jimmy

Last night I stepped out to take the trash out, and to my surprise there was fog!

People think because I live so close to the shore that I always see fog and cool temperatures. What people don’t realize is that San Pedro is hilly and where you live on a certain hill radically changes the sort of weather you get.

I live on a hill that faces away from the water, so fog is a rare occurrence. Triple-degree heat a la the Valley isn’t rare, however.

So there that is.

I have a lot of friends with no interest in sports and even less interest in football. Here is a video that details what football is in a nutshell.

I forget where I heard this, but I heard someone say that football is a bunch of fat guys running about for 10 seconds then falling down, waiting for a minute or so then repeating. That also is apt.

h/t to Deadspin

Mark Harris over at Grantland wrote how the larger “Best Picture” pool in the Oscars have actually shrunk Oscar contenders. But more interestingly, he discusses the campaign system used to nabbed nominations for films.

And for most films that are made and distributed independently, the cost of buying into the campaign system is now prohibitively steep. It is not a coincidence that, of the 12 movies on this year’s much-too-short short list of top-category contenders, 10 are from the studios or from studio-owned indie labels and the other two hail from the mightily well-financed Weinstein Company. Yes, ideally, voters would be able to look past this. But time is short, screeners are numerous, and it is obliviously high-minded to assume that with a little effort, voters can all render themselves invulnerable to the very loud noise that studio money can make. The same titles are being shouted in their faces week in, week out. How can anything else hope to be noticed?

Figures.

Recently I’ve been on a barrage of movie watching. I’ve missed a few: I still haven’t seen Nebraska or Captain Phillips. But here are my favorite films of 2013:

1. The Act of Killing
2. Spring Breakers
3. 12 Years a Slave
4. Upstream Color
5. Gravity
6. Blue Jasmine
7. The Wolf of Wall Street
8. Stories We Tell
9. Frances Ha
10. Her

I really fucking hated American Hustle and Dallas Buyers Club.

I realize I proclaimed my love of Spring Breakers calling it perhaps the best film of the decade. The Act of Killing just blew my fucking mind.

Back in the ’90s, there was a cooking show the Orange County PBS station (now the entire Southern California PBS affiliate) KOCE called “At Home on the Range”. The cook was RV impresario John Crean and self-professed “reformed slut” Barbara Venezia.

John was the chef and Barbara was the stirrer. She had many tools besides the spoons and spatulas she used to stir things. There are the fry glasses for when the oil spattered real bad. There are the rubber gloves for when things got too hot (rubber for your protection!)

The food is suspect, and the recipes are questionable at best. But what is undeniable is that they put together an entertaining show.

Thanks to the wonders of the interweb the shows are online. Well, some of them anyways.

Okay. It’s a bit cheesy at times, the production values aren’t the best, but for an 11:30 p.m. cooking show it was highly entertaining for my teenage self.

The show was in production until 1998 and lived on in reruns for years. The show also aired in Britain, Australia and New Zealand giving them fans internationally.

John passed in 2007 and his wife Donna passed in 2012. Barbara now is a columnist for OC Register.

I love taking public transportation. I thoroughly hate driving, and any chance I have to avoid it I do. My one big complaint is that there are not enough light-rail, subway or transitway services. So of course I applaud the groundbreaking of the Crenshaw-LAX light-rail line.

The new line will connect from the Expo Line at the Expo/Crenshaw stop to the Green Line at the Aviation/LAX stop. It will cut through Leimert Park, Baldwin Hills and Inglewood.

The thing though, “Crenshaw-LAX” is a bit of a misnomer since it will never stop in LAX. You have take a separate bus to get into LAX. They might want to get on that eventually.

By now everyone has heard about Seattle Seahawk’s cornerback Richard Sherman’s venting after his team clinched a berth in the Super Bowl. If not , here it is. That’s okay, it opens up in a new tab/window.

I’m not even going to talk about the racist shit some people spouted. But let’s see how some in the sports media talked about it.

They ranged from my reaction of go-on-with-your-bad-self to you-are-a-disgrace-I-can’t-believe-you-got-a-degree-from-Stanford-have-some-class. Let’s talk about this.

One thing I can almost guarantee is that all sports journalists hate the trite soundbites. “It is what it is.” “We gave it our all.” “At the end of the day…” I’ve made my distaste for this shit very vocal lately saying that I really want to carry a cattle prod to electrocute anyone who gives us these trite phrases. Other media folk have shared the same sentiment.

So why then do we persecute someone for giving us something outside of the normal Derek Jeter-esque quote?

“You can give us something interesting, but at least have some class.”

Okay, that’s fine. But let’s realize that this interview took place right after the game ended. Sherman had no time to cool down. The adrenaline was still pumping, perhaps even more so for him since his tip on the pass to Michael Crabtree with 22 seconds left led to the interception that won the game for Seattle. Of course things would be unpredictable.

On all of his other postgame interviews on the podium at the trophy presentation and on the set with the Fox guys, Sherman was calm and collected.

“But look at Russell Wilson.”

Sure, but like I said players are unpredictable immediately after the game.

Sherman in his weekly column on The MMQB explains a little bit about the history between the two.

It goes back to something he said to me this offseason in Arizona, but you’d have to ask him about that. A lot of what I said to Andrews was adrenaline talking, and some of that was Crabtree. I just don’t like him.

The Seattle Times learned the beef started when Crabtree tried to start a fight with Sherman at a charity event in Arizona.

I feel bad for athletes. They’re in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t position. And if you’re an outspoken black athlete, it’s even worse. You get thinly veiled racist words like “thug” and “punk” and “classless” thrown at you by so-called respectable journalists. Never mind if you have a degree from Stanford.

Perhaps the media gets what they deserve. I hear them bitch about how athletes give them nothing, yet I’ve seen some of their tweets about this “thug” Sherman. I guess it is what it is.

Denver 26, New England 16.

1. But what about New England’s defense? That’s a question I asked myself as this game unfolded. As much as I was susceptible to the Peyton-Manning-Can’t-Win-the-Big-Games narrative (I know, I should know better), I forgot about how un-Belichick-like the Patriot defense has been this season.

New England was 26th during the regular season in yards allowed per game and third-down conversion percentage allowed, 18th in passing yards per game allowed and 30th in rushing yards per game allowed.

Oops.

While Denver only rushed for 107 yards, Peyton Manning torched the Patriots secondary for 400 yards.

2. CBS reported on the sun. Early in the first quarter, sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson reported on the motherfucking sun. Let’s just bask in the idiocy of that concept. I just…

3. Omaha Schmomaha. I don’t get it. I thought we were done with the fascination of the “Omaha” audible call back when Eli Manning used it to win a couple of Super Bowls. In fact here is video of Eli using it during Giants training camp back in 2006:

So this is a thing again?

4. What a blah game. Even my router hated the game: it committed suicide during the game. A quick jaunt to Radio Shack and 15 minutes took care of it.

—
Seattle Seahawks 23, San Francisco 49ers 17.

5. Uh oh. The first play from scrimmage saw Russell Wilson scramble, run to his right and get strip-sacked by Aldon Smith. Uh oh, indeed.

Fortunately for the Seahawks, their defense stood up to allow only a field goal.

6. 4th-and-7. Trailing 17-13 just as the fourth quarter started, Seattle faced fourth-and-seven on the 49ers 35-yard line. Instead of trying for a 50+-yard field goal, Pete Carroll ultimately went for it. Anyone who knows me knows I believe that this is almost always the correct decision.

On the play, the 49ers jumped off sides. So at worst Seattle would have 4th-and-2. Wilson went for it and somehow threaded a pass to Jermaine Kearse for the 35-yard touchdown.

7. Shut up. MLB Network’s Brian Kenny wants to protect the children!!!!

Shut up. As said in the John Waters film Cecil B. DeMented, “Family is just a dirty word for censorship!”

8. Richard Sherman, ladies and gentlemen.

I don’t believe in marriage, and I would totally marry him if he asked.

All of these pundits on ESPN, CBS, Fox and NFL Network will pretend they know what’s going to happen. But all of that is utter bullshit. That’s why there is no need to watch any pregame shows unless you love a bunch of hot air being spouted. (Aside: maybe that’s what’s contributing to global warming? Sounds about as good as the cow farts-methane connection.)

So here is more hot air in the form of my predictions. Except in my case no hot air is being released into the atmosphere.

New England Patriots will beat the Denver Broncos 35-28.
Seattle Seahawks will beat the San Francisco 49ers 27-13.

Now on to deal with four of the more unbearable NFL fan bases.

Last night a rain came through Melbourne and cooled out what had been a horrible heat wave. Players were playing under 110F heat which meant that on the court is was as high as 125F. The question was why was play allowed to continue?

It becomes crystal clear when your hear from the tournament doctor. From SI‘s Jon Wertheim story:

Here’s the tournament doctor, Tim Wood: “Tennis, as a sport, is relatively low risk for major heat problems compared to… continuous running events. So you’re more likely to get into trouble in these events, in a 10K road race, than you are in a tennis match. As you can appreciate, the players, the time the ball is in play, in total time for the match is relatively small. The amount of heat they produce from muscles exercising is relatively small in terms of what someone continuously exercising will do. They sit down every five to ten minutes for every 90 seconds at change of ends, so there is chance to lose some heat at that time. Tennis by and large is a low risk sport, and that’s why by and large, like cricket, we can play in these conditions and not be too concerned.”

Horseshit.

Don’t the players have a union? Can they get together and refuse to play under such inhumane conditions? Josh Levin of Slate explores this.

So what’s holding back unionization? Extreme income inequality, for one. While Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL all have minimum salaries—thanks, players unions!—tennis players at the bottom rungs struggle to break even due to the high costs of travel and coaching. A struggling up-and-comer like Colin Fleming, then, has about as much in common with me as he does with Novak Djokovic. At the sport’s highest level, too, there’s no universal agreement about thorny subjects like drug testing, scheduling, and the ranking system. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, normally the best of pals, had a bit of a falling out a few years ago over Nadal’s belief that Federer wasn’t speaking out about the issues bedeviling tour players.

Said Canadian player Frank Dancevic after he collapsed during his first round match on the second day of play: “I was dizzy from the middle of the first set, and then I saw Snoopy and I thought, ‘Wow, Snoopy, that’s weird.'”

Fortunately from here on out temperatures are expected to get no higher than the 80s. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that what happened in this first week of the major was borderline criminal.

I snapped this picture this morning showing how the smoke from the Colby Fire some 50 miles away in Glendora. I usually don’t see smoke from fires out here in San Pedro, so it was a strange sight. You can see the edge of the smoke from the fire meeting with the clear skies off the ocean. Just something interesting to see.

Vice did an interview with Alexa Chung: television host, model, designer, author and probably a host of other things. Some people don’t like her, but I do. Regarding Miley Cyrus, she said something spot on:

I don’t know when it became acceptable to be quite as harsh about women just out of their teens who are experimenting. They’ve been given this platform and more money and more exposure to do it, within the confines of their experimental phase, and that’s unfortunate in some ways. But I don’t think we should put too much serious weight on it. What were you doing when you were 20? We’re like, “She really means that.” Well, maybe she doesn’t. Not to be patronizing, because she does know what she’s doing, but it’s just a grand scale version of what everyone did at that age—it’s just we didn’t have Terry Richardson documenting it for us.

I don’t think she’s being manipulated either. I think she is intelligent enough to make her own decisions. She’s obviously clever, she’s made millions. Newspapers are really weird because they’re like, “Oh someone should really do something.” Yet they point a finger, but also eschew responsibility. Who are the people that are gonna [intervene]? And what would they say? What’s gone wrong? She discovered hip-hop and is really happy about it, that’s cool. I wonder what will happen in the future…

In other words, stop being fuddy-duddies and sexist. It’s a very entertaining interview to read through. Go read it.