A Red Sox Christmas Wishlist
BY Joshua Hynes ON Thursday, December 18, 2008 @ 9:44 am
With the Christmas just a week away, I thought I’d pull together my wishlist of things I’d like to see from the Red Sox this coming season.
- Start locking up your good, young players. The front office has already started this process by locking up 2008 AL MVP Dustin Pedroia and are reportedly starting discussions with Gold Glover Kevin Youkilis, but the Sox need to do more. Pitchers like Jon Lester and Jonathan Papelbon should be locked up as well. And while we’re looking at locking up talent, shouldn’t they consider contract extensions for Josh Beckett sooner than later? If C.C. Sabathia can command $161 million over 7 years, what will Beckett be worth in 2 years on an open market?
- A new shortstop. Jed Lowrie showed he’s capable of filling in at shortstop through the end of last year, but you could see he went through the typical rookie swoon in September and October, having never played as long of a season before. Will Jed bounce back this year? Will he be able to wrestle this job away from “supposed” incumbent Julio Lugo in Spring Training? And if the Sox are unable to move Lugo, will they ask him to play a bench role of shortstop and second base and then not bring back Alex Cora? I wouldn’t put it past the Sox, though I also don’t think the front office would like their back-up shortstop making ten times as much as their starting shortstop. Personally I say look for Lugo to get a shot at taking the job back, as the team tries to showcase him through the first few months of the season and he’ll be dealt some time closer to the trade deadline.
- A catching plan. Whatever happens with Jason Varitek, the Sox know they need a plan moving forward concerning the catching position. It’s true they have a few prospects in the farm system that they think could fill the role admirably, but that’s at least two to three years away. So what to do in the intervening years? Despite the hesitation to commit large dollars and playing time to a declining catcher, I have to agree with some voices that the Sox now have to almost bring Varitek back. I’m not saying they have to overpay on years and dollars as the Yankees did for Jorge Posada, but they have to give a fair contract and not low-ball him. This is the man the team trotted out after a World Series win in 2004 when all their major stars were walking away for larger dollars. While Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe and Nomar Garciaparra were moving onto other teams, Varitek was being sold as the team’s captain. In the end, I have to admit that my dad is right in asking the question: how do you not re-sign your captain? I think the Sox will probably lock him into a 2 year deal, maybe with appearances and certain offensive contribution numbers vesting the second or third years. In an ideal world, Varitek would take this contract now and retire at 39 or 40 as a Red Sox, riding off into the sunset as one of the most loved catchers in team history along with Carlton Fisk.
- Strengthen the heart of the order. With Manny Rameríz gone, David Ortiz coming off of knee and wrist injuries and Mike Lowell coming off of hip surgery; it would be advisable for the Sox to find a new middle-of-the-order bat. Currently the Sox have been tied to Mark Teixeira, who represents one of the best power bats on the market for the next two or three free-agent classes. The problem that arises with a signing like Teixeira is where to place him in the field. As a two-time Gold Glover first-baseman, Tex would most likely slide in at first-base, moving Youkilis over to his natural position of third-base. The problem is that this leaves Mike Lowell as the odd man out. Only in the second year of a three-year contract, moving Lowell is regrettable as you would love to play Tex, Youk and Lowell all in the same line-up everyday. Yet unless Lowell is able to magically able to start playing shortstop, it’s unlikely to happen. While there’s some short-term pain with the signing of Tex, by the end of 2010 this team will be without Lowell, maybe Ortiz, Varitek, Lugo and possibly Tim Wakefield. Ever in a state of needing to look ahead, this team can’t just sit still. The Yankees are reloading and the Tampa Bay Rays are a good, young team that’ll be difficult for the next half-decade. Signing Tex is the first step in not only solving a short-term power loss of a Rameriz-type-bat, but also lock-up a solid defensive infield for next 5-6 years with Pedroia, Tex, Youkilis (given that he does sign a long-term contract) and Lowrie. In the long-run it’s a smart move and one I hope they make it.
That’s what I’m hoping the Red Sox accomplish this off-season.
LunchBagArt
BY Joshua Hynes ON Thursday, December 4, 2008 @ 9:42 am
I ran across this amazing website yesterday and just never got around to posting about it. LunchBagArt is just the daily postings of a father’s drawn artwork for his kid’s lunch bags. He states he does them on his lunch break, but I have to wonder if he starts and completes them because these seem pretty involved at times. Either way they’re awesome and you should check them out.
“The Kingdom” Opening Credits
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, December 3, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
I finally got around to watching Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom last night and I was blown away by opening credits to the film. So much so that I restarted the movie just to watch them again. How often does that happen? I thought the movie was a great action, culturally-relevant movie and the opening credits just enhanced the experience. It’s out on DVD now. PIC Agency put together these amazing credits.
Imitation Has To Be Effective For People To Keep Doing It (Surowiecki)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, December 2, 2008 @ 5:41 pm
In a sense, imitation is a kind of rational response to our own cognitive limits. Each person can’t know everything. With imitation, people can specialize and the benefits of their investment in uncovering information can be spread widely when others mimic them. Imitation also requires little top-down direction. The relevant information percolates quickly through the system, even in the absence of any central authority. And people’s willingness to imitate is not, of course, unconditional. If I get a couple of tickets because of bad information, I’ll soon make sure I know when I have to move my car. And although I don’t think [Stanley] Milgram and his colleagues ever followed up with the people in their experiment who had stopped to look at [an empty] sky, one suspects that the next time they walked by a guy with his head craned upward, they didn’t stop to see what he was looking at. In the long run, imitation has to be effective for people to keep doing it.
James Surowiecki
The Wisdom of Crowds (2003, pgs. 58-59)
The always amazing Kevin Cornell hilariously illustrates how to build a better pizza box top. Accompanying illustrations for the win. 0 Comments
An amazing little website from St. Francis Health System promoting the benefits of Greenville, SC. (via) 0 Comments
Scotty Reifsnyder
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, December 2, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Seeing work like Scotty Reifsnyder‘s just fuels that side of me that loves great illustration and wishes I worked harder at it. Check out the rest of Scotty’s work. You will not be disappointed.
My wife was the first person to tell me about this, but for anyone who's thinking of giving a gift card for the holidays this year, you might want to think again. Given the economic climate we find ourselves within, you might be better off giving cash instead. 0 Comments
Good Social Communities Feed Our Selfish Natures
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, November 26, 2008 @ 9:39 am
One of the few things I took away from this year’s Future of Web Design in NYC was a book recommendation from speaker Derek Powazek about the “wisdom of crowds.” Derek’s presentation was basically his interpretation and then application of James Surowiecki‘s book The Wisdom of Crowds to online, social media. The discussion that started that day has continued to roll around in my head as I personally am involved in a number of projects here at andCulture which involve vary amounts of online community interaction. In the end, all of the projects want increased interaction that lead to certain results. Maybe for one website it’s increased sales while for another it’s increased awareness. Understanding how communities interact, online and offline, not only helps me understand audiences more accurately, but as a designer allows me visually present information to them in a more effective manner.
One of the things that has come out of hearing Derek’s presentation is that I’ve picked up Surowiecki’s aforementioned book. I’ve also found myself increasingly reading more about the subject online as well. So it was interesting this morning when I ran across a blog from writer Tom Slee who posted Monday twelve theses on NetFlix and recommendation systems. If you have time, the read isn’t that long and it’s really insightful. The best point though is number eleven:
The word “community” is widely used in conjunction with recommender systems, but they do little to build communities. Their use is essentially an individual, isolated act. Groups and networks are as important in the creation and experience of culture as individuals. Recommender systems will play a role in how culture is experienced, but they are not necessarily a strong force pushing us either towards or away from a healthy culture.
It might surprise most people to realize that most of the more successful online social networks work because the way they feed the selfish nature within all of us, but really, should it? Given human nature to look out for oneself, why should the internet be any different? We might not be gaining any monetary reward, but that still doesn’t mean we aren’t being selfish. Popularity. Notoriety. Status. These are all things that communities can give beyond money. Even a seemingly selfless act, like helping people out on community forums, can be a selfish act because it raises your status as an expert. It’s an interesting idea that I’ll be exploring more in the near future, and you’ll probably be reading more about as I do.
Adventure Finds You In The Great Tales (Tolkien)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Sunday, November 23, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
‘I don’t like anything here at all,’ said Frodo, ‘step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.’
‘Yes, that’s so,’ said Sam. ‘And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have just landed in them usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’
‘I wonder,’ said Frodo. ‘But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.’J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers (The Lord Of The Rings, Part Two) (1999, pg. 696)
Fleet Foxes - A Take Away Show
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, November 12, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
Fleet Foxes - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.
Sprint has put together a pretty amazing microsite centered around their wireless internet USB card, Now. 0 Comments
Forever Photoshop CS3 was my bane when saving for web. Colors would shift and aggravation would ensue. Photoshop Color Management, I've finally bested you. 1 Comment
A Weekend In The Woods
BY Joshua Hynes ON Sunday, November 2, 2008 @ 6:12 pm
Growing up in Central Pennsylvania, inevitably you’ll come across signs notifying you of the fact that you’ve found The Appalachian Trail. Billed as “America’s First National Scenic Trail”, the 2,175 mile-long trail runs from Georgia all the way to Maine in one continuous, winding path. Finished in 1937, the trail hosts almost 4 million hikers every year and two-thirds of the American population is within a day’s drive of the trail. That’s pretty amazing.
Yet despite all of the very interesting and life-changing information, I’ve never spent a moment on the trail myself. Sure, I had run on other mountains and valleys throughout the Susquehanna Valley, but for some reason I never spent even a moment—let alone days—on the trail. So when a group of friends asked if I’d be interested in heading out for a weekend of camping and hiking on the trail, I decided that now was as good as any to give it a go.
There are a few things that I found it hard to realize when hiking the Appalachian Trail. First is that everything weighs something. That may seem like a moronic statement to make but try hauling around even 3 days worth of food and clothes and you realize how quickly a lot of really small things can add up to a lot. Second is that you’re basically climbing mountains for the majority of your time walking, and even when you’re heading downhill you’re not all that excited about it because you know that inevitably you’ll be climbing back up sooner or later. Third is that Pennsylvania is thought of as worst part of the Appalachian Trail, and for good reason. While I only completed about 20 miles this weekend with a bunch of friends, the entire stretch was littered with rocks and boulders every step along the way. I was very thankful that I had invested a bit for a good pair of shoes.
So here I sit Sunday evening, trying to relax after enjoying a hot shower and having slipped into some comfortable, clean clothes. Overall I enjoyed my time on the trail this weekend, though I’m a bit sore and stiff from having walked a distance that I’ve rarely walked within a few days. You see some amazing things while on the trail and you meet some interesting people. In the end though you get to spend a lot of time with some friends, teasing each other and sharing some great memories. I don’t think I’ll be running back onto the trail right away, but eventually I think I might find myself out there once again sometime in the near future.
The World Series, The Red Sox and the End of the 2008 Baseball Season
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, October 29, 2008 @ 11:09 pm
It only took 3 days to finally find out who was the winner of Game 5 of the World Series, but we’re finally done and Philadelphia, the obnoxious sports city that it is, finally has their first sports championship title since 1983 and their first baseball championship since 1980. It’s not a Boston 86-year or White Sox 88-year championship drought but the agony was no less in Philadelphia. After all it’s only the team’s second World Series title in its storied 126-year franchise history. Remember this is the same Philadelphia Phillies team set the all-sports record with their 10,000th lose just last July. They’ve been around for a while. Still congratulations to the Phillies. I shudder only at what living in Pennsylvania will be like for the next year.
As I look back on this year though, a few things come to mind:
- Baseball has a very, very long season. I realize that most owners would rather sell their first-born child than cut games from the baseball season, but in the wake of Game 5’s “Perfect Storm” debacle, the owners and commissioner have to really take a hard look at what’s best for the game. Peter Gammons, in the wake of Monday night, writes today that this Series is the “worst ever” because of the weather and baseball should consider cutting “162 to 148 games..., then the division series and League Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with the World Series theoretically completed by mid-October.” I can’t say I disagree with Peter. I love watching baseball, but with next year’s World Series already set to finish in November because of March’s World Baseball Classic, baseball has to worry about over-saturating it’s market. The lure of football is its finiteness. It starts in September and it has a new champion within 6 months. Baseball though starts in April and slogs through 6 months, with still another month of baseball to go in October (or November). It could be worse I guess. It could be NBA Finals.
- I really need to slow down on watching baseball games. I didn’t watch all 162 Boston Red Sox games this year, but I watched at least 75% of the games and I made the trek up to Fenway twice and to Baltimore once to see them in person. I had a Little-League coach who would drill into us that the game is 90% mental and 10% physical (and you could probably say the exact opposite is true of football), and I think that’s a big reason why I love the sport. Still there’s a point where something can dominate one’s life to much and I need to pull this ‘hobby’ back in line.
- If Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Curt Schilling and David Ortiz had been healthy, the Red Sox would have World Champions again this year. You knew this was going to come back around to the Red Sox, but I really do think that if Beckett, Lowell and Ortiz had been even 90% healthy, the Red Sox would be celebrating tonight instead of the Phillies. That isn’t sour grapes talking, it’s a personal belief. That’s not to say the Phillies were lucky (they were) or undeserving (they aren’t), because any team who can make it through an entire season and post-season always deserves it — yes even the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals. And, yes, the Phillies were a little bit lucky. Maybe “fortunate” is the better word, but to have their closer pitch perfectly this year, find their offense stroke at just the right time and play the Tampa Bay Rays right after a tiring and draining American League Championship Series all were fortunate things. That’s not to say the Rays were the better team, because they weren’t. Things just broke the Phillies way. It happens. You move on. If the Red Sox hadn’t been hurt like they were, they probably would have repeated; but they weren’t healthy and they didn’t make it, and that’s the way it happens sometimes.
The immediate question that comes up is, will the Phillies repeat? No. Could they? Yeah, sure they could, but I don’t think it’ll happen. There are a number of reasons why I think so, but I really don’t have the time or energy to spell them out here right now. Besides the Phillies just won a title. They should enjoy it for a while (a few nights at least).
The question for Red Sox fans though is what the front-office will do to get back to October next year. The team is facing a number of questions surrounding Jason Varitek, Mike Lowell, David Ortiz, Josh Beckett, Clay Buchholz, Coco Crisp and Jacoby Ellsbury. Will GM Theo go out and pick up the bat that this line-up so desperately needs? Will they sign Mark Teixeria or trade for Matt Holiday? Will Mike Lowell get traded or is that Julio Lugo‘s fate? What seemed like such a solid team returning in 2008 now is a roster of question marks in 2009. Injuries and age can do that to a team. I don’t know where the Red Sox will end up next fall, but I will say that you can expect them to be in hunt next September. I don’t know if you could say the same thing about the New York Yankees, but then again — that’s just the Yankee-hater in me talking.
If anyone is interested in picking up Snow Patrol's new album, A Hundred Million Suns, you can download the album for $3.99 at Amazon.com today. 0 Comments
The History of the West (Bryson)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, October 28, 2008 @ 1:59 pm
People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you’ve ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from 2 million to 90,000.
Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.
Bill Bryson
The Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America (1989, pgs. 251-252)
The Internet Shapes The Way We Think (Carr)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, October 8, 2008 @ 8:34 am
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid? (July/August 2008, The Atlantic, pg. 57)
Stalin Was One of The Great Mass Murderers of All Time (McCullough)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, September 23, 2008 @ 9:45 pm
[T]he evil of [Joseph Stalin] was no secret in 1945. In a February issue, published just before Yalta, Time magazine had noted that Stalin and his regime had deliberately caused the deaths by starvation of at least 3 million peasants and liquidated another 1 million Communists who opposed his policies. Facts are stubborn things, said the article, borrowing a line from Lenin, and these were the facts. Actually the facts were more horrible. Probably 5 million peasants had died; probably 10 million had been sent to forced labor camps. “I was remembering my friends,” the composer Shostakovich once remarked, “and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.”
Stalin himself had told [English Prime Minister Winston] Churchill in 1942 that “ten millions” of peasants had been “dealt with.” At one point in 1940, during the Hitler–Stalin Pact, he had had many thousands of Polish officers murdered, in what become known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. In truth, [Stalin] was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.
David McCullough
Truman (1993, pg. 419)
A Poor Banking Solution (Mallaby)
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, September 23, 2008 @ 7:31 am
The plan is being marketed under false pretenses. Supporters have invoked the shining success of the Resolution Trust Corporation as justification and precedent. But the RTC, which was created in 1989 to clean up the wreckage of the savings-and-loan crisis, bears little resemblance to what is being contemplated now. The RTC collected and eventually sold off loans made by thrifts that had gone bust. The administration proposes to buy up bad loans before the lenders go bust. This difference raises several questions.
The first is whether the bailout is necessary. In 1989, there was no choice. The federal government insured the thrifts, so when they failed, the feds were left holding their loans; the RTC’s job was simply to get rid of them. But in buying bad loans before banks fail, the Bush administration would be signing up for a financial war of choice. It would spend billions of dollars on the theory that preemption will avert the mass destruction of banks. There are cheaper ways to stabilize the system.
In the 1980s, the government did not need a strategy to decide which bad loans to take over; it dealt with anything that fell into its lap as a result of a thrift bankruptcy. But under the current proposal, the government would go out and shop for bad loans. These come in all shapes and sizes, so the government would have to judge what type of loans it wants. They are illiquid, so it’s hard to know how to value them. Bad loans are weighing down the financial system precisely because private-sector experts can’t determine their worth. The government would have no better handle on the problem.
In practice this means the government would make subjective choices about which bad loans to buy, and it would pay more than fair value. Billions in taxpayer money would be transferred to the shareholders and creditors of banks, and the banks from which the government bought most loans would be subsidized more than their rivals. If the government bought the most from the sickest institutions, it would be slowing the healthy process in which strong players buy up the weak, delaying an eventual recovery. The haggling over which banks got to unload the most would drag on for months. So the hope that this “systematic” plan can be a near-term substitute for ad hoc AIG-style bailouts is illusory.
Sebestian Mallaby
A Bad Bank Rescue in The Washington Post (September 21, 2008, B07)
Ricky Gervais to Steve Carell: “Give Me My Emmy!”
BY Joshua Hynes ON Monday, September 22, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
The Growing Bush “Police” State
BY Joshua Hynes ON Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
During the three and a half years he was in custody, [José] Padilla was made to endure various forms of torture. Kept in solitary confinement, Padilla was subjected to variations of sleep deprivation. Noxious fumes were introduced into his cell. His cell was made extremely cold for long periods of time. He was drugged, disoriented, and threatened with all manner of gruesome fates.
It it time for us to wake up. We have allowed the president to abduct an American citizen on American soil, declare him an “enemy combatant” (a charge the accused has no power to contest, which is rendered by the president in secret and is unreviewable), detain him indefinitely, deny him legal counsel, and subject him to inhumane treatment. How can we not be concerned about such a thing? Have we been so blinded by propaganda that we have forgotten basic American principles, and legal guarantees that extend back to our British forbears eight centuries ago? This is an outrageous offense against American and her Constitution. Claims that these powers will be exercised only against the bad guys are not worth listening to.
Ron Paul
The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008, pgs. 121-122)
What’s Your Wish For Today?
BY Joshua Hynes ON Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 10:02 am
Fifty People, One Question: Restored from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo. (via)
What Does “Liberty” Really Mean?
BY Joshua Hynes ON Wednesday, September 17, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
When I say liberty I do not simply mean what is referred to as “free enterprise.” I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and to live; the liberty of the family to decide how they wish to live, what they want to eat for breakfast and for dinner, and how they wish to spend their time; liberty of a man to develop his ideas and get other people to teach those ideas, if he can convince them that they have some value to the world; liberty of every local community to decide how its children shall be educated, how its local services shall be run, and who its local leaders shall be; liberty of a man to choose his own occupation; and liberty of a man to run his own business as he thinks it ought to be run, as long as he does not interfere with the right of other people to do the same thing.
Robert A. Taft
Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008, pgs. 5-6)
Red Sox Sell Out For The 456th Time
BY Joshua Hynes ON Tuesday, September 9, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
It took only five and a half years, but the Red Sox last night sold out their 456th consecutive home game at Fenway Park. Today’s Boston Globe saw the Red Sox running a “thank-you” advertisement, listing off 456 reasons why they’re thankful. Concerning more infographics, here’s another interesting sidebar that ran as well in today’s Globe.
