Remember Linda Hamilton? The somewhat hawt chick from the Terminator movies? Check out how she’s aging:
Shudder.
Linda Hamilton: Gross
R.I.P. Paul Newman
Legendary actor Paul Newman died of cancer today at his home. He was 83.
Read the full obituary at the BBC here.
STICKY: Poll Results!
The people have spoken! I’ve tallied the votes from the poll and written up the latest History Blog article: The Border Blasters!
The Chick List – with pics!
In early July, I posted this list of “Top 10 Celebrity Breasts”. As you may recall, the list was originally created by InTouch magazine; I only re-ordered their list to fit my personal preference.
Shortly after posting that, a longtime jimcofer.com reader wrote in to chide me for not posting pictures with my list. Here’s the thing: I met this guy through the forums at Ars Technica. Ars has a long and storied tradition of requiring pictures in certain threads, especially in threads about women, kittens, deadly insects, or some type of “massive fail” – a flooded server room or spectacularly wrecked car, for example. Ars might not have invented the “this thread is useless without pics” meme, but they certainly made it a requirement for posting.
So anyway… around a week ago, I posted this list of celebrities I’d like to sleep with. The backstory on the list is this: I was at a bar with Lisa and some friends, and everyone started going through their list of celebrities they’d sleep with… you know, like the episode of Friends where everyone talks about their “Freebie List”. Only yours truly was having a brain fart and couldn’t think of anyone at the time. I went home and opened a Notepad window, in which I’d type up the names of celebrities as I’d think of them. After keeping the window open for a week and a half, I had this giant list. I quickly divided the list up into two teams (“The Varsity Team” and “The JV Team”) and also divided each team into “first string”, “second string”, and “practice squad”.
I hadn’t actually planned to post the list on this site. I was originally going to post the list as a MySpace bulletin. But Lisa and I were going on a brief vacation, and I needed (OK, wanted) to come up with some stuff I could quickly “cut and paste” into a few “vacation posts” that would run while I was out of town. And the “Chick List” was perfect for that.
I guess you know what’s coming next. The same guy that emailed me about the “Celebrity Breasts” posts complained about my lack of pics in the “Chick List” thread. So… to appease not only him (Hey Chip!), but also the Gods of Ars Technica, you’ll find an updated “Chick List” now with pictures… after the jump!
Catch Up with AMC
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, AMC has two of the best shows on TV right now: Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
If you read this site at all, you probably already know all about my obsession with Mad Men, a show based in a New York advertising agency in the 1960s. So I won’t waste your time. Just click the “Mad Men” category on the sidebar to learn all you could ever want to know about the show.
I haven’t said nearly as much about Breaking Bad, which features Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) as a high school chemistry teacher who finds out that he has inoperable cancer. He wants to take care of his family financially after he dies, so he teams up with a former student to sell the best crystal meth known to man. It sounds serious (and it is), but the show has lots of humor to take the sting out of Cranston’s situation. Cranston, for example, is as square as they come… so even though he knows everything he needs to know about actually making the drug, he has no idea how to sell it… which leads to a lot of “fish out of water” humor. It’s a great show, and one totally worth watching.
I mention all this because AMC is running marathons of both Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the next few days. The network will run the first 8 episodes of Mad Men season 2 today, starting at 4pm. Next Wednesday, AMC will run the all 7 episodes of the first season of Breaking Bad starting at 8pm.
Look, folks… this is great TV. Mad Men just won the “Best Drama” Emmy, and Cranston just won the “Best Actor” Emmy for Breaking Bad. It’s incredible stuff… so check it out!
BREAKING: Jammie Thomas verdict overturned
Jammie Thomas, the first “victim” of the RIAA’s legal jihad, is temporarily off the hook. Thomas, who was found guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay $222,000 in damages to the RIAA last October, was given a reprieve by Judge Michael J. Davis, who decided to overturn his previous ruling due to an “error” he made in giving instructions to the jury. As Ars Technica reports:
In a 43-page decision released late Thursday, Judge Davis wrote that the jury instruction in question was inaccurate. At issue was what he described as the “plain meaning” of distribution. “The Court’s examination of the use of the term ‘distribution’ in other provisions of the Copyright Act, as well as the evolution of liability for offers to sell in the analogous Patent Act, lead to the conclusion that the plain meaning of the term ‘distribution’ does not includ[e] making available and, instead, requires actual dissemination,” reads Judge Davis’ opinion.
The legal issues under consideration are far too complex to get into here. Suffice it to say that the RIAA’s main legal weapon – that simply having a file in a shared folder is copyright infringement, whether anyone actually downloads the file or not – has had a wrench thrown into it by Judge Davis.
The Border Blasters
Teenagers these days have almost limitless sources for finding new music: legal services like iTunes or Amazon MP3, illicit services like FrostWire or Bittorrent, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, music blogs, band websites, YouTube, music videos on demand and music channels from their cable provider, satellite radio… even “old fashioned” technology like MTV. It seems that the original “information superhighway” – terrestrial radio – has been all but forgotten these days.
But back in the 50s and 60s, AM radio was the Internet. Teens relied on their radios to bring them the latest music from faraway places like Liverpool, England or Memphis, Tennessee. Music began to bloom everywhere like wildflowers. Entire genres of music, like soul and R&B, were exposed to mainstream white audiences for the first time. And no single radio station and no single DJ did more to help spread the gospel than XERF and Wolfman Jack.
To understand how XERF and Wolfman Jack changed the world, we unfortunately have to start with science and politics.
Below is a sample of a radio wave:
FM radio works by modulating the frequency of the radio wave (hence, FM = “frequency modulation”). The peaks and troughs of the radio wave get closer together or farther apart, depending on what’s being broadcast. In other words, you could stretch the right and left edges of the above picture (or squeeze them together) to “see” what an FM wave would look like. FM radio waves are short and cannot travel very far, nor can they penetrate tall buildings or mountains. This is why you lose an FM station when you enter a tunnel, for instance.
AM radio, by contrast, works by modulating the amplitude of the radio wave (hence, AM = “amplitude modulation”). With AM, the peaks get higher or lower, depending on what’s being broadcast. So you could take the image above and stretch the top and bottom sides (or squeeze them together) to “see” an AM wave. Unlike FM, AM waves are very long, and can easily pass through buildings or mountains. In fact, AM waves are so long that they can bounce off the earth’s ionosphere at night and travel in all sorts of directions. If you’ve ever listened to a nighttime call-in show on a local talk radio station, you might have heard people calling in from several states over. This is because the radio waves are bouncing off the ionosphere and landing hundreds of miles away. But more on that later.
In the early part of the 20th century, the United States, being an industrial giant, took a commanding “lead” in the number of radio stations it had versus Canada and Mexico. For this reason – as well as the usual American arrogance – when it came time to pass the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement in 1941, the US had made into law what had already been practiced for two decades: a huge chunk of the available airwaves went to the US. Canada received the lion’s share of the remaining bandwidth, and Mexico received… next to nothing. The Mexican government, miffed at being snubbed by the Yanquis, decided to fight back by allowing their radio stations to broadcast at up to 500,000 watts, although most stations drew the line at 250,000. This was several times the power of any American radio station, which were limited to 50,000 watts by the FCC.
Atlanta Time Machine!
The other day I decided to change the “In Memoriam” picture on the home page. In the past I dedicated it to brewers Arthur Guinness and Frederick Pabst, as well as Art Rooney, Sr., founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I thought about it for a while then decided on Horace McKennie, longtime bartender\waiter at Moe’s and Joe’s, a bar in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highlands area. The bar opened in 1947; Horace went to work there just a few days after it opened and worked there until he retired in the early 2000s. We went to Moe’s and Joe’s all the time in high school, not because they served us beer (in fact, we never even tried to get beer there), but because of the great food. You could get a “Moe-Joe Burger”, fries and a Coke in a glass bottle for less than $5 back then, plus we were always the “cool kids” that had to go to downtown Atlanta because just getting a burger somewhere near Gwinnett Place Mall just wasn’t “hip enough”. And it seems that Horance was always our waiter!
Anyway, while looking for a picture of Horace, I stumbled across a really cool site: the Atlanta Time Machine. The site’s circa-1997 web design isn’t all that great, but that’s not a problem. What’s cool there are the thousands of pictures of Atlanta from as early as 1900, as well as scans of ads for the original Underground Atlanta (which was actually worth going to) and the Clermont Lounge.
Check out some of these really cool pictures:
This is what Moe’s and Joe’s looked like back in 1949! The area really hasn’t changed that much, has it? One of the most interesting things about the ATM site is to see how much really hasn’t changed. Sure, most of the buildings in downtown have changed hands several times since the 30s and 40s, but you can look at the original pictures and ones taken in the past couple of years and see that the buildings haven’t really changed much. Sure, that high-rise was an insurance company in 1942 and is loft condos today… but the facade looks pretty much as it did it the 40s.
Here’s something really cool:
This is the very first Waffle House, located at 2719 East College Avenue in Decatur. This picture is from approximately 1965, which is ten years after this location opened on Labor Day in 1955. According to this page at the ATM site, as of 2005 the location was a run-down Chinese takeout place… however, according to this page at the Waffle House’s official website, it’s now the “Waffle House Museum”. I’ll have to check it out the next time I’m in the area!
Seriously, though… it’s an awesome site! I’ve kept a tab open in Firefox for the past few days and have found myself spending way too much time looking at the old photos!
Mad Men WINS!
Mad Men won the 2008 Emmy for Best Drama Series! Woo-hoo!!
I love that damn show! Congrats, folks! 🙂
Goodbye Yankee Stadium!
Like any red-blooded American, I hate the New York Yankees. I’m not even much of a baseball fan, but the loathing I feel for the Yankees transcends the sport and fills every fiber of my being. That said, I’m profoundly sad today, as this day – Sunday, September 21st, 2008 – marks the end of an era. After 85 years, Yankee Stadium is closing its doors, soon to be demolished to make way for “New” Yankee Stadium.
Miles of ink and acres of trees have been consumed by sportswriters talking about “tradition” in sports, and baseball in particular. Much of what they write about is sentimental pablum, the sports equivalent of “kitten rescued from tree” stories you see at the end of your local newscast. Let’s face it: no one will really miss Three Rivers or Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
But losing Yankee Stadium is different. It’s the House that Ruth Built. It’s the Cathedral of Baseball. 15% of all postseason games and 21% of all World Series games in MLB history have taken place in Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Don Mattingly, Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, Sparky Lyle, Graig Nettles and Ron Guidry played there. Casey Stengel, Billy Martin and Lou Piniella managed Yankee teams there. Lou Gehrig gave his famous farewell speech there. George W. Bush threw out the first pitch after 9/11 there. The New York Giants played the first overtime game in NFL history there – a game frequently called “The Greatest Game Ever Played“. The “DEE-fense! DEE-fense!” chant was invented there. Knute Rockne, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry coached football games there. Chuck Bednarik of the Philadelphia Eagles hit Frank Gifford so hard in Yankee Stadium that Gifford had to be carted off the field; the photograph of that moment (below) is one of the most iconic in the history of the NFL. The “win one for the Gipper” aphorism originated there. Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali fought there. The first Papal Mass in the Western Hemisphere was celebrated there. Pink Floyd and John Philip Sousa both played concerts there. Nelson Mandela and John F. Kennedy gave speeches there. Even Thomas Edison was involved in Yankee Stadium, designing the very concrete that makes up The Big Ballpark in the Bronx.
Yankee Stadium is a fucking icon… and, as of today, it will be consigned to the ashheap of history. Poor Yankee Stadium has fallen victim to its lack of $2500 seats, sushi bars and cushy corporate luxury boxes. Instead of “dirty water dogs“, those rich enough to afford a game will be able to dine at the Hard Rock Cafe inside the stadium… after parking in their VIP parking decks, of course.
And once “New” Yankee Stadium is completed across the street, old Yankee Stadium will be demolished – after the Yankees pick apart every saleable artifact of the stadium, like a Sunday Dinner Chicken. As one long time Yankee fan said of the future demolition:
“I don’t think I could watch it. Once this stadium is taken down, it’s gone forever. You can’t say Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle played here anymore. Those walls have living blood in them. When that ball hits, it would be the same as me or you getting hit with a 95-mile-an-hour fastball. Those walls are alive. They are going to scream.”
It’s depressing, and it’s senseless. It makes me profoundly sad to see Yankee Stadium go. Not in the tragic and personal “the 15 year-old dog I had since middle school just died” sense. As I said, I loathe the Yankees. But still, seeing this icon of American sports go… the most famous sports arena in the entire world… go away just for the sake of progress… it actually makes me tear up, as if they decided to tear down St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Colosseum just because “they’re old”.
Goodbye, Yankee Stadium. Although I never visited you in person, I saw you hundreds of times on TV in my baseball-obsessed youth. I had always planned to go to a Yankees game there… but I never got around it it. And now, I suppose I never will.
But that’s “progress” for you.