One of those days just like any other day.
Happy Birthday, James Ellroy.
Thanks for the memories, Brett Favre.
One of those days just like any other day.
Happy Birthday, James Ellroy.
Thanks for the memories, Brett Favre.
Today is the birthday of A.A. Milne, creator of the much-beloved Winnie-the-Pooh.
Reading up on Pooh at Wikipedia, I came across this wonderful note.
The origin of the “Poohsticks” game is at the footbridge across a tributary of the River Medway near Upper Hartfield, close to the Milne’s home at Posingford Farm. It is traditional to play the game there using sticks gathered in nearby woodland. When the footbridge required replacement in recent times the engineer designed a new structure based closely on the drawings (by E H Shepherd) of the bridge in the original books, as the bridge did not originally appear as the artist drew it. There is an information board at the bridge which describes aspects of how to play the game there. Periodically the water authority has to come with an excavator and remove the large mass of stalled Poohsticks which can build up in the river bed downstream of the bridge over time, to the extent of causing some localised flooding.
Did you know there’s a World Pooh Sticks Championship?
[They] take place annually at Day’s Lock on the River Thames near Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. The event was started in 1983 as a fund-raising event for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The lockkeeper put out a box of sticks and a collection box and it soon became an annual event. It originally took place in January but in the icy weather of 1997 it was moved to March. It is now organized by the Rotary Club of Sinodun, based in nearby Wallingford. The championships feature individual and team events. A member of the team from the Czech Republic which won the team event in 2004 explained the winning technique to Jonathan Hancock in an interview on BBC Radio Oxford: he looked to see which part of the river was fastest, and threw the stick in there.
Bobby Fischer, dead at 64.
He is a tragic figure, no doubt, an astounding genius on the chessboard and symbol of American defiance in the face of Russian domination of the game. He contributed immensely to chess theory. He even inspired a 1993 movie that I saw several times and enjoyed very much. Fischer was enigmatic, secluded, and mysterious for years.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but one wishes he had stayed missing.
Currently in production…
GET LAMP is a documentary about Text Adventures (later Interactive Fiction), the storytellers who created them, and their unique place in the history of computer games.
If you’re a zombie aficionado, set your butt down on Friday, October 26th and tune into Turner Classic Movies for a zombie movie marathon. Check this awesomeness out (times are PT):