Divorce & Baseball

If you and your wife own a baseball team worth $421 million, and you get a divorce .... just exactly how do you split up that asset? As Frank and Jamie McCourt, owners of the LA Dodgers, are finding out, it depends on how you raised the money to buy the team in the first place:

Even among the cadre of super-wealthy folks, it's just not that easy to drum up $421 million in cash. The McCourts didn't simply hand News Corp. a check drawn on the family's WaMu account. The process behind financing this purchase is especially interesting in the McCourt case, and is particularly relevant for the upcoming battle for the Dodgers.

Just About The Coolest Thing I've Ever Seen In My Entire Freaking Life

Okay, maybe not, because we all know I speak in hyperbole a lot. But check this out:

Given information commonly available online about many games — the box score and the play-by-play — the system automatically generates the text of a story about that game that captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key plays and key players. The story includes an appropriate headline and a photo of the most important player in the game.

Yes, that's right. Input: stats & plays from a baseball game. Output: AP-style story.

So awesome.

Photo jacked from Joe Y Jiang.

One More ... Non-TW though

This one's baseball related. I laughed my ass off when reading through it :-)

"I wish he'd have a little faith in me," [Jeremy] Guthrie said. "I don't like being picked up the night before my start and then simply dropped the next day. It wears on you as a player. And now I have to explain myself to my kids when they read in the papers that their daddy is a 'shit-for-brains asshole who can't even get five strikeouts when that's all we needed to win the category.'"

Cloud Strife, Cat Poop, and College Baseball

I'm downloading Final Fantasy VII for the PS3 right now. That game consumed my life when it came out in ... um ... I guess it was 1998 or so. I remember that it was released for the PC using the GLIDE API, which meant you could only play it in 3D with 3Dfx video cards (luckily I had one). Years later I'd try to reinstall and play it, only to be appalled at the software rendering (I had an ATI video card then -- Direct3D/OpenGL only). Stupid proprietary APIs -- everybody loses. Anyway, I know what I'm doing this weekend :-)

Texas lost to LSU last night ... 11-4. Losses are bad, but they are worse when you give up five runs in an inning on the back of a walk, two HBPs, and an error. That's just sloppy baseball. Maybe it was nerves? Whenever I watch a sidearm left-handed pitcher throw to a left-handed batter, I get nervous because, due to the camera angle over the pitcher's right shoulder, it seems the pitcher is throwing the ball behind the batter and it's going to hit him. And yeah that happened twice last night, haha.

The toilet training of the cat is going quite well. I was at the stage where the litter box was raised up high on a series of stacked books. That worked nicely until the books got above the level of the toilet -- then the stack became too flimsy to hold Bill, who apparently is a violent pooper. (Great mental image, ya'll!) Nah, actually it's a cat's instinct to cover up his mess, so after he pinches a loaf he will scoop litter over it to cover it up. When he does this, he rocks the litter box back and forth, so because the books are a) stacked high and b) not sturdy, the litter box sometimes falls over. This is bad because it scares him and teaches him that pooping = scariness, which we certainly don't want. Can you imagine if every time you went to cop a squat, someone jumped out and scared you? I imagine that's what this is like for him.



Instead of finding a more sturdy base, I accelerated his training by putting the litter box on top of the toilet seat (the lid is up), which, now that I write it out, is actually finding a more sturdy base :-) He can now jump from the side of the bath tub right into the box and go about his business. I came home from work yesterday and found some pee in there, which means he can get up there and take a leak by himself. Wonderful!

I'm going to leave this like it is for the next couple of days. Since I have off work on July 2nd-4th, I think that on July 1st I'll switch him to a metal bowl inside the toilet. I'm waiting for my off days because I need to be around to teach him how to squat over the bowl and to prevent him from tracking poo all over the house. I don't mind chilling by the bathroom all day as long as I've got Wifi :-)

Exciting times! I'll share pictures when I'm done :-)

Tidbits

Sean West has exactly the attitude I would have if I were a pitcher:

""I try to throw a no-hitter every start," West said. "If a hit comes up, I try to throw a one-hitter. If two hits come up, I try to throw a two-hitter, and so on."

Yeah, I'm a perfectionist. But I accept that reality is not always perfect.

* * *

One of my favorite bloggers/writers (is there a difference?) is Joe Posnanski. He is a long-time Kansas City Royals beat reporter for the Kansas City Star. I voraciously read his blog (when I have the time; his posts are usually quite long) and have been doing so for over a year now. He is a phenomenal writer; insightful, interesting, intelligent and thought-provoking. He crafts beautiful prose and tells wonderful stories on his blog. I have recommended his blog to a couple friends of mine who also enjoy baseball.

What's interesting though is that I own his book and read it, and I really don't like it. The subject is Buck O'Neil, a 95-year old baseball enthusiast and former Negro Leagues player who was inexplicably passed over for induction into the Hall of Fame induction right before his death. Perhaps because of the subject matter, it feels manufactured and overly sentimental; although I know it was crafted with love, it feels like a "human interest story" on the evening news. The writing is a lot more clipped and formal; one of the things I love about Joe's blog is that he goes off on random tangents. You can really tell he is a stream-of-consciousness writer (gee -- wonder why I might identify with that trait), and I suppose that gets lost when you add an editor and publishing house into the equation. In the book it felt like he was trying too hard to tell a story. I'd rather him just extemporaneously tell it, and I get that on his blog.

He's got another book coming out in September; I will buy it because I love Joe and the subject (The 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds, nicknamed "The Big Red Machine" for their overpowering style of play and, um, the color of their uniforms), but I'm not expecting great things.

Anyway, I bring up Joe because of a blog post he made recently. In it, he extols the value of the walk as a very underrated offensive weapon a team has at its disposal. This is nothing new; he constantly writes about how the Royals players don't walk at all and how that hurts them in the win column. (In fact, that is the subject of his blog post.)

I agree with Joe completely; lots of fans and analysts seemingly dislike the walk because it doesn't advance a runner (unless there's a force at the lead base), and, well, there's no action -- no thwack of the bat, no heart-stopping rush to beat the throw to first, etc. But I think the walk is nothing to be sneezed at.

In the blog post Joe puts together a table to analyze how often teams win when they don't walk. It's easy to find this data with sites like BBRef and Retrosheet around to catalog every pitch of every game played since 1958 (I'm not joking; this is literally what they do. I often think baseball should be divided into two eras: BR (before Retrosheet) and AR (after Retrosheet)) and offer it to you sliced any way you want it. So Joe puts together the table and finds out that as the number of walks a team gets goes up, its winning percentage (e.g. the % of times it won that particular game) goes up. If a team doesn't walk at all in a game, it wins the game 30% of the time. If a team walks six times in a game, it wins the game 64% of the time. And so on.

So clearly if you walk a lot you have a better chance of winning a game -- right? Unfortunately, the real answer is "I dunno." Joe falls victim to the ol' correlation vs. causation trap. He has shown that lots of walks and a high winning percentage appear together pretty consistently (he ran the study over 5 years' worth of games and noticed no wild swings in the numbers) -- which is good to know, and I think intuitively it makes sense that the more times you get on base (via a walk, hit, whatever) the better chance you have to win that game. This is, after all, one of the premises underlying Moneyball (sheesh I still can't believe there's going to be a movie about that). But although he never claims to have found causation, he sort of leaves the issue twisting in the wind. I infer he meant to imply causation because the entire theme of his post is how great walks are -- so to me he is starting the post with an agenda and then finding data to support it.

I say all this not to denigrate Joe. He's an amazing writer and a really smart guy. I just had to vent a bit. It's so hard to get past that CvC trap!! I would have thought he would have acknowledged it in the post.

Talking about correlation and causation makes me think of this beautiful xkcd comic:

Baseball is Life, Life is Baseball

So I went to the doctor's today to get the results of my physical. Nothing was wrong, they just think everyone should have one every year or so. As we were going over my numbers, it struck me as amusing how similar the numerical analysis of peoples' health is to the numerical analysis of baseball players. You know, like, "Your LDL cholesterol is high, take some medicine" is kind of like saying "Your WHIP is too high, spend some time with the pitching coach."

We could each have trading cards with our vital stats, tracked from year to year, listed on the back. "Ooh, 2007 was a bad year for his white blood cell count, but he rebounded with a strong showing in 2008. Looks to be a lock for 9, maybe 10,000 cells per microliter in 2009 and beyond." The graph of my EKG could have been the graph of my BB/K ratio (exemplified here, for illustrative purposes only, by Barry Bonds's):

Hey, stranger things have happened.

Jeezum Crow, "Moneyball" is Being Made into a Movie?

How did I not hear about this? Why did none of you tell me? :-)

For those of you who aren't as into baseball as I am, Moneyball is a 2003 book by Michael Lewis that chronicles the baseball draft through the eyes of Billy Beane, the general manager for the Oakland A's. It attempts to explain why the Oakland A's were so successful in the late 90s and early 2000s despite having a payroll the size of a peanut (especially compared to teams like the Yankees and the Mets). It's a great read, and what's even better about it is that it ended up causing such huge controversies in the baseball world. It really shined a light on sabermetrics, which now is like one of the big wedge issues that divide baseball people. Sometimes it seems like you're either familiar with VORP, Win Shares, DIPS, OPS, and so on -- or you're stuck using antiquated measurements like AVG and RBI to measure a player's worth. And each side thinks the other is crazy. Just like so many other things in life :-)

Anyway, I'm not convinced the book will make a great movie, because it has no real plot. Soderbergh even says flat-out, "It needs a gimmick." That's not exactly a promising sign. But Soderbergh is a great director, so I'm really curious to see what he can do with it, and what kind of movie it ends up being.

Baseball is Hard

So I bought a copy of MLB 09 The Show for my PS3. Ever since, I've been role-playing as the rookie pitcher Ryan Schmageki. I started in the Orioles' AA organization as a reliever and, after a couple promotions (first to AAA starter, then MLB reliever, now MLB starter) am now pitching for the Athletics. I've got a 93 mph fastball, an 82 mph change-up, and an 87 mph sinker. One of these days, I hope to learn how to throw a curveball.

In a year and some change in the majors, my statistics are, well, they're okay. My ERA is a tad high, over 4.50 I believe. (In 2008, the MLB average team ERA was 4.33). My WHIP is 1.2 something, which I don't think is terrible (2008 average: 1.39). My K/BB ratio is excellent though -- 72/9, or 8 strikeouts per walk. That is pretty damn amazing. In 2008, the MLB average was 2.01 strikeouts per walk.


The game is really really difficult, just like real baseball :-) As you pitch, you have control over two things: the strength of the throw and the point during your delivery at which you release the ball. These two things, along with your energy level, confidence in a given situation, and the wind, will influence the speed and location of your pitch. Each pitch also has numerical ratings in velocity, control, and movement -- you earn points to spend on improving these ratings over time. (This simulates training.) So that's pretty realistic. The better you do in a game, the more points you have to spend. And the game gives you certain in-game goals (strike out a certain hitter, induce a ground-out) and overall goals (increase your stamina rating, give up fewer than 20 hits in the next 7 games, etc.) that earn you even more points -- but count against you when you fail.

The problem is, the game's UI doesn't provide many clues as to how to throw the ball. After about a full season in the majors, I have yet to figure out how to locate my fastball. I've spent a ton of points in fastball control (which is how close your pitch lands to the target you choose) and still can't paint the outside corner (e.g., throw pitches that catch just a little bit of the plate for a strike). I don't walk many batters, but recently I've been going into lots of 3-ball counts, which drives up my pitch count, which decreases my energy level and increases the chance my computer-simulated manager will pull me from the game. I've googled for tips on pitching in the game, but nothing comes up. And the game doesn't have an in-game pitching practice mode. I keep trying to figure out how to throw pitches that land where I want (this combination of inputs produces this result), but to no avail. I can't tell if it's the game's fault or mine.

I also give up lots of bloop singles down the middle. It's incredibly frustrating to give up 2 of these to start and inning; little dinky hits that raise your WHIP (walks+hits per inning pitched) stat. It's enough to make me think it's just a quirk of the game's UI. No one hits that many through-the-box singles in real life. And I seem to get hit for a lot of home runs, too. Mind you, it's usually a good hitter -- Travis Hafner or Miguel Cabrera -- but sometimes it's Ichiro or Kenji Johjima. How can I go from 8 IP, 1 ER against the Yankees to 7 IP, 4 ER against the Mariners? Then back to 8 IP, 0 ER against the Red Sox?!

Because baseball is freaking hard and unpredictable, and this game gives you a really great sense of that, that's why. In the game, I'm a young (19-year-old) pitcher struggling with pitch location and giving up way too many hits. Players typically peak around 28 (maybe sometime in May if I keep playing the rate I do, haha), so hopefully by then I will get better. But for now, to keep myself from throwing the controller through my nice fancy HDTV when I give up a grand slam with the game tied, I'll just reduce the difficulty level. Last night I got really pissed off at it and decided to quit; but upon the light of day I think I'll soldier on. I wish there was an option to plead with your manager for a demotion. I need to go back to AAA to build up some more training points! There's a famous story about Willie Mays asking his manager to bench him because he wasn't performing very well ...

I could never be a baseball player. They say good baseball players have a short memory. You have to treat every batter the same, regardless if you just gave up a big fly or if you just struck a guy out. If you get hammered for 8 runs in one game, during the next game you've got to pitch like it's a new day. You can't have your failures hanging over your head. I am too much of a perfectionist. I get frustrated when I give up a run. But after all, it's not like Randy Johnson or Pedro Martinez never gave one up. And they're two of the greatest pitchers ever.

Gawl dang I love me some baseball.

Tim Lincecum's Tattoo

Tim Lincecum is a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. In the 2008 season, he won the NL Cy Young award. He's also the poster boy for MLB 2K9, the commercials for which feature a shot of the tattoo on the back of his neck:

Because my eyes are drawn to such things now, I quickly recognized that as the Chinese character 男 (nan2) which means, simply, "man" or "male". It's what bathroom doors in China are labeled with (opposite 女 for female).

See, I'm not the only one ... ;-)

Check out my new blog here, where I talk more about baseball & technology and have some pictures also!.

Fidel Castro Chimes in on the World Baseball Classic

Ever get the feeling your boss is looking over your shoulder while you work?

Or ... maybe watching you on TV and second-guessing every move you make?

That's certainly the case if you're on Cuba's national baseball team these days.

Reason Number 7,593 I am a Baltimore Orioles Fan

We've been playing since 2005 with a team logo that features a fucking UPSIDE-DOWN AND BACKWARDS APOSTROPHE.

Somewhere far away, a technical writer is crying.

This small but telling example of illiteracy (and make no mistake, that’s exactly what it is) extends to Baltimore’s alternate cap, BP cap, “portion of the proceeds” cap, and other gear. It’s been part of the team’s official graphics program since 2005, and I’m embarrassed not to have noticed it until now.

Actually that technical writer isn't "far away" so much as "right here typing this blog post". I mean c'mon, even the Oakland Athletics get it right!

Ya'll better snap up as much priceless gear as possible, before the error gets fixed and the supplies dry up.

Quick O's Update

Smart moves by the O's this weekend. I was at a house party Saturday night and happened to catch a scrolling ticker on ESPN that said we signed Markakis to a 6-year deal. (Upon looking more today, the deal isn't official yet.) And I saw today we got Felix Pie (I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced Pee-Yay), a player who was overshadowed in Chicago but will have a chance to shine in a great outfield that also includes Markakis and Adam Jones. And we only had to give up one of our crappy interchangeable pitchers. (The O's have a surplus of them.) Young outfielders are more of a sure thing than young pitchers are. This also means that our entire outfield is 25 years old or younger, which makes me feel a bit old ;-)

Andy MacPhail is doing a great job so far. I'm so happy we traded Bedard and Tejada and didn't sign Teixeira. Now we just need Peter Angelos to sell the team to Cal Ripken Jr. and we'll be all set!

Interlude: Voting & Baseball (and Pizza)

 (We interrupt this stream of Tibet-related posts to bring you news of how to be American while overseas. I'll return to the pictures momentarily ...

So many things are new to me in China, and absentee balloting is one of them. Thankfully though my 100% offical 2008 Election ballot is on the way to the early voting clerk in Austin TX. That's right -- I voted like 3 weeks early. So if it turns out that one of my chosen candidates is, like, a child-murderer, then, well, I'm kinda screwed. I wonder if you can rescind an early vote? (Probably not -- it's probably like early admission to colleges, where if you get accepted then you have to attend. Speaking of which, I've always wondered how they enforce that, and what if any penalties a school will levy if you back out.)

There's a nearby FedEx branch that participates in a program called Express Your Vote, which any American citizen can Express-Mail (hah!) their vote to the US for free. So that's what I did.

My Chinese colleagues are fascinated by the voting process and we've talked a lot about it. I showed them the ballot -- most of them asked me who the hell Bob Barr was and what the "Write-In" blank was for. Good times. They were also unaware of the congressional elections going on and the various local Austin elections I am allowed to vote in, so I filled them in on all that. (Luckily no one asked me what a county tax-assessor is. I would have said "Um, the person who does something with driver's licenses?") They asked me how my identity is verified when I'm overseas and the possibilities of switching your vote to count for another state to try and game the system. Fun.

The time zone differences mean that I'll be at work on Wednesday morning while the election night results are being tallied. I bet that some places over here will broadcast the results-tallying live in the way that sports bars broadcast major American sporting events at the odd hours required by the time zone differences.

Speaking of which, so far I've managed to see Games 1, 2, and 6 (ugh, sad that even had to be necessary) of the ALCS via the magic of satellite TV. However it means I haven't been getting much sleep on the weekends, because the games air at like 8 AM over here. For Game 1, Dan and I headed out to a sports bar in Puxi and ate what turned out to be a decent, but not great, attempt at a Western breakfast. (Neither country can get the other's food right.) There's something weird about being in a bar at 8 AM though, but hey, I'm not drinking or anything. 

The next day Dan found out he gets the games on his satellite TV, and since he lives really close to me, that's how we watched Games 2 and 6. It's even better because he's rooting for the Sox and I'm rooting for the Rays -- although only so I'll have a reason to care about the at-bats. My heart lies with the O's. Regardless of who makes it to the Series, I'll probably root for the Phillies. Not sure though.

After watching Game 2 last Sunday, Dan and I headed to a place called Bubba's out in northwest Shanghai. Bubba's is a BBQ joint run by a Texan, an Austinite no less. They have good old-fashioned BBQ to eat and a nice little sports bar thing going on, a hearty slice of America right in the middle of China. It's fun. They also re-broadcast sports games, so last Sunday I saw UT kick OU's ass in the most recent Red River Rivalry ("Shootout" was such a better noun.) I'm not the world's biggest UT or college football fan, but I make my non-China home in Austin so the game was interesting enough. 

They have chili cook-offs there every year too, which is pretty great. I hope that people add spices from Sichuan and Hunan. And they sell T-shirts that say "Bubba's: A Few Miles West of Austin" :-) So, so true.

Another bit on American/Chinese stuff: I ordered a pizza last week with sausage and green peppers. Outside of ham & pineapple, those probably are my favorite pizza toppings.

So the pizza comes, and it's got, like, a few strands of green pepper slices on it. Fine. But the killer was that it didn't have sausage on it. It had friggin hot dog slices. Inexcusable. I don't know if that's, like, the common way to translate "sausage". Maybe I'll try again next week and see if I get the same thing, haha.

The Zen of Dusty Baker

"Everybody knows [Micah Owings] can hit," Reds manager Dusty Baker said. "If anybody knows he can hit, they know he can hit."

-ESPN

Let me be the first to say: What??

In other news, the Orioles have mathematically guaranteed their 11th straight losing season. They will finish last place in the AL East for the first time since 1988. Damn you for getting good all of a sudden, Rays.

I was really shocked to find out that David Foster Wallace committed suicide. On a complete whim back in April, I ended up purchasing his book Consider the Lobster at Garden Books in Shanghai. I specifically remember reading the titular essay while sitting on a bench at Fuxing Park, and another one in which he reviews a dictionary (wow, nerdness alert), while waiting to pick my parents up at Pudong Airport. I was hooked instantly and ended up buying another book of his, well, one that he edited, anyway.

Just got back from a fun little trip to Wuxie and Shaoxing. Pics are going up as we speak -- err, as I type. If you are wondering where your socks are made, I would bet that Zhuji (the city near Wuxie) is the answer, as I saw numerous sock factories along the road. That makes for some gripping tourism, I assure you.

Congratulations Mark!!

Non-China related: My friend Kelly's brother Mark plays for the Houston Astros' AAA team, the Round Rock Express.  Last night he got called up to The Show and jacked a home run on the first pitch he saw! I did a double-take when I saw his name mentioned on BLS.

Trades

Internally, I'm not the best person in the world in dealing with change. I could cite numerous examples, but we'll leave it at that.

So that's why it's freaky to see Manny Ramirez in a Dodger uniform, Ken Griffey Jr. in a White Sox uniform, Pudge in a Yankees uniform, and Jason Bay in a Red Sox uniform. Mark Teixeira in an Angels uniform is a little easier to take, as he just joined the Braves last year. The CC and Rich Harden trades were a little easier still, since I don't pay attention to the Indians or A's that much.

MLB, you are upsetting my consistently-ordered and neatly-arranged universe. Thankfully, for the health of not only my sanity but also the team, the O's did not trade Markakis or Roberts.

::Needs Title::

Saturday afternoon I booked my hotel in Beijing. I'm not sure if I mentioned it on here, but the MIDI Festival that I was looking forward to was postponed. My friends were unable to get train tickets anyway, so it will be a Ryry solo adventure in the capital of China.

Along with the hotel I booked a tour of the Great Wall at the Simatai section. I knew absolutely nothing about which section of the GW is the "best", but Tim said it's one of the less tourist-y sections, so that's good. It's also one of the sections that isn't fully restored, which again is a good thing. The section is ~3.3 miles long and the tour info page said we'd cover it in like 3 - 4 hours. Awesome.

The Great Wall --- I mean, c'mon. I am getting really psyched for this trip. One great thing about China is that it has millenia of history which the US doesn't have, at least not in its current state. In Hangzhou I ate lunch at Louwailou, a restaurant that is 150 years old. That means that when the restaurant first opened, the pencil-with-attached-eraser was just being invented. Sort of puts things in perspective for you. Okay bad example of ancient history -- but you know what I mean :-)

The rest of the must-sees in Beijing -- The Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, etc. -- I'll do on my own after purchasing a TimeOut guide for the city. I feel confident enough in my reading of Pinyin, and usage of maps and knowledge of taking subway systems, and maybe asking people for help, to navigate. And my co-workers are still just a cell phone call away :-)

I should have Internet access so expect timely pics. I'm staying at the Days Inn Forbidden City. How Forbidden can a city be if there's a Days Inn (and, formerly, a Starbucks) there? I think it's best to not assume that any of this stuff is at all, well, "authentic." I mean it is, to be sure, but I'll just be disappointed if I expect to get the "authentic" experience from any of these places, you know? They're tourist attractions now and the number of people there will demonstrate that (especially since I'm going during the May holiday). I will go to have fun and see things and learn and that should be plenty :-)

On Saturday, I also went to see the first China Baseball League (CBL) game of my life. The Beijing Tigers beat the Shanghai Eagles 1-0. Nobody scored a run after the first inning, and not many people had hits either. Shanghai never threatened except in the bottom of the 9th, when there were runners on second and third with none out. But then we got three outs in a row to end it. I have some pretty good pictures up on flickr.









Of course I had to ask their mascot to take a picture with me:

(Qing gei he wo pai zhao is what I said - "Please take a picture with me.")



I dunno why I'm giving the thumbs-up like some doofus American tourist, but for some reason I did that :-)

There were maybe 100 people at the game, mostly from a nearby school. When they all got up and left at the end of the 6th inning, the place felt deserted. Too bad, really. But it was fun. Super-nice weather, warm sunshine, no clouds, and hanging out with Tim, his wife, and their friend who was visiting.

Today I did some shopping, first for gifts and then for clothes. My first stop was buying a set of chopsticks for Kevin. For this I braved the Xiangyang Market, located near my place at the Shanghai S&T Museum subway stop.

Have you ever seen Minority Report? Do you remember that scene where Tom Cruise is on the lam and he's running through a shopping mall? As he walks by store windows, eye scanners pick up his image and start blaring their ads at him. That's what it's like for me walking through the Xiangyang Market here. I walk by, there are shops on both sides with barkers standing out front, like three or four per shop, and my passage triggers a chorus of "Hello watch! Hello bag! DVD! Video game! Want buy shirt? Nice shoes! Cheap! Sale! BEST QUALITY!!!!!!"

I'm not joking - that actually happened, like five girls shouting simultaneously at me as I moved through the market's corridors. I stared straight ahead and ignored them, although the ridiculousness of the situation was too much, so I smiled and said Ni men hen hao wan ("You all are very funny.").

If that weren't enough, the place is literally a maze, and after I did manage to buy some chopsticks, it took me 20 minutes to find my way out again. Finally I asked a security guard (Yay for being able to speak Chinese a little bit) who pointed me in the right direction.

Being shouted at like this, not to mention having to negotiate for a sale, is really stressful for me. Which is why, as I walked down Dingxiang Rd towards the market earlier, I thought of Obi Wan Kenobi's famous description of Mos Eisley. Which is probably an overstatement in this case, but still, I did feel like I had to prepare for battle, haha.

After that I headed out to read at Garden Books and do some clothes shopping on Changle Lu. On the subway I tried to make conversation with a tall Chinese guy by asking which one of us was the most tall, but he wasn't having any of it. Either that or my Chinese sucks -- I think it's a combination of the two, actually, haha.

That's why I'm nervous about taking pictures of people, or doing things like this -- because I fear I can't speak well enough, and also, I don't want people to feel like I'm on some safari hunt for Chinese people. You know? I think maybe he felt that way. His girlfriend managed a bit of English though, which she said "You're a little bit taller." But still, it was weird.

The saving grace was seeing a teenage boy on the train reading A Catcher in the Rye. Very very cool. Makes me wish I hadn't left my copy in Austin. I couldn't see if he was reading it in English or if he'd obtained a Chinese translation. But just the fact that he was reading it made me very happy :-)

I didn't really like any of the stores on Changle Lu, specifically, not the one I set out to patronize, which is eno. Along the road I ran into Jeremy and Amy, and they told me about a sale that Uniqlo (which is basically, the clothes section of Target) was having. There's a location at the Super Brand Mall near my apartment, so I hopped back on the train and went there. I didn't find anything there; however I did find some worthwhile things at the H&M. So it's true, I can buy jeans in China :-) They just have to be European, haha.

That's all, pretty much. I leave for Beijing at noon on Wednesday. I'll try and post an update when I land :-)

We interrupt this Hangzhou broadcast for some baseball

So tomorrow I'm going to see the Beijing Tigers come play the Shanghai Eagles in some, you guessed it, baseball. I invited my Chinese co-workers to come watch, only to have some of them tell me that they have no idea what baseball's about. Understandable. So today I held a small meeting and explained the game to a couple of them. I wish I'd videoed it, because I think I did a good job. The best part came when I explained the infield fly rule :-)

Who knows if they'll show up tomorrow, but even if they don't, I know a couple expats will. I plan to take many pictures myself :-)

Re: Hangzhou: I 've been working late most nights this week so I haven't felt like posting much, especially not the long entries I know that Hanghzhou will require. But I want to document the trip in textual form, and give ya'll something to appreciate what it was like besides the pictures, so I'll probably finish it up tomorrow before the ball game, as I'm digesting fried matzah :-)

We get excited when this happens

Blogspot.com is unblocked for some reason. SO IS WIKIPEDIA!! Woohoo!! I can view my blog and search for random shit again. This is a strange feeling. Obviously not one that many Americans know, for good reason :-)

Another blockage that may get less coverage than these two site is feedburner.com. Many web sites I read use feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. The reason is that feedburner can track things like subscriptions and other demographic information that is useful to advertisers. But the site prepends the word "feeds" to all URLs. And apparently that's a no-no in China.

What's strange is that I can still get the RSS feed from feedburner -- it's just that I can't click directly into the link from the RSS item. This becomes a problem when sites post only tidbits of articles in their RSS feeds. For example if I see a story on THT or Wired that I want to read more of, I have to open a new tab and enter the URL myself. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but when compared with clicking a link, it's a lot of work.

Fortunately some sites, like Ars and /., provide "Read More" links in their RSS feeds that link directly to the news item. So even though their feeds use feedburner, I can click through to the actual story.

I might actually email THT about this issue. It's not like it's difficult to add a "Read More" link. And it functions as a call to action (Uncle Bob, you should be proud of me that I know that term) also.

In the meantime, baseball season has started, with my beloved Orioles already down 0-1. Most every site I see is picking them to be last in the division this year -- and I can't disagree. The fun thing is that because of the time difference, when I get to work in the morning there are games still going on, because it's only 9 PM ET. Games on the west coast don't even start until 10 PM ET, so on the weekends I should be able to wake up at 9:30 some days and go watch some baseball at Big Bamboo (where I saw the Super Bowl).

Exciting. My favorite-est blog ever is already posting like 5 times a day :-)

Tidbits

• Looks like I'll have a chance to see baseball in three countries. The China Baseball League just announced their 2008 schedule. I plan to attend a game in Shanghai on April 19th :-)
  
• Until yesterday, my feet were killing me after every long walk I took. I could really feel the pavement on the balls of my feet after each step. So this past weekend, I went shoe-hunting, only to get laughed out of two stores at the Thumb for having gigantic lao wai feet. However, I was tuned into this place called Decathlon, a sports/outdoors store, and so yesterday I visited and picked up a rather decent pair of light hiking shoes for just 250 RMB. They are Quechua brand, which I assume is Chinese for "of outstanding quality." (And not, as some might believe, an ancient South American language.) So far they are really nice and my feet feel tons better after a long walking trip.
• The Decathlon also had rollerblades in size 47, which is one size below what I need. That makes me think that somewhere in this city I might be able to buy a pair of rollerblades and go skating around Century Park or the Shanghai S&T Mueseum metro plaza. The hunt is on!!
  
• I discovered the Chinese word for "Jewish" is youtai. Not sure what, if anything, that translates to. (My guess: "Super Awesome".) So now I can say Wo shi Youtairen! There's even a book about us -- unfortunately it's in Chinese. I still should try and find a copy, though.
• Speaking of Judaism, one of the Chabads over here recently moved to within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. That should make it more likely that I'll go and visit them :-)
  
• Last Friday, I attended a technical presentation given by a group manager at work. He gave most of it in English, although there were points where he had to continue in Chinese because he didn't know how to describe the relevant terms in English. And actually, it was the basic stuff that he had trouble with in English. Like correlating a sine wave to the rotation of a coil when wrapped around a wire caught between two opposing magnets. He couldn't find the words in English for that. I thought that was pretty interesting. I can't really explain why I think that. Just -- I dunno. An example of how important language is, I suppose. And how extremely difficult it can be to learn one as your second language. As if I didn't know this already :-)
  
• Along these same lines, I was talking to another co-worker today about his English name. It is nothing like his Chinese name, which is Xiangjie. He picked his English name in college. We talked a little bit about whether it felt weird to be called by his English name all the time, at work and such. He said not really, because he was used to it. There are even some people at work that don't have English names - we theorized this might be because some people don't like picking one, but in some cases it might be because their Chinese name is really easy for us foreigners to pronounce. I said it was weird being introduced to a Chinese person and having them say "Hi, I'm Scott" or "Hi, I'm Wendy." Because I immediately want to be like, "Liar!" Hahaha. But I guess not really - because they decide what they call themselves, so it's not like they're lying. I guess I just want them to trust in my ability to remember and pronounce their Chinese name. But of course that will not be the case for all Westerners.
• I'm sort of in the middle of getting my own Chinese name. The first name is set, and I think it's Rui an. Amazingly enough when you plug the Chinese characters into Google Translate, it spits out "Ryan". Haha. So I think this was pre determined by someone other than myself :-) I don't have a last name yet, but since most Chinese prefer names that have a total of 2 or 3 characters, I'll have to pick a one-character last name. I was thinking gao for tall, so that might be it :-)
  
• I was totally going to go to the gym tonight but I unwisely sat down in front of the computer to update my blog first. Now all my motivation's gone -- boo -- and I just feel like making some jiaozi for dinner :-)
• I got another power bill today ... (dun dun dun ....)