How old is the phrase: “the brains of the outfit?” Short answer: much older than I thought. It goes back at least to 1874.. But I still don’t exactly know and if anyone else does I couldn’t find it. In researching David Stern I went idly looking for the earliest instances of the gangster film… Continue reading Origin of the phrase “the brains of the outfit”
Category: non-CFB
Lost America: The Hot Girl In The Woods
While researching the history of North Carolina’s Lake Norman (as one does) I encountered the story of “the real life Long Sam.” The wikipedia paragraph is so weird that I had to dig up the primary sources, which are ten times weirder. As presented in a full page spread in the Charlotte Observer on August… Continue reading Lost America: The Hot Girl In The Woods
Sports, performance, television and the Olympics
What is sport? Peak television’s power and its relationship to pure performance. Understanding one sports fan’s distaste for the Olympics.
How long were they selling recordings?
Read this this morning and I’ve been bouncing off the walls ever since. This is the New Yorker! So wrong and so checkable. At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders,… Continue reading How long were they selling recordings?
David Stern part 2 : NBA popularity
The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 — and so it… Continue reading David Stern part 2 : NBA popularity
On the matter of David Stern
David Stern died just over two years ago. If someone wrote the obituary he deserved I did not see it. They have all fallen on a spectrum between “breathless hagiography” and “chin-stroking encomium”. Let us summon the Advocatus Diaboli. Let us dig up the old pope. The truth demands it. Future generations take note. If… Continue reading On the matter of David Stern