Fantasy Baseball

If you are interested, I have set up a fantasy baseball league on Yahoo sports.

The league name is GHS Vikings

The password is 2k8

The league is setup in a head-to-head format. Which means that each week you get to take on another team and compete in 12 categories.

The categories are mostly standard, but I wanted to add an extra dimension to the league. So, I added Errors and Home Runs Allowed as extra categories to compete in. If everybody hates these two new categories, I can delete them. Just let me know what you think.

The draft for the league is set for Sunday, March 16th. Right now it looks like it is at 1 P.M. eastern, but the way that Yahoo has the time set up is a bit awkward. I’ll keep you posted.

Coming Soon: Big League Chew Field

As you know by now, the Tribune company is contemplating whether to sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field.

I’m of two minds on this topic.

On the one hand, it’s been Wrigley Field for as long as anyone alive can remember. Deciding to rename it now is idiotic. It would be like renaming Comiskey Park something like U.S. Cellular Park. No one would stand for it. It is a travesty. Wrigley is Wrigley. It isn’t a name that can be sold off. Everyone knows it as Wrigley and will continue calling it Wrigley. So, this whole selling naming rights just doesn’t work.

But on the other hand, Wrigley Field has always been a pitching point for a corporation. Seriously, Wrigley is a corporation and they have just had the naming rights on the park forever. So, what would be the difference if they replaced one company with another?

The end result is that regardless of whether the naming rights to Wrigley get sold or not, Wrigley will always be called Wrigley. So, any company thinking about purchasing the naming rights should be hesitant. First, they won’t be recognized as the true name of the park (it’s freakin’ Wrigley). Second, some people are going to be so upset about the renaming that they will hold a grudge against the new company.

Honestly, I still call the White Sox’ home park, “New Comiskey.” Comiskey is just what I’ve always known. I remember the last year of the Old Comiskey. With the slogan, “Someday, you’ll say you were there.”

Corporate naming rights only work when opening a new field. Seriously, I still think of the Astro’s ballpark as “Enron Field.” They were the corporate sponser when it open. That’s the way it will stay for me. Renaming doesn’t work.

Strange Days

Last night I watched Strange Days, which I had rented from Netflix.

Strange Days is set in the future. End of the year in 1999 to be exact. Sure, 1999 is now 9 years ago, but the movie was made in 1995, so it makes a little more sense that way.

The basic premise is that we now have a new version of media. This media combines reality TV and virtual reality. Basically, a person records their life experience and then anyone can playback those same experiences. At the same time, the city of Los Angeles has become a chaotic place where the issue of race is seemingly about to explode into a full out race war.

Watching the movie in context of today, it just didn’t work for me. The whole race war plot seemed absolutely absurd. Sure, there are still plenty of race issues, but we as a people seem to be working it out more civil than through war.

But when I think back about when the movie was made, it becomes a little bit more credible. In those days, we had gone through the Rodney King trial, subsequent riots, and the whole Tupac/Biggie/Police feuds. So, in that point in time this future didn’t seem too far out.

Anyway, The story progresses and our lead character gets dragged down a mystery full of deaths, mysterious people, and plot twists. The general plot worked all right, but it went a little slow/long for my tastes.

I was pretty surprised with the acting in the movie. Really, with names like Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Vincent D’Onofrio, Juliette Lewis, and Tom Sizemore, you’d expect it to be at least capably acted. Not here. Strange Days is full of terrible performances taken right out of the Denise Richards playbook. It is really bad.

Just as bad as the performances, the dialog of the movie is terrible. James Cameron really laid a bomb with this one. He seemed to try to make it edgy, but it fails miserably. This is extremely apparent with the hard core gang banger/rapper characters. It comes off as an old man trying to write speeches for a gangster. The words are phony and attempt too hard to be hard ass. It just doesn’t work.

Unbelievably, there was an aspect of this movie that was even worse than the dialog and acting. The real problem I had with the movie was that there were numerous times where they’d present something really cool/original. It gets my mind going about how cool it would be if they took it in one direction. But then they take it off in another direction (most often in a way to beat the race issue into our heads). That is probably the most annoying thing a movie can do; have a beautiful set-up and then take it in the opposite direction it should have gone.

Overall, I gave Strange Days 3 out of 5 stars on Netflix. It is a pretty interesting movie with some decent plot points. But it never comes close to tapping into the true potential of the movie. So, a 5 star concept ends up being executed at a 2 star level. Hence the overall 3 star rating. If you are really into Sci-Fi it may be worth checking out. Other than that, you’d probably be best served passing over it.