Monday, July 22, 2013

Ryan Braun, Cheater, Scumbag

The details:

Former National League MVP Ryan Braun was suspended without pay for the rest of the season and the postseason Monday, the first penalty from baseball's investigation of players reportedly tied to a Florida clinic accused of distributing performance-enhancing drugs.

The Milwaukee Brewers star accepted the 65-game penalty, 15 games more than the one he avoided last year when an arbitrator overturned his positive test for elevated testosterone because the urine sample had been improperly handled.

"I am not perfect. I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions," he said in a statement.
I must say I find this situation more exasperating than I would have originally thought. After all, I am a Cardinals fan and I lived through the Mark McGwire years. However, when that whole era was going down there already was the sense that something wasn't exactly right. When it exploded as a drug fueled myth no knowledgeable fan could be exactly surprised.

But that was all in the past, right?

When Ryan Braun signed his huge contract extension, choosing to stay with the small market club that established his name rather than chasing big money in a bigger market, I bought into the "feel good" storyline of it all. As a result I feel like nothing but a sucker today.

But really it is worse than that. Braun, in attempting to cover his ass nearly two years ago when he failed a drug test, absolutely trashed the reputation of the poor technician who handled that test. Basically Braun accused the tech of tampering with his urine sample. We now know Braun had a wider history of attempting to skirt baseball's drug policies. In the light of today's admission of guilt by Braun, the sumbag quality of that earlier denial has become unavoidable.

Braun should apologize to everyone whose integrity he so cynically attacked.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

A Brand New Intelligence Test

After considerable (and painful) research I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that there is no other publication in this entire world as intellectually insipid as the London Review of Books. I just finished a twenty something paragraph long piece arguing that the recent protests in Turkey was the rising of the proletariat against their capitalist oppressors. (LRB "explains" that capitalism and Islamism are synonymous terms, or something.)

I nearly passed out from laughing so long and derisively.


The test? Oh, if you find the premise of the Turkish protest as precursor to communist revolution silly, congratulations you are smarter than everyone affiliated with the London Review of Books. (Yes, I know I just damned you with faint praise. Sorry about that.)

If you don't find the LRB premise silly, you need to get out more.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Oh My, I'm Hi-Fi

As you may or may not know, I love music and am something of an accumulator. Back in the day I boasted over 600 vinyl albums, of which I still can lay hold of about 300 or so. I've lost count of the CD's I own, though it is somewhere north of 1500. There is nothing record breaking about those numbers, but it is fair to say I'm ankle deep in music at the best (or worst, depending upon your point of view) of times. 

However, like a lot of people, I drifted away from my stereo. My first set up I got as a Christmas present in 1982 and was comprised of a receiver (35w per channel), a turntable, a cassette deck, and two 3-way speakers. I played the ever living crap put of it. In 1987 I added a $99 Sharp CD player (the DX-600) with money earned from my first real job. 

Over time the cassette player died, was replaced by a newer model which also died, and was replaced by a CD burning deck which took over full time CD playing duties after the DX-600 finally spun its last. (The player drawer on the old Sharp broke down, but I got around that by drilling a hole in the top of the unit which allowed me to use a pen or pencil to pop open the drawer. That's just what you do when you are a broke-ass grad student.) Oh, at some point there was a 5-disc CD player that held sway briefly until I decided I really didn't like it very much and sold it. While all this was going on my original turntable finally succumbed sometime in the late 1990's. As I wasn't playing much vinyl I didn't attempt to replace it.

Next to go was the venerable MCS receiver which died in 2002 after twenty years of loyal service. Luckily I was able to inherit a different model MCS receiver (an MCS 3246 @ 45w per channel) that my parents had stopped using sometime in the early 1990's and was just collecting dust in their basement, so that was a bit of a wash. Shortly after this the CD burner unceremoniously died on me, leaving me to play my CDs on whatever DVD player I happened to be using. 

Eventually, I even had to retire the 3-way MCS speakers, which was a bit of a shame as they were actually pretty nice sounding, but years of wear and tear had taken a toll. Anyway, they didn't really work in the space I had once the wife and I bought our current town home in 2006. They now reside in a closet waiting for the day I have more room to work with and the money to invest in refurbishing them.

The net effect of these changes has been to slowly degrade my ability to even claim to have a dedicated stereo system. 

That is going to change. Actually, it already has begun to change. It really started with the speakers I chose to replace the large 3-ways back in 2011. I invested in a pair of Bose 201 Series V bookshelf speakers and they now reside on top of the armoire that presently houses our A/V equipment. In one sense the Bose really cannot reproduce the sound of the larger speakers, but they work great in my space. I'm sure I could have spent twice the amount for true audiophile level speakers, but I gotta believe the improvement wouldn't have been worth the extra cash to my ears.  

Yesterday, I added the newest member of my newly revitalized stereo system as the Onkyo C-7030 arrived. This is a single disc dedicated CD player and it is light years better than the various DVD players I'd been using for years now. It is also the first dedicated single disc player I've purchased since 1987. (I just say that to make myself feel old.)



Did I mention it looks awesome?

From here my path forward seems pretty clear. Sometime in the next year I will purchase a new turntable and a piece of furniture to house my entire honest-to-goodness stereo system

Of course, that won't be the end of it. The 80's vintage MCS receiver is fine for what it is, but I may decide to upgrade from the old hand-me-down. But that is all the future. For the present I'm enjoying the sounds again.