That Thanksgiving Editorial-on-Editorials I Was Talking About: Happy turkeys, everyone!

11/23/2006 10:40 AM  | 

Sorry, I Forgot to Ask -- Have You Been Listening to Enough Klaus Nomi? In case you haven't:

Yes, that's his voice. Here he is live:

He was just a simple man, after all.

This one's the stunner. From what I recall of the documentary, he was quite sick when he sang this, in what was likely the culmination of his original life's ambitions:

11/22/2006 10:33 PM  | 

Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past: Over at Opinion L.A. I've got some preliminary leftovers from a treasure-hunt we conducted this week of L.A. Times Thanksgiving editorials of yore, the prime fruits of which will be harvested & findable here as of midnight. The Opinion L.A. cache concerns the 1910s cycle of WWI-era isolationism-empathy-TasteMySteel, Hun! Quick sample of the latter:

On a front thirty-two miles long to a depth of eight mils at the apex Gen. Haig's intrepid soldiers are driving cold steel and the fear of God into the hearts of the Hun invaders.

Every branch of the Allied armies has felt the electric thrill of coming victory.

Back when I was at Reason I did the same trick for the mag's 35th anniversary, the results of which you can read here. What really surprised me back then was its hippie-looking and then commie-looking covers from the late '60s and early '70s; ironic because of course Reason always pretty much hated hippies and commies almost as much as cops. For example, check out this classic cover from January 1970:

The great thing about looking at magazine covers is how they couldn't escape design fashion, even if they wanted to. I mean, how 1974 is this?

And you can almost see the early '70s give way to the late '70s between August and October of 1976:

The whole Reason cover gallery is really worth seeing; they're starting to slowly upload some of the back content, which is weird and interesting and prescient and kooky. (Man, did they love their Gold Standard & such back in the day.) I look forward to when we eventually do this with Prognosis, which had some truly beautiful covers of its own (and some awful ones, too, especially in early 1994).

Anyway, good times, etc. Hope all y'all have a lovely Thanksgiving!

11/22/2006 09:23 PM  | 

Realistic Answer to Tony Pierce's Question: Because Bill Stoneman has some idiotic ideas about the value of players over 30 years old.

Consider that he ....
* Gave $14 million for Steve Finley's 40-year-old year and Edgardo Alfonzo's pathetic last gasp.
* Traded a promising young shortstop for the pleasures of paying a declining declining 30-year-old reliever $1.2 million to rack up a 6.70 ERA.
* Paid $32 million for Orlando Cabrera's age 30-33 years.
* Gave a journeyman reliever with a career ERA around 5.00 a multi-year free agent contract.

I'd go on but it's too depressing.

The contract for Gary Matthews (or "Garbage Matthews," as the kids over at Halos Heaven are already calling him) is worse than the Joe Rudi signing. It ranks right down there with signing Mo Vaughn.

Is there a silver lining?

Yes. I cannot bring myself to believe that Stoneman would have done this unless he was confident he could trade for one of the best third basemen in baseball. If this becomes the mechanism by which we land Miguel Tejada or Alex Rodriguez, I might begrudgingly get behind the whole project (especially if we can clear off some of our shortstop logjam, and not weaken our ML pitching staff). If Chone freakin' Figgins is our Opening Day third baseman once again, then the terrorists will have won, this time Forever.

11/22/2006 08:04 PM  | 

Over Here: This site is a lot more interesting than it was 14 days ago. Go there and leave a comment, for instance "Tim Cavanaugh should be stopped," etc.

11/19/2006 09:13 PM  | 

Hi! What are you doing down here?