Yes, but will it fly?

What happens when you duct-tape a video-enabled cell phone to a kite and try to fly it?

eirikso.com finds out.

Look, Edna! His BABIP went up!

I am a strange variety of sports fan. While I am absolutely delighted for the opportunity to drill down into all sorts of statistics and minutia, I only bother when I find a team that is comprised of players that I enjoy for their personalities.

I am sort of a wonk-humanist.

Two sites of note for the baseball wonk:

Fangraphs gives a live chart for every game showing the percentage possibility that one or another team might win during the course of the game (it loads live - so you can watch the line graph chug across the graph while important plays are marked and annotated). After the game is over you can also see the players on both teams ranked as to how much they caused their team to win or lose. I'm sure the players love the hell out of that.


(If you look at the game dates, you'll have an idea of how long I've been putting this post off.)

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Back in the 1990's when the internet and I were young, all of the Major League ball clubs maintained their own websites. Now they have all been scooped up as separate domains in the Major League Baseball website. I think that stinks. I loved the way the individual clubs had the ability to take control of their own design.

Another thing that I loved is that many teams posted their pre-game press releases. These things were 8-12 pages of minutia for the guys calling the game to draw upon in case the game got boring or something odd happened ("Well Jim, as I recall, the last time a third baseman for this team had back to back home runs was...").

Well, it looks like MLB has answered my prayers. Here is the collected pre-game press notes for all the teams. If you are so inclined, go drown in the stats.

Listening to the World - Algeria

I want very much to like Algerian radio, but I'm afraid that I have not been having the best of luck with it.

This site seems to be the best place to go for radio from Algeria (I've been clicking through to the French language section, so as to give me at least a fighting chance to find my way around). There are four channels on web feed and by the notes I've been taking the last few weeks they seem to correlate to:

Chaine 1 - Poppier - Dance Music
Chaine 2 - seems to be traditional music
Chaine 3 - talk
Radio El-Bahdja - More festive traditional music

This seems to be the case about sixty percent of the time. There seems to be a lot of talk on all the channels. The signal is pretty choppy, so whatever is going on is generally pretty frustrating to listen to.

Algerians! Do you have better radio? Send me a link!

No no, Gramma is the one sitting with the candle and bobbing her head like a muppet

Tom Jones and Janis Joplin, 1969.

The performance is about as good as you would expect, but the bit I like is the folks who are sitting at the tables in the middle of all the dancing and whatnot. There doesn't seem to be a real studio audience, so they must have been hired (or at least invited by their uncle Larry on Camera 2 or something).

I always like to think that folks who were in the background of these things have always mentioned it to their families and those families are now, with the magic of Youtube and whatnot finally getting a chance to see these little moments that up till now they'd only heard of.

I'm just a big old beta-testing fool

Blogger has opened up access to some of the functionality that they are still tinkering with in a service that they call "Blogger in Draft."

The upshot is, if you are an adventurous blogger you can sign in and watch as all sorts of goofy extra buttons pop up and go away.

First up on the testing block - video!

Funny that, as I had just decided to start noodling with my digital camera's crappy little video function, so I happen to have a crappy little video on hand:



For the curious, I was here when I shot that. I will be explaining in a little bit.

I hope I get to see this happen

Disclaimer on Ticketmaster:

"stage position may change without notice."

You can do all sorts of things wth books

Nina Katchadourian juxtaposes titles in her Sorted Books Project.

My favorite so far:

Suddenly every thrift store book section that I've ever visited in my life is flashing before my eyes

Joshua Callaghan, Lots of Future Shock, copies of Alvin Tofler's Future Shock, dimensions variable, 1995-2007

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 15

There's quite a bit of text here, but it doesn't help answer the question that has haunted me for ages.


Why is it called "Oil of Olay" in America and "Oil of Ulay" in the UK?

What I've learned so far:

"Olay" is a made up word. It seems to have been derived from the word "lanolin."

As the product was introduced to various countries, the name was tweaked to sound better, thus Oil of Ulay (UK), Oil of Ulan (Australia) and Oil of Olaz (Netherlands).

In 1999, all of the brand names were unified so that they are all now "Oil of Olay." I am astonished that I completely missed this.

This is the Oil of Olay global portal, you can click through to the country of your choice (I find Turkey particularly spiffy). You can get live online skin consultation through all of them (I did not have the courage to try this). I am quite delighted with this feature from the UK site. Just enter a friend's name and e-mail and write out a compliment that you'd like to give this person, and Oil of Olay (no longer Ulay!) will send your friend a personalized flash-animated spam ad!

and that settles that

Ever since I added my "I'm reading this:" thing to the side, I've been afraid that my number of small posts where I just pass things along have gone down in volume.

I have to draw special attention to this, via Regret the Error:

In the June 5 "Explainer," Christopher Bonanos made several errors. First, he stated that the pirate's "arrr" originated with Robert Newton. Lionel Barrymore used "arrrgh" in a film from 1934. Second, he identified Dorset as being in the Cotswolds district of southwest England. The Cotswolds are in central England. Third, he asserted that most pirates were from oppressed nations like Scotland and Ireland. Many were, but more came from southwest England than anywhere else. Fourth, he stated that "arrr" is "strictly fiction," and that no one ever walked the plank. West country pirates may well have used the phrase "arrrgh," and there does exist at least one recorded instance of plank-walking.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 12

When I starting trying to find out about Gordon of Philadelphia, I had a moment of hope that Gordon was Gordon Selfridge.

So far as I can tell, no luck. Which is a pity, because Selfridge was nuts and it would be fun to talk about him.

Anyway, it looks like I have to fall back on my old standbys:

"I think these guys have gone out of business!"

"My! What an outfit!"

And notice the hanging fern in the background. This was really classy in the seventies.

Booting back up

"You won't believe this, but right now I'm cleaning my oven."

Crash into June

I've been a bit preoccupied and not blogging. Things will be back to normal (if that is the best word for it) soon.