What’s the best new show of the summer?

It’s got to be Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

The premise: Five gay guys (The Fab Five) enter the life of one hapless straight man and give him a total life makeover. They redecorate his living quarters, redress him, teach him how to cook, teach him manners and grooming and even improve his CD collection, if necessary.

The show works on many levels. It’s hilarious. It’s fast paced and entertaining. It maintains the spontaneous edge “reality” shows strive for. It’s full of good advice for men. And women, especially those whose favorite Oprah episodes involve makeovers, will love seeing that not all men are hopeless.

Everybody I know is talking about the show. I heard about it from a gay friend, then found most of my co-workers already knew about it. People who turned their nose up at Survivor are already hooked on Queer Eye.

I’m particularly impressed with the marketing potential of this show. Once the ratings are huge, which they will be, the money the producers can rake in on product placement and merchandising on the show’s web site will be tremendous.

And I already have my TiVo season pass all set up.

I just found this out … Dean Esmay sucks.

These anti-blogger blogs are catching on.

Are these hard times? Well, it’s not quite 1933, or even 1943, but we are less than two years removed from Sept. 11. We’ve recently fought two wars and are now deep into reconstructing a damaged nation. Our economy is faltering. It seems, maybe, that we could use some good news or maybe a happy story.

Where’s Frank Capra when you need him?

A movie opened last night, and we went to go see it this afternoon, that is capraesque not just because it’s set in the 1930s, nor is it capraesque because it is without guile or cynicism, nor is it capraesque because it has heroes. It is all those things, but what makes it the most capra-like movie that I’ve seen in a long time is that it validates the importance of hope and the value of dreams. It shows that no adversity is too great to be overcome.

I can’t imagine this movie getting boffo box office prior to Sept. 11. We were all too cool to be taken in by the idea that everybody lives happily ever after. But when a movie sells out on a bright, beautiful, sunny day in Ventura, and when the audience cheers the forgone-victory of a movie-screen horse, and when that same audience sits through most of the credits at the end, you know Frank Capra is smiling in heaven.

Seabiscuit has been getting a lot of press, and rightfully so. It deserves consideration as one of the best movies of the year. It’s a great script; it’s well edited and deftly acted (Jeff Bridges is my early favorite for Best Supporting Actor), and it entertains from beginning to end. I’m not sure if the Academy of Motion Pictures has caught on yet that cynicism no longer sells and that dreariness is no longer an artistic virtue, but if they have, Seabiscuit should have its title called out a bunch of times at the next Oscars.

BTW: This isn’t the first movie about Seabiscuit. Last night I TiVo’d one from 1949 starring Shirley Temple. We’ll probably watch it sometime this week. I don’t expect it to be as good, but old movies are always worth watching.

Pulling up to the house this evening, I could see a padded envelop hanging from the mailbox. That meant only one thing — a CD had arrived. The only CD I was expecting was from some filthy cajun commie country crooner I knew before he threatened to lob lawyers at me, but it wasn’t from him. (Note, now Layne says the damn thing is late because he’s supposedly conned somebody into actually mastering the thing. Sheesh, what some guys won’t do to avoid blogging. Oh, wait, he’s been blogging a lot recently, especially for a guy who’s on summer vacation.)

So it wasn’t that CD, but it was still a bundle of goodness. The Trophy Husbands finally have a new CD out, and Dave and Kevin sent me not one, but TWO copies, which means I get to spread the happiness.

The new CD, btw, has the very happy title of “Walk with Evil.”

I’m listening it now. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from Arizona’s finest C&W-Rock-Rockabilly-Blues-Folk band. Lots of foreboding, defilement, crunchy guitars, pounding drums, and dust on the trail.

The still fabulous Dark and Bloody Ground can be found here.

The final thrill of it all: Dave and Kevin include “Howard Owens” in their liner notes’ “Thank You, Thank You”s. Here’s a first — my name on a commercially available CD. Fun.

If you ever need to know anything about a Bob Dylan bootleg, you can go here. Me, I needed to look up “Tangerine,” which I found in a thrift store a while back for 50 cents.

In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James writes about the wonder of it all during the first 30 years of professional baseball — no hitters were hardly remarked upon.

From our vantage point, the question seems to be not how it developed, but how it could have taken so long to develop. It’s such a perfect diversion for the early innings of a game. Although I have been to hundreds of games and have never seen a no-hitter, I still think about it almost every time I’ve at the park. I think about when the first batter gets out or when he gets a hit. I think about it when either side goes in order in the first, and I think about it whenever I look up at the scoreboard and see that 0 0 0. Each day the pitcher plays Russian Roulette with sudden immortality, and each day he loses, and after the fourth inning it is all forgotten.

No Padres pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter, and I never give up hope. At the start of every Padres game, whether I’m in the ballpark, watching on teevee, listening on the crystal box or following the game over ESPN.com, I’m thinking no-no until the other guys get the first whack. And I never fail to notice when the enemy’s pitcher has held the Padres hitless past the first batter, the second and third … on up until the scoreboard reads at least 0 1 0.

But I do have something up on James, as amazing as that sounds. I was there the night Doc Ellis threw his no hitter. The night was particular remarkable because it was a double header and we were treated to a fireworks show between games. I remember this because the PA announcer promised more fireworks after the second game if Padres pitcher Danny Combs managed to redeem the team by throwing his own no-hitter. Roberto Clamente dashed our hopes with two-out in the first inning.

I was also there the night Pedro Martinez threw 9 perfect innings against the Padres, only to give up a double to Bip Roberts in the 10th. Montreal won that game 1-0 in 10 innings.
UPDATE: I should add — it’s funny how you can disremember things over the years … for years I’ve told my Doc Ellis story and said that Steve Arlin pitched the second game. Also, on the Pedro story, I’ve always said the Padres won that game. But thanks to the power of the net, I can get the true facts and discover I’ve lied (under the new Democratic meaning of “lied”) for all these years.

Spring cleaning in the middle of July … I found a box of old cassette tapes. In the midst of the dust and forgotten T.S. Eliot renditions of his own poems was one box marked “Ken Layne.”

I already knew I had a demo of Layne with the Roadhogs, which I burned on CD so I could give a copy to Layne. I had no idea I had this tape.

Imagine finding a acetate of Hank Williams rehearsing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I’m not saying I have that, but I do have Layne with just his guitar running through “Not Lonely ‘Nuff For You,” as well as “You Aren’t Doing’ Nuthin’,” “Drift Back,” “Thank You Babe,” and “Winter Rains.”

Clearly, this was a demo Layne gave to my roommate (Todd Hilton, operating then under the name Hugh Jorgan, playing bass for the Roadhogs, now a math teacher in Temecula) so he could learn the songs.

And I’ve got it.

Not that I can do anything with it. I mentioned something to Layne once about putting an MP3 up on this site and he mumbled something about having three lawyers, and I crawled back in my hole.

But I’ve got a genuine Ken Layne demo tape. Though I hear such tapes are about as hard to get as fake uranium purchase orders in Niger. If you haven’t scored a Ken Layne demo yet, you can buy his new CD here. All of the cool people have already bought a copy.

Flipping it around tonight, I happened across the Faith Hill video for “Where the Lights Go Down.”

It was on CMT, which supposedly stands for “Country Music Television.”

Can somebody please tell me what is country about this song, this video or Faith Hill?

Here’s Rob Neyer on the whole “Bill James is a racist” meme. Hint: He says it’s not true.

In a manner of speaking, I grew up as a reporter. That is how I spent, or misspent, my youth.

I grew up hearing that reporters should be objective, but that objectivity was impossible. The wink and the nod, of course, was that you couldn’t help but be see a story through your own world view, which would inevitably taint how you presented the story. Of course, part of being an objective reporter, is never admitting to anybody, least of all yourself, that you are making subjective decisions about what to put in your story, how to weigh the value of certain facts and issues, and what turn of the phrase should be used to convey those facts.

This most subjective of exercises is referred to in the profession as the “editorial process.”

Here’s a little story to illustrate that point. Back in 1993 I was working for a California State Assemblyman named Tom Connolly. Now Mr. Connolly had once led a pretty wild life. Some of the facts of this life I knew and reported when he first ran for state Assembly in 1989. He had done cocaine excessively. What I didn’t know, and never reported myself, was that his excess included spending so much money on white powder that he couldn’t afford to pay his taxes. In no time, he ran up an $80,000 tab with the IRS (he also wasn’t paying his child support, and this was also a new fact to me, but that isn’t relevant to this vignette).

Tom decided to come clean with the voting public and admit all of his past misdeeds before the facts came out in a way that looked like he was trying to hide from his past.

One afternoon, Tom, myself and Union-Tribune political reporter Gerry Braun, sat down over chips and salsa and Tom talked. He revealed all. He held nothing back. He answered every question.

When the story came out the following Sunday, you would have thought Gerry Braun had uncovered all of this dirt on his own. The enterprising reporter.

I’m not saying he overtly claimed credit, but there wasn’t a hint in the story that Tom came through of his own volition. The story was “objective,” just not honest.

The story also contained this little gem about Tom’s back taxes: “It is a debt he won’t pay off in this century.”

Was that sentence objective? Well, if objectivity is judged by being factually accurate, it was accurate. At the rate Tom was paying off his debt, he was scheduled to even the books with the IRS in 2001 or 2002. But as any writer knows, certain words and phrases have connotation as well as denotation. The connotation of “in this century” is something far greater than eight or nine years. The reader’s mind can’t help but leap 100 years ahead.

Tom complained to Gerry Braun about this creative turn of phrase, and Gerry just laughed it off. He wasn’t bothered in the least that while factually accurate, he wasn’t being totally fair. I was appalled. Still am.

That said, I’m sure there are several sources out there, including former sources who read this blog, who could accuse me of the same sort of reportorial slight of hand.

When you’re in the business, you become inured to such subtle sins against objectivity. After all, objectivity, as we are taught, isn’t really possible.

I’ve been thinking more and more about objectivity recently, but not in the context of journalism.

Objectivity has become a big part of my life. In my hobby, baseball, I’ve been studying the theories of Bill James, which is primarily about looking at the game without emotional attachments, just hard numbers. When you look at the Game as a matter of statistics — and baseball reveals itself more through statistics than any other sport — you begin to shun myth, conventional wisdom and partisan prejudices. The game becomes about performance, not appearances.

And as a web application developer, I’ve been studying object-oriented programming, which is all about breaking down processes into key components and dealing with those components in rational, logical order. There is no subjectivity in programming. The idea is to build efficient performance and it requires thorough and disciplined analysis of a problem.

The nexus between sabrematics and OOP is that both deal with what can be seen and held — if not in the real world, at least in the mind’s eye. Neither skill can be practiced successfully without a high level of detachment.

As I delve deeper into objectivity, I am beginning to wonder if the big lie isn’t that journalists are objective when they aren’t, but that objectivity is impossible.

Objectivity may be difficult, require discipline and practice, but in news reports it might be easier to obtain than most journalists think. And what it may require is thinking more like an OOP programmer, or maybe a sabrematician.

I’m in no position to put this revelation into practice and test the theory, I just throw the idea out for others to discuss and think about.

Here’s an exercise for all of you reporters out there: The next time you sit down to write a story, instead of a traditional outline (if you outline your stories, which you should), model your story the way an OOP programmer would. Divide it into its class hierarchy. Figure out its objects, its states (how it exists) and its methods (behaviors, actions). Build your story around the objects, and make sure all states and methods are attributed. Every object should have at least one state and one method. This will help you, I think, see your story more objectively, and by including with every object a state and a method, you should ensure balance and fairness, and since the state and method rely on real, newsworthy objects, should help you keep your own states and methods out of the story. Finally, OOJ should help reporters focus just on the facts, analyze them deeply, and avoid the kind of subjective judgments that are more the product of laziness than good writing.

Here’s a book on OOP to help.

BTW: Gerry Braun is now the writing coach for the San Diego Union-Tribune. That’s probably a good place for a creative writer.

We’ve all had the experience of communicating with somebody over a period time and never seeing him or her face to face. Soon, we develop a mental picture of what that person looks like. It’s sometimes shocking how wrong we were once we finally meet the guy.

Well, here’s your chance to play this game and actually win something. Not much, but something.

Here’s the contest: What Does Eric J. look like?

Hint: He doesn’t have any fur.

For most of this column, I’m kind of going, “uh?” (link sent to me by Steve Smith). It’s something about race and baseball and how black kids don’t get fair breaks, but meanders for a long time firming up that point.

Then I get to this:

It is usually the American-born blacks’ records and place that are resented instead of celebrated. For example, it’s the stolen base that is denigrated as a weapon by baseball sabermaticians like Bill James, at precisely the time when a Rickey Henderson steals 130 bases in a season. There are sour grapes when a baseball man uses stats to tell you a stolen base isn’t important. Any time a baseball manager will give up an out for a base, as with a sac bunt or groundball to the right side, any time a base is so precious, then it goes without saying that the stolen base must be important. Not the CS, the caught stealing, or stats of success rates, but the stolen base itself.

OK, I think the point here is that Bill James is a racist. Why? Because Bill James doesn’t value stolen bases enough and he did so at precisely the time when the best base stealer is black. I believe that logical fallacy is called “post hoc” — Right after Rickey Henderson, a black baseball player, steals 130 bases, Bill James, a white guy, writes an article that devalues stolen bases.

One problem with the premise is that James doesn’t argue against stolen bases. Sabermaticians like James, say instead, “Don’t get caught.” The generally accepted principle is, if you want to help your team, you need to get caught less than 30 percent of the time. Henderson, over the span of his career, has been caught only 20 percent of the time. That means he’s helped create runs, not cost his team runs. A stolen base is worth, or so I’m told, .18 of a run. A caught stealing costs twice that. (Also, I should note that Henderson has a career OBP of .402, which makes him even more worthy of a roster spot on a Jamesean team).

The thing sabermaticians understand, and Wiley obviously does not, is that a baseball team gets only 27 outs. That makes them a finite and ever diminishing commodity. You want to avoid volunteering them to the enemy. Bases, on the other hand, contrary to Wiley, are a replenishable resource. So long as you haven’t used up all of your outs, you can always get more bases. This makes outs much more valuable than bases.

As for Henderson’s and Barry Bonds’ treatment by the media — Wiley compares their treatment with that of Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, forgetting that those three stars were just as reviled by their contemporaries as Bonds and Henderson today. It is only with the passage of time that we’ve elevated them to the pantheon of baseball gods and forgiven them their human frailties. Someday, we’ll do the same for Henderson and Bonds (and personally, I already have). Of course, acknowledging that would leave Wiley without a column.

It’s ironic that Wiley is writing his column about blacks not getting a fair break in a year when the most phenomenal rookie, Dontrelle Willis, is black. It is also a year when the number one and number two draft choices, Delmon Young and Rickie Weeks, are black.

Wiley actually gets around to discussing Weeks, but then blames racism in the lower levels of baseball for why Weeks had to go to an all-black college instead of a major baseball university. It apparently never crosses Wiley’s mind that Weeks, like many, many college players, didn’t really fill out and develop until after he started college. No, it must have been racism.

Of course, as we read on, we learn that this column isn’t really about Rickey Henderson or Rickie Weeks, it’s about Cole Wiley. It’s about Cole’s inability to succeed in baseball. In other words, it’s all about a Dad’s sour grapes.

I’m surprised ESPN would allow it’s server space to be used for tripe inspired by nothing more than bitterness.

On July 3, Ken Layne told us he was going on blogging vacation.

Since then, he’s made 11 posts, which was about his normal output before the “vacation,” and he’s released a CD.

Some vacation.

If he were a Republican, I’m sure Democrats.com would be pushing an anti-Layne petition by now.

Which league is better — the American League or the National League?

Tonight, it’s the American League, it seems. The AL beat the senior circuit tonight on a Hank Blalock two-run blow off Eric Gagne, 7-6. That means, the AL is better, right?

Well, not according to Clay Davenport and Nate Silver. Based on their analysis, it’s not surprising that NL teams beat AL teams in interleague play at a rate of 54 percent.

Does one game, granted a game filled with most of the sport’s best players, really erase the trend?

Any statistician will tell you, one event is too small of a sample size.

Yet, this was the most important game All Star Game in the mid-season classic’s history. This time, as the teevee spots reminded repeatedly, it mattered. Home-field advantage in the 2003 World Series now belongs to the American League.

In a sport beset by lousy rules (the designated hitter, for example), cheating players, competitive imbalance, and too much player-owner strife, the best idea Commissioner Bud Selig had was to make the All Star Game “matter.”

Never mind that conceivably, one or both teams who will make it to the WS only had one player in the ASG, or that neither the AL or the NL manager are likely to even make it to the post season this year. Never mind that the two managers who do make to that magical final series had no control over the outcome of this game. Never mind that both teams were forced to take on less deserving players under game rules (Rondell White, Mike Williams, Dmitri Young, Lance Carter) while some of this year’s best players were left at home (Milton Bradley, Sammy Sosa, Frank Thomas, Aubrey Huff, Todd Walker, Lance Berkman Orlando Cabrera, Sidney Ponson, Brandon Webb).

Never mind all that — this game mattered.

It’s a shame that it did.

Bob Benz is blogging from Jamaica, where apparently they have large almonds, strong drinks and persnickety servants who don’t relate to white liberal guilt. He’s even got moving pictures (QuickTime).

This is starting out as a bad day — this e-mail account that I have and use for most of my personal corrospondance now, I’ve been able to keep it spam free for a year. Today, the first ever spam arrived to this address.  It’s only a matter of time, I suppose, before more than 100 pieces a day start arriving, just like all my other accounts.

Just for the record: There is no lower form of life in the universe than a spammer.

My favorite record store has been sold. The Record Outlet is now Grady’s.

The store, at least, is in good hands. Grady is young, energetic, responsible and knows music. (Name dropping aside, his sister is Olympic runner Marla Runyon.)

I bought four LPs in there today. The one I most want to tell you about is “Prez” by Prez Prado.

Prado is a guy who’s music should be in the collection of every latin music lover, and if you don’t love latin music, you will if you listen to a few Prez Prado tracks. He was the true Mambo King of the 1950s. He really had an ear for great arrangements, infective melodies and lively tempos. Besides, his trademark grunts are half the fun.

Predo is best know for the hits “Mambo No. 5,” “Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White,” and “Patricia.” His best songs are punctuated by bright, shinny slithery horns. “Prez” has no shortage of brass parts that are downright greasy.

My favorite Prado LP, though, remains “Exotic Suite.” I mention it with a high “buy” recommendation.

Also in today’s bargains from Grady’s was Chet Atkins “Finger-Style Guitar” and “Workshop.” Two of Chet’s classics.

It’s always cool to find great old LPs.

There is a lesson they don’t seem to teach in J-school these days, at least as forcefully as they should — if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Doug Thompson seems to have learned this lesson the hard way.

Reporters sometimes fall into these traps because they’re too gullible when chasing the next big scoop. They care too much about the big story and not enough about the truth.

If that ever changes, we’ll all be better served.

What did your team wear when? Find out in the Baseball Uniform Database.

As far as I’m concerned, the Padres never looked better than they did in 1970.

Small children are freightened by it. Islamists are denouncing it. Commies are switching sides to get it. Women in birkenstocks are marching against it. And Real men have already bought it.