I suppose everything can get repossessed if someone falls behind on their payments. This story from Boing Boing about a guy who repossesses planes, small and large reads like a Hollywood story:

Popovich's first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you. So without so much as looking back, he got on the plane and flew it right to Chicago. "My job is to grab that plane," Popovich says. "And if you haven't paid for it, then it's mine. And I don't like to lose." Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not the kind that spirits away Hyundais from suburban driveways. Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

As does this story I remember reading a couple years ago about a cargo ship repo man:

Meanwhile, an oceangoing tugboat also hired by Hardberger slipped into port and backed up to the Aztec Express. Under a full moon, the crew began cutting the anchor chains with blowtorches. In case harbor officials noticed and tried to call for help on their cellphone, Hardberger had paid a witch doctor $100 to cast spells on the port's soccer field. The witch doctor marked the field with gray powder, a clear warning to believers in voodoo, the nation's dominant religion. No call ever went out.

However, this story about another boat repo man, not so much.

From this Mark Bowden article about Arthur Sulzberger Jr this quotation:

Among the other prospective buyers whose names have surfaced in the press are Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York; Google; and even, perish the thought, the press baron Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal has emerged as journalistic competition for the Times in a way it never was before.

I keep harping on this, but I really don't see how newspaper's survive without coming up with a new model. One such model could be finding a corporate patron, like, uh... Google.tra

A couple weeks ago, The New York Times wisely introduced Article Skimmer as an additional way for readers to interact with the news. It's fast, intuitive, and easy to use. I put this in the solidly innovative column that I've seen a bunch of from the Times over the last year or so.

But then let me introduce Skimmer's Bacon topic. I've been trying to think of a way to kill the bacon meme since January or so, but the New York Times just did it for me. I'm tired of the internet that allows lazy marketers to layer whatever they want with bacon and score cheap internet traffic. That's not an internet I want to live in, and I don't think that's the internet you want either.

I can't help but think the bacon topic is aimed at this cheap internet traffic and by catering to it, the New York Times has debased itself. Who do they think they are, really? They could have maintained their stodgy standoffishness, but by rolling around the mud with the pigs...well, let's just say that 'arbiter of cool' The New York Times is not. To say nothing of the fact that if you're a meme, and people send around links about you, and then everyone on the internet is talking about you, and then The Paper of Record talks about you, you're not a meme anymore. You've baconed the Times or some other cute play on jumping the shark. It should be noted for the record that, for the sake of my argument, I've ignored the likely scenario that the Topics on Skimmer are automatically created based on what the readers are searching for and reading. If that's not how Topics get created, well that's just sad. (Thanks, Aaron!)

Click image to enlarge.

Health insurance in Massachusetts is looked at as something of a canary for the rest of the country. This New York Times article discusses some of the challenges facing and accomplishments achieved by the 2006 Massachusetts law requiring health insurance for residents.

They want a new payment method that rewards prevention and the effective control of chronic disease, instead of the current system, which pays according to the quantity of care provided.

But...then that would make too much sense, wouldn't it? Get it done, Deval.

From Detroit, Death was punk before anyone knew what punk was, and then everyone forgot about them.

Following up on the transportation related post below, here's a write up on biking in New York City where 35% more people are biking this year as opposed to last year. (Via Kottke)

RAMJAM! Daron Aaronofsky more than made up for The Fountain with this one. Should have been Best Picture AND Best Actor.

Bonus link: Long ass New York Times Magazine profile from November of this year, a Radar interview from 2006, and a NY Times profile from 2003. No obligatory New Yorker profile for you!

This type of article comes out once in a while and it never makes me feel better. In fact, it makes me want to stop eating anything, ever. I don't want to eat anymore bug parts.

Peanut butter — that culinary cause célèbre — may contain approximately 145 bug parts for an 18-ounce jar; or five or more rodent hairs for that same jar; or more than 125 milligrams of grit.

In case you’re curious: you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites each year without knowing it, a quantity of insects that clearly does not cut the mustard, even as insects may well be in the mustard.

(Via Boing Boing)

Michael Lewis checks in with a profile of player Shane Battier and statistical whiz kid Daryl Morey. Some nuggets for you:

The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby... — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved.

[Interesting because this is a virus caused in part by Lewis' book Moneyball]

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one...[In football] the players most famous for being selfish — ...Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

...A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist...He’s racing down court for an open layup, and...he passes it back to a trailing teammate...the likelihood of scoring...declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much...Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag...And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag...

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.

“I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers.

One other interesting point in this article is that the Rockets gauge which teams in the league are looking at data the same way they are by how that team plays the game. I wonder if this causes them to over think aspects of the game, though, if they think there opponent is smarter than it is.

A chance encounter hipped me to the fact that it was four years ago yesterday that Hargo built The Somerville Gates. At which point, the internet went crazy and 4 million people looked at The Somerville Gates' website in a week. The site had to be taken down to cool the viral internet's greedy bandwidth needs, but the entire installation is now happily back online where it should be. More coverage from The Boston Globe, Big RED & Shiny, msnbc.com, The New York Times, and of course Boing Boing.