Major Mad Men recap delay

Well, as you’ve probably noticed, I still have not posted a recap of last week’s Mad Men. There’s a reason for that.

Last weekend I had my 20-year high school reunion in Atlanta. That was on Saturday.

On Sunday, Lisa and I went to visit one of her friends outside Chattanooga. We’d planned to leave around 2pm on Monday, but didn’t actually hit the road until 3:15. We were going to take I-75 north to I-40 and go home via Asheville. Unfortunately, we got halfway to Knoxville before finding out that a rock slide had closed I-40 near the TN\NC line. So we had to take an alternate route through the mountains (which was delayed a further 30 minutes when I made what appears to be a common navigational mistake). So what should have taken six hours took almost nine, and we didn’t get home until midnight.

Since getting home, a combination of work, household stuff and trips to the vet have kept me from getting started on the recap… hell, I didn’t even watch the episode until Thursday morning!

I hope to start on it tomorrow (but it’s Halloween, so who knows?) and for sure I’ll make a lot of progress Sunday afternoon (we get the Cards\Panthers as the late game, and since that’s not worthy of HD, I’ll be able to watch the game in my office and write).

Sorry for the delay, folks… especially for such an incredible episode!

RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Joe Theismann

Former Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann is almost as famous for being a broadcaster as he is a football player. He served as color commentator for ESPN’s Sunday Night Football from 1988 to 2005, where he was known for saying almost as many stupid things as longtime color man John Madden. In fact, one thing that Theismann said almost always comes up on “stupidest things anyone’s ever said” lists:

“Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”

Everyone assumes that Theismann, a dumb jock, meant to say Albert Einstein. But the truth is more complicated than that. Perhaps Theismann did mean to say Albert Einstein… or maybe he was thinking of Norman Einstein, a former classmate of his at South River High School and the valedictorian of his class.

Yes, folks, there really is a Norman Einstein. He is an emergency room physician at Catawba Valley Medical Center in nearby Hickory, North Carolina. Here is his contact info. According to this Reader’s Digest article about the flub,

“‘I was a senior when he was a sophomore,’ Dr. Einstein said. As boys, they lived just blocks apart. ‘We played a little bit of basketball, touch football-that kind of stuff.’ But they weren’t close friends: Theismann was a jock, Einstein a brain. Einstein graduated in 1965 and was the class valedictorian. He attended Rutgers University and then medical school at Tufts University. Theismann headed to the NFL. Twenty-seven years later, in a corner of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Norman Einstein’s name popped back into Joe Theismann’s head.”

For the record, Sports Illustrated also ran an article about Einstein, but I can’t find it online.

So yes, Theismann misspoke. But his flub isn’t as stupid as it at first sounds.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Joe Theismann”

Thanks, Panthers!

Check out this map:

thanks_panthers

The people in red get to watch the Vikings take on the Packers this Sunday. That should be a hell of a game – Brett Farve returning to play at Lambeau Field, two well-matched teams going at it… and the line is the home team by 3.

The people in blue – me – instead get to watch the Carolina Panthers travel to Arizona to take on the Cardinals. That game should be a bloodbath – in fact, I’m surprised that the line is only 9. Me? I think the final score will be 34-6 for the home team. But I’ll get to see the Panthers – in all their crappy glory – instead of a game that, you know, people actually want to watch.

Bastards!

Oh, and John Fox said today that Jake Delhomme is still, somehow, the Panthers’ starting quarterback (check out this great article on SportingNews.com that asks what Jake has to do to get benched).

Should I go ahead and get season tickets for next year when Cowher takes over?

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-25

  • Woot! Tied for 1st place in the AFC North again! #
  • Dick Enberg is losing his marbles! #
  • Strangely, bacon-wrapped Butterfingers weren't that great. Bacon dipped in peanut butter, however, was AWESOME! #
  • HELP! Charlotte and Atlanta peeps: we have two BEAUTIFUL stray kittens that are under threat from a grumpy neighbor! PLEASE adopt one! #
  • Happy Trafalgar Day everyone! http://ping.fm/9FyKP #
  • Nooooooo! The Varsity wants to change their to-go boxes! #
  • … wishes MS would hurry up and release the RTM version of XP Mode for Win7 already! #
  • Wow – XP Mode is really COOL! #win7 #
  • "I'll give you the same deal I give everyone else: $50 for 10 minutes alone with the bodies." #
  • Even the devil on my shoulder was like "go to bed!" last night! #

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Fear and Loathing in the Pacific

James Cook was born to a family of Yorkshire farmers on November 7, 1728. It’s odd then, that Cook would go on to join the Royal Navy and become one of the best explorers and navigators in British history.

Cook had only five years of schooling, where he was seen as a decent, but not remarkable, student. When he was 16, Cook became a “shop boy” at a grocer and fabric shop in the seaside town of Staithes. In this, Cook was a complete failure, and in less than two years he had moved on to the nearby port town of Whitby. There he met Quaker brothers John and Henry Walker, who were in the business of shipping coal along the English coast. Cook apprenticed with them, and found that he loved it. Where he had once been indifferent in school, he now quickly absorbed all the algebra, geometry, astronomy and other skills needed to one day command his own ship.

In 1755, Cook volunteered for the Royal Navy as the Seven Years’ War began. He quickly rose up the ranks, especially once his skills as a mapmaker became known. Cook, serving in North America in the war, made some of the first contemporary charts of Canadian waters, maps that allowed General James Wolfe to launch several successful raids during the conflict.

After the war, the Royal Society hired him to sail to Tahiti in 1766 to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun (two other adventurers were sent to other spots on the globe; it was hoped that by triangulation they would be able to accurately measure the distance to the Sun). Once this was complete, Cook opened a packet of “secret orders” he had been given back in England: he was to locate the terra australis incognita (“unknown southern land”) once and for all, and claim it in the name of Great Britain. That Cook did, reaching a bay so teeming with wildlife that he named it “Botany Bay”. Thus, on that day in 1770, modern Australia was born.

Continue reading “Fear and Loathing in the Pacific”

Win7: XP Mode

One of the coolest features of Windows 7 is “XP Mode”, a way to run a virtual Windows XP session in Windows 7.

At its most basic, XP Mode offers “Desktop Mode”, in which a virtual machine opens up and boots into its OS. This is nice, but it’s nothing extraordinary – in fact, users of Virtual PC 2007, VMWare Workstation and Sun’s VirtualBox will probably yawn and wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s not much different than running any of those apps.

Where XP Mode really shines is “Seamless Mode”, in which shortcuts for applications installed on the virtual machine are added to the Windows 7 start menu. When you want to run one of those apps, you don’t have to start the virtual machine in desktop mode and wait for it to boot up – the application runs within a window under Windows 7. Aside from the “(Remote)” tag added to the title bar of the application, you’d have no idea it was even running virtually! Cool, huh? So you can now finally run Office 2007 and a virtualized Office 2003 on the same machine!

Continue reading “Win7: XP Mode”

January Jones: RAWR!

You’ve probably seen the January Jones pictures from GQ already, but this post over at The Superficial has some outtakes, which are arguably hotter:

January Jones in GQ

I read the GQ article tonight… apparently she likes football and beer, she once drank 26 beers in a single night, she’s thinking of going as Troy Polamalu for Halloween, and she once had the booze cut off from her on a British Airways flight… where she was playing quarters and chewing tobacco with the stranger sitting next to her.