Monday TV/Friday radio hit.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EDT. My Friday night radio hit on our Chicago affiliate is somewhere in this podcast; it’s very draft-heavy.

Working on the Gone with the Wind writeup.

Nine new-ish songs.

I’ll be on our Chicago affiliate with Chuck Swirsky tonight, but I’m taping it before the show so I’m not sure exactly when it will air.

Anyway, I have discovered that there is one substantial benefit to XM (Sirius XM, XM Sirius, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week) – an hour or so of their alternative stations usually gives me a half-dozen songs I like enough to purchase. Of course, listening for an hour a week is sufficient, so I’m not about to renew my subscription (which I let lapse in 2006), but I get it via DirecTV at home and occasionally in rental cars, which is how I came across these songs.

Ida Maria – “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” (video)

Arresting title, for starters. Ida Maria is a Norwegian singer who has a smoky voice and exudes a woman-on-the-verge vibe throughout the song (“What the hell do I do that for?) and seems to have some issues to work through (“I like me so much better when you’re naked”). The unbalanced lyrics ride on top of an upbeat, sparse guitar/drum backing. Good luck getting this out of your head.

Tokyo Police Club – “Your English Is Good” (video)

The shoutalong intro is kind of menacing – “Oh give us your vote/give us your vote/If you know/what’s good for you” – and the generally obnoxious lyrics, complete with snotty delivery, are backed by an Arctic Monkeys kind of rapid Britpop/punk guitar riff.

Men Without Pants – “And The Girls Go” (no video, but the whole song is here)

Best band name I’ve heard all year, and it turns out it includes Dan the Automator (of Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Dr. Octagon fame). It’s delightfully trashy rock, deliberately underproduced so it has a garage feel, with a guitar riff that never quite resolves so you’re given the sense that you’re listing to one side as you listen. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Rise Against – “Audience Of One” (video)

I was familiar with Rise Against from their acoustic song “Swing Life Away” but hadn’t heard any of their regular material until I heard this on XM. It’s solid-average, plays up a little with some good tempo changes and unusually sharp lyrics (not just for neo-punk but for rock in general), with the opening stanza, “I can still remember/the words and what they meant/As we etched them with our fingers/in years of wet cement” the first of a handful of strong images which, really, is about all it takes to rise above the lyrical level of the average rock song.

Living Things – “Oxygen” (video)

I had Living Things pegged as a one-hit wonder – and it wasn’t even a big hit or a particularly great song – after their terse and kind of juvenile anti-war song “Bom Bom Bom,” which hit #21 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2005, but this is definitely a step up for them in the songwriting department. It has a stronger hook and a wave of sound behind a chorus that features some actual singing that wasn’t present on “Bom Bom Bom.”

Editors – “Blood” (video)

This song is actually from 2005, but I didn’t hear it at all until last year and didn’t think it worth buying until the second or third time I caught it. It’s very Joy Division/Interpol, and if you don’t like those bands, I don’t think there’s anything I could tell you about this song that would make it worth your while. Mostly I just wanted to mention that I was sure the first line in the chorus was “Blood runs through your feet,” when in fact, it’s “Blood runs through your veins,” so either the Brummie accent pronounces “vein” with a long “e” or my ears are shot to hell.

Franz Ferdinand – “No You Girls” (video)

They write good songs – I doubt you needed me to point this out. I was thinking the other day about how FF are kind of like Stone Temple Pilots in that, while you weren’t paying that much attention, they’ve racked up a bunch of good singles that would make a pretty strong greatest-hits album if the record company was in the mood for a money-grab. STP was there after four albums; FF might not even need that long.

Cage the Elephant – “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked” (video)

CtE seems like your basic college jam band, which really isn’t my style, but the slide guitar riff and the vocalist’s half-rapped/half-drawled delivery had me singing the song to myself at the SEC tournament despite the fact that I didn’t think I even liked it. The lyrics aren’t especially clever – the singer meets a prostitute and a mugger and sees a crooked priest on TV, territory I’m pretty sure we’ve covered before. Apparently the song went top 40 in the UK last year but just started getting radio play here in the last few months.

Matt & Kim – “Daylight” (video)

Picked this one up a few months ago – I’m a sucker for a good call-and-response song, and this one comes with a shuffling percussion beat for a sort of minimalist punk-pop sucker-punch in just under three minutes.

Draft articles and videos.

Aside from one more article tomorrow, I think I’m done with my online draft coverage for this year. Here’s what went up in the last few days, since my stuff isn’t always easy to find:

My day two recap, covering five teams that did something interesting. My day one recap was a little more expansive, since the bulk of the top prospects always go in the top three rounds anyway. My final top 100 ranking went up on Tuesday before the draft started.

I’m quoted a few times in this piece on prep players.

I did two chats this week, one on Wednesday and a predraft one on Tuesday. And yes, they’re working on the chat software bugs.

Radio:

Video:

It doesn’t look like my TV hits from Tues/Weds are online.

I also want to say publicly how grateful I am to the yeoman’s work done by Jason Churchill on the ESPN MLB Draft blog this year. Having Jason to get content up there daily while I was running across the country seeing players and catching stomach flus was an enormous help, and I thought the stuff he produced was outstanding and really moved our draft coverage forward this year. And I assume you all know that if I thought his stuff sucked, I would say so, meaning that what I’ve said here is genuine.

Finally, thanks to all of you for reading and watching and, in many cases, reaching out to me to offer compliments on the work that I did or that Jason did. The best part about this job is that I get to produce unique content that people want to read and like to read, and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of hearing people say that they enjoyed some piece that I read or some random radio hit that I did. Thank you.

TV tonight.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS at 5:35, 6:15, 6:40, 7:05, and 7:50 EDT, as well as sometime in the 8:00 and 10:00 hours. I’ll also be on ESPN from 9-10. All times Eastern.

Jason and I will live-blog at least the first round on the ESPN.com MLB draft blog as well.

Another projection.

Projection #3. Can’t say I love it or feel that confident about it. The Crow situation is complicating matters; his agents are clearly shopping for a landing spot for him, and so far I don’t believe they have found a taker.

Another videoclip, this one about the top arms in the draft. Oh, and Aaron – moving your hands is good presentation style, if you do it deliberately. Waving them around like you’re drunk and ranting … not so much.

My ESPNEWS hit from today. Can you see the bags under the bags under my eyes? Personally I think I sound awful. Also, that shirt is not purple, but it’s purple on my screen. I’ll show you purple – trust me.

I’ll be on with Brian Kenny tonight at 9:25 pm EDT.

Tuesday media schedule includes ESPNEWS hits at 6, 6:30, 7, and 7:30 pm EDT, and the Sportscenter special on ESPN from 9-10.

There will be a Tuesday chat, tentatively at 2 pm, but I might have to push it back to 3 depending on TV.

Media today + article on Strasburg.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS at 2:40 pm EDT, on ESPN 101.1 FM in St. Louis at 2:20 pm CDT, and on Atlanta 680 the FAN at 3:50 pm EDT.

I wrote a piece destroying the two anti-Strasburg memes I’ve seen this year – that “greatest college pitcher ever” candidates don’t work out, and that pitchers taken #1 overall don’t work out. Just a reality bill that some folks won’t want to pay.

And there’s another video up on players who’ll get to the majors quickly from this draft.

Draft blog post.

Draft blog post is up on Matt Purke’s demands and Randal Grichuk’s suitor.

More “vignettes” from me on building through the draft and ’09 draftees who could move quick.

I’ll be on our St. Louis affiliate on Monday at 12:20 pm CDT to talk draft.

More Klaw than you can stand!

Today’s draft tidbits, all bullet-pointy.

Another article on top prospects in this year’s draft who were undrafted out of high school.

I’m quoted extensively in this survey article on the HS crop in this year’s draft.

Another videoclip, this one about Scott Boras’ role in this year’s draft.

Also, Levi Stahl discusses Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me in this and one prior blog post. I’ve never read it, but loved her first novel, The Dud Avocado, when I read it back in January.

Last up – I’ll be on our Pittsburgh affiliate again on Saturday morning at 10:40 am, and I’ll be on ESPN Radio sometime in the 9 am EDT hour on Sunday morning.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.

After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but I didn’t. I liked it, and I can see glimmers of brilliance in it, but the core story just didn’t grab me or propel me forward.

Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.

Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.

Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind.

New projection, radio, etc.

New first-round projection is up. As I noted in the comments there and on Twitter, I heard after it was posted that the Rockies are “heavy heavy” on Matt Hobgood for one of their two picks.

Radio hit on Baseball Tonight this evening.

UPDATE they just posted my NYC radio hit with Seth Everett.

Ticket to Ride is a very cool game, by the way. I need to update that boardgames post, once I survive the draft.