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Gladwell’s reading Game of Shadows (which alleges that Barry Bonds took steroids) and proposes that record setters like Bonds, Flo Jo, and Bob Beamon should be subjected to a high degree of statistical analysis before their records should be allowed to stand. (followup)
This Onion story is right on the edge between humor and tasteless: Kent State Basketball Team Massacred By Ohio National Guard In Repeat Of Classic 1970 Matchup. I laughed, but I felt bad about it.
Update: The burger w/donut buns is not a new invention…it’s commonly called the “Luther Burger” after Luther Vandross. Double true. (thx, scott)
“What would your ideal fantasy-baseball lineup be if you had to create it using only characters from classic Nintendo video games?” Toad and Mario from Super Mario Bros make the starting lineup.
MC Hammer has posted a love letter to Barry Bonds on his weblog. “As you close in on the record, and the day of reckoning is at hand, there will be many attemps by the bloodhounds to shake you and force you to quit.” David Jacobs thinks the fans and the media are being hypocritical about Bonds’ situation.
Not a big surprise, but it looks like Barry Bonds took all sorts of performance-enhancing drugs in the last few years of his career, including the season he hit 73 home runs.
Kirby Puckett dies at age 45. Aw, shoot. As a local, I cheered the Twins on to their two World Series victories…I can still hear Bob Casey’s “KIR-beeeeeeeeee PUCK-it” echoing around the Metrodome.
I’ve got a few stories about the Winter Olympics open in tabs, so in the interest of getting rid of them:
- Photographer Vincent Laforet discusses his process in getting the photographs he wants.
- How the broadcast graphics were done for NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.
- The Nation on what went wrong with NBC’s coverage.
- Here’s the New Yorker’s take on the TV coverage.
Finally, Gelf Magazine compares Olympic predictions with the actual results. The media outlets surveyed all predicted higher medal counts for the US, but weren’t off by that much (aside from the ridiculous AP predicitons). Only NBC and Nike were surprised that Bode Miller sucked so royally.
Part 2 of the Bill Simmons/Malcolm Gladwell conversation is even better than part 1. They really rip into what Isiah Thomas has done as GM of the Knicks. “The mess [Thomas] is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com.”
Part one of a wonderful rambling email exchange between sportswriter Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. Part two on the morrow. (thx, richard)
The Captain of Design himself points us to the ski trail maps of James Nieuhues. Nieuhues is a prolific fellow…he’s done paintings for most of the large ski resorts in the western US.
Russia plans to drive a golf ball off of the ISS with a gold-plated, scandium alloy six-iron into a four-year, low-earth orbit….which may actually damage the space station if the ball is not “hit out of the station’s orbital plane”. I understand this event will be debuting at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
A lesson in sports uniform typography: vertically arched lettering versus the easier-but-cheesier radially arched lettering. (via do)
Video compilation of the best dunks from the 2006 NBA dunk contest. Andre Iguodala’s off-the-back-of-the-backboard and behind-the-back dunks were both very sick and wrong.
The history of the NBA logo…and yes, that’s Jerry West. (via th)
Gold medal winning mogulist Dale Begg-Smith, described during the Olympic telecast as a successful entrepreneur, was actually a bigwig at a spyware company. Business aside, his final run wasn’t good enough to warrant the gold. (via /.)
A collection of “stupid nude calendars”. I confess that I found this while looking for photos from the racy curling calendar…but I came away empty-handed. (Only slightly NSFW.)
Very unflattering (and excellent) article about Michael Jordan, written during his second (third?) comeback with the Washington Wizards. (via truehoop)
I did some skiing last week up in Vermont and took some videos with my phone on the slopes. The quality isn’t great, but hopefully you’ll get the gist.
A short clip of me skiing through the trees:
Riding the chair lift:
And one of me skiing behind Meg:
The motion in the last one reminds me of Quake…like I’m chasing after her with a railgun or something.
ABC (owned by Disney) traded former Monday Night Football announcer Al Michaels to NBC for, in part, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character created by Walt Disney in 1927, pre-Mickey.
Since I’ve been skiing a little bit recently (for the first time in years), I decided to check out what was happening online in the skiing world. Specifically I wondered if there were any ski blogs out there and if the many ski magazines offer online archives of their content.
Just like every other topic under the sun, skiing is well covered in blog land; no chance for fresh tracks here. A couple of quick searches uncovered blogs about backcountry skiing, New England skiing, ski adventures from around the country, skiing products and fashion, Colorado skiing, an attempt to ski 120 days of powder, Euro-centric skiing, and even a skiing videoblog.
Most of the skiing blogs I found focus on their respective author’s adventures on the slopes. If someone wanted to start a skiing meta-blog (blogging not just skiing adventures but other skiing-related topics and pointing to other people’s adventures), would there be enough good information out there to point to? The magazine racks of ski country convenience stores are filled with all kinds of periodicals about skiing…how much of that content is online? From what I can tell, the skiing magazines do offer content on their sites, but not necessarily from the pages of their print magazines. Both SKI Magazine and Skiing Magazine have archived print articles on their sites, but only from June 2005 and earlier. Both have other resources like forums, skiing news, resort details, videos, and online-only features. Neither site is organized particularly well for quick information perusal and retrieval. Skipressworld offers PDF versions of their entire print magazine online, including the current issue. Powder magazine has some online archives as well as online-only features like videos and message boards.
And so on…Google News is currently featuring over 10,000 articles about skiing (although much of that is due to the impending Winter Olympics), Flickr has thousands of skiing photos, and nearly all the ski areas an resorts have web sites on which you can check the current conditions, the lines at the chairlift via webcams, and trail maps. Killington is even doing podcasts.
So there’s lots of skiing info out there. I know there must be a few skiers among the kottke.org readership…what are your favorite skiing sites and resources online?
Mashup sport: chessboxing.
The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the no.1 thinking sport and the no.1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors - both mentally and physically. In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on.
More from the LA Times and the Guardian.
In an age of media fragmentation, here are ten cultural events that are still shared collective experiences among US citizens, including the Super Bowl, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code.
I can’t believe that paying the NFL $330 million for being able to use trademarked terms like “Super Bowl” and “Pittsburgh Steelers” in advertising is worth it, particularly when you can use euphemisms like “The Big Game” for absolutely free.
TrueHoop has a good roundup of Kobe’s 81-point performance the other night. Quoth Henry: “This is the first time I have put something that happened last night straight into the ‘basketball history’ category of TrueHoop.”
The Baseball Visualization Tool was designed to help managers answer the question: should the pitcher be pulled from the game? Handy charts and pie graphs give managers an at-a-glance view of how much trouble the current pitcher is in. I wonder what TBVT would have told Grady Little about Pedro at the end of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS?
Update on the teams and players involved in The Play. The Play = that college game with all the laterals and he was down and the band streams onto the field and the guy runs over the trombone player in the end zone. You know, The Play. (thx, david)
Photos of pool hustlers in NYC. (via coolfer by way of the actual janelle)
More than you’d ever want to know about Tecmo Super Bowl. Still one of my all-time favorite video games…I play it on my Gameboy and still have a Sega Genesis in the closet.
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