The expected win-loss records of the teams in the AL East, as determined by runs scored & allowed. Which team is which? Doesn’t much matter, as you can see.
Talk about parity. Here’s hoping for an unprecedented 5-way race to the finish…

The expected win-loss records of the teams in the AL East, as determined by runs scored & allowed. Which team is which? Doesn’t much matter, as you can see.

Talk about parity. Here’s hoping for an unprecedented 5-way race to the finish…

World wide web rubbernecking, defined.
Tomorrow, the apocalypse.

World wide web rubbernecking, defined.

Tomorrow, the apocalypse.

One development is the repeated use of Beethoven, sparing but extraordinarily precise; at three cruxes in the story, we hear the same short exerpt from the slow movement of the “Emperor” Concerto, deliberately unresolved. Not until the final credits is the piano allowed to enter. I was left prostrate by this, I must admit, and other, comparable flourishes — Kubrick’s elaborate, often synthesized bursts of the Ninth Symphony, say, in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ — suddenly feel clunky and overwrought. Only Bresson, with his careful placing of Mozart’s C-Minor Mass in ‘A Man Escaped,’ is on a level with the Dardennes, and you feel a Bressonian presence at the end of ‘The Kid with a Bike.’

From Anthony Lane’s review of The Kid with a Bike, in the March 19th New Yorker. In the same review, he also makes references to The 400 Blows, L’Enfance Nue, Oliver Twist, The Bicycle Thieves, and two other Dardennes brothers movies.

I’m smart, too.

He was a liberal on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights; a champion of government programs, such as universal health care; an anti-protectionist, “open door” internationalist; a private-sector multimillionaire who was also a personal square, completely uninterested in life-style “experimentation”; a reflexively patriotic, flag-pin-in-the-lapel sort of fellow; a wealthy man possessed of the slightly daft notion that although he had been born to privilege, every American has the opportunity (and the wish) to live as he does; a patrician with a deep sense of noblesse oblige.
(The pre-2006) Mitt Romney, as only The New Yorker could (and would) describe him. From Louis Menand’s analysis of recent books about Romney in the March 19th issue.
seems to appear everywhere, for ex: taxi, buildings, well lady GaGa may counts
The definition of “ubiquitous,” according to one of my 8th-graders
I’m simultaneously surprised, amused, and soul-buoyed that The Times’ most emailed article of the day is about punctuation.

I’m simultaneously surprised, amused, and soul-buoyed that The Times’ most emailed article of the day is about punctuation.

theweekmagazine:

The 60-million-year-old remains of a gigantic predatory turtle the size of a car was found in a Columbian coal mine, giving researchers new insights into the tendency for oversize species to thrive after the age of the dinosaurs. 
The turtle had a 5.7-foot shell, large enough to double as a kiddie pool. So, how did it get so big?

theweekmagazine:

The 60-million-year-old remains of a gigantic predatory turtle the size of a car was found in a Columbian coal mine, giving researchers new insights into the tendency for oversize species to thrive after the age of the dinosaurs. 

The turtle had a 5.7-foot shell, large enough to double as a kiddie pool. So, how did it get so big?

(Reblogged from theweekmagazine)
Mr. Wolman,
Can you help me edit this? Also, what is a boob tube? You wrote “How does its depiction as a “boob tube” show what this society has become?” on my paper. Im not sure what it is.
One of my students, re. her paper about television’s role in “Harrison Bergeron.” I might have gotten myself into some trouble here…

allcreatures:

A lemur went on the run after it escaped from a wildlife park, venturing over three miles before being caught. Sambava, the four-year-old male ring-tailed lemur, escaped from Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Illfracombe, Devon. He was captured after being lured down off a roof with fruit treats.

Picture: SWNS.com (via Pictures of the day: 17 May 2012 - Telegraph)

Awesome!

P.S. Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park???

(Reblogged from allcreatures)

Unprecedented! Two poems from one issue of The New Yorker that I didn’t find completely opaque

(And one of them even rhymes. Unheard of!)

“T.S.A.,” by Amit Majmudar

“Poem,” by Douglas Goetsch

I’d selected Fielding and my other hosts after scrolling through hundreds of profiles, winnowing out those whose narratives included the words “party,” “vegan,” and “free spirit,” and the phrases “I believe in the journey,” “Never stop learning, never stop loving,” and “Burning Man.
Patricia Marx, in “You’re Welcome,” her entertaining piece about couch-surfing in the April 16th New Yorker
People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised.
Adam Gopnik, re. Nicolas Sarkozy, in the May 7th New Yorker
It ain’t rocket surgery.
Skip, an aspiring comic book author, in Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary about Comic Con