Tom McMahon

Al Oerter And The Olympic Four-Peat

From ESPN Classic

Fortune Gordien. "Rink" Babka. Ludvik Danek. Jay Silvester. Between 1956 and 1968, they were supposed to win discus gold medals in the Olympics.

Al Oerter overcame all of them.

Perhaps more impressive, Oerter overcame his own body telling him to stop. Instead, he won four consecutive gold medals, making him the first athlete to four-peat in any Olympic event.

Quite a story . . .

Logitech io2 Digital Writing System

Logitech io2 Digital Writing System

The Logitech io2 pen is the second generation of an amazing tool that captures your handwritten notes into an electronic pen, converts them to text, and exports them to word-processing or e-mail programs. Thus you can convert notes from meetings, interviews, or whatever into editable documents. The pen will also capture shapes, tables, and charts.

The Volkswagen Microbus

From the New York Times

Not everyone was enraptured with the ungainly "bread loaf," as kinder critics called the early models. The first Microbus was skewered for being a 2,500-pound vehicle with motive power on par with today's riding lawnmowers. The van's size and shape brutally overtaxed the 1,131-cubic-centimeter, 25-horsepower engine, which was limited to a "long-distance maximum speed" of 47 miles an hour, according to the manual. The van porpoised down the road, its wheels tended to fold under in turns and it would all but stop in a headwind.

The versatile rear-engine layout was adapted to many forms including a pickup, a high-roof delivery van, a camper and the Kombi model with removable seats. As a public service vehicle, versions were produced as mail trucks and even ambulances, albeit very slow ones.

The VW bus was both crudely primitive and cleverly innovative.

As Mr. Clark demonstrated, it could be started with a hand crank, like a horseless carriage, until the late 1950's. It was so minimalist that a dashboard was an option. The heater pulled its warm air supply from across the engine, with all the attendant smoke and aroma. Air-conditioning? Surely you jest.

Word Of The Day: Captcha

An Example of a Captcha

You know, those thingees used for sign-ups so they know you're really human and not a robot (via Ben Hammersley, after a fashion)

The Limits Of A Hit TV Show

From Brent Bozell

Television today is so splintered, with so many choices, that a hit show -- even a No. 1 show -- doesn't translate into broad (and never mind majority) appeal. "Desperate Housewives" attracts less than 25 million viewers a week. Out of an estimated U.S. population of 290 million people, that's less than one in 10 Americans who cares for this allegedly massive hit show. That fraction of the country is a very lucrative fraction for ABC and its advertisers, but political and pop-culture theorists are drawing wild conclusions about an America riddled with hypocrisy with some rather addled mathematics.

By the same token, a show like NBC's "Will and Grace" is ranked 20th so far this season, averaging about 15 million viewers. That's very good ratings for a TV show these days, but it's awfully flimsy to take those 15 million Americans -- five percent of the population -- and say, voila, America favors gay marriage.

Constellations Postage Stamps

Constellations Postage Stamps

Coming next year from the US Postal Service

Nazi Doctor of Death Josef Mengele's Near-Fatal Hairball

From Der Spiegel

A diary and letters written by Josef Mengele that recently surfaced in police archives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, show that the infamous concentration camp mass murderer remained a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi until his death.

The medical history of the notorious Nazi doctor is so bizarre that it really doesn't fit the image of the cold and calculating monster of the concentration camps. At some point during the years after he fled prosecution in Germany, Mengele, terrified of being discovered, began chewing off the tips of his moustache hairs and swallowing them. After a few months, the hairs collected in his intestines into balls, blocking his digestive tract. It was a life-threatening condition.

Nevertheless, Josef Mengele, born in 1911, survived his case of intestinal obstruction. But the illness had such a profoundly debilitating effect on the man -- who treated prisoners like laboratory rats during the Nazi era, who surgically removed people's hearts while they were still alive and sliced newborns into pieces -- that he abandoned his idea of returning home to Germany after spending more than 30 years in exile. He was simply too weak.

Cadillac Armor

Cadillac Armor

Why? Because quality makes a difference:

Certain areas of vehicles, such as the roof pillars and door handles, are among the most difficult and time-consuming to armor. Our competitors often do not armor these areas to save time, reduce costs, and sell lower priced armored vehicles. They call this technique “probability armoring,” because an assailant’s bullet “probably” won’t penetrate the unarmored areas and hit someone inside.

At Cadillac, we don’t believe in leaving your safety to chance. We cover every possible angle of attack, leaving nothing to chance. Every armoring system includes overlapping armor at the seams and critical joints, to defeat all possible shot lines.

You can bet that if I ever need an armored car, I'll insist on Cadillac!

The GOP In Hollywood

From longtime Malibu resident Ben Stein

This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula's Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.

At a self-help meeting where men and women confess to drug use, betrayals, thefts, homicides with cars, at a break, a woman stealthily came up to me last Saturday and motioned me into a corner outside the room in Malibu. "I want to tell you there are some of us who agree with you. We have to keep it quiet because we want to get our kids into the right schools, but we're there. We're there. And there are more of us every day." Then she scuttled off into the night. Slamming crack can be spoken of with a smile, but not voting GOP. That could be dangerous.

But it's changing.

The Vladivostok Triumph Arch

The Vladivostok Triumph Arch