Link Dump

With six whole weeks of horror movies, the link repository has been growing and growing with lots of interesting tidbits from the depths of the internets:

  • Flipping Out – This is the most inspired and hilarious writing I’ve read in a long time. It’s about the single craziest inning of playoff baseball that’s likely to ever happen, but even if you’re not a sports person, you should read this, because it’s brilliant. There’s a great precision to the writing, and the format is almost conversational, but it’s like one of those Tarantino movies where people are speaking naturalistically, but their speech is stylized in a way that no one actually speaks. Or something. Just read it, ok? It’s great.

    Both the most- and least-surprising aspect of that moment was that baseball has a rule for it. And, as you noted, the rule – rule 6.03a, as we learned – is literally an EXACT description of what happened. It was the most surprising aspect because, indeed, no one had ever seen it before. It was the least surprising aspect because of course baseball has a rule for this, it has a rule for everything. And of course it was incredibly specific, because all of baseball’s rules are incredibly specific. Baseball rules are the opposite of football rules. Football rules are like…

    “If a guy kind of grabs a pass but doesn’t really like totally like have it, and then he kind of maybe shimmies around but doesn’t make a like ‘football move,’ or maybe he doesn’t like seem to really like command the ball in a way that I can’t describe but it’s like pornography and I know it when I see it, or something, then let’s go ahead and say it isn’t a catch?”

    Yes – football rules often end in question marks. Because not even the rule writers believe in them.

    Baseball rules are like: “There was an A’s-Yankees game in May of 1933 and this insane thing happened and we made a rule to cover that exact situation.” I’m actually surprised it didn’t say:

    RULE 6.03a: If Russell Martin tries to throw a ball back to a relief pitcher in a tense 7th inning of a deciding playoff game and Shin-Soo Choo is doing that weird thing where he holds his bat out directly in front of him like a divining rod and Martin’s throw bonks off his bat and rolls away, Odor is allowed to score from third.”

    I hesitated to even include this pull-quote because the entire article is amazing and you should really read it, but I couldn’t help myself. Also, NBC needs to make a 30-for-30 style documentary that is just these two guys performing exactly what they wrote here, edited into the actual inning as played.

  • Genre Savviness Is Not Enough – I probably should have found a way to work this into the Six Weeks of Halloween, but whatever, this is also a great list of lessons learned from horror movies. Sample awesome:

    24. If you hear a nursery song and you are not in an actual nursery, vacate the area immediately.

    25. If your travels must take you through a rural area in which agriculture is done, try to make sure you stick with the towns that grow ground crops. No one has ever been chased through a field of peanuts by an eldritch abomination or cult. Avoid cornfields and apple orchards at all costs.

    Also worth checking out, Popehat’s list.

  • If the moon were only one pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system. One of many attempts to internalize the enormity of space.
  • A Wild Weekend in Florida – I used to think that Twitter was a terrible place for long form writing, and for the most part I’m right, but then there’s this story about strippers, pimps, guns, and murder, as told by the smarter of the strippers. It’s an astounding piece of work and needs to be turned into a film at some point.
  • A-List Directors, interviewed by Sam Mendes – This is charming, and they actually managed to get a large amount of major names.

    Have you ever walked off a set in a temper?

    Ang Lee: I only Hulked out once.

    Christopher Nolan: I once tried, but nobody seemed to notice, so I came back.

    George Clooney: No. The reason is because eventually you have to walk back on, and that would be too humiliating.

    Good stuff.

  • Arrested Westeros – Mashup of Arrested Development quotes with Game of Thrones screenshots. It’s surprisingly effective.

And we’ll leave it at that for now. See you soon.

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