Dorks And Losers

On Fri­day, Oprah Win­frey picked Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera as the next selec­tion into her widely pop­u­lar book club. She should recon­sider. It’s not intended to take away from the tal­ents of Mar­quez nor from the qual­ity of “Cholera.” It’s intended to pur­suade Oprah to pick lesser known works.

From my back­ground grow­ing up in the Bay Area, Love In The Time Of Cholera was required read­ing in high school. But so was Night by Elie Wiesel and A Les­son Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

A book club should help get peo­ple to read books that they wouldn’t have heard of oth­er­wise. Oprah is one of the most pow­er­ful women in the world. She has tremen­dous buy­ing power, and holds sway over mil­lions of peo­ple. I will not even men­tion the whole beef cat­tle mad-cow incident.

I com­pletely respect Oprah and the way she’s worked her way through the years to the sta­tus and power that she has now. But at the same time, she should rec­og­nize that she can help a lot of peo­ple in more ways than one. Given the recep­tion that author Jonathan Franzen had for Oprah pick­ing his The Cor­rec­tions as a book club selec­tion and that whole James Frey deba­cle, it’s no won­der that she has been forced to go for the safe choices.

But art is all about incit­ing dis­cus­sion. Art shouldn’t be safe. It should be con­tro­ver­sial. It should make peo­ple feel and think in dif­fer­ent ways that they’re used to. It should get peo­ple to explore the world and themselves.

Why else do peo­ple still watch movies like Crash or Babel when they could be watch­ing more enter­tain­ing pop­corn flicks like Trans­form­ers or Spider-Man?

I don’t expect Oprah to just spend her time read­ing books, but Oprah should use her buy­ing power to help other lesser-known authors a big­ger foot through the pub­lish­ing and book-buyers world. Mar­quez doesn’t need any help get­ting books off the shelf.
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I don’t know what’s worse, LeBron James wear­ing a Yan­kees hat while con­fess­ing to be born in Cleve­land, Ohio, or the fact that he was wear­ing a very ugly shirt. I’m hav­ing huge Carl­ton from the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air flash­backs.
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Inter­est­ing point by Buster Olney: “At the All-Star break, the teams with the most wins in the NL were as fol­lows: San Diego (49), Los Ange­les (49), Mil­wau­kee (49), NY Mets (48) and Atlanta (47). And none of them made the play­offs.“
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The San Fran­cisco Giants’ decade long win-now phi­los­o­phy will hurt the orga­ni­za­tion for the next few years. I com­pletely agree with Bruce Jenkin’s analy­sis. Every other team in the National League West divi­sion is younger and better.

The fact that the team has relied on aging vet­er­ans will hurt the most in regards to the team’s inabil­ity to develop posi­tion play­ers. I always bring up for­mer out­fielder Todd Lin­den who now plays for the Florida Mar­lins. He dom­i­nated AAA in 2995. Con­fi­dence was always a fac­tor, but the fact that there were only two OF spots avail­able, the team gave them instead to the likes of Mar­quis Gris­som and Moi­ses Alou (the lat­ter still plays but can’t stay healthy). When the team doesn’t give you a shot, it can be hard to believe in yourself.

Not to men­tion giv­ing Ray Durham a two-year con­tract last year when giv­ing Kevin Frand­sen a start­ing spot at sec­ond base would have been way more pro­duc­tive given how Durham strug­gled in 2007. The list goes on and on. It’ll take a few years of play­ing like 2007 for the Giants to get those high draft picks and rebuild the farm sys­tem. But of course, that only works well if you have qual­ity scouts eval­u­at­ing for you.

The 49ers were ter­ri­ble for many years and now seem like con­tenders. Expect the same for the Giants start­ing three years ago. We just didn’t notice till now.
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“I like to get a woman and wring her out like a flan­nel.” — poker player Mr. Ulliott on how he trains for long hours of play­ing poker by hav­ing long sex ses­sions.
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Another weird sta­tis­tic that comes out of someone’s ass. 10% of all iPhones are sold to unlock­ers. I don’t get it.
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“Once you get over the shock of mak­ing the first move, you’ll feel so much bet­ter. Action is empow­er­ing. Sit­ting and wait­ing is hard. Ask any wall­flower at a junior high school dance.” — Les­son 2 of why being proac­tive is bet­ter than wait­ing when it comes to mak­ing the first move.

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