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Let me root, root, root for the home team…
From our old friends at Pop Chart Labs… A comprehensive taxonomy of 482 professional baseball team names, spanning over 150 years and covering teams from the bigs to the minor and independent leagues,...
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What if…
From the invaluable Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, a new feature, What If?– “answering your hypothetical questions with physics, every Tuesday.” First up: What would happen if you tried to hit a...
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The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat…
The Olympic Games: nine days and counting. As we refresh ourselves on the rules of ribbon dancing and brush up on badminton, we might spare a moment to recall some of the events that have been...
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The End (Diagrammed)…
click the image above, or here, for larger version From Good, a breakdown of the 10% of the world’s population (!) that believes the world will end by the conclusion of this calendar year. ### As we...
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Off season…
Idle hands at work: Baseball Card Vandals… Collect ‘em all! ### As we sharpen our Sharpies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1996 that Grand Master and world champion Gary Kasparov took the...
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Hey Joe…
The milligrams of caffeine per ounce vary from chain to chain as wildly as the mood of someone hopped up on six cups from McDonalds… or one cup from the Death Wish Coffee Company. [Data from the...
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County Fair…
In 2005-6, photographer Greg Miller travelled the country, from Florida to California, for Life‘s newspaper supplement, shooting that essential summer rite, the County Fair. Read about the series...
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Significance is where you find it…
At CoolSerialNumbers.com, Nashville musician and currency collector Dave Undis brings together like-minded digit-heads who have little interest in the history of money or even the denomination of a...
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Let the games begin…
click here for larger interactive version If every state in the union had to choose an official sport, what would they pick? Football, football, lacrosse, football, skiing, football, football … and...
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Batter Up!…
Walt Whitman once said: “Baseball is our game — the American game: I connect it with our national character.” Still, as Foreign Policy observes… As baseball has skyrocketed to popularity in other...
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“By blood a king, in heart a clown”*…
Readers will remember Arthur Drooker, photographer-extraordinaire of conventioneers. His most recent foray will reassure those who’ve been worried at the prospect of a clown shortage, even as it...
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“Wear your heart on your skin in this life”*…
Opening this week at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, ”Tatoueurs, Tatoués” (Tattooists, Tattooed) features 300 works of tattoo art, sourced from the 18th Century to the present day, and from around...
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“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”*…
The McIlhenny Family The Business: Tabasco hot sauceThe Fortune: The company’s net worth is estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion. (At $2.5 billion, that’s 626,566,416 five-ounce bottles of original...
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“Nobody is a villain in their own story”*…
The New and Complete Newgate Calendar or, Villany displayed in all its branches. Containing accounts of the most notorious malefactors from the year 1700 to the present time, Vol.1, By William...
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“You can’t criticize geometry. It’s never wrong.”*…
In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn’t come bigger than this. In the world of bathroom tiling – I bet they’re interested too. If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies...
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“All art is propaganda”*…
Between 1943 and 1945, with the help of Warner Bros.’ finest animators, the U.S. Army produced a series of 27 propaganda cartoons depicting the calamitous adventures of Private Snafu. Read the...
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“Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”*…
On the eve of the World Series, an appreciation of Game 6 of the 1975 championship contest between the Red Sox and the Reds: “Game Changer: How Carlton Fisk’s home run altered baseball and TV.” * Leo...
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“A combination of Halloween [and] Mardi Gras — really, a Star Trek convention...
…While the game dates back to B.C. times and clubs of serious Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) players have existed quietly for decades, a tournament in 2002 launched RPS on its path to being a sport that...
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“Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling...
email readers click here for video Part friendly circus act, part vicious duel: welcome to the world of combat juggling. Unlike the variety show clowns that would entertain you as a child, combat...
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“The Olympic Games… purport to follow the traditions of an ancient athletics...
The above graphic from HowMuch.net, a cost information site, visualizes data from a recent study by Oxford University to compare the budgets of previous games. The study found the average cost...
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