Sex Pistols, Merle Haggard, World Cup

I now recommend Bill Weir's Twitter feed:

Despite the tie, Alexi Lalas says we should celebrate. So bring in the strippers and Zima (sigh).

For the rest of his life, the UK goalie will look at his fish and chips and wonder about the purity of the tartar sauce.

I'm quickly learning that soccer is vast stretches of tension sprinkled with lucky flashes of release. Kinda like marriage.

A moment in time

The New York Times asked people from around the world to submit a picture taken at 3 p.m. GMT (10 a.m. eastern) on May 2. The result is nearly a worldwide mosaic of photographs, which you can view here.

There appear to be thousands of them.

I don't hate them anymore

I mean, I did kind of want to punch a woman in the face at my sister's wedding, but I feel sorry for Demaryius Thomas.

And I'm real glad we won.

That Clemson - Georgia Tech ACC Title game, looks like that will be for 5th place in the SEC East.

Warner Robins girls softball rules the world

Full coverage, with pictures and video.


Image: Beau Cabell, The Telegraph.

Music in a time machine

The archivist for Widespread Panic has a blog. And then I'm sitting at work listening to an early version of the band play Not Fade Away in 1985 and reading the story of the band's formation:

Once we had to take our game outside, we obviously encountered the random person wanting into our circle. That’s how we met JB and Mikey. Nope, they didn’t come by and join in, but their friend Neal did. And when Neal found out that Dave and I had seen his friend JB perform solo the weekend before, he was all about making that connection. Especially when he found out Dave played the bass.

Well we met JB and Mikey soon after that chance meeting with Neal. Where I have no clue, but before long the house on King Avenue was the place to hang out….and those three guys started finding their way… which was obviously a natural progression to what JB and Mikey had been doing separately and together prior to Dave showing up.

I remember that time being just about having fun watching my friends make music in a living room in Athens. And catching JB solo or JB & Mikey together in some sort of semi-official way… basically wherever JB could talk the manager into letting him do his thing. I know they took it seriously but I still had no clue where any of it was headed. And I don’t think they really did either at the time.

G.I. Joe: The other half of the battle

All those years watching cartoons, and it never occurred to me to ask "What's the other half of the battle?"

But the answer makes sense.



If kind-of-witty nerd t-shirts are your thing, you can buy this one here. Hat tip: Words Tumbl Down.

Missing link found; one less thing to worry about

Have you heard about Ida? Said to be the missing link of evolution.

The New York Times says we'll see about that, as is so often true:

But despite a television teaser campaign with the slogan “This changes everything” and comparisons to the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination, the significance of this discovery may not be known for years. An article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS ONE, a scientific journal, will report more prosaically that the scientists involved said the fossil could be a “stem group” that was a precursor to higher primates, with the caveat, “but we are not advocating this.”

History, digitized

A partnership of various libraries from around the world, including the U.S. Library of Congress, has put together something called the World Digital Library.

It appears to be in its infancy stages, but includes digital versions of some of mankind's earliest writings, as well as old maps, historic pictures and works of art.

Abraham Lincoln cannot be photographed. Click to enlarge.

Allan Pinkerton, President Abraham Lincoln and Major General John A. McClernand at Sharpsburg/Antietam.

You should also go see this map, made in 1554.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee

This one's for you, KJP. There are a bunch of these with actual video footage of the guys, but this is the song Joe picked out:


I let my harmonica talk for me...

Terminator Salvation

Looks pretty freaking good to me.

Coach Goff: This year "probably the toughest Georgia tech game we've had in a long, long time."

My actual job is covering politics for The Macon Telegraph. This afternoon Sen. Saxby Chambliss was in Perry for a rally, and Coach Ray Goff (Qb: '73-'76; captain, SEC player of the year for SEC champions in '76; Head Coach: '89-'95) was there.

Coach Goff, who has moved to Lake Blackshear, was kind enough to do a little video interview.

Nothing hard hitting. I just asked him what he thought of this year's team, why the wheels seem to come off sometimes in football, whether anyone ever calls one of his "Zaxby's" and asks to speak to "Saxby" and how he came to be wearing a yellow-and-blue shirt on Wednesday.

And I let him put in a plug for Sen. Chambliss. If Jim Martin's campaign can produce Jim Donnan, the same rules apply.

Palmer: "I think Georgia, big time under-rated right now."

Proving that Florida people aren't ridiculous 24/7 (well, excluding the hair), former contributor to the undeserving bane of our existence and current until-now-inexplicable part of ESPN's college football coverage Jesse Palmer notes that, despite what the polls say, Georgia could beat BYU and Texas Tech.

Don't have a link for you, I'm watching College Football Live on ESPN.

The Red & Black March

The Red & Black March, the 1908 Georgia fight song lost for close to a century, has now been arranged for a larger band. Follow the link from The Anti-Orange Page to listen.

You have to expect this tune is coming to a halftime show near you in 2008. For the story of the song's rediscovery check out this piece in The Banner-Herald.

And thanks to Georgia Sports Blog for, as they so often do, calling my attention to this.

Blackout over China

I was not aware that Georgia's linebacking corps was in China today.


Image: Associated Press

Lots of information about today's solar eclipse, viewable only in certain parts of the world, from NASA. That includes this map, which shows the timetable for future non-Richt related blottings out of the sun.


2017 is looking good.

College football schedule generator

Just what it sounds like: You tell it what teams you want included and it spits out a schedule for you.

Assuming it works, which it seems to.

Sent to me by a Virginia Tech Hokie.

But is it Chilly Water?

The Science Times (The New York Times' science section) is usually worth reading.

For example: There is water on Mercury, according to the Messenger spacecraft NASA has flying past the planet. Who knew?

An instrument aboard Messenger sampled Mercury’s surface composition by catching some of the charged atoms that have been knocked into space. Silicon, sodium and sulfur were detected. So was water.

“Which is a real surprise,” said Thomas H. Zurbuchen, an associate professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan and lead author of another paper in Science. “The first time we took a whiff of the planet, it’s right there.”

One possibility is that the water exists as ice in the shaded parts of craters in the polar regions.

UGA has a new fight song

Remember a while back when someone at the University dug up sheet music to a fight song that hadn't been heard in decades? A piano version of The Red and Black March is now online.

Is 'Awesome while Chaplinesque' a phrase?

By the way; whoever suggested someone should band this thing out on piano and get it online is a genius.

Absinthe: Now legal, but unlikely to make you cut your ear off. Damn shame, too.

I don't know how I missed this, but Absinthe, the potent and mythical liquor drink, was legalized in America late last year. For years you could get knock-offs called "absente," but this appears to be the real stuff that Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway drank... sort of.

I saw a bottle the other day. So I called the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States as well as the coolest kids at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, aka the TTB.

It had been banned since 1912. But science has shown that the Thujone content in Absinthe - the stuff that allegedly causes hallucinations - was so low that it was of no concern. So it was approved, according to TTB Spokesman Art Resnick.

I got the same story from Frank Coleman, with the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

So, bottom line it for me, Frank and Al - is this the stuff Hemingway used to call "Death in the Afternoon?" Is this the stuff that supposedly made Van Gogh cut his freaking ear off?

Said Al: "I don't know what (Hemingway) drank. I don't know how much Thujone it had in it. ... That's all up for question in terms of the myth that surrounds this product. I couldn't tell you for sure that it ever did (cause hallucinations). But the product that's on the market now would not have that effect."

Said Frank: "It is (the real stuff) minus whatever historically, was in it. ... The stuff that made Van Gogh cut off his ear... allegedly... who knows."

Killjoys. Anyway, I couldn't find it online to link it, but here's some paragraphs from a March Washington Post article about Absinthe:

Ernest Hemingway created his own concoction, mixing the green liquid with cold champagne to make what he called "Death in the Afternoon." ...

Some think absinthe's very popularity led to its downfall. After the roots of grape vines in France were badly damaged by small insects in the late 19th century, absinthe surged in popularity, which might have made the wine industry uneasy.

"That's when they began a smear campaign, and they needed a reason, which is how the rumors started," said T.A. Breaux, an environmental chemist who spent 14 years analyzing absinthe bottled before the ban. ...

Absinthe, it was said, could cause hallucinations, epilepsy and madness. It was thought to have caused Van Gogh to cut off his ear. Then came the trial of a Swiss man accused of killing his family on the day he had two absinthes and other alcoholic drinks. Soon after, the drink was banned in Switzerland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Brazil and, in 1912, the United States.

At the time, scientists attributed the problem to wormwood, the bitter herb used in making absinthe. Studies have shown that in large doses thujone, a toxin found in wormwood, sage and cedar leaf, can cause convulsions or kidney failure.

Modern experts, however, say early absinthe contained so little thujone that a man would die from alcohol poisoning long before being hurt by the toxin. U.S. regulations today allow no more than 10 parts per million of the chemical in absinthe.

HBTD

A couple of Dawgs are featured in today's sports cover story in USA Today. Sweet.

Nothing like winning in Athens

Whoomph, whoomph, whoomp.