Improv Everywhere Gives Little-Leaguers a Taste of "The Show"

Guerrilla improvisational theater group Improv Everywhere went to a Little League baseball game in Hermosa Beach, California, and turned it into a major-league experience, giving the players and spectators alike a taste of The Show.

(via Debbie Notkin)

Tags: baseball little league improv everywhere video youtube funny humor wtf

Martin Luther King Kept Uhura on Star Trek

Actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek television series, reminisces about her role on the show:

She says that as the first season came to a close, she told Gene Roddenberry that she wanted to leave the show and return to theater. Not long after, she was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr., at an NAACP event. Dr. King told her of the importance of the show and her role in it to the African-American community, saying she was changing the face of television. Her conversation with Dr. King convinced Nichols to change her mind and stay on the show.

(via Avedon Carol and Ampersand)

Tags: star trek uhura nichelle nichols martin luther king jr television video youtube race gender civil rights

Awe-Inspiring Poker Hand Pits Aces vs. Kings vs. Queens

Here is an amazing hand of poker from last year's broadcast of the Party Poker European Open III.

With blinds of $1K and $2k, Dennis O'Mahoney opens the action at $6K to go, holding pocket kings. Darren Hickman has pocket queens and raises $20K.. Achilleas Kallakis goes into a huddle, with pocket aces, eventually deciding to raise all-in with his stack of $66K. Two players acting afterwards fold pocket sevens and pocket fives! Now it's O'Mahoney's turn to put on his thinking cap. Eventually he folds. Hickman calls Kallakis' all-in bet, and the two see a rainbow board of 2-3-K. The turn is a 4, and the river a Q, and Hickman's rivered set of queens crack Kallakis' pocket aces. If O'Mahoney had stayed in the hand he would have won a huge pot, but he had made a good preflop fold.

Just how incredible is this hand? When you think of it, not very. The odds against being dealt pocket aces are 220:1 against. At a six handed table, you expect to see someone dealt aces slightly less often than once in every thirty-seven hands on average. The numbers are the same for kings and queens, so if you neglect card depletion effects, the probability of three players having AA, KK, and QQ are going to be somewhat less than 1/37 cubed, or about one deal in fifty thousand. (At a ten-handed table, it is more like one deal in 10,800).

Now remember that poker has been televised for some years now, and in preparing the broadcast, the producers pick out the interesting hands. AA vs. KK. vs. QQ guaranteed to be interesting, even if — perhaps especially if — one or both of the players holding KK and QQ make good laydowns before the flop. Have there been fifty thousand deals of hold'em hands dealt at tables with card-peeking cameras since the advent of televised poker? I don't know, but I would guess that the actual number is somewhere in that order of magnitude. So it isn't surprising that sometime in the recent history of televised poker this confrontation between AA, KK, and QQ took place. And it's no surprise at all that a poker buff would put it up on YouTube. If you wait long enough in poker, everything is going to happen.

Tags: poker hold'em tournament aces cracked youtube video party poker european open probability tv poker

'Tis the Season for Marshmallow Peeps

2012: Survivor: Easter Island Originally uploaded by andrea z.

Peep in a Microwave:

Peep Brulée

Peep Research

The Lord of the Peeps

Earlier As I Please posts about Peeps:
Elder Peeps
Passover Peeps: The Ten Plagues

Tags: marshmallow peeps peeps candy video youtube silliness microwave wtf

Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel Rant

Rob Paravonian breaks the silence about the secret hatred many of us feel about Johann Pachelbel's diabolical Canon in D Major:

(via gunga_galunga, in a comment in the Lone LiveJournal of the Apocalypse)

Bill O'Reilly Warns Nation of Lesbian Gangs

Did Bill O'Reilly mistake porn video director Winkytiki's magnum opus, The Rebelle Rousers [NSFW] for cinema verité journalism? Or has he been smoking the stuff they sell in Amsterdam's "coffeeshops"? (For the record, I didn't see him there.)

Watch this video of O'Reilly on Fox News on June 21. It defies description. Tom Tomorrow does a yeoman's job of trying:

The things I learn from Bill O’Reilly

The new menace sweeping the nation is Lesbian Gangs which force unwitting teenagers into lesbian sex by threatening them with pink 9mm Glocks.

The preceeding sentence was not a satire of Bill O’Reilly, but rather, an accurate summary of the report I just watched.

(via Violet Blue)

USAW TV Spot Highlights Grrl Power

This advertisement for USA Weighlifting is completely real, if staged. The young woman who is showing up the workmen is Natalie Woolfolk, the US Women's Weightlifting Champion.

(via Farah Mendlesohn)

GSA Administrator Doan 'Honestly Doesn't Remember' Illegal Meetings

Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) pins GSA Administrator Lurita Doan to the butterfly board in his questions about GSA lunchtime brown-bag lunch meetings at which political plans were discussed, in violation of the Hatch Act.

Doan "honestly doesn't remember" asking meeting participants how to help Republicans win elections in 2008, but she doesn't refute the testimony of those participants who claimed that she did so ask. She calls the brown-bag lunches "team-building meetings." Braley retorts, "the only team built is the Republican team."

(via Atrios)

Old Card Mechanic Video by John Scarne

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing points us to this vintage video, "Cheating in Gambling," featuring legendary card mechanic and poker authority John Scarne.

Remember The Sting? During the railroad poker game sequence, when Paul Newman's character Henry Gondorff was manipulating the deck of cards, the closeups were of Scarne's hands.

Frauendfelder claims that Scarne was his great uncle. Small world.

All You Need to Know About Acting in One Easy Lesson

Sir Ian McKellen explains: It's all just pretending:

(via Ellen Kushner)

Singularity? Or Gravitational Collapse?

Sarah Dopp points us to a Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us, a piece of fatuous Web 2.0 cheerleading that tells us that ZOMG! the Web changes everything!!!111!!:

What particularly gets up my nose is the claim that syndications like RSS, Atom, FeedBurner et al. RELEASE CONTENT FOREVER FROM THE STRICTURES OF FORM ZOMG!!!!11!

Horsepuckey.

You can't separate content from form. Content cannot exist without form. The interpretation of form is how we determine content.

The reason syndications enable display of content in a variety of forms is that the content so displayed is highly constrained.

I've heard these "There will be Pie in the Sky when you join MySpace" claims before. Remember the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchy? Strong cryptography was supposed to bring on the Infocalypse and end government. Well, we've got strong cryptography, and the Feds are still tapping our phones.

Meanwhile, Mark Gritter points us to Karl Auerbach, who asks the question, Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

You would have thought that in this internet age that we might have learned that clarity of internet protocol design is a great virtue and that management, diagnostics, and security are not afterthoughts but primary design goals.

There is a lot of noise out there about internet stability. And a lot of people and businesses are risking their actual and economic well being on the net, and the applications layered on it, really being stable and reliable.

But I have great concern that our approach to the internet resembles a high pillar of round stones piled on top of other round stones - we should not be surprised when it begins to wobble and then falls to the ground.

I am beginning to foresee a future internet in which people involved in management, troubleshooting, and repair are engaged in a Sisyphean effort to provide service in the face of increasingly non-unified design of internet protocols. And in that future, users will have to learn to expect outages and become accustomed to dealing with service provider customer service "associates" whose main job is to buy time to keep customers from rioting while the technical repair team tries to figure out what happened, where it happened, and what to do about it.

What's the bloody use of a vast externalized memory and reasoning capabilty that takes ten minutes to load a page and is filled with dead links because the routers are down?

Dough We'd Like to Knead

Mark Harris at Preludium points us to this remarkable video of a talk-show appearance by Cornell University history professor Steven Kaplan, who tells us what goes into great bread (caution: this might not be safe for some workplaces):

I bet you thought I was kidding when I called it "Bread Pr0n."

There's a more sober profile of Prof. Kaplan in the Washington Post. He is the author of Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (Duke University Press, Nov. 2006).

(via Lynn Kendall)

A Valentines Day Tradition

Hundreds smack each other around in SF pillow fight
The annual Valentine's Day pillowfight in Justin Herman Plaza at dusk on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2007, in San Francisco. Chronicle photo by Katy Raddatz

(Alas, I couldn't attend as I had a class to go to that evening.)

Update: Cindy Emch points us to this video:

Al Qaeda Linked to Mooninite Plot

A video has appeared on the Internet that depicts Osama bin Laden taking responsibility for a nefarious plot that brought ridicule and contempt upon the mayor and the police department of the city of Boston.

(via Making Light)

Sick to My Stomach

This video of American soldiers taunting Iraqi children with a bottle of water has been just about everywhere I go on the Internet, and it seems to make everyone angry.

If you had ever lived for weeks on end in a very hot place where such bottles of water were all there was to drink, if you had ever stood in the back of a pickup truck and handed out such bottles to thirsty strangers, well, then, maybe you might find that this video makes you particularly angry.

I've Joined Netflix at Last...

... and I'm looking for movies to put into my queue.

This one looks good: a comedy for everyone who ever prayed for release from the bondage that is high school:

My Netflix account is the same as my email address, if you want to friend me there.

(via skippy)