jayaresea.com -- current

Banner Day

Today Terry and I completed a task some, including myself, thought might not ever happen again: we updated the wiffleball website. It's been about three years, but what better time than 11 days beforehand to launch the 2009 Swingin' For Santa mini-site?

The job itself of making it is a chore. A fun chore, but a chore all the same. Especially the final 24 hours. The feeling when you're done though (well, 99% done) usually makes it all worth it. So fun to finally be able to just sit back, breathe for a second, and see how it all looks.

Big thanks to Mark Montgomery for providing content, anyone who played/participated at any of the previous iterations of our SFS event, and of course our bros at Rockstar for providing the all-important funding!! We won't letcha down, guys! Rock on!

Sportsman of the Year

Why yes, Derek Jeter *did* have a much better year than Usain Bolt, silly! Just ask Sports Illustrated! What the hell did Bolt do that was so impressive? Jeter hit .334! And finished 3rd in the AL in the MVP race, losing out to only some catcher whose name I can't remember and one of his Yankee teammates.

High Enough

Sometimes I chuckle* when listening to music online, especially when I realize I'm listening to something I would normally not give two shits about, but I DO simply because of some long-lost memory it provides. In any other context, this music would mean nothing to me. It's not bad music per se, but it's unremarkable music. Still, I enjoy it thoroughly because it takes me back to a specific idyllic time in my childhood.

*I hate that word, "chuckle"...if you ever hear me "chuckling", rest assured it's a big fat sarcastic laugh. Nevertheless, I'm using it. Whatever.

That specific time is the first half of the 1990s and that location is Scott Carmichael's house. Well, his parents' house, where he was living at the time without rent. And where I was a frequent guest.

I wasn't exactly a music encyclopedia in 1990. I was 10 years old, barely any chest hair to be found, and the breadth of my knowledge was more or less restricted to NKOTB and whatever my parents owned (on tape). But it's around that age that kids start yearning for more, starting to realize their parents' collection is just the tip of the iceberg*. Yet at the same time, you're constrained to whatever measly allowance money you receive (if any) for whatever measly help you provide around the house (if any), so you're not exactly able to buy the entire AC/DC catalog at Musicland. You end up beholden to, of all things, your FRIENDS' parents' collections if you want to broaden the horizons. And from the ages of 10-15, I spent far more time at Scott's parents' house than any other besides my own. Mom Carmichael was mostly an adult contemporary fan, sharing a few titles my own mom owned, so there wasn't much to be found there. But Dad Carmichael was a rock fan, like my dad, albeit a somewhat different rock fan. A bit more eclectic in variety, ranging from butt rock to some new wave and a healthy dose of modern rock. I remember hearing a lot of Sammy Hagar, Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen, Tom Petty, INXS, Dire Straits, Bad Company, Damn Yankees, Styx, etc, etc. These were the soundtrack to my most relaxed and fulfilling evenings of that era. The ones I spent at the Carmichael's, making up dopey dice football or dice baseball games, or perhaps playing Tecmo Super Bowl until the sun came up. Friday or Saturday night, not a care in the world. Sure, you have homework to do, but you can put it off considering it's a sheet of multiplication tables that will take you about four minutes to complete**.

*"Wait, you mean there are MORE Journey albums out there besides Raised on Radio?! Like...27 more albums?!"

**I was really good at the multiplication tables. Mainly thanks to the aforementioned dopey dice games.

I was old enough to appreciate the weekend, old enough to soak it in and breathe deeply. I was old enough to be able to preoccupy myself with stats, paper, and music, and I was young enough to really have zero serious responsibilities. It was my childhood prime.

So when I'm sitting at work, and Live Baby Live by INXS comes on, I can't help but listen fondly with a smile on my face, despite the fact that INXS is mostly just an average band and this album is, at best, mediocre. I don't "hear" it so much as get that freeing feeling of the weekend. It reminds me of a Friday night where I have nothing to do but hang out with a cool dude at a cool house with a cool football game we created ourselves. We've got nothing to do & nowhere to go. The night is young. The Dr. Pepper tastes better, somehow. INXS sounds better, somehow. The Damn Yankees are practically tolerable life is so beautiful right now!

Tonight it's Friday, but it's 2009 and Scott's 650 miles south. And I've gotta call BofA to see if I can get this late fee waived. And my gf and I have a new townhouse, and there's lots of stuff to be done. Gotta find a sleeper sofa for the bottom bedroom. Errands to run. Hoping to pick the scooter up from the shop tomorrow, hoping the charge isn't too excessive. The car's sunroof is leaking after heavy rain, hope it doesn't rain too hard tonight cause I still haven't figured out a solution...

...well, don't say goodnight. Thanks for the hospitality, Carmichaels!

Goodbye

Cameroon�At the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, more than a dozen residents form a gallery of grief, looking on as Dorothy�a beloved female felled in her late 40s by heart failure�is borne to her burial.

[National Geographic]

Books I've Read: Sandy Koufax - A Lefty's Legacy

When I was a kid, baseball stats and history were context-less. Baseball players were as good as the numbers on the back of their baseball card, which only fueled the mystique that was Sandy Koufax. His career was maybe half the length of a normal pitcher, but oh how amazing he was in the half he gave us, especially his last four seasons. A record of 97-27 (avg of 24.3 wins and 7.8 losses per year), 1.86 ERA, averages of 298 IP and 307 K per season. And he did what so few athletes do, he went out on top. Sure, this was mostly due to an arm that simply couldn't be stretched any further without longterm damage, but his final season saw him top 300 IP with both his highest season wins total and lowest season ERA. On the strength of those four seasons alone he easily made the Hall of Fame and is considered by many to be the greatest pitcher who ever lived. And shh, but he was also a much better post-season pitcher than even the legendary Andy Pettitte*, with his worst start being a 6 IP, 1 ER affair in a 1966 loss. All told he was 4-3 with a 0.95 ERA in 57 playoff innings. Finally, he was my pop's favorite player of all time, as far as I knew, and when you're 8 years old, nobody knows more about baseball than your pops.

*Can we please put to bed this "Andy Pettitte is a playoff STUD!" BS? Take a moment and compare his regular season career stats with his postseason career stats:

              W    L  Win%   ERA  WHIP  K/9  BB/9  K/BB
Reg.Season  229  165  .629  3.91  1.36  6.6   2.8  2.33
Postseason   15    9  .625  3.89  1.33  5.8   2.4  2.39

I mean...PLEASE? McCarver? Buck? You reading this? He's the exact same pitcher in both settings. Please remember that when these blowhards start in on the "In the postseason, this guy is just a WINNER" (or worse, a "GAMER!") garbage the next time Pettitte does nothing more than induce a groundout to end a scoreless inning. He's about as awesome in the postseason as Derek Jeter is. Oh, that reminds me:

               BA   OBP   SLG   OPS
Reg.Season   .317  .388  .459  .847
Postseason   .312  .380  .476  .857

These stats aren't hard to find.

However, as I've grown older, I've become more and more interested in more and more sophisticated stat measuring, more and more interested in context, and more and more disinterested in unverified tall tales of greatness, grittiness, or "heart", especially when those tall tales ignore the context. And this has put a damper on the mystique of Koufax for me. For one, he pitched for the Dodgers, who had the Mt. Everest of pitching mounds, allowing Koufax a nice view of the back of the shorter umpires' necks, and a pitcher-friendly ballpark to boot. His four seasons also came in some of the grandest pitching years in all of baseball outside of the Dead Ball-era. The National League ERA from 1963-1966, Koufax's four majestic seasons, was a mere 3.49, and that's an aggregate from all games in all teams' stadiums, not just Dodgers Stadium and their mountain-top pitching mound. To contrast, the past four combined seasons of AL pitching have amounted to an ERA of 4.47, an increase of about 28%.

This is illustrated with the handy stat "Adjusted ERA+", which normalizes a pitcher's ERA for the year and park in which he played. A mark of 100 is league average; the higher the number, the more dominant he was against his peers. The highest post-1900 mark of all time was Pedro Martinez's 2000 season when he registered an absurd 291, thanks to a 1.74 ERA when the league average ERA was 4.92. An ERA+ of 291 in Koufax's era would have amounted to about a 1.20 ERA.

Sandy Koufax's best season ERA+ was the 190 he posted in his final season, 1966, when he finished with a 1.73 ERA while the league ERA was only 3.61. It's still a great number, but only the 57th-best in league history. Zack Greinke, the 25 year old with the 50-53 career record, just this year posted a 203 ERA+ (32nd all time). His ERA was worse than Koufax's (2.16), but the league ERA (4.46) implies a much more hitter-friendly context.

Which is a long way of saying that 10 or 15 years ago I would have read this book much differently than I read it now. I went in skeptical, expecting glowing praise and relentless stories of the man from a writer who probably didn't take the context much into effect. Countless people expressing how he's possibly the greatest pitcher who ever lived when, really, he's not. Repeated claims that nobody's put together a four year string like his when, actually, I've had three guys just in my lifetime alone put together better and longer stretches. I expected to roll my eyes a few times.

It's a testament to the book I think that despite all this, I closed it still much impressed by Koufax and actually not at all annoyed by the writer, who really didn't focus much effort on the "how much better than everyone else was he?" question and more on simply "what made him KOUFAX?", America's shy Jewish darling of the 60's who's kept such a low profile since retiring that many would be surprised to hear he's actually still alive. You don't see him sideline reporting or shooting the shit with Joe Buck during the playoffs. It also focuses on how he spent the "dominating" half of his career pitching with a left arm that would have placed 99.4% of today's pitchers on the 60 day DL. Which was probably what I found most impressive and allowed me to ignore all the nagging "buts" in my head. Simply put, if Sandy Koufax pitched today, he wouldn't pitch. He'd be Mark Prior, constantly going on and off the disabled list and retiring at 25, not putting together a four year string of dominance that people still discuss in hushed tones.

The book is split into two alternating sections, every even-numbered chapter being a recap of each inning during his 1965 perfect game against Bob Hendley, a game where there was only ONE hit, the Dodgers won 1-0, and it lasted only 1:43. Six minutes shorter than White Chicks. The odd-numbered chapters act as a sort of biography of Koufax and discuss how he became the legend he is.

So for half the book (the recap of the perfect game), you're not in any real danger of the author going into "Koufax=most dominant pitcher ever!!" territory since you're really only dealing with that one snapshot of his career, and let's face it, he *was* dominant that night. It's hard to overstate a 14 strikeout perfect game, no matter the context, so long as he's not facing the California State Little League champs. I mean Jack Morris is one of the most overrated pitchers of all time, but if you wrote a book about just that infamous Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, you're pretty much licensed to say whatever wonderful, overblown things about him that you please, so long as you're only referring to *that* game.

As for the Koufax book, the road that could possibly lead to "tall tales of grittiness" territory actually seem to be strongly corroborated. One of the main themes is the well-known knowledge that Koufax pitched hurt for most of the 2nd half of his career (ironically, the half in which he dominated). This is illustrated with multiple teammates and opponents coming in contact with Koufax after a game, his left elbow bloated to the size (and color) of a collegiate football, wrapped and soaking in ice. The dialogues tended to go like this:

Random teammate: Good god Sandy, that looks terrible! How long are you going to be out for?
Koufax: This? Oh this happens all the time, I'll be ready to go next time it's my turn.

It's also sufficiently corroborated that Koufax would douse his arm with a salve called Capsolin that brought tears to the eyes of anyone standing within a few feet of him and forced the team to wash his uniform separately from the rest of the team. All in order to dull the pain on days he pitched. Which would be an eye-rolling anecdote if only one guy mentioned it, but it gets brought up time and time again throughout the book by a plethora of different names.

You take these tales of pain management and glance at the 300+ innings of Cy Young ball he was throwing for his final four seasons, the last of which forced him to retire, and it's hard to insist on my pessimistic view of the context. Humility is humility, pain is pain, and 300+ innings is 300+ innings. Not THAT much has changed between 1966 and 2009.

The end to an interview with Koufax by Sports Illustrated after naming him Sportsman of the Year for 1965 (after his 2nd-to-last-season):

SI: Do you ever sit back and say to yourself, what an amazing thing it all is, your records and your achievements, that this is happening to you, that people will be talking about you 50, 100 years from now the way they talk about Cy Young and Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander now?

SK: No, I never thought of it that way. I've never thought anything's happening to me.

SI: Well, it is.

SK: I can't picture people talking about me 50 years from now, either, and I never in my life sat down and thought about Walter Johnson or Cy Young or the other great pitchers.

SI: Or yourself as one of them.

SK: That's right.

SI: And how do you feel when people say you might be the greatest pitcher that ever lived?

SK: I never even think about it.

SI: Never?

SK: Never.

Ok, you're not the greatest...but you were pretty good for a guy with a bum arm.

Revisiting "2K3 Pads"

A followup on the post from a few weeks ago, where we climbed into the time machine and watched a few videos I did for the wiffleball site back in 2002, showcasing a few residences from a few guys in the league.

In 2003 I was looking forward to continue the series with a hot new season...but for whatever reason I only got two of them done. And...well, here they are.

1. Scott Carmichael, Chico, CA

Scott's Pad was our "season premiere" for the 2003 (and final) season, and I was itchin' to get started on these, having realized how fun and entertaining the 2002 episodes wound up being. Scott was the Babe Ruth of the league, so I felt he was an appropriate subject for the premiere, and I knew he'd be ready to give the camera something to remember. I was not wrong.

What I Like:
(seriously...where to begin?)
1. Let's just start from the beginning...Scott's wig. I love Scott's wig. I think it's one of the greatest wigs I've ever seen. Part of it is because it looks, on him (and with a hat on), totally natural. I could totally picture him with that haircut. But for as long as I've known him he's always had the same close-cropped hairstyle. The wig comes out and he's suddenly in character mode, and I love it. Love the wig.
2. The whole scene with him going though "his side of the cupboard" and showing us what's in it...ending with him summing it up while the contents of his cupboard sits on the stove. Always gets a laugh, and not just out of me. "Whenever, you know, I need something to eat I just come in here and dig through and..." while we're looking at a Powerbar, a plate of christmas coconut balls, some vitamins, an empty container, and a tape measure. Best part is this was not planned at all. I had no idea what he was going to pull out of there and I doubt he did either.
3. Inarguably the best moment of any of the five Pads episode was Scott showing us the "walk-in closet" in his bedroom. I won't argue this. Many real-life Cribs subjects (mostly women) showed off their huge closets and absurd amount of clothes/shoes, so Scott, of all things, chose that to satirize, and I think it's perfect. To be honest, this took a few takes to get right because I simply couldn't stop laughing when I'd see him struggle to "walk into" the closet.
4. Using his recently-departed roommate's empty room to show off where he goes to "think about things" and get back to his roots.
5. So many things in the bathroom. The two trash cans (one on each side of the toilet, presumbaly for lefties and righties), the inconsistent leopard print and blue towel themes. So much got left on the cutting room floor too.

What I Hate:
1. I hate the opening establishing pans in the kitchen. Terrible framing and way too quick of pans and cuts. Looks really rushed and bad.
2. This would be a recurring problem, and I'd have to ask someone smarter than me on the subject (Mark?), but there's this high-pitched interference noise coming from, I think, the flatscreen TV in both this episode and the next one that totally distracts and annoys me. Which sucks because I think the whole "Scott looking for a game he has for his PS2, picking out one that's 4 years old, realizing it's just the box AND that it's a game for a completely different system" woulda been even better than it already is. Oh's well.

2. Dean Evans, Chico, CA

Dean Evans' pad was, sadly, the final one. Looking back I have no idea why I stopped at only two for 2003 and five overall. It's not like Dean sexually harrassed me during the filming, ruining the process forever. Yes, these are time-consuming to make, but even in the moment it was obvious to me that the end result was well worth it. On top of that, in May of 2003 (likely around the time this one was shot/completed), I graduated college, removing the primary excuse I may have had to cease doing these.

What I Like
1. Dean's a goof, but this lends to stuff you wouldn't typically see (in a good way), like wrestling figures on top of the refrigerator (I'm 97% sure those were not placed there for the camera's benefit but rather exist up there all the time), him trying to play his roommate's drums for us, and wiffleball bats in the freezer (a practice he did really adhere to for the whole season).
2. One of the more pathetic collections of food to be found in a fridge. Basically amounts to "condiments and pickles." I used to go to Dean's house every Monday night to watch Monday Night Raw, and only one time did I see anyone use the kitchen, and it was his roommate. Dean always had fast food. Maybe I saw him wash his hands in there once or something, I dunno, it was awhile ago.
3. The infamous Katie Holmes Shrine.
4. On his bed...where are the sheets? It's just a mattress and a Carolina Panthers fleece. Was he doing a wash? I was probably a little creeped out and never asked, sadly, and he never explained. Doesn't sleeping on a sheet-less mattress seem a little serial killer-esque?
5. Running through his NES game collection, "Baseball Stars...greatest baseball game ever made." Made me proud. If he had said "Baseball Stars, decent but far inferior to RBI Baseball" or something to that effect, I would have had to end the filming right there and start tearing down Katie Holmes posters screaming "KATIE HOLMES, DECENT BUT FAR INFERIOR TO WINONA RYDER!!"
6. As he leads us into the back yard, he gets a look at what we're about to see and emits a laugh that basically says "I haven't been back here in months and I must have stopped paying my lawn guy." Seconds later we're staring down a jungle of grass & plants as Dean lets us in on all the "partyin it up" that goes on back there, the Sarcasm Meter reaching Clint Wattenberg levels.

What I Hate
1. The high pitched interference coming from, I assume, the TV in his room. Like the Scott Pad (above), it ruins the whole scene for me.
2. Kind of minor quibble but I wish we spent a bit more time exploring that fucking backyard. As a new (town)homeowner, I can't imagine having a backyard and not using it. I'd mow the lawn every other day, I'd go shirtless and use that dusty weight bench every day, I'd probably try and build some mini-wiffleball field. He only checks it out because I strong-armed him while holding a video camera.

************

The impetus to post these flashback videos was not only that I found a few I thought I had lost, but I'm hoping to film a few new editions when I get down to Chico in December. And by "few" I mean "as many as I can squeeze in." Some new guys, some updates on guys I've done before, etc. Looking forward to it. 2K10 Pads, coming soon!

Used CD Adventures

So the lady and I have been going through our CD collections, 95% of which was already on our laptops or desktops as well as backed up on various externals, and consolidating. You see, we bought a townhouse the other day, and in the interest of easing the move, we're removing the unessentials, especially those that can bring in a buck or two. So after a couple days of deliberation, we had a stack of "keep these" (homemade CDs from friends, CDs whose physical presense we weren't ready to remove from our life, CDs we were too embarrassed to take to a used CD store and basically admit to owning, etc) and a slightly larger "sell these" stack (CDs we had forgotten we even had anymore, CDs we haven't opened since 1997, etc).

We then took the "sell these" stack and split it up into two sections, the "clean" CDs and the ones with various amount of scratches and wear & tear. I then took the ~30 clean CDs to Easy Street Records. In this stack were two double CDs by George Acosta...two of his more recent albums, A State of Mind (2007) and All Rights Reserved (2006).

About 15 minutes later, I was walking back home. Easy Street took about 20 of the CDs and I got about $60 for them. A few they said were a little scratched and they're pretty picky about the CDs being like new, but they said Everyday Music is much more liberal with what they take in, since they actually have a "scuffed" section where they sell slightly worn CDs at even more reduced rates. Strangely though, Easy Street did not take either of the George Acosta albums. I got home and looked at the CDs again. Pristine. I've probably only used them both once, to rip them onto the laptop. Hmm. Oh well.

Last night after work I took all the rest (Easy Street rejects + all the "wear & tear" ones, probably about 75 all told) to Everyday Music in Capitol Hill. Their process is a little different, as I found myself browsing their CDs for over an hour while some guy ran through my stack in his own, much more deliberate way. After he was done, he brought me over and broke it down. About 10 of the CDs amounted to anywhere between $1 and $4 apiece, and then there was a big stack of about 50 that he said that, for whatever reason (scuffed, they already have a bunch, etc), he could only offer 10 cents apiece for. I scanned the stack quickly and let him take them without argue. On one hand, 10 cents was ridiculously low for some of those, but whatever, I don't need these, whatever we didn't sell we were going to give away anyway. Let the local music shop make a buck off them.

Then he handed me a stack of 10-15 CDs that he couldn't give me ANYTHING for. Not even 10 cents. Some of these I could understand, I didn't do the best job removing some of the throwaways. One 3 CD set had a CD missing while the other two were seemingly glued to the paper sleeve. Another was a random Primus CD in a random 4xCD musicology CD case I had gotten in college. But what else did I find in this stack?

BOTH George Acosta double albums.

Now, I know it's not because the CDs are in unsalvageable shape. They're practically brand new. And I know it's not because they drowning in used Acosta CDs and simply refuse to take anymore; during my hour spent browsing their collections, I found myself in the "A" portion of the Electronic section and saw they had but ONE Acosta used CD, a scuffed version of "Release AM".

For some reason neither they nor Easy Street want to sell his stuff. Not even for 10 cents. Practically brand new double CDs. They don't think somebody would hand over four bucks for either of them?

Poor Georgie, I hope he never googles himself and finds this. If he does though...hey George, less of the wimpy vocal trance and more like Release AM!!! My ipod craves it!

45 seconds

ESPN likes making news items out of things that are probably not even close to being real news items, but this one is pretty ridiculous, and it doesn't even involve a NY or Boston team!

I'll sum it up for you with paraphrased quotes.

TJ Houshmandzadeh (WR, Sea): The Chicago Bears didn't pursue me in free agency last year, so I plan on playing well and showing them what they missed out on. Still, and this is somewhat irrelevant, they've got some pretty good receivers over there.

Lance Briggs (LB, Chi): This guy sounds bitter. I, too, plan on playing well Sunday!

TH: Umm, no, I'm not bitter. Briggs is a good player and can say what he wants. I can't talk much trash because my numbers aren't great.

LB: ...

[The end]

Me: Thanks ESPN, but can I have these 45 seconds of my life back?

If that is "verbal jabbing", I'd hate to see NFL guys get even more friendly and non-confrontational.

A Really Important Post

The other day we took our cat outside for the first time since we got her...4 years ago? Something like that. It was a big moment in the household. She used to be an indoor/outdoor cat in her previous life, but since we adopted her she's been in this 528 sq ft box we here call an apartment. A palatial palace compared to her 1.25 sq ft digs at the Humane Society, but surely by now she's forgotten about all that. She'll sit and stare out the window all day, eyeing birds she can't chase and and leaves she probably thinks are small animals.

We strapped her into her harness, which she hates, and carried her outside. And...I think she liked it! We kept her in the little alley outside the apt, not really subjecting her to the dogs or ugly people that might be found on the sidewalk. When in the apartment wearing the harness, she has this weird malfunction in the brain which causes her to veer to the left when walking, and she'll back into a corner and not move until the thing is off of her. Outside she was tentative, walking slowly and like a stealthy spy (low to the ground), but at least seemed to walk in a straight line and gradually seemed to get more comfortable. And...then she crawled under a dumpster and wouldn't come out until we went under and pulled her out, almost freeing her of her harness in the process. Like her papa, she's still a wimp.

Revisiting "2K2 Pads"

Somewhat tangential thoughts while Jeff Saturday and Peyton Manning glower at me on the cover of ESPN The Mag and I reluctantly prepare for another annoying NFL season. What did I ever do to you guys? Jeez, go try and intimidate someone else.

If you ever go to the old wiffleball site, you can access the two "2K3 Pads" episodes we produced during the 2003 season. I'm sure you all knew that. As time goes by, and the league moves further and further back into my life history, those videos are among my favorite items to think of.

They all started in 2002, a product of my quick disdain for the MTV show "Cribs", where mostly C-list celebs would show you around their home, typically showing off the amount of money and worthless things they've accumulated. The occasional celeb would be in on the joke and play the whole thing tongue-in-cheek, but most of them were climbing over each other to show us their 11 strong car collection or speed boat, into which they'd all climb into at the end of each episode and speed off in a manner that can only be described as "tauntingly."

I thought it'd be funny to do the same thing, but with the funny fellas in my wiffleball league and their anti-wealthy abodes. Instead of car collections or speed boats, we'd get "running water" or "street parking available." Plus it would allow me an excuse to play with my video camera and editing software and make something that would last forever. Something I could watch when I was 80 years old and dying of colon cancer. One final laugh.

Until recently, I thought I had lost forever the three I did in 2002, the first three. But I found them and quickly made about 13 backups of them before uploading them to youtube. By no means are these the original quality...those I've come to realize are gone forever. These were the ones I compressed for the website, and I'm going to post them here for shits & giggles, along with a sort of "director's commentary" on my favorite bits of each one and the parts that make me cringe in horror.

1. Clint Wattenberg, Ithaca NY

Clint's "Pad" was the first one ever. I shot it in March of 2002, after having returned from the NCAA Div 1 Wrestling National Championships, where Clint won his first of two All-American honors. So fortunately, he was in a chipper mood and rearing to go. I didn't really have any plans, or storyboards or anything. The plan was simply "follow Clint around as he talks about each room in the house, go back to Chico and edit it into something in time for the launch of the 2002 season website in April." Hopefully it'd be funny.

What I Like:
1. When Clint starts digging into the recycling bin, pulling out roommate Gabe's refreshments of choice, my laughter was completely real and I find it just as funny 7 years later. "Some white wine...must have been eating fish", especially, always gets me.
2. Just a bevy of throwaway, dry humor lines from Clint. As I wasn't paying 100% attention while shooting it, instead trying to pretend I was some dopey MTV camera guy and do what kind of shots they did, many of Clint's lines I didn't even notice until I watched it when I got back to Chico. Such as:
2a. "I know I can make my own CDs and watch DVDs on it, which is pretty good...for a computer I found."
2b. Making sure to differentiate the creatine monohydrate and the creatine phosphate.
2c. "Nice purple stereo...that doesn't mean it's real good, it just means it's purple."
2d. "This is the Silver Bullet...which is kind of a misnomer, cause it's gray."
3. Everything shot outside (once "Roll Out" by Ludacris starts). I don't know if he says one non-sarcastic thing the entire time.
4. Watching Clint at the very end as we shot the end sequence. We didn't really have any specific way to end it, I figured he'd just say goodbye and I'd walk away, like they did on Cribs, but at the last second I decided to try and follow him in and get the door shut in my face. This inadvertently set his doorbell off, and the brief look on Clint's face says, to me at least, "uhh, we're gonna re-shoot that, huh?" Nah.

What I Hate:
1. The whole sequence in the living room, simply because I had the music bed set a little too loud and if you're not listening to it on headphones, you sort of have to squint to make out what Clint's saying. I just get annoyed when I see it and want to fast forward.
2. A few moments of poor audio editing...when I throw in the "Fuel" intro while in the kitchen, I probably cut it a moment or two too late. Then I think I started "Kitty" (the bedroom scene) a moment or two too late...that always bugs me.

Truth be told, after we shot it and I was sitting in his living room, I thought this was going to be a terrible idea. I didn't think it would translate well. Little did I know that Clint's dry humor was just a little slow to get to me, and it wound up being pretty good.

2. Jeff Morrison, Chico CA

Jeff's was #2, and I was more confident here after having edited Clint's and realizing that if I just shot enough footage, it would be easy to make a 3-5 minute video that's funny. If you don't realize (and you should), Jeff was living with his folks at this moment in time. As it is, I think eventually Jeff would become among the first in the league to actually purchase his own home. To his credit, he didn't care about living with his folks and was more than willing to ham it up. Also sarcastic, but a bit more obviously than Clint, Jeff knew what kind of attitude to have in order to emulate those "Cribs" episodes.

What I Like:
1. "C'mon let's head over to my room WHO LET THE DOGS OUT!!" Back before I started with shooting Clint's, I knew I was going to use a lot of the same music as the Cribs episodes. Hence the Ludacris, Jay-Z, and others from that early part of the decade. And I KNEW "Who Let The Dogs Out" was going to be used in someone's episode, I just didn't know whose. I didn't want to waste the moment, and I think it was used well.
2. His little double bed and him declaring that "this is where the magic happens." Uh huh. For the record, the ONE requirement all subjects had when making these was they had to work in a "this is where the magic happens" at some point, presumably in reference to their bed, since it seemed ALL "Cribs" celebs said that like some kind of douchey frat guy. Right right...you get laid, you're awesome.
3. "I got a lot of pairs of pants...got a lot of pants."
4. Showing the bathroom in the house, which oddly enough was in his parents' bedroom. I don't know if it was the only one...but it was very plain and clean. Which is illustrated with the look on Jeff's face when trying to come up with something to say about it. After a couple beats he nails it. "I take showers and stuff in here...ladies."
5. Running on the treadmill, of course. What got lost was the fact that a) the treadmill was really loud and b) Jeff was running with slippers on. The effect was quite the opposite of that made with the Rocky IV music.
6. Like he's gonna tell us a secret, "Uhh...I'm really into car collecting" with this little proud look on his face. Then he shows us his '88 Volkswagen.

What I Hate:
1. The shot from 0:48 to 0:56 where I in slow-mo pan across the least interesting and stupidly shot angle of the dining room. I don't know what I was thinking here, and why I couldn't come up with better b-roll while he talked.
2. For some reason I forgot to include music for the brief period he's in the living room. I know this wasn't done on purpose because half the point (and fun!) of making these was the music.

And that's about it. I think this was one was actually probably the cleanest of all five we did.

3. Casey Sylvester, Chico CA

Casey Sylvester was the final one for 2002. I was actually planning on doing more than 3 as I think Casey's was shot in May or so, and the season didn't end until October, but for whatever reason I dropped the ball and this was it. His is the first to actually be the typical living arrangement for most of the players, a college-town area apartment complex full of Chico State students. Clint and Jeff were both minorities with their homes.

What I Like:
1. "You're not a baller, unless you have TWO Playstation 2's" perfectly satirizes the "Cribs" show, which was just full of ridiculous and nonsensical objects and things, and celebs bragging about how they own these things.
2. His computer's wallpaper background being a huge picture of his own face. To this day I don't know if this was what it really was or if he only did this as a joke for the episode.
3. "Scott Carmichael, you know...prefers his ladies on the rocks. I prefer my ladies, on the bed." Nice dig at Scott. Since the video's too crappy and most of y'all don't know of the context, he was referring to the year 2002 Wiffleball Calendar, where Scott Carmichael's "slogan" for his month was "Prefers His Ladies On The Rocks" with shots of him in the rocky area of Upper Bidwell Park. You know, cause he likes to bang them under the sun, on rocks. Casey prefers a bed.
4. Related is the ONLY little trick thing I pulled in the editing of any of these episodes, that I almost forgot about and I doubt anybody notices. Casey refers to enjoying having his way with women on his bed, so I pan over to his bed, and then voila! Casey's on the other side of me!
5. Still in the room, Casey referencing Jeff Morrison's "little half bad" and alluding to how he can't bang the kinda ladies Casey bangs on his luxurious full-size bed.
6. The transition from Casey offering to take us down to the pool area, and then him suddenly down there with no shirt, a towel, and shades on, always gets me.

What I Hate:
1. The super slow-mo shot of the "lovely calla lily" in his bathroom that just stutters along and looks super cheap. The video that is, not the picture itself, which I'm sure is very expensive and rare.
2. Probably the most cringe-inducing thing of all the episodes I made was the "bleep" of him saying "you don't gotta go home but get the FUCK outta here!" TERRIBLE decision and TERRIBLE "bleep" sound. I remember I was on a self-imposed deadline and was so close to being done, but for some reason I was having a hard time finding the typical "bleep" censor sound, gave up, and just used this one to be done with it. In hindsight, what I learned was it would be MORE THAN WORTH IT if I just spent another hour or so and found the appropriate sound effect. Better yet, I also learned that there was NO REASON for me to be censoring him. Why did I bleep him??? Was I afraid a group of school children were going to stumble onto this video and get upset because their idol Mister Sylvester uttered the F word? And sadly, I don't have the source video anymore, otherwise I long ago would have re-rendered it with either no bleep or the appropriate bleep. What made it doubly worse was that he probably had the best "this episode's over, go away" sign-off between all five we did, himself seeming at least moderately threatening, but I screwed the pooch. Oh well. Sorry Casey!

To be completely honest, I was a little worried before Casey's, especially when I found out there'd be two friends there during the filming, in a fairly-small apartment. I thought Casey might not open up as much as he might otherwise and not have as much fun with it. That he'd try a little too hard to keep it "cool" instead of "silly", which was the whole point of the videos. But to his credit he was game. I think the only thing he didn't want to do that I suggested was get some footage of him jumping into the pool and/or hitting on the women around the pool. But I guess I can't blame him for that.

****************

So there ya have it, the director's edition of all three "2K2 Pads" episodes. It's good to have them on record. In a little bit I'll director-ize the two episodes I did in 2003 (Dean Evans and Scott Carmichael) to make this effort complete.

Felix vs. Greinke

��AP Photo/John Froschauer

Note to my good buddies at 950kjr.com, our local sports radio outfit, specifically Elise Woodward:

Felix Hernandez is having a good year, I won't argue that. And I can understand your excitement after his 8 shutout innings yesterday in the 3-0 victory over the division rival Angels. He's 14-5 now, and it looks like he's coming into his own. Finally. Yay.

But push or no push, you should know that in a fair world, his chances for the Cy Young rest not on his own shoulders, but on those of the best pitcher in the major leagues this year, Donald Zackary Greinke. I'd say Felix is a solid #2 so far this year in the AL, but let's not kid ourselves, he's still about 30 yards behind Greinke in this 100m horserace. It's going to take a 2005-esque implosion by Zack this month to give Felix the lead. And wins or no wins, unless they throw multiple no-hitters in September, as far as I'm concerned Sabathia, Beckett, Verlander and Halladay are out of the running. Yes, they all have 1 or 2 more wins than Felix and Greinke, but Halladay leads that group in ERA (3.13, half a run worse than Felix and nearly a whole run worse than Greinke). I mean Beckett's ERA is barely under 4.00. But yeah I know, he has 14 wins. And he pitches for those popular Red Sox.

Now, you are paid to pontificate over the airwaves to this beautiful city on the game I've loved ever since I could hold my own wiffle bat. You should know by now, in 2009, "Wins" or "won-loss record" are exceedingly unremarkable ways of measuring a pitcher's performance over a season. Again, they're not playing tennis. They rely heavily on both their team defense and team offense to accumulate wins. This isn't rocket science.

So when I hear you hypothesize about Felix's Cy Young chances, and you mention as his competition every pitcher with simply more wins than Felix, but not ONCE mention Zack Greinke, the ACTUAL guy he has to pass, the ACTUAL best pitcher in all of baseball, I get a little irritated. It's not because my BFF is once again being looked over because he pitches for the worst offense in the AL and therefore is "only" 13-8 and out of the Cy Young running as far as you're concerned (ok, maybe it's a *little* of that), it's that you are PAID to think and talk about this, and you are showing little to no understanding of what you're talking about. Do some homework!

I am obviously critical of your focus on "wins" as your main criteria for the Cy Young, and one of your ONLY criteria. And as better as ERA is, it's not perfect either. Maybe they're not all on the back of baseball cards and they're not displayed during Fox Sports telecasts of the game, but you might be surprised to know there are a litany of MUCH better measures for how well a pitcher's performed in a give season or career. Measures that don't ding a pitcher for having a cruddy defense behind him, or a joke offense that can never score more than two runs. Let me help you out.

The following is courtesy of fangraphs.com, as of tonight, 09/03/09. Number to left is their AL rank.

Let's start with wins, one category Felix has Greinke beat:

Wins
3(tied). Hernandez - 14
6(tied). Greinke - 13

Score one for Hernandez!

And to be fair, let's give Hernandez another category.

Losses
3(tied). Hernandez - 5
17(tied). Greinke - 8

Things looking grim for Greinke...until you realize he has basically EVERY OTHER STAT OVER HERNANDEZ.

Since it's related to wins and losses:

Run Support/9 IP
4. Greinke - 4.11
11. Hernandez - 4.70

Hernandez hasn't gotten much help himself, but he has gotten over half a run more on average than Greinke. This might have something to do with 14-5 vs 13-8. Maybe. And it's completely out of both pitchers' hands. Gee, if either of these guys pitched in CC Sabathia's slot on the Yanks (5.78 avg runs), what would their record be? 21-2? Let's hold it against them that they don't!

Strikeouts
2. Greinke - 202
4. Hernandez - 185

Strikeouts are important but I really only bring it up because you guys sounded SO impressed with Hernandez's total yesterday on the radio. You sounded like he was closing in on Koufax and Ryan. He can't even beat that no-namer from KC.

BB/9
5. Greinke - 1.89
15. Hernandez - 2.70

Look at this, he strikes out more...and walks less.

HR/9
1. Greinke - 0.52
4. Hernandez - 0.65

WHIP
1. Greinke - 1.08
7. Hernandez - 1.17

Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP)
1. Greinke - 2.39
4. Hernandez - 3.11

This makes a bit of sense. Greinke's FIP is very similar to his ERA. Hernandez's is basically half a run worse...because he pitches in front of the league's BEST defense (based on UZR at least). The Royals? 2nd to last in UZR. Hernandez gets help Greinke can only dream of getting.

Win Probability Added (WPA)
1. Greinke - 4.50 (no one else above 4.00)
5. Hernandez - 3.06

Wins Above Replacement
1. Greinke - 7.6 (next best: 6.2. Greinke is highest in all of MLB, including hitters...even Albert Pujols)
4. Hernandez - 5.5

Another thing one of the dopey producers brought up was how Felix could easily have a few more wins if it weren't for poor run support. But as you can guess, so would Greinke. Here's a list of either no decisions or losses where each went at least 6 IP and gave up 2 or fewer earned runs.

Hernandez
7.0 0ER, ND
6.2 0ER, ND
7.0 1ER, ND
7.1 2ER, ND
7.0 0ER, ND
7.0 1ER, ND
Total: 0-0

Greinke
8.0 1ER, L
6.0 2ER, ND
6.0 2ER, L
7.0 1ER, L
7.0 1ER, ND
6.0 2ER, ND
7.0 0ER, ND
Total: 0-3

Hernandez has a couple more no-run games in there, but Greinke has one more overall and thanks to the AA-level offense hitting behind him, he has 3 extra losses to show for it.

I'm running out of ideas for other stats...but rest assured Greinke has Hernandez beat in basically EVERY WAY POSSIBLE except wins and losses. He also has EVERY PITCHER beat in most every category. Except wins and losses. It's NOT HIS FAULT.

Finally, I'm willing to accept that maybe Elise and her producer were just talking about the Cy Young in the way it's probably going to go, not the way it SHOULD go. If the season ended today, I'm not even 25% confident Greinke would get the Cy Young, even though it's so obviously his to lose. So maybe they were only thinking that way...but in a small way that's even worse because it simply perpetuates the joke that is season-ending award voting and the simplistic, 3rd grade-like way many of the guys with votes look at stats. At the very least, they should add a footnote to their segment, saying something like "well, we all know the award SHOULD BE Greinke's to lose, but let's look at this through the eyes of the 78 year old voters and look at nothing but wins and losses, and include whoever leads Boston and New York in those categories...cause that's all that matters to many of them."

And hey, maybe they did do that...I don't know, because after 5 minutes of not hearing Greinke's name ANYWHERE, I turned it off.

I Had Dinner Again

Portobello mushroom and red pepper sandwich, on olive bread with pesto mayonaise, one leftover sweet potato slice, and lemonade. Is that healthy? Is bread back in the healthy category again? How about pesto? Where do we stand with pesto in 2009?

Considering how much I want to run down the street and get a slurpee at the moment, I'm guessing this was healthy. Two in a row!!!

Taking One For The Team

If you grow up playing baseball, watching baseball, and generally just making sure you're around something baseball-related at all times, you're under great risk of developing certain superstitions. Baseball is all about, besides awesomeness, superstitions. I for one tend to scoff at superstitions usually, especially when it involves my girlfriend and horoscopes, yet once in awhile that small side of my brain, alive only because of my youth on the diamond, gets the better of me.

Tonight Zack Greinke was scheduled to take the ball for the Royals. He who started the season with all those scoreless innings, SI covers, and proclamations for Cy Young awards. He's somewhat fallen off that cloud since then. Sad thought it is, it kind of had to happen.

His first 8 starts looked like this:

GS   IP    H   ER  BB   K  OAvg   ERA  WHIP  W  L
 8  60.0  40    4  10  65  .189  0.60  0.83  7  1

Since then he's posted these numbers:

GS   IP    H   ER  BB   K  OAvg   ERA  WHIP  W  L
17 113.1  119  43  28  117 .270  3.41  1.30  4  7

If you told me before the season he'd pitch the whole year like that 2nd set of numbers, I'd take it, but the insane start he put together raised expectations towards greater things. And while it's still *good* for what is a "slump", with the little league team he's playing for, he needs to be lights out to get wins. In all of July and August he was 1-5, and so today I decided to play god and told myself "for every strikeout Zack gets, I'm doing 25 pushups." I figured if I wanted him to succeed, I would need to sacrifice a bit of comfort on my end. Makes sense, no?

With a 5:10pm start time, I saw at work that he worked through the first inning with two strikeouts. I took this bittersweet news (good start, but I got 50 pushups waiting for me at home) and got on the bike to leave.

I got home and opened up the boxscore as well as mlb.tv to watch my fate unfold. By the time I got everything running, I saw he'd gotten through 3 scoreless with 5 Ks. Gulp. 125 pushups, huh? Well, better get started on those.

The game breezed along as I yearned for recovery time. My arms throbbed, but this was working, this was vintage Greinke. Sadly for my arms, in many ways it was better than vintage Greinke. His first out of the 6th inning set a personal record...his 11th K. His first out of the 8th inning set a KC Royals team record...his 15th K.

And that is where he ended. 8 IP, 5 hits, 2 ER, 1 BB, 15 Ks. And thanks to an unheard of six runs from his offense, a win. He's now 12-8. Pedestrian record, but he's still ranked #1 in the AL in ERA. #2 in Ks. #2 in WHIP. #3 in IP. For a crap team.

I was never able to catch up to him. I still have 75 pushups left to do. After I post this I will get the next set...my arms start to give out around 20 though. But I need to finish before bed.

I ain't superstitious but I imagine I'll be doing this again in 5 days. Sometimes to get a little, you've got to give a little. And we've got a Cy Young to win here!

Dinner

Green beans, sweet potatoes, and salmon.

First healthy meal of 2009! Here's to one or two more before we close out this decade.

Dying Young

I remember, in 1990 or 1991, I was at good buddy Joey Holt's house, spending the night, smoking dat cheech & chong. His younger brother Stevie (now "Steve"), and my younger brother Terry (now "T-Payne") may have been hanging out there as well, I don't remember. At that point in my life, Joey was my confidant* when it came to women, and I his. Mostly our grade school crushes, but also the occasional celeb crush. He knew mine and I knew his, even though we were a grade apart. He knew I had a thing for Julia Roberts, as I was knee-deep in my "for some reason I'm really into redheads" stage of pubescence. My 4th and 5th grade crush was also an adorable redhead...Holt knew and knows this.

*Also a confidant, to a lesser extent, was Scott Carmichael, though he took the reigns as main ear from Jr High on. I don't think the three of us went through any sort of cootie phase in life at all. We LOOOOOVED the ladies from day 1. We were also terrified of them.

Anyhow, in some context I can't recall, Joey pulled out this typewriter of his while we were vegging out, playing video games or watching TV or something. I'd never had one, and rarely if ever had used one. so I was enraptured by this magical thing that rendered pencils and pens obsolete and so wanted to hammer away on it. But about WHAT should I write?* Scrambling in my head for something, and having absolutely no shame at all around Joey on the topic of women, I decided to type out a fan letter to Julia Roberts! This was post-Pretty Woman. She had some movie called "Dying Young" out that I hadn't seen (and would not see until I saw about five minutes of it this weekend on TV before switching channels to women's golf), but in the letter I remember stating I wanted to see it, even though it looked like a total chick flick, simply because she was in it. I probably handed the letter off to Holt for approval or proof-reading, and promptly forgot about it. I never sent it anywhere, for all I know it could still be hidden somewhere in Holt's old closet, if that still exists.

*It's like when I find a site like lala.com and suddenly have thousands upon thousands of albums at my perusal to listen to. Suddenly I have no recollection of albums I like or albums I want to listen to. I actually have to stop for a second and think "okay wait a second, what do I like again?"

All those words are there to serve as a clumsy segue to the fact that *I* am dying young. I don't have cancer (that I know of), and I'm not going through chemo while some street-tough former candry striper serves as my nurse and falls for my deep thoughts on life and death. But I am most definitely going through some form of accelerated aging.

I'm getting gray hair. EVERYWHERE.

I've begun shrinking. I used to be a svelte 5'11. Now I think I'm 5'9. It's very distressing.

I'm more bald than I should be, as we all know by now. This also serves as an impediment towards masking my shrinking with some ridiculous perm fro.

I can no longer maintain an erection!

My eyebrow(s) are growing more and more like Andy Rooney's every day. I'm only 29 years old! He's 129! My ear hair also probably resembles what his would look like if he didn't have a professional fix him up before sending him in front of an HD camera.

Finally, after watching Oprah tonight (beautiful Friday night I might add), I learned 14 year olds are usually missing that rational part of the frontal lobe that does not become fully formed until age 21 or so. I don't remember ever not having the rational part of the brain. It was probably fully formed by age 11 or thereabouts.

Actually, come to think of it, that would run into the 1990-1991 timeframe where I was writing fan mail to Julia Roberts on Joey Holt's typewriter, high on dat cheech & chong. Maybe I'm doing okay.

Ranking The Discography: Radiohead

Been plowing through Radiohead's impressive discography the past day or two at work, and soon enough I found myself wondering which albums I preferred and in what order.

As a background of sorts, the first album I ever got was "OK Computer". I got it around the time it was released, after the Paranoid Android video was played enough on MTV to grow on me (about 5 times). I then played the hell out of it. I was enamored with tracks 2-9, what I thought to be a murderer's row of awesome. Of course I eventually went back and got the two preceding albums and then got each subsequent album like a dutiful fan.

7. Pablo Honey
I can barely make it through this album in one sitting. Creep does rule though, as big a cliche that is to say or write. I think my parents even know about that song. My strongest memory from 1993 and the video was the lead guitarist looked so very very very German. SING IT!!!!!

YEAH, the MTV Beach House!! Remember that?! And who better to be hangin at the house bbqing and drinkin brews than the bros in Radiohead? If you were to ask me at the time, I would have put 5-2 odds that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood were 45% composed of heroin.

6. Hail to the Thief
I have nothing against this album really, other than it's really unmemorable. I even had to look up the name of the album, that's how unimportant it is in my daily life. There are some sweet songs on here (2+2=5, Sit Down. Stand Up, Sail to the Moon, Myxamatosis, and Where I End and You Begin...yes, I had to look up all those titles except for the last one), but the rest I find fairly middling. This is also their longest album, and you can definitely tell.

This is not to suggest (by placing it 2nd to last) that this is a bad album. I think Pablo Honey is the closest thing they have to bad album, and even that one is more "mediocre" than it is "bad". Hail to the Thief is a good album that simply does not stand up with their other, more majestic work.

5. Kid A
As someone who likes "computer" music, I was not apoplectic about them putting down their guitars occasionally and proving they can make inventive and creative music with multiple tools, with multiple tempos, and with or without Thom's voice. I also always get a big kick out of those music publications that give an album one review when it comes out, and then six years later admit they were wrong and name it the 65th greatest British album of all time. As I've stated before, it's why Rolling Stone magazine gives almost every album nothing worse than 3 stars and nothing better than 4 stars...at least until they figure out what everyone ELSE thinks and then can properly rerate it 20 years later to better fit in.

Then there's Idioteque, which dropped the gauntlet and proved they could hang with not only any traditional band out there, but with the knob-twiddlers as well. I mean, it's not up to Aphex Twin's snuff, but it's not like Aphex Twin can pick up a guitar and write Street Spirit. And none of them math geeks have Thom's voice.

4. Amnesiac
I always lump this one with Kid A and treat them like two parts of a separately-released double album. Amnesiac came 2nd and the only reason I rank it ahead of Kid A is thanks to Like Spinning Plates, one of the finest things ever recorded.

3. The Bends
Another one of the finest things ever recorded closes this album, their sophomore effort, the one that what got them the recognition they've held to this day. Montgomery and I were making a video for the PV XC team back in 1999 and we went to the league meet to film the team dominate everybody and lay waste to the course. I believe it was the Shasta High course, but I could be mistaken. Nevertheless...the team did not dominate anybody. Barely anybody raced well and I believe they performed worse than expected in every race. For this video we were intending to do little recaps of every race. I remember driving back with Mark, shaking our heads, trying to figure out how we were going to spin a positive on this race. We decided to not insult our audience and instead used Street Spirit, one of the more depressing songs around, with a bunch of slow-mo shots of the team running, faces illustrating anguish.

And for awhile after that, I regretted the decision because it nearly ruined the song for me. What was once possibly a "perfect" song had been reduced to a mere reminder of this really pathetically long and boring XC video we had made years back. While I had a blast making the video in the moment, I don't particularly like thinking about the video at all, to this day, but I'm happy to report that Street Spirit powered through this mental block and now only kinda reminds me of the video. The fact that this memory has not killed the song for me speaks volumes about the song. You'll just have to trust me.

No, that's not Clay Aiken in the video.

2. OK Computer
Ever since I first realized its greatness, I compared all their other albums to this one. And for awhile they all fell short. Tracks 2-9 are still a murderer's row, and I've since developed a grudging respect for all tracks outside that window.

It's kind of funny now to look back at Fitter, Happier, what was then thought of as nothing more than an interlude of sorts in the middle of the album ended up being a precursor to the "soulless computer sound" many would bitch about when they incorporated it fully on Kid A, the following album.

1. In Rainbows
Almost a perfect amalgam of all that's great from their previous 6 albums. And not like "this song sounds like The Bends-era, this song sounds like Kid A-era", but more like "this song has the best elements from every album they've done." There are rockers, ballads, musicianship, blips & bleeps, Thom's voice, and at 42 minutes, is only slightly longer than those early-80's Van Halen albums, which leaves you wanting more. And it all sounds so effortless, like they wrote it all in a long weekend. I've done recovery runs that required more effort than it seems they needed to put in for this album.