And the Academy Award Goes To...

Does anybody really care? I have a perfect track record of predicting Oscar winners, and the formula basically works like this: the more difficult it is for me to stay awake during the movie, the more Oscars it wins. This heuristic has proved its worth all the way from Gone With the Wind to Dances With Wolves and The English Patient. Therefore, I predict that this year's big winner will be The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was the movie equivalent of taking 12 anti-allergy tablets washed down with a bottle of Nyquil. Throw away the Ambien and put this puppy in your Netflix queue, 'cause it's a snoozer.

Aggravating Marketing Spin

In my line of work, obviously we have to make things sound more useful and/or interesting, but these phrases have been WAAAAAY overutilized:

1. Leverage: Why say "Using your resources" when you can say "Leveraging your resources" and achieve twice the impact and ten times the douchebaggery?

2. Solutions: It's okay to use this word if you have just proved Fermat's Last Theorem. Otherwise, just stick with "products" and you won't sound quite as pretentious.

3. Value-Add: I would hope something that I'm paying for adds value.

4. Anything that starts with "e-": I think that the Internet is a recognized and well-entrenched part of the fabric of our society now, so we can stop saying that we had e-conversations over e-mail making e-dates for our e-calendars. Close second: anything that starts with "i-".

Driving Me Crazy

I don't know what it is about people being inside their cars, but evidently they believe that their windows are lined with tinted lead or something, because the things I see people doing in their cars is ridiculous. I've seen people:

-Eating, and I don't mean snacking on Skittles, this bitch had a Subway sandwich and chips on her lap.
-Picking their noses
-Picking their ears
-Sticking their fingers in their mouths after picking their noses and/or ears
-Doing makeup
-Singing (not regular singing but fucking ROCKING OUT)
-Texting (if I see you texting I WILL get in front of you and I WILL flick you off through my sunroof for thinking that my life is less important than your "LOL ur crazee gurl!")

What I think we should do, which will cut down on driver stupidity, is that instead of license plates, everyone should be required to stick their full name and picture on the front and back of their cars. Then maybe people won't be so damn incompetent on the road.

Boy, Baseball is a Mess

And I thought that even before the A-Rod revelations came out. It was a little surprising to me that he was on the juice, because he's always been so lean. But then again, THIS guy was named in the Mitchell Report:

I guess you can't always rely on size, because Nook Logan has to be the skinniest guy in the entire league. If it turns out Ichiro was on the juice, I quit watching baseball altogether.

The other serious problem with baseball, in my estimation, is the absence of a salary cap. It's simply not good for the game, and I say that not as a fan, but purely from a business perspective. When there are just several perennially dominant teams, there is sizable risk of the erosion of the fanbases of lesser teams, who will simply lose interest in their hometown squads. For example, I have virtually no interest anymore in attending Orioles games unless there's something intriguing to me peripheral to league competition. I just know that we're going to get squashed every year by New York and Boston (and now Tampa), so my enthusiasm is pretty much in the toilet. So as fans, we stop showing up, we stop caring, we stop buying jerseys...pretty soon the whole country is just Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs fans.

So as if there isn't enough already to dislike about baseball, I hope the Yankees enjoy their pyrrhic victory; even if they don't destroy the league, CC Sabathia will eat them all.

Best. Fantasy Team. Ever.

Every year I joke that if in the middle of the season, if I'm just too far back to ever catch up, then I will dump all my players and create the ultimate theme fantasy squad. Usually I throw out Team Asia (every roster spot filled by an Asian guy) or Team Carlos (every roster spot filled by a Carlos). Today I actually wondered if I could make those whole teams and if they'd be any good. Let's take a look:

Team Asia:

1B: -
2B: Kaz Matsui
SS: Chin Lung Hu
3B: Akinori Iwamura
C: Kenji Johjima
OF: Ichiro
OF: Hideki Matsui
OF: Shin Soo Choo
Flex: Kosuke Fukudome
SP: Daisuke Matsuzaka
SP: Chien Ming Wang
SP: Hiroki Kuroda
RP: Hong Chih Kuo
RP: Takashi Saito

Not a bad team (if a bit power-deficient), though I admit that it was harder filling out the slots than I expected. It's too bad Hee Seop Choi left the league; I was hoping to flesh out a full squad and just fell a 1B short. As one would expect, the depth of pitching far exceeds positional depth.

Team Carlos:

1B: Carlos Pena
2B: -
SS: -
3B: Carlos Guillen
C: Carlos Ruiz
OF: Carlos Beltran
OF: Carlos Lee
OF: Carlos Quentin
Flex: Carlos Delgado
SP: Carlos Zambrano
SP: Carlos Silva
SP: -
RP: Carlos Villanueva
RP: Carlos Marmol

Now that is a damn good team! The pitching/positional balance tips over to the other side here. But one thing's for sure: you could win any league in the country with a team of just Asians and Carloses.

Guys I'm Not Touching With a 10-Foot Pole

Well, I take that back. If these guys fall past their projected draft positions, I'd be happy to take them. I just don't want them at their current valuations.

- Daisuke Matsuzaka: This is one of the phoniest 2.90 ERAs in recent years; his peripherals would have pointed to around a 4.00 instead. Dice-K was incredibly lucky last year--continually loading the bases and then wriggling out of it is not so much skill as luck. If you had the skill, would you have loaded the bases so many times in the first place? With that said, Matsuzaka has pretty good strikeout numbers and is definitely a solid starter, though the WHIP keeps him out of the stratosphere. Let someone else gamble on him.

- Jay Bruce: Certainly got off to a hot start, but his second time around the league showed that he could be dealt with pretty effectively. Throw him junk away or bust him high and tight and he'll swing through the pitch pretty reliably. He will be a star someday, but he's going to struggle this year; his 71% contact rate has to improve a lot to avoid becoming Adam Dunn redux. I think he'll do it--just not this year.

- Matt Kemp: I had him on my team this year (actually, I had both him and Dice-K), but I fully realize how lucky he was. With his prodigious strikeout rate and mediocre contact rate, he had no business hitting even the .290 that he did...the .360 BABIP indicates a lot of lucky drops. He also has the potential to be a star, but he's as likely to hit .250 as he is to hit .300, and at some point, his doubles power has to mature into something a little grander before I'm completely sold.

Mmm, Dolphin Sandwich

For the most part, humans are very reluctant to eat smart animals. You never hear about chimpanzee steaks or dolphin fillets. Personally, I don't know why it's better to eat dumb animals; while we've developed the notion that the more intelligent a creature is, the more value they have, I don't know why that's necessarily the case. It seems to me that a cow shouldn't have less of a right to life than a dolphin does simply because it's not as intelligent.

I'm not saying that we should stop eating cows. I'm saying we should start eating dolphins.

I kid, but we do eat very intelligent animals, it's just that nobody realizes it. Octopuses (yes, "octopuses," which is only correct, but arguably more correct than "octopi") are incredibly smart. They can even learn to open jars!



And if you haven't seen it before, this is absolutely mindblowing:



I can't eat the guys anymore!