The striking thing, to me, about the sport of football is that we can easily forget the human element of the game. Every so often you get a very sharp reminder of that. This is one of those examples:
I had my first meeting with the newsroom staff tonight. As we all got settled in I realized that I know more of this bunch at the beginning of the year than I ever have. And they are talented young journalists. We expect a big year.
Here’s something you never expect, a shopping cart road block:
Like they’re saying, “You didn’t buy enough stuff! Go back inside!”
I didn’t buy anything because, for four days in a row I’ve been there for a specific thing and they have managed to not have it in stock.
Ran a nice 10K today. That was all in one continuous motion, even. According to those classic gym charts I was at 70 percent of my max heart rate. My last mile was under nine minutes.
It was a nice workout, begging the question “Why didn’t I feel like this on Sunday when I was falling apart in the Chattahoochee Olympic?”
Finally, I’ve been watching the third season of Newsradio on Crackle recently. I haven’t watched the show in some time, long enough to have forgotten how smart the writing routinely was. In the third season it gets difficult to watch Phil Hartman, though, because there’s something in his eyes that makes you wonder what difficulties he and his wife were already dealing with at home. But that could just be because you know what would happen a short time later. But this is an exception to that, and perhaps one of the best three or four studio scenes from the entire series:
Talked about this video in my social media practices class today:
This is the first time I’ve taught this class, but I’m pretty excited about it. We’ll talk about the personal usage aspects for the first week or so and then get into more professional applications. I know a handful of the students from other classes or projects and as a group they are a sharp bunch. I hope they get something out of it.
I tend to spend a lot of my time on campus in just two or three buildings which are all nearby. But today I had to go across the quad to pick some equipment that had been, let us say, misplaced. And I saw a food truck:
That was a new one to me.
I remember, last week, watching the GOP debate thinking This should be pretty fun on Saturday Night Live. But that was a 20th century response. I should have been thinking about a modern response, because this is brilliant:
James Lileks always likes to say you never hear the last one. Well, we’re still a good way from this year’s last katydid, and they didn’t mind pointing that out tonight.
If you click on those little play buttons you can hear how the microphone of an iPhone is not very good at capturing this sort of sound. Which is where we are with technology now. It does this thing, and allows me to use this particular tool to create and ship something to another place. And we don’t think it does it especially well.
Starting in 2016, there will be no more UCI Women’s World Cup. Instead, the women will be one step closer to parity with the men after introduction of the UCI Women’s WorldTour.
The idea began to take shape after a summit in December 2014, and the final product will launch at the beginning of the 2016 season.
Women were previously only granted 10 days of racing in the World Cup series, in which their events often lacked the media attention and social media buzz seen during the men’s events. Now, racers will have potentially 30 days of racing available in the WorldTour, which will include stage races instead of simply one-day events.
About time. Let’s get them on TV so I can watch them go, too.
My favorite pro cyclist is Taylor Phinney. He’s been recouping from a horrible leg injury, now back in just his second race in more than a year. And today he did this:
Ridiculous headline: An actual tiger gets loose in Packard Plant in Detroit. A photographer was permitted to use the old facility, but didn’t mention the tiger. And then the animal got loose. Because that’s the sort of thing that one can expect in Detroit, I guess. Though, to be sure, this seems more like a piece of a southern conversation:
“I got a call from a friend who asked me to help them get this tiger out of a staircase,” said Andy Didorosi, 28, of Detroit. “He asked me if I had a leafblower, and I said I had a weedwhacker, so he told me to bring that. … I stopped what I was doing, grabbed my tools and hopped in my truck, because, you know, tiger.
Anna blinked back tears now and gripped Jeremy’s hand as she recalled one of the lowest points of her life.
“I’d always heard about people who were on their deathbeds and holding on, waiting for someone to tell them it’s OK to go. I thought maybe that’s what he was doing,” said Anna.
“I went in to his room and told him, ‘Jeremy I love you so much and I’m so proud of you and you’ve worked so hard. I know you’re tired and it’s OK if you want to let go and want to go home. I’ll be so jealous of you because you’ll be walking the streets of gold with Jesus, but I will be OK here because I have friends and family to look after me.'”
She kissed his forehead and left, expecting that to be their last conversation.
The next day, he began to improve.
His recovery is a modern medical miracle. A friend of mine knows that couple and had a lot to say about them both. It is a charming story.
St. Louis police officers found a 93-year-old Tuskegee Airman’s stolen car Tuesday afternoon behind a vacant home a few blocks from where it was taken, according to police sources.
[…]
The man lost his money, then the car, in separate crimes involving at least three men Sunday morning, police said.
The victim appeared to be in good health Tuesday but told a reporter he didn’t want publicity because it would only cause more harm. He said he just wanted to get his car back.
Victimizing an elderly individual is particularly egregious. Let alone a man who was a war hero, a man who had to fight his country to fight for his country. There should be a specialized investigation unit that takes on such cases, a TV-style
Time to build up the distances. So I had a 2,000 yard swim and a four mile run this evening. It all felt nice and slow and easy. So, really, I was moving as fast as I could.
I found these three posters in an Italian restaurant in London. I took a few quick snapshots because, I figured, they’d one day be worth sharing. My apologies for the reflections. There was a stairwell and bad lighting and actual food to eat.
It isn’t the most influential spaghetti western, but For a Few Dollars More is a direct descendent. And this is a ridiculously good poster and, no matter the language, you probably know exactly what film this is for:
Released in 1965, the film became the highest-grossing film in the history of Italian cinema. It came to the U.S. a few months later and made millions more.
The Deerhunter, and so now you know that the poster acquirer — shut up, that is too a real profession — for this restaurant has taste:
Ferruccio Amendola did the Italian dubs for Robert De Niro’s Mike Vronsky. He did dubs for more than 30 years, usually carrying big, domineering characters.
Sorry for the angle here, but The Hustler poster was hanging too high:
Totally worth it.
Play this while you read below:
Happily, the Italian dubs for Fast Eddy in both The Hustler and The Color of Money were done by Giuseppe Rinaldi. That’s no small thing. He’s considered the greatest voice actor in Italian history. He dubbed more than 200 foreign actors in about 500 films. Hudson, Sellers, Sinatra, Lancaster, Douglas, Peck, Martin, Dean, Poitier. Were you a leading man in the second half of the 20th century? Chances are that, in Italy, you sounded like Rinaldi. He worked for almost 40 years, until 1997, and passed away a decade later.
Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats was played by Carlo Romano, who was an incredibly accomplished voice actor as well. He appeared in 86 films and did voicework for a few hundred more foreign actors. I can’t find him in that role on YouTube, but there are examples of Romano’s other work. He was no Gleason.
One historical tidbit for the day. This is the Protestant Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, built in the 1890s. It was badly damaged in a bombing raid in 1943. The present building, a church with an attached foyer and a separate belfry with a chapel, was built between 1959 and 1963.
The damaged spire of the old church remains as a memorial hall, which opened in 1987.
The Memorial Church today is a famous landmark of western Berlin, and is nicknamed by Berliners “der Hohle Zahn”, meaning “The Hollow Tooth”.
We wentto the zoo, which came highly recommended. The Berlin Zoo, all 86 acres of it, has 1,500 different species, the most of any zoo in the world. All told, there are 20,500 animals inside. It gets more business than any other zoo in Europe. Here are some of our new friends:
There’s a petting zoo. We bought a few delicious food pellets and The Yankee picked out an animal …
I’m not sure what she thought would happen, but she was a bit surprised by it:
