People, this is what “serious badass” means.

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You think Julius from Pulp Fiction was a bad motherfucker? Did John Wayne embody “tough sumbitch” for you? Yeah, they’re pansies. Check out Samuel Whittemore, hero of the American Revolution:

Samuel Whittemore (1694 – February 3, 1793) was a farmer. He was eighty years old and living in Menotomy, Massachusetts (present-day Arlington) when he became the oldest known colonial combatant in the American Revolutionary War. […]

On April 19, 1775, British forces were returning to Boston from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening engagements of the war. On their march, they were continually shot at by colonial militiamen.

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. He managed to fire five shots before a British detachment reached his position.

N.B. that the revolution was fully 100 years before “firing five shots” was possible without reloading, manually, 5 times. Whittemore was, of course, not yet done:

Whittemore then attacked with a sword. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

7-0. War Eagle.

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They’re not my favorite SEC squad by a damn sight, but Auburn money put food on the table at my house growing up, so they’re not my least favorite, either.

Auburn did the SEC proud tonight, shutting down Oregon’s tempo attack and bagging the conference’s fifth consecutive title, and preserving the SEC’s status as the only league to never lose the title contest; we’re now 7-0 in title game play.

As long as we’re counting, the SEC is also the only conference to send so many teams to the big game (5: Alabama (2010), Auburn (2011), Florida (2009, 2007), LSU (2008, 2004), and Tennessee (1999)). The runner up, by the way, is the Big XII, with 3, only two of whom won (Texas in ’06, Oklahoma in ’01).

See you next year.

I swear to God this isn’t gloating

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I just got this on the only Alabama alum mailing list I’m on (thanks, Hatch). I checked; it’s actually excerpts from a Michigan State sports board thread during the Capital One Bowl. I highlighted a couple favorites.

“Julio takin’ us to schoolio”

“why are they allowing Alabama to play with 35 players on defense?”

“I think their punter is currently drinking around the world in Epcot.” [from the early 3rd quarter]

“If we played 10 times, they would win 15”

“If Cam Newton costs $200,000 for a season, how much is a 2nd half rental?”

“and now [MSU starting QB] Cousins is dead”

“If I was our QB I would hire an attorney and sue them for negligence or intentional infliction of physical and emotional distress.”

“I’m ready to accept MSU boosters paying for an offensive line. If we get caught I can deal with it.”

“This is getting out of hand…an Alabama d-lineman just popped out of my TV and threw me 10 yards behind my couch.”

“Do you think this is how Custer felt?”

“We’re going to have a wing named after us at Orlando Regional Medical Center by the time this game finishes.”

“This is embarrassing. So are we officially a basketball school again?”

“I want to know how many times in the history of organized football that teams have punted on 4th and goal”

“So this is what they mean by team speed”

“if i’m [backup QB] Maxwell, I fake an injury on the way to the huddle” [Maxwell was knocked out of the game three plays later.]

“good lord. Their 4th string running back just ran through our entire defense and all we could do was swing our purses at him.”

TSA reports TSA Sucks

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No, really:

[E]ven more scary than that is the article notes that the TSA admits that it’s really bad at finding weapons, saying that the “failure rate” of tests is reaching 70% at some major airports and at some airports “every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners.” So, while scanners are looking at or touching your crotch, they’re apparently not bothering to look for guns. Comforting.

Our New Favorite Obsessive Blog

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The Suits of James Bond. Face it: with the exception of the early Moore films, Britain’s favorite secret agent has been a sartorial model for the ages, and the resurgence of trim suits in the wake of Mad Men has made pretty much every bit of kit worn by Connery’s version of the superspy as current in 2010 as it was in the 60s.

Me, I’d love to have that Goldfinger suit. To start. To say nothing of the fabulous Brioni suits the Brosnan-era Bond favored.

In which Gibson predicts reality. Again.

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JWZ has a great summary of the iamamiwhoiam art project. Check it out:

At the beginning of the year, these weird, short, high-production-value videos began appearing on Youtube with no explanation of what they were or who made them, straight out of Pattern Recognition. They featured a heavily distorted woman licking trees and doing other bizarre things in the woods with music that sounded like The Knife or Fever Ray. Cult following ensued. The videos got longer, revealing more of the singer and the songs.

Then in November they posted a short video saying, “We need one volunteer, call this number”!

The next six videos posted show their volunteer getting on a plane to Sweden, arriving at a hotel, and being silently fucked with by faceless weirdos, eventually getting a supporting role in their “live concert”.

He concludes:

This project is absolutely the best, weirdest thing that the internets have brought us in years.

I agree. He’s got a playlist up of the videos; if you have a bit of time, check it out.

Dept. of Stating the Obvious

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Nate Silver on the Julian Assange charges:

The handling of the case has been highly irregular from the start, in ways that would seem to make clear that the motivation for bringing the charges is political.

Indeed. Go read the whole thing. A bit more:

The initial warrant in the case against Mr. Assange had been issued in August. But it was revoked the next day, due to what the lead prosecutor cited as a lack of evidence. It was only last month — just as WikiLeaks was preparing to release a set of confidential diplomatic cables –that Sweden again issued a warrant to detain him.

After turning himself in to the authorities in London, Mr. Assange was initially denied bail (although he has since been awarded it) — which is particularly unusual given that Swedish authorities have still not formally charged him with a crime, but merely want to bring him in for questioning. Most unusually still, Sweden had issued an Interpol red alert for Mr. Assange’s arrest, something they have done for only one other person this year accused of a sex crime: Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, who is suspected of multiple cases of sexual assault against children.

What’s wrong with RIM, and How Platforms Die

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Nobody was caught quite as flatfooted by the iPhone as was Canadian tech darling Research in Motion, the company that brought us the Blackberry. Palm was on the ropes, and Windows Mobile has been a joke more or less since introduction — but RIM had a solid product and a committed user community that Apple has steadily eroded as they improved the iPhone platform.

The MobileOpportunity blog has a great rundown of this, complete with charts and graphs, that really is a fascinating read. One of the takeaways is that, for a firm like RIM, new subscriber growth is a major deal. You can sell all you want to the converted, but you don’t grow your market that way. You’ve got to sell to new users to do that. And RIM’s new subscriber growth is down.

As a follow-up bit of information, Gruber points out something interesting from RIM’s last earnings statement, which showed those distressing new-sub numbers:

RIM says it will no longer report subscriber growth in future quarters.

They’re in a bad spiral. I hope they can fix it, because Palm is dead and gone, and I think a happy, healthy handset ecosystem needs RIM.

Of note: One 1987 Buick. 167 miles. Not for sale.

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In the middle 1980s, the fastest production car in America was, for a brief window, not some piece of European exotica; it was a Buick. The Grand National and its big brother, the GNX, were sleeper cars — they looked just like every other G-platform GM car, but packed serious heat under the hood. The GNX variant pushed nearly 300 horses (Buick sandbagged the rating at 276) and over 350 lb-ft of torque. Sixty miles an hour was less than five seconds away. Quarter mile times were similarly impressive.

Of course, being GM products, they mostly all fell apart by the mid to late nineties. Except for one, apparently: Boulevard Buick, in LA’s Signal Hill area, still has an unsold, pristine GNX on the floor; it’s got 167 miles on it, accumulated mostly going to and from the service bay for periodic maintenance.

It is not for sale.

“You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked. Well I’m not licked. And I’m gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause.”

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Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is delivering an actual, no-shit, filibuster of the tax cut compromise bill. This is interesting because for many years, the “genteel” world of the Senate has rendered the actual “keep talking forever” aspect of the filibuster unnecessary; all that was necessary was to signal the intent of the minority party (or, I suppose, a coalition) to block cloture, and they wouldn’t force the drama to actually take place.

C-SPAN has live video, which you should watch just to say you’d seen one live.

(Extra Heathen points for any non-Erin parties who can properly identify the title quote.)

Wikileaks Bombshells

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The cable-leak dump from Wikileaks has been kind of short of huge disclosures, at least until today. Apparently in retaliation for his arrest and possible extradition, Assange’s organization has dropped a new cache that, honestly, you should at least scan immediately.

Holiday Reminder: Pyrex Isn’t Pyrex

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If you, as I did, grew up trusting Pyrex cookware as essentially indestructible and capable of handling stove to counter to freezer all in one go, well, have I got some news for you.

Pyrex was Pyrex because of its makeup: it was, for most of our lives, borosilicate glass (and in fact came to be shorthand for borosilicate glass). Most kitchenware is soda lime glass, and it’s soda lime glass that is infamous for shattering if, say, you take a casserole out of your oven and put it directly on a stone countertop. It’s very vulnerable to thermal shock, and can even shatter with no small amount of violence when it happens.

Borosilicate glass is much, much more resistant to this sort of thing — you can literally take it from a 500 degree oven and put it directly on a wet, cold countertop with no ill effects. This is why people loved Pyrex. And this is why it’s a goddamn ridiculous, obnoxious, idiot marketer decision for someone to make Pyrex out of something other than borosilicate glass, but that’s just what “World Kitchen” did when they bought the brand name from Corning in 1998. Pyrex today is soda lime glass, not borosilicate, and Consumerist shows us what that means.

It’s a shocking breach of trust for this goofball firm to make Pyrex that, fundamentally, isn’t Pyrex, but that’s what happens when you get people who think of “branding” as more important than actual goods.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t sad

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I totally get that the FBI has the shivvers about Moolim Terra and all, but they’re starting to look silly.

First, we’ve had yet another example of the FBI trumpeting success in quashing a “terror plot” that was basically engineered by the FBI in the first place. They’ve done this more than once, and they’re basically getting passes on entrapment over and over again — but the bottom line is that none of these guys would’ve actually done anything nefarious without the the FBI’s undercover goading and undercover “weapons” or “explosives” dealers.

Now, we have this story from California. The gist is that some Muslims in an Orange County mosque became distressed by the increasingly violent rhetoric of one of their new members, so they called the Feds. And subsequently discovered that the “violent” instigator was . . . a mole for the FBI.

Nice one, guys. How ’bout you try catching some actual bad guys who, you know, do bad stuff without you setting it up for them?