2018 Best-Ofs Are Here!

The good, the bad, and the ugly, through the lens of Hopper over the past year! I try to stay positive, but I can’t help but shine a light on the ugly truth, if only to steer you, my faithful, away from a bad experience. As those internet kids say, YMMV, and take everything with a grain of salt …

Best Fiction Book

Horus Rising by Dan Abnett

Patch picked it off the shelf of a used book store we were perusing, and I loved it. And – it’s part of a 53+ and counting series, though not all by the same author. I bought two more books in the sequence which I will start tomorrow.

Runner-Up:

Demian by Herman Hesse

Had the odor of high school about it (as in, “I think I may have read this in high school … or at least the Cliff Notes version”) but it was great nonetheless. Those opening chapters, with poor Emil’s innocent conflict with Kromer, to the surreal, goose-bump-inducing ending, I loved reading every second of it.

Best Non-fiction Book

(tie) Never Call Retreat and Short History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton

Catton was undisputedly the best writer on the Civil War. Period.

Runner-Up:

Making History: Waterloo by Andrew Roberts

The culmination of my Napoleon phase (March to May). A superlative, hour by hour recounting of the Battle of Waterloo, much in the vein of the book Pickett’s Charge which I read last year (i.e., who was doing what, when, where in a very readable style).

Best Movie

The Walk (2015)

Extreme goose-bump inducing big screen treatment of the dude who stealthily and secretly strung a wire between the two Twin Towers in early 70s New York and walked across it. The last two minutes will make the toughest man fight back tears.

Runners-Up:

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Chappaquiddick (2018)

Both very well done biopics. I’d watch them both again.

Worst Movie:

Deadpool 2 (2018)                                                                  

Ugh. Just ugh.

Best TV:

Introducing Little One and Patch to Michael Scott and crew care of The Office re-runs.

“That’s what she said!!!!”

Worst TV:

Yellowstone (June 2018).

Beautiful cinematography, hideous characters. I lasted two-and-a-half episodes.

Best Podcasts/Video Channels

Buzzfeed Unsolved, Jocko Willink, Dr. Taylor Marshall

Phases

January Jazz

Napoleon (March to May)

WW2 revisited (yearlong intervals)

Civil War revisited (yearlong intervals)

Bible books when I felt on my death bed in July

Book purge (mostly summer)

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (March to July, unfinished business)

Patch’s soccer tournaments (June and October)

Bathroom Renovation (mid-October to mid-November)

Least fun phase

Stricken with bronchitis, March 17 – March 24 and June 22 – July 20

Runners-Up:

Jury duty, July 31, 8 am to 3:45 pm.

Reading that my old parish priest, who baptized both my children and visited me twice in the hospital to give me the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, was put on indefinite leave due to a past sexual harassment case with a seminarian.

Funnest Day

My birthday – The girls allowed me to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still in peace, and followed it up with dinner out, gifts, and ice cream.

Worst Mistake:

Shaving the beard, early May. It was just too damn hot, I resembled Zach Galifainakis, and the wife wasn’t around the trim it down to manageability!

Biggest Life Change:

The newest member of our family, Charlie, the Jack Russell mix. He’s become the son I never had!!!

Best Experience I Thought I’d Hate but Didn’t:

Disney World, January 11-14

Proudest Moment:

The trophy award ceremony after watching Patch’s soccer team dominate the local ESPN tournament in October with a record of 4-0, with 10 goals for and 1 goal against (Patch plays center defense).

In Memoriam:

My two father-in-laws, Dale (May) and Bill (November), and my good buddy Steve (August). Rest in peace, guys.

N.B.

Reading is a huge part of my life – I read for escape, for relaxation, for enlightenment, for entertainment. However, in the ever-increasing inexplicable busyness that is my life, I only put away 33 books cover-to-cover this year. Last year I read 46 and my record is 60 in 2014. 

I think it’s due to challenging myself with epic several-hundred-page tomes over the course of the year. Books over 500 pages I put away were: Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, a textbook on Christian Science, a bio of Napoleon, nearly half of PKD’s Exegesis, Billy Graham’s autobiography, When China Rules the World, the Pearl Harbor saga At Dawn We Slept, and at least a half-dozen 350-400 page works. 

Thusly, 2019 will have a lot of slim cool sagas in paperback form to take my mind off my troubles, so next year I should put away maybe 50 or so. That’d be par.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND ENJOY THE NEW YEAR SAFELY!!!

Why I Hate TED Talks

Below is a parody I recently came across of “TED talks”, those ever-popular videos viraling up youtube. I found it immensely funny.

“TED” stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, and I’ve watched more than a fair share of these videos seeking solutions and enlightenment to the variety of problems I face in my daily life. Go to youtube and type in “TED Talks” and you’ll come up with a list of 2,900+ of them. Problem is, I’ve come to realize, is that none of these talks actually offers anything of substance, as the parody video below more than adequately conveys. If you’ve ever watched one on youtube, you’ll understand this video immediately.

Paradoxically, I think it is more of a TED talk than your standard run-of-the-mill TED talk.

Strat-o-matic

One of the craziest, most unpredictable thing that happened this past summer was that Little One, now a not-so-little fourteen-year-old, suddenly inexplicably woke up one morning a diehard Yankee fan. We’d gone to a Met game that May, and she enjoyed it, liked the party atmosphere and the stadium goodies (ice cream in the mini batting helmet), but really didn’t follow the game nor cheered or booed. Same thing when I’d watch a game at home. We’d been going regularly to Yankee games, too, one or two a summer, over the years, and it elicited the same response from her.

Then, sometime in June, she woke up that diehard Yankee fan.

She learned the names of all the guys on the team, and gave them all nicknames. Then she learned their stats and their backstories. Then she started box scoring the games. Then she started DVR’ing games she couldn’t watch live. Then she requested Yankee tickets for special occasions like her Middle School graduation and birthday. This past Christmas she got Yankee socks, a Yankee banner, and a Yankee scarf to compliment all her other Yankee gear, such as the Yankee jersey and the Yankee pillow.

Two months ago, after the Yankees lost in the playoffs, I wondered about her psychological state of mind. What would get her through the next six months until Spring Training ’19?

Strat-o-matic baseball!

It was a game from my youth, something I hardly thought about over the past forty years. But I knew it was the perfect Christmas gift for Little One from Dad.

Strat-o-matic baseball is a baseball simulation game using a set of dice to determine the outcome of every at-bat. You’re the manager; you assemble a batting lineup based on a statistic card for each player on your team. You also need to take into account the player’s position fielding rating, too. Once you and your opponent have created your batting order (and ok’d the opponent’s lineup), you play the game just as a regular game is played, and you box score it.

There’s a red die and two white ones. The red die determines whose stat card you use – 1 to 3 and you consult the batter’s card, 4 to 6 the pitcher’s. Then you use the numbers on all three to see the outcome of the at-bat. Thus, each card has 36 outcomes, and they’re based on the player’s actual performance in actual play. Some outcomes are straightforward, like a strikeout or a walk. When the result comes up as a groundball or a fly ball, the position it was hit to is indicated. You then consult another chart and roll a geeky 20-sided dice to determine the outcome of that grounder or fly ball.

It sounds dull and clinical, but it really isn’t. I remember having a blast playing it with my brother and uncle way back in the late 70s, and so far Little One and I have been enjoying it – much to my delight. So far we’ve played two games. The first, on a lazy Christmas afternoon, her Astros beat my Cubs in a late inning rally, 7-6. The second, played last night, my Twins (led by Bartolo Colon) wailed on her Astros, 9-6, leading 7-0 at one point.

We’re honing our skills before the subway series begins.

The 2018 version of Strat-o-matic baseball seems more comprehensive than the 1978 version. For one thing, we have all 32 teams, based on actual 2017 performance statistics. Forty years ago I think we only had four teams to use (one was the Cincinnati Big Red Machine, the other was the Yanks, and the other two I can’t recall). I don’t remember the nerdy 20-sided die being used back then; I think we just rolled all three dice at once to generate a result of 3-18. I guess you now have four more outcomes with the Dungeons and Dragons icosahedron. But everything else, all the charts and such, slowly came back to me. We’re going to expand beyond the basic game in the upcoming week, utilizing steals and righty vs lefty pitching and hitting. It should be fun. And on a side note, I hope the sabermetrical statistical thing might actually kindle an interest in mathematics in her. It is, after all, in her genes.

We’ve decided to play forty more games until Spring Training starts in med-February. I promised her the Mets will take six of eight of the Yankees match-ups, much like I said they would in actual games. We’ll see. It’s going to be World War III around the Hopper household over the next couple of weeks …