Unlikely Words

Icon

A blog with delusions of grandeur

Jesus is My Friend on Glee

Watching Glee on DVR and noticed Oral Intensity did a cover of Sonseed's Jesus Is My Friend. If you haven't watched this video, you really owe it to yourself find sometime to watch what critics have called, "Not only one of the funniest music videos of ALL time, but also a really interesting use of religious appropriation of popular musical culture. A must see."*



*If a critic said this, it's a coincidence because I just made it up.
**I've probably posted this before.

Steve Martin’s banjo skills

I'm not sure how I missed the fact that Steve Martin plays the banjo, but he does, and he's good.

Up and down

Chris Akrigg rides up and down A Hill in Spain. Notes of Danny MacAskill.



Via Matt Haughey

Time Lapse of Everglades Camping

I like this. The beginning is beautiful.



Via Scott

Scientology

You've by now, no doubt, seen several people post about the Scientology article in The New Yorker. I just wanted it noted for the record that I read the whole damn thing.

I just looked through Longreads, and this article is by far the longest of the 119 New Yorker articles, clocking in at 100 minutes and 24,922 words. Most of the articles listed are around 20 minutes or 45 minutes. If there's a directory of really long New Yorker articles, I'd like to see it.

Stellar

Kottke invited me to use Stellar a couple months ago, and I've started to really enjoy it. I wasn't sure how much I'd use it at first because I'm not a huge Flickr user, and I haven't historically used the "Favorite" buttons on other sites I do use. I also have a hard enough time keeping up with all the other properties I follow. That said, I find myself looking forward to checking my flow because the content bubbling up there is different from what I'm currently seeing on Twitter, Tumblr, and RSS. Here's Jason's post introducing Stellar.

If you're in already, you can follow me here.

Watching the paint dry

ink_truck_crash_030911-thumb-608x391-35226

I always wanted to know what would happen if a truck carrying printer cartridges crashed, and it happened in my relative backyard!

Approximately 16,000 pounds of ink cartridges from the Flint Group, an Indianapolis-based company selling printing and packaging products, was bound for a newspaper company in Portland, Maine. Red, blue, and yellow ink cartridges were inside the truck, but Ferson said there is no evidence the yellow ink was released.


Via Wired

Foursquare 3.0

All along it seems like Foursquare has been trying to make it easier for everyone to make their own Feltron Annual Report. I'm OK with that. It's certainly what I like to use about it. Looking more closely in my account a couple months ago, I found the Stats page which says it's inspired by the Feltron reports. 3.0 described here.

The Extra 2%

Internet good guy and friend, Jonah Keri, is out with his first book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First:
In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team’s Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. When former Goldman Sachs colleagues Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman assumed control of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005, it looked as if they were buying the baseball equivalent of a penny stock. But the incoming regime came armed with a master plan: to leverage their skill at trading, valuation, and management to build a model twenty-first-century franchise that could compete with their bigger, stronger, richer rivals—and prevail.


Check out an excerpt in GQ, and one on ESPN. Here's a bit about how the Rays missed on Albert Pujols even though one of their scouts loved him and they could have gotten him for a flyer.
They still worried about the player's build, as Jennings had earlier, and wondered what position he would play. This was especially odd, since the player didn't get much chance to try out at third base, his natural position, or first, where Arango thought he could also fare well. Many skeptics also wondered about his age: he was born in the Dominican Republic, didn't move to the United States until high school, and always looked old for the age he was supposed to be. Meanwhile, the player's agent was new to the gig, and that uncertainty raised fears that just signing the guy could become dicey, even in the later rounds. Besides, the Devil Rays had their targeted names up on the draft board, and the draft was flying by. Jennings wasn't ignoring Arango's projection per se. There was just so much other stuff going on that they didn't give it much thought. By the time you get past the tenth round, most players have no shot of ever sniffing the big leagues, let alone becoming productive regulars, let alone becoming the kind of superstar Arango envisioned. No big deal.


Congrats, Jonah!

Newsweek

I've been traveling and I saw the George Clooney Newsweek in the airport. Cripes... At what point does it get downgraded from a magazine to a pamphlet? I remember thinking that merging a website losing about $10 million a year with a magazine losing about $25 million a year didn't seem like a good idea... I had a couple tabs opens of articles I was going to link to about this whole thing, but I lost'em all a couple weeks ago and then forgot about it until I saw Clooney's mug staring back at me from what looked like a comic book.

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting Unlikely Words. If you liked what you read:
Subscribe to RSS, check out our About Page, read some of our favorite posts, or follow us on Twitter or on Facebook, or on Tumblr.

Subscribe by email

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Archives