Author: Jim Cofer

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Et tu, Brute?

From the “This Is Why They Call It The Daily Fail” Department:

In the UK there’s a long-running TV show called University Challenge, in which teams from universities – especially posh schools like Oxford and Cambridge – answer ridiculously difficult questions for points. The team with the most points at the end of the show continues on in a knockout tournament not unlike March Madness.

Since 1994, the show has been hosted by TV personality Jeremy Paxman. And if you thought Alex Trebek was “snooty” and “condescending” when a Jeopardy! contestant gives a wrong answer… let’s just say that Paxman puts him to shame. This article in the Daily Mail refers to Paxman’s “withering put-downs” and “goading” of incorrect answers.

But it seems that Paxman got a comeuppance of sorts recently. A team from Claire College Oxford was asked to identify the composer of a snippet of classical music. They guessed, incorrectly, that it was by Bedrich Smetana. Paxman replied that it was Antonín Dvorak.

The problem? The music was from a piece by Dvorak, but the specific snippet the show played was actually an ancient plainchant (or, if you prefer, a Gregorian chant).

To give a modern analogy, it was as if the show played the first ten seconds of the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” (which is nothing but a sample of an Enya song called “Boadicea”), and the team answered “Enya” but were told they were wrong because it was the Fugees:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA1PAkKD3Q4

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQwgpaLR6o

Anyway, the Daily Fail wrote the linked article, gloating that Paxman had gotten it wrong. But within their article – ABOUT HOW PAXMAN WAS WRONG – lies this whopper:

daily_fail_music
(Click to embiggen)

For those too lazy to click the thumbnail, the Mail asserts that “St Gregory the Great is said to have standardized [plainchant] in the mid 18th century”.

Pope Gregory I lived from around AD 540 until March 12, 604. Which, you’ll note, is not the mid 1700s. I’m not sure how the hell the Mail managed to make such a huge error. At first I was thought “maybe the author was thinking ‘seventh’ century and accidentally added the ‘-teenth’ at the end”. But then, most of what Pope Gregory did – if he did what he did – would have been done in the sixth century. And although traditionalists have long asserted that Gregory was the man who made them part of the Western Church, many scholars are convinced that the chants weren’t invented until AD 750 (and in France, no less), and that the chants weren’t standardized until the 9th or 10th centuries, well after Gregory passed.

Either way… good job, Daily Fail!

UPDATE: They have since corrected the error, and added another Paxman screw up on University Challenge to the linked article.

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Football and Baseball

I was hanging out at one of my regular message boards this week when I stumbled across a post entitled “Things you didn’t know were real until you were an adult”. Posters admitted to all sorts of youthful naivete, like thinking that lobotomies were something made up for books and movies, or that “Jews for Jesus” was just a Richard Belzer joke, or not knowing that “cavalry” and “Calvary” were two different words.

One of the posters – who is not a sports fan – admitted that he had no idea there were two teams named the “Giants”: a baseball team and a football team.

Yes, there are two sports teams called the “Giants”. What’s more, they originally played in the same city: from 1883 to 1957, the baseball team was the New York Giants. In 1925, the NFL’s New York Giants team was born. To avoid confusion, they were often called the “New York Football Giants”, something you still hear sportscasters like Joe Buck say from time to time, even though the baseball team moved to San Francisco in 1958.

In the early days of the NFL, it was common to name NFL teams after long-established baseball teams. The Pittsburgh Steelers, for example, were known as the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1933 to 1940. In 1934, there was an NFL team called the Cincinnati Reds. There was an NFL teams known as the New York Yankees (1926-1928), the Brooklyn Dodgers (1930-1943) and the Cleveland Indians (1931.) There were at least two baseball teams with the Washington Senators name, the inspiration for the Washington Senators football team, which played a single season in 1921… when the NFL was still called the American Professional Football Association.

But one of the most interesting stories of all – especially given the current controversy – involves the Washington Redskins. Four men bought the rights to a Boston team in 1932. They named their team after the Boston Braves, a local baseball team (which moved to Milwaukee in 1953 and then Atlanta in 1966).

As it turned out, the football team lost $46,000 in its first year, the equivalent of $805,000 in today’s money. So three of the investors bailed, leaving George Preston Marshall as the sole owner. The next year, Marshall hired a new head coach, a Native American named Lone Star Dietz. He also signed many Native American players. But the players objected to the “Braves” name, so Marshall named them the “Boston Redskins” instead. And the Native American players were apparently OK with this: the 1933 team photo featured the entire team in warpaint and feathers.

Continue reading “Football and Baseball”

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David Bowie’s Eyes

Ask a hundred people to name a physical feature of David Bowie and almost all of them will say that he “has different colored eyes”:

bowie_eyes

Here’s the thing though… Bowie doesn’t have different color eyes. That’s a medical condition called heterochromia iridum, which is usually just shortened to heterochromia. Instead, as the picture above clearly demonstrates, one of his pupils is permanently dilated, a condition known as anisocoria. And the reason his eyes are like that… is because of a girl.

In 1962, when Bowie was 14, he fell for a girl named Carol Goldsmith. Problem was, his best friend, George Underwood, fell for her too.

According to Bowie, he got the date with Goldsmith. The next day, Bowie went to school and bragged to everyone about it, and the jealous Underwood punched him.

According to Underwood, he’d gotten the date with Goldsmith, and Bowie was jealous of him. So Bowie called Underwood on the day of the date and made up some story about how Goldsmith couldn’t make it. Underwood believed him, and made other plans. Goldsmith waited for Underwood for an hour and, of course, was furious when he didn’t show up. So she went out with Bowie instead. When Underwood found out that he’d been double-crossed, he punched Bowie.

Whatever actually happened, Underwood’s punch landed so that his knuckle hit Bowie in the left eye. This badly tore the sphincter muscles in his eye (oh, grow up), preventing the pupil from closing. Doctors were able to save his eye, but the dilation was permanent.

As proof of the old “bros before hos” maxim, Bowie and Underwood remained friends after the incident. Underwood played in a few of Bowie’s early bands, and ended up becoming a graphic designer. He did the covers for Bowie’s Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars albums, as well as several Bowie posters, flyers and book covers. You can see several of Underwood’s works on his website here.

There are, however, several celebrities that do have heterochromia iridum. Kate Bosworth’s eyes are particularly striking:

bosworth_eyes

English actress Alice Eve’s eyes are two slightly different shades of blue:

eve_eyes

Wikipedia also lists Dan Aykroyd, Elizabeth Berkley, Henry Cavill, Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey, Jr., Mila Kunis, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Simon Pegg, Jane Seymour, Kiefer Sutherland, Christopher Walken, and Alyson Hannigan as having the condition.

EDIT: Sadly, David Bowie died two years ago. However, I recently found a picture of him, taken at age 14 before the infamous fight, that shows him with identical eyes:

David Bowie at 14

 

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MY $3 DINNER: Jamaican Beef Patties

The second in a continuing series of reviews of frozen food from Dollar Tree. If you like, you may read this review of Dollar Tree dim sum.

I can’t remember the date, but I’ll never forget the day. I was a junior or senior in high school, and one day I accompanied my mother to our local Kroger. Oh, I wasn’t doing that to be a “nice son” and help mom with the chores. I was doing it because my mom isn’t a “snacker”. To her a “snack” was lima beans and mayonnaise or cornbread drenched in buttermilk. She almost never bought Twinkies or Fritos on her own, so my going to the store with mom was the only way my sister and I’d get Little Debbies, Hot Pockets, microwave popcorn, and all of the other delicious junk food crap we craved as teenagers.

It was while mom was looking at the meat counter that I spied them. In one of those “casket freezers”, I spotted “Tower Isles Spicy Jamaican Beef Patties”. They looked good, so I got a box. And, a few days later, I fell in love. The spicy, curry-infused meat filling, the tumeric-laden crust… it was all good!

One of the downsides to moving to Charlotte was that I couldn’t find Jamaican beef patties anywhere, aside from Caribbean specialty stores on the other side of town. But then, one glorious day, I found that my local Walmart carrying them! $2.58 for a box of two patties! And, a year or two later, my local Dollar Tree finally put in a freezer section, and had them for only $1 each!

beef_patties_01

Heating them up is easy. You can either tear the package down the side and heat it up in the microwave for 2 minutes (there’s a “crisper sleeve” on the inside of the package), or you can put them in a 375F oven for 16-20 minutes. I prefer using a conventional oven because I like my patties crispy. It’s worth the wait, I think.

Here are the patties, ready to eat:

beef_patties_02

I normally get beef patties, but this time I decided to get two beef and two chicken. And they’re delicious! One thing, though: I’m not sure if Golden Krust makes their “spicy” beef patty milder than Tower Isles, or if I’ve just become so accustomed to spicy foods that my tolerance level is that high, but they’re just not spicy enough for me. I often drown them in my homemade West Indies Hot Sauce. Oh, and I actually like the chicken ones, too! They’re not nearly as spicy as the beef ones, but they have a great curry flavor that I just love! Mmmmm.. curry!

THE VERDICT: Would I eat them again? Hell, I’d eat them every day!

For the nitpickers out there: I normally buy four patties (as shown in the pictures), but I almost always only eat three for dinner. The fourth one is a leftover for snacks. So it’s still a “$3 dinner”.