Things I Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Timberlake#Relationships

In the August 9–15, 2008 edition of Heat magazine, when Timberlake was asked to describe his perfect woman, he replied “About 5’7” -5’8”, nice butt, Midwestern American, kind-of-German last name, green eyes, big pouty lips, fair skin, ahhh….sinewy bod…”

Oh god. I can’t even. I just can’t.

Why am I even reading this in the first place?

The world may never know. (e.g. I’LL NEVER TELLLLL!!!)

*

Image courtesy of dailymail.co.uk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Boiardi

The patrons of Il Giardino d’Italia frequently asked for samples and recipes of his spaghetti sauce, which he often gave to customers in old milk bottles. Boiardi began to use a factory in 1928 to keep up with orders, setting his sights on selling his product nationally.

And that is how a humble immigrant boy named Boiardi from Piacenza, Italy, who loved to cook more than anything else, came to be the king of processed, mass-marketed, canned schlock.

Why… it’s Chef Boyardee, of course!

Signore Boiardi would be proud to know his face graces the packaging of the traditional Italian offerings from his eponymous line, such as the classic “Cheesy Nacho Rotini”.

America: where dreams come true!!

Images courtesy of Time.com and chefboyardee.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan#Personal_relationships

For fifteen years in Washington, D.C., before his presidency, Buchanan lived with his close friend, Alabama Senator William Rufus King. Buchanan’s and King’s close relationship prompted Andrew Jackson to call King “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy”

James Buchanan was the 15th U.S. president (1857-1861), and the only one to never have been married.  The rumors about his sexuality have evidently swirled since even during his own time. The fact that this bigoted, homophobic, Puritan nation *might* have had a gay Commander-in-Chief just tickles me to the core. But this business about his… special friend… being called “Aunt Fancy” by Andrew Jackson just makes me love the dude even more.

Side note: Speaking of Andrew Jackson—lover of slavery, hater of Indians—I’ve never forgotten this fantastic story from a college history class:

Due to a series of escalating arguments in which each party hurled insults at each other, Jackson and an attorney (Charles Dickinson) agreed to a duel— to the death. Because that’s how arguments were settled back then, and Jackson was never one to back down from a challenge. The only problem for Jackson was… Dickinson was known as an expert shot.

Jackson decided to let Dickinson fire first, with the hope that he’d somehow miss his first shot. (This was beyond a Hail Mary pass.)

Now, by some act of God, Dickinson MISSED. Jackson took aim and returned the shot… right in the groin*. Of course, he wasn’t aiming for the groin, per se, but his musket had misfired. Bullets tended to be a little less reliable than they are these days. And that beyond lucky crotch shot caused Dickinson to bleed to death, meaning Jackson would live, go on to become president, indirectly kill thousands of Indians by making them march on the Trail of Tears, and quarantine the survivors on the Reservations.

But that thing about Dickinson missing? He didn’t, really. He most definitely shot Jackson—in the fucking chest —he just happened to miss the heart, lodging a lead bullet in Jackson’s chest that he would carry around for the rest of his life, “rattl[ing] like a bag of marbles,” and eventually causing him to die of lead poisoning.

Fun facts, brought to you by the History majors of America!

</sidenote>

Ok. So Buchanan’s “inability to impose peace on sharply divided partisans on the brink of the Civil War has led to his consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents.” Whatever. Bro had spunk.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

ALSO: I AM IMMEDIATELY CO-OPTING THE TERM “AUNT FANCY”

*According to Wikipedia, Jackson shot him in the chest, not the groin. But I prefer to take the word of my college professor, a 19th century American history scholar, and the professor that loved me the best.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weller

He is also the principal figure of the 1970s and 80s mod revival and is often referred to as the Modfather.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter who Paul Weller is at this point: if he were to make me an offer… I wouldn’t refuse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ty_Cobb

At the end of the sixth inning, after being challenged by teammates Sam Crawford and Jim Delahanty to do something about it, Cobb climbed into the stands and attacked Lueker, who it turns out was handicapped (he had lost all of one hand and three fingers on his other hand in an industrial accident). When onlookers shouted at Cobb to stop because the man had no hands, Cobb reportedly replied, “I don’t care if he got no feet!”

Sometimes, my dad likes to talk baseball. And by “sometimes,” I mean “always.”

He’s an interesting one, my dad. I suspect he’s borderline Asperger’s… or maybe even totally raging Asperger’s. He’s obsessed with numbers (like baseball stats or Sudoku puzzles), socially awkward to the point of caricature, and has an anxiety attack when anything alters his plan for the day (even if the plan for the day is “sit in my chair and do 10,000 Sudoku puzzles”).

(I seem to have inherited some of these traits… Obsessions! Social awkwardness! Rampant anxiety! Recently, I took a “Do I Have Asperger’s Syndrome?” test online that was out of 50 points, where 32 and above indicated probable Asperger’s. I scored a 30.)

Regardless, Dad’s obsession with baseball stats is actually a pretty interesting story. When he was very young, he contracted Polio. This was back in the ‘50’s, before the vaccine was invented, and it was a real epidemic—often causing paralysis, sometimes causing death. At that time, the best bet for kids with polio was an Iron Lung, but there were other experimental cures like wrapping legs in warm, wet blankets to stave off the virus’s effects—my dad having undergone the latter.

During his treatment, when he was about 10 or 11, he had to drop out of school and stay in the hospital for months. He was in a unit composed mostly of older World War II veterans who would gripe and yell at him for listening to the radio. To keep him occupied, his parents bought him a Baseball Encyclopedia full of statistics and trivia. He can still can quote it to this day.

Another fun fact: when the Brooklyn Dodgers came to Los Angeles in 1958, he clipped the box score from every game out of the newspaper. I believe they’re still somewhere in the attic of my parents’ house.

Point being: Baseball. He likes it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it too: I live in L.A., so I’m all about the Dodgers; my cousin Brendan Ryan plays for the Seattle Mariners; I played softball and baseball in high school. But if I mention anything at all to my dad (Hey, what’s up with Don Mattingly? or So, Albert Pujols is being traded to the Angels?), he will spout off for an unlimited amount of time about anything and everything baseball, mostly skewing toward the game’s early days. I once sat in a car with him for 15 minutes while he touched on (among many other things) black players in the 1880’s, Cuban players in the early 1900’s, the Negro Leagues, the 1947 racial integration of the Major Leagues, Satchel Paige (at 42, the oldest player to debut the Major Leagues—and maybe the best pitcher in the history of the game), Jackie Robinson, (Fun fact: he was a UCLA football star and an Army Lieutenant!), Jackie Robinson’s track star brother Mack who earned a Silver Medal in the famous 1936 Berlin Olympics behind Jesse Owens, Pee Wee Reese (Jackie Robinson’s white teammate who publicly supported him), why FDR kept baseball alive during World War II, and even the rise of pro basketball with players like Bill Russell being the first to break the color barrier with the Boston Celtics.

Wow.

Anyway, Ty Cobb came up a few days ago during the most recent baseball conversation, which began with the question, “Albert Pujols is being traded to the Angels?” and somehow ended up about the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Basically, from what I gleaned from my dad, Ty Cobb was a hell of a baseball player, but also a hell of a racist—to the point where he’d allegedly sharpen his metal cleats and intentionally slide into a base defended by a black player so he could take them out. Really fucked up shit. [Ed. Note: Upon review, this may be just an urban legend. Many out there on the internet argue that Cobb was not, in fact, a racist—he was just an asshole.]

Mr. Cobb was a bit (and by “a bit,” I mean “insanely”) surly. And not just to blacks.

During Cobb’s career, he was involved in numerous fights, both on and off the field, and several profanity-laced shouting matches.

Cobb once slapped a black elevator operator for being ‘uppity.’ When a black night watchman intervened, Cobb pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The matter was later settled out of court.

Cobb fought a groundskeeper over the condition of the Tigers’ field in Augusta, Georgia at Spring Training in 1907. Cobb also ended up choking the man’s wife when she intervened.

“Sure, I fought,” said an unrepentant Cobb in a revealing quote. “I had to fight all my life just to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.”

One of my favorite trivia tidbits comes from that time that he beat up a handicapped spectator for implying that he was half-black, the kind of nonsense that got one’s ass briefly suspended from playing in those days. (Nowadays? Probably a lifetime suspension, hefty fines, and significant jail time.) Though they didn’t much like him as a human, his Detroit Tiger teammates protested his suspension and refused to play without him. For one game against the Philadelphia Athletics, they recruited a team of ringers from college and amateur teams to step in. It turned out to be a fairly rare “complete game” for the ringer pitcher—i.e. he pitched the entire game without relief. Sounds like he could have used some, though, since the final score was 24-2, Philadelphia.

He was also one of the first people to invest in Coca-Cola, which meant he became ludicrously wealthy.

Essentially, Ty Cobb was a son of a bitch, but a goddammned good baseball player who made a ton of Major League records—and still holds some of them, including the highest career batting average.

C is for Cobb,
Who grew spikes and not corn,
And made all the basemen
Wish they weren’t born.

— Ogden Nash

You can thank my father for this blog post.

I am inordinately fascinated by other people. *

That doesn’t mean I like them. I’m just driven by an obsessive interest in how other people live: how they fill their hours, what scandals and drama weigh them down, what lifts their hearts up, what they eat for breakfast. Whether or not they’re gay, aggressively gay, closeted gay, or somewhere in the middle. I’m the kind of person who will look through your medicine cabinets not because I’m trying to find anything scandalous, but because I’m curious as to how you organize your toiletries. Because maybe there’s a better way out there that I’m unaware of. Or maybe I’d like to assess precisely how anal you are. Or maybe I’m going to find your Valtrex and blackmail you.

No, seriously, I don’t give a shit about your Valtrex. I’m more interested in banal details like whether or not your Q-Tips are accessible.

This warped obsession with human details means I spend more time than I should reading about other people. As soon as I start in on an article, everything falls apart. Do I know who this guy is? Ok, but do I *really* know who he is? Of course not. What other movies has he been in? How’d he get famous in the first place? What’s his real name? Ooh, there’s mention of an ex-wife… what’s her name? What’s her story? Who wrote this article, anyway—what’s his deal? And so on. And once I’m balls-deep in Wikipediaty, there’s no stopping me. Links lead to other links that lead to other links and so on and so forth for hours and hours… staring at my computer screen until my head feels like it’s going to explode.

That thing people say about curiosity killing the cat? Substitute “cat” with “productivity,” and you’re spot on.

Recent Biographical Wikipedia Articles I Have Accessed:

J. Edgar Hoover : “[historian David K. Johnson] views Rosenstiel as a liar who was paid for her story, whose ‘description of Hoover in drag engaging in sex with young blond boys in leather while desecrating the Bible is clearly a homophobic fantasy.’”

Sandra Bernhard (Quote): “My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that’s how I view the world.”

Tupac Shakur : “Shakur’s body was cremated and some of his ashes were later mixed with marijuana and smoked by members of the Outlawz.” 

Wyclef Jean : “Although his birth date was widely given as October 17, 1972, papers filed for his run as a candidate for the presidency of Haiti, disclosed that he was, in fact, born in 1969.”

Avril Lavigne (Quote): “I won’t wear skanky clothes that show my booty, my belly or my boobs. I have a great body.”

Coen Brothers : “Joel then spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. The film depicted a woman engaged in sex with her deaf boyfriend while verbally fantasizing about having sex with her boyfriend’s best friend, who is listening in the next room. Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979.His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, ‘Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’.”

Prahlad Jani : “After fifteen days of observation during which he reportedly did not eat, drink or go to the toilet, all medical tests on Jani were reported as normal and researchers described him as being in better health than someone half his age. The doctors reported that although the amount of liquid in Jani’s bladder fluctuated and that Jani appeared ‘able to generate urine in his bladder’, he did not pass urine.”

Otto Van Bismarck (Quote): “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

Alia Shawkat : “In October 2009, it was announced that Shawkat, Har Mar, and fellow Whip It co-star Page would produce and write a show for HBO called ‘Stitch N’ Bitch.’”

Carl Sandburg : “In Neshaminy School District of lower Bucks County resides the secondary institution Carl Sandburg Middle School. Located in the lobby is a finished split tree trunk with the quote engraved lengthwise horizontally: MAN IS BORN WITH RAINBOWS IN HIS HEART AND YOU’LL NEVER READ HIM UNLESS YOU CONSIDER RAINBOWS”

Kemp Muhl : “She is dating Sean Lennon, with whom she is involved in a musical project, titled ‘The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger’.”

Aimee Crocker : “The breakup of Aimée’s first marriage became a national scandal. Porter and his brother, Sydney, kidnapped daughter Gladys in Los Angeles, while Aimée and her mother attended a wedding. Charges and countercharges made daily news during the custody battle, and courthouse proceedings attracted a crowd of hundreds. In spite of Porter’s reputation as a notorious gambler, in spite of his kidnapping charge and a weapons charge, and in spite of the Crocker millions, the little girl’s mother would not be awarded custody. Aimée, it seems, had the worse reputation.”

Lotta Crabtree : “Lotta’s mother served as her manager and collected all of Lotta’s earnings in gold, carrying it in a large leather bag. When this became too heavy, it was transferred to a steamer trunk.”

Bernie Ecclestone : “He was then married to Slavica Ecclestone (née Slavica Radić) for almost 25 years. Radić was born in the town of Rijeka in Croatia in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1958. She is a 6’2” (1.88 m) former Armani model who is 28 years his junior, and 11.5 inches (29 cm) taller than her husband.”

Roseanne Barr : “At 16, Barr was hit by a car that left her with a traumatic brain injury. Her behavior changed so radically that she was institutionalized for eight months at Utah State Hospital.”

Vladimir Nabokov : “During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology, he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.”

Lash LaRue: “A role as the villain in a pornographic western, Hard on the Trail, led him to repentance as a missionary for ten years, as he had not been informed of the adult nature of the film and would not have consented to appear in the film.”

* Not necessarily by Justin Bieber.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Tambor

A role Tambor began in 2009 is that of the recurring character Len Drexler in the sardonic comedy Archer, an animated television series on the FX network. He is a major love interest to Malory Archer played by Jessica Walter – the two formerly playing husband and wife in Arrested Development.

This is a retroactive post from the day after the 4th of July, but I archived these Firefox tabs because the whole package was just too good to forget. I have no idea why I was searching for him. I have no idea why I was searching for any of the stuff open on my browser when I woke up. Well, with the exception of Beer Advocate, because I’m nothing if not a well-researched drunk.

That said, I love Arrested Development, and Archer is a fucking rad show.

And the Gazpacho recipe sounds pretty delicious.

The Yahoo search for Lindsay Lohan is disturbing on a lot of levels, starting with the fact that it was a Yahoo search. As is the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation: Dead Animal Collection page.

Really, seriously disturbing.

Also open with the above:

• L.A. Bureau of Sanitation: Dead Animal Collection
• Yahoo search for Lindsay Lohan
• BeerAdvocate.com (naturally)
• Recipe for Yellow Tomato Gazpacho with Cilantro Oil and Avocado

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai

Many of the Classical Chinese poets were associated with drinking wine, or more precisely, alcoholic beverages. In fact, Li Bai was part of the group of Chinese scholars during his time in Chang’an, called the “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup”, as mentioned in a poem by fellow poet Du Fu. However, Li Bai is of special note in this respect. As Burton Watson put it, “[n]early all Chinese poets celebrate the joys of wine, but none so tirelessly and with such a note of genuine conviction as Li [Bai].

Li Bai (aka Li Po, among other Westernized spellings) is one of the most prolific and well-known Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty. Famous for his technical prowess and “glorification of alcoholic beverages (and, indeed, frank celebration of drunkenness),” Li Bai penned such works as “Drinking Alone in the Moonlight,” translated below:

A pot of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.

To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes their way.
May we long share our eternal friendship,
And meet at last on the paradise.

I, too, am a poet who frankly celebrates drunkenness, having penned such works as the following haiku:

I drink to forget
how stupid I act while drunk
oops, infinite loop

Mr. Li, I pour a little out for you now. May you rest easy in the everlasting bender of paradise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_logo#Google_Doodle

My Dad:   “WHAT IS THAT THING???”

Me:   “Um… Dad. That’s Google. You know… the website?”

Dad:   “…BUT HOW DO I GET RID OF IT???!?!??!”

Computer funtime with my dad. (The man who calls the refrigerator the “icebox.”)

What he was referring to in panic was actually the Les Paul Google Doodle, an insanely addictive and interactive Google.com image in tribute to the master guitarist Les Paul (inventor of, among other things, the eponymous Les Paul guitar). In case you missed it, you could actually “play” the strings of the image like a guitar and even record your masterpiece.

In relaying the above story to my friends, however, I realized I had no idea what the actual name for the “Google.com image” was. And I was ashamed.

But I am ashamed no longer, because I am now armed with this knowledge. And I’m totally self-deprecating about it, which means I’m rubber and you’re glue and makes anything you say bounce off me and stick to you. BOOM!

(Source: twettey.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Jennings#After_Jeopardy.21

Taking advantage of the notoriety that Jennings’s losing Final Jeopardy! answer afforded, H&R Block offered Jennings free tax planning and financial services for the rest of his life. H&R Block senior vice president David Byers estimated that Jennings would owe approximately $1.04 million in taxes on his winnings.

Jennings also has a column in Mental Floss magazine called “Six Degrees of Ken Jennings”, in which readers submit two wildly different things and he has to connect them in exactly six moves, much in the same vein as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The column has been written since at least November 2005 and is still being written as of October 2008.

For those of you who don’t remember the contemporary events of 2004 (I barely do, but then again, I’m a drunk!), Jennings won the game show Jeopardy! 74 times in a row. That’s a total prize of $2,520,700. I regret blowing my parents off when they told me to apply for College Jeopardy. Especially now, when my biggest accomplishment from knowing a vast amount of useless facts to date has been winning trivia nights at a few bars. My prize? Beer.

All right, maybe it was worth it.

Jennings’s Six Degrees column is no longer, but he does have his own blog which is rife with wordplay quizzes, contests, book and game reviews, and interesting trivia. After all, you never know when you might be called upon to reach into the depths of your knowledge and pull out a random fact out of your brain. Better than your ass, especially when beer is at stake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Walker

Walker began selling his whiskey as Hiram Walker’s Club Whiskey. It became very popular and American distillers became angry, and forced the US Government to pass a law requiring that all foreign whiskeys state their country of origin on the label. This move backfired; Hiram Walker’s Canadian Club Whiskey became more popular following the change.

In addition to these notable accomplishments, Mr. Walker was also a cattle breeder and was party to a famous contracts case known as “The Pregnant-Cow Case.”

I hope it’s not being implied that involvement in such a legal dispute as “The Pregnant-Cow Case” is anything less than noble.

By-the-by, said Pregnant Cow Case is officially Sherwood v. Walker and is indeed famous, serving as a prime example of what’s known in the legal world as a “mutual mistake.” Two parties enter a contract believing something to be true (a cow is infertile), only to have it turn out to be false (surprise, knocked up!). Does the contract still stand despite the mistake? Well, it’s complicated: for the contract to be voidable, the mistake has to be material rather than collateral, which mmmmmmnnnnnnmgfjrh#6berr@

Sorry, I nodded off there for a second. I can’t help it: legal stuff bores me to absolute, abject death.

My sister keeps telling me to apply to law school. I usually tell her there’s no way I’d pass the bar—I’d rather go in. But now I’m wondering if I’ve found a cure for my chronic insomnia…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber#Early_life

Bieber’s mother, Pattie Mallette, was 18 years old when she became pregnant with her son.

Someone told me the Biebz’s mother was 16 when he was born. 18 isn’t much higher. Makes me rethink that whole “stay in school, don’t be a teen mother, go to college and get a job” thing.

Then again, that “get knocked up and give birth to Justin Bieber” thing isn’t such a reliable strategy. It might end up less “Baby” and more Rosemary’s Baby.

P.S. This is still my favorite tumblr ever: http://lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson#University_of_Southern_California

Another dramatic touchdown in the same game [of 1967] is the subject of the Arnold Friberg oil painting, O.J. Simpson Breaks for Daylight.

In 1968, he rushed for 1,709 yards and 22 touchdowns, earning the Heisman Trophy, the Maxwell Award, and the Walter Camp Award that year. He still holds the record for the Heisman’s largest margin of victory, defeating the runner-up by 1,750 points.

Reggie Bush killed USC’s bowl eligibility for the next two years. O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife. (Allegedly.) Both Heisman-winning running backs.

Heisman-winning USC quarterbacks just kill their NFL teams’ records.

Motto: if you’re going to play USC football, don’t shoot for the Heisman. Aim low. For everyone’s sake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Ludacris

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.