Things are moving along well on the production of The Violet Hour I'm working on for Manhattan Theatre Club at their beautiful new Broadway theatre, the Biltmore (and it really is quite gorgeous). We've started preview performances, and the audience response has been very nice, but there remains another couple of weeks of rehearsals before the show is "frozen" for reviewers to see, and another week or so until the official opening on November 6th.
This means that while I may have come out of the other side of my "crunch" period, I'm still going to be spending a lot of time at the theatre, and blogging will be sporadic at best.
It's interesting what one gives up when time becomes a precious commodity. As the nature of the posts below will show, I've pretty much stopped following the political scene for the last week (keeping my hand in by checking TPM, Calpundit and Daily Kos every couple of days), but I don't expect that I've missed an awful lot. I suspect that each day's revelations continued to show that the Bush administration is incompetent in many respects, dogmatic in others (with some of the incompetence rising from the dogmatism), politically opportunistic and addicted to self-serving expediency, and if not quite corrupt, certainly egregiously guilty of crony capitalism and providing client service to the rich and powerful to the detriment of the welfare of the general body politic.
I doubt that's going to change anytime soon, and certainly not in the next month, so the state of play when I return to the scene will most probably be just about the same as when I left -- except that Bush's numbers will, I hope, continue to fall, and the prospects for a Democratic recovery of the Oval Office will therefore continue to improve.
On thing I did not let slip, though, was baseball.
Although I was working during most of the last week's post-season baseball games, I saw as much of the action as I could at the end of the day, even if it meant standing out on the street watching the big-screen TVs inside a theatre district watering hole through the picture windows and glass doors (along with 30 or 40 other New Yorkers similarly interested in what their team was doing), or going into a bar (something that's not particularly usual for me, being something of a hermit) to watch the game while sipping a Glenlivet on the rocks.
So I kept up with baseball as much as I could, including following the pitch-by-pitch account on the MLB website or trying to get a pocket TV to work inside the theatre so I could check the score on breaks and pauses (never to the detriment of the show, of course -- I've learned from experience that I'm not sufficiently agile mentally to do two things simultaneously and give them both the attention they deserve). I managed to see the end of both game 6 and game 7, and even predicted (unfortunately, silently to myself) that Aaron Boone would win the last game in the 11th.
The World Series is already two games old, so it's a little late to be predicting, but I have already gone on record (to the e-mail discussion group I'm a part of) that the Yankees will beat the Marlins in 6 games. Looking back at my predictions for the American and National League Championships, I see that, once again, I was good on the AL (where I predicted the Yankees in 6, and they won in 7) and completely wrong on the NL (where I said the Cubs would win in 7).
The Yankees are my team, of course, so I want them to win, which is hard, if not impossible, to seperate from my prediction that they will win. Combine that with my really poor record at predicting the National Leage in the post-season, and I'd recommend that no one bet the farm based on my feelings about what will happen. I do think, though, that the result of Game 2 (Yankees over the Marlins 6-1) is going to be more typical of this series than the result of Game 1 (where the Marlins beat the Yankees 3-2).
Still, the Yankees are at a disadvantage for the next three games, playing without the DH. I firmly believe (but do not have the stats to back it up) that American League teams are hurt more when playing without the DH than National League teams are when they play with it. (If I had a little more spare time I'd search the SABR website to see if anyone has done a study exporing that question.)
And speaking of advantages, winning the All-Star Game was supposed to help the American League team in the World Series by giving them the home-field advantage over the National League team, but it looks to me as if that edge is more perceived than it is real. (For instance, of the 34 games played so far in this post-season, only 14 have been won by the home team.) Where the Yankees got hurt was in the scheduling of the post-season, where the Marlins got a full day of rest more than the Yankees did, even though both of their League Series went to 7 games. Maybe the advantage won at the All-Star Game should be a real one, the advantage of the schedule, and not the dubious help of playing more games in the home field. (But Fox might have a problem with that, since the games seem to be scheduled for their convenience.)
So, I expect the Series to go long, at least 6 games, and maybe even 7, but I still expect the Yankees to win.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
