"The dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together."

Wow, a powerful read from Men's Journal. I recommend reading it, solely based on the teaser paragraph:

Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old son struggle to stay alive miles from shore. As night falls, with no rescue imminent, the dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together.

The man who covers Texas executions

An interesting, if somewhat macabre, story about Michael Graczyk, the Associated Press reporter based in Houston, TX who has covered "nearly every execution the state has carried out."

From the New York Times:

No reporter, warden, chaplain or guard has seen nearly as many executions as Mr. Graczyk, 59, Texas prison officials say. In fact, he has probably witnessed more than any other American. It could be emotionally and politically freighted work, but he takes it with a low-key, matter-of-fact lack of sentiment, refusing to hint at his own view of capital punishment.

Strip hockey

From ESPN:

In an effort to inspire more team unity, Lightning players competed in a post-practice game of strip shootout, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

Players faced off in a series of shootouts, forced to lose a piece of equipment every time their attempt was thwarted.

Those wacky Canadians (I just assume a good percentage of the team is Canadian).

Confessions of a MLB ball hawker

Crazy.

Hample is a pro. He carries a cap for the home team and the visitors (more on that shortly). He has a streak to maintain (at least one ball per game attended since 1993), a reputation to uphold (he's written a book about ball-snagging, which essentially makes him the Dan Brown of books about ball-snagging) and an ongoing competition to win (he's currently in first place in an online ball-snagging league, and yes, there actually is an online ball-snagging league).

I've been to a number of minor league baseball games and two major league baseball games in my life, and I've never really been close to snagging a ball. The closest I've come is when I was at batting practice before a San Diego Padres game in 1998.

It was a game where Mark McGwire hit a home run (I remember two home runs, but apparently he never hit two home runs in a game while in San Diego in his 70 home run season, so my memory must be mistaken) -- but it was in batting practice where McGwire hit a blast to left field that was directly at me -- but five rows too far beyond me.

Casinos are everywhere

Nate Silver wrote a very interesting piece in Esquire about the explosion of casinos and how states maybe shouldn't count on gaming to help their state budgets. And it got me thinking...

First, there was one thing jumped out at me:

We have now reached the point at which residents of seventeen of the twenty largest metro areas are within a three-hour drive of a blackjack table. And Washington, D. C., will make it eighteen once Delaware permits blackjack, leaving only Dallas and Atlanta. Just about everyone who wants to gamble in the United States is already a morning's drive away from being able to do so; with the possible exception of isolated Texas, states that open new casinos will mostly be stealing customers from one another.

Between those 18 metropolitan areas (once Delaware approves their gambling), there will be 102,470,600 people -- just in the largest metro areas -- within a three hour drive of gambling.

From where I am sitting right now (in the 59th-largest metro area), I can be at one of four casinos that have blackjack within an hour -- Santa Ana Star Casino, San Felipe Casino Hollywood, Sandia Casino and Route 66 Casino. Put it at three hours, there are probably fifteen casinos that I can hit -- maybe more.

According to the American Gaming Association, there are five racinos (race tracks with slot machines) in the state, one of which is within an hour drive (The Downs Race Track and Casino).

The American Gaming Association says there are 21 tribal casinos in New Mexico. This is the seventh most in the country, behind Oklahoma (96), California (66), Minnesota (31) Washington (31), Wisconsin (29) and Arizona (24).

Three other states have more commercial gambling casinos: Nevada (266), Colorado (40), South Dakota (35, in addition to 11 tribal casinos), and Mississippi (29).

Of those states, only South Dakota has a smaller population than New Mexico. According to the 2008 census estimate, New Mexico had 1.98 million people, while South Dakota had 804,000 people. Nevada, in case you were wondering, had 2.6 million people.

So Nevada has one casino for every 9,774 people.

So what does it all mean? Well, mainly that I have too much time on my hands. And that if I had any money, I could gamble pretty easily.

Man convicted of stealing locomotive ordered to stay away from trains

From the Miami Herald:

"He knew the workings of the locks, the switches for different tracks,'' Polo told prosecutors. "He knew the train. To my knowledge he knew the train backward and forward. He knew everything . . . And he loved trains."

Ryan Gustin, a special agent for CSX's security force with a knowledge of trains, was also on hand. When Gustin would describe to the officer how trains operate, documents show, Dowdy would finish his sentences.

The man, Brandon Dowdy, reportedly stole the train to go see a house band (Big Dick and the Extenders, in perhaps the only time that phrase will appear in the Miami Herald) play.

His lawyer says he committed the crime because he was off his medicine for bipolar disorder.

Well thats ONE way to fix a crumbling building...

Cool stuff from Dispatch Work. Though I'm sure it is less about actual construction than art.

Most humane way of execution -- by gun?

From the New Yorker's Henrik Hertzberg:

It’s quick, it’s inexpensive, and it’s not as messy as you might assume. No one knows for sure how it feels, obviously, but I expect that because the bullet instantly destroys the brain stem, the pain, if there is any, is minimal. You’d feel the blow, I imagine, like getting slapped on the back really hard or tackled unexpectedly from behind, but it’d but just wham, lights out. No digging around for veins, no lingering agony.

When telling a friend about this, he suggested just loading people up on morphine until they die.

How the board game Monopoly helped WWII prisoners escape

This is a really cool story:

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country's secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.

It was the perfect accomplice.

Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.

Man throws thousands of golf balls in Joshua Tree National Park

From the LA Times:

"Sometime around 2007, our rangers began discovering large quantities of golf balls in some turnout areas of the park," said park spokesman Joe Zarki. "We were wondering what was going on here. There were also some tennis balls involved."

Rangers also found cans of fruit and vegetables left in the desert along with park literature tossed about.

All in all, between 2,000 and 3,000 golf balls. Plus the other trash.

Somebody call Ron Burgundy! Video of US' first baby panda

Bicyclists welcome at one Portland fast food chain's drive thru

From the Boston Globe:

A few weeks ago, Sarah Gilbert, a Portland native who is proudly “car-free,’’ pedaled her bicycle to the drive-through at Burgerville, a local fast-food chain. She ordered four cheeseburgers, one each for her husband and three young sons, who were waiting hungrily at home.

But when Gilbert tried to pay for the food, she was denied. This Burgerville drive-through, an employee told her, did not serve bicyclists.

As you can tell from the headline, this one had a happy ending.

How Darrell Hammond is making money post-SNL

Darrell Hammond is no longer on Saturday Night Live after being the longest tenured SNL cast member ever. So how is he making money now?

Apparently like this:

What we know about saving the bees

From the New York Times' Room For Debate blog.

Thanks to the terrific gene sleuthing of May Berenbaum and others, it looks like the pieces of the colony collapse disorder puzzle are starting to fit together. And we can stop arguing about who was right: The virus camp, the fungus camp, the pesticide camp, the varroa mite camp, or the nutrition camp. It turns out everybody was right. (Well, everybody except the cell-phone and microwave-tower camps.)

Go read what experts have to say about the mysterious collapse of honeybee colonies.

IKEA changes font, font-obsessed fans fume

I have to say... I don't care that much.

But when IKEA changed from a font that they've always used to Verdana, Time writes, some people were pissed off.

"Ikea, stop the Verdana madness!" pleaded Tokyo's Oliver Reichenstein on Twitter. "Words can't describe my disgust," spat Ben Cristensen of Melbourne. "Horrific," lamented Christian Hughes in Dublin. The online forum Typophile closed its first post on the subject with the words, "It's a sad day." On Aug. 26, Romanian design consultant Marius Ursache started an online petition to get Ikea to change its mind. That night, Verdana was already a trending topic on Twitter, drawing more tweets than even Ted Kennedy.

The last phone booths in Manhattan

Not just pay phones, but actual phone booths.

Something interesting from Huffington Post:

There are only four outdoor phone booths left in Manhattan - and they're all on West End Avenue. That's it: four

I wonder how many are left in Albuquerque -- are there any?

When I worked at the Victoria's Secret Call Center (yes, I worked there), they had two phone booths inside, which seemed... quaint.

And people would step in to talk on their cell phones in private which seemed... ironic.

I wish I could write as well as David Sedaris

His latest from the New Yorker is here:

The thing had been struck but not run over. It hadn’t decomposed, or been disfigured, and I was surprised by the shoddiness of its coat. It was as if you’d bred a rabbit with a mule. Then there was the tail, which reminded me of a lance.

“Hugh,” I called. “Come here and look at the wallaby.”

It’s his belief that in marvelling at a dead animal on the roadside you may as well have killed it yourself—not accidentally but on purpose, cackling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore, he stayed in the car.

“It’s your loss,” I called, and a great cloud of steam issued from my mouth.

As always with Sedaris (and the New Yorker), there is much, much more.

I can't even describe this story in a headline

Via @m_ruth, a story otu of a soap opera. If it was based in New Mexico:

A black bear in Espanola touches off an odd series of events leading to an animal control officer being arrested, accused of battering an underage girl.

There are four main characters in the story: A large black bear, an animal control officer, and his two unsuspecting girlfriends.

And, since it's from a TV network, here's the story in video form as well!

What it's like to be a Fenway Park stadium vendor

A very well-written story from ESPN's Page 2 about what it's like to be a stadium vendor at Fenway Park. You know, the hot dog guys, the beer guys who make it so you don't have to get out of your seat to still gorge yourself on ballpark hot dogs and beer.

Hot dogs are $4.75 apiece. That means for every hot dog a vendor sells, he (or she, since there are a handful of women selling stuff in the lyric little bandbox's cramped seats) collects roughly 60 cents. Bottom line: You gotta move some serious merchandise to make any serious scratch.

The night of Lester's no-no, I made a pretty penny. In the seven years I've been hawking at Fenway, I've made close to $40,000 in commissions -- which maybe sounds impressive, but since it's spread out over roughly 60 games a season it averages out to about $95 a night.

Read the whole thing. Well, I hope you read everything that I link to, but read this one especially.

Creating the Baseball Hall of Fame plaques

Every inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame has a bronze plaque with their likeness and a few words about them. One full size plaque is made for the Hall of Fame and one miniature plaque is given as a memento to the Hall of Famer (or their family).

Paul Lukas of ESPN's Page 2 took a look at the process of making the plaques.

With hundreds of thousands of fans visiting Cooperstown each year, Ellis is arguably the highest-profile sculptor in America -- and yet also, paradoxically, one of the most anonymous. I wanted to learn more about how the plaques are manufactured, so I recently visited Pittsburgh to see Ellis at work and watch the rest of Matthews' production process (you can see a video of my visit at the top of this page).