Playoff time

The high school basketball playoffs are upon us and I had my first game for the Register on Friday night as OCVarsity.com staffed 14 contests. Mine was a 2AA game featuring Thousand Oaks, which had to travel about 60 miles down the 101 and 405 to Marina High School and Westminster. There is always traffic on the 405, so it did not surprise me that the Thousand Oaks cheerleaders only got to Huntington Beach midway through the first period. By the time they got there, the Lancers were up 7-1, and despite the long trip they cruised to the win. Anyway, here is a link to the coverage.

http://www.ocvarsity.com/articles/westminster-36007-hit-lions.html

Iron's exit a new wrinkle for Monopoly

So for the past month I have been getting the occasional item in my Facebook newsfeed concerning Hasbro’s plans to get rid of one of the iconic Monopoly pieces of my youth. I figured they would conduct this survey and then take a few days before announcing the piece that really was history and what would replace it.

Instead, the voting closed last night and this morning I awoke to find out that my beloved iron is getting the boot. It will be replaced by a cat in new versions of the game, however it should come to nobody’s surprise that Hasbro will be putting out a Golden Token Bonus set that will include all of the current tokens and the five suitors for the open spot in the lineup. So a lot of this was – shocker – a way for Hasbro to get some attention to what might be a flagging brand.

I know, I hate it too, the idea that Monopoly, the king of board games over the past seven decades, needs to pull a stunt to make people try to remember the last time they played. I am still trying to figure that out myself.

I remember spending many summer evenings playing Monopoly at my cousin Ricky’s house on Smith Street while visiting my grandmother in Pennsylvania. I got an anniversary set at some point that includes a spinner to hold the property deeds, although that one was (and still is) back in Virginia, so I would head over to Ricky’s after supper (as opposed to dinner, but that is another story for another day) and we’d play for a couple of hours. Our games usually ended amicably, which is saying something since there are a lot of stories out there about games that end in fights. Or frankly just end because they were taking too long.

My current Monopoly set was purchased when Jamesway was going out of business in Luray in the mid-1990s. It is a 60^th anniversary set in a box shaped like Trivial Pursuit, and the board even unfolds like the one used in that game. The tokens are apparently modeled on the ones from Monopoly’s early days, and are also golden colored, so I think I’ll need to hang on to the older game for what I see as an authentic iron.

The iron was among the less-flashy tokens, so it should not surprise me that it didn’t make the count. I saw elsewhere on the internet that the wheelbarrow was the second-least popular. I know that I only used it when the iron was already claimed. Most players seem to like the racecar and the Scottie the best, but a few of these pieces are more questionable than the iron.

For example, the shoe. It’s just one shoe, not a pair, so what is its true worth? I guess it makes sense from the perspective that an unpaired shoe makes a great doorstop, so it could also be a game token.

I always thought the hat was not a very balanced piece of metal, and the horse was the only token among those in my first Monopoly sets that needed to be on a pedestal. The rest stood on their own.

When the news broke this morning, I mentioned it to Christina, and she seemed to process it and move on. Then, half an hour later, I hear from the kitchen: “Wait a minute. They still have the f---ing thimble?”

The impending loss of the iron sent me to the closet where we keep our board games, and there are lots of great memories stored there. Christina and I have started playing Mille Bornes again, which has already been the source of great fun. My 30-year-old Risk game is up there, and that got a lot of use in summers back in Chesterfield County, but not much in recent years.

I still have Payday and Gambler, two great Parker Brothers games of the 1970s and 1980s, and Scattergories, plus all kinds of versions of Trivial Pursuit. I also have a terrific game called Out of Context, which is a quote-guessing game we used to play at John Waybright’s house when the Page News and Courier news staff got together for, ahem, strategy meetings.

Finding time (and people) to get together and play these great games is not that easy these days, but trips down memory lane like this make me wish it was. And maybe there will be an opportunity to do so again.

But right now, my main concern is this disrespect for the iron. And I’m steamed.

Screen's shot

I'm starting to think there is a problem with the screens Motorola uses in its Droids. Either that or because I have been lucky enough not to crack a phone to this point I manage to keep them long enough that some other bug pops up.

I am writing this entry from the Pacific Place center in downtown Seattle, across the street from a Verizon Wireless store. Yes, they said, the phone is dead. No, they said, we cannot do warranty replacements, they must be sent to my home address. Yes, they said, they are sent overnight. No, they said, since this is Sunday the order won't be filled until Monday and it will be Tuesday before I have a replacement.

Just like the last time this happened, 20 months ago, they have been great about it. Phone is still under warranty so I will probably get a reconditioned unit, but at least it won't cost me anything. Oddly, the last time this happened, the reconditioned phone outlived the one I bought new (that Droid 2 lasted all of four months before the screen died in the middle of the Strasburg Mayfest).

Now I have the new and improved Droid 4, although I guess it's a paperweight about now. Thankfully, I am warm and dry on a cold, windy, rainy day. Unthankfully, this has cut into the time I thought I would be taking photos of people dealing with the cold, windy, rainy day. Thankfully, I will now stop using this back and forth device. Unthankfully for readers, I wanted to do it one more time.

So we'll do some people watching in front of Barnes and Noble for a little while (What's this? A bookstore? Wow!) and get on the road back to Los Angeles soon. What a crazy world this is.

Something quite different

Christina and I have attended three tapings of “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” together. Despite the way it looks on TV, the production is fairly tightly run, and once the show begins they rarely even take the full two or three minutes for commercial breaks before they roll tape again for the next segment.

So our experience on Friday afternoon/evening was quite different.

Christina got an e-mail on Monday from Ryan, one of the 1Iota folks who help coordinate the audiences for shows like Craig Ferguson’s. The e-mail noted there was a special show slated for Friday that would include only Ferguson doing sketches. She put in for the free tickets, and did a little research that helped us find out that they were going to shoot some taped segments for a show that will run after Super Bowl XLVII on Feb. 3.

Much of the pre-show activities were the same as the previous three shows we saw at Television City. We were allowed to park in the adjacent lot, then walked to the sidewalk on Fairfax Avenue where we lined up with about 150 other audience members. I got there a little bit before Christina since I was driving up from Torrance while she took a half-day off of work.

Because it was a Friday, the small snack bar and CBS store adjacent to the area where audience members go through security was closed. It was cold (for Los Angeles) and they kept us in the outdoor holding area for a bit longer than I remember waiting for other shows.

When they let us in the building, we waited in one of three lines upstairs before going into the studio, once again the usual drill. It was when we were seated in the studio that we first saw how different this experience would be.

On the right side of the stage a green screen was set up while at the center was an old leather couch and a 1970s console television set with rabbit ears. At the left, one of what turns out to be two Geoff Petersons was in a leather chair.

The regular warm-up guy, Chunky B, was joined by another staff member since there would be several scenes that required time to set up, rather than the one-shot, 50-minute talk show. The camera guys came up and they set up around the couch and TV set and we were all ready to go…and then we weren’t.

Union break. See you in a half hour (or so). So Chunky and his cohort did their best to keep the audience entertained. It reminded me of our experience at “Mike & Molly,” except that having someone to play off of made it flow a little better. But we still had the series of quiz questions and bad singers that we dealt with at the sitcom taping (with the exception of fewer parlor tricks). People will do almost anything for a T-shirt.

When the union break was over, they crew came out and moved the cameras to the green screen, where they started the actual taping with Josh Robert Thompson (the voice of Geoff Peterson) doing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tips on visiting New Orleans. The bit was well-received, but the audience was getting antsy. Where was Craig?

Finally, Craig arrived, ready to do a Sean Connery impression. As usual, he was spot-on, reflecting on past Super Bowl memories, a few of them even rooted in some sort of reality. Midway through taping the various segments, the crew brought Craig a bowl of popcorn, and then he went into one of the cabinets in the living room set and produced a stuffed sheep, which joined him on the couch for the remainder of the bit. They had to stop tape a few times when Craig’s bald cap was coming loose. I suspect difficulties in makeup may have also led to the delays that had stretched our time in the studio past two hours.

After he wrapped up the Connery segment, he asked the crew if Michael Caine was next and then went off stage. After about 10 more minutes of warmup, Craig came back, this time to the green screen, to tape some “Michael Caine in space” for use in the Super Bowl show. This was when the difficulties of the night came into full focus.

Holding a drink in one gloved hand and a cigarette in the other, he asked a crew member for a light. Craig read about three or four of the jokes off the teleprompter before someone told him he had to put the cigarette out because there was not a “special-effects person” on the set. He then read about five or six more before someone else said he could not have the cigarette at all.

This led to a bunch of inside jokes that only the audience would get as he continued to plow through the material on the teleprompter. For the most part it was still funny, but you could tell there was a growing level of frustration as he would say things like “You know what would make this better? A cigarette.” He also made several references to how a comedy bit could possibly make impressionable children want to smoke or speak in an English accent.

After finishing what was in the teleprompter, Craig looked at the staff and asked if he needed to do the ones where he was holding the cigarette again. We could tell he was not pleased with the prospect of having to get in makeup again another day before the show airs to redo the segment, so he and the staff decided it would be better to do it again. Of course, that meant the audience had heard the jokes already once, which proved to be an issue at the “Mike & Molly” taping as well.

The absurdity of the whole thing kept us laughing. We could all feel for the situation he was in as the taping stretched past three hours. He ultimately wrapped up the Michael Caine segment, did a cold open (which we are not sure is for the Super Bowl show) and said it would take too long to get out of makeup for the last bit they had planned, something with Geoff. He thanked the audience for sticking around as long as we did (7:15 p.m.) and left the stage.

It appeared to me that the ill-timed union break probably threw off the entire schedule. Craig probably planned to do the Connery thing first, then the Caine, and the Schwarzenegger segment could have been taped while his makeup was being removed.

While we love the program, and cannot wait for the chance to see another regular show, Christina and I agreed that Friday’s taping was interesting to see, but something we did not need to do again.

An addition to this item. It is after the Super Bowl and we were surprised to see none of what was taped for the special to show up on the air. We are trying to find out why and what happened to the stuff, but so far no dice.

More from the hardwood

I'm working on a few ideas for blog posts, but in the meantime, here are some links to recent basketball coverage. Enjoy.

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/huntington-35418-ivey-alamitos.html

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/dorado-35351-inside-points.html

Hooping it up

The past two weekends have involved covering girls basketball tournaments in Orange County and I wanted a place to put some of the links in case folks wanted to check out my coverage. This past Saturday's game, in which a very good Westminster team came out and quickly took control in the final of Ocean View's tournament, included dealing with a running clock in the fourth quarter, then finding out the system to enter statistics for the newspaper was down, so I had to read my box score over the phone the old fashioned way. Still it was a lot of fun, and we got to try out Slater's 50/50 in Huntington Beach, so that was nice as well.

Anyway, here are the links from Ocean View's Hawk Holiday Classic.

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/westminster-35108-hawk-holiday.html

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/ocean-35098-view-quarter.html

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/beach-35067-ocean-harbor.html

Giving the clock a shot

I had just started to care about college basketball.

Prior to 1980, whenever Channel 12 would show that slide that told me it was pre-empting whatever NBC was offering so it could show an ACC basketball game, I grumbled and found something else to watch. But with Ralph Sampson in his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, the Cavaliers had become interesting. People in school were talking about the games and I wanted to see what the excitement was about, so I started following the team through those Thursday night games with Jim Thacker and Billy Packer into the 1981 NCAA tournament.

Losing in the semifinals to UNC, the Cavaliers came back two nights later to win the last third-place game in NCAA tournament history to LSU (trivia players take note). That was about the time I took notice of the UNC-U.Va. rivalry, which would hit a sour note a year later in the 1982 ACC tournament.

The tournament final looked like it would be a thriller, the new kid on the block vs. the established kings, the North Carolina Tar Heels, coached by Dean Smith. And it was…for about 30 minutes. The problem is a college basketball game lasts 40 minutes. Smith decided to pull the Tar Heels back into a stall, going more than seven minutes without taking a shot. This was their style at the time, and UNC would use it to win the NCAA title three weeks later.

Obviously, I was stung by Virginia's 47-45 loss, but a lot of that came from watching what had become a soccer match (sorry, had to go there). Little did I know that this game would go a long way to bringing the shot clock to college basketball.

I always thought the 24-second clock in the NBA was a little out of the box. Frankly to this day I think that is too rushed. But there also has to be a way to keep teams from just passing the ball around while time bleeds off the clock. The first experiments with a shot clock in the mid-1980s set the time at 45 seconds, and actually turned it off with four minutes left in the game.

Meanwhile, the first experiments with the clock in NCAA women’s basketball…wait, I’m sorry, turns out they were using a 30-second clock since the early 1970s. And they still are.

Eventually, the men’s clock stayed on the entire game and through overtime, then in the 1990s it was shortened to 35 seconds. But high school basketball has mostly ignored the shot clock. When I was working in Virginia, it would be mentioned every couple of years, but ultimately the cost of the equipment, the need for someone to run the clock, just the fact that it probably doesn’t impact the game at that level were all mentioned as reasons against the change.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into the gym at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach last Wednesday and saw two shot clocks that were actually in use. Turns out that California is one of eight states where high schools use the shot clock, and it’s the same as in the NCAA -- 35 seconds for boys and 30 seconds for girls.

I asked an assistant coach from the Woodbridge High School girls team the next night how long California had been using the shot clock, and he said at least 18 years since it was part of the game as long as he had been coaching.

What was the impact on the game? Well, not a lot for the first 28 or so minutes, but in each of the first three games I saw there seems to be less fouling down the stretch. I remember a junior varsity game between Page and Luray when the entire fourth quarter consisted of Page players being fouled so Luray could get the ball back. Six minutes of this. So anything that can cut back on those types of games gets my endorsement.

The threat of two free throws after the 10^th foul of the half has not cut back on the length of games, so maybe more states adopting shot clocks could. The NBA is talking about making fouls away from the ball in the last minute or two of a game two shots plus possession of the ball. That could be effective.

In the interim, with the tight deadlines newspapers face these days, I'll endorse anything that keeps the games moving.