Beaneball

I'm working my way backward through the Lawrence Lessig trilogy, having started with Free Culture, which I wrote about last July. I just finished The Future of Ideas on the train today. The themes are, of course, very similar. Where Free Culture dealt with (duh) cultural things like music, art, and literature, however, this book dealt more with technological and business-oriented innovation. His concerns are essentially the same in both cases: the government is moving too quickly to entrench the Old in their positions, granting them extended copyright, liberal patent, and other protections, all to the detriment of the New. His point is not that the New should win for the sake of being new, but that general human progress is made by allowing new technology and practice to overtake the old. If we continue putting in hurdles for the New to jump, we'll significantly retard their ability to innovate, leaving us stagnant in the hands of the Old, who, for perfectly sane business reasons, have no desire to make radical changes. The Old merely want to get marginal increases on what they've already got. The unfortunate thing about what Lessig says is that his solutions are so pie-in-the-sky. They always involve the government finally standing up to big business and saying, "Hey, you know what we're going to do? We're going to do what's best for the people." Of course, that'll never happen. It's in the nature of our big-money political system that the in-power (both business-wise and political-wise) stay in power, and even if Lessig sells three million copies of his book, that's not going to write a campaign check for any Senators.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Reading at 20:20 | |

I've undertaken a slight re-design involving adding a new left sidebar, adding some color, and cleaning up the backend to make it a little bit more readable for me (I'm bad at CSS, good at table-tags). Plus I kind of like the effect of the background grey bleeding through as "borders." That was unintentional, but I left it because I thought it looked kind of neat.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in The Blog at 23:32 | |

Mark Ellis has signed a two-year deal for $6 million. There's a club option for $5 million, with a cheap $250k buyout. I'd guess, considering that Ellis is already 28, that Oakland won't be picking up that option after 2007. So call this a two-year, $6.25M deal. There's not really a lot to say about it, though. Ellis had a remarkable 861 OPS last year and was, by VORP, the 6th-best second baseman in the major leagues last year. I expect that'll turn out to have been his career year, especially since his .316 batting average looks a little fluky. I'd bet on a .280/.350/.430 line next year. That's not bad, and since his fielding skills are apparently pretty good (11 FRAR last year - that's a whole win right there), I'd be happy to be paying him ~$3M per year for two years.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 17:47 | |

They did it! Frank Thomas is an Athletic! For half a million bucks base, the A's got one of the greatest hitters of the past 30 years to DH for them. So he's 37. So he's had injury problems. So what? The man had a .590 slugging last year despite just a .219 batting average. If he's healthy, the A's got a six-win player for $3 million (the maximum value of the contract). If he's not, they got a 1-3 win player for half a mil. Most importantly, it's an exciting thing to have a truly awesome, all-time great like Frank Thomas on the team. The last time someone of his career-caliber played for Oakland was probably 1998, when Rickey Henderson made his last A's appearance, dropping a .376 OBP and recording his final significant stolen base total, with 66. Angels? What Angels? I'm exuberant. I wonder what this means for Nick Swisher, Jay Payton, and Bobby Kielty, though. Consider that the A's have a .350-OBP guy as the fifth outfielder right now. That's not a problem, necessarily, especially since Thomas (or anyone else, as we saw last year) could drop at any moment. However, we'll see if Jay Payton likes splitting time, and we also have to hope that Nick Swisher can continue to develop if he's not playing every day. From an offensive standpoint, is there a better 1-5 outfield in baseball right now? Defensively they're not too shabby either, even if Swisher and Kielty are average at best, because of the presence of two legitimate center fielders plus an additional decent one (Payton).

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 18:33 | |

Here're the articles I read today.

• At CleveScene.com a story about an Ohio Supreme Court decision that allows insurance companies to get their money back if they pay out to cover injuries that, it turns out, are covered by some other insurance. In the case at hand, a girl was hurt in a car accident and the other driver's insurance company paid up. The family's insurance paid something as well, but when the total bills turned out to be covered by the other driver's insurance, the family's insurance company demanded its money back. The paper, of course, blasts this as being unfair "to the little guy." I'm not sure. Clearly, it hurts for the injured. That said, if the medical bills are covered, what's the justification for another company to pay when there are no more bills? What's sketchy about the whole situation is that the Ohio Supreme Court is an elected body, and this decision overrules earlier law by a one-vote margin, with the swing vote provided by the newest judge, Maureen O'Connor, who received $400,000 in campaign contributions from doctors and insurance companies.
• At CNN.com, a story about legislatures looking into potential political bias in universities and colleges. Most of the schools in this country are obviously unbalanced politically. The question, though, is whether that has an actual adverse affect on the education of conservatives. The answer might be hinted at by considering the fact that plenty of conservative politicians and public figures went to top schools and got top grades at those schools. A huge number of Congresspeople from both sides of the aisle went to Harvard Law, for example, which as an institution is probably less liberal than Harvard University as a whole, but is still unlikely to be compared to Bob Jones University any time soon. That's not conclusive, of course, and I'm certainly biased in an obvious way, but my inclination is to think that the whole thing is overblown, a corollary of the constant cries of "liberal media bias" that have decimated the ability of those media outlets perceived as liberal to have any kind of credibility to criticize a conservative regime.
• Also at CNN.com, I see that the new Virginia governor, Tim Kaine, will deliver the rebuttal to Pres. Bush's State of the Union address. It's an interesting choice, given Kaine's status as a newcomer and his relatively small national profile. I can't find a list of who's given the rebuttal in the past, but as an example, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, far more veteran than Kaine, delivered the speech last year.
• Here's a review at the Dallas Observer of Marah's album If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry. The album sounds interesting, if you can get past the tiresome whining about the state of music today, why people should appreciate albums instead of just listening to shuffle, and so on.
• At the same publication, Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley has released a solo album which sounds right up my newfound musical alley: "Lewis pulls off a convincing turn as an old-timin' country/soul singer rather than a generic singer-songwriter."
• At the Deseret Morning News, a Utah man acquitted of murder 15 years ago has confessed, which is certainly backward from what it usually is. If you're squeamish at all, I'd avoid the story, which involves a semi-graphic description of the murder of a small child.
• Something that'll make approximately one person I know happy: Everwood will be back next year.
• Denny Neagle could be helped out since the officer who arrested him for solicitation didn't read him his rights before Neagle made some statements that could have been damaging at trial. Those statements will be excluded as a result.
• The Wizards have bought out ex-Laker Chucky Atkins's contract, allowing him to try to find a place where he can play more minutes. Atkins started just two games this year and was averaging under 20 minutes per game.
• I'm only linking to this relatively routine meth conviction story because it happened in good ol' Monterey County, where I grew up for ten years before going to college. Finally, I have a response to the "It's beautiful there" I always get from people when I tell them where I grew up. "Yeah, but they got mad meth."
• The government's going up against Google, trying to get them to turn over information in some of their databases
• Laura Bush called Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remarks "ridiculous": "I think it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous comment -- that's what I think." Apparently, that's all she said, because that's the only quote from her in the story, which is pretty weak. I think my favorite response so far, though, is Scott McClellan coming off like Tony Soprano with his "way out of line" comment.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in News at 10:16 | |

I'm not sure I remember the last time I was this excited about the NFL playoffs. For some reason, I chose this year to be the one where I watched pretty much every minute of all the games, and I've been rewarded with some pretty remarkable action.

• Who gets shut out in the playoffs? Even better, who gets shut out in the playoffs after scoring the third-most points in the entire league? As Chris Berman might say, the Geeeeeeee-men, that's who. Eli Manning? 113 yards. Tiki Barber? 41 yards. Panther defense? Absolute domination. Obviously, this game wasn't much for drama, but the spectacle of the shutout was pretty cool.
• Speaking of spectacle, how about Mark Brunell throwing for 41 yards against Tampa Bay ... and winning? And it's not like Clinton Portis (53 yards) carried the load. No, this one was all defense. The Washington d-line must have tipped about twelve Chris Simms passes, which is part of a league-wide trend toward tipping passes, but also part of Simms not playing like he's 6'4". Really, if you're that big, you should be able to get your ball over the line.
• I didn't watch the Steelers-Bengals game as closely, largely because I knew Cincinnati didn't have a chance after Carson Palmer went down. Jon Kitna played valiantly, I thought, and he made the most of the skills he has (his mobility, mainly) to cause some trouble, but it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to be enough. I, like Bill Simmons, was hoping the Bengals could get to the Super Bowl just for the spectacle of seeing Chad Johnson navigate Media Week.
• New England-Jacksonville was never really competitive and generally didn't really have a lot to recommend it. Oh well.
• I predicted that whoever got to 10 points in the Carolina-Chicago game would win it. Instead, the teams combined for fifty and the game ended with Rex Grossman trying to lead a final drive for a touchdown and two-point conversion to tie the game. He's about as qualified to lead that drive as I am, though, so the ending was predictable. Both defenses disappointed me, but what really killed Chicago was poor traction: two times, a defensive back fell down, allowing Steve Smith to score a touchdown. Who knows what happens if the defenders keep their feet in those situations.
• Washington-Seattle wasn't ever really in doubt, even after Shaun Alexander went down. Washington just didn't have the horses to stay with the Seahawks. Alexander's injury creates an interesting situation for next week, when both Seattle and Carolina could be missing their running backs.
• The Patriots-Broncos game was hugely disappointing to me. I'm not what you'd call a Patriots fan, but I have some unreasonable dislike for the Broncos, probably related to some combination of feelings against Mike Shanahan and Bill Romanowski. New England just made far too many mistakes, uncharacteristically, and paid the price.
• And the best for last. Pittsburgh dominated Indianapolis for about 55 minutes. They were getting to Peyton Manning, not letting him get good throws off, shutting down Edgerrin James, and generally coasting on the strength of two good early drives. You can't keep a good offense down forever, though, and I really started to believe once Manning led the Colts to two touchdowns to bring the game within three points. Then ... wow. The failed fourth-down conversion deep in Indianapolis territory. The Colts timeouts forcing Pittsburgh to do more than just kneel. The devastating Jerome Bettis fumble. The return for a touchdown stopped by Ben Roethlisberger grabbing Nick Harper's ankle. And the most accurate kicker in the history of the league absolutely shanking the final field goal. And can I just add a note on Nick Harper? Didn't he play a magnificent game? He gets stabbed by his wife, gets his knee smacked around early in the game, and then, with the exception of one pass interference call, plays great, culminating in nearly taking a fumble 98 yards for a likely-game-winning score.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Football at 10:58 | |

I saw King Kong last night with a group of friends in Seattle. It was entertaining, though it was really too long. Jack Black couldn't really do anything with what he had to work with, Jamie Bell was absolutely wasted, and even the special effects weren't, to my eyes, that great. There were a lot of moments where it really seemed to jump out, "Hey, those actors are just running in front of a green screen!" It would have to be better than Mad Hot Ballroom to crack my top ten, and it certainly wasn't. I've still got hopes for Munich, Brokeback Mountain, and, if I see it in time, Match Point.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Movies at 22:40 | |