Perry Ellis
As the Paxman and the splendiferous and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Mrs. Pax are across the pond, sampling the varied pleasures of the Continent (weird animal parts cooked in their own fat and liter-sized steins of unfiltered beer), we present this week’s super-double-bonus edition of the Random 10.**
Pax Arcana
I hope my plane didn’t crash last night, because that would make this blog post really, really creepy (I wrote it on Tuesday before heading to Paris and Berlin).
While I’m gone, take a few minutes or hours to contemplate the below chart, which offers a quick and easy way to discern whether you married a responsible gay hostess or a shiftless layabout with crooked stocking seams:
[Found at Boing Boing]
Judging from the math element involved, I’m gonna say the chances the creator of this scale had a decent marriage are inversely proportional to the percentage of errant high-fives he’s thrown.
Father Scott
Hank Steinbrenner-bashing is already fairly common, and it’s going to get to Isiah Thomas levels soon. But he kind of has it coming.
“The bottom line is that the team is not playing the way it is capable of playing,” Steinbrenner, said, according to the New York Post. “These players are being paid a lot of money and they had better decide for themselves to earn that money.”
Because it’s a question of effort, not talent. Johnny Damon is still the 2002 Johnny Damon. Mike Mussina is the 1998 Mike Mussina. Jason Giambi is pre-shrunken balls Jason Giambi.
Steinbrenner, who runs the Yankees with his brother Hal, has faith that the team will improve. But he wants to see greater effort, or else changes are going to be made, according to the report.
“This is going to get turned around,” Steinbrenner said. “If it’s not turned around this year, then it will be turned around next year, by force if we have to.”
Glad to hear that he has faith. That’s important in leadership. If you say something will happen, then it will happen. Just like how the Magic beat the Pistons last night. And how Isiah took the Knicks to a championship without making any more roster moves. And how I’m nailing Jessica Alba.
And what kind of force is ol’ Hank talking about? Is he going to go toe-to-toe with Joba Chamberlain. Start whipping Darrell Rasner?
“We have good professional hitters and I have a lot of faith in them,” Steinbrenner said, according to the report.
Professional? Yes. You pay them to “hit” for a living. Good? Um…
“I’m not saying they are not giving the effort, but they need to be playing harder.”
Who doesn’t love blatant contradictions?
The Yankees have been without a pair of injured starters in third baseman Alex Rodriguez and catcher Jorge Posada. But Steinbrenner says that’s no excuse.
“We’ve got to forget about all the injuries and start playing our butts off,” Steinbrenner said, according to the newspaper.
This couldn’t make less sense. It’s not the drop-off in production from A-Rod to Morgan Ensberg and Jorge Posada to Julia Childs, it’s that they’re not playing their butts off. If Morgan and Julia are just as good, why are the Yankees shelling out $45 million a year for these two over the next five years?
And now for a sentence you thought you’d never read, except maybe in the Onion:
But he pointed to the AL East-leading Tampa Bay Rays, who have taken two straight from the Yankees, as an example of a team playing the game with passion, saying his team has “got to start playing the way the Rays are playing,” according to the Post.
Father Scott
This has already gotten plenty of attention around the NBA blogosphere, but I’m not sure it’s made its way into the Boston eclectic humor blogosphere (of which none can deny Pax Arcana runs).
JE Skeets and Tas Melas at The Basketball Jones put together a rap song that appears to be untitled but should be called “Fuck LeBron Up,” in which ”Brian Scalabrine” (Skeets) attempts to “finish something that Deshawn Stevenson and the Washington Wizards couldn’t.” Now that the Cavs are making a series of this and Boston columnists are making the subsequent Zakim bridge-jumping references, it might be nice to laugh a little. And if you don’t laugh at the line “when I’m on the court 1.8 points son, extrapolate that over 40 minutes now who’s the chosen one?” and imagine Scal trying to take on LeBron, well, maybe you just don’t like basketball fake diss rap tracks. But either way it’s funny.
And for what it’s worth, JE and Tas do a great podcast fairly regularly over at The Basketball Jones — it’s really well produced and a great listen. Maybe Perry and I will put a couple together while Pax is eating cheese and trying to convince Mrs. Pax to partake in a threesome with some hairy-legged chain-smoking 85 pound chick.
As for tonight’s game, I’m sure Celtics fans are brimming with confidence now that the Cs are back in town and we all assume that they’ll flip their switch back to “awesome.” But color me officially worried (what color is worried? Probably lavender? No, that’s sexually available. How about puce?).
We still haven’t seen that good of a game from LeBron James, who is better at basketball than anyone in the world is at anything (might not be as much of an exaggeration as you think). And the series is tied. Four games of information should be enough for Bron to figure out how to exploit Boston’s defense. Meanwhile, the offense has looked pretty dreadful, and the way Doc has yanked Rondo’s minutes around in the name of Sam Cassell has me worried. I think Rondo’s confidence is shot (not that his blog shows it), which is a shame. Ray Allen hasn’t hit a basket in three and a half weeks, and Garnett continues to pass up dunks to kick it to Scot Pollard in street clothes. I see a Pierce-James battle, and the winner between those two takes the game.
Perry Ellis
They don’t know their Scotch from their whiskey, either, apparently.
This would be whisky. A whole lot of malty, peaty whisky. Mmmmm, whisky.
From the Highball Distillery comes the welcome news that a group of 14 Beaver State distillers are starting a guild. Its reason for being? “[T]o promote Oregon spirits and to provide a forum for local distillers to communicate with one another.”
That’s all well and good, but judging from this piece in Willamette Week Online, those boozehounds might want to brush up on their nomenclature:
“‘It’s a gamble, but I have a lot of confidence in my skills,’ says co-owner and distiller Lee Medoff. ‘I don’t know how things will age in this climate. But I want everything to be local—water, woods, grains.’
Like his distillery, Medoff wants his ‘whisk(e)y’—the (e) refers to the fact that the pair hasn’t decided on the English or Scotch spelling of the liquor yet—to be Northwest-specific, something as distinguishable as scotch or bourbon.”
As any self-respecting sot like us knows, the only potable that can lay claim to the whisky spelling is Scoth. That is, the brown water made in Scotland (and only in Scotland).
So our vote for the guild’s first order of business is to sober up a tad and get your spelling straight. Then pack up some of that good stuff and send it back East. Pronto.
Seriously, guys. All this talk is making us thirsty
Pax Arcana
I have bidness in Berlin next week, but because I like to travel the old fashioned way — by steamship, and with heavy trunks hauled by obsequious porters – I’ll be taking off tonight.
The Mrs. Pax Arcana charmante et judicieux and I will first alight to Paris, where they speak French and have interesting towers and art stuff. There I plan to abscond with contraband raw milk cheese wrapped in a sock.
On Friday we head to Berlin to hassle the Hoff.
I’ll be there until next Thursday, trying desperately to find Father Scott some authors who can deliver on time and without embarrassing delays. Also I have some of my own work to do.
I’ll try to post whenever I get a chance over there. But don’t hold your breath.
Au Revoir und auf Wiedersehen.
Pax Arcana
Sending and receiving text messages from your cell phone — or as Pax Arcana calls it, the “gossamer communicatron” — involves a complicated array of technologies.
First the signal is transmitted from your handheld device to a nearby television antenna, where it is sent into ether and converted into radio signals. Then a series of tree-shaped radio receivers convert the signals into morse code and pipe the dots and dashes through a complicated network of underground tubes called “The Internets.” Once the morse code is translated by a crew of protocol droids, gasoline-powered turbines push the messages in hermetically sealed envelopes to a storehouse dedicated to your recipient’s cell phone number. An operator then reads the message and types the text onto the recipients cell phone screen through some sort of inscrutable black magic called “satellite.”
Speaking of satellites, one British space scientist (via Boing Boing) says the cost of sending and receiving text messages is four times higher than NASA pays for digital transmissions from the Hubble telescope. Which is way the fuck out there in space.
Ready to be bored?
“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”
Of course there are infrastructure costs — switching stations, towers, mall kiosks — that cell phone companies have to pay for somehow. The Hubble got its money from John Q. Taxpayer.
Speaking of, how much did the Hubble cost anyway? Oh, here it is. $6 billion. That sounds like an awful lot of money, doesn’t it?
Not so, says this one guy:
NASA space science chief Ed Weiler is quick to put that seemingly huge number in perspective.
“Thats about $6 billion spread out over 30 years,” he said. “And that equates to about two cents a week per American taxpayer over that period of time.”
Two cents a week? That’s more than a dollar a year! Do you know how many text messages that buys?
SMS data rate is 4x more expensive than data from the Hubble [Boing Boing]
Pax Arcana
Microwave ovens were invented to give divorced men a quick, easy way to heat up their Hot Pockets while pondering where it all went wrong. But it turns out they’re good for other things, too.
The New York Times reports that one scientist has devised a plan to use microwaves to kill invasive bacteria and other organisms that stowaway on huge cargo ships.
The ships take on water to maintain stability while empty, then dump the water at a different port when they’re being loaded. Meanwhile, all those little critters in the water are transported from place to place and dumped out into the ocean.
Dr. Dorin Baldor of LSU says using microwaves to quickly heat the water to 140 degrees before purging it will kill off the potentially invasive organisms:
The system he developed uses a 5,000-watt microwave unit (most home ovens are 800 watts or less) and a “resonance cavity” that focuses the energy on a water pipe. By varying the power and water flow, the researchers raised the water temperature quickly to about 140 degrees, high enough to kill the organisms they studied, including algae, brine shrimp and oyster larvae. The findings are published in Environmental Science and Technology.
If my experience with this technology is any indicator, the main obstacle to success will be even heating of the organisms. The edges of the boat’s ballast tank will be piping hot while the middle will still be lukewarm, even after following the goddamn instructions. You can stir and stir, but still you’ll get some pockets that stay cool while others set the entire roof of your mouth on fire. Goddamn pizza rolls.
Microwave Is Redirected to Kill Shipboard Pests [New York Times]
Pax Arcana
I spotted this helpful sign in the men’s room at Target on Saturday, shortly before attending a baby shower for the soon-to-be-parents of little Buster Perry Ellis.
It’s nice to be reminded of things like this from time to time, no?
Pax Arcana
Here’s one for anyone who has ever accidentally set his laptop on fire.
Just me?
When the space shuttle Discover blew up on re-entry in 2003, pieces of the wreck were scattered across a long swath of Texas prairie land. Actually I have no idea if it was prairie land — that just seems to go with the whole Texas thing.
Among the debris recovered was a hard drive that had been melted into a metallic mass by the blazing hot gases of the explosion. On the drive was data collected by the astronauts on an experiment on liquid xenon. Much of the data had been radioed back to earth before the fatal wreck, but the experiment could not be completed without the remainder.
That’s where Minnesota-based Kroll Ontrack comes in. The data recovery specialists were able to locate the metal platters inside the melted husk. The platters had been damaged, but were not warped. After building a new drive apparatus to spin the platters, Kroll Ontrack was able to recover about 99% of the data kept inside.
Here’s the best part:
They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not yet been written.
Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.
Sadly, Kroll Ontrack rendered much of the DOS data worthless when it accidentally ran C:\>deltree instead of C:\>fdisk. GEEKS IN THE HOUSE SAY HEYOOHHHHH!!!! High five!
Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident [AP]
Pax Arcana
Perry Ellis
fatherscott
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