At Good, Amanda Hess looks back at the origins of online handles and squeezes confessions out of some of her peers. I was a pretty early AOL user — eighth grade, so ’94 or ’95 I guess. And for some reason I cannot now recall, I first signed on under the name “SLYDOG TED.” I assume, knowing my eighth-grade self, it was some ska reference.
I was going to look up the original article and provide my own take on this, but there’s just no way I could cover it better than Colbert did. Slightly NSFWish if your workplace is squeamish about monkey ladyparts:
I’ve got nothing to add. Via Vulture:
Big League Stew compiles the best of Sports Illustrated’s oral history of the filming of Major League, including the anecdote that Dennis Haysbert actually hit a home run during shooting.
Jonathan sends along this video about a sports photographer in Germany with a cool-looking technique, and points out how well this would work for baseball. Not to be this guy, but I have to imagine it’d sell pretty well too. Certainly better than James Franco’s imaginary steamboat.*
Fun fact: I wrote a couple of show-jumping recaps for the now-defunct WCSN.com back in the day. Classics, if you ask me.
*- Which is kind of a sweet band name.
As you may know, the trailer for the forthcoming Moneyball movie hit the Internet last week. It looks, well, kind of terrible. Here it is:
If you’ve read this site with some regularity, you might know I prefer movies in which things explode. There are precisely zero explosions in the trailer for Moneyball, unless you count Brad Pitt (as Billy Beane) upending his desk.
Anyway, it looks from the trailer like the Moneyball movie is going to be more about a ragtag group of unlikely heroes than exploiting market inefficiencies (which obviously makes a lot of sense, movie-wise). But the way I see it, if Michael Lewis dramatized the story a bit when he wrote it and now studio execs and screenwriters are taking liberties of their own, why not really push it?
Here are versions of the Moneyball movie I would more likely enjoy:
– Action: Jason Statham stars as a rogue general manager who probes too deeply into baseball’s numbers and discovers something he wasn’t supposed to know. Now 29 other GMs will stop at nothing to destroy him, unless he takes care of them first. Vengeance is the new market inefficiency. Features scene of Statham as Billy Beane and sexy spreadsheet vixen Megan Fox diving from exploding stadium.
– Sabromance: Billy Beane (Paul Rudd) has everything: Smarts, good looks, a great family, and a dream job in baseball. But when tough times force him to make some unpopular decisions at work, he finds out that what he needs most is a loyal friend. A story of two men who learn that stripping baseball of its soul just might save their own. Some gross-out manboob humor. With Jonah Hill as Paul DePodesta.
– Musical: The stuffed-shirt commissioner of baseball has banned dancing, but a young hotshot GM is ready to change all that. Starring Matthew Morrison from Glee.
– Film Noir: I can’t figure out how Moneyball might be remade as a film noir, but I bet it’d be sweet. You know I’m on vacation, right?
– Any movie with Terry Crews: We don’t spend nearly enough time discussing how great Terry Crews is. I watched about a half hour of the movie White Chicks the other night because it had Terry Crews in it. Guy steals every scene he has ever been in.
According to The Daily, Dave Chappelle is working on a new show for a paid streaming subscription service. This is interesting and exciting news for a variety of reasons, mostly because it means we may someday soon have access to more stuff Dave Chappelle does.
You have to check this out. Via Michael. These are balloons. I can make a dog, but it’s, ahh, not as good as this:
Courtesy of a reader who prefers to remain anonymous:
Man, that show was sweet. Anyone know when the second season starts? The first season cracked the TedQuarters Top 10 things of 2010, if you’ll recall.
Language NSFW. Via Anthony:
There’s not much I can add to that. After the Crunchwrap Supreme came out, I wrote a poem about it, but it’s in an old notebook and I can’t find it now. Doesn’t touch this guy anyway.
Tedquarters 