Category Archives: Words

Forklift chase not quite as entertaining as it sounds, but still pretty entertaining

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Fort Worth police recently got involved in a strange low-speed chase with a forklift….

“When we passed him, the guy was standing up chugging a beer and threw it at the cop car behind him,” Lowery said.

Police finally arrested 43-year-old Timothy Raines on Interstate 30. He was charged with a list of crimes including theft, aggravated assault on a peace officer and driving while intoxicated.

– Lari Barager, Fox 4 News Dallas Fort-Worth.

Here I thought Tim Raines was coaching somewhere, and a bit older than that, and not the type of guy to joyride a piece of construction equipment down an interstate with the law on his tail. But then I suppose it takes all kinds.

Honestly I’m surprised we don’t see more stories like this one. People leave the keys in forklifts and other awesome-looking pieces of heavy machinery way more often than you’d think. I know because I always check, and then when I see the keys I’m always tempted to take that sucker out for a spin.

TedQuarters does not endorse forklift theft, intoxicated driving, or endangering people and dogs.

Anyway, here’s the YouTube video. It’s not quite as entertaining as you’d hope, but it’s got a good Cloverfield-type feel to it. Language not at all safe for work:

Via Scott.

Now you can smell New York City at home!

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With the help of Kickstarter, author Amber C. Jones is going to publish a scratch-n-sniff book for children (and New Yorkers) highlight the city’s wide array of aromas. She raised over $20,000 for New York, Phew York, which will include scents such as: garbage, pizza, hot dogs, sewer steam, fish, peanuts, horse manure, shish-kabobs, smoke, bagels, and we assume maple syrup, among many others.

– Animal New York.

People from outside New York City often joke about New York City smelling foul, but I find that it’s mostly a surprisingly pleasant-smelling place. It depends on the neighborhood obviously, but in most areas the aroma of street meats and those Nuts for Nuts carts overpower anything less desirable. I hope this book reflects that.

Also, the nuts from those carts aren’t half as good as they smell.

Here comes that Dude again

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Lucas Duda hit another home run last night. It looked sort of like this — not exactly like this, but since I can’t show you last night’s for a couple of days, I’ll just embed this one again:

Look at that. Watch it again. Revel in Lucas Duda’s grandeur.

When the Mets called up Ike Davis last season (was it really just last season?), Jerry Manuel praised his “easy power.” I liked that.

Duda appears to have the easiest power of any young player we’ve seen in Flushing in years, with a big uppercut swing as uncomplicated as his public persona. He is 6’4″ and 255 pounds and capable of smashing 450-foot home runs, but in interviews, he is almost bashful. His teammates joke about his reticence. Fans, broadcasters, bloggers and beat reporters seem eager to give him a nickname: The Dude, the Big Lebowski, the Lumberjack, the Liger.

He has all the makings of a folk hero. But will it last?

Plugging Duda’s remarkable Triple-A totals from 2010 and 2011 into the Minor League equivalency calculator yields a Major League line of .257/.334/.480, not terribly far off his .260/.328/.454 career mark in the bigs. And his small sample of at-bats in Buffalo in 2011 run through the same tool turn out a .248/.348/.467 mark, distinct mostly in batting average from his .287/.358/.472 stint with the Mets this season.

Obviously any estimator like that paints in broad strokes; I mean only to point out that there’s plenty of precedent in Duda’s Minor League resume for the production we’re now seeing.

He’s 25, so he’s likely still got a bit of improvement ahead of him. And if you want to be nice about it, you might cut him some slack for his awful first handful of games in the Majors and bump up his career OPS a tick.

In any case, if the bat’s really this good, it plays just about anywhere. Problem is, in the coming years the Mets likely won’t have much room for Duda at first base — his natural position and the one he has been playing every night of late.

Davis plays first, is a year younger than Duda and has done more than Duda to show he belongs in the Majors. There has long been talk that Davis could move to right field, but that move seems unlikely to happen anytime soon given the ankle injury that ended his 2011 season. Provided he is healthy, Davis should be back at first for the Mets in 2012 and beyond.

Terry Collins admitted last night that he had to consider using Duda in right field moving forward because Duda will likely be competing for time in that spot next spring. Might as well get to it. You can find someone else to play first. Nick Evans is still on the team, right?

It’s reasonable to doubt whether Duda could handle right field defensively, but there’s no time like right now to figure out if he can. The ability to pencil in Duda’s bat to the Mets’ 2012 lineup would give Sandy Alderson more flexibility with his offseason resources, and give Mets fans the promise of more awesome moonshots to come.

Trolling Rollerball

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I caught a part of the 2002 remake of Rollerball on TV last night.

I saw the movie for the first time in the summer of 2000 (I think; it may have been 2001), at a free screening at my local movie theater. It sucked. Chris Klein stars as a total moron who gets involved in some stupid human-bloodsport run by indistinct criminals in a post-Soviet hellscape, then somehow it all goes wrong.

After it mercifully ended, my girlfriend and I were asked to be part of a focus group to discuss the movie. We were offered $10 each to do it, and we were both happy for the opportunity to let the people responsible for Rollerball know exactly how we felt about Rollerball.

When we joined the group — maybe 15-20 people spread out across the front two rows of the theater — it became pretty obvious that the people chosen to discuss the movie did not represent a cross-section of movie-goers but were selected by demographic. It was almost all sets of two, and no two sets were of the same race and general age. My girlfriend and I were apparently there representing 18-25 year-old white people.

It turned out it didn’t much matter, since all races, ages and creeds could bond together and agree that Rollerball was a terrible movie. The marketing people asked us a series of questions: What did you think of the cast? What did you think of the plot? What did you think of the action?

Every time, nearly the entire group responded angrily. It actually got so heated I started to feel bad for the marketing folks, since presumably they had nothing to do with the actual production of Rollerball. And no matter what they asked, they got yelled at by basically every member of the focus group.

Except one guy, the reason I bring this all up today. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but looking back on it now I think he might have been a brilliant real-life troll capitalizing on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The man was in the focus group to represent black guys from 25-34, which is to say he was a black guy somewhere between the ages of 25 and 34. There’s no way he enjoyed Rollerball; he seemed like a reasonable fellow. But I assume he must have recognized his chance to speak for men of his age and race as a chance to mess with the marketing arm of a big Hollywood studio.

Amid the outrage of those around him, this guy calmly and politely framed every one of his answers to emphasize how much he enjoyed LL Cool J’s work in Rollerball. 

“What did you think of the cast in this movie?” “It was good. I really liked LL Cool J; I thought there could have been more of his character.”

“What did you think of the ending?” (SPOILER ALERT!!) “I didn’t like the part when LL Cool J dies. LL ain’t going out like that.”

“What did you think of the soundtrack to this movie?” “I thought there should have been more LL.”

And on like that. He answered every question with a straight face, earnest expression and calm explanation of the ways the movie could have been improved if it better exploited the talents of LL Cool J.

Sadly for that guy, in the version of Rollerball that finally came out some two years after that focus group, LL Cool J (SPOILER ALERT!) still went out like that. But not for lack of a heroic trolling effort, which we salute today.

And not for nothing, the movie probably would have been a lot better with more LL Cool J throughout. Exhibit A: Deep Blue Sea.

What’s unrealistic

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I don’t want to spend too much time on anything Mike Pelfrey said this weekend, or even the way it was presented or the fallout that followed. To belabor the relatively benign quotes and perpetuate the conversation about them is to do exactly what the New York Post hopes will happen when it makes them the focus of its game recap and publishes them under an inflammatory headline.

It’s not even a bad thing or something for which we should fault the paper or journalist responsible, it is only one more example of a business model that is as old as daily newspapers themselves. If you find it tiresome, upsetting or misleading, the best way to combat it is to understand the context and/or ignore it.

The rest of the quotes from Pelfrey in the same story, paragraphs beneath the weighty lead, present not only his confidence in the Mets’ front office but his willingness to shoulder responsibility for the club’s sub-.500 record in 2011. The most incendiary comment in the article comes from an anonymous teammate, who was likely reacting to only one small fraction of Pelfrey’s conversation with the reporter — just as countless Mets fans have.

For some reason, many people — including Pelfrey, apparently — decided that because Pelfrey pitched on Opening Day for the Mets in 2011, he should perform like the lauded True No. 1 Ace. It was never going to happen; Pelfrey does not have an effective enough arsenal of pitches to be more than the league-average innings-eater he has been since joining the Mets’ rotation full time in 2008.

He has suffered through a rough season, as pitchers who yield lots of contact sometimes do. And in the absence of obvious targets Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo, down-year Pelfrey makes for as good a bugaboo as any.

But it’s silly to punish a guy for some harmless, realistic comments and your own unrealistic expectations for his performance. If he pitched the the way he has pitched but said he thought the Mets were going to win the World Series in 2011, people would want to run him out of town for being delusional.

Don’t call it a comeback

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He said that European colleagues still tease him about finding success here, among diners whose palates are corrupted by ketchup. The low prestige of ketchup hits Mr. Andrés hard.

Now he is on a quest for redemption. He (and a few other chefs and entrepreneurs) are challenging the hegemony of the red, corn-syrup-sweetened product. “It is time to embrace and celebrate ketchup, not be ashamed of it,” he said.

And so his new pop-up restaurant, America Eats Tavern, has a separate menu of traditional ketchups, made from local and foraged ingredients and served on everything from fried chicken to bison steak to hot dogs. (Some, it should be noted, consider ketchup on hot dogs an abomination.)

– Julia Moskin, N.Y. Times.

The Grey Lady is on the TedQuarters-led effort to destigmatize ketchup, only the article somehow fails to mention this site, plus I never knew ketchup was stigmatized until a couple weeks ago.

Seriously though this place apparently has eight ketchups on the menu.

Ahhh…

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Marshall, the former Dodgers outfielder now managing the Chico Outlaws of the independent North American Baseball League, was suspended three games for fighting Monday with Tony Phillips.

Yep, that Tony Phillips, the one who played in the major leagues for 18 seasons. And is still playing for the independent Yuma Scorpions — managed by Jose Canseco….

Marshall may regrettably be best remembered as the player who sat out a game for “general soreness” and dated Go-Go’s lead singer Belinda Carlisle.

– Steve Dilbeck, L.A. Times.

Ahhh… Wait, no. First of all… No, no, first of all — OK, OK…

Yeah, there’s just nothing I can add.

How much are flights to Yuma these days?