From Adam Bertocci, author of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (previously): Overthinking Ghostbusters.

"A great ballclub, a beautiful demonstration of what talent can do when assembled with planning and guided by intelligence." - Bill James, on the 1986 New York Mets

Allen Barra, "The Dynasty That Never Was" (2002):

How good was Darryl Strawberry at his peak? How good might he have been? We'll never know the answer to the second question, but the first is perhaps best answered by comparing him to New York's three great power-hitting outfielders of the 1950s. The chart below picks up Strawberry's career after the 1988 season:

                    G    AB   HR   RBI  BB   SB
Darryl Strawberry  823  2885  188  548  449  165
Willie Mays        762  2899  183  519  351  161
Mickey Mantle      806  2924  173  575  524   43
Duke Snider        798  3062  151  538  325   44

Dwight Gooden was the youngest player ever to be named Rookie of the Year, and the youngest to lead the league in strikeouts. And that was just by age nineteen! By age twenty-one, he was already 58-19, had struck out an average of 215 batters a year for three seasons, and had posted three straight seasons of ERA under 2.50. Roger Clemens is considered by many, including myself, as the greatest starting pitcher in history. By the time Clemens had won 58 games, he was twenty-five years old and had already lost 22.

How about a man who was, arguably, the best first baseman of the decade? Keith Hernandez was a bona fide star well before '86. Playing for the Cardinals, he had won the NL batting crown in 1979 with a .344 average, also winning the MVP award while leading the league in runs scored, doubles, and on-base average and winnning a Gold Glove at first base. 1986 was his seventh season over .300 and he also led the league in walks and fielding average. ... perhaps the finest-fielding first baseman in baseball history, with 11 Gold Gloves and a record six times leading the NL in double plays.

But as good as Strawberry and Hernandez were, the heart of the Mets, or at least what was supposed to make them the team of the '80s, was their pitching staff, particularly the starting rotation. Some called it the league's best rotation without Gooden.

At his best, Sid Fernandez was actually more unhittable than Dwight: three times he held NL hitters to the lowest batting average in the league. How great is that? Well, the greatest lefthander in New York baseball history, Whitey Ford, never did that once.... Walter Johnson, who won 417 games, many of them in the low-average, dead ball era, was hit for a .227 average. Sid Fernandez pitched for fifteen seasons and opponents hit just .209 off him. Think about that for a moment.

Howard Johnson hit 10 homers in 88 games for the '86 team while filling in at third and short. He was twenty-six. For the next five seasons, he put on a power-speed exhibition that few third basemen in baseball history have ever approached. Only two players in baseball history have had at least four seasons with at least 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases. Howard Johnson and Barry Bonds.

Gary Carter is one of the four or five best catchers in National League history, and one of the top ten - maybe one of the top seven or eight - best ever. He was a ten-time All Star, has nine seasons with 20 or more home runs, and seven seasons with more than 80 RBI. Behind the plate, he led the league in assists four times, double plays five times, and total chances a record high eight times.

"Blow Job" is a series of portraits of people with gale-force winds blown directly into their faces. (SFW)

The artist is Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern. More images can be found on his Facebook page.

A Grade 11 student, with a summary of Sean Dixon's novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal due in two days, gets help from the author. It does not go particularly well.

A famously reclusive writer, John Swartzwelder is responsible for many of The Simpson's iconic episodes. He stopped writing for the show in '04 and began to self-publish a series of increasingly absurd Sci-Fi Detective novels.

The nuclear-disarmament group Global Zero just released a report proposing a ten-year plan for the United States and Russia to reduce their arsenals below 900 warheads each, well below the New START treaty limits of 1,550 deployed warheads each by 2018. Implementation is unlikely in an election year.

Global Zero's plan would also dismantle all of the Air Force's land-based ICBMs and remove remaining nuclear forces from "alert" status, disabling the ability to launch a massive strike within minutes. The primary author, retired four-star General James Cartwright, led the U.S. Strategic Command (the unified combatant command for all American nuclear forces) from 2004 to 2007.

Read the full report here (26-page PDF).

Hitchhiking Director John Waters Picked Up In Ohio By Indie Rock Band

Chuck Brown: DC Legend, Godfather of Go-Go and originator of some of the breakbeats that laid the foundation for hip-hop has passed away. Here's his live set at the 9:30 club from a few years ago. 2, 3, 4

Not So Pure Michigan (youtube), a play on Michigan's "Pure Michigan" tourism campaign. (For more on Michigan's troubles with its neighbors see Mitten-gate.)

‘You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life’—László Krasznahorkai.

The acclaimed Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango has recently been published in an English translation by George Szirtes. Satantango is Krasznahorkai’s first novel, but the third (after The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War: both likewise translated by Szirtes) to appear in English.

Patient filmgoers may be familiar with Béla Tarr’s 450-minute black-and-white movie version of this tale. Krasznahorkai and Tarr have collaborated on several other films, notably The Werckmeister Harmonies (based on ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’) and, most recently, The Turin Horse , reportedly Tarr’s final opus.

Consequences, Choices, Children in Crisis, Challenges. HBO's multi-part research documentary The Weight of the Nation examines obesity in America in four parts, marshaling leading doctors, epidemiologists, economists, researchers, and community leaders to understand and explain the individual costs and public solutions to a multi-faceted social and individual problem. The documentary both explores large picture statistics, while giving voice "to those that often too seek to be invisible: members of the nearly 70 percent of Americans currently diagnosed as overweight or obese. (AV Club Review)"

Also included online:
Twelve bonus short films.
A policy report on Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention.

HBO will also air "The Great Cafeteria Takeover" about students involved with Rethinkers "Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools" who "convinced Aramark to deliver locally grown produce" (AVclub ibid) to their school. Trailer / HuffPo Article

Bonus : 60 Minutes interview with Dr. Nora Volkow on Hooked Why bad habits are hard to break, and not character defects.

"A Harvard MBA Pays Down $101K Of Debt." Two years after he graduated from Harvard with an MBA, Joe Mihalic, now manager of strategic alliances and business development at Dell, vowed to do "everything in my power–short of lying, cheating, and stealing–to pay down" his student loan debt, (then totaling 90K,) "in the next ten months." After applying for a weekend delivery job, he also decided to chronicle the steps he was taking on a blog: "No More Harvard Debt." First page of posts is here. Penultimate post explains his process: "Mission Accomplished."

From the "Mission Accomplished" post:

"...there were definitely some contextual factors at play here. My income was higher than the average household income of $50k and I lived in a city that has a relatively low cost of living. I was also single and childless, so the lifestyle changes I made were generally victimless."

Breaking Bad POV. Wes Anderson From Above. Tarantino From Below. Aronofsky for Your Ears.

Made by Kogonada (via Kottke)

That the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.

Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are obese.

Here is a link to the LBM Body Weight Simulator.

Did you know that the blind can see? And that's not even the most interesting part.

Did you know the sighted can see what they can't see? We have receptors for light (mostly blue) that bypass our consciousness and route deep into our brains (mostly the thalamus). And this 'second sight' has a hand in what we experience every day, from eye-dilation to migranes, and, significantly, the brain's sleep circuitry and the body's circadian rhythms.

If you live in Toronto, you may have seen them busking in the street or in the parks. But if you were a stranded passenger on Air Canada flight AC 876, which was delayed for 20 minutes on the tarmac at Pearson Airport in Toronto en route to Romania, then you got to see the Lemon Bucket Orkestra play an impromptu 4 song performance.

They reached Romania safely and are on their way to play the International Romani Art Festival in Bucuresti.

Fourteen Ways To Spot A Bad Critic : Tarol Hunt, illustrator of the webcomic Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes [Previously], weighs in on hate mail sent by his readers.

Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Irene Shubik started as a television script-writer, first writing for Encyclopædia Britannica Films (some videos on Archive.org) in the United States before moving back England, where she was hired on at Associated British Corporation. There, she worked as a story editor for the prolific TV producer Sydney Newman on the anthology series 'Armchair Theatre.' A long-time fan of science fiction, Shubik approached Newman about creating a science fiction version of 'Armchair Theatre,' and Newman agreed. The result was 'Out of This World,' which ran for a single season in 1962. Shubik followed Newman to BBC, where they continued the theme of 'Out of This World' with a new program, 'Out of the Unknown.' Between the two series, 63 episodes were made, though only 21 episodes survive in full, and audio and video clips survive from another 18 episodes. The videos and original short stories are linked below the break.

An adaptation of John Wyndham's short story Dumb Martian was originally intended to launch the series. However, Sydney Newman elected to broadcast the story as part of 'Armchair Theatre' the week before 'Out of This World' made its debut. The play ended with an epilogue by Boris Karloff introducing and previewing the new spin-off series. As such, Dumb Martians is generally included in the episode list for 'Out of This World.'

The show's single season consisted of 13 hour-long programs, each hosted by Boris Karloff. All but two episodes were adaptations of sci-fi short stories. The series ran in 1962 on ITV, where it rated quite well. A second season was a sure thing, but it didn't happen as Newman left ITV for the BBC, inviting Shubik to join BBC.

Shubik accepted, on the condition that she be promoted to producer within a year. She started at the BBC as a story editor for another anthology series, 'Story Parade.' After that program featured an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's novel 'The Caves of Steel,' Shubik asked Newman to do another science fiction anthology series. In 1965, Irene Shubik was the producer of 'Out of the Unknown.' Similar in format to 'Out of This World,' but Karloff was no longer the host.

"I had to read hundreds of stories to pick a dozen." She later recalled. "You have no idea how difficult some of these authors are to deal with, and it seems a special thing among SF writers to hedge themselves behind almost impossible copyright barriers, even when they have got a story that is possible to do on television. So many you can't. Either the conception is so way out you would need a fantastic budget to produce it, or the story is too short, too tight to be padded out to make an hour's television."

30 of the first 38 episodes were adaptations of existing stories by Asimov, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Larry Eisenberg, and others. Shubik produced the first two series and commissioned the scripts for the third series, but the third and fourth series were produced by Alan Bromly. Bromly shifted the series from science fiction to what he called "plays of psychological suspense," full of "supernatural thrills." The fourth and final season featured an additional eleven episodes, but only one was adapted from a prior work.

Unfortunately, of the 49 episodes, only 20 are known to have survived the BBC's wiping of old programs, but missing episodes have surfaced from time to time, with the latest being found in 2006 in the archives of a European broadcaster. 625.org.uk has summaries and information on episodes from seasons 2 through 4, and a number of the original short stories are available online. Additionally, YouTube user Pam1927 has uploaded the extant episodes.

Out of This World
0 "Dumb Martian" by John Wyndham (Archive.org book scan)
1 "The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips (story posted on a forum)
2 "Little Lost Robot" by Isaac Asimov [Google of quickview "I, Robot," which includes this story; original PDF; video in 4 parts on YouTube: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4]
3 "Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin (online short story; alternative source)
4 "Impostor" by Philip K. Dick (PKD fansite listing)
5 "Botany Bay" by Terry Nation (original story for the show)
6 "Medicine Show" by Robert Moore Williams (snippets of a review of the episode, and some info on publication history)
7 "Pictures Don't Lie" by Katherine Maclean (source anthology info and plot summary)
8 "Vanishing Act" by Richard Waring (original story for the show)
9 "Divided We Fall" by Raymond F. Jones (Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry)
10 "The Dark Star" by Frank Crisp (based on his novel Ape of London) (Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry)
11 "Immigrant" by Clifford D. Simak (story summary, in a review of Galactic Empires Volume 1)
12 "Target Generation" by Clifford D. Simak (txt converted to PDF)
13 "The Tycoons" by Arthur Sellings (Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry)


Out of the Unknown
101 "No Place Like Earth" by John Wyndham [ISFDb entry; full episode on YouTube]
102 "The Counterfeit Man" by Alan Nourse [Wikipedia entry with plot summary; full episode on YouTube]
103 "Stranger in the Family" David Campton [press and review clips; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
104 "The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov [Google books; full episode on YouTube]
105 "Time in Advance" by William Tenn [Wikipedia entry with plot summary; full episode on YouTube]
106 "Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come...?" Mike Watts [press and review clips; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
107 "Sucker Bait" by Isaac Asimov [ISFDb entry; full episode on YouTube]
108 "The Fox and the Forest" by Ray Bradbury (full story online; newer audio dramatization from the 1984 production Bradbury 13)
109 "Andover and the Android" by Kate Wilhelm (press and reviews of the original 1965 broadcast; Whozine has similar collections for other episodes, too)
110 "Some Lapse of Time" by John Brunner [ISFDb entry; full episode on YouTube]
111 "Thirteen to Centaurus" by J. G. Ballard [Ballardian review; full episode on YouTube]
112 "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl [Wikipedia entry on 'Midas World,' a collection of short stories; full episode on YouTube]

201 "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster [short story online; full episode on YouTube and on Google Video]
202 "Frankenstein Mark II" by Hugh Whitmore (press and reviews of the original 1966 broadcast; original story for the show)
203 "Lambda 1" by Colin Kapp [story summary; full episode on YouTube]
204 "Level Seven" by Mordecai Roshwald [story summary and review; full episode on YouTube]
205 "Second Childhood" by Hugh Leonard (press and review for the original episode; original story for the show)
206 "The World in Silence" by John Rankine (press on the original episode)
207 "The Eye" by Henry Kuttner (press on the original episode; Private Eye, probably the original story)
208 "Tunnel Under the World" by Frederik Pohl [Story on Project Gutenberg; full episode on YouTube]
209 "The Fastest Draw" by Larry Eisenberg (episode summary)
210 "Too Many Cooks" by Larry Eisenberg (press on the original episode)
211 "Walk's End" by William Trevor (press on the original episode; original story for the show)
212 "Satisfaction Guaranteed" by Isaac Asimov (short story on Scribd; surviving clip on YouTube)
213 "The Prophet," based on the short story "Reason" by Isaac Asimov (Google quickview; original PDF)

301 "Immortality, Inc." by Robert Sheckley (Google books)
302 "Liar!" by Isaac Asimov [Google of quickview "I, Robot," which includes this story; original PDF; surviving clips stitched together on YouTube]
303 "The Last Lonely Man" by John Brunner [episode summary; full episode on YouTube]
304 "Beach Head" by Clifford D. Simak (press and pictures of the episode)
305 "Something in the Cellar" by Donald Bull (episode summary)
306 "Random Quest" by John Wyndham (Wikipedia entry on the story, including references to the 1971 British film re-titled Quest for Love [first 9 minutes] and the 2006 updated adaptation [part 1 of 6])
307 "The Naked Sun" by Isaac Asimov (Google books preview)
308 "The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth [Story on Project Gutenberg Canada; the extant half of the episode on YouTube]
309 "1+1=1.5" by Brian Hayles (episode summary; original story for the show)
310 "The Fosters" by Michael Ashe (episode summary; original story for the show)
311 "Target Generation" by Clifford D. Simak (episode summary; first adapted for 'Out of This World')
312 "The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips (episode summary; first adapted for 'Out of This World')
313 "Get Off My Cloud" by Peter Phillips (press and pictures for the episode)

401 "Taste of Evil" by John Wiles (episode summary; original story for the show)
402 "To Lay A Ghost" by Michael J. Bird [extended press and screencaps; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
403 "This Body Is Mine" by John Tully [episode summary; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
404 "Deathday" by Angus Hall [book review; press clipping and information on the surviving video; full episode on YouTube]
405 "The Sons and Daughters of Tomorrow" by Edward Boyd (episode summary; original story for the show)
406 "Welcome Home" by Moris Farhi [episode summary; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
407 "The Last Witness" by Martin Worth (episode summary; original story for the show; remade as an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense under the title "A Distant Scream" [full movie] in 1986)
408 "The Man in My Head" by John Wiles [episode summary; original story for the show; full episode on YouTube]
409 "The Chopper" by Nigel Kneale (episode summary; original story for the show)
410 "The Uninvited" by Michael J. Bird (episode information from the MJB Tribute site; remade as an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense under the title "In Possession" [full movie, part 1 of 7])
411 "The Shattered Eye" by David T. Chantler (episode summary; original story for the show)

Disrupt Disruption: A Case Study in Brand Evangelism: The founders of LocalOffrly.Biz (like GroupOn + Living Social) discuss hypertargeted banner ads, sex dice, memes/virals, Klout scores, and "gamifying that which has refused to be gamified" ... at ROFLcon III. (via) (youtube playlist)

8-bitscapes : Artist Jamie Sneddon and photographer Kevin Rozario-Johnson take cityscapes and add in elements from classic videogames with delightful results.

Highlights include:

Mario Kart Banana Peel • Swarm • Pac Manhattan • Kong • Sonic in Koln

"This is the final victory of the censor: When people, even people who know they are routinely lied to, cease to be able to imagine what is really the case." Salman Rushdie, On Censorship.

Morgan Freeman in 1971, [SLYT] wearing bell bottoms and teaching kids to read on "The Electric Company."

The eight fingered Polish-Norwegian artist Andrej Nebb with his band, performing Bo jo cie kochom in Oslo in 1980. How he lost two fingers? Cutting his guitar with a chainsaw. That's why he had to play bass instead. Basically he fled communism to live a rock 'n' roll life. Here he is back in Poland in 2002, at Przystanek Woodstock.

Last week was Teacher Appreciation Week. If you were too busy looking forward to have time to appreciate a teacher, it's still not too late to appreciate the teachers behind the students.