Each one of these U.S. maps from Michael Crawford are more amusing than the last. Here, Oklahoma fears another Dust Bowl:
There’s something nice about Google Dropcloth. More here.
…I’m not much for fancy book readin’.
Lots of good NYer cartoons this week. This was the best.
to keep shining in your eyes, then take a look at this week’s best New Yorker cartoon.
No offense to the finished cartoons, but even without a caption, this week’s contest entry is my favorite New Yorker cartoon.
My favorite of this week’s New Yorker cartoons.
This is what it’s like at the end of a 40-mile bike race:
Rounding the bend at Owl’s Head Park, on Leif Ericson Drive, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, yesterday, a miraculous meteorological event occurred. Or, at least, it felt miraculous to the thirty-two thousand riders, myself included, in yesterday’s forty-two-mile Five Boro Bike Tour. The temperature had wafted above eighty-five as we entered the southbound half of the Gowanus Expressway in the early afternoon, and the line of smoggy cars rolling in the other direction did little to help. None of us smelled pleasant.
The rest of my account of said race is here.
This week’s best New Yorker cartoon.
Roz Chast, FTW.
I think this excerpt from Ben McGrath’s 2007 profile of Manny Ramirez captures both Manny and how much less fun sports, in some ways, are today:
He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”
Wouldn’t it be great if more athletes were kinda crazy? No shortage of anecdotes in this story.