One Of The Greatest Nights In Baseball Ever

Larry David and Bill Buckner 

Ok so I wasn't there, and it was the middle of the afternoon for me, but I was watching live as the Boston Red Sox managed to pull off the greatest collapse in the history of baseball and the Tampa Bay Rays mounted one of the least likely comebacks. . .I've read a lot of stuff about the amazing turn of events last night as the Red Sox somehow lost a game they were winning 3 to 2 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Rays won a game they were losing by 7 runs to zero in the eighth. No sport in the world brings out the nerdlingers and historians like baseball so what follows is a digest of the some of the less esoteric stuff: 


First up is Tyler Kepner of The New York Times who explains the whole apocalyptic series of events in language that a non baseball fan can understand.


Next up is the perspective of Michael Newman a self described 'annoying Red Sox fan' who was at the Sox Baltimore game at Camden Yards (sitting directly behind Christopher Hitchens).


I thought I would shift gears here and give you the great Nate Silver's amazing blog post on the statistical improbability of last night events complete with charts and diagrams. Nate claims that the rot set in for the Red Sox when Bill Buckner appeared on a hilarious episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (David is a Yankees fan). 


This link is to the Duk blogger on Yahoo Sports who gives us the exact moment where Dan Shaughnessy jinxed the Red Sox by promising the fans that the Red Sox could not fail to make the post season. They're already calling Shaughnessy the most hated man in Boston this morning. 


Finally I thought I'd link to the always interesting Pete Abraham, late of the Lohud Yankees Blog, who goes against the grain of easy criticism of Carl Crawford by talking about how he at least took responsibility for his actions and answered questions like a man.


Have I been reading baseball stories all day instead of working on my new novel whose deadline is looming ever closer? Uhm...  

Star Wars Still Works

Lucas claims that he knew they were brother and sister
right from the start, if so. . .eeechhh.

We've been having a series of classic family movie nights and on Saturday night it was finally the big moment where we all watched Star Wars. My kids aged 5 and 9 had never seen it and my wife hadn't seen it since it came out. I, of course, have seen Star Wars about twenty times but not for a while. These are some of my impressions. 
1. Star Wars still works. The narrative is solid and fast paced. The characters are well defined and interesting. I like the idea (which I think comes from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress) of initially telling the story through two secondary characters (R2 and C3PO) and the world making setup is done in a convincing way. The kids enjoyed the film, although my 9 year old not as much as my 5 year old.
2. Coincidences. Normally I hate coincidence as a plot device and and in Star Wars it's a big ugly coincidence that the escape pod Princess Leia sends out crash lands so damn close to the farmstead of her own twin brother. BUT this only really becomes a coincidence when we learn Luke's family history in The Empire Strikes Back. In Star Wars he could be just some random kid whose father happened to be a Jedi and a pilot. OR maybe you could say it was the machinations of The Force which brought the pod so close to the Skywalker farm. (That feels like cheating to me).  
3. The Special Edition is irritating. (But at least we didn't get the new and even more horrifying Blu Ray.) I don't even know if you can rent or buy the original Star Wars anymore but the one we got from the DVD shop was the remastered, "improved" special edition with lots more special effects, the appearance of Jabba The Hut and the notorious scene where Han Solo and Greedo both go for their guns at the same time but Solo is quicker on the draw (in the original Star Wars Han Solo just shoots Greedo under the table). None of this stuff is necessary and often it's invasive. The special effects done with 1990's computer technology are not that good and look pretty cheesy and the entire scene with Jabba is a bit of a disaster. These "improvements" slow down the momentum of the story and take you out of the film. Lucas should release the original print on DVD or if it's already out there make it more generally available. 
4. Less Is More. In the prequels we learned that too much politics, too much Darth Vader, too much pontificating about The Force were all bad things. In Star Wars the balance is just about right. 
5. The acting is good enough. Sometimes Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are a bit shaky but everyone else is excellent, including the many British character actors and day players. 
6. The ending is great. Death Star blows up, everyone gets medals (except Chewbacca and the droids), John Williams cues the orchestra, titles. Perhaps The Star Wars saga should have ended with one film. I love Empire Strikes Back but it doesn't really end properly and I have grown to hate Return of the Jedi with its retread of SW, its Ewoks and the weird ghosts of Yoda, Obi Wan, Annakin etc. I won't even talk about the prequels because in my universe they don't actually exist (like Alien3 and Alien4).
7. Star Wars is not my favourite sci-fi film (thats probably Blade Runner) but it is a good solid, family entertainment and without doubt a classic of the form. 

Richard Dawkins Is Not Really An Atheist

I've said this before and I'll say it again. Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist in the world isn't actually an atheist at all. This is what he said in an interview with the New York Times this week:
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In one essay, Professor Dyson casts millions of speculative years into the future. Our galaxy is dying and humans have evolved into something like bolts of superpowerful intelligent and moral energy.

Doesn’t that description sound an awful lot like God?

“Certainly,” Professor Dawkins replies. “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures.”

He raises his hand, just in case a reader thinks he’s gone around a religious bend. “It’s very important to understand that these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”

Could they be immortal? The professor shrugs.

“Probably not.” He smiles and adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be too dogmatic about that.”

This is not the first time Dawkins has said stuff like this. In a universe 13 billion years old with trillions of Earth like planets, it's not only possible that these god-like entities have evolved but it's much more probable than not that they're out there right now observing us. You can't prove that they exist but logically it seems like a safe bet. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that they have intervened in our planet's history over the last few thousand years? Not at all. Why wouldn't they? Possibly they'll intervene again. Something like prayer then wouldn't be a waste of time then would it? And belief in something like an Afterlife wouldn't be so absurd either. I am not sufficiently brilliant to understand Dawkins's parsing on this. He refuses to believe in god but he accepts the possibility, even probability, that there may be gods or god-like entities watching us. What's the difference? If a Christian were to accept that his god didn't come before the universe but evolved from it would Dawkins accept him as a fellow believer/non believer? 

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I'd also like just one interviewer to ask Dawkins what he thinks of his fellow Oxford professor, Nick Bostrom's work, in which he claims that almost certainly we are living in a Sim universe.

What Good Fiction Does

I caught an interview with Ricky Gervais once where he said that he didn't "read fiction because he always knew how the story was going to turn out, and could usually write a better ending in his head." Perhaps he could, but this rather misses the point of what fiction does. It's not really about racing through the pages to get to the ending. A good novel, a really good novel, enriches your existence and takes you to another place, carrying you on an emotional journey that you just can't get in other media. And it certainly shouldn't all be about the story, I get excited by beautiful or witty prose and sometimes an individual scene is so perfect that you find yourself reading it two or three times to take maximum pleasure from it, the way we all watch and rewatch Roy Batty's "Tannhauser Gate" speech at the end of Blade Runner. 


I was thinking about this the other day as an entire scene from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell came suddenly back to my mind for no reason at all. 
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(The next few paragraphs contain major spoilers.)
The scene I'm thinking of is the Go game at the end of the novel between the evil abbot and the magistrate of Nagasaki. The chapter is a masterpiece of tension, excitement and cold blooded revenge. When I think of that scene I am there in Nagasaki as the magistrate gradually loses the game (as he always does) and prepares to commit seppuku to appease his failure after the English invasion. The magistrate knows that the abbot is a deeply evil man who has been murdering babies and young women for decades (possibly centuries) and has invited him here to play one last game of Go, to drink sake, and to ask the abbot to carry out the merciful coup de grace. But, slowly, as we are reading this depressing scene we learn to our amazement that the magistrate has a secret plan...
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As the magistrate and his chamberlain and then the evil abbot and his servant drink the abbot's sake we discover that the cups themselves have been lacquered with poison and that all four of them, not just the magistrate, are going to die. "Why are your hands and feet so cold on such a warm day?" the magistrate asks the abbot, who, in that moment realises that he has been outgeneralled. 
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There are other highlights of Jacob De Zoet - the doomed rescue mission, the attack on the fort etc. but the Go game and its aftermath is in a class by itself. I was on the edge of my seat excited, afraid, tense, and I contend that great literature can do this to you in a way that nothing - not even the movies - can equal.  

David Byrne - The Bicycle Diaries

The Bicycle Diaries is the story of David Byrne's bicycling adventures around various world cities over the last two decades. Byrne has an economical, unfussy prose style and he's is a good observer which is an important thing in a travel writer. He's also pretty acute at describing what he sees, be it an urban wasteland in Detroit, a cemetery in Sydney or new developments in Berlin or Buenos Aires. Byrne is empathetic and non judgemental about what he's cycling past and this can be a bit boring after a while (the truly great travel writers like Paul Theroux and Mark Twain openly wear their prejudices on their sleeves) but it's not fatal. The bicycle was a good idea because it allows Byrne to get off the beaten tarmac and to see bits of cities that other people do not, this is especially important because Byrne is a celebrity and celebrities experience the world differently than you or me. Celebrities get their asses kissed and tend to see new places through the prism of agents, publicity people and the like, which unfortunately is what happens to Byrne in a few cities that he gets (London and Melbourne for example) completely wrong. 
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I have come to realise that TV travel programmes are utterly bogus and a complete waste of time. Michael Palin, Anthony Bourdain etc. travel from fake location to fake location with a crew of eight or nine people and their trite, uniformed observations are a mockery of genuine travel writing. Byrne by travelling alone, on a bike, without a camera crew, at his own pace, at least avoids these disasters. His charm rubbed off on me and as time wore on I forgave him his naivete, political correctness and need to tell us the bleedin obvious. David Byrne is not a wanker, in fact he seems like a cool guy (he's David Byrne after all!) but that doesn't mean he can't be a bit wanky from time to time especially when he's hanging out with cool cats at private clubs, galleries and fancy restaurants. When he keeps this material in the slow lane The Bicycle Diaries is an enjoyable book but it goes over the white lines into the kill zone when he's at yet another art expo or experimental theatre show or when he says stuff like this: "you know what's more boring than watching a cricket match? listening to a cricket match on the radio."
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(Dear oh dear, the poor deprived man has clearly never spent a lazy August afternoon drinking frozen margaritas, listening to the BBC's Test Match Special as the shadows lengthen and the commentators soft conversation becomes a bridge between an unbroken past and a nostalgic present and we hear old stories and forgotten names and ancient wisdom and see that we are participating in a venerable tradition - what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott calls a living argument - the Great Conversation Of Mankind in all its quirkiness, its richness and diversity and which is surely one of the few unspoiled joys left in this vale of tears.) 
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But that's an aside. On the whole I liked Bicycle Diaries, was not offended by Byrne's hipsterism and thought his advice on helmets, safety and riding in such diverse places as Bogota, Detroit and New York was invaluable. 

Ost Front Fiction

Much to my surprise the #1 best selling novel in the UK this week is Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It turns out that this is because of a brand new BBC Radio 4 adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh which has got great critical attention. 
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I liked Life and Fate but I strongly disagree with the commentators who said on Radio 4's Start The Week that it's better than War and Peace. It isn't. Tolstoy had a chance to edit his novel and because of the KGB Grossman did not... Anyway it gives me a chance to repost this blog from July on Ost Front Fiction:
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This little blog post will be the story of 4 Russian war novels that I've been avoiding and reading for a few decades now: War and Peace, Dr Zhivago, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry Stories. 
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War and Peace is the easiest to talk about. I read W&P over a hot humid Massachusetts summer about fifteen years ago and I really loved it.  Its emotional and dramatic and the characters are wonderfully realised and yeah the bloody coda goes on forever at the end but it's still that rare example of a "great book" that is in fact a great book. I liked W&P so much I listened to it again as an audiobook on my commute and liked it just as much the second go around.
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I did not have the same success with Dr Zhivago. Dr Zhivago was a tough read. I didn't care much about the characters, the writing was ornate and laboured and it's a bit of a surprise to discover that the central character is a "famous poet" because in the more tedious parts of the story you flick to the end papers and (at least in my volume) you can read Dr Zhivago's actual poems and they are pretty feeble stuff. I deliberately left my unfinished copy of Dr Zhivago on a flight to Detroit five years ago, tried it again last year and finally finished it last week after a bout of heroic persistence.  
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War and Peace is the great Russian Napoleonic war novel, Dr Zhivago is the great Russian novel of the Revolution and WW1 and Life and Fate is the great Russian novel of World War 2. It's set in and around the Battle of Stalingrad over the summer, autumn and winter of 1942. Stalin, Kruschev, Von Paulus, Hitler are all characters along with dozens of soldiers, wives, mothers and over a few harrowing chapters the inhabitants of one box car heading towards a death camp. Life and Fate has been compared to War and Peace but it's not quite as psychologically penetrating or as rich. Vasily Grossman was a famed Jewish war reporter in Stalingrad and witnessed the horror of the Stalingrad front at first hand. Life and Fate is unflattering in its portrayal of communists and communism and was banned prior to publication with the copies being seized by the KGB. Grossman was told by the KGB Director that he had a written a masterpiece but he wouldn't be permitted to publish it for at least two or three hundred years. He died before getting a chance to revise the novel and I feel that if he had lived he might have cut some of the lesser characters and perhaps concentrated more on the central story of the battle. It must be said though that the scene of the female doctor hugging the orphaned boy in the gas chamber might be the most powerful piece of prose I've ever read. 
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I should also mention Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry Stories which although not a novel is the defining account of the little known war between the Red Army and a newly independent Poland in 1920. Red Cavalry might be my favourite of all these books. Babel was a great observer of men and their deeds and his status as a Jewish reporter riding with the Cossacks gave him a unique perspective. Red Cavalry is filled with humour, salty dialogue, pathos, irony and a prose style so careful it almost puts Chekov to shame. 

Irish Poem Of The Month

Carol Ann Duffy is the current British Poet Laureate, she was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow in 1953. Her mother is Irish which is good enough for me.

Whoever She Was
Carol Ann Duffy

They see me always as a flickering figure
on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,
still wet sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples
burning as I hang the washing out.
Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts
of children on the telephone. Mummy

A row of paper dollies, clean wounds
or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant
of magic Words repeatedly. I do not know.
Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good.
The film is on a loop. Six silly ladies
torn in half by baby fists. When they
think of me, I’m bending over them at night
to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight.

Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings
to the bramble bush. My maiden name
sounds wrong. This was the playroom.
There are the photographs. making masks
from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come.

Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her
as she shapes a church and steeple in the air.
She cannot be myself and yet I have a box
of dusty presents to confirm that she was here.
You remember the little things. telling stories
or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong.
You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror
which they are holding to your mouth.

The Rest Is Noise

Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise sets out to be a comprehensive history of classical music in the twentieth century. Ross explains the culture, the geography, the personalities, the context and even the theory in a lucid and interesting way. I particularly enjoyed the stuff on turn of the century Vienna, a milieu I knew a little bit about from the novel The Man Without Qualities. The dynamic between Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg was fascinating and the five or six pages on the debut of Strauss's opera Salome was brilliant. Like Game 7 of the 1955 World Series, it seems that everyone who was anyone was either there or later claimed to be there. (Ross is skeptical of Hitler's claims to have been in the audience.)
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A lot of the information in the book was eye opening: even after he became famous (but not well off) Philip Glass worked as a plumber and taxi driver, for whatever reason half of all the important American classical composers were gay, Thomas Mann was consistently the most important novelistic influence on composers of the century, and it seems that classical music was only really significant in four cultures: Germany, Russia, France and the US.
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After finishing The Rest Is Noise I still wasn't sure that I understood the formal difference between a musical and an opera (he doesn't discuss any of the famous musicals of the 60s, 70s and 80s) and I think Ross underplays the role of pop music but not, of course, the intellectual's friend - jazz. I was also a bit annoyed that the playlist which the publishers have promised to maintain on their website (and on iTunes) doesn't seem to be working anymore - it would have been handy to read about a composer and then hear an example of their work, but alas it was not to be.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

light reduction is a big problem with 3D which is a
bit of a disaster for a 3D film set in a cave.

I finally got to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams. All six loyal readers of this blog will know that I’m a Herzog fanboy/acolyte. My favourite book of the year so far is probably Herzog’s account of the filming of Fitzcarraldo - Conquest of the Useless (and I hear there’s even an audiobook now read by Herzog which has got to be amazing).
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All this is a preface to a disappointed review of Cave. It’s a decent enough documentary but it is not up to Herzog’s usual high standards. It’s pretty obvious that Herzog just didn’t have enough material for a feature film about the Chauvet Cave and had to scurry to fill the time with archaeological finds from other caves in France and other digs in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. Herzog’s quirky style doesn’t really fit this material, which attempts to be a forensic documentary and at the same time a humorous look at the scientists investigating the cave. He doesn't commit to either scheme very seriously. Herzog did this sort of thing so much better in the superior documentary Encounters At The End of the World about scientists in the Antarctic - which is a must see, as is Grizzly Man, Herzog’s film about the late self styled bear whisperer Timothy Treadwell. Other recentish Herzog documentaries I'd recommend are: Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Wings of Hope and My Best Fiend which can be watched on YouTube, Google Video or, of course, DVD. Herzog's upcoming film about inmates on Death Row looks much more interesting.
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I really wanted to like Cave of Forgotten Dreams but I got bored in the middle portion and the loud angelic choirs and the camerawork eventually started to make me feel a bit nauseous. The 3D filming made the film much worse than it needed to be, indeed it is a particularly inappropriate technique for a film set inside a dark chamber. The fact that Herzog wasn’t allowed to use arc lamps, coupled with the light reduction caused by the silly 3D glasses meant that the film was very hard to see. 2D would have been better for this movie and I'm sure when I see it in 2D I will like it more. 3D as a concept is probably a busted flush: it’s a gimmick and the gimmick is wearing off again just as it did in the 1950’s and 70’s. Only teenagers and greedy executives like 3D, not adults or indeed, in my experience, young children. 

Dead Sharp

It's an exaggeration to say that crime fiction saved the UK publishing industry but it's not that much of an exaggeration. Half of all fiction books sold in the British Isles are now crime and mystery novels. Alan Coren used to say that the only titles that sold consistently in England were books about dogs and Nazis and so it would seem therefore that the time is ripe for a mystery novel set in Hitler's bunker starring Wolf, the Fuhrer's crime fighting German Shepherd...
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But wait a minute, I'm getting sidetracked, that's not what I was going to talk about. What I was going to talk about is a new collection of interviews with Scottish crime writers conducted by Len Wanner and called Dead Sharp. Wanner does an excellent job coming up with questions that draw out this surprisingly diverse collection of novelists. His analyses of their fiction, motivations, characters and so on are spot on. As you would expect from Scots there's a lot of humour in the collection and much of that humour is self depreciating. All in all if you're interested in Celtic Noir I think you'll love this book. I hope there's an edition of Irish crime writing interviews brewing in Wanner's mind too - indeed if he has his wits about him he might be able to get a whole series going.

Killing Rommel

Blair Paddy Mayne (DSO with 3 bars)

Killing Rommel is an entertaining novel by Steven Pressfield about a fictional campaign by the Long Range Desert Group to kill General Rommel in 1942/3. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Alfred Molina who has long been one of my favourite actors. The book is an interesting and atypical war story because it's really the story of a series of debacles, wrong turns and disasters. The hero of the book Lt. Chapman is not particularly brave or inspired or gifted which makes us like him very much. He's an ordinary bloke (allbeit one who went to boarding school and Oxford) who makes mistakes, agonises over killing people and just about rises to the occasion when he needs to. The story is nuanced and reflects the odd code of honour that existed in the African theatre in World War 2. I loved the fact that the novel is actually a series of anticlimaxes and blunders, retreats and diversions, philosophical asides, long descriptions of engine mechanics, and ruminations on writing and literature - this is not what I had been expecting from a WW2 novel. I've read that Killing Rommel is being turned into Hollywood film by Gerry Bruckheimer which doesn't bode well considering his track record and I really hope that they don't change the characters or the strange stance and episodic structure too much. 
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If I have one complaint about the audiobook its over Molina's accents - his New Zealanders sounded like South Africans to me and the voice he gave to Blair (Paddy) Mayne is a bit of a travesty in the fake Oirish department. Mayne was a legendary SAS commander who drove behind enemy lines in N Africa shooting up airfields, scouting German positions and gathering intel. He was a famous rugby international before the war and one of the great characters of the desert campaign. (He really deserves a novel of his own.) Mayne was from deepest Ulster but when he appears in Killing Rommel Molina gives him the accent of a leprechaun from a Lucky Charms commercial. I'm sure very few people will notice this or care but when it happened it somewhat took me out of what is an otherwise fantastic audiobook. 

Wankers On Sixth Avenue

Great story in The New York Times this week about Amazon.com's new publishing arm and how it's scaring the major New York publishers. Amazon, apparently are recruiting a few big name authors as well as the self published, the unpublished and the incompetently published for its new division. This is brilliant news. The New York book publishing world is largely run by eejits who don't know their arses from their elbows. It's a hyper conservative industry whose main job is to push down our throats the latest Stephen King bollocks or chick lit crap or Eat Pray And Shite or whatever its bloody called. These people are killing reading as a past time in America because of their lowest common denominator middlebrow always the dollars attitude. I've met quite a few of these emasculated, chinless wanks and they're all pretty ghastly yes men with a staggeringly narrow frame of reference. Will Amazon.com do a better job at giving us some original voices who really reflect America? Honestly, they can't do any worse. 
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If I was running Amazon.com's publishing arm these are the seven rules I'd have for my buyers. Why seven? Well by #7 I'd got this blog post out of my system hadn't I?


1. Don't publish any books that were written while the author was "experiencing real life" between terms at Harvard or Yale.  
2. No books about a dog or a cat that changed the author, unless it was a cat or dog that ripped the author's face off like that monkey did to that woman a few years back. That might be ok. 
3. No journeys to exotic locales to find yourself unless you find yourself becoming a heroin mule or a shoe bomber - again that might be interesting.
4. Nothing that Janet Malcolm could possibly like.  
5. Nothing by bloated, pig ignorant plutocratic radio talk shot hosts who wouldn't know a fact if the fact was to wear a fact T shirt and dance around saying I'm a fact, I'm a fact, I'm a fact like that bastard annoying map in Dora The Explorer. 
6. Hey do you like ALL the stuff you read in the New Yorker? You think it's funny and incisive? Do you? Yes this is a bloody test. Sorry you're not right for us chum, keeping on walking down to the bloody polo club or the yacht polishing society or wherever it is you tossers go.
7.  Here's another test: how do you feel about Bono? Is he A) a talentless shortarsed hypocrite who makes you want to shed your skin from sheer embarrassment or B) a renaissance man. 
8. Oh that's right it's out of my system now. 

The Wrong Kind of Slow - Breaking Bad Series 4

At Delphi, Apollo, the Lord of Light and patron of the Muses, urged pilgrims to "know themselves" and to "follow the path of moderation in all things." Slow is often a good thing, a useful antidote to an overheated world. Slow food, slow exercise, slow travel. You know the drill. You take the time to savour things, to enjoy the experience, the journey is its own reward...all that good stuff. 
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In film sometimes the slow burn works. Barry Lyndon has often been called slow but I find it engrossing. Same thing with 2001: A Space Odyssey. It can work in TV too, especially in this age of quick cuts and jumped up phony storylines that get solved in 40 minutes. But then there's the wrong kind of slow where the director or the show runner thinks that he's such a fascinating fellow that he can do anything he likes and we'll watch engrossed...This is what happened to Sophia Coppolla in her film Somewhere and it's whats been happening to Breaking Bad. Seven Episodes in we've covered the territory that they might have covered in perhaps two and a half episodes in another year. Brian Cranston has said on the Breaking Bad podcast that this policy is deliberate and that they are trying to "teach the American viewer an entirely new vocabulary and method for watching television." 
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Quite. Has social engineering been tried on American TV before? I can't imagine that this is a good idea. Breaking Bad's deliberate slowing down of the pacing has exposed a lot of the show's problems that I never noticed before. Here are some of them: 1) The plots can be shaky. Last Sunday's "we're selling drugs to get your attention" storyline was maybe the dumbest thing I've seen in four seasons. 2) Aaron Paul is a little too pretty and a tad too white collar for his role of Jessie. 3) Bryan Cranston is brilliant, as is the guy who plays Hank, but the rest of the cast (I'll name no names) are not the greatest actors working in the medium. 4) Mike's skills are increasingly supermanish and improbable. 5) All this has taken place in less than a year? It's getting like a Lee Child novel. How come everyone's not in the psych ward? (actually scratch that, that's probably going to be the slow boiling arc for next season) 6) The whole damn thing is just a little too played, no? 
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For me Breaking Bad, once one of the best shows on TV, has gone the route of dare I say it, Lost, or worse Battlestar Galactica Season 4. No, I take that back, nothing could be as bad as BSG S4, but they want to watch themselves and in the words of Robyn, they want to, you know, pick it up!

How To Respond To The Haka

The Rugby World Cup begins this week in the land of the long white cloud. I love rugby union and I played the game for 25 years. Despite living in a footie and rugby league town I still love watching rugby union, especially the Southern Hemisphere teams. 
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I used to be a fan of the All Blacks haka but as time has gone on I'm much less convinced of its utility and I hate the throat cutting haka, kapa o pango, which is really over the top. They don't put up with this sort of thing in FIFA run soccer matches but in rugby union, rugby league and a few other sports the opposing team is forced to wait around while the All Blacks perform their ritual challenge. If you're from Fiji, Samoa or Tonga you've got a haka of your own to answer the All Blacks with but everyone else has to just stand there and bide their time until its over. Personally I like what the great Willy Anderson did as captain of Ireland two decades ago, but he received so much negative press for his move that no one (to my knowledge) has tried anything like it since. It's a shame, I hope that in this rugby world cup someone shows the All Blacks that we all have our own traditions that are worthy of respect.

The Greatest Baseball Movies

I just watched the preview for Moneyball on YouTube - I'll probably see it as I'm a bit of a sucker for baseball movies: the quintessential American sport captured by the quintessential American art form. Even the really terrible ones like The Babe and Cobb have their moments. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that 1000 people have already posted their list of greatest ever baseball films on the blogosphere (here's baseball almanac's list) but what the hell, like I say, I love baseball and I love movies so here’s mine:


1.Bull Durham
2.The Natural
3.The Bad News Bears
4.Field of Dreams
5.Eight Men Out
6.Pride of the Yankees
7.61*
8.The Jackie Robinson Story
9.Bang The Drum Slowly
10.Major League

Is Steven Weber The Worst Writer on The Huffington Post?

It would be quite the badge of shame wouldn't it, what with Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn writing material for the same publication. I've printed below the first few paragraphs of Weber's new article for The Huffington Post...There is a lot more of it but I grew weary trudging through the mistakes of fact, logic, grammar and the sheer bravado of Weber's horrible prose. I know the point he's trying to make and politically I'm largely on board with him but doesn't The Huffington Post have a copy department or fact checkers or is Weber just too much of an egomaniac to be edited? Have a read for yourself...what would you fix if you were a copy editor for the HuffPo?
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Just came back from The Europe Place, having wandered about with family in tow (and vice versa), mainly making our way through Barcelona and Scotland, two cities steeped in history and art, drenched with passion and pride.


These are mature places, the denizens going about their business not as material-obsessed drones but as active participants in their respective cultures, able and articulate representatives of their countries. They are places whose maturity has enabled them to achieved a sort of balance of all the disparate elements which otherwise might threaten to swamp a national psyche and make it an unreasoning, destructive presence in the international sociopolitical scheme. In other words, it's nice there! (A side note: if the Earth is ever invaded by aliens, just send in some Scots. Those aliens -- or what's left of them -- will be limping back to their home planet within a few hours.).


And from that objective geographical perspective, I saw America from a, whattayou call it? Ah, yes: a parallax view (Another side note: great film by Warren Beatty by the same name. See it, why don't you?).


And fellow travelers I'm telling you, to understand the state of our own union, it's a view that really needs to be seen.


For, to return home from being abroad is to see America as it is and marvel at the mess it's become, like looking at a celebrity from a strictly verboten angle and seeing the scars, the stitches, the ooze. Which I myself have done, but never before a meal.


And one sees most clearly the utterly biased corporate media using all manner of cannily manipulative techniques to corral the nation towards its own selfish aim: to ensure profit at the expense of people. And one sees this only after having been removed from the sheep-dip that is American corporate media submersion. Only it's not parasites being cleansed from the sheep's wool, it's the ability to know when the wool's been pulled over its eyes...

Ursa Major: The Brilliance of The Bad News Bears

This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face... 

In a random line of dialogue from an episode of Cheers that has stuck in my mind Ted Danson says “Life is full of disappointments, I remember when we were all excited about The Bad News Bears, but all that was was Tatum O’Neal throwing a ball around.”

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That might not be a direct quote but the gist is there. I don’t know who wrote that line but clearly it is an ironic commentary on the dim relief pitcher Sam Malone not a reflection on The Bad News Bears. Last night we watched The Bad News Bears as one of our family movie nights. It was only the second time I’d seen the film and the first time since I was a kid. You don’t need me to tell you what a wonderfully crafted picture it is (just read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes). What I want to talk about here is the script written by Bill Lancaster (Burt Lancaster’s talented screenwriting son) and in particular one scene that sums up everything good film-making should be.

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Lancaster’s screenplay is masterful. There are at least eight or nine characters who are fully rounded individuals with their own completely believable idiosyncrasies and who all somehow have characters arcs i.e. they change and grow as the film progresses. Most Hollywood films have 1 male and 1 female lead  with fake character traits and an utterly phony arc. The Bad News Bears I will stress again has 8 or maybe 9 real characters who all grow and all change in convincing and logical ways. Even the villains grow (the scene where the pitcher hangs onto the ball at the end is dazzling). The story is strong and dialogue is snappy and quotable “You didn’t come into this life just to sit on a dugout bench, didya Lupus? Now get out there and do the best you can!”

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The particular scene I want to talk about is the air hockey game. Tatum O’Neal is trying to convince bad boy Kelly Leak to play for the Bears. As she’s talking him into it they’re casually playing air hockey and she’s kicking his ass. He’s not trying to lose in an obvious way - she’s just better. Leak makes her a proposition, he’ll play for the Bears if she beats him at a new game of air hockey and if he wins she has to come to the Rolling Stones concert with him. Cut to Walter Matthau waiting in the parking lot outside the amusement arcade. We all know how these movies are set up and we all know that eventually Leak is going to play for the Bears so we're thinking that this is how she's going to get him on the team. Instead a dejected Tatum O’Neal comes out of the arcade and tells Matthau that she’s going to go to the Rolling Stones concert with Leak and he is not going to play for the team. We, the audience are never told that Leak hustled her. That would be an insult to our intelligence. Lancaster trusts us so much we don't even get to see the game. This, of course, was the 70’s. In most Hollywood films today the hustling would be seen and then underlined with a corny bit of dialogue. In a scene we never actually witness we learn that Leak is not only a gifted sportsman and an angry punk kid but he’s also smart. Pretty good huh? That’s just one scene and in fact the whole film is like that: witty, well crafted and above all intelligent.