Posts tagged “baseball”

• Okay, I am late to the party on this one, but my heart just grew two sizes when I discovered that Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr managed to surreptitiously, throughout the course of the 2022/23 NBA season, insert all the lyrics from the Taylor Swift song All Too Well into his post-game press conferences.
• The story of the Archimedes Palimpsest is fascinating. I saw someone mention it on Instagram and couldn’t believe it was true, but it appears to be a legitimate tale.
• The team at The Athletic put together a compelling argument that not only is Mahomes worth his new half-a-billion-dollar contract, but he might actually be better than Brady.
• I doubt you need me to tell you this, but Sally Field is just incredible in Remarkably Bright Creatures on Netflix. The movie is wonderful and we loved it.
• Renewables have surpassed global coal power for the first time in over a century! (The last time coal lost its lead as the world’s largest electricity source, the Treaty of Versailles was in review and Congress had just established a national park in Arizona named for its big hole in the ground.)
• Shohei Ohtani meets 100-year-old Nagasaki survivor
• Sure, they may be trying to jump on the Wordle bandwagon, and it’s a bit tricky to play, but the new Catalogues game from The New Yorker is pretty fun once you get the hang of it. – hat-tip @heidiyounggrasshopper
• You can’t produce a Field Notes edition of The Maltese Falcon and not expect me to automatically purchase it.
• This Smithsonian article explaining The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life was pretty interesting.
• Some good news on the public health front: Florida Republicans Refuse to Take Up DeSantis Bill Loosening Vaccine Mandates
• Need another reason to stop eating meat? A flesh-eating cattle parasite is spreading beyond Texas.
• The Voting Rights Act Was the Nice Version
• Asian jumping worms, an invasive, soil nutrient-gobbling earthworm that can leap a foot in the air, are moving rapidly across the country.
• A second detainee has died at an ICE facility in Louisiana where a recent inspection report found insanitary conditions, problems with medical care, and the use of excessive force.

• Italy’s famous Lovers’ Arch collapses into the sea on Valentine’s Day – via my little sister
• What the? There’s a species of mushroom that makes everyone who trips on it think they’re seeing dozens of tiny humans. As far as we know, it’s the only hallucinogenic that makes everyone have the same hallucinations. – via Kottke
• A startup called LightBar is paying everyday internet users to probe AI models for outputs that rip off copyrighted film and TV content, then packaging that evidence for studios to use in lawsuits, settlements, or licensing deals.
• Research suggests that drinking 2 to 3 cups of caffeinated coffee per day (or 1 to 2 cups of tea) is associated with a lower risk of dementia. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• My uncle had two small parts in the 1990 Tom Cruise NASCAR film, Days of Thunder, which was filmed partly in Daytona Beach and the surrounding area. He’s at the very beginning of the film for a few seconds as a reporter interviewing one of the racers and he appears again in the fake police officer prank as a Florida Highway Patrolman. He’s the very tall trooper with a mustache. Uncle Dic (Domenic Albanese) was a supreme exaggerator and teller of tall tales, but for some reason I always believed him – because it sounded so authentic – when he told us that while they were waiting to film the scene he and Robert Duvall got in a farting exchange that had Tom Cruise in stitches. (I am also in the movie. You can see me during the celebration after the last race, right behind Cruise’s car. I’m the dumb teenager wearing a leather jacket in Florida.)
• Take a few minutes to read the fascinating backstory behind the Benjamin Franklin medal that was used in the coin flip at Super Bowl LX and how Topps selected its list of the 75 best baseball cards of all time.
• The official trailer has been released for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Winter Olympics

• I don’t know if there is any possible way NBC could do a worse job this Olympics. Several times now I’ve managed to avoid all social media and my email, flipped to NBC to start watching, and caught the end of the local news team spoiling everything I was about to watch. Peacock doesn’t help much, either, as it seems every time I try to watch anything there I see a message telling me the event has just concluded or hasn’t started yet, or I click to watch speed skating and am shown women’s hockey instead. It’s all very frustrating.
• France’s Viral Ice Dancing Team Has A Dark Backstory
• Ukrainian Vladyslav Heraskevych is the most important athlete at the Olympics right now
• SNL always has great sketches for the Olympics. I liked this year’s about the terrified luge racer, but it doesn’t top the All-Drug Olympics or Jason Priestley (with Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman announcing) as the worst ice skater in history.
• Norwegian skier Atle Lie McGrath, grieving his grandfather’s passing at the start of the Olympics, was so distraught from losing the men’s slalom gold medal that he threw his poles, unstrapped his skis and walked toward the nearby woods to be alone.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things:

• The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner.
• Cardi B slammed the Department of Homeland Security after it mocked her for saying she’d “jump” ICE if they came after her fans during a show.
• A Florida handyman who received a pardon from POTUS for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has been convicted of multiple state charges of child molestation and exposing himself to children
• A Pennsylvania Olive Garden employee killed himself by plunging his head into a hot deep fryer. (When I was a teenager a broken piece of fryolator equipment caused me to submerge my right arm up to the elbow in 425°F peanut oil. I got second and third degree burns all over my arm and where the oil splashed, and it was easily the most excruciating pain I’ve ever experienced.)

• The Philadelphia Eagles have produced yet another awesome and fun Christmas video. – via The Kids Kickoff
• Missing Flamingo Thought to Be Living in France
• Beginning in the 1970s, Alan Rosen – the Indiana Jones of vintage sports cards – professed that there would always be a market for older cards and memorabilia, and history has proven him right.
• The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day – via kottke
• It’s tough to argue with anything on this list of 100 small steps you can take to live to 100. And some of them are even pretty fun. – via hurly
• The Food and Drug Administration unveiled a new blueprint for the regulation of bespoke drug therapies, a way for these treatments to quickly get to market if they meet certain standards.
• A cannon, three coins, and a porcelain cup were among the first objects Colombian scientists recovered from the depths of the Caribbean Sea where the mythical galleon San José sank in 1708.
• This Is Fine dot gif:
  • Over 30,000 Charlotte, North Carolina students skipped school in protest of ICE operations in the area.
  • The U.S. is becoming an Nvidia-state: How the AI Crash Happens
  • Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives
  • I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. Students chose to actively avoid learning because it’s boring and hard.
  • Paul Bojerski, a 79-year-old who was born to Polish parents in a WWII German refugee camp and who legally emigrated to the U.S. when he was 5, has been abducted by ICE in Florida. – via @oliviamesser
  • Prominently displaying the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom is a clear and obvious violation of the First Amendment. How is this even an issue?
  • Sex Workers & A Secret Charity: The Story Of Cory Mills’ ‘F*cking Bananas’ Afghanistan Mission – via @ronfilipkowski
  • This story is simply heartbreaking. A Teen in Love With a Chatbot Killed Himself. Can the Chatbot Be Held Responsible? – via New York Times Magazine

It’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.

American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking.
from We Used to Read Things in This Country, by Noah McCormack

• The paradox of horror: How scary films can soothe your anxiety
• Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, traded his notebook for a baseball. And the words kept coming.
• I didn’t realize until reading a recap at The Athletic that on Saturday night Will Smith hit the first extra-inning Game 7 homer in the history of the World Series. Oh, and the nail-biter peaked at 33.1M viewers and beat the last Game 7 (in 2019) by 10%, making it the most-watched MLB game since 2017.
• The New England Aquarium built a geriatric island for aging penguins to live in safety and dignity.
• Take a walk! A modest increase in physical activity can delay cognitive decline by three years or more, and Alzheimer’s symptoms decrease with just a few thousand steps a day. And new research shows exercise could help reduce anxiety as effectively as traditional talk therapy in as little as 8 to 12 weeks.
• This is pretty wild: [M]ost Americans in 1790 consumed an average [of] 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol a year. (Today the average is closer to “just” 2 gallons per year.)
• Adults ruined “6-7” for Halloween – via my wife
• The University of Florida Gators 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux became the tallest college basketball player ever.
• I’ve long loved The Point, but never knew the full story of the brilliant, baffling rise and fall of Harry Nilsson. – via my dad
• Things Can Only Get Better:
  • Federal agents drive off with 1-year-old girl after arresting her father in Los Angeles
  • Louisiana officials waited months to warn public of whooping cough outbreak – via @elizabethjacobs
  • One analytical model shows that the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. – via @newyorker.com
  • The United States of America continues to extrajudicially murder people.
  • A Food and Drug Administration official who resigned on Sunday was sued by a Canadian pharmaceutical company, which accused him of soliciting a bribe and tanking its stock with false statements as part of a revenge campaign against a former colleague.
  • Employees at The Washington Post uploaded a fake video to 8 social apps. Only one told users it wasn’t real.
  • East Wing ballroom donations by corporate owners create awkward moments for news outlets

• One of the largest sports collectibles forgery rings in the hobby has been busted in a bizarre fraud and forgery case that has rocked the hobby.
• A professional toy photographer recreated the amazing story of the Shackleton Arctic expedition using LEGO bricks and a Nikon DSLR camera.
• Tragic things are going to happen. Figuring out how and why is the complicated work of serious professionals.
• I really cannot argue with any of the films on this list of The Ten Best Screenplays of All Time, but I dramatically disagree with the order. I also cannot imagine not putting Casablanca first and not including Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or any of a half dozen other Spielberg movies.
• Spontaneously Exploding Prosecco sounds like it would be a good late-90s Italian punk band name.
• The ‘rising fastball’ was a tantalizing myth. Then teams started teaching Induced Vertical Break.
• I agree with most of the points made in this essay on why Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in The Natural still resonates with sports fans. (It’s one of my all-time favorite movies.)
• An Amateur’s Guide to Working with the Media in a Hostage Crisis

• Florida surgeon general says state will eliminate all vaccine mandates.
• Consider those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened. Now imagine a world in which everybody is like that about everything—because nothing can be proven. – Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months
• The current administration’s shortcut rule-making is shortchanging all of us.
• His Book on Charlie Kirk Was About to Come Out. Then His Subject Was Murdered. (See also: Florida Reporter Suspended After Texting MAGA Congressman to Ask If He Still Supports Campus Carry After Kirk Shooting)
• The Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop and spread what it claims is patriotic education.
• It’s painful to read the archived story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them.

• Andor was phenomenal. Full stop. It wasn’t simply a great Star Wars story. It was a brilliant story even if you had — quite inconceivably — never even heard of Star Wars. It also managed to stay full-throttle awesome from S1E1 through S2E12, and somehow it did this even though everyone watching knew exactly what happens next, which had to have been unimaginably difficult to execute. (And I am not ashamed to admit that I didn’t realize Andor was “and/or” until several episodes into the first season, even though anyone unlucky enough to be the recipient of a professional email from me can tell you that’s one of my favorite conjunctions.)
• Related? The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
• The New York Liberty Became the First $450M Women’s Team
• I (mostly) agree with the list Bruce Feldman compiled of the 25 best players of the millennium (so far). I have bigger issues with the list David Ubben put together of the best college football games since the turn of the century. I was somewhat surprised to see Florida ranked tenth in the list Stewart Mandel made of the best programs of the 2000s. It’s hard to believe how long it’s been since we had the best QB in history.
• Take It on the Run by REO Speedwagon holds up.
• Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Oneil Cruz recently sent a home run out of PNC Park at 122.9 mph (against the Milwaukee Brewers), recording the hardest hit ball in the Statcast era.
• (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:
  • Dozens of staffers walked out when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya promoted an unproven COVID origin story.
  • [Current] administration orders Michigan coal plant to stay open
  • The Belief System Behind the Palm Springs Bombing
  • “[D]on’t worry about making your products safe for your customers. Even if you kill them, just pay a small fine and move on.” Apparently not prosecuting criminals is how to make America great again.
  • It’s always a bummer to learn that a perfect domain name is already taken.
  • Every high school theology, civics, social studies, and American history teacher should show the Bible lesson scene from The West Wing (The Midterms, S2E3) at least once each semester.

• The SNL 50th-Anniversary special drew almost 15M viewers, becoming NBC’s most-watched primetime entertainment telecast in five years. (For comparison, Super Bowl LIX had over 127M viewers.)
• Republicans have reintroduced the SAVE Act, a bill that could disenfranchise millions of American voters. Feeling helpless? Email Your Senators to Vote NO. Call Your Senators to Vote NO. It’s not nothing, and it really does make a difference.
• “This is a blunt-force budget cut with no clear strategy—gutting programs without considering their impact or even how services could be improved for the American people, often spinning public health into fear and chaos.”
• Related: The USDA is scrambling to rehire fired workers who were involved in the government’s response to the ongoing bird flu outbreak that has devastated egg and poultry farms over the past three years.
• Senate Democrats have the power to block federal contracts to Tesla and SpaceX. It’s the path to pushing [him] out of politics.
• Scratch Huntington Beach, CA off your list of travel destinations. Former Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting there after protesting the installation of a disgusting “MAGA” plaque at a local library.
• I graduated a long, long time ago and I still bleed orange and blue, but there’s something more than a little disgusting about the University of Florida begging me for cash when they have a $6B endowment and are annually paying millions of dollars to multiple football coaches they fired years ago. – via me
• Is ‘Zone 2’ the Magic Effort Level for Exercise?
• A new study on more than 17,000 people discovered that too little sex is linked to cardiovascular disease and a higher risk of all-cause mortality.
• Major League Baseball will employ what it calls the automated ball-strike system, or ABS, in a big-league spring training game for the first time this week.
• Dirpy is a handy site that lets you rip YouTube videos to mp3. (e.g. Doechii rapping about anxiety over the Gotye song Somebody That I Used To Know, Taylor Swift performing You Belong with Me and Untouchable on SNL)

• I loved reading this story about an 11-yo who pulled one of the most valuable baseball cards in history. The best quote from the article? “My brain pooped.”
• Hackers are hijacking WordPress sites to push malware on unsuspecting visitors. This is another good reason to make sure your plugins are core files are routinely updated.
• This short article about the psychology of scene transitions in film is really interesting. (Watch the video, too!)
• One of the more concerning consequences of the current administration is that when the most powerful nation in history is ruled by feckless ignorant toads, those who lust for power elsewhere are emboldened:
  • Paramilitary group attacks an open market in Sudan, killing 54 people and wounding scores
  • Congo says 773 dead in week-long fighting as military tries to repel Rwanda-backed rebels
• Last night I realized I can watch Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough on BBC through AppleTV. I had to pay for it, but I think that’s pretty reasonable. I was pleasantly surprised to see Steve Brusatte make an appearance. I read his book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World a year or two ago and loved it. It’s really mind-blowing how much more we know about dinosaurs than we did when I was fascinated with them in elementary school. Scientists might even have finally discovered where dinosaurs first evolved! (The documentary is titled Dinosaur Apocalypse on AppleTV for some reason. I guess that sounds much more dramatic.)
• More Bird Flu Bad News: Infectious disease expert warns wind-blown avian feces may be route of transmission.
• Google searches for “adult tennis lessons” were up 245 percent shortly after the premiere of the Zendaya love-triangle sports-flick Challengers. – via The Athletic
• After reading a few of her Bluesky posts, I decided to subscribe to the tech newsletter rendezvous with cassidoo.
• Just in case you were under the misguided impression that the current administration cares about, y’know, people:
  • The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been fired.
  • On Monday the Senate confirmed fossil fuel executive Chris Wright to serve as Secretary of Energy.
• A Coup in Plain Sight: An Explainer as the Crisis Solidifies

• Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
• Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
• ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
• Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
• On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
• You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.