Rick Reilly: You make the call. Little‐league championship, bottom of the ninth, two outs: do you pitch to the star hitter or walk him so you can face the cancer survivor? One coach chose option B and is being tarred and feathered for it. I’m not saying I’d feel good about it, but if I were in his shoes I’d do the same damn thing. Inherent in sports strategy is the recognition that not all players are of equal skill. Reilly says it’s supposed to be about fun, not strategy, but how can you have the former without the latter?
Left‐handed men see better paychecks. There’s no causation here, folks. Left‐handed men who attended college make 17 percent more than their right‐handed colleagues. That’s because the IQ distribution of left‐handed people is flatter than that of right‐handed people — we’re more likely to be creative, yes, but we’re also more likely to have learning disorders. So by chopping off the bottom half of that curve you’d confirm what I could’ve told you already.
After Monday’s keynote confirmed that there would be no iPhone in the near future, I walked into a nearby CompUSA and walked out with an unlocked Nokia 6682. I’d been waiting for an N80, but at this point it’s only slightly more feasible than that Star Trek communicator‐thingie. Tonight I finally figured out the proper settings to use it as a GPRS/EDGE modem for my MacBook Pro. 200kbps downstream! Somebody pinch me!
Ze Frank on how to combat terrorism. Ze can explain anything to anyone. And he does so with more eloquence than anyone who gets paid to represent me in government. Remind me again — why do we pay them, and what is it that they do?
ScriptDoc, an open standard being developed by the Aptana dudes (with help from John Resig of JQuery). JavaScript needs an authoritative documentation format, so if you’re a JS developer, sign up for the forums and start participating!
Rogers Communications is out $2.13M CDN because of an extra comma. Someone at their soon‐to‐be‐ex‐law firm doesn’t understand appositional phrases. This reminds me of Ed, one of my favorite shows, in which the main character is fired from his job at a New York law firm because he omits a comma from a contract, thereby costing his firm millions.
[Carlos Mencia]’s a guy who announces he’s about to be edgy, starts a joke, in the middle of it stops to remind you he’s being edgy, and then congratulates the audience when he’s done with a joke for being brave enough to get through his edginess, and then warns them he’s about to be edgy again. If he would stop with the three warnings and the one congratulation for being edgy, he could cram three more jokes in there… You should never have to go, “Hang on, people, ’cause it’s about to get fuckin’ dark! If your soul has a seatbelt, you better strap in, because —” okay, right now, you’re not dangerous.
It’s not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters… It’ll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon’s Plan, or The Hitch‐Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses “a great disturbance in the Plot.”
Gaming Archaelogy: R.O.B. R.O.B. was Nintendo’s Robotic Operating Buddy, the toy red herring robot that got the original NES into stores after the video game crash of 1983. I have vague memories of this thing, but totally forgot how freaking slow it was.
I can’t quantify how surreal this is: Ladysmith Black Mambazo is asked to record a DVD commentary track for a Saturday Night Live “TV Funhouse” short: Ladysmith Black Mambazo in Outer Space (3.5MB MP4). While they’re there, they run into Mr. T. and chill with him. There’s photographic evidence. Quoth Mambazo: “It was quite an honor to have such a famous tv show do such a cartoon featuring our group.”
