Because it came up in conversation today

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Strikes me that some of you are probably too young to remember Craig MacTavish. Crash, as he was known, was the last helmetless player in the NHL by like a lot. I became conscious of hockey around 1991 or so, and I’m not sure I remember any other helmetless players ever. And MacTavish played without a helmet until 1997. It was the type of thing that seemed really awesome when I was 15 but strikes me as less awesome and more senselessly dangerous now.

This exists: A Big Lebowski store

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Since we’re on the subject of Jeff Bridges. Belth provides the details.

Fun fact: I own the “ABIDE” shirt shown in the bottom picture. For a while it was the ace of my t-shirt rotation, until it started losing its fastball a couple years ago. Anyway, I happened to be wearing it on the  Q train from Brooklyn to Manhattan one day when John Turturro came on and sat right across from me. I didn’t want to draw attention to him so I didn’t say anything, but I puffed out my chest to try to get him to notice the shirt. He nodded politely.

Tron Legacy in brief review

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I saw Tron: Legacy last night.

SPOILER ALERT: This movie sucks.

Clearly it was inevitable that after Avatar filmmakers would start to figure, “Hey, if we make it look spectacular enough, no one will notice that we didn’t put a whole lot of effort into the script.” Only Tron: Legacy isn’t nearly as awesome to look at as Avatar, so it’s a lot easier to notice how awful some of the dialogue is.

Basically every time a character is introduced, a different character explicitly says exactly who the new person is. “Alan, you’ve been like a surrogate father to me.” “Quorra, you are a loyal assistant,” etc. The only character who isn’t really introduced as such is the main guy, who we learn is a cool guy from the assortment of cool-guy things he does in one of the opening scenes.

If in the first 10 minutes of any movie, you ride a motorcycle and/or leap from death-defying heights only to save yourself at the last second with some contraption no one realized you were wearing, that means you’re probably a cool guy. Xander Cage taught us that.

Anyway, the characters in Tron: Legacy all essentially adhere to the classic Shakespearean archetypes: The Cool Guy, the Old Guy, the Bad Guy and, of course, the David Bowie Guy. The plot is that the Bad Guy has captured the Old Guy and now the Cool Guy has to rescue him, with or without help from the David Bowie Guy. Some of them aren’t actually people and most of them are Jeff Bridges.

Then a bunch of stuff happens and some of it looks pretty cool in IMAX 3D. It wasn’t the type of 3-D where stuff flies off the screen at you, it was the kind where you sense depth in the field of vision, which is also awesome. It’s basically like a big laser-light show, only someone bothered trying to attach a plot to it. They should stop doing that. Just put a bunch of awesome looking stuff on the screen and I’ll come up with my own patter. That way we won’t have to sit through all the scenes before the guy even gets inside the video game.

The main thing is that IMAX 3D is awesome. I remember in grad school, a classmate saying she didn’t like going to the movies because it made her feel violated. She said she hated the experience of becoming lost in a movie, as you really only can in the theater, because she felt like she lost track of reality.

I think about that a lot because all the things she described — and I’m not doing them justice — are the same reasons I love going to the movies. I often go alone, which seems weird to people, but I’m not at the movies to be with people, I’m at the movies to see the movie. When there are people around I feel obligated to make snarky comments so I don’t experience the same sense of escapism.

Anyway, I find — and maybe this is just me — it’s increasingly difficult to really put everything else out of mind and just focus on the movie. I think my iPhone is partly to blame. That’s why I enjoy IMAX 3D. It’s almost mentally taxing just to be able to focus your eyes on the whole screen, and such an overwhelming experience that you really have no other option but to dive headlong into the movie. Even if it’s stupid.

Wasted at-bats

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While working on a freelance job this weekend I wound up ruminating about just how many plate appearances the Mets committed to out machines in 2010. So I looked it up.

For no other reason than my own edification, I added up how many plate appearances each team in the NL East gave to position players with sub-.300 on-base percentages. I realize that .300, in this case, is a somewhat arbitrary benchmark for out-machineyness, and that there are park factors in play and everything else. But it’s a pretty stunning outcome regardless.

The Phillies gave 473 PAs to position players with sub-.300 OBPs.

The Braves gave 625 PAs to position players with sub-.300 OBPs.

The Marlins gave 479 PAs to position players with sub-.300 OBPs (though it’s worth noting that Wes Helms compiled 287 with an even .300 mark).

The Nationals — the lowly Nationals! — gave 1285 PAs to position players with sub-.300 OBPs.

And the Mets gave 1633 PAs to position players with sub-.300 OBPs.

More on Wright’s volatility

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Bill Petti at Beyond the Boxscore continues his examination of David Wright’s volatility in recent seasons. This time, he compares Wright to a couple of his contemporaries.

This is interesting stuff, and there’s more to come on the subject — both from Petti and from friend of TedQuarters Seth “Ted” Samuels. I had a chance to read Seth’s research and it’s great, but I don’t want to give away his conclusions before he publishes it somewhere.

Advances made in anti-piracy technology

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A new long-range laser weapon takes a page from Greek antiquity to thwart marauding pirates at sea. It won’t set their ships on fire, but it can let pirates know they have been spotted and might make them wish for an eye patch, as New Scientist reports.

British defense giant BAE Systems is testing a new green-light laser, which can automatically modulate its intensity depending on the weather and distance to target. Piracy has been on the rise, according to the International Maritime Bureau — there were 430 pirate attacks last year, including an audacious attack on a U.S. warship in the Indian Ocean.

– Rebecca Boyle, PopSci.com.

Pirates are no joke, it turns out. I guess the thing is, huge cargo ships really only need a very small crew. Since all the actual loading and unloading is done by people at the ports, a massive boat shipping consumer goods across the ocean will only have a few dudes on it. So a skiff full of guys with guns can pirate up a big ship without too much trouble.

My buddy was a Lieutenant on a Navy aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. Apparently one night pirates started approaching the boat, mistaking it in the dark for a cargo ship or something. Someone on board shined a massive searchlight on them and they got the hell out of there.

But man, if they actually got close enough to go through with it, that’s got to be one of the worst things that can happen if you’re a pirate. You think you’re in for an easy plunder, and then you get on the boat and there are like hundreds of trained and armed Navy guys on there. Classic pirate blunder.

Lastly, if this new device catches on, people will get to shoot lasers at pirates.

I am still waiting on my check from Taco Bell

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Filmdrunk puts together a video history of product placement in movies. Very entertaining:

I, for one, had no idea Hershey’s paid Spielberg to use Reese’s Pieces. The way I saw it, it’s entirely likely that a kid might use Reese’s Pieces to lure an alien into his house. (Also, did Speak and Spell pay anything?) I suppose since I saw E.T. long after its theatrical release — and after Reese’s Pieces were already popular — I never realized that Reese’s Pieces were relatively new when the movie came out and actually owe some of their popularity to the scene.

The whole thing seems a bit slimy, for sure. But I guess the thing is, we use, discuss, joke about and interact in various ways with consumer goods daily. I figured by now we’d be seeing more of this in television shows, since DVRs allow us to skip all the commercials and everything. I thought the use of Sun Chips as a plot device in an episode of The Office was a harbinger of more obvious product placement to come.

Now that I’m thinking about it I’m considering all the great uses of products in things I like and wondering which were remunerated. Obviously Arrested Development’s beyond meta incorporation of Burger King was genius. Did Abba Zabba pay for placement in Half Baked, or did Dave Chappelle just think Abba Zabba was the comically appropriate candy bar for that scene?

Oh, and for the record, I find most of Adam Sandler’s fast food bits in movies funny. The highlight of Little Nicky was when Sandler’s son-of-the-devil character — after needing to be coached through his first experience chewing and swallowing earthly food — declares, “Popeye’s Chicken is f@#$ing awesome.”

Because he’s right, you know.

Bonus sandwich: Donut Ice Cream Sandwich!

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The wife and I were walking along 9th Ave. on Friday evening and spotted a sign in a window boasting Donut Ice Cream sandwiches. The picture on the sign made it clear that they meant ice cream sandwiched between two halves of a donut, and not a sandwich made out of donut-flavored ice cream, though I’m sure that would be delicious too.

Anyway, obviously I knew I had to have that, so after dinner we stopped by the place — Holey Cream, on 9th and 53rd.

The guys behind the counter were extremely liberal with samples, which was cool since they had a lot of worthwhile ice cream flavors to try. When I asked to order a donut ice cream sandwich, though, the guy asked if I could wait two minutes.

Since there was no one else in the store, I had no idea what was up. Turned out the dude was looking out for me; about a minute later he pulled from somewhere — we smelt it before we saw it — a tray of freshly baked piping hot donuts. Sweet.

You first pick an icing for the donut. I went with chocolate, because I sometimes find vanilla icing on donuts a little too sweet and I knew I’d be stuffing the thing with ice cream besides.

Second, you pick a topping for the donut. I went with crumbled Oreos, because duh.

Last, you choose an ice cream. Here’s where I screwed up a bit, I think. I went with their red velvet flavor based on the delicious, cream-cheesy sample I tasted, but without realizing that there were big hunks of legit red velvet cake in the red velvet ice cream.

On any other occasion, that would be a major win. If it were a hot fudge sundae or something, obviously you want the cake in there. But in this particular instance, since the donut was providing all the cake I needed, the extra cake in the ice cream threw off the ice cream:cake ratio a little bit.

And look: Let it never be said that there can be too much cake. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from my buddy Ripps, who said: “I’m going to die someday. And when I die, on my deathbed, I’m going to say, ‘I should have had more cake.'”

But great sandwiches are all about proportions and I botched this. For this I am a bit ashamed. Also, the red velvet ice cream was particularly sweet even by ice cream standards, and since there were donuts and icing and Oreo crumbles also in play, I might have picked something a little more straightforward.

All that said, the thing was still amazing. It was excellent ice cream on top of a fresh donut. The wife immediately advocated it for the Sandwich Hall of Fame, but after some consideration I talked her out of it. That pantheon is reserved for perfection and near-perfection, and there were some clear flaws in this sandwich — even if they were all my fault.

The good news is that it’s fully customizable, so I’ll be able to take a shot at a Hall of Fame sandwich next time I go, which will probably happen the next time I pass the place.