When [It] Strikes Me

The Dores figure to be a pre-season top 5 team in 2011 and will be previewed in 6 parts.

This is the third in a six part series on Vanderbilt baseball’s 2011 season. Among all my most unhealthy habits, an addiction to following the Commodores baseball squad seems to be the most pervasive and difficult to crack. As a result, I’ve turned a time-wasting bit of fanaticism and converted it into a chance to write a bit. You can read each preview by clicking below on the links that follow the jump.

It should be noted that while this website endeavors to provide a solid team preview, membership over at VandySports.com is a must for any Commodore baseball fan.  Chris Lee and Mike Rapp produce stellar premium content which is well worth the money spent.  I know there’s no way I could follow the team as intently as I do without it.

Up today is a breakdown of pitching coach Derek Johnson’s corps and a brief breakdown of each horse in the stable.  The Dores will endeavor to replace four departing arms in closer Russ Brewer, go between guys Drew Hayes and Chase Reid and lefty specialist Richie Goodenow.

Click on through for the preview, part 3. Read more…

The Dores figure to be a pre-season top 5 team in 2011 and will be previewed in 6 parts.

This is the second in a six part series on Vanderbilt baseball’s 2011 season. Among all my most unhealthy habits, an addiction to following the Commodores baseball squad seems to be the most pervasive and difficult to crack. As a result, I’ve turned a time-wasting bit of fanaticism and converted it into a chance to write a bit. You can read each preview by clicking below on the links that follow the jump.

It should be noted that while this website endeavors to provide a solid team preview, membership over at VandySports.com is a must for any Commodore baseball fan.  Chris Lee and Mike Rapp produce stellar premium content which is well worth the money spent.  I know there’s no way I could follow the team as intently as I do without it.

Up today is a breakdown of where I see the positions on the field ending up and a basic overview of the players that are going to compete to fill them in the 2011 season.  The Dores lost only two position starters last year, shortstop Brian Harris and catcher Andrew Giobbi.  Both left as five-year players and graduates of Vanderbilt University.

Click on through for the preview, part 2. Read more…

The Dores figure to be a pre-season top 5 team in 2011 and will be previewed in 6 parts.

This is the first in a six part series on Vanderbilt baseball’s 2011 season. Among all my most unhealthy habits, an addiction to following the Commodores baseball squad seems to be the most pervasive and difficult to crack. As a result, I’ve turned a time-wasting bit of fanaticism and converted it into a chance to write a bit. You can read each preview by clicking below on the links that follow the jump.

Up first is my review of the 2010/11 Vanderbilt recruiting class. The 13 man group fills out the Vanderbilt roster that lost a handful of folks before the start of the 2010 campaign and then six players following the year. It represents the last recruiting class started by Erik Bakich and the first for new recruiting coordinator Josh Holliday.

It should be noted that while this website endeavors to provide a solid team preview, membership over at VandySports.com is a must for any Commodore baseball fan.  Chris Lee and Mike Rapp produce stellar premium content which is well worth the money spent.  I know there’s no way I could follow the team as intently as I do without it.

Click on through for the preview, part 1. Read more…

If Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite print cartoon (and it is), then its online counterpart is xkcd.  The brainchild of former NASA robotics engineer Randall Munroe, it is a webcomic that mixes romance, sarcasm, math, and language.  Most of all, it speaks to the sense of humor of the internet and geek culture in general.  Some of it is obscure and flies over my head, but a good number of the comics just hit home and tickle the funny bone.  And, in the case of my favorite all-time comic ever (Spirit, featured in this post), tugs at the heart-strings.

xkcd also features a great online store with some cool posters, pins and apparel.  I rock the “Science: It Works….” t-shirt in my wardrobe (though it admittedly gets less use than it should).  Munroe operates under a solid creative commons license, so I’m hosting several of my favorite comics here, though I encourage everyone to visit xkcd.com and to buy the xkcd: volume 0 book on Amazon.

Click on through to see Part 5. Read more…

Although I’m apprehensive about its somewhat slow pace, I still think Rubicon has what it takes to grow into a real winner and a hit. As such, I’m putting some faith in it and am anointing it with instant recap status.  To read prior Quick Hits for the show, click here on my posts tagged #Rubicon.  Here are my Quick Hits for Episode 1.07, “The Truth Will Out.”

There weren't a lot of good production stills for this episode, so I've gone back to the elegant image from the amazing opening credits.

I think I’ve figured out Rubicon’s problem. It’s not that it doesn’t work as a show… it does. It is just that it actually is cursed by leading into Mad Men. Although Mad Men has allowed Rubicon to hold onto viewership and actually increased its numbers in the last couple of weeks – the 1.31 million live viewers for Episode 6 reversing some of the bleed from the highly hyped second episode (the premiere event several months after the pilot first aired) – it also strikingly displays how far Rubicon has to go to reach that peak.

AMC is advertising it now as the show for your head, as Mad Men is for your heart. That may be true and I do believe that this has the potential to weave complex and entertaining storylines over 13 episodes, season arcs, much as Damages does. But as Damages is sloppy in describing the legal profession, Rubicon similarly struggles at times with maintaining the intelligence it should follow through on. This means getting literary, getting anal about detail and skirting some of the unnecessary character development that you must undertake in the first few episodes of a show’s run.

I’m hopefuly that that hump has been passed (or that Rubicon crossed, if you will) with this past episode. Not only was it the most action packed in the series run, but it also reflected the first time a character was integrated organically into the cast.

Read more, after the jump. Read more…

Although I’m apprehensive about its somewhat slow pace, I still think Rubicon has what it takes to grow into a real winner and a hit. As such, I’m putting some faith in it and am anointing it with instant recap status.  To read prior Quick Hits for the show, click here on my posts tagged #Rubicon.  Here are my Quick Hits for Episode 1.06, “Look to the Ant.”

Travers escaped to a gaming cafe to execute some searches.

I had quite the busy week last week and insufficient time to do a full Quick Hits for Rubicon’s sixth episode. As a result, I’m typing this up both late and in an abbreviated manner. The episode was, on the whole, quite good. There’s been a marked, yet subtle speeding up of the plot. We also saw in this episode one of the glaring weaknesses and one of the potential turning points for the show as it possibly moves toward greatness.

I’ll open by hitting the weakness first. I really do think that they are a bit quick to fall into stereotypes. While Travers, Kale, Spangler, Katherine Rhumor and Miles have all shown potential to be very deep, complex and connective characters, there remains a tendency to go stereotypical with Maggie, some tangential characters and even Miles. In particular, the rendezvous Maggie had in this episode was just manufactured snooze fest.

Maggie herself is a character who seems fundamentally flawed. We’ve been introduced to her only in snippets, some of which worked (like her spying for Kale) and most of which didn’t (her far too forced pining for Travers and her bizarre unexplained relationship with her ex-husband, not to mention her somewhat worthless blog).  She disappears for extended periods in the show’s brief run and all of the screen time she does get is just a bit too forced, particularly in scenes she shares with Travers.  The show seems to want to push her character, but I think they’d do well to just let it go and let her drift into the background.

Click on through for more thoughts. Read more…

I started this website on a whim and, initially, as a Tumblr about 10 months ago. When I did, I told myself it would be for my personal pleasure and to get me to write more.  When I realized that Tumblr was a somewhat addictive format that didn’t lend itself to substantive writing I shifted my focus to WordPress (while maintaining a Tumblr account for it’s outstanding Dashboard feature and community). Since doing so in late November, just over nine months ago, I’m had the pleasure of welcoming 10,000 unique visitors. That total is a good 9,000 more than I would have expected.

Though I hope to write more social commentary, political discussion and scientific/religious debate, I’m quite enjoying the pop-culture and review format so much of When[It]StrikesMe has assumed. And it pleases me greatly that those of my friends that I’ve let in on the site’s existence have enjoyed reading it.

I was asked recently what advice I would give to someone who was just starting out with their own site. I told them to a) write it anonymously (I sure as heck don’t want my ability to write freely impinged upon by knowing the consequences of doing so publicly and in perpetuity online) and b) to do it for pleasure and not revenue (though, of course, if you want to click on an ad and help defray the GoDaddy cost of hosting, that’s greatly appreciated too).

You can more easily follow the blog by clicking the RSS feed, Twitter feed and Facebook icons on the upper right hand of your browser page.  Anyways, thanks to all 10,000 of you visitors. It’s my hope that you’ve enjoyed reading as much as I have enjoyed writing.

The Schnitz Truck in action (photo from MidtownLunch.com).

Oh, the humanity.  I recall as a young boy visiting Austria and having a brief, torrid love affair with schnitzel while on a ski trip.  The pounded, breaded and lightly fried deliciousness has since existed only in spirit in the vacant hole in my stomach where true, schnitzely love once resided.

Rewind about seven months to my week-long vacation to Los Angeles, where I was introduced on several nights to the late night magnificence that is the Kogi Taco Truck — OK, it was actually one of the knock off Korean barbecue trucks, but it was still amazing.  Peking duck tacos equals heaven at 1 a.m.

I’d not yet strayed into the world of high end New York food trucks as my employer has a pretty decent (and subsidized) cafeteria and there’s a Chop’t Salad Company right nearby.  Pretty darn convincing arguments for food service, right there.  But a few weeks ago as discussion of the Vendies street food awards was ramping up, I started to take notice.

Click on through to keep on reading. Read more…

If Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite print cartoon (and it is), then its online counterpart is xkcd.  The brainchild of former NASA robotics engineer Randall Munroe, it is a webcomic that mixes romance, sarcasm, math, and language.  Most of all, it speaks to the sense of humor of the internet and geek culture in general.  Some of it is obscure and flies over my head, but a good number of the comics just hit home and tickle the funny bone.  And, in the case of my favorite all-time comic ever (Spirit, featured in this post), tugs at the heart-strings.

xkcd also features a great online store with some cool posters, pins and apparel.  I rock the “Science: It Works….” t-shirt in my wardrobe (though it admittedly gets less use than it should).  Munroe operates under a solid creative commons license, so I’m hosting several of my favorite comics here, though I encourage everyone to visit xkcd.com and to buy the xkcd: volume 0 book on Amazon.

Click on through to see Part 4. Read more…