The Hopp Stop

I watched Jarhead last night. I liked it quite a bit, would give it 4/5 on the Netflix scale. I had forgotten that this is a Sam Mendes (American Beauty) movie. How long before the first movies start coming out on this gulf war? Until then, here are links to a couple scenes of chaos behind the wheel in Iraq, thanks to Winding Road for them.

How soldiers drive in Iraq. I don’t blame the soldiers for driving like that, given the risks they face, but if I was an Iraqi, it would be pretty damn annoying.

Rush hour in an Iraqi intersection.

The SF Chronicle web site picked up an interesting AP story on the Fab Five with a recap of what they are up to now. Michigan took down all the banners from their run due to the Ed Martin-related violations; apparently they are stored in a historical library. It’s tough to believe that we’re coming up on ten years since Michigan made the NCAA tourney, pretty pathetic. I can remember watching Michigan in 1998 (spring of my sophomore year at Stanford). Tractor Traylor was on that team, along with the rest of Steve Fisher’s final recruits. If memory serves, they lost to UCLA in the first or second round.

Moving on, it was a rough week at work, so I’ve got some saved-up links. To start, a couple post-signing day evals for college football: The Free Press has gathered some blurbs from recruiting gurus about Michigan’s class. Mildly positive news from the Chronicle about Harbaugh’s first class from Stanford. ESPN has a ranking of the top classes; Michigan is at #10. Stewart Mandel at SI.com has an overview of today’s recruiting world and includes this quote from a Rivals.com guy: “‘[Carr] is not a dynamic personality who’s going to go into a living room and wow you,’ said Farrell. ‘Obviously, there’s an age gap, and when you’ve got guys like Urban Meyer, Ron Zook, Pete Carroll coming into your living room, you’re going to be impressed with that.’” I can’t see Lloyd texting with recruits, but his visit with Ron English did seal the deal with Donovan Warren, that USC-lock CB from Long Beach. (The retort to my point is that constant contact via texting or whatever is complementary to the traditional coach visits and campus visits. Touche.)

In baseball news, the Mariners signed their closer, J.J. Putz, to a new $13m deal. Normally I could care less, but Chris and Blake played against Putz in high school, so it’s fun to see his career progress. A few weeks back there was a Freep article on the Tigers’ fan tour in Michigan; I’m posting that mostly because of the comical photo of Magglio and Sheffield all slicked up. And who does Magglio’s hair? Fabulous.

This might be my favorite one yet (other than the one with Gisele Bundchen, of course): Apple mocks the Windows Vista user account controls, which require you to confirm so many actions via dialogue boxes that users are likely to simply disable the feature and thus lower their security level.

Thanks to Daring Fireball for this.

Pretty boring game last night, not much to say. I did find this amusing Rex Grossman seal that someone put together (from Ars’ Infinite Loop blog). Seems about right; Steve Young referred to Grossman’s deep throws–>interceptions in the 4th quarter as “irresponsible.”

I got around to scanning a few articles tonight.

Here’s a GQ story on the Shins in advance of their new album (which I’m enjoying quite a bit after several listens)

Chuck Klosterman is one of the reasons (along with, often, Ezra Dyer on cars) I look forward to Esquire every month. He recently looked at the impact of YouTube on metal virtuosity.

Tha Rolla, Ghris and I had a discussion recently on electric cars, plug-in hybrids and the not-quite balanced “Who Killed The Electric Car?” movie. I mentioned a column by Csaba Csere, editor-in-chief of my favorite car mag, Car & Driver, that discussed GM’s plug-in hybrid concept and its production feasability. Here it is.

Finally, Car & Driver had two DRA-apropos references in its most recent issue.

One of my loyal rocker readers has expressed disgust that the Giants re-signed Bonds, viewing it as a crass economic calculation by the ball club that spits in the face of the right thing to do. (Hope I characterized that accurately.) I agree with him, although I’m less disgusted by the decision than he was.

Anyway, the ongoing Bonds contract drama is pretty interesting, as it pulls the Wizard of Oz curtain back a bit on baseball’s contract process. Apparently teams and players sign letters of intent as to the main terms in a contract, then hammer out all the other terms, which are generally boilerplate. Teams never back out of these letters of intent and players do so only very, very, very rarely, so once the letter of intent is inked, the deal is done for all intents and purposes. However, the “other terms” in the Bonds deal are not your usual boilerplate. The Giants negotiated to remove Bonds’ minions and former drug-pushers from the team clubhouse. They also wanted some CYA provisions so that if Bonds gets jail time for his BALCO-related perjury, they have a contractual out from what is otherwise a guaranteed contract.

So the sides worked their way through these issues, and then this week the commissioner’s office rejected the deal because of a personal appearances requirement…? As SI’s Jon Heynman writes, the appearances requirement is basically meaningless given Bonds’ mercurial personality. Heynman’s explanation by implication, that the MLB corporate office wants the current deal to fall through, is also curious, because I think it’s pretty unlikely that Bonds won’t get a contract offer from another team and thus lose his shot at Aaron’s record (saving MLB the PR headache of a ‘roid rager holding the game’s biggest record). While I’ve read that the Giants were the only ones to negotiate seriously with Bonds during the winter meetings and subsequent time period, Bonds remains an above average player, health allowing, and teams are ultimately driven by performance and economics, not principles.

Finally, the Heynman column talks about Peter Magowan’s letter to season ticket holders. Either this is a candid assessment of the club’s decision making, or it’s a face-saving attempt by Magowan after many expected, based on prior Magowan comments, that the Giants would wash their hands of the game’s biggest PITA.