More baseball bets before the season starts:

Chicago White Sox under 87.5 wins

In 2005, they won 99 games with great pitching and mediocre hitting.
In 2006, they won 90 games with great hitting and medicocre pitching.

In 2007, their offense will regress back toward the mean (especially if Scott Podsednik and Darin Erstad play everyday), and I don't see their pitching being able to make up the difference.

Arizona Diamondbacks over 78.5 wins
Arizona Diamondbacks win NL West

If I had to pick a team that would be this year's Detroit Tigers, it would be the Diamondbacks. They have a lot of good young hitters, a solid rotation led by Brandon Webb and Randy Johnson, and a competent management team.

Baseball Prospectus expects this team to contend for the NL West title, and their odds of winning the division have shrunk from 7-1 to 7-2 in the last few weeks because of that.

Los Angeles Dodgers under 88.5 wins
Takashi Saito under 35.5 saves

The Dodgers had one of the best offenses in the NL last year, but I don't see how they're going to repeat that if they choose to play Juan Pierre and Luis Gonzalez over more talented players like Matt Kemp. Randy Wolf and Brett Tomko don't inspire much confidence at the back of the rotation.

I'm not confident Saito will finish the season as the Dodger closer. The NL might be able to catch up to him in his 2nd year in the league, and the Dodgers have a closer-in-waiting in Jonathan Broxton in case Saito isn't as dominant this year.

If you watch PBS, you might see this "Spotlight On" 5 minute video clip about FICO credit scores.



The marketing people at my company did create this video recently, so I don't know why it looks like it was made in 1980...

Yesterday was a day of bowling flukes for me.

1) I bowled a 193 yesterday in the last of about 6 games of bowling. This screams "fluke" for the following reasons:

-In the other games, I averaged about a 120.
-My previous all-time high was 155.
-Only a couple years ago, I bowled a 29 in a single game. (And I was trying the whole game.)
-I was helped by 2 extremely lucky strikes that began a string of 4 consecutive strikes. The second was particularly lucky because I missed the front pin entirely, but somehow got a domino effect to pick up pins 4, 2, and 1 at the end.

2) I also managed to pick up a 4-10 split earlier in the day, although I think only one other person actually saw it.



My small group is going bowling on Thursday, so I'll probably follow this up by bowling a 50 or something...

I think it's time for me to try to remember the phonetic alphabet.

There have been a few times recently where I've gotten letters mixed up with people, so it would be helpful to know this list:

Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu

Although I probably won't ever say "Z as in Zulu". I had to look that up to know that was a South African ethnic group.

Today at work, I bought the following stamps:



Half of the stamps on the DC Comics Super Heroes pane show portraits of characters; the others show covers of individual comic books devoted to their exploits.

I'm not into comic books at all, but these look so nice I almost don't want to use them. They're much better than the usual stamp set of flowers or doves I'm given...

As my mom continues to learn how to use computers, I've been teaching her about email etiquette and appropriate communication methods.

She forwarded an article to me today, and it is pretty interesting. The article is about how Japan doesn't want to apologize again for their World War II military brothels.

My mom asked me to forward this to my friends, but like most people, I don't like sending or receiving email forwards. I told her that my blog would be a better outlet for sharing this with people.

It does feel weird rejecting my mom in a way, but I do want to help her avoid becoming an "auto-delete" (someone who sends so many forwards that you start deleting all of the person's emails without reading them).

Cal 76, #3 UCLA 69

2 more wins and we're actually in the NCAA tournament!

In my desperate attempt to improve my Korean skills from "embarrasingly non-existent" to "still embarrasingly non-existent, but now I understand something every 20 words or so", I'm listening to a Korean language audio lesson.

What I find strange is that these are the first 15 expressions they teach:

My pleasure
It's over
Why not?
It's about time
You're here

You're kidding
It's out of the question
What's going on?
Are you sure?
I don't have time

I'm afraid
To do my best
Smoking prohibited
To do without
Good night

You're kidding? It's out of the question? Smoking prohibited???

Can you imagine learning these expressions as the very first things you learn in a foreign language?

What happened to the lesson where the first expresssions you learn are Hello, My name is Mr. Lee, and I don't speak Korean?

Gotta new laptop at work, a Dell Latitude D620.



The one thing that annoys me most is that the screen is shorter and longer. Since I use the laptop screen as a secondary monitor, my resolution settings aren't as nice as they used to be.

But it's lighter, faster, and doesn't have any problems, so I can't complain too much...