Kevin's diary is updated sporadically and includes a recurring cast of characters. If you have any comments, send mail to kdrum@home.com, but be forewarned that I probably won't answer….

Monday, October 27, 1997

While I was researching the topic of which expansion teams were the fastest to win a world championship (see below), I came across a couple of interesting sports trivia questions:

Q: Has any team ever come back from a 0-3 deficit in a best-of-seven championship series?

A: Yes, but only once. In the 1942 Stanley Cup the Toronto Maple Leafs lost the first three games to the Detroit Red Wings but came back to win in seven.

Q: In the history of the National League there have been five years in which league or division playoffs were required because two teams were tied at the end of the regular season. What team has been involved all five times?

A: The Dodgers, of course. What's more, they were even involved in the 1981 strike-year playoff between the first half and second half winners. Their overall record in these six games is 2-4.

Sunday, October 26, 1997

Last week at dinner we were discussing whether the Florida Marlins would be the youngest expansion franchise to win a championship in a major sport (baseball, football, basketball, hockey) if they won the World Series this year.

The short answer is: No. The Milwaukee Bucks, by any reasonable measure, deserve that title by winning the NBA championship in their third season (1970-71), and the New York Rangers--only technically an expansion team since they joined the NHL within ten years of its launch--get an honorable mention by winning the Stanley Cup in their second season (1927-28). However, I decided to check this out in more detail by embarking on a massive research project to compile a list of when every team started and when they first won a world championship so that we could figure out the record holder in each sport. This turned out to be more difficult than I expected, however, so first a few caveats:

• What counts as a team's first year? Figuring out when a team first appeared is frequently a judgment call, especially in baseball. Do you count their first year of existence, their first year in a major league, or their first year in today's major league? The Pittsburgh Pirates, for example, were charter members of the American Association in 1882, moved to the National League in 1887, left the NL after faring poorly, then rejoined in 1891.
  
  Or how about the Dodgers, which started out in the Inter-State Association in 1883, joined the American Association in 1884, and then joined the National League in 1890?
  
  In the end, I decided to use the first year that a team played in what is now considered to be a major league. In baseball, the commissioner's office has ruled that this includes the National League, the American League, the American Association, the Union Association, the Player's League, and the Federal League. In football this includes the NFL, the AFL, and the AAFC. In basketball it includes the NBA, the ABA, and the NBL. In hockey it includes the NHL and the WHA.
  
  (Note that even this still requires judgment calls. The Baltimore Colts, for example, started in 1946 in the AAFC, joined the NFL when the two leagues merged in 1950, folded after their first NFL season, and then were started up again in 1953. So what's their first season, 1946 or 1953?)

• Which championships count? There's really no good answer to this, so I arbitrarily decided to count only the major championships as they exist today: the World Series for baseball, the NFL championship and the Super Bowl for football, the NBA championship for basketball, and the Stanley Cup for hockey.

• Do charter teams count? In every league there's a winner in the first year, but it seems silly to count this as a "young" franchise. So in this listing only expansion teams count.

• What's an expansion team? We normally think of the expansion team phenomenon starting in the early 60s, but how about teams before that? The Dodgers joined the National League in 1890 (and won the NL championship their first season), but do they count as an expansion team? This can only be decided arbitrarily, so here's the rule I used: any team that joined the NFL/NBA/NHL within ten years of its founding is counted as a charter member. For baseball, all AL charter teams and all NL teams founded before 1885 count as charter members.
  
  Using this rule, the first expansion teams in each sport were: the Washington Senators (today's Texas Rangers) and Los Angeles Angels in baseball (1961); the Boston Braves (today's Washington Redskins) in football (1932); the Chicago Packers (today's Washington Bullets/Wizards) in basketball (1961-62); and five teams that joined the NHL in the 1967-68 season: the Minnesota North Stars (today's Dallas Stars), Los Angeles Kings, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins, and St. Louis Blues.

With that out of the way, here's the answer for all four sports:

• Baseball: The Florida Marlins started in 1993 and won the World Series in 1997, their fifth season. The New York Mets started in 1962 and won the World Series in 1969, their seventh season.
  
  Honorable mentions (for charter teams): The Chicago White Stockings (today's Cubs) won the first NL championship in 1876. The Boston Red Sox won the first World Series in 1903, their third season.

• Football: The Cleveland Browns started in 1946 as an AAFC charter team, won all four AAFC championships, and then won the NFL championship in 1950, their fifth year. Of the "classic" expansion teams, the fastest rise was that of the Miami Dolphins, who started in 1966 and won the Super Bowl following the 1972 season, their seventh.
  
  Honorable mentions (for charter teams): The Chicago Bears won the NFL championship in 1921, their second year. The New York Giants joined the NFL in 1925 and won the NFL championship in 1927, their third season.

• Basketball: The Milwaukee Bucks, led by Lew Alcindor, started in 1968-69 and won the NBA championship in 1970-71, their third season. The Portland Trail Blazers started in 1970-71 and won the NBA championship in 1976-77, their seventh season.
  
  Honorable mentions (for charter teams): The Philadelphia Warriors won the first NBA championship in 1946-47, their first year as a team. The Minneapolis Lakers started in 1947-48 as an NBL expansion team and won the NBA championship in 1948-49, their second season.

• Hockey: The Philadelphia Flyers joined the NHL during its first major expansion in 1967-68 and won the Stanley Cup in 1973-74, their seventh season. The New York Islanders started in 1972-73 and won the Cup in 1979-80, their eighth season.
  
  Honorable mentions (for charter teams): The Toronto Arenas (today's Maple Leafs) won the first NHL Stanley Cup in 1917-18, their second season. The New York Rangers joined the NHL in 1926-27 and won the Cup in 1927-28, their second year.

Baseball is especially difficult to analyze both because its roots go back farther than the other sports and because the World Series didn't start until 1903, more than a quarter century after the National League started up. Here's the basic chronology:

• 1876: National League formed. The only surviving teams from this era are the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Cubs, and Cincinnati Reds.
• 1882: American Association starts up.
• 1892: American Association folds. Three AA teams end up in NL.
• 1901: American League formed.
• 1903: First World Series. At this point, the NL and AL are both 8-team leagues and will stay that way until 1961.
• 1961: Expansion era begins.

Professional football started in 1920. It has been the most turbulent sport and has faced challenges from multiple competing leagues. The basic chronology:

• 1920: American Professional Football Association formed. The only surviving teams from this era are the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals.
• 1922: APFA changes its name to National Football League.
• 1932: First NFL playoff game played (previously, the team with the best season record was the league champion).
• 1946: All-America Football Conference formed.
• 1950: AAFC merges with NFL, adding the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and Baltimore Colts to the league. (The Colts folded in 1951 and another team by the same name was started in 1953.)
• 1960: American Football League formed.
• 1961: NFL expansion era begins.
• 1967: First Super Bowl between AFL and NFL (following 1966 season).
• 1970: AFL and NFL merge.

Professional basketball started in 1946 and didn't really stabilize until the late 50s. The basic chronology:

• 1937: National Basketball League formed. This was primarily a league of midwestern company teams.
• 1946: Basketball Association of America formed. The only surviving teams from this era are the Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, and Golden State Warriors.
• 1948: Four NBL teams join the BAA.
• 1949: The six remaining NBL franchises join the BAA, which is renamed the National Basketball Association.
• 1961: Expansion era begins.
• 1967: American Basketball Association formed.
• 1977: NBA merges with ABA, absorbing four ABA clubs.

Although the Stanley Cup has been around since 1893, the NHL did not start life until 1917. The basic chronology:

• 1910: National Hockey Association formed. The only surviving team from this era is the Montreal Canadiens (the Toronto Maple Leafs joined the NHA in 1916).
• 1912: Pacific Coast Hockey Association formed. No PCHA teams have survived.
• 1914: Stanley Cup trustees limit the field challenging for the Cup to the champions of the NHA and PCHA.
• 1917: NHA disbands.
• 1918: National Hockey League formed to replace NHA.
• 1924: PCHA disbands. From 1926 through 1966 the NHL was a six-team league.
• 1967: Expansion era begins.

Thursday, October 23, 1997

Lost to Dvorman 6-7 (5-7), 2-3 (YTD record 9-49). I had a game point at 5-4 on my serve but couldn't convert it.

Monday, October 20, 1997

I played around with my digital camera a little more today, and it still seems pretty cool. The automatic exposure functions could be better and the flash capability could definitely be improved, but with decent lighting it takes pretty good images. Here are a couple from tonight's escapades:

"Kitten Staring at Camera"	"Still Life With Fritos"

Overall, the light sensitivity seems excellent, about as good as ASA 1600 film. The saturation is similar to ordinary print film, the color accuracy is mediocre, and the sharpness, of course, is poor. However, so far I've been using the camera in "field" mode, and the sharpness might well turn out to be better in "fine" mode

Sunday, October 19, 1997

Happy birthday to me! As of 8:03 PM I'm 39 years old.

Marian got me a Sony Mavica digital camera as a present, and it's really cool. Absolutely not worth the money, but it's a neat toy nonetheless and after playing with it for a few minutes it's pretty clear to me that ordinary film will be obsolete before long--say in ten years or so. Why? Because the present drawbacks to digital cameras are quite solvable whereas the advantages are enormous. First, the drawbacks:

• Poor picture quality. The model I got captures about 350K pixels, and this will have to go up by 10 to 20 times before the quality becomes reasonable. However, this is a no-brainer and is sure to happen in the next decade.
• No hardcopy pictures. All you get are JPEG images that you can view on a computer. However, I would not be surprised if color laser printers get cheap enough and good enough in the near future that 1-hour photo shops will be able to take a floppy disk full of images and print them cheaply on a laser printer in only a couple of minutes.
• Limited storage space. The Mavica can only store about 20 images on a floppy, and better quality images will probably take up 1 MB each even with good compression algorithms. However, this problem can be solved with cheap floppy technology that stores about 100 MB, and this is likely to occur within the next ten years.

Now, however, consider the advantages of a digital camera, most of which are inherent in the digital format and can't ever be replicated in a standard roll film camera:

• Superior lens technology. Since the CCD area in a digital camera is tiny (about 1/4 inch on my model), a 10x zoom lens like the one I have on the Sony is no problem. A 10x zoom on a 35 mm camera is impossible, and anything even close to it would be about a foot long, weigh five pounds, and cost about $2000.
• Great low light sensitivity. The picture of Marian on the right is a good example of this (as well as an example of the so-so picture quality mentioned above). The exposure is really quite acceptable despite the fact that it was taken without flash by the light of single 100 watt lamp. Even with ASA 1000 film that would be nearly impossible with an ordinary camera.
• Instant playback. After you take a picture, you can view it in the LCD viewfinder immediately to see if the exposure and focus were OK.
• Price. The images are stored on floppy disks, which are cheap and reusable.
• Pictures are available instantly. Only a Polaroid camera can do this today.

There's a good chance that sales of standard roll film will have dropped 50% by the year 2007. All things considered, I would not invest in Kodak stock right now.....

My other birthday present (sort of) was a new suit. Actually, two new suits and a sport coat. I picked up the suit I bought last weekend (navy with very subtle multicolored pinstripes), and while I was at the store I went ahead and bought a dark grey suit and a tweedish sport coat. Amazingly enough, not a single one of the jackets needed any alterations at all. This has never happened to me before, and this time I managed to find three jackets I liked that fit perfectly off the rack.

The autopsy results on Irma finally came back and, as Harry suspected, it was not a heart attack. It turned out to be a blood clot in her lungs, and there was no warning of it and no way it could have been prevented.

Saturday, October 18, 1997

We went to dinner with Steve and Mary Lou tonight at a place in Long Beach called Delius. It's a fixed menu restaurant and the selections were pretty good. Apparently Steve has been going there for 18 years and is now on his third change of management.

Topics of conversation included:

• Superman and related super heroes. Steve and I were really getting into this and it felt sort of like falling into the middle of a Seinfeld episode. After this went on for quite a few minutes Mary Lou asked, a bit incredulously, if this was really how I wanted to spend my birthday eve. If she only knew....
• The origin of Braniac (Superman's #2 villain behind Lex Luthor). I looked this up after I got home and discovered that Braniac was a robot built by the computer tyrants of Colu. The computer tyrants have long since been overthrown, however, and Braniac is "the last of the great computer minds." Interesting note: Braniac's first appearance was in July 1958, so he very nearly shares a birthday with me.
• Favorite movies. Steve and Mary Lou believe that there are certain movies they like so much that if they were dating somebody and found out they didn't appreciate said favorites, that would be the end of that relationship. I can't say that I subscribe to this notion, but we traded movie titles that we would expect our lifetime mate to appreciate anyway:
  • Steve: Annie Hall, A Hard Day's Night, and Casablanca. Dr. Strangelove was a close fourth.
  • Mary Lou: The Big Chill, Manhattan, and Citizen Kane. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was originally on the list but was disqualified due to a technicality.
  • Marian: Much Ado About Nothing, The Princess Bride, and Hook. Also anything starring Katharine Hepburn.
  • Kevin: I sort of cheated and named the Star Wars trilogy. I should have come up with something better, but I have such a poor memory for things like this that I was hard pressed to remember my all-time favorites. However, I did like everyone else's choices (except for Virginia Woolf, which I've never seen). I suppose a genuine list of all-time favorites might include Star Wars (counted as one movie), Ordinary People, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast, and Spinal Tap.
• Did George Lucas really have the whole Star Wars story in mind before he ever made Star Wars? Mary Lou says yes, I say no. Or at least if he did, I think it was only the vaguest sort of outline and that it changed considerably in subsequent scripting. Steve, like me, does not believe that at the time Star Wars was filmed Lucas had the idea that Darth Vader was Luke's father or that Luke and Leia were brother and sister. Too much internal inconsistency in the script. Mary Lou, however, who has taken some scriptwriting classes, claims that major characters are never given names that start with the same letter (Luke, Leia) unless there's some good reason. This doesn't quite convince me, but I don't have a good enough memory of character names to refute it.

When we got back to the Elders' house we spent a few minutes with their cat, Cyrano, and their new kitten, Odile. Their kitten, unlike our little hell raiser, is very affectionate and does not spend her every waking moment chasing dust motes and trying to bite people. Marian and I have hatched a clever scheme to trade kittens with Steve and Mary Lou, but it will only work if they don't know what we're up to. I hope no one tells them....

Friday, October 17, 1997

Today is the 3-month anniversary of the day we brought Rosebud home from the shelter. Happy birthday, Rosebud!

Tuesday, October 14, 1997

Robert Heinlein once wrote (in Time Enough for Love) that "all the so-called democracies I've heard of...grew up slowly from the plebs discovering that they could vote themselves bread and circuses--for a while, until the system broke down." The implication, taken from Roman history, is that the masses are forever bleeding dry the productive members of society, eventually bringing all of civilization to its knees.

I was reminded of this after reading Caesar and Christ, a history of the Roman Empire, and was further reminded of it while reading The Great Wave, a history of inflationary episodes in European history. It turns out that the statement is not only factually untrue (as it relates to the Roman Empire, anyway) but also completely wrong in its implications.

In Rome, the plebeians after the time of Caesar never even had a vote, nor any other sort of power, and in fact both the corn dole and the public games (Heinlein's "bread and circuses") existed mostly as a desperate attempt to bribe the populace into docility despite the horrific way they were treated. The upper classes in Rome were greedy and venal almost beyond comprehension, and as time went by they amassed ever more wealth until finally the plebeians had sunk so far into poverty that they were literally starving in the streets. The plebes never did vote themselves either bread or circuses, and it was the ever accelerating greediness and indolence of the upper classes that eventually contributed to the fall of Rome.

What's more, it appears that this same cycle plays itself out over and over in history. I haven't finished The Great Wave yet, but one of the central conclusions of research into price cycles in Europe is that there have been four great inflationary waves since 1100 AD and in each of them it was the rich and powerful who benefited from it: rents and interest rates increased to the benefit of the rich and the price of basic materials such as food and fuel increased to the detriment of the poor. In each of these waves the disparity between rich and poor climbed inexorably until the poor had finally had enough and started beheading monarchs.

This strikes me as a commonsensical conclusion. A pure capitalist economy is like a machine with a positive feedback loop: the powerful amass ever more power and wealth and the poor are left with less and less. We tacitly accept this as true in the business world and enact antitrust laws to prevent it, but for some reason we refuse to believe it about society at large. The disparity between rich and poor in America has increased dramatically in the past two decades, but the general reaction of most conservatives is to either deny that this is happening (the Wall Street Journal opined that it didn't really matter because, after all, some poor people manage to claw their way out of poverty) or to simply say that they don't care.

I wonder what these folks think the proper limit is? Would it be OK if the top 5% of the country owned 80% of the wealth? 90%? 99%? Without the kinds of checks and balances that we have in both the business world and in our governmental system, this trend will continue until the poor are just this side of starvation. Then what will we do?

Monday, October 13, 1997

I was thinking about books the other day, and it occurred to me that I have run across a really superlative book about once every five years. In fact, I was able to think of exactly five books that--to me--are on a different plane from anything else I've read: not just a little better, but in a whole different class:

• 1975: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A tremendously absorbing psychological tale. Not a hint of physical action anywhere, but a page turner even so. I wonder what it's like in the original Russian?
• 1979: The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro. An extraordinary biography of Robert Moses, the man who redefined the use of pure raw power at the same time that he reshaped the physical form of New York. Not always a fair portrait, perhaps, but always enthralling.
• 1983: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson. The second half of the second book (The Illearth War) is the most compulsive reading I've ever done. I can still remember where I finished it (a laundromat in Tustin).
• 1990: The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser. An absolutely mesmerising novel of treachery and intrigue set in Dickensian England. I can also remember where I finished this book: in a car on the way to Los Angeles (I made Marian drive because I wanted to finish the book).
• 1997: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. This year's winner. It wasn't a page turner like the others (in fact, I couldn't read more than about 40 pages at a time) but it was as funny and as finally textured a book as I've ever read.

A few things come to mind when I look at this list:

• They are all long books. The average length is 993 pages and only one of them (Crime and Punishment) is under 700 pages. For some reason, short books--even good ones--just don't have the same impact on me as long ones.
• Four out of five are fiction, and none of them is science fiction. Maybe I should be broadening my fiction reading habits?
• They are all bestsellers. Apparently my taste is fairly plebeian.
• Another great book is due to come my way in the year 2000. Only three years to go!

Sunday, October 12, 1997

Marian flew to Sedona this afternoon to stay with her father and sister for a couple of days. The cremation is scheduled for tomorrow and Harry is going to head back to Palm Desert on Wednesday. Marian plans to drive out there on Thursday and help him get the house in order. The whole thing is still a little hard to believe.

I'm feeling in a historical frame of mind lately, so I went to the bookstore yesterday and looked for some good history books. I found one called--get this--World History by Hugh Thomas, and bought it. It claimed to be a history of trends and processes in world history and looked pretty good.

I haven't started it yet (I have to get through my book about periods of inflation in European history first), but I did read the first page, which contains this paragraph:

The solar system of which the Earth is part [yes, he's starting at the very beginning] is now known to be a galaxy of 100 billion stars....Our galaxy and the Earth came into being almost simultaneously, following the contraction, by rotation, of clouds of dust, between 4000 and 5000 million BC. The sun was a concentrated core at the centre of this rotation. The planets formed around pieces of débris.

Let's take this a bit at a time:

• The solar system is not a galaxy.
• Our galaxy and the Earth were most certainly not formed anywhere close to simultaneously. The sun is actually a fairly young star--about 5 billion years old--and there are many millions of much older stars in the Milky Way, which was formed about 15 billion years ago.
• Rotation does not contract anything. Clouds of dust do indeed become stars, but they do so via gravitational attraction.
• Is there really a reason for saying "5000 million BC"? Does Thomas think that the 2000 years since the birth of Christ are significant in this context?
• The planets did not form "around" pieces of debris, although this is a little more defensible than the other statements. Like the sun, they were formed by the gravitational attraction of dust and rocks.
• Doesn't it seem a little pretentious to use "débris" rather than "debris"?

I sure hope the rest of the book is better than the first page....

Saturday, October 11, 1997

Harry called at 6:20 this morning to tell us that Irma died suddenly in her sleep during the night. She hadn't been ill and her death came completely without warning, apparently caused by either a heart attack or a blood clot. She was only 64.

Friday, October 10, 1997

Tough bridge night. No slams, lots of partials, maybe one or two games bid and made. Final score:

Thursday, October 9, 1997

Split sets with Dvorman 6-4, 2-6 (YTD record 9-48). The highlight (or lowlight) of the evening came at 5-4, 30-30 in the first set. I hit a short chip to Dave's backhand and rushed the net. Dave threw up a pretty well disguised lob, I scurried back to the baseline and, with the ball still behind me, hit a towering blind lob, praying only that it would go in the general direction of the court. The lob sailed up and up and up, looked like it would go short, and then plunked down exactly on top of the net. Dave was right on top of it, but it stopped dead and rolled off the net, completely unplayable. I then won the next point and the set on a couple of good passing shots.

In the ninth game, with Dave serving, we played 23 deuces. I had 22 game points and lost every single one of them until the very last point when Dave double faulted.

Kofax goes public tomorrow! Hooray! Click here for a stock quote....

Monday, October 6, 1997

The state of Maine, according to its license plates, is "Vacationland," and after spending the weekend there I now understand why. In a 100 mile stretch of Highway 1 between Camden and Bar Harbor (that's U.S. 1, not the real Highway 1 here in California) I counted no fewer than four miniature golf courses. I guess now we know what the residents of Maine like to do on their summer vacations.

Other Maine notes (at least, notes on that 100 mile stretch of the Maine coast between Camden and Bar Harbor): half the stores are called "Mainely [Blank]," as in "Mainely Quilts" or "Mainely Hair" or some such....used book stores are incredibly numerous, surpassed only by the unending parade of antique and "collectible" stores....fast food is in short supply: there were a grand total of two McDonalds outlets on my 100 mile route (and I'm proud to say that I ate at one of them).

Most unusual sight: driving through Bar Harbor, a yuppified former fishing town that now looks sort of like Carmel, I chanced to look out across the ocean (i.e., the Atlantic ocean, not the real one here in California). On the water I saw lots of little sailboats dotting the sea, a few swimmers, a cute little jetty, and then...scanning around the horizon...out in the harbor...I saw...what? An invasion from outer space? No, that didn't seem right. Upon a second look it was just a cruise ship, an unbelievable white mountain of a cruise ship to be sure, but an ordinary cruise ship nonetheless, anchored off this tiny town and belching vast numbers of tourists onto its crowded yuppie streets. I would have as much expected to find such a thing in my bathtub as in this itsy bitsy little hamlet.

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