Sweeping the Bayside derby

In English soccer, they call it a local derby when two teams from the same area play against each other, so I've started referring to the the interleague matchups between the A's and Giants as "Bayside derbys" (pronounced DAR-bees, like it is across the pond).

Oakland had the better of the San Francisco in this year's Bayside derbys, sweeping them at AT&T this weekend and winning two of three in Oakland last month. The rivalry between the A's and Giants fans is more good-natured and chummy than it is in other two team markets (there probably aren't many Mets-Yankees hybrid caps in NYC), but there's still a lot of pride in beating the other team, especially from the Oakland side. The Giants dominate the media coverage so much around these parts with their nice ballpark and their superstar players, that the Oakland fans have something of an inferiority complex (no there there and all that), and they take great joy in sticking it to the Giants.

And this weekend was one big sticking-to! On Saturday and Sunday, the Giants managed a grand total of zero runs, and it's hard to win when you don't score any runs. And on Friday, after injuries to both catchers (and over-zealous substitution by Bruce Boche), they ended the game with third baseman Pedro Feliz behind the plate and center fielder Randy Winn at third base and a pitcher Noah Lowery in right field. Not surprisingly, they ended up losing that one as well.

The two Bay Area teams are like mirror images of each other this year. The A's (34-28) have as many wins as the Giants (28-34) have losses, and vice versa. That would have stayed true no matter how this weekend's games had turned out, but with Oakland starting a June surge (8 out of 9 baby! Just like I predicted) as SF starts their June swoon, it seems like these are two teams moving in different directions. The A's are playing just good enough to win in each game, while the Giants play just bad enough to lose. Their hitters are staying patient and waiting for good pitches to hit, while the Giants hitters hack away at 3-1 slop with the bases loaded. The A's fans yell and cheer constantly, while Giants fans sit and chomp their garlic fries. It has to frost Peter Magowan to hear "Let's Go Oak-land!" cheers in his own ballpark!

Today's game was on two different television channels, but in order to watch in HD, I had to endure Kruk and Kuip's G's homerism, but there wasn't a lot for K&K to cheer about today. If I was still a Giants fan, this weekend's performance would cause me to reassess my fandom. If you're going to lose, at least go down swinging (and I don't mean at 3-1 pitches outside and in the dirt)!

Be True to Your Stereo

Almost every year, at the start of summer it seems like I go on an early Beach Boys jag, where early means "pre-Pet Sounds". Their mid-70s Endless Summer and Spirit of America compilations were two of the first records I bought with my own money. The Beach Boys and their songs are a big part of what Summer means to me.

The start of Summer is still a couple of weeks way now, but this generation now has their own Spirit of America, the 1975 collection the extended 1974's Endless Summer (which collected most of the big hits) with deep album cuts from the 1963-1965 era. Their original Capitol album were out of print, so SoA was a way for new fans like me to get the full picture of the golden era of the Beach Boys.

The Endless Summer for this generation was Sounds of Summer, the 2003 collection with all the Beach Boys biggest hits from 1962's "Surfin' Safari" thru 1988's "Kokomo". It was the career-spanning hit compilation for a new generation of Beach Boys' fans. And a few years later, the fans that want more have The Warmth of the Sun, which collects 30 non-hit songs from their history. This provides an alternative history of the band, and provides a much deeper picture of the Beach Boys than just skimming through the hits.

The main selling point of The Warmth of the Sun for old fans like me are the four songs from the 1965 Today! and Summer Days.. albums remixed for stereo. Their initial albums thru All Summer Long were released in both mono and stereo. But the albums from 1965's Today! thru 1967's Wild Honey (including Pet Sounds) were only released in mono and duophonic (ie fake) stereo, because Brian Wilson only delivered a mono master to the label for these albums. This was the height of Brian's studio creativity, and the mono masters were true to his vision, they didn't provide the full picture of his genius. The songs used three of the four recording tracks for vocals, so Brian's arrangements were condensed down to one track then Spectorized down with the vocals into a mono recording that may have sounded great on the radio but not as great on the hi-fi. Getting these songs reissued in stereo has become a holy grail for some Beach Boys obsessives.

Pet Sounds was reissued in stereo ten years ago, and back then I thought the stereo mixes were an aberration, but I've come to accept the stereo Pet Sounds as the real album because it sounds just so much better than the original mono version. Remixed stereo versions of Today and Summer Days (the two albums before Pet Sounds -- Brian's Rubber Soul and Revolver) would be a godsend, and stereo mixes of these songs have come out on various compilations. A stereo "Kiss Me Baby" on Endless Harmony, "Dance Dance Dance" on Sounds of Summer, and new stereo mixes of two of my favorite Beach Boys songs ("Please Let Me Wonder" and "Let Him Run Wild") on Warmth of the Sun.

Being able to hear these two tracks in glorious high fidelity stereo makes me feel twelve years old all over again. "Let Him Run Wild" was on Endless Summer and "Please Let Me Wonder" was on Spirit of America, so I grew up thinking they were important songs in the Beach Boys canon, but they were both b-sides to lesser singles. Both songs sound like early blueprints for the arrangements that Brian later perfects on Pet Sounds.

Here are those two, plus "Kiss Me Baby" from Endless Harmony and and original Capitol Records full dimensional stereo version "Be True To Your School" from 1964's Little Deuce Coupe album, courtesy of the late Chuck Britz.

The Beach Boys in stereo
Be True To Your School (1964, from Little Deuce Coupe)
Kiss Me Baby (2000, from Endless Harmony)
Please Let Me Wonder (2007, from Warmth of the Sun)
Let Him Run Wild (2007, from Warmth of the Sun)

Curt Schilling Gets a Peter Schilling

A Peter Schilling is a one hitter. Get it?

I went to Yahoo Sports about 30 minutes ago to check on the score of today's A's - Red Sox game and saw this line score.


1-0 in the bottom of the 9th. Still time to get another run and.. wait! Is that a 0 in the "hits" column for Oakland? And it's in the bottom of the 9th! At the bottom of the box score, I saw

BOSTON PITCHER CURT SCHILLING HAS A NO-HITTER
THROUGH EIGHT INNINGS.

Then after refreshing a few minutes later, it said

BOSTON PITCHER CURT SCHILLING HAS A NO-HITTER
THROUGH 8 1/3 INNINGS.

And about a minute after that..

BOSTON PITCHER CURT SCHILLING HAS A NO-HITTER
THROUGH 8 2/3 INNINGS.

Wow! He's on the verge. But then..

A SINGLE BY OAKLAND'S SHANNON STEWART
WITH TWO OUTS IN THE NINTH INNING
ENDED CURT SCHILLING'S NO-HITTER.

Oh well. This is Schilling's third career one hitter, but he still doesn't have a no-hitter. And for the A's, taking three games out of four from the best team in baseball isn't too bad. They're now 5-2 in the month of June, which puts them three games over the .500 mark they were tethered to during April and May. And if Mark Ellis (who hit for the cycle on Monday night) had followed Stewart's single with a home run, it would have been their sixth win in a row.

If you really like it you can have the rights

One week ago, none of Paul McCartney's songs (Beatles or Wings or solo) were available for legal digital download. Within one week, his EMI back catalog was added to the new DRM-free iTunes, and his latest album Memory Almost Full was just added to emusic.

Macca's album is on Starbucks' HearMusic label, so the only place to buy the physical album is at Starbucks. I read this report today that said the album might be a "sales flop" in the UK because Starbucks sales aren't registered with Britain's official charts. So even if it "sells", it won't "make the charts". And if it doesn't "make the charts" it has to be be a "sales flop".

Since this is Paul's first album on a boutique coffee label after 45 years with EMI, and he's releasing it DRM free on all the digital services, I'm trying very hard to like his album, but after a couple of listens it's not happening. There are a few songs I like ("Ever Present Past", "Only Mama Knows", "Vintage Clothes"), but on the whole, it seems just as half-baked as all the other albums he's put out for the last 20 years. It gets bonus points for being the first one you can buy as high-bitrate non-DRM mp3s. Now both living ex-Beatles have their recent albums on emusic.

Thirty years ago today

On June 5, 1977 , the first Apple II computers were introduced for sale. Back then, their standard configuration was 4Kb of RAM, the Integer BASIC programming language burned into the ROM, and an audio cassette interface for loading and storing data. There was also a RF interface so it could be connected to a regular television. Their CPU was a MOS 6502 with a clock speed of 1Mhz. That's 4 (Four) kilobytes of RAM and a clock speed of 1 (One) megahertz.

In today's world, an Apple II is about as powerful as a garage door opener. But in terms of future impact on my life, the Apple II might be the most powerful product ever! From my first exposure to that machine in 8th grade math lab, I was hooked, and knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I grew up, I wanted to be a computer programmer!

Back in the early days of personal computing, the Apple II was the iPod of home computers. Other models (TRS-80s, Commodores) might have been cheaper and just as powerful, but the Apple II had that special something. I've thrown away a half-dozen or so personal computers over the past twenty years after upgrading to bigger and better models, but I still have the Apple IIc that my parents bought me for my high school graduation. There's no way I'm ever going to throw that away! I don't have any programs to run on it, but if I wanted to, I could turn it on today, hook it up to my TV, and write a few programs. The BASIC interpreter is burned into the ROM. And even now, I could probably program a space shuttle in Applesoft BASIC!

I was reading Steve Wozniak's autobiography iWoz, earlier this year, and he said that one of his goals for the Apple was to inspire users to write their own programs. Instead of being bundled with lots of programs like computers are now, the Apple II came with a BASIC interpreter and a tape recorder. You don't need us to write programs, write your own programs! And there were probably lots of people just like me who were inspired enough by this to end up programming for a living. And sometimes just blogging, while appearing to be programming. Thanks Woz!

It was one day ago yesterday

that Aimee Mann wrote an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times about what Sgt. Pepper means to her, 40 years on. I'm sharing this mostly as an excuse to post that picture, which is just begging to be printed out and colored! Where are my Crayolas?

Salt N Pepa Knew My Father

As I promised yesterday, here are selections from the other side of NME's Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father. Three Wize Men also do the "Sgt. Pepper's" reprise, so I'm skipping that, and I'm not that fond of Michelle Shocked's "Lovely Rita" (or Michelle Shocked in general) so I'm replacing it with the Nields version from their 1997 reissue of Gotta Get Over Greta.

Sonic Youth - Within You, Without You
Courtney Pine Quartet - When I'm Sixty Four
The Nields - Lovely Rita
The Triffids - Good Morning, Good Morning
The Fall - A Day In The Life

Isn't it ironic that Sir Paul wrote a song forty years ago when he was 24 about when he'd be 64 spending summers renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight with grandkids on his knee, and now when he is 64 (going on 65), he's getting ready to promote new album which makes him too busy to do a nostalgia tour for a record his former band made forty years ago?