On 28 June 1999, I, and I expect everyone else watching the X-Games live from home, was standing up in his or her living room.  It’s pretty clear that everyone with functional legs in the stands was also on his or her feet.

It was the skateboard “Best Trick” competition.  Tony Hawk had already landed a Varial 720 with uncanny beauty, which was itself considered an impossible trick for a long time.

So, yeah, what now?  He’s nailed a crazy-hard trick in competition.  He has the last run.  Under X-Games rules, he gets three tries.  He drops in, builds up speed, and … wipes out.  But … “WTF?!” says everyone watching.  “Seriously, what was he going for?  He’s not actually trying to land a 900 degree turn, in competition, on live TV, is he?”  By this point, with intense work on the trick by the world’s best athletes for 10 years, many skaters and commentators were starting to believe it was literally impossible.

So the cheers start.  Second run.  Drops in, builds up speed, goes up, starts spinning, and … wipes.  Damn.

Everyone is standing.  Third and final run.  The world holds its breath.  This is the moment.  He will land it on his last try in a televised competition.  He drops in, goes way above the deck, spins forever, and…

Wipes out.  Hard.  We wonder if he’s broken a couple of ribs.

“God,” we thought in the audience.  “He was so close.  The X-Games will remember this forever.”

Tony stands to walk out of the ramp, a camera zoomed in on his face.  And he throws this determined glare up to where the producers are sitting.  I’ve talked to other friends, and we all report whistling and thinking “Oh, fuck!”  I don’t think there’s a possible read of that look other than “If you want to get me off this ramp, you will send in a team of horses to drag me off.”

So he walks back up to the deck.  The commentators are sort of flailing around.  One says something like, “Ohhhkay.  I guess he’s still skating.  Folks, we’re making this up as we go along here.”

Tries again, his fourth run.  When he misses, he misses in a way that the impact could have shattered his kneecaps even with his guards.  But he got the board under him.

The commentators are asking if they’re still on the air.  The broadcast has gone over time, and other ESPN programming is being bumped.  To my knowledge, this is the first time ESPN had given preference to an “extreme” sport over something else.

Fifth run … and the board slides out from under him.  Walking off the ramp, he looks pissed off.

Bucky Lasek, who had beaten him in vert the day before, starts tapping his skateboard against the edge of the pipe — the “applause” among skateboarders.  Andy Macdonald, Tony’s long-time doubles partner, starts slamming his against the edge.  Tony goes for it … and so close on his sixth!

Back up to the deck.  He’s pouring sweat and looks like he’s been in a fight.  He’s exhausted.  Andy goes over to him and talks quietly to him, looking supportive, looking determined, and making me wish I could read lips.

The audience starts chanting “Tony!  Tony!”  Then the commentators start chanting that on the air.  I’m chanting at home, for the utter lack of good that will do. 

Seventh run … oh, man, that was close.  And they’re still on the air!

He climbs up again, and the best skateboarders in the world lay their hands on him, as if in benediction.  Eighth run.  Goes above the deck and spins, and at full broadcast speed it looks like it’s in slow motion.

And Tony lands it.  Tony lands what was considered an impossible trick.  I’m shouting in my living room.  He’s dogpiled at the bottom.  Cheers from everyone, including screams from the commentators.  When the crowd gets off him, ESPN gets a camera and a mic in his face.  Tony points at the crowd and says “If it wasn’t for you people I would have never made that.  Thank you.  This is the best day of my life.”  Beyond humble.  Beyond awesome.

Here’s the bit that no one ever talks about:  The judges are in a weird place now.  Unless they rewrite the rules on-the-fly, the 900 cannot count towards his Best Trick attempt.  Are they really going to take Tony Hawk’s earlier 720 and compare it to everyone else’s tricks, ignoring the 9?  That would be correct, but obscene. 

So the judges are trying to figure out what to do.  The other competitors quickly huddle, talk to each other, and say they want to speak to the judges.  They say to the people scoring: “Nah, don’t bother.  The rest of us withdraw our runs.  Tony is the only one who skated today.”  Problem solved.  Gold medal to Tony Hawk, and no silver nor bronze medal awarded at all.

And that is the number one, but number one among many, reasons I prefer the culture of X-Games competitions to traditional, huge-salary sports.  The support, the humility, the sort of charming naïveté that still exists in the rules and judging.  It’s the visual grace of one-on-one performance events — Olympic-style stuff — plus the moral grace of a community of jam musicians, versus the crass venality one finds too often in more-traditional competition events.

Here’s the best YouTube video I could find, with someone else’s similar, but different, take on things.  And please forgive the overwrought prose — attribute it to my inability to otherwise express something with such great emotional impact on me.

I’ve encountered some tab notation I’ve never seen before:

e:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
B:-o-///-|-----------------------------------------------|-o-/-|
G:--///--|r(7)--r(9)--r(7)--------r(7)--r(9)--r(7)-------|--/--|
D:-///-o-|------------------r(7)--------------------r(7)-|-/-o-|
A:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
E:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|

1.  Do r(7) and r(9) mean to pluck a string already bent a quarter tone above frets 7 and 9, respectively, and release the bend while the string is still sounding?

2.  Can someone explain how to interpret the notation of what I assume are slides at the beginning and end?

Please comment here.  And if this should be obvious, my apologies.

OK, grammar geek time.  A huge pet peeve of mine is lie/lay conjugation and construction errors.  I don’t know what to say: memorize them and practice them until they sound right in your ear?  Or read more?

1.  to lie, intransitive, meaning “to intentionally tell a falsehood”:  I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lied yesterday, I have lied.

2.  to lie, intransitive, meaning “to be prone or supine”:  I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lay yesterday, I have lain.

3.  to lay, transitive, meaning “to cause something to lie”:  I lay it, he lays it, I am laying it, I laid it yesterday, I have laid it.

Is that messy?  Yes.  Is it hard to remember?  Yes.  Will it always be this way?  Maybe not.  Is it still the case that you will sound like a dolt if you mess this up?  Oh, yes.

Please scrutinize the above table.  In none of these verbs is there an intransitive simple present of the form “lay”.  There is only a transitive one.  So if you say “I want to lay down,” my brain is waiting for an object, and when it doesn’t come, my brain tumbles a bit.  The educated ear is expecting something like “I want to lay down the remote control and go outside.”  If you mean that you desire to intentionally become horizontal, you say “I want to lie down.”

Likewise, you cannot say “He went in the back and laid down.”  That, too, needs an object: again, something like “he went in the back and laid down the law,” which, while pretty awesome-sounding, is almost certainly not what you meant.  If you expressing a simple past action, you say “He went in the back and lay down.”

You do not say “my cat is laying on me”, unless you mean that you have some weird atavistic female feline who produces eggs instead of live kittens.

And you will explode some people’s skulls if you say “He went and lied down”.  That’s … just … that’s completely wrong.  It’s up there with “Me and you’re cousin’s am gonna go bring the dog to the vet for it’s shots.”

Start warming up your wrist joints.  You’re going to need them for a facepalm in a short bit.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has offered, over the past few years, several theories often labelled “controversial”.  Here’s an overview, via The Independent:

1. Beautiful people are more likely to have female children than male children
2. Liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives
3. Muslim society has applied evolutionary pressure to make it much more likely for a Muslim to be a suicide bomber than for anyone else to
4. Men are selected to prefer blondes
5. Humans are evolved to be more prone to polygyny than polyandry, because historically a woman would be better off with a fraction of a rich man’s attention than all of a poor man’s, and the reverse was not true
6. Married couples with sons are less likely to divorce than those without
7. Adolescent peaks of criminality and creative endeavors have the same cause: evolved sexual competitiveness at that age
8. It is not that men have evolved a mid-life crisis.  Rather, it is a behavioral response to their wives’ menopause
9. It is to be expected, evolutionarily, that male politicians will risk their careers for an extramarital affair
10. Sexual harassment does not indicate the presence of anti-female sentiment; rather, it indicates that men are indiscriminating, because they abuse, harass, and degrade men as well

Woo-hoo!  Take your pick!  What offends you?  “Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct,” he states.  See that?  Short, inflammatory, and quotable!

OK, tabulation: what offends me?  That this fucker’s logical reasoning is pervasively flawed.  He repeatedly conflates correlation and causation; he relies on debunked, inaccurate, and culturally-dependent measures such as I.Q.; he assumes a person’s religion is the religion of his forebears; he relies on too much armchair reasoning and too little field investigation; he takes as a given that a six-point gap in I.Q. will be evident in first meetings of strangers; and generally he just acts like an imbecile.  If he’s right, he’s right for the wrong reasons.  And that’s worse than being wrong.

Are some of his theories speculations correct?  Maybe.  It is almost certain that some things labelled “political correctness” at some times and in some places are inconsistent with some facts of evolutionary development.  Well, duh.  But it’s not binary, and it’s not monolithic.  Why is he willing to make such a facile statement as “human nature is simply not politically correct”?  Not quite sure — but one can be certain that this willingness to dichotomize and falsely generalize characterizes his entire approach to the subject matter.  I think it worth noting that Steven Pinker, working in a related field but who has different horses in the race, has quote-reasoned-unquote his way to opposite conclusions, such as his claim that the validity of political conservatism over political liberalism is confirmed by the observation that artificial intelligence software with distributed rather than top-down organization functions better (I did not make that up.)

This should be a “move along, folks, nothing to see here” — except that many who deny evolution are likely to be offended by some or all of this (Especially Claim #2.  If you disagree that political conservatism and religiosity have a strong positive correlation with denial of evolution, I would love to know how you get Internet access on whatever planet you’re living on.  [↓Insert obvious comparison to Kanazawa's reasoning here↓])  And if it’s used as reinforcement that evolutionary theory must be nonsense and hateful and eugenic, and resisted at all cost, the … um … someone will have won.  And someone will have lost.  Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway: that is what pisses me off.  Fucker.

Reading H. Beam Piper’s Murder in the Gunroom, the main character was told “If, when you return, there are four cars in the garage, counting the station wagon…”

And I asked myself, why wouldn’t he count the station wagon?  They established that it’s functional.  Why, they used it just the previous day: they carted someone and his … his, er, luggage, from … from the … train station.  Huh.  Is that why it’s called that?  Because, originally, a station wagon does that?

I’m getting a bunch of hits on an old recipes page that’s no longer linked from the main site, but that Google still checks.   I first posted them in 2001.   Enjoy!

Hey, readers, that time of the year again, when I ask you to help support this site by using my Amazon referral link for holiday gifts (or other items) you might be buying anyway!

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar: Amazon.com

And thanks!

Niall:  Daddy, what’s that buzzing noise?

I look for the source of the sound.  It’s coming from a power pole.

Me:  It’s a transformer.

Niall looks to the pole, eyes widening, widening, widening.  Then I figure it out.

Me:  Oh, no!  Sorry, Niall!  Not a giant robot!  Something that helps take electricity to the houses.

I’ve made three LOLs in the cheezburger fashion this week.  They appear below, with spoilers appearing as “[?]“.

“Whoa, doodz! Thoze burrds Я fucking peristeronic as shit!!” [?]

Labels: “Head. Fieldy. Munky. KoЯn.” [?]

“Frown lines?  Dissolve them … with LOL CREME!” [?]

Seventeen years ago, Damien Echols (of what are now called The West Memphis 3) was sentenced to death, courtesy of gross police incompetence and disbarment-level legal proceedings, on the grounds of being an outspoken young man who liked Metallica and fit in poorly with conservative Christian culture.  Essentially all testimony against him has been recanted, police coercion is evident, and DNA evidence not only exonerates him but implicates two others.  At least some family members of the victims now believe him to be innocent.

As part of the wicked, tragic, and profoundly stupid “Satanic ritual abuse” moral panic in the United States, Echols was swept up in the superstitious bigotry of 1993 Arkansas.  Among other absurdities, black concert t-shirts he owned were displayed in court as evidence of his “satanism”.  Along with Echols, two other teenagers were arrested, tried, and given life sentences.

He has now been granted a new hearing for his innocence.

On behalf of people who were outspoken heavy-metal-listening black-t-shirt-wearing 19-year-olds in opposition to conservative Christianity; on behalf of opponents of state-sanctioned murder; on behalf of citizens concerned about abuse of law enforcement and judicial authority; on behalf of all who possess a modicum of human rationality and resistance to gross superstition about the “supernatural”; on behalf of those who are aware that “satanism” is not “devil worship” and that neither of those is a frightening scourge in America but that Bible Belt conservatism is; on behalf of, I hope, everyone reading this:  ABOUT.  FUCKING.  TIME.

In a just society, Echols and his alleged accomplices would be released, and several police officers, a judge, and the real murderers would replace them behind bars.  But these seventeen years should irrefutably attest that this is in no way a just society.

I was shopping at the grocery store with my mother:

Me:  (picking up a package of DaVinci Pasta “Spinach Nests”)  I didn’t know that spinach built nests!  Did you?

Mom:  (laughing)  No.

Me:  Do you think they wait until the sprouts leave the nest before they…?

Mom:  Yes, I’m sure they do.

Me:  (placing the package in the cart)  Oh, good.

A letter to Marketplace responded to a segment about banks complaining that they own all these empty, foreclosed houses, and that deterioration due to lack of use and maintenance is costing them dearly.  And, of course, asking the government for more money to maintain them.  The author asked “Where is the entrepreneurial spirit?”  Noting a growing population of working homeless, he suggested the banks “clean the gutters, paint the houses, and rent them.  Banks could help their communities, help the economy, and help protect their investments.”

Great!  How about a step further?  The houses are sitting empty right now, yes?  The elements and — here’s a key point — disuse of systems in the buildings are causing them to lose value.  Why not move the homeless into the houses in exchange for the newly-homed conducting repairs, performing maintenance, and generally properly exercising them?

If the homes are losing value because people are not maintaining them and not living in them, and there are people lacking homes who would love the “burden” of maintaining one, then isn’t there a pretty clear solution to this puzzle?  At the very least, if the banks wouldn’t agree to this, let’s call their bluff.

A number of subatomic particles were at a table in a bar, being entertained by a charm quark, when the bar was hit by a meteorite.

• The photon made light of the situation
• The electron tunneled its way out
• The Higgs Boson wasn’t worried, given its divinity
• The tachyon was out of there faster than you could say “Jack Robinson”, or indeed faster than the light from a Batman-style projector with “Jack Robinson” stenciled on the front could reach Alpha Centauri, even if such a device had, for some baffling reason, been built and activated the week before
• It is unclear whether the graviton was there at all, but if it was, it would have treated the occasion with suitable seriousness
• Some particle somewhere was heard screaming “Oh My God Oh My God Oh My God!”, but speculations as to what particle it was that was screaming vary, with the most common guess being some energetic proton that happened to be nearby
• The up and down quarks thought that maybe 30 extra lives would come in handy and started cooperating, but were stymied after the fourth step
• The Tau lepton and the Z boson were already splitting some soup, and just continued their activity
• The neutrino chuckled ruefully to itself while reading an as-yet-unwritten issue of Pravda
• The dilaton by the better vazes preferring under their better icy magnanimity
• The strange quark took responsibility for everything following the up and down quarks bit, explaining that Joshua had run out of cleverness so it (the strange quark) had picked engaging, and puzzling, but ultimately nonsensical punchlines with the hope of stymying those readers intent on getting all the jokes, and was thereby attempting a sort of meta-humor at the expense of mcgees.org visitors
• And the muon might have commented on the paradox of the strange quark characterizing its own punchline as being fatuous when it actually made a certain amount of sense, and then it might have exclaimed that its own comment had introduced further paradox by adding another item to the very same list, but my assigning this to the muon would not really have made any narrative nor scientific sense, would not have furthered, let alone fulfilled, comedic logic, and, besides, muons can’t speak

For the record: In the setup for the joke, the “meteorite” element has no payoff beyond the market price of iridium.