TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I usually do the NFC east last because it’s the division I know the best but I guess since the division gets to open the season that I have to start with it.

Washington Redskins - O/U 7.5, LY 9-7: The Skins got a Wildcard berth by the grace of God last season. They “improved” by bringing in an over the hill defensive player and not improving their quarterback situation. Clinton Portis about 125 in runningback years (he’s aged 50 more years since my yesterdays’ picks column). They’re just remaining a team that’s on the cusp of being good. I just don’t see Jason Campbell as an elite, playoff quarterback and, until he proves me wrong, they’re going to hover around a .500 team. The one caveat to this is that the NFC East draws the NFC West and the AFC North this year. I’m having trouble buying the ‘Skins as a 9-win team this year but their schedule says otherwise. Over. 9 wins.

Philadelphia Eagles - 8.5, 8-8: To save myself time, I’ll just say what I said last year: The warranty on the “mobile quarterback” apparently expires at age 28. Donovan McNabb will turn 31 32 this November. This means McNabb either needs to change his game (difficult) or not get injured. They wisely let their good back-up go to the Bucs (which, I don’t know which decision was more inexplicable… the Buccaneers offering Rich Garcia $5M to “compete for the starting job” or the Eagles not using some of their $11M in cap space to keep him on board for McNabb’s inevitable injury. Now, the Eagles are looking forward to at least four starts by AJ Feeley or Kelly Holcomb. Most of their receivers have been in the league less than three seasons and they replaced Donte Stallworth with Kevin Curtis still don’t have a running game that aren’t Donovan’s McNabb’s shaky wheels. As McNabb declines, so does this team. Under. 7 wins.

Dallas Cowboys - 10.5, 13-3: Has there ever been a more celebrated team that hasn’t won a playoff game in over a decade? Unfortunately for me, the Cowboys have same schedule as the Giants and are sadly a more consistent regular-season team. The Giants win last year was made doubly delicious by the fact it came at the expense of the Cowboys in Dallas. There are images of last year I will have with me for the rest of my life. Wade Phillips’s post-game cry-fest is one. The image of stunned Dallas fans in the stands is another. It will never get old. I’m on the fence with declaring that the Cowboys are the official “team everyone is high on who will underachieve” for some reason or another. But, until the window closes on TO in 2010 or 2011, I just don’t really see it happening. Since they’re more consistent than the Giants I give them the regular season nod again and the over. 12 wins.

New York Giants - 8.5, 10-6: M’boy Bootleg took a jab at the Giants and asked how the defending Super Bowl champions can still be playing the plucky underdog/they don’t respect us card. Here’s why. Last night, I picked up Eli Manning, the Super Bowl MVP, in the 10th round of a 12 team fantasy draft — defenses and Kickers were going before him. The Cowboys, a team that hasn’t won a playoff game since I was in high school, is HBO’s feature team this year. The Jets, who had a 6-win season last year, are dominating the media coverage. Vegas, after marking the Giants as a six-win team last year marks them as a .500 team this year. This is how you play the “no respect” card as a reigning champion. Now, losing the 20+ sacks that Osi and Strahan brought to the table isn’t going to be easy — probably not even possible — but the Giants have an occasionally irritating tendency to draft pass rushers in the early rounds of the draft. They have the supply. The loss of Osi of Strahan move the Giants defense from “excellent” to “very good.” If you asked me to sign for a “very good” defense and a “consistently mediocre” offense, I would. On top of that, the Giants have another favorable schedule, skipping all the elite teams save for the Cowboys twice and the Steelers. They’re playing the NFC West (which may still be the worst division ever in professional sports) and the AFC North (and everyone who thinks the Browns are repeating their out of nowhere season is fooling themselves). That leaves their hard, non-division games as Pittsburgh and Cincy. That’s it. Lock of the season. Giants over. 10 wins

Division Winner: Dallas. Wildcard: Giants. Possible Wildcard: Redskins.

Apparently, I lied. I forgot I had one more in the hopper before moving on to a couple non-fiction. I’ll bury this posting on the weekend because I’m relatively sure people care less about these book reviews then Ms. L cares about the Mets.

The Silent Blade is the first book considered outside the “Legend of Drizzt” cycle and is, instead, the first book in the “Paths of Darkness” cycle. This seems to be the point at which Salvatore and and Wizards of the Coast realized they had about twelve marketable characters stacked up inside one ten book set and it was time to split them up. This book serves to do that and also serves as the fantasy world’s study of PTSD and how different characters deal with it.

On one side, you have Wulfgar whose spent the last six years being tortured by the demons. Not symbolic demons… actual demons. After being sprung from hell he’s mentally ruined. We find out some of the tortures visited on him — including being given illusions of freedom to the point where he believed he’d escaped only to watch his friends massacred by demons. He’s watched succubusses (hm… what is the plural form up succubus? Succuben? ZING!) assume the form of Catti-Brie and then turn back at the moment of passion. He’s watched the same succubuses give birth to his twisted half-demon spawn only to be murdered by Errtu. In all… he’s had a rough go of it. He’s not dealing with freedom particularly well — continually flashing back to his problems and putting his friends in danger.

On the other side, you have Artemis Entreri. Entreri was brought to Menzoberranzan to live with the drow where he discovered that, even though he’s spent his entire life tuning his senses and becoming the most finely honed warrior on the surface, he’s barely as talented as the lowest of drow commoners. Visiting Menzoberranzan allows him to look at himself in a huge mirror and he doesn’t really like what he sees. He returns to the surface realizing that Drizzt may have been right and the life he always led was kind of pointless.

By the end of the book, relationships have been reshuffled as the agonizingly long dance between Drizzt and Catti-brie and their maybe/maybe-not relationship continues… almost to the point of ridiculousness. At this point, the two have been “friends” for something like twelve years, including having spent six years together as pirate hunters on the Sea Sprite. All this time, the reader’s to understand that Drizzt longs for her. Six years on a boat and spending all their time together and nothing happened? Their relationship never progressed? Really?

This is a good book for what it is, as long as one goes in to it with very little hope of a resolution of anything. If anything, this book sets in to motion a lot of obvious stuff that the reader can infer from the last set of books. Drizzt and Artemis will fight again. Jarlaxle’s quest after the Crystal Shard. Wulfgar’s need of some alone time to deal with his figurative and literal demons. And the Friends’ return to Icewind Dale. It’s a table-setter for Spine of the World, The Sellswords Trilogy, and Sea of Swords. It’s pretty much designed to divide our main characters in to three different books and set them on their own paths. High time, too, as any more fights between Drizzt and Entreri are just overkill. We get it… you want to kill each other for metaphysical, philosphical reason.

As for the divergent paths… I’m curious to see if Salvatore has the ability to make his non-drow characters interesting — because to this point they’ve all been a supporting cast. Whether or not Wulfgar can carry a whole book on his own remains to be seen.

And now we’ll wrap up the little bit of storyline that wasn’t wrapped up in the last book. Unsurprisingly, this is the last book that’s considered part of the “Legend Of Drizzt” series. If the series had ended here, it would have been acceptable. The later books using these characters (Sellswords, Thousand Orcs) will hearken back to stuff that happened in this series, but these three-thousandish pages gives you one whole story.

At the beginning of the last book, Lolth convinced Errtu that if he protected Menzoberranzan from outside influences while she was otherwised deposed (by deposed I mean “not a god anymore) she would give him a prisoner to torment and whom he could use to end his banishment. When a monster is defeated on the Prime Material Plane, he can not re-enter the prime material plane for 100 years. The only way around this is to have the creature that banished him summon him. It is presumed this prisoner is someone Errtu could use to convince Drizzt to end the banishment. Then, Errtu would be able to re-enter the prime material plane and find the Crystal Shard… the evil artifact that keeps popping up throughout the series.

It’s been six years since the Battle of Mithril Hall. Bruenor and Regis have gone back to Icewind Dale because Bruenor thought he should give control of Mithril Hall back to his great-8x-grandfather. Drizzt and Catti’Brie have decided to help the world by joining back up with Captain Deudermont and the Sea Sprite (introduced WAY back in the Icewind Dale trilogy… one of the first humans to accept Drizzt) to hunt pirates on the Sea of Swords (The Forgotten Realms version of the Atlantic Ocean).

After six relatively peaceful years hunting pirates, Drizzt’s past finally catches up to him as he receives a message that his former nemesis Errtu is holding a captive. To retrieve this prisoner, Drizzt must end Errtu’s banishment. The quest to release Errtu is the first half of the book. The quest to put him back is the second half.

Both halves are pretty good.

I did find it amusing the lengths to which Errtu went to get Drizzt to unbanish him. It’s good to know that demons from the Abyss suffer from bad-guy overplanning as well. Errtu was holding a hostage and wanted Drizzt to unbanish him. Instead of just sending him a message to that effect, he sent a doppleganger to trick his boat into sailing to a deserted island that was full of zombies. On the island was a witch who delivered the team a riddle. The riddle sent them to somewhere else. Now, Drizzt’s the only mortal who can unbanish Errtu. Errtu really wanted to be unbanished. You’d think that he’d, I don’t know, not try to get Drizzt killed before the unbanishing happens. Bad guys, no matter what species, are kinda dumb. Also, in a level of transparency that approached daytime television, we spend 300 pages being told that the hostage is Drizzt’s father Zaknafein while anyone with half a brain in their skull are likely to realize it’s Wulfgar as he was dragged into the Abyss and all.

Long story short, Drizzt and company do manage to summon and unbanish Errtu who immediately retrieves the crystal shard that was buried under an avalanche in book four.

In all, it’s really a satisfying ending for a ten book arc. Very few plot-threads are left dangling other than Wulfgar’s lingering PTSD from six years of torture in hell and whether or not the friends will finally manage to destroy the Crystal Shard. In all, well done.

Complaints with the whole series, if I had any, were mostly with Salvatore’s writing style. He had a terrible tendency to have the friends only be saved by amazing luck and his inability to kill core characters. He also is not particularly good at describing battle scenes. It’s not easy to describe a sword-fight between two characters who are supposedly the best swordsmen in the world and it falls a little short. He also has a tendency to have events happen via a string of coincidences (Matron Baerne just happens to have the soul of an ancestor of one of the people Drizzt happens to meet on the surface). It’s OK to fall on this occasionally… other times it makes the reader roll their eyes. He also ignores his own mythology when it suits him. In the Dark Elf Trilogy, he specifically says that the third son of a drow house is sacrificed to Lolth. In later books, the Baerne clan has three sons (Berg’inyon, Gromph, and Dantrag) and no mention is made of the three son rule. Later still, we find out that there was another third son (who is certainly older than Berg’inyon as he is Drizzt’s age) who was, in fact, sacrificed. There’s also the inexplicable attitude shift of Drizzt’s sister Vierna Do’Urden (and Drizzt’s equally inexplicable reaction) simply to create a bad-guy even though it made no sense and stands out as one of the more stupid moments of the entire series.

There is one more book that’s not really a part of this series but acts as a springboard to split the series in two. One branch follows the good guys. The other branch follows Artemis Entreri who, until this point, was the bad guy. Before that… I need a break.

I go through spits and starts telling me I should leave New York City. Occasionally the destination in question is Boston, sometimes it’s Charlotte, for about an hour on leap day it was London — but usually it’s just back home. Sure, we may have come across as a little sketchy when Steve Carrell came to visit. But really, I honestly enjoy actual doses of nature instead of rigorously regulated blocks of nature.

When I was home last weekend, I discovered that one of my top five favorite upstate homes are for sale. I found it on Keller Williams’ website

1) The house comes pre-installed with an 800 square foot Man Room in the basement. The pre-installed man room is 50 square feet bigger than my apartment.

2) The house is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence anchored into stone pillars. Handy for keeping out both the riff and the raff.

3) The three acres of land sits directly on the Hudson River. I could, theoretically, create a slip and slide that goes directly into the river.

4) The house has 10 rooms. I could have a room just for my beer.

5) The estimated price on nearly 10 times the square footage with 3 acres of riverfront estate on a 30 year fixed mortgage works out to be a little less than $100 more than my current rent.

6) A 173-year-old house is almost certainly haunted and full of secret passageways.

The city is stupid. It would be really hard to turn that house down if I put in a bid for like $375k and they said yes.

As it’s been getting kind of serious around here for the last couple of weeks I figure it’s about time to lighten up for a bit and blow through the six-ish drafts of books and TV and movie stuff in my draft queue before getting back to depressing myself with our sham political system. Let’s even take a break from the fantasy novels that I’m relatively certain no one but me cares about.

I don’t remember exactly where I first read about Bill Jenkinson’s The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball’s Greatest Slugger. It must have been listed as a source to one of my previous baseball books. When I read the blurb about it on the NYPL’s website, I pegged it as a statistical study of Babe Ruth’s career numbers and, in particular, his 1921 season (not a typo… it pays more attention to his under-appreciated World Series-losing 1921 season in lieu of his World Series-winning 1927 season). When I read the “104 home run” title, I presumed it would be something about ballpark dimensions and such and be a distinctive study of tape-measure home runs and retro-fitting current stadiums (like… the Oakland Coliseum vs. Shibe Park, The Cell vs. Shibe Park, The Metrodome vs. Griffth Stadium, Fenway vs. er… Fenway) to see where Ruth would have wound up for the season if he played in those stadiums. Sounds interesting, right?

I thought so, too. Turns out, this book wasn’t that all. I don’t think. Really, I read the whole book over three weeks and still really don’t know what the author was trying to prove other than “Ruth Was The Greatest Baseball Player Ever.” The 104 home runs may have been referring to the ones Ruth was robbed of when he hit 500-foot outs or he may have been including the home runs he hit in mid-season exhibition games. Honestly, the argument wasn’t presented concisely enough for me to even figure out what the author was trying to say.

By the first chapter, I was pretty sure I was in for a long, long read. In the first 20 pages Jenkinson professes his love for Babe Ruth and his disdain for modern-day sluggers. He also tells us he spent something like ten years exhaustively researching every home run Ruth ever hit. Instead of going through box scores, he tried to find as many primary sources as possible and piece together an actual distance for all of those home runs. He looked for people who were at various exhibition and barnstorming games to get their stories and, in some cases, have those people show him exactly where home plate was in the game and where the ball landed. He then listed all these accomplishments.

Exhaustively.

A standard paragraph in the first few chapters was something like: Ruth then traveled to Philadelphia where he belted four homers against the Athletics. One of those is rumored to have gone 550 feet but my research puts it around 495. The Yankees were only up by three games on the Senators at that point and Ruth felt ill. But the Babe felt guilty leaving the team in such hard times. On the way to St. Louis they stopped off in French Lick, Indiana and played an exhibition game against the Church of the Assumption All-Stars. Babe put on a show that day! Can you imagine modern players not only playing in exhibition games but having 30 scheduled in as part of the regular season? Sometimes even on the same day as real games? When Ruth finally made it to St. Louis he was exhausted but he couldn’t leave the people without a show. He ate a dozen hot dogs and struck out three times but hit a triple off the wall 450 away.

And that goes on. And on. And on for something like 2,487 pages.

What I DID get out of the book were a couple of well-constructed arguments to defend the more dishonest claims made by Ruth’s detractors. For example, the oft-heard point that he’s over-rated because he didn’t face the best competition because the league wasn’t integrated. While the latter part of that statement is true, the former isn’t. Ruth was one of the few major league players who actually DID face Negro League pitching… playing in a fairly large number of games against Negro League teams. The book mentions the confirmed number of home runs he hit off Negro League pitchers (I can’t remember it). It’s not like when Ruth played Negro League teams he suddenly turned in to .094 hitter who slugged .188. Another well-constructed point is this: professional athletes really didn’t have the options then that they do today. If you were a professional-caliber athlete and wanted to make money in the 1910s or 1920s then you either played baseball or boxed. He draws this comparison to the current crop of Latin baseball players. If you’re an excellent athlete in the Dominican Republic, you play baseball. If you’re an excellent athlete in the US, you play whatever you feel like — and baseball’s probably a distant third option. A third point mentions that some of Ruth’s career numbers are hindered by the time. He spent something like 100 games over the course of his career suspended for doing crazy things like “barnstorming” and “not hating black people.” He was also frequently sidelined with things like chest-colds and the like and would miss five or six games at a clip with things such as “chest colds.”

To say I was disappointed in this book would be a gross understatement. I thought it was going to be a statistical analysis or something like that. It turned out it was just a baseball book designed to canonize Ruth and give a laundry list of his accomplishments. If anything, I spent three weeks to get a couple good arguments if I’m ever in an argument in which I have to defend Ruth.

Best sub-plot in the book was the description of Ty Cobb’s disdain and hatred for Ruth because of the popularity he gained by hitting home runs. Cobb insisted that anyone could do what Ruth did and, to make the point, hit three home runs in one game before going back to playing “real baseball.” Another fun story: Ruth was covering third when Cobb decided it was time to come in spikes up. Ruth tagged him with the ball. In the face. And knocked him out cold. Apparently Cobb never came in spikes up on Ruth again.

Not a particularly fun book to read, though. Recommendation to avoid.

The following clip is of Steve Carell on the Daily Show… of a segment he filmed in Mechanicville. When I talk about “my townhouse,” this is the town that it’s in. I’d like to say it makes the city (yes, the one square mile that is Mechanicville is, in fact, a city) look bad because they only film old people and drunks — but 90% of the city’s population is old people, drunks, and old people who are drunks. Ms. L and I often joked that we were the youngest people in Mechanicville with jobs and without kids. It really wasn’t a joke though.

I saw this originally the day after it aired. The bar that Steve Carell goes to is called Costanzo’s. I have ordered pizza from there but it remains the one bar in Mechanicville I have never had a drink in. Primarily because I’ve always thought it was kinda shady and, from the stories I’ve heard, it’s been shady since my grandma’s day. The bar is this far from my townhouse. It’s the closest to me and I’ve never gone there. Unfortunately, if I ever did happen to move back it’s one of the only ones left in town. The bar where my 30th birthday was held has shut down. Another has become a parking lot for a nearby motorcycle repair shop. A third is for sale. A fifth relatively historic one has been flattened and the land is stuck in a pissing contest between a-holes. A sixth tried to charge me a cover last time I was home and seems to be out of place considering the surrounding population. Not good times in the city of Mechanicville.

In my defense… this wasn’t my town growing up. Mine was the next town over.

Since I moved to Manhattan I’ve been sort of a reverse food snob. That is: I wouldn’t shop at stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s because I figured that it was for ridiculously stupid organic snobs who wanted to spend $12 on a head of lettuce. You know what else cleans a head of lettuce? Fuggin washing it.

Of course, that’s left Ms. L and I to shop at one of the other super market chains in NYC. Removing the sketchy discount places and overinflated bodegas where you’re just as likely to find a decent six-pack of beer as a can of Chef Boyardee that’s actually PAST the expiration date — that left two places.

In this corner, there’s Gristede’s (pronounced Gris-TEE-dee’s or, for purposes of this piece, Nasty’s). Nasty’s has been “feeding New Yorkers for over 100 years.” If you take a look at This handy map and take a gander in the bottom left-hand corner where there are two stores within two blocks of each other, my apartment is handily located smack in the middle of those two locations. These, by default, have become our primary super market. When we need a $5 gallon of milk or a $6.50 box of Cheerios… Nasty’s is the place to go. Nasty’s also has the irritating habit of carrying different things between the two stores. Nasty’s North has the better $12.99 per 6-pack beer selection, better produce selection, a bakery and deli section, and ground chicken. Nasty’s South has a better deli, less lines, and better meat.

In the other corner, there’s the Food Emporium, a Manhattan. The Food Emporium is much closer to what I’m used to calling a supermarket. There are two within reasonable distance from me. One is on the outer edge of walking distance (I say outer edge because I then have to carry the groceries home and honestly, kids, a gallon of milk gets heavy about halfway through a 20-minute walk) and the other is a subway ride away. The Emporium within walking distance has a great deli, good seafood, good produce, and a good selection of stuff. The Emporium in Union Square has the beer selection (which has slowly climbed in the last few months from the originally very reasonable $8.99/6-pack to the Nasty’s level $12.99/6-pack) and the prices in general have slowly climbed to be equal to Gristede’s.

As an obviously huge fan of local super markets, I continued to suffer through them rather than try something new. That’s how I keep it real, yo. Then something wacky happy. I stumbled upon the newest “how did it take this long for someone to do this” website at Beer Menus.com. The site’s goal is to get the beer list for all of Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s bars and allow you to both find a bar and see the beer list or search for your favorite beer and find what bars around you serve it. Great idea. Immediately, I tried to search for Sixpoint which is by far my favorite the New York City microbrewery. When searching for Sixpoint, however, a hit came up for the Bowery’s incarnation of Whole Foods.

Re-he-heaallly?

It turns out the Bowery Whole Foods has an entire beer store with growler stations letting you buy half-gallons of various NYC brewed beers. On top of that, there’s an entire beer store surrounding the growler station that lets you buy beer at actual reasonable prices. The growlers are $7.99 and the sixers are $8.99. Since we were there, we did our week’s shopping and guess what? Cheaper than both Nasty’s and the Emporium and even threw its hat into competing with Fresh Direct.

So, thanks to beer, I’m a Whole Foods convert. Is there anything alcohol can’t do?

My ongoing quest to get through all the Drizzt books continues. Next up is Starless Night, the eighth Drizzt book and the second of the Legacy of the Drow cycle. I remembered liking this more than The Legacy but that isn’t saying much.

The set-up to this book is simple. Drizzt feels guilty for the death of Wulfgar and believes he has to stop the drow pursuit of him. To do that he has to travel back to Menzoberranzan to do….. something. I don’t really know, exactly, what Drizzt’s plan to stop, you know, a whole city from attacking him was but, regardless, he gives Guenhwyvar to Regis with explicit instructions to tell no one where he’s going. This only lasts a day or two until Catti-brie, stricken with grief over her fallen fiance, yells the truth out of Regis and takes off in pursuit.

Reading this book, I’m realizing what my problem is with reading these books again ten years later. I have many, many more level of geek experience now and these books are written as much for people who’ve never played the game as people who have. As such, I know most of the rules of the D&D world and keep applying them to the stories. For instance, Catti-Brie tracks Drizzt to Silverymoon — basically the Forgotten Realms version of Chicago — and finds the woman who Drizzt’s been sharing a relationship with. As it turns out, Drizzt has in fact been there. Now, Lady Alustriel (one of the most powerful spellcasters on the planet — the daughter of a GOD mind you — tells Catti-brie that she has no way to get a hold of Drizzt. And that’s entirely not true. There are NUMEROUS ways to send a message to Drizzt.

Second problem. Drow use sleep poison. Drizzt knows drow use sleep poison. Everyone on the surface knows that, when drow elves attack, they have poison-tipped darts on crossbow bolts that are designed to knock you out. But Drizzt somehow decides to assault Menzoberranzan without the use of any anti-poison measures at all? He’s really that stupid? This is a frustrating thing with Salvatore’s writing. He loves to use the drow sleep poison to capture characters so he makes them seem woefully unprepared for encounters. You know the annoying guy you watch a movie with who tells you they’re not properly portraying how a particular model of gun recoils? Yeah, that’s me with geeky D&D references in these books.

On a more positive note, this is really the first book since the Dark Elf Trilogy that really gets into the inner workings and the intrigue of the drow city of Menzoberranzan. We learn that, in fact, the Matron mother has no interest in kidnapping Drizzt. Instead, she is using Drizzt to rally the houses for an assault on Mithral Hall. They plan to take the dwarven city to be an outpost to the surface. Drizzt, it turns out, is just a rallying cry.

The other good thing about this book is it really starts to get in to Jarlaxle of Bregan D’aerthe. The drow city is a matriarchy. It’s organized into to a strict hierarchical structure where females are in charge and males are subservient. It’s nearly impossible to be a drow without a house. Except for Jarlaxle. Jarlaxle created a mercenary organization built from commoners and houseless nobles (such as Drizzt’s brother Dinin. After House Do’Urden was destroyed, Dinin was offered a spot in Bregan D’aerthe as opposed to getting killed by the attacking house. He accepted). Bregan D’aerthe holds no loyalty to any house and is available to the highest bidder. In fact, in the introduction to the organization, we see his mercenary band involved in an attack on one of the drow houses only to turn on the attackers and join the defenders when the matron mother of the defending house offers him more money. I love Jarlaxle and hope that future books really start to delve in to him even more.

I’m neutral on this book. I wouldn’t recommend it but I wouldn’t tell you to not bother.

It’s back and frosty.

Why don’t Randy and Simon just get down on their knees and blow Archuleta? If anyone else had sung two awful, schmaltzy ballads in the final four they would have been blasted us unmemorable and boring. This kid gets “you blew away the competition tonight.”

Die.