guy schmidt

untitled by patrickjoust.

All about baseball player’s rituals, taboos, and talismans. My favorite one: 

There is a taboo against crossing bats, against permitting one bat to rest on top of another. Although this superstition appears to be dying out among ballplayers today, it was religiously observed by some of my teammates. One of my Hispanic teammates became quite annoyed when another player tossed a bat from the batting cage and it landed on top of his bat. Later he explained that the top bat might steal hits from the lower one. In his view, bats contained a finite number of hits, a sort of baseball “image of limited good.” For Pirate shortstop Honus Wagner, a charter member of baseball’s Hall of Fame, each bat contained only 100 hits and never more. Regardless of the quality of the bat, he would discard it after its 100th hit.

I used to wear the same t-shirt under my lacrosse jersey for every game until it basically disintegrated from repeated washing and wearing. /via things

A 7 minute workout timer to help you do this. Brilliant. 

Awww, look, baby shit machines.

Songs I’ve been abusing lately: Television by You Won’t & The Woodpile by Frightened Rabbit (video). 

Two more Google Reader replacements, both paid services. Feeder, a free Chrome plugin and/or a paid full web version. Feedbin, two smackers a month with App support. 

Bolides, visualizing meteorites. Love this, so Asteroids. 

ScanLAB’s Harvester. /via bldgblog.

ckck:

R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen.

I spent many a Saturday afternoon watching the monsters this man made. 

Paul Miller talks about his year offline. Two points that stood out to me: 

The Internet (or fill in the blank with any thing: booze, shopping, work, etc.) isn’t the problem, we are: 

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible, and who can fix it.

And, the Internet isn’t the absence of interaction with real people, but a tool for being social: 

But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

Don’t get me wrong. I do think we should spend less time online, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. 

Into the sun.

The border wall, illuminated at night in Nogales, Arizona, on July 6, 2012. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

From In Focus’s On the Border. 

For years, a violent drifter with a long arrest record has roamed the wilderness of southern Utah, trapping what he eats, raiding weekend cabins for supplies, and evading one of the biggest manhunts in the West. He’s armed, dangerous, and desperate to stay free.

File this under real-life bogeyman in the woods, like the Goatman. 

This hour, we spend the entire episode on the story of Kelley and Tom, whose daughter was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, roughly halfway to full term. Their story contains an entire universe of questions about the lines between life and death, reflex and will, and the confusing tug of war between two basic moral touchstones: doing no harm…and doing everything in our power to help.

My son was born 5 weeks early. I was nodding my head to a lot of what Kelley and Tom said in this episode; those feelings of helplessness and hope constantly swapping places. 

Hello deer.

 Captain Chaos just before he was shot from the canon.

Big top.