Best Mets moment in years: Dae Sung Koo (a lefty, no less) rips a double off a 91 mph fastball from Randy Johnson for his first hit sincce high school in his second Major League at-bat -- more miraculous if you saw his first at-bat where he stood at the outer edge of the batter's box with no intention of swinging. (which I did, thanks to MLB All-Access). Then he scores from second on a sacrifice bunt when Johnson leaves the plate uncovered with a nifty headfirst slide.

Better yet, Tim McCarver says, "I'm going to go out on a limb say that thus far in this young season this is the biggest give-up at-bat" right as Randy Johnson delivered the pitch that got ripped to the gap. Priceless set-up.

Then, with Reyes getting set to bunt, McCarver says, "If it's not a perfect bunt, a guy like Koo could be an easy out at third" right before Koo scores from second on the bunt.  ¶ 7:10 PM 1 comments

  Revenge of the Sith was not very good. However, I watched The Empire Strikes Back afterwards, and was pleasantly surprised that *seeing* the backstory in Sith did make some of the moments in Empire more poignant (e.g., when Luke/Leah have their ESP moment, and the Vader/Luke confrontation), more than simply knowing the backstory had on previous (re)viewings.

More striking is how Empire is incredibly more emotionally engaging than Sith (which isn't saying much), despite the fact that the dialogue is just about as cheesy. I think there is probably an illuminating critique that could be made of the prequels based on the premise that George Lucas fell prey to the grandiose empire-building impulses of the Dark Side and thus lost any feel for the individual, but I'll leave that to a Star Wars freak to fill out. The out of control scale of the CGI sets/characters are probably the clearest example of this -- a product of ambitious control freakdom that winds up sucking the life out of human beings.

The most obvious advantages that Empire has are its physical sets (and storm troopers, yoda, et al.) with their textured, sometimes dingy, feel, and visually quieter, smaller, human-scaled, human-paced combat, which make the acting and action better and emotionally accessible, in spite of the cheesy dialogue that remains a constant throughout.
  ¶ 12:55 AM 0 comments

  According to the US Census (click on components of class, occupation) database administrators (3rd most esteemed occupation, out of 447) are held in higher esteem than post-secondary school teachers (25th most esteemed).  ¶ 11:15 PM 0 comments

  Best parasitic sports career ever.  ¶ 12:54 PM 1 comments

  I was reading about Marat Safin and his sister on some tennis forum, and ran across this picture of his girlfriend. Absolutely priceless for the looks she's getting from the spectators -- my favorite is the guy in top row obviously checking her out from behind his shades with his wife giving him the evil eye.  
Click to enlarge.  ¶ 11:48 PM 0 comments

  Grading papers again. A lot of the recurring grammatical errors are understandable (e.g. "can not" rather than "cannot") but there's one that I always run into that I can't understand -- people who quote, and then cite parenthetically, but with two periods, one before the citation, one after -- e.g. Galileo said "blah blah blah." (Galileo, 94). I just don't see how that could look right to anyone.

Update: forget that, here's the recurring mistake that is really inexplicable -- quotes that have the first quotation mark, but no closing quotation mark. I see this enough to know that it's no typo -- now how the hell does somebody who's ever read anything (in any language?) think it's okay to have a quote with no closing quotation mark???

Another update: I know that forming the possessive of a word that ends with 's' can be tricky -- y'know just an apostrophe if it's a plural noun, an apostrophe-s if it's a singular noun (I've been known to screw it up myself, and the paper topics actually incorrectly listed "Ursus'" rather than "Ursus's") -- but I have a bunch of students who think that the correct option is to AVOID THE APOSTROPHE ALTOGETHER! As in "Descartes argument is unsound." Again, this is happening frequently enough that I know it's not a typo, but systematic (and probably even conscious, which is the disturbing part like: dude, what do I do with the apostrophe here? Oh, I guess I should just leave it out). Though I guess I should note that the rule doesn't work for Descartes, whose possessive form is "Descartes'".  ¶ 3:42 PM 0 comments

  Jon Barry is Handles McCrissCross.  ¶ 12:14 AM 0 comments

  Revisit youth with a homemade Orange Julius -- I tried the recipe, it's yummy, Brought back memories of the Queens Center food court, slurping Orange Julius and chomping buttery corn on a cob from Kentucky Fried Chicken.   ¶ 10:33 PM 0 comments

  After being rudely exposed to the god-awful writing of college freshmen these past few years, I was hoping that the new SAT essay section might make things better. Early reports are not good.  ¶ 11:40 AM 0 comments

  Ric Bucher has a most informative piece on the Van Gundy controversy -- see the postcript in particular.   ¶ 11:30 AM 0 comments