So, I realize that the world of sports is progressing rapidly toward championships in the NHL and NBA, and the baseball season is underway (I could have said in full swing, but I try not to be a douche as much as humanly possible. It's what separates people like me from people like Simmons, Mariotti and the CHB, that and I don't get paid for this). But I don't have much to say about those topics right now. Just that if San Antonio wins another title this season, that's it for me with the NBA.

Greg Popovich is sort of like the evolutionary Red Auerbach and these Spurs are sort of like the Celtics dynasty of the 50s and 60s, at least in the same sense as JD Drew's numbers are sort of like ARod's career stats and in the same way that getting kicked in the balls is sort of like a good time.

San Antonio plays a disgraceful brand of basketball. And anyone who can legitimately say they enjoy watching a team meld cowardice with bullying tactics has no genuine affinity for basketball. Can anyone honestly imagine a player like Bill Russell stooping to using hack-a-Shaq tactics against Wilt Chamberlain (a terrible free throw shooter in his own right)? Russell probably would have thrown a beating on anyone who suggested such a thing. And rightly so, because that isn't basketball. Or at least it wasn't.

I realize that New Orleans is up 2-1 in their series with the Spurs right now, but I just can't see them holding on to that lead. I am not optimistic enough to think that the Spurs won't find a way to flop and hack their way out of the hole they're in right now. If that team collectively starred in a low budget, crummy horror movie, I think I just might have trouble remembering it was fiction.

And as for Manu Ginobli, can you imagine what his career would have looked like if he had the misfortune of playing in the NBA when basketball was basketball? For every rave review of his play, there ought to be at least a footnote to remind younger fans what Jordan, Bird, Johnson, Barkley, Wilkins and Doctor J would have done to him had he had the misfortune to face any one of them in his respective prime. And don't forget that the league's officials tended to actually call games in a fashion that resembled legitimacy back then. Ginobli would be on the bench in foul trouble or so shell-shocked that he'd have to retire. But the trouble with good old days is that they're always gone for good by the time you realize just what you had.

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to devote some attention to what was wrong with the Star Wars movies. Or at least some of the problems, since there are so many and I get bored fairly easily. I guess the fundamental problem is that the films are science fiction, and science fiction as a genre is created by people who are cut off from the real world where people have to make real decisions and face real consequences. That and they probably smoke a lot of dope.

Look at the way Darth Vader kept choking senior officers to death with the Force. After the first few admirals and generals got choked, that would be it for the morale and the discipline of the Imperial military. Fear is a fairly effective motivator, but at a certain point, a person is just going to say "What the hell, if I fail I'm going to be killed, so why even try?" Also, eliminating senior commanders would logically force his immediate subordinates into roles that they may not be fully prepared to take on in combat conditions.

Then there's the Force itself. What exactly is the Force capable of and why does it keep changing to suit the convenience of a particular film at a particular point in time? One Sith Lord hiding in the capital can diminish the ability of the entire Jedi council to use the Force, but another Sith Lord can't stop a kid with about 6 minute's training from using the Force to blow up a Death Star?

And why can Vader sense his son with the Force and not his daughter? For that matter, why the eff did they call the kid Luke Skywalker? Or is creativity one of the ten thousand things that lead to the Dark Side? It kind of defeats the purpose of hiding the kid if you're going to give him his father's last name.

Then there's the fact that the movies are filled with overrated characters who have massive cult followings and yet accomplish nothing. What was the big deal about Boba Fett? And now that I think about it, outside of putting the whining robot's head on backwards, what did Chewbacca do, exactly? But the most overrated character has to be Yoda. If he spoke normally, no one would even give a damn about him.

Episodes 1-3 suffer, too, from the absence of a compelling bad guy. Darth Vader in the original movies was compelling because he was big and scary looking and he had that cool SCUBA regulator breathing thing going for him, along with James Earl Jones' voice. The Emperor was a kind of a puss with creepy magical powers, but the Palpatine character was just a puss in 1, 2 and 3. I understand that was supposed to be part of his act to fool every one, but he just came off as a marginally talented English actor working with a shitty script.

And Anakin took more from the table than any character in any movie I've seen in the last ten years, with the exception of A Scanner Darkly, where every character not only took things from the table, but came back to steal table itself along with the rest of the furniture in the house. The little kid who played him in Episode One was so annoying that he would have triggered a rash of vasectomies had the average Star Wars fan even had the chance of contaminating the next generation with their DNA.

But that little kid ended up looking like Olivier doing Hamlet thanks to Hayden Christensen. God, was he awful. I realize, he won an MTV Movie Award for his performance in Episode 3, but that's not exactly an impressive accomplishment. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe he stole the show in Jumper, I won't know until I happen to see it one night after Val Kilmer's Spartan on USA at 4 AM three years from now, though.

It was more than a bit painful to watch Natalie Portman and Ewan MacGregor in the prequels. After the Professional and Beatiful Girls, it seemed like Portman could act. But it still has to be better to have peaked at 14 than never to peak at all. And MacGregor was excellent in Trainspotting, but with each passing year and each disappointing role, it looks like he channeled every last bit of talent he possessed into that project and that's probably going to be all she wrote for him.

What I've never figured out is the logical process by which Luke Skywalker just accepts the fact of his upbringing without any bitterness. If I found out that I had a twin sister who was adopted and raised as a princess while I was stuck farming water on a desert planet and raised by a broke d-bag who kept scamming me out of a chance to fly space ships, I sure as hell wouldn't take that with a smile on my face. I'd be on the Dark Side paying every waterwalker and do-gooder back for that in a second. But that's just me.

Finally, there's the fact that Lucas keeps revisiting the original films to tinker with them and invariably makes them worse. I didn't like Return of the Jedi much to start with, but the revamped ending and Lucas' midget fetish have made me hate it. Why did he have to edit in Hayden Christensen? What was wrong with keeping the older Vader who actually redeemed himself and not the young douche who went to the Dark Side? And why did he bring in the celebration scenes from Naboo? The Gungans sucked and were probably overly insensitive from an ethnic standpoint to begin with, and they didn't get any better.

It reminded me of something I read in Aldous Huxley's intro to the 20th anniversary edition of A Brave New World. He mentioned that in revisiting the work after that length of time, he saw a number of things that he would have done differently had he the chance and wanted to edit out, but in the end he left it as it stood. And it was the right thing to do. Better to let something that was widely appreciated stand flaws and all than try to perfect it, only to weaken it as a whole.

There are some things in life that come down to a question of perspective. For instance, one man's glowing tribute to a deceased icon from another team in another sport in another era can also be another man's shameless attempt to exploit a populace of sheep when the market for a given team's paraphernalia is saturated. Apparently every fan who wants them must already have all the pink shirts and red shirts and blue shirts that they could justify owning. So the Red Sox brass cooked up a blatant, disgusting sham of a tribute to Red Auerbach tonight.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, and I allow my hatred of the Red Sox to cloud my mind. Maybe that's why I think it strange that the Red Sox chose the night of their first home game against the New York Yankees to lament the passing of the greatest basketball mind since Naismith. I'm sure it was just coincidence that it should happen to be a Friday night and a national TV game. There is no way that this fine event could have any ulterior motive.

Giving the devil his due, I must congratulate whichever of Henry's minions was responsible for engineering and marketing this "tribute." Even I, believing it to be artificial and in poor taste as I do, think it was brilliant. Bringing the 16 banners from the rafters across town to adorn the Green Monster before the game started was the mot juste. I only wish that I and my small band of loyal readers were that clever and that shameless, maybe then I'd break the century mark for daily hits.

Fortunately for me, the universe has a way of evening the scales. Somewhere, I think Red might have cracked a smile about something that happened in Boston sports for the first time in years after A Rod took Big Schill deep in the 4th. It was also edifying to see Mientkiewicz advance two runners with a sacrifice bunt to help the Yankees manufacture their first run of the night. Up until Varitek tied the game with what I can only assume to have been Sammy Sosa's infamous batting practice bat and Crisp hit that triple, I was convinced that the bottom three in the Red Sox order would struggle to manufacture a case of athlete's foot.

Interestingly, down by 3 in the seventh, Francona elected to pinch hit Wily Mo Pena for Pedroia with runners on first and second rather than sacrifice to advance the runners. Perhaps Francona was thinking (assuming he can, in fact, think) that Petite was tiring. Unfortunately, that was not the case. He struck out Pena, and Proctor came on to retire Lugo and Youkilis. It is also possible that Francona may not have even known the situation. Or maybe he just had no confidence that the top of his order could drive in runners from second and third with one out should he call for the sacrifice.

I understand that one run one run isn't going to tie the game there, and it is now a moot point because the Yankee bullpen made the lead go away in the 8th. But at least it's more proactive to sacrifice and advance runners to second and third with one out than it is to sit back and hope for a big inning. But I blame myself for the 8th inning rally more than I blame the Yankees or credit the Sox. I jinxed the Yankees, because I had written this joke: "that rally just died in Jason Varitek's arms as though it were the 1980s band Cutting Crew" as he stepped to the plate. I feel like a tool right now, but I leave it in for the sake of intellectual honesty.

And Francona was lucky that burning Pena by pinch hitting him when he couldn't field Pedroia's position did not come back to haunt him tonight. The fact that it would have made infinitely more baseball sense to pinch hit Cora and have him execute the sacrifice or strike out like Pena did than wasting Pena in the first place did should temper the pride Red Sox Nation derives from tonight's comeback victory ever so slightly. I will concede that pinch running for Giambi made perfect sense right up until the point where a spare part from and made up of lesser spare parts unknown made the last out of the game batting fifth.

The Red Sox had no confidence going into that 8th inning. You could see Schilling's man-and-a-half sized ego deflate when A Rod hit his second. Personally, I think that it should have counted as a grand slam, even though only two men were on base at the time. After all, Coco Crisp managed to fall out of the field of play into the home bullpen, very nearly breaking his back in the process. The total, complete and utter humiliation for the player and the team in that one shining moment ought to be worth at least one additional run on the scoreboard.

Even in the ninth, when the Sox sent Hideki Okajima out to pitch to the heart of the Yankee lineup, it could not help but remind Red Sox Nation that Papelbon must be treated with kid gloves as though he were Samuel L. Jackson's character in Unbreakable this season. But Okajima rose to the challenge. He was a little upset with some of the calls that led to the Abreu walk. And maybe he had a point, but Abreu has a reputation for having a good eye, and reputation goes a long way. There was a time when Greg Maddux could bounce the ball like a cricket bowler throwing a googly and still get a strike call. That's the way it goes.

The guy I go to for my Red Sox information actually called me before the game to get in my eye about the green uniforms. His quote at the time: "Think Notre Dame." Of course, I didn't point out that Notre Dame hasn't exactly produced the desired result in their last few green jersey games (last year's game against Army doesn't really count). I was saving that for a big moment, like the second A Rod homer, but alas, he wasn't taking my call.

I do have to give him credit on one point, he said that he saw Schilling letting up at least five runs tonight. And he had that part right. He wasn't concerned when I spoke to him before the game, because Pettite didn't scare him. I guess he was right about that too, since Pettite was good enough when he had to be, but not exactly dominant over his 6 and 1/3 innings of work.

Even with the Red Sox having all the momentum because of their impressive comeback, this shapes up to be an interesting series for the Yankees. It is not going to be easy to win tomorrow or Sunday, with Karstens and Chase Wright making their Fenway debuts. Pettite came up big for them, and it would have been nice not to have wasted his performance. It would be nice to have the Sox lose two games this weekend and a sweep would have been awesome, but that's obviously impossible now.

I must say I wonder whether the artificial confidence a sweep for the hated Red Sox would instill in Red Sox Nation might have been worth all the bragging bravado I would have to endure. After all, sweeping that mighty lineup would not be a miracle (or even a fair sized country wonder to borrow an expression from Edwin O'Connor) with the starting rotation decimated by injuries to Wang, Pavano and Mussina. A comeback against Rivera is nice, and three blown saves for a closer of his stature is not exactly encouraging even if it is only April.

Rooting against the Red Sox is far more important than rooting for any one team. I will enjoy the inevitable collapse of this team with its suspect fourth and fifth starters, still not exactly proven middle relief and pathetic hitters manning the last third of the order. The bullpen held the fort and even chumps like Varitek, Crisp and Cora can't get out all the time. It is possible that I should be more repentant or keep silent, but I'm just not that kind of guy.

After all, I can't help wondering now that all the king's horses and all the king's men managed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again...how humble is Humpty Dumpty? I'm surprised he hasn't posted yet. I wonder, since my technical consultant tells me that a hit on this site has originated from a password protected area of wordpress (which supports his blog) twice in the past two weeks, whether he's waiting on me waiting on him?

It's been a little while now since I last posted on a baseball related topic. Like virtually every other sports fan in America, I have been devoting most of my attention to college basketball of late. For instance, I filled out my second bracket sheet today on boston.com. I hadn't intended to enter their bracket challenge until I saw that I could compete against Brian Scalabrine. The way I see it, between my total lack of athletic ability and Dann Ainge's penchant for brain typing, if I beat Scalabrine in this competition, I should get a million dollar deal with the Cs.

I simply could not let this article in the New York Times pass by without comment. Because Philadelphia fans booed Mike Schmidt and Yankee fans boo ARod, the two situations must be somehow related. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will already know that Mike Schmidt was my favorite player as a kid. I even wrote a post using him as a foil when I addressed the revisionist claim that Jim Rice was the most feared hitter in baseball when he was in his prime. Thanks to the magic of labelled posts, you can navigate to it with relative ease by clicking the Mike Schmidt label in the right hand column.

Mike Schmidt and Alex Rodriguez are not as similar as a comparison of their career numbers would lead one to believe. A Rod broke in at a younger age, 19 as opposed to 22 for Schmidt, so he has much better numbers at age 30 than Schmidt did. But Mike Schmidt played in an era with fewer teams. He also played his entire career in the National League. Even though they're both third basemen, it's still relevant because NL lineups all have that glaring hole in the 9 spot because the pitcher bats. For a guy like Schmidt that had to be cost him 5-10 RBI over a full season.

Schmidt also played in an era of massive ball parks that were nowhere near as conducive to great power numbers as the stadiums of this generation. Think about The Vet, Riverfront in Cincinnati, The Astrodome, Three Rivers, Old Busch Stadium (when it was the ghastly monstrosity with astroturf in the 1980s before the renovation in the 90s) and Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta to name a few. And even without steroids, HGH or any of the rest of the illicit performance enhancing substances we suspect today's power hitters to have used at some point (if they aren't still cheating on the sly), current players have a massive advantage over their predecessors of even 20 years ago because of the advances in nutrition and strength and conditioning programs.

But A Rod and Mike Schmidt are different in more ways than just numbers. A Rod has better postseason stats than Schmidt, but Schmidt was World Series MVP and champion in 1980. And Schmidt's surprising low postseason stats (.236 with 4 HR and 16 RBI in 36 games) are in large part due to a disastrous World Series in 1983 (1 for 20 over five games, .050 average with no walks, no RBI and six strikeouts). But even the Mariner teams A Rod took to the playoffs had better lineups than the Phillies teams of the 70s and 80s. It seems impossible to believe, but Mike Schmidt hit 48 HR for the eventual World Series Champions in 1980. The other seven regular position players combined to hit 58 home runs.

Mike Schmidt's relationship with the fans and media weren't perfect because Philly is Thunderdome. A Rod's trouble in New York is largely his own fault. I don't blame Yankee fans for disliking him. To come out and suggest that his difficulties in connecting to the fans were the result of being good looking, rich and biracial is absolutely insane. After all, what is Jeter? He is all of those things, plus he comes up big in big moments and he bust his ass every game.

I've heard more than a few people say that Red will be looking down on the Cs and working the lottery in their favor. I don't believe that for a second. Karma hasn't deserted the Celtics. Karma beat the Celtics half to death and left the team bleeding in a ditch. If you don't believe me, consider this. The Celtics lost to the Bulls tonight in the United Center. When the Bulls wore GREEN jerseys. I don't give a damn if it is the only home game of St Patrick's Day week. You simply don't wear green against the Cs.

Can you imagine wearing green jerseys against the Celtics with Russell, Heinshon, Cousy, Hondo, Cowens, Bird, DJ, Parrish or McHale on the floor? When the Cs lose out in the lottery, and I'm predicting now that even if they had all but 3 ping pong balls in the draft, the universe would find a way to stick them with that 4th pick. So Celtics fans might want to brace themselves for Joakim Noah or Big Baby Davis. When they miss out on Oden/Durant they're going to take one or the other of last year's models. And next year, we'll see Pagliuca come out and say: "If Delonte becomes Bibby and Al Jefferson becomes Karl Malone, I'd say Danny has done pretty well." And who knows, maybe I won't be the only one who finds that preposterous.

At least Wyc has his red Ferrari with the Celtics plate to console him as Banner 17 runs the last vestiges of Celtics pride into the ground. Either he thinks he's Magnum, or he's overcompensating for something. But it doesn't change the fact that the team has gotten worse and not better since Banner 17 took the reins. And Tyrus Thomas wearing a green jersey had a career night against the Boston Celtics.

And congratulations to all the pundits who lamented the fact that Drexel were not granted an at-large bid in the NCAA tournament. They did one hell of a lot of damage in the the NIT. They really made the committee look foolish.

This morning I happened to catch a little bit of Cold Pizza, which is almost always a bad idea. Shira Springer was on to talk about the Celtics. The talk managed to work its way around to the possibility that the Celtics will acquire the number one overall pick. As the talking head asked Ms. Springer which of the two top prospects would be the likely choice in the event the Cs should win the lottery, she said something that surprised me.

Shira talked about the Celtics personnel department doing their homework under their intrepid leader, and she mentioned something that I had forgotten for a time. Danny Ainge will bring in his ace in the hole, the brain typing guru Jonathan P. Niednagel. I'm not much in the way of a scientist, but this seems like this century's phrenology. Particularly if this charlatan's analysis of Erik Ainge is a representative sample of his work.

One need not waste much time surveying the wreckage of the Boston Celtics season to conclude that the Danny Ainge and Niednagel have not whiled away many hours talking with the flowers, as they lack the requisite grey matter. This critique of Ainge's fixation on brain typing may lack subtlety, but it is quite amusing. This article is perhaps the most horrifying and damning evidence that Ainge is a horrible GM, and the people who hired him should lose their NBA franchise privileges in much the same way as Butch (Bruce Willis) had his LA privileges revoked by Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.

Danny Ainge signed Brian Scalabrine to a deal worth $5mill per over three years because a guy who lucked out of real estate at the right time in California told him that Scalabrine shared a brain type with Michael Jordan and Larry Bird? You must be joking. For all I know (I will be brain typed over my dead body), I might share the same brain type. But I am a horrible basketball player. Hell, Mark Cuban might have the same brain type, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a frustrated jock sniff who can't play a lick of basketball.

Then there is the list of Niednagel's clients given in that piece from the New York Sun: Kevin McHale, Terry Donahue, who was probably the best college football coach at UCLA except for Dick Vermeil, Karl Dorrel, John McKay (even though he suffered from the sizable handicap of never having coached the Bruins and in fact having coached their arch rival USC) and me (another guy who never coached UCLA) and a bad GM for the 49ers, Kiki Vandeweghe and John Gabriel. That is a dreadful list, especially when you consider that outside of McHale, none of the others are employed as general managers at the moment.

And there is the fact that the author of the Sun piece quoted Ainge as having said: "You can take Red Auerbach, Jerry West ... all those guys that judge talent. I'd take Jon Niednagel." Personally, I think I'd take Red or West, or even someone who had only won one championship over a snake oil salesman. But this man will run the Celtics until they have 12 swingmen, no playoff appearances and hell freezes over. Or at least until an owner who no longer needs yearn for that happy day when his testicles descend into their proper position. I trust you will forgive me for the vulgarity.

For her sake, I hope Shira was joking. But it's hard to tell with her, since she was tragically born without a personality. I will say this and move on. If she brought brain typing into the conversation, and it wasn't a joke, she is either the third dumbest person in the world (behind Ainge and his guru) or she's on the team's payroll. To tell you the truth, I don't really care. Just so long as Danny Ainge and the brain typing boys make sure they buy the bridges I have for sale down in NYC before the door closes on their careers with the Celtics.

I haven't really been watching too much basketball lately. It's not easy to watch anymore. I have been watching a lot of the 31 days of Oscar on Turner Classic Movies. Ordinarily, I would leave the specifics of these evenings out of the blog because I recognize that most people don't share my interest in classic cinema. But tonight I saw Cactus Rose for the first time, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it.

It was very funny. But there was something inherently depressing about it. And it's not the 27 year old single straight guy dreading a winter storm warning and watching a 38 year old movie alone the night before Valentine's Day. OK, maybe it is that, but there was something else, too. Ingrid Bergman's character was in a night club doing late 60s dance moves. As a fan of Casablanca and Notorious, I was deeply disappointed to see that. It was beat. 25 years after starring opposite Bogart and Grant, there she was doing the damn mash potato. What a world.