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if you were a small child in the eighties (like i obviously was), you probably grew up watching a tv show called Transformers. i know i did. i was in love with the show. even now, years later, i can think back on it fondly.when i was a kid, my brother and i used to worship the Transformers. we would watch it religiously and argue over the relative merits of optimus prime and his cohorts. i even remember my brother once saying (when my mom refused to buy us a particular transformers toy), “when i grow up and have money, i’m going to buy EVERY transformers toy there is.” i remember thinking to myself, “that’s a pretty good idea. when mike buys all of them, i can come over and play with them after work.” somehow when i hit the age of 22 and started making some actual money, the thought of going out and buying every available transformers toy didn’t really appeal to me.

i swear, when i saw the link http://www.transformersmovie.com/ a few minutes ago, my eyes opened wide and i mouthed the word ‘wow.’ and that was without even clicking on the link. i don’t know if the movie will actually live up to the expectations in my head. after all, there’s something gloriously wonderful about the colorful robots that a live action film just might not be able to encompass. but for now, i’m giddy over the thought of the movie anyway. hmm, maybe i should make a run to the toy store this weekend. somehow i think my salary could buy me a lot of these. hmm…

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in march, i attended the sweet 16 games at oakland arena. if you’ll remember, i watched the ucla-gonzaga showdown, which was preceded by a rather uninspiring blowout of bradley by memphis. because the memphis-bradley game was so lopsided, i spent the entire second half watching a player on bradley named Patrick O’Bryant. a long-armed 7-footer, o’bryant picked up some notice the week before the sweet 16 by contributing in a surprising upset of kansas in the round of 32. some of the nba writers (chad ford, etc.) were touting him as a sleeper for the upcoming draft, so i took to specifically watching mr. o’bryant for the last 20 minutes of the game.my impressions? let’s just say there’s a reason that patrick didn’t make the first-team of the missouri valley conference. soft, unathletic, and unimaginative, o’bryant appeared to be the definition of a 7-foot stiff. pairing an undeveloped offensive game with a lack of understanding in simple defensive principles, o’bryant sucked. hard. i was unimpressed, to say the least. worst of all, he didn’t seem to CARE. his team was losing in the sweet 16 and i watched him jog up and down the floor, nonchalantly calling for the ball in the post and chucking up fading 10-footers.fast forward to monday night, when tim and i had this conversation:

jack: “you know who’s going to be the biggest bust in the nba this year?”
tim: “who?”
jack: “that patrick o’bryant guy. i can’t believe teams are talking about taking him in the top ten. i watched him up close for 40 minutes and thought he was the sixth best player on the floor.”

over the years, my analyses of nba prospects have largely been accurate. save for a few occasions, when i’ve misjudged, say, a mike dunleavy jr.’s impact on the league, i’ve done a pretty impressive job of handicapping the performances of the different picks. yet rarely have i had the opportunity to make an opinion based on in-person observation, which should only serve to sharpen my judgement. i was absolutely sure that patrick o’bryant will be a huge nba bust. a 7-footer with little athleticism, no strength, no offensive game, a lack of understanding of team defense, and no heart? a pretty sure-fire bust.

now fast forward to tonight when, of course, the warriors decided to select mr. o’bryant! awesome! go bay area sports teams! believe me, i’d more than love for him to prove me wrong and for someone to track down this post in one year’s time to demonstrate to me how incorrect i am. unfortunately, that’s not happening. the only solace the warriors front office should take tonight is that isiah thomas is still running the knicks to make them look good…

and then there is this minor league manager meltdown. hilarious.Blogged with Flock

oh, one thing you also shouldn’t do as a coach is back the commissioner into a corner and make him suspend you for being an ignorant jerk, hiding behind your lack of command of the english language. if bud selig doesn’t grow some balls and suspend ozzie guillen, he’ll look like a joke for as long as he’s commissioner of baseball.oh wait, too late!Blogged with Flock

i realize that i know little about how the world of futbol actually works (from a personnel standpoint), but everything i’ve seen or heard about bruce arena leads me to believe that he might not be the best coach in the entire world.

i’m not talking about strategically on the field (which eric wynalda rips arena on all over the press), because i don’t really know all that much about the tactical aspects of the sport. but being a former coach myself, i know that there are certain things that a coach should almost always do:

1) don’t call out players in public: after the U.S. loss in the first game against the czech republic, arena immediately ripped on his players and called them out for playing poorly. to the press. now i’ve never coached athletes with media scrutiny, but i would think that maybe talking to your players first might be a good idea. trust with your athletes is something you build as a coach. ripping them in public is an act that can ruin any trust that you have.

2) don’t whine ALL the TIME during the game: for some reason, every time they panned to bruce arena during the games, he had the look of mark cuban on his face. every call that went against his team was an occasion for him to throw up his hands and whine his ass off. now i don’t know THAT much about futbol, but if it’s like any other sport, arena needs to be judicious with his whining. whining to referees feeds into your players and creates an atmosphere of “we’re getting screwed!” that is not a positive.

3) don’t blame referees when it doesn’t matter: now unless it is the very rare case where you TRULY get screwed out of a game/championship (read: 1972 USA vs. USSR Basketball), shut your MOUTH about the referees after the game is over. seriously. mr. arena, no one wants to hear about the referees. all we care about is that your team didn’t play well enough to win. that is it. end of story. lose gracefully, zip up your mouth, and show some dignity when you’re representing our country.

4) show some backbone: as much as i dislike duke basketball and the yankees, every time i see bruce arena in an interview, i can’t help thinking about coach k and joe torre, who are the epitomes of class and proper behavior as a coach. but not only that, coach k displays strength and leadership every time he talks as the coach of duke basketball. i couldn’t ever imagine him saying “Right now, I’m just an idiot.” the proper answers to the questions arena were asked for this article? “I have greatly enjoyed being the coach of U.S. Soccer. It has been a tremendous privilege and I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, with a lot of room to grow. I hope that I’m able to return as the U.S. coach.” period. end of story.

5) show some class: after the loss to ghana, arena (apparently) walked off the field, briefly waving to Ghana’s coach and shaking no one’s hand. my lasting memory from the 2006 nba finals will be even mark cuban, the biggest whining crybaby in all of the nba, walking down to the court after game 6 and clapping for the winners. as a coach, you need to set an example for your team by losing gracefully. you especially need to do this when the Ghana team has accomplished such a proud feat for its country. luckily the players didn’t follow his lead on this. it’s pretty sad that the U.S. coaching representative can’t walk across the field to shake the winning coach’s hand.

6) accept the blame: most of all, your job as a coach is to take responsibility. sometimes you need to say things in post-game press conferences like, “Our team didn’t play well. As a coaching staff, we should have done a better job preparing our team to win. We didn’t accomplish our goals here at the World Cup and we are disappointed by our own performance. We congratulate the teams from Italy and Ghana.“

oh, and the proper response to the question ‘Was the penalty kick play right before the half a foul?’ is “I‘m not sure if it was a foul or not, but I want to be clear that the call is not the reason we lost the game. Calls will happen or not happen in any sporting event, but a winning team will find a way to work through them. The bottom line is that we didn’t get the job done on the field and we have no one to blame but ourselves.“

people don’t write news articles about quotes like that, but they do respect you.

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this might sound vain, but i’m glad that i’m me. not so much because i’m stunningly handsome and charismatic (cue laugh track), but because i can speak convincingly without yelling. now the ability to get my point across without twisting the volume wheel 25 clicks might not seem like a big deal, but there is a guy on our floor (let’s call him Yelling Guy) who reminds me why it’s so nice to be me.every time i walk near Yelling Guy’s office, the door is slightly ajar and i can hear his accented voice screaming. and when i say ‘screaming,’ i don’t mean speaking loudly or harshly, but really YELLING. like it always sounds like he’s firing somebody for incompetence. i always expect Yelling Guy to be cursing people out, throwing chairs, and kicking computer monitors. he has the type of voice that i used to associate with extra laps on the track and suicide drills until i puke. yet, whenever i walk by (cringing, afraid that he’s going to pull me into his Yelling Abode to yell at me), it turns out that he’s having a very civil meeting that (if i was deaf) is no different from any work meeting that i’ve been in. it’s actually very similar to talking to someone who was just at a really loud concert. and yes, i have considered the remote possibility that Yelling Guy moonlights as a security guard at heavy metal concerts and has no ear drums left. Yelling Guy yells so much that I really can’t discount this possibility.

one of the best things that i ever learned (and i can’t remember where i learned it, maybe from stoops) is that if you want people to listen to you, speak softer not louder. speaking softly gives your mind room to think and convinces other people to listen. plus, no one wants to be the asshole who speaks over people (unless he’s the asshole who speaks over people), so speaking softly discourages people (even Yelling Guy, probably) from interrupting you and generally looking like a dick. i’ve done heavy research and found that if you can find a way for people to avoid looking like complete jerk-offs, they’ll take it.

so what about Yelling Guy? well, i’m pretty grateful for him. i like to walk by Yelling Guy’s office in the middle of the day, both for self-gratification and a good laugh. i’m serious! i’ll walk by his office, snickering to myself about how ridiculous the yelling is. in fact, i’m going to do it right now, because i could use the humor. i just need to walk quickly though, or else he might start yelling at me. oh, Yelling Guy…

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but this is a foul, despite what mr. cuban says

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unfortunately, another tournament, another finish short. with the proper hours to think about my effort now, i’m pretty happy with how i played, but disappointed in the finish. rough one . next time…Blogged with Flock

when i was in eighth grade, i couldn’t sleep. i went through a period of about six months where i (literally) could not, for the life of me, fall asleep. every night i would roll around anxiously waiting for The Anvil of Sleep to drop on my head. the wait would ultimately culminate in a bizarre panic over my insomnia, which would (of course) keep me awake.my brother thought i was a little bit crazy. he eventually took to telling me to get the hell out of his room (where i would sit late at night complaining about my lack of sleep while he plugged away at high school homework). eventually my mom took me to the doctor, where it was determined that i needed to ‘calm the hell down and get some damned sleep’. i’m paraphrasing, of course.

interestingly enough, the doctor made some assumption that i was depressed, probably due to the enormous bags under my eyes and how insanely tired i was (hey, you try not sleeping for a week). apparently, instead of jotting down “can’t fall asleep,” he wrote “mild depression,” meaning that even today when i go to any doctor, he/she asks me if i feel depressed these days. instead of going into a long tirade like: “no, i don’t feel depressed. and i never did feel depressed. i just couldn’t friggin fall asleep!” which would probably make him jot ‘extreme violent tendencies to accompany his depression,’ i just politely say “no, i’m feeling great these days.” it’s much easier that way.

the funny thing was, of course, that i was the furthest thing from depressed in eighth grade. i had blossomed into a reasonably good athlete while being honestly disappointed by any score less than 100 on tests. and (strange for an eighth grade boy) i wasn’t uncomfortable about my laughable ineptitude around girls. no, depressed was not the term for me, nor was it the reason for my lack of sleep. if anything, i was mentally excited. TOO excited to get to sleep, i think. eventually i got over my insomnia by ‘calming the hell down’, and since then i’ve slept like a log.

i bring this up because last night was the first time i’ve been completely unable to sleep because of excitement since eighth grade. maybe it’s my upcoming two-week july trip to chicago and las vegas (though i’m not sure how i’ll keep up my workouts while i’m there there. pseudostoops, is there a gym in your building?). or maybe it’s my planned september trip to the Lost island. or maybe it’s yesterday’s realization that i’m 24 and can recount only five *really* notable things from the past two years since i went to europe. whatever it is, i’m feeling kind of excited. bring it.

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people are bugging me about the lack of actual “check out what’s going on in my life” type posts that used to be a staple of my old xanga journal. the truth is that i don’t know really know where they’ve gone, but here goes.semi-inspired by helping ivy train for a marathon the past few months, i’m planning on racing a half-marathon sometime in the october-november time frame. i’ve just embarked on a training regimine that includes healthy dosages of 6-8 mile runs (about 4-5 days per week), a few days of various cross training (for instance pedaling furiously on a stationary bike in front of the sweden vs. paraguay game just now), and three La Costena burritos per week. throw in a couple of in-n-out burgers and a few beers a week and i’m set!

in all honesty though, i am going to be taking this training thing pretty seriously. i’m hoping to book around 30-35 miles a week, with about 10 of those at a pretty high clip (i.e. 6:30 per mile). luckily i’ll have my trusty ipod handy to play hour-long episodes of the circuit (which also double as a timer for my runs). the goal at the end of the day is to run a half marathon in under 90 minutes. that’s my stated goal and i’m sticking to it until i pass out from heat exhaustion. remind me of that when you come visit me at the hospital.

when i sat down at my computer just now, i found a couple of great e-mails waiting for me. one from a friend i haven’t talked to in a while (even though colin says he was reminded of me by a nytimes article about addiction to online poker) and one that i had to dig out of the Trash bin of gmail because (i think) the lack of consonants in bonnie’s email (brkl…) makes it look like a spam address. it’s so easy, as a “grown-up” to forget about the power of personal writing. a simple description recounting your first experience at fenway park. a quick note to remind a friend that you left on a month-long europe journey on this exact day two years ago. simple notes like that can make a huge difference in the grand scheme of meetings, documents, and designs. moral of the story: go write an e-mail to somebody right now.

oh, last note, about those runs, i’ll be sticking most of them up on http://del.icio.us/smallchou/runs if any of you are interested. (and yes, i DO know that the times up there are not that great. working on that)

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