Dr. Strangelove Transformation Complete (via Life in the NohoDome)
Archive for January 31st, 2009
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying now that Cheney is Gone
Posted in Bush, Cheney, Politics on January 31, 2009| Leave a Comment »
R.I.P. – Ingemar Johansson (1932-2009)
Posted in Obituaries, Sports on January 31, 2009| Leave a Comment »
“Ingemar Johansson, the Swede who stunned the boxing world by knocking out Floyd Patterson to win the heavyweight title in 1959, has died. Johansson was 76.” (via ESPN)
[Sometimes a person, or an event, sticks in your head in ways you don’t necessarily appreciate until much later, perhaps not until the person dies or the event regains relevance. I have been an avid sports fan, mostly of baseball, since I was a young boy growing up in the 1950s in a home with a sports-crazed father. I remember vividly my father’s shock, and disappointment, when Johansson KO’d Patterson in 1959 – my father went on for months about how it was the greatest upset he had ever seen in any sport. The following year, in October 1960, just two months shy of my 8th birthday, my beloved New York Yankees were upset by the Pittsburgh Pirates in a classic seven-game World Series — classic if you rooted against the Yankees — ended by Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run. While the Yankees loss meant much more to me than the Patterson defeat, I think that together, the two famous upsets, one coming so soon after the other, “proved” to my nascent sports-fan’s sensibilities that the world of sports was a world in which anything — anything! — could happen. If so, Johansson is owed my thanks (as is my father, of course, and the still-despised Bill Mazeroski) for my lifelong love of sports.]
Related
Google & the Future of Books
Posted in Books, Business, Science & Technology, World Wide Web, Writers & Writing on January 31, 2009| 1 Comment »
“How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?”
(via The New York Review of Books)
Related
The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide 