Well, another year is in the archives.
Usually, I’d use this post – the first one of the year – to go over the stats from the previous year. Which posts got the most views, where my visitors came from, all of that.
But 2023 was my tenth year at this – with about 50 posts each year.
That’s a LOT of posts.
So I thought that instead, I might go back and pick my favorite posts from each year. The ones I had the most fun doing, the ones I’m most proud of, whatever.
2014: I was still figuring out blogging, and wasn’t too careful about saving my posts offline (at least in a format that matched what was posted). One of my better pieces was inspired by an incident in a baseball game where a player got caught obviously using pine tar in violation of the rules.
The problem here is a matter of respect for the law. People are always going to scoff at some of the minor rules and regulations on the books. Constant changing of the rules to reflect whatever the practice of the day is will only lead to confusion. And when people are confused over the rules, they tend to ignore them altogether. You’ll wind up with less respect for the rules than if you simply let people wink at them.
Pitching, Pine Tar, and Philosophy
2015: This was the year when I posted what has become my all-time leader in views, “Indiana Jones and the Top Men”.
It’s an immensely powerful artifact.
And Dr. Jones wants it to be in a lab somewhere, being poked and prodded by people who probably don’t really understand what they’ve got? And given that the movie is set in the 1930s, they’re probably not even Jewish….
But my favorite post of the year is probably my review of “Birth of a Nation”. Yes, I watched it, and it did NOT make me a racist….
Now it’s time for the Klan to make it’s debut. Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) decides it’s time to put blacks back in their place. He gets the idea after seeing some black children get scared by two white kids hiding under a sheet. My notes at this point tell me that the first time the Klan appeared in the movie, they were bad guys. That’s all I wrote; I’ve got no recollection of the details. But I will give you this – the Klan’s costumes are completely goofy.
Movie Review: Birth of a Nation (1915)
2016: First summer olympics, first presidential election. I really got into both of them, but I think my best work was in my discussion of the Electoral College.
…nowhere in the Constitution does it say how a state must choose its electors. So if one wants to try to reform the Electoral College, the way to do it is in the selection process in the individual states.
On the Electoral College – Part 2
I also had a fine two-parter on expanding major league baseball – which is going to happen sooner rather than later.
A look at the map of American League teams makes it bloody obvious that Portland must be in the AL. That league has only three teams west of Kansas City; the NL has five. Given the travel times involved, and the fact that the Pacific coast and Kansas City are two hours apart according to the time zones, Portland must belong to the AL. Players are already complaining about crappy travel situations (traveling after a night game to a different city for a day game the next day); imagine adding two hours of jet lag to that. If you don’t make Portland (or Vancouver, or Salt Lake City, or Las Vegas) an AL West team, then you have to put Kansas City in that division – which would be the only one in baseball that spans three time zones.
Expanding Major League Baseball – 2
2017: A bit of some statistical analysis of statistics. The current thinking in baseball is that pitcher’s wins don’t really mean that much anymore. I beg to differ.
First, we need to see if there really is a good correlation between WHIP, ERA+, and Won-Loss Percentage (W-L%). Fortunately, there is a way to test this. Our source data set includes those stats for the thirty teams, as well as for individual players. So on the principle that what is good for a player is good for a team (and vice-versa), we can check the correlation of those stats for the teams as a whole…
2018: A pretty “meh” year overall. Not much in the way of big, impressive works. I had fun writing this one (even if I stole the idea) about Halloween:
Mid October:
THEN: Get a decent sized pumpkin at the supermarket.
NOW: Drive an hour to a nearby “Pick Your Own Pumpkin” farm. Fight through the crowds of people with the same idea to find a parking space. Hope there aren’t too many people in the background of your selfies. After buying a dozen heirloom gourds, realize you forgot to actually buy a pumpkin, and pick one up at the supermarket on the way home.
2019: In a great way to pad my post count, I did the “Pick a movie that best represents each state” thing. I had fun doing it.
Hawaii: There are plenty of movies set here, but most of them are your basic ‘vacation’ movies where the particular setting isn’t at all important. So I’m going with one that really worked at getting Hawaii and Hawaiian culture right: Lilo and Stitch.
2020: I had two “favorites” this year. One looked back at whatever became of baseball’s “Rookies of the Year”
A Rookie of the Year could also expect to make an All Star team or two (the average is four, but that’s biased by players like Willie Mays, who appeared in 24 ASG’s, Cal Ripken Jr. with 19, and Derek Jeter with 14) and, with luck, a World Series (70 out of the 118 made it to the Fall Classic).
What’s more interesting than the numbers is the many players who had short careers – six or fewer seasons. Whatever happened to them?
I also enjoyed musing on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”
Most adaptations neglect to expand on one part of the story. True, it’s not really that important, but let’s take a look at it anyway.
What sort of business is Ebenezer Scrooge in, and can we discover anything new about the character by examining that aspect?
2021: Thanks to COVID, the Summer Olympics were delayed a year. I thought I’d just put all my observations into one big post, editing and updating it as needed.
The year also happened to be the tenth anniversary of baseballs Best Night Ever. Happily, I’d saved a bunch of links and articles from back when it happened.
I believe that there’s a book to be written here, in part because none of these recaps give enough attention to the collapses of the Red Sox and Braves. Or how the Orioles decided that even though they were out of contention, they were not going to roll over and play dead. Or what was happening in the other divisions, with their battles for home field advantage. We’d need the “behind the scenes” action, like the MLB Network deciding to forego commercials so they wouldn’t miss a single pitch.
2022: I went and actually READ the Kama Sutra…..
The work is divided into seven parts, each of which is divided into individual chapters. The first part is titled “General Remarks”, and serves as an introduction and background. You will note right off the bat that the original text is in a “chapter and verse” format common to a lot of religious texts. I guess it makes it easy to look things up, but it also means that the work is a LOT shorter than you’d think.
2023: And my favorite for this year, when I definitively solve the matter of whether or not Rick Deckard in Blade Runner is a replicant.
by the way, if I ever start reposting old stuff, it’s a clear sign I’m running out of steam, and I’ll probably close up shop pretty soon…..
Pure Blather 