This Is Not News

Nothing bothers me more than reading something and not feeling like I’ve learned anything at the end. I just had that experience with Phil Sheridan’s latest column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. To set up: The Eagles and the Phillies are the two most popular professional sports teams in Philadelphia. Five years ago, no one would suggest that the Phillies were in the same class as the Eagles, in terms of results or popularity. Four division titles and one world championship for the Phillies later, the two teams are on a much more even footing. Scuttlebutt around town is that the Eagles’ management is not happy about this and that the Phillies’ management is not broken up about the Eagles’ unhappiness.

So this simmering tension somehow became a topic of discussion because Eagles president Joe Banner used the Boston Red Sox as an example of a baseball team that aggressively pursues excellence as opposed to the hometown team. So Sheridan tried to re-examine the apparent tension between the two teams and argue that it is a good thing because it motivates each team to try to one-up the other. It’s an interesting premise; I’m not sure I buy it, because I think both teams have ample internal pressure for success. But I could be persuaded by a good argument. Sheridan doesn’t come anywhere close to providing one.

Look at this passage:

To say this was an Eagles town at that point would be an understatement. They were the focus of most of the enthusiasm, passion, controversy, and criticism while the Phillies, a decade removed from their most recent postseason appearance, were struggling for a foothold.

They found it, and there’s little doubt the Eagles’ towering popularity was a motivating factor. Where a number of baseball teams settle for the fresh revenues provided by new ballparks, the Phillies seized their moment. As the Citizens Bank Park presses began printing millions of new dollars, the Phillies reinvested in their team.

The alternative was a return to irrelevance when the novelty of the new ballpark wore off. Ask the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose attendance in gorgeous PNC Park plummeted with the team’s winning percentage. In a market dominated by the Steelers, who have accomplished more than the Eagles in the same time frame, the bar is very high.

Look at that second paragraph. “There’s little doubt the Eagles’ towering popularity was a motivating factor” in the Phillies’ decision to increase their payroll and try to win more games? Why? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the quote from a Phillies official saying, “Yeah, we were thinking of keeping the payroll down, but we just couldn’t do it because those Eagles are so darned popular.” There is none.

In fact, there’s evidence for a competing theory right in the excerpt. Teams that don’t succeed suffer from lower attendance and lower revenues. That would be true if the Eagles were lousy or if they won six straight Super Bowls. The comparison to the Pirates looks like it’s evidence in support of Sheridan’s theory because Pittsburgh also has a successful NFL team, but he never does the work to make the information support his theory over competing theories.

OK, so the conclusion that the Phillies were motivated by the Eagles, and said motivation led to their championship, is dubious. What about the idea that the resentment is good for the Eagles? Look at this passage:

But if the Phillies’ rise in popularity, as measured by sellouts and merchandise sales and percentage of local media attention, has annoyed anyone over at NovaCare, and if that annoyance helped drive the Eagles’ aggressive approach to this offseason, how is that a bad thing?

If one thing caused a second thing, and if that second thing caused a third thing, then we should be happy because the third thing is a good thing. But there’s no evidence that the first thing caused the second, or that the second caused the third. So what was the point of the argument?
You may be wondering why I’m spending this much time analyzing a sports column. Well, given the amount of time people spending reading, thinking and arguing about sports, it’s one of the ways that we practice critical thinking without realizing we do it. If we don’t get in the habit of calling out sloppy thinking there, we probably won’t do it when it comes to other topics, either.

Friends of ours recently introduced us to the board game Ticket to Ride, and we liked it so much we immediately bought a copy. In the game, players must gather resources in order to build train lines connecting various cities. The longer and more difficult to build your route is, the more points you accumulate. Each game takes about an hour, and there’s a good level of complexity and planning required. The game has been successful enough that there are numerous sequels and expansions, and I may pick up a copy of the Europe-based game to help my students visualize European geography.

In the course of looking up info about the game series, I found a Wikipedia entry for German-style board games. I had no idea that the nation had lent its name to an entire style of board games, but apparently they like themselves a lot of board games in Germany, with enough German-speaking board game critics available to award a prestigious prize called the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). It’s interesting to read the Wikipedia entry explain what makes a German-style board game different than other board games, and it’s also interesting to realize that as much as I like to play board games, there are people who take them far more seriously than I do. This passage probably explains why I’ve had more success getting my family to play Ticket to Ride than I have with other games:

In contrast to games such as Risk or Monopoly, in which a close game can extend indefinitely, German-style games usually have a mechanism to stop the game within its stated playing time.

So if the German approach creates games I can play with my family without needing to take a week off from work, all I can say is, Danke.

I may be repeating myself here. If so, consider it an added bit of meta-commentary, because I think the time is right for this conversation again.

In the last ten to twenty years, the reboot has joined the remake as a source for new programming. Serialized stories, from TV shows to movie series to comic books, have had their story continuity restarted, sometimes but not always with some kind of link to what has gone before. Examples include the Star Trek movie from 2009, the Battlestar Galactica series that aired on Syfy, Daniel Craig’s James Bond films, and every third week of DC Comics publishing. Many of these stories are well-received, but there is also a certain stigma attached – a reboot is considered a sign of laziness, or inability to come up with something new. I wonder if that stigma is deserved.

This came to a head in the last few weeks because of two events. A couple of months ago, DC announced that they would restart all of their comics from new issue #1s in September. Many, but not all, of the previously-published plot points would be wiped from the storylines. And then J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the cult-favorite SF series Babylon 5, announced that he had been in negotiations with Warner Brothers to reboot that show along the lines of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The premise would be kept, everything else would be up for grabs. Actors from the original series might be used, but perhaps they would play new roles.

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I am late to the party here, I know. The Internet chorus rendered its verdict on Green Lantern at the same time that audiences did, the former with an abundance of snark and the latter with an abundance of not-being-in-the-theater. But after 30 years as a DC fanboy, I think I have reached a breaking point, so I have some venting to do.

Plus, if we’re lucky, my brother will show up to share his thoughts, and that’s some prime entertainment value right there.

Here’s the thing about Green Lantern. They gave me just enough get-my-geek-on moments that I could imagine what an awesome Green Lantern movie would look like. And then they absolutely failed to deliver that awesome Green Lantern movie in any way. Pattie will tell you I spent two weeks before the movie came out watching and re-watching the trailers. There are about five to ten minutes where test pilot Hal Jordan is on the planet Oa, meeting aliens and making swords and shields out of green energy. DC and Warner Brothers made sure everyone say those ten minutes, because those ten minutes are pretty cool. One of the aliens is even named Tomar Re. (Tomar . . . Thomer . . . never mind.) The problem is that they forgot to save much equally-cool stuff for the actual movie. Instead, they showed an almost uncanny knack for making bad decisions at every opportunity.
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I finally got around to watching Iron Man over the weekend, and I liked it a lot. Definitely the best superhero origin movie I can remember, and considering how much of the movie Robert Downey, Jr. has to spend talking to himself, that’s pretty impressive. But there has been something nagging at me since I finished the movie and started looking at some of the deleted scenes: there’s a really ugly attitude toward women present. I know Tony Stark has the whole playboy lifestyle, but we’re going beyond a guy who dates a lot of women to a guy who employs flight attendants whose job appears to be to double as strippers who are willing to sleep with Stark and anyone he’s flying on his jet. And almost every woman in the movie appears prepared to drop whatever they’re doing to hop into bed with Stark. Even the reporter who antagonizes Tony, confronts him with evidence of his company’s wrongdoing, and questions his cover story sleeps with him. And after she does, she gets catty with Pepper Potts – seemingly the only woman who has avoided sleeping with Tony – and Pepper returns the favor. My sense is that this is all supposed to be a joke – that Tony is an irresponsible hedonist ramped up to the nth degree and the movie wants to showcase that excess. But I can’t help but be a little worried about people who don’t pick up on the joke, or who think Tony has it right in the first place.

Last night I was doing some searches for music – mostly because I was trying to psych myself up to buy The National’s album Boxer (I did) and because I wanted to see if Matthew Sweet’s new album was as disappointing as his last one (it’s not, but that doesn’t mean it rises to the level of “good,” unfortunately). But while I was at it, I decided to check if The Jayhawks’ Rainy Day Music was back in print – and lo and behold, it’s been reissued. One dollar later, “Save It for a Rainy Day” is in my iTunes library, and the sun is shining a little bit brighter, metaphorically speaking.

I have to say I was pretty disappointed reading this interview with Aaron Sorkin on GQ’s site. Sorkin’s work on The West Wing was one of the big pushes that motivated me to start Not News. And even when I lost interest in that show, and when Studio 60 turned into a major disappointment, I thought fairly highly of the guy for the idealism he poured into his work. But as it turns out, not only did he try to undermine the bargaining position of his union during the writer’s strike, he somehow seems proud of that and argues that it was the right thing to do. I don’t know if that’s poor judgment or pure selfishness, but geez, either way it’s disappointing.

I still owe the blog a couple of essays on my overall thoughts about the Obama campaign, but I gotta get my two cents in on the New Yorker cover. The idea of the cover is supposedly to satire the various e-mail smears and rumor-attacks directed at both Barack and Michelle Obama and point out how ridiculous they are. And certainly I don’t think anyone who gives serious thought to the cover thinks it’s a literal depiction of anything that goes on in the Obama home. But the thing that gets me is, satire usually exaggerates the thing that it’s mocking. It’s almost the entire stock in trade of editorial cartoons. And there’s nothing in the cover image that exaggerates or distorts the people who spread/believe these rumors. There’s just a ridiculous caricature of the Obamas. So why wouldn’t a reasonable person believe that the purpose of all the exaggerated satire is to mock the Obamas and thus to support the underlying claims of those smears? It’s not simply the use of racially charged imagery that makes this a bad cover – it’s the poor design that left out the intended target.

Matthew Sweet has updated his web site and announced a release date for Sunshine Lies, his next album. Two tracks can be sampled at the web site, and more are available at his myspace site. So far I’m very partial to Byrdgirl, which is one song more attached than I became to his last album.

Joie Calio from Dada released three tracks to mp3.com back in 2001 from a project that, at the time, he was calling Candy Apple Black. Those sessions form the basis of Happiness in Hell, an album released under the band name X Levitation Cult. The three mp3.com tracks are on the album, with different mixes that I can’t quite get used to after six-plus years. But the rest of the album is really good power-pop.

R.E.M.’s show at the Mann Center – which included Eddie Vedder guesting on Begin the Begin and Johnny Marr on Fall on Me – is easily my favorite of the five performances I’ve seen. I was pretty impressed with opening act The National as well, but I’m trying to figure out if their studio recordings have the same vibe that appealed to me live.

Roughly a week into listening to the new REM album, Accelerate, I realized I’m having fun being an REM fan, and that hasn’t been true in a while. I’ve been walking around with my iPod, singing along with many of the tracks and probably scaring passersby. I’ve been recording TV appearances and reading reviews, and feeling downright giddy about the upcoming tour. And I don’t want to be guilty of projection, but I think part of my fun is feeling like the band is having fun. I remember watching the documentary about the Vote for Change concerts back in 2004, where REM was playing with Bruce Springsteen right around the time that Around the Sun came out. There’s a bit backstage where Michael Stipe is looking at some of the packaging for the special edition version of the CD, and he gives a copy of the album to Springsteen. But there’s a bit where he shows the album to Peter Buck, and Buck seems pretty much disinterested, and almost glum. Given what I’ve read about the band’s attitude at that time, disinterested and glum don’t seem so off the mark. This time around, Buck’s bantering with Stephen Colbert and summing up the lessons of 2004 as “Make a better record” on the Today show.

It’s a nice feeling, is what I’m saying. But if Stipe is giving interviews in 2011 talking about how the band has finally addressed its communications problems, you’re probably gonna be seeing a story on the evening news about a lunatic philosophy professor running through the streets mumbling incoherently. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.