"Let's just follow the railing I guess..."

Portal 2
Portal 2 is the real deal. A complete aesthetic experience from start to finish.

A few minor squabbles (the loading times, a piecemeal narrative, a few aggravatingly nebulous environmental puzzles, the overdone retro-future shtick) and one major issue (WHERE IS HALF-LIFE 2 EPISODE 3?) aside, I hereby nominate Portal 2 as the new go-to-game for proselytizing to non-gamers.

And I haven't even gotten a chance to play the Co-Op mode with Mark yet (thank you very much PSN hackers).

Grade: A

hideouslyshattered AL Central

AL Central

To me this division sort of falls into the "who cares?" category. Of course, I would have said that about the NL West last year and the Giants went on to win the World Series. Anyway, I don't think any of these teams has the look of a WS champ. But of the five, the Tigers do the best job pretending.

Projected Standings:

1. Detroit Tigers
2. Minnesota Twins
3. Cleveland Indians
4. Chicago White Sox
5. Kansas City Royals

Detroit Tigers:

Detroit is simply above average. They have one of the best hitters in the game in Miguel Cabrera, even if he is a drunk. Justin Verlander certainly has the stuff to be an ace pitcher, though he does have a tendency look pretty bad for stretches.

But the question for Detroit isn't whether Cabrera and Verlander will perform, the question will be whether or not they can get enough from everyone else. Victor Martinez should be great at catcher, but can Austin Jackson and Ryan Raburn build on last year's success in the OF? Can Magglio Ordonez keep his brittle bones intact for one more year? Can Max Scherzer make the jump from promising young pitcher to solid pitching stud? My guess is that they'll get enough from their supporting cast to win the division, but not enough to win a playoff series.

Minnesota Twins:

This team doesn't look that good to me, but I've picked them to be second because they always do better than I think they will. The other thing is that the rest of the teams in the division suck worse than the Twins. The Twins have some good pieces: Mauer, Morneau, but to me they're built kinda like the Tigers with a little less talent high end talent. Where Miguel Cabrera is a top 5 player, Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer are maybe top 40, and that's when they're not missing games. The Twins' pitcher Fransico Liriano makes Verlander look like a steady, consistent option by comparison. They'll probably win a lot of games against the bottom three teams in the division, but I don't see enough here to pass the Tigers, and certainly not enough to make any noise in the playoffs.

Chicago White Sox:

The Pale Hose aren't a bad team. They're just not that good. They've got a bunch of solid offensive players, Adam Dunn, Paul Konerko, Alex Rios, Carlos Quentin (when healthy) . . . even their middle infielders aren't bad. But none of them are even as good as the Twins' best hitters.

Their Pitching Staff suffers the same malady. Down the line they're guys that you wouldn't mind on your team, but there's no ace, noone who can get you a win even when your offense is off.

Cleveland Indians:

Do not rock. They're not terrible, outfielder Shin-Soo Choo is severely underrated, and it looks like Grady Sizemore is healthy at least for now. If they could just start Michael Brantley instead of Austin Kearns that would be a formidable outfield. The problem is that you have six other players in your lineup. And while catcher Carlos Santana is a solid young talent the rest of the infield looks pretty bad. Throw in a bad to terrible starting rotation and you've got yourself a crappy team. The relief pitching is pretty good though. So there's that.

Kansas City Royals:

For years they have been at the bottom of the league. There's really no hope on the horizon. They are the Pirates of the AL. Or the Pirates are the Royals of the NL. I really couldn't say.

hideouslyshattered AL East

As Logan pointed out in the comments on my last post (to use the term liberally), baseball might be all we have left after August first or whenever the NBA Finals are set to wrap up this year.

With that as an introduction, I present to you, hideouslyshattered. A project that will surely be abandoned by the All-Star break, but for at least a little while will be my attempt to summarize the red hot leather action that is(n't) our national pastime.



Here's my 3 week late preview, starting with the AL East.

Predicted Final Standings:

1. Boston Red Sox
2. New York Yankees
3. Tampa Bay Rays
4. Toronto Blue Jays
5. Baltimore Orioles

Boston:

This is not, as the Boston Herald claimed, The Best Team Ever! But this is the best team in the AL East. They are built kind of like the Yankees. A payroll 28 of 30 teams can't even dream of, 4 or 5 hitters that would be the best bat on most other teams, and pitching that is suspect. The good first: their lineup is probably better than the Yankees. During the offseason they added Carl Crawford who finished 7th on last year's AL MVP ballot and Adrian Gonzalez who finished 4th in the NL. To win you just have to score more runs than the other team, and this team will score a lot of runs.
Now, as to that suspect pitching: Jon Lester is the outlier, a legitimate ace. After that it gets a bit sketchy, the Red Sox are, I'm sure, hoping that Clay Bucholz can reproduce his 2010 success. He won 17 games and had a 2.33 ERA. Not bad for a guy who hadn't pitched 100 in a Major League season before.

Unfortunately that ain't happening. Bucholz' xFIP (expected Fielding Independent Pitching) a stat that attempts to tell you what a pitcher's ERA should be, was 4.07. Same as it was in '09 when he had a 4.21 ERA. And pretty close to his xFIP from '08 when he threw 76 innings and had an ERA of 6.75. I expect a pretty harsh regression for Bucholz and so far he's delivered with a 6.60 ERA.

Josh Beckett will pitch pretty well when he's healthy. He just might not be healthy. John Lackey is, well, John Lackey, he's ok, but nothing more. And Matsuzaka has been a wild card thus far in his MLB career. If the Sox need to replace a starting pitcher they might turn to 96 year old Tim Wakefield, exciting.


New York:

Second verse, same as the Red Sox. Crazy good hitting all over this lineup. A legit ace in CC Sabathia. Then. . . big fat Bartolo Colon? Freddy Garcia? Ivan Nova? Please. The Yankee pitching isn't just bad, it's terrible, no good, very bad. They do have their own version of Clay Bucholz, Phil Hughes, who wasn't really even that good last year and just got sent to the DL because he sucks.

Still, that lineup will win a lot of games. And I'm sure they'll try to trade for some pitching before the year is out.

Tampa Bay:

I really hope I'm wrong about the Rays not winning the East. I love this team, but I think they're a year and a piece or two away. Their pitching is super talented, but probably a bit too young. And they could use another bat. Preferably at shortstop. If you haven't been paying attention the Rays started the year with Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon on their team, but Manny retired when the league confronted him with yet another failed drug test. Just Manny being Manny!

I think the Rays are the most exciting team in the league to watch. Manager Joe Maddon is open minded and tries new things, things that make sense all the time. Tony LaRussa and Dusty Baker could learn a lot. Evan Longoria is the best player in baseball. There, I said it. Love to see the Rays make the playoffs this year, but my gut tells me they won't until 2012.

Toronto: Not a lot to see here. Decent pitching, and mediocre offensive talent. For some reason the Blue Jays have decided to stock up on outfielders that can't really hit but can steal bases. Unfortunately outside of Jose Bautista, who is sure to come crashing back to earth this year, there's noone to bat them in.

I will say that if this pitching staff were to trade places with the Yankees' each one would be a threat to win 20 games.

Baltimore Orioles:

This team will not win many games. They play in the toughest division in baseball and have no players in the top 50 in the league. Probably two in the top 100. The are bad.


To recap: Red Sox and Yankees will likely pound teams into submission, the Rays have the talent to win the division, but it is probably not developed enough.

Stay tuned for the next installment of hideouslyshattered, the AL Central! Ooooooh.

Tender talons.

According to iTunes Statistician, I have listened to Ladytron more than any other artist in my library -- and by a considerable margin. This would strike me as odd - I wouldn't necessarily consider Ladytron to be one of my favorite artists - but I noted a similar phenomenon a few years back when I realized that "Flicking Your Switch" was my most listened to song at the time (now since eclipsed by a song I would consider a favorite: "Ambulance" by Blur).

It may just be a matter of coincidence. I first got into Ladytron during the summer of 2005, which is also when I started using iTunes and an iPod nano. In contrast, any time I spent obsessing over Blur in college went unquantified by Winamp and my portable CD player. We've haven't got a file on you, apparently.

Or it may just be that Ladytron is a phenomenal singles band. Instead of putting on 604 in its entirety, I am more likely to jam to "Discotrax" and "Another Breakfast With You" then jump ship when "CSKA Sofia" comes up. Don't get me wrong: all four of Ladytron's albums are great, but each one is marred by filler and/or meandering instrumentals. I would be hard pressed to name a song on the b-side of Light & Magic. Nothing wrong with that: Low Life and Technique are great albums, but I would point anybody interested in listening to New Order towards Substance.

Which I guess makes it reasonable for Ladytron to be releasing a "Best of" at this odd juncture in the band's career. The deluxe edition of the set, in contrast, makes little sense. For a band that is so careful in cultivating its image, Ladytron is astonishingly reckless with the curation of its EPs and singles. An extensive excavation of the band's catalogue offers few rewards amidst a landfill of throwaway b-side instrumentals. Even the remixes seem purely mercenary, which is truly a pity as the source material seems so ripe for cross-genre pollination. So almost all of the 33 songs that pad the deluxe edition are album cuts, which is ridiculous as all four of Ladytron's records only have 57 songs in total. At that point you are better off just ponying up and buying all four albums, filler and all.

As a corrective to the track selection of the official "Best of," which seems targeted to prick the ears of Nine Inch Nails fans still despondent over the news that Reznor had thrown in the towel (how else to explain the complete whitewashing of the 604's early analog sound?), I offer you my own modest sampler of Ladytron tracks. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out.

Tender Talons: A Modest Sampler of Ladytron, 00-10



1. High Rise [Witching Hour]
2. Ghosts [Velocifero]
3. Destroy Everything You Touch [Witching Hour]
4. I'm Not Scared [Velocifero]
5. Ace of Hz [Gravity the Seducer]
6. Evil (Ewan Pearson Radio Edit) [Evil Single]
7. Beauty#2 [Witching Hour]
8. Another Breakfast With You [604]
9. Flicking Your Switch [Light & Magic]
10. He Took Her To A Movie [604]
11. Seventeen [Light & Magic]
12. Discotrax [604]
13. Playgirl [604]
14. Blue Jeans [Light & Magic]
15. Deep Blue [Velocifero]
16. Burning Up [Velocifero]
17. Last One Standing [Witching Hour]
18. Weekend [Witching Hour]
19. Versus [Velocifero]

Connections

"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep you folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank."

-- Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, page 246.