The Louisiana Superdome is, I’m convinced, the most intimidating place to play in the NFL. The Times‐Picayune measured crowd noise at key moments in last night’s game; after a critical defensive stop, it peaked at 119 decibels — about as loud as it can get without being quite dangerous for one’s hearing. For comparison, I googled around and found a reference to a 108‐decibel peak at one game at the RCA Dome (the former home of the Colts). Domes have fallen out of favor, on the whole, but there’s no beating them when you want to make the road team feel unwelcome.
Category: Tumbles
Saints 38, Patriots 17
The Saints are 11–0. Had you heard? I’ve been reserved so far, but I feel a sports‐gasm coming on that won’t subside until the end of the NFL season. I apologize in advance.
December 1, 2009
It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.
Thomas Fuchs just pushed out the alpha 5 release of scripty2. This is the first release to include the small handful of UI controls I’ve been writing. The controls are designed to be compatible with jQuery UI’s Theme API — meaning that, for instance, a theme built with ThemeRoller could be dropped into a site using scripty2, and vice‐versa. More to come!
Randy Newman’s Jewish awakening came rather abruptly. While in high school, he was invited to a country‐club cotillion. When the night of the ball arrived, he received a surprise phone call from the girl’s father. “I’m sorry, Randy,” the father said, “my daughter had no right to invite you, because no Jews are allowed.” Newman answered, “That’s all right, sir,” hung up the phone, and asked his father, “Hey, Dad, what’s a Jew?”
I’ve never really seen anything like [Drew Brees]. He’s maybe barely 6 feet tall and he moves around there like he’s seeing everything. I can’t see a thing half the time, and I’m the same height. He’s super special.
Stay on Target!
Terence Nowicki, Jr., is a freelance editorial cartoonist. Very often I find his take on the news to be more interesting than those of in‐house cartoonists at major newspapers.
October 18, 2009
I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate.
Brütal Legend
Yes, I wish it were longer. Yes, the side quests are a bit repetitive. But how can you resist a world crafted so lovingly and meticulously? Just now, while exploring, I came upon a graveyard. The headstones were wearing headphones.
So I was in Mountain View last week, helping the Mozilla Labs team re‐architect Bespin. Toward the end of the week, as we were doing some collaborative coding, I opened a terminal and typed j bespin to bring me straight to my checkout of the Bespin source — and Kevin and Joe simultaneously went, “Wait, what’d you just do?” I realized I’d been using autojump — the cd substitute that guesses what you mean — for over a year, and hadn’t yet pimped it to anyone. Use it! You’ll wonder where it’s been all your life.