Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Fall Classic
The 103rd World Series begins Wednesday night in Boston’s Fenway Park, weather permitting (showers are forecast).
Who will you root for in the World Series
Archive for October 23, 2007
Best ‘yeah, right’ line of the day, so far
“There will be interest in Beckham over here that exceeds everything else. The U.S. will never have dealt with an athlete who has had this kind of international impact. Tiger Woods has that international appeal, but with due respect to Woods and Michael Jordan, David Beckham is at an entirely different level.”
Alexi Lalas, a few months ago, quoted by T.J. Simers. Beckham played 252 minutes and had zero shots on goal.
Fire!
If they evacuated you from your home, what would you take?
(Image from the L.A. Times. Click to enlarge.)
Remembering the ‘Happiest Years’
Johnny makes us all feel better.
Tagging
No, not that tagging, the kind of tagging you do on websites. Tagging is, simply put, indexing a blog post by identifying and listing keywords. NewMexiKen experimented with it last week but found it to be pretty much a pain with so many topics (for example, the birthday posts I do). So I stopped.
But it occurs to me, why tag anyway? If you have full text search, as this site does and as the internet does, why do we need to tag?
What am I missing here?
Best line of the day, so far
“Obviously the details matter and I haven’t seen them yet, but this could be one of those win win things. Or it could be one last chance for Countrywide to screw people. We’ll see.”
Eschaton reporting on a new Countrywide offer to assist borrowers.
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Filed under Best Line of the Day and Economics & Business on October 23, 2007
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Filed under Best Line of the Day and Economics & Business on October 23, 2007
Justifiable
She Should Have Held Out For a Jury Trial Because No Jury Would Have Convicted Her.
Hokies national champions
Move over Hokie football, there is another Virginia Tech team in the national spotlight this week.
The Bass Fishing Team at Virginia Tech is a national champion.
October 23rd
The iPod is six-years-old today. It was introduced by Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001.
The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase “Open the pod bay door, Hal!”, which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed an “ipod” trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in July 2000 for Internet kiosks. The first ipod kiosks had been demonstrated to the public in New Jersey in March 1998, and commercial use began in January 2000. The trademark was registered by the USPTO in November 2003, and Grasso assigned it to Apple Computer, Inc. in 2005.
Pele is 67 today.
Michael Crichton is 65.
Oscar-winning director Ang Lee is 53.
Dwight Yoakam is 51. Yoakam has been in a number of films — he was the nasty boyfriend in Sling Blade — but it’s country music that earned his fame.
With his stripped-down approach to traditional honky tonk and Bakersfield country, Dwight Yoakam helped return country music to its roots in the late ’80s. Like his idols Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams, Yoakam never played by Nashville’s rules; consequently, he never dominated the charts like his contemporary Randy Travis. Then again, Travis never played around with the sound and style of country music like Yoakam. On each of his records, he twists around the form enough to make it seem like he doesn’t respect all of country’s traditions. Appropriately, his core audience was composed mainly of roots rock and rock & roll fans, not the mainstream country audience. Nevertheless, he was frequently able to chart in the country Top Ten, and he remained one of the most respected and adventurous recording country artists well into the ’90s.
Weird Al Yankovic is 48.
Johnny Carson was born 82 years ago today. A little luck and many fewer cigarettes and he might be alive today. While he was alive, Carson would have been NewMexiKen’s choice for the person I’d most like to have dinner with.
John William Heisman was born on this date in 1869. He’s the guy the trophy is named after. The following milestones in Heisman’s career are excerpted from his 1936 obituary in The New York Times and put here in chronological order.
In 1888 he was a member of the Brown football team, and in 1889 of the Pennsylvania varsity football eleven.
He began his coaching career in 1892 at Oberlin College. In 1893 he coached all sports at the University of Akron. From 1895 to 1900 he coached football and baseball at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and from 1900 to 1904 was coach at Clemson College.
From 1904 to 1920 he coached football, baseball and basketball at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he developed the famous “Golden Tornado” teams.
In 1908 he was director of athletics at the Atlanta Athletic Club. From 1910 to 1914 he was president of the Atlanta Baseball Association. In 1920 he coached football at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1923 filled the same position at Washington and Jefferson College. From 1924 to 1927 he was head football coach and director of athletics at Rice Institute, Houston, Texas.
In 1923 and 1924 he was president of the American Football Coaches Association.
For the last six years [before 1936] he had been physical director of the Downtown Athletic Club.
12,000 and other idle chatter
NewMexiKen has 11,999 songs (tracks) in my iTunes library. And while I have more CDs to import, I thought I should celebrate by getting something special from the iTunes store for number 12,000. Any ideas?
I spilled a lot of bird feed yesterday and this morning the film crew for the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is sizing up my backyard — a dozen mourning doves, sparrows, finches, a partridge or two, scrub jays.
Apple stock rose more than 8 percent in the first hour this morning on yesterday’s earnings report of $1.01 a share. I keep thinking it’s peaked and “now” would be a bad time to buy — and it’s up nearly 30% in a month. As Jimmy Jones sang:
Oh you need timin’
A tick a tick a tick of good timin’
Timin’ timin’ timin’ timin’
Timin’ is the thing it’s true
Good timin’ brought me to you
Big fuss because J.K. Rowling told an audience Dumbledore was gay. That’s a surprise? Didn’t people read the books?
The Cleveland Indians logo, Chief Wahoo, has got to go. Can you imagine them getting away with that type of a caricature with African or Asian-Americans or Hispanics (think of the fuss over Sambo or the Frito Bandito)?
Overnight Annie and SnoLepard added some interesting pairs in the comments to the Whom would you rather be? list.
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Filed under American Indians and Baseball and Books & Writers and Computers, Internet & Technology and Music on October 23, 2007
The Santa Ana Winds
TalkLeft has a great excerpt from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the Santa Ana winds, those east-to-west hot winds that blow in southern California and fan the fires.
Just an excerpt of the excerpt:
The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”
In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.
The Strange History of Bra Removal
Michael Froomkin on the national security bra removal.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse
The Virginia legislature enacted a law five years ago making it a serious crime to drive past a police officer on the side of the road without changing lanes. As a result, unsuspecting motorists, who are not speeding, can nonetheless be caught in a speed trap and face a first degree misdemeanor ticket that carries a fine of up to $2500. According to a Virginia State Police news release issued in July, despite the significant financial penalty involved, nearly three-quarters of all motorists have never heard of “move over” laws.
Forty states have passed these laws which require drivers either to make an immediate lane change when approaching a police officer with his flashing lights activated, or to slow down at least 20 MPH under the posted speed limit.
