…and down the stretch they come: ALDLAND’s 2012 Kentucky Derby Preview

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Horse racing is an intriguing pairing of human and bestial talent. And money. The preparation that lasts years is tested in two minutes. Like any endeavour that involves large amounts of resources, extensive preparation, and flashpoint testing, predictability is highly prized. Here, however, it remains elusive. It is that absence of ultimate predictability, however, that keeps the sport and its accordant culture alive.

Since my only possible qualifications for writing a substantive post on horse racing at this juncture come from an evening watching harness racing at Vernon Downs five years ago and spending last week in Lexington, during which I saw plenty of horses and horse farms, but no horse racing, let me direct you to a collection of stories and other online features that will help you get ready for this year’s Kentucky Derby:

Beyond this pre-race coverage (such as it is), we will be live blogging the event beginning sometime on Saturday afternoon. Stay tuned for more details.

Finally, my win-place-show prediction, based on the same thing for which war is good, is:

  1. Union Rags
  2. Gemologist
  3. Take Charge Indy

Two other horses to watch are Daddy Long Legs and Bodemeister. Of course, you can watch all of them at once, and I’d advise that. It isn’t too difficult.

No matter what your style, be sure to check back here on Saturday afternoon for ALDLAND’s live blog of the 2012 Kentucky Derby.

Jonathan Vilma’s response to his one-year suspension

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After the NFL suspended Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma yesterday for his alleged role in New Orleans’ bounty program, Vilma issued the following statement:

I am shocked and extremely disappointed by the NFL’s decision to suspend me for the 2012 season. Commissioner Roger Goodell has refused to share any of the supposed evidence he claims supports this unprecedented punishment. The reason is clear: I never paid, or intended to pay, $10,000, or any amount of money, to any player for knocking Kurt Warner, Brett Favre or any other player out of the 2009 Divisional playoff game, 2010 NFC Championship Game or any other game.

I never set out to intentionally hurt any player and never enticed any teammate to intentionally hurt another player. I also never put any money into a bounty pool or helped to create a bounty pool intended to pay out money for injuring other players. I have always conducted myself in a professional and proud manner.

I intend to fight this injustice, to defend my reputation, to stand up for my team and my profession, and to send a clear signal to the commissioner that the process has failed, to the detriment of me, my teammates, the New Orleans Saints and the game.

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Related
Scrutiny of the Bounty: An Epilogue
Scrutiny of the Bounty: Chapter 2 – The Pretension
Scrutiny of the Bounty: A prequel

The DET Offensive: Recipe for a Slumpbuster

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When your baseball team is in a bad way like the Tigers have been, what can they do to get out of the collective slump? It’s a question as old as baseball, but if you’re playing in the AL Central anytime between the 1990s and the present day, the return path to winning ways runs through Kansas City. If you can get them to come over to your place, all the better. Mix in young Rick Porcello’s righting ship, add a pinch of Victor Martinez’s happy return to the clubhouse (if not the playing field), and extract Delmon Young’s unproductive toxicity. Score five runs in the first inning. Allow that to rise into a 9-0 lead. Let settle over the remaining five innings into a 9-3 victory.

Keep reading…

ALDLAND Podcast

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Yo peeps.  Take some time out of your workday and listen to the third ALDLAND podcast. Yeah, we’re still talking about soccer and baseball, but really there’s not much more else to talk about because a) the NBA is a myth and b) if you say you are interested in the NFL draft beyond who your team drafted then Chris Cunico and I both believe that you are lying. However I do promise that a future podcast will feature discussion of hockey, the least popular sport on the planet.

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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:

ALDLAND Silent Film Series: Intermission

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When I found the first selection for our Silent Film Series, I knew that I’d stumbled onto something special that could be the beginning of something even more special. I thought then that it would be easy to find other entries of similar quality, but after a while, I reached a point where I thought it might prove too difficult to ever find a suitable sequel. I remain happy with the second selection because I really like it and it showed me that the series could be broad in scope, encompassing different styles.

There is a certain energy in the first video, though, and I hope to recapture that in the future. While we wait (and I catch up on the past week in sports-on-the-internet), here’s an intermission in the form of a still photograph that immediately reminded me of some of the energy in the first entry.

In case you can’t tell, that’s thirty-onetwenty-three year old and new Seattle Seahawk Russell Wilson and his wife.

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Previously
Silent Film Series: Virgil “Fire” Trucks (Detroit, MI 1956)
Silent Film Series: Baron Davis (Oakland, CA 2007)

The DET Offensive: Delmon Young swings and misses

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While I was generally unplugged last week, bdoyk forwarded me this article from ESPN New York, which reports:

Detroit Tigers left fielder Delmon Young apologized to his team and fans Friday, just before getting arraigned on a hate crime harassment charge for a fight at his hotel during which police say he yelled anti-Semitic epithets.

Young posted a $5,000 bond at a brief hearing in Manhattan court and was released less than an hour before the Tigers’ game against the Yankees. He faces a misdemeanor aggravated harassment charge that entails targeting someone for his or her religious beliefs. If convicted, he could face up to a year in jail.
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The Tigers arrived in New York at 10:30 p.m. Thursday after their plane sat on the tarmac for 2 hours, 15 minutes in Detroit, according to Leyland.

Around 2:30 a.m., Young was standing outside of the Hilton New York. Nearby, a group of about four Chicago tourists staying at the hotel were approached by a panhandler wearing a yarmulke and a Star of David around his neck, according to police. After, as the group walked up to the hotel doors, Young started yelling anti-Semitic epithets, police said.

It was not clear whom Young was yelling at, but he got into a tussle with the Chicago group, and a 32-year-old man was tackled and sustained scratches to his elbows, according to police and the criminal complaint.

Not good. Since their hot start, the Tigers have been in a free fall, dropping eight of their last ten games in series against Texas, Seattle, and the Yankees. Perhaps even more concerning has been the lack of offensive production widely expected and on display in the season-opening series against Boston and Tampa Bay. Young is a starter because of his bat. He’s a defensive liability and now a mental and legal liability going forward, whatever “going forward” means for Young vis-a-vis the Tigers. Simply put, this was not the type of offensive production Jim Leyland and Tigers fans were looking for out of the streaky Young this year.

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Previously
The DET Offensive: Brennan Boesch’s Birthday – 4/12
The DET Offensive: Tigers open 2012 season with Sawks sweep – 4/9

ALDLAND Podcast

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Aldland’s weekly podcast is back.  Yours truly, along with astronaut-hating Chris Cunico, are back to discuss more Champions League soccer and some of the goings on in the MLB this past weekend.  So tell your boss not to bother you for 25 minutes and put this bad boy on your computer/iPod/whatever.

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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:

The Strange, Tense Power of Talking Heads’ ‘Fear of Music’ (via The Atlantic)

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When Fear of Music was released, the group was on the verge of outgrowing local New York success and moving toward the arena-filling, ten piece musical funkanauts they would be circa 1984’s concert doc Stop Making Sense. The success of their cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” and appearances on Saturday Night Live and American Bandstand had gained the group a wider audience, yet made them wary of selling out. This gave rise to a set of contradictions that would manifest even on Fear of Music‘s jacket: all black with raised worm-like shapes reminiscent of tire tread or, in Lethem’s view, a steel door that evokes both a “chilly authority” and “desire to be stroked.”
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[Author Jonathan Lethem’s] slow approach [to the album] yields big, as it reveals a record composed not of disparate songs, like, say, a short-story collection, but a “concept album” in the most abstract yet perhaps truest sense. Fear of Music tells no narrative, but weaves together its bleak motifs in such a way that a resonance chamber forms, the pop music equivalent of the postmodern, fractured books of Italo Calvino. Parts that at first seem only distantly related start to feel of a piece the further one goes and the closer one looks. The majority of the song titles act as a table of contents of sort—”Mind,” “Paper,” “Cities,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Animals,” “Electric Guitar,” “Drugs”—all riffing on themes of restlessness, dissolution, and instability. Crackpots, conspiracy theorists, criminals, and druggies emerge as characters, and a bleak landscape forms. Make no mistakes, it’s the apocalypse. … Read More

(via The Atlantic)