75 years later, and it’s still funny:
It’s Still Funny!
Stuff I Missed #324
As a kid, I remember that there was a bit of mild parental and feminist outrage over the movie poster for the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only:
Of course, being an almost 11 year old boy, I loved it! Sure, the main attraction was the model’s butt hanging out. But there was more than that: the “shininess” of her long legs and the strappy heels were really hot (remember, this was 1981, when “shiny” and “strappy” were in vogue). And the crossbow was sexy. This girl, whoever she was, was not only hot, she was dangerous, too!
It wasn’t until a couple of nights ago, when I caught the film on G4, that I googled the movie poster for the first time in years… and realized that the photographer was able to make the model’s ass fall out… by having her wear the bikini bottom backwards. Which is now something else I’ll never be able to unsee.
Quote of the Day
“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds, and die of a heart attack at 43, you can. You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.”
– Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson
Parks and Recreation
Little Annoyances #107
Early in the film Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) notices a hamburger that Brett (Frank Whaley) is eating. Jules asks if he can have a bite, and a terrified Brett says that he can.
When Jules picks up the burger, it’s whole:
But when he brings it to his mouth, it’s nearly halfway eaten:
Stupid, I know. But it’s one of those things that, after you notice it, is impossible to unsee.
These Chiefs and Those Chiefs
The Atlanta Chiefs were a professional soccer team that existed from 1967 to 1973, and again from 1979 to 1981. They were originally owned by the Atlanta Braves baseball team, hence the “Chiefs” name. They played the 1967 season in the National Professional Soccer League, but in 1968 the NPSL merged with the United Soccer Association to form the North American Soccer League (or NASL, which was occasionally pronounced “nasal”, for obvious reasons).
Depending on how you look at it, the Chiefs brought Atlanta the city’s first professional, major league sports title:
– Georgia Tech won college football national championships in 1917, 1928 and 1952 (and, later, 1990). But college sports are strictly amateur, and were especially so 50 years ago.
– The Atlanta Crackers were a minor league baseball team that existed from 1901 to 1961. They played in the Southern Association and were league champs 17 times. In fact, the Crackers were the winningest team in Southern Association history, and were sometimes called the “Yankees of the Minors”. However, while they were “professional” (in the sense that they were paid to play, unlike college teams), they were only a minor league team.
– The Atlanta Knights hockey team won the International Hockey League’s Turner Cup – no relation to Ted – in 1993, their second year of existence. But they, like the Crackers, were a minor league team, in this case, an affiliate for the Tampa Bay Lightning. Sadly, the arrival of the Atlanta Trashers caused the team to move to Quebec, where they were known as the “Rafales” from 1996 to 1998, after which the team was shut down for losing too much money.
– The Atlanta Braves didn’t win a World Series until 1995. However, they won two previous World Series, in 1957 (as the Milwaukee Braves) and in 1914 (as the Boston Braves). Thus, not only are the Braves the oldest continually-operating sports franchise in North America, they’re the only team to have won a World Series in every city they’ve called home.
– The Atlanta Hawks basketball team was originally founded as the National Basketball League’s Buffalo Bisons in 1946. However, just 13 games in to their first season the team moved to Moline, Illinois. There they became known as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, and were led by legendary coach Red Auerbach. But it soon became obvious that the “Tri-Cities” area (Moline and Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa) was too small to support a team in the new NBA. So in 1951 they moved to Milwaukee. And in 1955 they moved to St. Louis, where they won their only league title in 1958. They moved again to Atlanta in 1968. The Hawks’ 55 year championship drought is the second-longest in the NBA after the Sacramento Kings, and the Hawks haven’t even advanced past the second round of the playoffs since moving to Atlanta.
– The Flames NHL hockey team – which played in Atlanta from 1972 to 1980, when they moved to Calgary – has never won a Stanley Cup. In fact, neither the Atlanta Flames nor the Calgary Flames have ever even won their division. And the Atlanta Trashers – now the Winnipeg Jets – won their division exactly once, in the 2006-2007 season. And this also makes Atlanta the only city to lose not one, but TWO NHL franchises.
– The Atlanta Falcons have been to, but have never won, a Super Bowl. Which puts them in the same boat as the Arizona Cardinals, Buffalo Bills, Carolina Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, San Diego Chargers, Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans. It also puts them ahead of the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, none of which have ever even been to a Super Bowl.
But this post is about the Atlanta Chiefs.
That Strange Attraction
There’s an “old” superstition at the Tower of London which states that if the ravens held there ever escape, the monarchy will collapse and Britain will fall. For that reason, the birds have their wings clipped, and are given great care. And I say it’s an “old” superstition because it’s attributed to Charles II, although many historians are sure it’s a Victorian invention attributed to Charles II.
I have a similar superstition, only mine is about a computer. Specifically, this computer:
You’re looking at the venerable (if unsexy) Enlight 7237 case. Inside is an Abit BP6 motherboard, one of the first consumer-grade motherboards to accept multiple processors, and certainly the first to allow multiple Celeron processors. The two heatsinks (the revered GlobalWin FEP 32s) disguise two Celeron 466 mHz processors. The big green heatsink hides the 440BX chipset, arguably the best product Intel ever made. And rounding out the ensemble you have a Diamond Multimedia videocard of uncertain name carrying the NVIDIA RIVA TNT 2 chipset. There’s 512MB of assorted RAM in the machine, as well as four IDE hard drives from Western Digital, IBM and Maxtor, all connected to a Promise Ultra100 ATA card.
The computer is practically a museum of late 90s computing in a single box! I built it in 1999, and I went with the Celeron processors because at the time one could buy two Celeron 466 mHz processors for around a quarter the cost of Intel’s then top-of-the-line 933 mHz processor.
Of course, I don’t think anything will happen to me if this computer dies. And Britain will certainly not “fall” if something happens to this old computer. But my life would somehow not be the same if this old box died.
I cut my teeth on Windows NT on this box. Like a lot of folks, I got really sick of the instability of Windows 98 and wanted something better. So went on eBay and bought an OEM copy of NT Workstation 4 for around $35. I then built this box specifically to run NT. And, after a couple of weeks, I fell in love with the OS, and kept 98 on one of the hard drives just to play the occasional game, or whatever thing NT couldn’t do at the time.
Quote of the Day
“Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear. Ho ho ho. Let’s not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a
Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days
of the American Century
OMG! Glasses!
Be still my beating heart!
BOOM!
Goddamn. Wikipedia sez:
Nora Arnezeder (born 8 May 1989) is a French actress and singer. Arnezeder was born in Paris, France. Her father, Wolfgang, is Austrian and Catholic, and her mother, Piera, is an Egyptian Jew. At the age of two, she left Paris with her parents for Aix-en-Provence. When she was fourteen, she moved to Bali for a year and, once back in Paris, studied dancing and singing.
Random Thoughts
Have you ever been at home, doing some task (like the dishes), with your headphones on, and you’re just groovin’ to the tunes and lost in the task at hand, so lost that when you open the door and see that it’s raining when it wasn’t before you’re like “HOLY SHIT! IT’S RAINING!!”, as if you’re the first person to ever see rain?
* * *
As I get older, certain “rules” of social behavior get easier to understand, while others get harder. The “big rules”, like those against murder or adultery, get easier to accept and understand. But the finer points of social interaction seem to get more difficult for me to grasp.
I was at Walmart a couple of days ago, and as I stood in the checkout line I noticed that ChapStick has a new “Red Velvet Cupcake” flavor. “OMG!”, I thought to myself, “Lisa’s co-worker Kim loves anything red velvet! I should get her a tube!”
But then I thought “is that OK? Is that appropriate? Should I be buying another man’s wife ChapStick? Is that weird? What if some random dude bought Lisa ChapStick? How would I feel about that? But hell, man… you’re not ‘some random guy’! You know Kim. You went to her wedding! You’ve gone out bar hopping with her and her husband! It’s not like you have anything ‘going on’ with her… and it’s not like you’re buying her a dozen roses or some sex toy or something. But speaking of, why would I buy someone ChapStick? Maybe I should get her a couple quarts of oil and a belt sander while I’m here… ‘cos a tube of ChapStick is a pretty random thing, even if she loves red velvet. But then there was that time in Latin class… remember your professor? The sweet older Southern lady who kinda looked like Flannery O’Connor and lived in that HUGE house in Druid Hills and went to Agnes Scott back when that was something to be proud of? What was her name? Anyway, remember that one time when she had a horrible case of the sniffles, and during a break you went to that convenience store next to Walter’s – remember? It was called ‘Fast Lane’ and that older Indian guy worked there who tried to be really hip with the college kids with his ‘heeeeeyyy doooode, what’s a happenin’?’, and you were gonna write that pilot for a sitcom called Life in the Fast Lane… Anyway, the Latin professor, whose name you can’t remember but was realty sweet, had the sniffles and you went to Fast Lane and bought her a pack of tissues, and that wasn’t weird? Remember that?”
Aaaaaannnndddd this, folks, is why I couldn’t get in any of the “good” universities.
* * *
Hey atheists: what if I told you your mockery of religion is as disrespectful as me calling your precious snowflake of a baby “ugly”, and your constant atheist proselytizing is not only “as annoying” as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Old School Baptists, it’s actually worse because you’re selling… nothing.
Imagine walking on to a car lot, and being approached by the typical Ingratiating, smarmy, sycophantic, sleazy, greasy car salesman. Now imagine, just as you start talking with the salesman, another salesman appears – just as Ingratiating, smarmy, sycophantic, sleazy, and greasy as the first guy – only this guy is calling you and your need for a car “stupid” and “ridiculous”, and he tries to get you to not buy a car. That’s not annoying at all, is it?