Here are my final predictions for the 2003 season, which begins today (HUZZA!)

NL West

1. San Francisco Giants
2. Arizona Diamondbacks
3. Los Angeles Dodgers
4. San Diego Padres
5. Colorado Rockies

NL Central

1. St. Louis Cardinals
2. Cincinnati Reds
3. Houston Astros
4. Chicago Cubs
5. Pittsburgh Pirates
6. Milwaukee Brewers

NL East

1. Atlanta Braves
2. Montreal Expos
3. Philadelphia Phillies
4. Florida Marlins
5. New York Mets

AL West

1. Oakland Athletics
2. Anaheim Angels
3. Texas Rangers
4. Seattle Mariners

AL Central

1. Minnesota Twins
2. Chicago White Sox
3. Detroit Tigers
4. Cleveland Indians
5. Kansas City Royals

AL East

1. New York Yankees
2. Boston Red Sox
3. Toronto Blue Jays
4. Baltimore Orioles
5. Tampa Bay Devil Rays

NL Champs: St. Louis Cardinals
AL Champs: Oakland A’s

World Champs: St. Louis Cardinals

NL MVP: Albert Pujols, St. Louis
NL Cy Young: Roy Oswalt, Houston
NL Rookie: Xavier Nady, San Diego
Comback: Ken Griffey, Jr., Cincinnati

AL MVP: Alfonso Soriano, New York
AL Cy Young: Mark Muldar, Oakland
AL Rookie: Hideki Matsui, New York
Comeback: Frank Thomas, Chicago

Matt Welch gets his way, and Cathy “I’ll never have a blog” Seipp has a blog.

 Gushing Chung canned.

It looks like howardowens.com has picked up a new reader … Robin Roberts notes that he was born in Ventura County.  Want to know if that counts. For something.

Oops. Looks like who ever is in charge of putting CNN’s promotional ads on its website isn’t keeping up with the news.

This is funny … a little fisking of my war blog:

Hometown paper the Ventura County Star is mysteriously getting a lot of MSNBC attention for its sophomoric weblog, which considers Fox News the greatest source of war info. It thinks it’s cool because it uses warblogger words, like “fisking.”

Bombing of Baghdad … and pursuitwatch.com calls me and notifies me of a police pursuit in LA.  Is there really an LA teevee station showing a car chase instead of the war?

High praise from Jeff Jarvis, which I appreciate.

When the deadline passes and war is about to start, you want your most serious journalist on the air, right? So, of course, Gushing Connie is on CNN right now.

I’ve created a war blog for InsideVC.com

Does that make me a paid, professional blogger?

Shouldn’t smart bloggers with specific areas of expertise be trying to book themselves on talk radio? Here’s a site that can help do just that.

The left hand isn’t talking to the right hand over at Sony

They say you can’t know the players without a score card. Slate has given us a score card.

For a couple of months, I would look over at my co-worker’s computer, hearing music gurgling out … and I would see he had some grey little screen open that said “Spinner.”

I asked once what Spinner was and left it at that. I wasn’t really interested in exploring once again the services of online streaming radio. I’d been down that route with NetRadio and I wasn’t overly impressed.

Then one day, Bruce was listening to some old folk blues, which is a genre of music I truly dig and has been a recent passion.

“Where’da find dem ol’ blues tunes?” I asked.

“It’s Spinner,” he said.

So, now I had some motivation to download Spinner.

It’s been a week, and I’m very impressed with what I’ve found.

Take for example the rockabilly channel. NetRadio had a rockabilly channel, but whoever programmed it didn’t know squat about rockabilly. That programmer thought if it was 1950s era rock and roll, it was rockabilly, so you got Little Richard, the Chords and even Fabian on the rockabilly channel. On Launch, it was nearly impossible to find any rockabilly tunes.

But with Spinner, the rockabilly channel … well, it rocks. Or, more appropriately, chil’rn, it’s real gone. I know my rockabilly really well, and any rockabilly programmer that can include the Burnette Trio, Johnny Carroll and Joe Clay, along with Elvis and Carl and Jerry Lee, as well as find a few things I’ve never heard, has me impressed. I’m also impressed with the selection of modern rockabilly, which never fails to rip it up.

But Spinner is more than just rockabilly. It is pretty much ever conceivable genre and subgenre of music in the world. My current favorites include acoustic blues, Sinatra style, classic country, big band/swing, classic punk, Elvis, new wave, surf, Cuban, Hawaiian and Latin, to name just a few. But explore the other channels and you’ll find everything from acid jazz to contemporary Christian and thrasher metal.

Of course, I can speak for only the channels I’ve listened to so far, but so far each of those channels have shown a depth of musical knowledge by the programmers that truly makes listening to them both fun and educational. For example, I’ve discovered a couple of very cool jazz artists on the big band channel that I had never heard of. I’ve added them to my wishlist (hint, hint).

If you haven’t been to Spinner.com, check it out.

Sorry for the light posting the last couple of days.  I know that disappoints my five fans (hey, a month ago it was only three, so we’re making progress).

Work has just been hell. It’s not just the hours, it’s the amount of concentration that is going into what I’m doing.  My brain is fried.

Plus I have THREE fantasy baseball league drafts to prepare for.

I haven’t had a drink in FOUR days.

And it doesn’t look like any of this is going to get better any time soon.

I did write a longish piece related to the war the other day, and I may post it in the morning (frankly, I’ve offered it to another publication — really with the expectation it would be rejected because I only gave them 48 hours to decide on it, which is kind of rude and not a lot of time, but there is a very timely element to it … by the morning evening, it could be outdated).

Other than that, frankly, I’m sick of discussing the war.  I feel like I’ve said all I have to say on it.  I’ve taken it on from every angle. I’ve argued and debated and scorned and insulted, and at the moment I feel wrung out. That could change. I’ve felt this way before, but as I get increasingly snippy with my friends, and even worse with my enemies, I think, geez, maybe I should just think about baseball for a while. Play my guitar. Talk to my wife, for a change. 

I’m grumpy, I guess. Rightly so, I figure. But I also figure I should find other things to write about, but right now I just don’t have the time.

I’ll keep trying to post stuff — war related or not — so that this place doesn’t become a total wasteland.  You never know when a brust of creativity is going to spring forth.

If I were still a reporter, I think I would want to be in Kuwait right now.

My old buddy Tony Perry is there, and I’m jealous.

He’s doing video reports from the field. He’s filing some good stories. Not bad for an ink-stained scribe.

You can find his reports on the LA Times hub page for Iraq.

Apparently, bad things happen to third basemen who move to the outfield.

On the softball team I manage, when I moved our 3b to RF, he broke his collar bone in the first inning of the first game.

Now it looks like Phil Nevin is out for the season after dislocating his shoulder playing left field in a spring training game.

Nevin’s out. Hoffman’s out.

Bad voodoo for the Padres.

Johnny Cash is such a complete man. He is the prototypical all-American male. He out John Waynes John Wayne, is more rugged than Clint Eastwood, has more class than Frank Sinatra, makes Ronald Reagan look like a flag burner, cares for the downtrodden and exploited more than Michael Moore and is no less faithful than Billy Graham.

He is a complete and purely American character because he is a ball of contradictions. He is patriotic, but protests war and won’t forget his country’s faults; he supports law and order, but entertains prisoners; he is God-fearing, but has abused his body and drifted and strayed; he is an artist, but for most of his career has preferred simplicity over ornament; he doesn’t give a damn about what you think about him, but has carefully crafted his own image; and, for a man who has spent his life in the adoration of the stage light, he is humble and polite to the people he meets.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
     — Walt Whitman

Cash is 71, has had health problems, and is clearly aging. There is little doubt that he is very near the end of his career, if not his life. It is a career that began in 1955 at Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tenn. If his career had ended after he left Sun a few years later, he would still be remembered today as one of the giant legends of American music.

• Cry, Cry, Cry
• Folsom Prison Blues
• I Walk the Line
• Home of the Blues

But Cash’s career didn’t end there.

• Tennessee Flat Top Box
• Don’t Take Your Guns to Town
• Delia’s Gone
• Understand Your Man
• The Ballad of Ira Hayes
• San Quentin
• A Boy Named Sue
• Ring Of Fire
• Man in Black
• One Piece at a Time
• Cocaine Blues

Most of those songs were written by Cash, but where they weren’t, such as “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” or “Cocaine Blues,” Cash has shown himself to be a master at finding obscure songs and making them his own. Nobody will ever be able to cover those songs without giving tribute to Cash.

Cash has never been afraid to play songs by other songwriters, even famous ones. He’s covered Harlan Howard, Don Gibson, Jack Clement, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, U2, Neil Diamond and Nine Inch Nails. Each time, Cash, with his maler than thou voice, brings a new depth and dimension to the lyrics. He doesn’t always nail it, but he always makes you see the song in a new way.

Now, late in his life, a life that by any standard is bigger than life, Cash is turning out his most consistently outstanding work. Starting with 1994’s American Recordings, Cash, with the help of Rick Rubin, has put together a body of work, four CDs in all, that shames the country music world for it’s own pathetic poisoning of its very roots.

Nobody is doing music as honest, as heartfelt and as true as Cash has in this quadrilogy (one, two, three, four). The latest CD, The Man Comes Around, is only further confirmation that Cash is the man, the man for all seasons and the kind of man who made America what it is — as complicated, forthright, singular, imperfect, shameful and shameless, proud and doubting, brilliant and woeful as the man himself.

Well, it’s official. My opinion is worth exactly $10.25 cents.

And, apparently, the shipping and handling on my opinion is worth $14.75.

Thanks, Vince.

Now, what’s the topic?

As a conservative, free market guy, I should oppose rent control, right?

But what if the supply side of the market is artificially capped? What if rents go up not because the demand side is growing, but because the supply side is restricted through government regulations? In that case, do you really have a free market?

I say, of course not. What you have an artificially contrived method to drive up housing prices to the point that the market no longer functions as it should.

Where there are growth restrictions, I have no problem with rent control.

That’s why I’ll be supporting this new effort to impose rent control in Ventura.

Of course, this measure will fail at the City Council level, so their will need to be a ballot initiative, which I will help gather signatures for.

How much do you want to be that I get a notice within the next 30 days raising my rent, as landlords, since the greedy bastards who own this building, try to slip in one last rent increase.

I’ve already heard one tale of a renter getting his rent increased today, in direct response to new of the rent control proposal.

The nice thing, though, the ballot initiative can include language that rolls rents back to March 1, 2003 levels.

I’m all for it.

You want slow growth to drive up property values, then you need to accept rent control. Both are artifical intrustions into the market, but if you’re going to have one, it’s only fair to have the other.