DBD 7.23.10 Funny People

Stephen Colbert. He’s intelligent, he’s undeniably unique, and he’s viciously clever. He’s been on a decade-long run of excellence. The best part for me is that I’ve been with him from the beginning.

His Daily Show bits are still excellent six to eight years later; he fit the fake correspondent persona perfectly. Hard for me to believe Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart were all on the same stage at once. (Let’s not forget the underrated Strangers with Candy.)

or Brendan Small. I’m concerned that I no longer find conventional humor funny (HIMYM, Big Bang, 30 Rock, etc.)
Zach G is a good choice too.

Arguably the funniest guy of the last decade.

Get ’em if you need ’em

Cal will open its final year of action in the current configuration of Memorial Stadium before it undergoes retrofit and renovation, on Saturday, Sept. 4 vs. UC Davis. The upcoming season also includes visits from Colorado (Sept. 11), UCLA (Oct. 9), Arizona State (Oct. 23), Oregon (Nov. 13), Stanford (Nov. 20) and Washington (Nov. 27).
Tickets are available in any of the following sections to fit every fan’s budget.

• Reserved – Best seats in the house
• Corner – Great reserved seats at a discounted price for most games
• BlueZone – Family-friendly pricing for adults, youth and seniors for most games

Fans can also purchase a 3-Game Plan, which includes a ticket to the UCLA and Oregon contests, along with a choice of either Colorado or Washington.

Voting ends Monday. Vote often

Where the voting currently stands:

The Band 641
The Team 558
The Spirit 522
The Cannon477
The Axe 445
Memorial Stadium 306
The Fans 306
Oski 257
Total 3512

In case you hadn’t seen this yet, calbears.com put out an "official" story on this

Riley is the Pac-10’s active career leader in wins with a 15-8 all-time record and touchdown passes (37). His 28 games played are tied for the most by any active conference quarterback, while his 23 starts are second. He has completed 357-of-659 passes (54.2%) for 4,773 yards during his career.

Last year, he had a solid season, starting all 13 games and completing 209-of-382 passes (54.7%) for 2,850 yards with 18 touchdown throws and eight interceptions. His 2,850 passing yards and 2,901 yards of total offense both ranked as the fourth-highest single-season totals in school history, while his 18 TD passes are tied for 10th on the school’s single-season list.

The Manning Award was created by the Allstate Sugar Bowl in 2004 to honor the football accomplishments of Archie, Peyton and Eli Manning. It is the only quarterback award that takes into consideration the candidates’ bowl performances. Ten finalists will be selected in late-November. The winner will be announced after the bowls in January and will be honored at a ceremony in New Orleans.

Three Bears to Play in Televised Games in 2010 KFC World Cup of Softball

Three Golden Bears – former letterwinner Vicky Galindo and current student-athletes Valerie Arioto and Jamia Reid – have taken temporary residence in Oklahoma City for the 2010 KFC World Cup of Softball. Four-year Bear and Olympian Galindo is competing for gold with the U.S. senior national team while Arioto and Reid sport the red, white and blue for the U.S. Futures Team. ESPN will air seven games, including the July 24 game pitting the senior squad versus the Futures, on ESPN, ESPN2 as well as ESPN3.com.

The World Cup is July 22-26 at the ASA Hall of Fame Stadium, which recently hosted the 2010 NCAA Women’s College World Series. The Futures team gets its name for the sheer number of players that transition from the team to the senior national squad.

Peter Tomasulo tied for 24th after 1st round of Nationwide Tour event in Columbus, Ohio. Peter is 6 shots off the lead

On the PGA TOUR, Charlie Wi is tied for 51st after 1st round of the RBCCanadian Open
Charlie shot a 1-under par 69 yesterday and is 7 shots off the lead

He picks ASU 9th

No. 9: Arizona State. If picking Washington State to finish last is a slam dunk, projecting ASU at No. 9 is an easy finger roll layup. That’s where the Sun Devils finished last season and they don’t look any better — and quite possibly substantially worse — this season. At least last year ASU had its defense going for it. The Sun Devils finished last year ranked No. 13 in the country in total defense (297.58 yards allowed per game). ASU has lost seven starters from that unit and doesn’t appear to have done much to improve its anemic offense.

Eight strong innings for Matt Cain. Grant at McCovey Chronicles weighs in:

The difference between Matt Cain: innings-eating horse, and Matt Cain: top-o’-the-rotation starter is a plus changeup. That’s what turned Jason Schmidt into a Cy Young winner (non-’roids division), and tonight Cain had the plus changeup. Cain’s fastball is hard to pick up and sneaky fast, and his breaking ball can be tight, but if he can consistently throw the changeup as well as he did tonight, that will be the thing that makes him. That’s an if, not a when, of course. But games like tonight’s make it easy to dream.

Also, credit to Bochy for getting Cain out of the game even though there was a shutout intact. The only reason to keep Cain in the game was for the accumulation of teeth-gritting gumption points. Not worth it. Sorry, Mr. Jenkins. Tonight, discretion was the better part of valor. Well done, Bochy. Well done.

TAIWAN?

The Giants would open the 2011 season with a two-game series in Taiwan against the Arizona Diamondbacks if players from both teams approve a proposal from Major League Baseball, sources told the Mercury News on Wednesday.

Players union executive Gene Orza met with the Giants almost two weeks ago in Washington to outline the travel schedule, which would include two exhibitions against the Chinese Taipei national team before taking on the Diamondbacks in late March.
The Giants would return to Scottsdale, Ariz., for an additional week of spring training before resuming the regular season.

LINK

There is no narrative for an Asian American kid who led his team to a state title, went completely unrecuited, settled for Harvard, for chrissake, dominated the Ivies, went undrafted and then signed with an NBA team straight out of the summer league. Does anyone’s story in the NBA deserve more of a FTW? And while it might be technically true to say that he is his own man and should not have to bear the yoke of his people, that truth is utterly irrelevant. His story is so perfect that it will be gobbled up and turned into metaphor, he will be a experiment for how ESPN discusses "his kind," he will be the litmus test of where Stu Scott can go and where he cannot, he will be most easily accessible, visible counterpoint to the emasculated Asian male. He will be the Great Yellow Hope for millions of Asian people, not just in the Bay Area, but in Flushing, K-Town, Little Saigon, Annandale, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei and Beijing.

And yet, while repairing our faith in the multi-cultural vision by placing himself in the country’s most unlikely forum, the Great Yellow Hope of Jeremy Lin is not about equality at all. He might make a smiling cameo in the soft-handed dream, but he didn’t get to where he is because of it. His promise buries itself into more personal and violent lines—we are asking him, or, rather, his body, through the arbitrary act of helping five other men put a ball through a hoop more efficiently than five other men, to undo the harm of the stereotypes we do not discuss, to give us an icon to rally around without reservation or fear that our great hero might also reject us for the novelty of our wiring.

But they still had a robust thread yesterday on Athletics Nation.

More than 1,200 comments debating the issue of lewdness and profanity on the blog

Here is Silver Screen and Roll’s Take

This is a nifty pair of additions for the Lakers. Barnes we discussed in detail
earlier today; he gives the team excellent depth at the wing positions and will improve what already promised to be one of the league’s elite team defenses. When Ron Artest is off the floor, the drop-off won’t be nearly what opponents might’ve hoped for. Ratliff is ancient and very limited offensively, but he proved with Charlotte last year that he’s still an impact defender. His job will be to guard the rim and rebound in Taco Unit minutes while playing a slightly bigger role from time to time when Pau Gasol or Andrew Bynum is on the shelf. It’s not the sexiest signing ever, but it fills a need. Perhaps most important, it means the team can bring Derrick Caracter along slowly and not press him into action as the emergency backup center.

Passing this info along in case anyone in that area wants to go. I just found out about it this morning. RSVP deadline has been extended.

Cal reception at MJ Armstrongs in NYC

Hors d’oeuvres and open bar sponsored by the New York Metro Committee.

$10 per person in advance, $15 at the door. Space is limited. Please register at discovercal.berkeley.edu or by calling 1-888-UNIV-CAL by July 21.

Monday, July 26, 2010
MJ Armstrongs
329 1st Avenue (@ 19th St.),
New York

Speakers
Please join the New York Metro Committee of the University of California, Berkeley for a happy hour reception and a sneak peek at the California Golden Bears football season with special guest Coach Jeff Tedford and Sandy Barbour. Show your Cal spirit by wearing your blue and gold.

“Socially inept” Pennsylvania judge receives 2-month suspension

In a 20-page written opinion issued last month, the court said [Judge Gerard] Alonge called the women repeatedly — often at night, even after being told to stop — and learned intimate details of their private lives that suggested he had investigated them.

“This is beyond unsettling — this is scary,” wrote Judge Joseph M. James for the seven-member court.

A part-time public defender arrived home in October 2007 with her young son in the car and was surprised when Alonge pulled in behind her, introduced himself and said he was there “to meet the phenomenal and sensational attorney” he had heard about.

When Alonge called her the next night, the woman told her boyfriend, “It appears as though I have a man freak on my hands,” according to the opinion.

“We regard this conduct … as preposterous and certainly as demonstrating an appalling lack of judgment and good sense,” James wrote.

Friedman [the judge’s attorney] described his client as “socially inept and challenged with women,” a harmless would-be Romeo who hasn’t dated in years. He said the never-married judge has difficulty picking up on social cues, takes medication and sees a psychologist weekly for help with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

An interesting look at college bball recruiting

The image of college basketball has taken a beating in recent years, with rumors, murmurs and innuendo about cheating spreading like wildfire. Cynics believe no one is trying to follow the NCAA rulebook and that the game has fallen victim to the begging hands of agents, runners and hangers-on looking to collect on the next NBA star.

Is it that bad? What are the real problems? And is the NCAA doing enough to fix those problems?

To get the answers, ESPN.com went to the sources. During the EYBL Peach Jam last week, we interviewed 20 high-profile head coaches, representing each of the six power conferences. With the promise of full anonymity, we asked them to tell the truth about their sport.

And they did.

OhioBear, thank you very much for bringing those stories over. You have made me very happy.

is not remotely funny. DISCUSS!

I posit that the writing lacks both creativity and wit. Verdict: not funny. DISCUSS!

I’ve decided I’m not voting for Queen Meg or Jerry Brown. I’m demanding better candidates.

Interesting piece at AN on Billy Beane and contract extensions

Beane has gotten burned with pretty much every single one of his veteran extensions. Chavez everyone knows about and was alluded to earlier. Dye’s extension was no good either as the A’s nearly lost $25m in salary and value and the Kotsay extension burned a similar hole in the A’s pocket at about $23m. The A’s lost a much smaller sum on Hatty’s deal at around $4m. Ellis’ deal doesn’t even look at this juncture (for a discussion of why I will direct you to Iglew’s piece on UZR). There are some common themes to these deals. All of these players had injury issues when signed to their deals. All of which were considered strong defensive players (Dye’s reputation was mostly with his arm, thought modern metrics weren’t really around Total Zone shows him as more the solid to above average over the previous three years). Chavez was kept off the field but all of Kotsay, Dye, and Ellis went from being good defenders that were adding to their value to losing almost all of their defensive value in Ellis’ case or becoming black holes of suck in the case of Dye and Kotsay.

Furthermore, the A’s strategy of extending “underrated” players like Ellis, Hatteberg, or Kotsay makes it much harder to trade them for value in a market. The A’s rely on underrated players to deal with the fact that if they can’t pay full price for players that are traditionally valued highly. Superstar players like Ryan Howard who are overrated and overpaid would be the deathknell of the team’s budget. Conversely, players that are overrated are easier to win trades that deal them away (just as its easier for the team to build and trade pitchers because of the Coli). This hurts the teams attempt to trade players for prospects to rebuild the farm. The A’s haven’t developed hardly any players that would be rated highly according to traditional views of the game. Therefore when the deadline approaches the A’s are trying to trade players like Mark Ellis, who are seen as bit players by the rest of the league, rather than being seen as above average players for whom good prospect value should be trades. The keeps the A’s from beyond significant Haren/Swisher/Mulder type trades from acquiring good Milb talent in recent years for the parts that don’t make sense on the A’s moving forward.

Finally, we will look at resigning relief pitchers. Who wants a bullpen of Rincon Witasick Mathews Wuertz? Well in the years that Beane signed them they produced a grand total of .5 WAR thats $2m in todays wins. Witasick was paid more by himself. This is really simply a really bad idea

Dear Billy,

 

DO NOT EXTEND RELIEF PITCHERS, YOU SUCK AT IT.

 

Love,

DFA

At the end of the day the track record of Beane extending players is pretty mixed. The Mulder, Hudson, Zito, Haren, Hernandez and Swisher deals hold up against the test of time. The problem is that so many others don’t. While the first Chavez extension, Hernandez, and Swisher worked out well for the A’s, in the category that usually performs best for the team, young arby eligible position players, Beane has as many failures as successes. In the riskiest category Beane has had the most success, young starting pitching. Beane has not done well with veteran extensions of relievers or position players beyond their arbitration time. At the end of the day, the team isn’t making good decisions with its veteran extensions and isn’t cleaning up on its arby eligible extensions, which is the only way that teams like the A’s can keep their good players beyond the first non arby years of team control.

Real Bears: Meet the founders of Amyris which operates out of E-ville.

When our founders met at UC Berkeley, they realized they shared a vision. It was a clear vision of a company with a collaborative spirit – a company that would take the promise of synthetic biology and deliver impactful solutions to the world’s most significant problems.

Through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Institute for OneWorld Health, Amyris’ first mission was to develop the technology for a consistent supply of the low-cost anti-malarial drug, artemisinin. It was a long shot, but we did it. We have granted a royalty-free license to this technology to sanofi-aventis for the commercialization of artemisinin-based drugs. Out of this success, Amyris emerged with a proven technology platform and a unique company built on a foundation of innovation for the greater good.

One might be interested in following the artemisin story, which could be hitting the market in 2010/11. I believe Sanofi-Aventis is the company that will launch artemisin, which was developed at Amyris, if you’re interested in teh stock market.
http://www.amyris.com/index.php/en/products/artemisinin

So, who is going to the Gilroy Garlic Festival?

Fabio Viviani, the dynamic star of Bravo Television Network’s “Top Chef” series, will conduct a cooking demonstration on July 24 and host Garlic Showdown on July 25. The Garlic Showdown, presented by Raley’s and Nob Hill Foods, will match four prominent Bay Area cooking professionals in an Iron Chef competition on the Festival’s cook-off stage. The contestants will be given a “secret ingredient” and will have two hours to prepare, plate and serve their creations to a select panel of judges.

A House investigative committee on Thursday charged New York Rep. Charles Rangel with multiple ethics violations, a blow to the former Ways and Means chairman and an election-year headache for Democrats.

The committee did not immediately specify the charges against the Democrat, who has served in the House for some 40 years and is fourth in House seniority. The announcement by a four-member panel of the House ethics committee sends the case to a House trial, where a separate eight-member panel of Republicans and Democrats will decide whether the violations can be proved by clear and convincing evidence.

The timing of the announcement ensures that it will stretch into the fall campaign, and Republicans are certain to make it an issue as they try to capture majority control of the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had once promised to “drain the swamp” of ethical misdeeds by lawmakers in arguing that Democrats should be in charge.

“Most Ethical Congress EVAIR!!!” according to Madame Speaker

i don’t know how having a tax-evader as the chair of the Ways and Means committee can be construed as anything but unethical. And, perhaps you are thinking in the relative, but Madame Pelosi was not. Recall her “draining the swamp” comments

>500M ppl around the world are

[1]

Darryl (Oakland, CA)

Hmmm, Cal’s O Line and D line are looking really good to start 2010. I’ve seen you mention you see them under .500 this year. Senior QB, good lines, good WR and TE, perhaps the best secondary in the Pac 10…What is your train of thought on the low preseason ranking?

Bruce (2:33 PM)

Shaky QB in a league with a lot of good ones. Only two of their top seven tacklers back. I don’t see the point about the secondary. When I mentioned them under .500 in a recent chat, it was in regards to a question about which did I see as more likely 10-2 or 5-7..I think they’re around a .500 team. Cal’s only one 10 games once in the last five years and the QB was a lot different then.

HOW DARE BRUCE FELDMAN BELIEVE RILEY IS A SHAKY QUARTERBACK!!!!!!!!!!!

anyone else got a shipping notice for their season tix 2day?