Little Toy Robot

ESPN’s Jeff Merron gives us the all-time, all-fat major-league baseball team.

Another site gives us baseball’s “all porn mustache team.”

A secret Google data center is now decorated with a fantastic robot mural. I want one!

It’s the April 27th entry at the Googleblog, in case the permalink isn’t working.

I’ll sneak in some baseball predictions, by the way, since I won’t be around later today and don’t want to look too lame by posting them even later in the season:

AL East: Yankees (What, you think they’re really going to slump for long?)
AL Central: Twins (This is a very good team. I don’t think Cleveland has the pitching to stay in the race.)
AL West: Angels (Vlad. Guerrero.)
AL Wildcard: Red Sox (Yawn.)

NL East: Braves (Without a doubt, this is the most exciting division in the NL!)
NL Central: Cardinals (Can’t argue with that lineup.)
NL West: Dodgers (The Giants are a mess and the Padres are still a year or two away.)
NL Wildcard: Marlins (An exciting team to watch, like the Red Sox without the ‘tude. Can Delgado be their David Ortiz?)

AL Penant: Yankees (They won’t let it happen again.)
NL Penant: Marlins (If their pitchers stay healthy, I think they can pull this off again.)

World Series: Yankees in 7 games.

I’m just saying. Even if you think they’re evil, don’t you think they’re unstoppable? If you don’t like it, don’t take it up with me. Take it up with the Big Guy. Bud Selig.

AL team to watch in 2006: Twins (A few more years of postseason experience, and youngsters like Santana, Mauer, and Mourneau make this the team of the future; good pitching sets them apart from another very exciting young team, the Rangers.)
NL team to watch in 2006: Padres (As soon as this team adjusts to hitting at Petco, they will win big and give Jake Peavy the run support he needs to win the Cy Young award. Mark my words!)

The date is set.

IKEA, the world’s leading home furnishings retailer, today announced that its Atlanta, GA store will open this Summer on Wednesday, June 29, 2005. The store will be the Swedish company’s 23rd in the U.S. and first in the Southeast. Until IKEA Atlanta opens, the closest IKEA stores are in Houston, TX and Woodbridge, VA.

I can watch the construction from my window at work. I can’t wait.

Colin Meloy has done it again. The title of the Decemberists‘ third full-length effort, Picaresque, says it all. It’s a hodgepodge of short stories, spanning styles and subjects, ranging from a prog-influenced spy saga to (my favorite) an 8-minute wicked revenge song with an obligatory maritime theme. Great packaging with the CD, too.

A while ago Justin made me a copy of the Gray’s Ro Sham Bo. The Grays were sort of a pop rock supergroup, a little more straightforward than what I usually listen to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love this album. There are some absolute gems on here, especially “Both Belong” and “Spooky.” It’s time for me to explore the whole Jellyfish/Jason Falkner/Jon Brion thing.

Wow, it’s not that I march to the tune of a different drummer–I march to a tune that’s about ten years old. It’s all good, though.

Rick Kleffel interviews Lou Anders at the Agony Column.

This is an extremely detailed interview, more than you ever wanted to know about Lou Anders. What I thought was interesting, though, was near the end, where Anders talks about Pyr’s strategy of releasing hardcovers and trade paperbacks simultaneously for a few titles. While none of Pyr’s current titles interests me (though a few titles coming up do), I think this is a fabulous idea and hope it works out.

Bravo, Lou Anders, Bravo.

Michael Chabon’s talks are full of fictions. Paul Maliszewski sounds the alarm.

Paul Maliszewski–author of “I, Faker” who is writing a book on fakery, a man who got fired from McSweeney’s because he sent an email full of lies about writers to hundreds of people, while he was the only one who knew it was a joke–Paul Maliszewski, this gadfly, has exposed the notorious novelist Michael Chabon as a purveyor, peddler, perpetrator of untruths!

Bravo, Paul Maliszewski. Bravo.

Mariano Rivera is a classy guy.

Mitch Cullin’s Blurb Project is a slight trick of genius.

The architecture that never was of a Moscow… that never was. Oh, whatever. Check out the architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. That never was.

The new LitBlog Co-Op, which includes some of my favorite people.

Charles Dickens theme park. Will they have a ride for The Amazing Adventures of Captain Gladys Stoutpamphlet and her Intrepid Spaniel Stig Amongst the Giant Pygmies of Beckles, volume eight?

The Believer interviews China Miéville.

Michael Chabon has a new site. Warning: it hates Internet Explorer.

Fantasy baseball update: The Tokyo SuperGodzillas are tied for first place. The reign of terror begins.

There’s a great article in Slate on the emergence of “lifestyle centers,” the new breed of malls. It’s interesting to me because I live in a neighborhood that resembles the ideal that these places are trying to emulate. But it’s as if the developers have the power to simply wave their arms and whitewash some of the undesirable problems that will plague a neighborhood like Virginia-Highland when they build from scratch, things like traffic, poor people, parking difficulties, and the limited space and residential reluctance that keeps larger chains out of the area.

I grew up near one of the first “lifestyle centers,” Mizner Park, and I realized something disturbing about the way an ideal gets perverted by Florida during my recent trip to Tampa. The huge, new International Plaza and Bay Street (right by Legends Field, the Yankees Spring Training camp) is a hybrid supermall/”lifestyle center,” the first mall I’ve ever seen that tries for both.

Bay Street is a fake, pedestrian street that leads from the parking lot to one of the mall’s main entrances. It is lined by restaurants with patios and a few choice vendors like Starbucks. But indoors, the mall could be any mall. Which is just the point. It was almost eerie to see the place concede a little bit to contemporary taste, this trend to mimic urban shopping districts, but to do it in such a half-assed manner that it seems so inconsequential and draws so much attention to how artificial it is.

I’ve been tagged!

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Nope.

The last book you bought is:
Well, I bought three at the same time: The Erasers, by Alain Robbe-Grillet; Houdini’s Last Illusion, by Steve Savile; and an annotated edition of the first Father Brown book by Chesterton.

The last book you read:
Inamorata, by Joseph Gangemi. Great premise: In the 1920s, Scientific American offers a reward to anyone who can prove, without a doubt, the existence of the supernatural. A Harvard grad student gets the chance to investigate a Philadelphia psychic. But the book overall is a bit watered down and light on characters and details, the historical component is weak, and the ending is deeply unsatisfying.

What are you currently reading?
The Angel of Darkness, by Caleb Carr. I liked The Alienist and heard mixed reviews about this one. Which explains why it took eight years to get to it. But I was in the mood for something readable and not too deep, although at 750 pages I’m thinking it could have used a little red pen in the early stages.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

• Lanark, by Alasdair Gray: A virtual labyrinth of a book that can bear repeated readings.
• Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges: Talk about a labyrinth…
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: My favorite contemporary novel.
• Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball: Because I’d probably have to devise a game of solitary fantasy baseball or I’d go crazy.
• From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell: The collected, annotated edition, because it’s fascinating.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
No one! This must end! However, feel free to play along if you wish. :)

It has not been a particularly promising season so far for the Tokyo SuperGodzillas. The team, my entry into a fantasy baseball league of bloggers, was crippled on draft day by my overwhelming support of Japanese imports Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. Both players have done well for me so far, though: Ichiro got a hit in his first at bat and we expect to see that happen at least 250 times in the next six months, and Godzilla (Matsui) hit the first home run of the season on Sunday night and another on Tuesday. I predict that Matsui will put up monster numbers, and Ichiro’s average and at-bats will carry my whole team, but I think I’ll be scraping high and low to get some real power numbers this year.

(Don’t get me started on my starting pitching.)

In other news, it was a big Opening Day for other Japanese players I don’t have on my fantasy team. Kaz Matsui on the Mets hit a home run in his first at bat of the season for the second year in a row, and Shingo Takatsu on the White Sox picked up his first save.

It looks like the Sherlock Holmes revival is in full force. I see the paperback edition of Laura King’s latest, The Game, in every bookstore I visit, but the real story this month is the release of two highly anticipated Holmes pastiches in hardcover.

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin takes us into familiar territory: the twilight years of the great detective. It seems more like a work of so-called literary fiction than a detective story: “This subtle and wise work is more than just a reimagining of a classic character. It is a profound meditation on faultiness of memory and how, as we grow older, the way we see the world is inevitably altered.”

Caleb Carr, who has done this sort of thing before, looks like he will give us a Holmes we can recognize and a story we can swallow:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are summoned to the aid of Queen Victoria in Scotland by a telegram from Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, a royal advisor. Rushed northward on a royal train—and nearly murdered themselves en route—the pair are soon joined by Mycroft, and learn of the brutal killings of two of the Queen’s servants, a renowned architect and his foreman, both of whom had been working on the renovation of the famous and forbidding Royal Palace of Holyrood, in Edinburgh.

The Italian Secretary is due out next Tuesday, April 10, but it’s already shipping from Amazon.com

Carr’s book sounds like a lot more fun, but Cullin’s has been getting good reviews across the board. What’ s a gent to do? Why, read them both, of course!

The Long Nightmare is over. The baseball season begins tonight in cold New York City as the Red Sox take on the Yankees. Finally, less news about these Cardinals and more about these Cardinals.