Three Run Jimmy Jack

Tanya and I in front of "the Hook" at Pleasure Point

Sunday the wife and I went surfing in Santa Cruz. Pleasure Point to be exact. The water was cold and the tide was low. The waves were small but very well-formed. I caught 3 of the longest rides of my life. When I was a kid in Minnesota, the idea of surfing in the Pacific Ocean sounded exotic. Now that I live in CA, it still seems pretty exotic, and it is one of my favorite activities. It took me about 30 sessions to even get marginally good, and that's about what I am right now, marginally good. The feeling of being at one with nature is a constant while paddling around on a surfboard in the ocean. I can't help but feel this is where we all came from.

I usually write about the A's, but the Giants have done something worth writing about, they have signed Omar Vizquel to play shortstop for the next 4 years. This is of note to me because I like Omar Vizquel. Omar has 9 gold gloves and 10 times he has been amongst the leaders in sacrifice hits.He barehands a lot of balls and makes higlight real plays on a weekly basis. Sure he is getting old and his defense is probably not going to get better, but he is a good bunter and a smart hitter. He still has some wheels and knows how to play small ball. In the words of Steve Lyons, "he's a gamer." Baseball fans should not underestimate the value of a "fun player". Fun players generate revenue for a team because they put fans in the seats and get people to watch on TV. Maybe a 4 year deal for a 37 year old ss is suspect, but certainly teams have spent more and gotten less. I can't wait to see him play.

I love good movies. I hate bad movies, and I see more bad ones than good ones. I checked out imdb.com just to make sure I didn't forget any, and here is my list as of 11/20/04:

Mike’s Greatest Movies of All Time

1. Pulp Fiction – All hail the king. Comedy, tragedy, as heavy and light as Led Zeppelin.
2. The Usual Suspects – Kevin Spacey steals the show.
3. Shawshank Redemption – "Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’."
4. Groundhog Day – It gets better every time I see it.
5. The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
6. The Matrix
7. Blade Runner
8. Caddyshack
9. Dogma
   
10. Snatch
11. Star Wars
12. Office Space
13. What About Bob?
14. Being John Malkovitch
15. Bad News Bears
16. Rain Man
17. Memento
18. 12 Monkeys
19. Wild Things
20. The Station Agent
21. Notorious

From this list, maybe someone could know something about me? I don't know. My list is probably similar to that of many people. But I love Bill Murray and Walter Matthau. I love Brad Pitt too, and I love funny movies and SciFi and Gangster movies. Plot Twists are great too. The movies on my top 20 that AREN'T in imbd.com's top 250 may need some explaination.

The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 - This movie is about a heist gone wrong and Walter Matthau is the cop investigating. The bad guys have the Mr Blue and Mr Green names which Quentin Tarantino borrows for his movie, Reservoir Dogs. This movie rocks.

Caddyshack - Probably the most quoted movie in history, I am surprised it isn't on the imbd list. Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Rodney Dangerfield and a bunch of golf and sex jokes. "Cindarella story, outa nowhere, tears in his eyes."

Dogma - Brilliant questioning of religion with sex and fart jokes and Jay and Silent Bob. Kevin Smith's finest.

Office Space - "PC LOAD LETTER!?! What the FUCK does that mean?"

What about Bob? - "Baby Steps." "I'm sailing!" - Bill Murray as Bob.

Bad News Bears - the ultimate baseball movie. Quoted nearly as often as Caddyshack. "Take one for the team, Stein." "Back up sucker, this one's for Allah."

Wild Things - The only movie that made this list based on the females in it. Although it also has Bill Murray and Matt Dillon and more plot twists than any movie I have ever seen.

In case anyone reads this and wonders about the title, it's a palindrome that Jason Steed and I made up on a drive back from San Diego to Tucson around 1995. The letters read the same forwards or backwards. We entertained ourselves with the making up of palindromes for a few hours on an otherwise uneventful 7 hour drive in my Ford Fiesta. It is funny how I can remember some things from a long time ago, but figuring out where I put my keys can truly baffle me. Here are two other palindromes that I attribute to that trip:

Yoba knows wonka boy

no big red nut under gibon

I was thinking of the phrase "the end of an era" when I started on this tangent. I shaved and got a haircut last night. I went 14 days without shaving, which is the longest I have gone in 20 years. And my face just ITCHED. I decided that a lot of weirdos have beards and maybe I don't quite want to be a weirdo even if I am totally against our apparently stupid right wing-ruled society. And Tanya didn't like it much anyway.

me Day 13 of No Shave Experiment

An argument could be made that a person can really only love 500 albums at once. If someone says, "that is my 501st favorite album", it could be concluded that that album is not that well liked. I don't know if the human mind has a limit of 500 favorite albums or if that is just a nice round number that seems to fit. Any more than that, and when you move, you are looking at too many crates. And your run into the 501st favorite album scenario. So I was thinking of what my top 10 or top 20 favorite albums are. Then I thought, "which albums have I bought twice?" If I bought them twice, it means I wasn't satisfied with just vinyl, or I damaged one of them, or I lost one of them, but no matter what, it means I must have liked it enough to miss it.

Albums I have bought twice (in rough chronological order):

1. ACDC - Back in Black (first bought LP in 1981, bought LP again in late 80s, bought CD in late 90s)
2. The Cars first album
3. Black Sabbath - Masters of Reality
4. Led Zeppelin - IV
5. Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic
6. Led Zeppelin - II
7. The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers (bought the one with the real zipper at a thrift store)
8. Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique (lost first CD)
9. Soundgarden - Down on the Upside (scratched first CD)
10 Neil Young - Harvest

This is not a bad approximation of my top 10 favorite albums. I don't think the Cars would make it, but the rest of them might.

me 11/09/04 Day 6 Shavefree

I have decided not to shave. I don't know how long I will go, but I think I have already gone 6 days, which is probably longer than I have gone since I moved to California in 2000. I was trying to think of a reason not to shave. The Red Sox won the world series this year and they had a lot of guys with beards. The Yankees have a no facial hair rule and the Red Sox had a bunch of beards, just one more wayof saying, "we are not the Yankees." I thought that was cool.

I didn't like how that election turned out last week, maybe I need to show that I am not a republican. Maybe there should be a little more flower power and free love in the world. I got my flower I got my power, I got a woman who knows.

My boss said I should hold out until we get a Purchase Order for one of our machines. This is probably a pretty good reason to not shave. Here is a pic of how it looks so far.

When I looked at the map below, something jumped out at me. The blue states in the east look like the map of the Ivy League. The center blue map looks kinda like the map for the Big 10 conference, the western states map out the Pac8 conference before the addition of the AZ schools. I started to wonder if there was any correlation between which states had good schools and which states voted for Kerry.


Election Map

I went to US NEWS and WORLD REPORT's website and found their list of the top 50 Universities. Below is a list of those schools in the font color of the way their state voted.

source data:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/natudoc/tier1/t1natudoc_brief.php
Rank School State

1 Harvard University (MA)
2 Princeton University (NJ)
3 Yale University (CT)
4 University of Pennsylvania (PA)
5 Duke University (NC)
6 Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MA)
7 Stanford University (CA)
8 California Institute of Technology (CA)
9 Columbia University (NY)
10 Dartmouth College (NH)
11 Northwestern University (IL)
12 Washington University in St. Louis (MO)
13 Brown University (RI)
14 Cornell University (NY)
15 Johns Hopkins University (MD)
16 University of Chicago (IL)
17 Rice University (TX)
18 University of Notre Dame (IN)
19 Vanderbilt University (TN)
20 Emory University (GA)
21 University of California – Berkeley (CA)
22 Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
23 University of Michigan (MI)
24 University of Virginia (VA)
25 Georgetown University (DC)
26 U. of California – Los Angeles (CA)
27 Wake Forest University (NC)
28 Tufts University (MA)
29 U. of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (NC)
30 Univ. of Southern California (CA)
31 College of William and Mary (VA)
32 Brandeis University (MA)
33 New York University (NY)
34 Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison (WI)
35 Case Western Reserve Univ. (OH)
36 Univ. of California – San Diego (CA)
37 Boston College (MA)
38 Lehigh University (PA)
39 U. of Illinois – Urbana - Champaign (IL)
40 University of Rochester (NY)
41 Georgia Institute of Technology (GA)
42 University of California – Davis (CA)
43 Tulane University (LA)
44 University of California – Irvine (CA)
45 Univ. of California – Santa Barbara (CA)
46 Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. (NY)
47 University of Texas – Austin (TX)
48 University of Washington (WA)
49 Yeshiva University (NY)\
50 Pennsylvania State U. – (PA)
50(tie) University of Florida (FL)

36-15 the state with the top 50 (including one tie) schools voted for John Kerry.

Then I went to Wired Magazine's "Wired 40-masters of innovation, technology, and strategic vision - 40 companies driving the global economy"

source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/wired40.html?pg=4

Company Name, Headquarters according to Yahoo Finance

1. Google Mountain View, CA
2. Amazon.com Seattle, WA
3. Apple Computer Cupertino, CA
4. Genentech South San Francisco, CA
5. EBay San Jose, CA
6. Samsung Electronics Korea
7. Yahoo! Sunnyvale, CA
8. Electronic Arts Redwood City, CA
9. Pixar Emeryville, CA
10. Cisco Systems San Jose, CA
11. Infosys Technologies Bangalore
12. Dell Computer Austin, TX
13. IBM Armonk, NY
14. SAP Walldorf, Germany
15. Nokia Japan
16. Netflix Los Gatos, CA
17. Monsanto ST. Louis, MO
18. Toyota Motor Japan
19. Vodafone Group England
20. Flextronics Singapore
21. InterActiveCorp New York, NY
22. Nvidia Santa Clara, CA
23. WPP Group Great Britan
24. Intel Santa Clara, CA
25. EMC Hpokinton, MA
26. FedEx Memphis, TN
27. Microsoft Redmond, WA
28. Pfizer NY, NY
29. Costco Wholesale Issaquah, WA
30. Comcast Philadelphia, PA
31. Taiwan Semiconductor Taiwan
32. Ameritrade Omaha, NE
33. Gen-Probe San Diego, CA
34. Ryanair Dublin, Ireland
35. L-3 NY, NY
36. Citigroup NY,NY
37. Level 3 Bloomfield, CO
38. Inditex Spain
39. JDS Uniphase San Jose, CA
40. BP London

In this list, 23 companies are in states Kerry won, 5 companies are in states Bush won. So I don't want to draw too many conclusions from these two lists, but I think it would be safe to say that if you live in a state which has a top school or a top company, your state probably voted for John Kerry.

Hello World

I have been blogging at Barry Zito Forever for almost a year now. I love to talk baseball, and have had great fun, but sometimes I think there is more to life than baseball, espcially in the months of November, December and January. So here goes.