Will all the steroid talk bother Barry Bonds?

Not a bit. Bonds lives in his own isolated universe, where he's convinced himself that everyone's out to get him and it's him against the world. He keeps everybody away from him and doesn't give a damn. (In the Giants lockerroom, he has his own row of lockers, his own leather recliner, his own rules.) He'll feed off the controversy. It makes him stronger. Since he's been wronged (in his mind), all the questions will just be more evidence that the world is after him.

He's a strange man. A great hitter. Obviously a steroid user. And everyone agreed that Jeff Kent was a worse teammate by far. Hmmmm.

I don't like all this trash talking about A-Rod. He's too good a player. The last thing the Sox need to do is get him fired up.

I figure the most important thing is the staff. I'm as confident about Schilling as I am about any 38 year old pitcher. Which is to say, pretty confident, but not for sure. I really like the pickup of David Wells. But then again, I thought signing Ramiro Mendoza was a brilliant move a couple of years ago and that turned out to be a disaster. And Wells is even older. Matt Clement should be solid, coming in as a #3 starter. I think Charles Bronson Arroyo has progressed really well. How can you not love a guy with cornrows? Wakefield at #5. I dunno. It's a little old, but then again it doesn't seem any worse, on paper, than last year's staff. But to me, that's the biggest mystery. I like the Wade Miller signing. He was cheap, and if he's healthy, he's a #2 starter.

I wonder how good Giambi is going to be. Clearly, he was a pretty good hitter before he started taking steroids, but what will he do this season?

Looking at his career numbers, look at the increase in his slugging percentage between 1999 and 2000. He went from good to ridiculous. So assuming he gets off to a decent start, I'd expect him to hit about 30 homers, drive in maybe 100 runs. A pretty good offensive first baseman, but nothing spectacular. He should still have a good eye and get on base a lot. Of course, if he has a slow start, or if the withdrawal from steroids has more serious effects, all bets are off ("Hello, Tino Martinez!").

There's also Barry Bonds' ex-mistress/girlfriend, who's claiming he started taking steroids around 1999-2000. That makes sense too. Look at his career numbers. Big jump in slugging percentage between 1999 and 2000, and an enormous one between 2000 and 2001. Homers went from 34 in 1999 (note, this was an injury shortened season) to 49 to 73. Looks like steroids to me.

Here is where you contact the FCC to complain about the boring Super Bowl halftime show. Paul McCartney? Puh-lease. LAME!

So, uhhh, when does it start mattering how big the federal deficit is? This year it's $427 billion. The largest ever. Again.

When is the President proposing to make it shrink, for a change? (For just the numbers, look here)

The Sox home opener is April 11. Against the Yankees.

I predict that tickets will go for $1000.

If it's accurate, this article is worrisome. It claims that extremist Islamicism is on the rise in Bangladesh. Although for now they look to be mainly focused on torturing and killing their local political rivals, this philosophy has brought forth enough poisenous fruit elsewhere that we should still be worried. The Taliban started out as just another party in Afganistan's civil wars before moving to virulent anti-Americanism.

I think that we're creating more and more enemies around the world, and I maintain that this is a bad thing. Unfortunately, our president does not seem to share this logic. He does not seem to care about creating enemies. He's convinced that we'll just attack them. I'd rather we didn't have to.

Managing a baseball team is not an easy job. The way I see it, one needs to have two completely separate, difficult to master skill sets, which may be why there aren't many great managers out there.

The first of course is game coaching. When to call hit and run, when to take pitchers out, etc. In and of itself, this is hard because it encompasses so many different skills (knowing when to bunt is entirely independent from knowing how to work a bullpen). There are a lot of variables in baseball, lots to keep track of.

The other fundamental skill is managing the personalities. This is tricky. I think the reason that so many managers are crummy in one situation and then good two years later with a different team is that they can run a certain kind of clubhouse, but not others. (All together now, repeat after me: "Buck Showalter".) As a sidenote, I'm not convinced that this is any harder today than it was 50 years ago. I'm convinced that major leaguers have always been a quirky, cocky, arrogent, talented, strong, macho bunch of jerks, generally speaking. (I'm reading an account of the 1949 American League pennant race now, and Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were as difficult as anyone today.)

I've been thinking about the job that Terry Francona did for the Sox this year. Obviously this was a team that could have exploded. Pedro is a deeply proud, tightly wound but somewhat selfish man, Lowe is an absolute head case, Manny Ramirez is, uh, Manny Ramirez, Curt Schilling is your basic jerk, plus you have your Johnny Damon sideshow, etc. etc. Plus there's the Globe and the Herald howling at any miscue. Francona was fantastic at getting all the pistons to fire together in this complicated engine. This was all invisible. He did all of his best work out of the public eye, which is of course by design. The frustrating thing was that his actual game managing was, shall we say, debatable. So we all saw the odd decisions and did not see the marvelous work that happened when there was no game going on.

Another manager cut from this cloth is Dusty Baker. Year after year he would coax career years out of retreads. Every year he would get fed a bunch of old players, including someone who you always thought "THAT guy is still in the bigs?" Every year they would become great hitters. And one must be impressed with anyone who can manage a team where Barry Bonds is *not* the biggest ass (Jeff Kent, come on down!). On the downside, of course, Baker never met a young pitcher who he wouldn't overwork. If I were the Cubbies, I'd be very worried.

In terms of the best managers, I think LaRussa is very good at both parts of the job. But one sometimes gets the feeling that he's more interested in being the Smartest Manager In Baseball than he is at winning games.

I think the best two are Felipe Alou and Joe Torre. You don't read about them doing a lot of yelling and screaming. They don't need to. They run their clubhouses and there's no doubt who's in charge. They also make good in game decisions. They're not perfect, but I think they're about as good as you're going to find in the game today.

This disgusts me.

American kids need to learn science. This is not science. It is deeply damaging to the future of our nation. We don't teach gravity as a theory that can be believed or not believed as one chooses. Gravity is a phenomenon that one should seek to understand. When one sees surveys showing that American kids do worse at math and science then their contemporaries around the world, this sort of thing is the reason why.


Evolution threatens Christianity as much as gravity does.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Now this is funny:

I wonder when the first prominent member of Congress will get up and say that it's time to bring the troops home from Iraq. In Vietnam, we were there in force maybe 14 years. The Soviet Union was about 12 in Afghanistan. Are we still going to be in Iraq in 2016?
I disagreed with decision to go to war, but once we went in we clearly couldn't leave right away. These days, however, it's obvious it's going poorly, but how long do we wait until we give up? How many lives is our pride worth? At this point, I'm prepared to pull out after their election. Which may (or may not) happen at the end of January.
We shouldn't be there, and we especially shouldn't participate in an Iraqi civil war.

Well I went to the Rose Bowl, and it was better than last year. Michigan lost on a 3rd and 2 in the 4th quarter from the Texas 20. For some reason, we called a pass play, which went incomplete (it was right in front of where we were sitting), and we then kicked a field goal.

I like the coaching and the play calling in the game, but for that one play. Mike Hart had been running the ball well and I have to think he would have got the two yards. Even if we didn't get a touchdown out of it, it would have been more time off the clock. But if you can't convert third and 2 in that situation, you don't deserve to win. And we didn't.

Back from Africa

I'm back from Africa and I thought I'd attempt to summarize my experiences, although I'm certainly not a good enough writer to do my trip justice.

Perhaps first I should start with a few generalizations. Niger is directly north of Nigeria. It is a large country, twice the size of Texas, with about 11 million people. There are two main types of climate. In the north is the Sahara. South of the desert are semi-arid plains known as the Sahel, which is where the people live.

I might as well clear up a few possible things right off the bat. Niger is not romantic Africa. It is not lush Africa, nor is it beautiful Africa.
Niger is poor (the least developed in the world, depending on how one measures). It is dry. It is dusty. One doesn't go on safari there, because the animals are so rare. It is dirty. It is hot. It is over populated. When one walks outside, one is surrounded by beggars, mainly children incessantly chanting "cadeaux, cadeaux" (French for "gift"). In the capital, one smells burning trash at night. Transparency International rates it as tied for 122nd place in the world for openness (although in fairness my sister says that since the army has been paid more regularly the last few years, soldiers are less likely to demand bribes at roadblocks, so it's better than it used to be). As my dad said, going to Niger is not a vacation, it is an adventure.

But on to the adventure. We flew from Paris to Niamey, the capital. The airport at Niamey has one runway. It doesn't really have a gate. They run a portable staircase up to the plane, one walks down the stairs and then across the tarmac to a door in the airport. There in't much to see in Niamey. The roads, laid out by the French (who essentially created the city about 100 years ago) are wide. The main ones have four lanes of pavement and wide sidewalks which aren't paved; they're dust. One still sees camels walking around the city streets.

We left the next morning on a small boat, known as a pirogue, for Parc W. There is one river in Niger, the Niger River (and one bridge, the John F. Kennedy Bridge in Niamey). Pirogues are how one gets around on the Niger River. Ours was about ten yards long and maybe five feet wide. It was powered by a single outboard motor. Which died about lunch time. Very luckily for us, another boat happened by and towed us to the nearby market. After a some negotiating, the owner of our towboat lent us a new motor. Wisely not trusting our crew, he also sent his own guy along to run the motor. We arrived at our campsite that afternoon.

Parc W is a national park. One really feels isolated in the bush. Before dinner we had time to climb a nearby rock promontory, and outside the campsite, there was no sign of human habitation. The next morning we left before dawn to go looking for wildlife. We spent a day and a half driving around Parc W. It was fairly productive--we saw many antelopes, small crocodiles, buffalo, baboons, monkeys, innumerable beautiful birds, and lions. Yes, lions. We were close to the lions, about ten yards. It was very cool. We missed out on elephants and hippos, although we heard a hippo bellow from the riverbank.

After a couple of days, we drove back from Parc W to Niamey on a dirt road most of the way. While swerving to avoid a pothole so deep it had grass growing at the bottom of it, our driver gave himself a flat tire. He then proved himself unable to lower the spare tire from its place underneath the vehicle (i.e. we were stuck). I redeemed my five years of engineering education by figuring out that he was using the wrong tool and freeing the spare.

We had one night in Niamey and then we were off. We drove east, on one of the few paved roads. Our goal was Sabon Gida, the village where my sister lived for two years while she was in the Peace Corps. First, however, we had (the inevitable?) mechanical difficulties. Something was wrong with our vehicle's reserve fuel line. After sputtering all morning, the engine died in the heat of the day. As he pulled off the road, our driver must have hit a sharp piece of glass, because we then had a flat tire as well. Ugh. With the spare tire on, he managed to get the engine running enough that we could limp into Konni, a market town on the Niger-Nigeria border. After a few hours pursuing repairs, we eventually got to Sabon Gida.

It was fascinating. It's really two villages in one location because there are two ethnic groups: the Hausa (farmers) and the Fulans (herders). The Hausa (language: Hausa) and the Fulans (language: Fulfuldei) know each other, and get along fine, but they have two chiefs, two mosques, and they never intermarry. My sister and her husband speak Hausa, as do most of the Fulans. None of the Hausa speak Fulfuldei.
We were big news. Everyone came to see us. Both chiefs, both religious leaders, all of Kristen's friends. We saw a side of Africa that few people have a chance to see.
I did not expect to find that in this devoutly Muslim country, the people of Sabon Gida were jokesters. They laughed, they teased, they were witty and clever. They were also extraordinarily generous. They brought us all kinds of food, including lots and lots of milk (which was delicious, once we boiled it). They, the people who live relatively close to the subsistence level, could not stop bringing food to us, who are incomprehensively rich. I was warned that it would happen, but that did not make it any less poignant.

After two nights in the village we went further east, to Agadez, an old caravan town at the base of the Air (two syllables: aye-year') Mountains. Our hotel room in Agadez was very nice, with clean sheets, a ceiling fan, and, most importantly, a shower and a toilet. After a few days without either, they are much appreciated.
On our way out of Agadez, we stopped at the incomparable Dabous giraffe carvings. I'd seen them in National Geographic or something, and it was astonishing to see them in real life. They are just marvelous.

Next we ventured into the Air Mountains themselves. They resemble nothing so much as the surface of the moon. Much of Niger is devoid of plants; much of the Air Mountains are devoid of soil as well. It's a blasted, barren, and empty place. There are a few washes where bushes grow, and we did see a few people and camels making their way slowly, but this was rare.

{Brief historical diversion: North Africa was not always a desert. It used to be quite fertile. It supported all sorts of big mammals, it was forested, there were lakes. This was when the Dabous giraffes were carved--today there are no giraffes within hundreds of miles of the carvings. About ten thousand years ago, there was some sort of climactic change (I don't remember the cause--maybe a shift in ocean currents?) and it began to stop raining. Over time, the desert advanced and almost everything died. In the Air Mountains, there are enormous piles of rocks. I assume they once were verdant hills, but the plants all died, and then the wind and occasional flash flood washed all the soil away. Libya today is drilling for water. Vast stores of water exist under the Sahara, remnants of this earlier time.}

We spent the night in the mountain town of Iferouane. As I lay awake and looked up at the incredible stars on a nice chilly night, it occurred to me that I would never be in a more obscure place. Unfortunately, by this time every member of our party was suffering from food poisoning (or worse), and we had to turn back to Agadez. Driving over rough roads in extreme heat while suffering from intestinal difficulties is no one's idea of a good time.

So what to make of Niger? It's an interesting place. It's a hard place to visit. The only real reason to go is the people, who are as a general rule open, kind, funny, generous, and clever.

I leave you with some observations about Niger:

I lost about 15 pounds, between the heat and my intestinal ailments. By the time I left, I weighed in at 167, which I haven't been since early in my freshman year of college, when I was just starting rowing.

Private car ownership is very rare, well beyond the means of the vast majority of the population. At least 80% of the vehicles on the road fall into one of three categories:
(1) Vastly overloaded transport vehicles--this is how most Nigeriens travel and transport goods. The smallest are 'bush taxis', which are cars (Toyotas or Peugeots) crammed with about four paying passengers per row. Bags on top. This category also includes minivans, again jammed with people, often with 20 goats riding on top. On the large side are big semi trucks, overloaded with all manner of cargo, people, and animals.
(2) Mercedes sedans--unquestionably the vehicle of choice if you can afford one.
(3) Toyota Landcruisers (diesel)--unquestionably the vehicle of choice for trekkers like us. We had three while we were there, each with 200,000-300,000 miles. Incredibly rugged vehicles, considering the extreme conditions (astonishingly rough 'roads', 110 degree heat, incessant dust). I'd be interested in seeing how long a so-called rugged SUV (Built Ram Tough!) would last out there...

To amuse myself, I kept track of soccer jerseys I recognized in the towns. The tally:

France: 2
Nigeria: 1
Agentina: 1
Michael Owen: 1 (England)
Figo: 1 (Real Madrid)
Zidane: 3
Ronaldo: 1
Rivaldo: 1
England: 2
Brazil: 1
Arsenal: 1
and finally
Beckham: 11 (4 Manchester United, 4 Real Madrid, 2 misc.) He really is ubiquitous.

This will likely be my last post for a while. I leave for Africa on Saturday. Specifically, Niger, in West Africa. Why Niger? A valid question. My sister was in the Peace Corps there. She came back to here, and then has spent the last six months over there. I've never been.

We'll be spending some time in Parc W ("Park Doo-bl-vey", they speak French over there), some time in my sister's village, and some time in and around Agadez, which is deep in the Sahara. Agadez is near the Air ("A-year") Mountains which, perhaps counterintuitively, appear to be rather solid. (Get it? Air Mountains? Solid? Oh, nevermind.)

It's winter there. Note that the current forcast for Niamey calls for highs in the mid 90s, lows in the mid 60s, and widespread dust. Agadez, in the desert, should be somewhat cooler.

Niger has been relatively safe. No, I'm not going to forward that particular article to my mom, who will be spending the entire time worrying about us.

I'm meeting my dad in Paris and we fly to Niamey. I've already started my anti-malarial Mefloquin and the vivid dreams have started. Last night's was very intense, whatever it was.

It's pretty clear that Rehnquist is on the way out. It's only a matter of time.

Seems to me that it's a very good thing for Bush that he's held on this long. If he'd retired earlier, Bush would have had to picked someone. If he'd had to pick someone in 2002, there would perhaps have been a ruling where this judge revealed his or her rabid pro-life stance, which would have alienated enough women to cost Bush the election. Now, he can appoint whoever he wants.

But my guess is it'll be someone without a record. Undoubtedly it will be someone who grew up poor and is now rich (see yesterday's post). Someone who will, perhaps like Clarence Thomas, lie at his confirmation hearing and say that he'd never really thought about Roe v. Wade, so he couldn't offer an opinion about it. That's just my guess....

I find it interesting that the president habitually seeks to surround himself with people who are now rich but started life poor. The latest example is his nominee to be Secretary of Commerce (who does what, exactly?).

It interests me because Bush himself grew up fabulously rich and among the astonishingly powerful and has, because of his connections to that world, become rich himself. It's as if he needs to prove his authenticity. This desire to prove his authenticity may also be behind his 'just a regular guy' persona that he hews to relentlessly. (Of course, he's just a regular guy who grew up rich with a huge summer home in Maine, but he doesn't mention that much....)

It's as if he really does want to implicitly demonstrate to America "Hey, yes I'm rich, but being rich isn't a crime! Look at all the people around me who got rich of their own personality and drive." It's just interesting that he never fails to tout anyone ELSE's up-from-the-bootstraps story....

I'll be honest. I don't know much about the Ukraine. The stories seem to indicate that the pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was cheated in the voting. And Putin doesn't like him. So he can't be all bad.

BUT, I did happen to notice his right hand man, who happens to be a woman, Yuliya Tymoshenko. Ms. Tymoshenko is, shall we say, beautiful. Now I like Dianne Feinstein and Sandra Day O'Connor just fine, but they are no Yuliya Tymoshenko.....

Well at least Ashcroft is gone. He was an atrocious Attorney General.

For starters, consider (a) his FBI did a crappy job chasing the terrorists who were in the USA before Sept. 11 (this sounds like it'll get juicier within a few days); (b) he said, before Sept. 11, that he didn't want to hear any more about these terrorists (Sept. 11 Commission Report, p. 265); and (3) he was happy to enforce the "Patriot" Act, but not against gun crimes.

America is a better place with him gone.

Why do companies outsource jobs to India? I suppose one reason is lower costs.

But another is that thousands of smart engineers graduate every year in India, while here in the US we're still fighting about whether to teach evolution. Science education in the US is terrible, as evidenced by the number of people who believe in creationism and astrology.