God's Own Crunk

It is an exercise in narcissism that each May for the past several years, I’ve written my dream oratory to theoretical graduating high school seniors gathered before me. High school kids don’t read my writing, or if they do, it’s by accident, and no administrator in his right mind would allow me stand before a crowd of impressionable youth and address them.

Still, I do it, because I can. Ergo…

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Yerp. 

Merry Christmas! Click to enlarge, of course. Hope you and yours are having a merry xmas.

By virtue of having a November 22 birthday, a lot of crazy shit has, football-related, happened on my birthday. Games of the Centurae (/latin-ish), miracles on turf, etc – seriously, it’s heavy carrying a burden like that, and my older readers also know that, yeah, JFK was killed on 11/22.

So there’s that.

This clip happened on 11/23/84. 1984 was probably the greatest year in American peace-time for more reasons that I’m capable of explaining – it was just perfect, though.  Born in the 70s, a child of the 80s, I think of the 80s – 1982-86, especially – as an idyllic wonderland of Rubik’s cubes, Ataris, Really Good Spielberg Films, Less Than Zero,  and the advent of Marty McFlyisms. This isn’t a historical document, it’s a memory from a man who’s been institutionalized multiple times, so don’t quote me on it.

I hate Miami and am no fan of Boston College, but this was probably the best college football game ever played. In a time before statistics went Gameboy (/dated), the stats from this game were unreal, and just as I saw Christian Laettner hit the Shot Heard Round the World at the Mazzios in Ardmore-OK, so too did I, a kid 10-years-and-1-day-old, see Doug Flutie do this business.Seriously – go in that restaurant, take a lefty around the salad bar, up the step, on the rising, and yeah, I saw the two greatest sports moments that happened in my first 20 years in pretty much the same spot.

More/less.

This ain’t that – whatever – don’t you love that radio call?

Hivemind IRL – I’ve played or play still most of these games. This was posted over at Galleycat, a book blog I follow, and the blog asks “what game do you play while reading book?”

Because I’m an American in the 21st Century, I tend to visualize what Mainstream Hollywood Actor would work best in each role in a book (I assume everyone does this). I used to time the first few pages of reading in any given book so I could figure out how long it was going to take to read.

As for the video, the one about stopping the stopwatch at 1:00 used to be an autist’s obsession of mine, so I stopped playing that one.

The complete works, that is.

Around 1,800 pages, I started it on a whim in late June and just finished the last story in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mad catalogue this evening, the last story/case being “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman.” That case, like most of the catalogue, is a self-contained short story within a collection, in its case the collection being The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.

I hope I’ll write more about this, but who knows, but for now, I’d like to share a few thoughts.

The first: it’s been a vocabulary lesson for the ages. These days, I read using the Kindle app on the iPad, so it’s easy to highlight/define words I’m not familiar with. Beyond my Sherlock Holmes reading, I try to read at least three books each week, mainly nonfiction – the point is that I read a lot, duh. In my reading of Holmes, I highlighted nearly 300 words, which I assume is near what I marked while reading Ulysses, Lolita and Absalom, Absalom! combined, the three most challenging English-language novels I’ve read.

The stories are legendary, canon I suppose. The Valley of Fear is the best murder-mystery I’ve ever read, but this isn’t something I read a lot of, so I’m in no position to compare/contrast Doyle’s craft.

My last post focused on commercialization, but reading Holmes, I get why the sleuth is as popular as he is. The nice thing about finishing such a work is reading the canon is just the … beginning … Jeez, where do I start? a) the movies b) the TV shows c) the reinterprations of the character by stellar mystery writers … and that ignores all those cultural references I’ve absorbed.

On a final note, as silly as I come off here at z’GOC, I sincerely appreciate good writing, and it’s hard to find. Doyle’s writing is gorgeous, and there are flourishes – he did these stories over 40 years – that elevate far above his already exceptional material. As a man who love truly good writing on the occasion he sees it and finds plot, er, not that important, Doyle combines the two so perfectly it … doesn’t need me trying to describe it.

What a wonderful reading project – that’s what I’ll say about it.

I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so take it for what it’s worth - you can get the Complete Holmes here. Good stuff.

Lauren Conrad, who came to a bit of fame during the freshman season narrating “Laguna Beach,” and then came to real fame during its spin-off, “The Hills,” made an odd decision to destroy a book to make a decoration, that act itself all the more creepy considering the Martha Stewart Living music, and Conrad’s giddiness in the creation of her art. Lauren Conrad may be a fool, but I don’t suspect she’s the book-burning villain she’s being made out to be. Her crime, an anti-intellectual one, is shocking to fewer people than We, Ye Olde Civilised Folke, imagine. If you think I jest, read the comments.

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Via Instapundit...

My sibling is an industrial engineer, and before reading this paragraph I always figured they were destined to design more efficient lines at amusement parks (fwiw, said sibling is not only far more successful than I am, said sibling would also admit The Job has now has little to do with the degree in IE). That said, this is one of the more interesting things I’ve read online of late, so I thought I’d share:

Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs. There is a whole science of “pallet cube optimization,” a kind of Tetris for packaging; and an associated engineering, filled with analyses of “pallet overhang” (stacking cartons so they hang over the edge of the pallet, resulting in losses of carton strength) and efforts to reduce “pallet gaps” (too much spacing between deckboards). The “pallet loading problem,”—or the question of how to fit the most boxes onto a single pallet—is a common operations research thought exercise.

via Pallets: The single most important object in the global economy. – Slate Magazine.