Chrysler employee wins WSOP event

There is at least one lucky person who works for an American car company. Chrysler employee Ray Foley won a World Series of Poker event last week in dramatic fashion.

Numerous times during heads-up play, Cantu had Foley on the ropes. All-in and behind for his tournament life, Foley hit the cards he needed to keep his dream alive. Foley will never forget two hands during heads-up play: The first was a split pot in which he was holding A-7 versus Cantu's A-Q (8-8-5-6-5) and the second was when he hit a two-outer on the turn with 10-10 versus Cantu's K-7 (after Cantu hit a king on the flop). It just wasn't meant to be Cantu's night.

Foley's haul?

$657,969.

Not bad.

Twitter ain't off the record

From Benson, aka @desertronin.

It was discussing if a Capitol Hill staffer can expect his tweets to be off the record just by declaring it to be so in his bio on Twitter.

Farrauto put up a sentence on his Twitter account stating that all of his “musings” are off of the record. It’s like standing in the middle of a room of people, some of whom are his friends and others of whom are reporters, and shouting at the top of his lungs, then not expecting the reporters to write about any stupid things he said.

Anything you say in a publicly available place is on the record.

And anything that you put on Twitter from a non-private account is public. It's searchable, you can find everything on Google, on Twitter's search engine... so to think that by slapping up a disclaimer saying your publicly available "musings" are off the record is almost as funny as the press releases I constantly receive that have this disclaimer at the end:

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail,including all attachments is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review,use,disclosure or distribution is prohibited unless specifically provided under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and destroy all copies of this message

Sorry, Farrauto, anything you say in public is on the record.

And if your tweets are not protected, then they are completely public.

As the Washington City Paper put it:

You cannot speak into a microphone and be off the record at the same time. Those two things are incompatible and should never be attempted.

Twitter is just another kind of microphone, a internet-based, 140-character microphone.

I guess we can call him Batman

Minor league baseball players might have a little too much time on their hands...

Online poker

In the New York Times magazine there was a really interesting first-person account of a mom whose son becomes consumed with online poker. I don't want to give anything away, but it is definitely worth a read.

So go read it.

Twitter: Average user has 126 followers

Some stuff that Evan Weaver, Twitter's lead engineer in its services team, said at a recent talk:

-the average user has 126 followers;

-only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. So if you're looking at Twitter stats on your website, you're probably underestimating that source of traffic by a factor of five;

-an early peak test of the service came during President Obama's inauguration in January, when more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.

Read the whole article for some Twitter geek stuff.

NBA, soccer stars play in charity soccer game

Most of the NBA player, um, aren't good at soccer. Even considering they are playing with soccer pros and even soccer greats, some of the basketball players (Chris Bosh) just embarrass themselves.

But it's all for charity, so it's all good. A lot of NBA talk, so if your'e into that you'll like this. If not... then you probably won't.

Steve Martin does 'Billie Jean'

Via The New Yorker:

As a dancer, Michael Jackson was great. He was like Fred Astaire. This video, a parody of the “Billie Jean” video, was done for “The New Show,” which was a prime-time NBC program that Lorne Michaels did in 1983-1984, when he wasn’t producing “Saturday Night Live.” This was the opening—it was the first piece on the first episode of the show.

My dad loves telling me a story about a time I saw Jackson do the moonwalk on TV. He says my eyes got really big, I stood up, attempted the moonwalk, then sat down.

Didn't say a word, I just tried to moonwalk. I must have been six or seven at the time. But I'm sure that the first time everyone saw Jackson do the moonwalk, they all did the same thing -- stood up and tried it. And, utterly failing, sat down in shame.

Pitcher punches door, breaks hand, pitches another inning

Jeff Bennett, angry that he gave up a two-run single to Alex Rodriguez in a game on Wednesday, punch a door in the dugout. He broke a bone in his non-pitching hand.

But it gets better. From MLB.com:

After punching the door, Bennett said that he pushed the bone back in place and took the mound again in the seventh inning without telling anybody what had occurred. The reliever said that his glove kept his hand somewhat stable.

Bennett told the MLB.com reporter "It's just one of those things where a lot of things had boiled up and I didn't handle the release of it very well."

You don't say...

Anti-gravity record player

Well it's not really anti-gravity, but it still is pretty damned cool.

This is a record player that would be the hit of any party out there. It's called the Void and it is the coolest record player ever. Ever.



How does it work? Engadget explains:

The Void LP takes the concept of a self-sufficient speaker, amp and needle (the red ball), and then tosses them all into the air with a magnetic saucer.

It's not for sale yet anywhere according to The Rock and Roll Star, but I'm with him on this part:

My dreams aren't quite a reality, as yet. But when they are, and when it becomes available at a novelty gifts and/or stereo store near you, I'll be sure to let you know. In the mean time, however, if someone can make something like this, I will pay you handsomely for a baker's dozen.

SR-71 disintegrates around pilot during flight test

Via a comment on my post about the SR-71.

It's the story of an SR-71 test pilot surviving the plane disintegrating around him. I vaguely remember a high school teacher telling me about this story -- he was a retired Air Force aviator, so he had a lot of such stories.

But from a first-person perspective... wow.

Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us.

From that point, I was just along for the ride.

I highly recommend reading the entire thing. I read it twice.

Oh, and the test pilot, Bill Weaver, ended up landing in New Mexico.

MacGyver had nothing on German prisoners

Wow. Look at these confiscated prison items from Germany. They range from the somewhat mundane (a slingshot) to the truly crazy (a whip with razor blades).

But I guess they have a lot of time to think these things up.

Via Adam Savage of Mythbusters via Twitter.