Drinking whiskey clear!
From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending November 24, 2012:
1) Marsheaux – “Empire State Human”
2) Kate Nash – “Do Wah Doo”
3) Japan – “Cantonese Boy”
4) Virginia Astley – “Some Small Hope”
5) Jessica Bailiff – “Helpless”
6) Ambra Red – “Beauty 606”
7) Asobi Seksu – “Thursday”
8) Ladyhawke – “Magic”
9) Katy Perry – “The One That Got Away”
10) Blouse – “Videotapes”
If you’re not from North Carolina, you might not have heard the name Richard Reynolds before. But if you’ve ever smoked a cigarette, you’ve probably seen the words “R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company” on the side of the pack. And there’s a lot about the Reynolds story that’s interesting.
Richard Joshua Reynolds was born on July 20, 1850 in Patrick County, Virginia. I don’t know how wealthy the Reynolds family was, but they were prosperous enough to own several slaves and send their son to nearby Emory and Henry College in 1868. Reynolds returned to the family farm after graduating, but Richard, always restless and ambitious, sold his share of the family farm back to his father and struck out on his own.
One of the fundamental problems with his family’s farm was that it was nowhere near a railroad depot. So tobacco had to be put on horse-drawn carts and sent far away for sale. Richard knew he’d get better prices at a better location, so he set out for the nearest town that did have a depot: Winston, North Carolina. So the story goes, Reynolds rode in to town on horseback, reading a copy of The New York Times and dreaming of one day building a golf course somewhere in the area.
If you know anything about North Carolina, you probably know how huge tobacco was for most of the state’s history. And even though there were already fifteen other tobacco companies in Winston, Reynolds managed to sell 150,000 pounds of tobacco in his first year. Reynolds was a savvy businessman, always open to new ideas. One of these ideas – adding saccharin to chewing tobacco – made his products insanely popular. By the 1890s, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was selling millions of pounds of tobacco a year.
But Reynolds’ most famous – or infamous – invention came in 1912. Before this, almost everyone who smoked cigarettes rolled their own. The idea of buying pre-rolled, packaged cigarettes was just… weird to most people. Reynolds tinkered: tinkered with machinery that could make cigarettes by the millions, and tinkered with several tobacco blends to create the one with the best flavor. The result was Camel cigarettes, the first pre-packaged cigarette brand in the United States. Sales were slow for the first few weeks, but Reynolds cut the price to near cost and ended up selling 425 million packs of cigarettes that year. Not bad for a product that didn’t even exist a year before!
One of the people who made Camels such a success was Richard S. Reynolds, Sr., nephew of Richard Joshua Reynolds. He’d dropped out of the University of Virginia in 1903 to go to work for his uncle, and much of the research and development of Camels was done by him. When the product appeared to be a complete success he, like his uncle, felt the need to strike out on his own. So, only a few months after Camels hit the market, Reynolds, Sr. left the company.
“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across that recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the Government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder, like every other God worth worshipping, the one essential commandment: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.’ ”
– G.K. Chesterton
“Christendom in Dublin”
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their own free will.”
– Attributed to Joseph Goebbels
Man, I haven’t “done the news” on this site since March 7, 2012! So let’s get it on!
– Valerie Eliot, widow of poet T.S. Eliot, has died. Although I was a huge Eliot fan in high school, I didn’t really know much about his personal life. Needless to say, I was shocked to read that his widow had died… until I read the linked article. Eliot married a woman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, but the marriage wasn’t a happy one (you may remember the play and movie, Tom & Viv, about their flawed relationship). The two separated in 1932, but remained married until her death in 1947. In 1957, Eliot, then 68, married Valerie, who was 30 at the time. Eliot died in 1965 at age 76, but Valerie lived on until November 9, 2012.
– Remember the Daylight Saving Time change last week? I bet Niles Gammons of Urbana, Ohio does. Gammons was arrested for DUI last Saturday night at 1:08 AM. He was released shortly thereafter with a simple court summons. A little while later, the same arresting officer, in the same patrol car, saw Gammons’ car on the road again. He pulled the car over and found Gammons drunk behind the wheel. Thanks to the time change, Gammons was arrested for DUI at 1:08 AM… again! Two DUI arrests on the same day, at the same time? Awesome!
– Reasons to hate liberals: a) the £80 million school in London that has an indoor swimming pool, glass walls showing off a panoramic view of the city, a wait staff to bring tea and coffee to teachers, custom-made £300 chairs for students; b) Our Dear Leader and his looming $136 billion bill coming due in December; c) Driverless cars are the wave of the future… but not in Washington DC; d) despite the stereotype of religious folks as knuckle-dragging morons who believe the earth is 6,000 years-old and flat, liberals can be anti-science, too. In fact, I wrote about it back in March. But now Fred Pearce, an environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine, wants to know why so many in the green movement are taking anti-science positions; and e) back in March, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banned food donations to homeless shelters… not because the food might be tainted, or open shelters to legal liabilities… but because New York “can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content”. This has come up again in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
– Britain has, over the years, invaded 90% of all the countries on the planet. In fact, just 22 countries have not been invaded by Britain at one point or another. But guess who Britons consider their greatest foe? According to a survey conducted by Britain’s National Army Museum, that would be George Washington! (Runners-up, in order: Ireland’s Michael Collins, France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany’s Erwin Rommel and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk).
– Hats off to Microsoft! IT security firm Kaspersky has released its quarterly IT Threat Evolution report, and for the first time no Microsoft product appears on the “10 most vulnerable apps” list. Adobe apps account for five entries into the top ten (good job, guys!) while Oracle’s Java appears twice. WinAMP, iTunes and Quicktime appear once each.
– Journalists from The Sporting News recently asked 103 football players from 27 teams which coach, other than their own, they’d like to play for. The winner, in a landslide, was Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, with 31% of the vote. The runner-up, Bill Belichick of the Patriots, could only snag 10% of the vote. WOOT! GO STEELERS!
– Guess what the Voyager 1 spacecraft has detected at the edge of the solar system? Strangeness. Oh, astronomers have found starless galaxies, too.
– The word of the day is chamfer. A chamfer is “a beveled edge connecting two surfaces”. Although the word is most often used in woodworking, architecture and circuit board design, the word has also come to mean “the beveled dents in the side of electronic devices that help you open the device”. If you have a laptop or phone with little “dents” in the side which help you open the device, you have chamfers.
– Lastly… there’s no way Christy Turlington is 43 years-old:
Yes, this is a new picture from her upcoming campaign for Esprit.
The Anglican Communion Institute hits one out of the park with this analysis of the situation in South Carolina, entitled “Consumed By Litigation: TEC In South Carolina”:
What is not so obvious is that The Episcopal Church’s canon law points to the same conclusion. The Episcopal Church has no canonical basis for the actions that the Presiding Bishop and pro-Episcopal Church local parishes appear to be taking. There is no canonical authority for an “Interim Bishop” to be “appointed by the Presiding Bishop” in an existing diocese. Nor is there any canonical basis for a self-appointed “Steering Committee” to attempt to “reorganize” an existing diocese, to “communicate with the Presiding Bishop” or be advised by other bishops of the church. Indeed, the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church are clear: no bishop can act within the territory of an existing diocese without the consent of its Ecclesiastical Authority. If The Episcopal Church’s theory that the Diocese has not left is correct, then any notion of appointed Interim Bishops, Episcopal Advisors and transitional committees is strictly prohibited by The Episcopal Church’s own canons. Those appointments are the prerogatives of the diocese and its Ecclesiastical Authority acting pursuant to their governing instruments, not the Presiding Bishop or the “national church.” The absence of any canons authorizing what the Presiding Bishop and others are doing is proof that The Episcopal Church is operating under a profoundly flawed understanding of the church’s polity.
The article ends with a beautiful summary: either a diocese cannot leave the Episcopal Church, in which case the Presiding Bishop and her minions are blatantly violating the canons of the church and the civil law of South Carolina… or a diocese can leave the Episcopal Church, in which case the Presiding Bishop and her minions have wasted millions in legal fees for battles in other “rump” dioceses.
Your move, Katharine.
I’ve mentioned this a few times on the site, but my father owned a wholesale grocery store in downtown Atlanta. I worked there for almost 8 years in the candy department, which was next to the “salty snacks” and drinks section.
Many of my dad’s customers were Korean. Most had thick accents, but a few of them didn’t speak any English at all. Certain Korean shopkeepers would come in to the store and ask me for something like “gungee” or “kungee”. They’d say it like, 5 or 10 times, getting louder each time: “Gungee? Gungee? GUNGEE! GUNGEE!! GUNGEE!!!”
Since I didn’t speak Korean, I’d tell them I couldn’t understand them. So they’d helpfully point to their shopping list, which said:
Come to find out, they were looking for bags of roasted peanuts.
In case you were wondering, this happened 2-3 times, and the incidents were so spread out (and the customers’ accents so different) that by the time the next guy asked for “kungee”, I’d forgotten about the previous guy who’d asked for “gungee”.
[Thanks to Scooter for reminding me of this story!]
Various updates about the website:
PLANNED MAINTENANCE: My web host is planning to do some upgrades in the near future. These are scheduled to take place in the wee small hours of Eastern Standard Time. So if the site is unavailable, that’s most likely what’s going on. I’ll update this as my host updates me.
NEW FEATURE: When you visit a WordPress blog, the software defaults to loading the 10 most recent stories. When you get to the bottom of the page, you can click “Older Stories” to load the next 10 stories, and so on. The people who make WordPress also make a set of plug-ins called “JetPack”, and a recent update added an “infinite scroll” feature: when you get to the bottom of the page, the next 10 articles automatically load in the browser, and you can keep scrolling as far back as you wish. This is a feature of the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and I really like it. Unfortunately, you can’t use a footer with infinite scroll, so I moved the footer widgets to the sidebar.
NEW FEATURE (OF SORTS): One of the biggest complaints people had about Instagram is that it lacked “profile pages”. When you uploaded a picture to the site, Instagram would create an HTML page around the picture, which you could then send to friends as a link. But there was no “profile page” where people could look at your other pictures. Instagram has finally created profiles for users, and my account has been upgraded. You can see all my pictures here, or just use the Instagram icon in the sidebar (with the RSS, Facebook, Twitter and other icons).
THE PLUG-IN MERRY-GO-ROUND: For a long time I used a plug-in called WordBooker, which automatically added a Facebook post whenever I published a new article on this site. I also used another plug-in called Twitter Tools to do the same for Twitter. However, the author of WordBooker seemed to be locked in a constant battle with Facebook’s ever-changing API, so the plug-in broke early and often. Not too long ago, the folks behind Twitter Tools created a new plug-in called Social, which added the ability to post to Facebook as well as Twitter. But Social had one annoying bug: it would pull any random picture from the site and use that as the “featured picture” in the Facebook post (that’s why I temporarily disabled the Instagram widget in the sidebar). I found a plug-in which fixed that bug, but then noticed that JetPack has a similar feature called “Publicize”. I figure the “official” WordPress plug-in will be the most reliable and have the best support, so I’m gonna use that one… for now.
From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending November 3, 2012:
1) Ambra Red – “Oh Boy”
2) Marsheaux – “Empire State Human”
3) My Mine – “Hypnotic Tango (Radio mix)”
4) Modern English – “Life in the Gladhouse”
5) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – “Telegraph”
6) Gary Numan – “Films”
7) Ministry – “Revenge”
8) Book Of Love – “I Touch Roses (Long Stemmed version)”
9) Visage – “Fade To Grey (12″ Version)”
10) Kim Wilde – “Suburbs of Moscow”
If you spend any time at all on places Reddit you’ve probably seen the same questions asked over and over again. One question I’ve seen posted over the years comes from people outside the United States who ask “What’s the deal with Americans and college sports?” or “Why do Americans care which university is best at basketball?” or “How do you know which university to cheer for?”
I’ve seen the question answered many times, but the answers were, in my opinion, incomplete. Some answers would discuss college sports generally, while others would focus on the “which university to cheer for” issue. I hope, with this post, to answer the question fully. So if you have any European or Australian friends who ask about American college sports, in the future you can send them a link to this post!
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: For the duration of this article, I will use the term “football” to refer exclusively to American football and “soccer” to refer to the sport the rest of the non Anglosphere (except Britain) calls football. Yes, Americans get crap from the Brits for calling it “soccer”, but Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, South Africans, Belizeans and the Irish call it “soccer”, too. And much of Asia, including Japan, call it some variation of “soccer”, like “soka” or “saker”. But it’s just AMERICANS who are weird. On a lighter note, I will also follow the American custom of using the terms “university”, “college” and “school” interchangeably.]
* * *
First of all, when Americans talk about “college sports” chances are good that they’re actually talking about two sports: football and\or basketball. These are the predominant college sports in the United States, and the reason for this is historical: both sports initially became popular at the collegiate level, and it was their wild success as spectator sports that led people to risk creating professional leagues.
Take football, for example. The history of American football is a bit murky. It’s known that mob football, a medieval forerunner of modern soccer, was played in colonial-era America, possibly for the first time at Jamestown in the 1600s. However, organized games played by intramural university teams did not begin until the early 1800s. Mob football was a brutal sport; some sources say that “any means could be used to move the ball to a goal, as long as it did not lead to manslaughter or murder”!
By the 1860s, the game had been banned at most universities due to student number of injuries and destruction of school property. However, thanks to the introduction of manufactured balls of uniform size and shape – which made the ball bounce predictability for the first time, adding a new strategic element to the game – the sport continued to increase in popularity at prep schools. They came up with something called the Boston Game, a sport which combined the kicking aspect of soccer with the carrying aspect of rugby. The sport began to return to American colleges, and on November 6, 1869 a team from Rutgers University played Princeton University in what most historians consider the first true game of American football. This “new” sport quickly spread to other universities on the east coast of the United States, then went nation-wide once rules were standardized later in the 1870s.
By the 1910s, most large American universities had a college football team, and games were drawing as many as 80,000 spectators in some markets. There was an obvious market for a professional version of the sport, and several businessmen had a go at creating pro leagues. Unfortunately, most failed after a few years due to arguments between team owners. It wasn’t until 1920 that the American Professional Football Association was formed. The group changed its name to the National Football League two years later, and one day it would become the preeminent sports league in the United States.