Jason Kendall Sucks at Baseball

As I watched the dynamic duo of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan ruminate on how bad the Milwaukee Brewers catcher is in tonight's Sunday Night Baseball telecast, I had flashbacks similar to the end of The Sixth Sense remembering just how bad he was on the Oakland Athletics.

He is hitless in 15AB this season. He hit .242 and .246 with a total of 5 home runs in '07 and '08, respectively. He is so bad that I made my friend be Jason Kendell while I was the fake Barry Bonds (Reggie Stocker) in home run derby MLB06 PS2 (I still lost, I am the Jason Kendall of video gamers). Not that I NEEDED validation, but I Googled "Jason Kendall sucks" and here's what I found in some of the first few results:

Danny's Blog: Does Jason Kendall Suck?
In closing, Jason Kendall sucks balls, and will be a giant black hole for the Brewers all year. Or until he is replaced. ..

Cubs Acquire Jason Kendall
Cubs got Jason Kendall for FREE (basically) Rob Bowen was sent to the A's .... Kendall sucks. But if he's better than the other options you guys have then ...

Why the 2009 Milwaukee Brewers Will Suck
Bleacher Nation ...Jason Kendall sucks both at and behind the plate. Bill Hall vanished last year, and now he’s hurt or something, leaving someone like Mike Lamb to start at ..

Baseball Toaster: Catfish Stew : Kid Kendall
My five-year-old daughter decided early in the season that Jason Kendall was ... her dad thinks that player sucks

By the way, Kendall makes $5 million a year

Dear Zachary: The Craziest Documentary I Have Ever Seen

Basic premise:
Crazed woman kills boyfriend after he breaks up with her,
Flees to Canada where they drag their heels on the extradition back to the U.S.,
Woman announces she is pregnant with victim's son,
Best friend/filmmaker decides to document his life, interviewing friends/family/etc.,
Then everything goes completely haywire.

MSNBC aired this a few months ago (part 1 is here), but if you are looking for something to add to your Netflix queue, I recommend picking Dear Zachary . It is jarring:

"Stamping it bluntly, Dear Zachary is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen and I am not prone to such hyperbolic statements. Kurt Kuenne has remarkably turned this into a furious lightning bolt of reminiscence and outrage that is going to reach into each viewer's chest and squeeze their heart like a tomato in a vice. Dear Zachary unfolds like a masterful thriller that never loses respect for the wake its tragedies have left. And still, by the end when we're exhausted and ready to collapse under the weight of our tears and anger, Kuenne has created an absolute love letter to the art of parenting...it's the best documentary of its kind probably since Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. This is Oscar-worthy material and hopefully enough people on the committees will see it and cast a vote for next year." - Erik Childress, eFilmCritic.com

Story Time

From a friend:

One of the dumbest things I ever did in my youth was explain to my mother how to use AOL. When her father passed away, our family got some money and decided to hop onto the exciting rollercoaster that was the budding internet revolution.

I was 11 years old at the time, and I would bop around in the VH1 chatroom. It was the only one I could find that seemed remotely relevant to anything I liked. I would type in A/S/L and talk about how much I loved Hanson to a bunch of middle aged people that did not respond or care.

A few months later, more people bought computers, and my mom started to take interest in what I was doing on there. I excitedly explained the wonderful world of talking to strangers and how much easier it was to talk to my aunt in an instant message box. I showed her how to go into chatrooms and explained the typical protocol and she was excited to explore the world herself. Soon after she began to spend hours transfixed in front of the screen in the Long Island Over 40 Chatroom, not even talking, but simply watching other people in the chatroom converse.

This was around the time my parent’s marriage hit the skids. My mom spent a lot of time on the computer, and one day my dad came home with another computer and said we would get a second AOL account so that the rest of the family could actually use the internet. He put the computer in the basement, and as you might have guessed, it wasn’t long before he too spent much of his free time in the basement on that computer.

Whenever any of us would go down to the basement, my dad would immediately close all the screens on the computer. My mom clearly became curious as to what exactly my father was doing on the computer for so many hours. Her solution for this was to enlist a spy, 12 year old me, to try to find out. I guess in all honesty at the time I was excited to spy on my father, because at least if I could report something back to my mom, she would care enough to talk to me.

At random times during evenings, I would try different approaches to seeing what was on the screen. Sometimes I would try to run down the stairs, pretending I had something exciting to tell him. I wanted to catch him off guard before he had time to close all the windows. Other times I would creep down the stairs, hoping he wouldn’t hear me before I got far enough down to see the screen. My favorite was opening the door and laying my body partially crawled down the stairs while I craned my neck to view the monitor.

I never saw anything, however, because my glasses were broken and my parents were not interested in replacing them.

[ed. note: I was not expecting this M Night Shamalamadingdong twist ending]

Is YouTube Doomed?

Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne thinks so:

"The problem lies with the bean-counters. According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009. No matter Google’s $116 billion market cap: a half-billion dollar loss on a single property, even one as large as YouTube, is a bitter pill to swallow. Even Eric Schmidt, talking to the New York Times about the YouTube acquisition, was quick to say that, going forward, Google would “be more careful with potential large expense streams, which are of uncertain return.”

Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely."

Completely Clueless

If the World Was a 100 Person Village

See all of Toby Ng's designs here

The YouTube Presidency

From the New York Times:

"... and while Obama’s campaign speeches weren’t delivered expressly for YouTube the way Oval Office addresses are delivered for TV, the versions of those speeches millions of us saw were tailored to the site, with titles, omissions, crowd cutaways, highlight footage and a dozen other manipulations of sound and image that affected the impression they made. When Obama delivered his speech on race a year ago, the campaign uploaded, for example, its own version of the speech; it was cleaner and more elegantly produced than the CNN version, and it has been played more than 1.5 million times.

Every one of the president’s weekly public-address videos is conspicuously labeled “public domain,” and commentary is welcome. Plenty of detractors weigh in. Name-calling — “socialist pig,” “fascist in chief” — jostles for space with praise (“Nice to have an articulate, intelligent, thoughtful president again”). In general, the effect is one of openness and inclusiveness, even as the shooting and spreading of the videos has been tightly controlled. As of this writing, no video has surfaced, for example, from a St. Patrick’s Day White House event with the Irish prime minster, at which Obama thanked himself in an effort to parody an earlier teleprompter mishap. Could this be because his joke might be taken out of context by those who consider him the Teleprompter President?"

iamdiddyJust leavin the club!!!! Now the party really begins!!!! You only live once!!!! Just do it!!!!! Close your eyes and JUMP!!!!! Let's go!!!!

iamdiddyI'm so HIGH off life right now!!!! Get HIGH with me!!!! Off of life!!! Life is such a blessing!!!! Thank you GOD!!!!!!

iamdiddyIts 330 am!!!! Are you LOCKED IN????!!!!! Let's go!!! Who's wit me????

The Best of Leon

Moon Trailer

awesome.

Gooooal

Walker

Rumor Has It

That President Obama will throw out the first pitch at the Yanks home opener.