Links for 2011-08-19

"Everybody who plays a sport for fun has encountered a Serious Guy (or a Serious Girl). A Serious Guy turns 3-on-3 into a curse-filled nightmare. A Serious Guy makes backyard badminton feel like tax preparation, and elevates meaningless Wiffle ball into Game 7. A Serious Guy groans when you swing and miss. A Serious Guy can't believe you sliced that Titleist into the woods. A Serious Guy just smashed a volley into your face.

You don't even have to be playing with a Serious Guy to upset one. A Serious Guy will howl if you hit a ball into his court, or scream if you impede his $12,000 time-trial bike. A Serious Guy won't let your kid play in his playground game, because, you know, it's Serious.

A Serious Guy wants to win. He has no mercy or sense of humor or sense of proportion. A Serious Guy joins the kiddie soccer game at a family picnic, and blasts a 30-footer past a toddler. A Serious Guy calls three-second violations in Nerf hoops."

"I guess I should state the full question:

Why do mirrors reverse left and right, but they don't reverse up and down?

Answer: Mirrors don't reverse left and right and they don't reverse up and down. Wouldn't that be kind of funny if I just stopped here? But you know I can't."

"These are bold claims, amounting to a thesis that Britain has been wrecked and transformed from a familiar, law-abiding spot to an alien hell hole in just three or four decades. But here is an odd thing, surely: go back precisely three decades and you get to the summer of 1981, scene of some of the nastiest riots in modern British history, when racially charged violence saw tracts of Brixton in south London and Toxteth in Liverpool burn for days.

Seeking guidance, Bagehot decided to go off-line and read some books. From the shelves of the London Library, a gem: "Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears" a calm and witty history of moral panics that have gripped England over the ages, published in 1982, and written by a Bradford University academic, Geoffrey Pearson (later at Goldsmiths). "

"I appreciate that screenwriters aren't exactly top of the status pole, but - again - it's not as though the make-up artists are top of the heap, but they still manage to get everyone's make-up on right, seems like. Why is it so hard to Hollywood to achieve basic competence in screenwriting? I can't believe that the screenwriters themselves just can't write passable sf-adventure scripts, to save their lives. That's not possible. It's a craft. You can learn to chunk the stuff out. They could have, like, a camp, where people learn to do it."

"He stood just four feet tall, his body contorted by a hump in his back and a crooked gait, and his stunted torso gave the illusion that his head, hands and feet were too big. But he was a giant among scientific thinkers, counting Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as friends, and his contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time."

Winter Is Coming