Sorry for the extremely long delay. I really just took this winter break off and relaxed/didn't do anything for a few weeks. And now I'm back, and do I have things to talk about!
Baseball: Today, Roy Oswalt agreed to ace the USA World Baseball Classic team in a few months, which scares me. The last WBC just added more innings to a pitcher's season, and when a guy like Oswalt is being relied on heavily to throw 200+ innings of top-notch ball, those extra innings count. The last time you want your ace to be fatigued is in the final months of the season and the postseason. Oy. For example, ex-Astro Brad Lidge threw this awful season the season following his WBC performance. While the season has also been blamed on residual effects of Albert Pujols' moonshot in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS, its hard not to see the correlation between the extra innings and Lidge's performance.
Literature: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is undoubtedly the best book I've ever read. And I'm not even done yet. Dostoevsky is a master, producing a work that is scarily transcendent of time and place, which is especially powerful considering the novel was published in 1866, almost 150 years ago. While I can't say that I can personally relate to any of the characters (is it possible to relate to the mind-blowingly insane yet unusually wise Raskolkinov?), I feel as though I've been sucked into the world of Raskolkinov and the gang. More on that to come.
