April 2008 Archives

Welcome, Deadspin readers!

Back by popular demand:

Offense:

• QB: John David Booty, Minnesota. Who’s going to be the first over-eager play-by-play guy to describe a scrambling Booty: and Booty shakes his bootie…
• RB: Tashard Choice, Dallas. This was a tough choice. Some excellent names in the RB category (and in the CB category, too, but that’s not what’s we’re talking about right now).
• RB: Xavier Omon, Buffalo. The first of two Xaviers on this list.
• WR: Early Doucet, Arizona. Let’s hope for the sake of Buzzsaw fans that he doesn’t leave the NFL early.
• WR: Limas Sweed, Pittsburgh. Berman’s gonna call him “Limas ‘Bean’ Sweed”.
• TE: Martellus Bennett, Dallas. Rhymes with Marcellus Wallace. Hopefully comes without the band-aid on the back of the head.
• OT: Gosder Cherilus, Detroit. Maybe GM will come out with the Chevy Cherilus.
• OT: Breno Giacomini, Green Bay. Giacomo Puccini was blindsided by the illness that eventually killed him. Green Bay just wants Giacomini to protect the blindside.
• OG: Oniel Cousins, Baltimore. He’s a family man.
• OG: Mackenzy Bernadeau, Carolina. That names looks like it wouldn’t be out of place on the back of a NHL sweater.
• C: Kory Lichtensteiger, Denver. His parents got naming advice from Roger Clemens.

Defense:

• DT: Kentwan Balmer, San Francisco. Kentwan, you will be Qui-jon’s new padewan.
• DT: Letroy Guion, Minnesota. A guion is a subatomic particle. And if it’s not, it should be.
• DE: Vernon Gholston, NY Jets. Can’t stop thinking about Fhloston Paradise.
• DE: Andrew Studebaker, Philadelphia. I really hope he’s into classic cars.
• MLB: Beau Bell, Cleveland. Two voiced bilabial plosives in a row! How can the announcers go wrong here?
• OLB: Jerod Mayo, New England. You already know what they’re going to say when a blocker grabs a handful of his jersey and gets flagged for it.
• OLB: Xavier Adibi, Houston. The other Xavier. I wonder if they pronounce their name “EX-avier” or “Zavier”?
• CB: Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, Arizona. In the off-season he relaxes by playing polo at his 4,000 acre estate in Scotland.
• CB: Reggie Corner, Buffalo. Talk about a man born to do the job.
• S: Caleb Campbell, Detroit. Two voiceless velar plosives in a row! How can the announcers go… well, you know that somone’s gonna screw it up.
• S: Haruki Nakamura, Baltimore. Celebrates each interception with an improvised haiku: A fluttering ball/strong hands pluck it from the air/returned all the way

Related: the 2003 team, the 2006 team, and the 2007 team.

CNET goes behind the scenes at the land of the rising meatball and finds out what it takes to design an IKEA chair from the ground up.

Ya gotta watch out for the jawbone of an ass.

Of course, the greatest mass-murder in the Bible is God himself, who drowns the entire planet—men, woman, children, animals—save for those on Noah’s ark (as a side note, presumably fish, amphibians, and waterfowl made it through the flood fine, but I don’t think those are mentioned specifically).

This is 3:30 of video that will make your life a little better and your day a little brighter.

Actually, I’d say that that most famous plaintiff in this gallery of unfortunates doesn’t really come close to being ‘most screwed’… although she was ordered to pay the costs of the appeal.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

The perils of self-awareness.

You know it’s good when someone opens with “I am coming to grips with the sticker shock of hitting my 40th birthday. Unfortunately, I’m 57.”

The great David Weinberger explains the Two-Thirds Life Crisis and how it differs from the mid-life crisis.

It’s always good to start the week by bringing the funny.

• Girlfriend Changes Man Into Someone She’s Not Interested In
• Chuck Berry Remembers Call From Cousin About White Kid Playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’

When I was a kid, I spent hours and hours trying to beat the adventure game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It was a fiendishly hard game, but it was eventually beatable (admittedly with some help).

And now part of the story of the inevitable sequel which turned out to be rather evitable after all has been released (check out the comments, too).

… then it’s not going to get any better than this.

(via David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman)

How do you right a 55-thousand-ton ship that’s tipped over on its side?

Very, very carefully.

BTW, this is gonna make a great movie.

The Times has a cute story today about “Googlegängers”, otherwise known as people who you can find on the Internet with the same name as yourself.

I’d like to apologize right now to all the other Paul Frankensteins out there (I know of at least two more in the United States—one in Washington State and one in California (and no, we’re not related, thanks for asking)—and one in Germany) for completely dominating the Google search results for our name. Apparently, my Google-Fu is a bit too strong.

Anyway, here’s a link to a picture of another one of my Googlegängers (though I’m not sure which one he is, exactly) (I’m guessing from context that this particular Paul Frankenstein has long since shuffled off this mortal coil).

What’s interesting is that 98% of those same scholars rank Bush’s presidency as a failure.

And let’s face it: when professional historians think that you’re doing a worse job than James Buchanan or Millard Fillmore, you’re obviously not doing something right.

And in other news, perhaps a road trip to Montreal is in order.

It’s almost not parody.

As my friend Tam says, the torch relay is the best Olympic event of them all; it has the most drama….

Incidentally, I would like to point out that the whole Tibet situation, at least from the Chinese perspective, is somewhat more complicated than the West makes it out to be; while I am most emphatically not endorsing the activities of the PLA in Tibet at the moment, the fact is that from the Chinese perspective, the question of Tibetan sovereignty was settled sometime in the Ming Qing Dynasty, if not before. For the Chinese, the question of freedom for Tibet is a bit like the idea of returning the Great Plains to the Lakota for most Americans. Like I said, I’m just pointing out that the issue is somewhat more complicated than it may seem at first glance.

As a side note, it’s worth looking at Global Voices’ China page to get some feel for what people on the ground in China are thinking about this whole thing.

Rocinante, originally uploaded by Frankenstein.

Taken almost exactly two years ago, probably while I was walking to school from the subway.

If I wasn't walking to, I was walking from.