December 2008 Archives

I recently deleted Private Practice from our list of DVR season passes. The final straw for me was the last episode, in which Addison, whose job it is to take care of patients, and whose practice is suffering from a lack of said patients, drops a patient because she is a call girl. Addison seems to think it is her job to judge her patients rather than to provide them with medical care. And not only to judge, but to deprive those deemed immoral of needed care. Sure, there are other fictional doctors that the fictional call girl can visit. But if a real doctor did what Addison did, it would pretty much ensure that the call girl would never again be honest with her doctors, which would certainly affect doctors' ability to assess her needs. And we, the viewer, were supposed to applaud Addison for taking this firm moral stance.

This may have been the last straw, but it was not the only straw. The show is not great. Really, it is not even good. I watched it anyway. I think this particular episode just struck a chord in me and reminded me that, as a society, we actually seem to be going backwards in terms of women's sexual and reproductive freedom, and the repression and condemnation of women's sexuality. It fanned the flames of the anger I have at the Bush administration for trying to enact last minute rule changes that will allow pharmacists, doctors, and nurses to deny women things like birth control, the morning after pill, and abortions, all legal, due to "provider conscience." (I don't know if they have actually finalized this. If so, it was within the last week and I was busy with days and days of snow, and yuletide joy and whatnot.) It is not the medical community's job to judge the morality of my actions while deciding on my medical treatment. If I want contraceptives so that I don't wind up with a family of 12, and birth control is perfectly legal, the pharmacist should do his job and give me the damn pill. If he doesn't believe in birth control, he doesn't have to use it. Just like Addison doesn't have to be a call girl. I'm not questioning that decision in the slightest. Well-paid, comely surgeon is definitely better than call girl. But telling your patient, "No pap smear for you, you dirty whore!" seems counterproductive, and an abdication of professional responsibility.

So long, Addison McJudgey Montgomery. I will not miss you. I will, however, miss Judging Amy and Taye Diggs' abs.

Sorry we were negligent in posting your birthday greeting. Hope you had a great (albeit snowy) birthday!

Ho ho ho! Remember kids, religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds! Merrrrrry War on Christmas! Also there was no Jesus.

Back after a brief hiatus, it's Furdell Classic Cinema Theatre. Unfortunately, due to the collapse of the economy, FCCT's budget has been cut in twain! But we shall soldier on.

The Film: Zapped Again! (1990)

That's right, the sequel to: This movie.

Other sequels that were better than the original: The Godfather Part II, Rocky III, Teen Wolf Too, Still Casablanca-ing

French title: Encore, nous avons été zapped

Contribution to popular culture: This film may not have invented the self-congratulatory fist-pump, but by gosh it perfected the technique.

The badness: The M’s finished at 61-101, the first team with a $100M+ payroll to lose 100 games. The one time we wanted them to lose, which was at the end of the season to secure the #1 draft pick, they won three in a row to “edge out” Washington.
However, I don’t feel (fully) responsible for this one. The Mariners’ badness is the fault of Bill Bavasi, the General Manager who spent a ton on such questionable acquisitions as Richie Sexson, Jarrod Washburn, Jose Vidro and Carlos Silva. Sexson’s batting average became fixed to a promotion at Norm’s Ale House in Fremont, in which they matched the price of a beer to it (e.g. .172 average = $1.72 Buds, baby!). Washburn is vastly overpaid and mediocre, and sadly was not traded away last season when the M’s might have had the chance. Vidro made a bid at being the worst designated hitter in history… really. Silva reported gained at least 30 pounds during the 2008 season, and has three years left in his contract, during which we can only pray he eats himself out of a job.
Bavasi used the worst reasoning in signing players: rewarding players for past successes, when it should have been obvious that they were about to enter a down slope in their careers. The team actually competed for the division title well into the 2007 season, but it was something of an illusion… the team’s Pythagorean record was far below its actual record, indicating the M’s were actually getting a lot of lucky breaks, as opposed to actually being that talented. Unfortunately, Bavasi was convinced the team was one good pitcher away from the playoffs, and traded away good prospects for starter Erik Bedard, who, as it turns out, is made from papier-mache. Thus, not only is the team awful, its prospects of getting better anytime soon flew out the window under Bavasi.

The James angle: I’ve been following the M’s for a long time, and this is obviously not their first awful season in history. What stings about this one is the amount of money spent, and the likelihood that, with a gutted farm system, they will be bad for years to come. It’s worth noting that I received a Kenji Johjima jersey as a gift after admiring his toughness and clutch offense in 2006. In 2008, Johjima became something of a reviled figure after signing a huge contract extension at the relatively old age (for a catcher) of 31. Sure enough, in 2008 his average fell off a cliff (.227), and Washburn implied in an interview that the language barrier (Johjima is Japanese) was a factor in the team’s bad pitching performances.

The silver lining: Bavasi’s gone, hallelujah. His replacement as GM, Jack Zduriencik, actually seems to know something about other modern mathematical tools for evaluating players. He’s made moves to improve the outfield defense, which should at least make our crappy pitchers look somewhat better on paper. The team isn’t likely to finish about .500 in 2009, but at least they seem to be in more capable hands.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to announce a great scientific breakthrough in the field of logic. I have singlehandedly proven that, despite what Wikipedia may think, correlation does indeed equal causation.

For you see, I have long argued that my presence and rooting interest in a city's professional sports scene tends to inevitably doom it to the melancholy of prolonged failure. But, only now, in the year 2008, with my presence in Seattle clinging to the local sports teams like the slow onset of radiation sickness in a nuclear test zone, has the James Losing Effect been NOTICEABLE FROM SPACE.

OK, so I don't really believe in the JLE. But after 2008, a year in which improbably bad things befell the SuperSonics, Mariners and Seahawks, I sometimes wonder if the city will ever recover.

Apparently upon hearing that the original was recently cited on this very blog, David Lynch is producing Alex Cox's Repo Chick, which begins production in January.

Cox has previously said that the follow-up will “unfold against the background of the credit crunch and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, where repossessions of homes, cars and other forms of property is at a new high. ‘The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations…children”.

Yep, that's definitely Kent Phillips in front of the NWA backdrop. (I'm not sure if the NWA set looked like that in the 80s, but the real question is: how are they watching KOMO in Brooklyn?)