Friday, September 17, 2004
Gran Turismo 4 stalled until "winter" - PlayStation 2 News at GameSpot
GT4 Delayed? Again? Do we care anymore?
Gran Turismo 4 stalled until "winter" - PlayStation 2 News at GameSpot
New Greatest Line In A (Tennis) Movie
I have always held that in the genre of tennis films, the best line ever uttered was "Wimbledon is Wimbledon" a pithy pronouncement from Guillermo Vilas in the movie Players.
There may be a new champion.
In the new flick Wimbledon, our hero is motivated towards better play by his love for the Kirsten Dunst character. After obliterating his best friend (on court) the friend says "You hit from the soul … the heart … something's happened to you."
You hit from the soul. Wicked profound. Not as profound as Vilas, and wordier, but damn, what a ridiculous line.
There may be a new champion.
In the new flick Wimbledon, our hero is motivated towards better play by his love for the Kirsten Dunst character. After obliterating his best friend (on court) the friend says "You hit from the soul … the heart … something's happened to you."
You hit from the soul. Wicked profound. Not as profound as Vilas, and wordier, but damn, what a ridiculous line.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
It's time for the NHL to Die!
Peter Mansbridge looked worried on the National last night as he reported that the NHL lock-out was on. He should be worried as his excessive paycheque is probably paid by the revenues from Hockey Night in Canada. The CBC News days as a fiscal tapeworm may be at an end.
I was surprised to see how stupid so many Canadians are in their beliefs about what this lock-out means. It is not the end of hockey or the start of a long winter. INstead, if they look back to 1994, it results in more money spent on dinners out, movies, outings with the family and on other levels of hockey. If you really like hockey, then it is by no means clear that NHL game is the best one to watch. I like NCAA basketball but I find that the NBA game bores me to tears. I think what most Canadians stand to learn is that there life is better without the distraction of pro sports.
Even if you disagree with my argument above, you should still be applauding this lock-out as a Canadian NHL (as opposed to hockey) fan. Yes, teams will fold and players will earn less. Yes, many American owners will bail as there is no US tv deal. Yes, an NHL franchise will be worth less after the lock-out than before. Is this not what Canadian fans have been asking for for years in order to have Canadian franchises that are viable? So the lock-out goes on too long and kills Atlanta, Nashville, Pheonix and Carolina, or does it? Maybe Pheonix moves back to Winnipeg; Atlanta to Hamilton, and out of desparation, Carolina goes to Saskatoon. Or maybe Colorado moves back to Quebec City. Isn't this what Canadian NHL fans have wanted? Or, for you traditionalists who hate expansion, if the lock-out results in only the "original 6" being the viable teams, wouldn't that be a positive outcome? Let's not forget that the only reason Calgary has a franchise is because expansion to Atlanta didn't work the first time.
So, NHL players will be fewer in number, and lower paid. Owners will earn a lot less as everyone relies more on what Canada's only remaining major Canadian brewer is willing to pay for the tv rights and what Canadian fans are willing to pay to sit in the stands. But, the NHL will be more Canadian than before the lock-out and more accessible to a larger number of Canadians. So my only hope is that Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow lose each other's phone numbers long enough to kill whatever the NHL had become. The league will energe from this lock-out the better for it.
I was surprised to see how stupid so many Canadians are in their beliefs about what this lock-out means. It is not the end of hockey or the start of a long winter. INstead, if they look back to 1994, it results in more money spent on dinners out, movies, outings with the family and on other levels of hockey. If you really like hockey, then it is by no means clear that NHL game is the best one to watch. I like NCAA basketball but I find that the NBA game bores me to tears. I think what most Canadians stand to learn is that there life is better without the distraction of pro sports.
Even if you disagree with my argument above, you should still be applauding this lock-out as a Canadian NHL (as opposed to hockey) fan. Yes, teams will fold and players will earn less. Yes, many American owners will bail as there is no US tv deal. Yes, an NHL franchise will be worth less after the lock-out than before. Is this not what Canadian fans have been asking for for years in order to have Canadian franchises that are viable? So the lock-out goes on too long and kills Atlanta, Nashville, Pheonix and Carolina, or does it? Maybe Pheonix moves back to Winnipeg; Atlanta to Hamilton, and out of desparation, Carolina goes to Saskatoon. Or maybe Colorado moves back to Quebec City. Isn't this what Canadian NHL fans have wanted? Or, for you traditionalists who hate expansion, if the lock-out results in only the "original 6" being the viable teams, wouldn't that be a positive outcome? Let's not forget that the only reason Calgary has a franchise is because expansion to Atlanta didn't work the first time.
So, NHL players will be fewer in number, and lower paid. Owners will earn a lot less as everyone relies more on what Canada's only remaining major Canadian brewer is willing to pay for the tv rights and what Canadian fans are willing to pay to sit in the stands. But, the NHL will be more Canadian than before the lock-out and more accessible to a larger number of Canadians. So my only hope is that Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow lose each other's phone numbers long enough to kill whatever the NHL had become. The league will energe from this lock-out the better for it.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
GRAN TURISMO 4
Click on the red bar for some impressive replay video of GT4. If you watch clsely you will see a couple of the cars leave the ground as they speed over a rise in the track revealing, sadly, that the problem of the front end of the car having no weight has still not be fixed. Pathetic.
GRAN TURISMO 4
GRAN TURISMO 4
C.E.O.s Battle Professor For Contol of the World!
In his op-ed piece Ruling Class War, David Brooks compares C.E.O. (spreadsheet people) and university professors (paragraph people) and their political affiliations.
Kind of like comparing the influence of a destroyer to a dinghy. I think the balance is wrong, but my hoping won't give people with brains more power than the people motivated by share price. But my mind-control ray may be of some use...
Here are some tidbits from the article:
"There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.
C.E.O.'s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.'s donating funds to Bush's campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry's.
Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's... For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.
Accountants, whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic, are now heavily Republican. Back in the early 1990's, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln. Similarly, in the early 1990's, bankers gave equally to the two parties. Now they give mostly to Republicans, though one notices that employees at big banks, like Citigroup and Bank of America, are more likely to give to Democrats.
But lawyers - people who didn't realize that they wanted to be novelists until their student loan burdens were already too heavy - are shifting the other way. This year, lawyers gave about $81 million to Democrats and about $31 million to Republicans.
If you look at the big Kerry donors, you realize that the days of the starving intellectual are over. University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors and Harvard employees are second, topping folks from Goldman Sachs and others in the supposedly sell-out/big-money professions. [Thank god the academics are getting on an equal footing with the economic elite - JimDandy]
Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession. All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent.[How are the engineers at M.I.T. paragraph people? - Jim Dandy] Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.
Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a couple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory. Numerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply, and so also admire Bush's speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile, relate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy.
I subscribe, however, to the mondo-neo-Marxist theory of information-age class conflict. According to this view, people who majored in liberal arts subjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other "hard" fields. This loathing turns political in adult life and explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today."
I really have no idea how this is reflected on Canadian campuses, but I can guess what the flat-earthers would say. I meant to say Reformers. No, wait, disenfranchised westerners. Nope, I mean Konservatives. Whatever they are, intellectual curiosity is not their strong point.
Kind of like comparing the influence of a destroyer to a dinghy. I think the balance is wrong, but my hoping won't give people with brains more power than the people motivated by share price. But my mind-control ray may be of some use...
Here are some tidbits from the article:
"There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.
C.E.O.'s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.'s donating funds to Bush's campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry's.
Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's... For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.
Accountants, whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic, are now heavily Republican. Back in the early 1990's, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln. Similarly, in the early 1990's, bankers gave equally to the two parties. Now they give mostly to Republicans, though one notices that employees at big banks, like Citigroup and Bank of America, are more likely to give to Democrats.
But lawyers - people who didn't realize that they wanted to be novelists until their student loan burdens were already too heavy - are shifting the other way. This year, lawyers gave about $81 million to Democrats and about $31 million to Republicans.
If you look at the big Kerry donors, you realize that the days of the starving intellectual are over. University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors and Harvard employees are second, topping folks from Goldman Sachs and others in the supposedly sell-out/big-money professions. [Thank god the academics are getting on an equal footing with the economic elite - JimDandy]
Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession. All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent.[How are the engineers at M.I.T. paragraph people? - Jim Dandy] Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.
Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a couple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory. Numerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply, and so also admire Bush's speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile, relate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy.
I subscribe, however, to the mondo-neo-Marxist theory of information-age class conflict. According to this view, people who majored in liberal arts subjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other "hard" fields. This loathing turns political in adult life and explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today."
I really have no idea how this is reflected on Canadian campuses, but I can guess what the flat-earthers would say. I meant to say Reformers. No, wait, disenfranchised westerners. Nope, I mean Konservatives. Whatever they are, intellectual curiosity is not their strong point.
Monday, September 13, 2004
Call Him Dull, But He Is The Best
NEW YORK (AP) -- Roger Federer is at his best against the best, when it counts the most, and he was nearly perfect against Lleyton Hewitt. Federer became the first man since 1988 to win three Grand Slam tournaments in a year, thoroughly outclassing Hewitt 6-0, 7-6 (3), 6-0 Sunday to add the U.S. Open title to those he took at the Australian Open and Wimbledon.
There hadn't been two shutout sets in the event's championship match since 1884.
And here's what was particularly remarkable: The top-ranked Federer's opponent was no pushover. Federer dominated every facet against pugnacious, backward-cap wearing, 'Come on!'-yelling, fist-pumping Hewitt, a former No. 1 and a two-time major champion, including the 2001 U.S. Open.
Federer led the fourth-seeded Hewitt in winners (40-12), aces (11-1), and service breaks (7-1).
And now there are all sorts of other impressive numbers Federer can lay claim to:
-- no one had won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open back-to-back since Pete Sampras in 1995;
-- including Wimbledon in 2003, Federer is 4-0 in major finals, the first man in the Open era to start a career by winning his first four;
-- he's won 11 straight tournament finals overall;
-- he's won 17 straight matches against players ranked in the top 10.
There's more: No man had captured consecutive major titles since Agassi won the 1999 U.S. Open and 2000 Australian Open. The 18 Slams since then was the longest drought in the Open era."
I have to admit that I love the "backward-cap wearing, 'Come on!'-yelling, fist-pumping Hewitt" part as I hate fist-pumping in tennis. And backward caps on anyone over the age of 3. I blame Martina for the fist pumping mania. As for backward caps, well, they are as cool as baggy-pants-wearing, pseudo gangstas named Gavin, who hang out at the mall eating wraps and smoothies. Ghetto 4 Life!
There hadn't been two shutout sets in the event's championship match since 1884.
And here's what was particularly remarkable: The top-ranked Federer's opponent was no pushover. Federer dominated every facet against pugnacious, backward-cap wearing, 'Come on!'-yelling, fist-pumping Hewitt, a former No. 1 and a two-time major champion, including the 2001 U.S. Open.
Federer led the fourth-seeded Hewitt in winners (40-12), aces (11-1), and service breaks (7-1).
And now there are all sorts of other impressive numbers Federer can lay claim to:
-- no one had won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open back-to-back since Pete Sampras in 1995;
-- including Wimbledon in 2003, Federer is 4-0 in major finals, the first man in the Open era to start a career by winning his first four;
-- he's won 11 straight tournament finals overall;
-- he's won 17 straight matches against players ranked in the top 10.
There's more: No man had captured consecutive major titles since Agassi won the 1999 U.S. Open and 2000 Australian Open. The 18 Slams since then was the longest drought in the Open era."
I have to admit that I love the "backward-cap wearing, 'Come on!'-yelling, fist-pumping Hewitt" part as I hate fist-pumping in tennis. And backward caps on anyone over the age of 3. I blame Martina for the fist pumping mania. As for backward caps, well, they are as cool as baggy-pants-wearing, pseudo gangstas named Gavin, who hang out at the mall eating wraps and smoothies. Ghetto 4 Life!
Sunday, September 12, 2004
The US Open -- WHat the hell did I just watch?
I saw the first set of Federer--Hewitt and I wasn't sure if I was watching federer play one of the most brilliant sets ever or if Hewitt was playing one of the worst. I tuned in in the third set and Dick Enberg was talking about visiting the barns at the kentucky derby while Federer continued to dismantle hewitt. My own bias is that Hewitt is a pretty solid player so I am leaning towards Federer being a pretty amazing player at the moment, though I expect the Cynical T-Swift and Serena lovin' Jim Dandy will explain why I am wrong and why Federer is no Eddie Dibbs.
For the line call controversy, there were some brutal calls like the one that was in, but called out to keep Hewitt briefly in one of his service games. I do think that it warrants mention that Hewitt showed a lot of class when he got screwed by line calls. I think that T-Swift and Jim Dandy could learn a lot from a classy player like that and stop worshipping the Drama queen of "Hip Hop" Tennis, Serena.
Rack 'em
For the line call controversy, there were some brutal calls like the one that was in, but called out to keep Hewitt briefly in one of his service games. I do think that it warrants mention that Hewitt showed a lot of class when he got screwed by line calls. I think that T-Swift and Jim Dandy could learn a lot from a classy player like that and stop worshipping the Drama queen of "Hip Hop" Tennis, Serena.
Rack 'em
Joel Johannesen Still Hates Canada
Wow, the half-wits at proudtobecanadian.com (they don't deserve a hyperlink) have once again forgotten to jump start their brains.
Check out this fun discussion (http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1197&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1) and then remember how far above the foodchain you are than these clowns by virtue of your ability to reason. Oops, I am falling into the "liberal" trap of call Joel (is he realy a man?) stupid without providing documentation. Except that he does it for himself. At least we now know that not everyone living in the Lower Mainland is not a "latte drinking, tree-hugging commie". This guy mainlines lattes in one hand, and raises his fist to his boogey-man (the CBC - is that a lame target, or what?) with the other. Hey, Honshui : my challenge to you is to join his craptastic forum (using a fake e-mail of course - use google, yahoo, or canada.com) and stir up some shit. I think this could be right up your alley. Can you fake enough conservatism to make their empty heads spin? Let me know if you want to try and I will join as well.
Check out this fun discussion (http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1197&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1) and then remember how far above the foodchain you are than these clowns by virtue of your ability to reason. Oops, I am falling into the "liberal" trap of call Joel (is he realy a man?) stupid without providing documentation. Except that he does it for himself. At least we now know that not everyone living in the Lower Mainland is not a "latte drinking, tree-hugging commie". This guy mainlines lattes in one hand, and raises his fist to his boogey-man (the CBC - is that a lame target, or what?) with the other. Hey, Honshui : my challenge to you is to join his craptastic forum (using a fake e-mail of course - use google, yahoo, or canada.com) and stir up some shit. I think this could be right up your alley. Can you fake enough conservatism to make their empty heads spin? Let me know if you want to try and I will join as well.
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