It’s an uncanny resemblance

https://i0.wp.com/i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb177/jedidude_2007/AdmiralAckbar.jpg

and….

it’s a trap!

You kids stay off of Goose Gossage’s Lawn!

Goose Gossage misses the good ‘ole days:

“But there’s no one to pass the torch anymore, no one to teach the young kids how to act. The Mets did a lot of that [celebrating] last year, and look how it came back to haunt them.”

Gossage told the Record that he would have never been allowed to celebrate like Chamberlain. His teammates would make sure of that.

“I’m trying to think of what would’ve happened if I did what Joba did, especially if I was a rookie,” he told the Record. “The veterans would’ve sat me down so fast, it would’ve never happened a second time. Truthfully, there would’ve never been a first time.”

I didn’t like what Joba did, either. Frankly, it’s a little bush. I believe that Barry Sanders’ Dad said it best: “Act like you’ve been there before.” But Goose Gossage sounds cranky here.

Couldn’t Goose have called Joba himself? Or called Mo? Someone? Complaining to the press about how Baseball used to be a purer game (make your own Greenie joke here) is irritating, frankly.

Every time I hear a former ballplayer whine about something like a fist pump when they ignored asses full of nandrolone, greenies, racism, juiced balls, etc., I just have to sigh.

And post, too, I guess.

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And today’s funniest blog headline is…

found here.

Being a Yankee fan makes this even funnier, I think.

Industrial Monkeys of the World, Unite!

So I’m reading the Freakonomics blog at work (an obvious slowdown action meant to undermine office productivity, as I am feeling underutilized) when I happen upon a nifty little gem of an article.

Okay, I didn’t happen upon it. It was linked from the NYT homepage. But anyway.

Frans De Wal is talking about an experiment in which two monkeys were given a task and rewarded with either a grape or a cucumber…

However, if they received different rewards, the one who got the short end of the stick would begin to waver in its responses, and very soon start a rebellion by either refusing to perform the task or refusing to eat the cucumber.

The question becomes: is this response rational or irrational? Should the monkey maximize its returns by doing the work for whatever it can get? Or should it take the “irrational” route, and react with “inequity aversion” (otherwise known as pitching a fit).

De Wal continues…

I actually don’t think the response is irrational at all, but related to the fact that in a cooperative system, one needs to watch what kind of investment one makes and what one gets in return. If your partners always ends up getting a greater share, this means that you’re being taken advantage of. So, the rational thing to do is withhold cooperation until the reward division improves.

So, let me get this straight. If monkeys don’t get equitable returns on their investments, they should stop working until the distribution improves? Remarkable. And they actually do it.

I’d love to see something about this experiment being done on a larger scale and to see what happens.

What, wait–it’s been done? Wow.

We knew it all along

At first, I thought that this story was an archived post from DC’s days as a Net:

But then I saw the actual story. It’s a little better. He has arrhythmia, and that’s it. As a lifelong fan of the Orangemen, I’m both happy to make the joke, and glad that it’s not that serious.

Oh, DC, what could have been if you wanted to be great as much as we wanted you to be great. Your own free will was, and forever will be, a burden to us.

My Dream Talk Show Panel*

Here are the panelists:

Will Leitch

Angry Buzz Bissinger

Contrite Buzz Bissinger (please read through to the bottom)

And this guy.

*And fuck you, Bob Costas, for getting two of the four of these on your show. Oh, and also fuck you for turning every postseason 5th inning double into the fall of the Berlin Wall. You make the Masters hype seem like, well, a run-of-the-mill blog post.

Don’t think or do: explore!

OTP, dear reader, has recently become fascinated with productivity.

As a concept. Not really as a lifestyle, yet. I’m easing my way in.

But anyway, I keep finding all kinds of great websites to peruse while procrastinating, most of them having to do with productivity and the pursuit of its enhancement. Today, that website is Tools for Thought.

The thing I like most about the site is that it names all the behaviors that we are doing that makes us unproductive so that we can deal with them. It’s a little bit like therapy for the unproductive person.

Anyway, i suggest you try it out. I’m sure that it will become as fun a crutch activity for you as it has for me.

Via 43 Folders

I wish I knew about this when I was teaching Venn Diagrams.

indexed

I wonder if Jessica uses the hipster pda?

So far, So good.

Via Graphjam.

Just join Scientology Already.

So I’m watching ESPN (Yankees vs. Indians), right? And I see the crawl has a new word on the left hand side, one with more letters than I’m used to seeing: C L E M E N S.

Oh, come on! He gets his own crawl category now? What the hell is that? Seriously, I just want Roger Clemens to join Scientology (you can’t convert to a science fiction club) so that we can all go, “oh, okay. Now I get it. Humph.”

Also, what’s this about him having a relationship with a country singer? Unless it’s Toby Keith, I don’t care.

Wake me up when Al Cowlings is driving him across the CBX.