Matt Cerrone Tweeted that if I record a rap album it should be called “Check Yourself Before You Trebek Yourself,” and I responded that I always planned on using “Check Your Ted” or “Only Built 5 Cuban Linx.”
Randy from The Apple had a better idea. Outstanding:
Let the record show that this will be the last time I ever rip Murray Chass in this space. I confess that I’m growing a soft spot for the man. No, he shouldn’t have lashed out at Tom Verducci on hearsay, as he did last week. Of course not.
But add up the sum of the Murray Chass parts at this point — the blog-hating blog, the cliched blinders-on criticism of the stats community, even just the way he’s continuing to work despite no professional affiliation or advertisers. It can be infuriating and obnoxious and just downright silly, but I think more than anything, it’s sad.
I didn’t always view it this way. Back before this blog existed, I wrote for SNY’s The Nooner blog under the pseudonym Duke Casanova (a tribute to two great men named Raul). Murray Chass wrote a post about Mike Piazza’s bacne and I responded with an angry Fire Joe Morgan-style screed for that site’s “The Editorial Whee!” feature (hence the first-person collective).
Anyway, since I’m bored of speculating about what Cliff Lee’s currently thinking and uninterested in weighing in now on the Mets’ social-media efforts, and since the Nooner blog no longer exists and ripping Murray Chass is currently en vogue, I re-posted the Murray Chass teardown here. Check it out.
After five shark attacks in six days in Egypt, a scientist believes a shark might have developed the taste for human blood. We’re screwed.
I was swimming with some friends in Florida a few years back and a lifeguard type drove up on an RV and yelled at us to get out of the water. We got all pissy and started giving him bluster about how there were no laws that said we couldn’t swim there, until he said, “there are sharks in the water.” That is a foolproof way to get me out of the ocean.
His presence did not go unheralded in the apartment, in a new warehouse conversion along the Brooklyn waterfront, although the intimate cluster of guests could have easily served themselves. “In my opinion, if you don’t have a bartender at your party, you’re a loser,” said Dustin Terry, who lives a floor below Ms. Argiro and said his job was to get models and Saudi royalty into hot clubs. “The bartender brings class and sophistication.”
“If you can’t afford to hire a bartender,” he added, “you shouldn’t be having a party.”
That seems to be the consensus of a growing crowd of 30-something New Yorkers who wish to signal they’ve graduated from post-collegiate squalor to young professional coming of age. No matter how small their abodes, they won’t invite friends over for cocktails without the assistance of a bartender — even if there’s barely room for the bartender to stand.
Wait, hold on: Is this really a thing? It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to a house party, but technically I’m going to be a 30-something in a little over a month. And I can’t really imagine anyone I know hiring a bartender to work a party in a tiny apartment. Seems like conspicuous consumption to me, and, worse, a huge waste of space.
Of course, like I said, most people I know don’t throw a lot of house parties. Or if they do, they don’t invite me.
If you’re having a party and you’ve invited me, know that I’m totally cool with a spread of hard liquors and mixers in plastic bottles on a sticky table, and maybe some cans of beer on ice in a cooler underneath. If that’s unsophisticated, I don’t want to be sophisticated.
Also, if you ever catch me saying something like, “If you can’t afford a bartender, you shouldn’t have a party,” please, please punch me in the face. In fact, though I’m generally a pacifist, I’m tempted to find Dustin Terry and fight him just on principle.
Lots of Times links today. Hat tip to Chuck Cannongeyser for this one.
Noel Murray of the Onion’s AV Club asks, “Why does most sports broadcasting suck so hard?” It’s a good question and his investigation is reasonably thorough. I agree that the best shows are the ones with the highest ratio of highlights:nonsense.
I think an important point he sort of skirts, though, is that in-game sports broadcasts are aimed to please the largest possible audience. They’re not necessarily dumbed down but they’re certainly simplified in the name of appealing to the casual fan. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be or that it would be all that hard for a baseball broadcaster to explain the paramount importance of getting on base, but I imagine the thinking is that hardcore fans are going to watch no matter what the broadcasters say, so no need to appease them.
For the first time a commercial spacecraft was launched into orbit and returned safely to Earth….
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, launched its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a Dragon capsule, at 10:43 a.m. Eastern time from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket appeared to operate flawlessly as it headed skyward.
Nine minutes later, the Dragon capsule reached orbit. It circled the Earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles before re-entering the atmosphere. Slowed by three parachutes, it softly splashed in the Pacific Ocean about 500 miles west of northern Mexico. Ms. Garver said she had been told it landed within a mile of the recovery ship.
So it begins. Sweet. Since NASA’s clearly not getting me to the moon anytime soon, maybe we can benefit from a little competition, the free market and all that.
Also, I like that the company is called SpaceX. It’s the right mix of sounding like something from a dystopian-future movie and sounding like a extraterrestrial exploration enterprise owned by Xzibit. Ideally by the time they’re ready for human spaceflight, the rides will be thoroughly pimped.
As far as I understand it, the bulk of the knowledge you gain from going away to college is not from the classroom, but from interacting with new people from different places and various backgrounds. Not that you can’t gain the same knowledge elsewhere or otherwise or whatever, just that college sort of expedites the process and allows you to do it all in a reasonably safe place while getting drunk with some frequency.
Anyway, every student brings something to the exchange: unique perspectives, diverse interests — all that stuff they probably brag about in the student handbook, if there is such a thing.
I brought water balloons. That was my contribution to the Georgetown University campus community from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2003.
At home on Long Island, my friends and I owned one of those water-balloon slingshots. It was amazing. Also, for some unclear reason, Rockville Centre is like the nightlife capital of Southern Long Island, providing a group of very bored young men with a bevy of unknowing potential targets for water-balloon fire.
Drunk people get so mad when they’re nailed with water balloons. And the hilarious thing about using the slingshot is that the victim never even considers that it might have come from like 100 yards away. A balloon shot from that distance always explodes on impact so it doesn’t really hurt as much as you’d expect. So the natural reaction is only to check your immediate surroundings for the perp. Little do you know he’s comfortably hidden across the parking lot, giggling his ass off.
Actually, thanks to Google Maps, I can show you. The A flag on this one is R.J. Daniels, one of the town’s bars — though it wasn’t called R.J. Daniels then. That red awning behind it is the outdoor-patio area of the bar, which got pretty crowded in the summers and extended out into that tiny patch beyond the awning. Ground Zero, essentially. We set up either on the train trestle (the red arrow on the left) or the parking lot behind the gym, past the elevated train tracks and across the street.
The distance, you will note, provided us ample time to run like hell in the rare instance a posse of angry drunk dudes would figure out that the balloons were launched remotely and come storming out of the bar thirsty for blood.
Once I felt comfortable enough in college to unleash my hobby upon the campus, my friends and I found a great spot. Check it out — the arrow in the map below points to a little-known but easily accessible perch above the main entrance to the campus’ student center. From it, you had a clear but well-covered shot at anyone coming out of the Henle dorms to the north or walking along the main campus paths, seen here in white.
Get a case of beer and a cooler full of water balloons and you’ve got yourself a pretty solid evening out. (Lord, we were losers.) One time we put a balloon between a guy playing guitar and the girl he was trying to impress. Another time, a well-placed shot in the middle of two passing groups prompted a minor scuffle. We knocked a drunk guy over once with a direct hit. That one we felt a little bad about, after we stopped giggling.
For safety reasons we tried to avoid cars. But once, from a different location, we hit a slow-moving black town car heading to a campus function, and then the angry driver when he got out and started yelling. We were told later that the passenger was a certain Senator Biden from Delaware.
Anyway, my sophomore year I caught a case of mono that forced most of my water balloon exploits indoors. Desperate times. I wound up in a pretty serious and ongoing water-balloon battle with my neighbors downstairs which meant I kept filled balloons on hand in our bathroom at most times.
One of those times, some loud and liquored-up students were standing outside in the courtyard, three floors below my bedroom window. Maybe I was jealous that they could still enjoy parties while I was stuck inside sick.
Anyway, I figured nothing all that bad could come of it, so I dropped a balloon quick and ducked inside. This is a close-range shot we’re talking about, much riskier than when we normally targeted strangers. The arrow on the left is the approximate location of my window, and the arrow on the right is about where these people were standing.
I didn’t imagine all that much that could go wrong if I just tossed one out the window into the group. My door was locked, plus most people who go to Georgetown are total weenies.
Only not the particular guy I hit. He was a 270-some pound lineman on the football team, and he and two of his football buddies lumbered upstairs and kicked open my door.
I took the R. Kelly approach: deny everything. The drenched dude asked me if I was throwing water balloons, I said no. He asked me why my window was open, I said it was for fresh air. Then one of his friends made his way into the bathroom and came out asking why I had all those water balloons in the bathroom if I wasn’t throwing water balloons. I said they weren’t mine.
They stared me down for a few anxious seconds, then one turned to the other two:
“OK, this guy’s cool.”
It gets better: Apparently all the commotion prompted someone in my stairwell to call the cops. Before they showed up, the drunk guys went back outside, all fired up and looking for trouble. They found it in the form of one member of the basketball team and two of his high-school friends from D.C.
I don’t know what prompted it, but from my window I watched as one of the D.C. locals stepped to the football guy, punched him in the face and knocked him to the ground. Then he took one step to his right, punched the next guy in the face and knocked him to the ground. Then he took another step and reared back to punch the third guy, only the third guy just sort of ducked out of the way and stumbled to the ground on his own.
When the cops arrived, they found three drunk, drenched, dazed meatheads practically waiting to be arrested.
The postscript is that some of my oldest friends from college were also on the football team, and I told them the whole story a couple days later. Turns out they also didn’t like the meathead in question, and used the story of his ignominious ass-kicking as fodder for harassment for the remainder of their time in college.
There’s little demand for wheelchair-accessible cabs, according to a controversial draft report that could affect which model taxi is picked for the entire fleet.
Wheelchair users took 5,800 trips during a two-year pilot program that allowed disabled passengers to telephone for cabs, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission report.
The TLC spent $1 million in City Council funds on equipment and other expenses for the program – meaning each trip cost $172.
– Pete Donohue, N.Y. Daily News
So this report is saying that since not many wheelchair users call this number so they can then wait for a cab, we know wheelchair users do not need cabs. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable conclusion, does it?
Strikes me that one of the most convenient aspects of taxicab travel for most of us is that you never have to wait for a cab; you just flail your arms in the air long enough at any intersection and eventually one will pull over. I imagine, then, that cab use by wheelchair-bound people would rapidly increase if all cabs were accessible, and no one had to call and wait for one of the city’s 240 accommodating cabs.
The city is using the study to help pick the winner among three bids to build the next standard taxi model. And it’s worth noting that the one fully wheelchair-accessible model — designed by Turkish manufacturer Karsan — is by far the coolest.
Check it out. Not only does it boast WiFi and Internet access and tons of legroom, but it’s got an all-glass roof so passengers can look up at the tall buildings. Great for tourists, and a good way for a grizzled New Yorker to appreciate all the awesome skyscrapers without looking like a rube.
Look at this thing. It’d be sweet if a few thousand of these were cruising Manhattan in a few years:
Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.”
This story is not about Mono Lake or arsenic, she said, but about “cracking open the door and finding that what we think are fixed constants of life are not.”
This is an interesting article, if perhaps one ripped from the pages of Norm MacDonald’s Duh! Magazine. It turns out life — this type of bacteria, specifically — is capable of existing in ways we didn’t previously know or consider. Really, the conclusion is that it once again turns out we don’t really know all the things we think we know.
I’ve mentioned before — and I think Carl Sagan has too — that I don’t understand why it always seems like we’re searching for “life as we know it” elsewhere in the universe (or multiverse, I suppose). It strikes me as far more likely that there exists life as we don’t know it, composed of some other series of elements or, who knows, composed of something we cannot even conceive due to the current limits of human understanding.
And here’s what I’m wondering: If and when humans do discover life — whether it’s the type of life we currently recognize or something new — what will we do with it? Like say a space probe of some sort uncovers something that appears to be living, what happens then?
Strikes me that the robot or astronaut would likely secure some sort of specimen, then take it back to the space station — or even to Earth, if possible — and run all sorts of tests on it. That’s how you do science, right?
But that’s textbook alien abduction, brother, and that type of thing is frowned upon when it happens in rural Missouri or whatever.
Then again, I suppose our concept of what aliens would do to us if they did get here — in reality or in our delusions — is entirely predicated on reasonable speculation about what we would do in the exact same situation. We assume — or many of us do — that if aliens were to come to Earth, they’d find some humans and beam them up into their spaceships for all sorts of poking and prodding, Fire in the Sky-style.
That’s really just because we have no point of comparison for intelligent life, so we figure all life intelligent enough to travel between planets would behave like we would in the same situation. Basically all our speculation about initial alien interaction involves scientific research, diplomacy, or war.
But it’s probably just as likely that aliens would show up and do something that makes absolutely no sense to us, because hey, if they’re smart enough to get here they’re probably a lot different from us. We can’t even get back to the damn moon.
I saw this about a month ago but Tommy Bennett reminded me of it today. This is the weirdest and best thing the Internet has ever produced. I’m curious if it’s altered in any way besides the speed.
Tedquarters 