Wednesday, September 17, 2003
I'm pretty tired, lately. Working my ass off. At least I'm getting props for it, from my superiors. It's sort of depressing to me that their opinion even matters, but that's where I am right now. I'm tired of getting so meta- with everything; I just want to settle in for a bit and chill out. We'll see.
Despite that depressing preamble, things are still going pretty well.
Fear does not exist in my dojo, does it?! NO, SENSEI!
Despite that depressing preamble, things are still going pretty well.
Fear does not exist in my dojo, does it?! NO, SENSEI!
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Looks like some at-least allright movies are coming up. Meg Ryan's going to get naked! I feel pretty naughty saying that, but these pages are no strangers to naughtiness. I'm going to go see "Lost in Translation," which stars Bill Murray (and I defy you to name 2 bad Bill Murray movies) and is directed by Sofia Coppola, who did The Virgin Suicides, which I liked a lot. I'll probably also see Cabin Fever, simply because I like slasher films with lots of T&A.
Also, I'm going to Cali! And I watched The Karate Kid tonight. So I feel alright, even though work sucked today. Time for bed.
Also, I'm going to Cali! And I watched The Karate Kid tonight. So I feel alright, even though work sucked today. Time for bed.
Almost bedtime. But I wanted to take a minute to say that things seem to be going really well at the moment. I'm prolly jinxing myself, or maybe I'm just excited about visiting Peter G. in San Francisco in a few weeks, but I feel like things are looking up. My friends all seem happy, my job is actually not seeming too shitty at the moment (although I definitely need a new one), things with my girl are exxtra cool, and I have a sweet ride to tool around in. Additionally, I started running short distances again, and I feel healthier than I have in months. And I'm cooking again. And A-Rod is US Open Champion. Etc, etc. Of course, there's something else going on that I am not going to talk about, but I'm sure you can figure out what that is. Can't you?
Sunday, September 07, 2003
So, A-Rod did overcome D. Nalbandian last night in 5 sets, and although the Argentine bitched about how several (very close) calls had gone against him, you have to give Roddick credit for playing balls-out when the chips were down.
At 6-7 in the third set tiebreak, down match point on his serve, he smoked an unreturnable missle out wide that clocked in at 136 MPH. No joke: this was probably the best serve I've ever seen. I believe Roddick holds the record for the fastest serve, at 149MPH, but to hit it that hard, he usually has to blast it straight down the T, where the net is shortest. From the ad. court, hitting the ball wide over the high part of the net presents the most difficult angle for a righty, so a 130+ laser is probably the last thing you'd expect to hit. Especially down match point, but that's how huge Andy Roddick is.
I guess I really got into tennis my Jr. and Sr. years of college, when I kept some strange hours and thus was able to catch a lot of tennis on TV, which is generally televised after 11:00pm or in the middle of the day when the working stiffs (now, myself) can't watch. We also had a Nintendo 64 with Mario Tennis at my apartment, which I was totally hooked on. On of my favorite things about that game was its realistic portrayal of different surfaces, including grass, concrete, clay, and more exotic rubberized courts with Mario's grinning face imprinted on them. Here's my list of my Top 2 favorite Mario Tennis court surfaces:
1. Grass. Mostly because I played with Waluigi, the evil character whose eyes glowed purple with Evil after each successful point. Waluigi was a serve-and-volley player and I usually played him lefthanded (another of the game's nice touches), and grass benefits s-&-v players most of all. Why, you ask? Gentle reader, that's because in Mario Tennis, as in life, hard-hit balls skid on grass and are extremely difficult to return. Waluigi, who with his freakish height hit a great serve at bizarre angles inaccessible to shorter (and right-handed) players, used this effect to gain an insurmountable advantage on his serve. Think about it: this 6-6 freak with glowing eyes is going to fire a little pea at you and it's going to skid low under your racket and actually pick up speed when it bounces? I got to the point where I was pretty hard to beat on grass with Waluigi.
2. Rubber. There was this blue rubber surface in the game that bounced high but was reallyfast, as in strong servers really had an unfair advantage on this court. I liked fast points, but the high bounce gave things an element of unpredictability that I quite enjoyed. Also, if you were using Mario, the high bounce sometimes allowed you to hit overheads from the baseline, which was like getting to serve in the middle of a point. Good times. I miss Mario Tennis.
At 6-7 in the third set tiebreak, down match point on his serve, he smoked an unreturnable missle out wide that clocked in at 136 MPH. No joke: this was probably the best serve I've ever seen. I believe Roddick holds the record for the fastest serve, at 149MPH, but to hit it that hard, he usually has to blast it straight down the T, where the net is shortest. From the ad. court, hitting the ball wide over the high part of the net presents the most difficult angle for a righty, so a 130+ laser is probably the last thing you'd expect to hit. Especially down match point, but that's how huge Andy Roddick is.
I guess I really got into tennis my Jr. and Sr. years of college, when I kept some strange hours and thus was able to catch a lot of tennis on TV, which is generally televised after 11:00pm or in the middle of the day when the working stiffs (now, myself) can't watch. We also had a Nintendo 64 with Mario Tennis at my apartment, which I was totally hooked on. On of my favorite things about that game was its realistic portrayal of different surfaces, including grass, concrete, clay, and more exotic rubberized courts with Mario's grinning face imprinted on them. Here's my list of my Top 2 favorite Mario Tennis court surfaces:
1. Grass. Mostly because I played with Waluigi, the evil character whose eyes glowed purple with Evil after each successful point. Waluigi was a serve-and-volley player and I usually played him lefthanded (another of the game's nice touches), and grass benefits s-&-v players most of all. Why, you ask? Gentle reader, that's because in Mario Tennis, as in life, hard-hit balls skid on grass and are extremely difficult to return. Waluigi, who with his freakish height hit a great serve at bizarre angles inaccessible to shorter (and right-handed) players, used this effect to gain an insurmountable advantage on his serve. Think about it: this 6-6 freak with glowing eyes is going to fire a little pea at you and it's going to skid low under your racket and actually pick up speed when it bounces? I got to the point where I was pretty hard to beat on grass with Waluigi.
2. Rubber. There was this blue rubber surface in the game that bounced high but was reallyfast, as in strong servers really had an unfair advantage on this court. I liked fast points, but the high bounce gave things an element of unpredictability that I quite enjoyed. Also, if you were using Mario, the high bounce sometimes allowed you to hit overheads from the baseline, which was like getting to serve in the middle of a point. Good times. I miss Mario Tennis.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
The dust settles on another week, and Saturday finds my man Andy Roddick down 2 sets to 1 at the US Open to...to whom? To David Nalbandian? One of the weird things about men's tennis is the fact that, for every hyped American like A-Rod--who is indeed realizing his unbelievable potential this summer--there are guys named David Nalbandian or Juan-Carlos Ferrero who are pretty much just as good. Casual tennis fans might not even recognize the name of Roger Federer, who was this year's Wimbledon champion and is probably the best player in the world at the moment (he lost in the quarterfinals at the Open).
I've iterated before, in other forums, that I really enjoy tennis as a spectator sport, and I guess it's time for this year's installment. A lot of what I enjoy about tennis is, believe it or not, mathematical, as in: tennis is a game of math. There's the obvious geometry of the game, but there's also a lot in the way of probability that I find more subtlely enjoyable. As David Foster Wallace has written, tennis is a game of expanding possibilities, in which every shot gives rise to N outcomes, and every return presents N-squared more. I find no other game that I watch regularly harder to predict--watching baseball or football, savvy viewers can usually have a sense of what's going to happen before or as it happens. I've watched quite a bit of tennis, and I still can't regularly tell you where the players are going to hit the ball, or even what shot is a good shot until it's thudding into the backdrop at 90+MPH. This makes for occasionally frustrating viewing, but it also means that, at least for me, tennis is very exciting to watch indeed.
I also have this thing where I enjoy the effect the different surfaces have on who is favored to win. Unlike in team sports, there is no home field advantage in tennis, but each surface has a tremendous impact on the play of a match, and certain players have the ability to use certain surfaces to their advantage. I could write a lot more here, and maybe one day I will, but during the 5th set of a U.S. Open semifinal (on DecoTurf II, naturally the most democratic of surfaces), I have better things to do. A-Rod's now in at 4-3 and double break with a look at a second serve. He's a young man with a bright future ahead of him.
I've iterated before, in other forums, that I really enjoy tennis as a spectator sport, and I guess it's time for this year's installment. A lot of what I enjoy about tennis is, believe it or not, mathematical, as in: tennis is a game of math. There's the obvious geometry of the game, but there's also a lot in the way of probability that I find more subtlely enjoyable. As David Foster Wallace has written, tennis is a game of expanding possibilities, in which every shot gives rise to N outcomes, and every return presents N-squared more. I find no other game that I watch regularly harder to predict--watching baseball or football, savvy viewers can usually have a sense of what's going to happen before or as it happens. I've watched quite a bit of tennis, and I still can't regularly tell you where the players are going to hit the ball, or even what shot is a good shot until it's thudding into the backdrop at 90+MPH. This makes for occasionally frustrating viewing, but it also means that, at least for me, tennis is very exciting to watch indeed.
I also have this thing where I enjoy the effect the different surfaces have on who is favored to win. Unlike in team sports, there is no home field advantage in tennis, but each surface has a tremendous impact on the play of a match, and certain players have the ability to use certain surfaces to their advantage. I could write a lot more here, and maybe one day I will, but during the 5th set of a U.S. Open semifinal (on DecoTurf II, naturally the most democratic of surfaces), I have better things to do. A-Rod's now in at 4-3 and double break with a look at a second serve. He's a young man with a bright future ahead of him.
