19 November

Now that’s really unfortunate… and gross…

But the question on my mind (besides “How is that guy not vomiting?”) is, “Why the hell were they hauling a whale carcass through the middle of a city on a flatbed truck?”

Found here via here.

But to prove that every cloud, or punctured whale carcass, has a silver lining (ugh… sorry… I don’t want that image either), a few clicks onward led me to this wonderment: a photographic compendium of audio cassettes. Now this is a dead technology, laughably inferior to what we almost take for granted today. But from about 1981 when I got my first little red portable tape recorder from Radio Shack, until 1998, when I got my first CD burner, cassettes were it, baby, and I probably went through thousands of blank cassettes from just about every available brand between the ages of 8 and 24. And if you can’t appreciate that, at least I’ve found someone who can.

What other crazy stuff has been happening in professional sports while I wasn’t looking?

It’s true: I pay very little attention to professional sports of any kind. It’s not that I don’t like them, I’m just usually not that interested. I used to be; I collected baseball cards in middle school, and my peak of interest in pro sports conveniently coincided with “my” Minnesota Twins winning the World Series for the first time ever, in 1987.

Since then, it’s been all downhill. I was excited about the Vikings in 1998, only to be let down by Gary Anderson’s only missed field goal of the year, in the NFC Championship game. I watched the Twins’ tiebreaker game against the White Sox this year, only to be let down yet again by a team that has an incredible knack for falling ever-so-slightly short, again and again. Perhaps this “always the bridesmaid” trait common amongst the Minnesota pro teams is what makes it hard for me to be a sports fan. But more likely, I’m just not that interested, and that’s all there is to it. These days the only professional sports I actually get excited about watching are Wimbledon and the Olympics, and their relative infrequency probably contributes to my enthusiasm.

Yet, I am still drawn in by unexpected developments, like the Steelers’ 11-10 win this week. I knew that was a weird score, and I thought it was cool when I learned that out of the over 12,000 NFL games played in the league’s history to date, this was the first ever to end with that score.

But this fact still caught me totally off guard. I was reading kottke.org this morning and he just casually mentioned that the Seattle Supersonics had moved to Oklahoma City. To quote Dave McFly, “When the hell did this happen?” This year, apparently, and I had no clue.

Oh well.