Friday, March 4

Reading--mostly research for play; rereading A Wife's Tale.

Seeing--Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party; rewatched Holes with the boys.

CD--Moneyball

I find I am revisiting favorites in a way that I haven't done for years. For that matter, I could also have listed:
TV--the old Dick Van Dyke Show
I wonder if this is a function of the kids' growing up and giving me both free time (so that it doesn't feel like every second is so urgent) and a small but real sense of emptines (sending me seeking comfort in old pleasures). Virtually everything on this page is a re-watch, re-read, etc. And they have all yielded a lot of new pleasure and satisfaction on revisiting.

Anyway, I am getting through Moneyball with more momentum this time; it was very broken up last time. I think I will keep some of the arguments/lessons it presents, especially if I jot a few of them down. Overarching question is how can a relatively poor baseball team (Oakland) play competitively and even vanquish one (NYY) with three times as much to spend on players? Findings: there has traditionally been a lot of prejudice in scouting and drafting (against fat players, short players, players who don't LOOK good); there are inefficiencies in the market (closers are over-valued, for exampled); poor teams can do well if they buy tools piecemeal instead of looking for stars with 5, 4, 3 tools in one package; fans turn out in droves when their teams win, and nobodies become stars, so it's more important to build winning teams than to invest in stars; and most importantly, traditional baseball analysis has been looking at the wrong things. Bill James blazed the way for the most important skills to be assessed more accurately (and for statistical noise to be identified as such) and then, in his wake, a number of really brainy stats geeks articulated things even more finely. But Baseball ignored the new, good information in favor of what "everybody knows" except for Billy Beane (later followed by others).

Oh, I also stayed up last night watching all of Julianne Moore's Inside the Actors Studio interview. I think half of it belongs on the "re" list and half was new to me.

Sunday, February 20

BOOKS Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses

CDS Speak in a Week

MOVIES started Burn After Reading, quit after half an hour

THEATRE none, but saw Anne Bogart speak at Reed College

WROTE a lot

Also got rid of a ton of paper and clutter this week, so good.

Sunday, February 13

Reading:
Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses
The War on Moms (more on this to come)

Re-read:
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, not sure why except it is one of the RR books that stuck with me most.

CD Started:
The Five Love Languages of Children (potentially interesting), but bailed in favor of
Speak in a Week (French) for obvious reasons

Movies:

Theatre:
My show
Fela! through NT Live, not my favorite

TV:
I don't know, the usual--30 Rock, Modern Family
Oh, and the Super Bowl and some Blazers games with the guys

Wednesday, February 2

What?

Finished The Blind Side
Reading Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses
Reading: The 39 Clues (book 1)
Finished listening to Sense and Sensibility and haven't found anything good since
Watched: lots of episodes of Lie to Me

Can't remember anything else. To be fair, was in rehearsal most of January.