Not a lot of action here today, for which I apologize. Got busy trying to wrap things up so I could cut out a little early to go watch baseball with Toby. Anyway, couldn’t come up with anything better to fill up this post than this old Nooner from “The Pourhouse” set (green screen, whatever) back in April, 2009. Hit or miss, as always, but I’m still proud of the Santana joke that starts at 2:00.
Via Bad Astronomy:
I got a haircut today. And for the first time in recent memory, I might actually go two weekdays without shooting some web video or another, so your first opportunity to see my haircut will very likely be at the Village Pourhouse at 64 3rd Ave. in Manhattan tomorrow evening around 5 p.m. as I join Toby Hyde to drink and watch baseball.
I know that must have you on the edge of your seats, so one spoiler: It looks almost exactly the same, just shorter.
But how much shorter!?
Seriously though, come hang out. There’ll be booze and big TVs showing baseball. See if you can corner Toby because he has a lot of interesting things to say about a lot of interesting topics. I mostly will just stare blankly at one of the screens, nursing my drink, chewing my straw.
Read the story here:
If so, come hang out at the Village Pourhouse at 64 3rd Ave. in Manhattan on Wednesday to join me and Toby Hyde as we watch playoff baseball and enjoy beverages.
And even if you don’t like beer, come down anyway. It’s a reasonably accessible location and there are a ton of huge TVs.
Toby says he’ll be there by 4 p.m. for the start of the Yankee game. I’ll likely join him around 5 or so because I have work and stuff, and I imagine I’ll be there at least until the second game stops being interesting.
Did you know that the real-life Ichabod Crane was not a skinny Tarrytown schoolteacher but a stout, Staten Island military man? Washington Irving apparently thought he had a cool name, which makes sense, because he did. Lots of headless-horseman love up in Westchester this time of year. Hat tip to Jonah Keri for the link.
Two-timing Chilean miner Yonni Barrios went from being trapped a half-mile underground to real trouble when the first person who greeted him after he was rescued Wednesday was his mistress — not his wife.
Barrios gave a smiling Susan Valenzuela a smooch seen around the world moments after he was released from the rescue capsule.
Smiling broadly even as the TV cameras broadcast his betrayal of wife Marta Salinas, Barrios did not appear perturbed that his love triangle had exploded into a soap opera with an international following.
– Corky Siemaszko and Bill Hutchinson, N.Y. Daily News.
Seriously? So the Daily News apparently set out to find the seediest possible angle to the most heartwarming story in recent memory, and the best they could dig up was that one of the 33 miners was separated from his wife and now has a new girlfriend. This gets the front page, with the incredible headline “HOLE-Y SNIT!” and an overlay reading “RED HOT IN CHILE!”
Amazing.
I mean, not to get all high and mighty or anything, but this guy was trapped in a f#@$ing mine for 70 days. Now you’re plastering the details of his personal life on the cover of a paper thousands of miles away? I don’t know what type of freaky escapade he’d have to endeavor immediately upon surfacing to get me to judge him, but it’d have to be something way, way more foul than kissing his girlfriend because he’s separated from his wife.
I love this newspaper. I really do. I know I rip it a lot here but it’s only because I read it every morning. I thought about splurging for the Times today because I knew not a lot happened in sports last night and I wasn’t all that excited to read even more about A.J. Burnett, but I’m so happy I stayed loyal. The gray lady covered the same story, but without the News’ trademark punch.
And it’s comforting to me to know that — though I haven’t checked — the Post has likely already assigned Yonni Barrios some ridiculous nickname like “The Cavern Casanova” and by tomorrow will be three cycles past his current marital issues and onto sordid details of the orgies he hosted in college or something.
It’s an exciting time to be alive.
The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.
OK, a lot of stuff here. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m pretty much terrified of Google, for a variety of reasons. Their corporate mantra, after all, says, “Don’t Be Evil,” which suggests they’ve at least considered being evil. So I’m a little concerned to hear they’re testing debatably legal robot cars in secret on the streets of San Francisco. Believe me, the last thing we want is Google partnering with the machines this early in the game.
Second, I happen to love driving, but I’ve endured the particularly harrowing trek from New York to D.C. enough times to have considered at length the possibility of a self-driving car.
And it strikes me that it’s not really worth putting one on the road unless it is absolutely foolproof and requires almost no human interaction beyond initial directional programming. It will be far too tempting to sleep, eat, text, drink — whatever — in a self-driving car, so it seems like the first step is entirely eliminating the need for an alert driver. Especially since once we all get used to having our cars drive themselves — and new drivers come of age never knowing any different — our skills behind the wheel will atrophy.
My friend Charlie and I once envisioned some sort of motorized track along the side of interstates — sort of a glorified version of the car-wash thing — to let drivers coast along at 40 mph or so while they snoozed in their seats overnight. But then we never came up with a good plan for how you get on or off that thing, or how to avoid the inevitable pileups at the end.
Turns out they’ve figured what was killing the honeybees, incidentally, and it was a fungus-virus combination. (Also wreaks havoc on college freshmen.) For what it’s worth, I read not long ago that it’s entirely possible — and maybe even likely — that these types of temporary fluctuations in the populations of different species have happened before, we just weren’t around or didn’t have the technology to pay such close attention. Now some subset of bees resistent to the fungus or the virus survives and multiplies to fill the honeybee niche.
After Anthony pulls his crock of roasted cherries from the oven, we let the fire die, just short of 36 hours after lighting it. This fire has been protean, and the big-mouthed oven, which by now seems more like a character in our drama than a prop, has been prodigious in its output. I raise a glass to offer a toast, first to our hosts, then, of course, to the goat and lastly to all the cooks at the table. It seems to me that one of the many, many things our fire produced is a sense of community, as cook fires have probably always done, but especially among those of us who worked to bring all this food to the table.
Pretty decent read from the Times about a 36-hour backyard wood-fire goat roast, with lots of tasty-sounding descriptions. But I gotta say: I’m a little disappointed that this “pyro-gastronomical experiment” never descended into savagery.
If I ever throw a fire-pit meat-fest in my backyard, there’s going to be a whole lot less pleasant conversation and fennel and a whole lot more ominous chanting, warpaint and pyrolatry. Lord of the Flies stuff. We might even get way out of hand and murder the quiet guy in massively symbolic fashion.
Tedquarters 