I’ve mentioned it several times on the site, so I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it. But I just have to do it one more time: in late 2011 I first heard – and fell in love with – the Greek synthpop duo Marsheaux. And I’m not sure ya’ll really get what I mean when I say “fell in love”. It felt as if I was back in 7th grade, experiencing my first crush all over again. They were the first thing I thought of when I woke up and the last thing I thought of before falling asleep. Any spare moment – any at all – I had one of their songs in my head.
The problem was, the band only had three studio albums, and the most recent one – my beloved Lumineux Noir – came out in 2009. As much as I loved that disc, I could only listen to it so many times. Last.fm says I’ve listened to Lumineux Noir tracks 637 times, and while I’ve enjoyed it every single time, what I really wanted was something new.
The band had a new album in the works, but it was delayed several times. It wasn’t until April 22, 2013 that Inhale saw the light of day. And the second track on that album has become an instant favorite of mine: “Secret Place”.
Please try to fall asleep What a perfect moment Dreaming, only you and me So let’s sleep to be alive
Beneath the bright blue I hold you tight Floating, only you and me So let’s fly and touch the sky
In America, the end of every college football season is celebrated with a variety of “bowl games”: the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl are just a few. And, of course, the NFL took a cue from the college game by naming its yearly championship the Super Bowl.
But why are they bowls? Did the winner get a bowl of roses or cotton or sugar or oranges? A free set of tableware? Did the first trophies look like bowls?
Haha… no. It actually comes from 1914, when Yale University built the first modern football stadium in the United States. Prior to this, most universities just took a large area of flat ground, marked off the football field, then built wooden or metal stands on one side of the field. As the team grew in popularity, the school would then build stands on the other side of the field, then on either end zone as needed. And by that time, the school would enclose the whole area with a fence of some kind, so that only paying customers could watch the game. Or they’d just use a baseball field, which presented its own set of problems.
But Yale’s new stadium was different. For one thing, the entire thing was recessed into the ground, so that the playing field was several feet (meters) below the surrounding ground. Bathrooms and food stalls were included. Access was controlled by various gates, and the entire building was circular. The whole thing kind of looked like a giant bowl from above, and this led people to call the stadium the “Yale Bowl”, which is the name it has today. It was new and it was breathtaking. And it was such a success that the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (1921), the Rose Bowl (1922) and Michigan Stadium (1926) copied the basic design.
The Yale Bowl
But here’s the thing: the very first “bowl game” – the Rose Bowl – was originally created to help fund a preexisting event: Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. If you’re an American, you’ve no doubt seen at least a bit of the famous “Tournament of Roses Parade” on TV every New Year’s Day. Well, what happened was that the tournament was barely breaking even most years, so someone on the organizing committee suggested holding a football game to generate a bunch of revenue.
As envisioned, the game was to feature the best team from the western states playing the best team from the eastern states. However, in the inaugural game – played on January 1, 1902 – the eastern team (Michigan) crushed the western team (Stanford) by a score of 49-0. I don’t know if the Californians’ feelings were hurt or what, but for the next several years other sports were substituted for football. Given the immense popularity of college football today, it’s hard to believe that chariot and ostrich races were more popular than football, but so it was.
15 years later the game was resurrected. The first few games were played in nearby Tournament Park, but the game quickly grew so popular that a proper stadium became necessary. And so, in 1922 the “Tournament East-West Football Game” moved to the “Tournament of Roses Stadium”. Within a year, the stadium was called the “Tournament of Roses Bowl” (thanks to the Yale Bowl), and soon the game itself was just called the “Rose Bowl”.
I don’t know much about Brooke Addamo, other than that she is around 22 years old, is from Melbourne, Australia, was an unsuccessful contestant on season 6 of Australian Idol, and that she performs under the stage name Owl Eyes.
Her debut EP, Nightswim, came out a few weeks ago, and the title track is just sick:
Take my hand and speak to me Say this nightswim Will last for an eternity
If you pay any attention at all to IT security issues, you probably know that many (most?) computer viruses and malware aim to turn your computer into a “bot”. As part of a group of infected computers (known as a “botnet”), your computer would then be used by the virus’ author to send out spam, conduct Denial of Service attacks on other computers, or whatever other evil thing the author has in mind.
But there’s a new breed of malware out there attacking WordPress installations. Why? Because most WordPress installations are hosted at data centers, which have several times the bandwidth of your puny home connection.Which makes total sense if you think about it: if having horsepower and bandwidth are the ultimate goals of a botnet creator, why bother with home users and their rinky-dink Pentium 4s and 1.5Mbps DSL connections? Think big and go for a quad-Xeon box at a T4 data center!
Anyway, the point is, I have really jacked up the security on this site as of late. One thing I’ve done is to add two-factor authentication. The second is that I’ve installed a plug-in which tracks login attempts and IP addresses. If unsuccessful, it locks out the IP address for 72 hours and emails me the IP address of the rogue computer.
So here’s a new policy: if your IP address tries to login to the admin portion of my site more than three times, your IP address is locked out for 72 hours. If your IP address is locked out more than once, your IP is banned permanently.
If you feel that your IP address was banned unjustly, please let me know (and seriously, I’d love to hear your story) and I’ll look in to it.
I’ve got this giant stack of digital stuff on my desk (ok, they’re just bookmarks), so let’s get it on!
– Actor Ashton Kutcher made a biopic of former Apple head Steve Jobs. As part of “getting in to character”, Kutcher decided to go to Jobs’ famous “fruititarian” diet. Within days, Kutcher was in severe pain. Admitted to the hospital, his pancreas was all out of whack. What did Jobs die of? Pancreatic cancer. (story)
– This editorial from TorrentFreak talks about jail terms for unlocking mobile phones and how it shows the “true black heart” of the copyright monopoly. Which is funny, because Canipre, a company that helps movie studios sue downloaders was recently busted for using Flicker photographs without permission.
– There’s a new technique for estimating a person’s time of death… and it involves the brain’s internal clock. Neat, yet somehow scary.
– Speaking of science, some scientists are convinced that the Planck spacecraft has shown actual, physical evidence that our universe might not be the only one.
– Also from the world of science, the Suomi NPP satellite recently captured images of gravity waves caused by a cyclone near the Bay of Bengal. The pictures are fascinating!
– You might have heard this already, but Georgia Tech will soon offer a full online master’s degree for only $7,000. In what educators are calling a “first”, Tech will offer full, genuine CS master’s degrees to folks who can ante up the bargain basement price (well, and pass the coursework, of course).
– Cops in California went undercover at a local high school to bust a 17 year-old special needs kid for selling them marijuana. The kid – diagnosed with “Asperger’s and other disabilities” was at first excitedto make a new friend, especially one who called and texted him around the clock. But then the “friend” tried to get the kid to sell his prescriptions meds. When the kid refused, the “friend” badgered him to get him some weed. What I want to know is… why do cops have such a GIANT HARD ON to bust kids? (story)
– I love it when liberals fight each other! In what had to have been one of the oddest scenes ever, a group of transgendered men attacked feminists at a conference at Portland State University. So, basically, this particular bunch of feminists believe that “social roles based on sex are undesirable and harmful to women”. And this particular bunch of transgendered men believe that “social roles based on sex are natural and innate and that it is instead the unchanging nature of biological sex that is undesirable.” The men approached the women, who were sitting at a table with books and pamphlets. The men knocked the table over and destroyed the books. Fun!
If you’re any kind of fan of professional basketball, you might have noticed that scores from games in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s look more like NFL scores than NBA scores: 42-35, 31-28 or even 24-21. Why were scores so low back then? Were the all-white teams of the 1930s that bad at shooting the basketball?
Actually, no. The problem was that they hardly ever shot the ball at all. There was no shot clock, so a team could hold on to the ball as long as they wanted to. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for a team to nurse a lead by simply tossing the ball back and forth for 3 or 4 minutes at a stretch!
If that sounds incredibly boring… it was. By the 1950s, attendance at NBA games was nearing all-time lows and NBC was this close to dropping its contract with the league.
The crisis peaked on November 22, 1950, when the Fort Wayne Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons) took on the Minneapolis Lakers (now the LA Lakers). The Lakers had George Mikan, who was 6 ft 10 in and 245 lb. (for those of you outside the US, that’s “one really big dude” in metric). Mikan was named league MVP several times, held several scoring records, was a future Hall of Famer, and was the first commissioner of the ABA.
Needless to say, the outmatched Pistons decided to keep the ball away from Mikan as much as possible. So they held the ball as long as they could. In fact, the Pistons held the ball for ten solid minutes during one stretch of the fourth quarter. There were only four total points scored in the last quarter, and the final score ending up being an embarrassingly low 19-18. And a few weeks later the Indianapolis Olympians and Rochester Royals played a six-overtime game… in which one shot was attempted in each overtime… and that’s one shot total, not one shot by each team.
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.
“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
