Choke on this, John Fisher.
Wednesday, April 10th, 2024
The A’s may soon be gone, but Oakland has a new team: The B’s. Thanks to reader Kirk S., who tipped me off to Oakland’s new independent baseball team, the Ballers. They’ll be competing in the Pioneer League starting this year, and I hope Oakland’s baseball aficionados will rally around them.
Just look at this tremendous logo:
See also this interview with B’s designer Dustin O. Canalin.
Let’s have some fun while we wait too long for our trains.
Tuesday, April 9th, 2024
In recent years, Boston’s public transit system (colloquially known as “the T”) has been struggling mightily. Later this month, the people are marching for improvements:
As “Googly Eyes MBTA” notes, “If the trains can’t be reliable, at least they can be fun and bring a smile to the faces of over a million people per day”. I love it.
I would also be remiss if I did not note that some of us have been working on googly eyes for the T for nearly 15 years now.
“Ladycocks” is right out.
Monday, April 8th, 2024
Last night, the 2024 women’s college basketball tournament concluded, with the South Carolina Gamecocks defeating the Iowa Hawkeyes. Aside from the recent success of the women’s basketball program, sports teams from the University of South Carolina have not been particularly good historically. Though the school was founded in 1801, South Carolina’s first national championship in any sport didn’t come until two centuries later, in 2002. Nevertheless, in the ’90s, apparel from the school was very popular. Specifically, this classy cap was a common sight hundreds of miles away in New Jersey:
Another oft-spotted headwear option in that area originated from a school thousands of miles across the country, Oregon State:
I present without comment the fact that this image originated from Dicks.com.1
Both of these are a style called the “Bar” hat, made by sportswear brand “The Game”. Bar hats were particularly popular at the end of the 20th century, displaying the names or nicknames of dozens of different colleges and their sports teams. The two above, however, were particularly widespread sources of juvenile japery. Yes, many an adolescent boy strolled into Lids at their closest Garden State mall to purchase a hat featuring a slang term for genitalia.
I was a teenager myself in that era, but I wanted a different option. In an effort to subvert the puerile humor of others, I sought out the single goofiest Bar hat I could find. After much contemplation, I opted to rep the University of California, Santa Cruz:
Go Banana Slugs!4
Back to South Carolina, though, and their matchup last night. I know that a “hawkeye” is “a native of Iowa”, a much cooler demonym than “Iowan”. However, I recently had the realization that I wasn’t sure what a “gamecock” was. So, I looked it up, which revealed that it means “a rooster of the domestic chicken trained for fighting”. Oh.
And also, yikes. On multiple levels, that’s a terrible name for one of the best women’s college basketball teams in the country.
Footnotes:
Speaking of which, there’s a recent TV ad for the company that has repeatedly caught my attention.2 When Will Arnett says “Have I heard of Dicks.com?!”, it sounds like he’s about to launch into an epically filthy joke.3↩︎
That ad is archived here. ↩︎
A friend-of-the-site who shall remain anonymous informed me that once upon a time, Dick’s Sporting Goods did not own the Dicks.com domain name. It was, in fact, porn, as Archive.org can show you, if you really feel the need to confirm it, or you’re just feeling lonely.
It appears the retailer took ownership of the domain around the beginning of 2011.↩︎
Old school netizens know that banana slugs are fearsome, and indeed, one of the most vicious and pathological predators of human beings on the planet. ↩︎
A minor league stadium for a bush league owner
Friday, April 5th, 2024
Earlier this week, the Red Sox swept the Athletics in a three game set at the unbranded Oakland Coliseum. While I detest the horrible invasiveness of advertising into every facet of our lives, it’s sad and more than a little pathetic that the A’s can’t even find a company to purchase the naming rights for their stadium. Of course, it’s not too surprising, given what’s happening in Oakland. The team stinks. In game one of the series, they committed five errors in the first three innings alone. It was painful to watch.
Then again, not many people did watch. A total of 18,166 fans attended that three game series in person, an average of just over 6,000. That is very, very low for a major league baseball team. In fact, it would be pretty low for a minor league baseball team. In 2023, 19 minor league teams managed to attract more fans per game.
The problem is that the A’s miserable ownership has been neglecting the team for years. They coughed up the lowest payroll in 2023, and then decided to reduce it further in 2024. After failing to get the public to buy them a new stadium in Oakland, they made a push to follow their former stadiummates, the NFL’s Raiders, to Las Vegas. It’s not clear that the Las Vegas Athletics will actually happen1, but it’s certain that the team’s lease at the Coliseum is up after this year.
Discussions for a short-term lease to continue playing at the Coliseum apparently failed recently, and yesterday, the team announced they will be playing in West Sacramento from 2025 through 2027 (or possibly later).
The A’s will play at Triple-A ballpark Sutter Health Park for the 2025-27 MLB seasons and have an option for one more year in 2028, should there be any delays in the Las Vegas ballpark construction process, the A’s announced Thursday. The team will not feature a city designation during the interim years. It will simply go by the Athletics or A’s.
All of this can only be described as sad. The A’s are a storied franchise who brought four World Series championships to Oakland. Now, they’ll be playing 90 miles from their home of over 50 years, in a minor league ballpark that doesn’t even have actual seats in the outfield. If a single big name free agent chooses to sign with the Placeless A’s2 in the next few years, I’ll be shocked.
Major League Baseball never should have let things get to this point. Fans deserve better and they are, rightly, pissed. As friend-of-the-site Oliver Y. noted, however, at least one group is surely thrilled. The marketers at Sutter Health are probably popping champagne in celebration of their past decision to buy the naming rights to a AAA minor league baseball stadium.
Footnotes:
Just two months ago, the mayor of Las Vegas suggested the team should pitch a new plan in the Bay Area, rather than coming to Sin City. ↩︎
I’ve never heard of a team lacking a location designation before. That’s a hell of a thing. ↩︎
70% of orders needing review is, let’s say, a lot.
Thursday, April 4th, 2024
Amazon has indicated they’re moving away from their “Just Walk Out” technology, which allowed shoppers to purchase items without needing to visit a checkout.
Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
A whole lot of what may appear to be computer intelligence is actually just low-paid offshore humans. In this case, it wasn’t worth it at all.
Imagine a rat flipping you a tiny bird. Adorable!
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024
Down at the University of Richmond, they’re teaching rats to drive cars. It turns out, the rats enjoy it, even when they don’t get treats for doing so.
Self-driving cars have been 10 years away for at least 20 years. Perhaps we ought to shift our efforts to rat-driven cars.
This is, apparently, not an April Fool’s joke.
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024
When I saw a headline indicating that 15 places in the US had “lost their total solar eclipse, I was confused”. A solar eclipse is not like weather, which changes frequently, nor is it subject to political lobbying and maneuvering. Instead, it’s a lot more like clockwork, and it’s something we can measure with extreme precision.
So what changed? Fascinatingly, our understanding of the radius of the sun. New calculations there mean the path of totality for the coming eclipse will be about 2000 feet narrower than previously thought. If you were right on the edge, move a half-mile (or more) inward.
“That would be spooky if it had.”
Monday, April 1st, 2024
Last week, a British woman attempted to rescue a hedgehog she’d scooped up on the side of the road. There was just one problem:
It was not a hedgehog at all, but rather the top of a hat.
I know it’s dumb, but I just can’t stop laughing.
It’s the practice of binding books in human skin.
Friday, March 29th, 2024
The Boston Athenæum is one of America’s oldest independent libraries, with a collection of hundreds of thousands of volumes. Only one book, however, is bound in the author’s own skin:
[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]
This infamous volume is “Narrative of the Life of James Allen”, who was a 19th-century criminal. One of Allen’s many aliases was “George Walton”, which is why the front cover reads, in Latin, “This book is bound in the skin of Walton”. Yuck.
The Athenæum explains the book thusly:
“While sick with the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, James Allen requested that a copy of his memoir be bound in his own skin and given to John Fenno Jr., the one man who had successfully resisted when Allen attempted to rob him at gun-point in 1834.”
That’s pretty grotesque, but hey, it’s apparently what Allen wanted.1 You have to respect a dying person’s wishes.2
Across the Charles over at Harvard, however, the origins of a similarly-bound book are rather more distressing. There, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “On the Destiny of the Soul” was, until very recently, bound in the skin of the body of an unknown psychiatric patient who almost certainly made no similar request for the disposition of her remains.
After many years, the Harvard Library is working to make things right:
“The Library is now in the process of conducting additional provenance and biographical research into the book, Bouland, and the anonymous female patient, as well as consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains,” the statement said.
The announcement follows a decade-long effort from rare book experts Paul Needham and John Lancaster calling on Harvard to remove the book from its holdings and repatriate the remains to France.
I imagine that last year’s news of misappropriated human remains at the Harvard Medical School morgue spurred this process along.
Footnotes:
Lightning actually strikes the same places over, and over, and over again.
Thursday, March 28th, 2024
Earlier this week, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in dramatic fashion, after one of its supports was struck by a container ship. Six people are believed dead, with another two rescued from the water, but it could have been much worse.
Maryland governor Wes Moore told reporters that, thanks to the mayday call, officials were able to stem the flow of traffic over the bridge, an intervention that he says “saved lives.”
Because this bridge was such a critical piece of infrastructure, discussions about replacing have already begun. In an article covering some of what we can expect, I came upon this sentence:
As the new bridge is designed, experts said planners should examine ways to prevent future collisions.
Eh, really? Is that worth the effort? Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Why bother wasting time on that?
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