Saturday, May 15, 2010
DID YOU KNOW THAT "THE ONION" USED TO BE CALLED "BASEBALL DIGEST"? Hall of Famer pitcher Kid Nichols (361 wins in a career stretching from 1890-1906), in January 1948, published a column in Baseball Digest titled "Pitchers Are Sissies Now."
A big league pitcher who wins twenty games today becomes the toast of the baseball world and is given a fat raise in pay. In my day—the Nineties—if you won only twenty games the club owner would say, ‘You didn’t do so good this year—we are going to cut your salary next season....(HT: Jonathan Chait.)
And did you ever hear of Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Radbourne or Mathewson having an elbow operation for the removal of chipped bone? Such operations were unheard of until recent years. If the arm got sore, we went out and pitched until the soreness left -- we had to, or we would have been dropped from the team. Nothing short of a broken leg could have kept us out of uniform.
Friday, May 14, 2010
GOOD, GUYS. IT'S A NINE. TO SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS WE NEED A TEN. LADY GAGA, YOU NEED TO HIT THE ONES AND FIVES. BRUCE, IT THINK IF WE WORKED ON IT, YOU COULD HIT A HIGH B: Elton John, Sting, Lady Gaga, Debbie Harry, Bruce Springsteen, and Shirley Bassey cover Journey for the benefit of the rain forests.
Among the other covers not captured on video at the benefit last night at Carnegie Hall, Bruce doing "Cuts Like a Knife," Sting singing "She Drives Me Crazy," Gaga taking on "Stand By Me," and Sir Elton tackling "Like a Virgin" and "Material Girl." Sounds like the greatest episode of Glee, yet.
Among the other covers not captured on video at the benefit last night at Carnegie Hall, Bruce doing "Cuts Like a Knife," Sting singing "She Drives Me Crazy," Gaga taking on "Stand By Me," and Sir Elton tackling "Like a Virgin" and "Material Girl." Sounds like the greatest episode of Glee, yet.
BLACK AND WHITE TITLE CARD: In honor of the end of Law & Order: Original Recipe, Alan is asking readers to come up with a L&O "dream cast." Your rules--have to be characters who appeared at some point in the role you have put them in (no Det. van Buren or ADA Schiff), and Wiki has a helpful chart--other than that, be creative. There are a few selections that no one's going to fight over--anyone want to argue for Cragen over van Buren as Lieutenant, or for Lenny Briscoe not to be Senior Detective? That second cop slot is a hard one (Ed Green? Rey Curtis? Mike Logan?), and while I expect general consensus on Claire Kincaid as one of the two ADA's, and that Jack McCoy fits into pretty much everyone's lawyer list somewhere, the third wheel is tough.
Personally, I went with van Buren, Briscoe, Green, DA McCoy, and ADA's Cutter and Kincaid, but I'm willing to be persuaded differently.
Personally, I went with van Buren, Briscoe, Green, DA McCoy, and ADA's Cutter and Kincaid, but I'm willing to be persuaded differently.
IF THEY DIDN'T GIVE UP THEY CERTAINLY GAVE OUT: Michael Wilbon on LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers:
added: Bill Simmons. "I always thought his ceiling looked like this: Jordan's DNA crossed with Magic's DNA crossed with Bo Jackson. Nope. Take the Jordan DNA out. Have to. Jordan was a ruthless mother******. Jordan was a killer. Jordan didn't care if his teammates despised him. Jordan never, ever, not in a million years, would have allowed his team to quit in the final two minutes of last night's game like LeBron did. His teammates feared him, loathed him, revered him and played accordingly.... [L]ast night, LeBron's DNA finally made sense to me. Throw Jordan out. Throw Magic out, too, except for the 'controls sections of a game with passing/rebounding' part. Keep Bo. Now, add this guy ... Julius Erving. I will explain."
It's possible no athlete has ever come into the professional ranks with so much expected of him. In this case, the assignment was essentially to save his home town, to win with a team that had never won, in a city whose teams haven't won in decades. Elway, as smothered as he was in Denver in the early years, didn't grow up in the Rockies feeling obliged. Chicagoans paid attention to Michael Jordan only after he started winning.At least Wayne Gretzky won four Stanley Cups in Edmonton before leaving.
added: Bill Simmons. "I always thought his ceiling looked like this: Jordan's DNA crossed with Magic's DNA crossed with Bo Jackson. Nope. Take the Jordan DNA out. Have to. Jordan was a ruthless mother******. Jordan was a killer. Jordan didn't care if his teammates despised him. Jordan never, ever, not in a million years, would have allowed his team to quit in the final two minutes of last night's game like LeBron did. His teammates feared him, loathed him, revered him and played accordingly.... [L]ast night, LeBron's DNA finally made sense to me. Throw Jordan out. Throw Magic out, too, except for the 'controls sections of a game with passing/rebounding' part. Keep Bo. Now, add this guy ... Julius Erving. I will explain."
LISA, ANGELA, PAMELA, RENEE: The annual release of the Popular Baby Names list is always a cause for much navel-gazing both the media and ourselves, with much of the attention focused on the ascendance of Twilight names including Isabella, Jacob and Cullen.
I have a feeling we can crowdsource this data in more interesting ways. I noticed, for example, that Katrina has continued its rapid descent, from #246 in 2005 to #600 in 2007 to #815 last year, while Brooklyn keeps climbing from #182 in the year of Brooklyn Beckham's birth (1999) to #101 in 2004 to #37 last year. The top five girl's names all end with schwas, and it's only until a little later where you hit the strong-e run (Natalie, Lily, Ashley, Hailey, Kaylee, Riley, Aubrey ...). Also, Madelyn > Madeline > Madeleine and Skylar > Skyler > Sky > Skyla (the Will Hunting pronunciation), and the kids who will hate their parents most upon learning the real genesis of their names (other than the 3,640 girls named Genesis) are likely the 2,155 girls and 283 boys named after Marley, a dead dog.
[Also a possible form of child abuse: naming your kid Aryanna, Aryana or Aryan. Yeah, they made the list.]
As Kim noted in 2006, "Of course, the real entertainment value of the list lies less in monitoring the top 10-20 names than in watching the trajectory of individual names over time and assessing whether a particular name has jumped the shark or will have jumped the shark by the time one's wee offspring hits the first grade. Have fun."
I have a feeling we can crowdsource this data in more interesting ways. I noticed, for example, that Katrina has continued its rapid descent, from #246 in 2005 to #600 in 2007 to #815 last year, while Brooklyn keeps climbing from #182 in the year of Brooklyn Beckham's birth (1999) to #101 in 2004 to #37 last year. The top five girl's names all end with schwas, and it's only until a little later where you hit the strong-e run (Natalie, Lily, Ashley, Hailey, Kaylee, Riley, Aubrey ...). Also, Madelyn > Madeline > Madeleine and Skylar > Skyler > Sky > Skyla (the Will Hunting pronunciation), and the kids who will hate their parents most upon learning the real genesis of their names (other than the 3,640 girls named Genesis) are likely the 2,155 girls and 283 boys named after Marley, a dead dog.
[Also a possible form of child abuse: naming your kid Aryanna, Aryana or Aryan. Yeah, they made the list.]
As Kim noted in 2006, "Of course, the real entertainment value of the list lies less in monitoring the top 10-20 names than in watching the trajectory of individual names over time and assessing whether a particular name has jumped the shark or will have jumped the shark by the time one's wee offspring hits the first grade. Have fun."
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