I suppose, after a week away in Los Angeles, that the first thing I do upon my return should be to update the Rapid-Fire Book Club and note for posterity the books that have been brought back to Wisconsin.
Turns out this is a large task. Last time I was in LA, I brought back six books. This time it was eight. I lose control of myself just a little bit in LA bookstores, it turns out.
There was also an ESPN Magazine to read on the plane down (the books that were supposed to last me until then kind of.... didn't), but come on, we're not counting that.
So let's get to steppin' here.
*Doyle, John- The World Is A Ball: The Joy, Madness, and Meaning of Soccer
*Holkins, Jerry, and Krahulik, Mike- Magical Kids In Danger (Penny Arcade's 8th collection of old strips)
*Jackson, Joe- The Thief At The End Of The World: Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire
*Martin, Demetri- Point Your Face At This
*Needham, Hal- Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life
*Rajesh, Monisha- Around India In 80 Trains
*Rose, David- Sexually, I'm More Of A Switzerland: More Personal Ads from the London Review of Books
*Ward, Geoffrey C.- A Disposition To Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Internal Programming Note
This is probably the last you're going to hear from me here for probably the next week, as tomorrow morning I fly into Los Angeles and my computer access will be nonexistent or near-nonexistent. I return home on the 21st. So set your calendar for that.
(You're not setting your calendar for that.)
(You're not setting your calendar for that.)
Monday, May 13, 2013
Wasn't This A Failed NBC Reality Show Once?
So this game is awesome. If you have me friended on Facebook, you've already seen this, but I have a quiz for you and it has nothing to do with Sporcle this time.
The game is called GeoGuessr. You are dropped in a random location on Google Street. You are permitted to walk around to get a better gauge of your location, but no zooming out of street view. You are provided with a world map, and your task is to pinpoint, on that map, where exactly you've been dropped. The closer you get, the more points you score. One game lasts five rounds.
Nothing is technically stopping you from using Google in another tab to assist you, but it wouldn't be sporting, now, would it?
If you top 15,000 points, you did all right; if you top 20,000, you kicked butt.
The game is called GeoGuessr. You are dropped in a random location on Google Street. You are permitted to walk around to get a better gauge of your location, but no zooming out of street view. You are provided with a world map, and your task is to pinpoint, on that map, where exactly you've been dropped. The closer you get, the more points you score. One game lasts five rounds.
Nothing is technically stopping you from using Google in another tab to assist you, but it wouldn't be sporting, now, would it?
If you top 15,000 points, you did all right; if you top 20,000, you kicked butt.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
It Can Be Done
I believe it's a good idea to give kudos to Guatemala today. Really, it ought to have been done on Friday, but we're here now. On Friday, Guatemala became the first nation ever to successfully prosecute a former head of state for genocide via their own judicial system. The recipient of the verdict, Efrain Rios Montt, was found guilty for his role in the genocide of Guatemala's Mayan population during the his rule from 1982-83, pas part of the larger Guatemalan Civil War. Rigoberta Menchu won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her role in alerting the larger world to what was going on. In 1999, Menchu filed suit in Spain because she didn't think Guatemala could prosecute this themselves. Most agreed with her, including Spain. Montt was sentenced to 80 years, most of which is rather academic given that he's 86 years old.
Needless to say, Montt is appealing.
For the record, let's go have a look at what the United States thought of it at the time. 1982-83 would correspond to the Reagan administration, so... let's see.... oh dear, did we ever back the wrong pony on this one.
Needless to say, Montt is appealing.
For the record, let's go have a look at what the United States thought of it at the time. 1982-83 would correspond to the Reagan administration, so... let's see.... oh dear, did we ever back the wrong pony on this one.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Crazy As A-B-C
Last night, if you tuned into Kitchen Nightmares, you would have seen Gordon Ramsay, as he's fond of saying, do something he's never, ever done before: refuse to save a restaurant. It is not the first time he's walked away- in the British version of the show, he did so to the Walnut Tree Inn- but he had already helped them once, and walked out on a revisit. This is the first time Ramsay has refused to help at all.
The offending restaurant- which for some quite frankly deluded reason thinks the firestorm from the episode is good publicity- is Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona. if you go to the restaurant's Facebook page, you will find that owners Amy and Samy issued a statement which, as I happened to personally note, was released during the airing of the episode, I think during the first half. Just in time for enraged viewers to descend upon it. In the episode, it is discovered that the owners had run through over 100 different employees over the previous year; tips intended for the servers instead went into the pockets of the owners; the one server they had at the time of filming was fired for asking a simple question that the editors were happy to replay just in case any viewers doubted who was in the wrong; and all the woes of the restaurant were blamed on people on the Internet who were out to get them.
In the statement released, the owners deny taking the tips, even though one of them, Samy, had admitted on camera, to Ramsay, that they did. The commenters not only quite vehemently begged to differ, but viewers ended up so outraged that some went and did some more thorough digging into Amy's past, which tends to only happen for the really abhorrent reality-show personalities. This dig turned up (PDF) a prior conviction for using someone else's Social Security number to obtain a $15,000 line of credit.
If you'd like to see for yourself how things went down, I can't guarantee that by the time you click they'll still be up as Fox tends to lock down YouTube clips in the early goings after original airing, but I've got an active set here and here.
Despite any protestations that Amy and Samy- Amy in particular- might make, Amy's Baking Company is almost certainly not going to survive having Gordon Ramsay go on television and tell the world that their restaurant isn't worth trying to save. In fact, I have it as the most spectacular torpedoing of a professional career that I have ever seen on a reality show. And as we've noted here before, personal and professional lives are very easy to go down in flames via the medium if one is not careful.
Which leads me into what I consider to be another top contender. The one previously noted was a personal flameout; this is probably the biggest professional flameout after Amy's Baking Company.
In 2007, NBC aired a show called Phenomenon. It was essentially a talent-search competition for mentalists. The show rounded up ten of them; the audience would whittle them down as audiences do, winner got $250,000. The winner of the show's only season was a guy named Mike Super, but that isn't what we're here for.
We're here for a man named Jim Callahan. In episode 2 of the 5-episode run, Callahan, a self-proclaimed paranormalist, performed a trick where he summoned the spirit of author Raymond Hill (I'm not sure who he is either) in order to identify an object inside a case. One of the show's two judges, Uri Geller (you know him as the guy who made spoon-bending famous), enjoyed the trick.
The other judge was Criss Angel.
In the magician's community, there have long been two major camps: those who will claim that every trick is real or at least go along with those that do, and those who are open about the fact that tricks are just that- tricks- and take glee in exposing those in the other camp. Geller is in the former camp. Angel is in the latter camp. Prior to the premiere, Angel had gone on Larry King to promote the show and his own show, Mindfreak, and said the following:
Geller shouldn't have needed Criss Angel to tell him. James Randi had made a cottage industry out of regularly tormenting him, with an entire book devoted to debunking him written in 1982, and a few months prior to the show, The Sun- which let's note is a tabloid who we'd normally never link to here- went through 30 years worth of sporting predictions Geller had made and found them to be so bad that they titled the article "The Curse Of Uri Geller". The message was clear, though: Angel was ready in case anyone was stupid enough to try and claim they were somehow supernatural.
So when Callahan was revealed to be stupid enough- and Geller duly played along- Angel pounced.
Angel's offer was the same offer that James Randi had made for years to anyone who could prove paranormal abilities under scientific conditions. Callahan never guessed. He was promptly voted out. Geller never guessed either, but amazingly, there are those that say he ought to be awarded the million dollars anyway.
First off, let's say that Angel opened one envelope and said the other would be revealed on the season premiere of Mindfreak; however, it was not for whatever reason and the contents of the second envelope remain a mystery. The one he did open read '911', with Angel giving the reasoning that, if someone on 9-10 had been able to predict 9/11, maybe it could have been stopped.
Why would someone claim that Geller deserved the money? I could only find clips of the opening that related to that topic. I'll decline to link to it directly, but here you go. The reasoning was that, while Geller refused to answer directly, he launched into a diatribe with Angel in which he mentioned a 9, and later on a 1, and later on another 1. He may not have said them consecutively, and he was throwing around other numbers too, but he said a 9, a 1 and a 1 in the correct order at some point, so give him the money.
No, really. They're serious. Stop laughing. Even if I'm laughing too.
Callahan, for his part, to this day refuses to cede ground, telling his side of the story with the page title 'He Really Did It'. He went on to be challenged to perform a 'remote viewing' test- in which something's written in a box, the box is closed, and the test is to tell what's been written- and hemmed and hawed about it so long and moved so many goalposts that the challenge was rescinded. This is pretty much his going reputation.
Wonder if he saw that coming when he got into the magic business.
The offending restaurant- which for some quite frankly deluded reason thinks the firestorm from the episode is good publicity- is Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona. if you go to the restaurant's Facebook page, you will find that owners Amy and Samy issued a statement which, as I happened to personally note, was released during the airing of the episode, I think during the first half. Just in time for enraged viewers to descend upon it. In the episode, it is discovered that the owners had run through over 100 different employees over the previous year; tips intended for the servers instead went into the pockets of the owners; the one server they had at the time of filming was fired for asking a simple question that the editors were happy to replay just in case any viewers doubted who was in the wrong; and all the woes of the restaurant were blamed on people on the Internet who were out to get them.
In the statement released, the owners deny taking the tips, even though one of them, Samy, had admitted on camera, to Ramsay, that they did. The commenters not only quite vehemently begged to differ, but viewers ended up so outraged that some went and did some more thorough digging into Amy's past, which tends to only happen for the really abhorrent reality-show personalities. This dig turned up (PDF) a prior conviction for using someone else's Social Security number to obtain a $15,000 line of credit.
If you'd like to see for yourself how things went down, I can't guarantee that by the time you click they'll still be up as Fox tends to lock down YouTube clips in the early goings after original airing, but I've got an active set here and here.
Despite any protestations that Amy and Samy- Amy in particular- might make, Amy's Baking Company is almost certainly not going to survive having Gordon Ramsay go on television and tell the world that their restaurant isn't worth trying to save. In fact, I have it as the most spectacular torpedoing of a professional career that I have ever seen on a reality show. And as we've noted here before, personal and professional lives are very easy to go down in flames via the medium if one is not careful.
Which leads me into what I consider to be another top contender. The one previously noted was a personal flameout; this is probably the biggest professional flameout after Amy's Baking Company.
In 2007, NBC aired a show called Phenomenon. It was essentially a talent-search competition for mentalists. The show rounded up ten of them; the audience would whittle them down as audiences do, winner got $250,000. The winner of the show's only season was a guy named Mike Super, but that isn't what we're here for.
We're here for a man named Jim Callahan. In episode 2 of the 5-episode run, Callahan, a self-proclaimed paranormalist, performed a trick where he summoned the spirit of author Raymond Hill (I'm not sure who he is either) in order to identify an object inside a case. One of the show's two judges, Uri Geller (you know him as the guy who made spoon-bending famous), enjoyed the trick.
The other judge was Criss Angel.
In the magician's community, there have long been two major camps: those who will claim that every trick is real or at least go along with those that do, and those who are open about the fact that tricks are just that- tricks- and take glee in exposing those in the other camp. Geller is in the former camp. Angel is in the latter camp. Prior to the premiere, Angel had gone on Larry King to promote the show and his own show, Mindfreak, and said the following:
"No one has the ability, that I'm aware of, to do anything supernatural, psychic, talk to the dead. And that was what I said I was going to do with "Phenomenon." If somebody goes on that show and claims to have supernatural psychic ability, I'm going to bust them live and on television. That's what Houdini did for more than half of his life, because those people prey on the vulnerable... Uri -- we had a conversation, because I told him that if he did make that claim, I would have to do the same thing."
Geller shouldn't have needed Criss Angel to tell him. James Randi had made a cottage industry out of regularly tormenting him, with an entire book devoted to debunking him written in 1982, and a few months prior to the show, The Sun- which let's note is a tabloid who we'd normally never link to here- went through 30 years worth of sporting predictions Geller had made and found them to be so bad that they titled the article "The Curse Of Uri Geller". The message was clear, though: Angel was ready in case anyone was stupid enough to try and claim they were somehow supernatural.
So when Callahan was revealed to be stupid enough- and Geller duly played along- Angel pounced.
Angel's offer was the same offer that James Randi had made for years to anyone who could prove paranormal abilities under scientific conditions. Callahan never guessed. He was promptly voted out. Geller never guessed either, but amazingly, there are those that say he ought to be awarded the million dollars anyway.
First off, let's say that Angel opened one envelope and said the other would be revealed on the season premiere of Mindfreak; however, it was not for whatever reason and the contents of the second envelope remain a mystery. The one he did open read '911', with Angel giving the reasoning that, if someone on 9-10 had been able to predict 9/11, maybe it could have been stopped.
Why would someone claim that Geller deserved the money? I could only find clips of the opening that related to that topic. I'll decline to link to it directly, but here you go. The reasoning was that, while Geller refused to answer directly, he launched into a diatribe with Angel in which he mentioned a 9, and later on a 1, and later on another 1. He may not have said them consecutively, and he was throwing around other numbers too, but he said a 9, a 1 and a 1 in the correct order at some point, so give him the money.
No, really. They're serious. Stop laughing. Even if I'm laughing too.
Callahan, for his part, to this day refuses to cede ground, telling his side of the story with the page title 'He Really Did It'. He went on to be challenged to perform a 'remote viewing' test- in which something's written in a box, the box is closed, and the test is to tell what's been written- and hemmed and hawed about it so long and moved so many goalposts that the challenge was rescinded. This is pretty much his going reputation.
Wonder if he saw that coming when he got into the magic business.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Red Alert
Ever since we landed on the moon, the next logical step for the space-inclined has been landing on Mars, and ideally, colonizing same. There have been two major sticking points, though, and we're not even counting the whole water issue:
1. Getting someone there in one piece.
2. What to do when it's time to leave.
The moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. Mars' orbit will never bring it closer than 33.9 million miles away, and in 2003, its distance of 34.8 million was the closest it had been in 50,000 years. Nobody's figured out any way to bring back anyone or anything that's been sent that far. The usual procedure is to just not bring anything back at all.
Which makes it rather problematic for a government to send someone to colonize Mars. They'd be sending someone to another planet knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will die on that planet. First off, could a government bring itself to knowingly do that. Second off, who'd even sign up for such a thing.
The answer to the first question appears to be to take it out of the hands of governments and see a private organization, nonprofit Mars One, step in. Someone who's willing to take the weight of such a mission on their shoulders. As for who would volunteer... apparently 78,000 people so far. Almost certainly more by this posting, though I couldn't hunt down a counter on the official website. Mars One intends to take four people on the first mission.
The one big problem here- my big gripe- is that no matter how many people you attract to this, you ultimately need the most competent people possible. And this isn't entirely going to be in the hands of experts. After preliminary screening, the plan is to send 20-40 candidates per applicant nation to a TV round where the audience votes on who moves on, and after final training, after which they expect to have six groups of four that they intend to send to Mars,, the audience is supposed to vote on which group goes first. The first group is the toughest one. The other groups will have the advantage of building off what has been established by previous groups. You need the most competent of the groups to be the first one to make the trip. Not the most popular.
I'm not disparaging the applicants themselves here. One can't tell whether they're all exactly clear on what they're signing up for, but it takes some serious balls just to put your name in the hopper. My hope is that Mars One does what's best for them.
Well, after deciding to send them on a one-way trip to Mars, in any case.
1. Getting someone there in one piece.
2. What to do when it's time to leave.
The moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. Mars' orbit will never bring it closer than 33.9 million miles away, and in 2003, its distance of 34.8 million was the closest it had been in 50,000 years. Nobody's figured out any way to bring back anyone or anything that's been sent that far. The usual procedure is to just not bring anything back at all.
Which makes it rather problematic for a government to send someone to colonize Mars. They'd be sending someone to another planet knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will die on that planet. First off, could a government bring itself to knowingly do that. Second off, who'd even sign up for such a thing.
The answer to the first question appears to be to take it out of the hands of governments and see a private organization, nonprofit Mars One, step in. Someone who's willing to take the weight of such a mission on their shoulders. As for who would volunteer... apparently 78,000 people so far. Almost certainly more by this posting, though I couldn't hunt down a counter on the official website. Mars One intends to take four people on the first mission.
The one big problem here- my big gripe- is that no matter how many people you attract to this, you ultimately need the most competent people possible. And this isn't entirely going to be in the hands of experts. After preliminary screening, the plan is to send 20-40 candidates per applicant nation to a TV round where the audience votes on who moves on, and after final training, after which they expect to have six groups of four that they intend to send to Mars,, the audience is supposed to vote on which group goes first. The first group is the toughest one. The other groups will have the advantage of building off what has been established by previous groups. You need the most competent of the groups to be the first one to make the trip. Not the most popular.
I'm not disparaging the applicants themselves here. One can't tell whether they're all exactly clear on what they're signing up for, but it takes some serious balls just to put your name in the hopper. My hope is that Mars One does what's best for them.
Well, after deciding to send them on a one-way trip to Mars, in any case.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Irony for $200, Alex
'This authoritarian country's state-run television network recently used a clip from Jon Stewart of satire-news program The Daily Show to criticize the government of the United States, evoking wishes from their own countrymen that they had a Jon Stewart to call their own.'
What is China?
What is China?
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