Archive for the ‘Spiders’ Category

Obit watch: June 1, 2022.

Wednesday, June 1st, 2022

Lester Piggott, one of the great British jockeys. I don’t know a lot about British horse racing (or Irish horse racing, for that matter, though I can tell you who Shergar was) but even I’d heard of him.

With 30 victories, Piggott holds the record for the most wins by a jockey in the five British Classics races — the Epsom Derby, the 2,000 Guineas Stakes, the 1,000 Guineas, the Oaks Stakes and the St. Leger Stakes — and he is the last British jockey to win his country’s Triple Crown, aboard Nijinsky in 1970.

…

“The way he rode, with an unusually short length of stirrup for a relatively tall man and his bottom high in the air, must have made the horses feel there was no weight on them,” Luck said in a phone interview. “People said to him, ‘Why do you ride with your butt in the air?’ And he said, ‘Well I have to put it somewhere.’”
Luck added, “Piggott ushered in a golden generation of riders in Europe; he was the one they all aspired to.”

Kenny Moore. He sounds like an interesting guy: he was an Olympic marathon runner, an early tester of Bill Bowerman’s shoes (which went on to become Nike), an All-American in cross-country…

…and a long-time Sports Illustrated writer, specializing in track coverage.

“He wasn’t a writer of devices,” Peter Carry, a former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, said in a phone interview. “He was a guy with a real literary bent and a real sense of language. He was quite economical and eloquent at the same time.”

…

George Hirsch, a former publisher of Runner’s World magazine, which Mr. Moore wrote for after he left Sports Illustrated, said that Mr. Moore’s athletic past had enhanced his access to his subjects.
“I can remember when he interviewed someone like Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit,” Mr. Hirsch said in a phone interview, referring to two elite marathoners, “and he would run with them and see who they were in ways that he couldn’t have done if he had not been an elite runner.”

Charles Siebert, actor. Other credits include “Xena: Warrior Princess”, “Mancuso, FBI”, “And Justice for All”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye” (and of course “The Rockford Files”), and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo”.

Posted in Horses, Movies, Obits, Spiders, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Headline of the day.

Tuesday, August 15th, 2017

Live scorpion reportedly found in bag of Costco bananas

This is ridiculous, and Costco should be ashamed.

Everybody knows that a beautiful bunch of ripe bananas hides the deadly black tarantula, not scorpions. Is this just cost-cutting on Costco’s part? Are scorpions cheaper than tarantulas?

(Sorry. I’m feeling a little punchy. You might even say me wanna go home.)

Posted in Food, Music, Regular, Spiders | Comments Closed

Headline of the day.

Monday, November 3rd, 2014

Unexpected Complexity in a Spider’s Tiny Brain

For more information on the crack spider’s bitch, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Regular, Spiders | Comments Closed

In case you were wondering…

Wednesday, January 1st, 2014

…Joe Allen will not be adding a poster for “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” to his “wall of flops”.

“Any show that plays for three years on Broadway, providing steady employment to members of the theater community and pumping money into the local economy, is no failure in my book.”

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Spiders, Theatre | Comments Closed

The Spiders from Cleveland.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

By way of Borepatch, I found this rather amusing post on the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

For those who don’t follow baseball history (or loser history) the Spiders were a major league baseball team. But you would have been hard pressed to tell in 1899: the team went 20-134, the worst record ever in baseball history. (That’s a .130 winning percentage.)

They finished 84 games out of first place. They lost 40 of their last 41 games.

(I would actually kind of like one of the hats, but I’m not sure it is a $49 hat. And the J. Thomas Hetrick book MISFITS! Baseball’s Worst Ever Team is not just available from Amazon, but actually has a Kindle edition.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Loser, Spiders, Sports | Comments Closed

Olympic watch: July 16, 2012.

Monday, July 16th, 2012

The LAT would like for you to know that the United States is not fielding teams in all the Olympic sports. Notable exceptions: soccer (the US team was eliminated), men’s field hockey, and team handball.

Interesting aspects:

  1. “Team handball” is apparently a thing.
  2. “…in 2006, the sport’s governing body was decertified by the USOC”.
  3. There is apparently such a thing as “professional handball”, at least in Germany.
  4. “…imagine LeBron [James] and [Derrick] Rose and others like him playing handball. It wouldn’t take long, with proper coaching and funding, to get those guys competing at a level needed to earn a trip to the Olympics.” Maybe, guy, but I’m not sure the skill set that makes you good at basketball translates to being Olympic level at handball, team or solo.
  5. The guy who currently runs USA Team Handball is David Gascon. Perhaps you know him better as LAPD Cmdr. David Gascon, former second-in-command of the department, and the guy who went on TV to announce O.J. was a fugitive. (I wanted to embed video, but I can’t find any on YouTube.)

The WP would like for you to consider what happens to athletes who don’t make the team. Do they defer their dreams until 2016? (Not if you’re a baseball or softball player; those sports ain’t coming back in 2016.) Do you go pro on the woman’s boxing circuit?

“Yeah, I won a gold medal. Big deal,” [Decathlete Bryan] Clay said. “I still have to pay rent, still have to change diapers, still have to mow the lawn. In the grand scheme of things, the gold medal is awesome, but to live a full life, you need a lot more.”

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Spiders | 1 Comment »

You know something?

Sunday, August 21st, 2011

I didn’t have to use my AK. All in all, I’d have to say, it was a good day weekend.

I got up bright and early (by Saturday standards) and staggered down to the Saxet Gun Show, where I met up with the legendary Borepatch and some other folks. (I am leaving their names out because I want to protect their privacy. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket. It has nothing to do with me being a bad and evil person and forgetting their names. It is all about privacy protection. Just ask my wife, Morgan Fairchild.)

I don’t have much to add to Borepatch’s report. I only found one gun I really liked at the show (a Savage model 24, .22 LR over 20 gauge) and the owner was asking just $250, but I didn’t have that much cash on me, didn’t want to leave and find a bank, and…well, if it is there next month, maybe. This would be a good survival gun for the car.

Also, Borepatch is right about the number of approving comments that Sean Sorrentino’s Gunwalker t-shirt received. Borepatch and I discussed the idea of trying to sell them at gun shows, which is a very tempting idea indeed.

(While I was there, I met another gentleman who recognized me from my statement in Borepatch’s comments that I’d be wearing that shirt. It turns out he’s a regular reader of Borepatch’s blog, my blog, and the Saturday Dining Conspiracy pages. Personally, I thought reading both my blog and the SDC pages was an approved method of “enhanced interrogation” for prisoners at Gitmo, but hey, whatever gets you through the night. I was going to introduce him around, but I was on my way to see a man about a racehorse at the time, and when I came back, he was gone. Feel free to leave a comment, Mr. I’m Not Identifying You Here For “Privacy” Reasons.)

(I also saw one of the H&K .22 rimfire MP5 clones. It was going for around $600, as I predicted.)

After the gun show, I went down and paid off my layway at Tex-Guns, official purveyors of fine weapons to WCD. I now have a very nice Marlin 336 lever gun in .30-30: once I get some logistics worked out, and September 1st rolls around, this is going to sit in my car as my equivalent of a “patrol rifle”.

And then I went and had dinner with my mother and some friends at the Vivo on 620 at Lake Creek Parkway. The current chef, Paul Petersen, ran a place called the Little Texas Bistro in Buda; we ate there once, and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Then he moved out to Marathon and worked at the Gage Hotel there for a while. Now he’s working at that Vivo, and hasn’t lost his touch. I had the”surf and turf”: one crabmeat enchilada and one brisket enchilada. It was one of the best meals I’ve had this year, and very reasonably priced.

(I did have some problems with Vivo, but none of them were with the cooking. They all stem from the current management’s decision to encourage an active singles/pick-up scene at Vivo. We were in a semi-private room, and towards the end of the meal, the music was loud enough that some of our party had to leave. Also, I’m not a prude, but when you’re taking your mother someplace, and there’s paintings of topless women everywhere, and a photo collage on the wall of the semi-private room featuring butts and other body parts, that’s a bit disconcerting.)

Today, of course, was the long threatened trip to the Snake Farm. I’m happy to say that everyone who went also came back, they all enjoyed themselves (from what I hear), and everyone who wanted one got a t-shirt. Or, as we like to say around here…

…the guys get shirts!

And much progress has been made on getting the Saturday Dining Conspiracy logs up to date. Which is comforting.

And Lawrence has put up some good photos from Worldcon, including a few of friends of mine I haven’t seen in a long time.

So, yeah, it has been a good weekend. How was yours?

(For those of you who don’t understand the “didn’t have to use my AK” reference, which is probably 99+% of my audience because you’re not fans, I suggest you go to your refrigerator and look at some Ice Cubes. (Warning! Adult subject matter!) Actually, I’m not a huge fan, either, but “It Was a Good Day” tickles my funny bone for some odd reason.)

Posted in Admin, Clothing, Geek, Guns, Lizards, Regular, Reptiles, Shirts, Snakes, Spiders | 3 Comments »