October 11th, 2006 → 4:59 pm @ Seth Mnookin
All the reports coming in are saying that the pilot of the plane was the Yankees’ Cory Lidle.
To those Sox fans out there: don’t give the rest of the country more reasons to hate you by making light of this in any way.
(Wolf, of course, keeps it in perspective: “This comes only a few days after the Yankees were elminated from the playoffs.”)
Post Categories: Uncategorized
October 11th, 2006 → 4:17 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Wolf Blitzer: “Are there ambulances that you can see? We can hear the sirens behind you.”
Anderson Cooper: “Actually what you’re hearing probably behind me is a parked car — the alarm just went off.”
And: Wolf just told viewers that the Bel Air is a building with “two- and three-bedroom apartments valued as high as 1.5 million dollars which is not unusual for a two- or three-bedroom apartment in New York City.” Clearly, Wolf hasn’t been on the market for a new apartment for some time; in August, the average price for a two-bedroom apartment on the UES was $1.8 million; for three bedrooms it was $2.5 mil.
Post Categories: Broadcasting & CNN
October 11th, 2006 → 4:02 pm @ Seth Mnookin
More gems from today’s coverage…
Around 3:15, CNN’s U.N. correspondent Richard Roth began reporting on-air. From him we learned that:
* When a plane crashes into a residential building, longtime enemies find a way to get beyond their natural animosity: “New York is a tale of many cities, and there are people who would rather, on the East Side rather fly to Chicago than go to the West Side of Manhattan, that’s the way New York is, but obviously it’s a cause for concern for everybody.”
* When the in-studio anchor said the accident scene was not far from LaGuardia, Roth took the opportunity to bitch about New York traffic: “In rush hour it can take forever.” Roth, pro that he is, did recover, and once he realized he was being asked if the accident site was far from LaGuardia via plane, he said, “It’s a great view at times but some painful memories.”
* And finally, it’s gotten harder and harder to buy a quart of milk at 2 am: “New York skyscrapers, it’s certainly a building boon in Manhattan over the last few years especially, even after 9/11. Downtown has got more construction and uptown you can’t walk a block in Manhatan without running in to major construction crews. Small stores and neighborhood stores keep closing in areas and you wonder how they get supplied with food and all that because you’ve got apartment buildings going up nonstop.”
Apparently, it’s not only the Bush administration that feels the U.N. doesn’t need to be a top priority.
Post Categories: Broadcasting & CNN & Media reporting
October 11th, 2006 → 3:34 pm @ Seth Mnookin
At 3:23 pm, not long after live coverage of the plane crash into a 50-story apartment building on 72nd Street just east of the East River had begun, a young woman on her cellphone had strategically positioned herself behind a WABC-News reporter broadcasting from street level. Whenever he pivoted, she pivoted as well, making sure she remained in the camera shot; several times, it appeared as if whomever she was on the phone with told her she was on TV. At least I assume that’s why she was giggling and doing little mini-waves.
Less than 10 minutes later, CNN reported that NORAD had placed “combat aircraft” over “numerous U.S. cities.”
Post Categories: Rampaging morons
October 11th, 2006 → 2:39 pm @ Seth Mnookin
And yes, I know there’s lots to talk about. I’ve been busy! So to tide folks over until I get back to year-end wrap-ups…
* The Seibu Lions’s Daisuke Matsuzaka was posted for free agency. This means: MLB teams can submit sealed bids to the Lions for the right to negotiate with Matsuzaka (or, rather, his agent, the warm and cuddly Scott Boras). The high bidder wins. The Sox, Yankees, and Mariners and thought to be the only teams in the hunt, and there’s speculation the total cost could be somewhere around $100 million ($25 mil for the right to negotiate; $75 for a six(ish) year contract.
The twenty-six year old Matsuzaka is rumored to throw gyroball, a pitch gripped as if you were giving a Vulcan greeting that spins like a football (or a bullet). If thrown correctly, it’s conceivably kind of a fastball/curve combo — traveling at fastball speed and breaking like a curve — and conceivably is unhittable. Matsuaka has said he doesn’t throw the pitch; still, there’s a YouTube link that seems to belie his claim. (Here’s a great piece on the gyro; all gyro links come via Sons of Sam Horn.
The upside to Matsuzaka is obvious: he could be one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball. The downside is also pretty obvious: players don’t always make smooth transitions to MLB. Also, he’s thrown a ridiculous amount of pitches in some games, including a 17-inning, 250-pitch outing that he followed with a no-hitter the next day. This seems like one of those genius/moron moves: if the Sox sign him and he’s everything everyone thinks he could be, Theo and the Trio will be on a pedestal once again. If he hurts himself or can’t handle MLB (or Boston), they’re borderline learning disabled. Makes me glad I don’t need to make decisions like that.
* Torii Hunter will not be patrolling center field for the Sox next year; the Twins picked up his option. After that it’s anyone’s guess: he’s already making Pedro-in-’04 threats about what’ll happen if the Twins don’t negotiate a long-term deal before the season starts. (It’s conceivable that Hunter’s balls-to-the-walls style is all that well suited to Fenway, anyway.
* Jim Thome beat out Frank Thomas (and Curt Schilling) as AL Comeback Player of the Year, which seems a) like a mistake, and b) yet more proof that awards are at least occasionally decided by what players are more popular with the press.
That’s all for now.
Oh, except: Joe Torre’s coming back. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing: the most important thing a manager does is keep his players interested over 162 games, and oftentimes there’s a shelf life on how long any one manager can (or should) last. That said, as soon as Steinbrenner started with his spoiled baby routine it was a lock Torre would be back in the Yankees dugout; if he was gonna go, it would have had to be a behind-the-scenes, quiet negotiation.
Post Categories: 2006 Offseason & Daisuke Matsuzaka
October 11th, 2006 → 1:27 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I waste enough time poring over baseball blogs and obsessively dissecting news articles; because of that, my current involvement with YouTube generally consists of nothing more than checking Google’s stock price…because I’m determined to lose all of my savings in any tech bubble I can find.
But I digress. If you haven’t already seen Monty Python opening montage-esque (or, rather, the Terry Gilliam-esque) clip Battle of the Album Covers — in which the baby on the front of Nirvana’s Nevermind is killed by the dragon on Asia’s eponymous debut; the, um, protuberance from the Stones’s Sticky Fingers is inserted onto the cover of The Velvet Underground and Nico; and the Green Day grenade from American Idiot blows up Lionel Ritche, Phil Collins, and pretty much any ’80s artist who put a close-up shot of their faces on the covers of their records (they all end up in the Metallica Master of Puppets graveyard) — please, please, check it out.
(The clip was apparently put together by these guys and animated by this guy, although I can’t find any evidence of it on those sites.)
Post Categories: YouTube
October 11th, 2006 → 10:36 am @ Seth Mnookin
This is the first in an occasional series of pieces in which published articles are examined to see how closely they align with reality. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this occasional series has already been launched, with a recent piece on a New York Times story on whether baseball teams’ success in September leads to success in October.
Today we’ll be looking at a piece in Slate titled “Scott Pilgrim‘s Progress: A Brilliant Indie-Rock Cartoon.” The artfully crafted article/slideshow by Dan Kois unpacks Bryan Lee O’Malley’s “indie-rock romantic comedy.” I appreciated the story; as a one-time aficionado of graphic novels who’s fallen a bit behind the times, I’m was glad to be told about a new(ish) entry into the genre that’s apparently worth checking out.
But Kois’s story, while seemingly on point when it details Scott Pilgrim itself (especially in regards to its relationship with manga, a genre about which my knowledge pretty much begins and ends with 1988’s Akira ), makes a number of blunders in a relatively short article. To wit:
* (Comparing O’Malley’s latest release, Scott Pilgrim and the Infitite Sadness, to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) “Each is an artful, ambitious third release by an artist who flourished on the fringe and whose work is suddenly being recognized by the mainstream. And like Mellon Collie, the third volume of O’Malley’s series is a disappointing—and uncharacteristic—misfire.”
Mellon Collie came out in 1995, two years after the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, the band’s four million (plus)-selling, quadruple platinum-breakout hit; it reached #10 on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart. To me, that counts as being recognized by the mainstream.
* “The genius of the first two volumes [of the Scott Pilgrim series] was that they rejected the dead-serious tropes found in most American graphic novels.”
I’m not sure what graphic novels Kois has been reading, but many of the country’s best-known graphic novelists rely on humor. There are the old standbys like Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb. There are newer artists, like Jessica Abel (Kois cites her La Perdida but ignores her Artbabe series, which included classics like “Too Punk To Funk”). Joe Sacco achieved renown after publishing Palestine, but he began his career with works like But I Like It, a chronicling of his European tour with the now-defunct punk band the Miracle Workers, . No one will ever accuse Peter Bagge of being overly serious, and even Optic Nerve author Adrian Tomine and Daniel Clowes, best known for Ghost World and David Boring, use humor to address their characters’ alienation and frustration.
* “Another link between Scott Pilgrim and manga lies in O’Malley’s subject matter: romance. With a few exceptions—Alex Robinson and Tom Beland among them—literary graphic novelists have spurned romance as a subject.”
Virtually all of the examples cited above deal with romance. Harvey Pekar famously chronicled his courtship and marriage; R. Crumb’s entire oeuvre focuses on his relationship to women; Tomine and Clowes almost always use romance as a jumping off point.
I enjoyed Kois’s story, and I’ve already ordered the Scott Pilgrim books. I would have enjoyed his story even more (and still would have ordered the Pilgrim books) had Kois not overreached in trying to prove how unique O’Malley is as an artist.
Post Categories: Media reporting & Slate & The Factchecking Series
