"Where there's smoke, there's moonshine"

Just an awesome headline. From McClatchy:

Parker said he made undercover purchases of the illegal hooch in 2006 and 2007 but couldn't find the still. Parker, of Scotland Neck, has been with ALE four years.

Pretty interesting story actually.

Jemele Hill ignores that everyone hated Isiah Thomas

Jemele Hill, writing about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird's book, mentions that Johnson led the charge to keep Isiah Thomas off the 1992 Olympic basketball team (everyone knows them as the Dream Team). Yet, she ignores one salient fact in this: No one like Thomas.

Thomas played on one of the most unlikeable teams ever (the "Bad Boys") and almost no player on any other team liked him.

On the Amazon-Wal Mart price war

From The New Yorker:

The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the first place. Instead, you can compete in other areas: customer service or quality. Or you can collude with your putative competitors: that’s why cartels like OPEC exist. Or—since overt collusion is usually illegal—you can employ subtler tactics (which economists call “signalling”), like making public statements about the importance of “stable pricing.” The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end. One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.

Definitely a cool read (and don't worry, it's short).

CNBC writer: American who won NYC marathon not American enough

Umm... what the hell.

From CNBC:

It's a stunning headline: American Wins Men's NYC Marathon For First Time Since '82.

Unfortunately, it's not as good as it sounds.

Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he's not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

Yeah, he's only "technically" an American because he's only "technically" been a citizen since 1998.

Kefleighi was born in Eritrea.

As with CBS late night talk show host, Craig Fergusion, he is American on Purpose.

Stephon Marbury is weird #NBA

According to ESPN, Marbury was kicked out of his courtside seats at a New York Knicks game when they found out that he didn't have tickets for the seats he was sitting in.

But Marbury had even more bizarre behavior at Madison Square Garden:

Adding to the bizarre scene, Marbury pulled out a video camera shortly after arriving and began shooting the live action, at one point standing up -- thereby blocking the view of the fans behind him -- while play was ongoing.

Marbury is... just weird.

Defriending bruising to your 'digital ego'?

From CNN:

Experts say rejection on social networks can hurt worse than an in-person snub because people are usually more polite face-to-face than they are online.

Umm... no. The only way that it bugs me if someone defriends me on Facebook is if it's someone who I actually know or knew in person.

Some random person defriending me not only does not bruise my 'digital ego' -- but I usually have no idea that they have done so.

Basically just linkbait from CNN.

Why the NY Times doesn't cover boxing

An interesting exchange of e-mails between HBO's Larry Merchant and Tom Jolly, the sports editor for the New York Times, on why the New York Times rarely, if ever, covers boxing.

I have to say, though, some of the excuses are good:

Most bouts are on Saturday night and our final edition for the national edition goes to press at 11 p.m. The final local edition closes at 12:30. The most noteworthy of the fights were included in briefs for those last papers, and all of the results appeared in our wire feed on nytimes.com/sports.

And some are bad:

We’re willing to [report on a Saturday match on Monday] if it’s a bout that transcends the core fan base, but there haven’t been many such fights since Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield passed their prime.

Manny Pacquiao anyone?

An interesting read nevertheless.

French newspapers take a page out of drug dealers' book

French newspapers are trying to get young people hooked on newspapers by offering a year's subscription for free to young consumers.

The government Tuesday detailed plans of a project called “My Free Newspaper,” under which 18- to 24-year-olds will be offered a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

“Winning back young readers is essential for the financial survival of the press, and for its civic dimension,” the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said.

As @c_chisolm said, "It's how all dealers operate."

So Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog #NFL

Jets QB Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog on the end of the bench during a 38-0 blowout over the Raiders on Sunday. And, somehow, this exploded into a mini controversy, with the folks on Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn and various talk radio stations lambasting Sanchez for the sin.

Now, ESPN is reporting, Sanchez donated 500 hot dogs and 500 hamburgers to a local homeless shelter. Which is never a bad idea.

But, seriously? People care about this?

*sigh*

Schwazenegger's "message"

Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger had a not-so-subtle message for Democratic assemblyman Tom Ammiano. The first letters of the first seven lines were "F-U-C-K-Y-O-U."

A coincidence?

Gary Langer writes the odds are one in ten billion of this happening by coincidence, as Schwazenegger's spokesperson (understandably) said.

Here’s how not to figure it precisely, rather a quick and unsophisticated back-of-the-envelope calculation: If the odds of picking a particular letter at random are one in 26, doing it over seven selections (the number of letters in question) is (1/26)^7, or .0000000001245. Just about one in 10 billion.

Now, the odds are not even to picking each letter. It depends on the amount of words that start with those seven letters -- plus, not as many words start with an "x" or "z" (I think none of of the words in this post do, for example) -- though more will, admittedly, start with a "t" than a "k."

I'd love for someone who actually has knowledge of this sort of thing to tell us the odds of this happening by pure coincidence.

That said, even if it's not coincidence (I am almost 100 percent certain that it did not), I still find it funny that Schwarzenegger 1) did this and 2) thought he could get away with it. Should a sitting governor do these sort of juvenile pranks?

Nope. But it's still funny.