Some e cards from a silver jew

Some e cards from a Silver Jew is a great new tumblr log. The premise of the site is contained in its title.

B. Michael's Notebook Miscellany

Don't forget to check out b. michael's notebook miscellany.

green dress

green dress, originally uploaded by Mary Jane 2040.

B. Michael's Notebook Miscellany

If you're interested in reading anything else by me, then I advise you to go here, which is where I'm posting now.

I stopped using Blogger because the links and photos functions were all wonky. (Although, this issue looks fixed now; ironic.)

The Streets Is

The Streets Is, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

I'm a pretty bookish person: I hve an m.a. from a socallwd great books program, love pens and notebooks and whatnot, and I even read a lot kinda. More thAn zero-to-one per year. Buuuuut. I mean I love joyce; know how to use a semicolon; and I'm applying to philosophy phds. Bit damn dog. Im holding the future in my hands


I love me some music. And the Internet. And I'm usually late ony phone bill. So you see where I'm going this? The fucking iPod touch straight owns! Like no shit. I fail to see why I'd ever need to open a book again. I can listen music, look at shit on the internet, blog bay blah bah. This experience is way I'd fuck more entertaining than reading is. Its me fun than it was meant to be.

Good thing I like reading and books and whatnot. But I'd be willing to wager that a lot most even people don't share my interest in reading. And so this development I'd even more pernicious be because even though I can resist the siren song of the umpc (ultra mobile p c) I dont see such resistance gaining intersubjective validity. Gbye books hello frivolity.

I for one blame frivolous books: comedy central authors, bad mysteries, reading the romance. Waste makes waste.

Steel Stallion Rides Sister Rides

Steel Stallion Rides Sister Rides, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

"I was disappointed," Farve said, "that the last pass I threw was intercepted." LOLZ

Trees One

Trees One, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

This shit is what the shit I am talking about when I talk about the New Mexico light. The "Fabled New Mexico Light (tm)" is what makes the trees look like they're on a goddamn movie set. Maybe that's why companies come to this state to film: Because it looks like we goddamn for fuck's sake invented lighting.

Country Sad Ballad Man

Country Sad Ballad Man, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

Over at Blastings! Thrilledge, our former ex-bff observes that

A lot of calculations and projections are necessary to prove anything,

which is as useless a thing as you're likely to read in the Internets these days. It's like saying, "Everyone agrees that the best way to convince someone of something is to make them agree with you," a double x double quadruple whammy if there ever were one. (There's not.)

This statement, which starts off a generally un-statty post (which we like over here) is the calling card of the whole troubled modern statistical movement in baseball. If the sports writers would just look at Burt Blyleven's numbers, man, then it would be clear to them that... Well it's not clear. And no matter how much data you sling, you're never going to convince anyone. Or, as Ben said to Jack back in season two, I don't want you to do the surgery. I want you to want to do the surgery. You have to change the whole worldview, not merely change a few data points. You have to make them want to want the data.

Thinking men from Plato to Kant to Wittgenstein (and even that baseball Nietzsche Yogi Bera saw this one) have seen through the sham simplicity of the naive worldview, a myth. If you're a Platonist, the formal world that is the real source of real meaning (wtf!?, right? What is that even like?) is the operative thing-like thing that most people miss out on when they're looking at the world. Or, the imaginative faculty that unifies the manifold of apperception (if you're Kant), is what makes the world make sense. Or the grammatical hinge propositions that structure your form of life, say Wittgenstein, are the things that give it meaning. The source of meaning, though, not to be an irrealist, is not the world itself, but rather the unique and capricious interplay of other peoples' worlds (i.e., intersubjective validities) with your own meaning-structure. And the Sabremetrician virgins living in their moms's basements eating the Doritos etc., etc. always fail to grasp (well not that FJM, master of irony) that most people remain impervious to the convincifying powers of numbers. Numbers numb us.

It's like saying that America spends X dollars per minute, which dollars could stretch to the moon and back five times. That doesn't mean anything to most people. And saying someone is worth x wins above replacement (it's a simple concept, but so is not smoking drain cleaner and pseudofed) fails to mean anything to most people. But watching Derek Jeter make one scraptastic, jumping-all-over-the-fucking-place, limited-ranged catch and putaway sticks in the mind. That's why analysts are fond of saying that seeing a guy play every day is an advantage w/r/t analyzing the game. It's not, if you're statistically inclined; but to the observer, the way he makes sense of it all is to remember certain special moments, and file the rest away (in the circular file). It's the same reason why ex-players sort of suck as coaches or general managers or whatever. They tend to universalize the few particular events that happened to them, and take this specific-universal knowledge as their starting point for analysis and decision making. Which, to the egghead stat doofus, is a poor way to go.

But while the pocket-protector-wearing, slide-rule-using populace fails to outnumber the red-blooded, girl-fucking majority, that's just how it will be.

Pinkeye Dough Be

Pinkeye Dough Be, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

Just wait. Pretty soon some original cartoons/webtoons will be uploaded in this space. I just made one up. Just now, in between typing the "p" and "a" in "space." It's that easy.

Manny Acta's tragicomic Selfsameness

This sort of thing has already been covered in FJM, but since I promised to make this a sports blog, let's look proceed.  Squawking Baseball interviewed Nats manager Manny Acta last year.  He had something good to say.

Squawking Baseball:  What's your stance on bunting and other one run strategies?

Manny Acta:  Bunting is pretty outdated.  Everybody scores so many runs nowadays, it doesn't make sense to play for one run unless it's late in the game and it's close.  I hardly ever bunt early in a game, unless it's with a pitcher.  A big inning can win you a game.  One run in the third inning can't, unless you have Pedro pitching.

But how good really?  Well, it looks like Acta picked up on the, er, hit-out-bunt matrix differential, which was covered/invented by Baseball Prospectus.  Good, good.  But the same fine minds that brought us that little nugget also found that the manager has little-to-no effect on a ball game.  At least, not a positive effect.  The lineup can be mostly randomized and it won't make much of a difference.  And how hard can it be to click the little pitch count counter?  It seems like a monkey (a stoic monkey) could run a team.  Will Acta come to terms with this realization?  Will it be like a computer becoming self-aware and short circuiting/blowing up?  This outcome seems at least as likely as any other, which is to say, who knows.  I think we need some new metrics, meta-metrics, which should measure the effects of following the new metrics' effects on statistics.  Do you follow?  That is to say, that the new paradigm of tracking and interpreting the day-to-days of baseball must influence the way it's constituted and played (because of, say, gm or managerial or ownership decisions).  And these trends, these meta-trends should also be quantified.  By who?  By the manager.  I mean, you can only chew so many sunflowerseeds before some serious dental work is needed, amiright? 

Which would mean that Acta could function effectively as a manager, become self-aware, and not have to get out of The Matrix.

Funny LOL Ha Ha

Funny LOL Ha Ha, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

So this one here, this photo above. It's a joke, get it? The kids might get to play some structured 5-on-5 or NBA Jam-esque 3-on-3. But when you're just fucking around looking for a game? No Kids Allowed. "Parent Pickup Only."

Stronger Better Faster Longer

Stronger Better Faster Longer, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

The Colts might just be the luckiest team ever to win a Super Bowl. The Manning family sucks qua QBs.

The Critic Is Always Right

The Critic Is Always Right, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

The whole point is not to secure objectivity but to explain it. Which is to say, to drop the ism and just be "real."

Flickr?

">I'm obsessed with it. Blogging is for chumps.
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Dog Park

So we discovered the dog park a few weeks ago.  It's where all the dogs are at.  "Are/Is at" is an interesting construction, right?  Well, it's too dark to write, isn't it?  Thinking about the participle-versus-gerund debate, which "Where's _____  at?" makes us think of,  just makes our head hurt.  But so here are some pictures.  From Flickr, because we can't figure out how this works.  This = blogger upload.  Shit sucks.  And how do you copy + paste into the body?  We didn't have no goddamn problem with pictures or copy + pasting when we were doing then no sound.

We think you click to enlarge?

"We getting money over here.

What it do pimpin?

See you boys drinking;

But y'all niggas ain't tipping.

Hold up a yeah,

It's something wrong wit it.

If the money gon' nigga:

Be the fuck gone wit it."

(Thurston defends his stick.)

(There's some shit up in Thurston's paw.)

(This is how dogs run?  We feel kind of like Muybridge.)

TO BE CONTINUED... (CON'T!)

We're gonna start posting again REAL SOON. Like, real soon. Just think about one thing: Why these days are there so many slobby, non-executives waiting in the Starbucks line while typing away on their Blackberries? Viz., why do so many people have Blackberries? People who obviously fail to need MS Exchange support; who don't have meetings; who email each other pictures of cats? We dunno and we don't get it. It's a modern Zen koan.

TLP

There's a certain sense of isometry in Wittgenstein between language and thought.  So isn't it curious when he says in the introduction to the Tractatus that, "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence," which he then follows up by saying something to the effect of that we cannot speak what we cannot think because this would be to get outside the boundary of thought.  But, doesn't the "what we cannot talk about," and the fact that we must pass it over in silence, doesn't that imply that we think of something, proposition P, say, and that we must then decide that proposition P is something about which we cannot speak, like, say that "that sunset is absolutely the greatest thing we've seen all day!"

Ignoring the eidetic-normativity of the whole quote, of course, we could say that he said it wrong, and that he said it right later.  That he should have said it then, and basically said it later by writing like it was his maxim, "What can be said at all should be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must make a point of indicating."

What is it that after a long day of doing chores and stuff, we come home and the only game on is Denver Vs. KC?  And Denver is beating the tar out of KC, and of course the only player we care about is Tony Gonzales (for fantasy purposes).  Fuck, it figures.  And then watching this game just reminds us how the Bills should have beaten Denver, and also Dallas, and how they'd be like 9-4!  And why is Chester Taylor leading Adrian Peterson (good one)?  We have Chester Taylor and figured the logical play would be to bench him because Purple Jesus is our homeboy.  Right?  So he gets 100 yards and a TD.  He, Chester Taylor (a very creepy, rapist-sounding name, right?).  Purple Jesus Christ!

Multimedia message

This is the last thing you will ever see.
And death isn't an event in life. So, too bad.

Multimedia message

Test cameraphone post

Lastings Milledge, the National Pastime, and Finding Relief in Solitude

IDFNBGAW is ostensibly a sports blog:  That is, we're inspired by the inimitable Weezy F. Baby, who is, we're told, quite the sports fan.  We're also inspired by the concept of Swag, which, again, is quite sports-related.   So, it brings us GREAT JOY to comment on the latest greatest news of the Internets.  Lastings Milledge is going to be a National!

(Courtesy of Gothamist, but the captions are ours.)

So what does this mean for IDFNBGAW?  Well, allow us to explain.  Back in 2005, we were just starting to think about getting out of college.  Impermanence was the rule.  We wanted to latch on to something lasting, traditional, Great and Beautiful.  So we thought, hey, what about that baseball thing?  That's pretty tradition-laden.  And aren't baseball games the places where fat cat businessmen casually negotiate over $million deals?  Over footlongs and plastic bottles of Bud??  

The only thing left was to pick a team.  Growing up, we used to like the Yankees.  But then they had to go and win so much that, by 2005, they were a highly unfashionable choice.  What other teams were there?  The Mets?  But they were a poor man's Yankees.  The Red Sox seemed popular, but all their fans are assholes.  Oh, what's that?  There's a new baseball team?  Yes there is.  The Washington Nationals were just coming back to being, rising from the chrysalis that was Expos.  They seemed fresh and old school.  There was no bandwagon, therefore no bandwagon fans.  They were a northeast team, so we could go to games.  The stars had aligned.  Perfect!  So we went off to Zappos or Footlocker or something and got a Nationals hat.

And we read all about them on the Internets.  And everything seemed primed for a bigtime baseball resurgence over in IDFNBGAW Land.  Except for two things:  1) The Nationals sucked.  Maybe they traded for Soriano or something?  They had one guy, like, a 3b or Cf that was pretty good?  Maybe El Duque's brother?  They were horrible.  And then with the RFK-is-actually-a-lot-bigger-than-we-thought-it-was Washington Post article, which totally demoralized the team.  But, the bigger problem was 2)

Baseball is suuuuuuuper boring to watch unless it's a deciding playoff game.  And, as per 1), the Nationals were not getting anywhere near the playoffs.  Therefore, the whole let's root for the Nationals plan fell through.

But maybe this Milledge trade is what we need.  There's going to be a new ballpark.  And the Mets' epic collapse last year may be an emotional speedbump that they're just not gritty enough to overcome.  The Braves are all card carrying members of the AARP.  And, who else is in the NL East?  We have no clue because we don't watch baseball.  But, rest assured.  Come April, we will definitely be reading about it on Deadspin.  And we cannot wait to read about Milledge's latest rap/baseball endeavors.  We wish him the best:  To fly with the fishes and swim with the pigeons; to live in a different world like Dwyane Wayne.

This Is the Best Workout Mix Ever

(Click to enlarge, duh.)

On the way to the gym, but first, let's tell you about something.  This is the best, most magical mixtape ever for working out (or, you know, "working out," if you know what we mean?)  This list of songs is by far the best, most advanced technology ever to surface concerning the motivation and physical limit-pushing of man.  We already gave you the first song.  Here's another song.

Incidentally, the best song of the year: "For Reverend Green" by the Animal C o l l e c t i v e.

Should We punch people on the Nose?

("Typical example of the eruption column demonstration, taken from the 4th floor of Lathrop Hall, on the Colgate University campus.")

You know how you sometimes tell someone to go to hell and fuck you I hope you die get away from me and you barely have the restraint, or maybe you're just too tired from yelling, restraint to quit your fist from hitting him on the nose? I thought that's how I felt about Colgate. The place was a rotting, minatory corpse of a place. It bled Nantucket red and smelled like Keystone Light. The faculty were recidivist masturbators: too old not to spit ashes in your face, or too young to listen. But then... ?

Well you move on and all those feelings stay where they were. They were the product of your particular age-location feeling-matrix. They aren't you now; they were you then. And maybe you're a pussy, but you think maybe you were wrong. And you can't just go punching people on the nose all the time because they'll throw you in jail with all the pederasts and gruel cadgers. And anyway, everything was pretty good then. You still loved bands, and books were nice and smelled like novelty. And people never asked you about New Age topics; and metaphysics was something Aristotle wrote about. But when you did read Aristotle, you were lectured by professors; tutors didn't moderate a bullshit discussion. Because that shit is some brokedown, poor excuse for an education. And fuck that. They're all great books, so you can go to hell, too.

(Model trains.)

In concussion: we here at IDFNBGAW think you should go punching people on the nose. And Santa Fe, you're next.

Tell me What it Look Like

(Image courtesy of Oklahoma's OK.gov site)

It looks like we're getting a desk job. So, you know. More blogging.

Facebook = Real Fucker, Funny as Well

Facebook can be a real fucker sometimes. We used to know him back when he had a definite article, like, back when he wasn't as cool and shit. Now he's all stuck up. There won't be an official IDFNBGAW facebook page (but you loyal fans can make tribute pages, if you feel that way and, you know, live in your parent's basement coming up for air only so long as it takes to grab another bag of Dorito Cooler Ranch; quickly descend; and log back into World of Warcraft or read blogs or write blogs or whatever.)

However, and this is a big "however," facebook can be pretty funny, too. While we tried (kind of unsuccessfully) to create an official IDFNBGAW profile, we had to fill in one of those "I'm not a spambot" word verification boxes.

As you can see to the left, facebook asked us to type in "booby country" in order to prove we're not some sort of spambot.  In all fairness to spambots, though, they are also pretty good at creating phrases like "booby country."

OS X 10.5 Leopard Review Metaview

We love all things technology here at IDFNBGAW.  And as such, we're providing a little Review Metaview of OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The yellow arrow points to the new translucent menu bar.  Everyone hates it.

The blue arrow points to the new 3-D dock.  Everyone hates it.

Time Machine.

The Worst Blogger Ever

Pictured to the left is the worst blogger ever. There is a subtle yellow arrow pointing at him.

Some of you may know him as the curator of Blastings Thrilledge, a blog devoted (slavishly, fellatio-ly even) to Lastings Milledge, a third-tier scrub prospect of the New York Metropolitans/rapper.

Some of you may ask, "Why is this person the Worst Blogger Ever?" and that's a valid question. Some of you may even say, "He seems like quite the fledgling naturalist; and we all know that naturalists are all-right fellows."


Well we at IDFNBGAW are here to remind you of Darwin--God-hating, monkey-loving Darwin. He wasn't an all-right fellow, now was he? No: He killed God and had sex with monkeys. And this blogger is cut from the same cloth!




















Here you can see the blogger cradling a pretty little butterfly in his hand. Quite the speculative naturalist, right? This touching shot seems to convince you that he cares about the butterfly, and that, therefore, he is a good person--and by extension a good, i.e., not the Worst Ever, blogger.




And then only moments later, he crushes the butterfly like the Satan-loving naturalist bastard he is. And that, QED, is why this man is the Worst Blogger Ever.

Rookie of the Year, Best New Blog

Best New Blog = IDFNBGAW!


We couldn't resist, so we took this "screen grab" with our camera phone.

A quick explanatory note. All images on IDFNBGAW (except where noted, i.e., the header picture) are taken by us--c'est nous--on our camera phone. These beauties are property of us here at IDFNBGAW.




So here's a song from Ween's latest album, The Cockroach. We find it reminiscent of that fine tune "You Fucked Up," with a dash of "It's Gonna Be a Long Night." And speaking of "dashes," how much is a dash? We've been getting into Manhattans around here, which call for a dash of bitters. (It's not a Manhattan if you don't dash in the bitters, obvs.) So sometimes we put in, like, three or four shakes; and other times we put in just, like, one or two. It all tastes basically the same because we use that $8 rye that you pick up at the gas station. But for sake of argument, how much is a dash? Or a jigger? What the fuck. Are bartenders like 15c. sovereigns who got to make up units of measurement by means of whim and fancy? "Oh, an Earl will be the length of my big toe. And 3 Lancastshires shall be the amount of time it takes my dogs to run down a fox." Is that how the bartenders came up with their ridiculous measures? "Dude, I bet you won't drink a jigger of my piss!" "How did you come up with Jigger?" "Well, after I took a leak, I jiggered my dick off into this little cup, and that's how much a jigger is!" I bet that's how the jigger was invented. Anyway, yeah.

Rookie of the Year, Best New Blogger

We know that Best New Blogger seems to indicate the person making the blog rather than the blog itself (the classic blogger V. blogged distinction, which hinges on the anti-realistic, idealistic worldview first popularized by Heraclitus, fucker); however, if the award were for Best New Blog, then we couldn't run this picture.

Pretty sexy, right?  So that's us (us=me).  We're Best New Blogger.  Thank you, hold the applause.

B O N U S F E A T U R E

The Black Kids are by far the most impressive instantiation of the 2007 indie-roller-disco movement.  I think some of the kids in the band are even black.  This is they're best song, the chorus sticks in your head like chewing gum.

Hurricane Jane (from their Wizard of Ahhhhs demo.)  Good, apparently, until 3 December.

Rookie of the Year, Best New Dog

Here at I Don't Fear Nothing But God And Weddings (IDFNBGAW hereafter) part of what we're all about hype, swagger, what your grandparents would call "moxy," and what Rick Lazio would call "chutzpah:" the Fresh, the New, and the True. So here we go with the young turks who are tearing it up and crocheting it back together into some sort of art-fag, avant-garde, postmodern triumphalist trompe l'oeil shit. We're handing out our annual Rookie of the Year awards in IDFNBGAW land.

Rookie of the Year, Best New Dog

Our ROY, Best New Dog is Thurston, our new house dog/alarm clock/personal trainer/really intricate toy.
Thurston is what we like to call a Santa Fe Heeler. He features distinctly washedout burnt sienna coloring;
large multi-plane independent pivot ears; and an eye patch.

When he was a puppy, Thurston
shanked a man in prison.

He enjoys listening to Brian Eno's ambient music.

He plays dead; don't hate the player hate the game!

He loves to loaf, but he can hang a triple double, 60
fantasy point week on you at any moment.

More ROY awards coming throughout the week.