Where’s Ron Burgundy’s report?

Baby panda born at San Diego Zoo. How could someone write this story and not make an Anchorman joke?  I mean, yeah, it’s obvious.  But hell, it’s FUNNY!

Zombies; they’re the new Ninjas

Who’s not entertained by a good zombie story?  But lately, they’re friggin’ everywhere.  Not literally, of course.  (or are they?)  Every time zombies come up I feel the need to go grab a trucker hat and a PBR.  It’s gotten so widespread, the popularity of zombies has even spread to the academic world.

The Freakonomics blog links to a mathematical study of a zombie outbreak and thelikelihood of human survival.  A nice idea, and I’m sure a lot more fun that logorithms and cosines or whatever the hell else mathematics graduate students usually write about, but we already know how it’d go down.

World War Z, by Max Brooks, is “an oral history of the Zombie War”.  Written as a collection of individual interviews with various participants from all over the world and in different roles in the war,  he explores cultural differences, politics, and human responses to catastrophic situations. My favorite section was the interview with Col. Christina Eliopolis, although I don’t want to talk about it too much, as the ending has a nice twist I don’t want to ruin.

While the social commentary was well done and a big part of the book, I found the biggest strengths to be Brooks’ ability to capture the many different voices of the characters.  If you buy in on page 1, you’re treated to a parallel universe complete with nationalistic pride, shady businessmen, incompetent politicians, and government cover-ups.  Brooks varies the tone, jargon, concerns and focuses on each of the characters so realistically you’d swear he’d done these interviews with real people.  It’s not only entertaining, but also well written.  I’d definitely recommend this book.

Miscellanea

A variety of posts, via Berg’s or Paul’s delicious feed, twitter, or various google reader links.

• Infusing rum with mint & sugar (form making mojitos)
• Best Bars in America, by state
• SuperCook lets you enter what you have in your kitchen, and gives a recipe list of what you can make
• HBO’s Resurgence, a nice article about HBO and upcoming programs (including David Simon’s new show) via Tim Goodman of the SF Chronicle
• Will Leitch on the Mets’ front office mess, and Billy Beane via New York Magazine

80’s Shawshank Ending

Found this starred in my inbox from ages ago, pretty funny:

Awesome 80’s Montage: Shawshank – watch more funny videos

Great news for Cubs fans like me…

For some reason, I was thinking about Major League the other day.  Specifically, Yankees’ slugger Haywood and his, at the time, ridiculous stat line.  As Bob Uecker says, “Haywood steps in, the American League triple crown winner. .341 average, 48 homers, 121 R.B.I.’s. He’s homered the only two times he’s faced Vaughn.”  When I was little, I remember thinking how utterly insane this line was.  You know, exaggerated for a movie.  Then I looked at Pujols’ baseball-reference page. Here’s his 162-game average: .334 BA/42 HR/128 RBI. I mean, he’s got a career 1.050 OPS! Really, it’s like he’s out of a movie. And he plays for the Cubs’ biggest rival. And I’ve never owned him on a fantasy baseball team. Awesome…

Curve balls

Via Rob Neyer’s SweetSpot, a great visual representation of what makes a curveball so tough to hit (besides the whole “curving” thing). Also on that link, some other cool visual effects I’d recommend checking out.

Random sport stuff

In honor of King James’ MVP (my buddy Phil showed this to me a few weeks ago):

Another good video (courtesy of the Sports Guy, who’s now on twitter):

Why do I still pay for cable?

Oh yeah, ESPN (and the many channels it’s spawned, and the various FoxSports family channels). But this is great news: via Tim Goodman’s blog, I found out that ABC/Disney is now on hulu! Sweeeeeet.

Internet’s abilities STILL underrated

My roommate just pointed me to a site that I’m probably way late discovering, but it’s new to me. Pandora is a FREE radio site. You tell them an artist you want to hear, they start you off with a song by that artist/band, and then thru the use of some crazy algorithm-type thingy, they play similar songs. You tell them whether or not you like the song, it customizes it more. You can create several different “stations” so that you can customize each one a different way. LOVE IT. The only, and I mean ONLY, problem I’ve found, is that you cannot select a specific song, due to the way that they have licensed the music. And I really wanted to hear The Gnome last night. Oh well. All in all, this site is rather awesome.

Major beer tax hike proposed in AZ

Thanks to my buddy Tony, I was alerted to a problem that hits me very close to home.  Arizona legislators have proposed a beer tax increase of over 2000%! You can view the actual bill here. As the article notes, you can become a Beer Activist, or, as Tony suggested, contact your legislator.