Monday, June 22, 2009 - Posts
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The 2009 U.S. Open was a massive shank—too much rain and too little Tiger Woods made golf's showcase event close to unwatchable. For the beloved Dan Jenkins, covering his 200th major tournament, the omnipresent storm clouds were less a deterrent than a welcome source of material. Over the last week, Jenkins filed more than 150 tweets from the Open, quipping about the weather ("If you want to get a swing tip today, try the aquarium"), Phil Mickelson's fashion sense ("Easy to root for Phil; still hard to root for those shirts"), and the tourney's anonymous champion ("I didn't have Lucas Glover in the pool, but good on you if you did. The unsung guy wins over the sung guys").
These 140-character dispatches earned Jenkins kudos from sports bloggers and the old-line media. (OK, that second link—in which "the ancient Twitterer" is described as "a sensation"—goes to a column written by his daughter Sally. But the point still stands.) Jenkins' tweets were the best thing about a bad U.S. Open, but it's worth thinking about whether Tweetdeck is the best venue for the world's greatest golf writer.
In terms of sheer output, @danjenkinsgd destroys Dan Jenkins the long-form writer. After this year's Masters, Jenkins filed a 1,300-word recap for Golf Digest. Add all of his tweets together, and Jenkins has dashed off 3,200 words on the Open. I'd also argue that Jenkins the Twitterer is funnier than his print-journalism alter ego. A slow and steady stream of one-liners plays better than carefully couched jokes—it's the difference between getting strafed by a BB gun and getting nailed by a cannonball. Timeliness is also key here: It makes more sense to joke about Phil Mickelson's attire when your readers can see what he's wearing.
Jenkins' just-in-time delivery wasn't always for the best. Twitter works better for color commentary than for play-by-play, even if the play-by-play man is a genius observer. Jenkins was an ideal companion during the Open's intractable rain delays, passing the time with jokes and historical footnotes. When the golf got more exciting, he didn't add much to the TV coverage or to lengthier, real-time Web writing. A sample tweet from Monday: "Glover fails to birdie the par-15 13th and remains tied with Phil at -4. Ricky Barnes two-putts for birdie and is alive at -2."
Twitter also doesn't do historical breadth. Jenkins made loads of allusions over the last week, everything from a rundown of all the U.S. Opens that ended on a Monday to a quote from Ben Crenshaw circa 1975. While this level of recall is incredible, Jenkins' musings came off as a string of factoids rather than a well-curated collection of supporting details. Luckily, this year's Open—which will be best-remembered for being forgettable—made this a moot point. The story of last year's tournament, in which a one-legged Tiger Woods refused to lose to underdog Rocco Mediate, was best told in a sweeping feature. This year's U.S. Open, played underwater and won by some guy named Lucas Glover, was nothing if not ephemeral. It was a Twitter tournament, and Dan Jenkins was the right man at the right time in the right medium.
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Variety reported yesterday that the Steven Soderbergh/Brad Pitt production of Moneyball, Michael Lewis' great book about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistics to change baseball, was closed down just 96 hours before shooting began. Apparently, Columbia Pictures chief Amy Pascal read Soderbergh's latest revision to the script, became wary of big changes in it, and pulled the plug, leaving the director casting about for a new studio. One unusual element in the planned film? Soderbergh intended to splice "interviews with such ballplayers as Beane's former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry" throughout.
This news raises the possibility of two grim outcomes: 1) that Moneyball may never get made and 2) that if it does get made, it may not be any good. Although interviews with Dykstra are always entertaining, the plan to include documentary footage worries those of us who are big fans of blockbuster Soderbergh (director of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven movies) and less enamored of his arty, experimental alter ego (director of Bubble and the two-part, four hour-plus Che epic). We'd assumed that Moneyball, the tale of a general manager leading a poor, underdog team to unprecedented success, would be a kind of Ballpark Eleven: A heist movie about a team of likeable smartypantses (including Pitt as Beane, comedian Demitri Martin as number-cruncher Paul De Podesta, and charming ballplayer Scott Hatteberg as himself) sticking it to the smug baseball establishment. But perhaps Pascal got spooked because Soderbergh has something more unorthodox in mind: A star-studded feature film intercut with a semi-documentary meditation on Beane himself. We may never know!
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 21: "tropical storm Andres." Googlers are no doubt wondering whether tropical storm Andres—just recently upgraded from a depression—is headed their way. Forecasts show this storm will stick to the Southwest coast of Mexico before heading off into the Pacific by Friday. Andres is the first Eastern Pacific tropical storm of a hurricane season forecasted to produce six Atlantic hurricanes.
No. 25: "kodachrome." Kodachrome, the 35 mm color film that made Kodak a household name, is going the way of the Polaroid after 74 years of production. According to the Los Angeles Times, digital cameras have reduced sales of Kodachrome to just "a fraction of one percent" of Kodak's still-picture film sales. The requisite campaign to keep Kodachrome alive has already launched, and Kodak is hosting a gallery of shots taken with the film.
No. 31: "Mia Wasikowska." This weekend, Disney released a photo of Johnny Depp made up like an undead hobo clown for his role as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's upcoming remake of Alice in Wonderland. But the big news today is that Burton has chosen 19-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska as his Alice. Wasikowska is probably best known for her stint on the HBO drama In Treatment. "She just had that certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality," Burton told the Daily Mail.
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