Tom McMahon
The Strategy of Bingo. The Excitement of Chess.
05/09/2008
Banjo Lapel Pin
A great gift for the banjo lover/player in your life. But do banjo players ever wear clothes that have lapels? (Don't be confused by their confusing web page, you can still order just one lapel pin.)
Sports Journalism
From Wigderson Library:
I lost all respect for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sports section, and Drew Olsen in particular, when I read what a cancer Chuckie Carr was to the Milwaukee Brewers after he left the team. While he was with the team, there was no story. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other Wisconsin newspapers with sports sections are so institutionally tied to the sports that they are covering that they do no real coverage at all. These supposedly "accredited journalists" couldn't even find steroids in a locker room when baseball and football were awash in the stuff.
Yet they're great at reporting rumors (or even making stuff up) that will make a nice headline, complete with a "look inside" on the front page. How many times did ESPN retire Brett Favre? How many trade rumors are reported that turn out not to be true? How many single-source anonymous references make it into sports coverage?
They aren't even experts in the subjects they cover. Want proof? This football season watch how many of these "experts" who get paid to watch 40-plus hours of football, get paid to get inside information on the teams, get paid to analyze each game, do worse than 50-50 on making game predictions. If the guy who runs your office pool does better than half the writers at CBS Sportsline, there's something wrong with the writers at CBS Sportsline.
05/08/2008
Ted Key, 1912-2008: Creator of Peabody and Sherman
From the NY Times obituary:
- Ted Key also created Hazel
- Jay Ward, the creator of Bullwinkle, was a friend of Mr. Key’s brother, Leonard.
- Key's father was an immigrant from Latvia
Globalization
From Planet Proctor:
What is the truest definition of Globalization? Princess Diana's death, and here’s why: An English princess, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashes in a French tunnel in a German car with a Dutch engine driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky, followed closely by Italian Paparazzi on Japanese motorcycles. She was treated by an American doctor using Brazilian medicines.
This was sent to me by an American using Bill Gate’s technology. You're probably reading it on your computer with Taiwanese chips and a Korean monitor assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant and transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen and trucked to you by Mexican illegals!
That, my friends, is Globalization…
US Constitution Lapel Pin
Under $10. Makes a great gift for those friends of yours who are too liberal to wear an American Flag lapel pin. (via Pat Cunningham)
No Point In Pretending Anymore
An excerpt from Christopher Hitchens:
However, it was not really the class vote at which people were looking. In North Carolina, Senator Obama reaped almost one hundred per cent of a constituency which the commentators quite frankly called by its primary color.
In Indiana, that constituency is not such a large share of the electorate.
Nobody especially likes to bang on about this, but this is as good an explanation as any for the discrepancy between the two candidates and the two states.
And, since West Virginia and Kentucky are next up – and reporters are almost unconsciously describing these two states as for some reason more “natural” for the former First Lady – in a short while we will be seeing the pendulum of politics swing back again.
There is less and less point in pretending that this campaign is not “about” race.
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