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Braves Nickname Jerseys

The Atlanta Braves have only consistently worn player names on the back of their jerseys since adopting the powder blues in 1980. But Ted Turner, then a local TV mogul who bought the team in 1976 to put them on his UHF channel, was open to trying just about anything. So in May and June 1976 the Braves wore nicknames on the back of their jerseys.

Some of these were well-established nicknames. Phil Niekro was KNUCKSIE, of course, while Jimmy Wynn was CANNON (from “Toy Cannon”) and Bruce Dal Canton was PROF (from “Professor”).

Others were hitherto private locker room nicknames:

Vic Correll was BIRD DOG because he trained bird dogs in the off-season.

Roger Moret was GALLO, Spanish for “rooster”, which matched his build and personality.

Tom Paciorek was WIMPY, after the Popeye character who loved burgers. Early in his career he wasn’t getting paid the big bucks, so he saved money on road trips by ordering hamburgers instead of steaks like the rest of the team.

Marty Perez was TACO, a nickname given to him by Puerto Rican player Orlando Cepeda. He seems to have been a good sport about it, and actually liked tacos.

And then there was Darrell Evans, who was HOWDY because he looked like Howdy Doody.

Some were less interesting. Rod Gilbreath was just ROD, while Biff Pocoroba was POCO, Max Leon was MAX and Rowland Office was ROW. At least Jerry Royster was J BIRD!

But then there was Andy Messersmith. He was a pitcher. He was also #17. Turner’s TV station – then WTCG, not yet WTBS – was Channel 17 in Atlanta. So Turner had him turn his jersey into an advertisement for CHANNEL 17:

Andy Messersmith

The baseball commissioner would have put up with nicknames, but not ads. So Andy’s jersey was changed almost immediately, and the whole experiment only lasted two months.

Interestingly, no one kept an original nickname jersey. The nicknames were removed from the jerseys, and the jerseys put back into the rotation. There’s a Niekro nickname jersey on display at Truist Park, but while it’s an authentic 1976 jersey, “KNUCKSIE” was added much, much later.

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UPDATE: Getting a Serial Number from the Command-Line

Hi Folks!

Waaaay back in 2015 I wrote this post that shows you how to get an OEM serial number or service tag from the command-line in most flavors of Windows.

That particular trick is now dead for most Windows 11 users. It relies on WMIC – Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line – which Microsoft has removed from most versions of Windows 11.

WMIC was a built-in (digitally signed!) tool that IT administrators could use to inventory and configure corporate PCs. It’s been used as a malware pathway for ages, so it’s not surprising to see why Microsoft would remove it. Honestly, it probably shouldn’t have ever been installed on stand-alone PCs and\or only enabled when a PC joins a Windows domain.

In any case,

wmic bios get serialnumber

no longer works. Please try this PowerShell command instead:

Get-CimInstance win32_BIOS

You should see this. I’ve blacked the Service Tag, but you get the gist of it:

That’s it
Shawn

🙂

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Maria McKee and “Dodgeball”

Currently there’s a hipster secondhand clothing store called 2nd Street at 1057 Ponce de Leon Ave., in Atlanta, close to Plaza Theatre and across Cleburne Terrace from The Majestic:

Ponce Turtle's
click to embiggen

From 1977 to 1993, Atlanta’s regional record chain was Turtle’s Records and Tapes. And the place that is now 2nd Street wasn’t just a Turtle’s, it was the Turtle’s where most indie bands held meet & greets. I met Nitzer Ebb at this store, for example.

I also met Lone Justice’s lead singer Maria McKee at this store, just as she was launching her solo career.

Maris McKee

She arrived, perhaps the highest person in metro Atlanta at that moment. I remember looking at her thinking “My God, woman… you have access to weed the likes of which I cannot even imagine.”

So she clumsily (and… highly? is that a word?) said hello to the 40-ish people there. She talked about her debut album for a bit, then answered a few questions. A Turtle’s employee then put a stool out for her and her assistant handed her an acoustic guitar.

She was wearing this HUGE silver ring! It was long – almost as long as the finger it rested on.

Maria McKee ring
Not the actual ring, but similar.

She played a song, then during the next one she started strumming the guitar really hard. The ring flew off her finger and hit a guy in the face, just above his left eye.

It was hilarious to me, because it happened almost exactly like the “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!” scene from Dodgeball. I don’t know if the ring was that heavy, or that she was strumming the guitar with that much force, or it if just hit the poor guy’s skull perfectly, because you could hear the ring THUMP against his skull over McKee.

So I started laughing. It was a perfectly scripted unscripted moment. And McKee laughed, too… she laughed her ass off at first, but regained her composure when she saw that the guy was actually bleeding. Not a lot of blood, mind you… but enough for McKee to say “Holy shit! Are you OK, man?”

Someone found the ring and gave it back to McKee, who gave it to her assistant “for safekeeping”. An employee found some paper napkins in a drawer somewhere and gave them to the guy to stop the bleeding.

And I got a silly story I’m still telling 37 years later! It’s terrible, but it really was funny watching that guy react to getting hit with the ring!

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The Birth of the Book

On November 10, 1951 Sir Hugh Beaver went hunting. At one point an argument broke out in the hunting party over which bird was “the fastest European game bird”. This was the 1950s, long before the Internet, and Sir Hugh, the managing director of the Guinness beer empire, realized that similar arguments must break out in pubs all the time.

Back at the office, Beaver mentioned the idea of making a “world records book” to his staff. A co-worker named Christopher Chataway recommended his college friends, the twins Norris & Ross McWhirter, who had just started a fact-finding agency in London. And so: Guinness hired them to make a massive fact book.

A couple thousand copies were printed and given away free to pub owners. The idea was the book would sit behind the bar at the pub and decide random arguments. However, many of those publicans soon called the company to ask for a replacement: customers were stealing them in huge numbers. Guinness realized they were on to something, and decided to “take it public”. Thus, the Guinness Book of World Records became a thing.

When I was a kid, it was common for the “Guinness” name on the cover to use the same “stencil font” as the beer:

Guinness Book from 1981

The late 70s\early 80s Guinness logo

NOT-SO-FUN FACT: Ross McWhirter was very anti-Irish, belonged to some sketchy right-wing political groups and may have worked with British intelligence in trying to infiltrate the IRA. For this reason, he was assassinated by the Provisional IRA in 1975.

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Deleting a Specific Jump List

“Jump Lists” are the list of documents that appear when you right-click a taskbar icon in Windows 1x. They’re a handy tool, but as far as I know, Microsoft still doesn’t provide a way to delete only the jump list of a specific app.

Windows Jump List

Consider: you’re hosting a Zoom call and will share your desktop with attendees. You will need to open Microsoft Word as part of your presentation, but you don’t want anyone seeing your Jump List history with “Offer Letter from [Other Company]” or “Updated  Resume”, etc.

So how do you delete just Word’s jump list? Easy!

Close the app you want to delete the jump list of, then go to:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

Make sure the Explorer window is sorting the long, gibberish-looking files by “Date Modified”, and in descending order (most recent at the top):

Jump List Editing

Now right-click the taskbar icon and pin (or unpin) any document from the jump list. Refresh the Explorer window to verify that the first file is the most recent. If it is, delete it… because that’s the jump list for the most recently edited icon, which you just edited.  Repeat for any other apps you want to clear!

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The World’s Longest Home Run

This is Bob Montag. He played for the Atlanta Crackers, a minor league baseball team, in the 1950s. He was a below-average outfielder, but was known for hitting very long home runs. In fact, he once hit a home run that traveled 520 miles!

Sort of.

Bob Montag

Montag hit a home run during a game in 1954. The ball traveled some 450 feet, easily clearing the right-field stands. It landed in the coal car of a train that just happened to be passing Ponce De Leon Park. You can even see the train tracks in this aerial photo:

Ponce de Leon Park

Ponce de Leon Avenue is just visible on the left. Across Ponce from the park was Sears’ gigantic building, which became City Hall East for a time before being sold off to become the current Ponce City Market.

When the conductor found the ball in amongst the coal he was mightily confused… until he realized the ball must be part of Montag’s “huge home run” the radio announcers were talking about. The train arrived in Nashville, swapped cargo & passengers, then returned to Atlanta.

The conductor stopped by the park and told the story to Montag, who autographed the ball for him. And thus, the legend of the “home run Bob Montag hit that traveled 520 miles” was born.

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Autokaffee

This is the Hertella Auto Kaffeemachine, a third-party option for German Volkswagens in the 50s or 60s, and the only known coffee maker for a passenger car:

Kaffeemachine

It has some clever tricks: the mug is held in place via magnet, and the entire unit is held in place by a simple bracket, to make washing it easy. But it lacks a power switch, so you have to plug (and unplug) it manually. And it appears that it would have made terrible coffee, since it basically brews the coffee just like tea.

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Henry VIII and Turkey Legs

If I mention “Henry VIII”, you’d likely think of a fat guy eating a turkey leg. But that’s likely inaccurate.

Turkeys are indigenous to North America. After several arguments over whether turkeys made it to England during Henry’s lifetime, Tudor historians now generally agree that they probably did arrive late in Henry’s reign. So he possibly ate turkey, but there’s NOTHING in the historical record that says he did or didn’t, nor if he liked it.

Many people swear they’ve seen a portrait of Henry holding a turkey leg… but if so, that would be news to Tudor scholars. They’re most likely thinking of Hans Holbein’s portraits (and later variations thereof) in which he’s holding gloves, not a turkey leg:

Henry VIII (#1)

Henry VIII (#2)

Henry VIII (#3)

OK, but where do we get the idea of Henry the Glutton? Likely from the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII:

Henry VIII (#4)
It’s a film where Charles Laughton portrayed Henry as almost comically over-the-top in every way. Loud? Fat? Womanizer? Gluttonous? Laughton turned all those traits up to 11 in the film. Famously, there’s a scene where he tears into a roasted chicken and casually tosses the bones over his shoulder as he eats. THAT’S likely where the trope come from!

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The London Necropolis Company

By Queen Victoria’s reign, London was running out of space to bury its dead, especially since engineers were digging up so much of the city to bury water & sewer lines… and some were even talking about burying entire trains! WHAT A WORLD!

A group of investors bought a huge plot of land in Brookwood, Surrey, 23 miles outside the city, and started the London Necropolis Company. That land became the world’s largest cemetery at that time. But they needed a way to move bodies and mourners to the cemetery… so they also built the London Necropolis Railway.

In typical British fashion, it was class-based. Third-class burials saw mourners jammed into basic railcars, and their loved one tossed into a pauper’s grave. First-class burials involved fancy railcars and mausoleums. As you might guess, second-class was middle class, with nice (but not lavish) railcars and the typical service and headstone folks have today.

The London Necropolis Company was in business from 1854 until 1941, when the railway was destroyed by German air raids. The company wasn’t as popular as investors had hoped: only 200,000 burials had taken place in the 87 years it was open, far short of the 50,000/year its owners had aimed for.

FUN FACT: there are many golf courses in Surrey, and the fare to Surrey on the Necropolis Railway was far cheaper than a regular train. So golfers would often wear black and crash a funeral party, just to save a few shillings getting to the club!London Necropolis Railway (seal)

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When Windows Misidentifies Your Monitors

So, I have the world’s worst power company. And surprise, surprise my power went off today.

Because of this, I have a UPS backup for my PC and primary monitor. The secondary monitor isn’t on the backup, so when the power went off, that monitor turned off immediately. I normally do a daily walk, so I decided I’d go do that while the power was out. With the primary monitor off, the UPS can power my micro PC for almost 4 hours, so I hoped when I got back in an hour the power would be back on and I could just turn on the secondary monitor and go.

The power was indeed back! But now I had a problem: Windows had somehow swapped my monitors, because when I clicked “Identify” the correct numbers showed up on each screen… but they were backwards on the actual monitor settings applet. No matter what I did – restarting, removing and adding the secondary monitor back via Device Manager, I just couldn’t figure out how to get the monitors to identify correctly.

I dug and dug through search engines trying to find my specific problem. It was not fun. In the end though, I found a fix and it’s pretty easy:

1) Unplug the secondary monitor from your PC and close any Settings windows.

2) Delete the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Connectivity

3) Plug the secondary monitor back in, and open Display Settings. The displays should now be identified correctly.

I don’t often go in to a lot of details in my “Geek Tips” because I’m assuming you are a Windows “Power User”. If you don’t know what a “registry key” is, you should ask your personal PC guru before messing with ANY of this stuff!