Some Facts About Neil Armstrong

Via Wikipedia*

• In the fall of 1979, Armstrong was working at his farm near Lebanon, Ohio. As he jumped off of the back of his grain truck, his wedding ring caught in the wheel, tearing off the tip of his ring finger. However, he calmly collected the severed digit, packed it in ice, and managed to have it reattached by microsurgeons at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
• In May 2005 Armstrong became involved in an unusual legal battle with his barber of 20 years, Marx Sizemore. After cutting Armstrong’s hair, Sizemore sold some of it to a collector for $3,000 without Armstrong’s knowledge or permission. Armstrong threatened legal action unless the barber returned the hair or donated the proceeds to a charity of Armstrong’s choosing. Sizemore, unable to get the hair back, decided to donate the proceeds to the charity of Armstrong’s choice.
• Armstrong was also inducted into the Aerospace Walk of Honor and the Astronaut Hall of Fame. [Ed.'s note: Did they really need to vote on inducting Neil Armstrong into the Astronaut Hall of Fame? Did somebody vote against him? Are there Aeromautical purists of such discerning taste that they consider Neil Armstrong unworthy of the Astronaut Hall of Fame?]

*Unverified, because honestly, who cares?

I Actually Didn’t, But I’m Glad It Worked Out This Way

Chris Singleton Dumb

About A Florida Politician & Her Hilarious Lineage

As if anyone needed another reason to pay attention to the scintillating world of Florida gubernatorial politics, Alex Sink has burst on to the scene with a juicy nugget of novelty that is as erotic as it is pertinent — that is to say “not very,” but I like it nonetheless.

While making headlines in papers from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel to the Tallahassee Democrat as a 2010 gubernatorial candidate (Note 2nd use of “gubernatorial”) and the first female CFO of the state of Florida, the real story behind the Sink lies in her lineage, as she is a direct descendant of the world’s most dignified two-headed monster, Chang and Eng Bunker.

For those of you who have been living under a rock and/or aren’t well-versed in the people-who-are-attached-to-each-other scene, the Bunker “brothers”* were a pair of Thai-American conjoined twins who according to Wikipedia, “their condition and birthplace became the basis for the term “Siamese Twins.”

The Bunker collective lived a relatively normal life considering the face that they were a walking work of science fiction, immigrating to America in 1839 and setting up a plantation where they became successful farmers using the popular agricultural technique of owning black people as property and forcing them to work in the fields without pay. The Bunker body also wed a pair of sisters, presumably with each head getting their own wife, and between the conglomeration of heads and genitals that was this 3.5-person marriage they produced 21 children.

With free labor playing a key role in their otherwise innovative business model, the Bunkers went broke following the Civil War and returned to freak show circuit, that apparently being a popular thing in the decades prior to the advent of flagpole-sitting. Chang died of pneumonia in 1874 and Eng hung around for a couple of hours with his dead half-body just kind of laying there before dying himself.

So there you have it. The tale of the original Siamese Twins is way more interesting than that of their great-granddaughter, who grew up with just one head and became a politician in some hick state. Take that, Alex Sink.

TCV Gives Us High-Quality Video For Christmas

AbeVigoda.com Keeping Us Informed

If you ever find yourself wondering whether Abe Vigoda is alive or not on any given day, head over to AbeVigoda.com, a daily-updated site that meticulously tracks the famous actor’s living status. Of course, Rake Blog also takes great pains to ensure that readers will be informed as soon as the eighth lead in Good Burger passes, but it’s nice to know that someone else is out there fighting the good fight for this great man and the adoring public.

Typical Year-End Retrospective: The Best Goddamn Stuff of 2009

I could launch into a diatribe about the arbitrariness of a year as a quantity of time to examine pop culture, but this happened to be a particularly good year of stuff, so let’s get to it. Not necessarily in order, except for Inglourious Basterds as #1 because it may be the best thing ever:

Inglourious Basterds: Hitler-killing, Jew-boy jackoff fantasy, courtesy of the goy Tarantino. Every single minute of Inglourious Basterds is enthralling, and  Quentin finally delivered a film that transcends his Tarantino-ness, forgoing his oft-terrible cameo and replacing Uma Thurman with a younger, more-interesting Uma Thurman named Mélanie Laurent, who looks as good wearing a tam as anyone in the history of hats. Christoph Waltz is amazing and perfectly creepy in that bizarre pseudo-sexual way that Germans are creepy as SS Colonel Hans Landa and Ryan the Temp does more with his five or six lines than The Office has accomplished in six seasons.

Them Crooked Vultures: 2:42 until the end of “No One Loves Me and Neither Do I” is rock.

The Cleveland Show: Seth MacFarlane shows that he (or at least his crew) is capable of writing comedy that doesn’t rely on lame segways and randomly inserted pop culture references. The Cleveland Show works because it is legit funny and the blackest thing on TV since Living Single.

Executive Order 13492: Brothermang shows up and shuts down America’s concentration camp in Cuba. This is probably more important than Inglourious Basterds or The Cleveland Show, but doesn’t include Mélanie Laurent or a talking bear, so whatever.

The Beatles Remasters: The Beatles are obviously the best, but being able to discern the surprisingly awesome bassline in “Dear Prudence” is an epic revelation. The best records of all time finally sound like the best records of all time.

Ghost Toast: Yup.

Albert Pujols, Joe Mauer, Zack Greinke & Tim Lincecum: The four best players in baseball put up epic seasons and sweep the awards. Cheers to the BBWAA for doing their jobs. Forget Roy Halladay, Mark Teixiera and the rest of the class of excellent players who are just below the best players in the game. The only players who matter are the absolute best — these four guys and A-Rod, Chase Utley and a handful of others.

Black Jack Taco: It has a black shell and is a taco. What else do you want?

With Such Interesting, Hard-Hitting Stories On The Front Page, How Could The Washington Post Possibly Be Struggling!?

Character Actor Death Timeline

Click to enlarge…

Marcus Thames Hits Baseballs Very Hard

Marcus Thames is an interesting player. A 30^th-round pick of the Yankees in 1996, when he was still enlisted in the Mississippi National Guard, Thames didn’t make his major league debut until the ripe old age of 25 (older than I am now – I have a shot!). The following season he was traded to Texas in exchange for George W. Bush-colleague Ruben Sierra.

Unceremoniously released by the Rangers following the 2003 season, Thames was picked up by the Tigers, where he established himself as the Marcus Thames that a few people know and even fewer love, posting an adjusted OPS+ of 118 on the strength of 22 extra-base hits in 184 plate appearances. He has remained with the Tigers as the team’s primary pinch-hitter, averaging 269 plates appearances per season with a line of .245/.307/.501 over that span.

Now, a .307 on-base percentage is hardly something to write home about unless your favorite hobby is comprising lists of uninteresting facts and mailing them to your parents. However, Thames’ isolated power of .256 over his six seasons in Detroit is worth taking note of (although I imagine your parents would still find it odd to receive mail from you informing them of such). From 2006-2008, Thames’ isolated power ranked 3^rd, 6^th and 7^th in the American League among players with at least 250 plate appearances, before falling to 38^th in 2009, although he still finished ahead of Robinson Cano, Grady Sizemore, Vladimir Guerrero and Nick Markakis among others.

Despite his lousy contact rate (.243 career batting average), Marcus Thames is still a good baseball player, and like Rob Neyer, if I were a major league team looking for a bat to come off the bench I would give him a shot. Plus, it never hurts to have an extra black guy around in case shit goes down. Right? Guys?

BP Jumps The Shark

It’s been a long time coming, but only now do I feel comfortable saying with 100% certainty that Baseball Prospectus is no longer any more credible a source for empirical baseball analysis than any of the mainstream sports media outlets. About the Washington Nationals’ signing of free agent Ivan Rodriguez, BP staffer Kevin Goldstein writes:

If you are the Nationals, who is the most important player on your roster? It’s Stephen Strasburg, and it’s by a country mile. Could there really be anything better for Strasburg’s development than giving him a veteran catcher who understands the game as well as anyone around?…

This contract will be impossible to measure based on the $6 million and whatever Rodriguez does statistically. It might only me [sic] measurable on human factor levels that even the smartest statistical minds haven’t quite figured out.

First of all, this is 100% opinion, not analysis. As Goldstein notes, there is no metric to determine how much, if at all, a player’s performance is effected by another player. It is fine for Goldstein to be of the opinion that having Rodriguez around could be beneficial for Stephen Strasburg, however, Baseball Prospectus has always supposed to have been above unquantifiable statements and baseball cliches such as the benefits of veteran leadership.

It makes perfect sense that BP should be in decline, as many of the site’s more innovative-thinking writers have moved on, including Keith Woolner and Dan Fox who now work for the Cleveland Indians and Pittsburgh Pirates, respectively, and Nate Silver, who became a famous person during last year’s Presidential Election for his progressive political website, FiveThirtyEight.com and hasn’t contributed a column to BP since May. The site, which formerly maintained the attitude and feel of a punk-rock band of outsiders, has also moved into the mainstream via a partnership with ESPN last year.

I don’t blame the Baseball Prospectus crew for wanting to make some money and gain some exposure; working sucks and getting paid to write about whatever you want on a daily basis is a situation that should not be taken for granted. However,  articles like Goldstein’s only demonstrate just how much BP has sold out.

I used to visit ESPN.com for baseball news and then head over to BP for analysis. However, as the two entities have merged, literally and in subject matter, I found myself less inclined to spend money on  a site whose content overlapped with one I was getting for free (got an Insider password, holla). I cancelled my subscription to BP last year, as I explained to longtime BP contributor Jay Jaffe after meeting him a couple of weeks ago, because at this point they’re just not doing anything that I can justify spending money on.

Good luck to Baseball Prospectus and its writers, I have no problem with them making as much money as they can. However, I am no longer interested in paying for anything they have to say about baseball.

Get Rewarded For Not Being An Idiot!

New York Dwellers:

Do you know things? Prove it! Come by Cherry Tree Bar in Brooklyn this Wednesday and all forthcoming Wednesdays for the foreseeable future for Trivia Night. I’ll be hosting the festivities, which kick off at 9:00. Winning team gets a $60 bar tab, but everyone will leave with interesting factoids to report to your friends so you don’t have to just stand around talking about the weather or whatever other dumbass things you people do!

Pearl Jam: “No Way”

Live in Vancouver 9/25/09

Facebook Almost Solves Jake Rake

My custom-tailored (more like Jake Taylored! Right? It works on two levels because of the Major League and my name being Jake…come on!) advertisements on the Facebook. Two out of three isn’t bad…

O’s Could Pull The Ol’ Ponson Swap, But Correctly This Time

While player movement rumors are generally brushed aside here at the Blog, the speculation that the Baltimore Orioles may pursue free agent pitcher Erik Bedard this winter is too hilarious to ignore. As those who are unfortunate enough to follow baseball in Baltimore no doubt recall, Bedard pitched for the Orioles from 2002-2007 before serving as the O’s personal $24 worth of beans in exchange for the Seattle Mariners island of Manhattan.

The bounty famously received in exchange for two years of control of Bedard consisted of current major league all-star center fielder Adam Jones, Orioles top pitching prospect Chris Tillman, two other minor league pitchers and 2008 O’s all-star selection George Sherrill, who was then flipped to the Dodgers for prospects Josh Bell and Steven Johnson in 2009.

To convert one frail pitcher into decades of low-cost major league talent is pretty awesome, but to then get the pitcher back on top of all that is nothing short of triumphant. Go Orioles.

PS: The title of this post refers to the Orioles’ shifty maneuvering in 2003, when they traded Aruban judge-assailant and serial drunk driver Sir Sidney Ponson to the Giants for three young pitchers, only to sign Ponson as a free agent the following offseason. The series of deals could have been quite a coup except for the fact that all three of the pitchers the O’s received sucked shit and Ponson predictably continued to be way better at behaving poorly than baseball.