Top Ten ____________________ of 2006

• YouTube videos as reported by the Associated Press, complete with lack of links
  
• Canadian films
  
• robot Christmas gifts (gifts that are robots, not gifts for robots)
  
• tags
  
• worst film trailers
  
• stories in video game news
  
• sexiest geeks
  
• creepy fossil finds
  
• Yahoo searches
  
• robots

2006, the year in records (consumerist edition)

As near as I can remember, these are the cds I bought this year:

• Art Blakey - Moanin'
  
• The Decembrists - The Crane Wife
  
• The Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia
  
• The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls
  
• Bob Dylan - Modern Times
  
• Bob Dylan - Love and Theft
  
• Duke Ellington - Money Jungle
  
• k.d. lang - Reintarnation
  
• Charles Mingus - Blues and Roots
  
• Judas Priest - British Steel
  
• Public Enemy (feat. Paris) - Rebirth of a Nation
  
• DJ Q*Bert - Wave Twisters, Episode 7 Million: Sonic Wars Within the Protons
  
• Horace Silver - Horace-Scope
  
• DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
  
• DJ Shadow - Funky Skunk
  
• DJ Shadow - The Outsider
  
• The Stanley Brothers - Amazing Grace
  
• Johnny Valentino - Stingy Brim
  
• Various - 18 Truck Driving Classics
  
• Rhonda Vincent - All American Bluegrass Girl
  
• Randy Weston - Zep Tepi
  
• X-Ecutioners - Built from Scratch

How bout y'all?

Addendum: What the hell? Let's make it a meme. Wobblie, Eric, and Dru, consider yourselves tagged.

Double plus addendum: I totally forgot Roscoe Holcomb - the high lonesome sound, which is altogether awesome, and the day after posting this I got a whole passle of cds from may Amazon wishlist as gifts. So add some Ricky Skaggs, Woody Guthrie, and miscellaneous bluegrass to the list. More importantly, you should check out wobblie's response.

As long as I'm addending: There was a Charlie Parker box set back in January, but it was crap. Not because of the bird, but because of the production.

But Gerry, I said, that's an elective office...

Notable deaths in 2006:

• James Brown - super funky wife beater
  
• Octavia Butler - science fiction writer
  
• Desmond Dekker - ska bandleader, singer, and songwriter
  
• Betty Friedan - author of The Feminine Mystique
  
• John Kenneth Galbraith - economist, author of The New Industrial State
  
• Stanislaw Lem - Polish science fiction writer
  
• Buck O'Neil - negro leauge baseball player, instrumental in getting negro league greats into the baseball hall of fame
  
• Wilson Pickett - soul and R&B singer
  
• Alan Shugart - pioneered the development of the disk drive

MAKOTO NAGANO!!!!!!!!!!!

We now return to our regular scheduled, cliche ridden, end of the year, non-ninja warrior blogging.

2006 - The year in cultural literacy (an incomplete list)

Television: Deal or No Deal, Battlestar Galactica, Big Love

Political Books: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq - Thomas E. Ricks, State of Denial - Bob Woodward

Video Games: Wii Sports

Music Videos: Gnarls Barkley, Crazy

Albums: Bob Dylan, Modern Times; Justin Timberlake, Future Sex/Love Sounds; Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar

Movies: Little Miss Sunshine, Borat

Teh Internets: YouTube, Second Life

Sports: Zidane's head

Miscellaneous predictions

• Deal or No Deal will turn out not to have legs.
  
  
• Rather than continue to preside over a disastrous attempt to pacify Baghdad street by street, Robert Gates will resign as Secretary of Defence after less than six months.
  
  
• The Wii will blow the PS3 completely out of the water. Sony, emerging from bankruptcy in 2008, will enter into talks with Sega, Atari, and Electronic Arts focused on updating and endorsing the 3DO platform.
  
  
• Hillary Clinton will withdraw from the 2008 presidential race.
  
  
• Mark McGwire will not receive enough votes to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
  
  
• There will be a major terrorist strike somewhere in the world on the 11th day of some month. It will involve coordinated bombings of public transportation. If it's in the United States, nationwide standards will be adopted making it so inconvenient to use public transit that everyone will drive.
  
  
• The klezmer scene will continue not to expand.

This X-mas in death

Item: James Brown, R.I.P. My suggestion for the tombstone: "Wife beating bastard, but funky"

Item: Six GIs dead in Iraq this weekend, making 81 so far this month.

Item: CNN was too depressing, so I turned to TNT to watch Angel. First commercial was for something called a final wishes planner, which is pretty clearly a gimmick to sell life insurance, or maybe funeral plans. Presumably to old, lonely people.

Happy Holidays!

Odd

Once upon a time there was a seven word string which, if you googled it, would return TheBellman as one of the top results. Then I used that string for the title of a post pointing out that TheBellman was one of the top results. Within a few hours, that string no longer returned TheBellman as a top result. Except now it does again. Huh.

Headline most likely to be turned into an emo song

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds

Of course, if you actually read the article, it gets a lot more gruesome.

A species of moth drinks tears from the eyes of sleeping birds using a fearsome proboscis shaped like a harpoon, scientists have revealed. The new discovery – spied in Madagascar – is the first time moths have been seen feeding on the tears of birds.

But sleeping birds have two eyelids, both closed. So instead of the soft, straw-like mouthparts found on tear-drinking moths elsewhere, the Madagascan moth has a proboscis with hooks and barbs “shaped like an ancient harpoon”, Hilgartner says. This can be inserted under the bird’s eyelids, where the barbs anchor it, apparently without disturbing the bird.

Edward R. Murrow never had to deal with this

All week I have been trying to post something substantive, so that DR doesn't have to fill up all my empty space with baseball posts, but, I have to admit, I am having Serious-Policy-Posting block. I don't know if it's because I am pages deep into my latest work of fiction, or whether I am just behind on all issues of relevance.

Anyway, the blockage continues, so in lieu of substance, I give you... genitalia in flight!

CNET's Second Life bureau was assaulted the other day during an interview with virtual land magnate Anshe Chung. As the interview was set to begin, the CNET theater was set upon by a horde of animated flying penises.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future.

I believe this is exactly what William Gibson was envisioning when he wrote Neuromancer. I can just picture his editor calling him up. "Yeah, the story is great...very innovative, cutting-edge stuff. Could use a few less airborne dicks."

Click on through for a youtube video of the incident.

Yes, this is one of those hall of fame posts

Some time ago I wrote a post proposing revised magic numbers for entrance into the Baseball Hall of Fame. One thing I didn't do in the original post was list the excluded players who would merit inclusion given my proposals, so I've posted that list after the jump.

Looking back, I think a couple of the numbers I proposed might be a little bit on the low side, and that there are others -- 4750 total bases for example -- that few players reach without also passing one of the more established benchmarks. One number, 4000 strikeouts, jumps out as being on the high side. Only four players have hit that plateau: Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, and Steve Carlton. If the number were lowered to 3000, only three players not currently in the hall would be added to the list: Bert Blyleven, Greg Maddux, and Curt Shilling.

Of the purely statistical benchmarks proposed, the one I'm most perplexed by are triples. There are lots of pre-modern players with more than 150 triples, along with a handful of players whose careers went into the 1930s, but the only unambiguously modern players to hit that mark are Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente, and Lou Gehrig. The change, I'm given to understand, has something to do with advances in glove and fence technology. Among players active in my lifetime, Willie Wilson is the career triples leader with 147. Among active players, the aging Steve Finley is way out in front with 124. I guess my thinking when writing the original post was that anybody who could hit 150 in the modern era must be a hall of famer.

The numbers that commenters gave me the hardest time about in response to the original post were gold gloves and all-star appearances. You can follow the link to the original post to read my dismissive response to those criticisms. Looking now at the list of excluded players that those benchmarks would include, though, inclines me to agree that they are too permissive.

(Key: * - active player, + - has exhausted HOF eligibility, @#!% - Pete Rose)

• 10 Gold Gloves
  
  • Jim Kaat, 16 LHP+
    
  • Greg Maddux, 16 RHP*
    
  • Ivan Rodriguez,12 C*
    
  • Keith Hernandez, 11 1B+
    
  • Roberto Alomar, 10 2B
    
  • Omar Vizquel, 11 SS*
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 10 OF*
  
  
• 12 All-Star games
  
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 19
    
  • Pete Rose, 17@#!%
    
  • Tony Gwynne, 15
    
  • Barry Bonds, 13
    
  • Ivan Rodriguez, 12*
    
  • Roberto Alomar, 12
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 12*
    
  • Barry Larkin, 12
    
  • Mark McGwire, 12
    
  • Mike Piazza, 12*
  
  
• 1600 Runs
  
  • Ricky Henderson, 2295
    
  • Pete Rose, 2165@#!%
    
  • Barry Bonds, 2152*
    
  • Craig Biggio, 1776*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 1663
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 1647
    
  • Jimmy Ryan, 1642+
    
  • George Van Haltren, 1639+
  
  
• 4750 Total Bases
  
  • Barry Bonds, 5784*
    
  • Pete Rose, 5752@#!%
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 5388
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 5168
    
  • Andre Dawson, 4787
  
  
• 550 Doubles
  
  • Pete Rose, 746@#!%
    
  • Craig Biggio, 637*
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 603
    
  • Barry Bonds, 587*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 585
  
  
• 150 modern Triples
  
  • none
  
  
• 1600 RBI
  
  • Barry Bonds, 1930*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 1835
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 1695
    
  • Harold Baines, 1628
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 1608*
  
  
• 700 Stolen Bases
  
  • Ricky Henderson, 1406
    
  • Tim Raines, 808
    
  • Vince Coleman, 752+
    
  • Arlie Latham, 739+
  
  
• 450 Saves
  
  • Trevor Hoffman, 482*
    
  • Lee Smith, 478
  
  
• 50 Shutouts
  
  • Bert Blyleven, 60
  
  
• 4000 Strikeouts
  
  • Roger Clemens, 4604*
    
  • Randy Johnson, 4544*

Being a cheerful post addressing certain aspects of our nation's priapismic foreign policy

As the national conversation about Iraq grows ever more reasonable, it becomes easier and easier to fall prey to a sort of perverse optimism. Yes, the thinking goes, things are awful, but at least the right questions are being asked. At least the ISG report's assessment of the situation is grounded in reality. At least the Democrats aren't engaging in a more hawkish than thou pissing match with the Republicans. At least the American people seem to understand that this war is an unmitigated disaster. At least, at least, at least.

But, you know, as a certain wise head reminded us today, the President of the United States still has a raging hard on for this war. Maybe, just maybe a new fact has slipped into his worldview. Maybe he now believes that Iraq is spinning out of control into an ever more violent civil war. The question is, what is he going to do with this information?

Well, if the rumors are true then we have a good idea of the first part of his plan. He wants more troops in Baghdad. The thinking seems to be that we won the first battle of Baghdad too quickly, so it's time to start another, bloodier, one.

Huzzah!

In second step of the new plan for victory news, Bush seems to be taking certain parts of Powell's we-don't-have-enough-troops-to-control-Baghdad critique seriously:

"I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines," Bush told the Post. "And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea."
|The Washington Post|

The article includes the qualification that, "substantial military expansion will take years and would not be meaningful in the near term in Iraq." Which, you know, would be a comforting sentiment if there were some reason to hope that the next near term after this one was going to be one in which the United States wasn't bogged down in Iraq.

Just in time for X-mas

Got my check today for my vast online poker winnings. I cashed out, of course, because the GOP Congress was kind enough to prepare the way for electoral defeat by outlawing internet gaming. Way to go, Grand Olde Partypoopers!

This post is not about the Hall of Fame

Talk about an eye catching headline: Indian runner fails gender test, loses medal

Before following the link, I spent some time imagining the questions.

1. True or False: Sex roles are innate, and do not vary between cultures or over time.
   
2. True or False: Gender is a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity.
   
3. True or False: All binaries necessarily present false dichotomies.

Silly me! It was a medical test.

From the article:

The test reports sent to the Indian Olympic Association on Sunday said [Santhi] Soudarajan "does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman," The Times of India reported.
...
An Indian athletics official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Sounderajan almost certainly never had sex-change surgery.

Instead, the official said Sounderajan appeared to have "abnormal chromosomes." The official also said the test revealed more Y chromosomes than allowed.

The most likely conclusion seems to be that Soudarajan^[1] is an intersex person who identifies as female. Now, I understand that intersex persons face significantly more serious obstacles than being denied eligibility to participate in athletic competitions, but still, this sucks. Even if we exclude all of the effort Soudarajan put into training, her genetic endowment goes a lot deeper than the fact that she hapens to have an extra Y chromosone. Why is that particular abnormality grounds for exclusion from competition while Lance Armstrong's freakishly efficient (and apparently innate) respiration is hunky dory? Or how about Shaq's freakish size?

The answer, of course, is that those other genetic abnormalities don't blur the distinction between women's and men's sports. Fair enough. But the thing is, intersexuality isn't all that rare -- conservative estimates put the frequency of intersexual condition at about 1 per 2000 births. (By contrast, whatever confluence of genetic and environmental factors account for growing to a height of 7 feet are much, much, much, much, much, much rarer.) And if intersexuality isn't particularly rare, then the genetic distinction between men and women is already fairly blurry. In the face of that, insisting on a non-blurry distinction in sport seems wrong-headed.

----------
1 Of the article's three spellings of the athlete's name, s-o-u-d-a-r-a-j-a-n seems most plausible to me, so that's what I'm going with.

(and so do girls)

Alternate title for this post: We'll all be gay when...

(via, indirectly via)

I didn't see this in the decumbiture

There must be some bizarre astrological convergence today, some relationship expressed beyond whatever pedestrian harmonic controls vehicular safety. How else could it come to pass that a public figure is both appearing on a Sunday morning talk show and making sense about Iraq?

I'm talking about Colin Powell who, on Face the Nation this morning, first tore to shreds the Bush Administration's troop surge gambit and then offered a realistic assessment of what we can usefully do going forward. It was surreal.

At a fundamental level, Powell's criticism of the troop surge gambit is that it comes without any discernable rationale. In response to speculation that the troops will go to Baghdad and be part of an effort to stabilize the city Powell says, refreshingly, that 40,000 troops can't do that and that "The American army isn't large enough to secure Baghdad."

Plus, in a nod to all the wonks out there, he linked this critique to a three point test for evaluating any further use of military force in Iraq. Here's how it goes:

1. Is there a clearly articulated mission?
   
2. Can that mission be accomplished?
   
3. Do we have enough troops to accomplish the mission?

I don't know about you, but I've always been a sucker for a Powell doctrine.

As for his plan going forward, it's basically the ISG recommendation without the permanent bases and rapid reaction force. That is, Powell thinks that we should work with the elected Iraqi leadership to help them train police and put in place the political pieces that are going to make possible the establishment of stability.

Will this work? I'm not overly optimistic, but then, neither is Powell. Which is, I'll say it again, refreshing. It's not a give up and get out plan and it's not a stay the course plan. It's a figure out what we can productively do, do it, and live with the consequences plan.

All of which brings me to this. Whatever happened to the Colin Powell presidential speculation? I know that the conventional wisdom is that he lost his chance with his WMD testimony at the UN, but I have trouble seeing why that's supposed to matter so much. The bad spin, I guess, is that it shows that he's either dishonest or won't stick to his principles. But, you know, it's hard to see how that sets him apart from the field. And, anyway, there's positive spin too. Namely, that Powell is a team player.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm on the Powell 2008 bandwagon, but he looks pretty good to me on the key issue of getting the hell out of Iraq. Unlike establishment Democrats, Powell wouldn't feel the need to prove his hawkishness. And unlike establishment Republicans he's not a melange of batshit crazy and evil incarnate.

Update: Video of the appearance is up at Crooks and Liars.

Is that a Taurus in that Taurus?

According to a study by InsuranceHotline.com, a Web site that quotes drivers on insurance rates, astrological signs are a significant factor in predicting car accidents.

The study, which looked at 100,000 North American drivers' records from the past six years, puts Libras (born September 23-October 22) followed by Aquarians (January 20-February 18) as the worst offenders for tickets and accidents. Leos (July 23-August 22) and then Geminis (May 21-June 20) were found to be the best overall.

Gemini, for the win!

Romanov originally wanted to have some fun by examining astrological signs as a possible cause for the variance between insurance companies quoting high and low rates but didn't expect to find anything interesting.
...
Even age, another variable for determining insurance rates, is less of a consideration to Romanov. The cutoff line for being considered a higher risk driver is 24 years of age; 25-year-olds are considered not-high risk.

"I'd rather get into a car with a 24-year-old Leo than a 25-year-old Aries," Romanov said.
...
"I wasn't believing in it before," said Romanov, "but I would think twice before getting into a car with an Aries." (link)

Don't even get me started on Scorpios. So, what's your sign?

UPDATE: I thought I'd share the thoughts of zombie Hervé Villechaize:



I guess the Foley jokes will continue until someone eclipses him in the sex-with-minors category.