Steel Curtain

GeograFAIL: It’s college football time!

BowlBus provides charter bus service from various cities to college football games. But you may want to double-check that the driver knows where he’s going.

(Admittedly, last year’s Penn State @ Indiana game was played in Washington, DC, so maybe their planners just gave up after that.)

Caption contest: “Big Ben’s meat” edition

Comment of the day: Super Bowl edition

At Volokh Conspiracy, commenter DonBoy writes:

Well, as we see, many lawyers don’t care about professional football; and in return, many professional football players don’t care about the law. So it all evens out.

Steelers vs. Jets, pizza, wine

Via Serious Eats, I made Cooks’ Illustrated’s thin-crust pizza for the playoff game. One pie was a plain cheese pie, while the other was pepperoni (poached, of course, lest I incur the Wrath of Kimball). The main departure from the recipe was to use fresh mozzarella cut into discs, since Giant Eagle only carried part skim mozzarella in the firmer formats.

The pizza was a success, with the fresh sauce a big hit. I’d say my biggest problem is shaping the dough. My pizza crusts always end up with a very thin center, gradually thickening to a thick cornicione. Obviously I’d rather have a uniform crust from the center to just inside the cornicione.

The wine was a 2003 Edmunds St. John 2003 “Wylie-Fenaughty” Syrah (El Dorado County), chosen because it was a birth-year wine for Carlee’s recent birthday. My note:

Clear dark plum. Restrained nose of red fruit, herbs, clove, menthol. Smells like there's some grenache. Bracingly mineral, herbal, iodine, coffee, with blackberry finish. (90 points)

Soundtrack: Wiz Khalifa: Black And Yellow

Now let’s get 7.

50 years ago…

Via the LA Times, half a century ago, Caltech triumphed in a nationally-televised athletic contest:

Rarely had a Rose Bowl seen such flawless execution.

The preparation was inspired, the key players unwavering and a national television audience enthralled.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, an intrepid interloper made an uninvited, unprecedented and unforgettable appearance in the so-called Granddaddy of Them All.

Caltech made the Rose Bowl.

A small band of ingenious Caltech students made it happen, surreptitiously altering a University of Washington halftime flip-card routine so that it would spell out "CALTECH" in what became known as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961.

We have to take our victories however we can get them.

GO STATE BEAT SPARTANS!

On the repeatability of NCAA football games

Nate Silver has a new column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. In the inaugural edition, he writes of the difficulty of ranking college football teams.

Trona

Years ago, the Future Spousal Unit lived in Ridgecrest, California, best known as the home of NAWS China Lake. The fighter planes took off over her double wide, shaking her awake in the morning. It was 117 °F the day we unloaded her moving truck. A hot wind constantly blew sand in our faces. The town shut down before 9:00 PM, even the fast food places. The coyotes and roadrunners were three dimensional, and didn’t order from Acme.

But whenever we felt like we were at the end of the earth, we remembered the nearby town of Trona. Now filmmaking duo Sparrow Songs has produced an excellent short documentary on the town:

Sparrow Songs - Episode 12 - Fall Begins in Trona, CA from Sparrow Songs on Vimeo.

What the film fails to capture is the smell. Trona reeks with a disgusting sulfurous odor from the chemical plant. When driving through the town, to Death Valley or the Pinnacles, we were glad that we had no reason to stop.

(Via Mental Floss)

To the guy sitting in front of me at the Penn State game yesterday

I share your enthusiasm for the skills of backup quarterback Matt McGloin, who beat Michigan last week while starter Rob Bolden was injured. And McGloin sure turned the game around yesterday, scoring 35 unanswered points to bring Penn State out of a 21-0 hole against Northwestern, and get career win #400 for Joe Paterno.

However, your chant of “We want the white quarterback!” recalls Bill Maher’s 2008 comment:

A black president? Half of Pennsylvania isn't ready for black quarterbacks.

And your other chant of “WE ARE… PENNSYLTUCKY” pretty much nails down which half.

Stay classy, drunk rednecks. May no act of ours bring shame…

“We’re not dividing matrices out there”

Oregon right tackle Mark Asper, quoted by Matt Hinton, on the bizarre signal posters on their sideline:

"It's not, 'OK, I have to add the top square and the bottom square.' We're not dividing matrices out there."

C’mon, Mark, inverting a 2x2 matrix isn’t that hard. For example, the inverse of the above matrix is simply:

“Dividing” another matrix, such as the one to the right, by this matrix is simply a matter of performing matrix multiplication of the new matrix and the inverse shown above.

This multiplication is left to the reader (or quarterback).

These guys have 45 seconds to get the play together. Frankly, I don’t see what would be so hard.

The fate of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE rests on tonight’s Penn State game.

That is all.

1. 
   seanmcarroll @plutokiller, a friendly wager? Penn State wins today, Pluto is a planet again. Alabama wins, I admit there's only one universe. 11 Sep 2010 from web
2. 
   plutokiller @seanmcarroll I'm in. If its a tie, neither Pluto nor the Universe exist. 11 Sep 2010 from Seesmic for Android in reply to seanmcarroll
3. 
   seanmcarroll @plutokiller If it's a tie, Pluto is ITS OWN UNIVERSE. 11 Sep 2010 from Twitterrific in reply to plutokiller

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