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Sunday, Aug 08, 2004
triumph of the shrill
"Comedy writer Robert Smigel has built a formidable career out of childhood fixtures such as silly voices, animals, cartoons, and puppets. He received his big break in the mid-'80s, when Lorne Michaels hired him as a writer for Saturday Night Live; Smigel went on to write such classic skits as the one in which William Shatner admonishes a crowd of Star Trek fans to get a life. In 1991, Smigel hooked up with fellow SNL writer Conan O'Brien to write Lookwell, a revered pilot starring Adam West as a clueless, washed-up TV star turned detective. The show wasn't picked up for production, but Smigel later become one of the primary creative voices behind Late Night With Conan O'Brien."
Saturday, Aug 07, 2004
money honies
"Before Moneyball, the mainstream more or less ignored sabermetrics. Those who brought up statistics were dismissed as roto-geeks; the game couldn't be boiled down to numbers, and if these losers would get their heads out of their spreadsheets and actually watch a game, they'd know that.
But now, as Moneyball showed everyone, they're on the inside, taking over some of the game's most prominent franchises, and what's more, they've been successful. Sabermetrics no longer belongs to fringe outsiders, it's part of the game. Sabermetric teams are still a minority, but it is firmly entrenched, and likely to spread."