Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass

Saw and loved the movie...so my thought was that the book would even be better, more fantastical...ughhhh what a slog through it became. Very disappointing. What I don't understand is that this was supposed to be a kid's book (?) and I just never got that. I mean the Harry Potter books have a kid element to it that adults can easily relate to but this one just seems too harsh, too dark to be a kid's book. Really not a lighthearted book but kind of sinister. I will finish the trilogy but it won't be a top priority.

I really thought all the religious stuff was way overblown, as usual...it only provides an outlet for a healthy dialogue about what it all means. If only people were open-minded about these things and instead of feeling attacked and backed into a corner with claws out, simply consider other viewpoints and move on. Does it really matter so much to you about what others think about something? Is it wrong to have different thoughts? Why take it personal, in the end what you think only really matters to you.

Peter Parker, SWM

Big shake up for our friendly neighborhood spider-man. Twenty odd years of his comic life flushed down the drain. Was this a good move? Personally I don't read the mainstream spider-man...I keep to the ultimate version. And why do I do this...well part of it is because it is a stripped down simple version of spidey not shackled by the weight of 500+ issues. No clone saga debacle and no marriage. Spidey should always be that awkward teenager or twenty something. The marriage thing was probably good at the time because frankly how many twentysomething plots can one reuse but then we are now at that time of gee how many different marriage plots can we twist. Good or bad is kind of irrelevant because comic book characters have to have that soap opera mentality about themselves otherwise no one would bother to see what happens month to month and year to year. It really doesn't mean that the marriage thing was a wasted plot point but it helped develop the character in one way and in hindsight it really didn't move the core character in the direction that makes him interesting. Let's hope they don't ruin the renewal. My thoughts for Peter's Singles Ad:

SWM seeks SWF who isn't afraid of spiders. Enjoys costume parties. Can we save the Universe together?

This Week in Comics

X-Factor 27
Chapter 11 in the ongoing series. Kind of a filler issue...some issues get resolved like the multiple man getting sent back through time (cool concept though!) Bet we see Layla down the line...two issues to go. Predator X is at the Mansion...big throw down in the next issue. Pretty decent this was the first filler art issue. Up to this point the issues have been well written and drawn but his one had the look of a last minute filler artist...got to hate that. Best thing about this series has been the cover art...fantastic.

Captain America Omnibus

Wow what a well written series. I admit I missed out on the Death of Captain America...I came in at Issue 26 having missed out on a beautifully scripted arc up to that point. When Marvel put these issue into their Omnibus edition I initially balked at paying $100 to read the issues. Fortunately Mile High Comics had their 40% after Thanksgiving sale so I snapped this up like a big dog. Finally got to read it over the Holiday Break and what a great series. I mean every issue led somewhere or provided some clue to the bigger picture. There wasn't any fluff or unnecessary crap that sometimes we have to put up with long term series (i.e. the author decided to mail in a story that month because he didn't feel like it). What amazed me was the tight group of actors. Reading the X-men through the years there is such a huge cast of characters that you that you can afford to go down on some tangent with B-list characters and get away with it. This one though as a tight knit group, a long standing history, and a take that certainly does not suck. My only real question is when Ed took this over and brought Bucky back into the mix, did he know about Civil War. His plots do get a bit of track due to the Civil War storyline...did he intend to really kill of Steve Rodgers from the beginning? Obviously it was a certain progression of his story up to Civil War and once the fall out occurred it made sense. Anyway it was a good read.

Haiku Wednesday

Stock Show

The Old West is here
Cowboys are in the city
Where did Trigger go?

Magazine Wrap Up

Wired

Michel Gondry, frankly I had never heard of him...but then Jack Black's new movie about video store clerks remaking famous movies came about and...guess who the director is? Up to this point his best known movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I thought was good but kind of in that David Lynch style of moviemaking (i.e. more impressed the movie actually got made because frankly it would have taken a leap of faith for anyone to actually green light...wouldn't you'd think someone would have to understand it before letting it go forward...all in the name art!)

42 Entertainment? Again anyone? Well if you remember the internet search for interesting clues for the movie AI then you've got the organization. The latest has been Nine Inch Nails internet advertising. Mysterious flashdrives lying in bathrooms reviewing a new song which ends with crickets which when analyzed by a spectrograph reveals a phone number in Cleveland which leads to a phone message which led to a website and etc etc... Also the whole perplex city cards indicated the potential for world wide games. Exciting but unfortunately most of us have lives...

Where does $15.99 go when purchasing a CD?

0.16 Musician's Unions

0.80 Packaging/Manufacturing

0.80 Publishing Royalties

0.80 Retail Profit

0.96 Distribution

1.60 Artist's Royalties

1.76 Label Profit

2.40 Marketing/Promotion

2.88 Label Overhead

3.84 Retail Overhead

And iTunes - $9.99

1.40 Artist

3.00 iTunes

5.59 Label

Interesting infoporn article on nutritional values

Sky and Telescope

The prime meridian was established in 1850 by George Airy and then in October 1884 at conference in Washington DC declared that this would "the " meridian.  Didn't realize it took so long to make it official.  At one time, Paris tried to become this meridian and years before India had established a 0 degrees longitude.

New Yorker

In depth article on the head of the US intelligence service.  Seems a decent type of guy but can you really honestly feel safe about someone running this organization who grew up in the Cold War era and probably still can't figure out how to turn off the ringer on his cell phone?  Problem with government jobs and seniority...by the time these guys get into the position to run an organization they don't know beans about what is going on in the world around them.  I mean this article discusses a Disney Imagineer coming in and designing the Natonal Counter Terrorism Center.  They talk about Intellipedia (a la wikipedia) , A-Space (social network), and looking into virtual worlds???  Good golly have they forgotten the underlying basis of intelligence...i.e. local gossip, learning foreign languages, integreting into societies.  Ughhhh

The one thing interesting that I didn't know about was a Women's school in DC during WWII that operated the machinery that deciphered German naval code...for the story here

/div>

Rox Talk

Part III in my Game Score + research (Part I and Part II). The last post showed that using the extra outs adjustment factor and graphing the results using a pitch per out scenario could provide a necessary adjustment to the Game Score framework that added in the pitch count to make a realistic comparison between Red Bartlett's 58 pitch efficient pitching performance to Kerry Wood's 20 strikeout dominant performance. In conclusion to Part II, I wanted to see how this adjustment factor effected a team's performance over a season and what if I used correcting factor for actual pitches per out rather than using 3?

So the extra out adjustment factor showed to be a good adjustment when you consider the best pitched games but what about a team's performance over a one year period? Looking at the Colorado Rockies in 2007, the following graph indicates how the adjustment factor looks for a team during the season.

Pretty linear (note Aaron Cook's 74 pitch game below the x-axis). The correlation of this is equal to 0.77 while Game Score is equal to 0.46 (data not shown). So this shows for an average pitching staff, a pretty good correlation between pitch count and Game Score+, although there is a greater amount of negative game scores with this adjustment. During the regular season the low Game Score was 4 which translated to -23 GS+ (which wasn't the worst adjustment, this goes to a -65 GS+ pitched in Game 53 by Hirsh who throw 103 pitches in a 4 2/3 effort). So to conclude this adjustment factor shows good correlation to an average team between pitch count and the new metric Game Score+.

The final data crunch is to look at the good pitching performances and the 2007 Rockies using actual pitch per out instead of a constant 3. To review, I took all pitching performances and adjusted all the pitching performances to 9 innings. For those pitchers who didn't go 9 innings, these extra pitches were divided by 3 (assume 3 pitch strikeouts which if you recall is based on the 81 pitch perfect strikeout game) and provided the "extra outs" metric which is subtracted from Game Score. Instead of assuming a 3 for every pitcher then I just used pitcher's actual pitches per out ratio that was established for the innings they did pitch.

The final question is then instead of using 3 pitches to account for each out for pitcher's adjusted 9 inning game then what happens when we use their actual pitches per out ratio they were actually having during their appearance?

Well this method certainly drops the large negative games scores and still holds a pretty good correlation factor of 0.57 versus 0.77 using the 3 pitch per out factor. For the good pitching (data not shown) it drops the the correlation factor to 0.02 versus 0.25. Because of this I think using the 3 pitch factor seems to be the best bet.

Finally if you recall the whole purpose of this exercise was to try and determine if Aaron Cook's 74 pitch complete game was worthy to be considered a great game. If you recall Bill James' Game Score for this game was 67. Using my Game Score + adjustment factor you increase his score to 69. How does this relate to the best performances from 2002 - 2007? Well he barely eeks in to around 120th and doesn't even come close to matching the 2006 performance by Jeff Francis who pitched a complete game Game Score 91 versus Game Score+ of 75 (due his taking 129 pitches or requiring 48 extra pitches or 16 extra outs).

This Week in Comics

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #10
Whedon is back for a pseudo filler issue. Guess this one was a bit out of the ordinary as the issue had a "reader" as a character which was chosen from readers who sent in an email stating why Buffy means so much too them. As far as the issue goes again it delves into the much bigger buffyverse which I just don't have a good feel for. It seems Buffy will be betrayed by someone close and the thought is Willow who then goes on to say if she hasn't already (?) Huh?? Anyway back to a continuity with he next issue. Do find the stories good but boy if you don't know Buffy it can be a challenge...even reading the wikipedia entry doesn't really clear anything up...whew!

Uncanny X-men #494

Now of course talking about a history... with almost 500 issue in the bag (assume 12 issues a year...) and we almost have 40 years of continuity to mess with...and I thought Buffy was tough to follow. Is it any wonder kids have a tough go of it trying to hook up with these long standing comic stories. I mean this Messiah Complex is really reaching into the old bag of tricks bringing out some long standing enemies and story lines. With Cable and Bishop being central characters in all this it would seem that the writer's have happened upon some long standing plot points and are finally trying to bring some closure. This is Chapter 10 so about 3 issues to go...still waiting for the shoe to drop...

Running

Just a quick chart showing my running averages over the last 4 years. The square is the mean and the lines on either end is the 95% upper and lower confidence limits.

Haiku Wednesday

Snowflakes

Quiet and lazy
Gently falls to my jacket
Melts, gone forever

And a bonus one for the new year

Nature's mathematics
Very simple, yet complex
Why else is car stuck?

Out with 2007 and in with 2008

Well another year in the books, another orbit around the sun. Good year, kept up with blog and I am pleased with how it has gone...it is nice to have the year laid out for you. 2008 will be better. I hope to improve some of the baseball posts. So the final tally:

- 31 books read (favorite, "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" - Michael Chabon)
- 94 comics reviewed (favorite, "Captain America" and "Messiah Complex")
- Best Movie seen was "Juno"
- Best Album was "Linkin Park"
- 29 Haiku's Written

My Favorites

Flickering shadows
Flame Dancing to its rhythm
Mesmerizing light

The night sky beckons
They shimmer and wink at me
Old friends say hello )

By the way this is what the readers of the NY Times thought was the most interesting for 2007:
1. Magazine: Sweeping the Clouds Away
2. U.S.: Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead
3. U.S.: Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student
4. Health: Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter
5. Magazine: Unhappy Meals
6. Maureen Dowd: A Mock Columnist, Amok
7. Books: An Epic Harry Potter Showdown
8. Multimedia: The Victims
9. Circuits: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
10. Dining & Wine: 101 Simple Summer Meals

Good year, things to look for next year....new Indiana Jones movie, Be Kind Rewind, the end of the Messiah Complex...)