“I was twenty-one years old and working at this local station in the sports department and Mickey Mantle came by as part of a promotional tour. He came into the sports office and wound up sitting there while the PR guy was doing some other stuff. So we’re in this room together, but I’m not going to bother him. He’s Mickey Mantle, right? The office had TV screens with different feeds and games that are going on, but one of the screens had the live feed from Boston Garden. So now it’s like 4:30 p.m., and the lights are not even on at the Garden, but Larry Bird is out there shooting, as is his pregame ritual. He would always be out there three hours before anyone else, shooting a half an hour or an hour by himself. Not even anyone retrieving the ball.
So Mantle sits back and starts watching Bird shooting, and two minutes go by, and I notice Bird hasn’t missed a shot. Two more minutes by, Bird still hasn’t missed a shot. And I see Mantle start to sit up, to get on the edge of his chair and get more and more intently focused on watching this. No joke, Bird has probably taken a hundred shots in a row and not missed one. Mantle is just totally amazed by what he’s seeing, and I’m watching him watch Bird. I’m getting a real kick out of this because I’m seeing this guy, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, watching one of the greatest basketball players of all time, all the while knowing that there are only two people in the world who are are aware of what’s going on now, and it’s me and Mickey Mantle.
I think Bird was shooting for close to ten minutes without missing a shot, and finally Mantle gets to the point where he has to say something. He’s just so amazed by what he’s been seeing that he looks at me and says, ‘This boy doesn’t miss.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘Yeah, but you’re Mickey Mantle.””
– ESPN Producer Bill Fairweather,
as quoted in Those Guys Have All
The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN
In this History Blog post, I talked about Robert Fortune, the Scot who almost single-handedly made tea the national drink of Great Britain.
The problem that needed solving was this: the British were absolutely mad for Chinese tea. However, the Chinese weren’t interested in any of the goods the British wanted to trade for tea. Instead, they demanded payment in silver. Shipping silver halfway around the world to buy tea wasn’t just risky, it also caused inflation at home, too… as Isaac Newton found out. So the East India Company set up a trade triangle in which British goods were shipped to India and traded for opium – which the Chinese loved. The opium was shipped to China, where it was exchanged for tea, which was shipped back to the UK. And everyone was happy.
Well, everyone except the Chinese government. Needless to say, the Chinese were angry that the British (and French and Americans) were shipping tons of addictive drugs into their country. After several diplomatic attempts failed to find a solution, the Chinese decided to go to war against the Westerners. Which seemed like an easy win: the Chinese had an army of 200,000 to go against Britain’s 19,000 troops. And the Chinese were clearly superior to the European barbarians. How could they lose?
As it turned out, they lost. Badly. China’s sense of racial superiority ran headlong into Britain’s modern weapons and tactics. The war lasted 3 years, 5 months, 1 week and 4 days, and China lost 20,000 men to just 69 for British forces. And in almost every battle, the British played the role of the 1995 Chicago Bulls to China’s [insert your area’s worst high school basketball team here]. And so, on August 29, 1842, representatives of the Qing Empire boarded the HMS Cornwallis (ironic?) and signed the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty gave the British five “treaty ports”, in which they would have considerable autonomy. The Chinese also agreed to pay the British $21 million in silver dollars for various reparations on a three-year installment plan, with 5% interest charged for late payments. The Chinese also gave the British the island of Hong Kong, which will be important later.
The Chinese weren’t happy with the Treaty of Nanking. They tried to ignore it whenever possible, or halfheartedly enforce it when compelled to. In 1844, French officials signed the Treaty of Huangpu and American officials signed the Treaty of Wangxia. These treaties gave French and American traders rights similar to those enjoyed by the British, but with one crucial difference: there was a clause in both treaties whereby they could be renegotiated every 12 years. And, because of China’s lack of enthusiasm for enforcing those treaties, the French and Americans fought for more concessions in 1856 when they came up for renewal. And the British decided that they too wanted to renegotiate the Treaty of Nanking, something the Chinese flat-out refused to do.
– You’ve probably heard this by now, but a school in Beaver County, Pennsylvania was recently put on lockdown… because of the theme song to Will Smith’s Fresh Prince of Bel Air TV show. It seems a receptionist at a local optometrist’s office called the mobile phone of Travis Clawson, a senior at Ambridge Area High School, to confirm an upcoming appointment. Clawson had the Fresh Prince theme as his voicemail greeting. The receptionist, apparently the only American unfamiliar with the song, misinterpreted the line “[s]hooting some b-ball outside of the school” as “shooting them all outside the school”. Panicked, the woman called police, who shut down the school for a half hour and questioned Clawson for three hours. Oooops! (link)
– It could be worse: 18 year-old Alisa Massaro, of Joliet, Illinois, had a necrophilia fetish so bad that she could contain it no longer. Her longtime boyfriend, the 24 year-old Joshua Miner, allegedly hatched a plan in which his friend Bethany McKee, 18, would lure two men to Massaro’s house with promises of “sex and video games”. Miner’s other friend, Adam Landerman (the son of a police officer) assisted. Landerman allegedly “surfed” on the backs of the two dead men, and later (allegedly) joined Miner and Massaro for a three way on top of the corpses. Jesus… what’s wrong with people? (link)
– Thanks to bizarre urban planning, there is a house on Anna Catherine Drive in Orlando that is 50 feet from, and shares a backyard with, a home on Summer Rain Drive. But to actually drive from one house to another takes seven miles of roads. According to Google Maps, the drive takes 20 minutes. (link)
– The FCC has long held dominion over the nation’s telecommunications network. But it has been reluctant to get involved with regulating ISPs, VoIP providers, or any other data-based industries that use IP instead of a traditional circuit-switching network. So AT&T has a cunning plan to convert its entire network to IP-based communication, effectively “de-regulating” itself. The old telephone network, which you helped pay for with your tax dollars, would be dead and buried, and AT&T would be free do… well, so whatever it wanted, and damn the FCC for having the gall to try and stop them. Look, I’m as much of a “free market guy” as they come, but it’s clear that the telcos and cable companies have done a disastrous job with broadband access. America ranks 9th in the world in overall average broadband speed, but we pay an average of $528 a year for the privilege, which ranks us a paltry 21st out of 33 countries in similar speed tiers. Yet the idiots who run Time Warner Cable (which, I realize, is not AT&T) go whining to the North Carolina legislature when a small town like Wilson, NC gets fed up with their slow service and wants to create their own municipal broadband network (result: North Carolina has some of the highest broadband prices in the nation, despite Research Triangle Park being second only to Silicon Valley in the number of tech firms. In fact, Charlotte has the most expensive broadband in the entire country, more than even New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C). And guess what? Time Warner Cable CTO Irene Esteves recently said that consumers “don’t want” gigabit Internet. Well, no, not for $500/month we don’t. But if Google Fiber came to Belmont, NC I can assure Ms Esteves that I’d switch over so fast it’d make her head spin.
– I have no interest in having kids, but this article at the Daily Fail has some interesting info about old wives’ tales about pregnancy and scientific truth (or the lack thereof) about them.
– Did you ever tie a note on a balloon and let it go? It seems like every school kid did when I was young, as a way to teach kids about weather patterns and geography. A kid in England did this not too long ago, and his balloon floated all the way to New South Wales, Australia! That’s 10,545 total miles… neat-o!
– The city of Ixonia, Wisconsin was named at random. It seems that residents couldn’t agree on a name for their new town, so on January 21, 1846, a young resident named Mary Piper drew random letters from a hat. She continued until something approaching a name was formed.
– Interested in medieval embalming practices? Who isn’t? Hot on the heels of the discovery of Richard III’s remains in a parking lot in northern England, a group of French researchers released their report on the heart of England’s Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart. It was a custom in Richard’s day for hearts to be removed from bodies and preserved separately from the body. Richard’s heart was apparently wrapped in linen, preserved with mercury, and then soaked in extracts of myrtle, daisy, mint, pine, oak, poplar, plantain and bellflower. The heart was lost for several centuries, then found by accident in 1838. The heart had turned to dust, and it was this dust that was analyzed by the French researchers. They also confirmed that Richard likely died of gangrene, and was not poisoned, as was sometimes rumored. (link)
– Poor Lauren Silberman. She became the first woman to appear at the NFL Combine (a week long “scouting camp” for players who’ve recently left college). I can just imagine her, setting the ball up on the tee… shaking her arms a couple of times to loosen up… doing a couple of small jumps to prepare… then thinking to herself: “Here goes… I’m going to strike at the heart of this male-dominated, patriarchal institution… I’m going to free all my fellow sisters to… DAMMIT!”:
On the last Thursday of every November, millions of American families get together and eat a huge meal. It’s called Thanksgiving, and was originally celebrated by the Pilgrims in honor of their first harvest in 1621. It didn’t become a regular holiday in the United States until the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln called for a day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens” on the last Thursday of November in 1863.
One of the hallmarks of the Thanksgiving meal is a roasted turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), a large bird native to the New World. But why is it called a “turkey”? Does it have anything to do with the country of the same name?
Sort of, yes. Europeans have eaten guineafowl for centuries. These are large birds native to West Africa (which is where Guinea is, and where the gold came from that the British later minted into gold coins also called Guineas). But the English never hunted the birds themselves. The birds were captured in Africa and shipped to Turkey, where merchants sold them on to customers in central Europe. Because they “came from Turkey”, the English called the birds “Turkey fowl” (or “Turkey hen” or “Turkey cock”, if you wanted to be specific).
So when explorers arrived in North America, they saw these huge birds and called them “Turkey fowl”, and later on, just “turkeys”. Although they were wrong – guineafowl and American turkeys are totally different birds – the name stuck.
But it wasn’t just the English who got it wrong. The bird is called turcaí in Irish and twrci in Welsh, both borrowing from the English “turkey”. And in Armenia, Catalonia, France and Israel they’re called “Indian chickens” (as in “India”, not “Native American”). This is also hinted at in Malta, Poland and Turkey, where the bird’s names have allusions to India (in fact, Turks call them hindi).
In Dutch, the word for turkey is kalkoen, meaning “from Calicut” (Calcutta). Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish and Estonian use some variant of the Dutch, like kalkun, kalkúnn, or kalkon. And, thanks to colonialism, it’s also the word used in Papiamento, the native language of the Lesser Antilles, especially Aruba and Curaçao.
Do you use the “Send to” folder in Windows? I do. In most cases, it’s easier to right-click a file and choose “Send to > Mail Recipient” than it is to open a new email and attach the file manually. And before I started using Notepad++ (which adds an “Open with Notepad++” entry to the context menu), I’d often add a shortcut to Notepad to the SendTo folder; this allowed me to open any type of file by right-clicking and choosing “Send to > Notepad”.
A couple of nights ago I was thinking about how often I drag and drop files from some folder on my computer to my Dropbox folder, and I thought how cool it would be to add Dropbox to the SendTo folder. But then I thought it would be even better to have a Dropbox folder in SendTo, with shortcuts to my different Dropbox folders, like “Photos” and “Public”. That way I could just right-click a file and choose “Send to > Dropbox > Public” to share a file with someone.
Only problem is, Microsoft completely screwed this up in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (and, if I could figure out how to test it, possibly Windows 8). In Windows XP, you could easily do such a thing by creating a subfolder in the SendTo folder and adding whatever shortcuts you wanted to that folder. The subfolder would expand and you’d could access the shortcuts there:
Click to enlarge
In Vista, Microsoft changed this so that you can still put a folder in SendTo, but it no longer expands… so no more cascading icons for you:
click to enlarge
WHY would Microsoft remove such a handy feature from the “latest and greatest” versions of their operating system? I can’t imagine that it posed any kind of security threat, and the people who really used the feature must have really liked it. Say you’re a software\web developer of some kind, and you use several apps to edit various documents. In XP could could have them all in one handy SendTo subfolder; in Vista\7\8, you have to put every one in the root of SendTo, making it harder to use and a mile long. Good job, Microsoft!
ISSUE #2
Is anyone else getting sick of seeing this on Google results pages?
click to enlarge
I was searching for a place to buy those limited edition Lay’s potato chips, and Google “helpfully” corrected me by showing me the results for “Lays” chips instead of “Lay’s” chips. The only problem is… the brand name of the chips is Lay’s:
I also like how every result in my screen cap refers to them as “Lay’s” chips!
This is happening more and more often. Not long before Christmas, I thought I’d search for a friend from elementary school. His last name is “Saunders”. Google instead showed me “Sanders”. There is no famous person with my friend’s first name and the last name “Sanders” (no, his first name wasn’t “Colonel”). As near as I could tell, there are as many semi-famous “Sanders” as there are “Saunders”. So thanks, Google. Ever tried searching for the Petroleum Research Fund by its initials – PRF? You get “Showing results for PDF”. Thanks, jackass. Searching for Firefly actor Adam Baldwin? Surely you meant “Alec Baldwin”, right? Searching for info about Katy Perry’s birth name, “Katheryn Hudson”? We’ll show you the results for “Kate Hudson” instead!
I don’t get the blind love everyone has for Google. They’ve repeatedly shown that they don’t trust their users worth a damn. As author Andrew Blum (“Showing results for Andrew Bloom”) said: “Their stance is the corporate equivalent of a 1950s-era gynecologist who believes women can’t comprehend what’s being done to their own bodies.” And goddamn is it annoying.
The ACC released the official 2013 football schedule today, and I’ve created downloadable versions of Georgia Tech’s schedule that work with both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail\iTunes.
As you probably know, game times and TV coverage aren’t sometimes known until a couple of weeks before the game. Unlike my famous Steelers schedules – which include the kickoff time and the TV network – this schedule has the games starting at 8AM and lists the location of the game instead of the network (“Bobby Dodd Stadium, Atlanta, GA”, instead of “ESPN2″). A reminder is scheduled for 13:00 (1:00PM ET) the day before each game.
The download is available two formats: the traditional CSV format (used by Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Calendar) and the iCalendar format (used by Google Calendar and iTunes\iPhone). The CSV version of the schedule is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 98 or later. It might also work with any calendar app that can import calendar events from CSV files; it has only been tested with Outlook 2010, however. The iCal version of the schedule has not been tested at all. I used this handy online tool to convert the CSV to iCal format. If you experience any problems with it, please take it up with the converter’s author and not me!
In a change for 2013, I have decided to put the CSV and iCal files into the same download package. Be sure to import the right one after downloading!
Outlook users may follow these simple instructions to import the schedule. Make sure to read the all the directions below before you begin, as there are some options you may wish to change before importing the calendar:
Download the file to your desktop and unzip.
For OUTLOOK 2007 and earlier: select “File” > “Import and Export” > “Import from another program or file”, then click “Next”. For OUTLOOK 2010: Select “File” > “Open” > “Import” > “Import from another program or file”, then click “Next”.
Choose “Comma Separated Values (Windows)”, then click “Next”.
Use the “Browse” button to select the CSV file you unzipped in step 1.
On the next screen make sure to select “Calendar” as the destination then click “Next” and “Finish”.
DISABLING REMINDERS: If you wish to disable the reminders, open the CSV file and change the value of “reminder on/off” (column G) to FALSE for each game before you import the Calendar into Outlook.
CHANGING “SHOW TIME AS”: By default, the entries will display their time as “Free” on your calendar. If you wish to change this to something else, change the value of each entry in Column V (“Show Time As”) from FREE to “1? (Tentative), “2? (Busy), “3? (Free) or “4? (Out of the Office) – without the quotes.
TROUBLESHOOTING: If you try to import the schedule but don’t see any of the games listed in your calendar, shut Outlook down (open Task Manager to make sure that OUTLOOK.EXE is not running) and re-open Outlook and try the import again. If you’re still having problems, leave a comment below and I’ll try to help!
VERSION INFORMATION: These files were tested on February 25, 2013 on a computer running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and 32-bit Microsoft Office 2010. It was scanned with Microsoft Security Essentials 4.2.223.0 and found to be virus-free. It’s the exact same file I’ve used for a decade now, so it should work for just about everyone.
As you’ve probably heard by now, potato chip giant Lay’s is having a contest to introduce a new flavor of potato chips. They’ve narrowed the field to three flavors and released limited quantities of the chips. We consumers are being asked to vote on which flavor we like best: Sriracha, Chicken & Waffles or Cheesy Garlic Bread. I went to several stores over the past couple of weeks and finally tracked them down this past Thursday at my local CVS:
Which chip will reign supreme… at least in my book? Read on, folks, for the Great Chip Battle of 2013!
“Allez cuisine!”
SRIRACHA
SMELL: Like potato chips, with a faint whiff of Sriracha-like vinegar.
APPEARANCE: Mostly golden brown, with a few chips coated in a faint pink dust. They’re not nearly as red as Lay’s “Flamin’ Hot” chips, but that’s not a bad thing if you don’t want to stain your fingers!
TASTE: The chips do taste faintly of Sriracha, although it’s kind of subtle. Like the buzz from cheap macrobrew, the heat doesn’t come on until you’ve had a few. In my book, the Sriracha flavor isn’t nearly strong enough, and is crippled by an annoyingly sweet flavor. The ingredients list says that sugar is part of the “Sriracha seasoning”, and I’ll be damned if I can taste that much sugar in genuine Huy Fong Sriracha!. Of course, I may be biased here. I put Sriracha on damn near anything humans can consume: pizza, soup, hot dogs, eggs, tacos, chili, burgers, pork rinds, fried okra, blackeyed peas, mac and cheese… almost everything. If it’s not cake, cookies or ice cream, I’m probably putting Sriracha on it. And these chips, while good, were a bit of a let down. I need to dip them in actual Sriracha sauce to get the flavor I need want, and that just defeats the purpose of having a Sriracha chip.
CHICKEN & WAFFLES
SMELL: After an initial explosion of some kind of “maple syrup-like” aroma, the chips began smelling like old potatoes. There was a strange musty, dirt-like smell that was just kind of… odd.
APPEARANCE: Mostly golden brown, with a few specks of spice here and there.
TASTE: Totally bizarre. At first I mostly tasted some kind of artificial syrup flavor. I hate to sound like a food snob here, but I only eat real maple syrup, and preferably Grade B syrup at that. But as I continued through the bag, I noticed another taste… was that.. sage? I never really tasted anything that reminded me of chicken, which is odd, given that Nabisco conquered that problem with Chicken in a Biskit crackers all the way back in 1964. So it seems as if the chips have the taste of the seasoning that comes on fried chicken, but not the chicken itself. And as I went through the bag I’d get the occasional burst of flavor the reminded me exactly of a breakfast cereal my sister and I ate as kids. But for the life of me, I can’t place it. Golden Grahams? Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Did they make French Toast Crunch back in 1983? All in all, the chips aren’t unpleasant, and I can see where they were really aiming for the “chicken and waffles” flavor. I’m just not sure they hit the mark.
CHEESY GARLIC BREAD
SMELL: A vague, artificial “cheese and garlic” aroma. It’s not unpleasant, but it smells like “letdown”.
APPEARANCE: Golden brown, with a golden powder on them and a few specks of spice.
TASTE: Wow! I can’t taste any “bread” flavor, but the cheesy garlic taste is really there! Flavors of Parmesan cheese dominate, but the amazing thing is that it somehow has that slightly nutty taste that Parmesan gets after it’s toasted. And then the cheese mellows out to a kind of bulky, mellow, mozzarella kind of taste. It lingers in your mouth like an “Italian style” macaroni and cheese dish with lots of garlic and mozzarella.
I have been a hardcore Firefox user since at least 2005. But I still use Internet Explorer from time to time. For example, because my netbook has limited CPU and RAM, I usually close Firefox (and its 6-15 open tabs) when I’m not using it. If I want a web browser to check one thing really quickly, I’ll typically just use Internet Explorer rather than wait for Firefox to open and load all those tabs.
Because I mostly use Firefox, if I happen to be using IE for whatever reason and see something I want to bookmark, I’ll usually just drag the favicon from the IE address bar to the desktop. This has traditionally created a standard desktop shortcut that’ll open in the user’s default browser. I can click on the shortcut later to open the link in Firefox, or drag the shortcut to my Dropbox folder so I can use it on my desktop machine or Android phone.
But then Microsoft went and screwed this up. In Windows 7, Microsoft changed this behavior so that if you drag an icon from the IE address bar to the desktop you create a “pinned shortcut” instead, one that only opens in IE… which is a nifty feature if you’re an IE user. But what if you want to create a good, old-fashioned shortcut that opens in the default browser?
You have two options.
The first is to hold down the SHIFT key as you drag and drop. This will create a “normal” shortcut that will open in Firefox, Chrome or whatever your default browser is.
The second is to drag and drop as usual, but then change the shortcut’s extension from .website to .url. Unfortunately, there’s no way (that I can see) to do this from the Windows UI. So you’ll have to break out the command-line and type something like
ren *.website *.url
at the desktop (or wherever you saved the .website shortcut). You can also, of course, do this with any existing pinned shortcuts, too.
East Village Radio is an online radio station based out of New York City’s East Village. The station began broadcasting on 88.1 FM in 2003, but after an article about the station appeared in the New York Times, the FCC noticed that they had no broadcasting license (oops!). And so EVR was forced to go Internet-only.
It’s a “community-oriented” station, meaning that it has a wide variety of programming, much like a college station. I’d listen to the station more, but it seems like every time I think “hey, what’s on EVR?” it’s a Norwegian Death Metal show or six hours of Trinidadian rap. Having said that, I do make an effort to check out my favorite show, “The Rest Is Noise” with Delpine Blue, which airs every Wednesday at noon ET.
I was excited to hear that former Joy Division\New Order bassist Peter Hook would be on the January 30th show to promote his new book: Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. I even added the show to my Outlook calendar so I wouldn’t forget!
So the time came, and Hook was indeed on the show. The interview was interesting, and the music really great. As the interview was ending, Blue mentioned a contest in which all one needed to do to win an autographed copy of the book was to leave a comment on the EVR site. I never win ANYTHING in contests, but went ahead and left a comment anyway.
Imagine my surprise when, one week later, I received this in my email:
Woo-Hoo! Like I said, I never win ANYTHING in online contests, despite having entered hundreds of them since joining the Internet in 1996.
And, this past Tuesday, the book arrived!
The autograph:
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So… a BIG THANKS to the staff at EVR for picking me to win the book! If you’re looking for cool new tunes, be sure to check out East Village Radio!
