First and foremost, all day Saturday (9am-5pm), I'm in front of the CVS at Shattuck/Rose in Berkeley, supervising student volunteers who will be guilt-tripping encouraging shoppers to donate canned foods and Robert Parishibles to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. OptimistPrime and 67MARQUEZ have promised to stop by at some point, and not just because I informed them that if they did stop by I would match all the canned food donations but if they didn't stop by I would take cans out of the barrel and hurl them at frightened kittens. Gigglingone is still thinking about how she feels about animal brutality and is listed as a "definite maybe."

Please stop by and say "hi" if you can. (I don't mean if you can say "hi" -- I mean if you can stop by.) By doing so, you will be helping the hungry (because if you don't stop by, I will see to it that my student volunteers starve). Oh yes, of course, you can bring canned foods too -- terrific idea, excellent point. But mostly, stop by and entertain me. And please don't use excuses like "I live on the East Coast" or "I have to go to work," because we both know that you can still buy a plane ticket and arrive before 5pm, or you can quit your job in order to come entertain me.

So be a team player -- show some grit and intangible leadership and tell the world, "I will make this a canned food drive, not a can't food drive." You were going to come until I said that, weren't you? Dang.

In other news, I'm excited to see some of baseball's metrics now being applied to other sports, as it shows how baseball is really at the forefront of complex statistical analysis.

Baseball fans are familiar with FIP, a pitching metric that only looks at "fielding independent" results such as walks, HRs, and HBP. The NBA has announced they will soon begin using a similar metric known as DIS. DIS stands for Defense Independent Shooting, and will look only at free throws, breakaway layups, and shots defended by Steve Nash. They are also trying to incorporate "line drive rate" into the metric, but so far only Shaq's free throws would be affected anyway.

I really don't get what takes so long about these Staturday posts -- I whipped that one out in less than 15 minutes. What do you mean? That's what who said? Oh, heh.

Finally, John Sickels interviewed Billy Beane yesterday. (I don't mean "He should have interviewed Billy a long time ago!" or "In his last act before dying, Sickels interviewed the A's GM. I mean this information is also the last item in this post.) The interview went kind of like this.

See you tomorrow for a cartoon and a real post -- or see you later today if you care at all about kittens.