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Get Lost: Early Frontrunner for 2010 “Top 10 Videos”

January 20, 2010 | 2 comments

I’ll give you this, Lost-ies: the first season was pretty good. By the end of the second season, however, I was annoyed. I’ll give it credit for trying something different–and I use “different” here in the strictly value-neutral sense. “Different” is only different until it suddenly isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: actors, audio clips, friends, Hollywood, Lost, NPR, The Onion, TV, Twin Peaks, videos, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Peter Gammons on McGwire

January 13, 2010 | Comment

Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)

Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:

I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.

What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.

Tags: baseball, ethics, Hall of Fame, lies, Mark McGwire, news media, Peter Gammons, sports, steroids, writers

Oregon’s Big Reveal at the Rose Bowl

January 1, 2010 | 2 comments

First of all, welcome to 2010. I don’t know about you, but I feel better already.

Late in the previous decade (i.e., about three weeks ago), at the end of a post about the University of Oregon football team and their Amazing Technicolor Uniforms, I wrote:

This coming New Year’s Day, Oregon will face Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. The questions abound in the minds of the Ducks faithful… will the “steel”-colored pants appear in Pasadena, or will it be one-and-done for the gray trousers? What if they combined those with the day-glo chartreuse jerseys and the yellow helmets, for a perfect storm of mismatching?

Well, now we know: straight-up green and white. Nice restraint. Certainly nothing like the possible train wreck I envisioned. Despite looking good, right now the Ducks would surely rather feel good, which seems unlikely in light of their just-completed 26-17 loss to Ohio State. Read the rest of this entry »