral zone and hope to hang on to a 3-2 win. They played hockey. It was amazing. The Flyers didn’t seem too flat, although Pronger was pretty invisible, so maybe I’m choosing to ignore that they actually were. And they were victimized by some subpar play from their own backup goalie Brian Boucher. Still, it was good stuff.

The next test is the first game home, Wednesday night against the Kings. Year before last, the Sharks were seriously like 1-8 at one point in the first game home after a road trip of any duration. The Kings are making some noise this year, and this game is important (for October). The Sharks are going to have to learn that the season is one big test, and not feel like they only need to bring their best game when they feel like it.

The 2003-04 team that lost to Calgary in the conference finals was the only team in franchise history that answered every challenge. It was thrilling. Coming off a 73 point season, the team was not expected to do much of anything. And they started out bad. Real bad. They won 3 of their first 19 games. But then they broke off 5 in a row and never turned back and won the division. Once things got going, some big game would come up and I would think “This is where things go back to normal”. But they never did. It seemed like they won every single one of those games.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. This year’s team has a long, long way to go before I start to believe. But tonight was fun, and I am looking forward to Wednesday night to see if there is any reason for hope.

Review: The Billionaire’s Vinegar

Benjamin Wallace traces the history of some wine bottles circulated through auctions and tastings beginning in the 1980s that supposedly were discovered in France and belonged to or were supposed to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. There is the one sentence summary of The Billionaire’s Vinegar. But really that’s what the book starts out doing, but evolves into an expose on old fake wines in general, albeit still with a focus on a German named Hardy Rodenstock (which doesn’t sound very German to me). It’s a fun book, but not without flaws.

My main objection is the relatively easy treatment given to Michael Broadbent, the guy in charge of auctioning wine for Christie’s and considered to be one of if not the foremost expert on wine in the world. I mean, this whole business about the Thomas Jefferson bottles was extraordinarily silly. Basically these bottles show up with “1787 Lafitte Th. J.” engraved on them and that means they were Thomas Jefferson’s? That is really the extent of the research conducted to determine the authenticity of the bottles. And anything that turns up which could possibly, if further researched, lead to real evidence, Broadbent and Rodenstock instead just stop there and make that final determination anyway.

But it seems that since Broadbent was interviewed by Wallace, the author couldn’t quite work up the nerve to blast him in the way that he deserved. Who knows what sorts of rationalizations were used. Broadbent was old and had major heart surgery, so there’s really no point in dragging his name through the mud, is there? What more harm can he do? Instead I’ll call refer to him as “venerable” a few times. Sorry, but Rodenstock would have been nobody without someone who was supremely gullible, in the most charitable interpretation possible.

The other criticisms stem from kind of the same thing. Like, really? People were this stupid? I could go into a big thing about these dumbass super rich people pretending that a 1945 Mouton has hints of chocolate and dingleberries, but it’s not worth it. If they’re having a good time, I’m happy for them.

And I feel bad that I am pretty much slamming the book here, because I did enjoy it. It’s just that my criticisms are more specific, whereas my positive feelings are much more vague. I just liked it, you know? I wanted to make time to read it. That’s the measure of a good book, in my book. I’m more appreciative if that quality in this book than you may believe.

I’ve been going through a sort of book reading crisis lately. The last two books I’ve tried to read have not made me want to read them. One I started back in San Jose and finally gave up on shortly after getting to Arkansas a month ago. The one after that was similarly bad, and I just cast it aside a few days ago. I wondered if the books were actually that bad or if something had changed in me upon moving and starting a career. I had never read two crappy books in a row before. Maybe I lost my fastball somehow.

Alas, no, I’ve still got it. And a big thank you to Benjamin Wallace and The Billionaire’s Vinegar for proving it.

Phony NCAA Week 7 Evening Picks

The first seeds of desire to throw some insubstantial amount of money into an online sportsbook are germinating in my brain. I want to nip them in the bud. So here I shall document the picks I would make if I actually put money somewhere. It may be an insubstantial amount that I would stand to lose, but I can still do better things with it than make myself angry at how stupid I am.

If you would like to make some money, please do go bet against every position I take here.

UCLA (+7.5) at Arizona

TCU at BYU (Under 51.5)

Auburn at LSU (Under 49.5)

Oregon St. (+21) at USC

Arizona State (+7) at Stanford