::Friday, July 12, 2002::

EBERT LOVES IRWIN - I can't believe I'm saying it but the nation's leading film critic, Roger Ebert, has granted 3 stars to The Crocodile Hunter: Collison Course. This wouldn't be very strange except that it's the highest rating he gave to a wide release this weekend. Considering that the other two releases Reign of Fire and Road to Perdition have been recieving solid to outstanding reviews (click on the film title to see what I mean) it makes the 3 star granted to Steve Irwin and company a strange commentary on Ebert's movie-liking habits. Maybe Tabin was right...Ebert has lost his touch.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 6:35:13 AM| Link This ::

EPISODE II HITS DVD - Here are the rumored details on the DVD for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones:

LatinoReview scored two 'inserts' revealing full details of the two-disc set due out in October. Of the extras on the 50-chapter disc set, the most notable is the feature-length audio commentary by George Lucas, Rick McCallum, sound designer Ben Burtt, ILM animation director Rob Coleman, and three ILM FX supervisors (Pablo Helman, John Knoll & Ben Snow). There's eight exclusive deleted scenes with introductions, whilst "From Puppets to Pixels: Digital Characters in Episode II" is a documentary film which includes various things such as ILM's efforts with Yoda. More behind the scenes stuff includes "Films are Not Released: They Escape" documentary on creating the film's sound, "State of the Art: The Previsualization of Episode II" shows storyboards and animatics of key action scenes in the film, and there's all twelve parts of the Web documentary. Finally comes the exclusive John Williams "Across the Stars" music video (which includes footage from the film and scoring sessions), posters, international adverts, four trailers, the "R2-D2: Beneath The Dome" mockumentary trailer, twelve TV spots, a never-before-scene production photo gallery, a breakdown montage of ILM's 2000 FX shots within the movie, and exclusive DVD-ROM content.

Good good almightly that is a whole lot of stuff to throw into a DVD (how many disks will it be?!). The rumored street date is sometime in November or early January next year. Good bets are on the November release considering Lucas will probably want to get the DVD out before the holiday season (and I'd rather get it sooner then later).
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 6:00:34 AM| Link This ::

MORE GREAT THOUGHTS ON THE GAME THAT WASN'T - I haven't read this many strong articles since Al Gore and George Bush decided the 2000 election could not end in a tie. It seems the travesty that occurred Tuesday night has really fired up some of the best baseball writers. The highlights:

Jim Caple - "What a disgrace. The night they name the MVP award after Ted Williams, they didn't have one. What a shame. The night they name the award after a legend who played the entire 1941 All-Star Game and won it with a ninth-inning home run, they stopped playing after 11 innings. What an embarrassment. The night they honor a baseball giant who played the entire All-Star Game several times, they ran out of players. Ted would be spinning in his grave had his son not frozen him and placed him upside down in a refrigerator."

David Pinto - "...Bud (Selig), the man who's responsibility it is to lead baseball out of it's trouble, could not come up with an imaginative solution for the problem! The fans at the game had it right last night. Bud must go!"

Jayson Stark - "It's simple, really. You can't charge people 150 bucks a ticket and not play until somebody wins. You can't tell the nation that this is the only All-Star Game left that's still a real game and then tell them four hours later that it doesn't matter if anybody wins. You can't spend an hour before the game trotting out the men responsible for some of baseball's most memorable moments -- many of them game-ending hits and homers, by the way -- and then spend 11 terrific innings setting the stage for another one of those memorable moments, and then decide, 'Aw, never mind.'"

Ron Borges - Selig first made his money by hustling cars to unsuspecting Midwesterners. Tuesday night it was baseball fans who got hustled. Hustled out of their money and then hustled out of Miller Field without a satisfactory ending to a game that probably cost them $300 or more to attend. The business was different but the hustle was the same. Get the money and forget about the customer. Later Selig would say, “Frankly, I had no alternative.” Of course he didn’t. That’s the way he looks at everything. He has no alternative. That’s because he hasn’t had an original idea since he started calling used cars pre-owned cars in the hope no one would notice the scratches on the hood."

Rob Neyer - Boy, these guys are a bunch of geniuses. The umpires and the managers are all clustered around Bud Selig, trying to figure out what to do if the National Leaguers don't score in the bottom of the 11th. Gee, didn't anybody think about this before the game? Didn't anybody remember that baseball is the one game without a clock? Apparently not, because the delay just goes on and on while Selig "thinks" about what happens next. There's now a great chance that the 2002 All-Star Game will end up in a tie. Which, come to think of it, is the perfect conclusion for an exhibition game."

Tony DeMarco - "They played an All-Star Game last night, and nobody won. But there was a big loser, and once again, it was the game of baseball."

There is something really great writing in the above much of writers. A few common themes do emerge. First off Bud Selig did the wrong thing calling the game. It was as if he wanted to call it. As if his mother was calling him home and he had to go because he had no choice. This, of course, is false. You can always play on when it's not raining, dark and/or you have nine players on the field. The second is great anger at the first and fool who made it possible. These men feel like they have been slapped in the face because they have covered, loved and written about what is suppose to be a great, memorable game and instead turned into a meaningless, infamous joke of a black eye on all baseball. None of this is a good omen for the second half...expect perhaps we are getting some great prose about the national pastime (of which they'd all trade for common sense in MLB).
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 4:16:43 AM| Link This ::

SANER MINDS THEN MINE - The better writers on baseball then myself are sounding off and getting it just right. What happend last night in Wisconsin was a joke. Two nine men teams with rested starting pitchers and every player in the correct position decided to stop the fan's game.

Thomas Boswell - "Maybe Tuesday night’s humiliating culmination to a mockery of an all-star game will send Commissioner Bud Selig a message that even he can grasp: Baseball fans will not tolerate a work stoppage when it can be avoided." Then this, "You don’t call off the all-star game just because it’s after midnight or TV viewers have clicked off their sets. If you have to put Padilla at first base and let a fielder pitch, then so be it."

Boswell's the best baseball writer alive today and if you have any love of the game you need to read the above column. It is classic Bos and spells out the current affairs in MLB perfectly.

:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 6:46:45 AM| Link This ::

A TIE FIT FOR A NOOSE - I'm so mad. I worked till one o'clock and had Jenni tape the All-Star game so I could watch it later. What do I get?...a culmination of Bud Selig's and baseball's lunacy. After the game all I could hear on ESPN is how the players didn't want to play any more and were worried about sending players home incapable of not playing in the 2nd half. What Bullcrap is this? Are you idiots?! This is the All-Star game. It's for the fans you overpaid fools. Pitching 3 or 4 innings is nothing for a major league pitcher who throws 6 or 7 innings a start. Doing so does not make a pitcher unable to play in the 2nd half or in the postseason. The postseason is 4 months away! They can rest a few days and survive when they collect their pay checks, the average of which is 80 times the working man's salary. My goodness does the doctor stop surgery because he's worried about going on vacation four months later! (Okay maybe that's a stretch...but maybe not)

What happened tonight is a travesty against everything in competitive sports. This is a game for fans. This is a sport for the fans. A pitcher can't pitch 3 innings? I'm sorry but that's the greatest bullshit (sorry mom) I've heard in awhile. My god. The one redeeming moment was the fans booing Bud Selig. This brought so much pleasure to me when perhaps, morally it should not. This man is a fool, an idiot and a travesty on the name of baseball to boot. Hearing the fan's cheer "Let them play!" and Bud and everybody just sitting around not caring is the perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with baseball. I have nearly no doubt that there will a strike now. God what has happened to this game? Where's Ted Williams or Bart Giamiatti or Connie Mack or Red Barber or men who know what baseball is? Where's Bob Costas announcing a game or Vin Scully doing one on the radio during the car ride home? Their gone and their is no one who has learned from what made them great. What we have in return is a tie...a tie...my goodness a tie.

What happened? Did it get dark and they had to go home? Mom called them in for dinner? The last ball got lost? It started raining to hard to see the ball? Somebody broke a window and got in trouble? Nope. Instead we had mismanagement, idiocy and a friggen tie.

I'm so mad.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 4:37:50 AM| Link This ::

A CURE ARRIVES? - This is excellent news. According to a US Biotechnology firm a vaccine against aids maybe ready as early as 2005. Later this year 16,000 people in Thailand will be part of the largest ever trail for an aids vaccine as they test this possible miracle for millions of people. These facts where presented at the International Aids Conference in Barcelona where it was also learned that,

"A study presented to the conference showed three quarters of gay and bisexual men in US cities who were infected with HIV did not know they had the virus."

As wonderful as a vaccine would be, the above statement is an equally frightening proposition. Let's home the former can negate worry about the latter.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 3:37:56 PM| Link This ::

THE ATLANTA BRAVES AT THE BREAK - At the All-Star break of the 2002 Major League Baseball season the Atlanta Braves hold the best record in the game at 56-32. Lead by a brillant Greg Maddux they capped their first half with a typical 2-0 win over the Chicago Cubs today. At the break the Braves send Andruw Jones, Mike Remlinger, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz to the All-Star Game itself. One could equally make a case for Gary Sheffield or Chipper Jones but doing so is not the purpose of this writing.

No the purpose here is the surmise the first half of the Braves season. And what a great first half it has been. It didn't start off very well as the Braves struggled through the first month and a half season. On May 15th their record stood at 19-21, losers of 3 straight and they were 2 games out of first place. That night Greg Maddux pitched the Braves to a 6-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants. The Braves won the series and pulled above .500, they would not look back. Since then the Braves have not lost a series and have lost only 11 games in all compiling a 37-11 record over that time. The streak has included 13 straight series wins and victories in 15 of their last 18 games. They have lost 2 straight games just once in that span and have seen their lead over the second place Montreal Expos strechted to 9 1/2 games, the major's largest division lead.

In that span since the 15th the Braves sport a ridicilous 2.70 team ERA . For the enitre season their team ERA is 2.99 which places them first in the National League, more then a half run in front of 2nd place (2.99 - 3.56). Do I have to tell you what has carried them? Glavine, Maddux, Millwood, Marquis, Smoltz, Remlinger etc. have become the greatest pitching staff in baseball. It's been the bullpen that has helped carry the best starters in the game with an unworldly 2.27 bullpen ERA. Left-hander Chris Hammond, who pitched in the minors last year and missed the two previous years, is 6-2 with a 1.64 ERA; righty Darren Holmes, who didn't play at all in 2001, is 2-1 with a 1.51 ERA. The teams 32 saves, 31 of which belong to former Cy Young winning starter John Smoltz who only made the move the the bullpen last August, is 2nd in the league to Los Angeles' 34.

Now one could say the Braves are struggling offensively seeing as they are only 9th in the NL in runs scored with 389 but a closer look reveals that a merger 6 runs seperates them from 5th place Montreal. If the Braves play more then like have post May 15th there sure to improve their runs scored and will likely end up in the NL's top 5 in the catergory. What they do need to work on is walks in which they place 12th. A team that knows pitching should know that making the other teams pitchers work harder is a key to victory.

On all levels the Braves have been the best team during Baseball's first half. Most indications are that this will continue, though one does have to worry about the age of the pitching staff. Still as excellent as the pitching has been even a mild correction would be nothing to worry about. It's full speed towards October for the Braves...again.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 5:35:45 AM| Link This ::

TABIN MAKES NATIONAL REVIEW - I don't even think the man himself knows that his blog got mentioned in the The Corner on NRO from Friday. Way to go buddy. Someday, perhaps, I will be as famous as you.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 4:11:02 AM| Link This ::

THERE IS LIFE AFTER AICN - I've only been banned from one site in my life and that site is Ain't it Cool News. I won't even link to them as I do everything else. But not to worry The Facer has once again come to the rescue. Yes that Publius of the internet has established a help site for those banned from AICN. Don't it Suck? - The Official Support Group for People Banned from Ain't it Cool News Talkback is a true gift as it deals with the real issues surronding banning from AICN Talkback. Such as:

The long term damage banning causes. I like to call it "Severe Personal Post-Traumatic TalkBack Banning Syndrome," or SPPTTBBS for short. If you just stick your tongue out and make a raspberry sound, you've pretty much mastered how to pronounce that.

The site is so much fan you'll want to get banned just to join it!
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 3:20:50 AM| Link This ::

I'LL HAVE THREE TED WILLIAMS TO GO PLEASE - This is just plain weird. I don't know what to say about it yet. It's just too weird.

"...said that Alcor would freeze Williams’ head for around $50,000."

Yeah...weird.
:: Posted by Citizen Ryan | 1:02:26 AM| Link This ::

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