Satisfying Baseball Fix With Classic Clips

As the baseball season slowly approaches I find myself hungry for actual game footage. The Spring Training highlights are boring so I've found other resources.

The men in charge of Major League Baseball's media department have been notoriously strict about letting any game footage (whether from the past or present) appear on YouTube or anywhere else not owned by them. This is not only a major pain in the ass for devout fans of the game but it's also a huge missed opportunity to promote their product. There are nearly 100 years worth of World Series footage and an unthinkable mass of regular season video material in their vaults and yet nobody ever sees any of it.

Thankfully, YouTube does have a surprising amount of old World Series films. You can see clips of the 1937 Fall Classic between the Yankees and New York Giants; regular TV footage of the 1961 Series with at-bats by Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra; highlights from the '55 World Series when the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the Yankees; Cardinals legend Bob Gibson defeating the Red Sox at Fenway Park in Game 7 of the 1967 World Series and plenty more similar clips.

(More after the jump...)

Potent Quotables: Self-Reliance

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance":

"A man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this...
Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."

Thirst for Knowledge Thursdays: Jung's World-View-Flipping Memories, Dreams, Reflections

"A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force."
- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections pg. 277

In the midst of a conversation with my girlfriend the other day, the subject of which escapes me now, I was led to pick up an old favorite book of mine from the bookshelf and talk a bit about it to her. The book was Carl Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I went through a phase of closely studying Jung's writings and nothing came close to the powerful impact of that book. A highly influential psychologist with stacks and stacks of fresh ideas and insights, Jung never seemed to go deeper than he does in this book.

As is perfectly fitting for the man who coined the term "synchronicity," Jung's book suddenly popped up in my atmosphere again that same night as I was reading a recently-discovered blog called Brain Pickings. Seemingly out of the blue, there was Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections at the top of the page with a little blurb and even an illustrated diagram summarizing the book's story. This, of course, prompted me to start piecing together ideas for a blog post and I faintly remembered taking copious notes on the book when I had first read it in early 2009.

It was in November of 2009 that I initially started writing this blog, but before I ever decided to start sharing my own thoughts on the internet I had been practicing my writing privately in notebooks for a few years. Digging up my old notes for Jung's book I came across not only a dozen or so pages worth of quotes I had copied down from it, but even a thorough, glowing 8-page review I wrote for it. Looking back at the review, I'm glad to see that I meticulously documented the strong effect the book had on me because I've only read it once but I recall that it struck me powerfully. As I wrote back then, "Upon first rendering, it's a glorious flash of light but it is necessary to approach the material again and sit in its glow for a time. This is extremely powerful, illuminating stuff."

More Links: Madvillain Edition

Catching up with a growing stack of new hip hop material...

Let's start with the legend known as MF DOOM, one of my favorite word weavers. The quarterly publication Frank 151 will be primarily featuring the Doomster in their upcoming Spring 2012 issue. The booklet will feature illustrations, photos, articles, and more, all revolving around that most enigmatic and mysterious metal-masked lyricist. Should be awesome. Stones Throw will carry copies of it once it's available.

Any basketball fan of even the most basic hip hop knowledge could've probably seen this coming: now that the Lakers' Kobe Bryant has to wear a face mask to protect his broken nose, DigitalGravel has created a cool-looking tee shirt showing Kobe rocking an MF DOOM-style mask (pictured above). If I can rub a few nickels together, I might have to acquire one of those.

Spinning Earth Aglow

Lots o' Links: Roundball Edition

Following a sudden shift of surroundings when I moved (for the 5th time in 4 years) four weeks ago, I seem to have fallen off the blogging groove. I try now to climb back onto it as the baseball season approaches, the NBA season runs on by, and I absorb books and music much too fast for me to stop and compose reviews about them. So, in the interest of getting the ball rolling, today we'll do what any good blog does and take a look at some other people's work that I've enjoyed around the web.

First, I've got a little treat for you:


Not very long ago, a large conglomerate of talented bloggers and sportswriters gathered together to launch a new website featuring interesting, perhaps "high-brow" pieces on sports and its surrounding culture. Led by Free Darko mastermind Bethlehem Shoals, the site (called The Classical) seemed a perfect rival to Bill Simmons' recently launched Grantland project. As someone who prefers Shoals' writing style to anything Simmons could possibly devise, I had very high hopes for this endeavor but The Classical has, in my eyes, gotten off to a slow start. In the meantime, Grantland has gathered awesome writers (Jonah Keri, Rany Jazayerli, Bill Barnwell, Katie Baker, Jay Caspian King) covering every sport and I can't help but check out their content almost every day.

With the locked-out basketball season finally starting to get its wind and a fresh baseball season showing its first signs of life, The Classical is responding with some excellent pieces. I don't want this post to turn into a collection of nothing but Grantland and Classical pieces but... they've written a bunch of great stuff lately. These works in particular have really grabbed my attention:

Supernova 1987A

Spotted this beauty on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website. The ring in the center is Supernova 1987A which, as you may have guessed, is a supernova witnessed by astronomers in the year 1987. There are numerous theories for why it appears this way with two hoops surrounding it, but "their origin is still largely unknown."

Supernova 1987A remains one of the brightest stellar explosions we've witnessed since the birth of the telescope 400 years ago. These gigantic explosions occur as the final event in a massive (larger than our dwarf Sun) star's life. For an unfathomable length of time, a massive star maintains a delicate equilibrium between the strength of its outward-pushing nuclear explosions and inward-pulling gravitational force. At the end of its life, a star stops producing the nuclear energy at its core and the entire thing compresses in on itself through the violent process of gravitational collapse. As all of the matter and energy collapses into a tiny dense sphere, it suddenly bounces back outward and creates an incredibly luminous explosion. They are often so powerful as to outshine an entire galaxy (which is approximately 100 billion times larger).

I don't quite understand this stuff thoroughly enough to explain much more than that but I do want to mention neutron stars which are one possible final scenario after a supernova event.

A neutron star is an extremely condensed little star that, as its Wikipedia page attests to, squeezes 500,000 times the mass of the earth into a sphere smaller than Manhattan. These sci-fi-sounding spheres are scattered throughout the universe.

For more incredible astronomical stuff to look at and ponder, go check out THIS page with a time-lapse image of Supernova 1987A's shockwaves smashing into surrounding debris.

TED talks Sychronicity and Science

Lately, I find that the topic of UFOs creeps its way into my conversations with people more and more. Over the last year or so, it's something I've developed a gradually increasing interest in. It also pops up a lot in the work of Robert Anton Wilson, whose work I had begun to read for his James Joyce commentary and now I find myself devouring his whole richly varied oeuvre. On the topic of UFOs he remains, as he does with just about everything else, agnostic.

He shares plenty of shocking information and research about alien encounters and UFO sightings but always with a humorous tinge in the background, never going as far as to say that he believes all of it is true, but it is clearly a deep fascination of his. He likes to bring up the fact that many hundreds of scientists have had what they believe to be alien encounters and this usually leads Wilson into a far-ranging discussion of the newest ideas in modern physics. Frequently he will cite the work of Jacques Vallée, an astronomer and computer scientist who spent years working with NASA and has written a number of books on the phenomenon of UFOs from a soberly scientific perspective.

I am planning on gradually introducing some material here about the cosmological implications of UFOs and the disclosure projects that have taken place over the last ten years or so. But for now, without any alien stuff at all, here is Dr. Vallée's recent TED talk about the current state of physics and where our world view is headed.

First Glimmers of a New Baseball Season

For a couple months now I've been kicking around the idea of writing a piece about my desire to step away from following baseball this season, let my attention go to more important things, and especially not allow my emotions to get invested into the ups and downs of any baseball team.

This piece was going to be a list of reasons for Why I'm Done with Baseball (for now), one of the main reasons being that the sorry state of the New York Mets and the departure of their best player to an arch rival are just too frustrating for me as a Mets fan. Other reasons include the steep price of following the game (for years now I've been an MLB.tv subscriber but in order for that package to carry over to either the iPad or iPhone device, one has to pay extra---as if Major League Baseball needs my money more than I do) at a time when I don't have much disposable income; the long hours spent watching games or reading baseball articles could certainly be better spent (especially at a time when I'm trying to put together two book-length projects); and after the dazzling crescendo of the 2011 baseball season, I figure the excitement has nowhere to go but down this year.

Book Review: The Illuminati Papers by Robert Anton Wilson

It is not very often that I shell out the cash for a brand new book. Most of the books I read are worn-out, tattered pre-owned texts that I buy as cheaply as possible either online or from one of Austin's many wonderful used bookstores (the Half Priced Books chain is one of my favorite things about this city). Whenever I do opt to purchase a brand new book it's usually something that has just been released (like the Baseball Prospectus annual which I always need to have as soon as it drops) or something so special that I couldn't resist paying full price.

In the early stages of my addiction to reading Robert Anton Wilson's work, I couldn't resist snatching up a fresh copy of his book The Illuminati Papers from a local New Age bookstore. Many months and re-readings later, I'm very happy with my decision. After quickly zipping through six different RAW books, this is definitely one of my favorites.

Folk Flavor (Madlib)

This delicious, folk-flavored track originally reached my ears via Madlib's 2009 appearance on the Radio Nova show in Paris. Check out the full 30-minute set here, plenty of rare old records and mellifluous melodies. One of my favorite DJ sets from Madlib.